Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

Mirage of Greek Continuity 281
museum pieces, they have to be sheltered from corrupting
influences and eventually restored. Accordingly, European
travellers harshly criticize any acculturation or admixture of
foreign blood which would ‘pollute’ even more the precious
remains of pure hellenicity. In particular Riedesel condemns
‘l’affectation servile que les Grecs mettent à imiter les usages et
les costumes Turcs’ (1773, 335), in the layout of their houses, in
their furniture or in their food (ibid. 326–7).
Therefore it is the duty of the traveller to search for these
precious remains, collect them, and underline the continuity
between past and present by the use of the ethnographic present
and by adverbs such as ‘still’, ‘yet’ or ‘as formerly’.Travel
narratives of the eighteenth century are all full of attempts to
discover points of resemblance between the ancient and modern
Greeks.
Modern Greeks were supposed to retain the physical appearance
of their ancestors. James Dallaway (1797, 6) finds a
‘marked resemblance between those of heroes which have
been transmitted to us and the peasant or the mariner’ he
meets in the streets. In walking through a market, William
Eton (1798, 334) dreams that he is able, while looking around,
to ‘put together from different faces . . . the heads of Apollo and
the finest ancient statues’.
Travellers also paid particular attention to costume and discovered
many common elements between ancient and modern
Greece. The letters of Guys and Riedesel are especially interesting,
for one may see the arbitrariness of comparisons created
with the aid of dubious (to say the least) reconstructions of
ancient Greek costume from highly heterogeneous elements,
including not only Greek but also Roman works of art. Riedesel
relies on a Greek (?) bas relief he has seen in Italy to conclude
that on the island of Naxos men wear the same hats as in
antiquity: ‘les hommes portent de grands chapeaux de paille
suspendus à la nuque par un cordon, comme on le voit à une
figure du beau bas-relief qui se trouve à la maison de campagne
du cardinal Alexandre Albani représentant Amphion et Zethos.
Il parait que cet usage s’est conservé depuis ce temps là’ (Riedesel
1773, 260). The modern costume of the women is said to be
much similar to the ancient ‘tel que nous le représentent les
statues antiques et les peintures d’Herculanum’ (p. 328).