Introduction: founding the Observatory of Athens

It was on a crisp, clear morning of 26 June 1842, with a solar eclipse under way and a Danish gunboat firing its guns in salutation, that Professor Georgios Vouris of the University of Athens gave his first public speech.Footnote ¹ The occasion was the founding of the cathedral-like Observatory on the Hill of the Nymphs, even now visible to a visitor in Athens. His impressed audience included various persons of importance in the Greek state, from officers of the Greek army to the archbishop of the Greek Church, from his peers in the recently established University of Athens to the Master of the Royal Mints.Footnote ² But most notable of all the attendees was the young Otto I, King of the Greeks, who had come to Greece from Bavaria in 1832 to head the newly established modern Greek state.Footnote ³ Accompanying him were the visiting Danish crown prince and the Austrian ambassador Anton Prokesh-Osten, who at the time acted as his adviser and liaison with his father back in Bavaria.

The founding of the observatory was a personal triumph for Vouris. Born and educated in Vienna, he had come to Athens only in 1837 to assume the chair in astronomy and physics. He quickly secured the king's agreement for the creation of an observatory, which was, after all, a symbol of progress and civilization. However, the Greek state at the time faced serious economic difficulties and such grandiose buildings were not easy to fund. But Vouris, with the help of Prokesh-Osten, had turned to one of the richest bankers in Europe, Baron Georgios Sinas, also a Greek-speaking, Orthodox resident of Vienna, to finance the observatory' s equipment, as well as a substantial part of its building. By 1842, everything was in place and Vouris was called to address the diverse audience present for the occasion. He was perhaps the first Greek expert to address the emerging public sphere of the new Greek state specifically as a man of science, since neither the Greek state, the idea of a Greek science expert, nor the necessary institutions had existed even forty years before. Vouris thus occupied a strong and prestigious position but had no established institutional, cultural or intellectual tradition to draw upon. What, then, did he say?

Vouris started by addressing his audience as ‘Φίλοι ομογενείς’,Footnote ⁴ meaning ‘My fellows of the same genus, of the same lineage, of the same descent’. He did not say ‘my fellow Greeks’ or ‘my countrymen’. At the time, who was Greek and what would be their status within the new state was under intense negotiation. Greece was half its current size and many large communities of Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christians lived outside its borders, most of them in Ottoman lands but also in Vienna, Marseilles, Venice, Odessa and elsewhere. Thus for the Ottoman Sultan, for the Orthodox tsar in Moscow and for the people themselves, there were many careful considerations to be made when denoting someone as Greek. Moreover, from 1832 until at least 1844, an intellectual and political battle raged between the representatives of native interests, the so-called autochthones, and the educated scholars and merchants living in the Greek-speaking communities abroad, the eterochthones. What was at stake was the latter group's political and administrative position within the new state. But the meaning of the word γένος (genos) had come, through the writings of the scholars of the Greek Enlightenment from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, to mean the nation, in the French intellectual tradition.Footnote ⁵ The title ομογενείς signified both, and Vouris, addressing a public very conscious of these nuances and coming from Vienna himself, drew upon a scholarly lineage and a political ideal to include everyone in his potential audience.

Continuing his speech, Vouris went on to say that, following the divine laws of beginning, rise and decay, the glorious Greek ancestors that lit the world with their wisdom and knowledge first rose to immense heights and then decayed and fell. But now was the time when, following another law, the Greek nation would rise from the grave and resurrect its ancient glory. The Greek people, enjoying the merits of the king's rule, would have liberty, wealth and freedom. They at last had the chance to emulate their glorious ancestors in art and science and appear as their worthy successors. One of the many new benefits of the king's rule was the new university, where the sciences would have a new home. Only astronomy, the greatest of the sciences, which inspired high and brave sentiments and provided its many benefits to agriculture, navigation, geodesy and trade, did not have such a home. And that is sad, continued Vouris, because astronomy was based on and guided, as were most things, by the works of glorious ancient ancestors such as Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, Timocharis of Alexandria, Aristyllos of Alexandria, Aristarchus of Samos, Hipparchus of Nicaea, Ptolemy and Aratos of Soloi. The litany of progenitors ended with the special mention of Fainos, Euctimos and Metonas, who worked in Athens, on the same hill on which the new observatory was to be built.Footnote ⁶ And Vouris finished by recounting how, in his quest to build the observatory, he came across the baron, surely an instrument of Divine Providence, who undertook the necessary expenses. The speech ended with three cheers: to the liberty of Greece, to King Otto and to the university.Footnote ⁷

