5 The Cause of Greece, the Cause of Europe

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The news from Greece was reported throughout Western Europe, usually two months late. There was no means of following events in detail and reports had often to be revised later. The reaction of the public in the different countries of Europe is difficult to judge. The means by which opinion could be expressed were few. Newspapers had small circulations and were often subject to censorship. Parliaments where they existed were not representative. In all countries only a small proportion of the population were concerned with political questions.

It is clear, however, from the amount of writing on the Greek Revolution published in 1821 and 1822, that it roused intense interest in Britain, France, the Netherlands, the German states, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, and the United States. In Austria, Russia, and Italy the governments were even more authoritarian than elsewhere in Europe and the evidence for public interest in Greece harder to find. Yet it appears that in all countries where the classical tradition was strong, news of the Greek Revolution was eagerly sought.

Virtually none of the news emanating from Greece was free of distortion. The Turks had no great concern with international opinion, but their version of events was adequately put over with the help of the Austrians. News from Greece came almost exclusively from the Europeanized Greeks who had gone to join the Revolution and even at source it contained an element of propaganda. By the time it had passed through the Ionian Islands or through the Greek colonies in Europe several weeks later it had undergone a further transformation to make it more acceptable to Europeans.¹

Even more distorting was the great burden of literary and historical allusions which everything Greek and Turkish carried with it. In the absence of real knowledge about the way of life, traditions, customs, and ideas of the Modern Greeks, the Europeans relied on their prejudices. Theories about the identity of the Ancient and Modern Greeks, about the nature of ‘regeneration’, about the similarity in outlook between Western Christians and Eastern Christians are implicit in much of the writing. All of these worked in favour of the Greeks. Similarly, inherited ideas about the Turks worked against them.

The notion that the Turks were a colourful backward people gradually being engulfed by a technologically superior Western civilization had not yet become general. Instead, older ideas that had lost their validity centuries before still held their power—that the Turks were a cruel, aggressive, barbarian race posing an active threat to Western civilization; and especially the idea that Christianity was bound to be in deadly conflict with Islam. Churchmen rediscovered and indulged an atavistic hatred against Turks and virulently demanded their expulsion or extirpation in the name of God. The features of Turkish life that were generally known had for centuries excited a fascinated horror: the Grand Seigneur in his Seraglio with his eunuchs, his harem, his slaves, and his janissaries; the custom of killing off one’s brothers; of seizing infants for training for the armies; the bastinado and other highly sophisticated Oriental tortures. Much of the Western image of the Grand Turk was out of date or inaccurate, but the romantic poets had given it a new lease of life. Every word that came to mind in talking of Turks—pasha, scimitar, ataghan, spahi, dervish, turban—carried a weight of dreadful associations.

The official opinion of the powers on the Greek Revolution, pressed most strongly by Metternich and the Austrian Government, that the Sultan was the legitimate sovereign of the Greeks and that they were wrong to rebel against him, struck many people as hypocritical and cynical. Support for the Greek cause could be construed as disloyalty to the governments. It also meant, however, that political groups opposed to the governments for other reasons were tempted to embrace the Greek cause simply because the governments took a different view. The factors working in the Greek favour were overwhelming.

From Easter 1821 throughout the whole of Europe men in many walks of life were touched with a passionate sympathy for the Greeks and a desire to help them. The long years of repetition by poets and travellers had spread the ideas of philhellenism wide and deep, and suddenly it changed its character from being an intellectual, mainly literary concept, to a practical programme. When all allowance is made for the distortion of the news, the political situation in Europe, and other favourable factors, it remains an astonishing phenomenon. No country was unaffected. It was a European movement, springing up spontaneously in every society where European civilization was valued. The same sentiments occurred independently to men all over the Western world and drove them to action. It is not necessary to take the view that everyone who reiterated the themes of philhellenism believed implicitly in his own rhetoric. Yet the uniformity of all discussion of the Greek cause is one of its most significant features. Even those who opposed the efforts of the supporters of the cause seldom questioned the basis of the argument but only the political expediency of applying it.

There were important differences between the aims of philhellenism in different countries, but they were marginal additions to the solid nucleus of ideas which were common to all. The cause of Greece touched a nerve in people who had previously regarded themselves as outside politics. Many when they joined the philhellenic movement did not even realize that they were performing a political act. The cause seemed to be above politics. The idealism of youth was engaged and, for once, in a cause with which their elders could sympathize. It was said that the Swiss peasants, on their weekly journey into town asked eagerly for the latest news from Nauplia and never went home without dropping their contribution in the collecting box.² In the beer houses of Germany, it was said,³ men who were never known to have been interested in events outside their village, talked eagerly about the war.

