Travellers in Greece – An Occasional Series 2. Robert Liddell

Robert Liddell (1908-1992) is at risk of becoming an unknown name. The author of a dozen or so novels, several academic works about fiction, and a 1974 biography of C.P.Cavafy (still, amazingly enough, the only literary biography in English of the Alexandrian poet), he also wrote three travel books about Greece and one about Constantinople/Istanbul. All of his books are now out of print and most are hard and expensive to source at second hand. His is a minor voice, no doubt, but the oblivion of his work would be an undeserved fate. The Cavafy biography is out of date but still useful. And the travel books, Aegean Greece (1954), The Morea (1958) and Mainland Greece (1965), certainly repay an investment of time and money in the catalogues of second-hand booksellers. Together, they cover most of Greece, including Athos but excepting Attica and Evia, Macedonia, Western Thrace, the Ionian Islands and Crete; they offer a richly sophisticated, multi-layered reading of Greek topography, culture and history. 

 

Liddell lived half of his adult life in Greece. He joined the British Council in Athens, when it first set up shop there in 1939. During the wartime evacuation, he moved to Egypt where he taught at the University of Cairo for twelve years. Returning to Greece in 1953, he worked at the University of Athens, until retirement in 1972. After 1947, he never returned to England and spent the last decades of his life in Greece. 

 

Liddell read Classics at Oxford and on graduating took up work in the Bodleian Library. It is clear from the three guidebooks that during those years he was travelling extensively in Greece with his younger brother Donald. In the course of time, Liddell became a fluent Greek speaker and acquired an extensive knowledge of the country, its literature, traditions, topography, religion and people. He was, therefore, extremely well placed to write the sort of learned cultural guides that are something of an exception in the genre these days. I emphasise cultural. Liddell was not at all interested in politics: Osbert Lancaster’s brilliant characterisations of the Greek political game in Classical Landscape with Figures (1947) and Kevin Andrews’s very real encounters with Civil War politics in The Flight of Ikaros (1959) are as far removed from Liddell’s approach as could be imagined. Fleeting and superficial references to the third round of the Civil War in Epirus, to the Cyprus crisis of the 1950s and to the general election of 1951, seen from distant Amorgos (‘nowhere could have been quieter’), are as political as Liddell allows himself to be. All else is loftily high-minded and Olympian.

 

Liddell was living in Athens when he wrote the three travel books and they represent a composite account of many years of travelling in the places described: some of the experiences come from his travels with Donald in the second half of the 1930s, others appear to date from the late 1940s, when he was resident in Cairo, or from the 1950s, when he returned to Athens. Their structure is basically topographical (like a gazeteer) but is often influenced by place-related narratives, such as myth. The opening chapters of Aegean Greece are, for example, structured around the notion that Theseus is the central figure of Aegean mythology: Liddell traces Theseus’ presence in Crete, on Naxos and Skyros, in the Argo-Saronic, at Troezen and across his adventure-strewn land journey to Attica, as he himself explores those places. In The Morea, of course, the descendants of Tantalos and Pelops (the houses of Thyestes and Atreus) take centre stage, particularly in the Argolid. 

Despite his earlier travels with brother Donald, Liddell usually travelled alone, though his journeys by car were sometimes undertaken with a specially hired driver (he is amusing about the habits of his Greek driver ‘Nick’). He also travelled by taxi, by train, in buses, on the back of mules, and - in the great tradition of British explorers of Greece - by foot. Roads were often bad and public transport put him in touch with the patient, indomitable and often garrulous spirit of the people. At sea, on the Aegean, he is funny and ironic about the sufferings of ferry-passengers (‘the stewards include the best and the worst of humanity’). 

 

Liddell was evidently an introvert exiled (voluntarily) in a nation of gregarious extraverts: he was most certainly not Paddy Leigh Fermor (‘How glad I am to be travelling alone - how cross I should be with anyone else’; ‘it is a great disadvantage to know Greek’). But his preference for his own company did not, seemingly, isolate him anywhere and he doesn’t appear to have been shy; on the contrary, he throws himself repeatedly into animated conversations, gatherings, social events, shared meals. He attends a party (γλέντι) on Siphnos and falls to wondering why obsolete English often provides the best means of translating Greek terms such as μάγκας (‘roaring-boy’) or ντερμπεντέρισσα (‘roaring-girl’). He gives great accounts of a wedding on Carpathos, ‘panegyrics’ (πανηγύρια) at Tegea and on Kasos, though he always maintains some distance (‘I did not let myself be drawn into closer participation in the feast’). On Nisyros he overhears a complex theological conversation; on Kalymnos he talks extensively to the sponge-divers (only a few years before Charmian Clift and George Johnston would head there). It’s a curiously engaging account by a diffident Englishman in a society where diffidence is abnormal.

