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 GREECE

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GREECE

development of any civilization to absorb foreign influ- ences gradually, without breaking its own continuity. Only, in this period the centre of gravity has moved from Athens to Constantinople. It was a special characteristic of the Turkish conquest that it neither destroyed nor absorbed the races subject to the sul- tan. The difference of religion, involving in this case an entirely different kind of life and different ideals in everything, prevented absorption; and the subject Christians were too valuable an asset as taxpayers to be wiped out by the Arabs. So, after 1453, except for the loss of independence and the persecution in a more or less acute form that they suffered, the older Eu- ropean races in the Balkans went on as before. No doubt numbers of Greeks did apostatize, learn to speak Turkish and help to build up that artificial con- fusion of races which we call the Turks. But the enormous majority kept their faith in spite of grievous disabilities. They kept their language, too, and their consciousness of being Greeks. They never called themselves Turks (a word that in the Balkans is still commonly used for Moslem), nor thought of them- selves as part of the Turkish State. They were Greeks (which is what their name 'Pu/naioi really meant), their land was Greece still, though unhappily held by a foreign tyrant, for whose removal they never ceased to pray.

The real danger to the ideal of Greater Greece cov- ering all the Balkans was not, is not now, the Turk, who remains always only an unpleasant incident in the history of these lands ; it is the presence of other Christian races, Slavs, who dispute the Greek ideal with their languages and national feeling. Were it not for these Slavs we could count Greece as having absorbed Macedonia and Thrace by the time of Alex- ander, and as covering nearly all the Balkans to the Danube ever since. But the Bulgar, the Serb, the Wallachian — and Albanian too — are there with their languages and nations to oppose the "Great Idea" of which every Greek dreams. So we must still count Greece as a scattered and relative element among others. Under the Turk Constantinople was still the centre of this element. The oecumenical patriarch took the place of the emperor; his court, the Phanar, was the heart of Hellenism, where the purest Greek was spoken, the memory of the old Greek States most alive.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the wave of enthusiasm for liberty started by the French Revo- lution reached the Rayahs, as the Christian subjects of the sultan were called" by the Turks. The Rayahs had never ceased to hope for the day when " this so glori- ous and noble race should no longer have to submit to a godless turban" (Ph. Skuphos in his M-t]<ns irpbs Tbv Xpiffrdf); the Klephts and Armatoles had kept up a ceaseless, if hopeless, rebellion against the pa- shas and kaimakams. In 1814 the " Hetairia Phil- ike" was founded at Odessa, to work for the free- dom of Greece. In the revolution that followed, from 1821 to 183.3, Greeks joined equally all over the Turkish Empire, in the islands and the coast towns of Asia Minor, in Constantinople and Salonica as much as in Attica and the Peloponnesus. The treaty that finally gave freedom only to the lower part of the pe- ninsula was a bitter disappointment to thousands of Greeks still subject to the Turk. No doubt a more generous concession was impossible; but one must remember that the modern Kingdom of Greece is only a fraction of what has an equal right to the name of Hellas. The merchants of Smyrna and Salonica, the Phanariots of (.'onstantinople, the peasants of Crete, and even of distant ( "yprus, hang out the blue and white flag on feast days, talk Greek to their wives, and are just as much conscious of being Greeks as the citizens of Athens. Outside of "free Greece" {ii iXcvS^pa 'EKXds), "captive Greece" iv alxiia-^-^Tri 'EXXds) waits and hopes. Of this scattered fatherland, con- sidered as one country, whether now free or still cap-

tive, the real centre is still the Phanar at Constanti- nople. It is here, even more than at Athens, that the "Great Idea" of a Greece that shall cover the Balkans is cherished ; it is hither, to the Phanar and the patri- arch, that the eyes of all Greeks are turned. King George, with his Danish family, takes his stipend and enjoys such slight authority as his turbulent Parlia- ment allows to him, but the head of the nation, as a Greek told Dr. Gelzer in 1898, is not the king at Athens, but the oecumenical patriarch at Constantinople. (Gelzer, "Geistliches und Weltliches aus dem tilrk.- griech. Orient", Leipzig, 1900. See Fortescue, "The Orthodox Eastern Church", 240-244, 273-283.)

Something must be said about the name. The land and the people that we call Greece and Greeks are in their own language Hellas and Hellenes. Greek is a form of the Latin Grcccus, which in various modifica- tions {grieche, grec, greco, etc.) is used in all Western languages. Gnvcus is TpatKhs, an older name for the people. Tpai.K6s was a mythical son of Thessalos. Or, since this should rather be understood as derived inversely (the person as an eponymous mjrth from the race), various other derivations have been proposed. TpacKd! (a form 'PaiK6s also exists) is said to have meant originally "shaggy-haired", or "freeman", or "dweller in a valley" (W. Pape, "Worterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen", 3rd ed., Brunswick, 1870, s. V. TpaiKoi). The first people so called were the people of Dodona in Epirus, then the Greeks in gen- eral. After the common use of the other name, Hel- lene, this one still survived. It occurs occasionally in classical writers ; after Alexander it became common, especially among Greeks abroad (in Alexandria, etc.). From them it was adopted into Latin. But in Greek, too, it lasts through the Middle Ages as an alternative name for the Hellenes of classical times (Stephen of Byzantium, about a. d. 400: rpaiK6s, 6 'EWrfv, quoted by Sophocles in " Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods", New York, 1893, s. v. rpaiKAs). Latins and other foreigners, as well as Greeks writing to such people, use it not seldom for any Greek, as "Grscus" in Latin.

The other names: Hellas ('EXXds) and Hellene ("EXXiji;) are the classical ones. Hellas was a city of Phthiotis in Thessaly. From there the name Hel- lene spread throughout Thessaly. Herodotus distin- guishes in Thessaly " two chief people : the older Pe- lasgic, the other the Hellenic race", and tells how the Hellenes invaded that land under Dorus, son of Hel- len — another eponymous mythical hero (I, Ivi, cf. Iviii). TheelderPlinyappliesthenamefurther: "From the neck of the Isthmus [going north] Hellas begins, which is called by our people GriBcia" ("Ab Isthmi angustiis Hellas incipit, nostris Gra;cia appellata. In ea prima Attice, antiquitus Aete vocata" — Nat. Hist., IV, vii). Long before the New Testament the names were used by every one in our sense of Greece and Greek. So in I Mach., viii, 9 and 18. 'EXXds oc- curs once (Acts, xx, 2), "EXX?;;' many times (e. g., Rom., x, 12), in the New Testament. In the parti- tions of the Roman Empire neither Grfficia nor Hellas appears. The Peloponnesus and the land up to Thes- saly formed the Province of Achaia, then came Thes- salia and Epirus, then Macedonia and Thracia. But popular use kept the older name (e. g.,^ Pausanias, VII, xvi) ; a Greek still called himself "EXXijk. As Christianity spread Hellene began to suggest pagan—- a worshipper of the Hellenic gods. Eventually this evil flavour absorbed the word altogether. In the Greek Fathers it always means simply "a heathen". St. Athanasius wrote a treatise against the heathen and called it: A670S Ka6' 'EXXijeoiv, so all the others. Julian, in his hopeless attempt to revive the old gods, always uses it in this sense and makes the most of its honourable sound. But Christianity was stronger than the memory of Hellas, so from this time the name falls into discredit till quite modern times.