My father has become interested in Cycladic art, so yesterday he handed me half a dozen books out of the Winchester library and asked if I would vet them for massive idiocy. The first book in the stack was J. Theodore Bent's The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks, and in fact I handed back to him. It was published originally in 1885—the edition I was looking at is the reprint from 1965, foreword by Al. N. Oikonomides—and while it's a nice read if you like late Victorian scholar-tourism, I had trouble getting past that particular aspect of late Victorian scholar-tourism which rhapsodizes about the classical Greeks and regards their present-day descendants rather less warmly:
Furthermore, the pleasure felt by the people of Mykonos in possessing the valuable remains of Delos is only that of a satiated dog with a bone; they do not want them or understand them themselves, so they try to prevent anyone else from reaping the good that would ensue from their being properly looked after and opportunity given for a more thorough study of them.
Right, because that argument works so well on the Elgin Marbles. Bent has come to Mykonos specifically to hear the μοιρολόγιαι, the ritual laments performed by mourners over the dead, and yet even in his description of the funeral he is fortunate enough to attend on his third day on the island, he cannot refrain from remarks like "that harsh and grating voice which the Greeks love, but which is so distasteful to Western ears" or the comment that two grieving relatives "reminded one forcibly of the Carian women of antiquity who were hired for the same purpose; and one's mind wandered back to a Greek chorus—that of Æschylus especially—where the virgins at the gate of Agamemnon indulge in all the most poignant manifestations of grief, beating their breasts, lacerating their cheeks, and rending their garments; and I could not but admire the prudence of Solon, who forbade the excessive lamentations of women . . . and great was my relief when the priests arrived with their acolytes bearing the cross and lanterns to convey the corpse to the grave." Also he translates all the μοιρολόγιαι he recorded into rhyming couplets, so there goes any real sense of the language involved. If I ever meet his shade by noonday, I will say really insulting things to it from Aristophanes. After which I will be gracious, and thank it for collecting pieces of folklore I hadn't heard, as from the same chapter:
The archangel Michael is the modern Hermes, the angel of death, and in the representations of him, usually to be seen over the door entering into the part of the church consecrated to the sacred mysteries, he is depicted as a warrior having in his right hand a naked sword, balances in his left, and trampling a sinner under his feet. Again the idea is prevalent that at a man's birth the Fates fix the day of his death; consequently the pious believe that on November 8, the archangel's day, he looks through the list and writes down on a tablet the names of those who during the ensuing year must fall victims to his two-edged sword.
From the lamentations (μοιρολόγιαι) which are sung in Greece to-day we can learn much about the popular beliefs concerning the condition of the lower world . . . Charon, or Charos, to-day is a synonym for death. 'Charon seized him' is a common expression, and a clever popular enigma likens the world to a reservoir full of water at which Charon, as a wild beast, drinks; but the beast is never satisfied and the reservoir never exhausted. Imagination is the soul of these modern Greek death ballads; the ideas are beautifully poetical in many cases, though the language is crude and often difficult to follow from the complexity of patois expressions. They sing to you of feasts and banquets in Hades, where the dead are eaten for food; they tell you of the gardens of Hades, where the souls of the departed are planted and come up as weird plants.
King Charon is not the Death of the middle ages, the skeleton with a scythe in his hand; he is the Homeric ferryman; he rows souls across to Hades in his caïque, and he is a hero of huge stature and flaming eyes of a color like fire (Cf. πορφύρεος, 'Il.' v. 83); he goes round to collect the dead on horseback: so in olden days a horse was the symbol of death, as we see on so many tombstones. Charon, too, can lurk in ambush to surprise his victims, and can change himself into a swallow, like Athene, who perched on Ulysses' house on the day of the murder of Penelope's suitors. Charon's palace in Hades is decorated with the dead, and the bones of the departed are used for every purpose of domestic use. The dead who haunt it are for ever planning to return to the upper air, and form schemes for so doing, which Charon always discovers; sometimes they even manage to steal his keys, but in vain.
