Castoriadis on the objectivity of the Greeks

Just to go back to a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Thermopylae, the Persian invasions and Greek triumphalism, in which I insisted that the pride and sense of superiority characteristic of Greek culture was tempered by self-criticism and objectivity, this idea is found in Cornelius Castoriadis’ essay, The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy (in Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy), from which the following is an excerpt:

‘Hannah Arendt has rightly said that impartiality enters this world through the Greeks. This is already fully apparent in Homer. Not only can one not find in the Homeric poems any disparagement of the “the enemy”, the Trojans, for example, but the truly central figure in the Iliad is Hector, not Achilles, and the most moving characters are Hector and Andromach. The same is true for Aeschylus’ Persians – a play performed in 472 BC, seven years after the battle at Plataea, with the war still going on. In this tragedy, there is not a single word of hatred or contempt for the Persians; the Persian queen, Atossa, is a majestic and venerable figure, and the defeat and ruin of the Persians is ascribed exclusively to the hubris of Xerxes. And in his Trojan Women (415 BC), Euripides presents the Greeks as the cruelest and most monstrous beasts – as if he were saying to the Athenians: this is what you are. Indeed, the play was performed a year after the horrible massacre of the Melians by the Athenians (416 BC).’

Homer against realpolitik. On JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins

JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins is an excellent account, elegantly written, of the first 10 years of the Peloponnesian war (431-421 BC), which questions Thucydides’ renowned assertion that the ‘truest cause of the war between Athens and Sparta was the growing greatness of the Athenians and the fear that this inspired, which compelled the Lacedaemonians to go to war’.

Thucydides’ ‘realpolitik’ Lendon points out, has informed analyses of conflict for centuries and has held particular sway over modern American strategists and international relations gurus.

However, Lendon believes that in order to understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war it is necessary to go beyond ‘realist’ doctrines and insist on the centrality of Homeric values to the motivations of fifth century Greeks – with the emphasis on rank, honour, prestige, competitiveness, vengeance and shaming.

Reasserting Homer not only presents us with a more compelling portrait of classical Greek culture, self-perception and psychology, but also provides us with a valuable paradigm for appreciating the motivations behind all wars and conflict.

Wars are often fought, if we follow Lendon (and Homer), not for pragmatic reasons, in struggles over power, resources or conflicting interests, but for the sake of reputation, national self-esteem, pride and out of wrath and revenge, the latter for perceived injustices that may have been inflicted decades or even centuries ago.

Furthermore, by rescuing the Peloponnesian war from ‘realist’American scholars, who regard the conflict as a ‘power struggle’ between democratic Athens and totalitarian Sparta – and want, in the process, to identify dynamic, open American society with Athens and depict its enemies as embodying grim and stolid Sparta – Lendon asks us to reconsider the modern tendency to extol the virtues of Athens and denigrate or caricature the Lacedaemonian way of life.

For Lendon, the Peloponnesian war was a conflict the Spartans were reluctant to fight and sought to resolve at every opportunity, while charges of war-mongering, brutality, hubris and arrogance stick more to Athens. The noblest and most sympathetic character of the period was not the paradigmatically democratic Athenian leader Pericles but the moderate king of Sparta, Archidamus.

Above is a podcast of JE Lendon in conversation with Bill Buschel (http://billbuschel.wordpress.com/) regarding Song of Wrath. The show was first broadcast on Hellenic Public Radio in New York in 2011.

And for more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.

Werner Herzog talks Kos, Crete, Homer, Thucydides, Linear B and Wrestlemania

Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Holdengräber at the Onassis Cultural Center NY, 16 June 2015.

Castoriadis on Plato, the Greeks and living without hope

In a previous post, I looked at Plato’s disavowal of Hesiod’s depiction of a universe underpinned by chaos in favour of a view of the world permeated by goodness and noted the far-reaching ontological and philosophical implications this had, especially in the formation of Christianity.