The rhetoric of science and the question of scientific peripheries

What is the significance of Vouris's speech, at that specific time and in that specific place? Narratives of science as a modernizing force, with all the positive and negative connotations of the term, have been a staple of nineteenth-century history for a long time.Footnote ⁸ Traditionally, scientific activity within nineteenth-century Europe implied ‘modernity’, alongside, for instance, the rise of the nation state, secularism or economic liberalism.Footnote ⁹ But nineteenth-century Greek space is one of the rare cases where all the traditional trappings of modernity appear in the same period: a new polity, a new state, a new nation and, alongside them, a new kind of expert, the scientist. In the years after its liberation, the emerging nation steadily claimed the heritage of classical Greece as explicitly its own and tried to disengage itself from its Ottoman past, but also came to be more and more wary of its Western allies. Vouris's speech displays and grapples with all these tensions, in the form of a science expert publicly defending his own institutional dominion. In his observatory address, we see the inaugural public utterance of a series of similar engagements of scientists with a specific audience. In this paper, I aim to show how this novel social group, the Greek men of science, negotiated a role for their enterprise within the Greek public sphere, from the institution of the modern Greek state in the early 1830s to the first decade of the twentieth century. I will focus on instances where they appeared in public in their official capacity as recognized experts, esteemed professors or members of intellectual clubs and societies. Public utterances such as rectorial addresses, inaugural lectures, university jubilees, public speeches and journal and newspaper articles will form the main corpus of my research. I will thus specifically engage with the communicative dimension of their practice and identify the process through which something seen by most contemporaries as archetypically ‘Western’, namely scientific practice, was reformulated, reconstructed and in some cases reinvented to become a native institution. I will also describe the rhetorical schemata and the narrative strategies – that is, the ‘literary technology’ – with which Greek science experts engaged the intellectual, cultural and sociopolitical mentalities prevalent in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greece. In the end, this paper is not about Greek modernization and the role of scientists in it. Rather, my goal is to show how Greek natural scientists were neither apostles of modernity nor neutral, self-absorbed actors struggling in isolated wastelands, but energetic agents who used scientific expertise, national ideals and their privileged cultural positions to construct a rhetoric that would further all three.

Thus, in addressing the scientists' engagement with the nascent Greek public sphere, this study stands at the crossroads of two usually distinct historiographical lines of inquiry. The first is the examination of scientific practice in spaces traditionally denoted as the ‘periphery’. While diffusionist models of scientific knowledge have long been criticized both epistemologically and historically, the scientific periphery as a concept remains a tacit assumption, even if used in quotation marks.Footnote ¹⁰ In response, a number of different historiographical approaches have been put forth in recent scholarship on the circulation, appropriation and negotiation of scientific knowledge and practice.Footnote ¹¹ The suggestion that science can be seen as a form of communication has proven to be especially fruitful for re-examining ‘science in the periphery’, both as a topic of research and as a historiographical concept.Footnote ¹² In tandem, some of the recent calls for a global history of science, as both a methodological and a reflexive enterprise, place special emphasis on exactly the processes through which science is negotiated when it leaves its place of origin.Footnote ¹³ In particular, ‘cross-contextualization’ has been proposed as a specific strategy of reading beyond genres and culture, by examining how European sources have been used in non-European materials and vice versa.Footnote ¹⁴ However, few studies have so far pursued that suggestion. Furthermore, there is an implicit assumption that such processes took place only away from Europe. The concept of European space itself seems to be treated as an unproblematic diachronic entity, which lends itself naturally to categorization based on ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’.Footnote ¹⁵

A second methodological resource is to be found in the use of rhetorical analysis of scientific discourse. Studies associated with the field seek to analyse literary forms and textual strategies in order to understand the structure and behaviour of scientific communities and to highlight the crucial role of texts in the creation of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁶ Especially in the history of science, rhetorical analysis has been used, among other things, to identify rhetoric in action in the public speeches and orations of scientists and to highlight the formation and maintenance of disciplines.Footnote ¹⁷ For the purposes of this paper, I will take scientific discourse to consist of all the ways scientists use language publicly – in writing texts, giving speeches, preparing reports and so on. My aim is to identify the rhetorical schemata and the narrative strategies that structure the Greek scientific discourse of the era and to contextualize them, to see how this specific ritualized production of language affected persuasion for a specific audience.Footnote ¹⁸ Such analysis has been the province of studies focused on the Scientific Revolution or on emblematic spaces and scientists, such as eighteenth-century France or Charles Darwin. Its use in other contexts has been far more limited.Footnote ¹⁹ It is in this direction that this paper will now embark.

