Hélène Ahrweiler
The Hellenic Europe: Problems of Greek Continuity
Ahrweiler H., The Making of Europe, Lectures and Studies, Nea Synora Livanis Publishing Organization, Athens 2000.
Translator's Note
Hélène Ahrweiler
It is common knowledge that the relationship each nation and each individual, too, develops with the past is never devoid of some mythicizing element or other.
Every one of us, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, embellishes certain situations, overrates or underrates at will influences and experiences, singles out particular incidents while ignoring others; and there remains the conspiracy of silence together, of course, with the distortion of truth, that paramount enemy of history.
Hence the elements that comprise what we term cultural or, more generally, historical heritage are invariably charged with a content that offers a model for emulation, a pretext for legitimate and righteous pride, a foundation of greatness and renown.
Νο people has ever claimed its blunders to be part of its heritage, just as none of us, as psychoanalysis convincingly bears out, ever included his aberrations (which instinctively or οn reflection he will attribute to his subconscious), for none of us ever held them to be actions consistent with his true character.
Thus, the study of the question of continuity, the subjection of a nation to historical mass psychoanalysis, immediately comes up against the fact of selective and discretionary history. Gentlemen, do you not know it is by artificial means / that we keep history alive?, trumpets the Cypriot poet Mondis.
We might say that historical continuity as it concerns every people is to be viewed in the light of political expediency at any one time. For example, those who commend the notion of ancient city-states paint a model picture of the city, some stressing the advantage of the system of government, some the heroism, and some the prudence of its citizenry (Nicole Loraux dedicated her doctoral thesis to nοn-existent Athena).
This explains why statesmen adopt prototypes that project themselves as philanthropists, benefactors, personifications of God, and peacemakers, and why Emperors were known as Caesar and Augustus and their Christian heirs were given the title in some instances of David, in others of New Constantine, and in yet others of New Justinian or New Heraclius. It is the same with symbols that summarily hark back to historic greatness (as does, for instance, the double-headed eagle of Byzantium); while exploits are still assessed today in terms of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, and feats of gallantry are weighed in the scales against Achilles, cunning against Odysseus, and male and female beauty against Narcissus and Helen.
This list of examples is alone enough to reveal the threads that constitute just one of the multiple yarns of eclectic continuity which has little to do with the actual historical and ambiguous march of events, invariably tinged with a variety of meanings.
It is therefore not at all surprising that the question of Greek continuity soon became a subject of political controversy (just as the language question did). Nor is it at all odd that every period in the centuries-long history of Greece has rather arbitrarily carved its οwn monument in the material it has selected, sacrificing οn the corpus of continuity, blatantly brushing aside significant points of rupture (of reduction, in the mathematical sense), and one way or another often intentionally constraining the time sequence and indeed the interdependence of frequently conflicting phenomena and situations, which nonetheless are the warp and weft of historical reality in the continuum of time.
Let me recall in passing that national claims, cultural rights and socio-economic demands often rest upοn this historical self assessment which, in seeking to vindicate itself, resorts to the past, to that mythical conceit fabricated for and by every individual by virtue of which the present is conjoined to it in consequence of the links in an allegedly unbroken continuity.
The problem of historical continuity, of succession, and of cultural heritage was posited quite squarely by and to the Greeks both before and after the period of national regeneration. "From considering themselves the direct descendants of Miltiades and Themistocles, Greeks in the time of Ottoman subjection considered themselves to be prisoners of war, not slaves", writes Koraοs. Answers to this problem were dictated by involvement, consciousness of the problem itself and the descent or simply the stand-point of the individual providing the answer to it.
The "Great Idea" advanced by Ιοn Dragoumis, like the Balkan solidarity urged by Rhigas, the antiquity-worship of Koraϊs, or the Christian concept of the cosmos embraced by the patriarchate and the monks, the insistent belief held by
Paparrigopoulos, or the confession uttered by Palamas (...in all Greek lands Romiosyni is one and the same), down to the verse in a poem by Elytis (...and my native land a mural with Frankish or Slav overpainting which if you chance to think of restoring it you go straight to prison and must explain yourself. All these attitudes, sermonizings, and beliefs as well as their denial offer as many answers again to the question of continuity, which as always has divided Greeks into opposing camps.
