Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice Part 9

Nor does the commentator Eustathios say one word as to the change of name. We can only conceive that the line must have been added as a gloss in some copy, printed or ma.n.u.script, which was consulted by Quirini.

We will a.s.sume then that, as far as the island is concerned, Korkyra and Corfu--in its various spellings--are two successive names, one of which supplanted the other, while, as far as the city is concerned, they are strictly the names of two distinct though neighbouring cities, one of which fell as the other rose. And now the question comes, Is the island of Korkyra the Scherie of Homer? Is his description of Scherie and the city of Alkinoos meant for the description of Korkyra or any part of it, whether the historical city or any other? We must remember that the general witness of antiquity in favour of Korkyra being Scherie loses a good deal of its weight when we consider that the ancient writers felt bound to place Scherie somewhere, while no such necessity is laid upon us. Bearing this in mind, the plain case seems to be that it is far more likely that Scherie was nowhere at all. In dealing with Scherie and its inhabitants, we are not dealing with an entry in the Catalogue of the Iliad, the Domesday of the Mykenaian empire; we are simply dealing with a piece of the romantic geography of the Odyssey. Everything about the Phaiakians and their land reads as if the whole thing was as purely a play of the imagination as the Kyklopes and the Laistrygones. It is indeed quite possible that, even in describing purely imaginary lands, a poet may bring in his remembrance of real places, just as the features of a real person may be reproduced in the picture of an imaginary event. The poet, in painting Scherie, may have brought in bits of local description from Korkyra or from any other place. But that is all. As we read the story, it seems quite as reasonable to look on the map for Nephelokokkygia as to look on the map for Scherie. The thinkers of the days of Thucydides or of some time before Thucydides, deeming themselves bound to place Scherie somewhere, fixed it at Korkyra. The reason doubtless was that the Phaiakians are spoken of as the most distant of mankind, far away from any others, and that Korkyra really was for a long time the most distant of Greek settlements in this region. When Korkyra was once ruled to be Scherie, the process of identification naturally went on.

Spots received Homeric names. Alkinoos had his grove and his harbour in the historical Korkyra. All this is the common course of legend, and proves nothing for either geography or history. Yet the tale of Scherie, of Alkinoos, Arete, and the charming Nausikaa, is not simply one of the loveliest of tales. Scherie knew the use of wheeled carriages; therefore Scherie had roads. Alkinoos, the head king, was chief over twelve lesser kings. Here we get real history, though history neither personal nor local. Scherie itself may safely be looked for in the moon; but the roads of Scherie and the _Bretwalda_ of Scherie have their place in the early history of inst.i.tutions.

Other names of the island are spoken of, as Drepane and Makris, descriptive names which perhaps never were in real use, and which, if they were, were supplanted by the historical name of Korkyra. We must again repeat that _Korkyra_, not _Kerkyra_, is the genuine local name.

It is the spelling on the coins of the country; it is the spelling of the Latin writers, who would get the name from the island itself; it is the spelling of Strabo. But it is equally plain that in Greece generally the spelling [Greek: Kerkyra] prevailed. It is so in Herodotus and the Attic writers; it is so in Polybios; it is so in the Byzantine writers, who of course affect Attic forms. It must never be forgotten that, from the time of Polybios, perhaps from an earlier time than his, down to the present moment, written Greek has been one thing, and spoken Greek another. Polybios wrote [Greek: Kerkyra], while its own people called it [Greek: Korkyra], just as he wrote [Greek: elis], while its own people called it [Greek: Walis]. The difference has been thought to have its origin in some joke or sarcasm--some play on [Greek: kerkos, kerkouros], and the like. But the literary form may just as likely be simply a tempting softening of the local form. One point only is to be insisted on, that the syllable [Greek: Kor] in [Greek: Korkyra], and the syllable [Greek: Kor] in [Greek: Korypho], have nothing to do with one another. The latter name is no corruption of the elder; it is a genuine case of one Greek name supplanting another--perhaps rather a case of a Greek name, after so many ages, supplanting a name which the first Greek colonists may have borrowed from earlier barbarian inhabitants. In this case the change implies no change of inhabitants, no change of language. It is a change within the Greek language itself, which can be fully accounted for by historical causes. It therefore teaches that changes of name, such as the Slavonic theory insists on in Peloponnesos, though they do often arise from new settlements and reconquests, do also come about in other ways.

It is for the mythologist to find out whether Homer had Korkyra in his eye when he described the mythic Scherie. This, be it again noted, is a perfectly reasonable subject for inquiry, and in no way implies any historical belief in the legend. It is simply like asking whether the real Glas...o...b..ry at all suggested the mythic Avalon. History begins to deal with Korkyra in the eighth century B.C., when the settlement of the Corinthian Chersikrates added the island to the Greek world. From that day onward the island has a long and eventful story, reaching down to our own times. But, before that story begins, the historian may fairly ask of the ethnologist what evidence, what hints of any kind, there are as to the people whom the Corinthian colonists found settled in the island. It is not likely that they found so promising a site wholly uninhabited. Some branch of the great Illyrian race, the race which is still so near to the island, and which still supplies it, if not with inhabitants, at least with constant visitors, may well be supposed to have made their way into so tempting an island. The harbours of Corfu would surely attract the seafaring Liburnians. We are then brought to the common conditions of a Greek colony, planted, as usual, among pre-existing barbarian inhabitants, and, as Mr. Grote has so strongly enforced, sure to receive a dash of barbarian blood among some cla.s.ses of its members. The _demos_ of Korkyra may well have been far from being of pure h.e.l.lenic descent--a fact which, if it be so, may go far to explain the wide difference between the _demos_ of Korkyra and the _demos_ of Athens. Since the time of the Corinthian settlement, the island has undergone endless conquests and changes of masters, each of which has doubtless brought with it a fresh infusion into the blood of its inhabitants. But since the time of Chersikrates there has been nothing like extirpation, displacement, or resettlement. Korkyra has ever since been an h.e.l.lenic land, though a succession of foreign occupations may have marred the purity of its h.e.l.lenism. And one point at once distinguishes it from all the neighbouring lands. Among all the changes of masters which Korkyra or Corfu has undergone, they have always been European masters. It is the one land in those parts that has never seen the Turk as more than a momentary invader, to be speedily beaten back by European prowess.

