Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/46

 purely Slavonic ancestry had dowered the inhabitants of Greece with a purely Slavonic appearance, yet, if their thoughts and speech and acts were, as they are, Greek, I would still venture to call them Greek in nationality. Ce n'est que la peau dont l'Ethiope ne change pas.

But the people of modern Greece do not actually present so extreme a case of acquired nationality. They are partly Greek in race: and if it should appear that they are wholly Greek in nationality, the explanation must simply be that the character, no less than the language, of their Hellenic ancestors was superior in vitality to that of the Slavs who intermarried with them, and alone has been transmitted to the modern Greek people.

What, then, is the national character at the present day?

The first feature of it which casual conversation with any Greek will soon bring into view is that narrow patriotism which was so remarkable a trait in the Greeks of old time. If he be asked what is his native land ([Greek: patrida]), his answer will be, not Greece nor any of the larger divisions of it, but the particular town or hamlet in which he happened to be born: and if in later life he change his place of abode, though he live in his new home ten or twenty years, he will regard himself and be regarded by the native-born inhabitants as a foreigner ([Greek: xenos]). Or again if a man obtain work for a short time in another part of the country, or if a girl marry an inhabitant of a village half a dozen miles from her own, the departure is mourned with some of those plaintive songs of exile in which the popular muse delights. Nor are there lacking historical cases in which this narrow love of country has produced something more than fond lamentations; the boast of the Maniotes that they have never acknowledged alien masters is in the main a true boast, and it was pure patriotism which nerved them in their long struggle with the Turks for the possession of their rugged, barren, storm-lashed home. It was patriotism too, narrow and proud, that both sustained the heroic outlaws of Souli in their defiance of Ottoman armies, and also,—because they disdained alliance with their Greek neighbours,—contributed to their final downfall.

But so tenacious and indomitable a courage is in modern, as it was in ancient, Greece the exception rather than the rule. The men of Maina and of Souli are comparable to the Spartans: