Some Thoughts on the Trails and Travails of Hellenism and Orientalism: An Interview with Gonda

Efterpi Mitsi and Amy Muse: Much of the definition and understanding of Hellenism is predicated on a longstanding contrast (or discrimination— meant in both positive and negative senses) between ̳Greek‘ and ̳barbarian.‘ This has been expanded to be understood as a difference between West ( ̳Greek‘ or ̳civilised) and East ( ̳barbaric‘). You‘ve wrestled with this in your recent research, including the crafting of your provocative title ―Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire,‖ although in your Introduction to the book you argue to ―redraw the outlines of mutually dependent Orientalism and Hellenism‖ (2). Can there be a Hellenism without this East-West binary? Does the study of Hellenism promote or encourage binary thinking? We‘re thinking also of Dimitris Tziovas‘s ―Beyond the Acropolis‖ for The Journal of Modern Greek Studies in which he argues that ―Hellenism cannot escape a binary logic‖ (199), although he goes on to attempt a rethinking of Neohellenism through ―dialogism, hybridity, or syncretism‖ (202).

of metaphorical homecoming or cultural belonging, and the competing figurations of Greekness that Hellenism engendered. Ever since 9/11, I have been thinking about the West-East divide and about our own task, as scholars and perennial students of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, to bring a nuanced, critical, and elongated historical perspective to this perceived dichotomy, which is being reinforced or simplified further every day. The Orientalist bias still plagues modern times and discursive modes, narrations, both situated in the early months of 1820, thematise two Greek objects of relevance to the nineteenth-century West (and to our study of its cultural history): ancient art and ancient texts. These prominent themes allow us to unravel the larger cultural, ideological, and geopolitical processes involved, focusing on the Western philhellene ‗impulse' and the Orientalist ‗logic' driving it. Thus these stories, which are nothing short of adventure tales, operate like conduits through which a wide range of nineteenth-century issues and phenomena are examined. I assess both the statue (the priceless ancient artefact) and the play reading (the classical text and the oldest extant and prize-winning tragedy) as vectors of knowledge about the Orient (including emerging Greece versus the Ottoman Empire) but also about the West, its Romantic Hellenism, its burgeoning philhellenism, its expansionist designs on the East, and its tradition of classical scholarship, which fed into all of the above but fuelled the unreasonable quest for Greek continuity, in particular. Marcellus's records invite us to reflect on the intellectual realm but also on the expansionist reach of Western (phil)Hellenism and to consider how this Hellenism intersected with the project of Classical Studies and its own (hitherto underexplored) ‗Occidentalism,' which defined ancient through modern Greece at the expense of the ‗degenerate' and ‗hostile' East.
In the eyes of the professed French philhellene Marcellus, the ‗barbaric' and ‗despotic' Ottoman Empire holds captive both the Venus statue and those modern Greeks who prove to be worthy descendants of the ancient Greeks. While the phrase ‗the last of the classics' was coined to eulogise Marcellus, I like to apply it also to the Venus and to those ‗deserving' Greeks, suggesting various double meanings in my book's title. My title is, indeed, meant to be somewhat ironic as well as provocative: it exposes the instant assumption that only the Ottoman Empire could obstruct the liberation of Hellenism; the book shows that drastic action to shake Hellenism free from the prejudiced West was overdue as well. If we had a chance to question Marcellus, the ‗hero' of my book, he would certainly see himself as a liberator of Hellenism and as a saviour of (ancient) Greek culture. 1 His actions, however, reveal that he was out to free Hellenism for self-aggrandising reasons and for the self-legitimation of the Enlightened West, that is, for the ‗betterment' of the ambitious kingdom of France, to which he was beholden and whose mistakes he did not see. Moreover, the Hellenism that Marcellus boosted of saving had to be strictly (fifth-century BCE) classical in nature to be deemed worthwhile. This widespread demand compelled him (and his contemporaries) to uphold the Venus de Milo as a specimen of classical, not of Hellenistic sculpture and to sing the praises of the Greek revolutionaries of 1820 who reconnected with ‗their' classical roots but soon paid with their lives. For Marcellus, both the