INTRODUCTION
Alfred Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth, which was largely written at the British School at Athens between October 1909 and July 1910, has a good claim to be the most influential twentieth-century work of Greek history. Aiming to offer a personal vision of ancient Greece as it really was, in all its environmental, political, and economic difference from modern Britain, the book, following first publication in August 1911, went through five editions in 20 years and remained widely read in and beyond schools and universities up to the 1960s. Its many admirers included the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru; the West Indian historian and political thinker C.L.R. James; and American Supreme Court judges Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Excerpts from the book’s translation of the Periclean Funeral Oration were printed on posters on London underground trains during the First World War as part of the war effort, and the ethos of community and citizenship in the Greek city-state which the book’s title celebrated was extrapolated and broadened by Zimmern’s friend Lionel Curtis to promote what became known as the British Commonwealth of Nations.Footnote 1
Zimmern is discussed in modern scholarship mostly as the world’s first Professor of, and a leading interwar commentator on, IR.Footnote 2 Son of a prosperous German merchant of Jewish descent who moved to Britain in the 1860s, he attended one of the most famous public schools, Winchester, and its sister foundation in Oxford, New College, during the zenith of a type of classical education that was deeply connected with the central institutions of British power.Footnote 3 Zimmern’s fellow scholars at Winchester included boys who became Viceroy of India, Governor of Kenya, Lord Chancellor, and Head of the Civil Service, as well as some whose careers were cut short by the First World War, including Guy Dickins and Leonard Cheesman, who were later pupils of Zimmern at New College, Students at the British School, and elected to Oxford Fellowships; all of these read Classics at Oxford – except the Viceroy (Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell).Footnote 4 Zimmern himself was both a beneficiary of and distanced from this milieu. He achieved early success through election to a Fellowship at New College soon after finishing his degree. But, as we shall see, his attitude to these institutions was mixed. He discovered as he grew to manhood, he later wrote, that he was ‘not an Englishman in the deeper side of [his] nature’ (Zimmern Reference Zimmern1918, 65), and this ambivalence was no doubt part of the reason he resigned the Fellowship in 1909 to pursue interests in educational and social reform. First, though, he travelled to Athens to write The Greek Commonwealth while his classical knowledge was still fresh. His goals, as he explained to one of his mentors, the social psychologist Graham Wallas, were to enliven classical teaching and to make people think about the twentieth-century polis (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 8, 5 January 1910).Footnote 5
The aim of this article is to analyse the significance of the BSA for the development of The Greek Commonwealth. Besides shedding light on the composition and goals of Zimmern’s book, it will introduce previously unused evidence for the social atmosphere of the BSA in the early twentieth century, for the intellectual interests of its members, in particular archaeology and pre- and post-classical Greece, and for British attitudes to modern Greeks.Footnote 6 Anglo-Greek attitudes have helpfully been discussed through Michael Herzfeld’s concept of crypto-colonisation, a term which conveys the idea of a nation’s continuing economic and cultural subordination after it has gained political independence. It has been argued that the foreign archaeological schools were (and are) themselves part of the process of crypto-colonising, reminders of continuing economic disparities and of the origins of the Greek nation-state in the actions of the ‘Great Powers’ and in conceptions of nationality and Hellenism imposed from without.Footnote 7 The important insights of this mode of analysis will be bolstered and nuanced in this article by granular analysis of interactions among non-Greeks and between Greeks and non-Greeks in a specific institutional setting. Throughout, the influence of that setting will be related to the educational formation of its members (typically at Oxford or Cambridge). The article will close by relating Zimmern’s BSA experiences to the ideas of nationality he developed in his later international thought.
The main evidence for Zimmern’s time in Athens consists of the series of articles that he wrote from Athens for the Highway, the monthly journal of the Workers’ Educational Association, and of unpublished archival sources, mainly letters to or from Zimmern.Footnote 8 The survival of material is of course uneven: oddly the letters to his family in the Zimmern papers in Oxford contain none from this year in Athens, though several from his previous visit to Greece in 1904 (ZP, 7, fols 143–66). There is at least a welcome diversity in the recipients of letters from Zimmern: two mentors, Gilbert Murray, Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Graham Wallas; one woman, Wallas’ wife Ada Wallas, herself a writer; one of his peers at school and university, Robert Seton-Watson, already a Balkans expert; and one of his New College students, Edmund Morgan, later Bishop of Truro. In addition, something of what he wrote in letters to others can be inferred from their responses when these survive in the Zimmern papers.
My title is taken from an unpublished lecture Zimmern gave to Classics students in Oxford in June 1932, following his return as Oxford’s first Professor of IR, in a series organised by Murray and the Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, J.L. Myres (ZP, 142, fols 67–132: extracts at 69–73).Footnote 9 Zimmern told the students that:
There are two possible ways of approaching Ancient Greece. One is to forget the present and to immerse oneself in the past. The other is to remain in the present and to look back to the past. The first method is that of classical scholarship: the second that of Political and Social Philosophy.
‘As classical scholars’, he continued:
your object in studying ancient Greece is to know it as it really was. … It is a rare privilege to be allowed to retire from the Machine Age and to live, if only in thought, in the most satisfying period of the world’s history. …
Et ego in Arcadia: I too enjoyed that privilege – and I owe to it more than I can say. How well I recall, as though it were yesterday, the Athens of the Age of Pericles, as it emerged, as on a palimpsest, from behind the Athens of 1909 – the effort, soon reduced to a habit, of thinking away the later accretions, Roman, mediaeval or dating from yesterday, and seeing nothing but the thing as it really was at that chosen moment of time.
Here we see Zimmern nostalgically recalling his year in Greece with the help of a metaphor derived from the study of manuscripts, his Rankeian pretence being that one can scrape away the past to recover the original text of Periclean Athens. ‘But my day dream ended’, he went on, and ‘I look back to the days of my Athenian citizenship with affection and sometimes with regret.’ Zimmern does, then, show some awareness that the palimpsest metaphor was make-believe.Footnote 10 Yet he continues to give an impression of his book’s goals at odds with the concern he shows in his letter to Wallas with the twentieth-century polis – that is, with the nature of British citizenship.
Two brief codas will set the scene further. First, in the fourth edition of his book, in 1924, Zimmern justified limiting further changes to an Appendix on the grounds that:
as the years go on I am carried farther and farther away … from the state of mind in which I wrote it. When I sat in my room at the British School at Athens with my well-thumbed texts around me I had been soaked in the details of the subject for ten years and more. (TGC, 5)
So the book was left as an archive of his mental state during that year in Athens. Second, soon after the end of the Second World War, Zimmern moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in order to be closer to the new centre of world power. In 1953, he gave a large collection of his classical books to the local college, Trinity. Thanking him, one of the professors, Jim Notopoulos (who had just spent a year in Athens as a Visiting Professor at the American School) mentioned that he used The Greek Commonwealth as a textbook, adding that ‘I thought of you often this past year especially when I was working in the British School at Athens whose genius loci haunts your book’ (ZP, 66, fol. 103, 15 October 1953). What might Notopoulos have meant by that?
WHY ATHENS?
