GREECE SUBSEQUENT TO THE ROMAN CONQUEST.
I. GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS.
The Romans conducted their administration of Greece with much
wisdom and moderation, treating both its religion and municipal
institutions with great respect. As MR. FINLAY says, "Under these
circumstances prudence and local interests would everywhere favor
submission to Rome; national vanity alone would whisper incitements
to venture on a struggle for independence." [Footnote: "History
of Greece from 146 B.C. to A.D. 1864;" by George Finlay, LL.D.]
But the latter induced the Greeks to attempt to regain their
liberties at the time of the first Mithridatic war, about 87
B.C. Sylla, the Roman general, marched into Greece at the head
of a powerful army, and laid siege to Athens, which made a
desperate defence. At last, their resources exhausted, the
Athenians sent a deputation of orators to negotiate with the old
Roman; and it is stated that "their spokesman began to remind
him of their past glory, and was proceeding to touch upon Marathon,
when the surly soldier fiercely replied, 'I was sent here to
punish rebels, not to study history.' And he did punish them.
Breaking down the wall, his soldiers poured into the city, and
with drawn swords they swept through the streets." The severe
losses sustained by Greece in this rebellion were never repaired.
The same historian adds that both parties--Greeks and Romans--
"inflicted severe injuries on Greece, plundered the country,
and destroyed property most wantonly. The foundations of national
prosperity were undermined; and it henceforward became impossible
to save from the annual consumption of the inhabitants, the sums
necessary to replace the accumulated capital of ages which this
short war had annihilated. In some cases the wealth of the
communities became insufficient to keep the existing public works
in repair."
Cilician pirates soon after commenced their depredations, and
ravaged both the main-land and the islands until expelled by
Pompey the Great. The civil wars that overthrew the Roman republic
next added to the desolation of Greece; but on the establishment
of the Roman empire the country entered upon a career of peace
and comparative prosperity. Says a late compiler, [Footnote: Edward
L. Burlingame, Ph.D.] "Augustus and his successors generally
treated Greece with respect, and some of them distinguished her
by splendid imperial favors. Trajan greatly improved her condition
by his wise and liberal administration. Hadrian and the
Antonines venerated her for her past achievements, and showed
their good-will by the care they extended to her works of art,
and their patronage of the schools." It was at this time, also,
that the Christian religion was gaining great victories 'over
the indifference of the people to their ancient rites,' and was
thus essentially changing the moral and intellectual condition
of Greece. Aside from its power to fill the void in the heart
that philosophy, though strengthening the intellect, could not
reach, Christianity bore certain relations to the ancient
principles of government, that commended it to the acceptance
of the Greeks. These relations, and their effects, are thus
explained by DR. FELTON and a writer that he quotes: [Footnote:
"Lecture on "Greece under the Romans."]
"Besides the peculiar consolations afforded by Christianity to
the afflicted of all ranks and classes, there were popular elements
in its early forms which could not fail to commend it to the
regards of common men. It borrowed the designation ecclesia from
the old popular assembly, and liturgy from the services required
by law of the richer citizens in the popular festivities. It
taught the equality of all men in the sight of God; and this
doctrine could not fail to be affectionately welcomed by a
conquered people. The Christian congregations were organized upon
democratic principles, at least in Greece, and presented a
semblance of the free assemblies of former times; and the daily
business of communities was, equally with their spiritual affairs,
transacted under these popular forms. 'From the moment a people,'
says a recent writer, 'in the state of intellectual civilization
in which the Greeks were, could listen to the preachers, it was
certain they would adopt the religion. They might alter, modify,
or corrupt it, but it was impossible they should reject it. The
existence of an assembly in which the dearest interests of all
human beings were expounded and discussed in the language of
truth, and with the most earnest expressions of persuasion, must
have lent an irresistible charm to the investigation of the new
doctrine among a people possessing the institutions and the
feelings of the Greeks. Sincerity, truth, and a desire to persuade
others, will soon create eloquence where numbers are gathered
together. Christianity revived oratory, and with oratory it
awakened many of the characteristics which had slept for ages.
The discussions of Christianity gave also new vigor to the
commercial and municipal institutions, as they improved the
intellectual qualities of the people.'"
Among the imperial friends of Greece, whose reign has been
characterized by some writers as "the last fortunate period in
the sad annals of that country," was the Emperor Julian, known
as "The Apostate." He ascended the throne in 361 A.D.; and,
although he sought to overthrow Christianity and re-establish
the pagan religion, "he founded charities, aimed at the suppression
of vice and profligacy, and was distinguished for his devotion
to the happiness of the people." Well educated in early life,
he became an accomplished and cultured sovereign, "and in many
ways manifested his passionate attachment to Greece, her
literature, her institutions, and her arts."
* * * * *
II. CHANGES DOWN TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
On the establishment of the Eastern empire of the Romans, with
Byzantium for its capital, the Greeks began to exert a greater
influence in the affairs of government, and, outside of the
metropolis itself, the Roman spirit of the administration was
gradually destroyed. In the third and fourth centuries Greece
suffered from invasions by the Goths and Huns, and all apparent
progress was stopped; but during the long reign of Justinian,
from 527 to 565, many of its cities were embellished and fortified,
and the pagan schools of Athens were closed. No farther events
of importance affecting the condition of Greece occurred until
the immigrations of the Slavonians and other barbarous races,
in the sixth and eighth centuries. The population of Greece had
dwindled rapidly, and its revenues were so small that the Eastern
emperors cared little to defend it. Hence these northern migratory
hordes rapidly acquired possession of its soil. Finally this great
body of settlers broke up into a number of tribes and disappeared
as a people, leaving behind them, however, still existing evidences
of their influence upon the country and its inhabitants.
THE COURTS OF CRUSADING CHIEFTAINS.
The next important changes in the affairs of Greece were wrought
by warriors from the West. In 1081 the Norman, Robert Guiscard,
and in 1146 Roger, King of Sicily, conquered portions of the
country, including Corinth, Thebes, and Athens; and in the time
of the fourth Crusade to the Holy Land (1203), when Constantinople
was captured by Latin princes (1204), Greece became a prize for
some of the most powerful crusading chieftains, under whose rule
the courts of Thessaloni'ca, Athens, and the Peloponnesus attained
to considerable celebrity even throughout Europe. "But their
magnificence," says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, "was entirely
modern. It centered wholly round their own persons and interests;
and although the condition of the people was in no respects worse,
in some respects palpably better, still they did but minister
to the glory of the houses of Neri or Acciajuoli, or De la Roche
or Brienne. The beautiful structures of Athens and the Acropolis
were prized, not as heirlooms of departed greatness, but as the
ornaments of a feudal court, and the rewards of successful valor."
The Duchy of Athens was the most interesting and renowned of
these Frankish kingdoms; and in one of his lectures PRESIDENT
FELTON [Footnote: Lecture on "Turkish Conquest of Constantinople."]
points out the traces which this duchy has left here and there
in modern literature. "The fame of the brilliant court of Athens,"
he says, "resounded through the west of Europe, and many a chapter
of old romance is filled with gorgeous pictures of its splendors.
