fail to shock all Greece profoundly. And, in a slighter degree, the same
effect upon public feeling followed the act of Agesipolis, who, after
obtaining an answer from the Oracle of Delphi, carried forward his suit
to the more awfully ancient Oracle of Dodona; by way of trying, as
he alleged, "whether the child agreed with its papa." These open
expressions of distrust were generally condemned; and the irresistible
proof that they were, lies in the fact that they led to no imitations.
Even in a case mentioned by Herodotus, when a man had the audacity to
found a colony without seeking an oracular sanction, no precedent
was established; though the journey to Delphi must often have been
peculiarly inconvenient to the founders of colonies moving westwards
from Greece; and the expenses of such a journey, with the subsequent
offerings, could not but prove unseasonable at the moment when every
drachma was most urgently needed. Charity begins at home, was a
thought quite as likely to press upon a Pagan conscience, in those
circumstances, as upon our modern Christian consciences under heavy
taxation; yet, for all that, such was the regard to a pious inauguration
of all colonial enterprises, that no one provision or pledge of
prosperity was held equally indispensable by all parties to such
hazardous speculations. The merest worldly foresight, indeed, to the
most irreligious leader, would suggest this sanction as a necessity,
under the following reason:--colonies the most enviably prosperous
upon the whole, have yet had many hardships to contend with in their
noviciate of the first five years; were it only from the summer failure
of water under circumstances of local ignorance, or from the casual
failure of crops under imperfect arrangements of culture. Now, the
one great qualification for wrestling strenuously with such difficult
contingencies in solitary situations, is the spirit of cheerful hope;
but, when any room had been left for apprehending a supernatural curse
resting upon their efforts--equally in the most thoughtfully pious man
and the most crazily superstitious--all spirit of hope would be blighted
at once; and the religious neglect would, even in a common human way,
become its own certain executor, through mere depression of spirits and
misgiving of expectations. Well, therefore, might Cicero in a tone of
defiance demand, "Quam vero Græcia coloniam misit in Ætoliam, Ioniam,
Asiam, Siciliam, Italiam, sine Pythio (the Delphic), aut Dodonseo, aut
Hammonis oraculo?" An oracular sanction must be had, and from a leading
oracle--the three mentioned by Cicero were the greatest; [Footnote: To
which at one time must be added, as of equal rank, the Oracle of the
Branchides, in Asia Minor. But this had been destroyed by the Persians,
in retaliation of the Athenian outrages at Sardis.] and, if a minor
oracle could have satisfied the inaugurating necessities of a regular
colony, we may be sure that the Dorian states of the Peloponnesus, who
had twenty-five decent oracles at home (that is, within the peninsula),
would not so constantly have carried their money to Delphi. Nay, it is
certain that even where the colonial counsels of the greater
oracles seemed extravagant, though a large discretion was allowed to
remonstrance, and even to very homely expostulations, still, in the last
resort, no doubts were felt that the oracle must be right. Brouwer, the
Belgic scholar, who has so recently and so temperately treated these
subjects (Histoire de la Civilisation Morale et Religieuse chez les
Grecs: 6 tomes: Groningue--1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do
not remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:--"_Mon
roi Apollon, je crois que tu es fou._" But cases are obvious which look
this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of
prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of
Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the
African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic Oracle
in reference to his eyes, which happened to be diseased, but that he was
admonished to prepare for colonizing Libya.--"Grant me patience," would
Battus reply; "here am I getting into years, and never do I consult the
Oracle about my precious sight, but you, King Phbus, begin your old
yarn about Cyrene. Confound Cyrene! Nobody knows where it is. But, if
you are serious, speak to my son--he's a likely young man, and worth a
hundred of old rotten hulks, like myself." Battus was provoked in good
earnest; and it is well known that the whole scheme went to sleep for
several years, until King Phoebus sent in a gentle refresher to Battus
and his islanders, in the shape of failing crops, pestilence, and
his ordinary chastisements. The people were roused--the colony was
founded--and, after utter failure, was again re-founded, and the
results justified the Oracle. But, in all such cases, and where
the remonstrances were least respectful, or where the resistance of
_inertia_ was longest, we differ altogether from M. Brouwer in his
belief, that the suitors fancied Apollo to have gone distracted. If they
ever said so, this must have been merely by way of putting the Oracle
on its mettle, and calling forth some _plainer_--not any essentially
different--answer from the enigmatic god; for there it was that the
doubts of the clients settled, and on that it was the practical demurs
hinged. Not because even Battus, vexed as he was about his precious
eyesight, distrusted the Oracle, but because he felt sure that the
Oracle had not spoken out freely; therefore, had he and many others in
similar circumstances presumed to delay. A second edition was what they
waited for, corrected and _enlarged_. We have a memorable instance of
this policy in the Athenian envoys, who, upon receiving a most ominous
doom, but obscurely expressed, from the Delphic Oracle, which
politely concluded by saying, "And so get out, you vagabonds, from
my temple--don't cumber my decks any longer;" were advised to answer
sturdily--"No!--we shall _not_ get out--we mean to sit here forever,
until you think proper to give us a more reasonable reply." Upon which
spirited rejoinder, the Pythia saw the policy of revising her truly
brutal rescript as it had stood originally.