 

Liddell was a pleasingly dyspeptic traveller, often complaining about his lodgings and the food. In the years of his travels, tourism was only just getting going and few places had hotels of a good standard. Before motorways, airfreight and reliable shipping, food supplies were very local and restricted, as Patience Gray would discover on Naxos. ‘Island food’, he comments, ‘is as nasty as anyone has ever said it was’. Poros has ‘the most dreadful food to offer; nor is the wine much better’, while ‘the cuisine of Syra is atrocious.’ To be fair, he didn’t like English cooking either (‘yet one never feels that English food will kill one’). In Greece, he was happy wherever there was fresh fish on offer; he gives luminous accounts of great meals on Siphnos and Kasos. Even in the 1950s, it seems, cuisine wasn’t always terrible (and, as I am happy to attest, is now everywhere miraculously transformed). 

 

Liddell undoubtedly loved Greece: its seascape, its landscapes, its human characters and its cultural richness. Indeed, he is among those many British travellers who have seen it as the lost Eden:

 

To some of us who most love the Aegean, it is like a type or foretaste of Paradise. In the mountains and dry streams of these wind-shaken islands our homesickness for ‘that imperial palace whence we came’ is soothed, we almost forget that we are exiles, and we recognize places where we have never been before. Here, more frequently than anywhere else, come those unsought and unseekable moments of penetrating bliss, of Wordsworthian joy and quiet, when ‘we see into the life of things’. 

 

Like many of us lovers of Greece, Liddell was happiest when surrounded by nature at its most sublime: either at sea or on land. If there is a mountain to climb, he tackles it (though, like me, he often gets vertigo); if there is a famous cave nearby, he enters it (though he usually gets claustrophobia and doesn’t get in very far: ‘I am something perhaps of a spelaeophobe’). He wrote enchantingly about remote places, marrying poetic, often romantic description with great topographical clarity and accuracy. Indeed, he had a topographical sense that reminds me most of William Martin Leake (1777-1860), whose ground-breaking accounts of the Morea and Northern Greece Liddell clearly knew well and admired. Like Leake, he could seemingly put a name to every mountain, every stream, every out-of-the-way classical, mediaeval and Ottoman fragment that he encountered, and yet do so without sounding pedantic or fussy. In this extract he enters the Vale of Sparta from Kalamata through the Langada pass:

 

Descending we entered the Langhadha or gorge of Trypi. The road has been cut or blasted as a terrace in the rock face. Here the stone is a brownish cream. Pillars rise up from the gorge and needles poke up from the sides. Perhaps there is nothing of the sort finer in Greece, with the exception of the broad calm gorge of Tempe. But the splendid Bouräikos, with its mountain torrents, must not be forgotten. The Langhadha is bone dry in summer. At Trypi there is a fine fountain. Near here is the chasm where the Spartans hurled criminals to their death, and whence Aristomenes, the Messenian hero, escaped holding on to a fox’s brush. But more beautiful even than the pass was the backward view of Taygetus, when we emerged into the plain of Sparta. This, perhaps the loveliest of the Morean mountains, with great bastions and deep mysterious clefts, rises so sheer from the level ground towards a long, jagged ridge. Whenever it can be clearly seen it is magnificent, as now when its summits, the great ‘five fingers’, were blue and bare. It is even better in early spring or in winter, when there is a brighter green on the lower slopes and the trees are golden with ripe oranges, and the peaks are besprinkled with snow.

 

Liddell’s knowledge of the flora of Greece was no less impressive than his topographical mastery. As he moved across the landscape, he was able to do that most human and necessary (but vanishingly rare) of things: to name the plants, trees and fauna that he sees. His eyes are particularly acute in the mountains and forests of the Pindus; his descriptions of walks there are masterful, evocative, aromatic.

 

Topography and mythology compulsorily set the scene. But it is his knowledge of history (ancient, mediaeval and modern), of the diachronic sweep of Greek literature, and of Greek culture in all its forms that really constitutes the tapestry of Liddell’s storytelling. In Mainland Greece, the history ranges from antiquity to early modernity: he is compellingly interesting and opinionated on the figures of the Greek Revolution (Androutsos, Botsaris, Trelawney); on Byron and Hobhouse; on Ali Pasha. In The Morea, he has material aplenty to co-ordinate several layers of Greek history simultaneously, and is particularly masterful in his use of the little-known Frankish history of Achaea. Who might have imagined that at Isthmia, where ‘at the Isthmian Games of 196BC Titus Quinctius Flaminius, the victor over Macedon, proclaimed the liberty of Hellas from taxes’, the Frankish Prince of Achaea would, in 1305AD, celebrate a great tournament, ‘sending messengers through all Frankish Greece to proclaim that seven champions had come from overseas to joust there’, such that more than a thousand knights and barons entered the lists?  

