Selected Poems

by Byron

  Note [C]

  ‘While thus in concert,’ &c.

  STANZA lxxii. LINE LAST.

  As a specimen of the Albanian or Arnaout dialect of the Illyric, I here insert two of their most popular choral songs, which are generally chanted in dancing by men or women indiscriminately. The first words are merely a kind of chorus without meaning, like some in our own and all other languages.

  I

  I

  Bo, Bo, Bo, Bo, Bo, Bo, Naciarura, popuso.

  Lo, Lo, I come, I come; be thou silent.

  2

  2

  Naciarura na civin Ha peh derini ti hin.

  I come I run; open the door that I may enter.

  3

  3

  Ha pe uderi escrotini Ti vin ti mar servetini.

  Open the door by halves, that I may take my turban.

  4 4

  Caliriote me surme Ea ha pe pse dua tive.

  Caliriotes* with the dark eyes, open the gate, that I may enter.

  5

  5

  Buo, Bo, Bo, Bo, Bo, Gi egem spirta esimiro.

  Lo, Lo, I hear thee, my soul.

  6

  6

  Caliriote vu le funde Ede vete tunde tunde.

  An Arnaout girl, in costly garb, walks with graceful pride.

  7

  7

  Caliriote me surme Ti mi put e poi mi le.

  Caliriot maid of the dark eyes, give me a kiss.

  8

  8

  Se ti puta citi mora Si mi ri ni veti udo gia.

  If I have kissed thee, what hast thou gained? My soul is consumed with fire.

  9

  9

  Va le ni il che cadale Celo more, more celo.

  Dance lightly, more gently, and gently still.

  10

  10

  Plu hari ti tirete Plu huron cia pra seti.

  Make not so much dust to destroy your embroidered hose.

  The last stanza would puzzle a commentator: the men have certainly buskins of the most beautiful texture, but the ladies (to whom the above is supposed to be addressed) have nothing under their little yellow boots and slippers but a well-turned and sometimes very white ankle. The Arnaout girls are much handsomer than the Greeks, and their dress is far more picturesque. They preserve their shape much longer also, from being always in the open air. It is to be observed, that the Arnaout is not a written language: the words of this song, therefore, as well as the one which follows, are spelt according to their pronunciation. They are copied by one who speaks and understands the dialect perfectly, and who is a native of Athens.

  I

  I

  Ndi sefda tinde ulavossa Vettimi upri vi lofsa.

  I am wounded by thy love, and have loved but to scorch myself.

  2

  2

  Ah vaisisso mi privi lofse Si mi rini mi la vosse.

  Thou hast consumed me! Ah, maid! thou hast struck me to the heart.

  3

  3

  Uti tasa roba stua Sitti eve tulati dua.

  I have said I wish no dowry, but thine eyes and eye lashes.

  4

  4

  Roba stinori ssidua Qu mi sini vetti dua.

  The accursed dowry I want not, but thee only.

  5

  5

  Qurmini dua civileni Roba ti siarmi tildi eni.

  Give me thy charms, and let the portion feed the flames.

  6

  6

  Utara pisa vaisisso me simi rin ti hapti Eti mi hire a piste si gui dendroi, tiltati.

  I have loved thee, maid, with a sincere soul, but thou hast left me like a withered tree.

  7

  7

  Udi vura udorini udiri cicova cilti mora Udorini talti hollna u ede caimoni mora.

  If I have placed my hand on thy bosom, what have I gained? my hand is withdrawn, but retains the flame.

  I believe the two last stanzas, as they are in a different measure, ought to belong to another ballad. An idea something similar to the thought in the last lines was expressed by Socrates, whose arm having come in contact with one of his Critobulus or Cleobulus, the philosopher complained of a shooting pain as far as his shoulder for some days after, and therefore very properly resolved to teach his disciples in future without touching them.

  Note [D]

  ‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!’

  STANZA lxxiii. LINES I. AND 2.

