Guthenke - 2008 - Placing Modern Greece The Dynamics of Romantic He

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of
ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate
the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of
change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new.
Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory,
and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Placing Modern
Greece
The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism,
1770–1840
C O N S TA N Z E G ÜTHENKE
1
3
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Acknowledgments
This book is about the relationship between the ideal and the
materially real, and it has now travelled across four countries and
two continents. Eva HoVman, in her biographical essay Lost in
Translation, recounts how she was always considered bookish, but
how that made her, by her reckoning at least, always less of an idealist
and more of a literalist: she knew books were real.
Of the places and people who made this book real, my gratitude
goes Wrst to my academic advisers in England, who met my interests
with curiosity, tolerance, and a great deal of knowledge. In Cam-
bridge, at the very beginning, Nicholas Boyle, Simon Jarvis, and
David Holton let German aesthetics and Modern Greece meet. In
Oxford, David Constantine, Jim Reed, and Peter Mackridge gave me
encouragement and skills in generous measure, which I am pro-
foundly grateful for. Christopher Robinson and Jeremy Adler exam-
ined the D.Phil. out of which this book grew, and they pointed me in
the right directions. In 2002 I moved on to the New World, and back
to an old Weld. My colleagues in Princeton, both in Classics and in
Hellenic Studies, took in a wanderer and made sure I knew and know
myself at home and in a real place at every step. I hope they know
how much of a diVerence they have made to me.
Books also need real money. Without the Wnancial assistance of the
Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Studienstiftung des
Deutschen Volkes, the Alexander S. Onassis Public BeneWt Founda-
tion, and Oriel College, Oxford, the sojourns of this book would have
been nigh impossible. Grants from Princeton University and
the Stanley J. Seeger Fund for Hellenic Studies helped to see new
developments, changes, and revisions through, and a sabbatical
leave spent at King’s College, Cambridge, gave me both familiar
and new ground to stand on. Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 3
and 4 were published in the collection Cultural History and Literary
Imagination: German Literature, History, and the Nation, edited by
D. Midgley and Ch. Emden (Bern, 2002), and in the Journal of
Modern Greek Studies 21/2 (2003). I would like to thank Peter Lang
viii Acknowledgments
publishers and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to use
that material.
There have been readers too. Jim Porter oVered a critical eye and
his support when it was really wanted; Peter Brown knows the value
of thinking in terms of the shape of things; Dimitri Gondicas believed
in the shape. Hilary O’Shea and her staV at Oxford University Press
have been a treat to work with, and an anonymous reader for OUP
encouraged me to stake out territory more clearly.
Finally, my family and my friends have given me the love that
has sustained me throughout. The eighteenth-century Ottoman poet
Sü eyh Galip says it much better than I can: ‘Who comes from the city
of friendship wise j will know the true source of our merchandise.’
They know who they are, and how truly and superbly present they
are to me, even if some are far away.
Lastly, this book is dedicated to my grandmother. While she has
never been to Greece, or America, she has been a model for creating
realities in many other ways.
Contents
Note on Translations and Transliterations x
Introduction: Realizing the Ideal 1

1. The Form of Greek Landscape 20
2. ‘I love this land of Greece above all else. It has the colour
of my heart’: The Greek Landscape of the German Soul 44
3. Nature in Arms: German Philhellenism, its Literature,
and the Greek War of Independence 93
4. The Ambivalence of Nature: Poetry for the
New Greek State 140
5. Between Idyll and Abyss: The Greek Land, as seen
from the Ionian Islands 191
Epilogue 241
Bibliography 247
Index 271
Note on Translations and Transliterations
All translations from German and Greek texts (and the little French
and Italian there is) are mine, unless otherwise indicated. The trans-
lation from Sü eyh Galip’s Beauty and Truth quoted in the Acknow-
ledgments is from Victoria Holbrook’s edition of the work (New
York, 2005).
The transliteration of Greek is notoriously unstable ground: I have
used known English spelling for proper names and places where
available, and otherwise tried to be as consistent as possible.
Introduction
Realizing the Ideal
In a letter to his brother in January 1799, Friedrich Hölderlin resorts

to a bold, oddly strained metaphor that seems somewhat dislodged
from the auratic reverence he usually reserves for Greece: ‘I, too, with
all good intentions can only stumble behind those singular [Greek]
people in everything I do and say, and often I do it all the more
clumsily and out of tune, because I, like the geese, stand Xat-footed in
the waters of modernity, Xapping my powerless wings up towards the
Greek sky.’1 The modern individual and artist, aspiring toward
Greece, is grounded in a stagnant puddle. Hölderlin’s impotent
geese sit plumply against the famous Greek sky that Winckelmann
had turned into the pivot of Hellenism only a few decades earlier. The
metaphor may be as clumsy as the geese it describes; but the longing
it expresses is not only that of Hölderlin, nor is it an accident that he
should choose an image from the world of nature to describe the
relation of the modern writer to the land that stands in part, or in its
entirety, for Greek culture.
Even now, Hölderlin’s vision of Greece, like that of many of his
German contemporaries, is still often subsumed under the slogan of
the ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’: the term, from Eliza Butler’s
well-known 1935 book of that name, focuses on Hellenism as a
potentially dangerous idealism centred around the notion of Greek
1 ‘Auch ich mit allem guten Willen, tappe mit meinem Thun und Denken diesen
einzigen Menschen in der Welt nur nach, und bin in dem, was ich treibe und sage, oft
nur umso ungeschikter und ungereimter, weil ich, wie die Gänse mit platten Füßen
im modernen Wasser stehe, und unmächtig zum griechischen Himmel emporXügle.’
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. F. Beissner (Stuttgart, 1946– ), vi. 307.
2 Introduction
spirit, dangerous because it leads, or historically led, to a distorted
view of reality.2 Butler’s work, while often quoted, is seldom read in
detail these days, but her style betrays the fundamental part the
spatial imagination of Greece has played in European Hellenism. As
for the impact of Greece on German writers, and the high personal
cost this inXuence comes at, she complains that ‘the ideal ‘‘Hellas’’ of
their dreams had very little in common with either ancient or
modern Greece. None of them ever visited the country; . . . Had
they seen with their own eyes its wild, titanic landscapes and experi-
enced its sometimes menacing moods, they would perhaps have
recognized that tragic element in Greek poetry and thought which
they resolutely ignored and eliminated from their conception of the
golden age of Greece’ (pp. x–xi). While the dark, titanic, menacing
Greek reality probably owes more to her knowledge of Byron and the
visual arts than to a lack of German realism, she continues to present
the situation of German thinkers through an even more remarkable
vignette: with humankind like children marooned on a big island, so
she imagines, some are busy digging and building sandcastles, while
others are looking out across the waves. Those children on the edge
of the sea, for Butler, are the Germans, ‘taking the island as a symbol
for the world and the ocean for an unknown absolute power’;
because of this ‘dangerous idealism’, they Wnd themselves exposed
and ‘at the mercy of ideas’ (pp. 3–4). Actively subverting two images,
that of Odysseus taken hostage on the island of Calypso, and that of
Goethe’s Iphigenia, ‘das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend’
(‘seeking the land of the Greeks with my soul’), she stages her
Germans on a grotesque playground of the human condition, that
nonetheless is reminiscent of a Greek setting: the world of islands, the
deWning sea, a mild climate, and an unspoken assumption that the
environment is signiWcant in itself, as much as it lends itself to
Wgurative use.
2 Written in 1935, her study of the strongly canonical tradition of German

Hellenism was an appropriate and timely critique, laying bare the sinister link
between claims to cultural and political supremacy and an actual inversion of
freedom in their name. Important as it was, her analysis does not explain fully the
particular place which Greece, ancient or modern, occupied in the process and in the
practice of German literature.
Introduction 3
Since then, the pull, or tyranny, of Greek nature over representa-
tions of and writings on Greece has clearly not abated. The oYcial
information material of the Athens Olympic Committee, for ex-
ample, includes a section on the visual identity of the 2004 Summer
Games: the Wrst item mentioned is a colour-scheme designed to
reXect the natural colours of Greece: earthy tones, sea- and sky-
blue, a particular quality of light. But quite beyond the Olympics
and the visual culture of the tourism industry, the same observation
holds true: of the aspects of Hellenism and of the attributes of Greece,
the natural features of Greece are probably among the most unques-
tioned and those most resilient to critical re-examination. Although
the constructed character of space and place are by and large ac-
knowledged in recent critical approaches to landscape, mapping,
cultural geography and its literature, the use of nature imagery and
the expectations and mechanisms applying to this use have, espe-
cially when it comes to evaluating Romantic Hellenism, taken the
place of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘purloined letter’: they are the object
hidden in plain view.
This study, therefore, takes issue with one of the most lasting
features of Hellenism: its fascination with Greece’s materiality, not as
it opposes but as it is inseparable from its ideality. ‘Idealism’, as an
attitude towards Greece, I suggest, does not preclude attention to the
material aspects of the land of Greece; quite on the contrary, the sheer
placeness and ostensible presence has for a long time played a
functional part in imagining Greece and in seeing positive value in
that act of imagination. To suggest contact with the real as a powerful
corrective to the idealizing tendencies, as Butler implies for Germany,
is therefore beside the point. Not only are the Romantic and Idealist
attitudes she suspects not free from engagement with historical, pol-
itical, and geographical realities; but, more importantly, the materiality
against which modern Greece was and sometimes still is placed, is
actively part and parcel of what makes for its idealization in the Wrst
instance. There has been remarkable tenacity to single out Greece,
ancient or modern, for the enduring character of its natural features;
its particularity of place, at the same time, was and continues to be
thought extraordinarily suitable to embody universal concepts. One
such concept was that of freedom, or emancipation, and it was during
the heyday of European Hellenism in the eighteenth and nineteenth
4 Introduction
centuries that the place of Greece came to stand as a material symbol,
yet with a share of the unattainable that matched the dynamic work-
ings of the Romantic symbol.
Michael Herzfeld, writing on the workings of the external and
internal perception of contemporary Greece, talks of iconicity, or
‘persuasive resemblance’, as an underestimated factor in anthropo-
logical Weldwork and in anthropological theory alike; one of the
examples he uses is the resemblance between Greece, that is, the
Greek nation, and its nature, in other words, the seeming naturalness
of Greece and the argumentative force derived from it. Such a type of
iconic equation he treats as ‘one of the semiotic processes most
resistant to analysis, and a prime ‘‘back-grounder’’ of itself ’;3 that is
to say, the ‘naturalness’ that is one half of the equation feeds into the
unspoken assumption that further analysis is superXuous. What I
suggest in this present study, therefore, is an analysis in terms of the
enabling, and partly disabling, logic of aesthetic perception and
representation of nature, as landscape and physical environment, as
it was current from the late eighteenth century and as it was particu-
larly eVective with regard to representing Greece, both outside and
inside of what became the new Greek nation state.
While John Berger famously described landscape as ‘a way of seeing’,4
we ought to consider such a way of seeing also as a historically formed
category, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centur-
ies, at a time when Hellenism and the valuation of nature as a central
aesthetic and social term constantly merge and reXect each other. I am
interested in singling out the historical aesthetics, making the aesthetic
an important part of representation alongside historical, social, and
political factors, which is in line with its role at the time, and which also
accords with calls for considering representation as a historical factor.5
Given the recent interest in space and place as a category relevant to
Modern Greek Studies, my hope is that, beyond acknowledging the
workability, or attractiveness, of place as a fashionable category of
analysis now, it is possible and indeed desirable to explain the particu-
lar, and apparently still lasting, success of its imagery in the period in
3 Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State (London,
1996), 99.
4 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972).
5 e.g. by Luisa Passerini, ‘History and Semoitics’, Historein, 1 (1999), 11–36.
Introduction 5
question. This is a period where the seemingly simple statement that
nature is natural is often made, yet nature is precisely not ever meant to
be ‘simply’ natural; in fact it is highly ambiguously so. It is the sig-
niWcance and the relative instability of nature, coupled with the prom-
ise and value it was aVorded, that also makes it functional in the
framework of Hellenism.
The argument I put forward about aesthetic representation of
Greece is, broadly speaking, the following: the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, a key period of attention to Greece an-
cient and modern across Europe, are, as is well known, preoccupied
with the complex, estranged relation of man (or, by extension, artist,
scholar, or society) vis-à-vis nature. Such estrangement from nature
Wnds a parallel feeling of separation from the past. At the same time
both kinds of estrangement are understood to be conditions of
modernity and of its possibilities to express itself. Greece, as a
material, physical, present place, is the intersection of those trends
and discourses; it is a place where questions about unity can be
articulated: whether unity is understood in a political sense, that of
temporal continuity, that of subjectivity, or that of representation.
Materiality infused with meaning becomes the lens through which
Greece is viewed, while nature imagery is prominently used to
include the spectator in the act of observation. The result is an
authority of nature that has reverberations and consequences to
this day. At the same time, it is an authority that demands distance
and that ‘runs’, so to speak, on the ambivalence of that nature. Like a
visually ambiguous Wgure, it can foreground disunity or disillusion-
ment as much as correspondence or continuity, progress as much as
violent onrush. Hölderlin’s Xapping is powered by the same practice of
perception as the pronouncement by the Greek poet A. R. Rangavis
in 1867, that ‘[the Greek’s] nationality is a spring of exhaustless waters;
it may run concealed under mountains of oppression, as certain rivers
of his own country disappear for miles beneath the surface, to
break forth at last, as they do, with undiminished force and freshness.
If these waters be pent up, they will inevitably overXow their banks,
and deluge the land which they would otherwise fructify and
adorn.’6 Romantic aesthetics develops with great energy and a sense
6 A. R. Rangavis, Greece: Her Progress and Present Position (New York, 1867), 156.
6 Introduction
of motion the questions that arise from modernity and its palpable
eVects. The attachment to material places or persons, however, that
encourages self-reXection in the Wrst place, is both ordering and
destabilizing. If we look closely at this practice of perception, it
becomes clear that the encounter with the land of Greece is not only
expressed through, but conditioned by the trajectory of realizing or
materializing the ideal. What is more, this is an undertaking that in
Romantic aesthetics is fundamentally related to the dynamic of the
symbol. As a place full of material remnants of its cultural past, and
occupying a territory that was (politically and historically) not yet
Wxed, Greece was ostensibly blessed with a natural environment that
was thought essential to its historical character. It was past and present,
and yet it was incomplete. As a material metaphor it was meaningful,
and, being particular, it pointed beyond itself to the universal. This, in
turn, is a structure shared with the main preoccupations of Romanti-
cism and its forms of representation.
In the Wrst chapter, I will treat more fully this enabling form of
Hellenism and the crucial part representation of Greek nature plays
in it—Hellenism understood as an umbrella term that includes the
valuation of, especially ancient, Greek culture; political and cultural
Philhellenism, that is, the external support of modern Greece as an
independent national and cultural entity, and neo-Hellenism, that is,
the valuation of modern Greece from outside and from within.
Before doing that, I would like to situate and justify my approach
and its scope more clearly within the critical study of landscape in
literature and literary representations.
In Welds as diverse as literature, cultural and historical studies, art
history, geography, anthropology, and archaeology there is wide
agreement now that landscape is both selective and relative to an
observer and hence to be interpreted as such.7 Landscape, so the
7 e.g. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford, 1999); Barbara
Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Providence, RI, 1993); C. S. Bour-
assa, The Aesthetics of Landscape (London, 1991); Daniel Cosgrove, Social Formation
and Symbolic Landscape (Cambridge, 1984; 2nd rev. edn., Madison, Wisc., 1998); id.
and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic
Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge, 1988); Chris Fitter,
Poetry, Space, Landscape (Cambridge, 1995); Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon
(eds.), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford,
1995); along similar lines, Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places,
Introduction 7
consensus has it, represents a section of the natural world perceived
according to certain human patterns, intentions, and discourses, and in
turn responding to them. In other words, the critiquing of representa-
tion, and its particular link to materiality and spatiality as an organizing
experience, has arrived in disciplines studying hitherto ‘hard’ realities,
and has made their ways of seeing as much subject to critique and
analysis as speciWcally literary or artistic representations already are.8
Given the interdependence of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’,9 landscape is
just as much part of that process where both concepts, as constructs,
mutually shape and transform each other. As a sign system indicative
of social organization and processes, landscape is even best under-
stood as a process itself,10 involved in the shaping of individual or
social identity and its power relations.11 Theories of biological deter-
minism and habitat have, since the 1970s,12 been modiWed in favour
of analysing the epistemological frameworks that account for our
‘cognitive mappings’,13 and the cultural-historical conditions in
Paths and Monuments (Oxford, 1994); more literary, Joseph Hillis Miller, Topograph-
ies (Stanford, 1995); rich in material, although somewhat impressionistic, is Simon
Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1996). For a summary of approaches, see
Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (London, 1998), esp. 212–70; for a summary
of literary studies, Barbara Korte, ‘Sehweisen literarischer Landschaft. Ein Literatur-
bericht’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 44/3 (1994), 255–65.
8 Sara Blair, ‘Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary’, American Literary
History, 10/3 (1998), 544–67.
9 ‘Culture is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English
language, and the term which is sometimes considered to be its opposite—nature—is
commonly accorded the accolade of being the most complex of all;’ Terry Eagleton,
The Idea of Culture (Oxford, 2000), 1, with reference to Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of
Nature’, in J. Benthall (ed.), Ecology, the Shaping Enquiry (London, 1972), 147–64.
10 Eric Hirsch, ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in Hirsch and O’Hanlon,
Anthopology of Landscape, 1–30, 22 f.
11 e.g. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, 1994); Martin
Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Europe (London, 1994). G. Rose,
Feminism and Geography (Cambridge, 1993), similarly approaches the interpretation
of speciWc landscapes through an investigation of the social power structures and the
relation of culture and society at work in each case, drawing on theoretical tenets of a
Marxist-humanist tradition.
12 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London, 1975; 2nd, rev. edn., 1996)
and The Poetry of Habitat (Hull, 1978).
13 On cognitive mapping, see T. McNamara, ‘Mental Representation of Spatial
Relations’, Cognitive Psychology, 18 (1986), 87–121; R. M. Kitchin, ‘Cognitive Maps:
What Are They and Why Study Them?’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 14
(1994), 1–19.
8 Introduction
which representations of landscape are produced. It was in those
Welds that the study of place received new critical impetus, mainly
from a shared interest in the ‘articulation of space as a social product,
one that masks the conditions of its own formation’:14 the result was
a new wave of cultural geography, drawing on Marxist cultural
critique, French (post-)structuralism, English political economy,
post-colonial theory, and insights from sociology, urban studies,
and cultural studies, while art history contributed the concept of
iconography, that is, the theoretical and historical study of pictorial
symbols, and the focus on landscape as a ‘way of seeing’.15 Cosgrove
and Daniels, for example, developed the notion of landscape as a
‘cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or sym-
bolizing surroundings’.16 The present study, though not concerned
with visual representations of Greece and a speciWcally art-historical
approach,17 relies to no lesser degree on the contextual interpretation
of the symbolic imagery as a hermeneutic principle. The notion of
the symbolic value or function, however, is not self-explanatory,18
and it is most certainly not so within the all-out reXective context of
Romanticism. We need to question the changing meaning of what a
‘symbolic relation’ is in the Wrst place, so as to evaluate the semantic
range of a particular landscape and the ways it is historically repre-
sented. Recent work on ‘ethno-symbolism’ as a method of studying
nationalism and its forms of representation, likewise, is a good step
forward, but it does not usually ask or explain what the expectations
connected with the possibility of symbolic representation actually are
14 Blair, ‘Cultural Geography’, 544.

