I have felt part-Hellene since I was young but had never visited. My father taught Ancient Philosophy and always held up Hellas and its thinkers and poets as nonpareil. I went to St. John’s College, where we learned Classical Greek and studied the Hellenes non-stop for an entire year, steeping ourselves in Homer and the Periclean classics. Few of us, and certainly not I, failed to identify with Hellas as our true home, more real by far than the contemporary world. Most of us knew the geography of Troy and Thermopylae better than anything in these United States. After St. John’s I renewed my vows to Hellas at the University of Chicago with more Greek language studies, more classes and seminars on the classics.
But eventually, like most of us, I strayed. Over the years I occasionally re-read the books, or went to a lecture or an alumni seminar that rekindled some of the old magic. Just enough to want more, but life intervenes. Then a few years back I had a chance to teach a class where I assigned Thucydides and Plato, and I spent a summer back at St. John’s reading classic histories.
At some point I wondered to myself, shouldn’t I go visit? Perhaps this should have been obvious, but it wasn’t, to me. The Hellas I loved was 2500 years ago. What if I was disappointed? What if today’s Hellenes didn’t measure up; what if they ruined the whole thing so that I could no longer enjoy my sweet memories? It was like thinking about going to your high school reunion—maybe it was better not to see what the Prom Queen looked like now.
So the long and short is we decided on short notice to take a guided tour last May, with three days in and around Athens, and six days cruising different Greek islands. Here’s what I learned:
Don’t say ‘Greek.’ Greeks aren’t fond of being called ‘Greeks.’ ‘Greek’ is a Roman appellation; for a long time under the Byzantine Empire, Greeks called themselves ‘Romaioi’ or Romans. Under the Ottomans, when Greece fell into decay, the term ‘Greek’ developed connotations of stupidity and banditry. Greeks today call their country Hellas, and they are Hellenes.
I learned this, as much else, from Roula Skoula, the intrepid tour guide for our group. Roula was from Crete and frequently reminded us of all the great things that Crete—which was, alas, not on our itinerary–had given to Hellas and the world. She had great energy and knew most of what tourists might want to know about Hellenes, but with just a hint of the weariness appropriate to an ancient and much-put-upon people going through some particularly hard times. We all loved Roula.
Hellenes are not Western Europeans. This is counter-intuitive if you are steeped in the story of Greeks-as-founders-of-Western-civilization. But modern Hellenes have a very different picture of the past than us Americans, who come at it through British and Western European eyes. For us, Rome fell and the world entered the Dark Ages, emerging fitfully via the Renaissance and and Enlightenment to pick up the broken tradition a thousand years later. But for Hellenes Rome didn’t fall until much later, in 1453. The Byzantine Empire was a period of glory and pride, combining Hellenic culture and language with Christianity. To be Hellene was to be at the center of things.
I noticed that when our guides mentioned the fall of Constantinople, they never said just “In 1453 when Constantinople was captured by the Turks.” Instead, they always said “On May 29, 1453, when Constantinople was captured by the Turks.” The exact date of the fall is burned into Hellenic memory, like December 7, 1941 for Americans. It is the great catastrophe, the start of their Dark Ages under Turkish rule.
Hellas missed the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and to a large extent the Industrial Revolution. It was cut off from Europe and became a backwater, even though some individuals identified as “Hellenes” rose to high office under the Ottomans and others made fortunes as merchants. Ironically, it was these merchants and officials who, when they came into contact with Western Europe in the 18th century, discovered to their surprise that just being from Hellas or speaking Greek gave them special status among Western Europeans, who by this time had rediscovered Hellas and made classical Greece the symbol of learning and culture. Hellenes were eventually able to play on this connection to get help from the West to gain independence from the Ottomans.
Hellenes have some grievances. Since gaining independence, Hellenes have been striving to re-connect to the West. After many ups and downs they appeared to have succeeded in 1981 when they were allowed into the EU. Tragically this has not turned out well, causing anxious debate about whether this shows that Hellas is not at heart sufficiently Western (the German view) or that the Western powers took advantage of a small, weak country (the Hellenic view). There is a lot of very vulgar, pointed anti-German graffiti on the walls of Athens. It isn’t helped by memories of the tremendous suffering of Hellas under Italian and German occupation in WWII. We saw a number of memorials commemorating German massacres of entire villages.