The necessity, indeed, was strong for not acquiescing in the Oracle,
until it had become clearer by revision or by casual illustrations, as
will be seen even under our next head. This head concerns the case
of those who found themselves deceived by the _event_ of any oracular
prediction. As usual, there is a Spartan case of this nature. Cleomenes
complained bitterly that the Oracle of Delphi had deluded him by holding
out as a possibility, and under given conditions as a certainty, that he
should possess himself of Argos. But the Oracle was justified: there was
an inconsiderable place outside the walls of Argos which bore the same
name. Most readers will remember the case of Cambyses, who had
been assured by a legion of oracles that he should die at Ecbatana.
Suffering, therefore, in Syria from a scratch inflicted upon his thigh
by his own sabre, whilst angrily sabring a ridiculous quadruped whom the
Egyptian priests had put forward as a god, he felt quite at his ease
so long as he remembered his vast distance from the mighty capital of
Media, to the eastward of the Tigris. The scratch, however, inflamed,
for his intemperance had saturated his system with combustible matter;
the inflammation spread; the pulse ran high: and he began to feel
twinges of alarm. At length mortification commenced: but still he
trusted to the old prophecy about Ecbatana, when suddenly a
horrid discovery was made--that the very Syrian village at his own
head-quarters was known by the pompous name of Ecbatana. Josephus tells
a similar story of some man contemporary with Herod the Great. And we
must all remember that case in Shakspeare, where the first king of the
_red_ rose, Henry IV., had long fancied his destiny to be that he should
meet his death in Jerusalem; which naturally did not quicken his zeal
for becoming a crusader. "All time enough," doubtless he used to say;
"no hurry at all, gentlemen!" But at length, finding himself pronounced
by the doctor ripe for dying, it became a question whether the prophet
were a false prophet, or the doctor a false doctor. However, in such a
case, it is something to have a collision of opinions--a prophet against
a doctor. But, behold, it soon transpired that there was no collision at
all. It was the Jerusalem chamber, occupied by the king as a bed-room,
to which the prophet had alluded. Upon which his majesty reconciled
himself at once to the ugly necessity at hand
"In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."
The last case--that of oracular establishments turning out to be
accomplices of thieves--is one which occurred in Egypt on a scale of
some extent; and is noticed by Herodotus. This degradation argued great
poverty in the particular temples: and it is not at all improbable that,
amongst a hundred Grecian Oracles, some, under a similar temptation,
would fall into a similar disgrace. But now, as regards even this
lowest extremity of infamy, much more as regards the qualified sort of
disrepute attending the three minor cases, one single distinction puts
all to rights. The Greeks never confounded the temple, and household of
officers attached to the temple service, with the dark functions of the
presiding god. In Delphi, besides the Pythia and priests, with their
train of subordinate ministers directly billeted on the temple, there
were two orders of men outside, Delphic citizens, one styled _Arizeis_,
the other styled _Hosioi_,--a sort of honorary members, whose duty was
probably _inter alia_, to attach themselves to persons of corresponding
rank in the retinues of the envoys or consulting clients, and doubtless
to collect from them, in convivial moments, all the secrets or general
information which the temple required for satisfactory answers. If they
personally went too far in their intrigues or stratagems of decoy, the
disgrace no more recoiled on the god, than, in modern times, the vices
or crimes of a priest can affect the pure religion at whose altars he
officiates.