Cornelius Castoriadis  is also interested in Plato’s break with the classical Greek vision of the world. For Castoriadis, the Greek perception of Being as Chaos – at the heart of which is the tragic imaginary showing that ‘not only [are] we not masters of the consequences of our actions, but we are not even masters of their meaning’ – is substituted by Plato with a religious or quasi-religious ontology in which Being equals the Good equals Wisdom equals the Beautiful. Thus, Plato, Castoriadis says, rejects the ‘nucleus of the Greek imaginary’ – in which there is an absence of order for man – and replaces it with a theological and unitary ontology that presumes an underlying harmony and rationality in the world.

Castoriadis describes Plato’s innovation as a ‘philosophical monstrosity’ and argues that it has parallels with other theological and unitary ontologies, such as Hebraico-Christianity (with its belief in the Promised Land, resurrections, messiahs and the afterlife), and liberalism and Marxism, with their belief in progress and human perfectibility.

Castoriadis illustrates Plato’s rupture with the classical Greek vision of the world by looking at how the latter would have addressed Kant’s three fundamental questions of philosophy: What can I know? What should I do? and What am I allowed to hope?

On the first two questions, Castoriadis says, the Greeks initiated an illimitable discussion that precluded ever arriving at a categorical ‘Greek answer’. However, on the third question, What am I allowed to hope? the Greeks did provide ’a definite and clear answer, and this is a massive and resounding nothing’.

Castoriadis goes on that hope

‘is not to be taken here in the everyday trivial sense – that the sun will again shine tomorrow, or that a child will be born alive. The hope to which Kant refers is the hope of the Christian or religious tradition, the hope corresponding to that central human wish and delusion that there be some essential correspondence, some consonance, some adequatio, between our desires and decisions, on the one hand, and the world, the nature of being, on the other. Hope is the ontological, cosmological, and ethical assumption that the world is not just something out there, but cosmos in the archaic and proper sense, a total order which includes us, our wishes, and our strivings as its organic and central components. The philosophical translation of this assumption is that being is ultimately good. As is well known, the first one who dared to proclaim this philosophical monstrosity clearly was Plato – after the classical period had ended’.

As for the pre-classical and classical Greeks, Castoriadis says, their denunciation of hope and robust belief that the world can never be fully ordered (that the only order that exists is the order Anaximander describes, which is order through catastrophe, Being as creation and destruction), has profound implications for the way they did politics and philosophy:

‘For Hesiod, hope is forever imprisoned in Pandora’s box. In pre-classical and classical Greece, there is no hope for an afterlife: either there is no afterlife, or if there is one, it is worse than the worst life on earth – as Achilles reveals to Odysseus in the Land of the Dead. Having nothing to hope from an afterlife or from a caring and benevolent God, man is liberated for action and thought in this world.’

The myth of the Greek ‘dark ages’ and the Orientalising revolution

Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origins. (Sir Henry Maine)

Robin Lane Fox’s book, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer is a mesmerising account of the journeys Greek traders, settlers and adventurers made across the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC,  their contact with beguiling landscapes and exhilarating stories that helped them explain the origins of the Greek gods and advance Greek civilisation.

Not that Lane Fox’s book is an exercise in wonderment at Greek endeavour or an anthropological quest to explain the origins of Greek myths. Rather, it is an assertion that the so-called Greek ‘dark ages’ were, in fact, quite luminous; that between the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation (1200 BC) and the Archaic Period (800 BC), Greek civilisation was not introverted and lacking in ambition but sophisticated and progressive and the evidence of this is the intrepid seafarers from the island of Evia who, in their journeys to the Near East, Cyprus, Crete, Sicily and Italy – where they mingled with Greeks and barbarians alike –  absorbed what they saw and returned to Greece not with a new culture or new ways of thinking but with a deeper understanding of their own culture and an enhanced appreciation of their distinctive worldview.

Cyprus plays a key role in this narrative, the island’s strong Greek presence providing a natural place for western Greeks to trade and settle, and an ideal launching pad for further Greek exploration of the Levant. Lane Fox doesn’t deny these Levantine adventures left cultural and intellectual impressions on the Evians – it was from Phoenician colonists in Cyprus that Greeks learned the Alphabet – but he does refute the suggestion that this amounted to a Levantine or Oriental colonising of the Greek mind.

