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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2019
The Roman period in Greece has had a relatively short history of inquiry compared to other epochs of the country's long history and, as a result, very little has been written about modern perceptions of this period. For various reasons, neither modern Greeks nor foreigners have been particularly concerned with the country's Roman past, a period which has often been relegated to a negative realm. As a result, misperceptions about the Roman period in Greece are rampant, with many fallacies being perpetuated by labels and displays in museums and archaeological sites throughout the country, as well as by pedagogical institutions and the media.
Funding for fieldwork that led to the writing of this article was provided by the Craven Committee and Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Further research and writing were made possible by the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection Library Research Fellowship and the Elios Society at the State University of California, Sacramento. Thanks are due to Ewen Bowie and Sophia Zoumbaki for fruitful discussions on the topic and to the anonymous reviewer for suggesting several improvements. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania for discussing the material with me and granting me permission to publish images.
1 Stobart, J. C., The Glory That Was Greece (London, 1921), 265Google Scholar.
2 Xavier Pitafo, a Portuguese historian, quoted in Enzenberger, H. M., Europe, Europe. Forays into a Continent (London, 1990), 159–60Google Scholar.
3 Most of the scholarly works on the reception of antiquity in Greece focus on modern perceptions of the Greek past, particularly the classical period. The Roman period hardly figures in articles and books on the history of Greece. See e.g. Y. Hamilakis, ‘‘Learn History!’ Antiquity, National Narrative, and History in Greek Educational Textbooks’, in K. S. Brown and Y. Hamilakis (eds.), The Usable Past. Greek Metahistories (Lanham, MD, 2003), 39–67; Y. Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins. Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford, 2007); K. Vlassopoulos, ‘Acquiring (a) Historicity: Greek History, Temporalities and Eurocentrism in the Sattelzeit (1750–1850)’, in A. Lianeri (ed.), The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts (Cambridge, 2010), 156–78; J. K. Papadopoulos, ‘Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity and the Quest for European Identity’, JMA 18 (2005), 87–149; I. Damaskos, ‘Archäologie und nationale Identität im modernen Griechenland: Aspekte einer Wechselwirkung’, in E. Koszisky (ed.), Archäologie und Einbildungskraft. Relikte der Antike in der Moderne (Berlin, 2011), 75–88.
4 Several works on the reception of antiquity contain concise reviews of European and Greek scholarship on the subject. See e.g. M. Herzfeld, Ours Once More. Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, TX, 1982); K. Dimaras, Ο Νεοελληνικός Διαφωτισμός (Athens, 1989); S. L. Marchand, Down from Olympus. Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, NJ, 1996); E. Bastea, The Creation of Modern Athens. Planning the Myth (Cambridge, 2000); E. F. Athanassopoulos, ‘An ‘Ancient’ Landscape: European Ideals, Archaeology, and Nation Building in Early Modern Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002), 273–305; K. Vlassopoulos, ‘Constructing Antiquity and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Distantiation, Alterity, Proximity, Immanency’, in L. Foxhall, H.-J. Gehrke, and N. Luraghi (eds.), Intentional History. Spinning Time in Ancient Greece (Stuttgart, 2010), 341–60; S. Myrogiannis, The Emergence of a Greek Identity, 1700–1821 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014).
5 The ‘Troika’ is the trio of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, which have been responsible for Greece's bailout programmes since 2010.
6 Vlassopoulos (n. 4).
7 Note that the periods before the classical – i.e. the Minoan, Mycenaean, and, to a far lesser extent, the geometric and archaic – were almost unknown before the twentieth century, as archaeological remains from these periods had not yet come to light or, in cases where they had done, had been misattributed to later periods.
8 J. J. Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, 2nd edition, trans. J. H. Lodge (Boston, 1880; first published 1766), 186.
9 Ibid., 20.
10 Stobart (n. 1), 265.
11 Damaskos (n. 3).
12 Dimaras (n. 4).
13 Cited in ibid., 394; translated in Y. Hamilakis and E. Yalouri, ‘Antiquities as Symbolic Capital in Modern Greek Society’, Antiquity 70 (1996), 122.