So much for the origin and the name of the greatest of the group which in modern geography has come by the strange name of the Ionian Islands. The only sense in which that name has any meaning is if it be taken as meaning the Islands of the Ionian Sea. It ought to be needless to remind any one that the word in that sense has nothing whatever to do with the real Ionians, with the Ionic dialect or the Ionic order. It certainly has an odd effect when one hears the people of Doric Korkyra spoken of as "Ionians;" and we have even seen the whole group of islands spoken of as "Ionia," to the great wrong of Chios, Samos, Ephesos, and others of the famous Ionian twelve. But having said so much about names, we must in another paper say something of the long series of revolutions which mark the history of Korkyra under its two names, and of their effect on its present state.

CORFU AND ITS HISTORY.

1875.

We have already spoken of the singular change of name which has befallen the most famous and important, though not the largest in superficial extent, of the group known as the Ionian Islands. The change of name, as we hold, followed naturally on the change of site of the city. The new city took a new name, and the island has always followed the name of the city. The old city and the new both occupy neighbouring points in a system of small peninsulas and havens, which form the middle of the eastern coast of the long and irregularly-shaped island of Korkyra. There, to the south of the present town, connected with it by a favourite walk of the inhabitants of Corfu, a long and broad peninsula stretches boldly into the sea. Both from land and from sea, it chiefly strikes the eye as a wooded ma.s.s, thickly covered with the aged olive-trees which form so marked a feature in the scenery of the island. A few houses skirt the base, growing on the land side into the suburb of Kastrades, which may pa.s.s for a kind of connecting link between the old and the new city. And from the midst of the wood, on the side nearest to the modern town, stands out the villa of the King of the Greeks, the chief modern dwelling on the site of ancient Korkyra. This peninsular hill, still known as Palaiopolis, was the site of the old Corinthian city whose name is so familiar to every reader of Thucydides. On either side of it lies one of its two forsaken harbours. Between the old and the new city lies the so-called harbour of Alkinoos; beyond the peninsula, stretching far inland, lies the old Hyllaic harbour, bearing the name of one of the three tribes which seem to have been essential to the being of a Dorian commonwealth. But the physical features of the country have greatly changed since Chersikrates led thither his band of settlers twenty-six centuries back. It is plain that both harbours once came much further inland than they do now, that they covered a great deal of the low ground at the foot of the peninsular hill. The question indeed presents itself, whether the two did not once meet, whether the peninsula was not once an island, whether the original colony did not occupy a site standing to the mainland of Korkyra in exactly the same relation in which the original insular Syracuse, the sister Corinthian colony, stood to the mainland of Sicily. The physical aspect of the country certainly strongly suggests the belief. And though Thucydides does not directly speak of the city as insular, though his words do not at all suggest that it was so, yet we do not know that there is anything in his narrative which directly shuts out the idea. Anyhow, the great change which has happened is plain when we see how utterly the great Hyllaic haven has lost the character of a haven. It is now called a lake, and exists only for purposes of fishing. We may believe that these physical changes had a great deal to do with the removal of the city to another site, with the change from Korkyra to Corfu.

The description which Thucydides gives of the great sedition brings out a fact which we should at first sight hardly have expected, the fact that the aristocratic quarter of Korkyra was on the lower ground by the harbour, while the upper part of the town was occupied by the _demos_. To one who thinks of Rome, Athens, and ancient cities generally, this seems strange. But arguments from the most ancient cla.s.s of cities do not fully apply to cities of the colonial cla.s.s.

These, where commerce was so great an object, were no longer, as a rule, placed on heights; convenient access from the sea was a main point, and we can therefore understand that the ground by the coast would be first settled, and would remain the dwelling-place of the old citizens, the forefathers of the oligarchs of the great sedition.

There on the lower ground was the _agora_, where the Epid.a.m.nian exiles craved for help, and pointed to the tombs of their forefathers. The impression of the scene becomes more lively when we see not far off an actual ancient tomb remaining in its place, though it could hardly have been the tomb of the forefather of any Epid.a.m.nian. This is the tomb of Menekrates of Oianthe, honoured in this way by the people of Korkyra on account of his friendship for their city, a plain round tomb with one of those archaic inscriptions in which Korkyra is rich.

Archaic indeed it is, written from right to left, in characters which mere familiarity with the Greek of printed books or of later inscriptions will not enable any one to read off with much ease. It formed doubtless only one of a range of tombs, doubtless outside the city, but visible from the _agora_. An orator in the Roman forum could not have pointed to the tombs of forefathers by the Appian Way.