Meantime, through these outside ministers--though unaffected by their
follies or errors as trepanners--the Oracle of Delphi drew that vast and
comprehensive information, from every local nook or recess of Greece,
which made it in the end a blessing to the land. The great error is, to
suppose the majority of cases laid before the Delphic Oracle strictly
questions for _prophetic_ functions. Ninety-nine in a hundred respected
marriages, state-treaties, sales, purchases, founding of towns or
colonies, &c., which demanded no faculty whatever of divination, but the
nobler faculty (though unpresumptuous) of sagacity, that calculates
the natural consequences of human acts, cooperating with elaborate
investigation of the local circumstances. If, in any paper on the
general civilization of Greece (that great mother of civilization for
all the world), we should ever attempt to trace this element of Oracles,
it will not be difficult to prove that Delphi discharged the office of
a central _bureau d'administration_, a general depot of political
information, an organ of universal combination for the counsels of the
whole Grecian race. And that which caused the declension of the Oracles
was the loss of political independence and autonomy. After Alexander,
still more after the Roman conquest, each separate state, having no
powers and no motive for asking counsel on state measures, naturally
confined itself more and more to its humbler local interests of police,
or even at last to its family arrangements.
THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE.
[1833.]
It is falsely charged upon itself by this age, in its character of
_censor morum_, that effeminacy in a practical sense lies either amongst
its full-blown faults, or amongst its lurking tendencies. A rich,
a polished, a refined age, may, by mere necessity of inference, be
presumed to be a luxurious one; and the usual principle, by which moves
the whole trivial philosophy which speculates upon the character of a
particular age or a particular nation, is first of all to adopt some one
central idea of its characteristics, and then without further effort to
pursue its integration; that is, having assumed (or, suppose even having
demonstrated) the existence of some great influential quality in excess
sufficient to overthrow the apparent equilibrium demanded by the common
standards of a just national character, the speculator then proceeds, as
in a matter of acknowledged right, to push this predominant quality
into all its consequences, and all its closest affinities. To give one
illustration of such a case, now perhaps beginning to be forgotten:
Somewhere about the year 1755, the once celebrated Dr. Brown, after
other little attempts in literature and paradox, took up the conceit
that England was ruined at her heart's core by excess of luxury and
sensual self-indulgence. He had persuaded himself that the ancient
activities and energies of the country were sapped by long habits
of indolence, and by a morbid plethora of enjoyment in every class.
Courage, and the old fiery spirit of the people, had gone to wreck with
the physical qualities which had sustained them. Even the faults of
the public mind had given way under its new complexion of character;
ambition and civil dissension were extinct. It was questionable whether
a good hearty assault and battery, or a respectable knock-down blow, had
been dealt by any man in London for one or two generations. The doctor
carried his reveries so far, that he even satisfied himself and one or
two friends (probably by looking into the parks at hours propitious to
his hypothesis) that horses were seldom or ever used for riding; that,
in fact, this accomplishment was too boisterous or too perilous for the
gentle propensities of modern Britons; and that, by the best accounts,
few men of rank or fashion were now seen on horseback. This pleasant
collection of dreams did Doctor Brown solemnly propound to the English
public, in two octavo volumes, under the title of "An Estimate of the
Manners and Principles of the Times;" and the report of many who
lived in those days assures us that for a brief period the book had a
prodigious run. In some respects the doctor's conceits might seem too
startling and extravagant; but, to balance _that_, every nation has
some pleasure in being heartily abused by one of its own number; and the
English nation has always had a special delight in being alarmed, and in
being clearly convinced that it is and ought to be on the brink of ruin.
