On the tenth day of April, 1910, it was raining hard in Athens. A handsome man, aged forty, dressed in a white flannel suit and matching gloves, hired a two-horse carriage for the short drive to Skaramanga, a port on the coast facing the island of Salamis. Today, the shipyards of Skaramanga and the rusting tankers lying offshore are among the ugliest sights in Greece; a hundred years ago, there was not even a fashionable beach. There was, at least, an inn, where the visitor ordered lunch and a beer. Then, rising from the table, he called for the driver to unhitch one of the horses. Mounting without stirrups, he kicked the horse to a gallop and rode bareback straight into the sea. Far out from the shore, he raised a pistol, held it to his temple, and pulled the trigger. The rider disappeared; the horse swam back to shore. It would be another two weeks before the body washed up.

Pericles Yannopoulos had made a name for himself with a series of newspaper articles and two very thin cultural manifestos published in 1906 and 1907. In one of them, he had written, perhaps prefiguring his suicide: