BMCR 2008.10.08, David Wills, The Mirror of Antiquity: 20th Century

David Wills, The Mirror of Antiquity: 20th Century British Travellers
in Greece.  Newcastle:  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.  Pp. xii,
162.  ISBN 1-84718-267-4.  L29.99.

Reviewed by Peter Green, University of Iowa ([email protected])
Word count:  2728 words
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It was, I suppose, inevitable that post-colonialism and
Rezeptionsgeschichte should, sooner rather than later, combine to
tackle so juicily rewarding a topic for their special brand of moral
one-upmanship as British Hellenophiles' accounts of their reactions to
first-hand experience of Greece. As an easy target it has everything:
an exclusionary faith in Hellas generally, and Athens in particular, as
the fons et origo of Western culture; an elitist educational system
that privileged ancient Greek language and literature over all other
disciplines except philosophy and mathematics; and the kind of
all-pervasive in-built cheerful xenophobia (Hellenes vs. barbaroi,
comic Eastern natives who jabbered ba-ba-ba instead of talking proper
Greek) that led Edward Sai+d to characterize Aeschylus's Persians, in
Orientalism (1978), as a foundation text of racism. In David Wills, who
peppers non-PC instances of "he", "his", "him" (and, once, even
"England") with the righteously incredulous "[sic]" comment, presumably
to advertise his feminist and anti-nationalist credentials, the theme
has found an impeccably post-colonial investigator, who backs up his
arguments with tabulated statistics (based on fieldwork-derived
methods) of travellers' attitudes to monumental aesthetics and Greek
personal characteristics.

In his first chapter Wills--picking up where Terence Spencer left off
in Fair Greece, Sad Relic (1954), and covering much the same ground as
David Roessel's In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and
American Imagination (2002)--sketches the development of travel-writing
about Greece from the decades immediately prior to the Greek War of
Independence (1821-30) to the collapse of the colonels' junta in 1974.
Several recurrent themes are here stressed: the restoration of Greek
freedom viewed as payment for the civilization that Hellas had given
the world; the disconcerting contrast alleged between modern Greeks and
their glorious ancestors, between the Parthenon and contemporary Athens
(described by one visitor as an "ugly and bungaloid hole")--a contrast
offset by the alleged survival of old pagan beliefs; the excavation of
key sites (Knossos, Mycenae, Troy) and the myths generated by their
excavators; vigorous governmental propaganda in both world wars, aimed
at an audience that knew more about classical than post-independence
Hellas, to prove that the modern Greek was every bit as brave,
honorable, friendly and (of course) democratic as his ancient
ancestors. Wills also notes the war-weary escapism (and climatic
attractions) that impelled a good many British writers from about 1950
to seek the Aegean and stay there, and the slow change, with the spread
of tourism, of what had once been a cultural pilgrimage into a
generalized quest for sun, sea, and sex, or, at best, Shirley
Valentine's transformational discovery of a happy island world with
wider horizons than the Liverpool suburbs.

Wills' second chapter further explores the tangled relationship of
British and Greeks, and British perceptions of Greece: partly by way of
British public school education and the wartime media blitz propagating
Greek heroism as part of a pro-British slant on Greek political
allegiances, but in the first instance through Greece's own widespread
nationalist use of the past, after independence was won, as, Wills
argues, it "sought to establish its credentials as a 'European'
country" (p. 32). This involved, we are told, "losing" the four
centuries of the Tourkokratia and resorting to ancient achievements as
a guarantee of acceptance into "the mainstream of European culture" (p.
35). The transposition of Athenian democracy into a modern context was
particularly tricky, not least during Metaxas's dictatorship in the
1930s, when Spartan militarism officially replaced it as the ancient
model. But by and large this new Western self-image was promoted with
considerable success, and found a natural seedbed among the British
upper and professional classes, already acclimatized by prolonged
youthful exposure to regard ancient Greece as "a world of unreal
perfection" (Hilda Hughes, The Glory that is Greece, 1944, p. 135).