The Greek scientist, his place and his audience

Scientific discourse existed in Greek-speaking space even before the first official recognition of an autonomous Greek state in 1828.Footnote ²⁰ A network of Greek-speaking scholars initiated an intellectual and political movement, now labelled the Neohellenic Enlightenment, within the prosperous Greek-speaking communities of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Though they were not a unified collective, they mostly stood for the pursuit of liberation from the Ottoman Empire, recovery of the classical heritage and appropriation of the achievements of the modern era.Footnote ²¹ Science was to act as a weapon against backwardness and prejudice and was thus integrated within a discourse of popular education.Footnote ²² With the election of Ioannis Kapodistrias in 1828 as the first governor of Greece, however, the movement's influence waned. Kapodistrias consciously implemented an autarchic policy which was at odds with the Neohellenic Enlightenment, and chose to give precedence to primary and vocational education over establishing a university.Footnote ²³ Thus science was only to be found sporadically in military academies, or teacher-training institutions. The assassination of Ioannis Kapodistrias in 1831 plunged the country into political chaos, which subsided when the Bavarian prince Otto Friedrich Ludwig of Bavaria assumed the throne in 1833 as King Otto I of the Greeks. Until his dethronement in 1862, a network of institutions was founded which were to act as the loci for the appearance of the first Greek men of science. Notable among them was the University of Athens, founded in 1837, just three years after the Greek capital was moved from Nafplio to Athens. A pre-existing school of arts and crafts became more organized in 1844 and later became a full polytechnic school in 1887,Footnote ²⁴ the National Observatory was completed in 1846, and Botanical Gardens and Museums of Natural History and Geology followed from the 1850s onwards.

The University of Athens was from the start the central space for the activities of the Greek scientists. The observatory, the gardens and the science museums nominally operated under its aegis, and the polytechnic school and military academies employed the same people as science professors. The university was initially founded on an almost verbatim translation of Bavarian legislation, but it quickly ended up operating under an amalgam of French and German influences.Footnote ²⁵ As an institution, it quickly assumed the role of a cultural and intellectual national icon. Even when subjected to harsh internal and external criticism, the university never lost its legitimacy as an important institution for both the state and the nation.Footnote ²⁶ Most of its initial professors had studied in prestigious German and French universities, a tradition which continued well into the twentieth century. The small Department of Natural Sciences operated, until 1904, under the aegis of the School of Philosophy, the latter having as its main goal the production of civil servants and especially secondary-education teachers. In general, Greek science professors had also studied in famous French and German departments and had worked with scientists such as Georges Cuvier, Justus von Liebig, Robert Bunsen and Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis.Footnote ²⁷ They had also frequently pursued original research which they published and presented abroad, in journals and conferences. As communications and references in their work show, they were generally recognized as scientific peers by Europeans and even Americans alike.

Professors in the University of Athens, and especially in the Physical Sciences and Mathematics Department, were usually appointed for life, unless political turbulence forced them out of their chairs, as was indeed the case several times. It is only in their later years that new lecturers were appointed first to supplement the teaching of elderly professors and then to take over their courses. Thus some professors remained more or less active for three or four decades, while others taught for ten years or less and then left the Greek intellectual space. The subjects that were more prevalent in the first thirty years of the university's existence were botany, chemistry and natural history, but there was also a chair of physics. These first professors were also characterized by a willingness to tackle and write about diverse subjects, such as poetry, the administration of the university or current politics. With the same ease, they substituted each other in their courses, or even taught philosophy for a year or two. Thus they appear to identify more with their affiliation to the Department of Philosophy than with their expertise in a specific natural science.

A significant change in the Natural Sciences Department, as in the whole of the university, coincided with the dethronement of King Otto in 1862 and the subsequent enthronement of the Danish King George I in 1863. What could be described as a ‘younger generation’ of professors appears from 1863 to 1875, while the university as a whole reasserted its role under the new regime. Specialized disciplines such as organic chemistry and subjects formerly under the rubric of natural history, such as geology and zoology, acquired their own dedicated chairs. The new specialists had studied science in Austrian, French and German universities and thus had first-hand experience with the new scientific ethos formulated across Europe, in Paris, Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Geneva. But some of them also carried on the legacy of writing on philological, historical or poetical matters, even as they argued for the creation of an autonomous school of physics and mathematics.

Even so, for the entirety of the nineteenth century, the number of people who could claim scientific expertise was quite small. If we count as members of the group those who taught in the university, the polytechnic school, the teacher-training schools (Διδασκαλεία) and the military academies from 1831 to 1904, and the inspectors of the Greek mines and the curators and staff of the observatory, the gardens and the museums (usually just one person each), they appear to be just over forty in number. This number rises to a hundred if we include the graduates of the University of Athens who specialized in the natural sciences. However, the first graduate appeared in 1862, the second a decade later, and the vast majority of the rest after 1890.Footnote ²⁸ In the end, at any given time from 1831 to 1895, there were less than twelve people who could address the Greek public sphere as natural scientists.Footnote ²⁹ This number remained more or less unchanged from 1895 to 1905, since most of the emerging graduates in the natural sciences did not pursue careers that would enable them to make public utterances.

