The Impact of Classical Greece on European and National Identities [4, 1 ed.] 9789004502277

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Neohumanism: Ideas, Identities, Identification
GREECE
The Classics and the Movement for Greek Independence
From Subservience to Ambivalence. Modern Greek Attitudes toward the Classics
Ideological Aspects of Contemporary Archaeology in Greece
GERMANY
Philhellenism, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism
Arnold Böcklin and the End of Neoclassicism
THE NETHERLANDS
A Nation without a Country. Classical Greece in the writings of Jeanne Gallien (1773–1830)
Classicism and the Dutch State during the 19th century
EAST AND WEST
La tradition gréco-romaine sur Alexandre le Grand dans l’Europe moderne et contemporaine: quelques réflexions sur la permanence et l’adaptabilité des modèles interprétatifs
Xerxes anno 1918: the Persian Wars as l’art pour l’art
POETRY AND LITERATURE
The Classical Element in Victorian Verse
Pompéi à la Grecque: A Roman City with a Greek Mask
Imaginary Systems: Simone Weil and the Iliad. An Interpretation of a Greek Classic

Citation preview

THE IMPACT OF CLASSICAL GREECE ON EUROPEAN AND NATION AL IDENTITIES

Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg

THE IMP ACT OF CLASSICAL GREECE ON EUROPEAN AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES PROCEEDINGS OF AN INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM, HELD AT THE NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE AT ATHENS, 2 - 4 OCTOBER 2000

EDITED BY

MARGRIET HAAGSMA PIM DEN BOER ERIC M. MOORMANN

J.C. GIEBEN, PUBLISHER AMSTERDAM 2003

No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in The Netherlands I ISBN 90 5063 398 6

CONTENTS

Pim den Boer, Margriet Haagsma, Eric M. Moormann Introduction Pim den Boer Neohumanism: Ideas, Identities, Identification

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GREECE

Richard Clogg The Classics and the Movement for Greek Independence

25

Paschalis M. Kitromilides From Subservience to Ambivalence. Modem Greek Attitudes toward the Classics

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Kostas Kotsakis Ideological Aspects of Contemporary Archaeology in Greece

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GERMANY

Glenn W. Most Philhellenism, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism

71

Suzanne Marchand Arnold Bocklin and the End of Neoclassicism

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THE NETHERLANDS

Josine Blok A Nation without a Country. Classical Greece in the writings of Jeanne Gallien (1773-1830)

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W.E.Krul Classicism and the Dutch State during the 19th century

13 7

EAST AND WEST

Pierre Briant La tradition greco-romaine sur Alexandre le Grand dans !'Europe modeme et contemporaine: quelques reflexions sur la permanence et l'adaptabilite des modeles interpretatifs

161

H. Sancisi-Weerdenburgt and W.F.M. Henkelman Xerxes anno 1918: the Persian Wars as /'art pour /'art

181

POETRY AND LITERATURE

Richard Jenkyns The Classical Element in Victorian Verse

215

Eric M. Moormann Pompei la Grecque: A Roman City with a Greek Mask

241

Kirsti K. Simonsuuri Imaginary Systems: Simone Weil and the Iliad. An Interpretation of a Greek Classic

267

a

INTRODUCTION

The European fascination with Classical Greece has a long and rich history and in many scholarly fields the continued influence of the classical ideologies of especially the nineteenth century can still be felt. Scholars studying Classical Greek culture, whether philologists, ancient historians, or archaeologists, are regularly confronted by this legacy of past, which includes often normative approaches to Classical Greece. Classical archaeology, for instance, still differs profoundly in its organization and approach to material culture from the field of European archaeology/prehistory, because classical material culture has traditionally been approached primarily as 'art' - a point of view inherited from Johann Joachim Winckelmann - whereas prehistorians have tended to study material culture as part of ancient social organization. Little wonder, then, that over the past decades a growing group of scholars has focused its attention on this interest in Classical Greece evinced by European scholarship in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much introspection has taken place concerning the way Classical Greek culture was and is validated in European society over time, as well as in the scholarly fields concerned. This has resulted in a large number of important publications, many by authors that contributed to this volume, which contains the proceedings of a colloquium held under the title The Role of Greek Classics in the Development of European and National Identities. We hope that both the colloquium and the volume you have before you will help foster further interest among both classicists and historians in this important aspect of European scholarship and cultural history. 1 The colloquium was organised by the Netherlands Institute at Athens from October 2"d to October 4th 2000 as part of the celebrations of the inauguration of its new premises. The initiative for this colloquium came from Pim den Boer, chair for Cultural History of Europe at the University of Amsterdam. 1

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INTRODUCTION

After the French Revolution, during the nineteenth century, the educational systems of most European countries were remodelled on a firm national framework. This period of neohumanism can be distinguished from Renaissance humanism by a prominent new national and political dimension. It seems paradoxical, but at the same time that the Greek classics were so strongly 'nationalized' that they became an inevitable part of the different national identities, they also came to be considered the cradle of a new European identity. Even during the period of strong empire- and nation building, when the intellectual and artistic past was appropriated by nationalism, the Greek classics remained a common European sousentendu. Before the nineteenth century the political and democratic dimension of Greek history had been largely ignored. With the growth of radical political movements, particularly in England and France, but also in other European countries, ideas about Athenian democracy became a source of inspiration and identification. Thus the theme of this colloquium, the reception of Classical Greek culture in eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, is quite broad both in scope and in its interdisciplinary perspective. This was a conscious choice on our part because one of the purposes of the colloquium was to define more specific topics for future colloquia, the present one being the first in a series. The international group of scholars that contributed to this event shed light on the theme from different perspectives and illustrated clearly how Classical Greece served as an inspiration in many different aspects of society. These can be broadly grouped as literature (K. Simonsuuri, R. Jenkyns, W. Henkelman and H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg), politics (G. Most, P. den Boer) visual arts (S. Marchand), and intellectual life (P. Kitromilides, K. Kotsakis, W. Krul, J. Blok, E.M. Moormann, P. Briant, R. Clogg). The colloquium was held as a table ronde. All of those invited gave a twenty-minute presentation on their topic which was followed by an extensive discussion. The papers published in this volume are extended versions of the presentations. We warmly thank all the participants for their contributions.

INTRODUCTION

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An interesting aspect that was highlighted and discussed during the colloquium, - especially in the papers of P. Kitromilides and K. Kotsakis - is the influence Classical Greece has had on western Europe as opposite to the role it played - and still plays - in Greece itself. Discussions like this are important - especially for a young 'foreign' institute, as nineteenth century ideology stood at the basis of the existence of many of the older 'foreign schools' in Athens. We therefore feel that the goal of this colloquium series is not only to accommodate and present new and interesting research on the reception of Ancient Greece, but we also see the colloquium series as a means to foster discussion on roles a foreign institute in Greece can play academically as well as culturally. We received considerable help during the preparation of this volume. We would like thank Irene Karantanis-Haakman, Steven Lancaster, Selina Stewart and Steven Hijmans for assisting in the editing of the texts. We are also grateful to Han Gieben for his support and advice. When we started planning this colloquium, we were of the opinion that the theme, Greek Classics and their use and influence in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both on a national and a European level, necessitated the involvement of an ancient historian. We asked Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, professor of Ancient History at the University of Utrecht, to coorganise this event. Heleen immediately accepted our invitation and with her excellent suggestions and contributions we were able to make further refinements in the chosen theme. She also prepared a paper on Louis Couperus, a Dutch author of the late nineteenth century, well-known for his novels on the ancient world. Unfortunately, Heleen would not see the final result. Soon after her visit to Athens in February 2000, her health sharply declined and she passed away in May of that year. Her notes were carefully assembled by her PhD student, Wouter Henkelman. Based on these notes and his own knowledge of Couperus he gave a presentation

IV

INTRODUCTION

on the colloquium and wrote the article in the present volume, for which we are very grateful. We dearly miss Heleen's enterprising spirit, her intellectual vigour and her strong sense of humour and we therefore dedicate this volume to her memory.

NEOHUMANISM: IDEAS, IDENTITIES, IDENTIFICATION Pim den Boer

The rise and fall of the influence of the Greek classics, and the classical tradition in general, on the development of European and national identities is a bewilderingly large subject. It is about ideas, identities and identification. It is the aim of the Netherlands Institute in Athens to stimulate research into this very general and complex theme. The aim is very ambitious, but the procedure is pragmatic. We hope that this first conference will be the beginning of a series of research projects on more specialised fields in literature, poetry, architecture, theatre, philosophy, historiography, the history of archaeology, museology, religion, medicine and science. The best way to start and to explain our intentions is to begin with the meaning of the key concepts involved: humanism and neohumanism, philhellenism and hellenism. The history of the concepts used by contemporaries offers an outline for a general periodisation of the rise and fall of the influence of the Greek classics in the nineteenth century. My approach is from a European perspective, that is to say: an attempt to transcend national borders and to indicate some similarities and contrasts between languages.

HUMANISM AND NEOHUMANISM

Humanismus is a German word introduced in the beginning of the nineteenth century (Ritter 1974, vol. 3, 1217). Much older is the word umanisti signifying the professors and students of the studia humanitatis, the study of classical texts, of humanities. It derives from the neo-Latin concept humanitas meaning knowledge of human affairs. The concept of humanism appeared for the first time in the title of a book in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the head of the Educational Board of the Kingdom of Bavaria in MUnchen, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766-1848), who used

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the term Humanismus in his attack on Philanthropinismus (i.e. the utilitarian ideas about pedagogy and education formulated during the Enlightenment). Niethammer' s Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterricht unsrer Zeit (Jena 1808) was directed against the Realschule, a school dedicated to practical knowledge and professional training. In reaction to these enlightened notions, one could perceive, according to Niethammer, the re-emergence of genuine philosophical thought putting spiritual ideals at the centre of the study program once again. The classics had become important again because, as Niethammer firmly believed, in no other period than antiquity could one find the perfect expression of the human spirit. In every domain of classical enterprise truth, goodness and beauty were perfectly expressed ('wahre Classicitiit in alien Arten der Darstellung des Wahren, Guten und Schonen in ihrer grossten Vollendung' (Niethammer 1808, 81)). It took more than a quarter of a century before the concept of humanism became more frequent in German and other languages. The word humanism entered English in the 1830's (Oxford 1989, vol. 7). The word humanisme entered French in the 1840' s (Robert 1985, vol. 5). 1 A crucial role in the spread of the concept of humanism was played by Georg Voigt with his influential Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (Berlin 1859). Due to Voigt's work, the concept of humanism became an historical category, generally accepted by the majority of historians as designating the period of the Renaissance in Italy (Ferguson 1948, 159). In the twentieth century humanism was also used to designate much earlier, medieval periods, but let us stick to the accepted sense and use the term to describe the pedagogical program based on the reading of classical authors, so remarkably successful since the fifteenth century in different European countries. The concept of neohumanism has a very different history. Neuhumanismus was used for the first time in German at the end of the nineteenth century by the famous professor of pedagogy in Berlin, Friedrich Paulsen, in his passionate and sweeping Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitii.ten (Berlin 1885). 2 With all due admiration for this seminal work, Paulsen 1 It

2

was accepted slowly, 'humanisme' is not mentioned in Littre (1878). A second enlarged edition was published in 1895, a third, again enlarged edition in 1919.