To answer that question, it is first worth asking why Zimmern travelled to Athens to write a book about the ancient Greeks. ‘It was in the hope of learning to understand them that I came out to Greece’, he wrote in the first of his Highway series on ‘The Greeks and modern life’ (Zimmern Reference Zimmern1910c, 135) – the suggestion being that an intimate familiarity with the Mediterranean environment was required. He had certainly decided on this plan by 27 March 1909, when he tried to arrange a preliminary Balkans trip with Robert Seton-Watson on the grounds that he was ‘a little stale in the subject now’ and would ‘be glad of a good shaking up’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4). A desire for change is clear, too, in letters he wrote once he had arrived in Athens. To Graham Wallas on 17 October: ‘I feel a better man mentally already for having cut the cable with Oxford. It’s so difficult to grow up there’ (GWP, WALLAS/1/45, fol. 23). To Ada Wallas on 8 February 1910: ‘as Oxford recedes, lecture notes disappear too and one gets new eyes for one’s subject’ (AWP, 2/7/11). To Gilbert Murray on 28 March: ‘Tomorrow I am going on a picnic to Plato’s cave, behind Hymettus. Which (I am sorry to say) will remind me of Oxford. Out here one becomes healthy and honest and wise’ (GMP, 116, fol. 158). The desired change had the right effect: decades later, Zimmern recalled to Alex Photiades, a Greek friend whom he knew through UNESCO, how easily and fast he had worked in Athens in 1909–10 (ZP, 76, fols 6–7, 29 March 1947).
Writing his book in Athens was for Zimmern a way of turning his back on the British academic world. In the course of the year, Myres both telegraphed and wrote to Zimmern to ask if he could teach in Liverpool now that Myres was returning to Oxford. The terms of his letter suggest that he had heard of that Hymettus picnic: ‘I think it would be for yourself an experience of sufficient value to make it worth while interrupting your philosophic leisure, and descending into a momentary Cave’ (JLMP, MS Myres 84, fol. 15, 18 June 1910: original underlining). Before that letter arrived, Myres had already received a swift and clear answer from Athens by return telegram: ‘Thanks sorry impossible Mimmern [sic]’ (JLMP, MS Myres 84, fol. 17, 19 June 1910). Zimmern was in the lucky position of being able to turn such offers down owing to his father’s wealth (the trip to Greece itself cost £150, or about £15,000 in today’s money).Footnote 11
Why the BSA in particular? The School was founded in 1886 with support from private subscriptions and from various organisations (some Oxford and Cambridge colleges, for instance, as well as the Royal Institute of British Architects). In 1909, its director was R.M. Dawkins and his assistant was F.W. Hasluck, both scholars with wide interests in ancient and modern Greece.Footnote 12 While it catered mostly for the formal category of Students, typically recent graduates, the category to which Zimmern was elected, Associate Membership, was introduced (in the official definition) for ‘persons actively engaged in study or exploration in Greek lands’ (Gill Reference Gill2011, 102, 151). His direct prior knowledge of the British School was limited to his 1904 trip to Greece when he went there for some information – only to find it shut and get all he needed at the American School next door (ZP, 7, fol. 149).
The facilities and location of the School were one attraction. He noted in his letters that ‘it is a roomy comfortable house with a good library and balcony, two bathrooms and a tennis court, on the outskirts of the town with a view of Hymettus one side and Lycabettus the other, with the Acropolis standing out well over the houses townwards’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 27 February 1910).Footnote 13 It was ‘well out of the dust and Athens is never unbearable’ (ibid.), and even the heat had not proved bad by the start of July: ‘the mosquitos have the bad taste to prefer the other men to me … So I am getting quite used to reading writing and thinking with a minimum of clothes on, though I haven’t got to Thucydides’ length of calling a man a savage for wearing a cholera belt’ (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 58, 1 July 1910: a witty allusion to Thucydides’ discussion of athletic nudity at 1.6).Footnote 14 Zimmern may have written in similar terms to his friend Richard Livingstone, to judge from a reference to ‘naked Hellenism’ in a letter from Livingstone at this time (ZP, 75, fol. 4, n.d.).Footnote 15 By the end of the year, at any rate, he could declare himself ‘sorry to say goodbye to the Acropolis, even though writing and perspiration have become synonymous’ (AWP, 2/6/3, 19 July [1910]).
Another major appeal of Athens for Zimmern was the libraries. His pupil Cheesman told him that ‘you won’t find many economic books in the library. However there is a free right of entry into the German school where there are more’ (ZP, 12, fol. 25, 11 March 1909). In due course Zimmern’s full appreciation of the various libraries was expressed in the BSA’s Annual: they ‘allow genuine students not only to use, but freely to take out their books’, and ‘constitute a very full collection of works on all sides of Greek life, and their excellent arrangement and easy accessibility enable students to work with an immense economy of time and trouble’ (Anon. 1909–10, 296). A contrast is there implied with Oxford’s Bodleian Library. His letters show too that it was the need for books that kept him in Athens even in the heat of July,Footnote 16 and once he had finished he told a friend that the libraries had ‘practically all the books I wanted and hardly any besides’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 8 August 1910) – perhaps a hint at his own capacity for intellectual distraction.Footnote 17
GENIUS LOCI: THE BRITISH SCHOOL
What of the local and larger communities in which Zimmern wrote? Some idea of how he viewed Athens is shown by a letter he wrote to his ex-Winchester pupil Edmund Morgan (ERMP, fol. 17, 21 January 1910):
Living under the acropolis makes me realize more vividly than ever how human beings need a limited and homely circle or city if they are to be really civilized or happy. Clapham and Islington and the barrack-like Board Schools represent a most frightful waste of happiness, when one thinks that the people in them might all be living in an Athens or a Win. Coll. Perhaps they will be some day. There are the makings of a college anywhere, for instance in Rudmore.
While tempered by the typically Edwardian consciousness of waste,Footnote 18 the optimism of Zimmern’s words may be explained by the fact that his young addressee was then considering ordination: Rudmore was a working-class area of Portsmouth where Winchester had a mission. Nonetheless, the language of ‘an Athens or a Win. Coll.’ does map onto a running theme in The Greek Commonwealth which is found in other British representations of the ancient city at this time – the idea that the comradely atmosphere of the ancient polis resembles an Oxbridge college or public school (Millett Reference Millett and Stray2007, 186–7).
The college analogy is relevant too for thinking about Zimmern’s time at the BSA. Both Winchester and New College had strong associations with the School. In the pre-war period Winchester provided more Students than any other school as well as three directors, Francis Penrose, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, and D.G. Hogarth; Zimmern’s own Headmaster and history teacher, W.A. Fearon, supported the foundation of the School and had an interest in Athens’ material remains.Footnote 19 Of Zimmern’s other Classics teachers, A.H. Cruickshank was one of the first batch of Associates elected, while M.J. Rendall spent time in the Director’s house during Ernest Gardner’s tenure; in an unpublished memoir he compared his time at the BSA with ‘varsity life’ (Winchester College Archives, D8/189). Old school ties evidently counted at the BSA, much as they did at the old universities.Footnote 20 As for New College, it is joint top with Magdalen in David Gill’s (Reference Gill2011, 94) list of Oxford colleges that provided Students. One of Zimmern’s college friends, Paul Oppé, was at the School after finishing Greats (Gill Reference Gill2011, 370); so too later, as noted, were two of his pupils, Dickins and Cheesman.
