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Mirage of Greek Continuity 273
When these travellers, whose perception of the ancient
Greeks is mostly influenced by the negative portrait to be
found in Latin literature, discover some cultural continuity
between ancient and modern Greeks, it is usually for the
worse. In John Covel’s Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant
(1670–6), the sentence ‘Greeks are Greeks still’ is glossed in the
following way: ‘for falseness and treachery they still deserve
Iphigenia’s character of them in Euripides, trust them and
hang them’ (p. 133). According to Duloir, Greeks have only
retained ‘the worst qualities of their ancestors: namely deceit,
perfidy and vanity’ (Duloir (1654), 166).
There were, however, some rare attempts to establish some
kind of a more positive continuity. Belon (1553, 5, 6) finds that
‘the common people . . . whether from the islands or from the
mainland, retain something of their antiquity’ such as their
funeral customs : ‘the ancient manner of the pagans to mourn
their dead is still practised at the present time in the country of
Greece’. Sandys wonders if coffee is not after all ‘that black
broth which was in use among the Lacedemonians’ (Sandys
(1610), 66). J. P. Babin (1674) goes further and finds among
the Greeks some remains of their past virtues: ‘Ils ne tiennent
pas seulement cette curiosité par héritage de leurs ancêtres,
mais encore une grande estime d’eux-mêmes nonobstant leur
servitude, leur misère et leur pauvreté sous la domination Turquesque.
. . . Dans Athènes il se rencontre encore des personnes
courageuses et remarquables par leur vertu’ (pp. 208–9).
With his Athènes ancienne et nouvelle and Lacédémone ancienne
et nouvelle, Guillet de Saint Georges purported to give,
under the name of his brother, ‘the most faithful and succinct
description both of [the] past fortune and present condition’
(p. 126) of the two major powers of Classical Greece. Of course,
the brother was an invention and Guillet never left France.
However, his travel narratives, precisely because they are fictitious,
deserve much attention from anyone interested in stereotypes,
since, in order to be convincing, they have to stick to
verisimilitude and present a picture of the ‘modern’ Greeks
which fulfils the expectations of the audience. His portrayal of
the Maniots clearly show how contradictory these expectations
were: ‘Some will have them brutish perfidious and naturally
addicted to robbery; others consider them as the true posterity