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was obviously a pedagogical propagandist, writing in the extremely nationalistic context at the end of the nineteenth century. It is not surprising therefore that his general interpretation and, in particular, this new concept of neohumanism is biased towards German-Prussian nationalism. Witnessing in his days the irresistible rise of Berlin to world power, Paulsen's judgement of earlier periods, and particularly the role of Prussia in education at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is replete with anachronism. According to Paulsen, neohumanism is another word for German-Greek humanism. He contrasts neohumanism sharply with old humanism, which is considered synonymous with Italian-Roman (French) humanism. In his view, old humanism stands for imitation, and new humanism for creativity. According to Paulsen, Greek language and literature became the main course of classical education in German education when the Prussian state was rebuilt after its annihilation by Napoleon. It began when the learned aristocrat Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), who stood in personal contact with leading Greek scholars of his time, was put in charge of Prussian education. Paulsen considered this the most decisive period in the history of education. It was actually an intermezzo of fourteen months (1809/1810) in Von Humboldt's career as diplomat and leisured scholar in Rome. For Paulsen, Von Humboldt was not only a great minister of education and founder of the University of Berlin, but also an inspired pedagogue who banished sterile imitation in Greek as well as in German from education. He was the creator of genuine education understood as the formation of spirit and taste through the study of the classical authors ('Bildung des Geistes und Geschmacks durch den Verkehr mit den alten Schriftstellem' (Paulsen 1919, 3)). This quasi-mythical interpretation of the educational reform in Prussia has been extremely influential, even up to the present, in and outside Germany· 3 The exaggeration of the role of Prussia in the study of Greek language and literature is the product of late nineteenth century Prussian nationalism. Whereas the triumphant Zweite Kaiserreich of 1871 owed so much to Prussian political leadership and military power, within the large territory of German speaking states, not to mention Europe, Prussia was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, nothing more than a small and vanquished 3

See for example Marchand's otherwise refreshing and stimulating study (1996, 24-31).

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kingdom. After the military defeat of Napoleon, Paris remained the cultural capital of Europe, the undisputed centre of global cultural hegemony. Here and in London the Greek classics were en vogue. At that time even Milnchen, the capital of the small kingdom of Bavaria, was more important than Berlin in promoting the taste for classical Greece in Europe. The anachronistic identification of Berlin as the one and only cradle of Greek studies blurs the fact that during the nineteenth century, in all European countries and also in Prussia, not Greek but Latin remained the most important language in the classical school program. To give a concrete example from Prussia: in the school program of 1812 24% (76 hours) was devoted to Latin and 16% (50 hours) to Greek; in the program of 1837 the proportion of Latin grew to 26% and that of Greek was reduced to 13% (Landfester 1988, 69-71). The fundamental difference between humanism and neohumanism is the nationalization of the humanities. It is this national colouring of nineteenth-century education that presents the greatest contrast to the traditional education of the Ancien Regime. In so far Paulsen was right: old humanism was more universal and less nationalistic (Paulsen 1919, 2). The overwhelming influence of nation building in the nineteenth century was also evident in classical education. It is a general European, not specifically German, phenomenon. Let us therefore reserve the term neohumanism for the nineteenth-century form of humanism in which the study of the classics was influenced by modem nation building. But what exactly does this influence entail? At the end of the nineteenth century the modem popular nationalist movements in European countries often considered the classical education in the gymnasia and lycea as an old-fashioned obstacle to real modem national education. It was only then that the fundamental tension between nationalism and classicism became blatantly apparent. In the middle of the nineteenth century however, the idea that one's own nation was built on the fundament of antiquity had become an integral part of classical education in Germany, England and France. The individual identification with the classics, which had been prominent from Petrarch to Winckelmann, was widened to a more general, national identification. Or to put in a historiographical perspective: classical Greece was considered a cornerstone in the construction of

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national identity in different European countries. In the political context of the nineteenth century this introduced a new and potentially revolutionary dimension of the study of antiquity. In the omnipresent process of nation building, the radicals could look for liberal inspiration in the classical republics. When the Athenian polis was identified as the birthplace of freedom, or of democracy even, then the study of antiquity could become a threat to the order recently re-established in Europe after the turbulent Age of Revolutions. In the German kingdoms and the Habsburg Empire the spread of liberal ideas in universities and the press was silenced by the Carlsbad decrees of 1819. In France the old Bourbon monarchy became an almost comical imitation of the old order. In England after Peterloo, as the radicals called the massacre at St. Peter's Fields in Manchester in 1819 that ended a demonstration demanding universal male suffrage, the expression of liberal ideas was severely suppressed. In the long history of Christian education, the Greek classics had become a hardly distinguishable pre-Christian legacy. Since the Renaissance however, the corpus of Greek classics has been hailed as the mother of literature, philosophy, art and science. As long as monarchies dominated undisputed, the classical republican tradition was not virulent. But in spite of the repression during the nineteenth century, the political landscape of Europe changed radically, and so did classicism, even when republican politics was left out of it.

NEOCLASSICISM

Neoclassicism is commonly used as a term for the new sensibility towards the Greeks, which developed in the second part of the eighteenth century in the period intellectual history calls the Enlightenment. The new sensibility was responsible for the emergence of the neoclassicist style that remained dominant, together with its great but younger rival, the neogothic style, all over Europe until the First World War and even after. Initially, in particular during 1760' s, neoclassicism could be considered as a reaction to the Rococo and Baroque styles prevailing in different European countries. The word appeared only at the end of the nineteenth century and was used at

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first by contemporary art critics in Paris to designate new forms of classicism. Neoclassicism is now generally used however, to distinguish eighteenth century art and particularly architecture, from the earlier (seventeenth-century) French classicisme.4 The noun classicism was coined in the beginning of the nineteenth century in opposition to romanticism. It remained a technical term for a long time. Littre' s dictionary still described classicisme as a neologism in 1878. Only much later did classicism come to be used in opposition to other concepts such as modernism or mannerism (Ritter 1974, vol. 4, 854-855). Contemporary critics, historians and artists never used the word neoclassicism but spoke simply of 'the true style' and referred to it as a 'revival of the arts' (Honour 1984, 14). From the 1760' s onwards neoclassicism became a popular style, particularly in architecture, as a result of a number of influential publications. For example, the precise and well-illustrated work by James Stuart and Nicolas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens (first volume published in London, 1762) was important. The modem approach with its focus on techniques and materials as set forth by the Comte de Caylus in his Recueil d'antiquites (first volume published in Paris, 1752) had a considerable impact and led to a better appreciation of the arts in antiquity. Johann Joachim Winckelmann offered new interpretations in his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (first published in Dresden, 1764). In an interesting remark, Richard Jenkyns opposed the English travellers, Stuart and Revett, who measured and delineated the Parthenon on the spot, to Winckelmann, who never saw Greece with his own eyes and could thus become a visionary. In the malicious words of Jenkyns: 'gazing at the Laocoon in Rome, Winckelmann decided, with a perversity so astounding that it amounts almost to genius, that this complex contorted tour de force of agonized expressionism showed the essential qualities of all Greek art: noble simplicity and calm grandeur' (Jenkyns 1980, 13) Winckelmann's famous expression 'eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Grosse', referred to by Jenkyns, has become a cliche (Bitner 1970, vol. 1, 12).5 Crucial for the new sensibility were popular guidebooks 4 The word 'classique' was first used in literature for authors ('auteurs classiques') studied in class. See for example Encyclopedie ( 1966, vol. 3). 5 'Noble simplicity and sedate grandeur'. Eitner cites (Winckelmann 1765).

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and lavishly illustrated reports about the unearthing of the dramatically destroyed 'Greek' cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum (Moormann 2003). In this pan-European movement of neoclassicism, the period of great discoveries by scholars and intellectuals was followed by the period of great plundering by generals and diplomats. This was the age of Napoleon and Lord Elgin - and Bavaria followed the example set by France and England. While neoclassicism became the authorized style of the political and social establishment, ideas about ancient Greece could function as a repertoire of freedom for intellectual and artistic avant-gardes and as a utopia for nonconformists. Ancient Greece, real or imagined, could be used in different ways: to legitimise or embellish powerful institutions, but also to oppose and confuse. In a society dominated by authoritarianism and Christian morality, the ancient Greeks became models of obedient, as well as subversive behaviour. A new episode begins with the impressive neoclassicist building programs of the nineteenth century in the capitals of Europe: Paris, London, Milnchen, Helsinki, Berlin, Vienna and, of course, modem Athens proclaimed the new capital of Greece in 1834 (Bastea 2000). That brings us back to politics.

PHILHELLENISM

The Greek revolt in the 1820's was the earliest successful national liberation movement. The fight for independence against the Ottoman Empire was won with the help of the European powers. In the battle of Navarino in 1827 a fleet of British, Russian and French warships destroyed the Turkish sea power and a new European nation-state was created. The European support was, in a way, a proof of the strength of the new national-political dimension of humanism. There was of course in predominantly Christian Europe, also a strong religious current in the public protest against Muslim rule over Greek Christians, but the extent of mobilization among educated Europeans organized in so-called philhellenic movements was amazing and can be partly attributed to the historical identification with ancient Greece (Barth et al. 1960, Wagner-Heidendal 1972, Woodhouse 1969). The

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members of these movements in support of the creation of a modem Greek state used the trans-national term 'philhellenism' to describe their convictions, although it might be possible to question their sincerity. 6 We know for example, that the great champion of philhellenism and the most famous poet of Europe at that time, Lord Byron, was not so much preoccupied with the question 'how can I help the Greek struggle for independence', but rather with the question 'where shall I, Byron, be happy and find self-fulfilment' (Dover 1988, 299). And what about the modem Greeks themselves? The papers of Richard Clogg, Paschalis Kitromilides and Kostas Kotsakis inform us about the indispensable complement of European philhellenism, the movements and attitudes of the modem Greeks themselves.

GREEK STUDIES IN BERLIN AND IN LONDON

The new university of Berlin and the royal academy of Prussia played a leading role in the study of Greek antiquity. It would be wrong to underestimate the scrupulous works on philology, the exemplary editions, the monumental collections of inscriptions and the archaeological series published in Berlin. Every European scholar felt indebted to the work of August Boeckh ( 1785-1867), for decades after Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) the undisputed master of Greek erudition in Europe. However, the Prussian court created all the important institutions of science and learning. The Altertumswissenschaften in Berlin were completely dependent on royal patronage. In this political context, liberalism was restricted to the demands for academic freedom of expression for scholars and students. Boeckh himself may serve as an example. He was a freeminded scholar from a militantly liberal family background. In his role as representative of the University of Berlin he was obliged to give a speech each year, until 1847 in Latin, on the occasion of the king's birthday. In these speeches he frequently insisted on freedom of research and teaching, libertas sentiendi ac dicendi, which he 6 Littre

(1878, vol. 3) describes 'philhellene' as 'volontaire au service de la Grece moderne' and 'philhellenism' as 'amour des grecs modernes surtout par opposition la domination turque'.

a

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considered as the lifeblood of German universities ('die Lebensluft der Deutschen Hochschule'). But Boeckh never forgot to eulogize the existing monarchy as the most perfect of all state forms (Landfester 1988, 77-79, Schneider 1985, 15-25). The Prussian monarchy, the political status quo, was praised again and again as embodying the ideal of the mixed constitution, in which the monarch moderated the influence of the aristocratic and democratic elements. In Berlin, clearly, the important institutions of science and learning were dependent on official royal sanction. In London the situation was very different. A new university, the later University College, was founded independent of royal tutelage. The aim was to free higher education from the religious shackles and elitism of Oxford and Cambridge. One of the founding fathers was George Grote (Vaio 1990). Grote was a banker by profession, very active in the political struggle for the Reform Bill passed in 1832 and later became a Member of Parliament (1833-1842). He belonged to the intellectual circle of famous liberal thinkers like James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo and Jeremy Benthem. Grote had already written some revealing articles on Greek history in the 1820' s, but only after retiring from parliament did he find the time to publish his A history ofGreece (twelve volumes, London 1846-1856). With the inestimable aid of German erudition, Grote gave a revolutionary political re-evaluation of Athenian democracy (Momigliano 1966). His political experience, his utilitarianism and radicalism led him to praise its foremen as 'the teachers of posterity ... ensuring to the mass of free men a degree of protection elsewhere unknown ... and [leaving] superior minds sufficiently unshackled to soar above their religious and political routine' (Grote 1846-1856, vol. 1, vii). Furthermore, Grote's defence of the commonly depreciated sophists was clearly in line with his championship of secular education at University College (Clarke 1962, 117-118). On the other hand, Grote was very negative about Alexander the Great, whom he saw as nothing but an aggressive conqueror, un-Greek, unable to tolerate Greek free speech and preferring Asiatic servility (Clarke 1962, 120).7 From France, Alexis de Tocqueville praised Grote for stripping these enemies of humanity of their ill-gained brilliance and for reducing Alexander to what he had really been: a great bird of prey 7

For a critique of Asiatic cliches see Pierre Briant's article in this volume.

