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This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the phenomenon of aniconism in Greek antiquity. It examines the nature and significance of the phenomenon of aniconism in Greek antiquity by unpacking some of its apparent paradoxes, and by placing aniconism within the broader map of Greek art, religion, and visual culture. The discussion then turns to two issues that are fundamental to this inquiry: the validity of the usage of the key-term ‘aniconic’ and the place of aniconism within the broader scope of Greek religious art. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter shows that following the “rebirth” of Greece in 1833, the Western world began to look for signs of the promised revitalization that had been confidently assumed in earlier philhellenic literature. From 1833 until 1900, philhellenes and Turkophiles fought over their ideas on the degree of progress that had been made in Greece. However, toward the end of the 19th century, intellectuals in Britain and America began to turn away from the Victorian view of science and advancement as a sign of progress. In opposition to the perceived ugliness and emptiness of modern urban life, a pastoral ideal once again found favor. As at the end of the 18th century, a hundred years later the ancient Greeks again occupied a special place in the pastoral vogue. For many thinkers of European descent the ancient Greek world still represented their collective, lost, bucolic past. The importance of Greek antiquity in this desire to return to nature is supported by Samuel Hynes's observation that “Pan is a particularly prominent figure” in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.

This chapter focuses on the differences in the emergence of Greek medicine and Chinese medicine. Chinese antiquity, the consciousness of the necessity of laws emerged against a completely different backdrop than in Greek antiquity. The increasingly larger political entity in China eventually required a departure from the arbitrary rule based on personal relationships and emotions. Dao De Jing depicts a political philosophy that proposes the ideal of the smallest possible community, a community that seeks no contact at all with the neighboring villages. The idea of “order” in early Chinese science was essential to the expression of the idea of systematic correlation and correspondence of all phenomena in Greek antiquity, the ideal of a government guided by laws could be realized only in the smallest political units, the city-states of the polis, since this ideal also comprised the self-determination of every individual full citizen, an aspect that will again be important understanding an especially remarkable difference between Chinese and Greek medicine. In Greece, there was no persistent “cataclysmic turmoil” lasting several centuries to influence the necessity of restoring unity of the country into the general consciousness and focus a view of the systematic correlation and correspondence of all phenomena.

The Introduction outlines the aims of the volume and maps out transitions, debates, and new directions in the reception of antiquity in Greece over the last few decades, thus providing the background against which the chapters in the book should be read. A series of partly overlapping transitions currently taking place in the area of modern Greek classical reception studies are identified, involving shifts from continuity to diversity, elite to popular receptions, texts to performances, traces to uses, and eternal glory to critical history. The range of the volume is also highlighted. Covering a period stretching from the twelfth century ce to the present day, it looks at a variety of cultural practices and aspires to offer new perspectives in re-imagining the past and rethinking the role of antiquity in shaping modern Greek culture and its institutions.

This introductory chapter discusses ancient and modern responses to migration. Though the plight of migrants and refugees in the Greek-speaking world would have been similar to their plight today, absent the halting efforts of humanitarian agencies and the distracted gaze of the international community, there are some striking differences. Many people are at least somewhat sensitized to the predicament faced by displaced persons today, whereas the best minds of Greek antiquity show virtually no concern for their welfare. Another striking difference is that migration in the Greek-speaking world, whatever its cause, often represented a far more radical upheaval in people's lives than it does today.

This chapter focuses on Greek antiquity and explains the thesis of the counterfeit three centuries of the Early Middle Ages. It is quite strange that something totally identical to what happened in Greece happened in China three centuries later. It is assumed that both events occurred independently of one another, or, considering the transportation situation of the time, it may have taken just that long for the innovation from the West to finally find its way to the East. It is also assumed that both China and the Eastern Mediterranean received external impulses that originated somewhere between the two areas and flourished, first in Greece and then later in China. The era of the creation of medicine in ancient Greece, which can be dated much less satisfactorily and with far fewer verifiable written sources than for that of ancient China, nevertheless allows a differentiation that has already been useful for the observations in China.

Both the Chinese and the Greeks knew that a certain proportion of human illness sometimes takes a turn for the better without any human therapeutic influence but only the Greeks discerned what they saw and looked beyond it for something more. In Greek antiquity, a healing power of its own was attributed to the physis, or human nature. The Greeks saw that illnesses can heal by themselves. The most terrible cancers sometimes unexpectedly take a turn for the better, without any recognizable external cause. In Greece and beyond, in contrast to China, this observation led to a significant number of theories on the reasons behind such self-healings. The ancient dictum nouson physieis ietroi says that every organism possesses its own authority, its physis, which is the true physician for the illnesses of the body. The so-called self-healing powers represent nothing other than the certainty that the body has self-interest and its own capacity to pull itself out of crisis and restore a condition of harmony.

This chapter deals with the history of the construction of Berlin's Museum Island, and subsequently the Pergamon Museum and some of its earliest structures, the Altes and the Neues Museums. It begins with an analysis of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's painting, A View of Greece in Its Prime, as well as his architectural design of the Altes Museum, in an attempt to explain the adaptation of history into a modern theatrical décor. The painting's constitutional features and makeup somehow symbolizes the contradictions of Berlin's art museums, and the way it is viewed is significant in the transformation of the Spree Island into the current Berlin's Museum Island. Furthermore, this chapter discusses how Greece has become a seat of aesthetic ideal, but this becomes problematic as the country grows more accessible to travellers who could bring ancient remains back to their country of origin, prompting the displacement of Greek antiquities.

