Greek Intellectuals Research Articles

The Historical Politics of the Contemporary Greek Society

The aim of the study is to examine the contemporary politics of memory in Greece in the early 2020s. The author analyzes the role and place of various ideological trends in modern Greek social thought, defining them as factors in the development and transformation of memorial culture and the collective historical memory of society. The novelty of the study lies in addressing the current stage in the development of the historical policy of the Greek society in the context of an objective lack of interdisciplinary research. The article is based on the principles of interdisciplinary historiography on memory studies. The author uses the achievements of the memorial turn and intellectual history to analyze Greek politics of historical memory and memorial culture. The article reveals the importance of factors of weak institutionalization of memorial culture in the context of significant politicization and ideologization of historical memory. The article shows that social activists as agents of the politics of memory in modern Greek society make a significant contribution to the development and transformation of memorial culture, the spectrum of memorial practices of Greek intellectuals varies from nationalism to liberalism, the participation of intellectuals in memorial politics impacts the parallel co-development of various competing forms of historical memories and versions of memorial cultures. The research suggests that the role of society in the historical politics of modern Greece will increase, and the intellectual community will remain among the active participants in the collective memorial politics.

Praise in Verses: Constantinople Patriarchal Academy Professors on Constantine Brâncoveanu

Abstract The Constantinople Academy professors and Patriarchate lay dignitaries, Antonios Spandones, Iakovos Argeios, Antonios Byzantios and his brother Chourmouzios composed elegant epigrams in poetic dialect to praise the ruler of Wallachia Constantine Brâncoveanu (1654‒1714) during his reign (1688‒1714). The aim of this study is to present and analyze this specific group of epigrams found so far, either in print or in manuscripts, since their existence or content, was only partially known to earlier scholars. In particular, their authors, their transmission and content, as well as the characteristics they attribute to the ruler, and also the motives behind their composition are elucidated. The writing of epigrams indicates the close connection existed between him and the Patriarchal Academy: The Wallachian ruler sought to create a circle of Greek intellectuals in Constantinople, who praised him as the Maecenas of Letters, the defender of the Orthodox Church, and the successor of the Byzantine emperors.

РОЖДЕНИЕ АНТИЧНОГО ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ПАМФЛЕТА: СТЕСИМБРОТ ФАСОССКИЙ

The genre of political pamphlet, which reached a high flourishing in Greece in the 4th century B.C. (Isocrates and others), appeared in the previous century. Usually scholars begin its history from the “Athenian Constitution” of Pseudo-Xenophon (420s B.C.). However, the article deals with an earlier (evidently, simply the earliest) pamphleteer, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who wrote in the time of Pericles. His fragmentarily preserved treatise “On Themistocles, Thucydides and Pericles” represented a very lively written tendentious pamphlet (of mainly invective a tone) with some features of memoirs. The article analyzes biographical testimonies on Stesimbrotus and extant fragments of his principal work. As it represents leaders of radical democracy, Themistocles and Pericles, in negative light, but Cimon, a statesman from the opposite camp, is represented in it more positively, the author makes a conclusion on generally antidemocratic political orientation of the pamphlet, and that corresponds with the prevalent position of Greek intellectuals if the period in question.

Konstantinos Oikonomos and Russian Philorthodox relief during the Greek war for independence (1821–1829)

Abstract After the Archipelago expeditions of the Russian Navy in 1769–1774 and 1805–1807, thousands of Greeks fled the Ottoman Empire and resettled in the province of Novorossiia (southern Russia). Among the migrants were prominent merchants who strongly supported the Philiki Etaireia (Friendly Society) and the cause for Greek independence. Although Tsar Alexander I could not openly support the insurrection that broke out in 1821, Russia provided invaluable material assistance to the Greek refugees, who arrived in Russian cities such as Odessa and Kishinev. Special committees under Russian officials distributed funds gathered from private donations and public sources all over Russia. The famous Greek cleric Konstantinos Oikonomos also arrived in Odessa with his family. His speech at the funeral of Patriarch Gregory V (whose relics were buried in Odessa) helped solidify the image of the patriarch as an ethno-martyr. Oikonomos served as a mediator and advisor to the Ober-procurator of the Russian Holy Synod, Alexander Golitsyn, who was responsible for gathering information about Greek clergymen among the refugees. Oikonomos also played an important role in distributing donations for the families of the Greeks displaced after the massacre on Chios in 1822. The documents from Russian archives presented in this essay demonstrate the network of Oikonomos and the pivotal role that he played between the Russian high officials and Greek intellectuals, the Greek merchants, and his poorer compatriots. This chapter features an annex with the unpublished correspondence of Oikonomos as evidence for one of the largest humanitarian actions of the nineteenth century.

