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posit a continuity between Orthodoxy and ancient paganism:
‘the multiplicity of chapels may be a relick of the ancient custom
that prevailed in Greece of raising little temples to their false
gods’. Riedesel (1774/1802, 262) witnessed in Paros a religious
ceremony that reminded him of ‘les anciens mystères de Cérèsà
Eleusis’. Chandler (1776, 144), followed later by Douglas (1813,
61), draws a parallel between the cult of the Saints and pagan
polytheism: ‘the old Athenian had a multitude of deities, but
relied chiefly on Minerva, the modern has a similar troop,
headed by his favourite Panagia’.
In order to explain these similarities, real or imaginary, eighteenth-century
travellers usually assumed direct continuities
between the present and the past, even when they were aware
of other possibilities. So, when Charlemont wonders whether in
Athens women’s reserve comes ‘from an imitation of the Turks
or from a more perfect retention of ancient manners’ (1749/
1984, 126), he is, as he says, rather inclined to believe the
survivalist argument. In the same way, Guys (1772, 92–3) attributes
the wearing of the veil by Greek ladies not, like Montesquieu,
to an attempt to protect them from the concupiscence
of the Turks, but ‘to no other cause than the custom they have
so long practised’. Chandler is perhaps the best representative
of systematic survivalism, when he says that Athens ‘after it was
abandoned by the Goths continued, it is likely, for ages to
preserve the race of its remaining inhabitants unchanged and
uniform in language and manners’ (1776, 123).
In order to explain this phenomenon, some assumed that the
Greeks, though paradoxically characterized, like Thucydides’
Athenians, by their love of novelty, also felt an innate attachment
to the past and a healthy resistance to fashion and change:
This people, flighty as they are and lovers of novelty . . . have notwithstanding
always resisted the absurd caprice and inconstancy of fashion,
which so eminently prevailed with us. (Guys (1772), i. 135–6).
They
Mirage of Greek Continuity 285
tread undeviatingly in the footsteps of their forefathers; while we exert
our utmost ingenuity to recede as far as possible from the usages . . . of
our ancestors, as if we sought to contrast them with the present times.
. . . Inattentive, as the people of the Levant are, to what passes in the
world, they insensibly follow the customes of their forefathers. (ii. 32)