The theory that Greece only emerged from its ‘dark ages’ due to an Orientalising revolution, the massive importing and borrowing by Greeks of religion, literature and crafts from Anatolia, Assyria, Phoenicia and Egypt, is most associated with Walter Burkert, who is explicit about his objective; which is to mock the West’s traditional anti-Semitism by showing how Semitic culture shaped Greek and hence Western civilisation. For Burkert, the denial of formative Semitic influences on Greek culture was a calculated act of anti-Semitism devised by 18th and 19th century German classicists.

But for Lane Fox, these modern political considerations fly in the face of the evidence; which is that the East did not come to Greece, it was the Greeks who went to the East and that the Greeks used what they found there not to transform their identity but to embellish or explain what they already knew or believed. Thus, Greek originality and innovation not Oriental influence and models remain the key elements in any narrative on the origins of Western civilisation.

*The video above is the BBC documentary with Robin Lane Fox based on his book. Watch it while you can, before Metacafe takes it down.

I’ve been reading Alberto Moravia…

I’ve been reading a few of the novels of the Italian writer Alberto Moravia – Conjugal Love, Boredom, Contempt and The Voyeur. They’re all good and share themes of intellectual, creative and male impotence. Boredom – about the obsession an artist develops against his instincts for a teenage girl – is the best of the novels; The Voyeur – about the intellectual, political and sexual antagonisms between a French literature professor and his father – is the least interesting.

Contempt is the novel Jean-Luc Godard filmed in 1963. I've previously written about Le Mépris here. The film is fairly faithful to the book and where it deviates from it, it enhances it. Le Mépris is, in fact, a sensational work of art. Both the film and the book, as I said in my previous post, are ‘among other things, a meditation on Homer’s Odyssey, [and] a celebration of Mediterranean landscape’. The story involves a struggling writer employed to write a screenplay of The Odyssey. He is unenthusiastic about the project, but takes it to earn money to impress his beautiful wife.

In the novel, the German film director Rheingold, explaining why he's interested in making a film of The Odyssey, says that ‘the Anglo-Saxon races have the Bible and you Mediterranean peoples, on the other hand, have Homer… To the Mediterranean peoples, Homer is what the Bible is to the Anglo-Saxons.’

Elsewhere in the novel, the writer Molteni objecting to the German director’s modern, psychological interpretation of The Odyssey says that the northern European wants to change Homer's ‘bright and luminous world, enlivened by the winds, glowing with sunshine, populated by quick-witted lively beings, into a kind of dark, visceral recess, bereft of colour and form, sunless, airless.’

Indeed, the ascendancy of the Bible over Homer is the greatest catastrophe to have befallen Greek civilisation. ‘Bright and luminous’ Greek culture was superseded by a culture formed in deserts and caves. In fact, if anyone wants to appreciate how repellent and un-Greek Biblical culture is, then one only has to read – as I have recently read – the climax of the Bible, Revelations, and compare the personality of John the Theologian and his nauseating, emetic ravings, with that of Odysseus, ‘a man’, as Moravia says, ‘without prejudices and, if necessary, without scruples, subtle, reasonable, intelligent, irreligious, skeptical, sometimes even cynical.’

Insult, wrath and retribution in the Peloponnesian war: yet more thoughts on JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath

As I’ve said in my last two posts on Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, JE Lendon is keen to stress the role that revenge plays in that conflict and, indeed, in all conflicts.

The mechanism of revenge, Lendon says, starts with an insult (ὕβρις/hybris) – amounting to a calculated attempt to demean and cause an affront to honour (τιμή, timē) – which induces an ‘overpowering wrath’ and necessitates vengeance.

Only when revenge is accomplished is wrath ameliorated and honour restored. But, as Lendon points out, and demonstrates with examples from Homer and tragedy, this pattern – from humiliating insult to wrath to revenge to restoration of honour – is not a redemptive process. Rather, it is a process (directed by the Furies) involving chaos, frenzy and self-destruction. Such a process – of chaos, frenzy and self-destruction – is what ultimately characterises the Peloponnesian war.

