ANCIENTS VS.

MODERNS

Who Are the Greeks?

NICK BURNS

Roderick Beaton’s sweeping, sympathetic history of modern Greece

illustrates the tension between two kinds of nationalism—and ultimately,
between two kinds of freedom.

T hesupposed
Greek revolt against the Ottomans was
to start on March 25, 1821, but the
Greece: Biography of a
Modern Nation
Maniots had different ideas.
Roderick Beaton
University of Chicago Press,
The Mani is the middle nger of land that extends 2019, $35, 488 pp.
out from the southern Peloponnese, terminating at
Cape Tainaron, the southernmost point of mainland
Europe. It looks like the surface of the moon, and even today many of its
inhabitants dwell in their traditional castle-houses, forbidding piles of rock which
rise from the rock of the landscape like geological formations. It was one of the
last regions of Europe to be Christianized, after distant Britain.

The Maniots rose up more than a week ahead of schedule, led by their ruthless
warlord Petrobey Mavromichalis, whose name means “Black Michael.” The rest of
Greece followed suit.

In his sweeping, sympathetic history of modern Greece, which ought immediately

to become the standard history of the modern nation, Roderick Beaton describes
how factions soon emerged among the rebellious Greeks. On one side were
warlords like Mavromichalis, who represented the old, lawless kind of freedom;
on the other were educated men who looked to Europe for a model of centralized
order for their edgling nation.

Once the revolution had been won, it was Ioannis Kapodistrias, the erstwhile
Foreign Minister of Russia, who assumed the task of governing Greece. Being a
veteran of czarist administration, he took a somewhat autocratic approach to the
task, locking up Mavromichalis over a tax dispute. In retaliation the old warlord’s
son and brother shot Kapodistrias dead, plunging Greece into chaos until the
imposition of monarchy by the Great Powers.

Comparisons were made at the time between Kapodistrias’s assassins and

Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the lovers who killed the last of the Peisistratid
tyrants in ancient Athens, opening the way for the world’s rst democracy. The
question of whether the Greeks were willing to give up their old freedom for a new
kind of order did not die with Kapodistrias. Nor was this tragic classical parallel to
be the last of its kind.

I t nancial
is easy to laugh, and many do, at the idea that modern Greece, with its
woes and only partially merited reputation for tax evasion, is in any
meaningful sense an inheritor of the classical Greeks—those builders of the
Parthenon, originators of tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy. But part of the tragedy of
modern Greece is that it was the Great Powers who, having inhaled the heady
vapors of philhellenism during the early decades of the 19th century, intervened
against the Ottomans to guarantee the victory of the Greek rebels—in keeping
with the theory that modern Greece, freed from the Ottoman yoke, would take up
the mantle of its ancient predecessor.
Western Europe, as it is prone to do, soon became bored of this theory. Before the
dust had even settled from the Greek Revolution, an Austrian named Fallmerayer
was writing that the modern Greeks were not descended from the ancients at all,
but rather from Slavic invaders. In due course his view was discredited, and
thankfully we have grown less credulous of arguments that tie national identity
so obsessively to a bloodline (especially when they come from the mouths of
Austrians). But the disillusionment with the idea of modern Greece as
characteristically of a piece with the ancients remained. Since the end of the
Second World War, Europe has been understandably allergic to ethnic narratives
about ancient legacies.

This is heartbreaking for the Greeks, who never lost this idea of their national
history—an idea which the Great Powers af rmed all those years ago during
Greece’s war of independence. See, as an example, the longstanding dispute over
the name of the former Yugoslav country now called North Macedonia. Europe
found Greece’s refusal to accept the name “Macedonia” baf ing. Who cared what
this insigni cant country wanted to call itself? To the Greeks, however, the
question was existential: Are we the carriers of an ancient legacy, or not? To allow
this other nation, this bunch of non-Greek-speakers, to stake a competing claim
to Alexander the Great would be to strike at the very heart of the idea of Greece.
Of course they opposed it with all their strength.

For those of us who are not Greek, the question remains open: Is there a
characteristic “Greekness”—not a racial lineage; we are best advised to avoid that
fever swamp—that has survived from the classical period intact through the long
years of Roman domination, Byzantine rule, medieval chaos, and Ottoman
tyranny? Beaton notes that the only cultural institution to survive intact from the
dawn of antiquity to the modern day is the Greek language. The language was
enough for the ancients—a barbarian, after all, was simply someone who did not
speak Greek—and it should be enough for us. No one who has been greeted on a
city street with the word chairete, the very same greeting as you will nd in the
dialogues of Plato, can deny the Greeks their Greekness.

One bewitching gure in Beaton’s history is Rigas Velestinlis, the grandfather of

the Greek Revolution who was executed in Vienna in 1797 for plotting to free
Greece from Ottoman rule. In his 1793 book New Civil Government, Rigas imagined
a Greek identity not de ned by genetic inheritance but “shared culture and a
shared geographic space, as well as voluntary commitment.” In Rigas’s vision, a
Greek is simply “someone who speaks either modern or ancient Greek, and aids
Greece, even if he lives in the Antipodes (because the Hellenic yeast has spread
into both hemispheres).”