One of the heroines of Boccacio's Decameron, in the course of
her adventurous life, is found at Athens, inspiring the duke
by her charms. Dan'te was a contemporary of Guy II. and Walter
de Brienne; and in his Divina Commedia he applies to Theseus,
King of ancient Athens, the title so familiar to him, borne by
the princely rulers in his own day. Chaucer, too--the bright
herald of English poetry--had often heard of the dukes of Athens;
and he too, like Dante, gives the title to Theseus. Finally, in
the age of Elizabeth, when Italian poetry was much studied by
scholars and courtiers, Shakspeare, in the delightful scenes of
the Midsummer Night's Dream, introduces Theseus, Duke of Athens,
as the conqueror and the lover of Hippol'yta, the warrior-queen
of the Amazons."
Theseus. Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword,
And won thy love, doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling.
--Act I. Scene I.
THE TURKISH INVASION.
Some of these Latin principalities and dukedoms existed until
they were swept away by the Turks, who, after the fall of
Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire in 1453, by degrees
obtained possession of Greece.
Then, Greece, the tempest rose that burst on thee,
Land of the bard, the warrior, and the sage!
Oh, where were then thy sons, the great, the free,
Whose deeds are guiding stars from age to age?
Though firm thy battlements of crags and snows,
And bright the memory of thy days of pride,
In mountain might though Corinth's fortress rose,
On, unresisted, rolled th' invading tide!
Oh! vain the rock, the rampart, and the tower,
If Freedom guard them not with Mind's unconquered power.
Where were th' avengers then, whose viewless might
Preserved inviolate their awful fane,
When through the steep defiles to Delphi's height
In martial splendor poured the Persian's train?
Then did those mighty and mysterious Powers,
Armed with the elements, to vengeance wake,
Call the dread storms to darken round their towers,
Hurl down the rocks, and bid the thunders break;
Till far around, with deep and fearful clang,
Sounds of unearthly war through wild Parnassus rang.
Where was the spirit of the victor-throng,
Whose tombs are glorious by Scamander's tide,
Whose names are bright in everlasting song,
The lords of war, the praised, the deified?
Where he, the hero of a thousand lays,
Who from the dead at Marathon arose
All armed, and, beaming on th' Athenian's gaze,
A battle-meteor, guided to their foes?
Or they whose forms, to Alaric's awe-struck eye,
[Footnote: GIBBON says: "From Thermopylæ to Sparta the leader
of the Goths (Alaric) pursued his victorious march without
encountering any mortal antagonist; but one of the advocates of
expiring paganism has confidently asserted that the walls of
Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva with her formidable
ægis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles; and that the
conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile deities
of Greece." But Gibbon characteristically adds, "The Christian
faith which Alaric had devotedly embraced taught him to despise
the imaginary deities of Rome and Athens."--Milman's "Gibbon's
Rome," vol. ii., p. 215.]
Hovering o'er Athens, blazed in airy panoply?
Ye slept, oh heroes! chief ones of the earth--
High demi-gods of ancient day--ye slept.
There lived no spark of your ascendant worth,
When o'er your land the victor Moslem swept;
No patriot then the sons of freedom led,
In mountain-pass devotedly to die;
The martyr-spirit of resolve was fled,
And the high soul's unconquered buoyancy;
And by your graves, and on your battle-plains,
Warriors, your children knelt, to wear the stranger's chains.
--MRS. HEMANS.
* * * * *
III. CONTESTS BETWEEN THE TURKS AND VENETIANS.
Greece was long the scene of severe contests between the Turks
and the Venetians. Athens was first captured by the Turks in
1456, but they were driven from it in 1467 by the Venetians, who
were in turn expelled from the city by the Turks in 1470. But
Venice, as a French historian--COMTE DE LABOURDE--has observed,
"Alone of the states of Europe could feel, from a merely material
point of view, the force of the blow struck at Europe and her
own commerce by the submission of almost the whole of Greece
to Turkish rule;" and this feeling survived many centuries. In
1670 the Turks conquered Crete from the Venetians, and in 1684
the latter retaliated by offensive operations against the
Peloponnesus, which was soon reconquered by the Venetian admiral
Morosini. In 1687 Morosini crowned his successes by the capture
of Athens. The Turkish garrison had retired to the Acropolis,
and the victory is principally of interest on account of the
irreparable injury done to the works of art on that "rock-shrine
of Athens." Although he subsequently sought to evade all
responsibility for the desolation that ensued, it was Morosini
who directed his batteries to hurl their fatal burdens against
the Acropolis, and it was he who afterward robbed it of many
of its treasures. Hitherto the alterations made for military
purposes, and the slight injuries inflicted at various times,
had not marred the general beauty and effect of its buildings;
but when the troops of Venice entered Athens, the Parthenon and
others of that gorgeous assemblage of structures were in ruins,
and the glory of the Athenian Acropolis survived only in the
past. Contrasting its past glory and its present decay, a writer
in a recent Review makes these interesting observations:
"No other fortress has embraced so much beauty and splendor within
its walls, and none has witnessed a series of more startling
and momentous changes in the fortunes of its possessors. Wave
after wave of war and conquest has beaten against it. The city
which lies at its feet has fallen beneath the assaults of the
Persian, the Spartan, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Goth, the
Crusader, and the Turk. Through all these and other vicissitudes
the Acropolis passed, changing only in the character of its
occupants, unchanged in its loveliness and splendor. With a few
blemishes and losses, whether from the decaying taste of later
times or the occasional robberies of a foreign conqueror, but
unaffected in its general aspect, it presented to the eyes of
the victorious Ottoman the same front of unparalleled beauty
which it had displayed in the days of Pericles. To him who looks
upon it now, however, the scene is changed indeed--changed not
only in the loss of its treasures of decorative art (for of many
of these it had been robbed before), but with its loveliest fabrics
shattered, many reduced to hopeless ruin, and not a few utterly
obliterated. Less than two centuries sufficed to bring about
all this dilapidation: less than three months sufficed to complete
the ruin. If the Venetian, by his abortive conquest, inflicted
not more injury on the fair heritage of Athenian art than it had
undergone from all preceding spoliations, he left it, not merely
from the havoc of war, but by wanton subsequent mutilation,
in that state which rendered the recovery of its ancient grace
and majesty impossible."
The Venetians evacuated Athens in 1688, and a few years
subsequently the Peloponnesus was their only possession in Greece.
In 1715 a Turkish army of one hundred thousand men under Al'i
Coumour'gi, the Grand Vizier of Ach'met III., invaded the
Peloponnesus, and first attacked Corinth. Historians tell us
that the garrison, weakened by several unsuccessful attacks,
opened negotiations for a surrender; but, while these were in
progress, the accidental firing of a magazine in the Turkish
camp so enraged the infidels that they at once broke off the
negotiations, stormed and captured the city, and put most of
the garrison, with Signor Minotti, the commander, to the sword.
Those taken prisoners were reserved for execution under the walls
of Nauplia, within sight of the Venetians.
In BYRON'S Siege of Corinth, founded on the historical narrative; a
poetical license is taken, and the death of Minotti and the remnant
of his followers is attributed to the explosion of a powder-magazine
fired by Minotti himself. From the fine descriptions which this poem
contains we extract the following verses:
The Siege and Fall of Corinth.