The position of the quarter of the oligarchs by the modern suburb of Kastrades seems perfectly clear from Thucydides. The _demos_ took refuge in the upper part of the city and held the Hyllaic harbour; the other party held the _agora_, where most of them dwelled, and the harbour near it and towards the continent ([Greek: hoi de ten te agoran katelabon, houper hoi polloi okoun auton, kai ton limena ton pros aute kai pros ten epeiron epeiron]). This district marks out the haven by Kastrades, looking out on the Albanian mountains, as distinguished from the Hyllaic haven shut in by the hills of Korkyra itself.

But where was the Heraion, the temple of Here, which plays a part in more than one of the Thucydidean narratives? and where was the island opposite to the Heraion--[Greek: pros to Heraion]--and the isle of Ptychia, both of which appear in his history? The answer to the former question seems to turn on another. Was the present citadel, the true [Greek: Korypho], itself always an island, as it is now? The present channel is artificial--that is to say, it is made artificial by fortifications--but it may after all have been a natural channel improved by art. And that is the belief of some of the best Corfiote antiquaries. If so, this may well be the [Greek: nesos pros to Heraion], and Ptychia may be the isle of Vido beyond. The Heraion would thus stand on the north side of the old Korkyra, looking towards the modern city; it would stand in the oligarchic quarter on the low ground near the _agora_. It was therefore neither of the two temples of which traces remain. One, of which the walls can be traced out nearly throughout, and of which a single broken Doric column is standing, overlooks the open sea towards Epeiros. Another on the other side overlooked the Hyllaic harbour. This in course of time became a church, a now ruined church, but which keeps large parts of its h.e.l.lenic walls and some windows of beautiful Byzantine brickwork. It seems hardly possible in any case that the Heraion could have been at quite the further end of the peninsula, and that the island [Greek: pros to Heraion] could be either of the small islands, each containing a church, which keep the entrance of the Hyllaic harbour.

Such then was old Korkyra, the colony of Chersikrates, the Korkyra which figures in the tale of Periandros, the Korkyra which played such a doubtful part in the Persian War, which gained so fearful a name in the Peloponnesian War, and which, within two generations, had so thoroughly recovered itself that in the days of Timotheos it struck both friends and enemies by its wealth and flourishing state. It is the Korkyra of Pyrrhos and Agathokles, the Korkyra which formed one of the first stepping-stones for the Roman to make his way to the h.e.l.lenic continent, the Korkyra whose history goes on till the wasting inroad of Totilas. Then, as we hold, ancient Korkyra on its peninsula began to give way to Korypho (Corfu) on another peninsula or island, that to which the two peaks which form its most marked feature gave its name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCHES AT CORFU.]

This last is the Corfu whose fate seems to have been to become the possession of every power which has ruled in that quarter of the world, with one exception. For fourteen hundred years the history of the island is the history of endless changes of masters. We see it first a nominal ally, then a direct possession, of Rome and of Constantinople; we then see it formed into a separate Byzantine princ.i.p.ality, conquered by the Norman lord of Sicily, again a possession of the Empire, then a momentary possession of Venice, again a possession of the Sicilian kingdom under its Angevin kings, till at last it came back to Venetian rule, and abode for four hundred years under the Lion of Saint Mark. Then it became part of that first strange Septinsular Republic of which the Tzar was to be the protector and the Sultan the overlord. Then it was a possession of France; then a member of the second Septinsular Republic under the hardly disguised sovereignty of England; now at last it is the most distant, but one of the most valuable, of the provinces of the modern Greek kingdom. But Corfu has never for a moment been under the direct rule of the Turk.

The proudest memory in the later history of the island is the defeat of the Turks in 1716. Peloponnesos, the conquest of Morosini, had again been lost, and the Turk deemed that he might again carry his conquests into the Western seas. The city was besieged by land and sea; the two fleets, Christian and infidel, stretched across the narrow channel between the island and the mainland, the left wing of the Turkish fleet resting strangely enough on Venetian Butrinto, while the ships of Venice and her allies stretched from Vido to the Albanian sh.o.r.e. The statue of Schulemberg, set up as an unparalleled honour in his lifetime, adorns the esplanade of the city which he saved. Unless we count the Turkish acquisition of the Venetian points on the mainland, which, though done under the cover of a treaty, took at Prevesa at least the form of an actual conquest, this was the last great attempt of the Turk to extend his dominion by altogether fresh conquests at the expense of any Christian power.

Korkyra thus gave way to Corfu, and the endless fortifications of Corfu of every date were largely built out of the remains of Korkyra which supplied so convenient a quarry. None but an accomplished military engineer could attempt to give an account of the remains of all the fortifications, Venetian and English, dismantled, ruined, or altogether blown up. But the kingdom of which Corfu now forms a part still keeps the insular citadel, the outline of the two peaks being sadly disfigured by the needs of modern military defence. Of the modern city there is but little to say. As becomes a city which was so long a Venetian possession, the older part of it has much of the character of an Italian town. It is rich in street arcades; but they present but few architectural features, and we find none of those various forms of ornamental window, so common, not only in Venice and Verona, but in Spalato, Cattaro, and Trau. The churches in the modern city are architecturally worthless. They are interesting so far as they will give to many their first impression of Orthodox arrangement and Orthodox ritual. The few ecclesiastical antiquities of the place belong to the elder city. The suburb of the lower slope of the hill contains three churches, all of them small, but each of which has an interest of its own. Of one, known as [Greek: he Panagia ton blachernon], we have already spoken; another, known specially as Our Lady of _Oldbury_ ([Greek: he Panagia palaiopoleos]), is unattractive enough from any point from which the spectator is likely to see it.

