The names of two men are most often associated with the first stirrings of Greek ideas of independence: Adhamántios Koraís and Rígas Pheréos. A lithograph of the time shows the two men on either side of a maiden representing suffering Greece who is in an attitude of extreme dejection, half crouched on one knee and dressed in rags. A gaunt-looking Koraís on the left is dressed in the frock coat of an academic, and on the right is the more solidly built Rígas, in a long gown that might have been worn by a Turkish official. Each man holds an outstretched hand of the unhappy girl. What reality does this touching allegory represent?
Rígas was born in 1757 in the Thessalian village of Velestíno, the ancient Phére; hence his two toponymics, Velestinlís or, more commonly, Pheréos. After an impressive scholastic career Rígas went at the age of 23 to Wallachia in today’s Romania, where he became secretary first to the principality’s governor and then to an Austrian baron who brought him to Vienna for the first time in June 1790. Vienna, where Rígas spent much of the following years, provided both the stimulus and the opportunity for the expression of his revolutionary ideas. There was a considerable Greek community in Vienna, mainly merchants and students of science, who would meet at the city’s Tavérna ton Ellínon. Also in Vienna were the brothers Markídhis-Poúlios, natives of Macedonia, who published works in Greek. The brothers were able to publish openly the works which provided Rígas’ income, innocuous translations into Greek of physics texts from French and German and of recent French fiction, but under the repressive regime of the Austrian government anything subversive, such as Rígas’ revolutionary writings, had to be printed secretly at night.
It is for two works that Rígas is best remembered, both dating from 1797: a revolutionary hymn including an oath against tyranny, in rhyming couplets to be sung to a well-known tune, and in more philosophical vein a statement of the rights of man, combined with a proposed constitution for a new Greek republic.
The hymn with its oath is vigorous stuff, in the thumping, galloping metre of traditional Greek klephtic ballads which this translation of the opening of the hymn reproduces:
Shall we live in the mountain passes, like warriors of old?
Shall we live alone like lions, on the top of the mountain ridge?
Shall we live in caves in darkness, shall slavery drive us away?
Shall we say farewell to our family and to our beloved land?
No! Better an hour of freedom, than forty years as a slave.
Similarly, the oath begins:
O Lord of all creation, I solemnly swear to Thee
Never to act as tyrants do and never be slave to them
and concludes:
And if this oath is broken, may lightning strike me down,
And may I be burnt to nothing, and vanish like smoke on the wind.1
But the revolutionary hymn was not simply rhetoric, or something to be sung late in the evening at the Tavérna ton Ellíinon; it embodied important elements of Rígas’ philosophy, some unexpected. First, the revolution is to be not against the Turks as such, but against tyranny. Turks, he says, are oppressed equally with Greeks, equally with Christians:
We who suffer under the yoke, let us kill the ravening wolves
Who keep us in harsh subjection, Christian and Turk alike.
Thus Turks are summoned to join in the coming struggle and not only the Turks: in the course of some twenty lines Rígas calls for support from Bulgarians, Albanians, Armenians and Arabs, and from the people of Malta, Egypt and Aleppo.2 Although the appeal was to Muslims as well as Christians, Rígas somewhat naively proposed that the symbol of the united movement against tyranny should be the cross. Turks would also have been unsympathetic to his call to the islanders of Spétses, Psará and Hydra to burn the Turkish armada and reoccupy Constantinople and the church of Ayía Sophía.
