The "Grand Tour," pioneered by the English as an educational device for the polishing of young gentlemen's aesthetic tendencies, had expanded by the eighteenth century to include Greece as well as Rome. Although the tour was intended to draw upon the classical studies of the traditional British curriculum, travel in the Ottoman empire (of which Greece was a part until 1831) was rather a more strenuous proposition than a visit to Rome with tutor and cicerone.
Many young men were lured to Greece by the thought of seeing the stones on which Pericles stood, but many others, particularly those Americans who in the nineteenth century had begun to follow in British footsteps, came in search of adventures to test their mettle.
While many gentlemen in process of becoming educated (or famous) tended to search out the ancient sites in order to write a travelogue, investigate Miltiades' tactics at Marathon, or be romantically inspired by the propinquity of the ruinous and picturesque, others of a more practical bent, many of them Americans, visited Greece to observe, reform, or join in battle with the contemporary population. These adventurers tended to see a more positive side to the modern Greek than did the classicists, who saw only a debased Slavo-Turkish race infesting the monuments of the long vanished Athenian democracy.
The American taste for adventure and lack of interest in ancient monuments is exemplified by the sole American character in Edmund About's romance, Le Roi des Montagnes (1856), set mostly in a robber camp in the mountains north of Athens. The hero of the story, who rescues the dithering Dutch and snobbish English tourists kidnapped by Greek bandits, is, of course, an American, a naval captain whose presence of mind saves the day.
This paper will consider just a few of those visitors to Greece who found the classical past and its reconstruction less interesting than the current struggles of the emerging Greek nation . Lord Byron, who although enthralled with the romance of the classical past, found the modern struggles of Greek and Turk equally worth immortalizing, and who wrote that giving his life for the cause of Greek liberty was more important than anything else he could do; the American socialist Albert Brisbane, who regarded the newly born Greek state as an opportunity to observe the 'nature of man' and ultimately devise the perfect political utopia; Samuel Gridley Howe, who actually established a model farming community in the Megarid and who likewise hoped to learn what was man's basic nature from these Greek peasants; and finally, the American William Stillman, whose idea of a jolly vacation was to join the rebellious inhabitants of Crete in one of their bloody insurrections against the "terrible and the turban'd Turk," and who lived to tell the tale.
Greece presented itself as a convenient stage for acting out many European morality plays, from the discovery of the noble savage, to the rescue of fair Greece from the infidel; from vaunting the superiority of western political and technical organization, to experiencing the lure of the unchanging orient as sensual paradise.
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