Read Online Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor - Free Book Online Page A

shadow-play. It also bears a meaning which is free of any sad or derogatory undertone. It conjures up feelings of warmth, kinship and affection, of community of history, of solidarity in trouble, of sharing the same hazards and aspirations, of being in the same boat. It is the emblem of membership of the same family, a thing that abolishes pretence and explanation and apology. A Greek recognizing another Greek in adversity or exile or emigration, salutes him as a fellow- Romiòs and stands him a free meal or a bed and lends him a helping hand.
    In spite of the intervening lustre of Byzantium and the woes of foreign domination, consciousness of descent from celebrated ancestors in the ancient world survived, however dimly, among even the humblest Romaíoi . All this, for modern Greeks, is caught up in the word “Hellene.” Though time, among the unlettered, may have driven this feeling into the subconscious or reduced it to the irrelevance of an obsolete legend, it was always there; even though circumstances removed the word from general currency for centuries. Scholars and men of letters, sadly reduced in numbers, kept this heritage alive and when the Turks were driven away at last, it was not a revived Roman Empire of the East, centred on Constantinople, which emerged, but Hellas with its capital (after a period of indecision) in Athens. The dome of St. Sophia retreated—(not very far; it still hovers beguilingly in the awareness of all Greeks)—and the Parthenon, neglected for many centuries, sailed aloft as a new lodestar for their national life; and it was not as Byzantines or Romaics that the Greeks, perhaps rubbing their eyes with wonder, began their new life, but as Hellenes. It may be compared to the revival of an old, forgotten, but authentic title long in abeyance. Romiosyne , as we have seen, had the pungency of thefamiliar and the immediate; Hellenism has the glamour of an idea. They are two aspects of the same thing.
    It would be hard to fire the blood of an English road-mender with the names of Boadicea, Caractacus or Cadwallader, or a French grocer’s with that of Vercingetorix. At the rebirth of Greece, the inhabitants were suddenly, so to speak, taken in hand by rulers and hellenizing poets and scholars and by professors who had studied in the universities of the West, and introduced to a whole museum-load of forgotten marble relations. They were pleased; they were also overcome with shyness. These gods, philosophers, generals and heroes filled them with awe. They had always known about their grand kinsmen in a half-apprehended fashion; even though the only one they knew by name was Alexander the Great, the connection was a source of vague pride. The ancients were now presented as exemplars, almost as Confucian cult-objects. The modern Greeks, thought the classical innovators, had only to take them to their hearts for an emulous new Golden Age to begin and outshine the reign of Pericles.
    It is hard to blame them. They lived in an age of wonders. The marvel of liberation had happened. There was much to be criticized in the recent Romaic past, many alien barnacles to be chipped away, modes of thought to be rooted out and impurities to be purged from the noble Greek tongue....It was too early for them to understand that their fellow-countrymen’s descent from the ancient Greeks (and from a Greek past far remoter than the fifth century B . C . they had arbitrarily singled out as their starting point) was more convincingly asserted by hundreds of humble customs and superstitions that seemed backward and barbaric to their mentors, than it was by the rather charming neo-classical stucco buildings which began to spring up in Athens. It was impossible for them to grasp that the despised demotic was the rightful heir to the speech of the ancients, while the “pure” idiom in which they wrote—for Katharévousa has never been heard on human lips [4] —was, for all its noble