Revenge not only defines the conduct of the Peloponnesian war but also goes to the heart of the dispute between Athens and Sparta, which is a dispute, according to Lendon (stressing the importance of Homeric ethics in classical Greece) about rank – about Sparta’s determination to retain its ascendant position in Hellas and Athens’ attempt to compel Sparta to accept its burgeoning status.

Shaming is the weapon of choice to undermine, reinforce or elevate rank in the classical Greek world and, as such, the Peloponnesian war begins with punitive Spartan raids into Attica, looting, ravaging and wasting of land, which are reciprocated not by full-scale hostilities but by similarly pernicious Athenian raids into Laconia and against Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies.

Attacking your enemy’s allies is a crucial tactic in this war of reputation, retribution and shaming because it aims to prove that you are incapable of defending your subordinate confederates and are unworthy of your hegemonic position.

Thus, in the first years of the war, Athens moves on from raids against Elis and Messinea in the Peloponnese and expands its theatre of operations to Halkidiki in northeastern Greece where, in an attempt to prove the limitations of Sparta’s reach and power, Athens attacks and seizes pro-Spartan Potidaea.

Sparta responds to this humiliation by attacking an Athenian protectorate, Plataea, in Boeotia; but when Plataea holds out, Sparta seeks to undermine Athenian prestige and restore its own by encouraging the Mytelineans to break free from the Athenian sphere of influence (and fulfill Myteline’s long-term ambition to exert authority over the whole of Lesvos). Athens crushes the Mytelinean revolt, prompting the Peloponnesians to try a similar shaming maneuver in Corcyra. Here, they sponsor a pro-Spartan oligarchic coup, triggering years of strife and carnage on the island, which comes to epitomise the loathing and vindictiveness of this Greek civil war.

For all posts discussing issues emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian begins, see here.

History, myth and self-destruction among the Greeks: more thoughts on JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath

More reflections emerging from reading Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, in which JE Lendon stresses the role of status and prestige in that particular conflict and, indeed, in all conflicts.

Lendon makes clear that for the classical Greeks, imbued with Homeric culture, identity and rank were shaped not only by the historical but also the mythical past. Thus, we note that at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war and the defeat of Athens (404 BC) – and despite the urgings of its allies – Sparta declined to destroy Athens because of the city’s role decades earlier in the service of Hellas during the Persian wars.

For the same reasons, Alexander the Great was lenient towards Athens despite its overt hostility towards Macedonia – its part in the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) and the revolt of Thebes (335 BC) – although the Macedonians had no such compunction when it came to Thebes itself, which was razed and its population sold into slavery, and not just because in resisting Macedonia, the Thebans had lobbied for assistance from the Persian king, but because this treachery was part of an inherited pattern of betrayal, in Alexander’s eyes, in which Thebes had also sided with the Persian invaders more than a century before.

More illustrative, perhaps, of the way the past informed Greek self-perception, we note that Sparta’s perennial Peloponnesian rival Argos, after being defeated in the Battle of Champions (546 BC) and the Battle of Sepeia (494 BC), never reconciled itself to its diminished status and Sparta's hegemony in the peninsular and in Hellas; the Argives justifying their obsessive enmity towards Sparta on the grounds that in the legendary war that, essentially, established the Greeks as a nation, i.e. the Trojan war (1250 BC), it was Argos (under King Agamemnon) that led the pan-Hellenic expedition in Asia, while Sparta (and its cuckolded king, Menelaus) was a bit-part player.

 As Lendon puts it:

‘On the basis of Argos’ standing in myth, Argos could claim the highest rank of any Greek state. And the Argives were anxious to vindicate their rank in every succeeding generation.’

This vicious irreconcilable rivalry meant that from the fifth century onwards, Argos’ main foreign policy objective was to undermine Sparta and this it did by allying itself with whichever state happened to be fighting the Lacedaemonians – with Athens during the Peloponnesian war; with Thebes, Athens and Corinth in the Corinthian war; with Thebes, under Epaminondas, who took on and dealt a shattering blow to Spartan leadership and power, most notably at the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC); with Macedonia, as it sought to establish and maintain hegemony in Greece; and, finally, with Greece’s Roman overlords.

