Greek historiography before 1853 about Macedonia!

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  • Bratot
    Senior Member
    • Sep 2008
    • 2855

    Greek historiography before 1853 about Macedonia!


    (Κωνσταντίνος Παπαρρηγόπουλος) (1815-1891)



    European historiographical influences upon the
    young Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos

    Ioannis Koubourlis

    All national historiographies comprise texts that constitute turning points in their respective courses towards formation. In general, the main aim of the authors of such texts is to note the advances towards the writing of an all-encompassing history of the relevant national past; but, equally importantly, it is to point out persisting lacunae in such a history. These lacunae may concern certain ‘missing
    links’ in a given national narrative; and this is precisely the case of Greek national historiography before 1853, which had not as yet fully integrated Byzantium or the ancient Macedonians into the Greek national past.

    But these lacunae may also concern the very formation of the relevant national conception of history. For in order to reach maturity a national historiography must be based on a particular philosophy of history that establishes the ‘nation’ as the prime agent of historical action within a linear and, most importantly, homogenous historical time.


    Paparrigopoulos’s second book, The Last Year of Hellenic Freedom (1844), was an attempt to prove that the destruction of Corinth by the Romans took place in 145, and not in 146 BCE. As we know, his assumptions never convinced the historical community. That notwithstanding, this work is equally revealing of the contrast between the young essayist and the future national historiographer: in this
    text, Paparrigopoulos (1844, 8–11) spoke of the ancient Macedonians, in a similar vein to the Romans, as a foreign power against which the Greeks failed to unite so as to avoid being conquered.


    This may in many respects have been an intellectual project, conceived and implemented from the top down. It also took shape under the influence of the Western powers, whose projections of classical models onto the new state played an important part in the process. Here the contribution of the leading German historian of ancient Greece, Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), must be stressed, since it was he who composed the unitary narrative that gave Macedonia an integral place in the story of the Greek nation (Droysen 1833; 1836–43; cf. chapter 4 by Ioannis Koubourlis below).
    The parallel to Mommsen’s Italian history is striking, since both operated with a strong unifying agent who overcame petty particularism in order to realize the national mission. The inspiration clearly came from contemporary Prussia, but while in Italy this role was given to Rome, in Greece it fell to Macedonia.



    Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), to whom Paparrigopoulos (1849–53,1.206) referred for the first time in his Textbook of 1849, but without being able to take advantage of the contribution of the great German historicist, offered him weighty arguments regarding the Greek identity of the ancient Macedonians and the spread of Hellenic civilization eastwards. He also offered him one of the key concepts of the newly born Greek national historical school: the concept of
    ‘Hellenism’.
    Although Droysen himself restricted its use to the Hellenistic world, he and his disciples, such as Otto Abel (1824–1854), understood ‘Hellenism’ in the sense of a ‘Hellenic genius’, which had a historical trajectory of its own. In fact, what Paparrigopoulos and other Greek national historians such as Zambelios had to do after having read Droysen was to generalize the use of the concept so as to apply it to the whole of Greek history and, at another level, to identify it with the
    concept of ‘Greek nation’.
    The final result of this double intellectual process was the production of a series of terms and concepts well known to all contemporary Hellenists: ‘Ancient Hellenism’, ‘Macedonian Hellenism’, ‘Byzantine Hellenism’, ‘Modern Hellenism’, and so forth.

    Influenced therefore by Droysen and Zambelios, Paparrigopoulos started from the mid-1850s to think of Greek history not merely as a complex of facts, as he had done early in his life, but as the history of a Geist: ‘Hellenism’. In his five volume History of the Hellenic Nation, Paparrigopoulos was to present this Geist transforming itself into something else, every time that it moves to a different
    geographical terrain or historical era, and this in order to accomplish each time a different historical mission, without, nevertheless, losing its one and only identity. In fact, this particular conception of history, with all its idealistic anthropomorphism, constitutes the theoretical basis of Paparrigopoulos’s final argument in support of the Greek identity of the ancient Macedonians and the national role of the
    Byzantine monarchy:
    That [Macedonian Hellenism] is not Ancient Hellenism, we have [already] conceded; that it is not Hellenic at all, we deny with all our powers […] What really is a pure Hellenism […]? Nations can accomplish different missions at different periods and try to achieve different ends by different means […] So when we see the same language
    and the same […] quality of moral and spiritual force, it is not permissible to doubt the existence and the action of the same nationality, even if its action has been modified by time and circumstances (Paparrigopoulos 1860–74, 2.175).