Its form is by courtesy called basilican; but, if so, it is like the basilica of Trier, without columns or arches. Within it is a dreary building enough, but it presents one object of interest in a side-altar, a Latin intrusion into the Orthodox fabric. But the west end is one of the most memorable things to be found in Corfu or anywhere else. Two columns, not of the usual early Doric of the island, but with floriated capitals, though not exactly Corinthian, are built into the wall with a piece of their entablature. On this is graven a Christian inscription, which is given in an inaccurate shape by Mustoxidi (_Delle cose Corciresi_, p. 405), who has further improved the spelling. The spelling is in truth after the manner of Liudprand and the modern shoe-makers of Corfu, and is therefore instructive. At the top come the words of the Psalmist; "This is the gate of the Lord; the _writeous_ shall enter into it":--[Greek: haute he pyle tou Kyriou, dikeoi eiseleusontai en aute.] Below come four hexameters:--

[Greek: pistin echon basilian emon meneon sunerithon, soi makar hypsimedon tond' hieron ektisa naon, h.e.l.lenon temene kai bomous exalapaxas, cheiros ap' outidanes Iobianos edoken anakti.]

Who was this Jovia.n.u.s? Clearly a Christian as zealous as his Imperial namesake; for he cannot be the Emperor himself, as some have thought.

He thought it glory and not shame to destroy the works of the Gentiles--the [Greek: h.e.l.lenes]--and to turn them to the service of the royal faith. But are we to take the "royal faith" in the same sense as the "royal law" of the New Testament? or does it mean the "royal faith," as being set up under some orthodox Emperor, when the orthodoxy of Emperors was still a new thing? Anyhow the plunderer of Gentile temples and altars could not keep himself from something of the Gentile in the ring and the language of his verses. And had he made use of his spoil to rear a basilica like those of Constantine and Theodoric, we should, from a wider view than that of the mere cla.s.sical antiquary, have but little right to blame him. The rest of the columns, besides the two that are left, would have well relieved the bareness of his interior; better still would it have been if Saint Peter _ad Vincula_ had found a rival in two arcades formed out of the Doric columns whose fragments lie about at Corfu, almost as Corinthian and Composite fragments lie about at Rome. The third church, that which professes to be the oldest in the island, that which bears the name of the alleged apostles of the island, the Jason and Sosipatros of the New Testament, is a more successful work. Brought to its present form about the twelfth century by the priest Stephen, as is recorded in two inscriptions on its west front, it is, allowing for some modern disfigurements, an admirable specimen of a small Byzantine church. It will remind him who comes by way of Dalmatia of old friends at Zara, Spalato, and Trau; but it has the advantage over them of somewhat greater size, and of standing free and detached, so that the outline of its cross, its single central cupola and its three apses, may be well seen. This church, like most in the neighbourhood, has a bell-gable--[Greek: kodonostasion]--with arches for three bells, of a type which seems to be found of all ages from genuine Byzantine to late _Renaissance_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAINT JASON AND SAINT SOSIPATROS, CORFU.]

To go back to earlier times, the museum of Corfu contains an inscription, [Greek: boustrophedon] inscription, rivalling that of Menekrates in its archaism, attached to a Doric capital, of far later workmanship, one would have thought, than the inscription. The building art had clearly outstripped the writing art. The military cemetery contains some beautiful Greek sepulchral sculptures from various quarters, not all Korkyraian. And at some distance from the city, near the sh.o.r.e of Benizza--a name of Slavonic sound--is a Roman ruin with mosaics and hypocaust, whose bricks we think Mr. Parker would rule to be not older than Diocletian. In Corfu such a monument seems at first sight to be out of place. For h.e.l.lenic remains, for Venetian remains, we naturally look; still it is well to have something of an intermediate day, something to remind us of the long ages which pa.s.sed between the revolutions recorded by Polybios and the revolutions recorded by Niketas.

CORFU TO DURAZZO.

1881.

We start again from Corfu, and this time our course is northward. A survey of Greece as Greece would lead us southward and eastward. So would even a complete survey of the subject lands of Venice. For that we must go on to the rest of the western islands, to not a few points in the aegaean, to the greater islands of Euboia and Crete, to Saint Mark's own realm of Cyprus, which the Evangelist so strangely inherited from his daughter and her son. Not a few points of Peloponnesos for some ages, all Peloponnesos for a few years, Athens itself for a moment, comes within the same range. We might write the history of Argos from the Venetian point of view, a point of view which would shut out the history of Mykene, and would look on Tiryns only as _Palai-Nauplia_, the precursor of Napoli di Romania. But no man could journey through Greece itself with Venice in this way in his thoughts. Far older, far n.o.bler, memories would press upon him at every moment. The mediaeval history of Greece is a subject which deserves far more attention than it commonly gets, and in that history Venice plays a prominent part. But it is hard, in a Greek journey, to make the mediaeval history primary, and even in the mediaeval history Venice is only one element among others. A large part of Greece fairly comes under the head of the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice; but we cannot bring ourselves to make that the chief aspect in which we look at them. It is otherwise with the Dalmatian and Albanian possessions of the Republic. There, though other points of view are possible, yet the special Venetian point of view is one which may be both easily and fairly taken. So too with Corfu; thoroughly Greek as the island is, it still lies on the very verge of continuous Greece.