Indeed, Argos’ interminable feud with Sparta is typical of inter-Greek state relations – in fact, such abiding antipathies could be found as much within Greek states as between them – in which destroying yourself seemed a price worth paying so long as you took your rival down with you. No surprise, therefore, that Greeks inspired the concepts of the Cadmean as well as the Pyrrhic victory.

For more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.

The Return of the Exile

Below is Giorgios Seferis’ great poem, The Return of the Exile, about the perennial Greek theme of nostalgia and what awaits the nostos – Odysseus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the Greek refugee, immigrant, etc, etc – when he returns to his homeland after years in a foreign country. The poem has been set to music by Yiannis Markopoulos and I’ve made the song available in Radio Akritas. The singers are Ioanna Kiourtsoglou and Lakis Halkias.



The return of the exile
‘My old friend, what are you looking for?
After years abroad you’ve come back
with images you’ve nourished
under foreign skies
far from you own country.’

‘I’m looking for my old garden;
the trees come to my waist
and the hills resemble terraces
yet as a child
I used to play on the grass
under great shadows
and I would run for hours
breathless over the slopes.’

‘My old friend, rest,
you’ll get used to it little by little;
together we will climb
the paths you once knew,
we will sit together
under the plane trees’ dome.
They’ll come back to you little by little,
your garden and your slopes.’

‘I’m looking for my old house,
the tall windows
darkened by ivy;
I’m looking for the ancient column
known to sailors.
How can I get into this coop?
The roof comes to my shoulders
and however far I look
I see men on their knees
as though saying their prayers.’

‘My old friend, don’t you hear me?
You’ll get used to it little by little.
Your house is the one you see
and soon friends and relatives
will come knocking at the door
to welcome you back tenderly.’

‘Why is your voice so distant?
Raise your head a little
so that I understand you.
As you speak you grow
gradually smaller
as though you’re sinking into the ground.’

‘My old friend, stop a moment and think:
you’ll get used to it little by little.
Your nostalgia has created
a non-existent country, with laws
alien to earth and man.’

‘Now I can’t hear a sound.
My last friend has sunk.
Strange how from time to time
they level everything down.
Here a thousand scythe-bearing chariots go past
and mow everything down.’

Ο γυρισμός του ξενιτεμένου
‘Παλιέ μου φίλε τι γυρεύεις;
χρόνια ξενιτεμένος ήρθες 

με εικόνες που έχεις αναθρέψει

κάτω από ξένους ουρανούς 

μακριά απ' τον τόπο το δικό σου’.

‘Γυρεύω τον παλιό μου κήπο 

τα δέντρα μου έρχουνται ως τη μέση 

κι' οι λόφοι μοιάζουν με πεζούλια


κι όμως σαν είμουνα παιδί

έπαιζα πάνω στο χορτάρι 

κάτω από τους μεγάλους ίσκιους 

κι έτρεχα πάνω σε πλαγιές

ώρα πολλή λαχανιασμένος’.



‘Παλιέ μου φίλε ξεκουράσου 

σιγά σιγά θα συνηθίσεις 

θ' ανηφορίσουμε μαζί 

στα γνώριμά σου μονοπάτια 

θα ξαποστάσουμε μαζί

κάτω απ' το θόλο των πλατάνων

σιγά σιγά θα 'ρθούν κοντά σου 

το περιβόλι κι οι πλαγιές σου’.



‘Γυρεύω το παλιό μου σπίτι 

με τ' αψηλά τα παραθύρια

σκοτεινιασμένα απ' τον κισσό 

γυρεύω την αρχαία κολόνα 

που κοίταζε ο θαλασσινός.


Πως θες να μπώ σ' αυτή τη στάνη;

οι στέγες μου έρχουνται ως τους ώμους 

κι όσο μακριά και να κοιτάξω

βλέπω γονατιστούς ανθρώπους 

λες κάνουνε την προσευχή τους’.