    Thirlwall organized his History according to a cyclical schema of national rise and fall, based upon a theory that maintained that all nations passed through a series of analogous developmental stages.7 This national schema allowed him to rearrange the various historical and symbolic loci of Greek antiquity in a hierarchical fashion, pushing the classical period, strictly defined, towards the centre of the ancient Greek historical experience. Indeed, his History went a long way towards the positive reevaluation of ‘liberal’ Athens from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, while ‘heroic’ Sparta was accommodated in the background as the representative of an earlier, ‘frozen’ stage of Greek national development (Thirlwall 1835–44, 1.335–
    40). Finally, monarchical Macedonia was excluded altogether from the ‘national’ space of Greece: Thirlwall presented the ascendancy of Philip over the classical city-states as a ‘conquest’ of Greece by a foreign power.8

    footnote 8
    Note, for example, Thirlwall’s presentation of the revolt of the Spartan Agis against Macedonian power in 330 BCE, as a struggle against foreign dominion (Thirlwall 1835–44, 6.257).


    Source:


    for ddl:
    The purpose of the media is not to make you to think that the name must be changed, but to get you into debate - what name would suit us! - Bratot
  • Epirot
    Member
    • Mar 2010
    • 399

    #2
    Excellent stuff Bratot!

    I observed the same thing also at Gandeto's book 'Ancient Macedonians' that more than 19 "Greek" intellectuals, scholars and historians of XIX century did not grouped Macedonians as Hellenes. I ask if the same scholars have excluded also Epirotes from Greeks?
    IF OUR CHRONICLES DO NOT LIE, WE CALL OURSELVES AS EPIROTES!

    Comment

    • thessalo-niki
      Banned
      • Jun 2010
      • 191

      #3
      Originally posted by Epirot View Post
      I observed the same thing also at Gandeto's book 'Ancient Macedonians' that more than 19 "Greek" intellectuals, scholars and historians of XIX century did not grouped Macedonians as Hellenes. I ask if the same scholars have excluded also Epirotes from Greeks?
      That's interesting. Can anyone remind me the list of the 19 "Greeks"?

      _________________________________
      Odysseas Elytis - Our name is our soul

      Comment

      • Bratot
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2008
        • 2855

        #4
        Originally posted by thessalo-niki View Post
        That's interesting. Can anyone remind me the list of the 19 "Greeks"?

        _________________________________
        Odysseas Elytis - Our name is our soul

        Ok, lets start with these 14 first:






        Jakob Burckhardt:
        "Leider sind die Griechen, sobald sie nur schreiben konnten, ein Volk von Fälschern."

        -"Unfortunately the Greeks, soon as they only learned to write they become a nation of forgers"
        The purpose of the media is not to make you to think that the name must be changed, but to get you into debate - what name would suit us! - Bratot

        Comment

        • Bratot
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2008
          • 2855

          #5
          I kept the special part from this book for my dear deluded Greek friends:

          The context of the ‘1846 Lecture’ can help us to understand the problems regarding
          the writing of an all-encompassing Greek national history that Paparrigopoulos
          would not overcome until at least 1853, the year of the publication of his first, one volume,
          History of the Hellenic Nation. For in his earlier works, Paparrigopoulos had
          essentially distinguished between the history of the Byzantine state and the history
          of medieval Greece; he had then considered ancient Macedonians as a more or less
          distinct nation
          because as he wrote in his Textbook of General History in 1849, ‘the
          Macedonian nation accomplished, in the general history [of civilization], a different
          mission from that of the Hellenic nation’
          (Paparrigopoulos 1849–53, 1.193);

          Enjoy it!
          The purpose of the media is not to make you to think that the name must be changed, but to get you into debate - what name would suit us! - Bratot

          Comment

          • Pelister
            Senior Member
            • Sep 2008
            • 2742

            #6
            This is interesting. Thanks Bratot.

            "..production of a series of terms...".

            I've always been interested in 'how' the New Greeks write us out of the narrative, and write themselves in. The presupposition that Macedonia was a land of Greeks is false, nevertheless the New Greeks have managed to convince Others, mostly people in the West that it was a land of Greeks, who knew they were Macedonians, too. The only way they can construct this 'picture' is by directly engaging various rhetorical devices, bit of shorthand and other forms of interpretive mischief, such as a "Macedonian Hellene"...etc, even though no such entity ever existed throughout history.

