Chapter 33

From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw
little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by
three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and
deserted--a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all
Greece in these latter ages. We saw no ploughed fields, very few
villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and
hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert,
without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports
its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the
most extravagant contrast to be found in history. George I., an infant
of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the
places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and
generals of the Golden Age of Greece. The fleets that were the wonder of
the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of
fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of
valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day. The
classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian
wealth and greatness. The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand
souls, and there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them
to furnish forty millions and be liberal about it. Under King Otho the
revenues of the State were five millions of dollars--raised from a tax
of one-tenth of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth
the farmer had to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any
distance not exceeding six leagues) and from extravagant taxes on trade
and commerce. Out of that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep
an army of ten thousand men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand
Equerries in Waiting, First Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High
Chancellors of the Exploded Exchequer, and all the other absurdities
which these puppy-kingdoms indulge in, in imitation of the great
monarchies; and in addition he set about building a white marble palace
to cost about five millions itself. The result was, simply: ten into
five goes no times and none over. All these things could not be done
with five millions, and Otho fell into trouble.

The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a ragged population of
ingenious rascals who were out of employment eight months in the year
because there was little for them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a
waste of barren hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good
while. It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to
various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and were out of