Mataioponēmata: the politics of failure in translating theAeneidin eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greece

AbstractThe composition of translations of Classical texts in the nineteenth-century Greek state was a complex issue entwined with politics, ideology, and the cultural identity of the new nation that sought to construct its identity by looking back towards its glorious Classical Greek past. It is, moreover, an issue tied to the so-called ‘language question’, the ardent debate on the type of the national Greek language (archaizing Greek, katharevousa, or demotiki). The intellectual elite of the new nation-state, led by the professoriate of the newly founded Ottonian University and a number of influential Greek intellectuals of the Diaspora tried to acquaint the newly-liberated Greeks with the classical writers of antiquity primarily through education. Since these elites favoured the katharevousa, a conservative construct of the spoken Greek language fashioned as a compromise between Classical Greek and the spoken vernacular of the time, the produced translations of the ancient authors had limited appeal across time, and they never aspired to address an audience beyond academia. Thus, all translations of the Aeneid published in Greece during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were literary failures. They were never meant to be read independently from the original Latin, and, inevitably, were largely forgotten following the death of their authors.

Sculpture as Literature and History: Captive and Captivating Venus Figures from the Greek Revolutionary Era

This paper focuses on the sculpture of the Venus de Milo, a chance find of 1820, but a token discovery in the fermentation brought on by the growing tensions between the Ottoman administrative hierarchies, the foreign diplomats, the Greek intellectuals and yet aspiring revolutionaries, and the local populations of the Aegean islands. For lack of an ancient history of the Venus, antiquarianism, treasure-hunting, archival evidence, and Greek revolutionary history blend in the statue’s new lease on life, which is a Western afterlife in literature and legend as well as in history, from which the islanders of Milos have all but been erased. The Venus de Milo has become an iconic figure, heavily overwritten by aesthetic judgments, adventure stories of movement and migration, and the accounts of personal and political trajectories, all playing out in the upper and Western echelons of imperialist Europe and its classist (and racist) underpinnings.

Stephen Pericles Ladas and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations: the making and unmaking of a narrative

This article focuses on the narrative of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations with a focus on the role of a prominent figure in the making of this narrative, namely, Stephen Pericles Ladas. His 89-year-old book is still considered the standard text on the event and is unsurpassed in terms of its coverage of facts and figures. The article contextualizes and briefly examines this highly influential text on the Exchange of Minorities with a view to showing how it came to constitute the dominant narrative of the Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations. It is argued that Ladas appropriated the findings and arguments about this event from the publications of his contemporaneous Greek intellectuals and then framed them within the parlance of international law to craft a narrative favorable to the nation-state and the League of Nations. In the absence of any challenging opinions and publications, this narrative, which was largely inattentive to the human and moral consequences of the event, became the standard account of the Greco-Turkish case to be widely quoted by the international political and scholarly circles preoccupied with the question of ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities during the interwar period and after.

On Greek Intellectuals and the Roman Emperor Cult

The stance of Greek intellectuals towards the idea and the practice of Roman emperor cult has been often examined, with the main result that the complacent, conformist attitude of these subjects of the Empire has been ascertained (thus in a still basic study by G.W. Bowersock, 1973). A new scrutiny of the available evidence, however, spots also serious reserves in that circle towards the real content of emperor worship at least since the Antonine age, while outright and conscious flattery as driving force and quintessence of the imperial cult appears even earlier. After the proper analysis, cultic acceptance of a real benefactor-emperor, refined flattery or careful, direct or indirect, rejection appear as the three poles around which the attitudes of Greek intellectuals towards the imperial cult circled. Essentially, all three variant stances continued threads of reaction to the practice of ruler-cult beginning already in Hellenistic times, thus pointing to an underlying continuity between the ideological picture of the ruler in this period and the Roman Empire.

