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This introductory chapter outlines the role that ancient Greece and Rome — as both cultural ideals and antitypes — have played and continue to play in the construction of Caribbean cultural identity in anglophone Caribbean literature. It contends that to overlook dialogues between the Caribbean and ancient Greece and Rome is to perpetuate an odd occlusion in the Caribbean's cultural space and suggests that, rather than projecting alien influences onto the Caribbean, these dialogues might help us to better understand the distinctiveness of anglophone Caribbean literature and may also contribute fresh insights to the study of ancient Greece. Accordingly, the apparent tension in the compound term ‘Afro‐Greeks’ is used to open up an exchange of ideas between spheres of culture that are seemingly incommensurable.

This chapter examines how Byzantine administration worked on the ground in the provinces of Hellas and Peloponnesos during the period 1180–1204. The Byzantine Empire was governed through a complex administrative system, predominantly military in nature, within which civilian and ecclesiastical sectors played a key role. The theme of Hellas and Peloponnesos was created in the first half of the eleventh century when the two provinces were combined into a single unit. It was administered by both military and civil appointees. The chapter considers the administrative structure of provincial government, focusing on the triad of military, civilian, and ecclesiastical administration. It also discusses the diocese under the metropolitan of Athens that extended over central Greece, along with the local government officials of Hellas and Peloponnesos.

In Byron's poem Childe Harold, we observe how the poem's persona refers to himself as ‘Nothing’. It is made apparent that the soul of this poet accounts for a lot more than merely nothingness, and in fact the opposite — a more intense being. On another note, Milton, who expresses his thoughts regarding how a good book serves as the ‘precious life blood of a master spirit’, somehow asserts how the master spirit only becomes such when a good book is already composed. Although it is not explicitly pointed out in his statement, Milton, like Byron, implies that coming up with some concrete artistic expression masks a poet's nothingness. In this book, we analyse John Keats's two different masks — the Mask of Camelot and the Mask of Hellas.

Although several critics could attest to the notion that Keats had exerted great efforts to make the poem Hyperion his greatest work, and despite its apparent ambitiousness, this poem was considered a great failure by many. This endeavour was supposed to be perceived as a fragment — a work that possesses one of the most forceful of formal characters in the emergence of the Romantic movement. As Keats was not able to accomplish this feat of creating such a powerful poem, he created a new endeavour entitled The Fall of Hyperion which, although it also had to be discontinued, accounts for Keats's psychic investment. Even if the Mask of Hellas was used in articulating Hyperion, this task was never completed. This chapter illustrates how Keats perceived his poems to be too Miltonic, thus providing a reason for the neglect of such efforts. It also introduces the notion of Keats's too-muchness.

This chapter discusses that the cult of Artemis of Metapontion is caught up in the complicated processes of self-definition, involving changing populations all referring to this deity. It explains that while the nature of a divinity does not easily change, the arrival of new settlers causes the associated mythical traditions to supersede each other. It adds that the problem in dealing with the gods abroad, then, is not that they have no pasts, but that they have too many of them. It discusses that the performance of the code, and the interaction between myth and ritual therein, plays upon a variety of existing mythical pasts for Artemis, for the Metapontians, and for the ‘Akhaians’ of Italy, activating and exploiting them for a powerful evocation of an Akhaian identity in the complex and volatile social milieu of fifth century Italy.

This chapter examines Thucydides's account of Brasidas, Sparta's greatest military hero, who spearheads the liberation of subjected cities from Athens in the name of his city, Hellas. It begins by discussing Thucydides's introduction of Sparta through the Corinthians' attempt to move Sparta to war and the Spartan response. It then considers Thucydides's account of Brasidas's exploits as well as his relation with his city. In particular, it analyzes Brasidas's attempt to liberate Hellas from Athenian domination and suggests that Brasidas's “crusade” for freedom attempts to force Sparta to live up to its noble reputation. It also notes Thucydides's admiring portrayal of Brasidas, an indication that Thucydides's perspective also transcends that of his city. Brasidas's speeches and deeds on his Thracian campaign constitute one of the most dramatic chapters in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War.

