Philhellenism is a thing. You know it when you see it. Whether programmatically announced, visible in action or, less transparently, present in underpinning assumptions, philhellenism is readily recognisable in different places, periods and persons – and yet it also differs, in telling and significant ways, from context to context, culture to culture, individual to individual. It is so ubiquitous in (and often foundational for) the works, contexts and reception histories of ancient literature that it is near-impossible to avoid it – and yet precisely thereby it easily eludes critical analysis and interrogation. What exactly is it? How does it work? Why does it arise? What does it enable? What does it suppress? Whom does it work for? Whom does it work against? How self-identical – across space and time – is it? How do its various incarnations relate to one another? These questions are of considerable importance for scholars of classical literature as philhellenism is undoubtedly a central ‘pathway of reception’– both in antiquity and for antiquity –, the likes of which are examined in the series in which this volume appears. The title of the volume – with its focus on concepts, functions and transculturality – raises high hopes for advancing our understanding of this formative force in literary and cultural history.
The collection of essays joins a slew of edited volumes on the same topic – notably M. Espagne and G. Pécout (edd.), Philhellénismes et transfert culturels (2005); E. Konstantinou (ed.), Ausdrucksformen des europäischen und internationalen Philhellenismus (2007); K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (2008); G. Heß et al. (edd.), Graecomania. Der europäische Philhellenismus (2009) –, but promises to innovate with a ‘fundamentally new approach … The central thesis of this book is that European philhellenism derives its driving force from antiquity. In Rome a “classical philhellenism” emerges which … has been drawn on since the Enlightenment. … The emphasis on this transcultural aspect and on the literal movement may be what sets this edited volume apart’ (p. 1). While this claim to originality will no doubt ruffle some feathers, the volume's tripartite structure certainly seems geared towards substantiating it.
The first part, ‘Ancient Philhellenism’, takes soundings in (mostly Latin) literature of the Roman era. Pointing to the dynamics of emulation and rivalry at the heart of Roman philhellenism, the editors note in their summary of this first section that ‘[t]he articles here bring this spectrum (well-researched by classical philology) into focus’ (p. 1). Well-researched indeed: S. Tzounakas's conspectus of moments of philhellenism across Horace's works, D. Keramida's reading of Martial's Hercules epigrams (9.64, 65, 101) as a dual strategy to play to a philhellenic emperor and to establish one's own literary and cultural footing, and Alekou's review of Roman satire's mocking of philhellenic fads and belittling of Graeculi all cover well-trodden ground. Undergraduate students may find these introductions useful, but researchers in the field are unlikely to come away with fresh insights here. A. Wessels's discussion of the making of Livius Andronicus into a turning point figure in Roman constructions of Latin literary history is likewise most profitable for readers not already familiar with S. Goldberg, Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic (2005) (absent from the bibliography), which makes this argument at scale. The odd one out in this section (linguistically and conceptually speaking) is Vöhler's discussion of Longinus’ treatise on the sublime, which he presents as providing a blueprint that, in its core conception, ‘combines mimesis and enthusiasm to create a singular philhellenism which continues to appeal to modernity’ (p. 105). The proposition is not unattractive, but the essay is taken up almost entirely with extrapolating this dynamic from the treatise, leaving merely a one-page glance at Winckelmann's ‘Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works’ to support the claim that it was Longinus in particular who shaped (t)his form of philhellenism (rather than, say, Horace, whose maxim vos exemplaria Graeca | nocturna versate manu, versate diurna [Ars P. 268–9] Winckelmann himself places as the opening epigraph for this work).
The second part, ‘Philhellenism and the Greek Revolution’, opens with R. Jenkyns's differentiation between (idealising, aesthetic) Hellenism and (political) philhellenism and the assessment of their relative preponderance in the works and perspectives of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, leading him to the broader conclusion that ‘Hellenism has often got in the way of Philhellenism, but from the later eighteenth century onwards, Philhellenism has called on Hellenism in its support’ (p. 139). A highlight in the volume is M. Hillemann's meticulously researched, tightly argued and lucidly developed study of Wilhelm Müller's ambivalent reception and mediation of Byron, which reveals how the eccentric British aristocrat becomes a fulcrum for the negotiation of conflicting modes of philhellenism in Müller's work. D. Moyseos's chapter – focused on François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine and Gérard de Nerval – offers a broad overview of the inherent and oscillating ambiguities (of expectation and reality, enthusiasm and disappointment, self and other, individual experience and collective positioning) in the fast-growing tradition of East-bound literary travel writing. Amidst all the discussion of identity and alterity vis-à-vis Greece as Western Europe's foundation and nearest Other en route to the Orient, readers may miss some engagement with the wider dynamics of Orientalism in the vein of Edward Said's critique. P. Matalas's chapter on the experience and representation of the Greek landscape by travel writers and painters compensates for this with its sharp assessment of the appropriative dimensions at play in these ‘landscape practices’ (p. 197). His chapter also features at least a cameo appearance of Roman philhellenism as offering a model for later philhellenism, in the shape of Hadrian's villa, stuffed with Greek artwork, being approximated to the (re-)collection of the narrator's sights on his Greek travels, stuffed into his written account, in the preface to Christopher Wordsworth's Greece (p. 200). In M. Chehab's ten-page note on the first modern Greek constitutions, on the other hand, even philhellenism as such is reduced to a passing reference (noting that non-Greek philhellenes, unsurprisingly, played a role their development). Meanwhile, Pechlivanos's discussion of Korais's personal, and programmatic, usage of the word ‘philhellene’ in his writings demonstrates its pragmatic enmeshment with Korais's more universalising commitments to an educational révolution morale (rather than to a narrow nationalist agenda). French enlightenment thought here looms larger as a formative paradigm than any ancient precedent.
