The Mirage of Greek Continuity: On the Uses and Abuses of Analogy in Some Travel Narratives from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract P. Walcot’s influential book Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern (1970) best illustrates the mirage of Greek continuity and the persistence of ‘an uncritically survivalist argument’.His ‘ancient peasants’ include not only ‘Hesiod and his fellow Boeotians’and ‘early Greek peasant society’,but also Greek society in the classical period, since Walcot, following a suggestion of the sociologist A. W. Gouldner, argues that the set of values of the early Greeks were identical to those held by fifth and fourth century Athenians, supporting his claim with a series of random quotations from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and from Greek tragedy. As for his ‘modern Greeks’, they come from the mountain villages studied by contemporary ethnographers such as Friedl (Vasilika ), Campbell (the Sarakatsani), and Peristiany (the Pitsilloi), as well as from the Aegean islands described in a report written in 1886 by the ‘folklorist-traveller’ Theodore Bent.