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272 Mirage of Greek Continuity
discipline that we revere today’, is struck by the ‘amazing state
of ignorance’ of modern Greeks and shocked by their language
which is ‘a corrupted idiom of the ancient language’ (Belon
(1553), 4). More than a hundred years after, another traveller,
Aaron Hill, will use the same derogatory terms to criticize ‘a
much corrupted dialect [which] differs so extremely from the
ancient Greek, . . . that they hardly make a shift to understand
one word in ten when strangers speak it’ (Hill (1709), 202).
Pierre Gilles, in his Antiquities of Constantinople (1561), complains
about their ‘natural aversion for anything that is valuable
in antiquity’ (p. 21). William Biddulph also contrasts the ancient
splendour of a city that was ‘the mother and nurse of all
liberal arts and sciences’ and its present status: ‘but now there is
nothing but atheism and barbarism, for it is governed by Turks
and inhabited by ignorant Greeks’ (Biddulph (1609), 10). Similarly,
Sir Anthony Sherley, in his account of his journey to
Cyprus and Paphos, writes (1613): ‘we found no shew of splendor,
no habitation of men in a fashion . . . but rather Slaves to
cruel Masters or prisoners shut up in diverse prisons’ (p. 6).
They also point to the moral debasement of a people from
whom ‘all civility has been rooted out’ (Sandys’ dedication),
echo the contempt of the Turks for those who ‘have lost their
liberty and kingdom basely and cowardly, making small or no
resistance against the Turks conquest’ (Moryson (1597), 496), or
denounce the corruption of modern Greeks: ‘subtle and deceitful’
(Biddulph (1609), 79), ‘great dissemblers’ (Lithgow (1632),
ii. 64), they have been assimilated by their conquerors and are
even worse than the Turks :‘Pour leurs coutumes et leurs facons
de vivre, elle sont à peu près celles des Turcs, mais ils sont plus
méchants. Les Grecs sont avares, perfides et traitres, grands
pédérastes, vindicatifs jusqu’au dernier point, du reste fort
superstitieux et grands hypocrites’ (Thévenot (1655), 158–9).
These laments will still be heard long afterwards: when Gibbon
in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire portrays the
Athenians who ‘walk with supine indifference among the glorious
ruins of Antiquity’ and laments ‘the debasement of their
character’, which is ‘such that they are incapable of admiring
the genius of their predecessors’ (Gibbon (1776–88), vi. 486), he
is merely repeating George Sandys’s ‘supine recklessness’ (Sandys
(1610), 80).