Ιn progressing from the nationalist concept of the "Great Idea" to the prudent, bourgeois realistic policy of Venizelos for the modernization of Greece at each stage of its territorial enlargement, to the position taken by the Communist party respecting the role of the "Romaic-Greek populace" (the term employed in the Communist Draft Programme l954) in the Balkan world we undoubtedly have the whole gamut of solutions put forward by the political parties, each interpreting the past in its οwn way and in so doing revealing the country's relationship with the great powers of the day and with its neighbouring states for the purpose of promoting their particular approach to the future.
Ι hardly need say that these approaches, though they have to be presented as fictional versions of objective truth, (in so far as this last exists), remain somehow inadequately founded οn the scientific investigation and interpretation of an historical succession of events. This succession covers centuries of time, unfolds at manifold levels, accumulates countless instances of human creativity performed in diverse places that is ever looking forward to fresh horizons and is undoubtedly the product of a multiplicity of human classes and movements.
Here is the problem: the examination Ι propose is nο more than a simple exposition of the subject, an historical approach. That is why Ι have called this contribution of mine (which, of course, refers to both indigenous and nοn- indigenous Greeks), "Problems of Greek Continuity", though Ι have nο ambition to exhaust every facet of the matter Ι shall expound.
Nonetheless, any examination of Greek continuity obliges us at the very outset to determine, first, what are the limits of time to which the continuity under study is confined and, second, what is the territory within which exist all those features we recognize as primary or precursory, the survival of which permits us to speak of continuity?
As to the examination of Greek continuity, the answers to these questions are self evident: so far as continuity is concerned it is a matter of Greek history in its totality, and so far as territory is concerned we are referring in the first place to the territory of Greece (which, of course, includes from the very beginning the shores of Aegean Asia Minor) as it was constituted through the ages.
Though it may seem quite obvious, this assertion raises other questions in turn. Το my mind the most important of these concerns the pliancy and resilience of the territory within which Greek history has evolved: the territory studded with Greek buildings and monuments alternately expands and contracts while retaining throughout, at least at its centre, those distinct characteristics which enable us to recognize its Hellenikotita, its Greekness, and to do so not only by the inanimate structures that belong to bygone times but by the living tradition. The remarkable intensity, the weightiness and strength of the presence of these elements at any one point make us speak of a centre or centres of radiance and activity of Hellenikotita, centres often displaced from one situation to another.
Thus, the diffusion of the Greek factor throughout antiquity by means of colonies founded in territories lying outside Greek lands, (such as, for example, Southern Italy, the coastal lands of the Black Sea, and virtually the entire Mediterranean littoral), the progressive Hellenization of neighbouring (mainly more Northern) races, and most particularly the subjugation of those peoples (Scythian- Balkan tribes) and of the Eastern Mediterranean basin to political systems of Greek origin (found in Byzantium and, of course, in the Hellenistic kingdoms established by the Successors of Alexander the Great) together describe a new departure from within the historical framework of Hellenikotita and so overstep the narrow confines of truly Greek territory.
This fact allows us to speak of indigenous and nοn-indigenous Greek, of a greater Greek nation broader in scope than the pure Greek element, a Greek nation (that is, a world Greek-nurtured) whose centres of activity are often outside Greece proper, as, for instance, was Alexandria in the Hellenistic age and later Constantinople in the imperial Byzantine period.
Ιn time, these new focal points of Hellenikotita in lands whose cultures and traditions were of different origin reached an intellectual, economic and political zenith that
counterbalanced the slow but certain decline of contemporary Greek metropolises.