In its history and geography it is closely connected with the more northern possessions of the Republic; its Venetian side is at least as important as any other side; we can without an effort bring ourselves to treat it in a way in which we could hardly bring ourselves to treat Argos. We can then fairly take Corfu into our special Venetian survey; but we can hardly venture to carry that survey further. The rest of Greece, though it has its Venetian side, though it is important that its Venetian side should not be forgotten, can never be looked on in this way as an appendage to the Hadriatic commonwealth. We cannot go through the earliest homes of European civilization and freedom, and keep our mind mainly fixed even on the days when Rome had made them members of her Empire, and when their influence had gone far to make the later power of Rome at least as much Greek as Roman. Still less can we go through them with our mind mainly fixed on the days when so large part of Greece had pa.s.sed under the rule of a city which was in truth a revolted member of the Empire which it helped to split in pieces.

We start then again from Corfu, with our faces turned towards our old haunts among the Illyrian coasts and islands. In so doing, we pa.s.s for a while out of the Christian and civilized world, to skirt along the coasts where Europe is still in bondage to Asia. The wrong is an old one, as old as the days when Herodotus put on record how Greek cities for the first time pa.s.sed under the rule of a barbarian master. From his day, from times long before his day, from the days of Agamemnon, perhaps from the days of the brave men who lived before him, the same long strife has been going on, the same "eternal Eastern question" has been awaiting its "solution." And nowhere does that abiding struggle come more fully home to us than in the lands where the Eastern question has become a Western question. The Greek cities whose bondage to the barbarian was recorded by Herodotus were Greek cities on barbarian ground. They were outposts of Europe on the soil of Asia; they were spots in winning which the Asiatic might deem that he was winning back his own. And after all, the barbarian whose conquest of the Greek cities of Asia marks one important stage in this long strife, was a barbarian of another kind from the barbarians whom European lands have in later times been driven to receive as masters.

Croesus worshipped the G.o.ds of Greece, and Greek poets sang his praises. It may even be that the Lydian, like the Persian who succeeded him, was not a barbarian at all in the strictest sense, but that there was some measure of kindred, however distant, between him and his European subjects. It is another kind of master, another kind of bondage, which has fallen to the lot of the lands along whose coast we are now sailing. Here we do indeed see the West in bondage to the East, we do indeed see Europe on her own soil bowed down beneath the yoke of Asia. We pa.s.s by coasts which look to the setting sun no less than our own island, but which the Asiatic intruder still holds beneath the yoke,--over some of which he has pressed the yoke for the first time within the memory of living men. On these coasts at least we think of Venice only in her n.o.bler character. Here indeed every island, every headland, which owned her rule, was something saved from the grasp of the enemy; it was indeed a brand plucked from the burning. As we sail northward, we leave spots behind us, memorable in past times, memorable some of them in our own day. We leave behind us Prevesa, where, till almost within our own century, Saint Mark still held his own, hard by the City of Victory of the first Emperor. We remember how Prevesa was torn away from Christendom by the arms of Ali of Joannina, and how within the last three years freedom has been twice promised to her but never given. We leave behind us more famous Parga, where, within the lifetime of many of us, stout hearts could still maintain their freedom, in the teeth alike of barbarian force and of European diplomacy--Parga, whose banished sons bore with them the bones of their fathers rather than leave them to be trampled on by the feet of the misbelievers. There must be men still living who had their share in that famous exodus, and who have lived to see Europe first decree that their land should be again set free, and then thrust it back again beneath the yoke. We leave behind us Butrinto, happier at least in this, that there no promise of later days has been broken.

There we have pa.s.sed the point beyond which a.s.sembled Europe ruled that even the dreams of freedom might go no further. And as we sail between the home of freedom and the house of bondage, our thoughts overleap the mountain wall. They fly to the heights where Souli, birth-place of Botzares, is left to the foes against whom it so long and so stoutly strove. They fly to Joannina, so long the home of light and comparative freedom amid surrounding darkness and bondage, but which now, instead of receiving the twice-promised deliverance, is again thrust back into bondage for a while. We pa.s.s on by the High Thunderpeaks, fencing in the land of Chimara, famous in the wars of Ali. We double the promontory of Glossa, and find ourselves in the deep bay of Aulon, Aulona, Valona, with the town itself high on its hill, guarding the entrance to the gulf from the other side. Here is a true hill-city, unlike Korkyra, unlike even Buthrotum; but while Korkyra and Buthrotum, each on its sh.o.r.e, has each its history, Aulon on its height has none. We pa.s.s by the mouths of the great Illyrian rivers, by Aoos and Apsos, and we leave between them the place where once stood Apollonia, another of the paths by which Rome made her way into the Eastern world. At last we find ourselves in another bay, wider, but not so deep as the bay of Aulon. Here we look out on what remains of a city whose earlier name dwells in the memory of every reader of the greatest of Greek historians, a city whose later name, famous through a long series of revolutions, ought to be ever fresh in the minds of Englishmen, as having become by a strange destiny the scene of one stage of the same struggle as Senlac and York and Ely.

The city on which we look was, under its elder name of Epid.a.m.nos, that famous colony of Korkyra which gave an occasion for the Peloponnesian war. Under its later name of Dyrrhachion or Durazzo it beheld Englishmen and Normans meet in arms, when Englishmen driven from their homes had found a shelter and an honourable calling in the service of the Eastern Caesar.

