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Eric Glasgow: Eric Glasgow is a retired university teacher, Birkdale, Southport, Merseyside.
The story of the innumerable and diverse British philhellenes who struggled, often so actively and militantly, to support the Greek conflict with Turkey, before, during and after the Greek War of Independence (1821-32), has of course very frequently been described and documented, by both British and Greek historians. It is a moving and significant story, too, whose elements - of patriotism, liberation, and compassion - remain still to be heeded and acclaimed. On the other hand, in the heady fervour of such emotions - British as well as Greek - several rather less congenial facts have still to be entered and assessed. Byron's heroic death, at Missolonghi in 1824, is apt to disguise the inner nature of the British contribution to that struggle for Greek political independence during the first half of the nineteenth century. Much as the Greeks themselves, thereafter, acclaimed Byron as being typical of what the British had done for them, this is largely an understandable misunderstanding of the latter's role, which has somehow ever since remained with us, to confuse ensuing Anglo-Greek relations.
Moreover, the bulk of the Victorians - from Gladstone downwards - having been reared on the classics of Ancient Greece (Pericles, Homer, Plato, and Aristotle), were very tardy in giving up the Ideal for the Actual, in relation to the continuing identity of the Modern Greek State after 1832. Thus, when Gladstone - fresh from the eloquent intensities of his studies of the Homeric epic - went out to the Ionian Islands in 1858-1859, he was immediately and uncomfortably surprised that he could not understand very well Modern Greek language and literature, having frequently to converse instead in Italian (in which, usefully, he was fluent). Moreover, British philhellenes of the nineteenth century, perhaps rather unfairly, often learnt to distrust the chicanery, the mercenary greed, and the selfish dissensions, of the militant Greek warriors, comparing them to some exalted categories of nobility and humanism, imbibed from Homer and elsewhere. This disillusionment with the Modern and the Ancient, in terms of the realities of the Greek secular state, after 1832, persisted until at least the 1870s, even with Gladstone himself.
Political independence for Greece was one thing. Preserving...