The exploits of the Greeks were extolled in verse. In France no less than nine books of philhellenic verse were published in 1821 and another eighteen in 1822.⁴ In Germany one poet, Wilhelm Müller, had a great success. His first book of Songs of the Greeks sold a thousand copies in six weeks in the autumn of 1821 and three more books of new songs followed shortly afterwards before the censor intervened.⁵ All over Western Europe and the United States newspapers and reviews published poems more or less in the style of Byron as well as selecting suitable passages from Byron’s works for quotation.

The subject had an apparently irresistible attraction for conventional poets. It allowed them to combine rich romance about slaves, viziers, pashas, camels, jewels, harems, and all the splendour and mystery of the East with the older conventions about the Ancient Greek heroes. The two main themes, the comparison between the Ancient and Modern Greeks and the struggle of the Christians against the Moslems, were present in almost all the poems, but the number of variations which can be made on these two ideas and still retain the reader’s interest is limited. It is a measure of the receptiveness of the public that the demand for such poems continued unabated. Between 1821 and 1827 at least one hundred and twenty-eight separate books of philhellenic verses are known to have been published in France alone. The cause of the Greeks was a subject which stirred the feelings of many men who never attempted another poem in their lives. They felt that they must rise above everyday speech in dealing with this exciting, almost sacred subject.

Few of the poems of 1821 and 1822 are worth recalling except as evidence of the state of public opinion. Only one major poet joined the fashion. Shelley’s Hellas, written in the autumn of 1821 and based on newspaper reports, contains in extreme form the ideas worked on by so many others. It epitomizes the deep sense of personal involvement in the Greek struggle which was so widely felt all over Europe. In the preface Shelley made the classic statement of philhellenism.

In the drama itself all the other ingredients appear. The decay of Greece, the barbarism of the Turks, the hypocrisy of the governments. But the forces of evil are struck with terror when they see ‘The panther, Freedom, fled to her old cover’. The final chorus is a paean for the longed-for regeneration:

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.

Another Athens shall arise

And to remoter time

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendour of its prime;

And leave, if nought so bright may live,

All earth can take or Heaven can give.

It was only to be expected that the false news from Greece feeding the strong philhellenic tradition that already flourished should lead to demands for action. The cause of the Greeks seemed to be so overwhelmingly good and the reprisals of the Turks so obviously barbarous and cruel that admiration from afar was not enough. Surely the governments of the great powers of civilized Europe could do something to help the Greeks? And if the governments would do nothing, surely individuals could help?

In France the interest was intense. The press, enjoying a precarious freedom, was split. On the one hand the voice of the liberals declared that the heroes of ancient Greece had arisen from the dead.

Other newspapers supporting the Government fulminated against the spirit of carbonarism having invaded the East.

The flood of books of verse in favour of the Greeks was matched by the publication of numerous pamphlets in the same style making ever more extreme claims on their behalf. Thirty pamphlets appeared in France during the first two years of the war. Some were thoughtful political tracts by journalists and ecclesiastics, some were by students, some were anonymous, some were fabrications of appeals said to come from Greece itself and some repeated the grandiloquent manifestoes which the Greeks were so fond of propounding. Many were intended simply to put pressure on the French Government to change its policy of support for Metternich’s doctrine of legitimate sovereignty, and there was a good deal of discussion about French national interest—the chance of restoring French influence in the Levant, the danger of allowing the Russians to assume the leadership of the Greeks, and the possibility of new markets for French goods. Almost all the discussion however paid lip service at least to the clichés of philhellenism.

M. de Pradt, for example, a former bishop who published a steady stream of pamphlets on international affairs (with four on the Greek War alone), caught the popular mood:

The professors were among the first to give a lead. Professors of Ancient Greek Literature in particular felt that they were well fitted to speak on Modern Greece, and professors of philosophy and theology were never far behind. Just as the cause of Greece inspired men to write poetry who never wrote another verse, so it inspired to political activity others who for the rest of their lives were content to have their opinions set by government and church.

