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Agostino Capodistrias, brother of the assassinated president, who had been chosen president by the National Assembly on December 20, 1831, was ejected out of the presidency by the same assembly in April 1832, and Prince Otho of Bavaria was elected King of Greece. Otho, accompanied by a small Bavarian army, landed from an English frigate in Greece at Nauplia on February 6, 1833.
It was true, the thought had crossed his mind several times since he had quitted Nauplia that, after all, it was a great relief to be quit of Baldassarre, and he would have liked to know who it was that had fallen overboard. But such thoughts spring inevitably out of a relation that is irksome.
"I sailed last from Nauplia," said Tito; "but I have resided both at Constantinople and Thessalonica, and have travelled in various parts little visited by Western Christians since the triumph of the Turkish arms. I should tell you, however, Messere, that I was not born in Greece, but at Bari. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in Southern Italy and Sicily."
When, therefore, we turn to the history of the kingdom, our disappointment is all the more intense, for in the first fifty years of its existence there is little development to record. In 1882 King Otto's principality presented much the same melancholy spectacle as it did in 1833, when he landed in Nauplia Bay, except that Otto himself had left the scene.
Shortly after Lord Elgin had cleared the entrance, Gell and Dodwell found various pieces of green and red marble carved with geometrical patterns, some of which are reproduced in Dodwell's book. Gell also found some fragments in a neighboring chapel, and others are said to be built into a wall at Nauplia.
Hearing that Antigonus was encamped upon one of the heights near the city, he himself pitched his camp at Nauplia. On the next day he sent a herald to Antigonus with an insulting message, challenging him to come down upon the level ground and fight. Antigonus answered that he should fight only when he chose, but that if Pyrrhus was weary of his life, he could find many other ways to die.
Let me remind you of that passage in which Rabelais borrowing, I believe, from Lucian brings the good Pantagruel and his fellow-voyagers to a port which he calls the Port of Lanterns. Also we saw the Lanterns of Pharos, of Nauplia, and of the Acropolis of Athens, sacred to Pallas, and so on; whence I draw the moral that coast-lights are good, yet, multiplied, they complicate navigation."
But in July 1832 the sultan recognized the sovereign independence of the kingdom of Hellas in consideration of a cash indemnity; and in February 1833, just a year after the first overtures had been made, the appointed king arrived at Nauplia with a decorative Bavarian staff and a substantial loan from the allies. The Consolidation of the State Half the story of Greece is told.
He is, however, entirely ignorant of any other species of warfare, and is not sufficiently civilized to look forward for any other advantage to himself or his country than that of possessing the mountains and keeping the Turks at bay. He proposed destroying all the fortresses except Nauplia. 'Twas an error of Mavrocordatos to have made this man an open enemy to himself and to organization.
The garrison of Nauplia capitulated in December, on condition of personal security and liberty, and the captain of a British frigate, which arrived on the spot, took measures that the compact should be observed instead of being broken by the customary massacre. But the strongest fortress in Peloponnesos was now in Greek hands. In the north-west the season had not passed so well.
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