Ancient Etymology and the Enigma of Okeanos

AbstractOkeanos is at once a mythological figure and a philosophical concept appearing in many ancient accounts of the world. A frequent object of allegoresis, his cosmological role and his name posed an enigma to Homer’s readers, especially those with a rationalizing bent. This paper proposes that the paradoxical representation of Okeanos as a primordial generative power and a geographical limit may be explained by the influence of etymological speculation, which was a popular heuristic method used by Greek intellectuals from the archaic period throughout antiquity.

The Plurality of Greeknesses in Interwar Greece: A Matter of Culture or Politics?

The interwar crisis as perceived by conservative German and Greek intellectuals focused particularly on national identity, which they thought to be decisively challenged and threatened by radical transformation. In Greece the intellectual elites undertook the task to interpret the crisis in order to frame a cultural programme concerning the meaning of Hellenism that incorporated their ideological and partisan assumptions. This article explores the notion of Greekness, and the ways it embraced and encapsulated the problems that bedevilled both state and society, during the period of the interwar crisis. It aims, first, to examine the intellectuals' narrative and production of the ideology of Greekness as a signifier that launched, implicitly and explicitly, the elements that constituted a new imaginary institution of the nation. To this end, it will examine theoretical schemes and cultural transfers from German academic currents and theorists of the time and the appeal of their proclamations. The ideology of Greekness offered a means for the government to resolve the issues of the interwar state and, in particular, the challenge of its political survival and continuity. My second aim is to trace the convergences and divergences of the concervative intellectuals' schema of Greekness with the equivalent aspirations of the Thirties Generation. By capturing the meaning of Greekness, the conservative intelligentsia expanded the criterion for Greekness beyond an aesthetic perception of Hellenism and its related conversation with European modernism, as the issue was employed by the writers and poets of the Thirties Generation. Conservative's examination of Greekness disclosed the way that the politics of culture both served and promoted a hegemonic discourse. In conclusion my paper holds that the intellectuals' main concern was to utilize the cultural capital of Hellenism in order to propose a technique of governance, numbering the Greek case among the counterpart nationalist project in Germany at the time. Greekness demonstrated anew an imaginary conceptualization and institutionalization of the nation, that was articulated in accordance with the ideological assertions of conservatives circles and became synonym with a pedagogy of national conformity.

Greek Intellectuals and the Regime of the Colonels

espanolEste articulo versa sobre la relacion dialectica existente entre cultura y politica en Grecia bajo la dictadura de los Coroneles (1967-1974). Estudia como las nuevas tendencias en el mundo de la produccion escrita, pero tambien en el cine, el teatro y la musica, dieron forma a nuevas identidades culturales, radicalizando a partes de la poblacion y, especialmente, a los estudiantes, que a menudo emulaban el espiritu del 68 de otros lugares. Se trata de formas alternativas de cultura que se crearon en yuxtaposicion a la Junta, con varios elementos contraculturales, pero tambien tradicionales, y que adquirieron cierta importancia politica a lo largo del tiempo EnglishThis paper addresses the dialectical relationship between culture and politics in Greece under the so-called Regime of the Colonels (1967-74). It examines how new trends not only in the print world, but also in cinema, theatre and music, gave shape to new cultural identities, radicalising segments of the population, particularly students, who emulated the spirit of 1968 witnessed elsewhere. Alternative forms of culture arose in juxtaposition to the military junta, taking on various elements that were counter-cultural in nature, but also traditional, and gaining in political importance with the passage of time