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(Clarke 1962, 121). This is very different from the admiration Johann Gustav Droysen, Boeckh's brilliant young student, had shown for Alexander and for the Macedonian army. In Droysen's Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (Berlin 1833) the identification was clear: Macedonia was the Prussia of antiquity. Droysen would become the great nationalist historian of Prussia. Without exception, German historians saw the monarchical political order as superior to the republican one, in Greek as well as in Roman history. In the German states, universities were severely censored and liberalism was weak. In consequence, the humanities were not politicised, not even by professors with liberal convictions like Boeckh. The monarchy was admired and liberal demands were restricted to freedom for the academic guild.

GREEK STUDIES IN PARIS: REVOLUTION

GREEK DEMOCRACY AND FRENCH

In France, the political situation was again completely different. With an enthusiasm unmoderated by knowledge, French revolutionaries regarded Greek and Roman republicans as their forerunners (Parker 1937, Vidal-Naquet 1976). In 1793, when the National Assembly moved into its new hall in the Tuileries, full-length statues of the two lawgivers of Greece, Solon and Lycurgus, stood behind the chair of the president. The moderate lawgiver of Athens, Solon, rising from the people, had adapted the laws to the needs of the situation, while the radical lawgiver of Sparta, Lycurgus, elected king for many years, had changed the situation by a constitution that was said to be the best in the world (Parker 1937, 146-147). These were the eighteenthcentury cliches, culled mainly from Plutarch's moralistic and rosy Lives read at colleges. It was understood that in comparison the citizens of Sparta had enjoyed more equality and those of Athens more liberty. Even during the terrorist phase of the French revolution, identification with the radical Athenian democracy had been absent the bad reputation of Athenian democracy in ancient history was still too powerful. Could anybody deny that Athens had lost her power and prosperity in this period? Even for French revolutionaries, the radical democracy of Athens was less a source of identification than an

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example to avoid. Politicians opposing the Restoration did not refer to the history of Athenian democracy in support of their position. The intellectual leader of the liberals, Frarn;ois Guizot, aimed to replace absolute monarchy by the grace of God with a liberal monarchy based on a written constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie limited representation, not with a democracy. Guizot's course at the Sorbonne in 1828 on the history of civilization in Europe started with the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. For Guizot, Athenian democracy was not a source of inspiration, let alone an example to follow. Although another French liberal, Benjamin Constant, considered Athens to be the freest state of antiquity, he warned that it did not yet know the modem conception of individual liberty. In particular, modem states ought not to imitate two notoriously repressive institutions so common to the constitution of ancient states from Athens to Rome: ostracism and censorship (Constant 1980). After the revolution of 1830 the liberal Orleanist monarchy was established and Guizot came to play a prominent role in the bourgeois government. During the 1840' s Guizot, in his tum, had to face a vigorous, this time republican, opposition. Populism grew strongly and to the astonishment of Guizot and many other statesmen and political philosophers, radicals called for universal suffrage and democracy. Is it a coincidence that the first serious history of slavery in antiquity was written by a pupil of the esteemed romantic historian and enthusiastic populist Jules Michelet? Encouraged by Michelet, Henri Wall on wrote the still appreciated Histoire de l 'esclavage dans l 'antiquite in three volumes (Paris 1847), preceded by an introduction of more than 150 pages on modem slavery in the colonies. In line with his liberal-catholic conviction, Wallon regarded ancient society as completely corrupted by slavery. In 1848 Wallon entered politics and joined the staff of Victor Schoelcher, minister of colonial affairs of the Second Republic. Wallon became secretary of the Committee for the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies that was responsible for the decree of 27 April 1848 that liberated slaves in the French colonies and made them citizens. In 1852 the second republican experiment was abolished, Bonapartist repression imposed and the Second Empire proclaimed.

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Like many other democrats, Schoelcher had to flee to England. Michelet lost his chair at the College de France. The prudent Henri Wallon, who had warned for revolutionary excesses during the crises of 1848, managed to keep his chair at the Sorbonne and during the seventies would become father of the Third Republic after the fall of the Second Empire. During the fifties and sixties 'imperialism' in the literal sense became dominant in France. The imperial court and Napoleon ill personally promoted and financed archaeological excavations of Caesar's Gaul. The identification was evident. Napoleon ill even asked German scholars, renowned for their unrivalled erudition, to assist in writing the history of Caesar's reign (Den Boer 1998, 78-97). Conversely, republican opposition to Bonapartism often donned Greek dress. That brings me to the concept of hellenism.

HELLENISM

Clearly distinct from 'philhellenism' (meaning love of modem Greece), 'hellenism' had been in use since the Renaissance to signify the spread of Greek words in modem languages and, since the end of the sixteenth century, in French and English to signify the spread of the Greek language in antiquity (Oxford 1989, vol. 7, Robert 1985, vol. 5). In German the word was used far less frequently, for Hellenismus is not mentioned in Grimm's Worterbuch. The absence of the word in German allowed Droysen to coin a successful new meaning for it in his epoch-making Geschichte des Hellenismus. Droysen was fascinated by the political and military power of Alexander and his successors. They created the historical conditions for Hellenismus i.e. 'die Vermischung des abend- und morgenlandischen Leben', only comparable in historical importance to 'die Vermischung des germanischen und romischen Wesens' (Droysen 1836, vol. 1, vi). In his second volume, Droysen even compared the foundation of new cities during the period of Hellenismus with 'die Germanisirung slavischer Lander' (Droysen 1836, vol. 2, 755). 8 Following Droysen, Hellenismus became the specific designation for the period between the death of Alexander the 8 On

the religious question see Laqueur ( 1925) and Momigliano ( 1977).

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Great and the Roman occupation. In France and England 'hellenism' was used in a very different way than in Germany. During the second half of the nineteenth century leading figures in the pedagogical movement used 'hellenism' for the ideals and ideas of the ancient Greeks. Their aim was to reform secondary and higher education by paying more attention to Greek classics. In France 'hellenisme' in this sense was, as far as I can see, introduced by Emile Egger. Ignoring Droysen's work, he wondered why this convenient word had been abandoned (Egger 1869). Egger decribed hellenism as 'le genie de la belle antiquite, surtout representee par la Grece'. Egger's lectures at the Sorbonne must be considered as a kind of political opposition. The notes of the lectures were taken by the archiviste paleographe Soury, who would publish the compromising private papers of the Bonapartist court after the fall of the Empire. The identification with ancient Greece served as a protest against Bonapartist 'caesarism', Napoleon ill's ideologically motivated and vast research program on the archaeology, history, topography and epigraphy of ancient Gaul. Note that the Musee des Antiquites Nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye opened in 1867, the year of Emile Egger's course. Without any allusion to contemporary politics, the political implication was clear for everybody, even for the omnipresent Bonapartist censors who took notes in the lecture hall. Let us listen to Emile Egger: 'un fonds d'idees et de sentiments qui nous est commun avec la race hellenique ... les Fram;ais et les Grecs se ressemblent en bien des point, malgre la distance des temps et celle des lieux'. We can trace the profound analogy in education, in history, in language and in literature. In prudent words, Egger confessed: 'la France representant, defenseur, propagateur des idees que [la France] tenait salutaire pour l'humanite reformer les peuples'. France, just as Greece, had given the example of political liberation and disinterested political principles. He opposed the political and civil liberty of Athens to the presumed despotism of Asiatic societies. France was the first nation of citoyens in history. The declaration of human and civil rights was nothing but a Greek idea enlarged and rejuvenated by the modem mind. Egger spoke of a new renaissance in the nineteenth

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century and of the intimate resemblance of the Greek and French genius. What the students of the Sorbonne heard had nothing to do with a cultural obsession. It was clear, though implicit, political opposition to Bonapartist ideological imperialism: hellenism against caesarism. The political use of ancient Greece was not related to the innocent use of neoclassicist Greek design, in that artistic amalgam called 'style Napoleon ill'. The great transformation of Paris inspired architects from all over Europe to design huge and luxurious buildings, eclectically borrowing from all kinds of historical styles: neo-Greco as well as neo-Gothic, neo-Pompadour, neo-Etruscan, neo-Pompeian ... In England, Matthew Arnold published his seminal Culture and Anarchy, An essay in political and social criticism (1869) at around the same time as Egger's course. Arnold had first hand knowledge of the educational situation in France and Germany. He was gravely concerned about the poor quality of education in England: the aristocracy was indifferent, the bourgeoisie materialistic and the lower classes were completely uneducated. Arnold's book is a manifesto in favour of culture. He celebrated culture as 'a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world'. Cultural education was a task requiring immediate attention, for otherwise anarchy would prevail. Only the great Greeks (and some other European authors like Goethe and Heine) could teach us to refresh our stock notions and habits with new ideas. Educational reform based on the revitalization of Greek classics was, according to Arnold, the only way out of the political and social difficulties of his time (Arnold 1869, 11-12). Here again we notice the difference between the old humanism focused on individual education and the new educational ideals with their prominent political, social and nationalistic concerns. It is perhaps a superfluous remark, but the periodisation of art history and archaeology differs from that of literary history. The difference between art and archaeology on the one hand and literature on the other extends into the social realm, too. Neohumanism flourished among pedagogues at universities and in schools. Neohumanism is related to classical literacy, to literature and philosophy. Ancient authors were omnipresent in the classroom where

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hardly any (ancient) artist ever entered. These classrooms were peopled by the young of the bourgeoisie. Here they received their classical education, reading Latin and, due to the influence of educational societies propagating them, ever more Greek texts. In contrast, eighteenth-century aristocrats enjoyed the privilege of a private education and went on a Grand Tour to Italy, accompanied by a personal mentor. Their education consisted primarily of making notes and sketches while on travel. Attention was naturally focussed on Roman art and archaeology.

IDENTITY AND IDENTIFICATION

Let me come to the already frequently used key concepts of our conference. The word 'identity' has nothing to do with the old Greek concept of idea. The term 'identity' was created by Christian philosophers in late-Antiquity and refined by scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. The root is idem, meaning 'the same', an old form is 'idemptitie' or 'sameness'. 'Likeness' (similitas) or 'oneness' (unitas) was not sufficient, a new word had to be created for use in intellectual and theological debates. You will not find identite in ordinary sixteenth-century French. You will not even find Identitat in ordinary German in the early nineteenth century. 'Identity' can be defined as the sameness of a thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition or fact that a thing is itself and not something else. In psychology, personal identity is the condition or fact of remaining the same person throughout the various phases of human existence. In the same way, European identity is understood as that which has remained the same throughout the various phases of European history. Such a notion of European identity is manifestly nonsensical, however and contravenes historical common sense. The concept of European identity, cherished by the eurocracy in Brussels, is unmanageable, as well as dangerous. Moreover, the existence of a permanent European identity would contradict the notions of diversity and multiformity, both of which should be seen as key attributes of European culture. What about the concept of national identity? It is an expression favoured these days by politicians and diplomats on the payroll of nation-states, paying lip service to national audiences. It is apparently

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needed to counter economic globalism and European integration, but, clearly defined, the notion of national identity, of something remaining the same throughout the history of a nation, does not exist either. What has occurred in these kinds of political discourse on national and European identity is 'identification'. To identify is to regard oneself as sharing basic characteristics with foregoing generations. Usually with inhabitants of one's own region, but not necessarily as shown by the example of the German, English and French identification with the ancient Greeks. Of course, a reductive historical imagination plays a prominent role in such identifications. In this case it is identification with some supposed idea about ancient Greeks - conceived for whatever contemporary reason. The identification with the Greeks was never innocent. In this context the often-used expression 'Greek heritage' is misleading. It is not about something clearly described in a will - it has no material properties. As Arnold Toynbee said: heritage is karma, a Sanskrit word literally meaning 'action' but used technically in the vocabulary of Buddhism to mean the influence of the momentum of past action on present action. Karma can be an asset or a liability (Toynbee 1981, 1). The influence of the past on present action is, however, only one part of the story of the influence of the Greek classics on the development of European and national identifications. To put it very simply: this is one-way traffic. It is a one-dimensional perspective that presumes the possibility and the necessity of an objective search for ancient Greece, as if the nineteenth-century philologists, historians and archaeologists only had to find something that was lost. This naive attitude we call positivism. In contrast to this positivist approach, we have the idealist approach. This too is one-way traffic, but in the other direction. It calls for the deconstruction of ancient Greece. This approach amounts to a kind of semiotic reduction. Ancient Greece is considered to be a construction or contemporary representation. 'The invention of Greece' has become a fashionable title, as if ancient Greece is only a kind of a rhetorical device that ought to be deconstructed. There is of course a third possibility of two-way traffic. Between the positivist point of view (ancient Greece exists and we only have to dig to find the stones) and the idealist point of view (ancient Greece exists only as a figment of the imagination), lies a third, more sophisticated, perspective,

