English Brutal Colonisation of the Seven Islands: The Poems of Ossian by James Macpherson

Abstract

After the failure of the first strike of the 1821 Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire, which began in Moldovia in February, it continued in the Peloponnese one month later. The uprising resulted in victory with the formation of the Modern Greek state; its President was Jiannis Capodistria, a Corfiot. Greece was a state born mutilated in 1828 as it excluded: Epiros, Thessalia, Chios Mytilene, Samos, Crete and the Dodecanese Islands under Ottoman rule. The Ionian Islands were under English control, ostensibly known as the ‘British Protectorate’. The second expansion of the Greek state in the nineteenth century was engendered by Radical Ionian Greeks who rebelled against the English who had tyrannised the Seven Islands for almost fifty years until 1864 when they united with Greece. The influence of Celtic literature through the works of The Poems of Ossianby the Scottish antiquarian James Macpherson and Irish Melodies and ‘Imitation of Ossian’ by the Irish scholar Thomas Moore inspired the works of Seven Islands radical intellectuals, which provide a hidden code that coincided with political events at the time to unite the oppressed. The main translator of The Poems of Ossian was Panayiotis Panas, a Kephalonian scholar. He was the successor to Rhigas Velestinlis, the protomartyr of the Greek Revolution and follower of the national poet, the Zakynthian Dionysius Solomos. Panas aimed to unite and spiritually uplift the people by conveying the hope of living under freedom, equality, and fraternity; to live under democracy, without a monarchy. Neglected by the Greek Academy in the twentieth century do these translations of this Celtic literature and its influence remain in obscurity in this century? To what extent did the English have the right legally to gift the Seven Islands to Modern Greece in 1864? Has the sacrifice and patriotism of those who fought for the union of the Seven Islands with Greece been included in the school curriculum. Keywords: Irish melodies, translation, nineteenth century, history, The Mediterranean, The Poems of Ossian and British Colonialism