14 In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a great number of sculptures from the Roman period were exhibited, as the first catalogues attest: P. Kavvadias, The Sculpture of the National Museum. Descriptive Catalog (Athens, 1890–2), and P. Kastriotis, Γλυπτὰ τοῦ Ἐθνικοῦ Μουσείοu (Athens, 1908); see also S. E. Katakis, Athens, National Archaeological Museum. 1. Attic Sarcophagi with Garlands, Erotes and Dionysiac Themes (Athens, 2018). I thank the anonymous reviewer for bringing this fact to my attention. Note, however, that some recent exhibitions have gone in the right direction by either giving more credence to the Roman period, or, as in the case of the 2017–18 exhibit on Hadrian and Athens, organized by the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in collaboration with the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, have featured the Roman period exclusively.
15 Damaskos (n. 3).
16 See V. L. Antoniou and Y. N. Soysal, ‘Nation and the Other in Greek and Turkish History Textbooks’, in H. Schissler and Y. N. Soysal (eds.), The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition (New York, 2005), 106; Hamilakis (n. 3, 2007).
17 R. Van Dyke and S. Alcock, Archaeologies of Memory (London, 2003), is an excellent collection of studies on the nature of archaeological memory in world cultures.
18 Ibid., 3.
19 Gillis, J. R., ‘Introduction’, in Gillis, J. R. (ed.), Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 4Google Scholar.
20 D. Lowenthal, ‘Identity, Heritage, and History’, in Gillis (n. 19), 42.
21 Nowhere is this notion more apparent than in the various rallies organized by Greeks in Athens, Thessaloniki, and many other cities both within and outside Greece in order to emphasize the Greekness of Macedonia in relation to the neighbouring nation known officially as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The most recent rallies took place in February 2018 and drew more than half a million people according to Greek media.
22 Lowenthal (n. 20), 45. The restitution of the Parthenon marbles and the years-long dispute between Greece and the British Museum is perhaps the best-known case.
23 J. Assman and J. Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique 65 (1995), 130 (emphasis in original).
24 See E. Avdela, ‘The Teaching of History in Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18 (2000), 239–53.
25 Hamilakis (n. 3, 2007), 45.
26 See Harrison, G. W. M., The Romans and Crete (Amsterdam, 1993), 305Google Scholar.
27 I saw this brochure in a tourist agency during my visit to Paros in 2011 but have not been able to photograph it and reproduce it in this article.
28 A. Kouremenos, ‘Houses and Identity in Roman Knossos and Kissamos, Crete: A Study in Emulative Acculturation’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (2013).
29 See M. S. F. Hood and D. Smyth, Archaeological Survey of the Knossos Area (Athens and London, 1981); L. H. Sackett and J. E. Jones, ‘Knossos: A Roman House Revisited’, Archaeology, 32 (1979), 18–26; J. K. Papadopoulos, ‘Knossos’, in M. de la Torre (ed.), The Conservation of Archaeological Sites in the Mediterranean Region (Los Angeles, CA, 1997), 93–125; S. Paton, ‘The Villa Dionysus at Knossos and Its Predecessors’, in W. Cavanaugh and M. Curtis (eds.), Post-Minoan Crete. Proceedings of the First Colloquium on Post-Minoan Crete Held by the British School at Athens and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 10–11 November 1995 (London, 1998), 123–8.
30 Papadopoulos (n. 29), 115.
31 See Damaskos (n. 3).
32 The Ottoman period, which spanned five centuries and transformed the Acropolis, fares worse than the Roman period as it is only represented in a series of extraordinary maquettes, which are exhibited at the entrance hall of the museum. Some early Christian finds from the Parthenon are on display in the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
33 Tejirian, E. H. and Simon, R. S., Conflict, Conquest and Conversion. Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East (New York, 2012), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, note that Constantine required a translator for Greek as his primary language was Latin. Although his mother, Helena, was, according to Procopius, born in Bithynia in Asia Minor and may have been a Greek-speaker, it is evident that Constantine did not grow up speaking the language.
34 For the economic and political implications of the Amphipolis excavation, see Hamilakis, Y., ‘An Oneiric Archaeology of the Crisis: The Amphipolis Saga’, in Botanova, K. and Cryssopoulos, C. C. (eds.), Archaeology of the Future (Basel, 2017), 16–36Google Scholar.
35 P. Jones and C. S. Graves-Brown, Cultural Identity and Archaeology (London, 1996), 6.
36 Ibid.
37 See Damaskos (n. 3).
38 Bodnar, E., ‘Athens in April 1436’, Archaeology 23 (1970), 97Google Scholar.