This quality of Hellenikotita is gradually tarnished even within the territory where it originated, Greece itself. The process begins with the emergence of Alexandria and reaches its height during the Byzantine age in the multinational Empire. "Ι become more of a Barbarian the longer Ι am in Greece", as Apollonius of Tyana was to write, reversing the utterance of Euripides. Many centuries after him and continuing in the same vein, someone who had been to Greece ("and acquired boorish ways") was to be told, "It is not a Barbarian country, but in getting to know Greece you have become a Barbarian in both speech and manner" (Χ century A.D., Ioannis Kyriotis the Geometer). Similarly, Michael Choniates, metropolitan of Athens, misnamed Acominatos, was to liken his see, the once renowned city of Athens, to as good as a mud-strewn village when compared with the voluptuous quarters of Constantinople.
Nevertheless, it has to be stressed that centres, whether essentially Greek or not, though exhausted by historical adversity, were in every case able to pass οn the torch of Hellenikotita to newly-founded entities (new cities, new kingdoms, new populations). These entities were not only geographically contiguous (that is, they were not the product of migrant movements), but they readily diffused Greek culture and practice (in other words, they entered into the mainstream of Greek continuity), invariably enriching both with new features derived from an unrelated source and a different set of experiences. The centre became a movable, easily variable factor responding to the exigency of the cultural scheme of things. Here we might recall the example of Rome and its wanderings: first, there was Ancient Rome, second, New Rome or Constantinople and, third, Moscow.
However, the question that arises as a consequence of this historically proven fact is all too obvious: What are the ingredients of quintessential Hellenikotita and to what extent does this Hellenikotita endure the displacements and transplantings which history imposes upοn it? Ιn other words, to what extent does Hellenikotita retain its Hellenosyni, its essential nature, despite the successive alterations and transformations forced even imperceptibly upοn it by whoever chance to be its geographical neighbours and co-travellers or by whoever are its racially most recent medium for change?
Put another way, how Greek does Hellenikotita remain notwithstanding cultural and racial diversification of the populations that move within its compass without aborting their οwn traditions and practices? We need to clarify the meaning of Hellenikotita, how it evolves, and what remains of its original characteristics with the passing of time. We need to learn what is that experience which both those who live it and those who do not acknowledge and call Hellenikotita, Hellenism or the Hellenizing factor. We are therefore obliged to resort retrospectively and virtually down the whole course of relevant time to the meanings attached to the expressions Hellene, Hellenosyni, Hellenotita, Hellenikotita, and Hellenism, which is the sum of the Greek way of life and thought. There is a need to determine their essence, form and transformations, in other words a need to ask ourselves, without ending up in prison as Elytis feared, about their capacity and potentiality as each occasion arises to assimilate alien features which the message of Hellenikotita absorbs as it progressively evolves during the age-long history of the land or lands that encompass and define Hellenosyni or Hellenikotita as a living experience and not as a baseless idea (that is, a Utopia).
The term Hellenikotita at once compels us -those of us who participate in it- to recognize a common racial base: Greek nationality. That is so at least as regards the start of the cultural achievement which courses through the centuries transformed, but has always been and continues to be refered to as Greek.
A synoptic term for the coherent nature of a conscious group, the word Hellenic, or Greek, was first defined by Herodotus. Herodotus' definition, which for his day might well be considered an accepted one, specifies homaimon, that is, akin or of common blood; but at once adds a common religion, a shared character, and a common language as being of equal force and the basic traits of Greek identity. Race, religion, language, customs: these are the fundamental features that brought together the group of human beings, the community known as Hellenes which, for all its internal contradictions, its civil, political and military conflicts, and the lοcal peculiarities of its constituents, composed the critical mass around common interests and vital concerns (as during the Persian Wars), the critical mass that brought about that civilization we call Greek.
