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The Great Island
With this light I see the Erotokritos circulating among the enslaved race . . .
going from door to door, from ear to ear, filling souls with hope; and Erotokritos
coming to free Aretousa from prison, and the world shining to the very
corners of the sky; and the little boat travelling, loaded with the music of a
whole world, with this epic of the Greek seashore; and the romance of chivalry
turning into a history of the troubles of Romaiosyne, the troubles of the Greeks.*
Thus Sepheris expresses the debt of the Greeks to Kornaros and the
Cretan renaissance.
* Romaiosyne means Greekness. The Greeks have been called Romaioi (Romans) ever
since the country became Christian. Since that time until fairly recently, the word
Hellene carried a slightly pedantic flavour. In the vernacular it came to mean ‘pagan’:
one of the old order, ‘Hellene’ so far lost its original force that in the fifteenth century
the church of Santa Sophia was for the Orthodox ‘a haunt of demons and an altar of
the Hellenes’, in the words of Doukas.
Now of course the wheel has come round again and the Greeks are Hellenes. The
shift of meaning was bound to take place as soon as the war of independence increased
the Greeks’ preoccupation with their identity. It is Romaios which is now used pedantically
or self-consciously.