A regular theme of Roula’s when visiting archeological sites was how Hellas has been exploited by unscrupulous outsiders. British Lord Elgin is a particular target for looting selected artifacts from the Parthenon to pay off his debts; the Acropolis Museum pointedly contains empty slots for the missing parts of the Parthenon frieze, still held in London despite strenuous efforts to get them back. The more-than-slightly-crazed German Heinrich Schliemann is another target. In the 19th century Schliemann used dynamite to excavate the site of ancient Troy and sent precious gold relics from Mycenae back to Berlin (many of them now in Moscow, having caught the eye of Soviet conquerors in 1945). When I was young I was taught that Elgin and Schliemann did a service to civilization by ‘saving’ precious objects and making them available to the world. Not how it looks to the Hellenes.
Hellas has many layers. My education taught me that ‘Greece’ meant mostly the short period in the 5th and 4th centuries when Periclean Athens was in full flower. It remains a staggering accomplishment. But Hellas has a long, long history and the Classical period is just one short episode. I loved our visit to Mycenae, Agamemnon’s hilltop fortress-home, built centuries before Pericles out of huge stone blocks. The Homeric poems and later tragedies that record part of his story superimpose an Olympian paradigm on top of a pre-Olympian past—more layering.
On the island of Santorini we visited an ancient town buried in 1500 BC by a huge volcanic explosion—like Pompeii, though it appears the people in Santorini had enough warning to get away—and closely connected to (or maybe an outpost of) the Minoan civilization on Crete. After Pericles came Alexander and centuries of Hellenistic art and study, followed by hundreds of years of Roman rule. At many sites like the Athenian Agora, or Delos, or Ephesus, extensive Roman-era ruins sit side-by-side, or on top of, earlier ‘Hellenic’ artifacts.
Our visit only touched on Hellas’ Christian tradition. Even so, for many visitors Corinth doesn’t signify the Peloponnesian Wars, and Medea’s revenge against Jason, as it did for me; it is the site where Paul preached. You can see the excavated Roman-period stage in the agora. We spent a day on Patmos, an island where the Apostle John was exiled and wrote the Book of Revelation (or not, depending on which scholarly interpretation you believe). The New Testament was written in Greek and Christianity became a universal religion when it jumped from the small community of Jews to the much larger and cosmopolitan community of the Hellenes.
Hellas is full of mountains and islands. Ok, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but you have to see it to get it. No much of the terrain is flat, as far as I could tell; it is like having your whole country consist of West Virginia, or Western Colorado. So if you think about moving people and armies around in pre-modern times, it is incredibly time-consuming and difficult. The few flat areas good for agriculture are extremely valuable. We went to Delphi, about 100 miles from Athens and way up a mountain valley. It’s built on the side of a steep hill with temples and theaters and arenas carved into the mountainside—what labor! When you read in Sophocles or Herodotus that this or that city sent a delegation to Delphi to get a reading from the oracle, it’s not a hop, skip and a jump. It’s a long, arduous trip and not something you would do lightly–perhaps why Delphic prophecies were so valued. Traveling by sea would be much better.
And sea travel is eased by all the islands. What I realized traveling by boat through the Cyclades in the Aegean is that you are never out of sight of land. There is always an island of some kind in sight. So you can set sail in relative peace knowing you can get ashore if the weather blows up or you run short of water—though some of the smaller islands are pretty bleak.
On our way to Santorini we sailed close to, but not in sight of, the island of Melos. Melos is the notorious site of the “Melian Dialogue” described by Thucydides, which ends with Athens destroying the neutral Melians after they refuse to submit and join the Athenian Empire. The Athenians probably do not deserve to be let off the hook for this, but sailing through the region shifted my perspective on the Athenian demand. The islands are a chain that stretches out into and across the Aegean. Lose one link in the chain and it could break. Maybe Melos was right that its neutrality didn’t threaten Athens. But I could see an Athenian admiral, or just a plain ship’s captain, worrying that Athens needed every island, every part of the chain.