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

50 HOME LIFE IN HELLASsphere of activity is now happily obsolete, but ifthere are still potential bandits in the land they areto be found in the shepherd population of thePindus, and it is on that range and in themountains of ^Etolia that the lawless elementwould display itself were political convulsions toupset the reign of order in the country. Theterm Greek brigand as used by Westerns is for themost part a misnomer. The brigands were innearly all cases Vlachs or Albanians, and theassertion that the Greek peasantry were in leaguewith them was a libel on a people in the mainhonest, upright and hospitable. Who the realabettors were has been shown. The peasant wasat the mercy of the brigands, and he knew thatif he denounced them he would be subject toreprisals of the most atrocious character, instancesof which were only too fresh in his memory. Butthe moment he received the least support from theGovernment he was foremost in the field. Thusthe villagers of Arakhova organised themselvesand destroyed the band of Daveli, who hadestablished himself on Parnassus, and for yearshad made that famous mountain a name of terror,free only to his kinsmen the shepherds. He hadcome, like the rest of them from the north, fromPindus, and, like the rest, his operations had fortheir terrain the eastern plains. The centralspine and rugged north-west of Greece wasalways the breeding-ground of brigands, whencethey descended to the eastern lowlands, where