THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

404 THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE
of barbarism which, from the north and east,
threatened
to overwhelm them.
We are what suns and winds and waters make us;
and the Greeks of to-day are very much what their
fathers were before them.
There never was an age
when Greece was peopled by a race of heroes and philosophers,
or when her counsels were governed solely
by the purest patriotism. The Athenian crowd which
listened to the masterpieces of ^Eschylus or Sophocles
was as fickle, as superstitious, and as cruel as the Athenian
crowd of to-day.
The sun of the ancient culture
of Hellas is set, and we see but the after-glow which
lights up the highest and purest peaks;
while over all
that was low, and sordid, and commonplace, the night
of oblivion has fallen.
It is not for us, then, to judge
the modern Greek as unworthy of our sympathy, because
he seems cast in a less heroic mould than those
from whom he boasts his descent.
Our attitude may
well be that of Lord Byron, of whom Colonel Napier
said: ' All [the Philhellenes] came, expecting to find
the Peloponnesus filled with Plutarch's men, and all
returned, thinking the inhabitants of Newgate more
moral. Lord Byron judged them fairly; he knew that
half-civilised men are full of vices, and that great allowance
must be made for emancipated slaves.
He,