Portret Herodota w świetle traktatu De Herodoti malignitate Plutarcha z Cheronei

Portrait of Herodotus in the light of Plutarch’s treatise De Herodoti malignitate As a Platonist and moralist Plutarch paid particular attention truth. No wonder that in his reference to Herodotus’ Histories he took into consideration the issue of historical truth, which was for him very important — both in its ethical as well as didactic aspect. In his De Herodoti malignitate the Chaeronean moralist is concerned with truth as well as with offering moral uplift. Plutarch presents Herodotus as a perfidious liar who falsely presented such famous and heroic Greeks as Miltiades, Leonidas, Themistocles or Pausanias and — above all — depreciatingly treated the Boeotians and Corinthians. Moreover, Plutarch accuses the historian of Halicarnassus of being malicious (κακοήθεια). For him Herodotus’ lies were deliberate and slandering. Herodotus was also a blasphemer, a pro-barbarian historian; a man who disregarded women. Finally, we get the Plutarchan portrait of Herodotus himself as a blunt barbarian (ὁ ἔσχατος Καρῶν). Such a presentation of Herodotus seems to attest to Plutarch’s own prejudices, if not wickedness. By the same, however, one must take into consideration the literary tradition in which the whole treatise is rooted. So De Herodoti malignitate contains features of historical polemics and is an example of judicial rhetoric, in which the biographer attempts at persuading his readers that his charges against Herodotus are well justified. The treatise is a work representing the new intellectual trend, the so-called Second Sophistic; a polemic written in a period when the Greek intellectuals were deeply engaged in taking issues with past writers. Moreover, a fundamental aspect of De Herodoti malignitate should be taken into account — truth which is analyzed from a moral and psychological perspective. Although a leading motif of the treatise is truthfulness, the direct subject-matter of Plutarch’s considerations remains a lie, or — to put it exactly — lying. Accordingly, the Boeotian moralist singles out and analyses all the fundamental forms of lying. A suitable interpretation of the treatise De Herodoti malignitate depends thus on our knowledge of the cultural distance between Herodotus and Plutarch, although both authors were the representatives of Greek prosa.

Enlightenment and School History in 19th Century Greece: the Case of Gerostathis by Leon Melas (1862-1901)

Students in present-day Greek schools are taught History as a biography of the Greek nation from the Mycenaean times to the present. Over the course of three millennia, the Greek nation has experienced three periods of cultural flourishing and political autonomy: (i) the period of Antiquity (from the times of legendary King Agamemnon to those of Alexander the Great), (ii) the Byzantine period (from Justinian’s ascension in the 6th century to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453), and (iii) the modern era (from the War of Independence in 1821 to the present day). However, in this article we argue that in the 19th century the history taught in Greek schools differed substantially from the tripartite schema described above. In support of our thesis, we examine the most popular school textbook of the 19th century, O Gerostathis, by Leon Melas. In the Gerostathis, the history of the Greek nation is identified with that of Classical Greece (i.e. from the 6th century BC to the 4th century BC), which is held up as an exemplary era worthy of emulation. In contrast, the rise of Macedon under Philip II signals the cultural decline of the Greeks and the loss of their political autonomy, which was not regained for two millennia, until the 1821 national revolution. In that period, the Greek nation ceased not to exist, but survived as a subjugate of the Macedonians, the Romans, and finally the Ottomans. The Byzantine, on the other hand, is described as an unremarkable period of decadence that is only worth mentioning in relation to its final period, that of the Palaeologus dynasty, which bestowed upon the Greeks a legacy of resistance against the Ottomans. We argue that the above reading of the Greek past owed much to the Enlightenment, which as an intellectual movement still exerted a powerful influence (albeit to a gradually diminishing degree) on Greek intellectuals up to the latter third of the 19th century.

Alexander-Imitators in the Age of Trajan: Plutarch's <em>Demetrius</em> and <em>Pyrrhus</em>

Interest in Alexander the Great witnessed a revival among Greek intellectuals at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, coinciding with the reign of the Alexander-inspired emperor Trajan. This paper argues that Plutarch's Demetrius and Pyrrhus participate in this contemporary discourse by exploring the phenomenon of Alexanderimitation directly. Plutarch portrays these Hellenistic kings as men whose perceived similarities to Alexander failed, for various reasons, to bring them lasting success. These Lives call into question which of Alexander's traits a ruler should imitate and suggest that an association with Alexander can do as much harm as good to a ruler's reputation.

“Suspicor enim eam gentem a graecis originem duxisse”: Translating Utopia in Greek

ABSTRACT Although More's Utopia is a work for which classical Greek language and literature are central, it was not until 1970 that the work was translated into Greek. During the sixteenth century, Greek scholars bypassed the fundamental texts of Renaissance humanism, clinging instead to the classical Greek past. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Greek intellectuals also ignored Utopia, partly because the nature of their Westernizing agenda did not attract them to a work embedded within the tradition of Catholic Latinate cosmopolitanism. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the term utopia entered Greek intellectual life, “scientific socialism” had also made its first appearance in Greek political culture, possibly preempting the desire to translate a work that would now appear to constitute the source of an already obsolete canon of “utopian socialism.” Tellingly, the textual life of More's Utopia in Greek began during the military junta. Its first translation arguably deploys it as a text charged by the desire for egalitarian democracy while at the same time privileging its satirical and playful aspects, partially in order to avoid state censorship. Though there are important differences regarding the framing of More's text by the four extant translations in modern Greek, the overall tendency seems to be to receive Utopia as a fundamentally political text, a text capable of inspiring thought, and perhaps action, during dire and challenging times.