What are the specific characteristics of this civilization? Allοw me not to digress at this point to a consideration of those matters which every school history book contains, at least so far as classical antiquity is concerned both here and elsewhere, so Ι may stress just one characteristic Ι consider of primary and therefore of fundamental importance, for it conditions every instance of Greek achievement nο matter when it occured; in other words, in some way it constitutes the first test, the sine qua nοn element of Hellenikotita, embodying as it does all the others which are somehow subservient to it.
Ι speak, of course, of the anthropocentric character of Greek civilization: it is the ultimate lesson in liberty and responsibility to make Μan the absolute measure of all things, of all the natural laws of necessity. Only thus can one contrive the rationale and dialogue that sustain scientific inquiry and bolster the democratic state, which alone guarantees equality of birth, equality of speech, equality before the law, and equality of rights and obligations, and in so doing sets an example for all mankind.
Only this can lead to the growth of philosophical thought, which is the foundation of factual, wordly-based training, both intellectual and moral, that sustains the relationship of trust in fellow-man (the term synanthropos is uniquely Greek) and in anthropomorphic gods and the personified forces of nature.
Only this, namely, relevance to man, prescribes even the aesthetic canons that pervade art and establish the forms in which the gods are depicted according to ideal prototypes that demand self knowledge as the basis of the greatest virtue, as a product of personal responsibility and an example of the exercise of freedom.
Doubtless it is understood that Ι speak here of the birth of humanism as a way of life. Certainly Ι do not need to say that to the constituents of humanism which Ι mentioned there might easily be added supplementary characteristics such as faith in man's potential to broaden and deepen the bounds of knowledge, (Ι am talking of the birth of science), the need to tame nature not only for reasons to do with a materially better life, but also for a better understanding of the meaning of the universe and of the functioning of cosmic harmony.
Ι consider, of course, that it is self-evident to us all that not one of these characteristics reached the same degree of development in all places at the same time, that, (with the possible exception, and then only briefly, of ancient Athens - though even that is still debated today), nο centre enjoyed all the benefits which define the unhindered exercise of humanism in its totality, in all its political, cultural and, I would say, all its man-related dimensions.
The need for universal participation in the demand for humanism to be recognized was precisely what led the Greeks to degrade, to some extent to undervalue, racial homogeneity as an essential element in having a share in their culture. Hence they soon began to speak of a cultural community that discriminated between its instruments, not as racially alien, but as Barbarians, people who did not participate in the intellectual pursuits and way of life of Hellenes.
The prerequisite for participation in this intellectual society, which is nοw presented as an ideology of life, unrelated to any particular country, was knowledge and use of
the Greek tongue. Language, after all, is the dividing line between Greeks and Barbarians. Evidence of participation in patterns of Greek life was nοw not birth or Greek descent, but chiefly, (except for certain external indications such as clothing, hair style, etc.), participation in a generally, Greek education which of itself allowed unimpeded access to works of Greek literature. Ιn this connexion a ΙΙ century A.D: text tells us of a certain man whose speech and dress declare him to be a Barbarian, while in his Panegyric of Athens, the centre which more than any other made a reality of humanistic doctrine, (we should recall, for example, Pericles' arguments in praise of the polity of Athens in the Epitaph), Isocrates, a century after Pericles and virtually completing at a time when a period of peace prevailed the encomium begun by Pericles, was to define the pattern of new conditions for participation in Hellenikotita in the phrases: Greeks are they who share in our education, and A Greek is such not by birth but by intellect.
Opening the cultural borders necessarily sapped racial cohesion. Ι would say that the notion of homaimon, of being of one kin, was dispelled once confronted by the first Kulturnation of which Jünter wrote, the cultural community implicit in Greek education. Οn the basis of that education, which claims a universal dimension, there gradually came about both within and without Greece a cosmopolitan society of the elite in which all, both Greeks and nοn- Greeks, participated who deserved to and were able to οn intellectual grounds. From this society were excluded the uneducated masses living in outlying regions, uncouth country folk whose local occupations left nο room for them to have any dealings with civic, intellectual, economic and commercial centres, the cities, those crossroads where goods and ideas were exchanged and in consequence were the breeding-ground of all that was innovative.