‘Παλιέ μου φίλε δε μ' ακούς; 

σιγά σιγά θα συνηθίσεις 

το σπίτι σου είναι αυτό που βλέπεις

κι αυτή την πόρτα θα κτυπήσουν 

σε λίγο οι φίλοι κι οι δικοί σου

γλυκά να σε καλωσορίσουν’. 



‘Γιατί είναι απόμακρη η φωνή σου; 

σήκωσε λίγο το κεφάλι 

να καταλάβω τι μου λες 

όσο μιλάς τ' ανάστημά σου

ολοένα πάει και λιγοστεύει 

λες και βυθίζεσαι στο χώμα’.



‘Παλιέ μου φίλε συλλογίσου 

σιγά σιγά θα συνηθίσεις

η νοσταλγία σου έχει πλάσει

μια χώρα ανύπαρχτη με νόμους

έξω απ' τη γής κι απ' τους ανθρώπους’.



‘Πια δεν ακούω τσιμουδιά

βούλιαξε κι ο στερνός μου φίλος 

παράξενο πως χαμηλώνουν 

όλα τριγύρω κάθε τόσο 

εδώ διαβαίνουν και θερίζουν 

χιλιάδες άρματα δρεπανηφόρα’.

Heroes and villains: comparing the Greek sacking of Troy to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople

I had the misfortune to watch the dreadful, contemptible blockbuster Troy, which purports to bring to the screen Homer’s Iliad. I’d seen the film a few years ago and remember disliking it then, but had forgotten how bad it was and decided to watch it again.

Everything about the film is awful and wrong. The worst butchery in the film is not that which we see on screen in the fight scenes but that inflicted on Homer, whose narrative is mutilated not to bring out any new or interesting points about the Iliad, but to pander to the most facile Hollywood clichés. (In this travesty, Hector kills not only Menelaos and Ajax but Briseis slays Agamemnon. Can you believe it?).

Anyway, the film isn’t the point of this post. The point is how the Iliad is not some patriotic diatribe – like Virgil’s dreadful Aeneid – aimed at extolling the virtues of the Greeks and denigrating the enemy Trojans. Indeed, as we all know, in the Iliad, the Trojans are, generally, more sympathetic and sophisticated than the Greeks. Priam is a much more noble king than the odious Agamemnon; Hector is more honourable than Achilles and when Troy is sacked (this is not in the Iliad but is recorded elsewhere in the Epic Cycle), the Greeks admit that this was accompanied by slaughter, rape and looting, crimes of hubris that will be paid for.

What we have in Homer, then, is a very early example of how in Greek culture it was imperative to admit your own shortcomings, examine your own motivations and to look to the ‘other’ for your better self. Indeed, this impulse towards self-criticism and self-loathing reflects that part of Greco-Western civilisation which is prone to self-destruction. This isn’t to say that the Greco-West always and necessarily sympathises with the other – often, it doesn’t and hasn’t – but the point is that it’s an essential component of our Greco-Western culture.

But, again, this isn’t really the point of my post, or it is but it’s not an original point. It’s been made a million times before. My point is to compare how Homer – 2700 years ago – dealt with the Greek siege of Troy and how Turkish culture has recently dealt with the siege and fall of Constantinople in the film Conquest 1453, which has been packing them in in Anatolia. According to this review, we have pious, heroic, fair-minded Turks against debauched Greeks:

‘The Ottomans are devout and resolute; the Byzantine emperor, Constantine, and his aides drink and lounge with women in wispy outfits. When Mehmet finally enters the gates, he tells cowering Orthodox Christians that they are free to worship. They smile in wide-eyed, wondrous gratitude.’

What nonsense, and what a disturbing inability to look at history critically or intelligently; and what fascist propaganda, showing how retarded and dangerous Turkish national ideology remains. We will know when Turkey has grown up – and ceased to pose a threat to Greece – when a film is made in Turkey about the Fall of Constantinople that reveals the Turks as villains and the Greeks as heroes.

(The clip above is the fight scene in Troy between Achilles and Hector, which I quite liked).