As a final note, the Greek science experts of the period operated and worked mainly in Athens and they published most of their work in printing houses based in the capital. Their target audience was the more or less literate strata of Greek society or the people who could actually attend the events at which they spoke. Despite the rapid spread of literacy in Greece during the nineteenth century,Footnote ³⁰ or the strong indications that a great number of people attended university lectures without being students,Footnote ³¹ the public sphere that Greek scientists addressed was of a specific composition, dictated by social and geographical stratification. For example, their inaugural lectures were given to university students, who usually came from families who could support their higher education. Their articles and public utterances were read within the literate strata marked by education and the interest, not to mention the economic means, necessary to access such publications. Thus the public sphere they addressed comprised the intellectual literati,Footnote ³² the higher echelons of the public administration or the educated middle class that was just coming into being as a social and political entity. Their encounters, if any, for example, with the agrarian population living outside Athens and other Greek urban centres of the era, which still comprised the large majority of the Greek nation, have not been documented.

Morality and the national role of science

In the eyes of many nineteenth-century Greek intellectuals, science was an arcane and rather suspicious enterprise, coming from abroad and ‘smelling of Calvino-Lutheranism’ or, even worse, atheism.Footnote ³³ Accordingly, one of the main concerns of the Greek scientists' discourse was to harness indigenous, contextually powerful rhetorical schemata in order to construct a morally acceptable image for their discipline. Thus, in their public utterances, the most common mantle they claim is that of the patriotic, humble teacher. Vouris in his observatory speech describes himself as being driven by ‘the dignity of science and the country's best interest’.Footnote ³⁴ In the same vein, Heracles Mitsopoulos, first professor of natural history, concludes his inaugural lecture in 1845 by emphasizing the importance of his duty to teach the youth towards the glory of country and king.Footnote ³⁵ Sixty years later, at the jubilee for his forty years in the university, Anastasios Christomanos, the professor of chemistry recognized as the patriarch of Greek chemistry by his contemporaries, states that the only objective of his life had been to cultivate younger generations' spirit and ethos by teaching and promoting the natural sciences. That, he says, was his only achievement worthy of mention.Footnote ³⁶ This rhetorical schema will appear continuously in most kinds of public utterance. Especially in the case of eulogies, the importance of the title of the teacher is made explicit by the specific mention of the pedagogical virtues of the deceased.Footnote ³⁷

A similar, very common, theme is that of the tireless, selfless worker and, later, of the soldier of science. The latter, not coincidentally, appears in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The so called ‘Grand Idea’, the notion that Greece should expand its borders to include all Greek-speaking populations in the area, had shaped political and social discourse in the mid-1840s. In conjunction with defeats and disappointments endured from the Crimean War onwards, this had led to the glorification and strengthening of national military prowess and ideals.Footnote ³⁸ Academic circles were not at all immune: during the turbulent year from 1862 to 1863, rival factions vied for the placement of a new monarch on the Greek throne and professors and students of the university voluntarily created military companies which patrolled the streets of Athens without taking sides. The move by the state a decade later to disband the University Phalanx, as it was known, led to violent confrontations with the students.

The image of the patriotic soldier was thus a powerful one. At the turn of the century, Konstantinos Mitsopoulos, professor of geology, said at the jubilee for his twenty-five years in the university, ‘Among great and wise teachers of the nation, I have myself been a simple soldier of science … my ultimate goal was to fulfil my duty in its entirety, as far as my powers allow’.Footnote ³⁹ The sentiment would be echoed almost verbatim by Anastasios Damvergis, the founder of pharmaceutical chemistry in Greece, at his own jubilee fifteen years later.Footnote ⁴⁰ But other scientists were more explicit about what being a man of science entails. Said Theodoros Orfanidis, professor of botany and recognized poet, in his customary rectorial address in 1867,

The strong romantic echoes of these texts are not a coincidence. The mid-nineteenth century in Greece has been repeatedly called the ‘Romantic Years’.Footnote ⁴² Greek Romanticism did not originate, as in Europe, as a rejection of classical themes. It rather grew from the echoes of the European intellectual scene to include themes already present in Greek space, such as the yearning for liberty, natural life and a return to the glory of classical Greece. In the end, a distinctive intellectual and literary discourse was formed.Footnote ⁴³ In the above speech, Orfanidis, a widely known and articulate literary figure of the era, appropriated Romantic narrative strategy to present his own work in a very specific way. The influence of Romanticism can also be seen when talking about colleagues, where the demands of humility do not apply and thus language becomes more florid: ageing professors are then described as ‘untiring martyrs’ and ‘brave soldiers’, ‘working from dusk until dawn’ for the betterment of science and country.Footnote ⁴⁴

