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Mirage of Greek Continuity 271
(1676), one may find a new emphasis on a positive, if imperfect,
continuity as well as an attempt to account for it.
What has been labelled the ‘romantic tradition about the
Mediterranean’ 14 or ‘Mediterraneanism’, that is to say the systematic
search for survivals of ancient Greeks among the moderns,
together with the repertoire of images and commonplaces,
always positive, sometimes nearly idolatrous, only became
dominant later, with eighteenth-century travellers. Prime exhibits
are Lady Montagu’s letters from her husband’s Turkish
embassy, Robert Wood’s comparative view of the ancient and
present state of the Troad appended to his Essay on the Original
Genius of Homer (1767), Pierre Augustin Guys’ Voyage littéraire
de la Grèce ou lettre sur les Grecs anciens et modernes, avec un
parallèle de leurs moeurs (1771), Baron Johann Hermann von
Riedesel’s Remarques d’un voyageur moderne au Levant (1773,
repr. 1802), Richard Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor (1775)
and in Greece (1776), and Comte Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage
pittoresque en Grèce (vol. 1, 1782). Among these travellers, Guys
is exceptional. While all the others originated in Northern
Europe, he was a marseillais who was quite aware of the similarities
between modern and ancient Greeks, but also between
Marseillians and Athenians; he was therefore able to replace the
usual contrast between ‘them’ and ‘us’ by a first person plural
(in letter VIII, which is devoted in part to the ‘National character
of the Greeks’) (Guys (1771), i. 108–10).
From Pierre Belon’s Les Observations de plusieurs singularités
et choses mémorables trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée (1553) to the
Marquis de Nointel (1670–80) and even Joseph Pitton de Tournefort,
Relation d’un voyage du Levant fait par ordre du Roi
(1717), the main emphasis is indeed on ‘the deformation of
that once worthy realm’ (Lithgow (1632), ii. 71–2), the degeneration
of modern Greeks: ‘[their] knowledge is converted
. . . into affected ignorance (for they have no schools of
learning amongst them)’ and ‘[their] liberty into contented
slavery, having lost their minds with their empire’ (Sandys
(1610), 77).
Pierre Belon, lured by the glory that was Greece and full
of reverence for ‘the authors of all beneficial knowlege and
14 CS 28.