As Wills points out, the abolition of Greek for Oxbridge entrance, the
growth of science in school curricula, and the inevitable shrinkage of
candidates for an old-style classical education that these innovations
produced--plus, undoubtedly, the cynical nihilism engendered by trench
warfare, which made dulce et decorum est pro patria mori sound like a
joke in the worst possible taste--between them ensured that this
supposed perfection lost much of its mesmeric force. Classics as a
discipline was now advocated less as a moral and civic exemplum, and
more for the mental and logical discipline it was held to instill (a
view doubtless encouraged by the known advantage it offered to
candidates for entry to the British Foreign Office or higher Civil
Service). But though progressively fewer people could claim familiarity
with the ancient world as part of their cultural heritage, the
essential credo remained, and was given an unexpected boost by Second
World War propaganda. In 1941, with the swastika flying over the
Acropolis, Gilbert Murray compared the conflict to the Peloponnesian
War, with "England of course playing the role of liberal and democratic
Athens" (Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought,
1969, pp. 365-6). Considering that Athens lost, this was perhaps a
little unfortunate; but then no one had forgotten the Nazis' jackbooted
appropriation of Spartan militarism (not to mention a good deal from
Plato's Republic), which set up the dichotomy Athens (good, liberal,
democratic) / Sparta (bad, repressive, totalitarian) for years to come.
The Greek campaign in Albania, like the savage Cretan resistance to
German paratroopers, made the propagandists' task an easy one.
Comparisons with the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylae abounded. The
struggle for freedom, justice, independence was seen as eternal. The
political divisions and in-fighting between conservatives and
communists (often fighting each other rather than the Germans), which
gave guerilla leaders like C.M. Woodhouse and N.G.L. Hammond such
headaches--by 1944 the RAF was actually strafing coup-minded resistance
forces in Athens--were tactfully brushed over. From the civil war of
1946-49, through the Cyprus conflict of the mid-Fifties to the
emergence of the colonels in 1967, a Cold War right-wing attitude
steadily hardened.

In his third chapter Will deals with the post-war lure of famous sites
and monuments, taking as his text a remark of W.J.R. Curtis in Modern
Architecture, Mythical Landscapes and Ancient Ruins (London 1997, p.
2), to the effect that "looking at a ruin is not a neutral exercise .
.   . One sees, to a degree, what one wants to see." This
unexceptionable, if platitudinous, observation is dutifully applied to
the topographic, mythical, historic, and aesthetic associations of some
ten major sites: the Acropolis, Aegina, Bassae, Corinth, Crete (mainly
Knossos), Delphi, Mycenae, Olympia, Sounion and Sparta. (Marathon,
Thermopylae, and Vergina don't make the cut.) The reactions of
travellers are fairly predictable. Sites gain from a beautiful natural
context (Delphi, Sounion), from their historical or mythic associations
(Crete, Mycenae, Olympia), from their architecture (Aegina, Bassae), or
from all of the above (the Acropolis), with the Parthenon "as a visible
guarantee of the virtues of democracy" (Mary Beard, The Parthenon,
2002, p. 144). This chapter also tracks the increasing retreat, during
the last two or three decades, of visitors from what might be termed
the Pilgrimage Mode, with authors advisedly supplying less and less
ancient background for readers unversed in the Greek past, whose
interests now lie elsewhere, and who are resolutely culture-proof. But
Wills' last word here (p. 80) is that "[t]he legacy of Greece may no
longer have been universally venerated as it once had been, but the
status and representation of its monuments remained remarkably
consistent." The reasons for this, and whether it is to be regarded as
a good or a bad thing, are not discussed.

In his fourth chapter, Wills looks for common features of contemporary
Greeks (viewed, astonishingly, en bloc) as presented by twentieth
century writers, drawing on the positive/negative reactions he
tabulates in Tables 5-7 ("friendly/curious about others",
"generous/hospitable", "attempt to take advantage of travellers",
"brave/heroic", "interested in politics/a democratic people",
"sociable/garrulous/noisy", "religious/superstitious", "simple or
pastoral way of life/timelessness", "images of a classical nature
related", "explicit statement about ethnic link to ancient people"),
culled from (by my count) over ninety travel-books. The main
conclusions he presents are as follows: (i) whether consciously or
unconsciously (and indeed, in some cases, where the ancient world is
ignored), writers, he finds, tend to see the people they meet through
the inherited lens focused on their ancient ancestors, or endow them
with attributes (e.g. a democratic instinct) "commonly associated with
the ancient world" (p. 81). (ii) Despite the rapid growth, and
industrialization, of urban Greece, Athens in particular, he notes a
tendency to depict the country as, in essence, primitive,
peasant-rural, and timeless, thus enabling writers "to portray the
Greeks as relics of a bygone age, as a people untainted by progress,
but who would also benefit from Western tutelage." (iii) This last
consideration leads some, especially long-term residents, into the kind
of criticism that Wills (like many others) labels "Orientalism": e.g.
accusations of laziness, misogyny, unpunctuality, bureaucratic
Byzantinism or all-pervasive official and political corruption. In
these cases the tendency is to blame four centuries of Turkish
occupation rather than the peerless heroes of antiquity.