Rendall’s comparison with varsity life is echoed in other contemporary accounts: Ernest Gardner (Reference Gardner1907, 122) even spoke of the foreign schools as a whole as an ‘international university’.Footnote 21 One obvious point of comparison between the BSA and the universities which provided most of its members, Oxford and Cambridge, was the position of women (Gill Reference Gill2011, 115–39). While there were female Students, women were not permitted to take part in School excavations until 1911 or to reside in the Hostel until 1920, the same year women were allowed to become full members of Oxford University. The all-male environment with a common table would have been familiar to Zimmern from his years at the two ‘Colleges of St Mary Winton’ (Winchester and New College) to whom his book is dedicated.
Another point of contact between the BSA and the Oxbridge college is their clubbish tone. In letters to Dawkins, Hasluck could refer to a research trip to Albania as an ‘Albagger hunt’Footnote 22 and speak of a meal at which two of the diners (Edward Allis Keeling, a diplomat, and William Erskine of the British Legation) had been ‘progged’ or ‘sent down’ by two others (Myres and Hogarth) (RMDPO, 30 July 1915).Footnote 23 Another example of this tone is found in a letter which Alan Wace (later Director) wrote to Dawkins on 9 February 1911 about a meeting of the School’s Management Committee in February. Wace alludes to the participants by the names of the Homeric gods at banquet (RMDPC): ‘Zeus was there, also Athena, and Iris with the frontispiece of B.S.A. XVI, Plutus attended, likewise Poseidon (alias the Homeric Crippen) soon to start for Troy, Hermes played with his eye-glass while Ganymede handed round the tea cups.’Footnote 24 These terms would have been comprehensible to his addressee: correspondence from the School’s London Secretary, John Baker-Penoyre, shows that ‘the Olympians’ and ‘Olympus’ were at this time commonly used by members of the Management Committee (presumably they had been ironically picked up from the non-Olympians).Footnote 25 Zimmern in time showed himself adept at picking up the lingo. When invited to join the Committee himself, he wrote that he was ‘very much flattered at the thought of being selected to sit among the Olympians’ (BSA Corporate Records, Alfred Zimmern to John Baker-Penoyre, 13 October 1912).
The analogy with varsity life holds even though Zimmern was officially an Associate among Students. One of the Students (Wace) was in fact of his own age, and the others only a few years younger. As a young tutor living in a set of rooms in New College, he had been used to close relations with students during term-time and to reading parties in country settings during vacations. One of the first things he did, in fact, on returning to England from Greece was go on a reading party with former students in Cornwall, where his draft was discussed chapter by chapter (AWP, 2/6/3 [September 1910]). The men at the British School formed a cohort of a similar size to such parties.
For Zimmern, this cohort consisted of Dawkins in the Director’s House; Hasluck, who was on leave in India and the Near East for the first months of his visit; the two men Hasluck called ‘the Macedonians’, Wace and Maurice Thompson, co-authors of works on Prehistoric Thessaly (Reference Wace and Thompson1912) and the nomadic Vlachs or Aromanians (Reference Cassavetti1914); three other Oxbridge products, Arthur Woodward (future Director of the School), with whom Zimmern had a fortnight’s walking in Aetolia, H.A. Ormerod (later author of a standard book on piracy), and S.W. Grose (a numismatist); and finally two architectural students, Lionel Budden and Harry Jewell.
That this varsity lifestyle was far from monastic is clear from a sketch Zimmern offered in a letter to Ada Wallas on 8 February 1910 (AWP, 2/7/11). After a hard morning’s writing, he would amuse himself with tennis, walks on Hymettus or Pentelicus, charades at the Legation, roller-skating to the band of H.M.S. Aboukir, and tea on H.M.S. Swiftsure. ‘Three cheers for the crisis which keeps British warships at Phalerum’, he wrote, probably not altogether seriously, though it is a comment still worth contemplating when reading Zimmern’s treatment of Athenian naval power – and, as we shall see, the political situation in Greece did give him other opportunities besides a better social life.
Further variety was provided by visitors from Britain. In October, the Oxford philosopher J.A. Smith, in Athens during a sabbatical, visited ‘the English School’ and ‘found there (solitary) Zimmern of New College working away at his book’ (Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Eng. misc. e. 1126, fol. 16 [letter to Mrs R.M. Carlyle]). The Easter vacation brought Oscar Browning and John Maynard Keynes from Cambridge (GMP, 116, fol. 158, 28 March [1910]); within a few years Zimmern and Keynes would be collaborating on solutions to the postwar economic crisis (ZP, 9, fol. 164, 80, fols 71–91). Also on hand was ‘the Spoo’, Zimmern’s former college head William Spooner of spoonerism fame, who was on a Hellenic Travellers’ Club cruise during which he took part in a debate on Athenian imperialism (ERMP, fols 27–8, 20 April 1910; Anon. 1910, 27–8). Another man with an Oxford connection whom Zimmern may have encountered was Maurice Hutton, Professor of Greek at Toronto, who wrote an account of his trip to Greece for his university magazine (Hutton Reference Hutton1911).
There are signs that Zimmern was popular at the School. In June 1910 Hasluck wrote to Dawkins from Turkey of the possibility of doing some travelling with Zimmern, ‘whom I love’ (RMDPO, 6 June 1910),Footnote 26 while the following year W.R. Halliday, another ex-Winchester Zimmern pupil who became attached to the School (later Principal of King’s College London), wrote to Murray that ‘he is much loved out here by everyone, and all the Greeks who have met Ἀλφρέδος ask cordially after his wellbeing’ (GMP, 18, fol. 23, 28 January [1911]). A sense of harmony is suggested, too, by the Christmas wishes Wace sent Myres ‘from all here in the hostel, Woodward, Zimmern, and Thompson’ (Dawkins being excluded as living separately with his sister in the Director’s house). A quarter of a century later, Wace, congratulating Zimmern on his knighthood, suggested that none of his friends would be more delighted ‘than those who were fellow students with you in Athens’ (ZP, 37, fol. 96, 2 January 1936). Wace’s use of ‘students’ suggests that the formal difference in Zimmern’s status cannot have meant much.