statue and the ‗reincarnated' ancient Greeks had to be among ‗the last of the classics,' for the sake of his-story and of the exigencies of modern history. The Frenchman himself was ‗the last of the classics' for being enamoured with an ideal of Greece that was unrealistic and outdated already in the 1820s. His peregrinations are symbolic of the West's search for Greece in its classical image-and of its (‗disappointing') discovery of a Greece in its sub-Western profile. Marcellus's enthrallment, however, came in spite of his exposure to progressive Greek circles and to Greek lands in turmoil, readying themselves for an armed insurgency (which broke out in March 1821). But the author's own revolutionary sympathies did not extend to accepting and protecting-let alone setting free-a viable Hellenism for the modern Greeks. Greeks populated Marcellus's memoirs but they always had to prove themselves: they had to be sufficiently classical to counterbalance the Orientalist image associated with them and also to be deserving of Western support. Modern Greeks had to prove that, within a short time span and through contact with Western intellectuals like Marcellus, they could become as classical as the ‗civilised' Western Europeans had supposedly been for centuries. Unfortunately, the Greeks internalised these normative standards: they incorporated them in their definition of Neohellenic patriotism, which drove the nation-building project for another full century  Marcellus's stories mark entire trends, not singular moments or isolated behaviours, in the cultural encounters between philhellenism and Orientalism. The case of Marcellus warns the student of history and culture to be wary of Eurocentric dichotomies and imperialist agendas-both then and now. The Frenchman's records, therefore, compel us to scrutinise our methodological approaches to (phil)hellenism and Orientalism and to their role in the nineteenth-century evolution of classical scholarship and intellectual history at large. The West and the Orient were far from closed entities, and our study can help us comprehend how they interrelated by examining processes of exchange, diplomacy, commerce, and even complicity. Further insights into the shades of historical differentiation can certainly be gauged from Greece's stance in the fraught encounter between West and East. A detailed analysis of Greece's position in the first decades of the nineteenth century (paying critical attention to the cultural dimensions of its burgeoning nationalism) enhances our understanding of West-East frictions and also deepens the questions posed of modern Greek culture and Classical Studies. These questions are not simply of a topical but also of ideological and even of (academic) disciplinary relevance. It is time to acknowledge Classics' own preconceived notions, that is, the politics and morality of our scholarly pursuits.
Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism (1978), still stands as a provocative beginning in this hermeneutic context: it is not a tried and true endpoint but spurs further research and cultural critique. Marcellus's records complement, nuance, and differentiate what Said has laid out. They do so by focusing on ideas in discourse, images, imaginings, and representations in literature, travel writing, and diplomatic reporting, but also on archaeological and collecting practices and on the historicisation of such practices against a backdrop of local tensions. Marcellus's treasure hunt (a practice which his elite French contemporaries encouraged) must make us question the depth of his philhellenism and the extent to which philhellenism associated with French imperialism. Therefore, the notion of Hellenism, in forms still practiced by classicists, needs to be scrutinised for its role in supporting the imperialist and colonialist discourse. 2 Marcellus's sense of identification with the Greek revolutionaries generated a patronising depiction of their nationalism. His careful framing of his memories, too, in his dramatising (and exoticising) conception of modern Greek receptions of classical texts, was tainted by Orientalism. In a paternalistic manner, the Frenchman had the modern Greeks play at being ancients rather than Europeans. He remained doubtful about the Greeks' lasting momentum for throwing off their Oriental bondage. He painted the Turks, however, with the thicker Orientalist brush, leaving them without hope of ever being anything other than Easterners. For him, the Ottoman ‗tyranny' was defined by all that the West perceived as lacking in the East: liberty, progress, rationality, humane conduct, or the values seen as germane to Western morality and civilisation.
