The apathy of the rulers of the civilized world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilization—rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin, is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shews of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But for Greece — Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters […]
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, preface to Hellas: A Lyrical Drama, 1st November 1821.
“We are all Greeks,” said Shelley in the first year of the Greek War of Independence, appealing for Western assistance in the struggle. He was on to something.
For as long as the concept of ‘Greek’ has existed, other people have wanted to claim it as their own. It began in 146 BC, when the Roman Republic’s ambitions of conquest turned to face east towards its former allies in Achaea. It continued through the establishment of the Byzantine Empire (c. 300 AD), the Sack of Constantinople (1204), and the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans (1453). In the 19th century, when the first regions of Greece achieved independence, the Greeks chose to emulate the ancients - purposely creating the country in the image of the old. The Great Powers quickly imposed a monarchy to establish it in their image instead - the German prince Otto took the freshly-created throne (yes, a man called Otto took over a country previously occupied by Ottomans - you can’t make it up), because as Palmerston put it, then they would feel “confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect [them].” When the Greeks later rejected that king, they were given instead a Danish prince to become their George I - who would ultimately turn out to be the great-grandfather of none other than our King Charles III.
In the 20th century, newly independent Greece had to face off invasions and encroachments from all sides - with Germany, Italy, Turkey and the USSR all trying to lay claim to its mountains and shores. The West defended it to a point, but didn’t make good on their promise of returning East Thrace and Constantinople (Istanbul) to Greece; they instead instigated an ethnic cleansing operation in 1923 of 1.2 million Greeks (and 400,000 Turks) in a ‘population exchange’ between Turkey and Greece when Greece was unable to take back the land alone. They didn’t intervene in the rise of a Greek military junta, nor did they prevent the Turkish invasions of north eastern Cyprus (which remains occupied to this day). When Greece finally kicked out the monarchy and declared a republic in 1974, they were swiftly welcomed into the European Union and later the Euro for ‘protection’, finally rooting it as Western. They were rewarded for this with such strict conditions on the failure of their economy in 2009 that it almost destroyed the country entirely.
Because, frankly, it was never about protecting Greece, it was about keeping it in its box.
As Shelley notes, Ancient Greek ideals, particularly those of Athens, the great city-state known best for its philosophers and artists but a military power in its own right too, have proven foundational to Western civilisation. It was there that democracy was first taken for a spin, it was there that concepts of mathematics, philosophy and science were codified in ways that are still used today, and it was there where many of the most famous myths and legends that persist in 2026 were first dreamt up.
From about the third century BC, the poets and playwrights of Ancient Rome would repurpose Greek stories - either quietly arranging them into existing Roman literature or treating them as if they always were there. Artemis became Diana, Zeus became Jupiter, Heracles became Hercules. This was the first widespread colonial appropriation of Greek literature in history. And although the Romans claimed ownership of many of these stories, we do have them to thank for our knowledge of a great number of them - lots of the myths we are familiar with now have clear roots in Greece but only survive in Latin, not Greek, texts. For much of history, it was the Roman versions that were best-known, and the Roman names used for the gods and heroes - this is despite the important and much-maligned role Greek scholars played in the preservation of that corpus.
Greece has inspired thinkers and travellers for its whole existence. Greek myth makes up a significant portion of opera and ballet repertoire, and it’s impossible to study literature or theatre without encountering the Ancient Greeks, because they are so firmly woven into the canon. You can’t even study the Bible without Greek myth - there are numerous stories in the Old and New Testaments which have direct parallels to Hellenic ones. Those stories have never died: they have continued to live and breathe all around Europe, added to, removed from, and adjusted for the contemporary context.
Take Virgil’s national epic, The Aeneid. It is an interpolation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in which he uses his reverence and resentment of Greek thought and culture to position Rome as directly descended from the Trojan prince Aeneas. He places Rome both in opposition to, and in the direct lineage of, Homer and the earliest Greeks, creating a cult of hostility (his is the phrase “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”) and also proto-eugenics: setting out some kind of ancestral superiority of the Greek, and by extension Roman, people.
