Free Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page B

tendency to disregard these, except at holidays of Christmas and Easter
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Patriotism based on 21 (R), and inspired, in wartime, by the memory of the Klephts
Patriotism based on 21 (H), and inspired, in wartime, by the heroes of the ancient world
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War seen in terms of guerrilla
Military science
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Rule of thumb
Text book
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In general, impulsive readiness for anything that is not vetoed by some hallowed taboo
More restraint and a more cerebral approach to the problems of life
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Homesickness for Byzantine Empire
Nostalgia for the age of Pericles
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Demotic
Katharévousa
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The Dome of St. Sophia
The columns of the Parthenon
    Should one add up the attributes of each column and mould them into people, two lop-sided freaks would emerge. Fortunately neither exist; each is a function of the other. Only enclosed in the arena of a single breast do they come to life. They are permanently, more or less, at loggerheads, and there is a wide range of contingencies for friction in which the actions of their host depend on which of them wins. After each of these bouts, he might paraphrase Gibbon: “I sighed as a Romiòs , I obeyed as a Hellene”—or the other way round.
    It seems wrong to write of this conflict without mentioning some of the attributes which are common to both sides. It would leave the picture badly out of focus.
    Emotional feeling for Greece is the country’s deepest conviction. Affronts, threats and the danger of invasion are the things that not only fling the Romiòs and the Hellene into each other’s arms—several things can do this—but reconcile all the internal differences of the country. Courage, self-sacrifice and endurance reach heroic heights. When the emergency passes, cohesiontoo dissolves, and political rivalries rage as fiercely as ever (no wonder the verb stasiazo , “I am in a state of faction,” was one of the earliest verbs one had to learn at school); parties abound and factions flourish but such is the individuality of the Greeks that the country is really made up of eight million one-man splinter-groups reluctantly forced into a series of temporary coalitions.
    Other traits leap to the mind: self-reliance; the belief that effort and cleverness, backed by luck, can accomplish anything; intelligence, rapid thought, alertness, curiosity; thirst for fame; restlessness and extreme subjectivity; a passion for news; eloquence, the knack for expressing thought in words; the impulse to express thought in action; energy and enterprise; enthusiasm and disillusion; a deep-seated feeling of confidence and of absolute equality not only with other Greeks, but with the whole human race, and of superiority to many; lack of class-consciousness or snobbery; strong family feeling; impatience with political opposition, corrected by tolerance of human shortcomings and fallibility; an easy-going moral code modified by rigid and puritanical notions of family honour; sensitiveness, especially to irony or affronts to personal dignity; quick temper, which can interfere with this; hatred of solitude and scorn for privacy, the need to sharpen the mind by conversation. Opinion is shaped by newspapers and by talk, seldom by private reading or un-utilitarian study; abstract philosophy and metaphysics are absent from Greek life. Talk is an addiction and it is conducted with invention, great narrative gifts, the knack of repartee, the spirit of contradiction, the questioning of authority, mockery, self-mockery, satire and humour. Love of pleasure emerges in the pan-hellenic passion for sitting up late eating and drinking and singing whenever the slightest excuse crops up.
    The Greeks are famous for their financial acumen. Their knack of spinning the air into gold is mercifully unpolluted byits accompanying blemish: meanness is scorned and almost non-existent; they prize and practise generosity whether or not they can afford it, and the laws of hospitality are as deeply rooted as the most