The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2De Quincey, Thomas
General
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays
But we are not always sure that we understand Mr. Finlay, even in the
particular use which he makes of the words 'Greece' and 'Grecian.'
Sometimes he means beyond a doubt the people of Hellas and the AEgean
islands, as _opposed_ to the mixed population of Constantinople.
Sometimes he means the Grecian element as opposed to the Roman element
_in_ the composition of this mixed Byzantine population. In this case
the Greek does not mean (as in the former case) the non-Byzantine, but
the Byzantine. Sometimes he means by preference that vast and most
diffusive race which throughout Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the Euxine and
the Euphrates, represented the Graeco-Macedonian blood from the time of
Alexander downwards. But why should we limit the case to an origin from
this great Alexandrian aera? Then doubtless (330 B.C.) it received a
prodigious expansion. But already, in the time of Herodotus (450 B.C.),
this Grecian race had begun to sow itself broadcast over Asia and
Africa. The region called _Cyrenaica_ (viz., the first region which you
would traverse in passing from the banks of the Nile and the Pyramids to
Carthage and to Mount Atlas, _i.e._, Tunis, Algiers, Fez and Morocco, or
what we now call the Barbary States) had been occupied by Grecians
nearly seven hundred years before Christ. In the time of Croesus (say
560 B.C.) it is clear that Grecians were swarming over Lydia and the
whole accessible part of Asia Minor. In the time of Cyrus the younger
(say 404 B.C.) his Grecian allies found their fiercest opponents in
Grecian soldiers of Artaxerxes. In the time of Alexander, just a
septuagint of years from the epoch of this unfortunate Cyrus, the most
considerable troops of Darius were Greeks. The truth is, that, though
Greece was at no time very populous, the prosperity of so many little
republics led to as ample a redundancy of Grecian population as was
compatible with Grecian habits of life; for, deceive not yourself, the
_harem_, what we are accustomed to think of as a Mahometan institution,
existed more or less perfectly in Greece by seventeen centuries at least
antecedently to Mahometanism. Already before Homer, before Troy, before
the Argonauts, woman was an abject, dependent chattel in Greece, and
living in nun-like seclusion. There is so much of _intellectual_
resemblance between Greece and Rome, shown in the two literatures, the
two religions, and the structure of the two languages, that we are apt
to overlook radical repulsion between their _moral_ systems. But such a
repulsion did exist, and the results of its existence are 'writ large'
in the records, if they are studied with philosophic closeness and
insight, and could be illustrated in many ways had we only time and
space for such an exercise. But we must hurry on to remark that Mr.
Finlay's indefiniteness in the use of the terms 'Greece' and 'Grecian'
is almost equalled by his looseness in dealing with institutions and the
principles which determined their character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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