Contacts With Greece
Greece and Britain. By Stanley Casson. (Collins. 75. 6d.)
A BOOK like this is a little hard on the author. It is the first of a new series on Britain's relations with various individual countries, analogous to the well-known Britain in Pictures series. In this case the pictures are so admirably chosen and so excellently repro- duced that till they have been studied one by one in detail no reader is likely to be able to concentrate attention on the text. If three or four are to be picked out for special .mention they must be the colour reproductions of Clarkson Stanfield's " St. Michael's Mount " and Dodwell's " Larissa " and the black-and-white of Zoffany's Charles Townley and his collection and Mytens' Earl of Arundel and his Greek marbles. • Colonel-Stanley Casson, set to trace the connexion between Greece and Britain through the centuries, has no easy task, for contacts between the two countries, apart from our share in the common heritage of eassical Greece, have been neither numerotis nor close Compelled to make the most of what material there is, Colonel Casson is always interesting, but not invariably convincing. His assertion, for example, that between 2000 and 1500 B.C. " a trade intercourse, exiguous but definite, existed between our islands and Minoan Crete or Mycenaean Greece " rests rather inadequately on a resemblance between burial methods and between beads found in Bronze Age graves in Wiltshire and in Bronze Age Greece ; and " a late Roman rhymester called Festus Rufus Avienus " (fourth century A.D.) can hardly be accepted as indisputable authority for facts about a Greek mariner said to have reached Britain in the sixth century B.C. With Pytheas, a Greek captain from Marseilles, we get on firmer ground, even if contact with Massilliot Greeks is not quite the same thing as contact with Greece, and the story of the intrepid mariner's circumnavigation of the British Isles makes engrossing reading. In discussing Byzantine influences on English architecture and art, Colonel Casson draws largely and effectively on the contents of the treasure- ship discovered at Sutton Hoo. in Suffolk just before the war broke out, and for that reason never studied or discussed as its unique importance merited.
Coining down to the nineteenth century and after, Colonel Casson emphasises, of course, the depth of British sympathy for Greece during her War of Independence, when Byron died at Missolonghi and Codrington destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleets at Navarino. He touches rather lightly on the turmoil of politics in twentieth- century Greece, with the various abdications and restorations, and is definitely misleading when, referring to the Corfu incident of 1923, he says that " Mussolini withdrew in humiliation." On the contrary, unhappily, the Duce withdrew in triumph, with his black- mailer's claim of 50,0oomo lire indemnity sustained to the last centesimo by the Conference of Ambassadors.
H. W. H.
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