This chapter examines the settlements in Aenos, Anthedon, Antioch by Hippos, Antioch in Huleh, Antiochenes in Jerusalem, Apollonia, Apollonia in Coele Syria, Arethousa, Arsinoe, Birta of the Ammanitis, Capitolias, Chalkis under Libanos, Demetrias Damascus, Dion, Dionysias, Gerasa Antioch on the Chrysorhoas, Helenoupolis, Heliopolis Baalbek, Hellas, Jerusalem (the Akra), Larisa, Lysias, Panias, Pella/Berenike, Philadelpheia Rabbat Amman, Philoteria, Samareia, Seleukeia abila, Seleukeia/Antioch Gadara, Seleukeia Gaza, Seleukeia in the Gaulan, Shechem, Skythopolis, Straton's Tower, Sykaminopolis, Boukolopolis, and Krokodeilopolis. Speculation about the site of Arethousa is often tied to the suggestion that it was previously known as Pegai and subsequently renamed Antipatris. Heliopolis was located at the site of the modern Baalbek. Lysias was located in the region east of the Dead Sea. The city name Panias was taken from a cave sacred to Pan. Straton's Tower encompassed the area to the north of the Crusader wall and the harbor area to the south.

Whether the early Greeks possessed as powerful a sense of identity as the Phoenicians is far from clear. Only when a massive Persian threat appeared to loom from the east, in the sixth century, did the diverse Greek-speakers of the Peloponnese, Attika and the Aegean begin to lay a heavy emphasis on what they had in common; the sense of a Hellenic identity was further strengthened by bitter conflicts with Etruscan and Carthaginian navies in the west. They knew themselves as distinct groups of Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Arcadians, rather than as Hellenes. There were the Spartans, proud inheritors of the Dorian name, who saw themselves as recent immigrants from the north. There were the Athenians, who insisted they were the unconquered descendants of more ancient Greeks. There were the Ionians, thriving in the new settlements across the Aegean, in Chios, Lesbos and on the Asian coast. The ‘Greeks’ cannot be identified simply as those who took delight in tales of the Greek gods and heroes, which were common currency elsewhere, especially among the Etruscans; nor would the Greeks have wished to recognize as fellow- Greeks all inhabitants of what we now call Greece, since they identified among the population of the islands and coasts strange remnants of earlier peoples, generically called ‘Pelasgians’ or ‘Tyrsenians’; besides, the Greek-speakers were themselves moving outwards from the Aegean and Peloponnese towards Asia Minor, where they would remain for over two and a half millennia, and towards Sicily, Italy and North Africa. How, when and why this great diaspora was created remains one of the big puzzles about the early Iron Age Mediterranean. What is certain is that it transformed the area, bringing goods and gods, styles and ideas, as well as people, as far west as Spain and as far east as Syria. The Greeks remembered these movements of people and things by way of often complex and contradictory tales of ancient ancestors who spread their seed across the Mediterranean: whole peoples at times reportedly boarded ships to be carried across distances of many hundreds of miles.

The importance of the Etruscans does not simply lie in the painted tombs whose lively designs captivated D. H. Lawrence, nor in the puzzle of where their distinctive language originated, nor in the heavy imprint they left on early Rome. Theirs was the first civilization to emerge in the western Mediterranean under the impetus of the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Etruscan culture is sometimes derided as derivative, and the Etruscans have been labelled ‘artless barbarians’ by one of the most distinguished experts on Greek art; anything they produced that meets Greek standards is classified as the work of Greek artists, and the rest is discarded as proof of their artistic incompetence. Most, though, would find common cause with Lawrence in praising the vitality and expressiveness of their art even when it breaks with classical notions of taste or perfection. But what matters here is precisely the depth of the Greek and oriental imprint on Etruria, the westward spread of a variety of east Mediterranean cultures, and the building of close commercial ties between central Italy, rarely visited by the Mycenaeans, and both the Aegean and the Levant. This was part of a wider movement that also embraced, in different ways, Sardinia and Mediterranean Spain. With the rise of the Etruscans – the building of the first cities in Italy, apart from the very earliest Greek colonies, the creation of Etruscan sea power, the formation of trading links between central Italy and the Levant – the cultural geography of the Mediterranean underwent a lasting transformation. Highly complex urban societies developed along the shores of the western Mediterranean; there, the products of Phoenicia and the Aegean were in constant demand, and new artistic styles came into existence, marrying native traditions with those of the East. Along the new trade routes linking Etruria to the east came not just Greek and Phoenician merchants but the gods and goddesses of the Greeks and the Phoenicians, and it was the former (along with a full panoply of myths about Olympus, tales of Troy and legends of the heroes) that decisively conquered the minds of the peoples of central Italy.