With such advantages in the worthy doctor's favor, he might have kept
the field until some newer extravaganza had made his own obsolete, had
not one ugly turn in political affairs given so smashing a refutation
to his practical conclusions, and called forth so sudden a rebound
of public feeling in the very opposite direction, that a bomb-shell
descending right through the whole impression of his book could not more
summarily have laid a chancery "injunction" upon its further sale. This
arose under the brilliant administration of the first Mr. Pitt: England
was suddenly victorious in three quarters of the globe; land and sea
echoed to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor Brown, in the
midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own razor. Whether
this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his mortification as a
baffled visionary, whose favorite conceit had suddenly exploded like a
rocket into smoke and stench, is more than we know. But, at all events,
the sole memorial of his hypothesis which now reminds the English reader
that it ever existed is one solitary notice of good-humored satire
pointed at it by Cowper. [Footnote: "The Inestimable Estimate of
Brown."] And the possibility of such exceeding folly in a man otherwise
of good sense and judgment, not depraved by any brain-fever or
enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of
reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor, having taken up
one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no
tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts and phenomena of
daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his one idea all that
it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated audaciously as a
solemn fact whatsoever could be exhibited in any possible connection
with his one central principle, whether in the way of consequence or of
affinity.
Pretty much upon this unhappy Brunonian mode of deducing our national
character, it is a very plausible speculation, which has been and will
again be chanted, that we, being a luxurious nation, must by force
of good logical dependency be liable to many derivative taints and
infirmities which ought of necessity to besiege the blood of nations in
that predicament. All enterprise and spirit of adventure, all heroism
and courting of danger for its own attractions, ought naturally
to languish in a generation enervated by early habits of personal
indulgence. Doubtless they _ought; a priori_, it seems strictly
demonstrable that such consequences should follow. Upon the purest forms
of inference in _Barbara_ or _Celarent_, it can be shown satisfactorily
that from all our tainted classes, _a fortiori_ then from our most
tainted classes--our men of fashion and of opulent fortunes--no
description of animal can possibly arise but poltroons and _fainéans_.
In fact, pretty generally, under the known circumstances of our modern
English education and of our social habits, we ought, in obedience to
all the _precognita_ of our position, to show ourselves rank cowards;
yet, in spite of so much excellent logic, the facts are otherwise. No
age has shown in its young patricians a more heroic disdain of sedentary
ease; none in a martial support of liberty or national independence has
so gayly volunteered upon services the most desperate, or shrunk less
from martyrdom on the field of battle, whenever there was hope to
invite their disinterested exertions, or grandeur enough in the cause to
sustain them. Which of us forgets the gallant Mellish, the frank and
the generous, who reconciled himself so gayly to the loss of a splendid
fortune, and from the very bosom of luxury suddenly precipitated himself
upon the hardships of Peninsular warfare? Which of us forgets the
adventurous Lee of Lime, whom a princely estate could not detain
in early youth from courting perils in Nubia and Abyssinia, nor
(immediately upon his return) from almost wooing death as a volunteer
aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo? So again of Colonel
Evans, who, after losing a fine estate long held out to his hopes, five
times over put himself at the head of _forlorn hopes_. Such cases are
memorable, and were conspicuous at the time, from the lustre of wealth
and high connections which surrounded the parties; but many thousand
others, in which the sacrifices of personal ease were less noticeable
from their narrower scale of splendor, had equal merit for the
cheerfulness with which those sacrifices were made. [Footnote: History
of the Greek Revolution, by Thomas Gordon.] Here, again, in the
person of the author before us, we have another instance of noble and
disinterested heroism, which, from the magnitude of the sacrifices that
it involved, must place him in the same class as the Mellishes and the
Lees. This gallant Scotsman, who was born in 1788, or 1789, lost
his father in early life. Inheriting from him a good estate in
Aberdeenshire, and one more considerable in Jamaica, he found himself,
at the close of a long minority, in the possession of a commanding
fortune. Under the vigilant care of a sagacious mother, Mr. Gordon
received the very amplest advantages of a finished education, studying
first at the University of Aberdeen, and afterwards for two years at
Oxford; whilst he had previously enjoyed as a boy the benefits of a
private tutor from Oxford. Whatever might be the immediate result from
this careful tuition, Mr. Gordon has since completed his own education
in the most comprehensive manner, and has carried his accomplishments as
a linguist to a point of rare excellence. Sweden and Portugal excepted,
we understand that he has personally visited every country in Europe.
He has travelled also in Asiatic Turkey, in Persia, and in Barbary. From
this personal residence in foreign countries, we understand that Mr.