The third (and shortest) part, ‘Philhellenism and European Identity’, continues the study of nineteenth-century philhellenism, albeit now on the other side of the Greek Revolution and with a focus on its wider implication for a transnational collective identity. K. Maras's chapter, a succinct summary of his 2012 book Philhellenismus. Eine Frühform europäischer Integration, offers an insightful Weberian analysis of the philhellenic committee movement, both in its instantiations in different European nations and in its pan-European character. His study demonstrates how this solidarity movement functions as a vehicle of citizens’ self-empowerment to political agency against the backdrop of reactionary Restoration after the Vienna Congress and at the same time advances with its discursive and organisational practices a growing sense of a shared European identity. Especially valuable in the wider context of the volume and its concerns at large is his framing of philhellenism as a discourse in Foucauldian terms (pp. 239–40). M. Mitsou's chapter on Friedrich Thiersch's De l’état actuel de la Grèce picks things up where Maras's chapter ends, namely at European philhellenism's self-demarcation from its non-European Other in the lands just beyond Greece. Reviewing Thiersch's and Ludwig von Maurer's contrasting plans for the ‘restoration’ of a modern(ised) Greece among the nations of Europe (including plans for colonisation by settlers from more ‘advanced’ European nations in Greece and Asia Minor to speed up the process), Mitsou's discussion serves as an important reminder of the geopolitical realpolitik underpinning philhellenic support for the new Greek state: to serve as a bulwark on Europe's border to Asia and to keep Russia's power in check. A. Politis's contribution speculates against this backdrop how much traction the ‘great idea’ of a greater Greece (in the territorial footsteps of the Byzantine Empire) really had among contemporary Greeks and considers its rhetoric in the light of the turning of the tide when the decline of philhellenic support for Greek ambitions starts to correlate with an increase in anti-European sentiment. G.W. Most's essay on politics, theatre and philosophy as three ancient Greek social institutions that lastingly shaped and continue to shape the identity of modern Europe ‘concludes’ the volume. ‘Concludes’ in inverted commas because, while eminently readable in its own right, Most's essay (like that of Maras) has already been published elsewhere, so that its placement under the heading ‘Conclusions and Prospects’ for the volume is somewhat disingenuous, all the more so since it, too, like virtually all the essays on nineteenth-century philhellenism, makes no reference to Roman philhellenism – the supposed fulcrum of this book's critical intervention.
Given the volume's title and introduction, then, a cover-to-cover reader can perhaps not be blamed for the impression that the whole is rather less than the sum of its parts – and that ‘aspects’ is, ultimately, the actual load-bearing word of the volume's title. Admittedly, the introduction states that the collected essays ‘examine the subject not in the form of a systematically structured textbook, but rather in the exploratory manner of exemplary case studies’ (p. 1) – but was the volume's stated innovative contribution not supposed to be a sustained exploration of the postulated anchoring of later philhellenism(s) in the formative Roman precedent(s)? The fact that the individual essays make no reference to each other, not even by way of cross-references (but instead repeatedly begin independently with iterations of stock truisms on ancient and modern philhellenism), further contributes to undercutting the volume's stated aim. As the volume comes with an index of names but without a general index or a consolidated bibliography for the volume as a whole, readers will likely be using it on a chapter-by-chapter basis, the quality of which varies considerably.
Philhellenism, this peculiar transnational and transhistorical cultural formation that forms cultural agents to align their thinking and cultural production with its tenets and is itself formed by cultural agents who calibrate its conceptualisation in alignment with their own agendas and cultural production, without doubt awaits further study.
