Scipio was neither active nor successful as a politician, although elected to prestigious roles after Zama. He celebrated his triumph over Hannibal (201). This peculiarly Roman religious ritual is explained and its conventions listed: there had been few in the war, so this was a great occasion. Scipio was not opposed to the war against Philip which Flamininus won at Cynoscephalae (197), nor did they differ over ‘philhellenism’. In 199, Scipio was elected (1) censor and (2) leading senator, princeps senatus. (2) was a one-man post for life; its main privilege was to speak first. As for (1), two censors held office for a limited period; eligibility and duties are explained. Close study of Livy suggests Scipio spoke rarely in the senate during the 190s; his censorship was certainly uneventful and non-controversial. He was consul again in 194. He visited the east (193); his conversation with Hannibal at Ephesus is defended.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

The section’s closing chapter discusses the polemic between Classics and Romantics, which, despite local differences and its lack of traction in Britain, helped crystallise Romanticism in many countries both as a national and as a pan-European cultural phenomenon. Beginning with contradictory statements by Stendhal and Goethe, it argues that the Classic-Romantic nexus not only contributed to the meaning of ‘romantic’ but also of ‘classic’. The first did not replace the other, but instead complexified it by re-appropriating texts from antiquity. The chapter first shows how eighteenth-century philology informed discussions of modern culture in critical texts by F. Schlegel and Schiller, and in A.W. Schlegel’s lectures. These in turn informed Staël’s influential statements in De l’Allemagne and in her letter on translation, which fired up Romanticism in Italy, as well as Stendhal’s ‘Racine et Shakespeare’, which did the same in France. The author touches on the ideological role of translation, but also of Romantic philology and of philhellenism, showing how the Romantics in Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Poland, and Russia re-appropriated the classics. The chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of Hölderlin’s Hyperion to show Romanticism’s reluctance to differentiate the classic from the modern.

In the late nineteenth century, the passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria became a major international sensation whose decennial performances attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from across Europe and the wider world. This chapter argues that nineteenth-century observers increasingly understood Oberammergau not only as a site for the re-enactment of the biblical past, but also as a provocative example of the open-air ritual theatre they associated with Greek antiquity. Historians often associate nineteenth-century German philhellenism with Protestant elites, but this chapter shows how an unambiguously Catholic phenomenon, the Oberammergau passion play, took on special resonance among those who were inspired by the call for Dionysian theatre associated with Friedrich Nietzsche at the fin de siècle. The analysis especially focuses on three German-speaking dramatists – Richard von Kralik, Oskar Panizza and Friedrich Lienhard – for whom the purportedly Greek qualities of Oberammergau prompted reflection on the possibilities and limitations of Dionysian drama as a tool of artistic, moral and national regeneration.

Plutarch is commonly viewed as a major exponent of a shared Greco-Roman culture among the imperial elite to which he belonged. However, while dealing with the Greek and Roman worlds on fairly equal terms, he essentially expects the protagonists of his Lives, both Greek and Roman, to display virtues grounded in Greek culture and conforming to Greek role models. Thus, Philopoemen–Flamininus analyzes the Roman conquest of Greece with a strong focus on Greek historical experience; Marius shows the adverse consequences of anti-Hellenism and lack of paideia in a Roman statesman; and Lucullus presents a Roman career shaped by philhellenic benefactions on the one hand and barbarian luxury on the other. Beyond the Lives, the Roman Questions frequently invoke Greek concepts and traditions to explain Roman customs and institutions, whereas Advice on Statesmanship is predominantly concerned with the autonomy of the Greek cities and the power of the local aristocracy, thus epitomizing the Hellenocentric perspective that characterizes Plutarch’s oeuvre as a whole.

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.

The Hermetic literature should be seen not in terms of philosophical speculation but as a path of experiential practice that aimed at radical spiritual liberation. To understand it properly, we must pay attention to the problematics of translation and be aware of philhellenist frames.

Historical writing described a form of imaginal enchantment, as illustrated by Hans Jonas’ concept of “gnosticism,” André-Jean Festugière’s “religion of the world,” and Frances A. Yates’ “Hermetic Tradition.” The importance of overcoming philhellenist ideologies, and the centrality of nonduality and embodiment to Hermetic spirituality.

We discuss the important – but rarely scrutinized – role of archaeology in the constitution of Greece and Israel as contemporary crypto-colonized states, defined by Herzfeld as countries with a strong national sentiment that serve as buffer zones and whose political independence is accompanied by massive economic dependency. We elaborate on what this crypto-colonizing process means for the two societies.

We explore the inherently racialized premises of colonial–national modernity and of imperial and national archaeologies, juxtaposing them with the contradictions and fluidity inherent in “Greek” and “Israeli” identities. This is followed by a brief critique of the reductionist, and often self-serving, roll-out of ancient DNA studies and of their political co-optation.

When reading Cassius Dio’s account of Nero’s reign, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer, unrelenting criminality of the emperor. In fact, Dio’s Nero is not as much a man as a representation of a rhetorical tyrant. While he is not unique in portraying Nero as a disastrous ruler, Dio is extraordinary in his denial of the emperor’s philhellenism. In doing this, Dio not only contradicts Tacitus and Suetonius, but also discounts the praise of Nero given by other Greek writers, such as Philostratus, Dio Chrysostom, and Pausanias, when they highlight the emperor’s liberation of Greece as a redeeming feature of his principate. With this in mind, this chapter explores the distinctive features of Dio’s narrative when compared to other accounts of the emperor’s reign, and considers the motives behind and the effects of Dio’s portrayal of Nero as a hater, and not a lover, of Greece.

The first chapter concentrates on the period around 1800, laying the groundwork by examining the concepts of sentimentality, the code of Romantic love, Bildung, interpretation, and the appeal of Greek antiquity as an analogue to the history and formation of the self. Beginning from Winckelmann’s erotic classicism it draws on the writings of Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Georg Herder, together with insights from recent literary, historical, and sociological work on the discursive codification of emotions and of closeness in that period.