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This chapter shifts briefly away from the study of the Bible and focuses on two classical philologists at Göttingen, important representatives of neohumanism: Johann Matthias Gesner and Christian Gottlob Heyne. In the case of Göttingen, the study of Greece and Rome (the discipline of classics) offers a very close parallel to the study of the Bible. Gesner and Heyne were contemporaries of Michaelis who, like Michaelis, found themselves in a precarious but promising situation: to adapt the study of philology to the realities of the new university, or simply fade into the background. Gesner and Heyne adapted, but without embracing the fervent philhellenism of later Romantics. Their vision of a critically reconstructed antiquity fully intelligible to modern ideals resembles the picture of ancient Israel that Michaelis, through nearly five decades of tireless research and publication, labored to produce.

One of the guiding questions of this study is whether a change took place in the representation of the Greek land with the emergence of the Greek nation state. This chapter looks at the strategies that politicize Greek nature and make it relevant to a German context after the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Greece was declared different from other national movements, and, according to the Romantic correspondence with nature, it was not the Greeks but Greek nature that liberated itself, enhancing its special position. The same imagery allowed for reflection on the German poetic voice and its standpoint in a politically conservative climate. One of the most prominent textual strategies is the use and notion of folk song. The main textual body is the popular poetry of Wilhelm Müller, supplemented with material from political pamphlets and geographical accounts.

This chapter deals with the fortune—and vicissitudes—of the Western classics in modern Japan. Western civilization, of which the Greek and Latin classics claim pride of place as fons et origo, came to Japan not without the accoutrements of imperialism and colonialism. Japan's hectic modernization, whose success was essential if it was to avoid the fate of neighbouring colonized countries, therefore emphasized the introduction of science and technology in the service of national enrichment and the enhancement of military capacity. But following closely behind this importation of practical expertise was the learning of Western culture, which in Japan was specifically represented by philhellenic Germany. Academic studies of Western classics in modern and, for that matter, post‐modern Japan, have since had first to transcend the prejudices arising as a result of the introduction of German philhellenism and then to gain a truly comparative perspective of their own.

While E. A. Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest has tended to monopolise the attention of historians of historiography, this essay argues that the Eastern Question occupies a central place in his historical thought. Freeman was an ardent and influential contributor to debates on the Eastern Question, which he construed as an historical problem. In works such as his four-volume History of Sicily, his Chief Periods of European History, his third series of Historical Essays and his monographs History and Conquest of the Saracens and The Ottoman Power in Europe, Freeman elaborated a conception of universal history to which the Eastern Question was central. Freeman’s prominent role in the Bulgarian Agitation of 1876 must be seen in the context of this deeply historical engagement with the Eastern Question.

The motives behind Disraeli's decision to embark on his Grand Tour through the Ottoman Empire are looked at in this chapter. The turnaround which occurred in Disraeli during the time of his ‘blank period’ is also considered, when he began to shift from the liberal Toryism of Canning towards the conservative Toryism of Wellington. It was then that he began to show mistrust towards the uprising of the Greeks, whom he began to regard, along with the other Balkan rebels, as the allies of Russia, as well as perceiving the Battle of Navarino as a fateful mistake. He believed that Russia had used Britain's philhellenism to go to war with Turkey. The experiences of his travels through Greece, Constantinople, the Holy Land and Egypt are examined in detail. His Russophobia, and imperial and class solidarity with the Ottomans are identified as the main sources of Disraeli's Turkophilia at the time.

In early 1770, a small expeditionary force from Russia landed in the southern Peloponnesus to aid local Greeks in a rebellion against Ottoman rule. The revolt of 1770 appears in history, when it appears at all, as a footnote to the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1768-1774 or the more important Greek rebellion of 1821. This chapter argues that 1770 marked a watershed in how Western Europeans perceived modern Greeks. The revolt was the emergence of philhellenism as a significant literary movement, and the year 1770 continued to echo in European writing for decades.

Given that the rhetoric about Greece had been established by Byron, this chapter argues that the only real developments on the perception of the Greeks since were an expansion of that Byronic rhetoric by Gladstone and other liberals to include the Balkan Christians generally and a simultaneous narrowing of philhellenic rhetoric to cover only those pure Greeks of unmixed blood who lived on remote islands and mountains. Both of these developments had deleterious effects on the perception of the Greeks. On the one hand, when lumped with the other Christians of the East, they were viewed as Balkan or Levantine; on the other, a preserve of real Greeks was created by disenfranchising the majority of Greece's inhabitants.

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.