On dim Cithæron's ridge appears
The gleam of twice ten thousand spears;
And downward to the Isthmian plain,
From shore to shore of either main,
The tent is pitched, the crescent shines
Along the Moslem's leaguering lines;
And the dusk Spä'hi's bands advance
Beneath each bearded pä'sha's glance;
And far and wide as eye can reach
The turbaned cohorts throng the beach;
And there the Arab's camel kneels,
And there his steed the Tartar wheels;
The Turcoman has left his herd,
The sabre round his loins to gird;
And there the volleying thunders pour,
Till waves grow smoother to the roar.
The trench is dug, the cannon's breath
Wings the far hissing globe of death;
Fast whirl the fragments from the wall,
Which crumbles with the ponderous ball;
And from that wall the foe replies,
O'er dusty plain and smoky skies,
With fires that answer fast and well.
The summons of the Infidel.
The walls grew weak; and fast and hot
Against them poured the ceaseless shot,
With unabating fury sent
From battery to battlement;
And thunder-like the pealing din
Rose from each heated culverin;
And here and there some crackling dome
Was fired before the exploding bomb;
And as the fabric sank beneath
The shattering shell's volcanic breath,
In red and wreathing columns flashed
The flame, as loud the ruin crashed,
Or into countless meteors driven,
Its earth-stars melted into heaven--
Whose clouds that day grew doubly dun,
Impervious to the hidden sun,
With volumed smoke that slowly grew
To one wide sky of sulphurous hue.
Having made a breach in the walls, as morning dawns the Turks
form in line, and wait for the word to storm the intrenchments.
Coumourgi addresses them--the command is given, and with the
irresistible force of an avalanche the infidels pour into Corinth.
Tartar, and Spähi, and Turcoman,
Strike your tents and throng to the van;
Mount ye, spur ye, skirr the plain,
That the fugitive may flee in vain
When he breaks from the town; and none escape,
Aged or young, in the Christian shape;
While your fellows on foot, in a fiery mass,
Bloodstain the breach through which they pass.
The steeds are all bridled, and snort to the rein;
Curved is each neck, and flowing each mane;
White is the foam of their champ on the bit:
The spears are uplifted, the matches are lit,
The cannon are pointed, and ready to roar,
And crush the wall they have crumbled before:
The khan and the päshas are all at their post;
The vizier himself at the head of the host.
When the culverin's signal is fired, then on;
Leave not in Corinth a living one--
A priest at her altars, a chief in her halls,
A hearth in her mansions, a stone on her walls.
God and the prophet-Ala Hu!
Up to the skies with that wild halloo!
"There the breach lies for passage, the ladder to scale;
And your hands on your sabres, and how should ye fail?
He who first downs with the red cross may crave
His heart's dearest wish; let him ask it, and have!"
Thus uttered Coumourgi, the dauntless vizier;
The reply was the brandish of sabre and spear,
And the shout of fierce thousands in joyous ire;
Silence--hark to the signal--fire!
* * * * *
As the spring-tides, with heavy plash,
From the cliffs invading, dash
Huge fragments, sapped by the ceaseless flow,
Till white and thundering down they go,
Like the avalanche's snow,
On the Alpine vales below;
Thus at length, outbreathed and worn,
Corinth's sons were downward borne
By the long and oft renewed
Charge of the Moslem multitude.
In firmness they stood, and in masses they fell,
Heaped, by the host of the infidel,
Hand to hand, and foot to foot:
Nothing there, save death, was mute;
Stroke, and thrust, and flash, and cry
For quarter, or for victory,
Mingle there with the volleying thunder,
Which makes the distant cities wonder
How the sounding battle goes,
If with them or for their foes.
From the point of encountering blades to the hilt
Sabres and swords with blood were gilt;
But the rampart is won, and the spoil begun,
And all but the after-carnage done.
Shriller shrieks now mingling come
From within the plundered dome:
Hark to the haste of flying feet,
That splash in the blood of the slippery street;
But here and there, where 'vantage ground
Against the foe may still be found,
Desperate groups of twelve or ten
Make a pause, and turn again--
With banded backs against the wall
Fiercely stand, or fighting fall.
Minotti, though an old man, has an "arm full of might," and he
disputes, foot by foot, the successful and deadly onslaughts
of the Turks. He finally retires, with the remnant of his gallant
band, to the fortified church, where lie the last and richest
spoils sought by the infidels, and in the vaults beneath which,
lined with the dead of ages gone, was also "the Christians' chiefest
magazine." To the latter a train had been laid, and, seizing
a blazing torch, his "last and stern resource,"
Darkly, sternly, and all alone,
Minotti stands o'er the altar-stone,
and awaits the last attack of his foes. It soon comes.
So near they came, the nearest stretched
To grasp the spoil he almost reached,
When old Minotti's hand
Touched with the torch the train--
'Tis fired!
Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain,
The turbaned victors, the Christian band,
All that of living or dead remain,
Hurled on high with the shivered fane,
In one wild roar expired!
The shattered town, the walls thrown down,
The waves a moment backward bent--
The hills that shake, although unrent,
As if an earthquake passed--
The thousand shapeless things all driven
In cloud and flame athwart the heaven,
By that tremendous blast--
Proclaimed the desperate conflict o'er
On that too long afflicted shore:
Up to the sky like rockets go
All that mingled there below:
Many a tall and goodly man,
Scorched and shrivelled to a span,
When he fell to earth again
Like a cinder strewed the plain:
Down the ashes shower like rain;
Some fell in the gulf, which received the sprinkles
With a thousand circling wrinkles;
Some fell on the shore, but, far away,
Scattered o'er the isthmus lay.
* * * * *
All the living things that heard
That deadly earth-shock disappeared;
The wild birds flew; the wild dogs fled,
And howling left the unburied dead;
The camels from their keepers broke,
The distant steer forsook the yoke--
The nearer steed plunged o'er the plain,
And burst his girth, and tore his rein;
The bull-frog's note, from out the marsh,
Deep-mouthed arose, and doubly harsh
The wolves yelled on the caverned hill,
Where echo rolled in thunder still;
The jackal's troop, in gathered cry,
Bayed from afar complainingly,
With a mixed and mournful sound,
Like crying babe, and beaten hound:
With sudden wing and ruffled breast
The eagle left his rocky nest,
And mounted nearer to the sun,
The clouds beneath him seemed so dun;
Their smoke assailed his startled beak,
And made him higher soar and shriek.
Thus was Corinth lost and won!
* * * * *
IV. FINAL CONQUEST OF GREECE BY TURKEY.
The fall of Corinth opened the way to a successful advance of
the Turkish forces through the Peloponnesus, and the Venetians
were soon compelled to abandon it. By the peace of Passä'rowitz,
in 1718, the whole of Greece was again surrendered to Turkey,
and under her rule the country, divided into military districts
called Pasha'lics, sunk into a deplorable condition which the
progress of time did nothing to ameliorate. The Greeks, being
virtually reduced to bondage, suffered untold miseries from the
rapacity and barbarism of their masters. Says the historian,
SIR EMERSON TENNENT, "So undefined was the system of extortion,
and so uncontrolled the power of those to whose execution it
was intrusted, that the evil spread over the whole system of
administration, and insinuated itself with a polypous fertility
into every relation and ordinance of society, till there were
few actions or occupations of the Greeks that were not burdened
with the scrutiny and interference of their masters, and none that
did not suffer, in a greater or less degree, from their heartless
rapine." For four centuries and over the Greeks suffered under
this despotism, which stamped out industry and education, and
tended to the extinction of every manly trait in the people, while
it also developed the native vices of the Hellenic character.
