_ had arisen, in close contact with the professional life of
western Europe, and equally responsive to the new philosophical and
political ideas that were being propagated by the French Revolution.

This intellectual ferment was the most striking change of all. Since the
sack of Constantinople in 1204, Greek culture had retired into the
monasteries--inaccessible fastnesses where the monks lived much the same
life as the clansmen of Suli or Agrapha. Megaspelaion, the great cave
quarried in the wall of a precipitous Peloponnesian ravine; Meteora,
suspended on half a dozen isolated pinnacles of rock in Thessaly, where
the only access was by pulley or rope-ladder; 'Ayon Oros', the
confederation of monasteries great and small upon the mountain-promontory
of Athos--these succeeded in preserving a shadow of the old tradition, at
the cost of isolation from all humane influences that might have kept
their spiritual inheritance alive. Their spirit was mediaeval,
ecclesiastical, and as barren as their sheltering rocks; and the new
intellectual disciples of Europe turned to the monasteries in vain. The
biggest ruin on Athos is a boys' school planned in the eighteenth century
to meet the educational needs of all the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire,
and wrecked on the reefs of monastic obscurantism. But its founder, the
Corfiot scholar Evyenios Voulgaris, did not hesitate to break with the
past. He put his own educational ideas into practice at Yannina and
Constantinople, and contributed to the great achievement of his
contemporary, the Khiot Adhamandios Korais, who settled in Paris and there
evolved a literary adaptation of the Romaic patois to supersede the
lifeless travesty of Attic style traditionally affected by ecclesiastical
penmen. But the renaissance was not confined to Greeks abroad. The school
on Athos failed, but others established themselves before the close of the
eighteenth century in the people's midst, even in the smaller towns and
the remoter villages. The still flourishing secondary school of
Dhimitzana, in the heart of Peloponnesos, began its existence in this
period, and the national revival found expression in a new name. Its
prophets repudiated the 'Romaic' name, with its associations of ignorance
and oppression, and taught their pupils to think of themselves as
'Hellenes' and to claim in their own right the intellectual and political
liberty of the Ancient Greeks.

This spiritual 'Hellenism', however, was only