15 Cosgrove popularized the expression for landscape research in his seminal study
on the public paintings of Early Modern Italian city-states, Social Formation and
Symbolic Landscape (1984). The phrase is originally that of Erwin Panofsky, reused by
Berger, whose emphasis on social and economic factors shaping the perception of
landscape as ideological, is shared by Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(London, 1973).
16 ‘Introduction: Iconography and Landscape’, in Cosgrove and Daniels, Iconography, 2.
17 As done, for example, in Christoph H. Heilmann, and Erika Rödiger-Diruf
(eds.), Landschaft als Geschichte: Carl Rottmann 1797–1850, Hofmaler König Ludwig I,
(Munich, 1998); Richard Stoneman, A Luminous Land: Artists Discover Greece (Los
Angeles, 1998); Fani-Maria Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers and Paint-
ers of the Romantic Era (London, 1981).
18 Cosgrove hints as much in the introduction to the second, revised edition of
Social Formation (1998).
Introduction 9
at any given time.19 When attention is directed to the verbal repre-
sentations of landscape, the concepts of image and symbol should
themselves be part of the context that is under scrutiny. The notion
of a symbolic relation, even if the constructed character of space is
duly stressed, is still often used in too unquestioning a way: a
symbolic relation, like metaphor, does not simply equal the corres-
pondence of signiWer and signiWed; rather, it tends to imply the more
complex relation of parts to wholes. Interestingly, it is recent work on
the language of archaeology that seems to be most aware of this
aspect of symbolic place, and it is an eVect that goes well with a more
general retraining of the scholarly eye on landscape as both material
and Wgurative.20 In the wake of the critical rediscovery of the con-
struction, ideologically or cognitively, of many ‘objective’ realities,
notes of warning have also been sounded not to underestimate the
resistance, or ‘weight’, which the material world, despite its malleable
‘thingness’, quite literally exerts.21 Post-modern ‘culturalism’, so the
cautioning goes, cannot evade material reality and the experience of
nature by claiming that, as a concept, nature is cultural.22 The
growing Weld of ‘ecocriticism’ in literary criticism, which studies
the representation of nature as a factor shaping human attitudes to
the environment and their direct impact on it, is one area that has
particularly insisted on instilling the study of (almost exclusively
British) Romanticism again with a sense of the importance of ma-
terial nature, and of the relative and generative ‘strangeness’ of the
natural world inherent in Idealism.23
19 e.g. as presented in A. D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cam-

bridge, 2001); or the contributions in Nations and Nationalism 10/1–2 (2004).
20 e.g. Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999); Rose-
mary Joyce, The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative and Writing (Oxford,
2002).
21 A discussion comparable to that about the place and ‘weight’ of material nature
is that of the role of the body in gender studies; see, with admirable clarity, Toril Moi,
‘What is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body in Feminist Theory’, in What is a
Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford, 1999), 3–120.
22 e.g. Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford, 1995); Kenneth Olwig, ‘Recovering
the Substantive Meaning of Landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geog-
raphers, 86/4 (1996), 630–53.
23 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and
the Formation of American Culture (Boston, 1995); The Future of Environmental
Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, Mass., 2005).
10 Introduction
The aim of this study, then, is to heed and combine two of the
avenues suggested by recent work on landscape. Looking at the speciWc
aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism from within means to reintegrate the
generative aspect of materiality into an investigation of Idealist and
Romantic artistic representation; a notion of perception and represen-
tation, moreover, that fundamentally builds on the mutual construct-
ive inXuence of the subject and the phenomenal world, which studies
of landscape have so recently (re-)discovered. Within Modern Greek
Studies, too, place and space have become concepts of critical leverage.
Artemis Leontis, for example, in her innovative study of mainly late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek writing on Greek place, relies
on precepts of post-modern geography to recapture space as a category
of constant reinvestment, and to make space visible above or against
history.24 While the recent critical fashion for placeness has itself come
under justiWed criticism for its evasion of history, for trying to revert
the prioritizing of temporality over spatiality, thereby replacing one
ideology with another,25 the representation of Greece is a particularly
interesting case: here, place has taken up a very speciWc position across
time, in the sense of providing a crucial and signiWcant environment
for what is considered essential about Greece, especially with regard to
its history or historicity. The frisson of an unchanging space (horizon-
tal, stable) in relation to history (vertical, changing), both aVecting
each other and making each other visible, has been part of the logic of
Hellenism since the eighteenth century.
The materiality of Greece, as an indicator of the past, and the
subsequent question of its territorial reality especially around and
after 1821, rendered verbal and literary representations of the Greek
land appropriately expressive of the tension between real and ideal;26
24 Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca, NY,

1995).
25 Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca,
NY, 2000).
26 If I mention only verbal representations, it is not because the same pattern
would not also apply to visual representations. I simply restrict myself here to the
literary sphere, as I feel that the analysis of visual images would require a diVerent set
of categories and tools of interpretation. For the fact that this tension is not only
fundamental to Romanticism but has particular purchase in the history of what is
considered ‘classical’, see James Porter, ‘The Materiality of Classical Studies’, Parallax,
9/4 (2003), 64–74.
Introduction 11
Greece is not merely an ideal as an ‘ab-sense’, to use Vangelis Calo-
tychos’s recent term, or a somewhat empty transcendence.27 Quite on
the contrary, the thrill of materiality, speciWc to its historical period
and its aesthetic preoccupations and assumptions, keeps the pre-
occupation going and infuses Greece with meaning. Pace Caloty-
chos’s pun, Greece ‘matters’ enormously.28
A few more words are necessary here on the terminology and
understanding of Hellenism and Romanticism respectively. Jennifer
Wallace, in her reconsideration of the Romantic Hellenism of Shelley,
has made a good case for the structural interdependence of classical and
modern Greece in respect of their literary and political perception.29
For that same reason, I here use the term Hellenism, as mentioned
above, as a shorthand to include the positive investment of ancient
Greece as a cultural system, the political Philhellenism of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and the imagination of modern Greece, or
neo-Hellenism, both outside and within Greece. This is not meant to
suggest that modern Greece has to be viewed, inevitably, through the
lens of antiquity; instead, it suggests that representations of contem-
porary Greece, and critical approaches to it, have owed (and still owe)
much to the structural position that suspends Greece between its own
antiquity and any given observer’s modernity.
While classical Hellenism denoted a cultural deWnition of the self,
based on the positive evaluation of Greek antiquity and its ideals of
beauty and freedom in their relevance for modernity, historical
Philhellenism, as an extension, included the concern with ‘returning’
such positive evaluation to the modern-day Greeks in support of
their political, national, and cultural emancipation. There was, how-
ever, a strong interplay of both phenomena, across Europe and
especially so in Germany, coming to a head around 1821. This is
not the place to consider Hellenism through the phenomenon of
hellenizing or classicizing literature, that is, as deWned by the literary
staging of classical artistic forms or motives or ancient settings.
Hellenism, rather than Classicism, could become the paradigm of a
certain ‘applied’ modernity that was able or willing to integrate in
27 Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Oxford, 2004).

28 Ibid. 32.
29 Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basing-
stoke, 1997).
12 Introduction
new forms what it considered its deWning past (not excluding the
allure of ancient models). Aesthetic and political (Phil-)Hellenisms
were equally concerned with issues of autonomy, which means that
the manifestations of political Philhellenism were strongly coloured
by the position in which aesthetic Hellenism had come to hold the
land of Greece for observation. Chapter 3 will look at the eVects of
political Philhellenism upon literary production, still shaped by the
images of a modern Greek landscape that had been part of Hellenism
before the events of 1821. Here, too, Germany is a particularly
instructive case. ‘Germany’ itself is a shorthand, as the German
nation state proper did not come into existence before 1871, which
makes the confrontation with a new Greek nation state all the more
pronounced, seeing that the dynamic of Hellenism banked on the
versatility, or ambivalence, of the organicist language it employed.
The ‘naturalness’ of Greek culture, ancient and modern, promised
translation and threatened instability alike, to the extent that natural
development could include degeneration as much as progress and
assimilation.
The classical Hellenism of Germany, although particularly strong,
was not an isolated phenomenon in the European context, nor was it
restricted to a rareWed intellectual pursuit. Its eVects and its trans-
formation into institutionalized forms were particularly strong and
long-lasting, even if it is imperative to remember the oppositional,
emancipatory direction of a small in-group it Wrst possessed. As
Suzanne Marchand diagnoses it,
the development of Germany’s national self-identiWcation with the Greeks,
precisely in its explicit rejection of the culture of Augustan ‘neo-classicism’,
did create a new complex of ideas and ambitions. The singling out of Greece
and its rhetorical elevation above Rome were distinctly the product of late
Enlightenment social and political conditions, and the extraordinary group
of inXuential intellectuals who shaped this fetish cast a long shadow over
German cultural developments in the two centuries to follow.30
For this overall small ‘extraordinary’ circle of intellectuals in the late
eighteenth century, classical scholarship and humanist Bildung as a
means of self-transformation oVered a twist to the old canon of
30 Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in

Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996), 4.
Introduction 13
subjects. While it did not change the reliance on state employment
for the learned professions, there began all the same its move toward
institutional establishment. The promise of cultural identity
bestowed by a shared Hellenism could give that group, faced with
an undeWned role in a quickly diVerentiating social system, an edge:
in terms of individual or group identiWcation, this was an edge in an
environment where the place of the intellectual was disputed; in
terms of national identity, it was also the edge over the neighbours,
particularly France.31 With the increasing establishment of the edu-
cational ideas of the neo-humanists, most prominently in the re-
structuring of the school curriculum and the foundation of the
University of Berlin in 1809 under Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bildung
(meaning Hellenic Bildung) was set on its successful course to be-
come a characteristic of the educated middle classes. And yet, the
marginal, precarious position of the intellectual lingered on (not
least in the self-perception of the Romantics), fuelled by their atten-
tion to the modern subject position in philosophy, aesthetics, and
political thought. It is this forceful sense of novelty, of revisiting the
meaning and workings of nature, self, knowledge, art, or history, that
had a centre in German thought of the late eighteenth century. With
the reception of German thought by the English Romantics, or the
wave of translations and adaptations of Goethe’s Werther across
Europe a decade earlier, there was an eVect far beyond the conWnes
of the country that did in fact not yet exist as a uniWed nation. When
Terry Pinkard states that ‘from its inception, [idealist philosophy]
was controversial, always hard to understand and almost always
described as German’, he points to an important factor that is valid
also for the notion of Hellenism and Philhellenism.32 Even if the
enthusiasm for Greece seems less forbidding and more popular than
Idealist thought, the bias Pinkard describes attaches itself to German
31 On the genesis of the intellectual and writer within the cultural nation, see
Bernhard Giesen, Intellectuals and the German Nation: Collective Identity in an Axial
Age (Cambridge, 1998), 80–102; on classical scholarship more fully Marchand, Down
from Olympus, 1–74; Ingo Gildenhard, ‘Philologia perennis? Classical Scholarship and
Functional DiVerentiation’, in id. and Martin Rühl (eds.), Out of Arcadia: Classics and
Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz (London,
2003), 161–204.
32 Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cam-
bridge, 2002), 2.
14 Introduction
Grecophilia too, which seems to this day respectfully invoked as
easily as it is knowingly looked down upon.
The question whether German Idealist thought is easily subsumed
under German or, for that matter, European Romanticism is another
question. For the purposes of the present study I am factually doing
that for the following reasons. The concerns expressed in German
philosophical aesthetics laid the basis for those of Romanticism and
its eVect on Hellenism, as I will show in Chapter 1. Moreover, even if
the tendencies of later eighteenth-century writing can justiWably be
divided into strands such as those of Storm and Stress (Sturm und
Drang) or Sentimentality (EmpWndsamkeit), I agree with Virgil
Nemoianu’s deWnition that such ‘pre-romantic’ elements are ‘best
understood as a series of accretions, of complementary or opposing
features grafted onto the predominant eighteenth-century model even
while modifying it’.33 The same goes for late Romanticism as a re-
assessment and modiWcation of the elements of Romantic aesthetics.
What seems most important to me though is that those strands,
which certainly deserve diVerentiation, were ascribed to ‘German
Romanticism’ from outside Germany early on and with lasting
consequences. Paradigmatic is the example of Mme de Staël’s De
l’Allemagne (1810/13) and the eVect her account (considered ‘un-
French’ by her censors) had on various literary scenes (England,
France, Italy, Greece) in their perception of ‘canonical’ Romantic
works.34 To be named, Romanticism needed to be communicated.
The dynamics of communication are the fabric of Romanticism. If
the world is conWgured as a magniWcent cipher or chiVre, a secret
language (as Novalis would have it; see Chapters 1 and 5), it is
communication that aims to make this chiVre, this writing of the
map visible. The parallel and mutually convertible realms of exterior
and interior match that: the journey towards the interior delights in
and despairs over the same logic as journeying on the outside. At the
33 Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age
of Biedermeier (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 23.
34 John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propa-
ganda in Staël’s ‘De l’Allemagne’, 1810–1813 (Cambridge, 1994); Lilian Furst, ‘Mme
de Staël’s De L’Allemagne: A Misleading Intermediary’, in The Contours of European
Romanticism (London, 1979), 56–73; on the prehistory of Staël’s version of Germany,
David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago,
1993), 84–103.
Introduction 15
same time, the nature of images and the relations implied is the very
content of Romanticism. The image as a manifestation of something
beyond itself is one of its main concerns, and it is deliberate that the
boundaries between image and actual object, as much as the bound-
aries between the natural and the supernatural, life and art, exterior
and interior, are Xuid ones. Yet Romanticism is fundamentally pro-
pelled by reXection. The desire of pinpointing, of realizing and
grounding a new reality, is balanced by the reXective act that Wlls
manifestations with extensive, excessive meaning, that creates desire,
and that renders its fulWlment inWnitely deferred.
The fact that Hellenism and Romanticism are so often, and often
uncritically, paired together is not only a question of historiography.
What both have in common is their programmatic self-understand-
ing as movements, making movement one of their constitutive
elements. Romanticism was preoccupied with the perplexing ques-
tion of unity, and it crystallized as a concept, across Europe, through
mutual observation and description, as much as by self-deWnition. In
the process, the claim to the transgressing and unifying potential of
Romantic production became a condition for staking out national
and individual variance. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century is a period of increased nationalization, but also one of
awareness and examination of how those individual units are linked.
The grand theme of unity and disunity (which reappears as a core
theme of political Philhellenism), and of relative dependence, is
therefore not just played out on the political stage, but is essential
to the preoccupation of the two movements with their own structure.
Ostensibly universal, yet deWned through particularity, Romanti-
cism and Hellenism are based on relations. And again, nature imagery
has a prominent part in visualizing their momentum. How this is
prominent in the language responding to the Greek War of Independ-
ence I will show especially in Chapter 3. Fortunately, Romanticism,
like its nature and landscapes, is these days studied as deliberately
universal and connective, but also programmatically insisting on par-
ticular, national or individual manifestations.35 I therefore suggest to
35 e.g. Gregory Maertz (ed.), Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical
Essays in Comparative Literature (Albany, NY, 1998); Angela Esterhammer (ed.),
Romantic Poetry (Amsterdam, 2002); Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics,
Literature, Theory (Chicago, 2003).
16 Introduction
do the same with Hellenism, and to begin by looking at the case
of (modern) Greece, where the relation both to Hellenism and to
Romanticism is a prominent and contentious issue throughout the
nineteenth century. How is Romantic Hellenism received in Greece?
What does it mean to inhabit the excessively meaningful reference
point of Hellenism and to write from and about it? One consequence is
the strong ambivalence towards Greek landscape that emerges from
the writings of the early nation-state period, an ambivalence that is
maybe also directed towards the project of modernity as a whole.
Artemis Leontis and Stathis Gourgouris have each recently argued
for an understanding of Hellenism as a project, and a topographical
one at that, in which the site of Greece has to be produced.36 To enlist
authors challenged to write from within that place of Greece allows not
only a new take on the problematic imagery of Greece, but it also gives
a new dimension to the study of Hellenism as a trans-national move-
ment whose assumptions and structural tensions repay attention.
How to measure and conceptualize that interaction then, espe-
cially when bearing in mind the persistent notion, suggested and
agonized over in Greek writing, of an inXuencing Romanticism?
Goethe had his own characteristically curt answer to the puzzle of
inXuence and movement: ‘The all-in-all foolishness of pre- and post-
occupations, of plagiarisms and half-quotations seems to me so clear
and yet so triXing. If something is in the air and if the time asks for it,
the same can originate in a hundred heads at once without anyone
having to borrow from anyone else.’37 Responsiveness to ‘something
in the air’ is exactly part of the imagery that I am out to catch. We are
dealing with a time suVused and saturated with nature imagery,
which is indeed ‘in the air’, although I am far from claiming Goethe’s
imagery as a suYcient model to explain the literary tendencies and
appropriations of Romantic aesthetic patterns. What needs to be
done is to take such programmatic statements seriously, insofar as
36 Leontis, Topographies; Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Col-

onization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996).
37 ‘Die sämtlichen Narrheiten von Prä- und Postokkupationen, von Plagiaten und
Halbentwendungen sind mir so klar und erscheinen mir läppisch. Denn was in der
Luft ist und was die Zeit fordert, das kann in hundert Köpfen auf einmal entspringen,
ohne daß einer dem andern abborgt.’ Letter to Zelter, 7 Nov. 1816; Sämtliche Werke,
35 (Frankfurt, 1999), 58.
Introduction 17
they reveal strategies of self-positioning, backgrounding their struc-
tural assumptions.
It has certainly been recognized that Greek responses to European
discursive models, be they literary, political, or institutional, were not
smooth; in the chapter on Athenian Romanticism I will comment on
older scholarly evaluations of such transfers that have operated in
terms of derivation and imitation. While rebarbative reception has,
in the meantime, been reread as resistance, with a view to the
diVerent function those imports fulWl, ‘resistance’ leaves a broad
range of meaning. Who or what does the resisting? Jusdanis rightly
speaks of the imported models of national literary culture, and of
literature as an institution, that do not function like their European
counterparts, and that ‘are resisted’:38 but what to make of that
passive voice here? Are they deliberately resisted by individual
Greek writers? Or is there, more likely in the case he makes, a
resistance, or obstruction, caused by the framework of the resisted
model, too? Shannan Peckham has examined such resistance in
terms of the instability of the nation as a category open to constant
reworkings, ‘emphasizing nationalism’s internal tensions and . . . the
often discordant political visions that it contains’.39 By looking at the
aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism in relation to representing land-
scape and physical surroundings, I hope to show that unstable
categories do not only have social-political signiWcance, aVecting
among other things the institutions of literary practice and produc-
tion, but that the European, Romantic representation of the Greek
land aVects the relative stability (or instability) of the very imagery
with which the literature of the new state operated—and which still
has purchase in images of contemporary Greece now. Representa-
tions of Greece by way of its characteristic nature and environment
are the point of communication between Greece and Europe.
Whether it is successful communication, however, depends on how
38 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National

