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Mirage of Greek Continuity 287
under one climate, their tempers are more different than if they
lived very remote from each other, which can be imputed only
to their different education’. Riedesel agreed that the harshness
of the climate and the cold East and North winds may have
contributed to producing ‘ce génie guerrier, cette austérité, ce
stoicisme . . . que nous admirons si justement chez les anciens
Spartiates’ as well as ‘l’esprit d’indépendance’ of the modern
Maniots (1772: 223), but he does not see any link between
the fertile imagination of Athenian artists and the climate of
Athens:
ce qui me surprend, c’est de trouver dans une contrée oùdomine le
vent impétueux du Nord cette imagination féconde et brillante qui
étonne dans leurs anciens poètes, ce génie créateur qu’on admirait
dans les chefs d’oeuvre des Phidias, des Praxitèles . . . dont le goût, la
délicatesse et la sensibilité me paraissent s’accorder si peu avec un ciel
sujet à des changements de température aussi subits que ceux qu’on
éprouve à Athènes. . . . (Riedesel (1772), 363).
3. the romantic sensibility
The romantic inagination of some eighteenth-century travellers
led them to believe it was possible that the past was in fact alive
in a country where ‘many of the customs, and much of the dress
then in fashion [are] yet retained’ (Montagu 1717/1965, i. 381).
In her letters from Turkey, Montagu was the first to give voice
to this new sensibility. Her letter to Alexander Pope describing
a picnic among Greek peasants on the banks of the Hebrus, ‘a
place where truth for once furnishes all the ideas of pastoral’, is
most remarkable:
I have often seen them and their children sitting on the banks of the
river and playing a rural intrument perfectly answering the description
of the ancient fistula . . . the young lads generally divert themselves
with making garlands for their favourite lambs. . . . It is not that
they ever read romances, but these are the ancient amusements here,
as natural to them as cudgel-playing and football to our British
swains . . . they are most of them Greeks. . . . I no longer look upon
Theocritus as a romantic writer; he has only given a plain image of the
way of life amongst the peasants of his country, which before oppression
had reduced them to want were I suppose all employed at the
better sort of them are now’. (Montagu (1717/1965), i. 332–3).