ZIMMERN AND ARCHAEOLOGY
How did Zimmern himself find the men at the British School? Cheesman had told him in advance that ‘you couldn’t have better company than the men out here’ (ZP, 12, fol. 25, 11 March 1909). But while in the preface to his book Zimmern holds archaeologists responsible for transforming the study of Greek history since the time of George Grote (1794–1871), he thanks none of those at the School by name (TGC, 7–9). The omission is the less surprising in light of the complaints about the company that can be found in Zimmern’s letters. On 14 November 1909 (GWP, WALLAS/1/44, fol. 74): ‘My companions here (so far) are rather dull.’ On 5 January 1910 (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 7): ‘The men here are all fiddling with archaeology, mostly prehistoric … I have no-one to talk [the book] over with here – which, after Oxford, is on the whole a blessing. Criticism can wait till it is more in shape.’ Then on 17 July (GMP, 117, fol. 147): ‘I have been talking to myself too much without companions (I am afraid archaeologists are not companions) for nearly a year.’ He evidently wrote in similar terms to Halliday, who told Gilbert Murray that he did not look forward to the BSA after meeting Wace and corresponding with Zimmern (GMP, 15, fol. 64, n.d.), and to Dick Gleadowe (also Winchester and New College; later Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford), to judge from Gleadowe’s reply (ZP, 12, fol. 103 [December 1909]): ‘don’t you really like these archaeologists? I met Wace up at Oxford this half: I don’t think we’ve any use for each other.’Footnote 27 A similar attitude can be found in others associated with the British School. A recent Greats graduate who stayed there in February 1908, Cyril E. Robinson (later a Winchester teacher and author of popular works on Greece), tried to entice a friend out to Athens with the complaint that ‘However nice they may be full-blown archaeologists aren’t company for a novice like myself’ (Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Papers of Robert Henry Lightfoot, MS 16109/13, 2 February [1908]).Footnote 28 And even a former Director, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, told the School’s Annual Meeting in 1910 of his feeling ‘that a little more art and a little less archaeology [in the Annual] would be a pleasant change’ (Anon. 1909–10, 305).
Zimmern’s apparent distaste for archaeologists could spread to their material too. In a letter to Graham Wallas, he contrasted the American School, with its interest in the classical Erechtheum, with its British equivalent (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 61, 1 July 1910): ‘our people are all on to prehistoric potsherds. Two of our men have been up in S. Albania (Jannina way) looking for Proto-Proto-Proto settlements’ – a joke on the rush of archaeological coinages with proto-prefixes that had been entering the English language in recent decades.Footnote 29 Yet here Zimmern may be picking up the playful language of the archaeologists themselves. In letters to Dawkins from round this time, Wace calls Arthur Evans a ‘proto-brick’ and says he will be ‘glad to leave protos for a bit, and take up Vlach instead’, while Thompson alludes to their great book on ‘protosherds’ (RMDPC, 23 November [1910] and 9 February 1911).
It is striking nonetheless that Zimmern in the same letter to Wallas expresses hostility to archaeological work even on classical remains (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 61):
What do you think the grubbers have been doing in the Parthenon? Taking up the pavement to discover the foundations of the projected building underneath. The chief things they found (serve them right) were the graves of some poor Franks who thought, till their rude awakening, that they were still asleep in St Mary’s.
Zimmern here refers to what the excavator, B.H. Hill (Reference Hill1912, 547), called ‘the clearing of a Byzantine grave’ – a ‘small but important’ excavation, in the judgement of the historian of the American School (Lord Reference Lord1947: 118), which proved, a contemporary reported, that ‘the older temple had six columns on the ends and sixteen on the sides, not eight and nineteen, as Dr Dörpfeld had argued’ (Chase Reference Chase1911, 115).
It may be that Zimmern’s criticism of archaeologists and their fieldwork involved some comic exaggeration. When he writes to Ada Wallas, Zimmern does say that ‘there are some very nice people here. I like the men in the school’ (AWP, 2/7/11, 8 February 1910) – though even here he adds ‘particularly a young architectural student from Liverpool’, that is, Lionel Budden, who Zimmern’s papers suggest was, along with Shirley Atchley of the British Legation, the only Athens acquaintance with whom he stayed in more than cursory contact in years to come.Footnote 30 Budden, moreover, in his first letter to Zimmern after leaving the British School, asked to be remembered to ‘Amaryllis’ (perhaps a Theocritean nickname for the housekeeper Anna) and the Director, sent his love to the various men at the School, ‘Isaiahs all’, and then asked: ‘How did you find Woodward as a companion in Aetolia – pretty much as you anticipated? & how is life going at the School now? Are you really as deadly dull as you feared you’d be?’ (ZP, 12, fol. 124, 2 March 1910). Budden’s comment on Woodward hints at Zimmern’s anti-archaeology stance, but the letter hints, too, that that stance was exaggerated. Indeed, a letter in the BSA archive shows that Zimmern helped Woodward get a job at Liverpool the following year (BSA Corporate Records, Zimmern to Penoyre, 11 June 1911).
The suggestion that Zimmern’s tone about archaeologists is partly a pose is strengthened by evidence that he did interest himself in archaeology. On his first visit to Greece in 1904, reflecting on what the Greek cities ‘managed to bring forth on their limited resources’, he wrote that ‘the effect of seeing the real places makes one lay more stress than ever on the art and archaeology and less on the internal politics and constitutions’ (ZP, 7, fol. 159) – a comment that anticipates the unusual structure of The Greek Commonwealth, which can be seen as a sort of historical commentary on the culture of Athens at her peak (Rood Reference Rood2025a). More mundanely, some time before 1909 Zimmern donated a Corinthian red-figure vase to the Winchester College Museum (Falconer and Mannack Reference Falconer and Mannack2002, 15–16). Zimmern’s goal was evidently to boost the pedagogical value of the collection, which had been established in 1897 (just before he left the school) by a number of Masters from travels in Berlin, Italy, and Greece, and was managed by A.G. Bather, a former Student of the British School (Anon. 1897). While at the British School, moreover, Zimmern visited the Museum at Thebes where a lecturer at Leeds, Percy Ure, was working on black-figure vases. In a letter to Ronald Burrows, at that time Professor of Greek in Manchester, Ure noted that ‘Zimmern says there is more to see at Ruvo than Tar. [Taranto]’ (University of Reading, Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, Papers of Percy Ure, 2 April [1910]).Footnote 31 Ure was evidently planning a stop in Italy on his way home, and Zimmern was able to offer him advice gleaned from his own travels in Southern Italy in 1903 (ZP, 7, fols 73–114) with his elder cousin-once-removed, Helen Zimmern, friend and translator of Nietzsche.
An interest in recent archaeological discoveries is shown throughout The Greek Commonwealth. As promised by the preface, the book often draws on such evidence, sometimes at first hand from archaeological reports, sometimes as mediated through the work of continental scholars. To give some examples of the former, recent findings of the British School in Melos and Sparta are referenced several times: at Melos, topographical findings (TGC, 440 n. 2); at Sparta, the discovery of iron lumps (306 n. 1), of a relief bearing the letters ‘Chilon’ (116 n. 1), and of pots that proved ‘Cyrenaic’ pottery to be Laconian ware (225 n. 1).Footnote 32
More interesting for the theme of this article is what Zimmern does in his book with archaeological finds. Consider, for instance, the discovery that ‘Cyrenaic’ pottery was Laconian. Zimmern introduces this discovery in a footnote to a discussion of the power of local tradition (225 n. 1). The discussion in the main text concludes with the statement that ‘Even dull-witted Sparta had her own pots.’ Zimmern then starts the footnote with an allusion (without citation) to results published in Reference Droop1910 by an experienced British School hand J.P. Droop. The footnote then continues with a further archaeological observation: ‘One of the most curious illustrations of Greek Conservatism in small things may still be observed in the doorways of the Propylaea. Door-jambs were traditionally made of wood: so, even in a building made of marble, they had still to be in the old material.’ That ‘may still be observed’ both attests to Zimmern’s own time in Athens and invites visitors (like those on their Easter cruises) to be careful observers. The note then takes flight: ‘With us art-forms become modified by material changes … In Greece they became modified by changes in the spiritual sphere.’ Zimmern then references a French sociologist (Tarde) for ‘the conflict between Custom and Fashion’, and concludes, in his most clubby manner, ‘Many Englishmen who have experienced both will think of their Public School as a home of Custom and their University as a seat of Fashion.’ One of many footnotes in the book whose direction is utterly unpredictable, this one shifts from the material to the spiritual within the Greek world (from pots and door-jambs to tragedy) at the same time as it opposes material modernity to spiritual antiquity.
