George Weller’s Greeks in _The Crack in the Column_ appear surprisingly
like Latins: “Each Greek is a volcano, and when he may erupt no man
knows, not even his friends who must quake with him, not even himself.”
In the number and complexity of their political parties they resemble
the French, yet in one way they seem to retain something of the Greeks
of antiquity viewing Imperial Rome. Small and impoverished in the
shadow of newly-risen giants, they cherish their role as inheritors and
transmitters of a great culture. At the book’s end, Nitsa, like Molly
Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, retires with her reflections:
The whole world is philhellene, as proved by the retreating Germans
leaving a wreath on the Tomb of Ignotos before they roared north to
die in the ambushes of the Slavs. But most self-surrendering of the
philhellenes are the Americans. These young antiques deserve the
most utter respect, the kindest care.