Literature (Minneapolis, 1991), p. xii; in The Necessary Nation (Princeton, 2001),
Jusdanis integrates an account of the Greek rebarbative perceptions of belatedness
and progress into a larger critical defence of nationalism as a necessary force of
modernization.
39 Robert S. Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the
Politics of Place in Greece (London and New York, 2001), p. x.
18 Introduction
we evaluate how much, or how little, the structure of representing
Greece makes possible its own translation.
In preview, then, what are the elements that make up the matrix for
the imagination of Greek nature? SpeciWc localities, often ancient,
function as symbolic markers; the description of general climatic and
geographical conditions that are given explanatory force in the inter-
pretation of cultural development and aesthetic experience; lastly
Greek landscape, determined by temporality yet indicating continuity
(as a form of unity), able to reXect and shape the disposition of the
artist per se and in relation to society. From here two aspects of
the relation between landscape and its ‘recipients’ evolve: the percep-
tion and description of speciWc landscape has implications for the
author and artist, while the landscape is also considered proper to its
Greek inhabitants who are invested with a particular aYnity to their
natural environment. On the one hand, this second aspect accounts for
descriptions of supporting nature as acting in accordance with its
inhabitants, a central feature in the poetry surrounding the Greek
War of Independence; on the other hand this implies an image of
Greek poetry, rooted within that natural environment, as an immedi-
ate and free response to nature. In practice, this ostensibly close link
between the Greeks and their natural environment falls out in the
appropriation of modes of folk literature both outside and in Greece.
As a consequence, in Greek writing, certainly of the Wrst decade after
the achievement of independence, there is much less emphasis on the
references to classical antiquity, even while the theme of revival and
regeneration is essential. To this end a reservoir of imagery is in use,
partly familiar from European philhellenic and Romantic writing, that
elaborates the Romantic correspondence of the individual and his
particular (Greek) environment and that inevitably results in ambigu-
ity. The use of some of the philhellenic motives by writers of the Wrst
decade of Greek statehood (such as Alexandros Rizos Rangavis or
Panagiotis Soutsos) is complex, but they, too, cannot avoid the neces-
sary split into a Greek antiquity and a European modernity, which
leaves Greece in a limbo, trying to stake a claim to both sides. A writer
like Dionysios Solomos, on the other hand, while silent on classical
antiquity, ostensibly treats of speciWc Greek localities; but he does so by
relying on an interpretation of the Romantic symbol that seems to
render the representation of the Greek land impossible altogether.
Introduction 19
The aim of this study is not simply to investigate the aesthetic
representation of nature; but to examine a particular historical situ-
ation when nature, aesthetics, and writing about Greece come together
to make modern Greece highly functional within Romantic represen-
tation. It is also to show the boundaries and, by way of those bound-
aries, the workings of Romantic representation (and representation of
Romantic writing) when it comes to the translation of Romantic
images of Greece to Greek writing itself, taking shape in the new
state. In that sense, Greek Romanticism can stand as a corrective to
the inherent dynamics of Romanticism, as it shows the structural place
of Greece within that system, through the problematic relationship
which Greek intellectuals had with Greek geography.
With such an approach, we may be able to go beyond explanatory
models of nostalgia or common idealism or ‘tyranny’, whether as a
model for German Hellenism, or for the transformation of European
literary and cultural trends in Greece. Instead, I believe the issue of
how to attach the ideal to a speciWc place can be the key to the
discourses on antiquity, modernity, emancipation, subjectivity, and
art, as they combined in literary representations of Greece, in the
sense of explaining why they formed such a powerful mesh and how
they also became hostage (if one wants to stay with the imagery of
tyranny and freedom) to the logic that linked those strands. My hope
is to end up with a more complex view on Hellenism that is at the
same time able to explain some of its recurring features better than as
arising out of habit, a somewhat elusive ‘Germanness’ or a very
generally deWned Romanticism, which is still often invoked to denote
idealization of a more or less detrimental degree. The trope of
attraction by and disillusionment with Greece, which I am sure
often translated into real experience too, is structurally keyed to the
mode of imagining and representing Greece as a place. The vision of
Greece, Idealist rather than ideal, cannot function without the pull of
materiality. When Greece, in the nineteenth century, becomes char-
acterized by its meaningful material nature, its tyranny, in conse-
quence, could not be but fragile. It was, after all, Hölderlin’s waters of
modernity, reXecting the Greek sky, that were keeping the geese
grounded, rather than the towering sky overwhelming them.
1
The Form of Greek Landscape
Nature, Klingsohr replied, is to our feeling mind what a body is to

the light. It absorbs it; it reXects it in peculiar colours.
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen
When, in the spring of 1821, uprisings across the part of the Ottoman
Empire hitherto known as ‘Turkey in Europe’ sent ripples of sym-
pathy across the Western world, provoking calls for the liberation of
Greece, the light of Hellenism had indeed come to hit on an indub-
itably material bulk. The expanse of Greek territory, all of a sudden,
appeared potential and fact alike, producing peculiar colours before
the minds of its observers. With the insurrections of the Greek
Orthodox population in 1821 the body of Greece, its material extent,
moved to the foreground. A cause and an object for reXection it had
been already, but now, by its physical presence and promise, it
acquired an extra weight that demanded response.
One of the initial questions guiding this study was whether the
advent of Greece as a territorial, and eventually political, entity, a
decidedly modern, present Greece, wrought a change in the repre-
sentation of modern Greece as a topos of Hellenism in the decades
before 1821. What this study argues is that we see an intensiWcation
of aesthetic vocabulary, which owes its form and dynamic structure
to idealist Romanticism that invested images of nature, and of Greek
nature in particular, with authority and with a particular propensity
to signify freedom and emancipation of the self; a gain, however, that
is of necessity interlocked with alienation from this material ‘body’.
To stay with Novalis’s image, liberating potential is inscribed in the
body of Greek nature, which then throws the light back onto the
viewer.
The Form of Greek Landscape 21
The body of Greece had, until then, largely been made up of
the manifestations of what was considered classical civilization, in
other words the bulk of its works of art, material or textual. This by
no means excluded attention to the physical aspects of Greece,
ancient or modern. Travel to Greece, that is, the acquaintance with
its geographical and natural conditions, had been on the increase
throughout the eighteenth century, although not everywhere in equal
measure (on which see more in Chapter 2 below). By the end of that
century, the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’, the intellectual
controversy that had dominated discussions on the nature of imita-
tion, especially in France and Germany, for nearly a hundred years
after Charles Perrault’s treatise of that name, had factually come to a
conclusion: against the normative standing of classical forms and art
works, the position of the ‘moderns’ had prevailed; its basis was the
historicizing argument that ancient and modern art belonged in the
Wrst instance to their respective proper spheres.1 Despite the military
metaphor and the ardency of the debate, the victory did not so much
imply a disregard for ancient models, as a shift in their claims
to absoluteness. Released from their function as exclusive models,
the manifestations of Greek nature and culture could now shine in
a new, even authoritative, light of distance. The attention to the
material remains of Greece and to its natural features further under-
lined the play with proximity and distance that had outlasted
the Querelle, which left in its wake a newly smouldering question:
not only whether imitation of ancient models was desirable but
whether such a bridging of a historical and necessary gap was actually
possible. Novalis’s quotation points the way to the key artistic con-
cerns of the time that framed the image of Greece: for one, the
intense attention to the task of representing reality and to the artistic
process itself, vis-à-vis nature. Nature is understood to reXect feeling
and to provoke reXection, a reXective moment that is relevant to
artistic perception as much as to rational and historical understand-
ing. These related strands of individuality, modernity, and nature, I
will argue in this chapter, converge particularly strongly on the place
of Greece, which, within Romantic logic, would relate to its ancient
1 Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et
les sciences, ed. and introd. H.-R. Jauss (Munich, 1964).
22 The Form of Greek Landscape
past as represented nature relates to its pre-modern experience.
ReXection is bought at the cost of distance from nature, and Greece,
while encouraging reXection and modernity, is at the same
time distinguished by its elusive promise of reality, presence, and
naturalness.
In other words, it is the very presence, or the expectation of
modern Greece as a physically speciWc and yet highly signiWcant
location that gives it the structural position it has in Romantic
Hellenism. Hellenism, as it is understood in this study, relies on
including in its horizon a modern, contemporaneous Greece, to
uphold the structure of this horizon, and it is thrilled by the very
fact of its materiality. The aim is to explain this Romantic Hellenism
from within, to unravel the grammar of its language, and to look at
the representations of Greece, which are themselves historically con-
structed and aesthetically functional in a very speciWc way. The
repertoire of Hellenism is not exhausted with reference to the famil-
iar monuments. Consequently, this is not a study about the fascin-
ation with ancient works of art and the classical sites. Nor is it a study
concentrating on the inevitably constructed (and in many ways
constructive) character of mapping. For these Welds there are insight-
ful studies.2 On a spatial scale, the present study inhabits a middle
ground: that of the ‘surrounding’ nature, the highly signiWcant en-
vironment of the artefacts, the physical and aesthetic landscapes that
Wll out the map, and that are thought to reveal the privileged
relationship of Greece to its nature, a relationship that carries inter-
pretive authority and political legitimacy alike. In other words, the
following analyses of contemporary Greece represented are less about
reaYrming space and place as an inevitable and desirable category in
Modern Greek Studies, than they are about investigating historically
speciWc ways of cognitive mapping, and the structural position given
to Greek place within them.
Some time in the mid-eighteenth century landscape becomes a
powerful item in the aesthetic vocabulary, even if this is not the
‘original’ point of landscape experience, but rather a late stage of its
2 On the rediscovery of classical sites, e.g. Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece; on

mapping, Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism.
much longer epistemic history.3 The perceived link between the
visible and the invisible, in other words, material reality pointing
beyond itself, is nothing new: it can be found in antiquity, and there
is a long tradition of postulating an ideational aspect behind the
reality of the objective world (as, for example, in the pastoral mode
and its prehistory). Similarly, nature has been given anthropo-
morphic attributes from the earliest descriptions onward (be it in
Homeric epic, the biblical psalms, or the ancient Near Eastern trad-
ition). In fact, personiWcation has probably been one of the most
frequently employed metaphorical strategies in the description of
landscape, or physical environment, altogether.4 In addition, nature
has been perceived as good or bad, congenial or threatening, in a
succession of predominant patterns of thought.5 What changes in the
modern period? ‘At some point in the beginning of the seventeenth
century’, Barbara StaVord suggests, ‘a profound conviction was co-
herently voiced that something really is out there and that art and
language were to be used to get beyond imitation . . . in order to
grapple with real things. This conscious rejection of certain estab-
lished mental constructions became part of the larger Enlightenment
struggle to avoid the conventionality of verbal and visual languages
in pursuit of an unmediated nature.’6 Along similar lines, images of
the individual in relation to their environment, natural or social, are
part of what Norbert Elias famously called the (long-drawn-out)
‘civilizing process’: the modern era of deWning reality increasingly
3 Cosgrove, Social Formation, for example, centres his seminal study of social
formation and symbolic landscape around Renaissance Italy; I also follow Ruth
Groh in her claim that although the paradigmatic shift in the aesthetic perception
of nature is located in the late eighteenth century, this turning-point is part of an
(aesthetic) perception of nature according to alternating criteria which existed
already in pre-modern societies (Ruth and Dieter Groh, Weltbild und Natura-
neignung: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur I (Frankfurt/M., 1996), ch. 2); see also
Kenneth Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance
to America’s New World (Madison, Wisc., 2002).
4 Petra Raymond, Von der Landschaft im Kopf zur Landschaft aus Sprache: die
Romantisierung der Alpen in den Reiseschilderungen und die Literarisierung des
Gebirges in der Erzählprosa der Goethezeit (Tübingen, 1993), 260 V.
5 Ruth and Dieter Groh, Die Außenwelt der Innenwelt: Zur Kulturgeschichte der
Natur II (Frankfurt/M., 1996), 96–107.
6 B. StaVord, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel
Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 1.
in terms of individual experience.7 By the same token, as soon as an
act of reXection is the basis of viewing immediate nature, that
immediacy, while still exerting a pull, recedes. Landscape itself be-
longs to the vocabulary of that European artistic debate, which at
least for a while favored natural beauty, albeit in the form of artistic
representation, over artistic beauty derived from the imitation of
ancient models. Originating from the medieval term indicating a
region or territory in general, and often used in an administrative
context, landscape came to denote a ‘viewed section of nature’,
synonymous with the artistic representation of a region or a section
of it, in particular the landscape painting.8 By the mid-eighteenth
century the term was established, and by the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century it was part of the language of the educated classes.
As a consequence, the terms of landscape and nature would not only
signify the artwork or an abstract concept, but would apply equally to
its physical external referent.9
Greece, in turn, was then becoming a privileged topos of freedom to
the same extent and with the same complexity that the concept of
nature had been changing to a ‘term denoting emancipation’.10 As
opposed to the variety of meanings nature could take on until the
seventeenth century, each meaning clearly deWned by opposing nature
to something else (e.g. grace or free will), nature becomes increasingly
and explicitly reviewed as a free-standing term during the eighteenth
century. This is contemporary with the growing historicizing of man
in relation to nature. Emancipation is now understood as denoting
either a return to a natural state or, alternatively, a progressive over-
coming of it. ‘Nature’ becomes an essentially ambivalent concept,
part of a dialectic where emancipation is, in Robert Spaemann’s
words, ‘the (natural) emancipation from nature towards nature’.11
7 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (Basel, 1939).

8 Rainer Gruenter, ‘Landschaft: Bemerkungen zur Wort- und Bedeutungs-
geschichte’, in A. Ritter (ed.), Landschaft und Raum in der Erzählkunst (Darmstadt,
1975), 192–207.
9 Kenneth Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual
Interstices of Nature and Culture, or: What does Landscape Really Mean?’, in Bender,
Landscape, 319.
10 Robert Spaemann, ‘Genetisches zum NaturbegriV des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv
für BegriVsgeschichte, 11/1 (1967), 59–74.
11 Spaemann, ‘Genetisches’, 62.
Through the awareness of being separate from nature, the sign system
of nature opens up to be read. While nature can denote the physical,
material world, in the tradition, still strongly felt, of empiricism, the
new concept is also accompanied by the attention that accumulated
around the Weld of aesthetic theory, that is to say, around the link
between sense perception, the imagination, beauty, and morality.12
Like freedom, nature becomes one of the terms discussed in its
moral, aesthetic, political, and material dimensions, and, crucially,
often several of these aspects are evoked together, reinforcing and
challenging each other’s elasticity.
T H E VA LU E O F G R E E C E
We can now begin to see, returning to Novalis’s dictum, what was

particular about the light that fell on Greece, and its reXection. Who
watched Greece, and why? What distinguishes Greece from other
‘historical’ landscapes, from England, Italy, or Germany itself? For
one, there is the peak of artistic, political, and natural harmony that
Greece was thought to have reached in its classical past. One such
‘classic’ instance of this inXuential view is, of course, the historicizing
account of ancient art oVered by Winckelmann: ‘Regarding the
constitution and government of Greece, it is liberty that is the most
noble reason of its superiority in art. Liberty had always held her seat
in this country, even near the throne of kings—whose rule was
paternal—before the increasing light of reason had let its inhabitants
taste the sweetness of complete freedom.’13 Not insigniWcantly,
Winckelmann goes on to describe the quality of freedom in a pleth-
ora of nature images built over a series of spatial metaphors:
12 Alexander Baumgarten, in his Aesthetica (1750), was the Wrst to use Ästhetik as a
term not merely pertaining to the senses or sense perception, but to refer to the
criticism of taste, a theory of free arts, and the notion of beauty. For the ‘success’ of
the term and its instant dissipation see e.g. Hans Reiss, ‘The ‘‘Naturalization’’ of the
term ‘‘Ästhetik’’ in Eighteenth-century German: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and
His Impact’, Modern Language Review, 89/3 (1994), 645–58.
13 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Schriften und Nachlaß, iv,
ed. M. Kunze (Mainz, 2002), bk. iv, p. 18.
The thinking of the entire people, like a noble branch rising from a healthy
stock, was elevated with freedom; just as the mind of a man accustomed to
reXection usually rises higher on an open plain (im freien Felde), on the open
road or on the top of a building, rather than in a cramped chamber and in
any conWned space; so, also, the manner of thinking among the Greeks must
have been very diVerent from that of other nations living under domina-
tion. . . . The same freedom which gave birth to great events, political
changes, and jealousy among the Greeks, planted, as it were, in that same
act the seeds of noble and elevated sentiments; just as the sight of the
boundless expanse of the sea, and the crashing of noble waves against the
rocky shore broadens our view and lifts the mind above lesser matters, so it
was impossible to think ignoble thoughts in the present of such great deeds
and men. The Greeks in their heyday were thinking beings.14
That imagery constructs a space where above and beyond the line of
organic growth there is opened a second, higher trajectory of cultured
and intellectual advance (just as a man-made building rises above the
plain ground), arising from reXection of that vista and resulting in
liberty; it is peculiar to the Greeks and yet open-ended (planting the
seeds) beyond their own decline (political changes and jealousy), and
just so Greece itself can be perceived as the manifestation of a spiritual
ideal that is historically superseded yet relevant for modernity (includ-
ing that of Germany). History is re-imagined in complex spatial terms,
in a framework that devotes ample room, quite literally, to nature,
landscape, and environment both as a cause and as a means of
its representation. The tension of viewing antiquity both as gone
and as a model, or catalyst, of regeneration is a paradox that has
been part of the positive view of antiquity at least since the Renais-
sance.15 What distinguishes the late eighteenth century is that this
pattern is becoming a focus of anxiety, a cornerstone of philosophical
speculation and a cross-current of the language and imagery of what
it means to speak about nature and its authority. A split had
also emerged in the perception of classical antiquity, meaning a
stronger emphasis than before on the distinction between Greece
and Rome. As is well known, that diVerentiation went hand in hand
14 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, iv. 19.