Latin Literature

Latin Literature

French, Greek Intellectual Elites and the “Language question” in a Greece during the 20’ and 30’: Louis Roussel’s Case

Louis Roussel a tenu dans l’histoire du néo-hellénisme en France un rôle de pionnier. Son journal, Libre, qui parut régulièrement de décembre 1922 à juillet 1936, nous fournit une vision très riche et très vivante de la vie intellectuelle athénienne dans les années 1920 et 1930.Nous étudierons successivement la représentation des partisans de la langue savante et la représentation des démoticistes dans Libre. Nous conclurons en constatant que Louis Roussel a, sur « la question de la langue » en Grèce, un point de vue philhellène et républicain : la langue doit être la même pour tous (pas de langue réservée à une élite) et c’est donc une seule et même langue qui doit être utilisée dans la vie de tous les jours, à l’école, dans les journaux, dans la littérature et les sciences. Tout le monde a ainsi accès au savoir et la Grèce peut devenir une nation.

Neohellenic Philosophy From Enlightenment to Romanticism

This paper attempts to present, both historically and analytically, the way philosophy had been exercised and developed in Modern Greece from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century in connection with its culture and history. It aims to introduce the reader to Neohellenic philosophy and its distinctive characteristics, and to acquaint her with the endeavours of many outstanding Greek intellectuals to continue the Hellenic philosophical and cultural tradition, going back to Greek Antiquity that had been transmitted through the Byzantine learning, while, at the same time, to incorporate into their thinking Western philosophical traditions. My exegesis starts from the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and the Greek intellectuals went into exile in the West. Dealing with issues of educational reforms and with philosophical and linguistic controversies (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries), I shall examine, systematically and selectively, the Western influences that made possible the revival of traditional philosophy in Greek thought as well as the renewal of Greek cultural identity that led to the Greek War of Independence (1821–1827) and into the modern period of Greek history and intellectual thought.

Loyaume and Νomarchie: Κeywords of the French revolution in the Greek vocabulary

<p>The French Revolution was the occasion for the reformulation of the definitions of basic concepts as <em>liberté</em>, <em>égalité</em>, <em>fraternité</em>, <em>nation</em>, <em>patrie</em>, etc. At the same time a lexical creativity, a large quantity of words appeared, some of them total news or with new significations, temporary or persistants (<em>aristocruche</em>, <em>humanicide</em>, <em>enragés</em>, <em>loyaume</em>, etc.).</p><p>This paper examines aspects of lexical and semantic developments in Greek language focussing on the era of the French Revolution. This important period was characterized by intensified contacts with Western Europe. In this process, Greek intellectuals expressed an open admiration of the new French model of the nation in their political works and attempted to form a new political language. Most of the modern notions were introduced from the French language, which in his turn had acquired a large amount of greek-latin loan words. The intercultural dimension provide the tools for analysing the ways in which the new terms and concepts were transfered to the greek vocabulary. These processes are examined as reflected in the <em>Hellenic Nomarchy </em>(Italy 1806), a crucial text of the period. </p>

Epigraphy in Early Modern Greece

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. In this paper, I study the emergence and advancement of epigraphic studies in roughly the first forty years following the foundation of the modern Greek state. The main protagonists - most of whom remain unknown outside Greece - are introduced, and their epigraphic output in its multiple manifestations is examined: the recording and analysis of inscriptions, the publication of articles and monographs, and the creation and protection of epigraphic collections. My study is contextualized by examining contemporary issues of ethnic identity and state-institution formation, as well as questions of interface amongst the Greek intellectuals themselves on the one hand, and between them and their European counterparts on the other. Ultimately, however, an attempt is made to understand the form and content that early epigraphic studies acquired in the Greek-speaking world, and the extent to which Greek scholarship contributed to the emerging field of epigraphy as it materialized with the publication of the early epigraphic corpora.