Will's final chapter takes a quick look at the rapid evolution of
Greece between the collapse of the Junta (1974) and today, and tries to
estimate the ways in which travel-writing has accommodated itself to a
radically changing social scene. Long-term residency became
increasingly popular at the same time as the traditional "Glory that
was Greece" attitude rapidly withered. Cheap air fares meant that
retirees were joined by those well-heeled professionals able to spend a
week-end in their Greek retreat and be back at work in London or
Manchester by Monday (a deal Americans could, and can, only view with
wistful envy). While a minority still hunted for increasingly rare
quiet and unspoilt enclaves of the "old Greece", hordes of package
tourists began to treat the country as just another interchangeable
chunk, like the Costa del Sol, of sunny Mediterranean la-la-land. The
consequences of this new invasion, not touched on by Wills, have been
something less than idealistic.  In the New York Times (23 Aug. 2008)
Sarah Lyall quotes the mayor of Malia, on the north-east coast of
Crete, on their habits: "They scream, they sing, they fall down, they
take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit." He added,
emphatically: "It is only the British people--not the Germans or the
French." By contrast, a quest for Hellenic temps perdu might seem
relatively harmless, indeed admirable. Even Wills admits that shepherds
now use cell-phones, and that "real Greeks" are as likely to patronize
a global fast food outlet as a traditional taverna; but the overall
impact of the modern social revolution in travel seems to have escaped
his notice.

His general conclusions are what one might expect. He reiterates the
general acceptance of the truism that a travel-writer reveals more
about himself than he does about the place visited, and complains, once
more, that this insight seems not to have occurred to writers about
Greece. He claims (p. 117) to have established "an archive of
attitudes" from the books he has studied, and this, in an inevitably
selective way, he has certainly done. The "other discourses --
historical and sociological, as well as literary" that he claims to
have examined seem to have had no more than a random effect on him. In
his study, the past is virtually always there as a mirror for the
present. Escapees from the rat-race are in pursuit of a changeless
world. Thus (p. 119) " 'modern' Greece could be regarded both as the
birthplace of European culture and as a primitive backwater." The
monuments in particular, Wills insists, not only gathered a nexus of
powerful historical associations but were seen, in their ruined
longevity, as a testament immune from the vulgar present. He concedes
that this Hellenic myth is fading, yet ends with the assertion (p. 121)
that "[f]or British observers and participants, Greece was--and is--a
fantasy land, in which notions of past and present, civilization and
culture, timelessness and change, could be played out."

As should by now be apparent, this study manages, in an often
repetitive and disjunctive fashion, to pinpoint, and document, several
fairly obvious truisms about the evolution of British literary
reactions to Greece: in particular the impact of antiquity filtered
through a classical education, the myths generated by uncertain
acquaintance with modern Greeks and their history, the legacy of World
War II propaganda, and the stunting effect on knowledge and
communication of the past promoted by the recent classless revolution
in overseas travel. The subject overall is one of immense cultural
interest, which makes this book's shortcomings all the more
regrettable. Unlike Roessel's In Byron's Shadow, a far more subtle,
nuanced, and socially acute investigation, Wills does not analyze in
depth any of the many books he studies: they are simply there to be
quarried for quotations. More than once he states that he is not
concerned in the first instance with the literary quality of the
writers he studies, but is equally "interested in the ones with small
budgets and lots of dreams",[[1]] an apples-and-oranges comparison
which also ignores the fact that the description precisely fits many
that he claims not to be concerned with (e.g. the young Patrick Leigh
Fermor).

Wills also, throughout, has an academic trick of citing, without
comment, but in such a way that leaves a residue of fashionable doubt
in the reader's mind, the claims of authors regarding instances of
conventional wisdom that do not really suit his thesis. "It was widely
believed that in ancient Greece lay the origins of contemporary
literature, architecture, political systems, and civic values" (p. 8).
[[2]] Similarly at p. 51: ".  .  . during the twentieth century ancient
Greece was regularly asserted to be the origin of Western culture",
etc. Of Olympia: "Writers continued to insist upon the importance of
the surrounding landscape" (p. 14). The actual, rather than the
romantic-imaginary, survival of the ancient past, especially the pagan
past, in the present gets the same treatment. On "uncritical
assumptions about the continuity of traditions in Greece" Wills reports
(p. 34): "[I]n their 1970 study of Greek rural beliefs  .  .  .
Richard and Eva Blum argued that 'there was much in the nineteenth
century in Greece that would have been familiar to Pausanias and to
Hesiod before him'".[[3]]  It is only "[f]or historian Alan Clark,
writing in 1962" that "the reaction of the Cretans to the Axis invasion
of 1941 was based on 'a whole tradition of mountain valour, of guerilla
banditry, of rock and field craft and marksmanship that ran in the
blood' " (A. Clark, The Fall of Crete, London (2000), p. 79). Sparta's
military totalitarianism is presented (p. 79) as the opinion of a
travel-writer (John Pollard Journey to the Styx, London 1955, pp.
99-100), and "a view of history" that "provided models, precedents, and
justification, for the British Empire".

