Journal of Modern Greek Studies

This volume appears in the Classical Presences series, which has now published more than 75 titles in its 10 years of existence. The number of those volumes that centrally address the contemporary Greek reception of antiquity can be counted on one hand; those addressing the Italian relation to the ancient past on one finger. Modern Greece fares well by this accounting, but the series overall serves as a reminder that the views of those people who live in classical lands [End Page 232] arouse limited global interest. From the international perspective on classical reception, the Greeks occupy a very particular political space that has given rise to distinctive, not to say parochial, concerns with the question of continuity. In his Introduction, Dimitris Tziovas points out that this volume aims to move the matter on to a wider range of issues: popular (not just elite) reception; performances rather than texts; the pragmatic uses of antiquities as opposed to description of them as traces; and a turn away from glorification to critical history. As Lorna Hardwick (one of the series editors) suggests in her concluding chapter, this volume offers the chance to explore how "modern Greek studies and classical reception research can be mutually illuminating" (334).

In order to begin to think about how a present relates to a past, some thought needs to be devoted to the topics of time, temporality, and history, since these all condition formulations. The basic idea of continuity, for example, rests paradoxically on the historicist conviction that the past is over, succeeded diachronically by other presents up to the now. Historicism was consolidated in the early nineteenth century and applied by Greek and European historians to the Greek past. Anastasia Stouraiti provides new insight into this matter by looking at the activities of antiquarians in the Venetian-controlled areas of what is now Greece. Many antiquarians were doctors, who transferred their skills in autopsia and historia to understand the ancient past. This chapter illuminates the prehistory of historicism, and it is not incidental that such an analytical approach developed in a colonial context where a driving foreign fascination with Greek history conditioned an increasingly objectivist, distanced view of antiquity.

Several chapters take up the topic of continuity—not from a naturalistic perspective that would see these continuities as actually existing despite the passage of time, but rather from a constructionist viewpoint that sees them as serving ideological demands. Vangelis Karamanolakis lays out the unwavering classicism of the University of Athens up until 1937, while Gunnar de Boel shows the appeal of Dorians for Greek writers in the mid-twentieth century. The Dorians represented autochthony and opposition to colonial powers, and General Metaxas (1936–1941) further embraced the authoritarian (Dorian) Spartans as the classical reference point for his Third Hellenic Civilization. For international tourist consumption, the Metaxas regime promoted images asserting the connection of the modern country to Greek antiquity. Particularly striking are the photos by Nelly's, Greece's Leni Riefenstahl, juxtaposing ancient statuary and modern physiognomies—a topic studied in the nicely illustrated chapter by Katerina Zacharia. Alexander Kazamias shows that classical associations could shift according to contemporary political needs. [End Page 233] Less than two decades after Metaxas asserted that martial, authoritarian Sparta funded the key concept of national mindedness (ethnikofrosyni), the Greek government reoriented this concept toward ancient Athenian democracy. This was no longer a racial inheritance but a cultural tradition open to incomers and thus compatible with membership in NATO and its embrace of a "GrecoRoman" heritage (143).

Dimitris Plantzos looks at the "idiosyncratic, nationalist metaphysics" that informed the views of the writers Elias Venezis and Andreas Karkavitsas, as well as the filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos (160). In the works of the novelists, more connection to antiquity can be found in a peasant girl or in local dreams of statues than in academic archaeology, while in Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist, the colossal hand of an ancient statue hovers over...