'In the language and manners of every Greek sailor and peasant the classical scholar will constantly recognise phrases and customs familiar to him in the literature of Ancient Hellas.' So the anxious tourist was reassured in the preface to the 1854 edition of Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Greece. The message was simple: on a Greek boat you will find yourself back with Odysseus ('the nautical contrivances and tactics of the ancients may be observed in daily use . . . the Greek seas are still as fickle as ever'); in a country cottage you will find yourself entertained by someone who could pass for Homer's swineherd Eumaeus. 'Even the ferocious attacks of vermin, which soon find out an Englishman, are exactly described in the graphic accounts given by Aristophanes of similar sufferings in Greek houses of old.'

LRB 18 August 2005 | PDF Download