The professor of Greek literature at Strasbourg held a public meeting in July 1821 in support of the Greek cause at which he delivered a lecture on the services which the Ancient Greeks had given to civilization. The themes of his closing remarks were all familiar:

A demand soon developed for practical help to be sent to the Greeks. And since it was clear that the Government was not prepared to do anything to help, it was left to private initiative to make a contribution. The most obvious way of helping was to raise money for the purchase of arms. Numerous public meetings were held and subscriptions and collections taken. Committees in support of the Greek cause sprang up in many towns quite independently of one another. Professors, priests, and student leaders made collections and handed the money over to the local Greek communities for forwarding to Greece. It was a spontaneous and widespread movement of sympathy and charity even though in many places the response was short-lived.

From the beginning the call was also made for volunteers to fight in the holy war. The proclamations of the Greeks themselves begged for help and they were soon being repeated in pamphlets. The Appeal to the French People, for example, which was published by ‘an ex-student of law’ in October 1821⁹ has all the themes of philhellenism. ‘Can you,’ he asked the people of France, ‘be the only people who will not help the descendants of Themistocles, Alcibiades, and Demosthenes? Can you allow your brothers in religion to be massacred? Are you no longer the descendants of the Crusading St. Louis?’ The Voice of Greece is made to declare: ‘Men of France, do not be deaf to my prayer, arm yourselves, go and join my son [Hypsilantes]…. My children will erect monuments to you, they will raise altars to you, their children will adore you and forever hold your names in the greatest veneration!’ The student’s answer to this appeal is clear: ‘Let us form sacred battalions, let us arm ourselves with invincible weapons, let us march, and let us go and purge the earth of these barbarians just as long ago Hercules purged it of the monsters which were ravaging it’.

The French student’s pamphlet contains all the elements that inspired volunteers all over Europe—the appeal to the Ancients, the appeal to Christianity, the appeal to be a latter-day crusader, the appeal to prospects of military advancement. The student reserves for his peroration a consideration which was distinctly French:

Many Frenchmen felt that, somehow, by promoting the cause of Greece, they would atone for the disgrace of Waterloo; that somehow the war in Greece would give an opportunity of reasserting the old glories of France, uniting Royalists, Bonapartists, Orleanists, Liberals and all the other disparate sections of Restoration France with the nationalism that had been so strong and so comforting during the war years. The element of anti-British feeling was to persist throughout the war.

The French Government, from the beginning, took an ambivalent view of philhellenism. It could not help half believing that sending French volunteers to Greece must be in the French national interest, even if the Frenchmen concerned were those most bitterly opposed to the restored Bourbons. It calculated—correctly—that, despite their political views, Frenchmen would remain primarily Frenchmen. The French Government therefore was inclined to run several contradictory policies at the same time in the confident expectation that they could not all fail. It supported Metternich in theory and yet made little attempt to interfere with the help going to the Greeks; and it also gave help to the Turks, especially to the Sultan’s subject and ally, the Pasha of Egypt. At Marseilles, volunteers on their way to Greece with the connivance of the French authorities could see frigates being built in the shipyards for the Egyptians. The ambivalence of French policy became even more pronounced later.

In Britain, which had at the time perhaps the most liberal political system and the most unrestrained press in Europe, the cause of the Greeks at first made less impression than elsewhere. An immense amount of writing sympathetic to the Greeks appeared in the newspapers and reviews, but suggestions that practical help should be sent met with little response. As elsewhere, the leadership of the movement was first taken up by scholars. Dr. Lemprière, the author of a dictionary of classical antiquities, began to campaign in the autumn of 1821 for a subscription to be raised to help the Greeks. A committee was formed and a few prominent men made a contribution, including Lords Lansdowne, Aberdeen, and Elgin, all famous for their collections of Greek sculpture. But only a few hundred pounds was collected and the committee was soon disbanded after a consignment of arms had been sent.¹⁰

But when in the middle of 1822 news arrived of the massacres of Chios, interest revived. About a dozen pamphlets on the Greek cause were published in addition to a vigorous campaign by several newspapers. All the familiar philhellenic arguments were reiterated:

Much effort was expended in disputing the doctrine of the legitimacy of the Ottoman Government, in explaining the commercial advantages of helping the Greeks to independence, and in raising fears of allowing Russian and French influence to predominate.

