Lipparini, Byron Swearing Oath on Tomb of Marcos Botzaris
Wednesday
Rev. John Morrow, a dear friend and former babysitter (60+ years ago), just sent me a Wall Street Journal article by John Psaropoulos on “how poetry won independence for Greece.” It’s an article tailor-made for Better Living through Beowulf.
There were a series of Greek uprisings in the 1820s against the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered the Greek peninsula in the 15th century. The rebels captured the attention of the Romantic poets, especially Lord Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley. Looking for historical precedent, Byron referred to two famous victories against numerically superior Persian forces in “The Isles of Greece.” The king sitting on “rocky brow” is Xerxes, who saw his fleet decimated by the Athenian navy:
The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations;—all were his!
He counted them at break of day—
And when the sun set, where were they?
The article quotes classicist Roderick Beaton saying that educated Europeans and Americans saw “something of their own at stake because they’ve been brought up on Homer and Herodotus and Marathon and Salamis.” Therefore, Beaton doesn’t see Byron’s and Shelley’s support as altruistic:
It’s actually the belief that the Hellenic heritage is common to all civilized people and therefore…it’s your own civilization that is threatened by the common enemy.” As a result, hundreds of Europeans fought for the Greek cause, Byron being the most famous.
Byron had a rock star presence that dwarfs anything we see today, with the “Byronic hero” capturing the imagination of young people everywhere, including the Bronte sisters (think Rochester and Heathcliff). Therefore when, a decade before the rebellion, the protagonist of Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage calls for the Greeks to rebel, it packed a punch. Don’t look to the French or Russians to save you, Childe Harold tells them. You must do it yourself:
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 ye? 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.
Childe Harold, Psaropoulos notes, had been a publishing sensation in 1812, selling out ten editions in three years, an unprecedented accomplishment.
Shelley made his own contribution to the Greek cause, writing his verse play Hellas to help finance the rebellion. The play is best known for its concluding chorus, which imagines a glorious present replacing Greece’s glorious past. Why look to mythological figures like Jason, Orpheus and Ulysses, Shelley asks, when a new great age is beginning?
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdu’d:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.
Oh cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh might it die or rest at last!
Some in Greece lean too much on their past, just as some in Britain and France still imagine themselves as having empires. American boasts of exceptionalism sometimes ring similarly hollow. Shelley wants the Greeks to let go of the past and create new myths.
Neither Byron, who died of a fever after four months in Greece, nor Shelley were terribly practical. Instead of creating new legends, the Greek rebellion proved inept and undermanned. Psaropoulos says of the Greek rebels,
Before the might of Sultan Mehmet’s professional army and navy, they could field only brigands, skirmishers, and fire ships. They had no cavalry, no military navy, no experienced military officers, no central command, no money and barely a government.
In other words, you may not want to listen to poets when you’re contemplating rebellion.
Yet the poems had an effect after all, capturing the imaginations of Britain, France and Russia. These nations had been hostile towards national liberation movements following the Napoleonic years, which had sparked a desire for independence amongst various ethnicities. (I can testify that there is a monument to Napoleon in Ljubljana, Slovenia.) These poets made revolution cool again.
To be sure, political calculations also entered in. The perceived weakness of the Ottoman Emire prompted the nations to support the Greek cause, and after their combined forces decimated the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Navarino, the Greeks achieved independence. Still, the poets had played a part, and the Enlightenment ideals that they embraced prevailed. As a result, Greece
became the first European nation-state forged in the values articulated by the U.S. Declaration of Independence. “Setting up a new state according to enlightenment principles [is] what the Greeks did for the first time,”…says Prof. Beaton. “To create such a state at all…out of materials that existed before 1821 is an extraordinary feat for which the Greeks deserve far more credit that they’re routinely given.”
Don’t underestimate poetry, in other words.