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namely to recognize the interaction between visions of the past and present concerns. The way we see ancient Greece, the way we interpret archaeological findings is determined by our contemporary ideas and intellectual traditions, but, if we are honest, we must recognize that our ideas are also corrected by what the Germans call der Widerstand der Sache, the resistance of old stones. NEW NATIONALISM AROUND 1900

During the 1880' s when nationalism became more deeply embedded, popular and vulgar in Germany, France and elsewhere, classical humanist education was severely attacked. In Germany, the attacks culminated in Emperor Wilhelm II's speech to the Prussian school conference in 1890 in which he reproached the gymnasia for their lack of interest in the national language: not Latin or Greek, but German should be the language of modem education (Landfester 1988, 149150). Classical humanist education was attacked because German Volkstum and not cosmopolitan Weltburgertum had to be the aim of modem education. Friedrich Paulsen's seminal publications propagating Neuhumanismus have to be seen as a defensive justification against angry criticism of the preponderant place of the classics in the gymnasia. In France, where 'le nationalisme integral' became very popular, similar attacks were heard but never became dominant because the political situation was completely different. The French republican government was permanently under attack from all kinds of right-wing enemies. The great parliamentary inquiry into the deficiencies of public secondary education took place in the context of the Dreyfus affair in order to find an explanation for the remarkable success of private catholic schools. The attacks on classical education continued into the first decade of the twentieth century when nationalist movements became extremely vigorous. In the teaching programs of the gymnasia and lycea of the German Empire and the French Republic, Latin and Greek classics rapidly lost ground. In England nationalism was also mounting, but there, society was more segmented than others and possessed a clearly segregated educational system. Anyhow, in Britain the classical tradition apparently met less resistance and could even remain untouched in some places.

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SOME REMARKS ON THE 1WENTIETII CENTURY

Let me conclude with some remarks on the twentieth century. The rise and fall of the influence of the Greek classics was not a clear-cut up and downward movement. In times of real crisis the need for identification remained strong. Alfred Zimmem's famous book The Greek Commonwealth may illustrate this. At first Zimmem distanced himself from his subject and stated that he wanted to study the way Greek civilization differed from ours. After all, Zimmem remarked, the large and increasing mass of information on economic life in ancient Greece, the availability of which distinguished modem scholarship from that of George Grote and his time, made the huge differences between antiquity and modernity abundantly clear (Zimmem 1911, 14). Zimmem wrote this in 1911, but three years later, in December 1914, after the first terrible months of the Great War, he identified Great Britain with Athens without any reservation. He wrote a new preface, for the second edition of his book, in which, by the way, he honestly expressed his indebtedness 'above all and in spite of all' to professor Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf of the University of Berlin. Permit me to quote Zimmem's impressive identification: ' ... war has broken out, bringing Great Britain face to face for the first time since she became a Democracy with the full ultimate meaning of the civic responsibilities, both of thought and action, with which, in the narrower field of the City-State, the fifth-century Athenians were so familiar. Greek ideas and Greek inspiration can help us today, not only in facing the duties of the moment, but in the work of deepening and extending the range and the meaning of Democracy and Citizenship, Liberty and Law, which would seem to be the chief political task before mankind in the new epoch of history on which we have suddenly entered.' (Zimmem 1914, preface) After the First World War, the prevailing mood in Europe was one of grief and mourning, of pessimism and insecurity about the future. Against this background, attention naturally turned towards the past. As in other fields, traditional values became more dominant than before the war. Leading intellectuals and pedagogues considered study

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of the Greek classics to be essential. Reports on education in different countries stressed their importance. Volumes were published on the legacy of Greece and in particular on the immeasurable value of classical education, on 'culture generale', 'Bildung' andpaideia. Even after the Second World War, during the 1950's, the position of the Greek classics remained prominent in secondary schools and universities in Europe. It was only the unprecedented growth of the number of students at European universities and the cultural revolution of the sixties that brought about the beginning of a rapid decline in the position of the Greek Classics in educational programs and the end of self-evident identification with the ancient Greeks. That was two decades before the deconstruction and ideological critique of the Greek classics by semiotics and cultural studies. But does this entail the final episode of neohumanism? Will ancient Greece become an ordinary period of dead history? Archaeology is fascinating the masses, expositions attract thousands of visitors and the postmodern public is buying ancient texts in modem translation as they have never done before ...

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT In January 2000, at a meeting organised by Margriet Haagsma, we set up a general project for the present and future conferences together with Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg. We travelled with Heleen to this planning session at the new Netherlands Institute in Athens. Heleen was already very ill, but her participation was impressive. Heleen was a very strong woman. We walked to the Pnyx where she delivered a brilliant speech to the people of Athens. Heleen had been a cherished student of my father, so our ties were multiple. She died 28 May 2000. Permit me to salute her memory, her courage and her friendship.

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REFERENCES Arnold, M., 1869. Culture and anarchy: an essay in political and social criticism. London. Barth, W. & M. Kehrig-Hom, 1960. Die Philhellenenzeit. Miinchen. Bastea, E., 2000. The creation of modem Athens. The planning of a myth. Cambridge. Den Boer, P., 1998. History as a profession. The study of history in France 1818-1917. Princeton. Clarke, M. L., 1962. George Grote. A biography. London. Constant, B., 1980. De la liberte chez les modemes. M. Gauchet, ed. Paris, 491-515. [First published as De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modemes. 1819, Paris]. Dover, K. J., 1988. Byron on the ancient Greeks. In: idem The Greeks and their legacy. Oxford. Droysen, J. G., 1836. Geschichte des Hellenismus. 2 volumes. Berlin 1836. Egger, E., 1869. L'hellenisme en France sur l'influence des etudes grecques dans le developpement de la langue et de la litterature franfaises. Paris. Bitner, L., 1970. Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850, Sources and documents. 2 volumes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Encyclopedie 1966. Encyclopedie ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers. Reprint. Stuttgart. [First published 1751-1780]. Ferguson, W.K., 1948. The Renaissance in historical thought. Five centuries of interpretation. Cambridge Mass. Grote, G., 1846-1856. A history of Greece. 12 volumes. London. Honour, H., 1984. Neoclassicism. Harmondsworth. Jenkyns, R., 1980. The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Oxford. Landfester, M., 1988. Humanismus und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur politischen und gesellschaftlichen Bedeutung der humanistischen Bildung in Deutschland. Darmstadt. Laqueur, R., 1925. Hellenismus. Giessen. Littre, E., 1878. Dictionnaire de la langue franfaise. 4 volumes. Paris.

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Oxford 1989. The Oxford English dictionary. 20 volumes. 2nd ed. Oxford. Marchand, S.L., 1996. Down from Olympus. Archeology and philhellenism in Germany 1750-1970. Princeton. Momigliano, A.D., 1966. George Grote and the study of Greek history. In Studies in historiography, Idem. London, 56-74. 1977. J.G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews. In: Idem, Essays in ancient and modem historiography. Oxford. 307-323. [First published in 1970]. Moormann, E.M., 2003. Pompei la grecque. In this volume, 239264. Niethammer, F.1., 1808. Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus in derTheorie des Erziehungs-unterricht unsrer Z.eit. Jena. Parker, H.T., 1937. The cult of antiquity and the French revolutionaries. Chicago. Paulsen, F., 1885. Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitii.ten. Berlin. 1919. Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitii.ten. 3rd ed. Berlin. Ritter, J. (Ed.), 1974-1998. Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie. 10 volumes. Basel and Stuttgart. Robert, P., 1985. Le Grand Robert de la languefranfaise. 9 volumes. Paris. Schneider, B., 1985. August Boeckh. Altertumsforscher, Universitii.tslehrer und Wissenschaftorganisator im Berlin des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin. Toynbee, A., 1981. The Greeks and their heritages. Oxford. Vaio, J., 1990. George Grote 1794-1871. In: W.W. Briggs & W.M. Calder (Eds.), Classical scholarship. A biographical Encyclopedia. New York and London. 119-126. Vidal-Naquet, P., 1976. Tradition de la democratie grecque. Preface in: M.I. Finley, Democratie antique et democratie modeme. Paris, 15-39. Wagner-Heidendal, L., 1972. Hetfilhellenisme in het koninkrijk der Nederlanden 1821-1829. Een bijdrage tot de studie vam de publieke opinie in het begin van de negentiende eeuw. Brussels.

a

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Winckelmann, J.J., 1765. Thoughts on the imitation of Greek Works in Painting and sculpture. Translated by H. Fuseli. London. [First published in German in 1755, Dresden]. Woodhouse, C.M., 1969. The Philhellenes. London. Zimmem, A., 1911. The Greek Commonwealth. Politics and Economics in.fifth-Century Athens. Oxford. 1914. The Greek Commonwealth. Politics and Economics in.fifthCentury Athens. 2nd edition. Oxford.

THE CLASSICS AND THE MOVEMENT FOR GREEK INDEPENDENCE Richard Clogg

In this paper I shall not be attempting to assess the way in which classical learning in Europe, and indeed in the nascent United States, contributed to the wave of sympathy for the Greek insurgents that manifested itself in the Philhellenic movement that developed in Europe and the United States after the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and which resonated in the art and literature of the 1820's. Rather I want to look at the way in which during the last three decades or so of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth there developed among a small group of literati in the Greek lands an awareness that the Greeks were the heirs to an heritage that was universally revered in the Western world. I also want to look at the way in which this emerging 'sense of the past' contributed to the development of the national movement that culminated in the insurgency of 1821, an insurgency that was to result in the establishment of the independent Greek state. GREEK NATIONALISM AS THE PRECURSOR OF BALKAN NATIONALITIES

The Greeks were the first of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire to gain sovereign independence, even if the sovereignty of the Greek state that came into existence in 1830 was qualified and constricted by the 'guarantee' of Britain, France and Russia and even if the new state contained within its borders scarcely a third of the Greek inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek movement was the first fully fledged national movement to develop within the boundaries of a non-Christian state, the Ottoman Empire, and, as Elie Kedourie has convincingly argued, it should be seen as the precursor of the nationalist movements that were to emerge in Asia and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Kedourie 1970).

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The reasons for the relative precocity of the Greek national movement in relation to the national movements of the other peoples of the Balkan peninsula are several and fascinating but lie outside the scope of this paper. One key factor in explaining this precocity, however, was the fact that the Greeks, or rather the small number of individuals that made up the embryonic Greek intelligentsia, perceived themselves to be, and were perceived in the wider European world as being, the lineal descendants of the worthies of the ancient world, the 'legal heirs', as Pushkin put it (Farsolas 1971, 64), of Homer and Themistocles, the legatees of a civilization that was the object of such reverence in Europe and in the New World, where, indeed, ancient Greek was seriously considered for adoption as the official language of the newly independent United States. Whereas, during the centuries of the Tourkokratia or period of Ottoman rule, there had been little awareness of this ancient heritage, during the fifty years or so before the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821 members of the nascent Greek intelligentsia were to become almost intoxicated with the notion of their Hellenic ancestry. This was a development that was to prepare the way for the archaiolatreia, the worship of antiquity, and the progonoplexia, ancestor obsession or 'ancestoritis', one might term it, that has been such a striking feature of the cultural and

educational life of post-independence Greece.