  I

  Before I say any thing about a city of which every body, traveller or not, has thought it necessary to say something, I will request Miss Owenson, when she next borrows an Athenian heroine for her four volumes, to have the goodness to marry her to somebody more of a gentleman than a ‘Disdar Aga’ (who by the by is not an Aga), the most impolite of petty officers, the greatest patron of larceny Athens ever saw (except Lord E.) and the unworthy occupant of the Acropolis, on a handsome annual stipend of 150 piastres (eight pounds sterling), out of which he has only to pay his garrison, the most ill-regulated corps in the ill-regulated Ottoman Empire. I speak it tenderly, seeing I was once the cause of the husband of ‘Ida of Athens’ nearly suffering the bastinado; and because the said ‘Disdar’ is a turbulent husband, and beats his wife; so that I exhort and beseech Miss Owenson to sue for a separate maintenance in behalf of ‘Ida.’ Having premised thus much, on a matter of such import to the readers of romances, I may now leave Ida, to mention her birthplace.

  Setting aside the magic of the name, and all those associations which it would be pedantic and superfluous to recapitulate, the very situation of Athens would render it the favourite of all who have eyes for art or nature. The climate, to me at least, appeared a perpetual spring; during eight months I never passed a day without being as many hours on horseback: rain is extremely rare, snow never lies in the plains, and a cloudy day is an agreeable rarity. In Spain, Portugal, and every part of the East which I visited, except Ionia and Attica, I perceived no such superiority of climate to our own; and at Constantinople, where I passed May, June, and part of July (1810), you might ‘damn the climate, and complain of spleen,’ five days out of seven.

  The air of the Morea is heavy and unwholesome, but the moment you pass the isthmus in the direction of Megara the change is strikingly perceptible. But I fear Hesiod will still be found correct in his description of a Bœotian winter.

  We found at Livadia an ‘esprit fort’ in a Greek bishop, of all freethinkers! This worthy hypocrite rallied his own religion with great intrepidity (but not before his flock), and talked of a mass as a ‘coglioneria.’ It was impossible to think better of him for this; but, for a Boeotian, he was brisk with all his absurdity. This phenomenon (with the exception indeed of Thebes, the remains of Chæronea, the plain of Platea, Orchomenus, Livadia, and its nominal cave of Trophonius) was the only remarkable thing we saw before we passed Mount Cithæron.

  The fountain of Dirce turns a mill: at least my companion (who, resolving to be at once cleanly and classical, bathed in it) pronounced it to be the fountain of Dirce, and any body who thinks it worth while may contradict him. At Castri we drank of half a dozen streamlets, some not of the purest, before we decided to our satisfaction which was the true Castalian, and even that had a villanous twang, probably from the snow, though it did not throw us into an epic fever, like poor Dr Chandler.

  From Fort Phyle, of which large remains still exist, the Plain of Athens, Pentelicus, Hymettus, the Ægean, and the Acropolis, burst upon the eye at once; in my opinion, a more glorious prospect than even Cintra or Istambol. Not the view from the Troad, with Ida, the Hellespont, and the more distant Mount Athos, can equal it, though so superior in extent.

  I heard much of the beauty of Arcadia, but excepting the view from the monastery of Megaspelion (which is inferior to Zitza in a command of country) and the descent from the mountains on the way from Tripolitza to Argos, Arcadia has little to recommend it beyond the name.

  ‘Sternitur, et
dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos.’

  Virgil could have put this into the mouth of none but an Argive, and (with reverence be it spoken) it does not deserve the epithet. And if the polynices of Statius, ‘In mediis audit duo litora campis,’ did actually hear both shores in crossing the isthmus of Corinth, he had better ears than have ever been worn in such a journey since.

  ‘Athens,’ says a celebrated topographer, ‘is still the most polished city of Greece.’ Perhaps it may of Greece, but not of the Greeks; for Joannina in Epirus is universally allowed, amongst themselves, to be superior in the wealth, refinement, learning, and dialect of its inhabitants. The Athenians are remarkable for their cunning; and the lower orders are not improperly characterised in that proverb, which classes them with ‘the Jews of Salonica, and the Turks of the Negropont.’