‘You are solemnly and indispensably bound’, wrote Lord Erskine in an open letter to the Foreign Secretary, ‘by a duty paramount to that of a statesman, to make an instant effort to engage the nations in alliance with this country to overthrow the cruel dominion of unprincipled, incorrigible barbarians, over a Christian people struggling for freedom and independence’.¹²

In much of the writing on behalf of the Greeks there lies the unspoken belief that Britain, as the most powerful country in the world, the victor of Waterloo, had only to give the word and the dreadful war could be brought to an end. An unattractive assumption of superiority pervades the appeals. It was said that the countries which did nothing to stop the massacres of the Greeks were themselves equally guilty with the Turks. When the Foreign Secretary in trying to defend British neutrality in Parliament remarked that there had been atrocities on both sides, he was branded as pro-Turkish. It was seriously argued on a number of occasions that it was the Turks not the Greeks who should be blamed for the massacre at Tripolitsa since the Greeks ‘may justly impute to the oppression of their conquerors not only the degradation of their persons but the debasement of their minds’.¹³

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, in reading the English pamphlets, that the authors were more inspired by hatred of Turks and Moslems than by concern for the Greeks. They cheerfully demanded the wholesale expulsion of the millions of Turks settled in Europe. Thomas Hughes, a Church of England clergyman who had visited Greece before the Revolution and had written a book of travels, was perhaps the most violent, calling in two pamphlets for the extermination of ‘the most weak, contemptible, vice-stained tyrants that ever polluted the earth on which they trod, vilifying and degrading the fairest part of the creation’. He quoted with approbation Lord Bacon’s opinion that whereas no nations are wholly alien one to another, there are some races whom it is a human duty to ‘suppress’ since they ‘have utterly degenerated from the laws of nature’ and ‘have in their very body and frame of estate a monstrosity …, they are common enemies of mankind … disgraces and reproaches to human nature’.¹⁴

But the English pamphleteers were their own enemies. Far from encouraging the widespread sympathy for the Greeks, they put people off by their extremism. The one balanced pamphleteer of the Greek Revolution, Sheridan, included in his list of causes of the relative indifference of the British towards the Greeks at this time ‘the language of their partisans’.¹⁵ Many men who would willingly have contributed money were ashamed to be allied with such unattractive purveyors of hatred. The sums raised in London were small and only a handful of volunteers set off to join the Greek army.

In the United States, too, the philhellenic movement made a strong start in 1821. At the same time as the Appeal to the Nations of Europe was allegedly issued from ‘the Spartan Headquarters’ at Calamata, another version was sent to the United States:

This Appeal was widely circulated in the United States at the instigation of Edward Everett, a professor at Boston. Although the reference to the ending of black slavery in some northern states drew attention to the uncomfortable fact that, in the United States, ‘all men’ meant some white males.

Yet among the sentiments which were common to philhellenic movements everywhere the Appeal identified and exploited a distinguishing national ingredient.

The Americans, confidently secure, even smug, in their own constitutional liberty could not conceal a feeling of superiority towards the unhappier political systems of the European nations. Throughout the war the American supporters of the Greek cause tended to feel that they alone were fitted to teach the Greeks about true liberty. In July 1821, at a dinner of Americans in Paris at which Washington Irving and Lafayette were present, the toast was given: ‘The land of Minerva, the birthplace of Arts, Poetry, and Freedom—civilizing her conquerors in her decline, regenerating Europe in her fall. May her sons rebuild in her clime the home of Liberty’.¹⁷ In 1824, at a benefit concert for the Greeks held in Cincinnati, an American general proclaimed, ‘Humanity, policy, religion—all demand it. We must send our free-will offering. The Star-Spangled Banner must wave in the Aegean’.¹⁸

But it was in Germany during the early years of the war that philhellenism made its greatest impact. The response to the cause of the Greeks was more widespread in Germany than in any other country; the passions aroused were more deeply felt; and, as proof of this, greater efforts were made to provide practical assistance. German philhellenism, like philhellenism elsewhere, consisted of the two or three simple ideas common to all philhellenic movement plus national additions.

Nowhere in Europe was the classical tradition stronger. The enthusiasm for the Ancient Greeks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had prepared the ground well. The political connotations of the classics were stronger than elsewhere because their impact was still recent. During the last years of the war against Napoleon a powerful idealistic and nationalist spirit had developed. The war had been fought for ‘Freedom’, a concept of intoxicating freshness and one closely connected with the newfound Ancient Greeks. The ‘Freedom’ had been mainly thought of as freedom from the foreign rule of the French, but many who took part in the last successful campaigns had dreamed of political freedom, of constitutional government, and they had been encouraged to do so by their leaders. The hopes of these liberals had been sadly disappointed in the years after Waterloo. In one German country after another a chilling authoritarianism reasserted itself. The political liberties were withdrawn, the promised constitutions never implemented or stripped of their meaning. Only in the small South German states did recognizably free institutions survive, and they were being steadily eroded. The Governments of Prussia and Austria, fearful of any sign of revolution, resorted to ever sterner measures to suppress the remnants of liberalism and so created a growing body of discontents. Most of the forty or so governments which composed the German Confederation agreed with the views of the two large countries, or were too weak to resist pressure to conform.