Greece, between ultra-nationalism and radical internationalism; plus some thoughts on Isocrates, Cavafy, Alexander the Great and Odysseus

Below is a piece I’ve translated from Greek that illustrates how issues over Greek national identity and direction are becoming increasingly polarised, with the extreme left, represented by Syriza, proposing a radical revision of Greek history and identity while the far-right Golden Dawn insists on the exclusivity of Greek culture and experience.

The author, Theodoros Spanelis, who I don’t know anything about, wants a Hellenism somewhere in the middle, patriotic but ecumenical and draws on Isocrates and Alexander the Great to make his case. He argues that Isocrates defined as Greek anyone, regardless of race, who shared in Greek education and culture (paideia) and he notes that Alexander established a vast Greek empire based on racial and cultural fusion and actively encouraged his soldiers to take Persian brides as part of this supranational vision.

Regarding Isocrates, I’ve written before that it is a complete misinterpretation to propose Isocrates as a precursor to the modern virtues of racial tolerance and integration based on shared values. Nothing could be further from the truth. Isocrates was making the case for pan-Hellenism, arguing that Greeks – and only Greeks – were united by a shared culture and that for the greater good of the Greek race they should put aside regional, tribal and political differences.

As for Alexander, his ‘fusion’ of cultures was politically motivated, designed to facilitate the better operation of his new empire (in which, in any case, Hellenism would dominate) and, indeed, this met with a good deal of hostility and resentment among Greeks, unwilling to accept barbarian culture on equal terms. Mixed-raced marriages were, again, mainly motivated by the politics of managing the spear-won territories – the offspring of such marriages were intended to create a Greek-oriented cultural and military elite – and, in fact, we know those Macedonians encouraged to wed their Persian concubines divorced them after Alexander’s death.

Also, it’s best not to take too seriously Mr Spanelis’ last paragraph, where he gets caught up in a rhetorical flourish about Hellenism without borders and distinctions and suggests a patriotism based on Cavafy’s Ithaka – in which Odysseus is a Bronze Age Marco Polo and the poet seems to suggest that engaging with alien cultures broadens the human experience.

Cavafy famously travelled very little, rarely leaving Alexandria, so we invest his poem (which should also be compared with The City) with the irony it deserves; while it’s difficult to regard Odysseus, back in Ithaca, after all he’s been through, as an enlightened cosmopolitan. Rather, as he sets about clearing the suitors from his palace, he is the same cunning brute and ruthless king he was the day he left his homeland.

Thus, Odysseus is many things, but not a paradigm for Hellenic patriotism. Actually, thinking about it, off the top of my head, none of the Greeks in Homer display patriotic virtues. Maybe the Trojans, but not the Greeks. However, this is another story.

The tailors of nationalism and internationalism
Since, at this time in Greece, Golden Dawn is the party of extreme nationalism and Syriza the party that expresses the spirit of internationalism, one has to ask, as a citizen who doesn’t identify with either side, is there another path one can take?

Thus, I was genuinely shocked by Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros when he said that he does not consider Greece’s international basketball star Sophocles Schortsanitis [whose mother is Cameroonian] to be a Greek, as if Sophocles is a common name in Africa; and by the article in Avgi newspaper by Nassos Theodoridis, a member of Syriza and the Anti-nationalist Movement, who suggested that Greece should have allowed the Italians to occupy the country in 1940 and because of our ‘stubbornness we became mixed up in an imperialist war’?

In the case of Golden Dawn disputing Schortsanitis’ Greekness, it ignores Isocrates’ famous phrase that a Greek is whoever shares in Greek education and culture (paideia), a view that enabled Hellenism to establish a global empire, transcending borders, peoples and transient kingdoms. It further ignores Alexander the Great’s promotion of mixed marriages, encouraging his soldiers to take Eastern brides and, indeed, he himself married Roxanne, who today would be regarded as an Afghan!

As for the Syriza’s internationalism, it forgets that in 1940, despite the fact that Greece’s prime minister was a dictator (an enlightened one, as it transpired) sympathetic to Germany, he chose to lead a heroic anit-fascist struggle in the name of freedom. For Syriza, no doubt, even Leonidas at Thermopylae was a nationalist and a futile one at that, since he should have, presumably, let the Persians pass and prevented the massacre of the 300 Spartans.