Like Virgil, Chaucer wrote about Troy, this time in the context of medieval romance, though his source was Boccaccio (and his source was the French poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure) for Troilus and Criseyde - set in the Trojan war, but with a freshly invented story. Shakespeare later wrote six plays set in “farthest Greece” (and a few more with scenes or entire settings in or near Greece) despite having quite limited material to work from compared to his greater number of plays set in Italy, the fashionable centre of the renaissance. He also wrote his own Troilus and Cressida, based on Chaucer’s.
European and American systems have continued what Virgil started - calling Athens the birthplace of Western democracy, Greece the cradle of Western civilisation, and claiming artefacts and trophies from excavation of Greek archaeological sites for their museums and galleries. Classics has been taught as long as Western universities have existed, and the great writers and artists have leant into the classics because they were told to. This perpetuation of Greece as ancestor to the West has been critical - the creation of nations in the image of Ancient Athens (or at least, the amenable bits) has been a conscious decision. Greece as the crucible for the West is a Western mythology, used by European colonisers as they took over vast swathes of land around the world to reset each place in that image. There are reams of quotes stretching from Emperor Hadrian to Boris Johnson about the importance of Greece and Greeks to Western thought, lionising Greek heroes as aspirational warriors for Westerners to emulate. In the neoclassical revival, they even built buildings in these places to mirror the ancients - so now the great Metropolitan and British museums feature temple facades on their exteriors. It is a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating story. It wasn’t the Greeks who were doing the occupying and colonising, and it wasn’t the Greeks who called themselves Western.
In English literature, the foreign interest in the Greek ideal reached its apex in the Romantic period. I’ve already quoted Shelley. His friend Lord Byron was so infatuated with the place that he fought in its war of independence - ultimately dying during the war (though of a fever, perhaps malaria). In a similar spirit to Shelley, when in the early 19th century Lord Elgin brought the Parthenon Marbles to London, Byron watched on in horror. He was so incensed when given a tour of the freshly-pillaged Acropolis that he wrote The Curse of Minerva to denounce it, which he considered so vicious a poem that he never intended for it to be public. He characterises the poem’s narrator’s first face-to-face encounter with Minerva (Athena) in metaphor for what Elgin (and the Ottoman occupiers) have done by pillaging Greece:
Yes,’twas Minerva’s self; but, ah! how changed,
Since o’er the Dardan field in arms she ranged!
Not such as erst, by her divine command,
Her form appeared from Phidias’ plastic hand:
Gone were the terrors of her awful brow,
Her idle Ægis bore no Gorgon now;
Her helm was dinted, and the broken lance
Seemed weak and shaftless e’en to mortal glance;
The Olive Branch, which still she deigned to clasp,
Shrunk from her touch, and withered in her grasp;
And, ah! though still the brightest of the sky,
Celestial tears bedimmed her large blue eye;
Round the rent casque her owlet circled slow,
And mourned his mistress with a shriek of woe!
She addresses Byron:
“Mortal!”--’twas thus she spake--”that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honoured less by all, and least by me…
This image of broken Athena, representative of Athens, is one you could have applied to Greece at many points in its history - pillaged, ruined, trampled by others trying to take a piece of it. It’s not one you can apply today though, as Greece finally emerges anew.
Byron is revered in Greece; there’s a statue of him in Athens, many districts around the country named “Vyronas” and the Acropolis Museum hosted a special exhibition in his honour when I visited last year. The boys’ name ‘Vyron’ remains popular to this day. Greeks have a term for those who have stood in support or reverence of, or communion with, the country and its history, like Byron, Shelley and Virgil: philhellene. It means ‘friend of the Greek’; there is even a Philellinon Street in central Athens, one of the arteries to Greece’s Parliament.
