free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
travellers and commentators and Venetians call the Cretans an adulterous,
deceitful and immoral people. This is not only a prejudice derived
from ancient testimony of Epimenides and St Paul. It is also a reflection
of the bourgeois society at this time. Even the folk songs reflect it. For
early Cretan folk song displays more sophistication over sex than is
common in Greece and Asia Minor. (These Cretan girls in the songs
tend to have lovers rather than mere admirers; and adultery is a
common theme as well as fidelity,) Sachlikis, who castigated this society
with the vigour and disgust of a Juvenal, had a right to do so, one feels,
since he spoke from experience. But others who knew Crete less well
undoubtedly went too far. Dapper, for instance: ‘La plupart des Candiots
ou habitants Grecs de cette ile sont de grands mangeurs et de grands ivrognes,
adonnez an vin, a la dibauche, a la gourmandize et a la luxure, et surtout aux
plaisirs sales et impurs de la chair. En un mot ils menent une vie faineante et
paresseuse.’’ Fair enough, if exaggerated. But he goes on unbelievably:
’Ils sont pourtant la plupart, et sur tout ceux qui vivent a la campagne, des gens
tendres, effeminez, dilicats, lents et paresseux, qui n’aiment pas le travail, et
n’ont aucun genie et peu de penetration d’esprit’ Shame! Sachlikis is more
credible.
All this early Cretan poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries–
the dialogues, consolations, complaints, narratives of earthquakes, and
so forth — may be seen as a preparation. During this time the Cretan
poets were learning two things; the mastery of rhyme, and the use of
their own Cretan dialect. Around 1600 the great period of the Cretan
renaissance began.
The works are as follows: The Shepherdess, a charming pastoral idyll;
three tragedies, Erophile, King Rhodolinos and Zeno three comedies, in
the tradition of the New Comedy of Menander; a pastoral play,
Gyparis; a miracle play, The Sacrifice of Abraham; and an epic-romantic
poem, the Erotokritos. In all these works there are Italian influences;
in some of them the Cretan author is following an Italian model. But
the resulting works are Greek in feeling.
I don’t intend to say anything about most of these. Contemplating a
three-line precis of the gruesome plot of Erophile is no pleasanter than
digesting the pre-act summary of a Wagner opera on the Third Programme.
I shall stick to the two masterpieces, The Sacrifice of Abraham
and the Erotokritos.
The Sacrifice of Abraham is a little gem. This play of something over
one thousand lines is not primarily a religious play at all; its point is
not the mystery of God’s command to Abraham. Rather, it takes the
command, which is delivered by the angel in the first scene, as a datum,
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