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270 Mirage of Greek Continuity
Scholars, merchants, ambassadors, or ‘Grand tourists’, they all
shared a common educational background, namely the history
and literature of ancient Rome and Greece, and they were
mostly looking for illustrations of antiquity. Like James Stuart
and Nicholas Revett, they went to Athens because ‘it deservedly
claims the attention and excites the curiosity . . . whether we
reflect on the figure it makes in history on account of the
excellent men it has produced in every art . . . , or whether we
consider the antiquities which are said to be still remaining
there’ (Stuart-Revett (ed.) (1825–30), i. I 13a). But they also,
as I hope to demonstrate, had something to say about the
modern inhabitants of that antique land.
Any attempt to find positive analogies between ancient and
modern Greeks is foreign to the majority of seventeenthcentury
travellers. They usually tend to enforce the thesis of a
‘Hellenism fallen from grace’ and a Greece populated by
‘wretched orientals’. 11 When they point out continuities between
ancient and modern Greeks, they usually rely on the
disparaging portrait of the Greeks inherited from the Romans
as well as from Christian authors such as Paul, 12 a portrait
mirrored by the derogatory sense of ‘Greek’ in sixteenthcentury
English :
first the word ‘Greek’ generally preceded by an epithet like ‘gay’,
‘mad’ or ‘merry’ became an ordinary conversational expression meaning
a person of loose and lively habits, a boon companion, a fast
liver. . . . The second common meaning of the word ‘Greek’ . . . was
based upon the opinion of Greek wickedness, rather than of Greek
dissoluteness. A ‘greek’ meant what we should call a ‘twister’, that is, a
sharper, a cheat, a crook. 13
But in the Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie de Grèce et du Levant of
Jacob Spon (1678) and The Journey into Greece of his fellow
English traveller Georges Wheler (1682), as well as in the two
fictitious narratives of Guillet de Saint Georges, Athènes ancienne
et nouvelle (1675) and Lacédémone ancienne et nouvelle
11 Herzfeld, Anthropology, 49.
12 See T. Spencer, Fair Greece, Sad Relics : Literary Philhellenism from
Shakespeare to Byron (New York, 1973), 32–5.
13 Ibid. 35, 37.