  Among the various foreigners resident in Athens, French, Italians, Germans, Ragusans, &c., there was never a difference of opinion in their estimate of the Greek character, though on all other topics they disputed with great acrimony.

  M Fauvel, the French consul, who has passed thirty years principally at Athens, and to whose talents as an artist, and manners as a gentleman, none who have known him can refuse their testimony, has frequently declared in my hearing, that the Greeks do not deserve to be emancipated; reasoning on the grounds of their ‘national and individual depravity!’ while he forgot that such depravity is to be attributed to causes which can only be removed by the measure he reprobates.

  M Roque, a French merchant of respectability long settled in Athens, asserted with the most amusing gravity, ‘Sir, they are the same canaille that existed in the days of Themistocles!’ an alarming remark to the ‘Laudator temporis acti.’ The ancients banished Themistocles; the moderns cheat Monsieur Roque: thus great men have ever been treated!

  In short, all the Franks who are fixtures, and most of the Englishmen, Germans, Danes, &c. of passage, came over by degrees to their opinion, on much the same grounds that a Turk in England would condemn the nation by wholesale, because he was wronged by his lacquey, and overcharged by his washerwoman.

  Certainly it was not a little staggering when the Sieurs Fauvel and Lusieri, the two greatest demagogues of the day, who divide between them the power of Pericles and the popularity of Cleon, and puzzle the poor Waywode with perpetual differences, agreed in the utter condemnation, ‘nulla virtute redemptum,’ of the Greeks in general, and of the Athenians in particular.

  For my own humble opinion, I am loth to hazard it, knowing as I do, that there be now in MS. no less than five tours of the first magnitude and of the most threatening aspect, all in typographical array, by persons of wit, and honour, and regular common-place books: but, if I may say this without offence, it seems to me rather hard to declare so positively and pertinaciously, as almost every body has declared, that the Greeks, because they are very bad, will never be better.

  Eton and Sonnini have led us astray by their panegyrics and projects; but, on the other hand, De Pauw and Thornton have debased the Greeks beyond their demerits.

  The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter.

  At present, like the Catholics of Ireland and the Jews throughout the world, and such other cudgelled and heterodox people, they suffer all the moral and physical ills that can afflict humanity. Their life is a struggle against truth; they are vicious in their own defence. They are so unused to kindness, that when they occasionally meet with it they look upon it with suspicion, as a dog often beaten snaps at your fingers if you attempt to caress him. ‘They are ungrateful, notoriously, abominably ungrateful!’ – this is the general cry. Now, in the name of Nemesis! for what are they to be grateful? Where is the human being that ever conferred a benefit on Greek or Greeks? They are to be grateful to the Turks for their fetters, and to the Franks for their broken promises and lying counsels. They are to be grateful to the artist who engraves their ruins, and to the antiquary who carries them away; to the traveller whose janissary flogs them, and to the scribbler whose journal abuses them! This is the amount of their obligations to foreigners.

  II

  Franciscan Convent, Athens, January 23, 1811.

  Amongst the remnants of the barbarous policy of the earlier ages, are the traces of bondage which yet exist in different countries; whose inhabitants, however divided in religion and manners, almost all agree in oppression.

  The English have at last compassionated their negroes, and under a less bigoted government, may probably one day release their Catholic brethren: but the interposition of foreigners alone can emancipate the Greeks, who, otherwise, appear to have as small a chance of redemption from the Turks, as the Jews have from mankind in general.

  Of the ancient Greeks we know more than enough; at least the younger men of Europe devote much of their time to the study of the Greek writers and history, which would be more usefully spent in mastering their own. Of the moderns, we are perhaps more neglectful than they deserve; and while every man of any pretensions to learning is tiring out his youth, and often his age, in the study of the language and of the harangues of the Athenian demagogues in favour of freedom, the real or supposed descendants of these sturdy republicans are left to the actual tyranny of their masters, although a very slight effort is required to strike off their chains.