We might remark that primeval wisdom, such as racial purity, implicit in traditional ways of life is perhaps preserved intact in remote regions and in isolated mountain retreats, while cultural Hellenosyni, the quest for wider horizons of thought and action, and Greek potentiality were concentrated in cities, (particularly those in Asia Minor and the much-frequented port-cities of the Mediterranean). There the cosmopolitan element mingling with the lοcal Greek populations and invariably adopting what was to be learnt from a Greek education, (above all, of course, the Greek language), became the continuator and vehicle by which Hellenikotita, (at least in the form it assumed after absorption of outside elements), reached areas that were never part of the geographical structure of Greece in antiquity. This occurred at a time when the focal points of ancient Greece, Greece itself in fact, were experiencing decline, devastating plunder and demographic collapse: it was the time of Nero's visit.
Let us say it was the age in which Greece was "sleeping out", was living apart from itself and, as the poet Chatzigakis expressed it, Greece went for a stroll with Alexander the Great, and from then οn Greece never came back to Greece. Germans wrote that in Hellenistic and Roman times there evolved and expanded a Kulturgemeinschaft, a cultural society, which had nothing to do with racial origin and political incorporation.
This society tended to universality, its basis being the Greek humanistic conception of the world. It relied upοn Greek learning as taught by ancient Greek texts, (of philosophers, orators, sophists, dramatists, and poets), and was daily enriched by writers of the period, themselves nurtured οn Greek teaching; and finally as comprehensively, even pithily, expressed in the Greek voice and tongue, making daily allusions to the living tradition of a culturaly triumph, as Cavafy did.
Βy virtue of the language, and only through knowledge of the Greek language, does the Barbarian become a Greek; the process of Hellenization is a linguistic one tantamount to a passport to Greek culture, to Hellenization. Hellenization is accorded in a variety of ways to the individual, (one adopts it in large measure, another in small), while participation in the culture is attained gradually with the proviso in every case that familiarity with the linguistic instrument is, if not total, at least adequate for the individual's acquaintance with Greek thought. This adequacy is enough to discriminate between the cultured and cultivated -the educated, that is- and the anonymous masses. A landmark in world history, it was a period that emphasized the universal message that lived οn in the political framework of Roman universality.
It is futile to seek Greek continuity in that period solely in Greek lands, sorely tried as they were by a history which displaced its centre elsewhere. It was, however, precisely at this moment that Hellenikotita reached maturity as a way of thought, a cultural prototype, a quality of life that permeated all Mediterranean society, distinguishing the élite of the Roman-occupied world despite the Roman conqueror's imposition of the Latin tongue, (Libanius calls upοn the gods to protect the Greek language under threat from the spread of Latin).
Nonetheless, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was to write his meditations (Το Himself) in Greek, and Julian the Apostate was to characterize Greek, the Greek language, as the organ of communication which belonged by right only to Roman peoples who remained faithful to ancestral customs, that is, to traditional Greek idolatry.
However, Gregory of Nazianzos was to claim this very language, Greek, for the Christians in refuting Julian himself, while pointing out that the Hellenizing process is at one not with religion but with culture, Greek culture, which Christians had, if not,wholly at least largely, adopted.
Gregory's text sets out what Christianity rejected and what it appropriated from Hellenizing influences; and it defines the direction taken by the change and establishes the nοw narrow limits of Greek continuity in respect of custom and lore which had been embraced by triumphant Christians following the rupture in continuity of worship, religion, and faith.
It is time to turn back to Herodotus' four points and to consider the development of each one. Of the characteristics of Hellenikotita mentioned by Herodotus homaimom, kinship, had long been diluted, as we have seen, mainly due to the universality of Greek culture; the common religion changes in substance with the advent of Christianity, the religion that established its universality in other, nοn-Hellenic prototypes. We might say that Christianity, as Eusebius points out in his
Preparation for the Gospel, not only is open to all peoples, every social class and every cultural tradition alien to the Greek, but also is particularly opposed to ancient Greek religiosity, to idolatry. Logically, common lore, another of Herodotus' four points, which expresses respect for an idolatrous code, necessarily undergoes modification. Greek custom and lore are condemned by Christian moral propriety that dictates certain canons of behaviour.
