“The moving row Of magic shadow shapes which come and go,” mentioned in Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam. “Here, on the green and village-cotted hill, is (Flanked by the Hellespont and by the sea) Entombed the bravest of the brave, Achilles; (They say so—Bryant says the contrary): And further downward, tall and towering still, is The tumulus—of whom? Heaven knows; ‘t may be Patroclus, Ajax, or Protesilaus; All heroes, who, if living still, would slay us. High barrows, without marble or a name, A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain, And Ida, in the distance, still the same, And old Scamander (if ‘t be he), remain; The situation still seems formed for fame— A hundred thousand men might fight again, With ease; but where I looked for Ilion’s walls, The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls. Troops of untended horses; here and there Some little hamlets, with new names uncouth; Some shepherds (not like Paris), led to stare A moment at the European youth, Whom to the spot his schoolboy feelings bear; A Turk, with beads in hand and pipe in mouth, Extremely taken with his own religion, Are what I found there—but the devil a Phrygian.”] “. . . ubi templum illi, centumque SabÆo Thure calent arÆ, sertisque recentibus halant.” —Æneid, i. 415. As a rule Turks despise the Christian races too much to take any trouble about converting them, but it is absurd to say that conversions are illegal. On the contrary, they are fairly frequent, and it is only necessary that the person converted should state publicly that his change of religion is due to his own free will. Cases of young girls embracing Islam are not rare. According to the law, minors wishing to become Moslems must be taken to the house of a respectable person, where a priest of their own religion can have access to them, and their change of faith is not legal until they are of age (which means in the case of a girl twelve or thirteen), but in practice every effort is made to isolate them in such cases from their friends and surround them with Mohammedans.] In the time of the Crusades the name varied between Attalie (or Attalia) and Sattalie (Sattalia). As it seems clear that it is derived from the founder, King Attalus, the S must be a later addition, and is perhaps to be identified with the Greek preposition els, which is responsible for such forms as Istambol (e?? t?? p????).] |
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