Even more marked is the difference when talking about scientists from abroad, both near contemporaries and important historical figures. The tone is then much more heroic, with the protagonists appearing as paragons of gentlemanly conduct, braving unknown dangers, toiling night and day in a laboratory or self-consciously sacrificing their lives for the greater good and the advancement of knowledge. Anastasios Damvergis makes a very characteristic example in his eulogy for Robert Bunsen, whom he had had as a teacher. He speaks of Bunsen working ‘from dusk till dawn’, with ‘zeal and dedication’, and emphasizes his ‘infinite modesty and gentlemanly behaviour, a testament to his inner nobility and valour’, which led him to hide his numerous medals when appearing in his official costume.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hercules Mitsopoulos four decades earlier put the argument more succinctly: ‘If we exclude the ideas of honour and religion, no other endeavour has more martyrs and battle-scarred practitioners to show than natural science’. And to prove the point, he mentions Aristotle falling in the river Evripos without consideration of his life, Plinius approaching Vesuvius just to study it, and Alexander Helmholtz constantly putting his life in danger ‘because a love for truth irresistible and firm compels him’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similar stories are told of Jan Swammerdam, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg and, of course, Galileo Galilei and Benjamin Franklin.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the heroic characteristic appears in many guises. At times, it is not the physical dangers that men of science brave, but the social. By showing the truth to people not ready and willing to accept it, they end up alone, persecuted, imprisoned or even executed.Footnote ⁴⁸

The morality of scientists is thus a special concern of Greek science rhetoric. Rarely, if ever, are great scientists mentioned without emphasizing their moral virtues. In some cases, this even becomes a normative principle, as fate strikes down those who become haughty. Or so Timoleon Argyropoulos, professor of physics, seems to imply when recounting the story of Humphry Davy and Faraday, where the former, at the apogee of his glory, becomes haughty, mistreats his apprentice and by his own mistake is forced to leave the natural sciences, dying away from his country. But Faraday perseveres in the face of adversity and by displaying his ethos and strength of character becomes the greatest English scientist.Footnote ⁴⁹

Finally, association with such men gave the opportunity to display another aspect of the Greek man of science, that of the cosmopolitan gentleman, who has gone abroad and has met and studied under the intellectual giants he describes. The accompanying associations are not always left unspoken:

The portrayal of the scientist's integrity and character is not enough, however. The scientific enterprise itself must be defended as a holy, moral enterprise. And indeed a steady stream of public utterances touches upon the subject for over sixty years. Science becomes an ideal and, as such, it is to be revered by its practitioners, as both an ethical and a national duty. In many cases, these demands mesh together in Romantic lyricism. Christomanos in his inaugural lecture in 1864 talks of entering the temple of science in order to honour his patriotic duty.Footnote ⁵¹ In the 1917 jubilee devoted to Damvergis, Professor Vournazos goes even further, describing Damvergis as ‘having devoted himself completely and utterly to the worship of science’, suffering thus the loss of his right eye, ‘an offering on the high altar of science and a noble sacrifice to the world of students’. But even that apparently did not deter Damvergis, who exalted by his actions ‘the joyous and mysterious paean of science’.Footnote ⁵²

In other cases, the inherent morality of the scientific enterprise is described in much more practical terms. It is a constant feature of most scientists' speeches to enumerate the many gains to be made by studying science and a strong ethical character is always among them. As early as 1845, Hercules Mitsopoulos says, ‘Natural sciences, gentlemen, develop and strengthen our intellectual powers, educate and improve the ethos and character of our soul and certify and stabilize our religious beliefs’.Footnote ⁵³ Almost two decades later, his fellow naturalist Theodoros Orfanidis will pick up the thread to suggest to his audience that in Europe ‘science acts like a beacon’ and helps produce the ‘abundant wealth of products that creates the moral influence and material strength of states’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Finally, in 1877, the famously articulate Anastasios Christomanos published an entire article in the prestigious journal Parnassos devoted entirely to the connection between morality and science.Footnote ⁵⁵ The gist of his elaborate arguments can be found in the opening and closing lines:

Variant types of similar argument will be consistently found throughout the nineteenth century,Footnote ⁵⁷ becoming more common as we get nearer the fin de siècle. Political, intellectual and cultural developments put significant pressure on the Western ideal. Western Europe was no longer seen as prima facie synonymous with enlightenment and moral and ethical superiority. The Piraeus blockade first by the British navy in 1850 and then by French and British forces during the Crimean War, Western investments in the Ottoman Empire and the gradual reclaiming of Byzantium as part of the national Greek heritage had put doubts on the idea that Greece was or should be a purely Western kingdom. In the same period, the notion of the Grand Idea was rapidly gaining ground, coupled with an even stronger emphasis on the classical heritage as the guarantee of the national character. In the light of these changes, the natural sciences, with their obvious Western aspirations and modernistic ethos, were regarded with suspicion.