 

In passages like this Liddell came close to achieving an ideal that I suggested in a lecture given at the Benaki Museum in 2016: the ideal of releasing from the very stones of the Greek landscape three millennia of continuous, interpenetrating, overlapping, startling, wonderfully and specifically located histories and tales. Liddell’s knowledge of literature (modern, Byzantine, Frankish and ancient) was no less compendious. Music, dance, karaghiozi shadow-plays, gorgeous liturgies - all were of equal interest to him.

 

Interestingly, however, we learn very little in all of this about Liddell’s personal life. As mentioned, he tells us of the tours of Greece he made with his brother in 1936-8, and we sense his aloofness as a traveller in the 1950s. Liddell was gay, but, with one exception, we get only a few passing hints of this. In Mainland Greece, however, he tells us, unusually, of visiting a friend called Francis on an otherwise deserted island near to Evia. It took me some research to work out who this friend was. But it turns out that Liddell was a friend of Francis Turville-Petre (1901-1942), an English archaeologist who had made an important discovery in Palestine and from 1933-1938 was living on the tiny island of Ktyponisi, in the hope of securing permission to dig a Mycenean grave-mound closeby. Turville-Petre was colourful. Openly gay, from an aristocratic Roman Catholic family, flamboyant if highly nervous, he was a friend of W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and had been with them in Berlin in 1929-1931. There he  introduced Isherwood to Heinz Neddermeyer, who would become Isherwood’s boyfriend. In 1933, Isherwood and Neddermeyer visited Turville-Petre on Ktyponisi; the visit would be immortalised in Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel, Down There on a Visit (1962). Liddell too visited, around 1938:

[Francis] settled upon the islet of St Nicolas the Less in the bay, where he built a bungalow. I stayed there for some three days about five years later, when the building was over and life was less uproarious, though still very odd: Francis (a self-doomed Mycerinus) lived by night and slept by day.

 

A small but intriguing glimpse into Liddell’s social life. It would be interesting to learn more, though this might be a tough task now. Liddell rejected the idea of autobiography and is a challenge for would-be biographers: he routinely destroyed his friends’ letters and urged them to destroy his; he left no archive. Real writerly introversion!

 

An Englishman who fell in love with Greece and spent the last four decades of his life there, teaching English in the university, Liddell is a great example of a very specific Anglo-Hellenic temper. His learned and absorbing travel books have deepened my understanding of places I thought I already knew; they have tantalized me with descriptions of places I haven’t properly visited (e.g. Aetolo-Acarnania). They inform and entertain, and consistently make the most interesting and surprising of connexions. Let me close with a typical piece of his writing. The excerpt comes from Aegean Greece; the author is at Phry on Kasos:

 

The café (owned by the dentist) is better than tolerable. I live there, reading Shakespeare - brought up on Greek poetry and English landscape, I have chosen for myself the even greater beauties (as I think them) of Greek landscape and English poetry. Notes on Shakespeare get mixed up with notes on my travels; but then, notes on Shakespeare are apt to be notes on life. Surely the Mantuan apothecary’s shop (for instance) looked, and smelt, like a provincial Greek grocer’s?

 

                                                    About his shelves

                   A beggarly account of empty boxes,

                   Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,

        Remnants of pack thread and old cakes of roses…

 

John 

30 June 2021

Anglo-Hellenism: Anglicans and the Orthodox Part IIb. A Greek Archbishop of Canterbury

In my earlier two posts in this series of three, I looked at the relations between the English and Greek churches in two periods: first after the foundation of the Greek state in 1830 and then in the period between the English Reformation and the Greek revolutionary war.  

Before the correspondence in the early seventeenth century between Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria and Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury, there is no evidence of direct contacts between the English and Greek churches for nearly a thousand years. But on 27 May 669AD, a remarkable man, known in English as Theodore of Tarsus, arrived in Kent, as the duly consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, to take up position as the head of the Church in Great Britain. He was already 67 when he landed on our shores, but he steered the church with energy and skill for 22 successful years, leaving a legacy that endured for centuries and is still reflected today in the structure of the Church of England. He is the only Greek to have exercised primatial authority over the English Church and, like all the earliest archbishops of Canterbury, he is revered as a saint by Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans alike. 