15 See e.g. Gregor Vogt-Spira, ‘Warum Vergil statt Homer? Der frühneuzeitliche
Vorzugsstreit zwischen Homer und Vergil im Spannungsfeld von Autorität und
Historisierung’, Poetica, 34/3–4 (2002), 323–44.
with a new polarization, cultural and geographical, in which Germany
identiWed strongly with a purely Greek and, so the assumption went,
more purely spiritual and ‘idealizing’ heritage, whereas the French
were professing a strong aYnity, not least political, with the Roman
tradition of republic and, later, empire. With a change of this kind
intertwining with the issue of artistic representation, questions of
cultural allegiance were coupled with the issue of national identity
(itself another item that, like the aesthetic, formally inhabited a prob-
lematic middle ground: that between the individual and humankind).
Winckelmann’s initial plea for the imitation of Greek art, in
Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and
Sculpture (Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in
der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 1756), was able, it would appear, to
exert its seminal inXuence over the following decades because it had
the potential to connect in the image and material of classical Greece
emerging theories of historical progress, of a national spirit, and the
related concept of the cultivation or Bildung of the individual.16
Compared to his History of Ancient Art (Geschichte der Kunst des
Altertums), which appeared eight years later in 1764, Winckelmann’s
Gedanken was the manifesto that enjoyed a truly enthusiastic reception
and proved to be the more popular of the two by far. And yet, the early
plea for imitation of the ideal of beauty expressed in Greek art, Wrst
formed under the Greek sky, already spells out the ambivalence at the
core of Winckelmann’s inXuential postulate. Greece is portrayed as a
historically and environmentally deWned unit—Greek antiquity in this
period usually implying the period of Athenian supremacy between
the Persian wars and its gradual decline until the defeat to Macedonian
hegemony and the time of Alexander the Great, that is, from the early
Wfth to the fourth century bc. The Greek ideal or spirit, though, is an
entity transcending historical restriction: it can be newly re-created
16 For the European prehistory and afterlife of Winckelmann’s position, see Norbert
Miller, ‘Europäischer Philhellenismus zwischen Winckelmann und Byron’, in Propyläen
Geschichte der Literatur, iv, ed. Erika Wischer (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 315–66; also the
collections J. J. Winckelmann, 1717–1768, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Hamburg, 1986)
and Griechenland als Ideal. Winckelmann und seine Rezeption in Deutschland, ed. Ludwig
Uhlig (Tübingen, 1988). On the national aspect, Renate Stauf, ‘Germanenmythos und
Griechenmythos als nationale Identitätsmythen bei Möser und Winckelmann’, in Ar-
minius und die Varusschlacht: Geschichte-Mythos-Literatur, ed. Rainer Wiegels and
Winfried Woesler (Paderborn, 1995), 309–26.
today. Still, the temporary acme of Greek artistic production (in Wfth-
century Athens) is thought to depend upon the singular coincidence of
environmental and socio-political factors: artistic beauty can be
achieved as an all-encompassing way of life, since it is couched in the
moral and political freedom granted by a republican constitution. In
this sense Winckelmann’s writings certainly constitute ‘the moment at
which history, culture, modernity, and the political life of a nation are
Wrst articulated in relation to each other’.17 Nearly a decade later, the
Geschichte der Kunst treads far more carefully, not only charting the
decline of the Greek spirit but also the failure to imitate and revive that
same spirit in later periods. Winckelmann’s doubts regarding the
possibility of imitation, and his strong sense of Greek antiquity as a
Wnite past, failed to provoke the same echo as his earlier optimistic
revivalism, without, however, being able to suppress in the long run
the seeds of disillusionment already implied in his earlier account. The
deWning feature of the search for continuity in the case of Greece is also
its strong sense of a rift: the claim to continuity is counterbalanced by
the insight that the Greek ideal is of necessity superseded.
The primacy put on historicity and its recognition increases the
value of continuity, which is in turn framed (or, at times, unhinged)
by the notion of progress. Greece not only clearly had a history, but
one that seemed to exemplify the momentous, perfect balance of
human reason and beautiful self-realization, if Winckelmann was to
be believed. Bildung, itself a programme of self-transformation or
self-direction (note the dynamic metaphor), aligned itself smoothly
with the study or understanding of antiquity. Bildung or cultivation
of the human individual through and towards the comprehensive
employment of reason had been a key concern already since the early
Enlightenment and it continued to be developed as a central issue;
human reason is understood to perceive historicity and make sense
of history; history, in turn, conforms and bears witness to the
development of human reason.18 Another of the great ‘visualizers’
of this new historicism, like Winckelmann, is Herder, who speaks of
history as ‘an animated geography of times and peoples’.19 For
17 David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, 2000), 18.
18 On the historicizing of reason, e.g. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of
History (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 3.
19 ‘Von der Annehmlichkeit, Nützlichkeit und Notwendigkeit der Geographie’,
Sämmtliche Werke (SWS), ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin, 1877–1913), xxx. 102.
Herder in particular, discussing the experience of history, an under-
standing of the past is possible because of the organic and analogous
relationship between the natural and the human worlds, both of
which can be analysed by a shared set of natural or ostensibly
scientiWc laws.20 In this unifying relation of the part to the whole,
the present can discern itself in relation to the past, as the object and
in the act of historical consciousness. The act of recognizing histor-
ical processes and progress mirrors the positive development of the
subject. The study of a historical epoch has an implied positive value;
hence, to chart cultural continuity between the positively valued
ancient culture and the contemporary bearers of this heritage be-
comes a desirable act per se.21
Charting the history of mankind means charting Bildung as it
manifests itself in individual epochs, under the relevant geographical
and climatic inXuences and with regard to individual nations and
societies. In Herder’s accounts on the philosophy of history, Ideas on
the Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784) and his earlier This, too, a Philoso-
phy of History for the Formation of Man (Auch eine Philosophie der
Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 1774), Greece is the cultural
stage analogous to the age of maturing youth. Yet Herder is adamant,
like Winckelmann before him, that Greece is also one of the prime
examples of a culture or nation containing the entire circle of Bil-
dung, its growth, maturity, and decline, in its history, enabling the
reader to comprehend and thus advance the progress of history.22
20 See H. B. Nisbet, Herder and ScientiWc Thought (Cambridge, 1970) or id.,
‘Goethes und Herders Geschichtsdenken’, in Goethe-Jahrbuch, 110 (1993), 115–33.
21 Herder’s historical thought is crucial, not only because of its paradigmatic
character for the period, but also for the impact it would continue to have, together
with his often too-sweepingly generalized views on national language and national
diVerence, across Europe, particularly so on the incipient nationalisms of eastern and
south-eastern Europe, even if his inXuence became more strongly felt only from the
mid-nineteenth century on. Herder’s work was introduced into Greek letters in 1816,
when the literary journal Ermis o Logios (printed in Vienna) published an excerpt
from his ‘Nemesis’; but it was only with the historiographical writings of the mid-
and late-nineteenth century that increased notice was taken of his work. See K. Th.
Dimaras, ‘ˇ J. G. Herder ŒÆØ ÆæıÆ ı ØÆ æ ø ı ººØŒ
Æ’, in ˝ ººØŒ ˜ØÆ øØ (Athens, 1977), 283–99.
22 Herder makes use of the full etymological range of the term; Rudolf Vierhaus,
‘Bildung’, in Otto Brunner et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche GrundbegriVe: historisches Lexikon
zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972–97), i. 508–51; also,
The material remains of Greece detectable today, even if by necessity
only fragmentary, are not indicators of an impending revival, but
provide the material links that render Greece’s past credible and save
it from the fate of a dream landscape and literary artiWce:
Take a look at Greece now; you will not Wnd the ancient Greeks any more,
nor their land. Were it not for the traces of their language which they still
speak, were it not for the ruins of their mentality which you can still see, or
of their art, their cities, or at least their ancient rivers and mountains, you
would be made to believe that ancient Greece was presented to you as a
Wction, an island of Calypso or of Alcinous.23
It is because of the material fragments of Greek thought, art, archi-
tecture, and nature that Greece can be positioned and understood. At
the same time the insight that those fragments are precisely that—
fragments—is part of the process of historical understanding which
in turn advances the process and progress of individual development
and perfection. Overall, Greece is thus always marked by an element
of the irrecoverable inscribed in it. A lost completeness predestines it
as ultimately ‘contemporary’, in the sense of an inevitable alienation
from nature, which distinguishes modernity. Schiller formulates this
same sense in his evocative dichotomy between the naive and the
sentimental both as categories of experience and modes of artistic
expression: it is natural scenes and landscapes that can produce the
longing for a lost natural state, which embodies the modern senti-
mental and moral stance, as he posits it in the opening lines of his
essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795):
There are moments in our lives when we dedicate a kind of love and tender
respect to nature in plants, minerals, animals and landscapes, as well as to
human nature in children, in the customs of country folk, and to the primitive
world . . . simply because it is nature . . . . They are what we were; they are what
Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Zur anthropologischen und semantischen Struktur der Bildung’,

in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1985–92), ii, ed. Reinhard
Koselleck, 11–46.
23 ‘Betrachtet Griechenland jetzt; ihr Wndet die alten Griechen, ja oft ihr Land nicht
mehr. Sprächen sie nicht noch einen Rest ihrer Sprache, sähet ihr nicht noch Trümmer
ihrer Denkart, ihrer Kunst, ihrer Städte, oder wenigstens ihrer alten Flüsse und Berge;
so müßtet ihr glauben, das alte Griechenland sei euch als eine Insel der Kalypso oder
des Alcinous vorgedichtet worden.’ Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,
bk. 13, in Werke, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt/M., 1989), vi. 568.
we should once again become. We were nature just as they, and our culture, by
means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature.24
Landscape and nature, as soon as we actively attribute a naive charac-
ter to them, that is, make them an object of our observation, are in fact
already a modern cultural phenomenon, and that insight has the
potential to guide modernity onwards to a return to nature on a
higher, synthesized level. Yet even if Schiller applies naive and senti-
mental as tendencies on a sliding scale that can reappear in any period
or writer, the naive relation to nature is for him still more intact in the
time (and Wgure) of Homer.25 Likewise, the writers of antiquity are not
unqualiWedly naive. Euripides to him is representative of a shift to a
feeling for nature, rather than a natural feeling, similar to the one that
characterizes the modern French fashion for the ‘natural’ shortly
before Schiller writes. By the same token, our necessarily modern
experience of seeking nature out of a sense of displacement from it is
analogous to our attitude towards the ancients altogether:
[s]ince, then, the Greek had not lost nature in his humanity, he could not be
surprised by her outside it either and thus feel a pressing need for objects in
which he might Wnd her again. . . . whereas we, not at one with ourselves and
unhappy in our experience of mankind, possess no more urgent need than
to escape from it and cast from our view so unsuccessful a form.
The feeling of which we here speak is therefore not that which the ancients
possessed; it is rather identical with that which we have for the ancients.26
24 ‘Es gibt Augenblicke in unserm Leben, wo wir der Natur in PXanzen, Mineralen,
Tieren, Landschaften, sowie der menschlichen Natur in Kindern, in den Sitten des
Landvolks und der Urwelt . . . bloß weil sie Natur ist, eine Art von Liebe und von
rührender Achtung widmen. . . . Sie sind was wir waren; sie sind, was wir wieder
werden sollen. Wir waren Natur wie sie, und unsere Kultur soll uns, auf dem Wege
der Vernunft und der Freiheit, zur Natur zurückführen.’ ‘Über naive und sentimen-
talische Dichtung’, in Werke: Nationalausgabe, xx (Weimar, 1962), 413. I am in the
following quoting from the English translation by Elias, in German Aesthetics and
Literary Criticism, vol. 3, ed. Barry Nisbet (Cambridge, 1985), 179–230.
25 Ibid. 431 (tr. Elias, p. 190).
26 ‘da also der Grieche die Natur in der Menschheit nicht verloren hatte, so konnte er,
ausserhalb dieser, auch nicht von ihr überrascht werden, und so kein dringendes Bedürfnis
nach Gegenständen haben, in denen er sie wiederfand. . . . wenn wir, uneinig mit uns
selbst, und unglücklich in unsern Erfahrungen von Menschheit, kein dringenderes Inter-
esse haben, als aus derselben herauszuXiehen, und eine so mislungene Form aus unsern
Augen zu rücken. Das Gefühl, von dem hier die Rede ist, ist also nicht das, was die Alten
hatten; es ist vielmehr einerlei mit demjenigen, welches wir für die Alten haben.’ Ibid. 431.
Our feeling towards nature stands in the same relation as our feeling
towards the ancients, according both the place of a sought-after
object. A landscape such as that of modern Greece, which contains
to a certain extent the traces and conditions of these past times, is
thus especially suited to induce (and in turn mirror) reXection in its
observer and the artist representing it, and in the period under
consideration here the potential of the Greek landscape to aVect
and develop the consciousness of its viewer can become its predom-
inant function. The ‘Greek cause’ was thus essentially always the
cause of the spectator.
RO MANTIC LANDSCAPES AND ROMANTIC SYMB OLS
These features of Greece, I suggest, bear great resemblance to the

characteristics and function of nature imagery as it is developed in
Romantic writing and thinking. Let me Wrst of all attempt to outline
how its nature and nature imagery could be said to be signiWcant. Let
me explain also how, with the advent of Kantian philosophy on the
European scene, the question of subjectivity vis-à-vis nature was
rearranged around a new axis; Romanticism, in engagement with
that rearrangement, lets us arrive at the ‘Romantic landscape’, usually
taken to mean nature as the ‘objective correlative’ of a speaking or
writing subject, and at its twin feature, the Romantic symbol. Both of
these are regularly mentioned in reference to Hellenism and descrip-
tions of Greece, yet without suYcient attention to the way they
correlate all too well with (and in turn generate) what are thought
to be the distinctive features of Greece: its historical antiquity, its
fragmented reality, and its naturalness.
How do we arrive at the Romantic character of landscapes? Georg
Simmel claimed that: ‘To view a piece of land and everything on it as
landscape means to view only a section of nature as a unity—which is
an alienating step away from the notion of nature.’27 Although
Simmel’s sociological interest is in the alienation of modern society
27 Georg Simmel, ‘Philosophie der Landschaft’, in Brücke und Tür: Essays des
Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst, und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1957), 142.
and social processes in the early twentieth century, the precariousness
of this alienation is already keenly felt a century earlier. Take, for
example, Schiller’s plea for a programme of aesthetic education. He
approaches the dualism of nature (the phenomenal world) and
freedom (the realm of ideas and reason) by isolating the subjective
reXexive moment as the initial moment of recognizing the gap as well
as the Wrst step toward overcoming it. For him, the experience and
representation of ordered nature can reveal freedom, just like any
moral action:
As long as man, in that Wrst physical state, is merely a passive recipient of the
world of sense, i.e. does no more than feel, he is still completely One with that
world; . . . Only when, at the aesthetic stage, he puts it outside himself, or
contemplates it, does his personality diVerentiate itself from it . . . Contemplation
(or reXection) is the Wrst liberal relation which man establishes with the universe
around him.28
He too calls for the combination of the seemingly incompatible
elements of sensuousness and rationality in the experience of the
beautiful, that is, in his terms, through an act of aesthetic education.
Although man must exist in a sensual world, ‘there can,’ he says, ‘in a
single word, no longer be any question of how he is to pass from
Beauty to Truth, since the latter is potentially contained in the
former, but only a question of how he is to clear a way for himself
from common reality to aesthetic reality’.29
If ‘Romantic’ is usually taken to imply a surpassing and modiWcation
of reality, it is instructive to look at the function of Romantic landscape
imagery in terms of the relation between reality and the ideal, a relation
essentially predicated on that between subject and object and the way
they constitute or produce reality. Freedom indicates the possibility of
diVerence from a determining nature. This is the concern, for example,
also of Kant’s critical attempt to relate nature (the phenomenal world of
the senses) and freedom (the world of reason, intellect, and morality),
especially so in his analysis of aesthetic judgements in the Critique of
Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). What is so crucial about his
account is the still indispensable role that the material continues to play
28 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen’ (1795), in

Werke, xx. 394 (25th letter).
29 Ibid. 398.
when it comes to judgements of taste, beauty, and value. Given the
reliance of most Romantic thought on the Kantian precedent, one way
or another, this establishes a Wrm legacy for the necessity to have a
material ground for what is ideal, especially when it comes to viewing
nature. As opposed to earlier empiricist positions on the matter of taste
and beauty, Kant upgrades and relocates aesthetic judgements to the
space between (universal) reason and nature, that is, senses, as its
opposite. He links his analysis of aesthetic judgements or judgements
of taste with that of cognitive judgements or judgements of under-
standing (which, too, occupy a middle ground: that between under-
standing and reason) (bk. 2, para. 23). What both types of judgement
share, by analogy, is that they can mediate between the universal and
the particular, either subsuming the particular under the universal or
reXecting on it. Their ‘territory’ (ibid.), in Kant’s wording, lies between
the phenomenal and the ideal, just as nature imagery will continue to
operate between the metaphorical and the material. Such judgements,
even if their structuring principle has no proper Weld of objects as its
territory, may have a ground with a certain appropriate character.
The complex nature of the term ‘nature’ becomes obvious again if
we consider that for Kant it can denote both the opposite of reason
and morality and the phenomenal world from which he almost exclu-
sively takes his examples of the beautiful and the sublime. When we
judge something as beautiful, according to Kant, it is because of a
disinterested and purposeless judgement, wherein also lies its freedom.
Moreover, it bespeaks the free interplay of the faculties of reason and
imagination that engage to achieve such judgement. Freedom is iden-
tiWed not by its empirical component, but, in its function, by its
spiritual and moral independence, as freedom is related to the condi-
tions of cognition. In short, individual freedom is furthered in the act
of cognition and the employment of reason. Kant’s focus on the
cognitive processes of the subject lets him postulate a formal analogy
between acts of reasoned cognition and acts of aesthetic perception
and aesthetic judgement. In Frances Ferguson’s words: ‘Our pleasure
in nature and our scientiWc knowledge of it are alike important for
identifying not reality but reality production.’30 Clearly, we then Wnd
30 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of
Individuation (Baltimore, 1992), 11.
repeated the link between aesthetics and autonomy. It is Kant’s
contention that art, that is, the aesthetic, bridges the ‘great abyss’
(another spatial, even picturesque, metaphor!) between freedom
and nature, between the super-sensible and the phenomenal worlds.31
In formal terms, this is a little like Wolfgang Iser’s deWnition of the
Wctive, as that which gives substance to the ideal while transcending
the real.32 What is more, freedom, as a rational idea, can only be
represented in a symbolic, aesthetic fashion, by an investment in the
beautiful, which Kant captures in the phrase of ‘beauty as a symbol of
morality’.33
Even if Kant appears to show little interest in the beauty of artistic
objects or, for that matter, in the threat of language failing represen-
tation, his account was absolutely seminal for Romanticism, not only
in Germany. This exposition of Kant’s view on aesthetic judgement
and practice has hopefully shown how necessarily symbolic represen-
tation of what is foundational for our subjectivity (i.e. ideas such as
freedom) is a pattern that characterizes our aesthetic relation with the
world, especially vis-à-vis nature and beautiful nature. His aesthetics
holds a middle ground in a network of tightly spun analogies, redeWn-
ing beauty and aesthetic judgement as functionally new and import-
ant. And just as Kant relies on examples from nature to gain insights
into the structure (and its analogues) of representation, so this study
proposes to look at nature imagery of Greece as a topos of freedom
likewise for its enabling qualities: the aim is to explain the persistence
and structural dynamic of that imagery. It is precisely this identiWca-
tion of a formal process and the necessary role given to representation
31 Kant, introduction to Critique of Judgement, sec. ix.

32 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology
(Baltimore, 1993), 3 f.
33 Critique of Judgement, sec. 59. He in fact operates here with two concepts of
freedom: moral freedom as a concept of pure reason (Vernunftidee) and, taken
functionally, the free interplay of the faculties of reason and imagination. It is by
virtue of this second sense that this free play of the faculties constituting aesthetic
judgements can serve as a symbol of moral freedom. Just as an empirical concept can
be (re)presented through an example, and intellectual concepts through what Kant
calls a schema, concepts of pure reason, such as freedom, have no adequate form of
presentation: the necessarily indirect route is through the symbol. Beauty, in the sense
of a beautiful object, can be just such a symbol of the idea of freedom. By the same
token, and by another analogy, artistic beauty symbolizes, or represents, an aesthetic
idea that cannot otherwise be rendered intelligible.
that provides such a useful tool for reading the imagery of Hellenism
from within, as it highlights the ‘match’ between the attributes of
Greek nature and the workings of its imagery as representation.
The inXuence of Kant’s account of beauty has been enormous,
‘partly because of its ability to mean everything to everyone’34—and
it maybe is no coincidence that the scope of Kant’s account of beauty
sounds not so diVerent from Schlegel’s pronouncement on antiquity,
that ‘everyone so far has been able to Wnd in the ancients what they
needed or wanted: especially themselves’.35 The post-Kantian under-
taking, in any case, arises from a growing unease with the neat
dualism on which Kant had based his aesthetics. Schiller, as we saw,
approached the dualism of nature and freedom calling for a practice
of aesthetic education. This attitude points the way towards assum-
ing a progressively aesthetic way to view and produce reality and an
increasingly central position of the autonomous work of art. The
problem of the embodiment of the abstract, of course, remains,
precisely in the question of the representation of the ideal and of
whether there are images of real objects and places, which can
adequately capture the ideas behind them. Images of nature continue
to be given a crucial position in these deliberations. ‘There are two
ways’, according to Schiller, ‘in which inanimate nature can become a
symbol of human nature: as representation of sensation or as repre-
sentation of ideas’:36 quite apart from stressing the symbolic value of
material nature, it is worth pointing out, this comment also betrays
the level of attention he, like Kant, grants to nature and natural
beauty in the Wrst place.37
Images of the natural world, therefore, signify: they express ideas.
The sign system of nature can be read, while emancipation rests in
the awareness of the correspondence between the natural world and
its reader that enables him to do so.38 The result is a striving towards
34 Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford, 1995), 92.