            Comment

            • TrueMacedonian
              Senior Member
              • Jan 2009
              • 3810

              #7
              Here's something from the new AMHRC Autumn review;

              Hellenism and the Megali Idea

              What is Hellenism? One answer is obtained by focusing on certain policies of Greek governments throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. These policies seem in significant proportion to have been given ‘historical support’ sourced from some German Romantics in the nineteenth century. An old propaganda campaign which has its roots not in Greece, but Prussia, began back when a German named Johan Gustav Droysen wrote a three volume work titled Geshichte des Hellenismus (History of Hellenism) between 1833 and 1843.

              According to one of many scholars Droysen coined the term Hellenism (1) which was defined as an unbroken, unending, uninterrupted assimilatory culture that dated back from the ancient Hellenes to the present. The purpose of composing such a Romantic continuity myth was in significant part, undeniably political. The aim was to lay the foundations, on the basis of ‘historical precedent’, for a case in favour of the construction of a German national state via the sponsorship of the Prussian state-let. (2). Droysen offered an interpretation of ancient history in which he portrayed Hellenistic history as posing the problem of “freedom”, in a form relevant to his own time. The solution, in Droysen’s mind was clear, ‘re-unification’ of Germany (3). How would this be achieved and what would be the justification? Droysen would later reveal in more direct terms, that the power of the Prussian war machine should serve the purpose of‘re-unification’. The justification was found in a very romantic tracing back of German ‘roots’ to the 700’s and Charlemagne.

              Modern Greece became a recognized state in 1830 via the sponsorship of Europe’s Great Powers (who for their own reasons were dismembering the Ottoman Empire) and the various elite groups controlling the state, began searching for the glue that could hold together the construction of a cohesive modern mass society. The convenience of Droysen’s Hellenism was at first not apparent to the ethno-culturally diverse strata attempting to govern the new state. Indeed, Greece’s chief historian at this time, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, expressed the view that the ancient Macedonians were different from the ancient Hellenes (4).

              Eventually however, myths of the ‘Droysenian’ variety came to be implemented through the state education system. One version presents an essentialist history and culture that in an uninterrupted form stretches back 4000 years (5). Another became a vehicle for the Megali Idea or the Great Idea. This Megali Idea was nothing more than an attempt to justify the expansion of the new state on basis of irredentist ‘Droysenian’ myths. It was publicly proposed by the Vlach Prime Minister of Greece Ioannis Kolettis in 1844. Kolettis would go on to state in a speech well known to Greek historiography, that:

              The Kingdom of Greece is not Greece. It constitutes only one part, the smallest and the feeblest. The name Hellenes describes not only those who live in this kingdom, but also those who live in Jannina, in Thessaloniki, in Serres, in Adrianople, in Constantinople, in Trebizond, in Crete, in Samos, and in any territory associated with Hellenic history and the Hellenic race…..There are two prime cores of Hellenism: Athens, the capital of the Hellenic Kingdom, and the City (Constantinople), the vision and hope of all Hellenes.(6)

              A classic example of essentialist ethno-nationalistic romanticism, ignoring the ethnographic realities of the present and even baselessly dismissing historical perspectives that had been commonly held within Greece until the 1840’s. This speech marked the beginning of territorial claims upon Macedonia. Macedonia had not before been seriously considered as land to be “re-claimed” by the intelligentsia in the new Greek state. Furthermore, between 1794 – 1841, at least fourteen Greek revivalist intellectuals expressed the opinion that the ancient Macedonians were not part of the Greek world and that they should in fact be viewed as conquerors of ancient Greece (7). Notably, this perspective found traction in an attempt to foster unity between warring factions during the Greek War for independence, when the philhellene Lord Cochrane quoted a famous passage to the Albanian Klepht (bandit) leader Kolokotronis from the first Philipic “in which Demosthenes exhorts the Athenians to lay aside their differences and unite against Philip of Macedon.”(8) Another intellectual/politician who would end up becoming president of the Athens Archaeological Society stated in a speech on 25 May 1841:

              ……And a battle in Chaironeia took place, in which Philip won, destroying the Hellenic freedom. But Philip committed something even more disastrous, he fathered Alexander!(9)

              Adamantios Korais, the chief protagonist for, and inventor of, Katharevousa, a language invented for the purpose of filtering out Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, Arabic, and other foreign words ‘unclean’ for the neo-Hellenes, saw the period of Turkish rule as simply the lowest point in the downward path that the nation had followed ever since Greece had been conquered by the Macedonian king Philip II in the second half of the fourth century BCE(10).