In a poem written in 1786 by the afterward celebrated British
statesman, GEORGE CANNING, the writer, after paying a handsome
tribute to the greatness and glory of the Greece of olden time,
draws the following truthful picture of her degeneracy in his
own day:
The Slavery of Greece.
Oh, how changed thy fame,
And all thy glories fading into shame!
What! that thy bold, thy freedom-breathing land
Should crouch beneath a tyrant's stern command!
That servitude should bind in galling chain
Whom Asia's millions once opposed in vain,
Who could have thought? Who sees without a groan
Thy cities mouldering and thy walls o'erthrown;
That where once towered the stately, solemn fane,
Now moss-grown ruins strew the ravaged plain;
And, unobserved but by the traveller's eye,
Proud, vaulted domes in fretted fragments lie;
And the fallen column, on the dusty ground,
Pale ivy throws its sluggish arms around?
Thy sons (sad change!) in abject bondage sigh;
Unpitied toil, and unlamented die;
Groan at the labors of the galling oar,
Or the dark caverns of the mine explore.
The glittering tyranny of Othman's sons,
The pomp of horror which surrounds their thrones,
Have awed their servile spirits into fear;
Spurned by the foot, they tremble and revere.
The day of labor, night's sad, sleepless hour,
The inflictive scourge of arbitrary power,
The bloody terror of the pointed steel,
The murderous stake, the agonizing wheel,
And (dreadful choice!) the bowstring or the bowl,
Damps their faint vigor and unmans the soul.
Disastrous fate! Still tears will fill the eye,
Still recollection prompt the mournful sigh,
When to the mind recurs thy former fame,
And all the horrors of thy present shame.
In 1810-'11 the poet BYRON spent considerable time in Greece,
visiting its many scenes of historic interest, and noting the
condition of its people. Here he wrote the second canto of
Childe Harold, in which the following fine apostrophe and appeal
To Greece, still under Moslem rule, are found:
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,
And long accustomed bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilom did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylæ's sepulchral strait--
Oh, who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Euro'ta's banks, and call thee from the tomb?
Spirit of Freedom! when on Phy'le's brow
Thou sat'st with Thrasybu'lus and his train,
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?
Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
But every carle can lord it o'er thy land;
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned.
In all, save form alone, how changed! and who
That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye,
Who but would deem their bosoms burned anew
With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty!
And many dream withal the hour is nigh
That gives them back their father's heritage:
For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh,
Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage,
Or tear their name defiled from Slavery's mournful page.
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress thee? No!
True, they may lay your proud despoilers low,
But not for you will Freedom's altars flame.
Shades of the Helots! triumph o'er your foe!
Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;
Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thy years of shame.
* * * * *
When riseth Lacedæmon's hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens' children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then may'st thou be restored; but not till then.
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust: and when
Can man, in shattered splendor renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?
FIRST STEPS TO SECURE LIBERTY.
Although the oppressive domination of the Turks was tamely
submitted to for so many centuries, the Greeks did not entirely
lose their national spirit, nor their devotion to their religion
and their domestic institutions; and long before Byron wrote,
Greece began preparations to break the Turkish yoke. The
preservation of the national spirit was largely due to the warlike
inhabitants of the mountainous regions of the north, who maintained
their independence against the bloody tyranny of the Turks, and
continually harassed their camps and villages. These mountaineers
were known as Klephts; and though they were literally robbers,
ofttimes plundering the Greeks as well as the Turks, yet, on
the decline of the Armato'li--the Christian local militia which
the Turks attempted to crush out--the Klephts acquired political
and social importance as a permanent class in the Greek nation;
and, as DR. FELTON says, "When the Revolution broke out, the
courage, temperance, and hardihood of these bands were among
the most effective agencies in rescuing Greece from the blighting
tyranny of the Turks." This writer characterizes the ballads of
the Klephts as "full of fire, and redolent of the mountain life,
which had an irresistible charm for young and adventurous spirits
chafing under the domination of the Turks in the lowlands;" and
to him we are indebted for a literal version of one of these
ballads, representing the feelings of a young man who had resolved
to leave his mother's home and betake himself to the mountains,
and "illustrating at once the impatient spirit of rebellion against
the Turks, and the sweet flow of natural poetry which was ever
welling up in the hearts of the people." [Footnote: This ballad
is taken from "a collection published by Zampelios, a Greek
gentleman, and a native of Leucadia."]
"Mother, I can no longer be a slave to the Turks; I cannot--my
heart fights against it. I will take my gun and go and become
a Klepht; to dwell on the mountains, among the lofty ridges;
to have the woods for my companions, and my converse with the
beasts; to have the snow for my covering, the rocks for my bed;
with sons of the Klephts to have my daily habitation. I will go,
mother, and do not weep, but give me thy prayer. And we will pray,
my dear mother, that I may slaughter many a Turk. Plant the rose,
and plant the dark carnation, and give them sugar and musk to
drink; and as long, O mother mine, as the flowers blossom and
put forth, thy son is not dead, but is warring with the Turks.
But if a day of sorrow come, a day of woe, and the plants fade
away, and the flowers fall, then I too shall have been slain,
and thou must clothe thyself in black.'
"Twelve years passed, and five months, while the roses blossomed
and the buds bloomed; and one spring morning, the first of May,
when the birds were singing and heaven was smiling, at once it
thundered and lightened, and grew dark. The carnation sighed, the
rose wept, both withered away together, and the flowers fell; and
with them the hapless mother became a lifeless heap of earth."
The last half of the eighteenth century witnessed, in Greece, the
first general desire for liberty. Secret societies were formed
to aid in the emancipation of the country, and "eminent writers,
at home and abroad, appealed to the glorious recollections of
Greece in order to excite a universal enthusiasm for freedom."
Among the latter may be mentioned CONSTANTINOS RHIGAS, a native
of Thessaly, born in 1753, a man of fine accomplishments and
an ardent patriot, whose lyric ballads are said to have "rung
through Greece like a trumpet," and who has been styled "the
Tyrtæ'us of modern Greece." One of his war-songs has been thus
translated:
Sons of the Greeks, arise!
The glorious hour's gone forth,
And, worthy of such ties,
Display who gave us birth.
* * * * *
Then manfully despising
The Turkish tyrant's yoke,
Let your country see you rising,
And all her chains are broke.
Brave shades of chiefs and sages,
Behold the coming strife!
Hellenes of past ages,
Oh start again to life!
At the sound of my trumpet, breaking
Your sleep, oh join with me!
And the seven-hilled city [Footnote: Constantinople] seeking,
Fight, conquer, till we're free.
Sparta, Sparta, why in slumbers
Lethargic dost thou lie?
Awake, and join thy numbers
With Athens, old ally!
Leonidas recalling,
That chief of ancient song,
Who saved ye once from falling--
The terrible! the strong!