An important feature of the Fifth Mediterranean was the discovery of the First Mediterranean, and the rediscovery of the Second. The Greek world came to encompass Bronze Age heroes riding the chariots described by Homer, and the Roman world was found to have deep roots among the little-known Etruscans. Thus, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entirely new perspectives on the history of the Mediterranean were opened up. An early lead was given by the growth of interest in ancient Egypt, discussed in the previous chapter, though that was closely linked to traditional biblical studies as well. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour introduced well-heeled travellers from northern Europe to classical remains in Rome and Sicily, and Englishmen saw it as an attractive alternative to time spent at Oxford or Cambridge, where those who paid any attention to their studies were more likely to be immersed in ancient texts than in ancient objects. On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation of ancient works of art was renewed in the late eighteenth century, as the German art historian Winckelmann began to impart a love for the forms of Greek art, arguing that the Greeks dedicated themselves to the representation of beauty (as the Romans failed to do). His History of Art in Antiquity was published in German in 1764 and in French very soon afterwards, and was enormously influential. In the next few decades, discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which Nelson’s cuckolded host, Sir William Hamilton, was closely involved, and then in Etruria, further enlarged northern European interest in ancient art, providing interior designers with rich patterns, and collectors with vast amounts of loot – ‘Etruscan vases’, nearly all in reality Greek, were shipped out of Italy as the Etruscan tombs began to be opened up. In Greece, it was necessary to purchase the consent of Ottoman officials before excavating and exporting what was found; the most famous case, that of the Parthenon marbles at the start of the nineteenth century, was succeeded by other acquisitions for northern museums: the Pergamon altar was sent to Berlin, the facings of the Treasury of Atreus from Mycenae were sent to the British Museum, and so on.

The study of the Athenian political order is one of today's most inspiring and active areas of ancient Greek history. It is therefore within a much wider framework than just the political history of Athens that the issue of the origins of democracy in ancient Greece must now be contemplated. Greece should at least mean Hellas, the Greek world as a whole, not just Athens and Robinson. But obviously, though this may be the case for a specialist in ancient Greek history, it is not necessarily so to nonspecialist general readers or even to most historians of modern and contemporary democratic political, who begin with a ritual obeisance to the ancient Greece. Ancient Greek democracy was a total social phenomenon, a culture and not merely a political system.

Seamus Heaney did not actually visit Greece until 1995, a trip ‘long promised, long deferred’, followed by a later visit to Delphi, which added a tribute to Zbigniew Herbert and two further ‘Sonnets from Hellas’ to the four set in the Peloponnese. These were all published in Electric Light in 2001, as was the superb poem ‘Out of the Bag’, which works in a ‘pilgrimage’ to Epidaurus. The aim of this short study will be to trace the topography of Heaney’s Hellas poems in order to bring out his vivid observation of locality and landscape. At the same time it will consider the associations that the Greek settings bring to his mind, especially those of other places: hyperborean Poland, Harvard, Lourdes, and, above all, the myth-haunted island at the far north-west of Europe.

Using Reinhart Koselleck’s twin concepts of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectations’, and drawing simultaneously on Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of prophecy as a prediction of the radically unexpected, this chapter reads the Romantic period’s obsession with prophecy symptomatically; i.e. as indicating a broad and intense discontinuity in historical experience. It argues that Shelley’s Hellas represents a decisive displacement of prophecy (in its predictive sense) by obscuring the future’s eventual shape while simultaneously affirming futurity, thus undermining historical continuity and dialectical progressivism, and revealing a new and modern concept of historical futurity or how the future might form or be. The chapter concludes that Hellas says more about historicization as an activity than about history as something objectively present, incorporating into its representation of historical experience meta-historical reflections on the possibilities for writing history in the era of Romantic temporalization.

This chapter analyzes the character of the Spartan polity, traces its origins, and describes the grand strategy that the Lacedaemonians first articulated in the mid-sixth century. It discusses the defense of the Spartan polity and the way of life associated with it before Persians burst on the scene. It also investigates how Spartans gradually adjusted their strategy to fit the new and unexpected challenge that suddenly loomed on the horizon when the Mede first appeared. The chapter describes the fashion in which Spartans organized and managed the alliance with which they confronted and defeated the invader bearing down on Hellas. It also highlights the way the victorious Hellenes gradually and awkwardly worked out a postwar settlement that seemed to suit all concerned.