Thus, as time progressed, scientists had to leap to the defence of their discipline more often, making a point of emphasizing how scientific disciplines promote not only moral, but also national, needs. However, this was not blind adherence to popular norms, but rather indicated an engagement with the prevalent ideological climate. The patriotic rhetoric of king and country was adjusted according to the political contingencies of the period. In the first years of King Otto, in the 1840s and 1850s, the few texts of this era are concerned with the bounties offered by the king's rule. A decade later, however, the national borders are seen as arbitrary and confining and the political climate is galvanized by territorial claims. Greek men of science then harnessed their expertise to justify the expansionist national ethos. Thus Theodoros Orfanidis said in his rectorial address in 1866, while discussing the Greek flora and fauna,

Finally, as the revolutionary years from 1821 to 1828 passed from memory to history and the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire became a talisman of the national character, some new rhetorical schemata emerged. The ‘illuminated scholars’ who brought knowledge to the subjugated people were as worthy of praise as the ‘armed liberators’ and warriors of the Greek revolution. Thus science was not only a worthwhile goal, but already a factor in Greek liberation. Again Christomanos, in his inaugural lecture in 1864, puts the issue succinctly when he declares, ‘As much gratitude as we owe to those who liberated us from slavery, the same we owe to those men who lifted our spirit through the natural sciences’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The circle was now complete. Science is moral, served by men of the highest calibre, who have served the goals of their nation before and after its liberation. However, it still remained to be proven that science, beyond serving Greek ideals, could also be seen as an essentially Greek enterprise.

History, destiny and progress

In that light, it is striking but not unexpected that the most universal and diachronic feature of scientists' speeches is the persistent use of the historical narrative. When making a public address, nearly all speakers during a period of sixty years chose to recount the history of their discipline,Footnote ⁶⁰ often displaying significant erudition. The most prevalent rhetorical schema was to identify some predecessors in the study of the relevant phenomena among the philosophers of classical Greece and then to trace a progression to the present. Vouris, for example, identified in his observatory address Thales and Meton of Athens, among others, as his intellectual forefathers in astronomy. Argyropoulos, fifty years later, placed the origin of the study of electricity (his own speciality) in Thales and Aristotle.Footnote ⁶¹ But Greek scientists also appeared quite sensitive to shifting intellectual currents when using history. In the first decades of the new state, in the 1840s and 1850s, national identity was considered self-evidently to stem from the ancient Greeks through a direct lineage. Disciplinary genealogies then started from ancient Greece, passed through Alexandria and the Romans, mentioned the Middle Ages and ended in the scientific heroes of the modern age.Footnote ⁶² Alexander the Great was not yet generally accepted as one of the glorious ancient ancestors, nor was Byzantium equivocally considered part of the national heritage.Footnote ⁶³ However, when J.B. Fallmerayer directly challenged the modern Greeks' ancestry and relation to classical antiquity, the need for the establishment of the continuity of the nation throughout the ages led to the creation, during the 1860s and 1870s, of a Greek historiographical school that firmly put both the Macedonians and the Byzantines in the Greek lineage.Footnote ⁶⁴ The historical narrative of Greek scientists then changed accordingly. Orfanidis in 1867, for example, was ambivalent when retracing the history of botany. From the works of Theofrastos he moved to Linnaeus, saying only that in the intermittent centuries the East was covered with deep darkness and the West by barbarism, until the ‘borrowed rays of Greek wisdom shone again in Hesperian Europe’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Christomanos, representative of a younger generation and the promoter par excellence of a newer scientific ethos, was nevertheless far more decisive three years earlier: Alexander the Great, as the pupil of Aristotle, helped guide the tide of Greek civilization towards Alexandria, where it flowered. Later, the Byzantines, as true Greeks, helped preserve the ancient scientific knowledge, even as it was declining all over Europe.Footnote ⁶⁶ For the rest of the nineteenth century, Alexandria would be presented as the last outpost of Greek science, while Byzantium would get only scarce and passing mentions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Greek men of science were, after all, educated mostly in Europe. They were quite ready to incorporate Byzantium in their narrative, but the prevailing view was that nothing of note happened in science until the sixteenth century, in Europe or elsewhere. Thus, especially when discussing sciences coming into their own after the seventeenth century, such as electromagnetism and zoology, they tended to focus on more recent years. In any case, however, the main goal of establishing the respectable Greek genealogy of modern science was achieved.Footnote ⁶⁸