An overwhelming preponderance of evidence, both ancient and modern,
suggests that every one of these statements, presented by Wills as
arguable assertions, is in fact substantially true, and Wills does not
help his genuine perceptions of starry-eyed romanticism by implying
that the whole ancient model was fantasy, which it quite clearly was
not. This attitude, I suspect, is what brought about the most
remarkable omission in The Mirror of Antiquity: any discussion of the
Greek language, central to communication between host and visitor,
personal relationships, literature, social and class nuances, and the
entire fabric of Greek history: not least to the period before and
immediately following the War of Independence, when the pursuit of
antiquity was challenged by the vernacular, Orthodox-based tradition of
resistance symbolized by the Memoirs of General Ioannis Makriyiannis,
and led to the linguistic split between katharevousa (an attempt to
revive something like ancient Attic, here only alluded to in an
unexplained quotation, p. 33) and de^motike^ (the current spoken
language). Unwary readers of Wills might suppose the Greek Hellenizers
had it all their own way. Not so. And the whole problem of coping with
a minority language, not least when behind it lies that language's
famous ancestor, is simply shelved.[[4]] This is a pity. There is
enough excellent material assembled in this ex-dissertation to warrant
a revised and expanded second edition, which stops trying, by
implication, to demonstrate untenable theories, is more rigorous in
distinguishing between fact and fantasy, and, above all, integrates the
linguistic question into its analysis of the evidence. For all this,
David Roessel would not be a bad model.[[5]]


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Notes:


1.   The quotation is taken by Wills from J. D. Ragan, "French Women
Travellers in Egypt: A Discourse Marginal to Orientalism?", in
Travellers in Egypt, ed. P. and J. Starkey, London (2001), p. 228.

2.   Cf. also [p. 44]: "Francis Noel-Baker maintained in his children's
book Looking at Greece that 'Europe's politics, philosophy,
architecture, mathematics, science, and even her music originated in
Greece'".

3.   Richard and Eva Blum, The Dangerous Hour: The Lore and Culture of
Crisis and Mystery in Rural Greece, London (1970), p. 6. Wills ignores
the Blums' earlier, and considerably more significant, study Health and
Healing in Rural Greece, Stanford 1965, not to mention that remarkable,
and well-documented, classic, J. C. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and
Ancient Greek Religion, Cambridge (1910).

4.    The nearest Wills comes to this is citing (p. 20) the famous
anecdote about Virginia Woolf, who complained that the Greeks "do not
understand the Greek of the age of Pericles--when I speak it."
Considering that she probably used, not even Erasmian pronunciation,
but the Anglicizing phonetic style affected by English Victorians, this
is hardly surprising. Too many classicists, even today, draw a very
firm, and contemptuous, line between Plato's Greek and its linear
descendant, which has not only lost the infinitive, but commits
solecisms such as making apo govern the accusative: Wills missed a
great opportunity here.

5.   I list here one or two minor points for consideration in any
future edition. p. 10: "limb-shaped votive offerings", far from being a
dubious claim of Theodore Bent's, are still found in Catholic and
Orthodox churches worldwide, not least in the Mediterranean. p. 70:
Linear B was not, strictly speaking, "the writing of ancient Crete",
this being Linear A, but A's (somewhat awkward) adaptation by the
Mycenaean conquerors. p. 71: Wills' apparent agreement with Payne that
there was "little record in history" about the island of Aegina should
go: the statement is demonstrably false. p.73: The claim that the
temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens was "largely a Roman edifice" is
highly misleading. p. 78: Doubt cast on the poor quality and quantity
of Spartan remains has to fudge Thucydides' clear statement to this
effect in his comparison (1.10) of Sparta with Athens. p. 120: "The
history of Greece was written as going straight from the Roman Empire
to nineteenth century independence": this is to ignore, most notably,
George Finlay's seven-volume History of Greece from its Conquest by the
Romans to the Present Time, BC 146 to AD 1864, Oxford 1877, and W.
Miller's Latins in the Levant: A History of Frankish Greece
(1204-1566), New York 1908.