ADAMANTIOS KORAES AS 'TEACHER OF THE NATION'

Pride of place in any analysis of the emergence of a 'sense of the past' in pre-independence Greece must necessarily be accorded to Adamantios Koraes, the intellectual mentor of the movement for Greek independence, the foremost among the Didaskaloi tou Genous or Teachers of the Nation, as they are known. For Koraes, as for so many of his educated contemporaries, it was travel to, and study in, Western Europe that was to inspire a passionate interest in the world of Greek antiquity. In a letter of September 1788 to Demetrios Lotos, the protopsaltes (the 'first chanter' in Church) of Smyrna (Izmir), Koraes' patrida or birthplace, he wrote of his initial impressions of the 'illustrious city' of Paris, the teeming

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'home of all the arts and sciences, the new Athens'. He excitedly urged Lotos to imagine a city bigger even than Constantinople, replete with 'a large number of different academies and public libraries', with its 'multitude of very learned men', where every art and science had been developed to perfection. There was 'a multitude of very learned men scattered throughout the city, in the squares, in the thoroughfares, in the coffee shops, where you can pick up every kind of literary and political news, with newspapers and journals in German, English and French and, in a word, in every language'. Paris, he enthused, was a city to amaze anyone, but for a Greek, aware that 'two thousand years ago in Athens his ancestors had achieved a similar (perhaps a higher) level of wisdom', such amazement must perforce be tinged with melancholy, on reflecting that such virtues were not only absent from the Greece of the late eighteenth century, but that they had been replaced by 'a thousand evils'. 'There', he wrote, 'in a country where once the wisest laws of Solon (whose name I have many times heard the savants of this place [i.e. Paris] pronounce with a kind of idolatry) reigned supreme, today ignorance, evil, violence, brutality, insolence and shamelessness hold sway. Instead of men of the stature of Miltiades and Themistocles, 'whom Europe continues to look upon with admiration', the Greeks were now governed by riff-raff and cameldrivers, or the 'monkish barbarians' of the Orthodox Church, whom Koraes, a true child of the Enlightenment, regarded as almost a greater affront to the dignity of his enslaved fellowcountrymen than her alien overlords, the Turks (Clogg 1976, 1189). Born into an educated merchant family in Smyrna (Izmir) in 1748, Koraes was to develop a close connection with Holland. At an early age he was taken under the wing of Bernhard Keun, the chaplain to the sizeable Dutch merchant colony in the city, a highly educated man with many contacts in learned society in the Netherlands. Keun taught the brilliant young Koraes French, Italian, German and, most importantly, instilled in him the profound knowledge of Latin which opened up for the young Greek the treasures of classical scholarship and prepared him for membership in that great Republic of Letters that was constituted by classical scholarship in eighteenth century Europe. In return,

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Koraes helped Keun with Greek, a language of which the young Smyrniote had an extraordinary mastery. In 1772, Koraes moved to Amsterdam where, for six years, he practiced as a merchant, becoming a Dutch citizen in the process. His paragios or apprentice, Stamatis Petrou, rapidly developed a profound loathing for his master Koraes, a loathing which found expression in letters sent to their common employer in Smyrna, Stathis Thomas. Making due allowance for the personal antipathy that existed between the two men, Petrou's letters afford a fascinating insight into the process of acculturation that got under way when Koraes first came into direct contact with a Western European society, and into the way in which he cast off the traditional, Orthodox, neoByzantine mores of the Greek community of his native city and adopted the ethos and mores of an educated European bourgeois in the age of the Enlightenment. Petrou delighted in reporting to Thomas the rapidity with which Koraes acquired the manners of the Franks. It was not long before Koraes began to frequent the opera and to read 'diabolical' French books. He consorted alone with women all hours of the day and night. Although initially he had hesitated to abandon his Turkish kalpak (fur hat) or to trim his moustache, he soon took to dressing alafranga, in the Frankish or European mode.

Foppishly concerned with his appearance, he frequented wigmakers and, like a Dutchjuffrouw, he fussed over his looking glass,

hairpins and scissors. Although he had arrived in Amsterdam as a devout Orthodox Christian, his attendance at the Greek Church in Amsterdam became ever more irregular. Indeed, Petrou was at one stage fearful that Koraes would commit the ultimate betrayal of his Orthodox inheritance by converting to Calvinism in order to secure the hand of a Dutch girl. It was Petrou who was responsible for the canard that Koraes was not well suited to the cut and thrust of commerce. Dr. B.J. Slot (1980), however, has demonstrated that Koraes, contrary to Petrou's slurs, was a competent, albeit conservative, merchant and not the hopeless bankrupt of Petrou's fevered imagination. Petrou's jibes, exaggerated though they may be, afford an alternative to the picture of Koraes that emerges from his own voluminous writings, that of a priggish, desiccated bachelor, a workaholic single-mindedly dedicated to the pursuit of classical scholarship and the emancipation of his fellow

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countrymen from the Turkish yoke. But the dandy never got the better of the budding scholar, and during his time in Amsterdam, Koraes added Dutch, Spanish and Hebrew to his formidable linguistic accomplishments, while mixing with Bernhard Keun's academic friends, among them Adriaan Buurt and Petrus Burmannus and probably also the classicist Daniel Wyttenbach. It is clear, however, that Koraes' heart was never truly in commerce and, after briefly returning to Smyrna, he left the Levant, never to return, to study medicine at Montpellier, while immersing himself all the while in the texts of Greek and Latin antiquity. His doctoral thesis was on Hippocrates and was published in Montpellier in 1787 as Medicus Hippocraticus sive de praecipuis officiis medici ex primo Hippocratis aphorismo deductis, oratio ab auctore D. Coray Smymensi and one enthusiastic Greek contemporary was subsequently to characterise Koraes himself as a 'new Hippocrates' (Valetas 1957, 182). Koraes was never to practice medicine. He devoted the remainder of his long life to classical scholarship on the one hand and to the inculcation in his fellow countrymen of an awareness that they were the lineal descendants of the Greeks of antiquity and heirs to a cultural heritage of unparalleled magnificence. This was an essential precondition, as he saw it, of their ultimate emancipation from the barbarian Ottoman yoke. On the completion of his medical studies, his French patron and mentor, D' Ansse de Villoison, wrote to Thomas Burgess, a classical scholar and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford to recommend 'a young Greek, a native of Smyrna, of the name of Corai' in the hope that 'some appointment, suited to a man of learning, might be procured for him in England'. Needless to say, no position was forthcoming for Koraes in the torpid, port-sodden Oxford of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, Koraes' first published work in the field of classical scholarship, his Observationes in Hippocratem, was published in two fascicules printed in Oxford and London in 1792 and 1797 respectively of Burgess' Musei Oxoniensis litterarii conspectus: accedunt pro speciminibus Corayii emendationes in Hippocratem [... ]. Koraes was rapidly to emerge as one of the leading figures in that true Republic of Letters, the world of European classical scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, in the early

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1800's, Heinrich Eichstadt dedicated his Halle edition of Diodorus Siculus to 'quatuor viris in re critica summis'. These were Richard Porson, Friedrich-August Wolff, Daniel Wyttenbach and Diamantis Coray 'Smymensi medicinae doctori' (Clogg 1969, 42). The great Cambridge classical scholar, Richard Porson, who held most of his contemporaries in contempt, likewise had a high regard for Koraes as a textual critic (Maltby 1856, 322). There was never a realistic possibility that the somnolent, inward looking University of Oxford of the late eighteenth century would open its doors to a Greek scholar, however brilliant, and in 1788 Koraes moved from Montpellier to Paris where he was to live until his death in 1833. He thus lived through and, while no Jacobin, was profoundly influenced by the events of the French Revolution. While eking out a living as a collator of classical texts, he published a whole series of editions of the Greek classics, 17 volumes in all, that appeared in the Ellenike Vivliotheke, whose publication was subsidised by the Zosimas brothers, wealthy merchants of Ioannina, for free distribution to the schools and colleges that came into existence in various parts of the Greek world. Poor and orphaned students were to receive free copies of the editions but only if, on the basis of bi-annual examinations, they were adjudged worthy by their teachers. Teachers likewise, provided they gave evidence of their commitment, were to receive free copies, while parents who were able to afford to buy copies for their own children could secure them from Greek booksellers in Vienna, Trieste, Venice and Livorno at a twenty per cent discount to the price charged to Europeans. All four of these cities, it should be noted, were important centres of the Greek mercantile diaspora whose emergence in the course of the eighteenth century was of such significance to the development of the Greek national movement. For the 'Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment' was very much based on the communities of the emergent Greek diaspora, just as the Philike Etaireia, the Friendly Society, that laid the organisational framework for the Greek revolt, was founded in the important diaspora community of Odessa in 1814. The editions which comprised the Ellenike Vivliotheke were specifically aimed at a Greek readership rather than classical scholars and were intended to cover the period from Homer to the Ptolemies. They were prefaced by lengthy essays, autoschedioi stochasmoi, or

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impromptu reflections, in which Koraes expressed his forcefully held view that education was the key to the emancipation of the Greek people. One of Koraes' major concerns was with the form of language that was appropriate to a regenerated Greece and he was a vigorous participant in the debates, which on occasion erupted in physical violence, about the 'Language Question' that got under way at the tum of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which were to continue with unabated vigour up until modem times. He is often held to be responsible for the adoption of the katharevousa, or 'purifying', Greek whose adoption had such a stultifying effect on the cultural life of the independent Greek state. But he was by no means a champion of the more extreme archaising tendency and his views on the language were moderate. He was essentially a proponent of a middle way between the demotic or spoken language of the day and a return to the supposed purity of Attic Greek. In the preface to his edition of Heliodorus' Aethiopica, which formed part of the Ellenike Vivliotheke, he wrote that: 'so to distance oneself from customary usage . . . as to be unclear in meaning, and completely unnatural to the ear, is tyrannical. So to vulgarize, on the other hand, as to appear disgusting to those who have received an education, seems to me demagogic. When I say that the whole nation shares in the language with democratic equality, I do not mean that we should leave its shaping and creation to the vulgar imagination of the mob' (Koraes 1804, 68). In addition to his editions of the classical authors Koraes was the author of a number of pamphlets of political content, some inspired by Napoleon's conquests in the Levant. These included his Memoire sur l'etat present de la civilisation dans la Grece, published in 1803 in Paris by the Societe des Observateurs de l'Homme, of which he was a member. This is an extraordinarily penetrating survey of the state of Greek society at the tum of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular he made the critical connection between the rise of a Greek mercantile bourgeoisie and the emergence of a small but influential nationalist intelligentsia, which was to have such influence in shaping the Greek national movement and in determining Greece's cultural orientation once independence had been won. He noted that, as they came to dominate the commerce of the Ottoman Empire, some

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Greek merchants had become extremely rich, so much so that for the first time it was possible to talk of millionaires among the Greeks. The need for numeracy and literacy had proved a powerful force in prompting wealthy merchants to endow schools and subsidise the studies of young Greeks at European universities. It was, he said, 'dans la patrie meme d'Homere, dans l'ile de Chio, que la Grece modeme a la satisfaction de voir, depuis quelques annees, le premier etablissement d'une espece d'universite OU d'ecole polytechnique'. Far from shutting their eyes to the 'lumieres' of Europe, the Greeks, proud of their origin, looked upon the Europeans as but debtors, who were repaying them, with a very high rate of interest, the capital that they had received from their ancestors (Coray/Koraes 1803, 35, 12, 58). Not surprisingly, Koraes' illuminating document has been commented on with much interest by students of nationalism such as Elie Kedourie (1970) and Benedict Anderson (1990, 70), the latter remarking that Koraes' essay 'contains a stunningly modem analysis of the sociological bases for Greek nationalism'. Koraes above all was concerned with raising the educational level of his fellow countrymen. This concern manifested itself not only in his voluminous writings but in his sending of books and scientific instruments to the schools and colleges of the Greek lands, above all to the famous Academy on the island of Chios, from which his family originated, and which was one of the leading centres of what has come to be termed as the 'Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment'. He was never very explicit, however, as to how educational regeneration was to result in political emancipation. Moreover, when the war of independence erupted in 1821 he thought it premature by a generation. It was a mark of his political naivete that when hostilities did break out in that year he should have written to Jean-Pierre Boyer, the President of Haiti, to enlist his support for the insurgent Greeks. It was characteristic that President Boyer in his reply should have made reference to the glories of ancient Greece. Boyer assured Citoyen Koraes that he had the greatest sympathy for 'les descendans de Leonidas' and would willingly have contributed, if not troops and ammunition, then money with which to buy arms, had it not been for the supervention of a local rebellion. Unable to offer much in the way

