Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 1596–1682 by Efterpi Mitsi

Author:Efterpi Mitsi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

42

The quote comes from Pythagoras ’ 404-line speech on the subject of eternal change, encompassing almost half of Book 15 and providing a unifying ground for Ovid’s theme which is represented in the many metamorphoses in the poem. Although it is arguable whether the speech is a serious philosophical essay, fusing Pythagoras’ teachings with those of Heraclitus, Empedocles, and the Stoics, or a spoof, 43 for Sandys, who would later translate Ovid’s poem, Pythagoras ’ theme of change from the creation of the world up through Rome’s imperial domination sustains his own allegory of ruins. Pythagoras ’ speech concludes with the most important exemplum of change, the fall and rise of cities and civilizations, linking philosophy, history, and poetry. Through these lines, Sandys emphasizes the significance of ruins as objects of metaphysical thoughts and imperial fantasies, at the same time acknowledging their ambiguity by adding right after the quote, “But those not at this day more than conjecturally extant” (20).

This ruined landscape, informed by Sandys’ classical vision and connected to his identity as a humanist, a reader, writer, and translator, manifests more powerfully than any other place the theme of mutability, the desolation and the fall of civilizations: “But now these ruines beare not altogether that forme, lessened daily the Turkes, who carried the pillers and stones unto Constantinople to adorned the buildings of the Great Bassas [Pashas]… Peeces of ruines throughout these plaines lie every where scattered” (22–23). The ancient sites are thus not only ravaged by time but also by Turkish ignorance and contempt for the city’s classical past. In Troy and Delos , Sandys realizes that it is indeed possible to ruin ruins. As a “ruin-elegizer,” Sandys belongs to a long tradition of lamentation over ruins. 44 His wavering between admiration and lamentation emerges in all ancient sites and cities, like Alexandria , “who hath nothing left her but ruins, and those ill witnesses of her perished beauties” (114).

His evocation of ruins together with the fragments from ancient poetry interspersed in his Relation recall the late-Renaissance paintings depicting landscapes of ruins, in which the human figure gradually diminishes until it becomes “a tiny marker of the enormity of the destruction that has been wrought in the scene.” 45 The traveler stands in the midst of the enigmatic ruins, which might or might be the remnants of Troy , rehearsing the historical repetition of decay and tragedy. Although ruins in Sandys’ tour are present as “petrified life,” “traces that mark the fragility of power and the forces of destruction,” 46 landscape is never static but transformed by the traveler’s Humanism and Protestantism and informed by his vision of the past and the future. The notion of landscape originated in the terminology of Renaissance painting; starting from the early fifteenth century in Italy and then spreading to Flanders and to the rest of Europe, it gradually signified the artistic and literary representation of the visible world. At present, landscape is seen as an “active and far more complex entity

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