In more modern times the long struggle for Greek independence produced a crop of poets who, if they could not emulate the dignity and linguistic elegance of their predecessors, were none the less able to express their national aspirations in rugged but withal very tuneful verse which went straight to the hearts of their countrymen.  The Klephtic ballads played a very important part in rousing the Greek spirit during the Graeco-Turkish war at the beginning of the last century.  The fine ode of the Zantiote Solomos has been adopted as the national anthem, whilst the poetry of another Ionian, Aristotle Valaorites, and of numerous others glows with genuine and perfervid patriotism.  But perhaps the greatest nationalist poet that modern Greece has produced was Rhigas Pheraios, who, as proto-martyr in the Greek cause, was executed by the Turks in 1798, with the prophecy on his dying lips that he had “sown a rich seed, and that the hour was coming when his country would reap its glorious fruits.”  His Greek Marseillaise ([Greek:  Deute paides ton Hellenon]) is known to Englishmen through Byron’s translation, “Sons of the Greeks, arise, etc.”  But the glorious lilt and swing of his Polemisterion, though probably familiar to every child in Greece, is less known in this country.  The lines,

    [Greek:  kallitera mias horas eleuthere zoe,
    para saranta chronon sklabia kai phylake,]

recall to the mind Tennyson’s

    Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

[Footnote 109: 

    Let us unfurl the standards! 
    Let us cross the Balkans! 
    Shouting “Allah!  Allah!”
    Let us drink the blood of the foe! 
      Long live our Padishah! 
      Long live Ghazi Osman!
]

XXIX

SONGS, NAVAL AND MILITARY

"The Spectator,” September 20, 1913

A British Aeschylus, were such a person conceivable, might very fitly tell his countrymen, in the words addressed to Prometheus some twenty-three centuries ago, that they would find no friend more staunch than Oceanus: 

    [Greek:  ou gar pot’ ereis hos Okeanou
      philos esti bebaioteros soi.]

In truth, the whole national life of England is summed up in the fine lines of Swinburne: 

    All our past comes wailing in the wind,
    And all our future thunders in the sea.

The natural instincts of a maritime nation are brought out in strong relief throughout the whole of English literature, from its very birth down to the present day.  The author of “The Lay of Beowulf,” whoever he may have been, rivalled Homer in the awe-stricken epithets he applied to the “immense stream of ocean murmuring with foam” (Il. xviii. 402).  “Then,” he wrote, “most like a bird, the foamy-necked floater went wind-driven over the sea-wave; ... the sea-timber thundered; the wind over the billows did not hinder the wave-floater in her course; the sea-goer put forth; forth over the flood floated she, foamy-necked, over the sea-streams, with wreathed prow until they could make out the cliffs of the Goths.”