The University of Athens played a decisive role in forming the modern Greek conception of Greek antiquity and the way it was perceived by the general public. This chapter attempts to explore the multi-faceted dominance of antiquity within the university by contrast with the two other significant periods of the Greek ancestral narrative (Byzantine and modern). In particular, it focuses on two important factors relating to the Greek sense of national identity: the formation of a national history and the Greek language question. Seen as an integral part of the 3,000-year continuum of the Greek nation, the very notion of Greek antiquity was expanded chronologically in the university curriculum and subjected to various methodological approaches in the interests of promoting the aspirations of the nation through the shaping of the Humanities in Greece.

Neo-Confucianism and existing social and economic structures were simultaneously a confirmation of the old and an impulse for something new in the late Song era. Chinese and Greek antiquities were incomparable in politics, society, and the economy. Both civilizations had produced a new medicine in spite of these differences. The patterns of society were applied to nature and then to the explanation of the organism in both civilizations. The simultaneous periods of the Early Middle Ages in Europe and the Tang dynasty in China were also incomparable in politics, society, and the economy. The High and Late Middle Ages of Europe and the Song, Jin, and Yuan eras of China were also incomparable in politics, society, and economy in the eleventh century. The old three-step repeated itself in the Song dynasty that involved the new formation of society, a new connection with nature, and a changed medicine.

British physician's journal Lancet proclaimed in 1850: “Medicine Independent of Theology.” The decisions makers focused on two factors, the reliability and reproducibility of knowledge during that era. Reliability means one can be sure that this knowledge provides many answers now, and one can be just as sure that this knowledge will provide even more answers in the future. Reproducibility means one can ask the question everywhere in the world, in every situation, and the answers are always the same. The knowledge of chemistry, physics, and technology began to change the living environment. It accompanied the Europeans on their expeditions out into the world and, being reliable and reproducible, assisted in subjecting foreign people to European rule. It was natural that the new medicine had to be built solely on this foundation. In chemistry and physics, functions and processes could be explained in this era. A single view of the body and the functions of its organism, in healthy as in sick days, founded on natural laws, in Greek antiquity, pushed itself into the foreground.

This chapter asserts the significance of the attainment of a renewed familiarity with the intellectual legacy of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity to the vigorous development of political thinking that took place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Similarly important was the intellectual stance that medieval thinkers themselves adopted when they sought to come to terms with that legacy. In the study of the political thinking of the era, one must come to terms with both factors and, accordingly, take them into consideration. Although both factors are of equal import, the following sections of the chapter first discuss the second factor—which is the one easily underestimated or often overlooked.

Some ancient Chinese observers had suggested circulation both of qi, the most finely dispersed, breathlike material, and blood. The blood and qi flowed through a complex system of vessels, here and there, to and fro, and early Chinese authors described two closed circulations in the body, each on the left and right sides, in which the flow proceeded as in a ring, without beginning or end. The ancient Greeks saw no circulation but they saw vessels and described them in detail. After all, the fluids in the body, particularly the four humors, had to reach all the regions. The focus in China was also on vessels long before an ancient version of the idea of circulation had been formulated there. The political terminology preferred by early medical authors in China makes the source of the impulses quite clear. The Chinese, through their choice of terminology, identified the national economy of the unified kingdom as the impulse. In Greek antiquity, as Empedocles and others formulated their ideas and profound doctrines there was no explicit model image of a great social circulation as there was in China following the unification of the kingdom.

This introductory chapter discusses Demosthenes, who was one of the most influential authors of Greek and Roman antiquity. It reveals that Demosthenes was one of the orators included in the canon of ten Attic orators, which was a list of recommended authors that may have reached its final form in the second century C.E. The discussion then identifies the challenges that face postclassical readers of Demosthenes and studies the ancient commentaries on Demosthenes. The three working hypotheses that are used in the book are then enumerated.

This chapter addresses the beginnings of the Pergamon altar, from the discovery of its remains by Carl Humann, its arrival in Berlin and initial presentation, to the subsequent reconstruction and current status as museum centrepiece. It also explains how and to what extent the art of Pergamon is related to the history of Greek art and classical antiquity; theories regarding this issue are based on the identification of historical style, moments of style change, degree of definitive Greek art, and the sculpture's consistency of naturalistic details. This concern regarding the character of the sculptures prompted a debate among renowned archaeologists and art historians. The chapter cites Adolf Hildebrand's Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst which illustrates the difficulties that can be encountered in trying to examine the relationship between the sculpture and its architectural frame in accordance with its audience's viewpoint.

This chapter traces the Greek and the Jewish paths to Christianity until the moment when the development of both paths rendered the Christian faith a demand. Nietzsche claims that the downfall of Greek philosophy reached its high point in the Buddhism of Pyrrho. Within this setting, Buddhism became the high point of three cultures: Greek Antiquity (Pyrrho), Judaism (Jesus), and Modernity (Schopenhauer). The chapter then advances three claims: Firstly, Nietzsche reads into Buddhism that kind of nihilism which characterizes the end of culture. Secondly, this kind of Buddhism forms the basis for the emergence of a new beginning. Finally, Paul’s overcoming of the dead ends that resulted from the Greek and the Jewish paths have become Nietzsche’s model for the overcoming of modern Buddhism.

Friedrich Kittler’s late studies on the Greek alphabet reveal a surprising fact about his work: Although he is commonly called the father of German media theory, Kittler actually advocated a realist concept of mediacy that privileges the representational qualities of media. Such a concept is fundamentally at odds with the basic assumption of all media theory—namely, the notion that media do not simply represent reality but shape or even constitute it in the process of mediation. The chapter traces the evolution of Kittler’s thinking of media to show how the Greek alphabet came to be the ‘perfect’ medium in Kittler’s historical and theoretical framework and how Pre-Socratic Greece serves as the imaginary setting for Kittler’s idea of immediate sensation and communication, a ‘direct’ contact with or access to reality.