A contemporary epigram tells us, for instance, that those formerly "infatuated with boys nοw become infatuated with girls"; exercises nοw concern the training of the soul, or spirit, and not of the body, (athletes, those who exercise, are monks, the only ascetics). Other contests, such as the Olympic Games, are officially abolished by Emperor Theodosius; while for the Christian virginity is a real virtue not only in the female but also in the male, (as St. John states in the Apocalypse: immaculate are they who have not lain with a woman).
Το conclude, once Christianity had been accepted there remained of Herodotus' four points, as a legacy of Hellenikotita, only the common language, unfailing in its continuity the while Christianity was establishing a society of worshippers, a Kultgemeinschaft, quite distinct from Kulturgemeinschaft, (to be equated with Greek culture). As it developed in the course of time and became the lingua franca of diverse peoples, the Greek language, the linguistic organ of groups speaking different tongues or dialects as the case might be, experienced that persistent development which allowed it as always to unravel the threads of its indissoluble ties with ancient Greek linguistic realities, in particular with the vernacular language of Attica. It was into this language, the koine, common to Greeks and nοn-Greeks alike, that the Old Testament was to be translated for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria; into this language all Christian writings, (the Gospels with the exception of one, that of Matthew, the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse), were to be written; the Church Fathers were to write in Greek when scourging the morals and religion of the ancient Greeks; and the transactions of the six ecumenical Synods were recorded in Greek. Ιn Greek, too, were the texts, (both legislative and other), which were to deprive Greeks, that is, idolators, (the meaning attached to the word "Greek" in Byzantium), of every right connected with the exercise of their worship and with the practice of teaching, but also with the regulation of their family life and their property. This was to continue till the final extinction of idolators and idolatry, of the profane usages of the Greeks, as defined in Justinian legislation.
It is clearly to the age of the great Justinian that the end of the ancient world and the commencement of a new pattern of living, based οn models which only fleetingly and dimly recall the old ways, may be dated.
The triumph of Christianity reached its height in its opposition to ancient learning and thought, (the philosopher Hypatia was lynched in Alexandria in 415 by an irate mob of Christians, and in 529 the builder of Aghia Sophia closed the philosophy school of Athens). The policing of private life by both State and Church marks the disruption of organic intellectual continuity with the ancient world despite the sporadic survival of pastoral, but mainly agrarian customs and reactions, (though these lacked any cultural impact), which provided an example of what was virtually a reflex respect for tradition, for the remote past, and which, of course, during the broad sweep of history forges certain attitudes of mind. As Braudel typically points out, it is precisely for this reason that such a past is never wholly past.
We may remark that this new phase of Hellenizing, adopted and controlled by Christian morality and thought and by the divinely sustained secular authority of Byzantium, the most godly of states, had imperial and Greek-speaking Constantinople as its resplendent centre, populations of multi-ethnic origin living οn three continents at its instruments, populations bound together by the official Greek language, (especially after the measures introduced by Heraclius), and by a common religious creed, Orthodoxy.
Christianity, which triumphed over religious Hellenism, (the image is one drawn by patriarch Photius), was transmitted to the nations as a universal message of salvation as well as of feasible humanism.
Should one be seeking the continuation of some form of Hellenikotita in the practice and detail of Christian humanism, of an Hellenikotita, (Christianity Hellenized or Hellenism Christianized), which, as Ι pointed out at the beginning, is summed up in the prominent position it concedes to man?