Even so, this rhetorical strategy always culminated in the recurring references to contemporary scientists. Depending on the speaker's area of expertise, scientists ranging from Nikolai Lobatchevsky to Charles Darwin and from Wilhelm Roentgen to Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were mentioned. Recognized pioneers and older professors were usually spoken of with reverence and even veneration, but other near contemporaries were critically appraised and their theories accepted or rejected accordingly. Indeed, it is obvious that Greek scientists considered themselves equals to their Western peers, albeit working under more difficult circumstances. Theodoros Orfanidis used Edmont Boissier's reference to his own work to describe how the lack of a specialized Greek journal forced Greek scientists to rely on ‘European friends’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the same vein, Christomanos, while discussing the importance of teaching chemistry, was straightforward in his assessment of his own worth:

The final measure of comparison, however, was always the glory of the classical age. The narrative was consistently one of revival, rebirth and reascension. Let us revisit Vouris's speech in 1842, when he said,

Sixty years later, Konstantinos Mitsopoulos would call for the youth of Greece to study the wonderful motherland, guided by the teachings of ‘the great ancestors’ to bring glory to the country and to their Greek name.Footnote ⁷²

Thus science acquired the characteristics of a national duty. But the use of this narrative strategy created tensions. How to reconcile the celebration of the triumphs of modern science with the glorification of the ancient ancestors? And how to negotiate the growing tension between the perceived Western character of science and the growing disillusionment of Greece with the European superpowers?

The answer to the first question lies in methodology. It was the empirical ‘scientific method’ of Bacon that led to current progress, speech after speech assures us. If only, Dimitrios Stroumpos decried in his rectorial address in 1858, the ancient philosophers had paid more attention to the teachings of Aristotle, who advocated experience as the basis of knowledge, then surely scientific progress would not have halted and declined until Bacon put her again in the right path.Footnote ⁷³ It is this wrong turn that led the ancients to the wrong path. Or, as Nikolaos Apostolidis, in his presentation of the history of zoology in 1884, put it, when the method of Aristotle is reclaimed, then the sciences prosper.Footnote ⁷⁴ And, of course, in this way, even this new scientific method was presented as having a respectable ancient Greek lineage in the process.Footnote ⁷⁵

The second quandary is resolved by reconceptualizing the relation between progress and science. If Western morality and ethos had been shown to be lacking, their industrial and military might were never challenged. The repositioning of Greece once again as the ‘model kingdom of the East’ in the mid- to late nineteenth century, and the association of Western powers with negative developments,Footnote ⁷⁶ did not diminish the calls for progress on all frontiers. From the 1850s onwards, Greece had embarked on several tentative steps towards technological modernization, by creating a network of roads, installing telegraph lines and providing gas illumination to major cities.Footnote ⁷⁷ Greek scientists, while not central to these efforts, nevertheless took part in them by analysing water springs, making metallurgical analysis or writing on the needs of the nascent Greek industry.Footnote ⁷⁸ Progress had been a constant theme of Greek scientists' speeches even since Vouris's time, but its meaning and associations changed. Initially treated as one of the various gains of promoting science, by the end of the century it had become, alongside history, the main rhetorical schema in the texts and speeches of Greek scientists. From being the moral and generic aftermath of pursuing science, progress gradually became the litmus test par excellence of a civilized nation. For both Orfanidis, one of the old guard of Greek scientists speaking in 1867, and Georgios Remoundos, a professor giving his lecture on the eve of the new century, the true measure of a society's intellectual progress and civilization was ‘the study and progress of natural sciences, or, in other words, the study of nature’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Christomanos, in his rectorial address given a few years earlier and appropriately titled ‘Natural sciences and progress’, once again brings all these themes together and goes further, declaring:

Thus when moral and intellectual progress was tied to Western achievements, science was presented as a mainly intellectual pursuit. Later, when military might and technological progress were called for, especially after the years from 1882 to 1892, when railway tracks were being laid all over Greece and large-scale civic works were taking place, science once again stepped in to fulfil that role. And, of course, these demands were always cast under the light of the classical Greek heritage, the destiny of the nation and the genius of the Greeks. But even within such core rhetorical strategies, not all scientists pursued the same schemata at the same time, or hesitated to differentiate their position. In 1870, Leandros Dosios, a lecturer in organic chemistry in the University of Athens, put forth a positivistic ethos that disengaged science from morality, by saying that while progress in morals and other endeavours is not possible to measure objectively, natural sciences differ exactly because progress is quantifiable and irrefutable.Footnote ⁸¹ In contrast, Spiridon Miliarakis, professor of phytology, in 1901 criticized the venerable Christomanos's recent rectorial address for giving emphasis only to technological progress, while leaving out spiritual gains. Miliarakis is a representative of a scientific discipline that had failed to produce practical gains in Greece despite having a continual presence for over seventy years. He thus rejoices in the creation of a new Botanical Museum and is adamant that truth and pure knowledge are worthwhile goals in themselves, producing no less than seventeen examples of botanical research stations across Europe to back up this assertion.Footnote ⁸² In any case, the Departments of Mathematics and Physics were transformed into an autonomous school in 1904 and new chairs in physics, chemistry and mathematics were created, bringing new scientists and specializations in Greece. By then, however, large-scale public projects undertaken by reformist governments such those of Charilaos Trikoupis enabled Greek engineers to emerge as the emblematic experts of modernity. They remained so until the nuclear era.Footnote ⁸³

Conclusion: the rhetoric and cross-contextualization of science

The historian Patrick O'Brien – though talking in a very different context and on a rather different subject – once famously asserted that ‘the periphery was peripheral’.Footnote ⁸⁴ This implicit assumption seems to hound a certain kind of historiography of science like the Ghost of Christmas Past. But the engagement of Greek scientists with the emerging public sphere of their time suggests, I believe, a different picture. This paper addressed only a specific part of their activities, and thus many themes were not touched upon.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, by focusing on the public utterances Greek scientists made as scientific experts, there seems to be nothing peripheral in their role as energetic, prominent actors. They engaged eagerly and consistently with national ideals, scientific subjects and cultural and political events, without presenting themselves, or being seen, as doing anything qualitatively different from their peers abroad. They complained bitterly about their lack of resources but they also celebrated and compared their museums and gardens with the most prominent European examples. They incorporated these narrative practices of equality within their own rhetoric and used them to further and defend their manifold role within Greek space. Greek scientists also did not present themselves as zealots of a modernizing ethos to be found abroad. Instead they cross-contextualized science as an enterprise within the space in which they were active. They aimed to make science local and situate it as such. Within their discourse there was nothing natural, unproblematic or even emblematic about the connection between science, secularism and polity. Nor was Europe treated as a taken-for-granted exemplary entity, to be summoned as the origin of these developments. Instead, there were military might, scientific prowess and technological advancement, and these criss-crossed the East–West divide in more ways than one.

Greek scientists, as scientists, vigorously tackled these themes and incorporated them within the discourse of their activities. The process itself involved marshalling the various ‘rituals’ of Greek public speaking, such as fiery speeches, provocative rectorial addresses and composed journal articles. It also included the creation of novel narrative strategies (Romanticism and patriotism, for example), the use of already existing rhetorical schemata (such as those of the nation and its heritage) and the introduction and harnessing of new communicative themes (progress and morality as intertwined national duties, to name but two). It meant an active engagement with, and reconciliation of, a series of disparate demands put upon the scientific community by the ideologically, socially and politically turbulent period. It was a negotiation of ideological dipoles such as heritage and progress, innovation and morality, and Greece as a Western or an Oriental space. But Greek men of science were no simple adherents of local intellectual trends. Rather they come across as interacting with a public sphere which was in itself in a state of flux, and introducing, strengthening or opposing narrative strategies accordingly. Thus they put forth proposals for institutional reforms while at the same time incorporating current Greek historiography in their speeches. They defended the essentially national aspects of science, even as they called for a redefinition of the prevalent ancestor glorification. Or they vigorously defended the morality of the scientific enterprise, while describing themselves as soldiers, hierophants and teachers. Neither were they monolithic in their approaches and arguments. The claims put forth and the rhetorical strategies used were varied and at times antithetical. Different scientists in different periods engaged different subjects and stressed different aspects of what they considered to be scientific practice. The end result was a multifaceted discourse, where different threads can be seen traversing the ethos, role and practice of ‘Greek science’, as it was established at the time. Archetypical elements of science, such as the scientific method or state-of-the-art scientific theories and practices, which traditional historiography usually ascribes to spaces seen as centres of scientific production, were negotiated in such a way as to become contextually local, in form, function and history. Thus Greek science experts put forth an image of who they were and what they did which could become an active part of the shifting national discourse. In tandem, the public and the state recognized their importance and rewarded them with jubilees, poems and statues. Despite the dire needs of the state at the time, scientists managed to found laboratories, museums and collections throughout this period. In the end, their rhetorical enterprise must be seen as successful, even as the context that made it necessary was rapidly changing under the new realities of the twentieth century.