The arguments for the return of the Parthenon Marbles have been made eloquently and extensively by people much more qualified than me. Yet as I first wrote in April, I see sharp parallels between the Marbles and the appropriation of Greek stories by artists from abroad. The Marbles have served the British Museum greatly over the two centuries they have lived in London - attracting tourists and being used as the backdrop to fundraisers. Despite the Museum’s failure to look after them properly (they have been damaged by London’s pollution and some failed attempts to clean them over the years), their value to the museum has only increased. Perhaps most telling of the state of affairs is the British Museum’s incredibly patronising trustees’ statement on why the Marbles apparently can’t be returned.
The British Museum is hardly the only one. In all cases, the West only seems to pick up the pieces of Greek culture they find most amenable and most easily swallowed into its style of art, and they rarely seem interested in Greek interventions to tell these stories. One of the most telling things in my research for this post was this: if you want to study Classics at some of the UK’s most revered universities, you are encouraged to learn modern Italian, French and German. This is so that you can be across the most important classical scholarship, which isn’t solely dominated by the Anglophone. Greek scholarship isn’t considered an important part of the equation.
Does Greece have no universities? Are there no classicists in Greece? Of course there are - but they’re forced to publish in other European languages if they want to be read by Western scholars. In fact, Greek scholars are actively dismissed - one only needs to look into the debates around the pronunciation of Ancient Greek texts to see how modern Greeks have been marginalised and sidelined, spoken down to by scholars as if they failed their GCSEs. The Greek education system takes the ancient stories incredibly seriously - the Iliad and Odyssey alone are studied in more depth in schools than most English ones study all of Shakespeare; Ancient Greek is a required subject, rather unlike Old or even Middle English. The centres of academic power have historically dissected and tried to own these stories for millennia, while seeming reluctant to engage with Greeks at all. They have taken the second half of Shelley’s quote - ”We are all Greeks“ - incredibly seriously, while ignoring the first part - “the apathy of… the civilized world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of [Greece]… is something perfectly inexplicable.”
These are, of course, the same people writing lengthy statements about why Elgin didn’t steal the marbles, and why they belong abroad.
This goes beyond scholarship. Byzantine paintings are hardly present west of Greece, and Greek instruments - both ancient and modern - are rarely heard outside of Greek or Middle Eastern cultural contexts. Modern Greek writers like Cavafy and Kazantzakis may be revered in literary circles, or composers like Hatzidakis and Theodorakis in musical ones, but they’re hardly known in the mainstream. If you spend any serious amount of time in Greece, you quickly find that the version of Greece sold to us isn’t quite the version that persists - there is a hodgepodge image of the country presented in the West, the one that best suits our temperament. You are probably aware that ancient statues were painted - the all-white versions we know today are because the pigments have since faded. What you may not know is that the restoration of statues to be as pure-white as possible was a conscious effort in the 18th and 19th centuries by, you guessed it, Western museums adopting the Renaissance artists’ interpretations.
Why would they want the statues to be as white as possible? Hmm.
These phenomena are not strictly limited to the white West though. There was an effort in the 20th century to claim that the Ancient Greeks were actually Black Africans who have since been whitewashed by Western historians. Whitewashed yes, but the theory that Ancient Greece was mostly populated by Black peoples has been thoroughly dismantled by subsequent scholarship. Even claiming so risks feeding right-wing nonsense though - of course Ancient Greece had Africans amongst the populace. The depiction of Andromeda in media as a white warrior princess is just one example of that whitewashing away of Africans in Greek stories. But as I said at the start - for as long as we’ve existed, people have seemed to want to claim us. Frustratingly for many Greeks (and don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of racism in Greece too), this means toeing a careful line between championing our own struggle while not inadvertently fuelling right-wing oppositions to justice for the Global Majority.
In any case, the appropriation of the Greek ideal is not something confined only to the creative fields. In striking resemblance to Virgil, 20th century fascists jumped through incredible hoops to claim Greece as their own, inventing a lineage for Nordic-Germanic peoples as directly descended from the Ancient Greeks (they explained away contemporary Greeks’ darker complexions by claiming subsequent Greeks had bred with Jews, Africans and Asians and lost their purity, piling racism on top of racism). The far right across the West has repeatedly done this all the way to the present day - harkening back to Ancient Greece and Rome just like Shelley did, but in their case twisting it to present their ideology as rooted in classical philosophy.