35 Athenaeum Fragments, no. 151.
36 ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’ (1794), in Werke, xxii. 265–83.
37 See also Sheila Maria Benn, Pre-Romantic Attitudes to Landscape in the Writings
of Friedrich Schiller (New York, 1991), who undertakes to re-evaluate Schiller’s alleged
hostility towards nature.
38 For the concept of a Natursprache, a natural language, taken up with new vigour by
Romanticism, see Axel Goodbody, Natursprache: Ein dichtungstheoretisches Konzept der
Romantik und seine Wiederaufnahme in der modernen Naturlyrik (Neumünster, 1984).
an image of nature that mirrors the metaphysical processes of the
knowing subject.39 The assumed correspondence, though, remains
based on an analogy, which presupposes an initial rift, not a full
identity. Beauty as a symbol, on its way to the Romantic symbol, is
powered and stalled in equal parts by unattainable unity, and it is this
same pattern that we will Wnd underlying almost all descriptions of
contemporary Greece in the period in question here.
In Romantic aesthetics, the focus on the boundaries between Innen-
welt and Außenwelt generally intensiWes, just as the rift on which those
boundaries are predicated. While the nature of their relationship is
reinterpreted, new ways are explored to show their interrelation. The
famous ‘romanticizing of the world’ of Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum
fragment no. 216, is an undertaking that, although or because not
merely literary, puts the aesthetic as a reality producer centre stage.
Romantic Seelenlandschaften—landscapes of the soul—make visual the
experience of the conscious ‘I’, an experience that is both creative or
spontaneous and responsive.40 As the ‘objective correlative’ they are not
merely tools, but are instead part of a two-way relationship. The
creative, conscious subject and the phenomenal world are thought
organically linked. To Novalis, ‘the soul is seated where the inner
world and the outer world touch’, the ‘I’ is its intersection.41 Images
of personiWed nature, of a human landscape, remain a strong element
in the catalogue of Romantic nature imagery, not so much as estab-
lished Wgures of speech as because they express the fact that nature is
conceived of as an extension of the thinking and feeling subject and vice
versa. Early Romanticism focuses on the unity of the natural and
spiritual worlds and the assumed absolute identity and unity prior
to all subject–object divisions, and perceives the subject as grounded
in a world whose structure it shares. In this mutual relation, reality
becomes malleable. The result of this peculiar bond is a de-framing
of images, and recurring patterns of transgression that inform the
Romantic vision.42 Brentano’s question: ‘Does the world create me,
39 ‘Das Bewußtsein des Betrachters geht hinaus in die Natur, um sich dort selbst in
Gestalt einer Landschaft wiederzuWnden’, Alexander Kupfer, Die künstlichen Paradiese.
Rausch und Realität seit der Romantik (Stuttgart, 1996), 180.
40 See also Pinkard, German Philosophy, 137 V.
41 Novalis, Blüthenstaub, in Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel and Paul Kluckhohn
(Stuttgart, 1960–88), ii. 419.
42 Heinrich Hillmann, Bildlichkeit der Deutschen Romantik (Frankfurt/M., 1971), 15 V.
or do not I create it?’ is not merely rhetorical;43 it is paradigmatic for the
excitement and also the insecurity intimated in that relation. The
absolute unity, however, between subject and world remains unrealized
(or lost), since it would be without an object, so to speak; it can only be
represented symbolically: in the work of art.44 The Romantic symbol,
activated by the assumed original identity of the intellectual and the
sensuous, rests on a principle of constant deferral. Nature is a sign
system, and in the images of nature making up the Romantic landscape
the dynamic of the sign is transformed into an environment marked by
disappearance of boundaries. Just as the spiritual (rational, moral, etc.)
is something transcending phenomenal reality, the representation of
landscape obeys the same inherent process. At the same time, there is a
painful awareness of the ambiguity of such a dynamic: the inWnite or
the absolute and the images to grasp it can never be quite reached, as
they are always already transcended; the progressive and boundless
forward search is accompanied by a parallel consciousness of stagna-
tion, together with a fear of instability or alienation.45 The awareness of
limits leads either to enclosure within the conWnes of the horizon or,
alternatively, the inWnite void outside it.46
To control the totalizing relation between subject and object, between
interior and exterior, both aesthetic perception and artistic representa-
tion, as aspects of the imagination, are seen to shape the external world
and the individual in equal measure; according to a principle of analogy
and correspondence, nature is part of a cross-projection that enables it
to function as a symbol. Somewhat perfunctory statements such as ‘we
43 Clemens Brentano, Godwi, in Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp, 4 vols. (Munich,

1963–8), ii. 218.
44 See Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt/M.,
1989), 151.
45 Alice Kuzniar, ‘The Vanishing Canvas: Notes on German Romantic Landscape
Aesthetics’, German Studies Review, 11/3 (1988), 359–76, argues for such an extreme
with regard to painting. She speaks of the ‘paradox of nonrepresentation’ and the
‘eVacement of the natural referent in landscape painting’, with particular reference to
the Jena Romantics and Novalis, and concludes that ‘For the Romantics, the ideal
landscape painting would be the blank canvas, one that points to the absence of what
it depicts’ (p. 359).
46 Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschrei-
tung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 193–241, distinguishes
‘utopian Xight’ and ‘the return of the border’ as the two poles of an oscillating
movement.
may observe that the common feat of the Romantic nature poets was to
read meaning into the landscape’47 must gain in complexity when
landscape is acknowledged not only as a mere tool and carrier of any
chosen meaning, but as obeying an inherent dynamic structure. The
awareness of the fragile ontological status of nature is especially manifest
in its perception and representation as landscape: it displays the same
medial qualities as the work of art, in that it partakes in reality and
imagination as a second reality, which renders its status inherently
unstable.48 The direction is that of expansion, yet the stress is increas-
ingly on the awareness of fragmentation and the absence of totality,
especially as early and then high Romanticism pass.
Against the backdrop of this forceful logic, the value attributed to
fragmentation and to the necessary oscillation between the part and
the whole expressed in the symbol becomes particularly pertinent in
images of the Greek land, in more than one way. As a site, it merges
the real and authentic with the ideal or symbolic. In its representa-
tion, on the German as much as on the Greek side, we can therefore
single out three ways in which the land of Greece became signiWcant:
as nature it refers to the relation between man and the world around
him, which is one of correspondence. Secondly, as landscape, it
introduces an aesthetic element that shows up the artistic process
and a related process of emancipation. Thirdly, as locality, Greece
oVers speciWc, historic, material sites, whose survival is a mark of
continuity and authenticity, which is given a positive value. Its
historicity allows emancipation, while at the same time it promises
presence. Greece becomes paradigmatic for a state of fragmentation
while alluding to a preserved ‘naturalness’ that distinguishes it from
its Western European spectators. It provides a powerful material
symbol, a topos, which stimulates and contains speculation, beyond
its geographical limits. As a material symbol it displays at the same
time the workings of the symbolic relation that is prevalent in
47 W. K. Wimsatt, ‘The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery’, in M. H. Abrams

(ed.), English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1960), 25–36,
31. They may be perfunctory, but they certainly still have currency in writings on
Romantic Hellenism.
48 ‘This core of the Romantic model and purest form—the possible–impossible
expansion of the self to a seamless identiWcation with the universe—is unstable and
explosive’, Nemoianu, Taming of Romanticism, 27.
Romantic writing: a dynamic relation of insuYciency, longing, and
elusiveness, which renders disappointment a structurally necessary
component, rather than an expression of tyrannical or myopic ideal-
ism. Within this structure the threat of violence is never absent
though: be it as images of violent nature or, eventually, in the spectre
of political disunity those images attach themselves to, which will,
especially after 1821, become a central concern of Philhellenism, in
European literature in general and in Greek writing in particular (see
Chapters 4 and 5).
Romanticism entails an understanding of the aesthetic represen-
tation of physical reality that makes the present land of Greece a
privileged object, since both, the act of representation and the object
of Greece, conform to a shared strategy of deWning the modern
individual. This is a highly self-reXective strategy that is built on a
rift: that between the subject and the object in order to represent
symbolically on the one hand; and that between the ancient past and
the present on the other hand. This rift is understood as the condi-
tion of a potentially liberating or emancipatory modernity.
Physical nature, materiality, landscape as represented nature, form
the intersecting point where the tension caused by this rift is ex-
pressed, be it in strictly literary, that is, Wctive texts, in travel ac-
counts, or in historical and scholarly writing. The term ‘Romantic
Hellenism’, often used broadly to gloss the full spectrum of writing
from Winckelmann to Byron and the late Romantic French travellers
on to Nietzsche and Freud, I therefore take to mean an awareness of
Greece, ancient and by implication also modern, that has its foun-
dations in the logic of an idealist Romanticism and its modes of
representation; a Romanticism whose concerns appear particularly
well mirrored in its relation to Greece and the images chosen to grasp
its enabling nature.
Characteristic of Romantic Hellenism is its appreciation of Greek
antiquity as part of an understanding of modernity: in the sense of an
understanding of a fundamental distance of modern individual,
society and artist from nature. Nature becomes a function of eman-
cipation, even if a headily ambivalent one, and of progress and
liberation. The pattern is matched on the artistic plane: conscious-
ness of aesthetic distance (and subsequent longing) becomes part of a
strategy to claim autonomy for the artistic and aesthetic process.
Understanding the present alienated situation implies the under-
standing and ultimately the integration of the past. The past state is
irrecoverable, but can maybe be synthesized on a higher level. This
longing is shadowed in the concept of the symbol that of necessity
represents the meaningfulness of the whole through only a part.
‘Modern’ is seen in opposition to two notions: that of the complete
or harmonious or not fragmented, which is its lost origin and in an
altered shape its driving goal, and, secondly, that of the past or
ancient, especially at a time when artistic debate redeWned or at
least still remembered the normative character of ancient models.
The diVerence from the past becomes the condition of modernity,
and it is the artists, and the philosophers who give art a prominent
function in their philosophical understanding, who feel this bestows
on them a privileged position. Here Greece enters. For a start, the
distance of Greece is a quite literal one, in its geographical sense, and
Johannes Fabian has famously shown for anthropology how spatial
and temporal distance conspire to make an object of study attractive
and meaningful.49 As a place, Greece bears the marks of the past, but
it is also displaced from it. It needs to be categorized as modern, but
at the same time it has the privilege of material ‘sameness’ that makes
it a place of hope for revival. But just as separation is the very
condition of modern art, and just as the understanding of Greece
as separate from its ancient civilization distinguishes its modern
spectator, visitor, or writer, so is a contemporary, non-classical
Greece necessarily excluded both from its past and also from Western
modernity. Greece is supposed to bear the traces of decline and
revival at the same time. It is privileged by nature but it is a nature
that also indicates diVerence, distance, loss, and violence. Greece
needs, aesthetically and structurally, to remain in that suspended
state, since the rift is the condition of modernity—the signiWcance
given to Greece’s material state makes sure that that gap is kept open.
Let me close with two then-contemporary deWnitions of the Ro-
mantic, to add to my shape of the Romantic Greek landscape.
Goethe’s deWnition of the Romantic in (any) landscape combines
most of the constitutive elements mentioned so far: ‘The so-called
49 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New
York, 1983).
‘‘romantic’’ feature of a region is a calm sense of the sublime in the
form of the past, or, what is the same, of solitude, absence, or
seclusion.’50 It is an aesthetic based on the heritage of the sublime,
which arises in the awareness of the past and connects to the experi-
ence of solitude and absence. Although most of his experience of a
‘romantic region’ is abstracted from that of travelling in the Alps, the
elements he identiWes also informed the aesthetic perception and
representation of the Greek land in Germany. Friedrich Schlegel,
glossing the term ‘romantic’, points to its double-meaning as both
generic and historical; the romantic was a historical genre as well as,
more importantly, a still valid literary attribute that should not be
missing from any literary work: ‘The diVerence is that the romantic is
not so much only a genre but rather an element of poetry, which can
be more or less dominant but must never be entirely absent.’51
Similarly, we can say that Greece was understood as both a past
culture and a present potential of normative value, surpassing his-
tory, an attribute that must likewise never be missing from represen-
tations of the contemporary, physical face of Greece.
The bone that is inevitably picked in discussions of German
Hellenism is that so few of the German Hellenists actually travelled
to gain Wrst-hand experience of the place. That there were some
powerful socio-historical reasons that made actual contact with
Greece less feasible than in other countries is an issue I will discuss
at the beginning of the next chapter. What I hope to have shown,
however, is how the experience of Greek nature in mediated form was
considered beneWcial already. The mediation, in fact, as it pointed to
its shadow of immediacy, was what mattered, whether one wants to
call that a particularly philosophical case of sour grapes or not. What
does mediation in this case actually involve? How are images of
Greece actually mediated? What are its channels? If we look at the
literary representation of Greece, it would appear that it is reliance on
50 ‘Das sogenannte Romantische einer Gegend ist ein stilles Gefühl des Erhabenen
unter der Form der Vergangenheit oder, was gleich lautet, der Einsamkeit, Abwesen-
heit, Abgeschiedenheit.’ J. W. Goethe, ‘Maximen und ReXexionen’, in Werke, ed. Erich
Trunz (Hamburg, 1948–64), xii. 488.
51 ‘Nur mit dem Unterschiede, daß das Romantische nicht sowohl eine Gattung ist
als ein Element der Poesie, das mehr oder minder herrschen und zurücktreten, aber
nie ganz fehlen darf.’ ‘Gespräch über die Poesie’ (1800), in Kritische Schriften, ed.
Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich, 1956), 324.
‘real contact’ in mediated form, borrowed or Wctionalized, that is the
staple of German contact. In other words, cross-referencing, open or
covert, to other accounts and pre-existing images, which refuses to let
go of a measure of immediacy though. By the logic of approaching
the ideal in the real, actual contact should probably only intensify the
pattern. In the case of the very few who travelled (and there were
some), it probably did. It certainly did for the readers and writers of
travel literature, who are the topic of the next chapter.
2
‘I love this land of Greece above all else.
It has the colour of my heart’: The Greek
Landscape of the German Soul
One of the actual objects that brought direct and indirect vision
together around 1800 was the Claude glass, so named after the
sixteenth-century painter Claude Lorrain and the particular hue his
landscapes seemed to communicate. The Claude glass, a small, port-
able, and slightly convex tinted mirror, that was mainly popularized
by travellers and visual artists as a seeing and sketching aid, was to
be used on site, and it created slightly reduced reXections with a
softened edge and a lowered colour key, that could then serve as
models for drawings and paintings.1 The structure of this proto-
photographic device meant, of course, that being on site, standing
in and opposite the landscape that was seen, was a precondition; at
the same time, the vision had to be indirect, through a mirror, with
the onlooker not so much seeing through a lens, as actively looking
away from the scene and, obliquely, into the mirror. Aside from the
place which such a mechanism had in Grand Tour itineraries and
travel to the South, it is worth stressing that the necessary entangle-
ment with materiality operates along similar lines as we Wnd in the
preoccupations with Greece: not only, or not so much the artiWciality
of vision, but the fact that at the basis of most representations is an
awareness of their material condition that is indispensable to the
view, and shaped by it in return. Like the landscape images drawn
1 For a history of the object, Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of
the Black Mirror in Western Art (New York, 2004).
Greek Landscape of the German Soul 45
from a Claude glass, the representations of Greece, too, tend to hide
their structure while creating an eVect of greater immediacy.
Just as the social and intellectual context for viewing Greece changed
during the late eighteenth century, so Greece itself as an object did not
stand still either. Next to the diVerent forms and uses of Hellenism as a
cultural programme, awareness was growing of the geo-political posi-
tion of contemporary Greece too. Greece as a political entity did of
course not yet exist other than as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and it
was in the late eighteenth century still best referred to by its carto-
graphic term of ‘Turkey in Europe’. Within the adminsitrative order of
the Ottoman Empire, that separated its domains by religious aYliation,
most of modern-day Greece belonged to the millet-i rum, that is, the
Christian Orthodox (‘Roman’ or rum) community. Criteria for the
political identiWcation of individual and community raised questions
of great relevance and with ample scope for dissent both in Europe and
in the area that would become the Greek nation; but to its European
onlookers the Greek peninsula, peopled by Orthodox Christians, was in
the late eighteenth century relevant Wrst and foremost for its strategic
importance in the European balance of power. In 1770 the Peloponnese
had become the site of a series of insurrections, as a buVer during the
war that Catherine the Great’s Russia led against the Ottoman Empire
(1768–74). This is not to suggest Realpolitik as a simple explanation for
Greece’s increasing visibility on a European political map, or to belittle
the signiWcance attributed to Greece for its ancient heritage by the
Western European or the Russian side;2 quite on the contrary, the
discursive use that was made of Greece’s potential in that context
might help to explain the distance between expectations and results
on the side of all those who participated. The prospect of Russian
support for insurrection, by the ‘saviours’ from the North, had acti-
vated Greek hopes for a reinvigorated, independent pursuit of Ortho-
doxy (in its Byzantine territorial extension) and it had triggered local
uprisings against Turkish rule, although to little avail. The insurrections
were put down quickly and, despite a victory of the Russian Xeet
near Çesüme, the result was little more than Turkish reprisals and a
2 On Catherine’s Enlightenment hopes for establishing Russia as a new Byzantium

as well as a part of Europe, see Larry WolV, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of
Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), 195–234.
46 Greek Landscape of the German Soul
reinforcement of the status quo. In Germany, the echo of such political
unrest was not a widely and publicly resounding one, as it would be
during the 1821 War of Independence, but it reverberated suYciently
in smaller intellectual circles where it merged with an increasing aca-
demic interest in contemporary Greece, propagated mainly by scholars
and university teachers. The political hopes expressed for the future of
Greece, and its input into the discussion of ideas of liberty were, in the
decades following the unsuccessful 1770 uprising, accompanied by
keen, if not always accurate, attention to the geographical and physical
conditions of the country.3 Travel accounts, mainly by French and
British authors, in this context acquired an extra cache of translators
and a growing readership.
One of the literary texts that worked the appealing legacy of travel
literature into its fabric is Friedrich Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion oder Der
Eremit in Griechenland (1797–9), in which the diVerent strands are
brought together that contribute to the imagination of Greece at the
turn of the nineteenth century. In this key text, topographical descrip-
tions of Greece, some of them relying on travel literature, are used to Wt
a personal philosophy of identity, which uses the sharp relief of mod-
ernity against antiquity to chart the progress of the individual as both
artist and political being. Hölderlin relies on the data, but also on the
artistic aspect, of travel accounts, or rather, of travel imagery of Greece,
to fashion for the Wrst time a deliberately (and painfully) modern
Greece whose terrain is seen and experienced through the eyes of an
equally inescapably modern Greek character: that of Hyperion, who
himself shoulders the legacy, the potential, and the responsibility of the
traveller. I preface the look at Hölderlin’s own contribution to the image
of Greece with a prehistory of some of the topoi he uses, such as the
logic of travel accounts or the motif of climate, which feed into the logic
of Hyperion’s material Greece and which give to the peculiarity of
German Greece a greater depth than that presumed by the catchphrase
of the ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’.
3 Gerhard Grimm, on the basis of catalogues of printed books between 1750 and
1830, argues that university teaching (due to the increased mobility of both teachers
and students after the reduction of universities post-1800) served as the main carrier of
information, with writings on ‘Landeskunde’ as its medium: ‘Griechenland in For-
schung und Lehre an den deutschen Universitäten vor dem Ausbruch des griechischen
Unabhängigkeitskrieges’, Institute of Balkan Studies Symposium (1985), 29–46.
TH E LEGAC Y OF TH E TRAV ELL ERS:

CLIMATE, CULTURE, AND CONTINUITY
It would be impossible to characterize period travel accounts without

reference to the pervasive argument that geographical and climatic
conditions determine national character. This approach can claim a
long history reaching back to antiquity—Winckelmann prominently
and repeatedly quotes Hippocrates as one source for his account of
environmental eVects—and it is certainly not limited to Greece; but it is
here that it has enjoyed a particularly lasting success.4 Of course, it was
Winckelmann himself who put into circulation one of the soon-to-be-
favourite sound-bites of European Hellenism: his famous dictum
‘Good taste . . . began its formation Wrst under the Greek sky’5 acquired
a status of ready-made quotation on any aspect of either Greece or
European Hellenism, that has long outgrown its centrality to Winck-
elmann’s own argument.6 Still, his writings are suVused with images of
nature, and they remain paradigmatic for the success of postulating a
certain immediacy of Greek culture in relation to its natural environ-
ment, a recurring key motif in the imagination of modern Greece.
The eVort to establish a systematic connection between the cli-
matic and geographical environment on the one hand and a set of
national characteristics on the other is best seen in echoing relation
to slightly earlier French accounts of cultural history such as those of
Montesquieu, G. L. L. BuVon, or Jean-Baptiste Dubos.7 According to
4 The theme is recurrent from Herodotus to recent literary criticism, and it is alive
and well. Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, ˇ ºø ŒÆØ ¯ººØŒ ºØØ ØŒ Ææ
(Athens, 1998), 32 f., 57, for example, makes use of an unquestioned concept of
Mediterranean nature as an interpretive tool for the ‘Mediterranean sensibility’ of
Solomos; it is characterized by its balance, mildness, and beauty, and its ability to
unify men when it makes them aware of their autonomy. For a diVerent, and more
innovative, approach, Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London, 2000), 94–118,
who argues for the impact of climatic events on the production of poetry.
5 Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der
Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, ed. Ludwig Uhlig (Stuttgart, 1969), 1.
6 Lepenies speaks of the air of compromise that characterizes Winckelmann’s 1755 text:
‘Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Kunst- und Naturgeschichte im achtzehnten Jahrhun-
dert’, in T. Gaehtgens (ed.), J. J. Winckelmann, 1717–1768 (Hamburg, 1986), 221–37.
7 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (1748), pt. III; Dubos, RéXexions critiques sur la
poésie et sur la peinture (1719). These accounts in turn, of course, owe much to the
corpus of Hippocratic writings on climatic inXuences, e.g. Airs, Water, Places.
those, the Greek cultural area, past and present, and the European
West are to be interpreted in terms of their relative location, as in the
received Aristotelian model of three climatic zones. Aristotle, relying
on established character categories of North and South, had classiWed
political characteristics along geographical analogy, setting the
rough, unrestrained and violent sense of freedom of the Northern
zones against the Southern indolence and willingness to be enslaved;8
Greece in this scheme, avoiding either form of excess, stood for the
possibility of free development, and a stable political order to boot.
And yet, how far does Greece stretch in this pattern? French thinkers
investing in the theory of climate followed the Renaissance tendency
to designate the entire area of the ‘Romania’ (the heartland of the
Latin West, including France) as the temperate zone; German
scholars, entering the debate a little later, in the second half of the
eighteenth century, and especially concerned with the respective
positions of France and Germany, extended the argument along
similar lines, drawing on the notion of central Western Europe as
potentially bridging the gap between the balanced yet superseded
Mediterranean South, and the North as the fount of freedom.9 Kant,
for example, in his Lectures on Physical Geography (1765),10 followed
BuVon’s axiom of the three climatic zones and located Germany
Wrmly in the middle of the temperate zone, which proves the Xexible
and in fact supra-geographical, or certainly supra-territorial, nature
of this system of classiWcation. Herder’s works on universal history in
the 1770s Wnally integrated the imagery and the speculations on the
relevance of climate into a complex notion of reXective historical
understanding, as outlined above; relying on the formative eVect
of geographical factors, they chart the position and development of
Greece through the imagery of human age. The cultural stage of the
ancient Greek civilization (which is the only time and place of Greek
history that is reached by the arch of Herder’s spotlight) is the analogue
to the age of maturing youth, the period of ‘youth and bridal bloom’,
8 Aristotle, Politics 7. 7.
9 See Gonthier-Louis Fink, ‘Von Winckelmann bis Herder: Die deutsche Klimathe-
orie in europäischer Perspektive’, in Gerhard Sauder (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder
1744–1803 (Hamburg, 1987), 156–76; Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie
I. Antike und Moderne in der Ästhetik der Goethezeit (Frankfurt/M., 1974), 25 f.
10 Published in 1802, by F. T. Rink, as Physische Geographie.
of ‘the dream of the young man and the fancy tales of the maiden’.11
It is Greece’s particular location and varied geographical set-up as a
country largely composed of coastal areas and islands that to his
mind had a beneWcial eVect on cultural exchange and cultural
inXuences from and into Greece. At the same time, it is the natural
environment itself that is seen to have fostered the natural progres-
sion of Greece’s geographically highly secluded parts towards polit-
ical and cultural maturity: ‘The land of so many separate parts
sheltered some tribes in their valleys, others by their coast or on
their island, so that out of the long years of youthful activity, which
the scattered tribes and kingdoms enjoyed, grew the grand and free
mentality of the Greek Muse.’12
Herder, like the majority of those making a plea for the Greek
heritage in Germany, never visited Greece himself; still, he was not
only contributing to the state of historical theory, but was also well
read in contemporary travel accounts circulating in Europe. Travel
writings, such as those Herder mentions in the Ideen alone, include
those of Cornelis de Bruyn, Richard Chandler, the Comte de Choi-
seul-GouYer, H. A. O. Reichard, J. H. von Riedesel, and James
Stuart.13 Whether commenting on Greece ancient or modern, there-
fore, a historical model dominates his account of place, explicating
the historicity of the setting in terms of its relative permanence.
TRAVEL ACCOUNTS AND IMAGINARY TRAVEL
This is not the place to introduce systematically the range and

character of travel accounts of Greece, the majority of them English
or French, with only a few in German.14 Still, even a limited sample
11 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in SWS v. 495, 497.
12 ‘Im vielgeteilten Lande schützte diesen Stamm sein Tal, jenen seine Küste und Insel
und so erwuchs aus der langen jugendlichen Regsamkeit zerstreuter Stämme und König-
reiche die große freie Denkart der Griechischen Muse.’ Ideen, bk. 13, in Werke, vi. 521.
13 Hans-Wolf Jäger, ‘Herder als Leser von Reiseliteratur’, in Wolfgang Griep and
Hans-Wolf Jäger (eds.), Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert. Neue Untersuchungen (Heidelberg,
1986), 181–95.
14 For in-depth studies, see e.g. Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek
Revival: British Travellers’ Perceptions of Early Nineteenth Century Greece (London,
can highlight the origin, function, and dissemination of some of the
imagery steadily employed in the representation of Greece. DiVerent
as the accounts are in style and intention, particularly before the
increase in actual travel from the 1800s onwards, they share the
fascination with the actual, and therefore telling, location of classical
culture and the survival of the material environment once home to
an ancient civilization.
Most European travel accounts regarding Greece rested on the now
familiar pattern of comparison between the contemporary scene and
the past, with Greece’s material presence opening up the issue of
continuity. A writer and traveller like Robert Wood, in Ruins of
Palmyra (1753), or in his slightly later Essay on the Original Genius
and Writings of Homer with a Comparative View of the Ancient and
Present State of the Troade (London, 1769 and 1775), widely read in
Germany and translated into German in 1773,15 proceeded by
matching contemporary locality to Homeric description, in what
he called his own ‘poetical geography’:
classical ground not only makes us always relish the poet, or historian more, but
sometimes helps us to understand them better. Where we thought the present
state of the country was the best comment on an antient author, we made our
draftsman take a view, or make a plan of it. This sort of entertainment we
extended to poetical geography, and spent a fortnight with great pleasure, in
making a map of the Scamandrian plain, with Homer in our hands.16
His argument that the understanding of classical literature is en-
hanced by the knowledge and description of the actual locale also
proved to be a powerful impetus for contemporary Homeric scholar-
ship across Europe (notably on C. G. Heyne and subsequently
1990); Olga Augustinos, French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the
Renaissance to the Romantic Era (Baltimore, 1994); Richard Bechtle, Studien zum
Griechenlandbild deutscher Reisender (Esslingen, 1959); David Constantine, Early
Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, 1984); Iulia Chatzipanagioti, ‘ ‘‘Grae-
cia Mendax’’: Das Bild der Griechen in der französischen Reiseliteratur des 18. Jahr-
hunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Fremdwahrnehmungs- und Stereotypenforschung’, doctoral
dissertation, Vienna (1997); Robert Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1993).
15 Circulated initially by J. D. Michaelis and C. G. Heyne in scholarly and literary
circles in Göttingen, it was read by Herder and Goethe amongst others. See Con-
stantine, Early Greek Travellers, 73 V.
16 Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmore, in the desart (London, 1753), 3.
A. F. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum). In Germany, though, it would
appear to have been the scholarly interest, the theory of outside
observation, that outweighed, yet included in its structure, the desire
for literal ‘theory’: for going there to watch.
By European standards, and particularly with respect to Greece
and the Levant, German travellers were rather conspicuous by their
absence. Between 1700 and 1810, nineteen German works were
published which concerned themselves with areas of the Ottoman
Empire, especially Greece. Out of the nineteen only twelve were the
result of ‘autopsy’, of the writer’s own travel and seeing with his own
eyes. For the same period and area there are, by comparison, Wfty-
three French and forty-four English publications.17 Certain socio-
cultural factors may explain the imbalance. Germany was not one of
the strongest trading partners of the Ottoman Empire. Nor was
Germany as involved in colonial undertakings and policies in the
East, aVecting relations with the Sublime Porte and ambassadorial
business, as were England and France. Thirdly, Germany lacked the
kind of social system that would have encouraged a travel ideal along
the lines of the aristocratic Grand Tour and at the same time would
have provided the sources of enlightened patronage to facilitate
extended scholarly travel.18 Still, there was an increasing fascination
among the German educated class with travel and travel literature;
particularly within the, itself rather fragmentary, network of the
German principalities, travel proved a successful means to establish
a network of intellectual contact. Travels to France and Switzerland
were valued, trips to England were a particular favourite with the
liberally inclined, Italy was an increasingly popular destination, and
commercial ties with Eastern Europe made travel in this area not
uncommon.19 An interest in travel writing on Greece there was,
though, particularly after the events of 1770, and it is diYcult to
17 Numbers are taken from the database of travel literature prepared by Chatzipa-
nagioti-Sangmeister, referred to in her article ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Murhard (1778–1853)
Ø ˆ æ Æ ÆØØ Æººı æ Æ’, in Asterios Argyriou et al. (eds.),
ˇ ¯ººØŒ ˚ Æ Æ `Æº ŒÆØ ˜ 1453 –1981 (Athens, 1999),
207–21, 213; see also the catalogue of accounts in Loukia Droulia, On Travel Literature
and Related Subjects: References and Approaches (Athens, 1993).
18 Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 2.
19 See e.g. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Werner Jäger (eds.), Reise und soziale Realität
am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1983).
separate those travelling from those writing at home. The reservoir of
travel accounts, together with literary and scholarly material pub-
lished at home, formed, after all, part of a unique European network
of texts providing reference material for each other.20
By the logic of the travel account, seeing material remains
amounted to a ‘substantiation of the Ideal’;21 to identify certain
geophysical constants allowed observers to localize and authenticate
the past at the same time. Still, disappointment, or rather the threat
of discontinuity, was never far in these comparisons, as it had to be
for Greece to retain the dynamic of its place. In his Annotations to
Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art, Winckelmann
himself comments on contemporary Greece and the Greeks, and he
does so in starkly unfavourable terms: barbarism has eliminated
science, ignorance is covering the country. Monuments are either
destroyed or exported. No traces of freedom are left. Entire islands,
such as Samos, ‘lie fallow’; ‘the change and the sad look of the
ground’ and the ‘restrained free movement of the wind across the
uncultivated and overgrown banks’ show that ‘even the physical
nature of the country has lost its erstwhile shape through neglect’.22
What survives, nonetheless, is the appeal of the landscape of Attica,
and the beauty of the island Greeks in particular. On what testimony
Winckelmann claims such expertise, however, becomes clear in a
similar passage in his later History of Ancient Art:
The most beautiful race among the Greeks, especially in regard to complex-
ion, must have been beneath the skies of Ionia, in Asia Minor, according to
the testimony of Hippocrates and Lucian . . . This province is also product-
ive, even in the present day, of beautiful Bildungen, as appears from the
statement of an observant traveller of the sixteenth century . . . For in this
land, on account of its situation, and in the islands of the Archipelago, the
sky is much clearer, and the temperature—which is intermediate between
warm and cold—more constant and uniform than it is even in Greece.23
20 For examples of the textual cross-references in English and French accounts, see
David Constantine, ‘The Question of Authenticity in Early Accounts of Greece’, in
G. W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English
Imagination (Cambridge, 1989), 1–22.
21 Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 4.
22 Winckelmann, Gedanken, 82 f.
23 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, i. 3.13.
His comments upon the manifest decline, visible not only in the ruins
but in the landscape and its inhabitants, Winckelmann shares with
many of the travellers. Even for Pierre Augustin Guys, who in his Voyage
littéraire de la Grèce ou lettres sur les Grecs anciens et modernes (1771)
tries to compare the modern Greeks favourably to their ancestors, the
temptation to portray them as a fragmented version of the past—
‘comme dans ces statues mutilées’ (i. 21)—is irresistible. Guys was
well acquainted with Winckelmann’s writings, as is revealed by more
than just his focus on statuesque beauty and the conditions of Wne art.24
The ambiguity of Winckelmann’s deliberations on the possibility of
imitation of ancient art may Wnd an echo in the fragmented state of the
scene oVered to Guys’s eyes and in some of the more negative traits of
the present Greek character he describes in other sections; and yet,
contemporary Greece becomes literally a living piece of art: ‘I recog-
nize, under the same sky, the very same genius, which once produced
the Painters and Poets; I see there the tableaux vivants and the animated
models after whom talent could still work now with success’ (ii. 4).
What emerges with particular force is the necessity of a supportive
natural environment, a conducive climate;25 as the seat of genius, it
can promote artistic sensibility, as it itself partakes of artistic qualities.
In Greece, nature alone once created the Painters, Sculptors, Musicians and
Poets, in a word all the men of genius who have spread such éclat over this
happy country. A lively and pleasant imagination, an active spirit, a Wne
organization, a delicate taste and especially an extraordinary sensitivity, all
these qualities combined under the most beautiful sky, in view of the most
smiling landscapes, under a government most appropriate to develop, to
extend and to increase the genius which, without freedom, has no resources:
this is what happened to the Greeks and what we Wnd there. (i. 7–8)
Phrased this way, Greece, old and new, is the scene where natural
conditions, viewed from a contemporary artistic perspective, can
24 Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 147 V. Guys is known to have owned copies
of Winckelmann’s works, and longer sections of the Voyage littéraire (chs. 31–4) are
devoted to the production of Greek art, closely corresponding to Winckelmann’s
Gedanken. There is also evidence of correspondence between the two, although none
of the letters have survived. (References in text are to volume/page numbers of the
1771 edition of the Voyage.)
25 Guys expresses his general approval of Montesquieu’s theory, despite minor
corrections regarding Turkey, in the 30th letter of the Voyage littéraire.
only come to full fruition when combined with a socio-political
environment that is distinguished by freedom and attention to the
individual. As in Winckelmann, imagination and environment are
thus dependent on each other in a productive fashion; moreover,
they are regarded as a means to further social cohesion, as becomes
clear when Guys gives the country’s physical condition as one reason
for the patriotism of the ancients: ‘The beauty of the land and of the
climate: since the local physique is not the weakest link which
attaches us to our common mother’ (ii. 165).26 Guys’s account
consists of a series of letters to his patron, a Monsieur M., which
reveal the impact that the prospect of Greece supposedly has on him
as its observer and on his act of quasi-artistic production in the form
of travel writing; thus he writes of the liberty with which he can put
his ideas on paper, inspired by an ‘enthousiasme grec’: ‘I throw my
ideas on paper, I use the liberty you allow me to deliver to you my
thoughts and my speculations. You will notice that the Greek enthu-
siasm makes me digress and carries me further than I should go.
I have experienced it already’ (ii. 23).
The same sentiment is repeated a little further down in the geo-
graphical metaphor of the writer losing himself in his reXections like a
man in a Weld: ‘I have abandoned myself to my thoughts: I have strayed,
without noticing, like a man who has entered a big meadow where one
cannot distinguish a path in the soft grass which covers it; he takes a
walk in every sense, he loses himself, he picks the Xowers he chances
upon, he stops and he retraces his steps to Wnd the path he ought to
take’ (ii. 42).
What Guys thematizes here, beyond the playful tone and the stress
on the ‘pleasure of carrying the mind back to scenes of antiquity’ (ii. 8),
is the polyvalence of liberty as a condition, object, and eVect of artistic
production, intimated through the prospect of Greece. What is also
clear is that this is an enthusiasm and an eVect that attaches mainly and
probably only to the visitor: the Greek people themselves, for better or
worse, are tied, by virtue of such positively connoted continuity, to a
‘stability’ that makes their modernity, their losing themselves in a grassy
Weld of reXection, highly unlikely.
26 The two other reasons which Guys adduces for the ancients’ patriotism are,
notably, their natural inclination and their thorough education.
This particular pairing of doubt about the restitution of a Greece
in tatters with optimism that the Greek ground with its traces of the
past has a beneWcial eVect on the traveller as a modern, reXective
subject, is no less apparent in some of the rare German accounts. In
line with the educational purposes acknowledged throughout most
European travel accounts, German travellers paid particular atten-
tion to the advancement of Bildung gained in the experience of travel.
A. L. Schlözer, for example, academic and explorer, distinguished
travelling for its own sake as the most valuable kind: ‘the journey is
an end in itself, its aim is Humanität.’27 One such account is the Wrst
part of Fragments for the better Acquaintance with Today’s Greece,
Collected on a Journey by J. L. S. Bartholdy in the Year 1803–1804
(Bruchstücke zur näheren Kenntnis des heutigen Griechenlands, gesam-
melt auf einer Reise von J. L. S. Bartholdy—Im Jahre 1803–1804),
published in Berlin in 1805.28 Throughout, Bartholdy prides himself
on replacing the usual sweeping evaluation of the contemporary
Greeks as a degenerate group of people fallen under the barbarian
Ottoman yoke with a more careful account of their social history and
geography; in the end, all the same, he joins the side of those stressing
the decline and barrenness of the Greek land. SigniWcantly, he dis-
tinguishes the two camps of argument for and against a Greek
cultural revival in terms of their characterization of the natural and
agricultural state of Greece: the faction arguing for favourable con-
ditions (largely French, according to Bartholdy) describe Greece’s
rich soil and agrarian potential, whereas those predicting a negative
future stress the rocky ground and the irreversible erosion of fertile
soil. The author himself expresses his own Wnal evaluation through
the image of the Greek landscape as a formerly densely wooded area,
27 A. L. Schlözer, Vorlesungen über Land- und Seereisen, nach dem Kollegheft des
stud. jur. E. F. Haupt (Göttingen, 1962), 13, a series of lectures, which Schlözer
delivered regularly at the University of Göttingen between 1772 and 1795. See also
H. E. Bödeker, ‘Reisen: Bedeutung und Funktion für die deutsche Aufklärungsge-
sellschaft’, in Griep and Jäger, Reisen im 18. Jahrhundert, 91–110.
28 References in text are to page numbers of this edition. Although Bartholdy is
little known today, he enjoyed a curious Greek afterlife in the novel Xouth the Ape, or
The Morals of the Age (1848) by Iakovos Pitsipios. In Pitsipios’s social satire, a quite
Wctional, yet allegedly Wercely anti-Greek Bartholdy commits murder in the Greek
circles of Paris and is, for his sins, transformed into an ape. After many adventures,
stretching as far as South America, he ends as pet-servant to an Athenian nouveau
riche, by Pitsipios’s reckoning by far the worst punishment imaginable.
which has subsequently been cut down and possesses hardly enough
foundation to maintain its autonomous natural growth:
To me, Greece seems like a once magniWcent forest full of the most ancient
and rare trees. Those have all been cut down and all hope is lost that new
trees can be grafted onto the old stumps. Moreover, it is precisely those
wretched stumps that hamper new cultivation, although it is nothing short
of impossible to uproot and remove them in order to plant a new plantation.
How, and if at all, this new plantation is going to prosper lies in darkness,
especially since now foreign kinds of wood will be made indigenous where
nature herself once gave bountifully and freely. (p. 455)29
Bartholdy’s extended image of old stumps hindering new growth
re-injects both metaphor and ambivalence (which usually goes with
metaphor) into an agrarian economic debate that had literalized the
importance of nature for discussing Greece, as if the interpretation of
Greek nature as signiWcant formed the centre through which all talk
of its conditions had to pass in regular circles. Greece, its past
understood as a historical, social, and cultural unit, shifts with the
Wgure of the ancient forest now cut down to a curiously unwieldy
territory where history is eVectively dead nature. Indirectly,
Bartholdy seems to bear out Niklas Luhmann’s observation that
nature, as a means of justiWcation for social interaction, can easily
function as a term of obstruction (‘SperrbegriV’).30 For Luhmann,
who is interested in historical models of how social behaviour is
explained, an argument from nature, as opposed to an argument
from individual character, for example, stands in the way of increas-
ing individualization. In Bartholdy’s case, environment, as real phys-
ical environment and as the past that shapes culture, halts free
development, too. Future prospering is uncertain, and foreign grafts,
made indigenous, may resuscitate the forest of Greek culture, literally
29 ‘Mir erscheint Griechenland wie ein ehemals herrlicher Wald, der voll der ältesten
und seltensten Bäume stand. Diese sind sämmtlich gefällt worden, und die HoVnung,
frische Stämme den alten Stümpfen aufzusetzen, ist verloren. Ja es erschweren diese
schlechten Stubben eben die neue Kultur, obgleich es nichts weniger als unmöglich ist,
sie auszurotten und wegzuräumen, und eine neue Schonung anzulegen. Ob und wie
diese nun gedeihen werde, liegt verborgen; zumal da man jetzt fremde Hölzer einhei-
misch machen wird, wo zuvor die Natur alles freiwillig und freudig gab.’
30 Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt/M.,
1982), 139.
and metaphorically, but may just as well be rejected.31 Nature may be a
means and a medium of cultural translation and communication, but
‘going native’, the import of foreign grafts, woods, or elements, is
potentially, and structurally, obstructing development as much as the
stumps of the past do. At the same time, he conWrms the still-beneWcial
eVect of the material reality of the Greek soil upon the suYciently
perceptive traveller—in other words, the current state of Greece, much
as it obstructs its own future progress, enables somebody else’s. In a
‘Letter to My Brother’, which is attached to the published manuscript,
Bartholdy conscientiously lists the items of classical literature and
contemporary accounts he had studied in preparation for the journey,
among them especially the one by Guys, and he states: ‘It is certainly
no mere Wgment of the imagination that a certain feeling of sacredness
takes hold of us when we stand on classical ground; and every man
who values science, art, freedom, normativity, and originality cannot
help but be overcome by it.’32
Despite the value attached to the immediate experience of Greece,
the ultimate beneWciaries were therefore to be the writers and readers
of travel accounts. Wood, in 1753, had still seemed doubtful whether
the immediacy of travel could be translated: ‘The particular pleasure,
it is true, which an imagination warmed upon the spot receives from
those scenes of heroick actions, the traveller can only feel, nor is it to
be communicated by description.’33 Yet the experience of Greek
nature in mediated form could be equally beneWcial for the reader
and writer of travel literature, even if their imagination was warmed in
a cooler spot. As we saw, the comparison of Greece present, in
its natural and material manifestations, with its past follows a pattern
that represents and thereby stimulates the workings of the imagination
31 On the openness of organic imagery, in the context of German debates about