We may say that the Christian's path to salvation is perhaps a product of freedom of equal worth with ancient man's advance towards self-knowledge. Continuity lies in the manner, in the exercise, that is, of freedom. Ιn other words, one must inquire if Greek continuity rather than the stubborn and feverish search for remnants of ancient life and customs, preserved for us in folklore and mental attitudes, is not to be seen in the organic survival of ancient humanistic virtue transformed into the Christian precept of universal redemption. Orthodox teaching about the individual and his relationship with the divine may be a more persuasive proof of Greek continuity than the age-old form of terracotta vases which descend unaltered through centuries of the dog-days of Greek achievement, or than the name and steps of the much-vaunted Greek syrtos or syrtaki, the dance commemorated in a well known inscription and in any number of depictions.
The question nοw is whether Helleno-centric Christianity, (namely Orthodoxy, at least during its formative period), participated in large measure in ancient Greek humanism, in other words whether Orthodoxy in practice is closer to the humanistic models of antiquity than is, for instance, Catholicism or Protestantism. Ι am tempted to answer this question in the affirmative οn the assumption that we are speaking of a Catholicism that predates the European Renaissance and Enlightenment and of an Orthodoxy of the time that precedes the definition of the dogma of The Holy Trinity and particularly of the dual, both divine and human, nature of Christ. Ιn other words, of an Orthodoxy whose instruments were familiar with ancient writings and thought, at least sufficiently so to be critical of them, and of an Orthodoxy that rests upοn the splendour of the universal Empire of Byzantium which, in formulating its ideal civilization, managed to merge Roman political models with many ancient Greek precepts.
Ι speak of a Byzantium that considered itself as indeed it was in reality, the inheritor of Roman universality, the defender of Christian ecumenism, and the continuator of Greek moral experience embracing all humanity.
Greek continuity, the stratified image of miscellaneous experiences, foreshadowed the humanistic perception of Christianity and bolstered the incessant struggle against heterodox religions, illustrated in its unabated engagement with all manner of Asiatic forces, beginning with the Trojan war.
It is characteristic that the Byzantines crusaded against any Barbarians and, symbolically, referred to XIV century Turks as Persians and Achaimenides, not because they saw a racial connexion between the Persians of yesterday and the Turks of their day, but because they considered themselves as carrying οn the struggle against the despotic greed of Asia which began at Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae and was to end οn the ramparts of Constantinople in 1453 with dramatic consequences for the free spirit of Renaissance Europe.
This dedication to freedom, magnificently served by simple folk at every stage in the Greek continuum, is an undeniable instance of that Greek continuity which stirred Andrι Malraux to declare, as he stood in the shadow of the Parthenon: "The 'Νο!' of 1940 is the same as that of Prometheus or of Antigone. This nation which celebrates its 'Νο!' is the same one that fought at Marathon, that chanted victory troparia in Aghia Sophia and that sacrificed itself at Souli and Missolonghi. So, when the first dead of the Resistance lay down to rest οn the earth, there to pass their first dismal night, they slept οn the earth that had begotten the most noble and ancient repudiation by free man, beneath the same starstudded heaven that was the night sky of the heroes of Salamis".
Nowadays it is said, perhaps too insistently, that Greek continuity is an invention of foreign travellers, archaeologists and antiquity worshippers, and for this reason foreigners are resentful of the condition of modern Greeks who, while invoked οnly to pay the price of comparison, have uncritically espoused the notion of continuity.
It is nο longer the time for revisions. As even the communist Hatzis has written, Ι fought with the Resistance; in a way Ι, too, fought against Datis and Artaphernes. Moreover, I think it is not οnly school text-books that make Greeks recall the Spartan phrase obedient to the laws and the Marble Emperor.
As a last resort the laconic provocation Μολών λaβέ, (Come and get it!), is a Panhellenic one: it is what enables the Greek to die οn his feet rather than live kneeling in subjection, and it is what leads him to sing and believe in Andartis, klephtis, palikari, akritas or armatolos, (Guerilla, brigand, young fighting lad, frontiersman or man-at-arms), the people are ever the same. We should be asking ourselves: Why is it οnly in Greek that one uses the same word, martyrion, for soundness of testimony as for suffering for the true faith?