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of practical assistance, President Boyer nonetheless assured Koraes of the 'voeux ardens que le peuple ha'itien forme pour leur delivrance, deja les Grecs modemes comptent . . . des trophees dignes de Salamine ... Puissent-ils, semblables aux Grecs de l'antiquire, leurs ancetres et sous les ordres de Miltiade qui les dirige, faire triompher, dans les champs d'une nouvelle Marathon, la cause sainte qu'ils ont entreprise pour la defense de leurs droits, de la religion et de la Patrie!' (Clogg 1996, 8). SENSE OF THE PAST

Koraes was by no means alone in seeking to develop an awareness of the ancient heritage of the Greeks. A number of histories of the ancient Greek world were published, many of them translated from Western languages. These included a sixteen-volume translation into Greek of Charles Rollin's Histoire ancienne des Egyptiens, des Carthaginois, des Assyriens, des Babyloniens, des Medes, et des Perses, des Macedoniens, des Grecs, which was printed in Venice at the early date of 1749, scarcely ten years after the last volume of the original had been published in Paris. The translator, Alexandros Kangkellarios, justified the inclusion of the history of other civilizations such as those of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians in order that the qualities of the Greeks and Macedonians would become the more apparent. This was not the view of one of his near contemporaries, Gregorios Paliourites, the author of a Short History of Greece (Epitome Istorias tes Ellados) published in Venice in 1815, who felt that the long-windedness of Rollin's work and its coverage of other civilizations could only confuse young Greeks who, albeit the descendants of Miltiades, Leonidas and of Epaminondas and suchlike worthies, were ignorant of the deeds and even the names of their forefathers. The English, the French and the Italians 'and all the enlightened peoples of Europe' sought to make the history of their motherland as the first lesson of their children. Frequent reading of the achievements of their ancestors might, so he hoped, lead tender souls to imitate them (Paliourites 1815, 17-8, 20-1, 23). Oliver Goldsmith's The Grecian history from the earliest state to

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THE CLASSICS AND THE MOVEMENT FOR GREEK INDEPENDENCE

the death of Alexander the Great was translated by Dimitrios Alexandridis and published in Venice in 1806-7, while Nikolaos Skouphas published a translation of M.S.F. Scholl's Histoire abregee de la litterature grecque as the Synoptike lstoria tis Ellenikes Philologias ap 'arches tautis mechris aloseos tes Konstantinoupoleos para ton Othomanon in Vienna in 1816. Stephanos Oikonomos' Grammatike tes Ellenikes Glosses, a reworking of Philipp Carl Buttman's very widely used Griechische Grammatik (Berlin 1801), an endeavour undertaken at the urging of Adamantios Koraes, was likewise published in Vienna in 1812. Vasileios Efthymiou's Pheravges Grammatike praktike tes palaias Ellenikes glosses, published in Vienna in 1811, was based on the Latin grammar of Christian Gottlob Broder. Many of these books were either straightforward translations or adaptations of European originals, which their translators had encountered during studies at European universities or during their sojourn in the centres of the Greek diaspora. Indeed, William Leake, an acute observer of Greek society in the decades before 1821, noted that Daniel Philippides and Gregorios Konstandas had recorded in their Geographia Neoterike (Vienna 1790) their shame at the extent of their reliance on foreign writers for their 'chorographical' knowledge of the Greek lands: "'Ah, what a disgrace to us, the descendants of Hecateus, Ptolemy, Pausanias, and so many others, to run to the descendants of the Scythians, Celts, and Gauls, to learn something of our Greece"' (Leake 1814, 173). Other books dwelt on various aspects of the civilization of the ancient Greeks, among them Gregorios Paliourites' Archaiologia Ellenike, etoi philologike istoria, periechousa tous nomous, ten politeian, ta ethima tes threskeias, ton eorton, ton gamon, kai epikideion, ta dimosia kai ta kata meros paignidia ton palaion Ellenon, exairetos de ton Athenaion (Greek archaeology, that is to say literary history, containing the laws, the polity, the religious customs, the festivals, the marriages and funerary customs, the recreations of the ancient Greeks, and particularly of the Athenians), published in Venice in two volumes in 1815. Similar compendia were published by Athanasios Stageirites in Vienna 1815 and Kharisios Megdanes in Budapest in 1812. Biographies of individual worthies of the ancient world, such as the lives of Themistocles and Miltiades by Athanasios Stageirites published in

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Vienna in 1816 and 1818, also appeared. The columns of Greece's first literary periodical Ennes o Logios e Philologikai Angeliai, published in Vienna under the wary eyes of the Habsburg authorities between 1811 and 1821, were replete with discussions of the language question and of the heritage of Greek antiquity. It is significant that the anonymous author of the most radical political tract of the pre-independence period, the Ellenike Nomarchia, etoi logos peri Eleftherias, published in 'Italy', in dedicating the volume to Rigas Velestinles ( 1757-1798), the proto-martyr of the Greek independence movement, ranked him with his 'free ancestors' Epaminondas, Leonidas, Themistocles and Thrasyboulos. One of the most interesting productions in this prolific output of books reflecting an interest in the heritage of antiquity was an edition of the Physiognomonika, incorrectly attributed to Aristotle, published at the press of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1819. Two factors make this specific edition of particular interest. First of all, it was published at the very fount of Orthodoxy, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, whereas the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church was resolutely opposed to this resurgence of interest in classical antiquity which it equated with paganism. Secondly, the Physiognomonika, had been translated from ancient Greek into modem Greek and thence into Turkish, printed with Greek characters, for the karamanlides, the Turkishspeaking Greeks of Asia Minor for whom a substantial number of books were printed in karamanlidika, Turkish in Greek characters, in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his preface, the translator, Anastasios Karakioulaphes of Kayseri or Caesarea of Cappadocia, wrote that he intended it as a small gift to the 'heteroglot sons' of his 'most beloved Motherland, Greece'. The Turkish-speaking Greeks were numerous not only in Asia Minor but in the Ottoman capital itself. Few showed much awareness of, or interest in, their Hellenic ancestry before the end of the nineteenth century, which makes this publication of 1819 of particular interest. The 1819 Physiognomonika in karamanlidika, Turkish in Greek characters, is a very rare volume, fewer than a thousand copies of which were printed, but there are no less than two copies in the Taylorian Library in Oxford which once formed part of the library

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THE CLASSICS AND THE MOVEMENT FOR GREEK INDEPENDENCE

of Professor R.M. Dawkins. One of these once belonged to one 'Demosthenes Hac1 P. Kemaloglu Ala~hirli', a wonderful combination of a classical with a Turkish name, with Ala~ehir being the Turkish name for Philadelphia. For a key manifestation of this emerging interest in the classical past was the practice, which can be dated to the first decade of the nineteenth century, of naming children not after the saints of the Orthodox Church but after the worthies of ancient Greece. Some enthusiasts actually substituted the names of Greek antiquity for their Christian baptismal names. Probably the best-known instance of this practice occurred in 1817 at the Ellenomouseion of Ayvahk (Kydonies), a prosperous, almost exclusively Greek-inhabited town not far from Pergamum. The Ellenomouseion was one of the most advanced centres of education actually within the Greek lands. At the instigation, characteristically, of a visiting French philhellene, Ambroise Firmin Didot, students at the College 'so as to revive within the precincts of the College the language of Demosthenes and Plato', covenanted together, as befitted the descendants of the Hellenes, to abandon their coarse and vulgar vernacular in favour of their 'mother tongue'. The penalty for any lapse was to be the public recitation of a page of Homer. In appending their names to the covenant, the various signatories assumed classical in place of their Christian baptismal names. In this way, Ioannis became Pericles, Ilarion Xenophon, and Theophanes Cleanthes. Didot, appropriately enough, signed himself Anacharsis (Clogg 1976, 80-81), after the immensely popular, albeit long-winded, fictionalised account of the journey of Anacharsis the Younger in the Greek world in the fourth century BC written by the Abbe J.J. Barthelemy. The Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece had been duly translated into Greek appearing, after some tribulations, in a seven-volume edition published in Vienna in 1819. In the preface to this translation, the translator, Khrysoverges Kouropalates, gives an insight into the way in which Greek intellectuals became almost intoxicated with nationalist sentiment. 'There is nothing in the world', he wrote, 'more honourable, more desirable, more sacred than the Motherland ... in short, patriots of all nations think of nothing else, breathe nothing else, have no other wish, than the advantage, the increase and the glory of the Motherland'.

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The Revd. William Jowett, an English missionary, who, on the eve of the Greek revolt, visited Chios, like Ayvahk a major centre of the 'Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment', observed what he termed the 'great fashion, at present, of giving their children classical names' such as Calliope and Euterpe. He encountered one Chiote bent on baptizing his daughter Anthepe 'having discovered that that was the name, in very ancient times, of a Queen in Scio' (Jowett 1822, 75). Another missionary traveler, the Revd. S. S. Wilson himself encouraged the practice. In 1824, a proud father on Spetses asked Wilson whether his two-month-old son was not a 'noble Greek'. '"Perhaps", said I, "a future minister or legislator". "What shall I call him?" enquired the father turning to me; "for we are not going now to name our children after a pack of saints; we shall, in future, give them great, ancient names, those of our ancestors". "Well", I "What?" replied, "call the babe Themistocles". "Themistocles?" -"Wilt thou write it me down?" I did so in good Greek; and, I have reason to think, that if the dear little fellow is yet in this world of mortals, he is bearing the honoured name of the Athenian legislator' (Wilson 1839, 265). Sometimes enthusiastic students assumed classicising names of which there is no record in antiquity. Panayiotes Theodorides and Giorgios Ioannides, for instance, took the names Panagiotes Phoibapollon and Phoibapollon o ek Smymes respectively (Argyropoulou 1968, 52). Greeks not only endowed their children with classical names during the early years of the nineteenth century but, as Koraes noted in his Memoire (1803, 44), they began to name their ships in a similar fashion. Whereas they had hitherto been named after saints, they now chose the names of ancient Greek heroes. When Nicholas Biddle, a Philadelphia grandee and one of the first Americans to visit the Greek lands, took ship in Naples in 1806, he embarked on a 'polacre brig' called Themistocles (McNeal 1993, 51). Virtually the entire fleet of the 'nautical' island of Hydra, which was to play such an important in establishing Greek control of the sea during the war of independence, was endowed with such names. Ships of Hatziyannes Mexes, a leading ship owner of Spetses, another of the 'nautical' islands, were named after Pericles, Themistocles, Epaminondas and Leonidas. One Spetsiote ship was named after Pericles' partner Aspasia, while Laskarina Bouboulina, the

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Spetsiote heroine of the War of Independence, commissioned a ship named Agamemnon. Another indication of this interest in the past was the emergence of a scholarly interest in, rather than as had hitherto been the case, a superstitious reverence for, the physical remains of Greek antiquity and a concern to protect this heritage from the mania for collecting of foreign antiquaries. Koraes fulminated against the monks of the Monastery of St John on Patmos for having sold the famous codex containing Plato's Dialogues to the Cambridge scholar E.D. Clarke. One of the purposes of the Philomousos Etaireia, or Society of Friends of the Muses, which was founded in Athens in 1813 and had foreigners as well as Greeks in its membership, was 'the excavation of antiquities, the collection of marble inscriptions, of statues, of vessels and of any other worthwhile object'. Schoolteachers, many of whom had studied in the universities of Europe, were in the forefront of this re-awakening of interest in classical antiquity. It comes as no surprise therefore that in the schools and colleges of the Greek world in the decades before 1821 there should have been strong emphasis on the study of ancient Greek and of the history and literature of Greek antiquity. In 1760 Georgios Phatzeas, a priest from Kythera, wrote in his Grammatike geographike, e mallon analysis kathara, exikrivomene, kai syntomos tou oloklirou somatos tes Neoteras Geographias ... (1760), an augmented translation (via the French and Italian) of William Guthrie's New Geographical Historical and Commercial Grammar, that 'in Greece, where in ancient times Wisdom flowered, and the Muses dwelt, there are today no Academies and Reading Rooms, worthy of the name Academic. For the barbarous tyranny of the Turks does not allow the descendants of the Hellenes to attend to the study of the Sciences, of Wisdom, as was the custom of their progenitors'. But by the end of the eighteenth century the educational scene had changed markedly. In schools such as the Ellenomouseion of Ayvahk, the Academy of Chios, the Megale tou Genous Scholi (The Great School of the Nation) at Kuru~e~me in Constantinople, the Lykeion of Bucharest and the Ionios Akademia (Ionian Academy), founded in Corfu by the eccentric Frederic North, Fifth Earl of Guilford, 1 the foundations 1 Guilford built up a superb library for the Ionian Academy or University but his heirs thwarted his intention that the books remain on Corfu on his death and large parts of the