  To talk, as the Greeks themselves do, of their rising again to their pristine superiority, would be ridiculous; as the rest of the world must resume its barbarism, after reasserting the sovereignty of Greece: but there seems to be no very great obstacle, except in the apathy of the Franks, to their becoming an useful dependency, or even a free state with a proper guarantee; – under correction, however, be it spoken, for many and well-informed men doubt the practicability even of this.

  The Greeks have never lost their hope, though they are now more divided in opinion on the subject of their probable deliverers. Religion recommends the Russians; but they have twice been deceived and abandoned by that power, and the dreadful lesson they received after the Muscovite desertion in the Morea has never been forgotten. The French they dislike; although the subjugation of the rest of Europe will, probably, be attended by the deliverance of continental Greece. The islanders look to the English for succour, as they have very lately possessed themselves of the Ionian republic, Corfu excepted. But whoever appear with arms in their hands will be welcome; and when that day arrives, Heaven have mercy on the Ottomans, they cannot expect it from the Giaours.

  But instead of considering what they have been, and speculating on what they may be, let us look at them as they are.

  And here it is impossible to reconcile the contrariety of opinions: some, particularly the merchants, decrying the Greeks in the strongest language; others, generally travellers, turning periods in their eulogy, and publishing very curious speculations grafted on their former state, which can have no more effect on their present lot, than the existence of the Incas on the future fortunes of Peru.

  One very ingenious person terms them the ‘natural allies of Englishmen;’ another no less ingenious, will not allow them to be the allies of anybody, and denies their very descent from the ancients; a third, more ingenious than either, builds a Greek empire on a Russian foundation, and realises (on paper) all the chimeras of Catherine II. As to the question of their descent, what can it import whether the Mainotes are the lineal Laconians or not? or the present Athenians as indigenous as the bees of Hymettus, or as the grasshoppers, to which they once likened themselves? What Englishman cares if he be of a Danish, Saxon, Norman, or Trojan blood? or who, except a Welshman, is afflicted with a desire of being descended from Caractacus?

  The poor Greeks do not so much abound in the good things of this world, as to render even their claims to antiquity an object of envy; it is very cruel, then, in Mr Thornton to disturb them in the
possession of all that time has left them; viz. their pedigree, of which they are the more tenacious, as it is all they can call their own. It would be worth while to publish together, and compare, the works of Messrs. Thornton and De Pauw, Eton and Sonnini; paradox on one side, and prejudice on the other. Mr Thornton conceives himself to have claims to public confidence from a fourteen years’ residence at Pera; perhaps he may on the subject of the Turks, but this can give him no more insight into the real state of Greece and her inhabitants, than as many years spent in Wapping into that of the Western Highlands.

  The Greeks of Constantinople live in Fanal; and if Mr Thornton did not oftener cross the Golden Horn than his brother merchants are accustomed to do, I should place no great reliance on his information. I actually heard one of these gentlemen boast of their little general intercourse with the city, and assert of himself, with an air of triumph, that he had been but four times at Constantinople in as many years.

  As to Mr Thornton’s voyages in the Black Sea with Greek vessels, they gave him the same idea of Greece as a cruise to Berwick in a Scotch smack would of Johnny Grot’s house. Upon what grounds then does he arrogate the right of condemning by wholesale a body of men, of whom he can know little? It is rather a curious circumstance that Mr Thornton, who so lavishly dispraises Pouqueville on every occasion of mentioning the Turks, has yet recourse to him as authority on the Greeks, and terms him an impartial observer. Now, Dr Pouqueville is as little entitled to that appellation, as Mr Thornton to confer it on him.

  The fact is, we are deplorably in want of information on the subject of the Greeks, and in particular their literature; nor is there any probability of our being better acquainted, till our intercourse becomes more intimate, or their independence confirmed: the relations of passing travellers are as little to be depended on as the invectives of angry factors; but till something more can be attained, we must be content with the little to be acquired from similar sources.*