1 - Waking the Dead-Greece as an Ideal and an Exemplar

Summary

The real Hellenism is more important to me than the entire Orient.

JULlUS WELLHAUSEN to Theodor Noldeke

Schone Welt, wo bist du? kehre wieder,

Holdes Bliitenalter der Natur!

Ach! nur in dem Feenland der Lieder

Lebt noch deine goldne Spur.

Ausgestorben trauert das Gefilde,

Keine Gottheit zeigt sich meinem Blick,

Ach! vonjenen lebenwarmen Bilde

Blieb nur das Gerippe mir zuriick.

FRIED RICH SCHILLER, ‘Die Gotter Griechenlandes“

o ye vain false gods of Hellas,

Ye are silent ever more!

Get to dust, as common mortals,

By a common doom and track!

Let no Schiller from the portals

Of that Hades, call you back …

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, 'The Dead Pan'

Das sind sie selber, die Gotter von Hellas,

Die einst so freudig die Welt beherrschten,

Dochjetzt, verdrangt und verstorben,

Als ungeheure Gespenster dahinziehn

Am mitternachdichen Himmel.

HEINRICH HEINE, ‘Die Gotter Griechenlands'

A new spirit arose in the land of Ashkenaz … This spirit was the

Greek spirit, which they aroused and clung to with all their might, for it

was a smiting rod for Catholicism and the spirit of polarity that their

priests spread throughout the land…

PERETZ SMOLENSKIN, ‘Et lata'at'

GREECE AND GREEKS AS SYMBOLS OF PERFECTION

WHY GREECE?

When asked why he went to the trouble of digging up inscriptions and coins, the first Renaissance archaeologist, Cyriac of Ancona (c. 139 I - I 450), replied: ‘To waken the dead.’ ‘Homines maxime homines’ (,men who are in the fullest sense men’) was how the younger Pliny described the Greeks of Greece proper (Epistulae, viii. 24. 2), and Cicero wrote with a devotee's admiration: ‘Athens, the source whence civilization, knowledge, religion, agriculture, justice, and law are thought to have sprung and spread into all lands’ (Pro Flacco, 62). Generations later this admirable land and those imaginary people of the distant past rose fom the dead to become a symbol of human and ‘almost godlike’ perfection. Greece was to wake from the dead and was seen not as a mother who had completed her task but as one who could still sustain and nurture her children's children as well.

Wake from the dead, yes, since even if the pagan gods were always alive in European culture during the Middle Ages, Europe of the Renaissance and after was fully aware of the historical distance which separated her from classical antiquity.