Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

THE GREEK PEOPLE 203the moderns, whereas that work was written longere he visited Greece. Sir Richard Jebb attestshis belief in the undying Greek nationality, "boundto the old Greeks by ties of race and characterand language. The Greek has never been ableto strip himself of his Hellenic character, whetherthe influence was wielded by Roman or Ottoman,Venice or Russia, France or Great Britain, andit will be so to the end."Hellenists approach the question with a pardonablebias in favour of a people who still speak thetongue of Hellas.Ethnologists, lacking the enthusiasmof the scholars, take more cautious views.Though most of them allow that Greek bloodenters into a Hellenised conglomerate, some ofthem incline to the opinion that community oflanguage and tradition rather than lineage islink between the moderns and the ancients.theMr.D. G. Hogarth points out that the broad skull ofthe European " Hellene " of to-day is still furtherremoved than that of the Greek of Asia from thelong skull of the Greek of old. Nevertheless,he admits that there is a surviving strain ofHellenic blood,itself largely contaminated, evenin antiquity, and now mixed with that of Slav,Albanian, Vlach, and Turk.There can be no doubt that those Greeks whoclaim a pure descent from the nation which wasconquered by the Romans in 146 B.C. overstatetheir case as much as Fallmerayer did his.Apartfrom physiological improbability, the vicissitudes