Marcellus's philhellenism was thus configured at the nexus of imperialist politics, Orientalist fantasies, and the Western ‗civilising mission' to pull Greece out of the -emptiness‖ of Asia. 3 The Frenchman kept up the pretence of contributing to knowledge while, in fact, he contributed to the politics of knowledge-and power (to tap into Said's Foucauldian perspective on the Orientalist discourse). Significantly, the Western European intelligentsia saw all of his acts as contributions to the fields of Hellenism and Classics, whereas, in essence, they contributed to the growth and strength of Orientalism.
In the person of Marcellus, whose classical training was extensive, we gain a kaleidoscopic perspective on how the discipline of Classics has fuelled West-East power relations, even though Classics developed the tools and methods to comprehend antiquity, the classical tradition, and Hellenism in more ambivalent and complex ways. Powerbrokers with a classical training such as Marcellus have perpetrated their own kind of colonialism of Greece under the cover of ‗liberating Hellenism,' of saving a land, its treasure, and its culture from ‗peril,' as much as the Venus de Milo or the Elgin Marbles needed to be salvaged. The themes of peril, rescue, or escape are central to my analysis: Marcellus presents the ‗purchase' of the Venus as a necessary abduction of the statue, which is whisked off to the safety and civilisation of Paris. His memoirs, however, point up the distinction between classical traces that were still physically rooted in Greek soil and those that were not, or the dialogue/rivalry between archaeology and philology. 4 For Marcellus, the Venus statue had to be salvaged from the ‗preying' Greeks and the ‗destructive' Turks alike, even though its ‗barbarian' site of origin was Greek.
With wilful blindness, the Frenchman claimed to have recovered the sculpture not from a remote Aegean island but from an East embalmed in ‗backward' and ‗intolerant' traditions. The text of Aeschylus's Persians, on the other hand, had long made its safe escape and could, in the 1820 reading, be subjected to a non-material (but still unequal) exchange of knowledge and ideology. Marcellus deliberately Orientalised the geographical domain that was the ‗theatre' of his operations during the years of Greece's transition from occupied Ottoman territory to modern nation-state. The philhellene's words and deeds revealed blatant inconsistencies in the face of real power and opportunity.
It was Herodotus who first drew the demarcation line between Greeks and ‗barbarians,' and he served as an ancient mentor to Marcellus. Herodotus, however, did not colour his distinction in negative terms but was driven by a fascination with foreign cultures and became one of the first travellers in the Middle East. Marcellus followed in the footsteps of modern travellers to the Orient and shared in the curiosity that impelled Herodotus, but constantly revealed how much intellectual baggage he was bringing along. The traveller/ treasure hunter often gave himself away, as in the episode I cite at the opening of my book: When...Marcellus...went looking for the presumed school of Homer on the island of Chios, he asked some local women for directions, but to no avail. He recalls, -when I persisted and asked about the seat of Homer, they answered me in all seriousness that Omer Pasha, whenever he came to Chios, seldom removed himself that far from the city; and that, in any case, he would sit only island on the very frontiers of West and East, served Marcellus with a reminder that the Classics' focus of Hellenism was not indigenous to their lands, and that Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, and others had been preoccupied, rather, with staking out a living that was conditioned by present challenges, not by past glories. Hellenism without the West-East dichotomy was one of experience-on-the-ground, daily needs and predicaments, and cross-cultural exchanges, which reckoned with the true realities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. In the fervour of the revolutionary years, however, a binary thinking about the ‗sullen,' ‗violent,' and ‗tyrannical' Eastern enemy came to serve all parties: the Greek revolutionaries of 1821 and also Russia, France, and Britain, which could only reluctantly be convinced to join the struggle ‗for the cause of the Christian Greeks.' The Great Powers, however, were more motivated by Greece's antiquity than by the fate of the ‗earliest Christians.' Greece's very existence as a modern nation was thus ‗owed' to its classical past. Revolution entailed a revolving back to past history, a tenacious investment in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic continuity, and a fierce denial of racial mixing.
Consequently, modern Greece came about as a restorative act, a purification process that could never viably claim to be entirely pure, let alone disinterested. Because ancient Greece had never been a country, this restorative act focused on Athens, which became metonymic for all of Greece.