Who made that bold diversion
In old Thermopylæ,
And warring with the Persian
To keep his country free;
With his three hundred waging
The battle, long he stood,
And, like a lion raging,
Expired in seas of blood.
--Trans. by BYRON.
Another poet, POLYZOIS, writes in a similar vein:
Friends and countrymen, shall we
Slaves of Moslems ever be,
Of the old barbaric band,
Tyrants o'er Hellenic land?
Draws the hour of vengeance nigh--
Vengeance! be our battle-cry.
It may be stated that Rhigas, having visited Vienna with the
hope of rousing the wealthy Greek residents of that city to
immediate action, was barbarously surrendered to the Turks by
the Austrian government. On the way to execution he broke from
his guards and killed two of them, but was overpowered and
immediately beheaded.
* * * * *
v. THE GREEK REVOLUTION.
The various efforts made by the Greeks in behalf of freedom,
or, as more comprehensively stated by a recent writer, "The
constancy with which they clung to the Christian Church during
four centuries of misery and political annihilation; their
immovable faithfulness to their nationality under intolerable
oppression; the intellectual superiority they never failed to
exhibit over their tyrants; the love of humane letters which
they never, in all their sorrows, lost; and the wise preparation
they made for the struggle by means of schools, and by the
circulation of editions of their own ancient authors, and
translations of the most instructive works in modern literature"
--these were the influences which finally impelled the Greeks to
seek their restoration in armed insurrection, that first broke
out in the spring of 1821, and that ushered in the great Greek
Revolution. On the 7th of March Alexander Ypsilanti, a Greek,
who had been a major-general in the Russian army, proclaimed
from Moldavia the independence of Greece, and assured his
countrymen of the aid of Russia in the approaching contest. But
the Russian emperor declined intervention; and the Porte took
the most vigorous measures against the Greeks, calling upon all
Mussulmen to arm against the rebels for the protection of Islamism.
The wildest fanaticism raged in Constantinople, where thousands
of resident Greeks were remorselessly murdered; and in Moldavia
the bloody struggle was terminated by the annihilation of the
patriot army, and the flight of Ypsilanti to Trieste, where the
Austrian government seized and imprisoned him.
In southern Greece, however, no cruelties could quench the fire
of liberty; and sixteen days after the proclamation of Ypsilanti
the revolution of the Morea began at Suda, a large village in
the northern part of Acha'ia, and spread over Achaia and the
islands of the Æge'an. The ancient names were revived; and on
the 6th of April the Messenian senate, assembled at Kalamä'ta,
proclaimed that Greece had shaken off the Turkish yoke to preserve
the Christian faith and restore the ancient character of the
country. A formal address was made by that body to the people
of the United States, and was forwarded to this country. It
declared that, "having deliberately resolved to live or die for
freedom, the Greeks were drawn by an irresistible impulse to
the people of the United States." In that early stage of the
struggle, however, the address failed to excite that sympathy
which, as we shall see farther on, the progress of events and
a better understanding of the situation finally awakened.
During the summer months the Turks committed great depredations
among the Greek towns on the coast of Asia Minor; the inhabitants
of the Island of Candia, who had taken no part in the insurrection,
were disarmed, and their archbishop and other prelates were
murdered. The most barbarous atrocities were also committed at
Rhodes and other islands of the Grecian Archipelago, where the
villages were burned and the country desolated. But in August
the Greeks captured the strong Turkish fortresses of Monembasi'a
and Navarï'no, and in October that of Tripolit'za, and took a
terrible revenge upon their enemies. In Tripolitza alone eight
thousand Turks were put to death. The excesses of the Turks showed
to the Greeks that their struggle was one of life and death; and
it is not surprising, therefore, that they often retaliated when
the power was in their hands. In September of the same year the
Greek general Ulysses defeated a large Turkish army near the
Pass of Thermopylæ; but, on the other hand, the peninsula of
Cassandra, the ancient Pelle'ne, was taken by the Turks, and
over three thousand Greeks were put to the sword. The Athenian
Acropolis was seized and garrisoned by the Turks, and the people
of Athens, as in olden time, fled to Sal'amis for safety; but
in general, throughout all southern Greece, the close of the
year saw the Turks driven from the country districts and shut
up in the principal cities.
A PROPHETIC VISION OF THE STRUGGLE.
When the revolution of the Greeks broke out the English poet
SHELLEY was residing in Italy. It was during the first year of
the war that Shelley, filled with enthusiasm for the Greek cause,
wrote, from the scanty materials that were then accessible, his
beautiful dramatic poem of Hellas; and although he could at that
time narrate but few events of the struggle, yet his prophecies
of the final result came true in their general import. Forming
his poem on the basis of the Persians of Æschylus, the scene
opens with a chorus of Greek captive women, who thus sing of
the course of Freedom, from the earliest ages until the light
of her glory returns to rest upon and renovate their benighted
land:
In the great morning of the world
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
Like vultures frightened from Ima'us,
[Footnote: A Scythian mountain-range.]
Before an earthquake's tread,
So from Time's tempestuous dawn
Freedom's splendor burst and shone:
Thermopylæ and Marathon
Caught, like mountains beacon-lighted,
The springing fire, The winged glory
On Philippi half alighted
[Footnote: The republican Romans, under Brutus and Cassius,
were defeated here by Octavius and Mark Antony, 42 B.C.]
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan.
[Footnote: Milan was the center of the resistance of the
Lombard league against the Austrian tyrant Frederic Barbarossa.
The latter, in 1162, burned the city to the ground; but liberty
lived in its ashes, and it rose, like an exhalation, from its
ruins.]
From age to age, from man to man
It lived; and lit, from land to land,
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.
[Footnote: Florence freed itself from the power of the
Ghibelline nobles, and became a free republic in 1250.
Albion--England: Magna Charta wrested from King John:
the Commonwealth. Switzerland: the great victory of
Mogarten, in 1315, led to the compact of the three cantons,
thus forming the nucleus of the Swiss Confederation.]
Then night fell; and, as from night,
Re-assuring fiery flight
From the West swift Freedom came,
[Footnote: The American Revolution.]
Against the course of heaven and doom,
A second sun, arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
From far Atlantis its young beams
[Footnote: The fabled Atlantis of Plato; here used for America.]
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine streams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again,
[Footnote: Referring to the French Revolution.]
Through clouds, its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain.
[Footnote: Referring to the revolutions that broke out about
the year 1820.]
As an eagle, fed with morning,
Scorns the embattled tempest's warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain cedar's hair,
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine; Freedom, so,
To what of Greece remaineth, now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings play,
And in the naked lightnings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leave, where'er she flies,
A desert, or a paradise;
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory or a grave.
In the farther prosecution of his narrative, the poet represents
the Turkish Sultan, Mahmoud, as being strongly moved by dreams
of the threatened overthrow of his power; and he accordingly sends
for Ahasuerus, an aged Jew, to interpret them. In the mean time
the chorus of women sings the final triumph of the Cross over
the crescent, and the fleeing away of the dark "powers of earth
and air" before the advancing light of the "Star of Bethlehem:"
A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapor dim
Which the orient planet animates with light;
Hell, sin, and slavery came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed until their lord had taken flight.