We have seen, then, that Zimmern did pick up something from the dominant archaeological interests of the British School. This interaction does, however, raise a further question about how the chronological span of Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth relates to the interests of the members of the School.
FROM CLASSICAL GREECE TO BYZANTIUM
The focus of Zimmern’s book is firmly classical, as its sub-title Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens suggests (it was revealingly taken for granted that the fifth century BC was meant). The half-century before the Peloponnesian War is called within the book itself ‘the richest and happiest period in the recorded history of any single community’ (432). The war then marks a moment of rupture, and Zimmern polemically dismisses the claims of the fourth-century philosophers to be reliable guides to the atmosphere of Athens in her prime. Traces of this same attitude can be seen, too, in his letters, as when he is willing to ‘forgive’ the Americans the ‘impiety’ of their Parthenon excavations, ‘for they have done really good work in piecing together the Erechtheum: and they do at least care for the 5th century’ (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 61, 1 July 1910). This sort of attitude was widespread: the Headmaster of Malvern could even tell a group of Hellenic cruisers in 1910 that ‘modern Athens doesn’t matter except for Museum and meals’ (James Reference James1910, 74), while a review in the Hellenic Herald (a journal aimed at Greek expats in London) at this time called the history of the Acropolis after the Periclean era ‘a subject on which we would not willingly dwell’ (A.C. 1909, 106).
Zimmern’s concession about the American School’s concern for classical Greece implies a contrast with the BSA. Zimmern’s pupil Cheesman had told him in advance that ‘Shop of all kinds from neolithic to Byzantine is talked here’ (ZP, 12, fol. 27, 11 March 1909). This observation chimes with Richard Clogg’s (Reference Clogg2000, 171 n. 20) suggestion that ‘at no stage since has so much of the School’s effort been devoted to the study of the recent history of Greece and of its modern language and society as during the “Golden Age” which coincided with the directorships of Dawkins … and Wace’.Footnote 33 Hasluck even wrote in a letter to Dawkins of the School’s ‘ominous gap between 1200 BC and 1200 AD’ (RMDPO, 13 December 1913). The clash with the conventional focus of classical education in Britain is shown by a letter William Miller, an Associate of the School and longtime resident in Italy and Greece, wrote on 24 February 1925 in which he recalled Gilbert Murray being unfamiliar with a Near Eastern toponym (Albanian Cheimarra) even though it is mentioned by Byron – ‘but Byron is “post-classical” and therefore outside the ken of Professors of Greek at Oxford’ (RSWP, SEW/17/17/11). Alfred Zimmern seems as removed from a broad chronological interest in Greece as his Oxford mentor.
It is revealing that Zimmern’s preference for classical Greece was shared with his closest friend at the British School, Lionel Budden. Budden had gained funds for his visit on the back of an undergraduate thesis on ‘The Greek revival in Britain’ (Budden Reference Budden1909) – this revival being defined by neoclassical architecture. His stay at the School resulted in the short term in articles in architectural journals on the restoration of the Acropolis and on the architecture of modern Athens (Budden Reference Budden1910; Reference Budden1912); in the latter he lamented the city’s medieval survivals. In the longer term Budden’s preferences are seen in his much-admired war memorial in front of St George’s Hall in Liverpool.
There are signs nonetheless that the British School did stimulate in Zimmern some interest in the later history of Greece. On 28 March 1910, he told Gilbert Murray (GMP, 116, fol. 153) that he ‘got sick of writing four or five days ago and plunged into the Middle Ages for a change’. This reading is reflected in his book in a citation of ‘Destruction of the Greek Empire, by Sir Edwin Pears (an old Constantinople resident)’ (TGC, 28) – whom Zimmern had indeed met there (GWP, WALLAS/1/45, fol. 24; Zimmern Reference Zimmern1929, 325–6) – and in two references to William Miller’s The Latins in the Levant (TGC, 19, 69). In the first of these, Zimmern speaks of Otho de le Roche, ‘first feudal lord of Attica and Boeotia’, returning in his old age to his native Burgundy. In the second, he groups Miller’s book with Sir Rennell Rodd’s The Princes of Achaia as ‘the two most recent general books in English about mediaeval Greece’ – though as ‘both are rather bewildering from their mass of detail’ he recommends the reader who knows Greek to read The Chronicle of Morea in the original: it ‘is full of interest to those who are interested in the clash of East and West’. An ensuing reference to the sociologist Demolins suggests that Zimmern was thinking of differing social organisation rather than military conflict: in the letter to Murray he explains that the Chronicle ‘shows the men of the West trying to establish their feudal institutions among people who simply couldn’t understand them and brings out the differences between our social world and that of the πόλις (however broken up) in a most vivid way’ (GMP, 116, fol. 154). As this explanation shows, delving into the Middle Ages could in fact fortify Zimmern’s valorisation of the non-feudal features he found in the fifth-century polis, such as the lack of hierarchy in housing and in personal names, and so serve his critique of modern British society.
The influence of Zimmern’s reading at the British School can be traced in the manuscript of The Greek Commonwealth (ZP, 126–7). By the time of that plunge into the Middle Ages in late March 1910, Zimmern had completed 14 chapters which he entrusted to his former pupil Reginald Coupland (another Winchester scholar) to take back to England for typing (GMP, 116, fol. 155). Comparison between that first draft and the published book shows the process of expansion. The reference to Otho de la Roche was added later – supplementing an earlier allusion to Count Berthold of Katzenellenbogen, of whom Zimmern would presumably have learnt on visits to relatives in nearby Frankfurt (ZP, 126, fol. 74).Footnote 34 Another later addition was the mention of The Chronicle of Morea – and in revising his text Zimmern gave a less glowing verdict on Miller and Rodd once he had actually read their books (ZP, 126, fol. 160).