the nation, to lend itself to arguments for purity as much as assimilation, see Brian
Vick, ‘Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy in
Neohumanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 63/3 (2002), 483–500.
32 ‘Daß sich unser auf klassischem Boden ein gewisses heiliges Gefühl bemächtigt,
ist wahrlich kein bloßes Hirngespinst, und jeder Mensch, dem Wissenschaft, dem
Kunst, dem Freiheit, dem Gesetzlichkeit und Originalität etwas gelten, muß mehr
oder weniger in Griechenland davon ergriVen werden.’ Bartholdy, ‘Brief an meinen
Bruder von meiner Reise nach Griechenland’, in Bruchstücke, 77.
33 Wood, Ruins of Palmyra, 3.
as a distinctly human, subjective and modern faculty. The imagin-
ation, in other words the aesthetic experience of Greece, was tightly
bound up with concepts of freedom, which in turn rendered the
experience particularly valued. With Greece, historical and artistic
freedom is the subject-matter, located in the physical remains of the
past, while the workings of the imagination implied a complementary
free interplay of the mental faculties. With the increasing relevance
given to the imagination as a subjective faculty, representation could
compete with the place of autopsy. Yet what about the Wctional
manifestations of the travel experience? While the particular materi-
ality of Greece plays a part in giving rise to imagination and reXection,
it is the Wctionalizing act that links the ‘realities’ and the ‘imaginary’
(to use Iser’s terms), transgressing the one while concretizing and
giving material weight to the other, with the result of drawing atten-
tion to the workings of the imaginary.34
Whether it is in the travellers’ desire to comply with the taste of the
audience or an educational intention to further Bildung, the Wctional
and the authentic, as much as the past and the afterlife of the past,
overlap in the tight network spun between and above the travel litera-
ture in circulation. One such model case is that of the Abbé Barthélemy’s
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788). An important numismatist
and epigraphist and himself the translator of Wood’s accounts into
French, Barthélemy’s work was a Wctive travel account, set in the
Hellenistic period, informed by the current state of scholarship and by
ancient precedent and facts compiled from ancient authors alike. Going
through four editions until 1821, it would deserve mention for its sheer
literary impact alone. An almost instant success across Europe, it
triggered a vogue of romans grecs and was translated into several
languages, including Modern Greek.35 The Wctional history of the
young Scythian prince Anacharsis, unfolding over six volumes, follows
his educational journey of nearly thirty years through the Greek world
of the fourth century bc. Given his genealogy as Anacharsis the Younger,
he recalls his namesake, also a Scythian traveller from the North, men-
tioned by Herodotus, whose Histories are themselves an exercise in
34 Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 2–21.

35 There were three partial (two by Georgios Sakellarios, and one by Rhigas
Velistinlis) and one complete translation (by Chrysoverges Kouropalatis) into
Greek between 1797 and 1819; see Augustinos, French Odysseys, 38 V.
linking climate and relative North and South position to cultural
development or stasis (the more extreme the geographical distance,
the more static the society).36 Barthélemy’s, by extension, is a Greek
land where historical signiWcance, physical beauty, and the cultivation
of present society mirror each other, arranged in one extensive tableau
vivant. Attention is lavished on pleasurable natural features, their
tranquillity, colour, and luminescence; a benign climate provides an
environment as fertile and prosperous as its society is cultivated;
Greece, it is not wrong to say, becomes essentially ‘a graceful extension
of French culture’.37 According to this contemporary ideal of simplicity
which equates the natural with the quietly cultivated, ‘his sketches of
Greek scenery were a perfect setting of his image of Greek civilization:
smooth and unruZed surfaces, regular and symmetrical lines, and
smiling valleys sheltered by majestic mountains.’38 Still, and despite
the ostensibly unruZed equation, the spectre of Greek decline is not
kept at bay here either: for Anacharsis the Younger returns to his
northern homeland after the historical Greek–Macedonian battle at
Chaironeia (338 bc), which he vocally considers tantamount to the
defeat and demise of Greek liberty. The contemporary Greek nature of
Barthélemy operative in the semi-Wctional Greece of Anacharsis the
Younger, recalling the Greece of Herodotus, who gave History its name
yet was treated for much of his afterlife as a Wctionalizing geographer, is
underpinned, and in that sense necessarily undermined, by the very
weight of the historiography of Greece as it was current in the eight-
eenth century (the decline of Greek liberty at the end of the fourth
century)—as much as by the weight of literary tradition.
As a scholar and collector Barthélemy was personal tutor to the
Comte de Choiseul-GouYer, ambassador to the Sublime Porte from
1783 to 1791, where he made sure that he spawned his own literary
genealogy. Choiseul-GouYer’s own Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce
was published, in two parts, in 1782 (excerpts appearing from 1778)
and 1809.39 His account, mainly concerned with the description of
antiquities, nevertheless comments on the political present; certainly
36 For a comparison of the two Anacharses, see François Hartog, Memories of

Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (Chicago, 2001).
37 Augustinos, French Odysseys, 39.
38 Ibid. 46.
39 For Choiseul-GouYer’s eventful political biography see ibid. 157–73.
in the Wrst volume, where he expresses some pro-Greek sentiment in
the form of hope for impending cultural revival, while he is equally
aware of the disillusioning dichotomy between the past and the
present. The Voyage Pittoresque was widely read in Germany and
partially translated, by H. A. O. Reichard, in 1780 and 1782. One of
its readers was Gerhard von Halem, a high civil servant at Oldenburg,
poet, dramatist, and regular contributor to literary periodicals, such
as H. Ch. Boie’s Museum. His little-known literary anthology of 1798,
Blüthen aus Trümmern (Blossoms from Ruins), is also a combination
of documentation, scholarly respectability, and a well-considered
appeal to the imagination: essentially a compilation of von Halem’s
own tales and dramatic scenes of contemporary Greece, as fashioned
by him, it relies to a great extent on some of the travel accounts
mentioned already. It is not entirely clear what motivated his
choice,40 yet it is clear from his letters (his regular correspondents
included, apart from H. Ch. Boie, the writer and translator of
classical literature Friedrich Graf Stolberg, and the Homeric transla-
tor Wilhelm Voss) that he was well acquainted with those taking a
strong interest in classical antiquity and travel literature alike.41
The overarching theme of Blüthen aus Trümmern is the promise of
new cultural life arising before the eyes of the Greek traveller. The folding
of the Wctive into the material gleaned from travel accounts, which
themselves explore the fault-line between the factual and the workings
of the imagination, runs alongside von Halem’s deliberate plea for the
beneWts of the travels of the mind. In the process of imaginary travel, so
the collection suggests, the cultural and political situation of Germany
seeks to be reXected in the contemporary Greek land and its imagin-
ation. The perspective of the work’s introduction, therefore, is that of
man in possession of his humanness, aVected by the aspect before him:
Fresh bloom out of ruins; new life sprouting from decay; what more could
nature oVer to move the man more deeply who contemplates his environment
40 Hardly any literature is available on Halem, who also took a strong documentary-
Wctional interest in the Middle Ages, and no literature at all on Blüthen aus Trümmern,
to shed light on his choice of subject-matter. For some material, see L. W. C. von
Halem, Gerhard Anton von Halems Selbstbiographie nebst einer Sammlung von Briefen
an ihn (Oldenburg, 1840; repr. Bern, 1970).
41 Boie’s translation of Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor was published in 1776,
that of Chandler’s Travels in Greece one year later, in cooperation with Voss.
in full awareness of his humanity? . . . It is a truly beautiful idyll that reality has
oVered to the latest sentimental visitor to the islands of the archipelago
[Choiseul-GouYer]. He grasped the scenery with love and thus represented
in it also a Wtting image of the new contemporary Greece. Beautiful rejuven-
ating nature, irresistibly breaking through the ruins of the once cultivated
(gebildet) Hellas, it preserves itself in its lovely ancient simplicity:
thus is the character of this wondrous country and above all of this Weld of
islands which the hand of an almighty power had gently sown across the wide
open sea.42
Despite the reference to Choiseul-GouYer as his source, the use of
literary terms such as Scene, Bild, and Idyll for the view presented to
him as a sentimental spectator indicates the artistic quality of beau-
tiful Greek nature. The transformation of Greece into an aesthetic
object justiWes the involvement of the reader’s imagination and
renders the immediate eVect, mediated in artistic representation,
accessible to all of a similar sensibility:
Often, when I had wandered long among the ruins of ancient Greek archi-
tecture and among the sheer number of broken marble architraves, cornices,
and column drums, under the guidance of Tournefort, le Roy, Choiseul-
GouYer, and Stuart, often I then rejoiced to see some people between the
ruins. And how grateful was I to the travellers, Spon, Wheler, Guys, Chand-
ler, Savary, and the others, that they had made those people still more
familiar to me! With delight I recognized the features of the ancient Greek
spirit in them, which had persevered, despite millenia of barbarity.
It was my pleasure to collect those features, to paint little miniatures of the
new Greece and to intensify the colour by making use of the entire palette
aVorded by the oscillation of the modern Ottoman and the ancient Greek
spirit. While the Fury of war was marching through the German fatherland
42 ‘Blüthen aus Trümmern; junges Leben, das aus Verwesung keimt; ist irgend
etwas in der Natur, was inniger rühre den Menschen, der, in vollem Gefühle seiner
Menschheit, sinnend um sich her schaut? . . . Wohl ist es ein schönes Idyll, was die
Wirklichkeit hier dem jüngsten gefühlvollen Besucher der Inseln des Archipelagus
[Choiseul-GouYer] darbot. Mit Liebe faßte er die Scene auf, und gab uns in ihr
zugleich ein treVendes Bild des neuen Griechenlandes. Sich verjüngende schöne
Natur, die durch die Trümmer des einst gebildeten Hellas unaufhaltsam hervorbricht,
und sich erhält in lieblicher Ureinfalt, das ist der Charakter dieses merkwürdigen
Landes, und vor allem der Insel-Saat, welche die Hand der Allmacht mild in das weite
Meer ausstreute’; Gerhard von Halem, Blüthen aus Trümmern (Bremen, 1798), 3 V.
Further references in text are to page number of this edition.
torching its prettiest pastures, I took Xight to Tempe. I kindly invite those of
an equal mind to this valley of peace. (pp. 7 f.)43
In other words, Greek nature is essentially and ‘naturally’ predis-
posed to be translated into and communicated in aesthetic form.
What is more, by presenting imaginary travels to Greece, in an act of
artistic creation, as a valid alternative to war-torn Germany, Halem
outlines clearly the pattern and the raison d’être whereby artistic
production and aesthetic perception enable the individual to identify
their own position within a political context. This relation between
individual and national Bildung and the political situation of the
present, negotiated against the backdrop of Greece as a literary
setting, is even more pronounced in the Wrst dramatic fragment of
the collection. ‘Der Pilger von Pathmos’ unfolds as a dialogue be-
tween Theobald, a hermit monk, and Koras, a young pilgrim
stranded on the island of Patmos after a storm; in the exchange of
life-stories that follows, the old Athenian monk tells of his former
travels across Europe in search of the freedom gone from Greece.
Encouraged by the example of the Maniots,44 yet doubtful because
the insurrection of 1770, despite the Greek-Russian victory at Çesüme,
has been abandoned, he now hopes for the ‘Xame of freedom’ to be
rekindled and ‘through civic unity and action to perfect our ennoble-
ment’ (p. 18). The young pilgrim, who appropriately reveals himself
43 ‘Oft, wenn ich unter Anleitung der Tournefort, le Roy, Choiseul-GouYer, und der
Stuart lange unter den Trümmern der alten Griechischen Baukunst, unter dieser Menge
zerbrochener Marmor-Gesimse, Karnisse und Säulenfüße umher gewandelt war, oft
freute ich mich dann, wenn ich durch diese Trümmer hie und da auch Menschen
erblickte. Wie dankte ich daher den Reisenden, Spon, Wheler, Guys, Chandler, Savary
und anderen, daß sie mir diese Menschen noch näher brachten! Denn mit Entzücken
erkannt ich in ihnen die Züge Alt-Griechischen Geistes, der sich erhielt trotz der
Barbarey der Jahrtausende. Diese Züge zu sammeln, kleine Scenen aus dem neuen
Griechenlande zu malen, und, zur Erhöhung des Colorits, die mannigfaltigen Farben,
welche wechselnd Neu-Osmanischer und Alt-Hellenischer Geist darboten, zu nutzen,
das machte mir Freude. Während die Furie des Krieges ihre Fackel schwang, und die
schönsten Fluren des deutschen Vaterlandes verheerte, Xüchtete ich nach Tempe.
Freundlich lade ich die Gleichfühlenden zu mir ein in dies Thal des Friedens.’
44 The Mani, the southernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, was part of the ancient
province of Laconia. That its inhabitants are descendants of the Spartans who Xed the
Slav invasions in the seventh century is Wrst suggested by Constantine Porphyrogenitus
(De administrando imperio) in the tenth century. Cf. Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan
Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969), 119. The Mani was one of the areas
heavily involved in the unsuccessful insurrection of 1770. See also below, Chapter 3.
to be the son of a Maniot Wghter, recounts the vigil at his father’s
tomb which led him to forgo the world and turn to a monastic
existence. This would be little more than a familiar educational
tale, if not that the natural setting is given a functional character: it
is the scenery surrounding the Maniot’s grave that induces the
memory of lost Greek freedom. The old monk eventually persuades
Koras to follow the example of St John, whose living memorial is the
island of Patmos, the material basis of the story, as a whole, and to
return from there to the world. Again, the choice of Patmos is not
accidental, and it tightens the network of signiWcant, generative, and
entirely cultural landscapes. Von Halem’s sketch of transitional, ac-
tivating landscapes draws on a common source with Hölderlin’s
Hyperion, namely Choiseul-GouYer’s account of his visit to Patmos.
To Choiseul-GouYer his stay on the island was particularly memor-
able for an encounter with a monk, who approached him to enquire
about the state of aVairs in Europe and, more precisely, the fate of
Voltaire and Rousseau.45 Choiseul-GouYer’s monk proceeds to tell
him of his studies in Italy and his subsequent return to Greece, where
he sought a life renouncing the world of politics and learning.46
In that sense, a Greek location functions as the alternative to a
place of instruction and activity that has apparently lost its promise
and edge, replacing the disappointment of modern learning with a
promise of instruction from and through nature. While the monk’s
education in Italy is completely in line with historical accuracy (Italy
had long provided centres of learning for Greek students), the shift of
privilege from a tired post-Roman territory to a renewing Greek
scene is instructive, and would certainly not have gone unnoticed
by the eye of a readership trained on the value of Hellenism. The
setting in von Halem’s version is therefore not only relevant insofar as
it holds or induces memory, but it also plays an active part in
developing the faculties of those inhabiting it:
Follow me Wrst to my bower close by; I built it on the rocky slope with a view
of the wide archipelago.—Here we are—you can see, the harsh ground yields
hardly any vegetation. Every morning I heap new earth onto the tender roots
45 Choiseul-GouYer, Voyage pittoresque, i. 165. Von Halem himself mentions the

story in his commentary (p. 224).
46 Choiseul-GouYer, Voyage pittoresque, 166.
exposed by the rain and little by little my care is rewarded by friendly
shade. . . . My spirit Wnally broke through the limits of my need and soared
onto the open sea. And to my mind the ruins which came before my eyes
everywhere soon became more than stones and boulders. I had an intim-
ation of better times now long gone (pp. 11 V.)47
The imagery of the barren ground is a familiar motif; combined with
that of the unrestrained view over Greece, it focuses on the transcend-
ence inspired in the observer (and, by analogy, the reader), an eVect
enhanced by the sight of ruins as material mediators, surrounded by an
impoverished nature.48 The monk Theobald’s past travels in search of
freedom, remembered and told from that heightened perspective, are
the point where geographical description and geographical metaphor
merge. Crossing the Rhine from France, where the Greek spirit exists
like an unripe fruit threatened by decay before its time, Germany, in
contrast, presents itself to Theobald as
an archipelago of German principalities, separated in dangerous currents,
exposed to the stormy sea of their rulers’ interests. Its inhabitants are distin-
guished by their respectability, prudence, and industriousness and they deserve
to be united one day in the greater interest of humankind. Yet it is more likely
that the islands of our archipelago should join up to become a solid land-mass
than that Germany should see the light of uniWcation. (p. 14).49
The parallel between the multiplicity of German principalities and
the city-states of ancient Greece had been a topos of German writings
47 ‘. . . Folge mir erst in meine nahe Laube, die ich mir am Abhang des Felsen baute
im Anblick des großen Inselmeers.—Hier ist sie.—Du siehst, schwer gedeiht das
Gesträuch in diesem kargen Boden. Jeglichen Morgen häufe ich die Erde auf die zarten
Wurzeln, die der Regen entblößte. Allmählig lohnt doch freundlicher Schatten meine
Sorge. . . . Mein Geist durchbrach dann des Bedürfnisses Schranken, und schwebte ins
breite Meer hinaus. Die Ruinen, die aller Orten meinem Blicke sich zeigten, wurden
bald mehr als Steinmassen für mich. Ich ahnete verXossene schönere Zeiten.’
48 For the artistic representation of ruins as both indicating a transitional stage or as
conWrming continuity, see Heinrich Bühlbäcker, Konstruktive Zerstörungen: Ruinen-
darstellungen in der Literatur zwischen 1774 und 1832 (Bielefeld, 1999), 13 f; Reinhard
Zimmermann, Künstliche Ruinen: Studien zu ihrer Bedeutung und Form (Wiesbaden,
1989), 252 V.
49 ‘Ein Archipel deutscher Staaten, die durch die Wogen des Interesses ihrer
Gebieter in manchen gefährlichen Strömungen getrennt sind. Die Bewohner, ausge-
zeichnet durch Biedersinn, Besonnenheit und Fleiß, verdienen es, daß einst das
größere Interesse der Menschheit sie vereine. Aber eher versammeln sich unsers
Archipelagus Inseln zu festem Lande, ehe Deutschland jene Vereinigung sieht.’
since Wieland.50 Yet by superimposing the natural and geographical
imagery of Greece metaphorically on Germany, von Halem achieves a
more direct comparison. Despite the critical attitude towards Germany
that is implied, the application of metaphor establishes a framework by
which aspirations of freedom and cultural emancipation (particularly
to be located in the island world) become the common and justiWed
ground for comparison between Germany and Greece. Remembering
the aesthetic susceptibility required by von Halem of his reader, it is the
very act of imagining the Greek land as an aesthetic object that enables
writer and reader alike to derive productive insights from it. To make
that particular comparison at all, in other words, and to base it on the
example of nature, proves the ground(s) of comparison already.
The last part of the story describes the return of the Maniot boy
Koras to Greece, with the aim ‘to prepare his fellow citizens for the era
of freedom’ (p. 24). Von Halem has him journey across the Balkan
peninsula to meet the Morlaken people. The Morlachs or Morlacchi, a
people of uncertain ethnic origin and sometimes confusedly named as
‘Vlachs’ too, had by the end of the eighteenth century become the
subject of ethnographic curiosity, not unlike that later bestowed on
the Greek klefts, for the half-appalling and half-appealing mixture of
free barbarity and unspoilt virtue that was attributed to their origins
and customs. Halem’s Koras, appropriately, encounters here scenes of
a ready hospitality grounded in natural freedom:
Then [Koras] descended into the lovely Kotar valleys; here the hospitable
Morlach opens his paltry hut to every traveller, here the sacred bond of
friendship is tied at the foot of the altars, here freedom walks hand in hand
still with innocence, as it did in the golden age. With the evening twilight he
would often climb the mountains and listen for the folk songs of the Morlachs.
They celebrated the deeds of their ancestral heroes, accompanied by the
monotonous sound of the strung Guzla. Other wayfarers, hearing the familiar
sounds from afar, would join in their song and thus it echoed to and fro until it
reached a bend in the valley and died away in the ravines. (p. 24).51
50 Conrad Wiedemann, ‘Römische Staatsnation und griechische Kulturnation: Zum