The decades-long process of fervent Athenocentrism hampered the development of the rest of the modern country. My hope is that more detailed analyses of West-East exchanges and travels, such as those captured in Marcellus's memoirs, will discourage the binary thinking that has served political and military causes for far too long, and that they will bring the focus back on the intricacies of co-existence in what has been one of the most culturally diverse regions of the world through the ages. The study of the complexities of Marcellus's acts, thoughts, writings, and fictions may help us move beyond our renewed, twenty-first-century tendency to engage in binary posturing. We must, rather, commit to the dialogism, the hybridity, and the syncretism (to use Tziovas's terms) that have been catalyst impulses within The ancient Greeks had set the military boundaries between Europe and Asia and perceived the Persian Wars as a conflict between two forces that were different mainly in numbers (with the Greeks being at a huge disadvantage). For Herodotus, the Asian forces were not inferior but daunting and their customs were intriguing. He described a struggle for resources in which self-serving pettiness was common to all, but admitted that the Greek responsibility for the conflict's outbreak was actually greater.
When, however, Hellenism grew to better define itself (starting already in the fourth century BCE), it found the archetypal enemy in this early fifth-century BCE conflict and gladly drew up analogies with the Trojan War (of mythical times), Alexander's conquest of the East (during the decade prior to his death in 323 BCE), the fall of Constantinople (1453), and the Greek Revolution (1821). Western travellers surprised the Greeks by ‗othering' them, too, and lumping them in with the exotic and feminised Orient. As a country stirring itself for its national uprising, however, Greece needed to shed these biases and it went along promulgating the East's hostility as a perennial constant.
The concern with classical antiquity prompted Western Europe to lend its cooperation to the Greek cause, which was redefined as the cause of Western civilisation, Christian religion, and Enlightenment rationalism. Because Greece's struggle for independence became the cause of the West, it spurred renewed interest in the racial purity of the Greeks and in the origins, successes, and failures of the fundamentally different state systems of ancient Athens (democracy) and Sparta (militaristic oligarchy). 6 In the context of the growing acknowledgment of ancient Greek culture's hybridity, let me cite here a recent discussion in The Guardian, initiated by Charlotte Higgins, in dialogue with some of the leading scholars on the subject (11 July 2013). Higgins's article is entitled -Ancient Greece, the Middle East and an ancient cultural internet: The ancient Greek world is being recast from an isolated entity to one of many hybrid cultures in Africa and in the East.‖ She states, in words that apply to changing perceptions of nineteenth-century Hellenism as well (and why it should not be understood without reference to the East): [T]here is a fresh urgency, according to [Tim] Whitmarsh and like-minded scholars, to the study of the classical world's relationships with what is now the Middle East, and the new approaches are significantly different from those offered in the past. Access to newly discovered or newly available texts is allowing classicists to reframe the terms of engagement between cultures: less a one-way importation, followed by transformation and "perfection" of the original influences, and more a dialogue, or an "intertwining" as Johannes Haubold, professor of Greek at Durham University, puts it.
So, instead of the study of ancient Greece being predicated on its uniqueness-its isolated, exceptional and untouchable brilliance--some scholars are recasting the Greek world (and, in different ways, the Roman world) as part of a series of networked cultures in multivoiced conversation with the lands lying east and south of the Mediterranean. Greece deserves a place at the core of Reception Studies, in that the Greeks have always been rethinking and reusing the ancient legacy, and did so long before it became fashionable. I aim to make contributions in this area, with studies that open windows on these ongoing dialectics but that remain readable for specialists in diverse fields and also for the general public, which will discover how much Hellenism is still present in our daily intellectual exchanges. Possessing some knowledge of the history of Hellenism has simply become essential for anyone who keeps hearing about Greece in the day's news bulletin. This daily focus on Greece has pushed the country in a (reluctant) paradigmatic role once again: currently, the West is watching Greece as if it were an on-going laboratory experiment, whose economic and political outcomes will help the West-again-to determine how to proceed when similar crises occur in other European Union countries or in the global economy. Greece and Hellenism are no longer exclusively scholarly pursuits but are as current as today's news headlines. Greece not only invites us but forces us to think of Hellenism as constitutive of a global, transnational world. hard to establish the kind of interdisciplinarity that these fields deserve and that keeps enriching them. My hope is that the discipline will be able to sustain this commitment even in times when academic departments shrink and tenure-track lines disappear, and while departments in Greece fend off perhaps the greatest possible threats to their existence. The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, for instance, is a stellar example of such a sustained commitment to interdisciplinary approaches.