              Eventually though, intellectuals like Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos would ‘catch on’ to ‘political requirements’ and begin to incorporate Droysen’s concept of Hellenism. Paparrigopoulos ignored a wealth of contrary historical and extant ethnographic evidence in order to create a historical narrative supporting the “unification” of the Hellenic nation that Kolettis had expressed a desire for (11). The same period that saw the rehabilitation of Byzantium in the Greek national narrative (1830’s to 1850’s) also saw ancient Macedonia fitted into the discourse of Greek national continuity; this move went hand in hand with the desire to incorporate modern Macedonia within Greek national territory(12).
              The state’s ideological machines were now ready to ‘educate’ the masses with the new ideology. Kolettis and his protégé Paparrigopoulos had begun the process of the Megali Idea. The implementation of this idea was destined to have costly consequences for the inhabitants of Macedonia.
               
              Ivan Hristovski

               

              Sources

              1 Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C., Peter Green (1992; 482-83). Green quotes one contemporary scholar who stated ‘Droysen’s conceptions were propounded so forcefully that they have conditioned virtually all subsequent scholarship on the subject’ (1992; 483).
              2 Droysen and the Prussian School of Thought, Robert Southard (1995; 1-2).
              3 Ibid (1995; 11-12).
              4 European historiographical influences upon the young Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, Ioannis Koulouris -The Making of Modern Greece; Edited by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks (2009; 59).
              5 Constantinos Paparrigopoulos: History of the Hellenic Nation, Vangelis Kechriotis - Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770-1945; Edited by Balazs Trencsenyi and Michal Kopecek (2007; 75).
              6 See The Vlachs, the History of a Balkan People, Tom Winnifrith (1987; 139). Winnifrith states that Kolettis was "a Vlach who dressed like a Turk and had been a court physician to Ali Pasha" and also Ioannis Kolettis: Of This Great Idea, Vangelis Kechriotis - Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770-1945; Edited by Balazs Trencsenyi and Michal Kopecek (2007; 246).
              7 Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy; The social origins of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, Victor Roudometof (2001; 102).
              8 That Greece Might Still Be Free; The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, William St. Clair (1972, 326).
              9 The nation and its ruins; Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece, Yannis Hamilakis (2007; 112). The speech was given by none other than I. Rizos Neurolos.
              10 See Inventing Greece, Peter Bien Journal of Modern Greek Studies - Volume 23, Number 2, October 2005, pp. 217-234. Bien further adds 'even katharevousa was produced not just for the Ottomanized Greeks, but also for Western philhellenes, as Koraes reveals when he confesses that his notes, "written in our common tongue, were ready for the printers when some friends of mine - philhellenes expert in our ancient but not our modern language - eventually persuaded me to Hellenize [my notes] so that they might be understood . . . by the scholars of Europe, who are ignorant of Modern Greek" (Bien 1972:51, citing Koraes 1833:41) and also see: A language in the image of the nation: Modern Greek and some parallel cases, Peter Mackridge - The Making of Modern Greece; Edited by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks (2009; 182).
              11 Language and National identity in Greece, Peter Mack ridge (2009; 182).
              12 Ibid (2009;182).
              Slayer Of The Modern "greek" Myth!!!

              Comment

              • Bratot
                Senior Member
                • Sep 2008
                • 2855

                #8
                I remember some Greek said:

                "Greece is the most artificial of all artificial nations that resulted from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire" ?

                The purpose of the media is not to make you to think that the name must be changed, but to get you into debate - what name would suit us! - Bratot

                Comment

                • Lügendetektor
                  Junior Member
                  • Jan 2010
                  • 35

                  #9
                  Originally posted by Bratot View Post
                  I remember some Greek said:

                  "Greece is the most artificial of all artificial nations that resulted from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire" ?

                  indeed, Yerasimos Kaklamanis

                  and to fill up the topic...with a u further greek quote:

                  "It is an illusion to think that ancient Macedonians were Greeks". Karagatsis - a Greek writer

                  Comment

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