Rígas’ thoroughly ecumenical vision was also based on the idea of the supremacy of the law: ‘So let the law be paramount, our country’s only guide.’ This leads to Rígas’ declaration of the rights of man, and his proposed constitution. Rígas’ rights follow closely those proclaimed a few years earlier in America and in France: equality, liberty, security of life and security of property. To these are added later in the document freedom of speech, of religion and of petition to authority. But Rígas makes it clear that the overriding right is the right to resist and if necessary overthrow an unjust government: ‘When the Government harasses, breaches, disdains the rights of the people and does not heed its complaints, then for the people or each part of the people to make a revolution, take up arms and punish their tyrants is the most sacred of all their rights and the most compelling of all their obligations.’3
The other rights which Rígas maintains all hinge on the law. Only the law can restrict a man’s freedom, not the whim of a judge; law is for the fault, so punishment is the same for all, and must fit the fault; legislation cannot be retrospective; a man is innocent until proved guilty. On the question of how actual laws are to be derived from the general law, Rígas is not clear; but then nor were many of his predecessors of the Enlightenment. He suggests that laws spring naturally from something like Rousseau’s general will: ‘The law is that free decision, that has come about with the consent of all people; for example, we all wish that the murderer be executed. And to take another law which is protecting us, we all wish to have authority over our property, no one therefore has permission to take anything from us by force. This is a law, because singly we accept it and we wish it.’4 And even more imprecise is a later article stating that ‘every citizen has an equal right with other citizens to combine to enact a law’.5
A number of Rígas’ specific proposals are very far-sighted. There must be civilian control of the military. The government must be open, so the public should have access to all details of taxation. The law should be known to all, so Rígas’ constitution must be inscribed on copper tablets and set up in every town and village. Rígas even proposes a form of welfare state to help ‘unfortunate inhabitants both in supplying them with the wherewithal to work, as well as giving the means of subsistence to those who can no longer work’.6
The value of Rígas’ contribution to the Greek cause was that he took the principles underlying the American and French revolutionary declarations and adapted them for Greece. His message was that Greece too could enjoy a constitution, and here is what its articles would actually say. With the help of his compatriots in Vienna, he was able to print and distribute his calls for revolt. Three thousand copies of the revolutionary declaration, constitution and hymn were produced in October 1797, and the hymn was sung over the next two decades throughout the Greek Orthodox world, even it was said in the Turkish capital.
While Rígas remained in Vienna he had been able to escape the attention of the autocratic and anti-revolutionary Austrian authorities. That he eventually fell into their hands was a matter of mischance and betrayal. In December 1797 Rígas with his faithful companion and biographer Perrevós set out for Trieste, sending ahead to a friend a letter and boxes containing copies of all his writings, the subversive ones at the bottom. The friend was away, but his business partner opened the letter and boxes and handed them over to the Austrian authorities.
When Rígas arrived in Trieste he was arrested. Perrevós, on Rígas’ instructions, sought the help of the French consul, who was prepared to say that Perrevós was a French citizen, and thus he escaped. Seventeen others were arrested with Rígas as members of a conspiratorial brotherhood and sent to Vienna for interrogation. Those with Austrian or Russian nationality were expelled from Austria. Rígas, after a failed suicide attempt, was handed over with the seven other Turkish nationals to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade, where on the night of 24 June 1798 all were murdered on orders from Istanbul and their bodies thrown into the river Sava; drowned while trying to escape, said their captors. In a story that can only have come from his executioners, an improbable source, it is reported that just before he died Rígas said: ‘This is how brave men die. I have sown; the time will soon come when my country will gather the harvest.’7
Rígas quickly became revered. When in 1809 Byron met the young Andréas Lóndos, later a revolutionary leader, the poet mentioned Rígas’ name, at which Lóndos immediately jumped up and ‘clasping his hands repeated the name of the patriot with a thousand passionate exclamations, the tears streaming down his cheeks’.8 In the next century Rígas’ portrait was appropriated by the Communist resistance to German wartime occupation, and his name was used by the secret society of students opposed to Greece’s military dictatorship of 1967–74. Rígas’ dying words may well have been apocryphal, but his name is still alive today as both prophet and proto-martyr of the Greek revolution.
Adhamántios Koraís was born in Smyrna, modern I˙zmir, in 1748, so was some ten years older than Rígas, but far outlived him. His youth, he tells us in his autobiography, was spent in efforts to get an education in a city where at that time it was almost unobtainable. The Greek school in Smyrna, only recently established, had a single teacher who provided ‘very poor teaching, accompanied by frequent beating’. Languages were Koraís’ passion. He found for himself teachers of Italian and French, but they differed from his Greek teacher, he says, only in that they taught him without beatings. Latin could not be learnt because the only teachers were the Jesuits, hated for their proselytising. Learning Arabic would mean a Turkish teacher, a prospect he could not stomach. When Koraís’ family silk business sent him to Amsterdam for six years in his twenties he continued his education there. After an unhappy return to Smyrna, devastated not long before by an earthquake and fire in which the family house was destroyed, he went in 1782 to Montpellier in southern France for six years’ study of medicine, and reached Paris in 1788 at the age of 40, his period of self-education at last completed.
