Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Shepherds and Yokels
Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 5th ed. (1931; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 230:
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It is not our cloistered Hellenists and city-dwellers but our shepherds and yokels who, in their daily occupations and habits of housekeeping, touch most nearly the ancient Greek — not merely the Greek of the unsettled early days and of the quiet Middle Ages, but the alert and enterprising citizen of fifth-century Athens.Id., translating from Henri Francotte, L'industrie dans la Grèce ancienne, t. II (Brussels: Société belge de librairie, 1901), p. 53:
'Go today into the recesses of the Ardennes and you will still find some of these children of the soil. You will meet the old-fashioned peasant, systematically ignorant of everything connected with commerce and industry, an aristocrat and a conservative in his own peculiar way, protesting against every novelty, and adding year by year to his ancestral store. An Athenian of two thousand years ago would have understood him: today he is but the last survivor of a vanishing race.'
