Koraes, Toynbee and the modern Greek heritage

Abstract

At first sight it is nothing more than an accident of history that brings the names of the Greek philologist and patriot Adamandios Koraes and of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee together: in 1919, Toynbee was appointed to be the first holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the University of London. The third component of my title introduces some rather more substantial common ground. The ‘heritage’ of the Modern Greek people from the ancient past plays a large part in the work of both — explicitly and at length in the writings of Koraes, less conspicuously but scarcely less fundamentally, as this paper will argue, in Toynbee’s mammoth investigation of the forces at work in shaping world history.