Century | Tristan Craig

By Tristan Craig

Between the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, Greece and Rome were in Europe hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement – culturally, artistically, and politically. Neoclassicism permeated art and literature, with interest in Ancient Greece eventually moving to the fore in Britain through the Romantic Hellenism which arose in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Whilst Classical Athens would be adopted into the collective memory of nineteenthcentury Britain, manifesting conspicuously in Enlightenment treatises, revivalist architectural form, and the Philhellenic movement, its consolidation in modern society rested on ideological, rather than chronological, continuity. In response to this movement, contemporaneous scholars sought to trace the link between the two divided worlds through the predominantly neglected Byzantine Period, spanning over one thousand years of Greek history. This article will examine the extent to which ancient Greece and the eastern Roman Empire were appreciated and appropriated in Britain during the nineteenth century and how this manifested in the emerging independent Greek state, British identity, and wider European interests.

Whilst discourse on Periclean democracy pervaded the works of Scottish Enlightenment scholars such as David Hume, John Gillies, and William Mitford during the eighteenth century, it was within the context of the Napoleonic Wars that Philhellenism would fully take root in Britain. Enmity toward Napoleon, who declared in 1812, ‘I am a true Roman Emperor; I am of the best race of Caesars – those who are founders’, had profound implications for the distinctly Roman model of liberalism that proliferated in eighteenth-century Britain. Polemical works against French imperialism ultimately gave rise to revisionist historiography which sought to trace the link between the ancient Greek polity and British liberalism. However, it was the publication of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens in 1762 which would introduce the British public to the grandeur of Athenian architecture and provoke a burgeoning interest in Classical Greece. This was realised nowhere else other than in the attempts to reconstruct the Athenian Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, and from which ornamentations had been largely stripped by Lord Elgin in the formative years of the nineteenth century. Three notable projects in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London sought to emulate the Parthenon, the latter two serving as monuments to the Napoleonic Wars, telling of the stance against the previously dominant Roman classicism which Napoleon styled himself upon. Whilst the Cambridge and London projects did not progress beyond the initial plans, public fundraising began for Edinburgh’s National Monument. The city was styled as the cultural and intellectual successor of Athens, ‘whose genius has already procured for it the name of the Modern Athens’ and its topography, namely Calton Hill, was thought to mirror the Athenian Acropolis, lending itself well to attempts to rebuild the Parthenon upon it. For all the enthusiasm of those most committed to the Hellenization of the city, a lack of money proved to be the undoing of the project and on 30 June 1829, one of the principal architects, William Henry Playfair, announced that construction would cease indefinitely.

The acquisition of the Parthenon marbles by the British Museum in 1816 heralded a profound interest in the antiquities of Classical Greece. Richard Lawrence, in his 1818 monograph highlighting key exhibits of the Museum, commended the purchase of ‘this admirable collection of Grecian sculpture, being for the improvement and exaltation of the British school of art’. His aim was both to celebrate the artistic achievement of the sculptures and denounce those who, ignorant of their inherent beauty, who might question their worth. An admiration for the splendour of Classical Greece was gaining traction, even amongst those whose political persuasion was at odds with “Greek liberalism”. Lord Byron, who would come to join the Greeks in their fight for independence, was a staunch supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte (referring to himself by the initials ‘N.B.’) and remarked melancholically on the Athens which confronted him on his travels, far removed from the Classical world he admired. In the second canto of his 1812 poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he writes:

‘Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,

The vestiges of antiquity no doubt struck admiration in Byron, not least in his denunciation of Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles: ‘Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed / By British hands, which it had best behoved.’ This nostalgia found itself bounded by classical antiquity, even after Byron returned to Greece in 1823 to participate it the founding of a new nation which, in his eyes, would be free from the trappings of the feudal European order. There was no mention of the two millennia of history which followed the Classical Period, and certainly no mention of Byzantium.