The Germans knew less of the real conditions of Modern Greece than any of the other nationalities of Western Europe. Unlike the British and French, few of them had been taken to the Mediterranean by the wars. There were only a handful of travellers from Germany who made their way to Greece during the half century before the Revolution. Literary philhellenism, on the other hand, was there as elsewhere a well established genre. Kotzebue’s ‘Ruins of Athens’ for example, to which Beethoven composed the music, is concerned with the theme of Minerva deserting the Parthenon to found a new temple of the Muses in Europe. Hölderlin’s Hyperion, which first appeared in 1797, was curiously prophetic. It was the story of a German going to fight in a Greek War against the Turks. To Hölderlin it was not so much Greece that was being ‘regenerated’ as Germany in Greek dress. When the Greek Revolution broke out, this idea took on a new urgency. If the ‘regeneration’ of Greece meant violent revolution would not the regeneration of Germany mean the same? The Governments of Austria and Prussia, which saw a potential jacobin in every man who questioned monarchical absolutism, could not ignore the connection. Liberals tended to be philhellenes and philhellenes to be liberals.

In the German states, as elsewhere, the philhellenic movement of 1821 and 1822 was mainly inspired in the universities, and it was partly for this reason that it aroused such suspicion in the governments. The students of Germany, conscious of having played a leading part in the expulsion of the French, had made themselves into an important political force on the return of peace. They had demanded constitutional liberty and unification of Germany and had established an organization of students’ unions covering the whole of Germany. In 1819, however, following the assassination by a student of Kotzebue, a Prussian minister whose name had become associated with reactionary policies (and incidentally the author of The Ruins of Athens), the Carlsbad decrees, applied all over the German Confederation, abolished the students’ national union, reinstituted strict censorship, and imposed a range of other measures against the universities. It was only to be expected that the governments would treat with suspicion any new political movement originating in the universities which could provide an opportunity for evading the Carlsbad decrees.¹⁹ Philhellenism, since it would provide an excuse for collecting money and for establishing connections all over the country, could perhaps be exploited for internal political purposes.

At Easter 1821 the professor of philology at Leipzig in the Kingdom of Saxony, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, issued a pamphlet under the title Greece Regenerated, which questioned the official doctrine that the Greeks were wrong to revolt against their legitimate sovereign. It was hardly a novel idea but the pamphlet seems to have aroused a great deal of interest simply because a professor had dared to question the government on such an important matter of policy.

Krug’s pamphlet was only the first of many professorial pronouncements all over Germany. The theology professor at Leipzig published a pamphlet called The Cause of Greece, the Cause of Europe. Yet another quotation of the familiar sentiments will show how universally they were being repeated all over Europe:

Another Leipzig professor drew the parallel between the German and Greek Wars of Independence and hinted at the Germany he wanted to see. Remarks such as the following tended to reinforce the suspicion that the advocates of freedom for the Greeks had half their minds on the freedom of the Germans:

Such sentiments were regarded as dangerously radical by the Austrian and Prussian Governments and all who took their lead from them.

From the beginning, calls went out for volunteers to fight. In June 1821 a prominent politician made a speech in the parliament of the Grand Duchy of Hesse at Darmstadt saying that Germany would be oppressed by blood guilt if help was not sent to the Greeks. By August, in several of the smaller German states the call had been made. In Aschaffenburg in Bavaria Baron Dalberg announced that he was forming a Corps of Volunteers. In the imperial city of Hamburg the following notice was taken round from door to door:

As everywhere, it was the professors who set the pace. Professor Thiersch in Munich had actually been admitted to the Greek secret conspiracy, the Friendly Society, in 1814. In August 1821 he issued a call for German volunteers which was published throughout Bavaria suggesting that the volunteers could be paid from the lands they captured from the Turks. In Leipzig Krug issued a second pamphlet declaring that to fight for the Greeks would be to obey the first commandment. His scheme for private help appeared to be thoughtful and practical.

