March 8, 1919

Three of the strangest looking men wandered into my office yesterday morning. Their dark mysterious faces and their stealthy tread excited the suspicions of our guardian sailors, but soon they produced a letter from Venizelos which authenticated their mission. The Greek Premier said they were the properly accredited representatives of the Overseas Greeks, as yet “unredeemed,” of the Euxine Pontus (better known in the western world as the Black Sea). But on closer inspection of the letter from the Cretan mountaineer and guerilla fighter, who in the last ten years has developed into the smoothest of diplomats, it appeared that it was couched in more reserved terms than was usual in his writings.

“Down to the present,” he said, “our Council of State has not decided to include the colonies or settlements which these gentlemen so worthily represent in the picture of Greater Hellas which we are about to present to the Conference. Yet these, our noble kinsmen, are in great need of supplies, indeed of even the bare necessities of life, and I am writing in the knowledge that their unfortunate plight will excite sympathy in America, from where alone help can come.”

House told me to take them to the Food Administration; it was a walk of several parasangs, but I enjoyed every foot of it. We talked about the misnamed Anabasis and it was as fresh in their minds as the retreat from Mons in mine.

Hoover¹ received us with his most ferocious glare. They were all of a tremble, and my knees, too, were knocking together. In a quavering voice one of them told their story in a sort of bastard Italian, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, and I passed it on to Hoover as best I could. He told how all navigation on the Black Sea had been arrested by the war conditions, and so no longer could their usual foodstuffs reach them from South Russia; and how outside Trebizond Anatolian bandits were lurking so that the peasants in the interior, the few who had any, did not dare to bring their produce to town. With what seemed a contemptuous smile, Hoover listened and then, just as I thought he was going to have us all thrown out through the open window by the side of his desk, he said: “Tell ’em I’ll feed ’em. They must be here tomorrow—sharp at nine—and we will work out the details.”

For five minutes the Pontus Greeks confounded themselves in salaams and genuflections, but Hoover paid no further attention to them. He had lit another cigar and with sheafs of telegrams in his hand he was immersed in other tales of woe.

The delegation was so jubilantly excited that I did not dare to leave them alone in the mazes of traffic outside. I walked them another parasang or two to a boulevard café and ordered drinks which I hoped would prove soothing. Several of their countrymen who were lurking in the background joined us and all burst out in paeans of victory. They agreed that Mr. Hoover was the greatest man who had lived since Alexander and that I was evidently a favorite son of Hermes. I wanted to hear something about the war as viewed from their distant standpoint and also about their relations with Mother Hellas, and they were not at all loath to enlighten me.

“We, too, helped not a little in winning the war,” one asserted. “Of course, our war chariots of the Homeric days were the forerunners of the tanks.”

Soon they were telling me the story of the fate of their nation, alas, for so many centuries submerged by the unspeakable Turks.

“We represent the oldest overseas Greek colony in the world, several centuries older than Marseilles; of course, to us the French port is a mere parvenu,” they insisted. “Our noble city of Trebizond [on the Black Sea], the Attic atmosphere of which none of the barbarian hordes has been able to destroy, should really be called Xenophonopolis. Now this is why: When Xenophon brought his men back from the Persian campaign with Cyrus and once again they were all cheered by the sight of the Pontus, ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I want to found a great city—a home for the overseas Greeks, a bulwark of Hellenism against the barbarians on the dark shores of the Great Sea.’ At first the plan was warmly applauded; with trained oxen the confines of the city that was to be were being drawn when —ah! that was terrible, I should not tell it—”

But I insisted, and at last the sad tale came out.

“There had slipped into that noble band of Greeks an unreliable soothsayer, a despicable sorcerer. We recall his name to cover it with infamy, and if you will allow me, I will now expectorate. (All three delegates spat in unison.) His name was Silanus of Arcadia. He had cozened up to Cyrus and extracted much money from him and he did not care about founding a noble city, a bulwark of civilization; he wanted to return home and ‘revel’ with his money. So he told the hoplites that Xenophon was deceiving them, that he had no thought of building for them homes; no, he was planning to lead them back into the deserts of Asia from which they had so recently and so narrowly escaped. And that sorcerer was a cunning man. Every time he consulted them, the entrails told the same story. They said, ‘Go home.’ So the great plan was defeated, or rather postponed for several generations, and Xenophon returned to Sparta where, though broken-hearted over the failure of his project, he had a good time hunting and raising dogs and writing histories.”

Stories of the founding of cities almost always start controversy, and this story of how Trebizond was or was not founded is no exception to the rule. One of the delegates would not admit that when the Ten Thousand reached the sea the shore where the noble city now stands was a lonely strand.

“It was not like that,” he insisted. “Ours has been a noble city, a Greek colony since the dawn of history, long, long before Troy. It is recorded in our archives that when the Ten Thousand arrived they were escorted by the City Elders to the Shrine of Hercules and there they made appropriate sacrifices to the conductor who had led them, not unscathed, but still safely, through many dangers, to the dancing sea.”

Quite an argument now arose, but I brought it to a conclusion by the statement that by going back to Xenophon their claims would have priority over all other colonial adventurers. It would most certainly suffice.

A few hours later Venizelos came back and thanked us warmly for bridging over the gap between Hoover and the Euxine Pontus.

“But I have told them that I cannot claim the south shore of the Black Sea, as my hands are quite full with Thrace and Anatolia. I told them to ‘go home, make all the money you can, and send it back to the mother country. If you do that, we shall always cherish you’ —and they went away well pleased.” Then, as an afterthought, the Greek Premier said: “Often it seems to me wiser, and certainly more helpful, to have commercial marts rather than political colonies beyond the seas. But for the contributions that came from them in a steady stream we never could have faced the financial strain of this cruel and most costly war. It was our merchants in Cairo and Constantinople, in Liverpool and in Norfolk, Virginia, who kept us afloat.”