Gordon has obtained an absolute mastery over certain modern languages,
especially the French, the Italian, the modern Greek, and the
Turkish.[Footnote: Mr. Gordon is privately known to be the translator of
the work written by a Turkish minister, "_Tchebi Effendi_" published in
the Appendix to Wilkinson's Wallachia, and frequently referred to by
the _Quarterly Review_ in its notices of Oriental affairs.] Not content,
however, with this extensive education in a literary sense, Mr. Gordon
thought proper to prepare himself for the part which he meditated
in public life, by a second, or military education, in two separate
services;--first, in the British, where he served in the Greys, and in
the forty-third regiment; and subsequently, during the campaign of 1813,
as a captain on the Russian staff.
Thus brilliantly accomplished for conferring lustre and benefit upon any
cause which he might adopt amongst the many revolutionary movements then
continually emerging in Southern Europe, he finally carried the whole
weight of his great talents, prudence, and energy, together with the
unlimited command of his purse, to the service of Greece in her heroic
struggle with the Sultan. At what point his services and his countenance
were appreciated by the ruling persons in Greece, will be best collected
from the accompanying letter, translated from the original, in modern
Greek, addressed to him by the provisional government of Greece, in
1822. It will be seen that this official document notices with great
sorrow Mr. Gordon's absence from Greece, and with some surprise, as a
fact at that time unexplained and mysterious; but the simple explanation
of this mystery was, that Mr. Gordon had been brought to the very brink
of the grave by a contagious fever, at Tripolizza, and that his native
air was found essential to his restoration. Subsequently, however, he
returned, and rendered the most powerful services to Greece, until the
war was brought to a close, as much almost by Turkish exhaustion, as by
the armed interference of the three great conquerors of Navarino.
"The government of Greece to the SIGNOR GORDON, a man worthy of all
admiration, and a friend of the Grecians, health and prosperity.
"It was not possible, most excellent sir, nor was it a thing endurable
to the descendants of the Grecians, that they should be deprived any
longer of those imprescriptible rights which belong to the inheritance
of their birth--rights which a barbarian of a foreign soil, an
anti-christian tyrant, issuing from the depths of Asia, seized upon with
a robber's hand, and, lawlessly trampling under foot, administered up to
this time the affairs of Greece, after his own lust and will. Needs it
was that we, sooner or later, shattering this iron and heavy sceptre,
should recover, at the price of life itself (if _that_ were found
necessary), our patrimonial heritage, that thus our people might again
be gathered to the family of free and self-legislating states. Moving,
then, under such impulses, the people of Greece advanced with one heart,
and perfect unanimity of council, against an oppressive despotism,
putting their hands to an enterprise beset with difficulties, and hard
indeed to be achieved, yet, in our present circumstances, if any one
thing in this life, most indispensable. This, then, is the second
year which we are passing since we have begun to move in this glorious
contest, once again struggling, to all appearance, upon unequal terms,
but grasping our enterprise with the right hand and the left, and with
all our might stretching forward to the objects before us.
"It was the hope of Greece that, in these seasons of emergency, she
would not fail of help and earnest resort of friends from the Christian
nations throughout Europe. For it was agreeable neither to humanity nor
to piety, that the rights of nations, liable to no grudges of malice
or scruples of jealousy, should be surreptitiously and wickedly filched
away, or mocked with outrage and insult; but that they should be settled
firmly on those foundations which Nature herself has furnished in
abundance to the condition of man in society. However, so it was, that
Greece, cherishing these most reasonable expectations, met with most
unmerited disappointments.
"But you, noble and generous Englishman, no sooner heard the trumpet of
popular rights echoing melodiously from the summits of Taygetus, of
Ida, of Pindus, and of Olympus, than, turning with listening ears to
the sound, and immediately renouncing the delights of country, of family
ties, and (what is above all) of domestic luxury and ease, and the
happiness of your own fireside, you hurried to our assistance. But
suddenly, and in contradiction to the universal hope of Greece, by
leaving us, you have thrown us all into great perplexity and amazement,
and that at a crisis when some were applying their minds to military
pursuits, some to the establishment of a civil administration, others
to other objects, but all alike were hurrying and exerting themselves
wherever circumstances seemed to invite them.