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1795]

MISGOVERNMENT OF CRETE

237

set me. Candia is a large and well-situated town, which, thanks to its Venetian possessors, is still better built and handsomer than the others of Turkey, and has some streets wide and convenient, which is no small praise after seeing the holes and corners they generally live in at Smyrna, Salonica, and Constantinople. It is strongly fortified with Venetian fortifications, which are now, as usual, neglected, but not much injured, and would still, I should think, stand a strong siege if defended by anybody but Turks. We lived in a great rambling house of the Venetian Consuls, and were comfortable enough; we were often visited by some of the principal Beys, who appeared to us humanised and civil, one or two even clever in comparison of what we have been used to; we therefore made no small acquaintance for the time we stayed. The Viceroy of the island is an old man, who has been Grand Vizier; an office not now always fatal to its possessors, as it was in the flourishing times of the Empire, when Turks were savage and rebellious by nature; now their character is somewhat altered, and the only possession fatal to them is that of great riches, which the Sultan appropriates by cutting off their heads and transferring the dirty gold and silver to the treasury. In every rank here a low interest has succeeded to their old more fierce and untractable barbarity, and as, in the times of their strength, nothing was to be done with them but by force, so now everything may be made of them by money; and the corruption is general. Nothing so precarious as offices and governments here, and in the year's residence we have had in Turkey, more than one of our rich acquaintance have surrendered (a term equivalent to resigning at St. James's) their necks to the bowstring.

The Pasha of Candia at first refused to let us see the island, Candia not being mentioned in our travelling orders with sufficient precision; however, by a petition, enforced with a sop to every Cerberus

like agent that surrounds him, he thought better of it, and we went our tour. This governor has the command of every office in the island, and, as Pasha of three tails, has the power of executing summary justice, or, in plain terms, of taking off the head of any person in the island, responsible only to the Seraglio, who may probably retaliate in the same summary way upon him, if any secret and powerful enemy takes the pains to supplant him there. His power is in some measure checked by the privileges and power of the janissaries, who in every fortress, as in Salonica, Larissa, Negroponte, and here, enjoy rights they well know how far to exercise. They are a fierce, lawless, armed rabble, responsible only to the commandant of their own regiment, who is one of their own corps, and often of low rank, raised by cabal, or by military merit, that is here superior strength, or brutal courage. He alone punishes them, and will not unfrequently screen them from the civil jurisdiction, and even from the Pasha himself, if he has interest at Constantinople. By this means all the towns, where they are established, are the centres of military sedition, disorder, and even rebellion. None but the great Turks and the soldiers are safe from insult, and Christians are exposed to every injury and even assassination on the slightest quarrel with them.

I do not recollect I ever talked to you before of this extraordinary government; but this short sketch will give you a general idea of that which prevails in the great towns here. For illustrative examples I could tell you that a little while before we arrived a Greek bishop at Candia had refused some money which a janissary thought he had a right to demand of him. The day after a large party of them rushed into his chamber, and he was murdered by repeated stabs and pistol-balls. In vain the public justice pursued the offenders, the janissary Aga only strangled one of them, and him not the ringleader. In short, above forty assassinations had happened in

1795]

THE LABYRINTH

239

a few months, and the country was every day still exposed to robbery and iniquity of all sorts-so much for Candia.

Gortyna is at a village about twenty-five miles distant, at the foot of Ida, separated from the plain of Candia, and of Cnossus, by a chain of hills chiefly barren, stony, and uninteresting, though some of the dells on the western side are more deserving of notice, and have pretty and picturesque aspects. Gortyna is in the largest and finest plain of the island, opening at one end to the southern sea; it is rather fertile than picturesque, but now is thinly inhabited and ill cultivated. There is little to see here: old, prostrate columns, ornamented fragments, well-known inscriptions, and a stripped theatre as usual. The little river Lethe, which crosses it, still, as of old, overgrown with plane trees, and the shade famous for the amours of Jupiter and Europa, we looked at with more interest, as it applied more to our fancy than our eyes, and I have often experienced how much a pretty story, consecrated by anciently received opinion, gives consequence to scenes in themselves indifferent. Who did not look with pleasure at Shakespeare's mulberry, but the parson who cut it down? So the story of this little brook, with its reputation for oblivion, made us not pass it by, though it is a good deal less remarkable than the Greta. We don't want to forget or be forgotten, so I think did not take any draughts of it. A mile beyond is what is called the Labyrinth. It is in a mountain, a large subterraneous range of passages, unequal in breadth and height, many crossing into one another, most ending at large, irregular chambers hewn out in the rock, and sometimes meeting or branching off from opener parts of the cave, which it is true make the road difficult to find, though not so difficult as has been represented. You ask me what I think of this; to say the truth, neither more nor less than a large stone quarry, of which some of the passages, where low, are rather choked

up. It is everywhere full of the cuttings of stone, and in these open chambers, which I conceive only to be the working out on all sides of the better veins, the marks of the chisel are everywhere seen, and the sides, not being even but cut in irregular steps, seem often to show the very places where blocks have been taken out. I believe, therefore, this was the place Gortyna was dug from. This is contrary to Tournefort and the received opinion; however, I cannot think it the ancient Labyrinth, which, built on the model of the one in Egypt, was designed as a subterraneous palace-a habitation at least. One reason is unanswerable: the Labyrinth belonged to Cnossus. There was the Court of Minos, and they represented it on the current coin. Gortyna never did, and this is a mile from Gortyna, in the plain of Gortyna, and separated by a range of hills from that of Cnossus, which is twenty miles distant. Much is said on both sides; I own I only saw a deep-worked, intricate stone quarry, on a larger scale than the marble quarries we had seen, but much resembling them; and as one reason against this idea is drawn from difficulty of its access, and the lowness of some of the passages, I wish only to set those who object to this at the end of the high quarries of Paros or Pentelicus, which nobody doubts, and they must own they were answered.1

1 See p. 210.

CHAPTER X

OLYMPIA AND THE IONIAN ISLANDS

MORRITT is no less keen to discover in Thiaki the places described in the Odyssey; the topography, he says, "I think we have reason to suppose nearly as exact as we had already found the Iliad." But it should be noted that here also the identification is being disputed; among other reasons, because Thiaki (the Ithaca of historical times) seems too far from the mainland to suit the narrative of the Odyssey. Dörpfeld is held by many to have proved that the island of Leucas was really the Odyssean Ithaca.

Morritt always retained his conviction of a single authorship for the Homeric poems (see p. 255), in which belief he has had many adherents of the present generation-notably Andrew Lang. In Scott's diary, under April 22, 1828, there is the following entry: "Lockhart and I dined with Sotheby, when we met a large party, the orator of which was that extraordinary man, Coleridge. After eating a hearty dinner, during which he spoke not a word, he began a most learned harangue on the Samothracian Mysteries, which he regarded as affording the germ of all tales about fairies, past, present, and to come. He then diverged to Homer, whose Iliad he considered as a collection of poems by different authors, at different times, during a century. Morritt, a zealous worshipper of the old bard, was incensed at a system which would turn him into a polytheist, gave battle with keenness, and was joined by Sotheby. Mr. Coleridge behaved with the utmost complaisance and temper, but relaxed not from his exertions. 'Zounds, I was never so bethumped with words.'

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