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A (Hi)story of Illyria*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Jennifer Wallace
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Extract

Throughout history, little has been known about the land of Illyria. ‘As ”savages” or “barbarians” on the northern periphery of the classical world’, the historian John Wilkes writes, ‘even today the Illyrians barely make footnotes in most versions of ancient history, and more often than not they are simply ignored.’ Shut in by mountains, north of the betterknown Greece and covering roughly the area of modern-day Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia, Illyria has remained a closed world to outsiders, dismissed as barbarian in ancient times and remembered in more recent centuries only as an unexplored outpost of the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. As a result, Illyria has become a place of mystery, the site of myth and legend as much as of historical civilization-building or battles, a by-word for the realm of the imagination. Oscar Wilde summed up the popular association of Illyria with fiction when, in a review of an amateur production of Twelfth Night, he wrote with characteristic succinctness: ‘Where there is no illusion there is no Illyria.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , October 1998 , pp. 213 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

Notes

1. The Illyrians (Oxford, 1993), 4Google Scholar.

2. ‘Twelfth Night at Oxford’, First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 1908–1922, ed. by Ross, R., 15 vols. (London, 1969), Vol. 13Google Scholar, 46.

3. 1. 196.

4. 1. 56–8.

5. 7.7.1. See also Hall, E., Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), 170Google Scholar.

6. 1. 24. 1–2.

7. 1. 24. 5–6.

8. 4. 126.

9. See Lothian, J. M. and Craik, T. W. (edd.), Twelfth Night (Arden edition, London, 1975), xxxv–xliGoogle Scholar.

10. The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated out of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman, A worke very pleasaunt and delectable (London, 1567), 52Google Scholar. Shakespeare would have read Ovid in Golding's translation.

11. The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, 52.

12. See Bate, J., Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), 144–51Google Scholar, for a dark reading of Illyria and the Metamorphoses in Twelfth Night.

13. Empedocles on Etna I.ii.452–60.

14. See, for example, Geographi Graeci Minores, ed. by Müller, C. (Paris, 1855–1861), i. 15–96Google Scholar: ‘After the Libruni there come the Illyrian people. The Illyrii dwell by the sea as far as Chaonia, which lies opposite Corcyra, the island of Alcinous. There is situated the Greek city called Heraclea, with a harbour. There dwell the Lotus-eaters, barbarian peoples with the names Hierastamnae, Bulini, and Hylli who are neighbours of the Bulini.’

15. For more on Arnold's vision of Greece and Illyria, see my ‘Translation in Arnold's Empedocles’, Essays in Criticism 45, 4 (10, 1995), 301–23Google Scholar.

16. For more on the Napoleonic rhetoric of ‘liberation’, see Woolf, S., Napoleon's Integration of Europe (London, 1991), 14–17Google Scholar.

17. Danica 1 (12 12 1835), 288Google Scholar, quoted in Despalatovic, E. M., Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (New York and London, 1975), 89Google Scholar.

18. Researches in Greece (London, 1814), iGoogle Scholar.

19. Researches, iii–iv.

20. Daniel, Edward Clarke repeated the claim that the Albanians were more attractive and purer than the Greeks: ‘The Greeks are, for the most part, indolent and profligate, vain, obsequious, poor and dirty. The Albanians are industrious, independent, honourable and hospitable. They are a hardier and healthier race’, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, 6 vols. (1810–1823), Vol. 4, 321Google Scholar. For the attractive simplicity of the Albanians, see also Chandler, R., Travels in Greece or an Account of a Tour made at the Expense of the Society of Dilettanti (Oxford, 1776), 119Google Scholar.

21. Researches, 251. It is interesting to note that the Albanians, in their northern and mountainous terrain, are very close to the ‘Aryan Model’ of Greece which Martin Bernal argues was developed in the early nineteenth century: see Black Athena, 2 vols. (1987–1991), Vol. 1, 190–330Google Scholar.

22. Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia etc During the Years 1812 and 1813 (London, 1815), 101Google Scholar.

23. Travels in Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 and 1810, new edn., 2 vols. (London, 1855), Vol. 1, 137Google Scholar.

24. See Hobhouse's map in A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople, during the years 1809–1810, 2 vols. (London: 1813)Google Scholar, Vol. 1; see Leake's, map in Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vols. (London, 1835), Vol. 1Google Scholar.

25. Childe Harold 11.406–14.

26. Woodring, C., Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Cronin, R., ‘Mapping Childe Harold I and II’, Byron Journal 22 (1994), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Childe Harold II.355–60.

29. Byron's note to line 338, Childe Harold II.

30. See my Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke, 1997)Google Scholar, chapter 6.

31. For the link between the imagination and nationalism, see, for example, Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (edd.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar and Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

32. For one possibility of non-ethnic nationalism, see Tanner, M., ‘Illyrianism and the Croatian Quest for Statehood’, Daedalus (Summer 1997), 47–62Google Scholar.