ZIMMERN AND MODERN GREECE
A more delicate question is how Zimmern’s reconstruction of ancient Greece was affected by his experience of the Greeks he encountered while at the British School and by the attitudes to them taken by other members of the School. While some members (including Cheesman) did profess fondness for the Greeks (see below), many were more patronising. When Arnold Toynbee arrived at the School in 1911, he at once informed his mother of the School’s tendency to ‘scoff’ at the urban Greeks as ‘blackcoats’: ‘all Levantines are “dago”s in their language, and the would-be cultured among them “black coats”: it is not quite fair – they are trying so hard to be European’ (AJTP, 69/2, 27 November 1911). As Richard Clogg (Reference Clogg2000, 9–15) has brought out, Toynbee’s own later letters home several times unapologetically use the term ‘dago’ – a pejorative word for southern Europeans, supposedly derived from Spanish ‘diego’. Clogg notes, too, that the word is used in a letter from Wace to the Secretary of the School’s Management Committee, and various other instances can be found in letters from BSA men in this period. Halliday told Murray in advance that he had ‘talked about Dagoes & cheap witticisms’ with Wace and on arrival that ‘it hasn’t taken me long to dislike the Dago’ (GMP, 15, fol. 64, 16, fol. 138);Footnote 35 Wace informed Dawkins that he would arrive ‘at the centre of all dagodom by dago Easter’ (RMDPC, 9 February 1911); while Hasluck mentioned to Dawkins an Angevin despot ‘who turned Dago’ (RMDPO, 7 September 1915; also 14 November 1911, ‘the dagoes’).Footnote 36
Such attitudes are particularly striking given the political context. Zimmern’s stay in Athens came at a time of momentous changes. Tensions between Greece and the Ottomans had been increased by the Cretan proclamation of unification with Hellas in 1908 and by the pressure of competing Greek and other nationalisms in areas of the Ottoman Empire that were to be incorporated in the Greek state following the wars of 1912–13. When Wace joined Cheesman at a dig in northern England in 1909, Cheesman told Murray that Wace ‘was just back from Makedonia with a lower opinion of the Hellenes than ever’ (GMP, 16, fols 64–5, 15 September 1909):
He saw a Turkish village which a Greek band completely destroyed a few days later. I am afraid that if war broke out, as apparently it very nearly did, the School would disgrace themselves by going out to cheer when the Turkish flag was hoisted on the Parthenon. I like the Hellenes myself but it does annoy me to see all the papers praising the ‘correctness’ of their attitude when pictures of Greek officers who have been killed raiding in Makedonia are hung in every café.
Even if Cheesman exaggerated for literary effect, the underlying attitude is attested elsewhere. The following year, when Wace and Thompson were travelling with the nomadic Vlachs, Wace wrote a letter to Cheesman in the Vlach (Aromanian) language – astonishingly enough – reporting on the villages destroyed by Greek raiders, and suggesting that ‘all your friends (Philhellenes [written in English])’ should visit ‘so that they could see what a mistaken idea they have about these places’ (Cambridge, Pembroke College Library and Archive, 1058/WAC/1/6, 2 July 1910).Footnote 37 The famous book Wace and Thompson wrote together, The Nomads of the Balkans (Reference Wace and Thompson1914), gives a strong sense of their respect for the Vlachs, but not quite the sense of Vlach racial superiority to Greeks found in a letter Wace wrote to Myres a few days before that letter to Cheesman (JLMP, MS Myres 40, fol. 99, 24 June 1910):
The most amazing thing about these people is their absolute non-Greek & non-Italian character. Lively, energetic, good workmen (saddlers, cobblers, gunsmiths, jewellers etc), fond of a rag, able to understand jokes – very English in many ways – fair-haired – often blue-eyed – & white-skinned. … They are in every way far superior to the Graeculus esuriens of to-day. Therefore, since we know how far they have in more modern times influenced & colonized in Thessaly & N. Greece, could it not be a good idea to bring them into prehistoric Greece? They are an exceedingly interesting people from all points of view – such a change from the Greeks.
Wace, that is, strives to link Greek origins with a people who are English in both character and physique and who are utterly unlike the modern Greeks. The same imperial register is seen in the desire he more than once expressed in letters to Myres to become governor of Albania after independence from Ottoman control (JLMP, MS Myres 40, fols 125, 129, 1 May and 26 June 1913).Footnote 38
Zimmern himself came to the British School in 1909 predisposed to look down on the Greeks. On his previous visit to Greece in 1904, he commented to his sister Dorothea on ‘the trail of the Turk’ (ZP, 7, fols 156–7, 2 October): ‘[The Greeks] have been so crushed and brutalized and demoralized by the rule of people who had nothing whatever in common with them that they have practically had to remake their civilization since the Liberation, and they have not got very far yet.’ And in a Highway article he wrote about a week’s walking prior to joining the School, he describes Vlach shepherds on Euboea as ‘better looking than most in Greece’ (Zimmern Reference Zimmern1909a, 41) – a milder version of Wace’s stress on their (implicitly northern) physique.
That Zimmern did not change his mind about the modern Greeks is suggested by the letters he wrote to friends. In response to one, Albert Emery, a potter who later received a scholarship to study at Oxford, wrote that ‘I am glad that you gave me an insight into the character of the Grecian people, it makes one shudder, and after reading your letter I can quite agree with you, that Socialism will have to bring a big broom to clean out such Augean stables’ (ZP, 12, fol. 125, 7 March 1910). Or to quote some phrases from his surviving letters: ‘from what I have seen of Greeks I quite understand Byron’s impatience with them’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 27 February 1910); ‘the utter rottenness of the politicians here’ (ibid., 9 March); ‘not one of them seemed to have a decent sense of responsibility, and the things uppermost in their minds were trivial personal quarrels’ (ibid.); ‘I hope never to meet a less worthy and more generally rotten community than the kingdom of Greece’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 8 August); ‘I shall be glad to get home, because I am sick of the (modern) Greeks. My psychological state can best be summed up in the words of a nice English girl to me the other day. “I am tired of feeling better than everybody I meet”’ (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 58, 1 July).
Zimmern’s attitude remained largely unchanged despite the increasing familiarity afforded by a longer stay. While initially he could not speak much modern Greek, in time he could write that ‘I know enough … to carry me along and can get along with the people. They are the utterest rogues, but one can always make them laugh, and they always seem to prefer a smiling insult to an extra franc’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 10 February 1910). Or again: ‘I am getting quite a blood at modern Greek now. … bantering the people who try to swindle you is great fun … They are mostly rogues, but such amiable ones that I find it hard to declaim against their moral standard’ (ERMP, fol. 28, 20 April 1910). Or, describing a large festival on Tenos: ‘I could not have believed there was still so much superstition among a nominally civilized people if I had not travelled third class on the excursion boat’ (ibid.). Here we see Zimmern priding himself, as often, on his willingness to slum it in order to gain insight into the character of a people.Footnote 39 For all that, his Protestant upbringing seems to be making itself heard in his dismissal of the local traditions.