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were laid of that emphasis, indeed over-emphasis, on the classics that has characterised the Greek educational system up until modem times. Two American missionary visitors to the Academy of Chios in 1820, the Reverends Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, noted that 'the lessons of the second class are in ethics and history, selected from the works of Chrysostom, Isocrates, Plutarch, Dionysius and Lucian. The third class, in distinction, from the first and second, are instructed in poetry - lessons taken from the Iliad also in the different dialects and measures. The fourth class study Demosthenes, Plato, Herodotus, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Pindar, and are required to translate frequently from the ancient Greek' (Clogg 1967, 187). Platon Petrides recorded that the annual examinations in 1817 at the school of Zakynthos, then under British rule, entailed, inter alia, the writing of encomia of Aristides, Themistocles, Homer and Solon. One of the students, Count Ioannes Lountzes, penned a poem to Homer cast in the form of a Sapphic ode for the examination in poetics and rhetoric (Petrides 1817a, 27). Petrides noted that in England the study of the Greek classics was a necessary preparation for many professions. 'Should Greece' he asked, 'be the only place in which the Greek Muse is silent?' Nothing, he believed, would bring young Greeks, 'the hope of the Motherland', closer to the English and other nations or hasten the happiness of the Nation than the study of their beautiful language. 'Your language, o Young Ionian Islanders,' Petrides declared, 'albeit very corrupted, has not however been completely extinguished, but in the final analysis you speak the same language which your most brilliant ancestors spoke' (Petrides 1817b, 2, 5). Such was the emphasis on the classics at an Athenian school which William Allen visited in 1819 that the Quaker philanthropist was shocked to find that they taught 'Socrates, Eusebius, Plato and Xenophon, but not Jesus Christ' (Allen 1846, 114). OPPOSITION TO CLASSICAL LEARNING

This great upsurge of interest in the civilization of antiquity did not go without challenge. Dr. Mikhael Perdikares, in a book published library were sold to the British Museum in the 1830's. They form the basis of the British Library's superb collection of pre-independence printed books.

40

THE CLASSICS AND THE MOVEMENT FOR GREEK INDEPENDENCE

in Vienna in 1817, delighted in satirising the pretentions of the new nationalist intelligentsia, who insisted in dressing in Western clothes, alafranga, and in showing off their doctorates from European universities. He lampooned in particular their practice of changing their names: 'some take no pleasure in the surnames of their own family, and take the name of some ancient, or philosopher, or hero, thinking that, though without the virtue and learning of those of blessed memory, that with only their bare name they are those [worthies] themselves. So that one calls himself Empedocles, another Thrasyboulos, one calls himself Ass, another Blockhead' (Clogg 1976, 91). The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, which equated interest in antiquity with paganism and idolatry, was fearful lest this revival of classical learning would undermine the faith of the Orthodox faithful. In an encyclical of 1819, the Ecumenical Patriarch Grigorios V and the members of the Holy Synod, inter alia, condemned what they termed the recent innovation of 'giving ancient Greek names to the baptised infants of the faithful' as 'altogether inappropriate and unsuitable'. The lower clergy were urged to admonish their flock 'to abandon forthwith this abuse ... parents and godparents are in future to name at the time of the holy and secret rebirth [baptism] with the traditional Christian names, to which pious parents are accustomed, the [names] known in Church, and of the glorious saints that are celebrated by it' (Clogg 1976, 88). Gregory's predecessor as patriarch, Kurillos VI, was reported by Konstantinos Koumas, at that time director of the Patriarchal Academy in Kuru~e~me in Constantinople, to have claimed that he was unable to understand the fashionable preference for Thucydides and Demosthenes over what he termed 'the most elegant' Synesius and Gregory Nazianzen and to have declared the verses of the twelfth-century Phtochoprodromos to be much more harmonious than those of Euripides' (Koumas 1832, 514). Athanasios Patios, a conservative cleric and a staunch critic of the ideas of the Enlightenment and of Koraes in particular, declared that the ancient philosophers paid only lip service to virtue and learning, while he denounced Plato as being 'woman obsessed, a pederast and a parasite' (Nathanael Neokaisareos (Athanasios Parios) 1802, 15). Although Neophytos Kausokalyvites, was, like Athanasios Patios, a staunch conservative in religious matters, he

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translated and paraphrased texts of Homer, lsocrates, Plutarch and Lucian. In a delirious state shortly before his death in Bucharest in 1784 he rejoiced in the fact that he was about to join the souls of Plato and Demosthenes, a hope that so scandalised the Orthodox clergy of the city that they could scarcely bring themselves to give him a Christian burial (Dimaras 1969, 13). POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL

This great upsurge of interest in antiquity gave rise to some hyperbolic rhetoric. Benjamin of Lesvos, for instance, writing in 1820 in his Stoicheia tes Metaphysikes, on the very eve of the outbreak of the War of Independence, declared that 'nature has placed limits on the abilities of other people, but not, however, on those of the Greeks. Neither the Greeks of old were, nor the Greeks of today are, subject to the laws of nature' (Dimaras 1957, 5). For Gregorios Paliourites there was a time when 'our common mother Greece' was considered the mother of all mankind, was called the dwelling place of wisdom and the nesting place of the Muses, the treasure chest of human knowledge and of everything deemed sacred and wise (Paliourites 1815, 7). Much of this revival of interest in Greece's ancient past took place among Greeks of the diaspora. These openly made the link between the glories of Greece's ancient past with the prospect of her imminent regeneration. Naturally Greeks living in the Ottoman dominions had to be more circumspect in their enthusiasms and, in particular, in deriving a contemporary political message from this renewed interest in antiquity. The memoirs of the Comte de Marcellus, a former French minister to the Ottoman Porte, afford a revealing glimpse of the way in which some Greeks in the Ottoman capital just before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 made a very explicit connection between bygone greatness and the prospects of emancipation from the Ottoman yoke. De Marcellus records that during the winter of 1820/1821 he was invited to a literary evening in the mansion of a Phanariote Greek grandee in Bilyilk Dere on the Bosphorus, 'loin du tumulte de Constantinople', as he put it. The servants were dismissed; he was taken to a secluded room well away from public view and sworn to secrecy.

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TIIE CLASSICS AND THE MOVEMENT FOR GREEK INDEPENDENCE

His fellow guests included Dionysios Kalliarkhes, the Archbishop of Ephesus, and Costaki and Nikolaki, the sons of Alexandros Mourouzes, a former hospodar or prince of Moldavia. Coffee was deliberately not served, nor was the tsibouki or ~ubuk, the longstemmed pipe, smoked as these were deemed to be Ottoman customs. Instead the supposedly Hellenic sherbet or rose water were served. Konstantinos Oikonomos o ex Oikonomon, one of the leading figures of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, gave an introduction. This was followed by a reading of the Persians of Aeschylus in a 'voix animee, ardente et harmonieuse' by a student of the Ellenomouseion of Ayvahk. The fact that the young Greek was soon afterwards to die on the field of battle in Greece during the war of independence gave an extra note of poignancy to the occasion. When he had reached the victory of Salamis over the Persians, the young student of Ayvahk broke away from Aeschylus' text to recite the Thourios or War Hymn of Rigas Pheraios or Velestinles, the proto-martyr of Greek independence, who had been strangled by the Ottomans in Belgrade in 1798. This contained the famous couplet: 'Better one hour of free life Than forty years of slavery and imprisonment.' When the student had finished his reading, Costaki Mourouzes drew parallels between the Persians and the present situation of the

Greeks. The commander in Lydia could be compared with the vizir of Bursa. Another char~cter in the play was clearly the envoy of Mehmet Ali. A King of Macedonia had avenged the Greeks of this first invasion by barbarian hordes. Who would deliver her from the second? (Marcellus 1861, 226ff) CLASSICISM VERSUS TRADITIONALISM

A key question, of course, is how widely were the enthusiasms, even obsessions, of the nationalist intelligentsia and, in particular, this incipient progonoplexia, or ancestoritis, disseminated in the Greek world? Much of this ferment seems to have passed the great mass of the Greek people by. They were, above all, conscious of being Christians and had little sense of a specifically Hellenic identity. In an oft-quoted remark Nikotsaras, one of the leading

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protagonists in the Greek insurgency, showed little awareness of Hellenic ancestry. He was one of the most prominent of the klephts, the bandits, for the most part illiterate, who provided much of the military muscle of the Greek insurgency. When someone once compared his prowess to that of Achilles, Nikotsaras retorted 'What Achilles and such like fairy tales are you talking about? Did the musket of Achilles kill many?' (Koumas 1832, 544) The thought world of the great mass of unlettered Greeks reflected memories at a popular level of the great Christian Empire of Byzantium rather than of pagan antiquity. The most truly authentic, although by its nature the least tangible, aspect of Greek popular culture during the centuries of the Tourkokratia, or period of Turkish rule, was the almost universal credence in the prophecies and oracles foretelling the eventual liberation of the Greeks from the Hagaren yoke of the Turks. These included the oracles attributed to the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise; the legend of the Marmaromenos Vasilias, the Emperor turned into marble, Constantine XI Palaiologos, who had died defending Constantinople from the Ottoman Turks on that fateful Tuesday 29 May 1453, and who would one day return to life to lead a revived Christian Empire; the legend of the Kokkine Melia, the Red Apple Tree, from which the Turks had originated in Central Asia and to which they would one day return; the belief in the Xanthon Genos, the fair-haired race of liberators from the north, widely identified with the Russians, who would one day overthrow the Turkish yoke; the widely-disseminated but obscure prophecies of Agathangelos, purportedly compiled in the 13th century but in fact eighteenth century forgeries, which were held to portend eventual liberation from the lshmaelites (Clogg 1996, 253-281). Although very widely disseminated, such beliefs seldom manifest themselves in the written sources. An exception to this general rule is the diary of Joannes Pringos, a native of Zagora in Thessaly, who, like Adamantios Koraes, had worked as a merchant in Amsterdam in the eighteenth century but who, unlike Koraes, had amassed an enormous fortune in the process. Pringos is often held up as the very epitome of the 'progressive' bourgeois merchant, chafing under the arbitrariness and inefficiency of Ottoman rule and holding up the mercantile system of Holland as a model of enlightened efficiency. In fact he remained steeped in the thought-

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world of neo-Byzantine Orthodoxy. In a passage in his diary for 22 July 1771 he wrote that 'now should the prophecies of Leo the Wise be fulfilled, where he says 'Two eagles shall devour the snake'. These two eagles he identified as the insignia of the Byzantine and Russian Empires, and the snake as the Turks, who had wrapped themselves around the corpse of the Byzantine Empire. He was quite confident that, given that the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise was held to have prophesied that the Turks would remain for 320 years in Constantinople, the City, as Constantinople was simply and universally known in the Greek world, would be liberated within two years. This was a belief given some credence by the fact that the great Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 was then in progress (Clogg 1996, 260). But if beliefs of this kind more accurately reflected popular sentiment than the archaising enthusiasms of the small, but influential nationalist intelligentsia, the demonstrable, indeed at times obsessive, interest in Greece's classical heritage whose emergence in the fifty years or so before 1821 I have outlined in this paper, did contribute significantly to fostering a sense of identity that contributed to overriding the particularism and local patriotism so characteristic of the Greek communities during the long centuries of Ottoman rule. Moreover, the emergence of

progonoplexia, ancestoritis, and archaiolatreia, ancestor worship,

during this period exercised a profound influence on the educational system and indeed the entire cultural life of the newly emergent Greek state. It was this educational system which proved to be such an effective instrument in creating a sense of common Greek ancestry and identity among virtually all the inhabitants of the independent Greek state as it gradually expanded in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

