free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
popular with the people. By the scholars and the intellectual circles in
Athens, however, they were comprehensively ignored for some time;
one reason being the simple myth that Greek literature stopped in 1453
(or a thousand years earlier if one was a classical-Greek-nationalist
rather than a Byzantinist), and started again with the poet Solomos
and the war of independence.
‘I confess it is not a tasty business,’ wrote the revolutionary propagandist
Koraes in 1805, ‘for anyone to read the Erotokritos and other
such abortions of wretched Greece, but whoever loves the loveliest
mistress must not fail to flatter even the ugly handmaid if she can make
the entrance to the mistress easier.’ Recently this attitude has changed.
Cretan literature now gets plenty of scholarly attention. It even enjoys
at the moment, something of a vogue. Two plays, the bloodthirsty
Erophile and a miracle play, The Sacrifice of Abraham, have been successfully
produced in recent Athens Festivals. And Nikos Koundouros, the
young director whose film Young Aphrodites won first prize in the Berlin
Festival of 1963 is planning to film the epic Erotokritos; the result will be
a great event for Greek culture.
The flowering of Cretan literature came in the seventeenth century.
Before that time a number of poets, more or less in the Byzantine
traditions, had prepared the ground. There was, in these early stages, a
strong didactic, religious and moralist strain. The first of the Cretan
poets, for instance, Linardos Dellaporta, composed his works as a
justification and consolation for himself while he repined in prison -
unjustly accused, he claimed, by a woman of fathering a natural child
on her. It was a sad end to a distinguished career. He was born at
Candia, where he learnt Italian. After serving the Republic as a soldier,
he returned to Crete as a lawyer. Later he was sent on diplomatic
missions to the Sultan of Tunisia, the Despot of the Morea, and the
Porte itself as envoy of Venice - an important job. He was thrown into
gaol in 1403.
One would not bother to read Dellaporta’s work for fun; nor any
other of the early Cretan poets except perhaps Sachlikis. One would
merely note some interesting facts and then move on. The most interesting
fact is that the subjects which are deepest embedded in Cretan folk
poetry also fascinate these literary poets. There is an anonymous
fifteenth-century poem on xenileia (exile) which recalls the many folk
poems on the same theme. And both folk poet and literary poet take a
melancholy interest in Hades and Death. In the ‘Rhymed Complaint
on the Bitter and Insatiable Hades’ by John Pitakoros of Rethymnon,
the poet goes down to Hades in his thoughts and is conducted round by
54