Two anecdotes capture Zimmern’s take on the Greeks at its most negative. In one letter, he writes of the celebration of the centenary of Gladstone’s birth at a time when the Greek army was lording it over parliament: the locals, he notes, did not understand the irony of the Simonidean epigram about Hellas as the mother of freedom (Ἕλλαδα τιμῶμεν μητέρ’ ἐλευθερίας) that the School members composed (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 9, 5 January 1910).Footnote 40 The very act of composing the verse was a revealing flashback to their public school education. In another letter, Zimmern seizes on an occasion when a Greek translator confused Assisi and Assizes to condemn the Greeks’ ‘feverish imitativeness’ in relation to Western culture (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 59, 1 July 1910). The charge of imitativeness was levelled by many other British travellers at this time; its place within the crypto-colonial system is confirmed by the fact that precisely the same trait was deplored in the ‘babu’ (the educated clerk) in India.Footnote 41
It is not that Zimmern tarred all the Greeks with the same brush. Other letters speak of clever young boys who try to sell fake coins but know far more world geography than British undergraduates, or again of the discipline shown by Greek emigrants to the United States who send money home or return to shout ‘Hullo boys’ at passing strangers (GWP, WALLAS/1/44, fols 73–4, 14 November 1909; AWP, 2/7/11, 8 February 1910). Like others at the School, moreover, Zimmern’s preference among mainland Greeks was for those who lived in the countryside and the mountains rather than the city.Footnote 42 After his trip to Aetolia with Woodward, he wrote of ‘pleasant conversations with endless jolly peasants, priests, schoolmasters, donkey boys etc’ (ERMP, fol. 26, 20 April 1910). That term ‘jolly’ – which Zimmern also applies to a young guide in Crete (GWP, WALLAS/1/46, fol. 62) – was evidently not thought as patronising as it seems now.Footnote 43
Besides these rural mainlanders, Zimmern spoke with enthusiasm of the inhabitants of one island, Crete. He would later praise one Cretan in particular, Venizelos, in quasi-Periclean terms.Footnote 44 On his first visit, he found the Cretans as a whole ‘a really fine race’: ‘One ordinary Cretan is worth ten ordinary Greeks. It is for instance impossible to think of a Cretan as a “Dago”, while I am sorry to say Englishmen out here find it hard to think of the Greeks otherwise’ (GMP, 116, fol. 152, 17 July 1910). Here we see Zimmern consciously distancing himself from the other Englishmen he encountered in Greece. This distancing became stronger in his later writings in IR, as when he commented on the inhibitions which prevent the British from getting on terms with other peoples and make them resort to calling them ‘dagos’ instead (Zimmern Reference Zimmern1939, 148).
Zimmern’s comments on the Greeks while at the BSA were not limited to the private sphere. He told Ada Wallas that ‘there is a political crisis every fortnight which earns me a few odd guineas from the Manchester Guardian’ (AWP, 2/7/11, 2 February 1910). The paper was run by C.P. Scott, a product of Oxford Greats, and often had ex-Greats students on its staff, including Zimmern’s friends Robert Ensor, who worked for the paper from 1900 to 1905, and the Zionist Harry Sacher, who was on the editorial staff from 1905 to 1909. In addition, Zimmern had an uncle in Manchester who was on friendly terms with Scott (Rood Reference Rood2025b, 364). Unlike the Times, the paper did not have a regular correspondent based in Athens. From various references in his letters, we can surmise that all reports printed in the paper during his time in Athens from ‘our correspondent’ were written by Zimmern.
The first event Zimmern covered for the Manchester Guardian was a brief naval mutiny at Salamis in October 1909.Footnote 45 The report he wired starts in the manner of a tragic messenger speech: ‘I was the only foreigner present. I chanced to be walking on the shore overlooking the scene of the famous battle which decided the fate of Europe’ ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1909b). He filed another report the following day too, having talked to some of the crews ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1909c). The incident was gleefully picked up in letters from former pupils back in Oxford,Footnote 46 showing that Zimmern must have hammed it up in his own letters – as he had in fact done in the newspaper column: one of his letters shows that he was not there alone or by chance, but with Atchley of the British Legation, who had got wind of trouble and taken Zimmern to find out what was going on (GWP, WALLAS/1/44, fols 71–2, 14 November 1909).Footnote 47 Later Zimmern covered debates in parliament ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1909d; Reference Zimmern1910e), the Gladstone centenary ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1909e, 7, with mention of the British School’s poem), and a fire in the royal palace ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1910d), and his visit to Crete near the end of his stay seems to have been specifically to report on the nationalist movement for the paper ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1910f).Footnote 48
Beyond journalism, Zimmern took an interest in Balkans nationalism. His Scottish friend Robert Seton-Watson was an independently wealthy foreign policy guru who as ‘Scotus Viator’ had written two books (1907; 1908) critical of Hungarian nationalism (Giannakopoulos Reference Giannakopoulos2025a). As mentioned earlier, Zimmern had planned to travel with Seton-Watson in the Balkans on the way out to Athens, and later they hoped to do the trip in the latter part of Zimmern’s stay (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 10 and 27 February, 9 March 1910). That plan did not come off either, but what Zimmern did do was act as intermediary between Seton-Watson and those two champions of the Vlachs, Thompson and Wace. On his way home, while staying in Florence with Helen Zimmern, Zimmern wrote to Seton-Watson enclosing a letter from Maurice Thompson which evidently tried to persuade Seton-Watson to involve himself in Vlach affairs. Here is what Zimmern had to say (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 18 August 1910):
All that he says about the relations of the Greeks of the kingdom with their neighbours I can endorse in more temperate language, from my own more limited knowledge. I know, not the actions themselves, but the state of mind that produces them, a sort of lightheaded bigotry which will go any lengths to secure its stupid and fantastic end. You probably know the same mental atmosphere in Hungary, though there is probably less rhetorical nonsense or nauseous religiosity about it.
Three years later, after the geopolitical transformation of the 1912–13 wars, Seton-Watson did travel in northern Greece, and did so with letters of introduction from Wace that Zimmern had arranged for him.Footnote 49 On each of them Wace placed ‘a little letter in the corner to indicate the politics of the man, G stands for Greek, and R for Rumanian or Nationalist’. Warning that ‘Any Greek schoolmaster from Samarina, except one called Xenophon, is not to be trusted too far’, Wace added (doubtless conscious of the air of old-world chivalry) that ‘If you meet any Samarina Vlachs anywhere if you say you know the two Englishmen who went up there it ought to secure you good treatment at once’ (RSWP, SEW/17/30/2, 14 February 1913).
It remains to consider briefly how Zimmern’s varied encounters in Greece relate to his presentation of the polis in The Greek Commonwealth and to his later development as an IR expert.