Apart from his passion for learning, two other factors dominated Koraís’ youth: ill-health and hatred of the Turks. Of his health he says: ‘After my thirteenth year I began to spit blood, and I spat it incessantly until my twentieth year. From that time I did not cease spitting blood, but at long intervals, however, until my sixtieth year. For all this neither my unhealthy condition, nor the fear of worsening it, stood in the way of my thirst for knowledge.’9 Of his hatred of the Turks he says that it had been nourished in his soul since birth and that the devastation of Smyrna ‘transformed my abhorrence of living together with Turks into such a melancholy that I was in danger of falling into genuine madness’.10 For Rígas some Turks were potential allies; for Koraís all Turks were obsessively loathed.
Koraís arrived in Paris in May 1788, and fell immediately in love with the city, its cosmopolitan bustle, its learned men, its academies and libraries. This, he wrote wistfully to a friend the following September, was what ancient Athens must have been like. To earn his living Koraís turned, like Rígas, to translations, mainly from the ancient or the later Hellenistic Greek into French. He was also keen to alert the French to the situation in Greece, as he did in his Mémoire sur l’état actuel de la civilisation en Grèce, delivered to an attentive human rights society in 1803.
Koraís did not translate, as one might have expected, any of the books of the French Enlightenment into Greek, though he was well versed in their ideas and spoke in glowing terms of the compendium of their theories, L’Encyclopédie. His main effort was the production of his ‘Greek Library’, translations of ancient Greek authors into a form of modern Greek, which eventually reached some thirty volumes, each preceded by an introduction. These introductions, which he called ‘Impromptu Thoughts’, were not simply scholarly essays, but were used by Koraís to make rousing personal appeals to his fellow countrymen. The introduction, written in September 1821, to Aristotle’s Politics gives the flavour:
I can write no more, beloved fatherland, prevented as I am by the turmoil in my heart, which paralyses my hand and darkens my eyes with tears. I was a willing exile from your bosom, unable to bear the sight of your daily torments from the lawless acts of the barbarians. In these last days of my painful life I have learnt, beyond all my hopes, that your liberty, which had withered under the tyrants, has blossomed again. I shall not see or learn of its fruits, as I shall soon depart this life, but I pray that they may be abundant and beautiful for all your children, my own brothers.11
Such a statement was intended, of course, for a far wider audience than the learned, and here Koraís faced a difficulty: in what form of Greek should he write? The written and the spoken language had begun to diverge from around 300 BC. The archaic written form, the only one considered suitable for serious works, had remained very close to its ancient classical ancestor, while the demotic spoken form had developed along paths of its own, generally simplifying grammar and syntax and incorporating foreign words, especially from Turkish and Italian. The spoken form was understood by all, the written form only by the educated. By the time of Koraís, there were two opposed schools of thought about the language to be used to enlighten and educate the Greeks: those who believed that only a form close to ancient Greek would properly reflect the nation’s heritage, and those arguing that to spread the message widely it was essential to write in the language of the people. It was as if a serious writer in English was constrained to choose between writing in Anglo-Saxon or writing in the Dorset dialect of, say, William Barnes.
However, more numerous than either of the opposed groups were the compromisers, including Koraís, who favoured for his works a language that was largely based on the structure of the spoken variety, but retained many ancient features and rejected foreign importations. This last element gave Koraís’ form of Greek its name, katharévousa or purged. Koraís was not an innovator but was certainly a trail-blazer in the development of a new, more accessible Greek. What, in his publications and copious worldwide correspondence, did he use it to say?