The city on which we gaze, though it is only by a figure that we can be said to gaze on the original Epid.a.m.nos, is one of those cities which, without ever holding any great place themselves, without being widely ruling cities, without exercising any direct influence on the course of the world's history, have given occasion for the greatest events through their relations to cities and powers greater than themselves. Under none of its names was Epid.a.m.nos the peer of Corinth in the elder state of things, or of Venice in the later. Yet events of no small moment came of the relations between Epid.a.m.nos and Corinth, of the relations between Durazzo and Venice. Greater events still came of the relations between Dyrrhachion and Rome. The three names, though of course the third is a simple corruption of the second, are convenient to mark three periods in the history of the place, just as one of the great Sicilian cities is conveniently spoken of at three stages of its life as Akragas, Agrigentum, and Girgenti. When and how the name changed from Epid.a.m.nos to Dyrrhachion is not clear, nor are the reasons given for the change satisfactory. In practice, Epid.a.m.nos is its old Greek name, Dyrrhachion its Roman, Durazzo its mediaeval name. But the name Dyrrhachion can be Roman only in usage; the word itself is palpably Greek. In strictness it seems that Epid.a.m.nos was the name of the city, and Dyrrhachion the name of the peninsula on which the city was built. The change then has some a.n.a.logy with the process by which the tribal names in northern Gaul have displaced the elder names of their chief cities, or with the change among ourselves by which Kingston-on-Hull, as it is still always called in formal writings, is in common speech always spoken of as "Hull." Anyhow, under Roman rule, the name of Dyrrhachion altogether displaced Epid.a.m.nos. The new name gradually came to be mispelled or Latinized into _Durachium_ and _Duracium_, and, in that state, it supplied the material for more than one play upon words. When Robert Wiscard came against it, he said that the city might indeed be _Duracium_, but that he was a _dour_ man (_durus_) and knew how to _endure_ (_durare_). The Norman made his way by this path into the Eastern lands, as the Roman had done before him; but as his course was quicker, his stay was shorter. Epid.a.m.nos, along with Apollonia and Korkyra, were the first possessions of Rome east of the Hadriatic. They were possessions of the ruling city where dominion was for a long time disguised under the name of alliance. But, under whatever name, Rome, Old and New, held them till the Norman came. But the Norman did not hold them till the Venetian came. In a few years after the coming of Robert Wiscard, Durazzo and Corfu were again cities of the Eastern Empire.

Amidst all the revolutions which this little peninsula has gone through, one law seems to hold. Under all its names, it has had in a marked way what we may call a colonial life, in the modern sense of the word _colonial_. It has ever been an outpost of some other power, of whatever power has been strongest in those seas, and it has been an outpost ever threatened by the elder races of the mainland. Herein comes one of the differences between this Albanian coast and the Dalmatian coast further north. The Roman Peace took in all; but in the days before and after the Roman Peace, the settlements of Corinth, Venice, or any other colonizing and civilizing power, along the coast of which Durazzo was the centre, were merely scattered outposts. There never was that continuous fringe of a higher culture, Italian or Greek, which spread along the whole coast further north. As a colony, an isolated colony, Epid.a.m.nos or Durazzo was always exposed to the attacks of barbarian neighbours. And in this land the barbarian neighbours have always been the same. The old Illyrian, the Albanian, the Arnaout, the Skipetar--call him by whichever name we will--has here lived on through all changes. He has indeed a right to look on Greek, Roman, Norman, Angevin, Servian, Venetian, and Ottoman, as alike intruders within his own immemorial land. It was danger from the Illyrian that led to the disputes which open the history of Thucydides, when Corinth and Korkyra fought over their common colony.

It was danger from the Illyrian which drove Epid.a.m.nos into the arms of Rome. It was the Illyrian under his new name who in the fourteenth century for a moment made Durazzo the head of a national state, the capital of a short-lived kingdom of Albania. Twice conquered by the Normans of Apulia and Sicily, twice by their Angevin successors, granted as part of a va.s.sal kingdom by the Norman and as a va.s.sal duchy by the Angevin, twice won by the Venetian commonwealth, held by the despots of Epeiros, by the restored Emperors of Constantinople, by the kings of Servia, by the native kings of Albania, no city has had a more varied succession of foreign masters; but, save in the days of the old Epid.a.m.nian commonwealth and in the days of the momentary Albanian kingdom, it has always had a foreign master of some kind.

But in the endless succession of strangers which this memorable spot has seen, as masters, as invaders, as defenders, it is the Englishman and the Venetian who can look with most satisfaction on their share in its long history. Englishmen had the honour of guarding the spot for the Eastern Caesar; Venice had the honour of being the last Christian champion to guard it against the Ottoman Sultan.

