Remaking Persian War Heroes

Abstract

Thus Rene Canat writing with a flourish, as he explains how the nineteenth-century philhellenic fervor drove the artificial creation of a new classical Greece, a Greece that would uphold its Persian War triumphs, battle sites, and heroes. If Barthelemy had reinvented (the topography of) ancient Greece, Marcellus was willing and eager to help populate it. In his story of the reading of Aeschylus’s Persians, the diplomat unveiled some of those Greeks, “tenderly heroic” and “elegantly patriotic,” who, in the distant past, had defeated the Persian invader and now prepared to fight his perceived reincarnation, the Turkish host.