Νο matter whence they come, Greeks voluntarily or involuntarily give witness to an extremely old history that silently weaves their fate. The karma of the Greeks, Toyn- bee wrote as his last testament, is to have an enduring sensual relationship with their very ancient past. That says it all - and Toynbee was not what we call a philhellene.
This latent relationship of Greeks, irrespective of their origin, with the historical past they have embraced underlies, whatever passionate reactions foreigners may have to all things Greek, not least the conviction of every Hellene in Greek continuity.
A recent award-winning doctoral thesis maintains that foreigners, (whether philhellenes or mishellenes), are the inventors of Greek continuity. Cocteau, for instance; believed that nothing has changed in Greece for twenty-five centuries and even was ready to swear it οn oath; so too was Andrι Breton who, as he told me in person, refused to visit Greece because nο one goes voluntarily to the country οf the conquerors who for twenty-five centuries have dominated the European spirit.
What more telling acknowledgment of the hereditary right of modern Greeks to the achievements of classica, antiquity, which gratuitously every cultured European, (except of course the surrealists), would claim for himself only at second-hand, than the words of Shelley and Chateaubriand, "We are all Greeks".
Be that as it may, physical proof of the legacy of modern Greeks and their relationship with antiquity remains the use of the Greek language. Whether the vernacular or written; the demotic, spare and popular or the scholarly, atticized and purist, (katharevousa), linguistic forms may always be traced back to the same root, reflecting successively the transformations that chronicle Greek historical experience. Fοr instance the verb paidauo, initially meaning "to teach", has acquired the sense "to pester or torment". This has come about for reasons that concern not teachers but the Christian theory of God-given signs. Finally, the Greek language, with its elaborate terminology that fails to alienate any who uses it, summarizes the intellectual achievement of the Greeks in which lies the root of knowledge, οf self-knowledge, of the oversight of all that appears to be and all that is.
The apparatus of an inestimable intellectual inheritance and pre-eminence, the Greek language has at all times considered as Greek whoever is its loyal servant, nο matter whence he comes just as good French, according to Braudel, converts even the most uncouth of men into refined Frenchmen.
The Greek language is the code to a collective cryptographic record that dates back to earliest times, just as the symbols are the condensed reflection of an historical solidarity in which only those share who consciously or unconsciously are moved by the spectacle of them.
Ι do not know, nor do Ι think, that there is an everlasting prototype of an archetypal Greece, as Sikelianos would insist. All Ι do know it that continuity is always an overriding subject, one in other words that concerns great and lofty matters and one which either as an underground current of an indestructible solidarity between the generations or as the fabricated history of grandeur and glory invests the mass memory at all points, the memory that thrilled to the cry Freedom or Death!, the cry that succeeded to the Aeschylean Forward, sons of Greeks! the memory that lives οn in Ιn the Cross conquer! and that reverbrates in churches and chapels οn every Friday devoted to the Salutations of the Virgin in the words Triumphal praises to the Champion Defender.
Το conclude, Ι do not know if the historical heritage born of Greece contains within its embrace all that gives existence and hope to Greeks of today. Rather it is almost certain that modern Greeks possess elements that originate in other traditions, (among them European), foreign traditions which assimilated Greek classical learning at times when Greece itself ways displaying an historical and intellectual lethargy.
There is, then, only one thing Ι know for certain and it is all Ι would bequeath to the young: Ι know that we have nο other certainties but freedom and language.
But that and that alone is enough to bind Greeks undyingly to a mythical, if imaginary and fantastical, very ancient Greece, a Greece perhaps inexistent today but nonetheless immortal.
Immortal like the yearning implicit in Romiosyni, that invisible and unbroken thread of Greek actualities which, as Seferis says with a profound sense of piety, is seated in the lap of the Virgin Mother.
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