Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/164

136 on which the Homeric battle-scenes were relieved. The background is blank, like the plane surface on which a Greek frieze was relieved. But to the audience of Homer the names of the rivers and mountains in the poem recalled an actual landscape ; and all through the ancient poets there is a Greek landscape implied rather than described, of which the untravelled scholar can form no conception.

While we were at the Dardanelles, I observed a curious trait of Greek manners. The agent of the Calverts had lost 40,000 piasters by a robbery in his house. The robbery was traced home to the people of this village, and after some days the priest of the place declared in church that he had a charm which would infallibly discover the thief. This charm is the leg-bone of a wolf, which, if boiled in milk with a ploughshare, and then burnt, has the extraordinary property of rendering the thief lame: the moment the bone is put in the fire, one of the legs of the thief is forthwith paralyzed. The priest announced this in the morning, adding that he would not burn the wolf's bone till the next day. That same night the whole of the stolen property was thrown into the garden of its rightful owner in a bag, and so the thief did not incur the punishment prepared for him. I suspect that behind this exhibition of priestcraft there was a more real and tangible threat on the part of the Pasha of the Dardanelles, that he wovdd make the village responsible for the amount stolen; and so the priest, now as ever, was made the instrument of the Government.