Greeks on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Ships and Print(s)

Abstract

There is no shortage of works on the uses of classical learning in the 17th-century Dutch ‘Golden Age’. The Dutch were very familiar with ancient Greek authors and ancient Greece functioned as a source of inspiration and a yardstick for measuring their level of achievement. Yet already by the late 16th century the Dutch were increasingly encountering modern Greeks through commercial relations or through the mediation of printed publications. This chapter examines a wide range of material – from scholarly dictionaries and atlases to ambassadorial reports and captivity narratives – in an effort to investigate how Dutch perceptions of ancient Greece compared and contrasted with Dutch views on Greeks living under Ottoman and Venetian rule. Modern Greeks were viewed with sympathy and pity, but they were also occasionally judged as shrewd and untrustworthy, the last two attributes owing largely to their entrepreneurial bent.