Perhaps the most influential indictment of the Byzantine Empire is to be found in Edward Gibbon’s seminal work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In his multi-volume text, Gibbon deals with Byzantium fleetingly, offering enough attention to conclude his Roman history but providing little analysis of what he termed ‘a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery’. In focussing his attention on Constantinople rather than the full territorial expanse of the Byzantine Empire, his narrative subverted the evidence of stability and prosperity in the empire, echoing the eighteenth-century admiration of the Roman Republic. His interest in Greece was also profoundly limited to a liking for Classical literature and artistry, and his distaste for Byzantium followed that of other ardent opponents such as Admantios Koraes. Koraes, who lived from 1748 to 1833, was an expatriate of Ottoman Smyrna living in Paris and a scholar of Classical Greece and was equally disdainful in his treatment of the Eastern Roman Empire. He spurned the aristocratic Ecumenical Patriarch, the lavish expenditure on monasteries, and the stagnation of the Orthodox Church, which cared more for disputing frivolous ecclesiastical matters than dealing with the Ottoman occupancy of Greece. It was, as Koraes surmised, not the Byzantines or the Turks from whom the Enlightenment was propagated throughout Europe, but the ancient Greeks and their virtues of democracy and moral philosophy. Gibbon echoed Koraes’ sentiments towards Eastern Orthodoxy. His despised the monastic image worshippers and despotism of liturgical ceremony which he saw as divergence from, rather than continuation of, the Roman Empire. Both Gibbon and Koraes reflect the anti-Byzantine sentiment prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; however, over the course of the succeeding decades, the memory of Byzantium would gradually gain recognition as a fundamental aspect of European history. this time. Demetrios Vikelas, who authored several books on Byzantium, sought to restore its position as an integral part of Greek history. Rather than romanticise this period, as was the case in the prevailing medievalist literature and drama, Vikelas intended to interrogate the prevailing notion that Byzantium was an era of decline and to assert its position as integral to the rebirth of Europe. Vikelas argued that Byzantium should not be compared with the ancient but rather with the modern Greece through the preservation of Hellenism and the propagation of Christianity. In a similar vein, George Finlay, in his preface to Volume I of A History of Greece, remarks that the Byzantine Empire, distinct from that of the Romans and Ottomans, allowed the Greek nation to flourish under its imperial administration. According to Finlay, the translation of the Greek polis to the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century, with Constantine’s Nova Roma at the centre, allowed the otherwise dispersed empire in the east to prosper, and provides a defining link between the worlds. This was manifested greatest in the Iconoclast regime of Emperor Leo III (the Isaurian); as Miltiades had driven the Athenians to victory at Marathon, so too had Leo ensured the prosperity of the Greeks against the intellectual oppression of the image-worshipping clerics. Whilst Edward Gibbon used icon veneration as a means

Illustration by Emily Geeson

to demonstrate the weakness of Byzantium, Finlay focused on the reactionary Iconoclasm as a means of highlighting continuity. The literary eminence of the ancient Greeks also flourished amongst the learned in Constantinople until the Ottoman conquest, which Finlay notes had been largely neglected.

Finlay’s teleological approach to Byzantine historiography was propagated and expanded upon by fellow Philhellene E.A. Freeman. Even though Constantinople was, as Constantine inaugurated it in 330BC, intended as the Nova Roma, it was a city wherein the culture and language were Greek. It was this essential ‘Greekness’ which Freeman observed as a continuum throughout the history of Byzantine, which their identification as Roman subjects did not inhibit; as Byzantine historian Cyril Mango notes, in the nineteenth century, Greece had a population of less than a million and a half whilst they accounted for three to four million of the total population of the Ottoman Empire. Constantine Paparrigopoulos, the so-called ‘father of modern Greek historiography’ and author of the History of the Greek Nation, also attempted to reconstruct the continuum which lasted from Greek to Byzantium. Like Finlay, Paparrigopoulos argued that it was the Iconoclasts who perpetrated the continuity of Hellenism and that, despite their eventual demise, their liberalism would be realised once more in the nineteenth century.

It would not be until the twentieth century that the role of Byzantium in Greek national history was fully recognised, with the opening of the Byzantine Museum at Athens in 1912 and the appointment of the first professor of Byzantine history at the University of Athens in the same year. Throughout the twentieth century, scholars echoed the historians of the nineteenth century in both supporting and refuting the role Byzantium played in Greek history. Cyril Mango stated that ‘the Byzantines in general did not evince the slightest interest in what we understand by classical Greece’, a position which echoes that of many earlier historians. Others looked to the Enlightenment as evidencing a closer relationship with Byzantium--historian Robert Byron argued that classicism was no longer comparable with modern life and that the rationalism of Byzantium was more befitting the present condition. Whilst many vestiges to Greek Revivalism remain in Britain to this day, the National Monument residing in Edinburgh – which remains unfinished almost two centuries after construction began – is perhaps telling of how fleeting this collective memory was.

Classical Greece undoubtedly had a profound influence on the artistic, literary, and philosophical output of the nineteenth century. An ideological shared memory would birth a new movement of architectural form, provoked reflection of national identity, and ultimately led the most ardent of Philhellenes to participate in the Greek Revolution. With the arrival of the Elgin Marbles in the first decade of the century, British interest was piqued, with an outpouring of worship for the ‘unrivalled excellence’ of Athenian artists. Greece had replaced Rome, not least in Edinburgh, as the worthy forefather of the western world and served as the standard to which a nineteenth century individual ought to aspire. However, this infatuation largely glossed over the succeeding two millennia of history and often openly despised it. Byzantium presented a problem for the collective memory which antiquity inspired. For some, it was a period of disunity, oppression, and barbarity. For others, it provided the continuity through which the nineteenth-century intellect could assert themself with the ancient past. Whilst it can safely be asserted that the memory of Greece was certainly of greater importance during the nineteenth century, it was the memory of Byzantium which would provide the missing link unifying two otherwise separate societies.