Golden Dawn-type nationalism wants to make us a ‘suit’, which has, historically, for those who possess Greek education and culture, been too tight, taking an outward-looking Hellenism and transforming it into a miserable, poor and subordinated nation-state.

Alternatively, Syriza’s ‘suit’ is too loose and would reduce Hellenism to an odourless, tasteless mush, which, ironically, would coincide with the aspirations of Greece’s political elite – in favour of a Greece internationalised and globalised, without identity and form.

But for those of us who are sensitive to and immersed in Greek letters, we still proudly declare ourselves Greek and raise high the flag of Ecumenical Hellenism, which retains a distinctive identity, has no borders and makes no distinctions on the basis of colour or gender, paralleling Odysseus, who went everywhere and returned in rags to his homeland, but wealthier for all he saw and experienced. To put it more simply, we are patriots.

*See original piece here.

Dimitris Tsafendas: ‘The wandering Greek’

I want to add a couple of things to the interesting piece Dean Kalimniou has put together on Dimitris Tsafendas, who stabbed to death in 1966 Henrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister and architect and chief exponent of apartheid.

Tsafendas was born in Mozambique, the illegitimate child of a Cretan father and a mixed-raced local woman, who after an apparently happy early childhood with his paternal grandmother in Alexandria returned to the Portuguese colony and his father's new all-Greek family, which felt uncomfortable with the prodigal son and farmed him out to a boarding school in South Africa. Despite intelligence – Tsafendas spoke eight languages – the young adult quadroon found it hard to bear the numerous stigmas and symptoms of his outsiderness in racially conscious southern Africa and drifted into menial employment – and became a defiant, belligerent, uncompromising, opinionated and unstable character, attracted to radical politics and Christianity.

A remarkable period of adventures and wanderings followed, which took Tsafendas all over the world, and from one prison and psychiatric institution to another – Tsafendas suffered from schizophrenic episodes – before he managed to return to South Africa, where he precariously flitted between jobs and white and coloured communities, finally finding employment as a messenger in the all-white parliament in which he committed the murderous deed that landed him in prison and psychiatric care for the rest of his life – he died in 1999, aged 81.

Tsafendas' slaying of Verwoerd was denounced as the act of a madman, an interpretation the numerous filmmakers and writers who became interested in Tsafendas' story after apartheid collapsed, objected to, insisting instead on the political dimension to his crime. On the wreath she sent to his funeral, the documentary filmmaker Liza Key described Tsafendas as 'Displaced Person, Sailor, Christian, Communist, Liberation Fighter, Political Prisoner [and] Hero'.

However, this rehabilitation of Tsafendas as a political hero doesn't do justice to his story either. Reading Tsafendas' tragic narrative – superbly documented in Henk van Woeden's book, A Mouthful of Glass – it's hard not to regard Tsafendas as some sort of perverse Odysseus, driven from his native land by his family's hostility, desperate to return to kin and country but rejected and denied at every turn, exuding not cunning and intelligence but madness, who makes it back 'home' but fails to fit in, boring and alienating friends and family – who wish he'd never returned – with his outlandish tales of the world and high seas, and driven in the end to a brutal act of violence, which doesn't restore order but condemns him instead to the living hell of apartheid's prison and mental institutions.

There are also elements of Tsafendas' story that make us think of the specific experience of Greeks in the 20th century. In particular, van Woeden's book provides a fascinating glimpse into Hellenism in colonial Africa – in Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa – which is, perhaps, the least well-known of the Greek diasporas; and, as the 'Wandering Greek', Tsafendas also becomes an extreme symbol of modern Greece’s failure to fulfil its promise to become a country capable of providing security and opportunity for its tekna, disgorging them instead to the four corners of the world and exposing them, in one way or another, to annihilation.

The video clip is from Liza Key’s film, The Furiosus, which briefly features Tsafendas, describing the killing of Verwoerd.