This lofty, generous sense of the Greek nation was pliable enough to
accommodate not just the future citizens of the Greek state diaspora but also
their sympathizers abroad, the philhellenes and classicists, as well as the
members of the Greek diaspora—those followers in the footsteps of Herodotus.

But it never caught on. The vision of the Greek nation that has prevailed over
much of the course of its history was a different one, that suggested by the “Grand
Idea.” The idea was a Greek state for ethnic Greeks, or rather for all of them. This
required either expanding the borders of Greece to include the Greeks initially
outside it—or, less optimistically, uprooting those Greeks and relocating them to
within the borders of the Greek state.

This Grand Idea brought modern Greece its most ringing accomplishments and its
most bitter sorrows. The victories came in the form of Thessaly, taken from the
Ottomans in 1881; Macedonia and Crete, claimed after the rst Balkan War; and
part of Thrace, after the second.
Then came 1922. The classical parallels to modern Greek history always present
themselves most insistently when the Greeks are in the direst of straits, and the
Greco-Turkish War is no exception. In talks after the end of the First World War
Eleftherios Venizelos, the cunning Greek Prime Minister and standard-bearer for
the Grand Idea, had secured great swaths of the Ottoman Empire for Greece—on
paper. But when the newly reconstituted Turks began to ght back, the Greeks
had to go and get the territory themselves. Venizelos lost the election and the
faction that was against territorial expansion took power.

Just like the Athenians in Sicily some 2,500 years earlier, the war hawk who had
set an invasion into motion—Alcibiades for the Athenians, Venizelos for the
Greeks—was out of power before he could lead it. Like the Athenians, the invasion
of Anatolia went ahead anyway, led by men who were dead set against it but could
not abandon it without committing political suicide. And like the Athenians, the
invasion was a disaster. What had begun so promisingly for the Greeks, with the
Turks falling back across the Anatolian hinterland, ended with the great Ionian
city of Smyrna in ames, its Greek inhabitants eeing for their lives before the
Turkish advance.

The population exchanges between the Greeks and Turks after the war
accomplished the Grand Idea in a melancholy fashion, with the Greeks of Asia
Minor reduced to refugees in the suburbs of Athens and its port, the Piraeus. The
generals held responsible for the failure of the expedition were tried and six of
them executed—another classical touch. (After the Battle of Arginusae in 406
B.C.E., six Athenian generals were jointly tried and executed for failing to pick up
the survivors from sunk Athenian warships.)

It is not, of course, entirely the Greeks’ fault that so many bids for the greater
glory of the Greeks in Greece ended badly for the Greeks outside Greece. There is
also the zero-sum brutality of competing national projects, and before that, the
viciousness of a dying empire to blame—for the reprisals against the Phanariot
Greeks in the Ottoman Empire after the start of the Greek Revolution, for the
ouster of the Black Sea Greeks after Lausanne, for the exodus of most of what
remained of the Greeks of Istanbul, when the Cyprus con ict motivated Turkish
attacks on them in 1955. But there is something undeniably dangerous about
Grand Idea–style nationalism, about a national self-understanding that sees any
sizable quantity of members of the national group abroad as a kind of threat, or at
least a sign that the national process of self-becoming is incomplete.

The picture looks much different now, of course. There are few Greeks left on the
Black Sea or in Istanbul, but now there are British Greeks, American Greeks,
Australian Greeks. The Hellenic yeast has indeed spread even into the Antipodes,
as Rigas had it. There are also new gures in Greece, refugees and immigrants.
The exibility of Greekness is being tested again. There are men like Samuel
Akinola, an actor born in Greece to Kenyan and Nigerian migrant parents, but
who is not a citizen. As Schumpeter says, it is up to every nation to de ne itself,
and so must Greece—but it is hard not to feel a pang for men like Akinola, who
speak Greek as uently as anyone, but who remain metics in their native land.

Since independence from the Ottomans, the Greek nation was supposed to be
ancient, but it was also supposed to be modern and European. The European
project of domesticating the Greeks, which in one form involved envisioning
ancient Greece as the forerunner to modern Europe, also involved the political
and cultural assimilation of modern Greece into Europe. The warlords, Petrobey
and his ilk, were supposed to be con ned to the pages of novels, to be replaced
with the rule of law.

The warlords are gone, but the project is still incomplete, and may ever be. Greek
accession to the European Union brought with it money and works, the euro and
the yoke of European central monetary policy. The Greeks are not yet willing to
give up their old freedom, not quite, and they have suffered for it. Wondering why
Alexis Tsipras went to the people in 2015 to reject the bailout conditions Greece
had been offered by the “troika” of European banking authorities, only to accept a
worse set of conditions just ten days later, Beaton suggests that the hundred-
billion-euro toll to the Greek economy caused by Tsipras’s reluctance to accept
the terms on offer was simply the cost required to convince all the Greeks that—
like Athens before Macedon—there really were no alternatives to submission.

Greek freedom, then, is not a liberal kind of freedom, though it has become more
so. It is older than that, and it has never been codi ed. All that can be said for
sure is that it has something to do with Petrobey Mavromichalis, warrior-king of
the Mani, that desolate land where the people live in castles, where Europe ends
and the dark blue of the Aegean stretches unbroken to the African coast.
Published on: June 27, 2019

Nick Burns is a Fulbright scholar studying intellectual history. Follow him on Twitter: @NickBurns.