The Greeks: A Global History

Abstract

Roderick Beaton’s book The Greeks: A Global History provides a great synthesis of a complex history of three and half millennia written by an “outsider,” that is, not a native of Greece. Beaton, a (literary) historian of Byzantium and modern Greece, makes use of current scholarship in areas outside his own academic expertise to offer a global history not of Greece (a place) but of the Greeks. In addition to the longue durée, this global view encompasses both the classic achievements of the Greeks (intellectual, technological, and scientific) and their physical diaspora around the globe.Shedding light on major literary works, the book is a tribute to the longevity of the Greek language, spoken continuously from 1500 BCE to the present, and its most admirable creations, deftly highlighted in each chapter. The Persians of Aeschylus (472 BCE), for instance, is shown to echo the new moral and geopolitical universe of Hellas, where the Greeks fought for their liberty (p. 114). More than 2000 years later, the poem Erotokritos, written in seventeenth-century Crete by Vincenzo Cornaro in the vernacular Cretan dialect, reflects the new ideas of the Renaissance that shun classical education in favor of theatrical immediacy, not unlike the contemporary plays of William Shakespeare (p. 373–75).Thanks to their achievements, the Greeks managed to transcend the limits of their homeland to form colonies, networks, empires, and diasporas. Beaton’s use of the archaeological record to flesh out the entrepreneurial activities of the Greek-Mycenean world that stretched through the whole of the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to Gibraltar, should be applauded, as it opens new perspectives. The Mediterranean was repeatedly “conquered” by Greek merchants, not only in antiquity but also in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.The conquests of Alexander the Great went even further to usher in the global spread of Greek civilization, scholarship, and language to Asia and Africa. Becoming Greek (hellenismos) was the fashion everywhere, not only in the second century BCE but also during the Roman era and in Byzantium, where it evolved as the very identity of the state along with the Orthodox Church. Even under Ottoman rule, the Greek commercial diaspora and intelligentsia that had arisen by the eighteenth century created a palimpsest of the Hellenistic world where the Greek speakers were not the rulers but the ruled (p. 392). A similar diaspora of educated Greeks, such as the poet C. P. Cavafy, and successful shipowners, whose mental horizons and patriotic pride in belonging to a much more broadly based Hellenic nation, have made contemporary Greece a global nation (p. 425).If the connecting tissue of the book is the Greek language and its achievements, at the very core of the work is Greek identity as it was formed, understood, and modified through time. The author clearly espouses the definition of Greekness provided by Isocrates: “people [are] to be called Greek if they share our educational system.” Being Greek is not a matter of biological origin or a common ancestry but rather one of belonging to a cultural system, sharing a set of values, customs, and the Greek language (p. 151).Still, terms such as Hellene, Roman, and Greek are analyzed to appreciate the various ways in which the sense of belonging to a common folk was articulated through the ages. Herodotus was the first to articulate the concept of “Hellenikon” in the fifth century BCE (p. 120), a term encompassing the totality of the Greeks who defended their homeland against the Persians. As Christianity gained power in the fourth century, the word “Hellenes” became equated with the pagans (p. 257), some of whom were hounded down by Christian zealots, as was the case of the pagan philosopher Hypatia, who was murdered by a Christian mob in 415 CE in Alexandria. No matter, the Greek language was not only fused with Christian connotations but became the language of the church, and by the sixth century the Byzantine emperor Justinian went as far as composing his new laws in Greek. Yet, the Byzantines thought of themselves as Romans to the very end of their empire. The term “Roman” was retained by the Ottomans in its Turkish rendition, Rum, and by the Greeks themselves in its modern Greek reincarnation Romios. The term Hellene reappeared under a new guise in the fifteenth century; the intellectual Plethon in Mystra advanced the idea of genos—based on kinship, a progenitor of the concept of nationalism, itself a concept born out of the ideology of the European Enlightenment. By the Greek revolution of 1821, the Romioi were hellenized (pp. 399–400), but this artificial and nonconclusive transformation has plagued the modern Greek state in the past 200 years. Nationalism eventually morphed into the irredentism of the Megali Idea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The idea of the Nation remained immovable, whereas there were many instances where the state lost and could even be thought of as unpatriotic, as in the case of the National Schism in 1916, when Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos defied the king and set up a second, rival government in Thessaloniki to join the forces of the Entente during World War I (p. 429).The fifteen chapters of the book are arranged chronologically with dates that point to specific historical periods, for which the author has chosen witty titles that intimate his perspective on the period in question. A solid bibliography encompassing history, literature, and archaeology can be followed in the endnotes, typically placed at the end of a paragraph, which at times feels like an abstract highlighting the salient points of each study. A summary bibliography is offered at the end (pp. 551–57), and forty-three color photographs illustrate the text.Written well for the nonspecialist and read easily despite its length, the book does not simply regurgitate past literature but rather uses the latest scholarly developments to offer fresh interpretations that keep you on your toes. It is a book to be enjoyed by those who know the story of the Greeks and those who want to learn about it.