Koraís’ main preoccupation was with education. It had been the basis of the French Revolution, he believed: ‘I had learned that the increase and spread of education in the French nation gave birth to the love of liberty.’12 He also attributed military success to education: ‘the amazing French victories were the result of learning’.13 He encouraged rich Greeks to ‘multiply throughout Greece schools and libraries; at common expense send promising youths to Europe, that they may bring her benefits back to you; and entrust to them the education of our people’.14 When in 1802 the people of Soúli in north-west Greece were in the last stages of their resistance to the attacks of Ali Pasha, he advised them, as Albanian speakers: ‘When you have a little peace, bring to your country a teacher to instruct your dear children in the Greek tongue. When the warriors of Soúli learn from what ancestors they have sprung, nobody will be able to defeat them, either by guile or by force.’15
The results of education were, in Koraís’ view, almost guaranteed: in his metaphor, if the seed was planted in the right conditions, the plant would inevitably bear fruit. Education would ensure not only the achievement of independence but also the establishment of a proper constitution for the new state. But if education was essential to the success of a revolution, and the process of reviving and reinvigorating Greek education was only beginning in the first years of the nineteenth century, it followed for Koraís that revolution must wait, in his view till 1850 or later. He held this opinion consistently, expressing it well before the revolution (1807: ‘our people need at least fifty years of education’), during the revolution (end of 1821: ‘the event has come too soon for our people, who have not yet enough learning to understand their true interest; if it had come twenty years later …’), and after independence (1831: ‘the Greek rising was fully justified, but inopportune; the right time would have been 1850’).16
The two revolutions which he saw as models were the French and the American. Koraís was guarded in his comments on the later brutal developments of the French Revolution, but whatever the rulers of France did the French people retained Koraís’ esteem. The United States, of course, had no interests to defend in Greece, and Koraís warmly approved of the Americans, corresponding with President Jefferson and with the ardent philhellene Edward Everett.
We have come to the end of causes and people of whom Koraís approved, and must now turn to his hates, which were many and fierce. First on his list of antipathies were, of course, the Turks, ‘that race of sodomites’. The other European powers, always excepting France, fared little better. He suspected Russia of ‘pushing us forward to tame the wild beast so that they can then strike the final blow’,17 leading to a Greece occupied by Cossacks. The English, ‘uncircumcised Turks’, were to be distrusted because they too were simply pursuing their own interests. Special ire was reserved for the church, though Koraís himself was devout. He blamed it for the neglect of education, and for preaching obedience to the Turkish government: the Paternal Exhortation of 1798, enjoining submission, drew a forceful reply from Koraís, which he entitled the Brotherly Exhortation, and in which he proclaimed ‘the inalienable right of the oppressed to seek every means to throw off the yoke of tyranny’. In a telling contrast he pointed out that just as the Paternal Exhortation was being written Rígas and his followers were being martyred: ‘Perhaps at that very moment the knife of the executioner was descending on their sacred heads, their noble Greek blood was flowing from their veins, and their spirits were rising up to join the blessed souls of all who had died for freedom.’18
What then are we to make of Koraís’ contribution to the Greek movement for independence? He insisted on the importance of education, and his urging of rich merchants to spend their money promoting education was a sensible practical step. To Koraís too can be attributed the promotion and diffusion, if not the invention, of a form of Greek, katharévousa, which as well as helping to disseminate education would provide the linguistic bond of the new state. ‘Language is the nation,’ he wrote. On the other hand, though, Koraís’ insistence on education came to smack of single-issue fanaticism. To tell the starving war-weary Souliots to go home and learn Greek showed little appreciation of the realities. A similar myopia affected him in international matters. He blamed the powers of Europe, particularly Russia and England, for pursuing their own interests. It does not seem to have occurred to him that all nations, including the Greeks, pursued their own interests, and that salvation lay in finding ways to make the interests of other nations coincide with those of Greece.
Some of the ideas of both Rígas and Koraís were impractical if not daft. Even their practical proposals were in some ways tangential to the revolution which actually happened: Rígas wanted a different struggle, involving all who suffered from Ottoman rule, and Koraís wanted liberation to come much later. But each was a force for change by disseminating Enlightenment ideas, by articulating a commitment to a regenerated nation, and by the passionate rhetoric each used to advocate it. It is that commitment which is symbolised by their supportive hands ready to raise to her feet the suffering maiden Greece.