The moon of Ma'homet
Arose, and it shall set;
While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon,
The Cross leads generations on.
Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep,
From one whose dreams are paradise,
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her black eyes;
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The powers of earth and air
Fled from the rising Star of Bethlehem.
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
Our hills, and seas, and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams--
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears--
Wailed for the golden years.
In the language of Hassan, an attendant of Mahmoud, the poet
then summarizes the events attending the opening of the struggle,
giving a picture of the course of European politics--Egypt sending
her armies and fleets to aid the Sultan against the rebel world;
England, Queen of Ocean, upon her island throne, holding herself
aloof from the contest; Russia, indifferent whether Greece or
Turkey conquers, but watching to stoop upon the victor; and Austria,
while hating freedom, yet fearing the success of freedom's enemies.
The poet could not foresee that change in English politics which
subsequently permitted England, aided by France and Russia, to
interfere in behalf of Greece. Hassan says:
"The anarchies of Africa unleash
Their tempest-winged cities of the sea,
To speak in thunder to the rebel world.
Like sulphurous clouds, half shattered by the storm,
They sweep the pale Ægean, while the Queen
Of Ocean, bound upon her island throne,
Far in the West, sits mourning that her sons,
Who frown on Freedom, spare a smile for thee:
Russia still hovers, as an eagle might
Within a cloud, near which a kite and crane
Hang tangled in inextricable fight,
To stoop upon the victor; for she fears
The name of Freedom, even as she hates thine;
But recreant Austria loves thee as the grave
Loves pestilence; and her slow dogs of war,
Fleshed with the chase, come up from Italy,
And howl upon their limits; for they see
The panther Freedom fled to her old cover
Amid seas and mountains, and a mightier brood
Crouch around."
Although Hassan recounts the numbers of the Sultan's armies,
and the strength of his forts and arsenals, yet the desponding
Mahmoud, watching the declining moon, thus symbolizes it as the
wan emblem of his fading power:
"Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon, emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud
Which leads the rear of the departing day,
Wan emblem of an empire fading now!
See how it trembles in the blood-red air,
And, like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent,
Shrinks on the horizon's edge--while, from above,
One star, with insolent and victorious light
Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams,
Like arrows through a fainting antelope,
Strikes its weak form to death."
As messenger after messenger approaches, and informs the Sultan
of the revolutionary risings in different parts of his empire,
he refuses to hear more, and takes refuge in that fatalistic
philosophy which is an unfailing resource of the followers of
the Prophet in all their reverses:
"I'll hear no more! too long
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge,
Through rough and smooth; nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not, in whose hands we are."
When the Jew, Ahasuerus, at length arrives, he speaks in oracular
terms, and calls up visions which increase the Sultan's fears;
and when the latter hears shouts of transient victory over the
Greeks, he regards it but as the expiring gleam which serves to
make the coming darkness the more terrible. He thus soliloquizes:
"Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake, and live,
Were there such things? or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not! for naught we see, or dream,
Possess or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The future must become the past, and I
As they were, to whom once the present hour,
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained."
Although the poet predicts series of disasters and periods of
gloom for struggling Greece, yet, at the close of the poem, a
brighter age than any she has known is represented as gleaming
upon her "through the sunset of hope."
The year 1822 opened with the assembling of the first Greek
congress at Epidau'rus, the proclaiming of a provisional
constitution on the 13th of January, and the issuing, on the
27th, of a declaration that announced the union of all Greece,
with an independent federative government under the presidency
of Alexander Mavrocordä'to. But the Greeks, unaccustomed to
exercise the rights of freemen, were unable at once to establish
a wise and firm government: they often quarreled among themselves;
and those who had exercised an independent authority under the
government of the Turks were with difficulty induced to submit
to the control of the central government. The few men of
intelligence and liberal views among them had a difficult task
to perform; but the wretchedly undisciplined state of the Turkish
armies aided its successful accomplishment. The principal military
events of the year were the terrible massacre of the inhabitants
of the Island of Scio by the Turks in April; the defeat of the
latter in the Morea, where more than twenty thousand of them
were slain; the successes of the Greek fire-ships, by which many
Turkish vessels were destroyed; and the surrender to the Greeks
of Nap'oli di Roma'nia, the ancient Nauplia, the port of Argos.
By the destruction of the Island of Scio a paradise was changed
into a scene of desolation, and more than forty thousand persons
were killed or sold into slavery. Soon after, one hundred and
fifty villages in southern Macedonia experienced the fate of
Scio; and the pasha of Saloni'ca boasted that he had destroyed,
in one day, fifteen hundred women and children.
Goaded to desperation, rather than disheartened by their reverses
and the remorseless cruelties of the Turks, the Greeks struggled
bravely on, and during the year 1823 the results of the contest
were generally in their favor. They often proved themselves worthy
sons of those who fell
"In bleak Thermopylæ's strait,"
or on the plains of Marathon. Their patriotic determination to be
free, or die in the attempt, is happily reflected in the following
lines by the poet CAMPBELL, whose heart beat in sympathy with their
efforts for liberty.
Song of the Greeks.
Again to the battle, Achaians!
Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance!
Our land--the first garden of Liberty's tree--
It hath been, and shall yet be, the land of the free;
For the Cross of our faith is replanted,
The pale, dying crescent is daunted,
And we march that the footprints of Mahomet's slaves
May be washed out in blood from our forefathers' graves.
Their spirits are hovering o'er us,
And the sword shall to glory restore us.
Ah! what though no succor advances,
Nor Christendom's chivalrous lances
Are stretched in our aid? Be the combat our own!
And we'll perish or conquer more proudly alone!
For we've sworn by our country's assaulters,
By the virgins they've dragged from our altars,
By our massacred patriots, our children in chains,
By our heroes of old, and their blood in our veins,
That, living, we shall be victorious,
Or that, dying, our deaths shall be glorious!
A breath of submission we breathe not:
The sword that we've drawn we will sheathe not;
Its scabbard is left where our martyrs are laid,
And the vengeance of ages has whetted its blade.
Earth may hide, waves ingulf, fire consume us;
But they shall not to slavery doom us.
If they rule, it shall be o'er our ashes and graves:
But we've smote them already with fire on the waves,
And new triumphs on land are before us--
To the charge!--Heaven's banner is o'er us.
This day shall ye blush for its story,
Or brighten your lives with its glory.
Our women--oh say, shall they shriek in despair,
Or embrace us from conquest, with wreaths in their hair?
Accursed may his memory blacken,
If a coward there be who would slacken
Till we've trampled the turban, and shown ourselves worth
Being sprung from, and named for, the godlike of earth.
Strike home! and the world shall revere us
As heroes descended from heroes.
Old Greece lightens up with emotion!
Her inlands, her isles of the ocean,
Fanes rebuilt, and fair towns, shall with jubilee ring,
And the Nine shall new hallow their Helicon's spring.
Our hearths shall be kindled in gladness,
That were cold and extinguished in sadness;
While our maidens shall dance, with their white waving arms,
Singing joy to the brave that delivered their charms,
When the blood of yon Mussulman cravens
Shall have crimsoned the beaks of our ravens!