At Gotha in Thuringia Professor Jacobs and at Heidelberg in Baden Professor Voss put themselves at the head of the movement. Even in Prussia itself, at Berlin, Professor Zeune started a collection. In Switzerland and in Denmark it was again the professors of classics and theology who led the call for a practical expression of the sympathy for Greece which was so universally felt.

The Prussian Government had been prepared to tolerate philhellenism as long as it was mainly a literary theme or a subject for philosophical debate. The censor had allowed a good deal of sympathetic writing about the Greek Revolution within Prussia itself and even the Crown Prince had declared himself a supporter of the cause. But now there could be no disguising the political nature of the movement, dispersed and disorganized though it was. The Prussian Government took fright and decided to suppress this latest manifestation of liberal opposition. Permission was refused to circulate in Prussia any call for volunteers, and, as so often in German history, the professors caved in at the first touch of official pressure. Professor Krug was reprimanded by the Saxon Government, ordered to refrain from political activity, and his pamphlet was suppressed. Professor Zeune in Berlin was also reprimanded, and the money he had collected was confiscated and given to the poor fund. Throughout Prussia the censor tightened his grip. A query was submitted whether philhellenic poetry came within the terms of the ban as well as pamphlets. The answer came back that the Greek Revolution was inimical to the policy of Europe, the cause was being exploited for political purposes, and that poetry must be rigorously controlled.

In September and October 1821 the Prussian Government, with help from the Austrians, began to whip the other governments of Germany into line. A sharp protest was delivered to the Bavarian Government for permitting the publication of Professor Thiersch’s manifesto. In other circumstances, their diplomatic note said, the best way of dealing with Thiersch’s pamphlet would have been to ignore it, but the heads of many young German students had been seized with the madness, it was an evil influence on youth, it was stirring up revolutionary sentiment, and Thiersch should not go unpunished. He was accused of a long list of treasonable offences, but especially for plotting revolution and consorting with revolutionaries abroad under the excuse of being interested in freeing the Greeks. The Bavarian Government did not prosecute Thiersch or even revoke his call but the effect was much the same as if they had. Many supporters of the Greeks were frightened off, others continued their activities but more discreetly.

Most of the German governments agreed to follow the official Prussian and Austrian line and the professors obediently retracted what they had said about Greece. Zeune made a public statement in the newspapers that he could no longer be associated with receiving collections. Krug withdrew more graciously by issuing a third pamphlet which confined itself to asserting how united Europe was in the cause of the Greeks; the practical advice on how to help was deliberately omitted. Only in the smaller states of South West Germany did the supporters of the cause hold out. Baden, Württemberg, Hesse-Kassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, and the imperial city of Frankfurt were disinclined to take orders from the authoritarian Prussians. In this small area of Germany, the philhellenic movement was permitted to grow and the committees of Darmstadt, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt found themselves thrust into a position of leadership.

The Prussian ambassadors, reporting back to Berlin on their lack of success in these territories, drew an alarming picture of the philhellenic movement as a hotbed of revolution. Dalberg was described as a hypocrite with the name of humanity on his lips but revolution in his heart. From Frankfurt it was reported how the priests were inveigling women into the movement and preaching a crusade from the pulpit. The number of foreigners visiting the city was remarked on: the liberal banker Lafitte from Paris, a Frenchman travelling under a pseudonym who had been Robespierre’s secretary during the Terror and was now claiming to be a papier-mâché salesman, another known revolutionary posing as a wine merchant, Italians thought to be carbonari and so on. Frankfurt was said to be keeping the ashes of revolution alight.

The results of the attempts to stop recruiting in Europe will be described later. The governments, however, had another important weapon besides suppression at home. It was decided to close the ports. Austria and its puppet governments in Italy put a stop to the exodus of expatriate Greeks from ports in their territories. The Pope co-operated by closing the ports in the Papal States. Only Marseilles, of all the ports of southern Europe, remained open owing to the ambivalent attitude of the French Government. From the autumn of 1821 young men from every corner of Europe, inspired by the rhetoric of professors and churchmen, packed their bags and set out for Marseilles, determined to play their part in the holy war for the regeneration of Greece.

Footnote

*  The modern reader is often surprised at the names chosen by the pamphleteers as examples of the great man of antiquity. Epaminondas was the clear favourite, but they also had a strong preference for the obscure Philopoemen, since it was now possible to contradict the ancient tag that he was ‘the last of the Greeks’. On the whole, the ancient names were used simply as incantations designed to evoke sympathetic responses with little attempt to find relevant comparisons.