It has been suggested that the negative views taken of current-day Greeks by many northern Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be explained by the unreal expectations on which they were fed from childhood (Clogg Reference Clogg2000, 8); some Hellenists were thought to keep away from Greece so as not to shatter their illusions (Godley Reference Godley1925, 5). Frustrated expectations will not, however, do as an explanation for Zimmern’s attitude. For one thing, like many other travellers, he often stressed in The Greek Commonwealth continuity between Greeks ancient and modern – and not just in the rural or mountainous districts that were conventionally seen as sites for ancient survivals. Often these continuities are minor in themselves: weddings taking place in private houses (TGC, 74 n. 1); the quality of the Greek joiner (79); the ‘stout and well-to-do’ character of the demarch (158); a preference for sleeveless cloaks (216). But some continuities are taken to reveal ‘the Greek spirit’: thus a note found in some lines of Theognis on Wisdom and Riches might be heard by ‘the traveller … to-day in a Peloponnesian village on the lips of a returned and discontented emigrant’ (119). And other continuities bear on more momentous matters. In a Manchester Guardian article on Crete ([Zimmern] Reference Zimmern1910f), for instance, he wrote that ‘the Greek is almost as conservative of his nationality as the Jew. He does not forget the bonds of blood, and sends back to the mother country considerable sums of money.’ That comment chimes with the analogies between Greece and Palestine that run through The Greek Commonwealth. Again, in the book itself Zimmern wrote that ‘Then as now, the game of politics in Greece consisted mainly of personal rivalries’ (64), and compared post-Persian Wars rhetoric about liberation with the phrases used by Athenian leader-writers today (186). In their lack of colour prejudice, moreover, it is implied that ancient and modern Greeks hold the advantage over modern Englishmen (323 n. 1).Footnote 50
How did Zimmern reconcile these continuities with his negative comments on modern Greece? One clue lies in the letter I quoted earlier from the potter Albert Emery which implies Zimmern had written that Socialism would clear Greece’s Augean stables. Never a Marxist, Zimmern at the time of his stay in Athens can broadly be described as a collectivist liberal: that is, he believed in the power of social organisation rather than trusting wholly to laissez faire. Taking issue with Francis Galton, who stressed good breeding, he wrote in The Greek Commonwealth that ‘The Athenian community during the Periclean time must be regarded as the most successful example of social organization known to history’ (367 n. 2). Despite the personal rivalries, that is, the social and political structures of ancient Athens instilled love for the community while requiring of an exceptionally large number of citizens active work on its behalf. The excellence of ancient Athens was based both on the long hold of customs that were in harmony with the physical environment and on the revolutionary reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, which added a concern for abstract principles such as justice (Rood Reference Rood2025b). What was missing in modern Greece, by contrast, was due to centuries of Turkish oppression – but that was not the whole story. Zimmern could write, after all, that ‘the Cretans have self-respect, and the Greeks on the whole not’ (GMP, 116, fol. 152, 17 July 1910), or again in a Highway article entitled ‘Tents are better!’ (Reference Zimmern1910b) he praised the proud sense of tradition attributed to Kurds and Arabs in Mark Sykes’ Dar-ul-Islam, which he read while at the School. Specific problems with Greece were suggested in another Highway article: a fetishisation of the name of democracy owing to pride in its Greek origins and the use of the prospect of war against Turkey as a distraction from domestic problems (Zimmern Reference Zimmern1910a, 56). The attitude Zimmern showed in these various writings chimed with the lingering strain of negativity about Athens’ political machinery and the character of individual Athenian politicians that survived the influential defence offered by George Grote.Footnote 51
Zimmern’s political enquiries during his year in Greece resulted in some general thoughts about nationality at this time which can be seen as the seeds of some of his later ideas.Footnote 52 He told Seton-Watson while planning their Balkan journey that ‘it’s political human nature I’m after: e.g. what nationality really means to these people, or how, under modern conditions, a tyrannous bureaucracy really works’ (RSWP, SEW/17/31/4, 10 February 1910). Later that year, forwarding Thompson’s letter to Seton-Watson, he wrote (ibid., 18 August):
To me the main difference between a good and a bad young nation seems to be rather well summed up in the colloquialisms ‘white’ and ‘Dago’ (which one can’t help using in the Near East). It is really a question, not of political rights, but of what they ought to be, but often (as in Greece) are not, a symbol of, self respect and a power of spiritual resistance.
This perception finds its place in The Greek Commonwealth in less racially charged or orientalist terms in a gloss on ‘civilized nations’ as peoples ‘who have acquired the self-respect which is second nature to all true nationalities’ (246).Footnote 53 More broadly, the two strands of that book – the stress on communal instincts instilled by custom and on the achievement of the fifth-century city-state in building on them while liberating citizens from lesser loyalties – foreshadow Zimmern’s later separation of nation and state: the nation coheres through tradition while the state is the domain of political freedom. That distinction underlies his postwar preference (inspired by Lord Acton) for multi-national commonwealths as structures that allow space for national sentiment while still promoting justice and equality and lessening the threat to minorities. Though Zimmern scarcely reverted to modern Greece in his IR career, and never to my knowledge revisited the country, the political forces he detected in his year in Athens can be seen as a negative counterpoint to the developments that he hoped would gradually unfold in a world where a League of Nations co-existed with a British Commonwealth (Zimmern Reference Zimmern1926, 41–65).
CONCLUSION
In an 1843 review-discussion of the historian Niebuhr, George Grote described Thucydides’ re-writing of the Trojan War in the opening section of his History as ‘a sort of palimpsest, not unlike those of the monks in the middle ages, when they rashly obliterated a manuscript of the Aeneid, in order to fill the same parchment with their own chronicles’ (Grote Reference Grote and Bain1873, 93). Alfred Zimmern, we saw, used the same image in looking back on his own attempt to imagine fifth-century Athens. Needless to say, however successful he felt his attempts to recapture that world in his imagination, the account he produced in The Greek Commonwealth is itself, if not exactly a palimpsest, a sort of multitemporal paratext – an ‘introduction’ to, or ‘commentary’ on, Thucydides that was at the same time a reflection on twentieth-century civic life, a reflection grounded precisely in a sense of how different fifth-century Athens was from modern Britain.Footnote 54
In this article, I have explored the contribution of one institutional space, the BSA, to the creation of Zimmern’s work – and to some of its productive tensions. Zimmern, we have seen, came to Athens both to immerse himself in the physical setting of Greece and to mark his rejection of a lifetime as an Oxford don in the college he had himself attended as an undergraduate. What he found was a collegial institution in which he could both feel and not feel at home, and a small city undergoing a process of modernisation which offered points of comparison and contrast with his own re-creation of its ancient archetype. As we have seen, the BSA when Zimmern stayed there was itself haunted by imperial attitudes, attitudes from which he (like his friend Toynbee) would increasingly try to distance himself. What may seem surprising in view of the way early twentieth-century classical scholarship is sometimes imagined is that those imperial attitudes were most strongly maintained by men like Alan Wace whose interests lay outside ‘classical’ Athens itself, while Zimmern used his re-creation of the Periclean age not to suggest any simple alignment with modern Britain but to invite reflection on the different political, social, and economic conditions of modernity. Reading the book he wrote at the BSA remains fascinating as an exercise in triangulation. The Greek Commonwealth can be seen as a window into the very different age of Edwardian Britain looking back on the very different age of Periclean Athens, yet one that necessarily invites reflection on just how many different hands have written on the Greek palimpsest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A version of this paper was delivered at the Academy of Athens in April 2025. I am grateful to Michael Konaris for the invitation and for his hospitality in Athens; to the Director of the BSA, Rebecca Sweetman, for supporting the event; to Scarlett Kingsley for her help and for arranging a talk at the American School at Athens on Zimmern’s travels in Greece; and to the audience on both occasions for stimulating discussion. Sue Marchand and Andrea Capovilla commented on a draft. Oana Bărbulescu, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Martin Maiden, Thomas Mannack, Catherine Morgan, Christopher Stray, and Amara Thornton helped with specific points. The paper could not have been written without the help of archivists at several institutions: Bodleian Libraries; BSA (Amalia Kakissis); Cambridge University Library; Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Harry Ransom Center; Lambeth Palace; London School of Economics; Newnham College, Cambridge (Frieda Midgley); New College, Oxford (Michael Stansfield); SSEES Library, University College London; Ure Museum, Reading (Jayne Holly and Amy Smith); Winchester College (Suzanne Foster). Martha Stonequist kindly allowed me to quote from Zimmern’s correspondence.
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