After briefly surveying the treatments of Byzantium in early modern western European and Balkan literature, the chapter proceeds to explore, more pointedly, the Enlightenment approaches to the Greek antiquity and the Byzantine phenomenon in western Europe, Russia and the incipient national history-writing in the Balkans. Attention is paid to the key role played by Western philhellenism in the construction of the Greek national ideology with its cult of ancient Greece, by the contemporary Bulgarian relations with the Greeks in the construction of the Bulgarian historical narrative about the corrupting Byzantine influence, and by the Latinist school in Transylvania for the Romanian narrative about the Greek ‘theft’ of the Roman empire from its rightful heirs.

Chapter 7 concludes by reiterating the invisible ontologies that haunt current assessments of black skin. The fluid construction of black skin in ancient Greek literature and art aims to confront limiting treatment of race in the modern academy. A final glimpse at the poetry of Langston Hughes (1931) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1980) offers a suggestive model for revamping the ancient Greek archive in the twenty-first century.

In a way, Igor Stravinsky’s turn to Greek antiquity as a source of inspiration came about as a gift to the man who arguably played the most important role in the composer’s artistic development: Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). Indeed, Stravinsky’s very first work on a Greek theme, the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex (1926–7; rev. 1948), materialised as an anniversary present to the Russian impresario for the twentieth season of the Ballets Russes, in 1927.1 The fact that Diaghilev disliked what he described as ‘un cadeau très macabre’ (a very macabre present), says very little about the significance of this work – or, in fact, of Stravinsky’s subsequent works on ancient Greek topics – in the composer’s artistic evolution.