We stand then gazing from our ship on what is left of the city which Robert Wiscard crossed the sea to conquer, which Alexios came with his motley host to defend, and to find that in all that host the men whom he could best trust were the English exiles. There, as in their own island, the English axe and the Norman lance clashed together; there the stout axemen alone stayed to die, while the other soldiers of the Eastern Rome, the Greek, the Turk, and the Slave, all turned to fly around their Emperor. We look out, and we long to know the site of the church of Saint Michael, which our countrymen so stoutly guarded, till the Normans, Norman-like, took to their favourite weapon of fire. But may we confess to the weakness of looking at all these things only from the deck of the steamer? Perhaps there are some who may be forgiven if they shrink from thrusting themselves alone, with no native or experienced guide, into the jaws of the present masters of Durazzo. They may be the more forgiven when those who have the care of their vessel and its temporary inhabitants utter warnings against any but the most stout-hearted trusting themselves to the boats which form the only means of reaching the Dyrrhachian peninsula. Strengthened in weakness by such counsels, there seems a kind of magnanimity in the resolution to abide in the ship, to say that we have landed at free Corfu, that we shall land at recovered Antivari, but that we will not betweenwhiles set foot on any soil where the Turk still reigns. And the time of distant gazing is not wasted. Without risking ourselves either on Turkish ground or on the rough waves of the Epid.a.m.nian bay, a fair general view of the city may be had from the steamer. The wide curve of the bay has for the most part a flat sh.o.r.e, with a background of mountains in the distant landscape. Towards the north-west corner, a promontory of a good height, backed by a comb-like range of peaks, rises at once from the water. This is the peninsula of Dyrrhachion, once crowned by the Epid.a.m.nian city. The modern town is seen on a small part of the tower slope of the hill. The walls can be traced through the greater part of their circuit; a huge round bastion by the sea, more than one tower, round and square, teach us that Durazzo has been strongly fortified. If we may eke out our own distant impressions by the help of an old print showing what Durazzo was in times past, we see that it was fortified indeed. We can recognize in the picture most of the towers which we have seen with our own eyes, and there is shown also another tower far greater, a huge square tower of many stages, which no imagination of the artist can have devised out of anything which now comes into the sea-view of the city. But that view enables us to trace out a few buildings within the wall. We mark the distinctive symbols of the two stranger forms of worship, from the East and from the West, which have, each in its turn, supplanted or dominated the native Church. The Latin church, with its conspicuous bell-tower, carries on the traditions of Angevin and Venetian rule; the mosque, with its more conspicuous minaret, speaks of the more abiding dominion of the representative of the False Prophet. The native church meanwhile lurks significantly unseen in the general view. Our teacher on board our ship a.s.sures us that Durazzo is not without an Orthodox place of worship; but he cannot point out its whereabouts.

And it may be that it is no common anniversary on which we look out on the land which has pa.s.sed into bondage. Looked at by the evening light of the twenty-ninth day of May, the group of buildings at Durazzo, alike by what is present to the eye and by what is absent, brings to the mind the fate of a greater city than Durazzo was in its proudest day. It makes us muse how, after four hundred and eight and twenty years, we have still to repeat the Psalmist's words: "O G.o.d, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones." Durazzo has not indeed, like some other cities under the yoke, sunk to a heap of stones; but it is easy to see how the Turkish town has shrunk up within the Venetian walls, and again how narrow must be the circuit of Venetian Durazzo compared with the Epid.a.m.nos of the days of Thucydides, or even with the Dyrrhachion beneath whose walls our banished kinsmen so well maintained the cause of the Eastern Augustus.

For the church that they so stoutly defended we need not say that it is vain to look in such a Pisgah view of the city as is all that we can take. But to the left of the present wall, where the hill soars, one stage upon another, far above the height of Durazzo that now is, we must surely place the site of the akropolis of the old Korkyraian settlers. Such a post, looking over the wide bay and commanding its mouth, would be just what would commend itself to the Greek colonists for the site of their new stronghold, while the lower city would naturally be spread over the more sheltered ground which holds all that is left of Durazzo under the rule of the Turk. Pausanias indeed implies that there had been a change of site before his time, that the Dyrrhachion of his day did not stand on exactly the same ground as the elder Epid.a.m.nos. No doubt the loftier site was the older; men came down from the hill-top as they did at Athens and Corinth. Thus much the pa.s.sing stranger can see of this historic spot, even without setting his foot on the soil which the barbarian has torn away from Christendom. His course will bear him on to the place of his next halt, to the spot which, only a few months back, was the last soil which Christendom had won back from the barbarian. Since then, if another land has been denied the promised freedom, in a third the boon has been actually bestowed. And we may comfort ourselves by thinking that, while the shame of what is left undone belongs to others, the praise of what is done belongs to our own land only. We may comfort ourselves too by further thinking that right and freedom are powers which have an awkward way, when they have taken the inch, of going on to take the ell. The wise men whose wisdom consists in living politically from hand to mouth, are again crying out against "re-opening the Eastern question." In sailing along the sh.o.r.es, in scanning their history in past and present times, we feel how deep a truth was casually uttered in the shallow sneer which called that question "eternal." We feel how vain is the dream of those who think that this or that half-measure has solved it. As we gaze on enslaved Durazzo, with free Greece behind us, with free Montenegro before us--as we run swiftly in our thoughts over the long history of the spot--as we specially call up the deeds of our own countrymen on the sh.o.r.e on which we look--we feel that something indeed has been done, but that there is yet much more to do. Before us, behind us, are lands to which England, and England only, has given freedom. A day must come when, what England has done for Corfu, for Arta, and for Dulcigno, she must do for Joannina and for Durazzo.

ANTIVARI.

1881.