The dead growing in gardens, the horse, the swallow and the keys to hell: I love that.
And then I will tell it to λαικαζέσθω back to Hades, because really, in the chapter with the Nereids, the crack about bagpipes was unnecessary.
Furthermore, the pleasure felt by the people of Mykonos in possessing the valuable remains of Delos is only that of a satiated dog with a bone; they do not want them or understand them themselves, so they try to prevent anyone else from reaping the good that would ensue from their being properly looked after and opportunity given for a more thorough study of them.
Right, because that argument works so well on the Elgin Marbles. Bent has come to Mykonos specifically to hear the μοιρολόγιαι, the ritual laments performed by mourners over the dead, and yet even in his description of the funeral he is fortunate enough to attend on his third day on the island, he cannot refrain from remarks like "that harsh and grating voice which the Greeks love, but which is so distasteful to Western ears" or the comment that two grieving relatives "reminded one forcibly of the Carian women of antiquity who were hired for the same purpose; and one's mind wandered back to a Greek chorus—that of Æschylus especially—where the virgins at the gate of Agamemnon indulge in all the most poignant manifestations of grief, beating their breasts, lacerating their cheeks, and rending their garments; and I could not but admire the prudence of Solon, who forbade the excessive lamentations of women . . . and great was my relief when the priests arrived with their acolytes bearing the cross and lanterns to convey the corpse to the grave." Also he translates all the μοιρολόγιαι he recorded into rhyming couplets, so there goes any real sense of the language involved. If I ever meet his shade by noonday, I will say really insulting things to it from Aristophanes. After which I will be gracious, and thank it for collecting pieces of folklore I hadn't heard, as from the same chapter:
The archangel Michael is the modern Hermes, the angel of death, and in the representations of him, usually to be seen over the door entering into the part of the church consecrated to the sacred mysteries, he is depicted as a warrior having in his right hand a naked sword, balances in his left, and trampling a sinner under his feet. Again the idea is prevalent that at a man's birth the Fates fix the day of his death; consequently the pious believe that on November 8, the archangel's day, he looks through the list and writes down on a tablet the names of those who during the ensuing year must fall victims to his two-edged sword.
From the lamentations (μοιρολόγιαι) which are sung in Greece to-day we can learn much about the popular beliefs concerning the condition of the lower world . . . Charon, or Charos, to-day is a synonym for death. 'Charon seized him' is a common expression, and a clever popular enigma likens the world to a reservoir full of water at which Charon, as a wild beast, drinks; but the beast is never satisfied and the reservoir never exhausted. Imagination is the soul of these modern Greek death ballads; the ideas are beautifully poetical in many cases, though the language is crude and often difficult to follow from the complexity of patois expressions. They sing to you of feasts and banquets in Hades, where the dead are eaten for food; they tell you of the gardens of Hades, where the souls of the departed are planted and come up as weird plants.
King Charon is not the Death of the middle ages, the skeleton with a scythe in his hand; he is the Homeric ferryman; he rows souls across to Hades in his caïque, and he is a hero of huge stature and flaming eyes of a color like fire (Cf. πορφύρεος, 'Il.' v. 83); he goes round to collect the dead on horseback: so in olden days a horse was the symbol of death, as we see on so many tombstones. Charon, too, can lurk in ambush to surprise his victims, and can change himself into a swallow, like Athene, who perched on Ulysses' house on the day of the murder of Penelope's suitors. Charon's palace in Hades is decorated with the dead, and the bones of the departed are used for every purpose of domestic use. The dead who haunt it are for ever planning to return to the upper air, and form schemes for so doing, which Charon always discovers; sometimes they even manage to steal his keys, but in vain.
The dead growing in gardens, the horse, the swallow and the keys to hell: I love that.
And then I will tell it to λαικαζέσθω back to Hades, because really, in the chapter with the Nereids, the crack about bagpipes was unnecessary.
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