E.M. & A.M.: In
Personally, I feel that the area of theatre and performance has remained underexplored. Theatre and performance are not addressed in some of the most prominent comprehensive studies of modern Greek literature. While Greek-language monographs on Greek theatre are numerous, the paucity of studies in the English language remains striking. I encourage Greek scholars to publish more of their work in English or in other modern languages, to broaden the dialogue across cultures.Theatre and performance are also ideally positioned to spawn interdisciplinarity, given that stage practitioners and audiences bring their own histories, literatures, and ideologies to bear on play production. I would also like to see more research done in fields such as Greek photography, installation art, Museum Studies, international heritage preservation, and other subjects that veer off from the mainstream but that prove to be the perfect media for a more globalising outlook. Lastly, I am mindful of the intense interest that many Chinese students and scholars take in Greek culture, ancient and modern alike. Now the responsibility rests with all of us to not make the same mistakes again and to enable a truly transnational dialogue on Hellenism.
July 2013 those that had come to be of a ‗metaphorical' nature (in the double meaning of the word). Both artifacts (‗archaeology') and texts (philology) excited the traveling philhellene, but sculpture could still be unearthed and exported from emerging Greece (urgently and forcibly, if necessary), whereas most texts, long uncovered, exerted not a present and material but a symbolic impact. In other words, Marcellus saw the Venus as an artifact but not Aeschylus's tragedy. His praxis of collecting material fragments, however, does intersect with his collecting of thoughts and experiences based on texts. The ‗discovery' of the classical texts was known to be a shining achievement of the Western Renaissance. The bulk of the texts was already in ‗safe' Western possession in their physical form as Byzantine manuscripts. The classical literary corpus was no longer contested (material) property, unlike the many artifacts that were shipped off under politically contentious circumstances. By the 1820s, texts were perceived to be portable to and from any location and were thus disassociated from the Greek lands. Printed editions had made them into reproducible repositories of Western knowledge (be it knowledge inevitably reduced or distorted by its compression). In the best case scenario, texts could be restored or, ironically, ‗imported' to the Greek lands, not as manuscripts, but as book manuals for sharing knowledge. The discrepancy between Marcellus's treatment of treasure versus text also touches on the transdisciplinary question of the objectivity of ‗scientific' archaeology versus the (stated) subjectivity of philology. The Frenchman's account lets the reader gauge how and where the prestige-driven Orientalist mode of archaeology (or, rather, counter-archaeology) met the record of the text-based interpretation, which made the representational tour de force of the Venus story serve as a rationale agreeable to the West. 5 David Roessel (in this special issue) shows how the West placed pressures on the representation of the East and illustrates the personal, literary, and ideological conflicts arising from such pressures (in the person and work of Byron). As with Marcellus's stories and constructs, so we see one work of Byron comment on or invert the other and generate the kind of friction with which Western rebels and ideologues grappled. 6 I very much enjoyed reading Eleni Andriakaina's article, which centers on the question of who owned the Greek Revolution of 1821. She observes that actual freedom fighters as well as Westerners eagerly claimed ownership of the cause. 7 Philippe Jockey, too, highlights the extent of Marcellus's myth-making on the subject of the ‗purchase' of the Venus. His recent chapter, entitled -The Venus de Milo: Genesis of a Modern Myth,‖ is part of a brand-new collective volume on archaeology in the Ottoman Empire,Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914.