AMERICAN SYMPATHY WITH GREECE.
The progress of events in 1822 and 1823 made friends for the
Greeks wherever free principles were cherished; and from England
and America large contributions of money, clothing, and provisions,
were forwarded to relieve the sufferings inflicted by the wanton
cruelties of the Turks. It was the United States, however, as
the first American Minister to Greece, MR. TUCKERMAN, says, that
first responded, "in the words of President Monroe, Webster,
Clay, Everett, Dwight, and hosts of other lights," to the appeal
of the Greek senate at Kalamäta, made in 1821. When Congress
assembled in December, 1823, President Monroe made the revolution
in Greece the subject of a paragraph in his annual message, in
which he expressed the hope of success to the Greeks and disaster
to the Turks; and Mr. Webster subsequently introduced a resolution
in the House of Representatives providing for the appointment
of an agent or commissioner to Greece. These were the first
official expressions favorable to the struggling country uttered
by any government; and in speaking to his resolution in January,
1824, Mr. Webster began his remarks as follows:
"An occasion which calls the attention to a spot so distinguished,
so connected with interesting recollections, as Greece, may
naturally create something of warmth and enthusiasm. In a grave
political discussion, however, it is necessary that those feelings
should be chastened. I shall endeavor properly to repress them,
although it is impossible that they should be altogether
extinguished. We must, indeed, fly beyond the civilized world;
we must pass the dominion of law and the boundaries of knowledge;
we must, more especially, withdraw ourselves from this place,
and the scenes and objects which here surround us, if we would
separate ourselves entirely from the influence of all those
memorials of herself which ancient Greece has transmitted for
the admiration and the benefit of mankind. This free form of
government, this popular assembly--the common council for the
common good--where have we contemplated its earliest models?
This practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest
of mind with mind, and that popular eloquence which, if it were
now here, on a subject like this, would move the stones of the
Capitol--whose was the language in which all these were first
exhibited? Even the edifice in which we assemble, these
proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind
us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind,
are greatly her debtors.
"But I have not introduced this motion in the vain hope of
discharging anything of this accumulated debt of centuries. I
have not acted upon the expectation that we who have inherited
this obligation from our ancestors should now attempt to pay it
to those who may seem to have inherited from their ancestors a
right to receive payment. My object is nearer and more immediate.
I wish to take occasion of the struggle of an interesting and
gallant people in the cause of liberty and Christianity, to draw
the attention of the House to the circumstances which have
accompanied that struggle, and to the principles which appear
to have governed the conduct of the great states of Europe in
regard to it, and to the effects and consequences of these
principles upon the independence of nations, and especially upon
the institutions of free governments. What I have to say of Greece,
therefore, concerns the modern, not the ancient--the living,
and not the dead. It regards her, not as she exists in history,
triumphant over time, and tyranny, and ignorance, but as she
now is, contending against fearful odds for being, and for the
common privileges of human nature."
In an argument of some length Mr. Webster forcibly condemns the
then existing policy of the European Powers, who, holding that
all changes in legislation and administration "ought to proceed
from kings alone," were therefore "wholly inexorable to the
sufferings of the Greeks, and entirely hostile to their success."
He demands that the protest of this government shall be made
against this policy, both as it is laid down in principle and
as it is applied in practice; and he closes his address with
the following references to the determination of the Greeks and
the sympathy their struggle should receive:
"Constantinople and the northern provinces have sent forth
thousands of troops; they have been defeated. Tripoli, and Algiers,
and Egypt have contributed their marine contingents; they have
not kept the ocean. Hordes of Tartars have crossed the Bosphorus;
they have died where the Persians died. The powerful monarchies
in the neighborhood have denounced the Greek cause, and admonished
the Greeks to abandon it and submit to their fate. They have
answered that, although two hundred thousand of their countrymen
have offered up their lives, there yet remain lives to offer;
and that it is the determination of all--'yes, of ALL'--to persevere
until they shall have established their liberty, or until the
power of their oppressors shall have relieved them from the burden
of existence. It may now be asked, perhaps, whether the expression
of our own sympathy, and that of the country, may do them good?
I hope it may. It may give them courage and spirit; it may assure
them of public regard, teach them that they are not wholly
forgotten by the civilized world, and inspire them with constancy
in the pursuit of their great end. At any rate, it appears to
me that the measure which I have proposed is due to our own
character, and called for by our own duty. When we have discharged
that duty we may leave the rest to the disposition of Providence.
I am not of those who would, in the hour of utmost peril, withhold
such encouragement as might be properly and lawfully given, and,
when the crisis should be past, overwhelm the rescued sufferer
with kindness and caresses. The Greeks address the civilized
world with a pathos not easy to be resisted. They invoke our
favor by more moving considerations than can well belong to the
condition of any other people. They stretch out their arms to
the Christian communities of the earth, beseeching them, by a
generous recollection of their ancestors, by the consideration
of their desolated and ruined cities and villages, by their wives
and children sold into an accursed slavery, by their blood, which
they seem willing to pour out like water, by the common faith
and in the name which unites all Christians, that they would
extend to them at least some token of compassionate regard."
THE SORTIE AT MISSOLONGHI.
One of the noted exploits of the Greeks in 1823, and one that has
been commemorated in many ways, occurred at Missolon'ghi, the
capital of Acarnania and Ætolia, while that town was besieged by
a Turkish army; and the name of Marco Boz-zar'is, the commander
of the garrison, has ever since been classed with that of Leonidas
and other heroes of ancient Greece who fell in the moment of
victory. In his Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities
of Eastern Travel, the English author WARBURTON thus tells the
story of the well-known deed that saved Missolonghi to the Greeks
and hastened the delivery of their country:
"When Missolonghi was beleaguered by the Turkish forces, Marco
Bozzaris commanded a garrison of about twelve hundred men, who
had barely fortifications enough to form breastworks. Intelligence
reached him that an Egyptian army was about to form a junction
with the formidable besieging host. A parade was ordered of the
garrison, 'faint and few, but fearless still.' Bozzaris told
them of the destruction that impended over Missolonghi, proposed
a sortie, and announced that it should consist only of volunteers.
Volunteers! The whole garrison stepped forward as one man, and
demanded the post of honor and of death. 'I will only take the
Thermopylæ number,' said their leader; and he selected the three
hundred from his true and trusty Suliotes. In the dead of night
this devoted band marched out in six divisions, which were placed,
in profound silence, around the Turkish camp. Their orders were
simply, 'When you hear my bugle blow seek me in the pasha's tent.'
"Marco Bozzaris, disguised as an Albanian bearing dispatches
to the pasha from the Egyptian army, passed unquestioned through
the Turkish camp, and was only arrested by the sentinels around
the pasha's tent, who informed him that he must wait till morning.
Then wildly through the stillness of the night that bugle blew;
faithfully it was echoed from without; and the war-cry of the
avenging Greek broke upon the Moslem's ear. From every side that
terrible storm seemed to break at once; shrieks of agony and
terror swelled the tumult. The Turks fled in all directions,
and the Grecian leader was soon surrounded by his comrades. Struck
to the ground by a musket-ball, he had himself raised on the
shoulders of two Greeks; and, thus supported, he pressed on the
flying enemy. Another bullet pierced his brain in the hour of
his triumph, and he was borne dead from the field of his glory."
