ABSTRACT
This is how Aristotle describes the ape in his Historia Animalium. Throughout his description Aristotle emphasizes those features that differentiate apes from all other animals and bring them closer to man. Twenty-two centuries after the composition of Historia Animalium, an English traveller to early nineteenthcentury Greece, Reverend Robert Finch, described the modern inhabitants of Greece as follows: “many of the Greeks resemble monkeys and baboons.”4 We
would not be far off if we attributed Reverend Finch’s provocative reversal of the Aristotelian comparison between apes and human beings not as much to his mastery of biological matters as rather to his frustrated romantic Hellenism. His approach to the “degenerated” Greeks recalls the attitude of the majority of his compatriots towards their colonial subjects. In his History of Jamaica (1774) for instance, Edward Long observed with comparable arrogance: “I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonor to a Hottentot female.”5 It seems that no other travellers to nineteenth-century Greece would have explicitly endorsed Finch’s specific appreciation of modern Greek beauty. Nevertheless, a great number of them shared his dismissive approach to the modern inhabitants of Greece.6 For them, modern Greece represented a perplexing amalgam of conflicting stereotypes: the quintessentially European (the ancient Greek heritage), and the exotic Oriental (the Ottoman political present).
