Mosaics of Grecian History by Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

M >> Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson >> Mosaics of Grecian History

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38

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 Passae'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 Thermopylae'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 Lacedaemon'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
Tyrtae'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 Thermopylae,
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 AEge'an. The ancient names were revived; and on
the 6th of April the Messenian senate, assembled at Kalamae'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 Navari'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 Thermopylae; 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 AEschylus, 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:
Thermopylae 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 AEgean, 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."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38