We wind up our course with one more of the once subject cities of Venice, one where we can hardly say that we are any longer following in Norman footsteps, but whose history stands apart from the history of Dalmatia and Istria, while it has much in common with our last halting place. But here the main interest belongs to our own day. It is with new and strange feelings that we look out on a land which, when we last pa.s.sed by it, was still clutched tight in the grasp of the barbarian, but to which we can now give the new and thrilling name of the sea-coast of Tzernagora. And yet it is with mingled feelings that we gaze. We rejoice in the victories, in the extension, of the unconquered princ.i.p.ality, the land which has shown itself a surer "bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite" than Hungary or Poland, or even Venice, ever proved. We rejoice that the warriors of the mountain, long shut in by force and fraud, have again, with their own right hands, cut their way to their own sea. And yet we feel that, though the sea to which they have cut their way is truly their own sea, their own ancient heritage, yet the coast and the havens which they have won are not the coast and the havens which they should have won. If all had their own, Dulcigno, Antivari, and the ewe lamb which the rich man stole at Spizza, would be the havens of the free Albanian, while the free Slave would have his outlet to the Hadriatic waters at his own Cattaro and at Ragusa too. In such an ideal state of things, the present lord of Cattaro and Ragusa might reign peaceably and harmlessly in the duchy of his grandmothers, happy in deliverance from the curses of those whom he now keeps back from union with the brethren whom they love and with the one prince whom they acknowledge.

The Montenegrin, in short, kept back by wrong from winning his way to the sea by peaceful union with those who yearn for his presence, has been driven to win his way to the sea by the conquest of lands which were once the heritage of his race, but from which his race has now pa.s.sed away. Forbidden to be the deliverer of the Slave, he has been forced to be the conqueror of the Albanian. The Albanian Mussulman himself has practically gained by being conquered; still, as we said, if every one had his own, arrangements would be different. The blame indeed lies, not with the people who extend their borders when to extend their border is a matter of national life, but with those who, not in the interest of any people, nation, or language, but in the private interest of their own family estate, sit by to hinder them from extending their borders in the right way. We rejoice then as we look for the first time on the sea-coast of Montenegro; but we mourn that the sea-coast of Montenegro lies where it does and not elsewhere.

We mourn too that the enlargement of Christendom, the falling back of Islam, has been bought only by the destruction of an ancient and beautiful city from which the memorials at least of Christendom had not wholly pa.s.sed away.

Antibaris, Antivari, in the tongues of the land, _Bar_ and _Tivari_, is perhaps rather to be understood as meaning "the Bari on the other side" than "the city opposite Bari." But there is no doubt that its name contains, in one way or another, a reference to the more famous Bari, "Barium piscosum," on the other side of the Hadriatic. And Antivari is the opposite to Bari in a sense which was certainly not meant; no two sites can well be more unlike one another than the sites of Bari and of Antivari. The Apulian Bari lies low on a flat sh.o.r.e, with not so much as a background of hills; the Albanian Bari crowns a height, with a wall of more soaring heights on each side of it. The Apulian Bari had no chance of occupying such a position as this; the marked difference between the two coasts of the Hadriatic forbade it.

But the site of Antivari is hardly less unlike most of the other sites on its own coast. Zara, Salona and its successor Spalato, Epidauros and its successor Ragusa, Cattaro, Durazzo, and a crowd of others of lesser name, are none of them placed on heights. Some of them nestle immediately at the foot of the mountain; some have thrown out their defences, older or newer, some way up the side of the mountain; in none is the city itself perched high on the hills. For a parallel to Antivari on this coast we have to go back to the mountain citadel of Aulona. The position and the name of Antivari seem to point to a state of things differing both from the days of the Greek and Roman foundations, and from the days of the cities which arose to shelter their fugitives in the day of overthrow. Long Salona stood low on the sh.o.r.e; the house of Jovius stood low on the sh.o.r.e also; it did not come into the head of the founders of either to plant city or palace on the height of Clissa. When Antivari arose, it would seem that men had gone back to that earlier state of things which planted the oldest Argos, even the oldest Corinth, on mountain peaks some way from their own coasts. The inaccessible height had again come to be looked on as a source of strength. Antivari may take its place alongside of the mediaeval Syra, the Latin town covering its own peaked hill--a _mons acutus_, a Montacute, by the sh.o.r.e--while the oldest and the newest Hermoupolis lies on the sh.o.r.e at its feet. The town does not even look down at once on the haven; it has to be reached in a manner sideways from the haven. It is true indeed that the sea has gone back, that the plain at the foot of the mountains between the town and the sh.o.r.e was smaller than it now is, even in times not far removed from our own.

But Antivari was never as Cattaro; it always stood on a height, with some greater or less extent of level ground between the town and its own haven.

The city thus placed has gone through its full share of the revolutions of the eastern coasts of the Hadriatic. Once a commonwealth under the protection of the Servian kings and tzars, it came late under Venetian rule. But it remained under that rule down to a later time than any other of the possessions of the Republic on this coast, save those which came within the actual Dalmatian border and those detached points further to the south which have a history of their own in common with the so-called Ionian Islands. It was for a while in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, what Budua was for so long afterwards, the furthest point of the continuous rule of Saint Mark, a city which remained part of Christendom after Durazzo and Skodra had pa.s.sed into the hands of the infidel. In earlier times, when Antivari had a separate being, its tendency was rather to a connexion with Ragusa than with Venice. Ragusa, though the nearer of the rivals, was the weaker, the less likely to change alliance or protection into dominion. Antivari too, like most other city-commonwealths, had its patricians and plebeians, its disputes between the privileged and the non-privileged order. As the justice of either side at home was distrusted, it was agreed that the decision of some cla.s.ses of causes should be referred to the courts of Ragusa.

Such a settlement, though taking another and more dangerous form, is the same in principle as the favourite Italian custom of choosing a foreign _podesta_, as the earlier usage by which cities which had won their independence in all other points were still willing to receive a criminal judge of the Emperor's naming. In all these cases alike, the stranger is looked on as more likely than the native to deal out even-handed justice amid the disputes and rivalries of persons and parties.