Philhellenism ("the love of Greek culture") was an intellectual fashion prominent at the turn of the 19th century. It contributed to the sentiments that led Europeans such as Lord Byron or Charles Nicolas Fabvier to advocate for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Byron provided concrete assistance in commissioning several seagoing war vessels that proved to be useful in the successful Greek War of Independence in the early 1820s, as well as sacrificing his life to the cause.
The later 19th-century European Philhellenism was largely to be found among the Classicists, a field undergoing a growing split between anthropological and Classicist approaches to ancient Greece.
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In the period of political reaction and repression after the fall of Napoleon, when the liberal-minded, educated and prosperous bourgeois class of European societies found the romantic revolutionary ideals of 1789–92 repressed by the restoration of old regimes at home, the idea of the re-creation of a Greek state on the very territories that were sanctified by their view of Antiquity — which was reflected even in the furnishings of their own parlors and the contents of their bookcases — offered an ideal, set at a romantic distance. Under these conditions, the Greek uprising constituted a source of inspiration and expectations that could never actually be fulfilled, disappointing what Paul Cartledge called "the Victorian self-identification with the Glory that was Greece".[1]
Another popular subject of interest in Greek culture at the turn of the 19th century was the shadowy Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, who lived in the 6th century BCE. The new prominence of Anacharsis was sparked by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy's fanciful Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece (1788), a learned imaginary travel journal, one of the first historical novels, which a modern scholar has called "the encyclopedia of the new cult of the antique" in the late 18th century. It had a high impact on the growth of philhellenism in France: the book went through many editions, was reprinted in the United States and was translated into German and other languages. It later inspired European sympathy for the Greek War of Independence and spawned sequels and imitations throughout the 19th century.
In German culture the first phase of philhellenism can be traced in the careers and writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the inventors of art history, Friedrich August Wolf, who inaugurated modern Homeric scholarship with his Prolegomena (1795) and the enlightened bureaucrat Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the German states, the private obsession with ancient Greece took public forms, institutionalizing an elite philhellene ethos through the gymnasium, to revitalize German education at home, and providing on two occasions high-minded philhellene German princes ignorant of modern-day Greek realities, to be Greek sovereigns.[2]
Schiller's 1788 poem "The Gods of Greece" contrasted the exquisite and beautiful world inhabited by the Greek deities with the calculating, joyless and uncreative present.[3]
During the later 19th century the new studies of archaeology and anthropology began to offer a quite separate view of ancient Greece, which had previously been experienced at second-hand only through Greek literature, Greek sculpture and architecture.[4] 20th century heirs of the 19th-century view of an unchanging, immortal quality of "Greekness" are typified in J.C. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1910) or R. and E. Blum's The Dangerous Hour: The lore of crisis and mystery in rural Greece (1970); according to the Classicist Paul Cartledge, they "represent this ideological construction of Greekness as an essence, a Classicizing essence to be sure, impervious to such historic changes as that from paganism to Orthodox Christianity, or from subsistence peasant agriculture to more or less internationally market-driven capitalist farming." [5]
Among the modern historical relativists, the Classical heritage is only one facet of the vision of Greece that is imagined as ancestral. The theme of Nikos Dimou's The Misfortune to be Greek[6] is the perception that the Philhellenic West's projected desire for the modern Greeks to live up to their ancestors' glorious past has always been a burden upon the Greeks themselves.
In particular, Western Philhellenism focused exclusively on the heritage of Classical Greek history, in effect negating or rejecting the heritage of Byzantine history which for the Greeks themselves is at least as important (often, more important).
Martin Bernal, in his controversial 1987 work Black Athena, analyzed how 19th-century Philhellenes attempted to establish a link between the Germanic or Northern European peoples and Ancient Greeks.[7] Bernal pointed out that most Philhellenes were Northern Europeans of Protestant extraction. The Germanic and Greek races were contrasted to the African and Semitic ones. This was influenced by Herder's views on the unity of national or ethnic groups (Volk).
The Philhellenic movement led to the introduction of Classics or Classical studies as a key element in education, introduced in the Gymnasien in Prussia. In England the main proponent of Classics in schools was Thomas Arnold, headmaster at Rugby School.
Philhellenism also created a renewed interest in the artistic movement of Neoclassicism, which idealized 5th-century Classical Greek art and architecture.,[8] very much at second hand, through the writings of the first generation of art historians, like Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
The groundswell of the Philhellenic movement was result of two generations of intrepid artists and amateur treasure-seekers, from Stuart and Revett, who published their measured drawings as The Antiquities of Athens and culminating with the removal of sculptures from Aegina and the Parthenon (the Elgin marbles), works that ravished the British Philhellenes, many of whom, however, deplored their removal.
In antiquity, the term 'philhellene' (Greek: φιλέλλην, from φίλος - philos, "dear one, friend" + Έλλην - Hellen, "Greek"[9]) was used to describe both non-Greeks who were fond of Greek culture and Greeks who patriotically upheld their culture. The Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon defines 'philhellen' as "fond of the Hellenes, mostly of foreign princes, as Amasis; of Parthian kings[...]; also of Hellenic tyrants, as Jason of Pherae and generally of Hellenic (Greek) patriots.[10]
Some examples:
The literate upper classes of Rome were increasingly Hellenized in their culture during the 3rd century BC.[11]
Among Romans the career of Titus Quinctius Flamininus (died 174 BC), who appeared at the Isthmian Games in Corinth in 196 BC and proclaimed the freedom of the Greek states, was fluent in Greek, stood out, according to Livy, as a great admirer of Greek culture; the Greeks hailed him as their liberator.[12]
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