GREECE: Empty Cradle

The first democracy was born in battle. The strong, proud people who in the Fifth Century B.C. routed the armies and navies of Darius and Xerxes at Marathon and Salamis created in the world a new kind of government while their strength and pride in victory were fresh and powerful. Athens of the Golden Age was an imperialism as well as a democracy, the first empire in history administered by a sovereign people. Its fleet ruled the Aegean and word of government by the people spread through the Mediterranean world as far as the mouth of the Rhone.

Demosthenes blamed the decline of Greece on the decay of patriotism among its citizens, the decay of probity among their leaders. After Alexander the Macedonian, many people conquered Greece. The Romans conquered it in the Second Century B.C. Thereafter the Hellenes, no longer masters of the civilized world, were overrun by Latins, Franks, Slavs, Bulgars, Turks. Their culture and even their language disintegrated. Their country was pauperized and depopulated. For 20 centuries the government they had devised was only a memory. Then democracy once more stirred in the world, on the shores of the Atlantic. A few patriots and idealists helped Greece to regain her independence from the Turks, but it was too late to restore her greatness. Poor, shabby Greece was only the empty cradle of democracy. For the last century Greece has maintained a precarious freedom by letting herself be played as a pawn in the game of international power politics.

Last week her independence again was threatened—by the successors of the Romans who conquered Greece in 146 B.C. Before World War II Greece accepted a British guarantee of independence, but last week Great Britain was fighting for her own life. So Italy’s Benito Mussolini, whose sense of vengeance, of history and of opportunity is as keen as Adolf Hitler’s, saw his chance to add a piece to his dreamed of 20th-century Mediterranean Empire.

Robin Hood’s Head. Italy’s pretext for stirring up trouble with Greece was the murder, some time in the last month, of an Albanian named Daout Hoggia. The Italian press claimed that Hoggia, an irredentist and a “sort of Robin Hood,” had been killed by Greeks, who chopped off his head and displayed it as a warning in villages where Albanian minorities live. The Greeks said that Hoggia was a bandit, that he was killed by fellow Albanians who fled to Greece, that so far as they knew his head was still on his corpse. Slim as the incident was, it served Italy as an excuse for reminding Greece of Albanian claims on an unspecified part of the ancient Greek province of Epirus, a corner of which, Ciamuria, was taken from Albania by Greece in 1914 after the outbreak of World War I.

At the same time Il Duce’s newspapers recalled that Italy had been ejected from Corfu by the League of Nations, that Macedonia had once been a part of the Roman Empire, that the Dalmatian Coast of Yugoslavia had once belonged to the Republic of Venice. Il Duce’s probable objective: to force Greece’s Premier-Dictator John Metaxas and Yugoslavia’s Premier Dragisha Cvetkovitch to go to Rome for an “Italian Salzburg,” at which Albania (as nominee for Italy) would get Dalmatia and at least a part of Epirus, Bulgaria would get a corridor to the Aegean Sea through Thrace, thereby cutting off Greece from her ally, Turkey, and softening her up for further demands.

Assumption Day. On the morning of Aug. 15, the old Greek minelaying cruiser Helle dropped anchor off the Aegean island port of Tinos, carrying an official delegation to participate in the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and bathe in the holy waters of that island. At 8:30, while crowds of celebrants strolled the harbor front, a torpedo clove the water beside the warship, exploded against a breakwater. A second torpedo missed the Helle and exploded before the village. A third found its mark, burst in the Helle’s boiler room. The Helle sank an hour and 15 minutes later. Casualties: nine dead (one of heart failure); 22 wounded, some by stone fragments.

Next day a squadron of Italian bombing and fighting planes attacked two Greek destroyers, the Vasileus Georgios I (King George I) and the Vasilissa Olga (Queen Olga), off the island of Syra in the Cyclades. The destroyers zigzagged and opened up with anti-aircraft guns. The warplanes flew away. Two nights before, Italian warships forced the Greek liner Attiki into Palermo, where authorities refused to let her continue her voyage.

The Italian Naval Attache at Athens formally apologized for the bombings. The sinking of the Helle, the Italian press angrily insisted, was the work of the British. This claim enabled the press to bring up another complaint against Greece: that British warships use Greek ports to take on supplies and fuel (a point of international law which is not yet settled), thereby spoiling the Italian blockade in the eastern Mediterranean.

At week’s end Dictator Metaxas still had not gone to Rome. Months ago it was reported that “Little John” Metaxas, who was interned as pro-German in World War I, was prepared to make no real resistance to moderate Italian demands (TIME, June 10). But last week Italian demands, though still unspecified, were not thought to be moderate at all. Threatened with losing his country altogether, Dictator Metaxas called Berlin by telephone. He had one card left to play: Turkey’s promise to go to Greece’s aid if she were attacked. Adolf Hitler, who wants no big trouble in the Balkans just now, might be inclined to call off his partner.