free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Roman, Byzantine and Arab Crete
adopted Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire, Julius
Firmicus proclaimed that the tomb of the dead Jupiter was still worshipped
by the unreliable Cretans. The hallowed spot induced nearecstasy
in the sober Robert Pashley: ‘I now stand on the spot, in which
Zeus was supposed to be at rest from all celestial and terrestrial cares,
and which was so celebrated during many ages! The testimony of a long
series of ancient and ecclesiastical authors proves fully and distinctly
that the tomb remained an object of curiosity to strangers, and of
veneration to the Cretans, from an early period till after the reign of
Constantine.’*
But the Spanish emperor Theodosius’s persecutions wiped out many
such overt pagan superstitions throughout the Empire. After the fourth
century we hear no more of the tomb until foreign travellers began to
investigate the classical history of Crete many centuries later. The
Cretans were forced to preserve their old polytheism hy less blatant
means.
Over the uncharted centuries from A.D. 395, when Crete was
assigned to the Eastern Empire, to the Venetian conquest, we must
pass quickly. It was natural that the island fell within the domain of the
eastern emperor, just as it was natural that it should come under the
aegis of the patriarchy of Constantinople in 731 and thus go with the
Eastern Orthodox Church in the great Schism. By the eighth century,
however, it looked as if Crete might be torn away from the Byzantine
Empire, for the relentless aggression of the Arabs brought Crete within
their range; and not only Crete - Byzantium itself was besieged in 674.
* Robert Pashley deserves an introductory note, since he will be mentioned or
quoted in the following pages more than any other writer. He was an Oxford don, a
classicist, who visited Crete in 1834, when the countryside was still suffering from the
effects of the 1837 uprising against the Turks. A large part of his book is wasted in
speculation about the topography of ancient Cretan cities; a fashionable game at the
time, but exceedingly boring for the reader today. Skip the topography, for the rest is
pure gold. Pashley was patient, very inquisitive, fluent in Greek (and soon in Cretan
dialect as well), and well read, in the Venetian sources as well as the classics. The pity
is that he never wrote his projected history of Crete.
My favourite Pashley story is that of the Archbishop and the dancing girls. The
Metropolitan of Crete had recently given a party attended by distinguished Cretans,
foreign consuls and the Turkish pasha himself. In deference to the Turk, the good
Archbishop had the dancing girls brought in. Pashley’s cool footnote is a couplet
from the Achamians of Aristophanes. And he comments, ‘I suppose that, at the present
day, such an exhibition of the free and easy motions of such females, cannot be of
ordinary occurrence in the palaces of Christian prelates, either in the Orienta or in
any other church.’
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