. RICHARD CLOGG

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REFERENCES Allen, W., 1846. Life of William Allen, with selections from his correspondence. London. Anderson, B., 1990. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London. Argyropoulou, R., 1968. Panayiotes Phoivapollon kai Phoivappollon o ek Smymes. 0 Eranistes 6, 43-53. Clogg, R., 1967. 0 Parsons kai o Fisk sto Gymnasio tes Khiou to 1820. 0 Eranistes 5, 177-193. 1969. The correspondence of Adhamantios Koraes with Thomas Burgess 1789-1792. Anzeiger der phil. -hist. Klasse der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 106, 40-72. 1976. The Movement for Greek Independence 1770-1821: a Collection of Documents. London. 1996. Sense of the Past in pre-independence Greece. In: R. Clogg (Ed)., Anatolica: studies in the Greek East in the 1B'h and 19'h centuries. Aldershot. 7-30. Dimaras, C., 1957. Psykhologikoi paragontes tou Eikosiena. Athens. 1969. La Grece au temps des Lumieres. Geneva. Farsolas, D.J., 1971. Alexander Pushkin: his attitude towards the Greek Revolution 1821-1829. Balkan Studies 12, 57-80. Kedourie, E., 1970. Nationalism in Asia and Africa. London. Koraes, A., 1804. Iliodorou Aithiopikon Vivlia Deka. Paris. Coray [Adamantios Koraes] 1803, Memoire sur l'etat actuel de la civilisation dans la Grece, lu ala Societe des Observateurs de /'Homme le 16 Nivose, an xi (6Janvier1803). Paris. Jowett, W., 1822. Christian researches in the Mediterraneanfrom 1815 to 1820. London. Koumas, K., 1832. lstoriai anthropinon praxeon, vol. 12. Vienna. Leake, W.M., 1814. Researches in Greece. London. Maltby, W., 1856. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers to which is added Porsoniana. London. McNeal, R.A. (Ed.), 1993. Nicholas Biddle in Greece. The journals and letters of 1806. University Park, Pennsylvania. Marcellus, Comte de, 1861. Les Grecs anciens et les Grecs modemes. Paris.

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Neokaisareos, N. (Parios A.), 1802. Antiphonisis pros ton paralogon zilon ton apo tes Evropes erchomenon philosophon deiknousa oti mataios kai anoitos einai o talanismos opou kanousi tou genous mas kai didaskousa poia einai i ontos kai alethene philosophia. Trieste. Paliourites, G., 1815. Epitome istorias tes Ellados ... Venice. Petrides, P., 1817a. Diatrive ekphonetheisa eis tas dimosias exetaseis tes en 'Zakyntho Skholes. Corfu. l 8 l 7b. Eidopoieses kai protaseis pros tous neous tous Jonas dia na anorthosose ten glossan tes Palaias Ellados. Corfu. Petrou, S., 1976. Grammata apo to Amsterdam, P. Iliou (Ed.), Athens. Slot, B.J., 1980. Commercial activities of Koraes in Amsterdam. 0 Eranistes 16, 55-139. Val etas, G. (Ed.), 1957. Anonymou tou Ellenos, Ellenike Nomarkhia, itoi logos peri Eleftherias ('Italy' 1806). Athens. Wilson, S.S., 1839. A narrative of the Greek mission; or, sixteen years in Malta and Greece. London.

FROM SUBSERVIENCE TO AMBIVALENCE Greek attitudes toward the classics in the twentieth century. Paschalis M. Kitromilides

Clamouring about the return of the Parthenon marbles, excessive public reaction over the use of the name and symbols of the ancient Macedonian Kingdom as national emblems by a neighbouring state, the use of the name Hellas instead of Greece on announcements in Olympic Airways flights, the predominance of antique sites and monuments on National Tourist Organization posters and promotional literature and many other manifestations of public and official attitudes toward antiquity create an entirely misleading impression about the place and significance of classical culture in contemporary Greece. Many foreign observers, including archaeologists who have to compete with Greek colleagues over excavation permits, labour under these misleading impressions, thinking that in fact classical antiquity, Greece's distinguished ancient heritage, occupies a pivotal place in the culture of the country and commands unquestioned and unwavering respect and affection on the part of contemporary Greeks, to whom it supplies it is often thought, or the Greeks themselves would very often like foreign observers to think - an important part of the nonnative content of their identity. In fact things are much more complicated and convoluted than the images projected by the beautiful tourist posters we often see around us. Modem Greek attitudes toward antiquity and the classics are marked by profound antinomies and contradictions that occasionally, in this post-modem era, take up even a schizophrenic quality. The problem is not new. It has been part of Modem Greek culture since at least the eighteenth century, when a perceptive cultural critic, losipos Moisiodax, formulated it in truly incisive terms by pointing out that Greece suffers from both excessive esteem and excessive neglect of antiquity. This was written in 1761 and it has been that way ever since with fluctuations of course, which only sharpen the substantive problem identified by

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Moisiodax: fundamental ignorance of antiquity among Modem Greeks, who try to disguise it by ideologizing their presumed claims on classical culture. I cannot hope to discuss this complex and sensitive subject with any adequacy in this brief and necessarily cursory analysis. All I propose to do is to bring a historical perspective to bear upon it, expecting that this look at how Modem Greek attitudes toward antiquity evolved over time will clear away some of the misleading impressions I identified above. It is not of course possible to engage in a history of the classical tradition in Modem Greece in this essay. Let me just point out that a historical perspective on the subject would perhaps identify three broad phases, coinciding, in general terms, with the eighteenth, the nineteenth and the twentieth century respectively. These three phases could be epigrammatically described as: a) the age of discovery, or to use Peter Gay's terminology, the 'appeal to antiquity' in the age of Enlightenment. b) the age of subservience, or the uncritical elevation of antique models to the status of unquestioned normative authority in the age of romantic neoclassicism and c) the age of ambivalence, or the attempt to reappropriate antiquity as a subsidiary medium of symbolic expression in the age of modernism. The age of discovery was part of the attempt to elaborate a modem Greek identity through the appeal to Greek antiquity, which was what distinguished the Greeks from other Christian and Orthodox peoples. It was, therefore, an integral component of the intellectual effort to construct their distinct national lineage. The age of subservience on the other hand was an equally integral component of the strategy of nation and state building in the nineteenth-century 'neoclassical' kingdom, which needed normative standards in order to cement its cultural homogeneity and ethnic and social cohesion. The classical model was an outstanding intellectual resource and this can explain the extremes and excesses of archaism in nineteenth-century Greece. The strategy did work admirably however: in a few decades it produced a culturally, linguistically and ethnically homogeneous society that took excessive pride in its classical heritage and managed to express itself, to an impressive extent, in a purified formal Greek

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language, which aspired to approximate to a considerable degree the grammar and vocabulary of the ancient Greek language. There is an unending debate on this project to revive antiquity in Greek culture. It did go to extremes driven by excessive zeal, often encouraged or trying to impress - or even mislead - European and American philhellenism. But the generally negative appraisal of nineteenth century Greek archaism and linguistic purism, which is of course the verdict of its enemies, who have been the victors in the cultural battle, needs, I think to be modified. And the severe judgement that dismisses the whole project of archaism as artificial, uncreative and retrogressive - a clear case of the Whig interpretation of history - needs to be revised, at least at some of its points, in view of examples such as that of the early nineteenth century poet Andreas Kalvos, an archaist in poetry and a radical in politics, who turned out to be unquestionably one of the greatest poets of Modem Greece. So much for the age of subservience. Let me now tum to my main subject - the place of antiquity and the classics in the twentieth century, which could be understood as an age of ambivalence. In the history of the classical tradition in Modem Greece the twentieth century opened with two episodes, which confirmed beyond reasonable doubt the imposing normative weight of archaism: the age of subservience appeared to be exercising a complete hold on Greek culture when in 1901 an attempt, patronized by Greece's Russian-born Queen Olga, to translate and publish the New Testament in Modem Greek provoked violent reactions, which led to the resignation of both the head of the Church of Greece and of the prime minister. The other episode followed in 1903: an attempt to stage a performance of Aeschylus's Oresteia translated in demotic Modem Greek provoked violent public demonstrations of university students and enraged citizens who feared for the integrity of Greece's classical heritage. Three citizens died in the confrontation of the mob with the police in this flare-up of fanaticism over the fate of classical culture, whose selfappointed protector was the professor of ancient Greek literature at the University of Athens G. Mistriotis. These violent episodes, nevertheless, represented the fall of the final curtain upon the drama of nineteenth century archaism. Although the protagonists of the defence of archaism were

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university students, their sensitivities proved to be out of tune with the times. In 1906 Greece's true voice and conscience, the poet Kostis Palamas, made public, in his great epic poem, Dodecalogue of the Gypsy, a new critical attitude toward the uses of antiquity in Modem Greece - an attitude that verged occasionally on hostility and rejection. This new cultural criticism was part of the soulsearching and questioning of the fundamentals of the normative order in Greek society that emerged in the aftermath of the humiliating Greek defeat in the war of 1897. The questioning of the relevance of antiquity was a component of this outlook, which in retrospect came to confirm the claims of demoticism in the language question, which were voiced since 1888 by Yiannis Psycharis and his followers against Mistriotis, Kontos and other academic luminaries of archaism. One of the best expressions of the new attitude toward the value of antiquity was articulated in the allegorical novel by Andreas Karkavitsas, The Archaeologist, published in 1904. In this commentary on the consequences of the culture of archaism, a manic search for antiquities on the part of the «archaeologist», the novel's protagonist, leads to the discovery of a masterpiece of ancient sculpture, which he proudly installs at the centre of his house, until the statue falls upon him and kills him. Such was the climate toward the place of antiquity in modem culture, in which partook a significant part of Greek opinion at the opening of the twentieth century. Illustrations could be gleaned from a broad range of sources, including statements by leading political figures, among whom Greece's greatest statesman, Eleftherios Venizelos. What the new attitude amounted to, especially as it was formulated by Venizelos in his speech of 22 October 1911 in the Greek Parliament, was an appeal for a reappraisal of the place of antiquity in Modem Greek culture and the quest for a more realistic and relevant approach to the classics in the education of Greek children. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that throughout the twentieth century the Greek mind has been trying to come to terms with this problem, producing some very creative responses to it, to be sure, but ultimately failing to achieve a viable solution to it. Let me illustrate this cultural trajectory by pointing to a few examples, whose substantive significance very often eludes the analytical capability of conventional cultural history. The response

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to the questioning of the relevance of antiquity as expressed by Palamas' Gypsy and Karkavitsas' Archeologist at the opening of the century came with the cultural and ideological project of the so called 'Generation of 1930', the remarkable group of poets, artists and critics who appeared in the 1930' s and tried to renew Greek literature and culture through the aesthetics of modernism. Part of their project to recover genuine Hellenic values and the authentic substance of Hellenism was, inevitably, a reappropriation of antiquity. What appealed to their creative imagination, however, was Greek antiquity as symbolic vocabulary, as mythical names and topoi that might prove useful as allusive language in articulating their own modernist agenda. The one thing that apparently did not interest them was a substantive understanding of antiquity and the promotion of serious scholarship on the classics or on the ancient history of Greece. So the reappropriation of antiquity in twentieth-century Greek culture became a component of the project of modernism and did not involve a substantive renewal of interest in antiquity per se. There is no better example of this than the poetry of George Seferis: the use of antiquity as allusive discourse in a running commentary on modernity recurs throughout his poetic oeuvre from his early poetry in the 1930' s to his last poem EKi a