 

The story of who he was, how he arrived here and what he achieved in England deserves to be more widely known. It rests primarily on two sources: first, the highly favourable account of Theodore’s archiepiscopacy in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum), written in the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow in the 730s; and secondly, inferences that can be drawn from the Biblical Commentaries written in the school established by Theodore himself at Canterbury.[1]

 

Bede tells us that Theodore died at Canterbury in 690AD, aged 88. He was born around 602AD, at Tarsus in Cilicia, the city of St Paul. At the time he was born, the Eastern Roman Empire still controlled Palestine and Syria, though that would end during Theodore's lifetime. He was Greek-speaking and was educated in the exegetical traditions of the theological schools of Antioch, most likely at Antioch itself. Many Syrians were bilingual and Theodore may also have acquired a knowledge of Syriac Christianity in its most important city of Edessa. It seems likely that he remained in Syria after the Persian occupation of 613, which was finally ended by Emperor Heraclius in 630AD. But he must have left his homeland no later than 636AD, when Syria fell to the Moslem Arabs. 

 

There is ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that Theodore spent time in Constantinople. The range of interests in the Canterbury Biblical Commentaries matches what is known of the university curriculum at Constantinople in the seventh century. Bede mentions Theodore’s knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, plus their secular and sacred literatures, alongside metrics, astronomy and mathematics; on top of which modern scholars add philosophy, medicine and Roman civil law. He may have gone to Constantinople either as a scholar or refugee (or both).

 

By 667AD, however, Theodore was in Rome, living as a monk among other refugees of the Arab invasions, probably in the Cilician Monastery of St Anastasius Magundat (a Syrian who had been martyred by the Persians in 628). In that year, Wighard, who had come to be consecrated as the successor to Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury, died unexpectedly of a fever in Rome. At first, Pope Vitalian turned to Hadrian, Abbot of the Monastery of Nirida near Naples, to lead the English church, but he refused and the choice eventually settled on Theodore. On 6 March 668AD, Vitalian duly consecrated him as Archbishop of Canterbury and sent him off to England, accompanied by Hadrian himself, who was to keep an eye on this very Greek archbishop, in case he stirred things up in England on the still unsettled monothelete controversy. 

 

In the event, Theodore turned out to be the greatest of all the early occupants of St Augustine’s throne. He arrived only five years after the Synod of Whitby had settled the argument between the Celtic and Roman wings of the Church about the dating and observance of Easter. Following the victory of the Roman party at Whitby, he was thus the first Archbishop to enjoy authority over the whole English church in the Kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Essex, Wessex and Kent alike. 

 

Ruins of St Augustine's (once St Peter's) Abbey

Together with Hadrian, whom he appointed Abbot of St Peter’s Abbey in Canterbury, he toured the English kingdoms, establishing his personal authority with the Anglo-Saxon monarchs and the Church’s often powerful and strong-willed hierarchs. He ordained bishops to long vacant sees; he split the powerful Northumbrian and Mercian dioceses, creating new sees at Hexham, Lindisfarne, Lindsey (northern Lincolnshire), Lichfield, Hereford and Worcester. Despite disruptions and changes arising from the Viking and Norman invasions, Theodore’s administrative reforms underpinned the basic territorial patterns of English dioceses until the Reformation and largely subsist still today. 

At Hertford in 673, he called the first synod of the Church in English lands, bringing canonical discipline to ecclesiastical and monastic administration. A second synod, held at Hatfield in 680, firmly established Catholic Orthodoxy across the Anglo-Saxon lands, proclaiming the authority of the then five Ecumenical Councils and the First Lateran Council (which had repudiated monotheletism). 

 

In 679AD, Theodore made the peace between King Egfrid of Northumbria and King Ethelred of Mercia, proving himself not only the master of the Church in England but also a major powerbroker in secular politics.

 

But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was his establishment, with the help of Abbot Hadrian, of the first great school of international learning in English lands.[3] Alongside the parallel foundation of the Monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow by Benedict Biscop, who had also accompanied Theodore from Rome to England in 668/9, the school at Canterbury brought advanced knowledge and intellectual method to England and set in train their transmission across the Anglo-Saxon centuries. From Canterbury and Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, the torch of learning was carried by men such as Aldhelm and Bede, until it reached its florescence under, e.g., Alcuin of York in the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries. 

