Centaurs and the Lapiths

My dissertation was on travelers to Greece from 1676-1900.  These Europeans started visiting Greece when the Ottoman Porte began to allow foreigners in, and published travel memoirs describing what they saw.  One of my favorites is John B.S. Morritt of Rokeby who traveled in 1794-1796 at age 22, just after he graduated from Cambridge.  His letters to his mother, sister, and aunt were published, and I loved him most because the voice in those letters is so human and the youthful character is so clear.  Writing to his female relations, he puts many descriptions in terms he knows they will understand, "How much more wonderful it is when we recollect that these buildings were chiefly made by a people whose whole territory is not so large as half Yorkshire, and built, under Pericles at least, in the time of an unsuccessful war!"

He also seems to embody the perspective of so many of those early colonial travelers, which is to say extreme admiration of ancient Greece combined with exasperation at modern Greece, and Greeks.  "at first we lodged with the Consul, who is poor and a Greek, two circumstances which together always make a man a scoundrel. Finding we were cheated by everybody we employed, we left him and took a house of our own, so we are now Athenians."  Yes, indeed, "we are now Athenians."  

But he wasn't an Athenian, he was an Englishman, and a Philhellene who wanted to take Greece back with him, and he had the resources to do it.  As he enters Athens from Pireaus, he comes upon the Hephaisteion: "The object which, next to the citadel, embellishes it most is the little [so-called] temple of Theseus on a low, green hill at the end of the town. It is absolutely entire, and is at present a modern Greek church. The only changes it has undergone is in roofing the inside, which was in the ancient temple, I believe, open, and the unroofing of the portico between the pillars and the body of the temple, where the people assisted at the sacrifices."

As he gets up close, he notices the amount of destruction of the figures, and tries to understand who would do such a thing.  "The heads of all are mutilated, and it must have taken some pains to destroy them so much. Indeed, I hear they were destroyed prior to the Turks, in the barbarous ages of Christianity, and by order of the Greek Emperors, who, adopting the zeal of the iconoclasts, broke them as idolatrous ; and, indeed, the Turks, though they repair nothing, generally don't give themselves much trouble to destroy things placed so high as these are, which seems rather to have required the animation of bigotry, as well as the blindness of barbarism."

Centaurs and Lapiths on the Hephaisteion

Another view of the centaurs and lapiths

But there are also centaurs and lapiths on the Acropolis, and Morritt describes their "rescue" which to me sounds an awful lot like destruction:  "We have just breakfasted, and are meditating a walk to the citadel, where our Greek attendant is gone to meet the workmen, and is, I hope, hammering down the Centaurs and Lapithae, like Charles's mayor and aldermen in the " School for Scandal."

He closes his letter again as an inhabitant of Ancient Athens, as he describes its removal for England:

"I am wanted by the Centaurs and Lapithae. Good bye for a moment. Scruples of conscience had arisen in the mind of the old scoundrel at the citadel ; that is to say, he did not think we had offered him enough. We have, however, rather smoothed over his difficulties, and are to have the marble the first opportunity we can find to send it off from Athens. I, only being sensible of the extreme awkwardness of Grecian workmen, tremble lest it should be entirely broken to pieces on taking it out ; if any accident happens to it I shall be quite crazy, as now there is nothing damaged but the faces and one of the hands. If I get it safe I shall be quite happy, and long to show it you at Rokeby. Yours, J. B. S. Morritt."

Whenever I see Centaurs and Lapiths, for the last 20 years, this is what I think about.