But Missolonghi was saved, and under Constantine and Noto Bozzaris,
brothers of the dead hero, it withstood repeated assaults of
the Turks, until, in 1826, after having been besieged for over
a year by a very large naval and military force, it was finally
taken. Those left of the small garrison who were able to fight,
placing the women in the center, sallied forth at midnight of
the 22d of April, and cut their way through the Turkish camp;
while those who were too feeble to attempt an escape assembled
in a large mill that was used as a powder-magazine, and blew
themselves and many of the incoming Turks to atoms.
Some fifteen years after the death of Marco Bozzaris, the American
traveller and author, Mr. John L. Stephens, visited Greece, and,
at Missolonghi, was presented to Constantine Bozzaris and the
widow and children of his deceased brother. In the account which
the author gives of this interview, in his Incidents of Travel
in Greece, he describes Constantine Bozzaris, then a colonel
in the service of King Otho, as a man of about fifty years of
age, of middle height and spare build, who, immediately after
the formal introduction, expressed his gratitude as a Greek for
the services rendered his country by America; and added, "with
sparkling eye and flushed cheek, that when the Greek revolutionary
flag sailed into the port of Napoli di Romania, among hundreds
of vessels of all nations, an American captain was the first
to recognize and salute it." Mr. Stephens thus describes the
widow of the Greek hero: "She was under forty, tall and stately
in person, and habited in deep black. She looked the widow of
a hero; as one worthy of those Grecian mothers who gave their
hair for bow-strings and their girdles for sword-belts, and,
while their heartstrings were cracking, sent their husbands to
fight and perish for their country. Perhaps it was she who led
Marco Bozzaris from the wild guerilla warfare in which he had
passed his early life, and fired him with the high and holy
ambition of freeing his country. I am certain that no man could
look her in the face without finding his wavering purposes fixed,
and without treading more firmly in the path of high and honorable
ambition."
Mr. Stephens closes the account of his interview with the widow
and family as follows: "At parting I told them that the name of
Marco Bozzaris was as familiar in America as that of a hero of
our own Revolution, and that it had been hallowed by the
inspiration of an American poet. I added that, if it would not
be unacceptable, on my return to my native country I would send
the tribute referred to, as an evidence of the feeling existing
in America toward the memory of Marco Bozzaris." The promised
tribute was the following Beautiful and stirring poem by
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK:
Marco Bozzaris.
At midnight, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power:
In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet-ring;
Then pressed that monarch's throne--a king;
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,
As Eden's garden-bird.
At midnight, in the forest shades,
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,
True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.
There had the Persian's thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Platæa's day;
And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arm to strike, and soul to dare,
As quick, as far as they.
An hour passed on--the Turk awoke;
That bright dream was his last;
He woke to hear his sentries shriek
"To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!"
He woke, to die 'mid flame and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,
And death-shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain-cloud,
And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:
"Strike! till the last armed foe expires;
Strike! for your altars and your fires;
Strike! for the green graves of your sires,
God, and your native land!"
They fought like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain;
They conquered; but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their proud hurrah,
And the red field was won,
Then saw in death his eyelids close,
Calmly as to a night's repose--
Like flowers at set of sun.
Come to the bridal chamber, Death!
Come to the mother, when she feels,
For the first time, her first-born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm
With banquet song, and dance, and wine;
And thou art terrible: the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.
But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word,
And in its hollow tones are heard
Thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought;
Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought;
Come, in her crowning hour--and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight
Of sky and stars to prisoned men;
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,
When the land-wind, from woods of palm,
And orange-groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytien seas.
Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee--there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume,
Like torn branch from death's leafless tree,
In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb;
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone:
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babes' first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said
At palace couch and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him, the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate and checks her tears.
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
The memory of her buried joys,
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh:
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's--
One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die!
About the time of the exploit of Bozzaris, Lord Byron arrived
in Greece, to take an active part in aid of Greek independence,
and proceeded to Missolonghi in January, 1824. No warmer friend
of the Greeks than Byron ever lived; but while he sympathized
with, and was anxious to aid in every way possible, those who,
in his own words, "suffered all the moral and physical ills that
could afflict humanity," it was evidently his honest belief that
the only salvation for Greece lay in her becoming a British
dependency. In his notes to Childe Harold, penned before the
revolution broke out, but while all Greece was ablaze with the
desire for liberty, he wrote as follows: "The Greeks will never
be independent; they will never be sovereigns, as heretofore,
and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without
being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are
free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter." These
words show that he considered Greece incapable of self-government,
should she ever regain her liberty; and he therefore deprecated
a return to her ancient sovereignty. That this was his view,
and that he subsequently designed to give it effect in his own
person, we are assured from the well-founded belief, derived
from his own declarations, that when he joined the Greek cause
he had a mind to place himself at its head, hoping and perhaps
believing that he might become King of Hellas, under the protection
of Great Britain. But whatever his plans may have been, they were
cut short by his death, at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April
following his arrival there.
INTERFERENCE OF THE GREAT POWERS.
In the campaign of 1824, while the Greeks lost Candia and the
strongly fortified rocky isle of Ip'sara, a Turkish fleet was
repulsed off Samos, and a large Egyptian fleet, sent to attack
the Morea, was frustrated in all its designs. The campaign of
1825, however, was opened by the landing, in the Morea, of a
large Egyptian army, under Ibrahim Päsha, son of the Viceroy
of Egypt. Navarï'no soon fell into his power; and at the time
of the fall of Missolonghi, in the following year, be was in
possession of most of southern Greece, and many of the islands
of the Archipelago. The foundation of an Egyptian military and
slave-holding state now seemed to be laid in Europe; and this
danger, combined with the noble defence and sufferings at
Missolonghi and elsewhere, attracted the serious attention of
the European governments and people; numerous philanthropic
societies were formed to aid the Greeks, and finally three of
the great European powers were moved to interfere in their behalf.
On the 6th of July, 1827, a treaty was concluded at London between
England, Russia, and France, stipulating that the Greeks should
govern themselves, but that they should pay tribute to the Porte.
To enforce this treaty a combined English, French, and Russian
squadron sailed to the Grecian Archipelago; but the Turkish Sultan
haughtily rejected the intervention of the three powers, and
the troops of Ibrahim Pasha continued their devastations in the
Morea. On the 20th of October the allied squadron, under the
command of the English admiral, Edward Codrington, entered the
harbor of Navarino, where the Turkish-Egyptian fleet lay at anchor;
and a sanguinary naval battle followed, in which the allies nearly
destroyed the fleet of the enemy. Although this action was spoken
of by the British government as an "untoward event," Admiral
Codrington was rewarded both by England and Russia; and the poet
CAMPBELL, in the following lines on the battle, naturally praises
him for planning and striking this decisive blow for Grecian liberty:
The Battle of Nava'rino.
Hearts of Oak, that have bravely delivered the brave,
And uplifted old Greece from the brink of the grave!
'Twas the helpless to help, and the hopeless to save,
That your thunderbolts swept o'er the brine;
And as long as yon sun shall look down on the wave
The light of your glory shall shine.