Whichever way you slice it, for good or for ill, the stories and mythologies of Ancient Greece have served the West extraordinarily well. From opera to ballet, film to theatre, novel to poem, no other body of work has been so regularly adapted, translated, regurgitated, or used as inspiration. The West has in no small part built its art around those ancient stories. If you were to remove all the canonical works that use Greek myth as a source text, directly or indirectly, I’m willing to bet that you’d lose the vast majority of them. Somehow, inside it all, the views, opinions and knowledge of Greeks is dismissed - undermined as uneducated, unrefined, or unreliable. Even the word ‘Greek’ is an example of erasure - we call ourselves Hellenes; ‘Greece’ is a Latin word. It’s like still calling France ‘Gaul’.
As Melina Mercouri - whose statue sits not far from Byron’s - put it:
These Greeks who, long after Pericles, created the miracles of Byzantine art? These Greeks who even under Turkish occupation created entire schools of arts and techniques? These Greeks who despite 400 years of Turkish rule grimly maintained their language and their religion?
Almost all of Greece’s cultural funding goes towards the education, interpretation and preservation of the ancient stories, but none of it is deemed good enough in the West. The green shoots, however, are that in the last 20 years this has started to change - Greeks are finally starting to be taken seriously by Western scholars, universities have set up proper links to institutions in Greece, and for the first time, many academics are choosing to adopt the Greek pronunciations of Ancient Greek texts as more practical and readable. A recognition has dawned that maybe the Greeks do know something about their own history.
As academia has realised but the arts are yet to recognise, Chaucer, writing in Troilus and Criseyde, was right: all good things must come to an end.
In April I wrote about how there is a second neo-classical revival occurring in literature, which has meant Ancient Greek stories are being freshly told by a wave of writers and translators This includes popular names like Madeline Miller, Rick Riordan, Jennifer Saint, Natalie Haynes, Stephen Fry, and Emily Wilson. You would do well to note the lack of Greek writers on that list.
These writers have revived that Western tradition of adapting Greek art. Unlike some of the other writers I noted above, much of this work is framed by feminist or queer retelling, seeking to centre the parts of the stories that have historically been understudied or underrepresented (although this is a noble cause, it is a fallacy to assume that the ancient stories are all necessarily chauvinistic or homophobic - many of the ancient writers were extremely concerned with both the women of the stories and the homoerotic).
That revival is now a good 15 years old. My Substack in April argued that it’s time to invite Greeks into the theatre-making process, but one of the challenges for Greeks trying to reclaim ownership of those stories is that we’ve got to the point where publishers and agents are starting to publicly discourage more Greek mythological retellings (just look at a few agent wishlists to see what I mean). Keen to platform other mythological stories from the rest of the world - another noble act - they are cutting off the Greeks before they get a chance to join in, inadvertently joining the exact same Greek erasure that has been such a problem since the Renaissance. It seems publishing isn’t quite ready to make the shift that academia has.
The second stage of this revival is a growing list of theatre and film which engages with Ancient Greek figures. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is released this month, there are two Cleopatras in development, there is at least one extremely famous novel being adapted for stage or screen (I know because the rights were unavailable when I asked). Since Covid we have seen a big upswing in theatrical adaptations of Ancient Greek texts too, which have now proliferated on Western stages from a big long list of writers including such luminaries as –
No, obviously I’m not stupid enough to start naming people.
The thing is, I work in theatre. These people are my colleagues, some of them my friends. Regardless of the career suicide that would be involved, that just isn’t who I am, and it was one of my founding principles in setting up Substack… not getting caught up in pointing fingers at individuals.
But I don’t work in film.
If I have a criticism of my post in April (I have many, but this is the main one) it is that it spoke in such general terms that it was hard to apply anything directly. Part Two of this Substack is on its way soon, in which I’ll apply the context from this post to make things more explicit: it’s time to discuss why it is that so many Greeks are kicking off about Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.