 

St Theodore of Tarsus was buried in the Abbey of St Peter at Canterbury; his grave is still marked today in the abbey ruins.[2] Living before the Great Schism of 1054 between the Eastern and Western churches, he was in a unique position to mould the still nascent English church, intellectually and administratively, enriching it with the sophistication of Greek knowledge. He achieved this through an example of clear-sighted authority, commanding persuasiveness and personal holiness. The presence of this Greek saint in Canterbury in the early years of Anglo-Saxon Christianity never ceases to astound and inspire me. Truly he is one of the greatest saints of the English Church. His feast is celebrated on 19 September. He should not be forgotten. Αιωνία του η μνήμη.

 

John

Monday, 7 June 2021

 

[1] The relevant passages of Bede are largely in Eccl.Hist. IV (chapters 1, 2, 5, 12, 17, 21); his death is recounted in book V (ch.8). The reconstruction of Theodore’s intellectual life from the Biblical Commentaries is set out in Bernhard Bischoff & Michael Lapidge (ed.), Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); there is a useful summary in chapter 1 of Michael Lapidge (ed.), Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). 

[2] In the course of time, St Peter's Abbey was rededicated to St Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury. The abbey ruins are open for viewing and are managed by English Heritage.

[3] The career of Abbot Hadrian, an African, is almost as extraordinary and fascinating as that of Theodore himself. See the articles in the bibliography below by Michael Wood.

 

 

Further reading

 

If you have enjoyed these three blogposts and want to read more (or simply check out my sources), you can find much more in the following bibliography:

 

Bede, Historical Works II. Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Books IV-V. (trans. J.E. King) (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP 1930)

 

Bernhard Bischoff & Michael Lapidge (ed.), Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)

 

Stanley Casson, Greece and Britain (London: Collins, 1943)

 

William Chauncey Emhardt, Historical Contact of the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican Churches: A Review of the Relations between the Orthodox Church of the East and the Anglican Church since the Time of Theodore of Tarsus (New York: Department of Missions and Church Extension of the Episcopal Church, 1920)

 

Richard Clogg, Βρετανία και Ελλάδα (London: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 1995)

 

J.A.Cramer (ed.), The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (London: Camden Society, 1841)

 

Theodore E. Dowling & Edwin W. Fletcher, Hellenism in England: A Short History of the Greek People in This Country from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Faith Press, 1915)

D.E. Eichholz, 'A Greek Traveller in Tudor England', Greece & Rome 16.7 (Apr. 1947): 76-84

 

M. Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company (London: Routledge 1908)

 

Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2010)

 

Jonathan Harris, ‘London’s Greek Community’, in George Kakavas (ed.), Treasured Offerings: The Legacy of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St Sophia, London (Athens: Byzantine & Christian Museum, 2002): 3-8

 

Michael Lapidge (ed.), Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)

 

Robert Liddell, The Morea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958)

 

John Mole (ed.), The Sultan’s Organ: The Diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599 - London to Constantinople and Adventures on the Way (London: Fortune Books 2012)

 

Mark S. Nestlehutt, ‘Anglicans in Greece: The Episcopal Mission and the English Chaplaincy at Athens’, Anglican and Episcopal History 65.3 (1996): 293-313

 

Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Morea (London: Wm. Notts et al. 1689³)

 

Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 289-319

 

Dimitris Salapatas, ‘Anglican-Orthodox Relations: A Dead End or a Way Forward?’, Koinonia 63 (2014): 15-31

 

F.H.W. Sheppard (ed.), ‘The Greek Church (Later St. Mary's, Crown Street)', in Survey of London: Volumes 33 and 34 (London: London County Council, 1966): 278-287 (available at British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols33-4/pp278-287)

 

Bp. Theodoritos of Nazianzos, ‘History of the Greek Cathedral of Saint Sophia in London’ in Kakavas, op.cit.: 21-26.

 

Paul Watkins, ‘An English Church on Kythera’, Argo: A Hellenic review 11/12 (2020): 44-46

 

Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Frank Cass 1964) 

 

Michael Wood, ‘Anglo-Saxon Christianity’, BBC History Today (December 2017): downloaded (3 June 2021):

https://www.historyextra.com/period/anglo-saxon/michael-wood-anglo-saxon-christianity-refugees-hadrian-theodore-syria-libya/

 

Michael Wood, ‘The African who transformed Anglo-Saxon England’, BBC History Today (October 2020): downloaded (3 June 2021): https://www.historyextra.com/period/anglo-saxon/hadrian-clerk-libya-african-who-anglo-saxon-england/