On April 25, 1915, Denis Browne wrote a letter to Edward Marsh concerning the passing and burial of Rupert Brooke, who had died of a fever on a British hospital ship in the Aegean. Brooke and Browne were among the British troops sent to the Aegean to take part in the assault on Gallipoli, which the British and French hoped would force open the Hellespont and Dardanelles, cause Turkey to sue for peace, and bring a speedy conclusion to the First World War. This chapter shows that the Byronization of Brooke was an exclusively English enterprise, a kind of philhellenism without Greeks. Given the aura of Byron that had pervaded writing about modern Greece, it was perhaps too much to ask a group of aspiring young authors not to associate a fellow poet who had died of a fever on the eve of an assault against the Turks with the hero of Missolonghi.

This chapter assesses the distinctive features of the exiles' Philhellenism as compared to its British and continental versions. It considers the contrasting in attitudes of Italian exiles and British liberals towards Greek and Mediterranean freedom. It argues that while the Italian exiles considered Greece to be a European country ready for independence and representative institutions, and justified any means which would achieve this goal, the Benthamites orientalized Greece, depicted it as a backward Asian country, and believed that it needed to be ‘educated’ before it could become independent. The greatest contribution of the Italian volunteers to European Philhellenism was the notion of Mediterranean sisterhood between Italy and Greece and the idea that underpinned Italian patriotism until the end of the century. The significance heroic martyrdom of Santorre di Santarosa, who became the most famous European Philhellenic icon after Byron, lay precisely in its capacity to combine the Risorgimento and the Greek struggle for emancipation in a single movement for freedom.

This chapter examines the antiquity of tragedy. Thought about tragedy feeds on ulterior discussions of ancient political systems and of ancient epic, but the most significant factor may be a change in the status of poetics, and a diminution of Aristotle's authority. This development is associated in Germany with the Sturm und Drang, and receives much of its impetus from discussions in England. However, it is parallel to discussions in France, where normative Aristotelianism was similarly being criticized as inadequate to the task of grasping changes in the genre of tragedy. Across Western Europe, then, one can discern a broad shift away from the foundations of neoclassicism, and towards a philhellenism that emphasizes the singularity of antiquity. Taken together, these new ways of conceiving Greek literature within history represent a fundamental shift in thought about antiquity, which has tragedy as an important focal point.

As an ‘occasional’ genre, epigram encourages participation by keen amateurs (many of whose poems are reported by the Anthology as anonymous) as well as professional poets. This chapter explores the range of production in the skoptic sub-genre through six of its better-known minor authors: Pollianos, Apollinarios, Trajan, Gaetulicus, Piso, and Leonides. Pollianos is shown to be a witty literary critic who invokes key Hellenistic epigrammatists and develops elaborate allusive metaphors, symptomatic of literary antiquarianism under Hadrian; Leonides (or Leonidas) crafts ‘isopsephic’ epigrams in which the total numerical value of the letters in each couplet is the same. This isopsephy tests modern editors' patience, but can also stimulate them to playful creativity. The three Roman authors are philhellene amateurs; their Greek verse is not always correct, and Piso's poem is not really skoptic at all, but they illustrate Greek epigram's convenience to the Roman élite as a light verse form.

This chapter offers a new reconstruction of Alexander the Great's fragmentary edict to Priene (I. Priene 1; Rhodes–Osborne, GHI 86, probably of 334 bc). Alexander's edict, concerning the status of a number of dependent communities in the vicinity of Priene, such as Naulochon, has played a prominent role in modern scholarship on Alexander's Philhellenism, the nature and extent of ‘royal land’ in the former Achaemenid empire, the civic life of the Greek poleis of western Asia Minor in the early Hellenistic period, and ancient archival practices. Much of this modern scholarship, however, is based on questionable restorations of fragmentary passages in the edict. This chapter offers alternative reconstructions of three critical clauses in the edict, which (if correct) shed a new light on Alexander's policies towards the Greek cities of Asia Minor in the earliest days of his Asiatic campaign.

Chapter 1 examines American reactions to the 1821 Greek War of Independence and the Cretan Insurrection of 1866-1869. Prompted by American philhellenes, politicians, religious organizations, and activists argued vehemently for American intervention to help their “Christian brothers” in Greece and Crete. In their push for intervention, Americans cited the need for humanitarian intervention and based their arguments on developing concepts of international law to counter arguments against non-entanglement, as spelled out in the Monroe Doctrine and advanced most forcefully by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Undeterred by such policies, the American philhellenic movement, led by men such as Edward Everett, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Daniel Webster, helped galvanize the American public to aid the Greeks.