Paradigmenwechsel zwischen Gottsched und Winckelmann’, in F. N. Mennemeier and
C. Wiedemann (eds.), Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses, Göttingen
1985, ix (Tübingen, 1986), 173–8, 178, traces the motif from Wieland to Friedrich
Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, yet credits it with little importance.
51 ‘Dann senkte [Koras] sich in die anmuthigen Thäler von Kotar, wo der gastfreye
Morlake jedem Reisenden seine arme Hütte öVnet, wo der Freundschaft heiliges Band
The literary interest in folk motifs and its implications is treated in
more detail in Chapter 3 below;52 what is notable here is the way folk
songs echo in a graceful nature, which responds as their natural
habitat. The last prospect of the narrative, now on the Ionian island
of Cephalonia, is a panoramic one from above towards the west:53 ‘At
last Koras stood high up on Cephalonia, looking across the wide sea,
lost in thought. Night fell. He admired the full moon rising above the
ocean’s surface and he was overcome by sentiments he had never felt
before. The waves of the Adriatic came rushing toward him with a
name: Bonaparte; and: Bonaparte! the land echoed far and wide’
(p. 25).54 The mountain view as such, which we encounter time and
again in the landscape descriptions of the period, is reminiscent of
Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloı̈se, where St Preux reXects on a moun-
tain view as aVecting the imagination and inducing, in its total
perspective, transcendence and ease among a range of other sensa-
tions.55 In von Halem’s case, nature, as it is viewed, responds to the
am Fuß der Altäre geknüpft wird, wo noch, wie im goldenen Alter, Freyheit Hand in
Hand wandelt mit Unschuld. Oft in der Dämmerung des Abends erstieg er die
Gebirge, und horchte den Morlachischen Volksgesängen. Sie feyerten die Thaten
ihrer Helden der Vorzeit, und eintönig erklangen der Guzla Saiten zu dem Gesange.
Andre Vorüberstreifende, die fern schon die kundigen Töne vernahmen, stimmten
laut in ihr Lied ein, und fort tönte der Wechselgesang, bis etwa ein Thal sich krümmte
und der Laut in den Klüften verhallte.’
52 According to von Halem, his information on the Morlachs was taken from the
writings of the Countess Rosenberg and from Herder’s Volkslieder. A collection of
Croatian songs included in Alberto Fortis’s Viaggo in Dalmazia (Venice, 1774), some
of which Herder had included in his collection, were, however, largely pastiches of songs
written by the Franciscan A. Kačić Miošić (1704–60); the latter had composed them in
the tone and style of old Serbo-Croat heroic songs to help generate national conscious-
ness among his people under foreign (Turkish and Venetian) dominance; see Ulrich
Gaier, ‘Kommentar’, in Herder, Werke, iii, ed. Gaier (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 839–927, 859 f;
on the Morlachs as an object of curiosity, see WolV, Inventing Eastern Europe, 315–24.
53 On the recent invention of the panorama as an art-form at the time, see Stephan
Oettermann, Das Panorama: Geschichte eines Massenmediums (Frankfurt/M., 1980), 5 V.
54 ‘Zuletzt stand Koras auf den Höhen von Cephalonia, und schaute denkend in
das weite Meer aus. Es ward Nacht. Bewundernd sah er den Vollmond über die
MeeresXäche hervorgehn, und nie gefühlte EmpWndungen ergriVen den Seher. Da
rauschten ihm Adria’s Wogen den Namen: Bonaparte entgegen; und: Bonaparte!
wiederhallten fern die Gestade.’
55 J.-J. Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloı̈se, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard
Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, ii (Paris, 1969), Wrst part, 23rd letter, pp. 78 f.
liberating view by reciprocating with a political message.56 This one
mini-drama, then, combines all the hallmarks of the discourse of
Greek nature: freedom, understood as aesthetic, political, and indi-
vidual, is generated by placing Greece.
Of the other fourteen episodes of von Halem’s anthology, some, such
as ‘The Bishop of Damala’, or ‘The Needle-Worker’, feature verses or
verse dialogues inspired by folk motifs and songs taken from his literary
sources, such as Chandler and Guys, as he duly acknowledges in his
comments. Turkish-Ottoman tales are combined with Wrst-person
narratives of Greek resistance and stories of Western travellers searching
for antiquities or, in one case, for Homer’s tomb on the island of Nio.57
Locale and natural scenery serve throughout to enhance the feelings,
are means of teaching, or carriers of metaphor, as for example in the
story ‘Delli of Casos’, where the Greek narrator describes a Turkish
garden: ‘I thought the leafy bower was pressing upon me like the
Ottoman’s despotism’ (p. 59), while a storm shaking the leaves an-
nounces the impending arrival of Greek freedom; nature is moreover
presented as the object of perfect imitation in folk art, such as stitching
or song, and as the object of reverence, such as when, in the closing
story, the island of Nio, not unlike Patmos before, is in its entirety
revealed as the resting-place of Homer. In addition, it is noticeable that
apart from few exceptions the island setting prevails. Halem, in his
introduction, continues the organic image of the ‘Insel-Saat’: ‘There
lives a people here, separate from the mainland and its corruption,
which has mostly maintained its original character and remained close
to nature, without much law-making or science’ (p. 4). Well known
across the corpus of travel literature, the motif of the Greek archipelago
as closer to nature, and hence as a place endowed with greater residual
as well as potential freedom, will continue to feature strongly in the
writings surrounding the Greek War of Independence, on which more
56 In 1797, Napoleonic troops had taken over the Ionian Islands (among them
Cephalonia) from Venetian rule. Their arrival there had initially been greeted with
enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution, complete with commemorative
poems and the planting of Trees of Liberty.
57 Several islands have, following the strong biographical tradition of Homer in
antiquity, laid claim to Homer’s tomb, among them Chios and especially Ios, whose old
demotic name is Nio; see von Halem, Blüthen, 245; Bartholdy, Bruchstücke, 203. See
also the appendix ‘Homer’s Tomb’ in Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, 215–18.
below.58 Herder had already speculated that ‘the ancients made their
happy homes on islands and not without reason, for here they would
likely have found the most free and happy peoples’,59 and it is the vision
of individual islands interlinked across a connecting yet liberating
element that accounts for the appeal of the archipelago model: be it
in the guise of political community—von Halem’s ‘Archipelago of
German principalities’—or in the valued notion of the bond, especially
the bond of friendship, linking individuals and including the art
of correspondence practised by von Halem and his circle, as much as
the cult of friendship which the early Romantics would raise to a
programmatic level.
Apart from the special case of the archipelago, which recurs
frequently with regard to Greece, the topos of the island utopia,
preferably in the South, holds generally a prominent position in
German and European literature of the second half of the eighteenth
century, especially in the wake of the discovery of the PaciWc island of
Otaheiti by Cook and Forster in 1772.60 The model setting need
therefore not be Greek, but the imagined island communities each
often bear traces of a direct or indirect Hellenism, for which, given
their over-determined self-containment, they provide an eminently
suitable location. Like Romantic symbols, islands tend to point
beyond themselves, and if Hellenism is partly about the transcen-
dental potential of a contained, material location, then islands tinged
by Greekness function particularly well in their contexts of represen-
tation. Friedrich von Stolberg, one of von Halem’s close literary
correspondents and, very appropriately for island utopias, a transla-
tor of Plato, published a work entitled Die Insel (1788). Its Wrst part is
a dialogue, led by a character named Sophron, developing plans for a
utopia; the second part is a collection of poetry such as it might be
created on this utopian island.61 Despite choosing a small Danubian,
and hence realistically located, island as the location to inspire such
utopian reveries, the exchange is strongly modelled on the precepts of
58 For British travellers, see Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of the Greek Revival, 95, 237.
59 Herder, Ideen, bk. 13, Werke, vi. 518.
60 Heinrich Brunner, Die poetische Insel: Inseln und Inselvorstellungen in der
deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1967), 144.
61 For a detailed synopsis see Götz Müller, Die Utopie in der deutschen Literatur
(Stuttgart, 1989), 130–8.
the Socratic dialogue; Sophron, to round it all out, is introduced as
the son of a German politician who has only recently returned from a
formative educational journey to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Switzer-
land. Although as a literary work Stolberg’s piece remained largely
without inXuence, it sketches the semantic grid in which locality as
speciWc and ‘real’ (a Danubian island, not an unknown place), but
also as raised to a Greek status, becomes meaningful; a location
moreover, that produces meaning through the reXective approach
of the experienced traveller. Among the spate of eighteenth-century
utopian narratives mapped onto the world of the South, Wilhelm
Heinse’s novel Ardinghello and the Islands of the Blest (Ardinghello
und die glückseligen Inseln, 1787), a title strongly reminiscent of F. W.
Zachariaes’s Tahiti or the Islands of the Blest of 1777,62 is a particularly
stark example: here the ideal world of social experiment Wrst overlaps
with the geographically extremely accurate, only to be overtaken,
subsequently, by the uneasy encroachment of real political events.
Ardinghello, which is mainly set in sixteenth-century Italy, leads only
very late in the book to the foundation of an artistic community of
aesthetically like-minded, libertarian souls on the Cycladic islands of
Naxos and Paros (at the time indeed part of the Venetian-ruled
Duchy of the Archipelago), which are described following detailed
contemporary travel accounts (especially Choiseul-GouYer); the
community itself meanwhile is modelled after certain precepts of
the Platonic state, such as the separation of men and women and the
communal upbringing of children, although with strong Bacchanal-
ian overtones (Naxos being, after all, an island with cultic connec-
tions to Dionysos). The episode, however, ends with the remarkably
abrupt invasion of the realistic into this still-brittle commune: the
utopian plan of further expanding the territory of these blessed
islands is cut short by the arrival of the Ottomans and their historical
takeover of the island territory—and that is the end of the novel.
Heinse closes curtly: ‘The special secret of our constitution, revealed
only to those who had excelled themselves through heroic deeds or
brilliance of mind, was this: to bring to an end altogether the rule
of the Turks in this happy clime, and to elevate humanity back to
62 A letter by Boie to von Halem of September 1787 shows that both von Halem
and Stolberg knew the work; L. W. C. von Halem, Selbstbiographie, 65.
its former dignity. Yet after a period of bliss, relentless fate inter-
vened.’63 What distinguishes Ardinghello, therefore, is the thickness of
the ropes that tie the utopian community down to a realistic and
geographically and historically veriWable setting. It is not an ou-topos,
or an exotically far-Xung location; instead, its meaning derives pre-
cisely from the promising actuality of its environment. No matter
how many or how few people, relatively speaking, travelled to that
part of the world (Heinse almost certainly did not, even though he
repeatedly expressed a desire to travel there),64 the Greek archipelago
was reassuringly there.
Yet even if the ‘actual’ Greece, as a founding site for the exotic
commune, may be unexpectedly and oddly determined by the real
political situation of the Ottoman Mediterranean, Greece, as a place
of origin and displacement alike, is part of the aesthetic programme
of the novel. Set for the most part in Renaissance Italy, the novel is
largely a series of reXections on the relations between the creative arts
and questions of artistic autonomy, held together by a rather wild
coming-of-age plot, and it was at the time largely celebrated or
reviled for its alleged aesthetic immorality and libertarian attitude.65
In the series of dialogues on art, however, which form the backbone
of the work, landscape as an aesthetic object is given the central role.
The mentor-Wgure of the novel, who inspires the utopia in the Wrst
place, is the Greek exile Demetri; to him in particular is given the
position of identifying landscape as a work of art of nature, and thus
of conXating natural and artistic beauty. Landscapes, ambivalent in
Heinse as both the natural prospect and the artistic genre, are in
Demetri’s opinion given the status of prime genre for painting; they
63 ‘Das besondere Geheimnis unserer Staatsverfassung, welches nur denen anver-

traut ward, die sich durch Heldentaten und großen Verstand ausgezeichnet hatten,
bestand darin: der ganzen Regierung der Türken in diesem heitern Klima ein Ende zu
machen und die Menschheit wieder zu ihrer Würde zu erheben. Doch vereitelte dies
nach seligem Zeitraum das unerbittliche Schicksal.’ Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und
die glückseligen Inseln (Stuttgart, 1975), 376.
64 The archipelago is also a constantly recurring point of utopian reference in his
corrrespondence, see W. Brecht, Heinse und der Ästhetische Immoralismus: Zur
Geschichte der Italienischen Renaissance in Deutschland (Berlin, 1911), 46 V.
65 On the recent revival of interest in Heinse’s work, see the essay collection Das Maß
des Bacchanten: Wilhelm Heinses Überlebenskunst, ed. Gert Theile (Munich, 1998).
are instances of a true ‘Poetry of Nature’.66 Although instances of
actual Greek locality and descriptions of a speciWcally Greek land-
scape are comparatively few in the novel, which moves to the Greek
archipelago only in its very last section, it is signiWcant that the
heightened awareness of the value of aesthetic landscape is voiced
by the character of the exiled Greek: his (spatial) displacement from
his natural aYnity with Greece, Greece being the literal breeding-
ground of that which is considered truly beautiful in art, allows
Demetri to adopt the stance of the (non-Greek) modern artist who
is distinguished by a similar (temporal) distance from the original
realization of Greek spirit and art.
The modern Greek as a leadership Wgure realizing and reXecting
his displacement is a character who reappears a little after Heinse’s
publication in the shape of Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and Heinse himself
was the mentor of Friedrich Hölderlin, certainly as far as a theory of
the visual arts was concerned.67 If Ardinghello and Hyperion share the
sentiment of a lost nature and the attempt to regain it in a speciWcally
modern Greek setting, Heinse’s energetic revival of a sensuous utopia
still oVers an answer very diVerent to that suggested by Hölderlin.
H ÖLDERLIN’S HYPE RION: T H E GRE EK

LANDSCAPE OF TH E GERMAN SOUL
The work of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) in many ways exem-

pliWes the challenge of the realization and spatial visualization of the
ideal, based on a correspondence between internal and external
landscapes. In his poetry, speciWc landscapes, identiWed by concrete
place-names, cohere aesthetically with a poetic and philosophical
66 Ardinghello, 195. In his upgrading of the landscape genre in painting, Heinse slots into
a contemporary discussion that valued that genre less highly and thus pre-empts artistic
debate by a decade; see Ulrich Port, ‘Die Schönheit der Natur erbeuten’: Problemgeschichtliche
Untersuchungen zum ästhetischen Modell von Hölderlins Hyperion (Würzburg, 1999), 258.
67 For their personal contact in Hölderlin’s Frankfurt period (1796–98), see Port,
‘Die Schönheit’, 292 V.; Ulrich Gaier, ‘ ‘‘Mein ehrlich Meister’’: Hölderlin im Gespräch
mit Heinse’, in Theile, Maß des Bacchanten, 25–44; on Hölderlin’s reception of Ardin-
ghello further Elisabeth Stoelzel, Hölderlin in Tübingen und die Anfänge seines Hyperion
(Tübingen, 1938), 19 f.
programme that focuses on reality production and the role of the
aesthetic in between the rational and the sensory: in the realm of
the imagination. The transcendental is at the same time again not
apolitical but very much about society, individuality, and unity.
The landscape descriptions in Hölderlin’s work as a whole are
noteworthy for their wealth of precise geographical detail. Images of
Swabia and the Swiss Alps (his mythological new Hesperia) in par-
ticular are complemented by the depiction of Greece and other envir-
onments representative of the transalpine, Mediterranean, and, in this
sense, ‘Greek’ world (including the landscapes of the South of
France).68 Hölderlin’s use of travel writing in the composition of
Hyperion is well documented:69 for the all-important setting of Greece,
the land he never visited in actuality, Hölderlin is known to have
drawn on the usual suspects, such as Chandler’s Travels in Asia
Minor and Travels in Greece (published in German translation by
H. Ch. Boie and Wilhelm Voss in 1776/7) and Choiseul-GouYer’s
Voyage pittoresque. There is also evidence that he knew Barthélemy’s
Anacharsis.70 As would be expected, the source material undergoes
its own process of modiWcation. We are faced with a reality that is
concrete, but not independent. Since Hölderlin’s poetic landscape is the
mirror of internal, mental processes, that is, the medium of their
externalization, there is only ‘one level of objective reality, shaped to
the demands of aesthetic experience’.71 Just as in the poeticized world
of the other Romantics, even if Hölderlin stood at an odd angle to
them as a close-knit group, there is not a question of imposing an ideal
upon a material reality, but of mutual creation—and it is a set of issues
that is particularly implicated in Greek modernity.
68 David Constantine, The SigniWcance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Höl-

derlin (London, 1979); Romano Guardini, Form und Sinn der Landschaft in den
Dichtungen Hölderlins (Stuttgart, 1946).
69 Martin Anderle, Die Landschaft in den Gedichten Hölderlins: Die Funktion des
Konkreten im idealistischen Weltbild (Bonn, 1986); Friedrich Beißner, ‘Über die Realien
des ‘‘Hyperion’’’, in Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, 8 (1954), 93–109; Constantine, The SigniWcance
of Locality, and Hölderlin (Oxford, 1988), ch. 5; Werner Volke, ‘ ‘‘O Lacedämons heiliger
Schutt!’’ Hölderlins Griechenland: Imaginierte Realien—Realisierte Imagination’, in
Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, 24 (1984/5), 63–86.
70 Volke, ‘Hölderlin’s Griechenland’, 74 V.
71 Raymond Immerwahr, ‘Reality as an Object of Romantic Experience in Early
German Romanticism’, Colloquia Germanica (1969), 133–61, 152.
The novel Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland, its Wrst part
published in 1797, the second in 1799, stands at the end of a series of
Hölderlin’s attempts to contain the Hyperion theme in appropriate
form.72 The theme of a young, near-contemporary Greek, the story is
set around 1770, and of his individual search for freedom is a study
in the realization of ideals, caught in a network of mutually reinfor-
cing cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and political facets. The Wnal
version is constructed as a series of confessional letters from Hy-
perion to his German friend Bellarmin, recounting his path from
Greece and his youth through a period of quasi-exile in Germany to
his recent return to his homeland; the second part contains some
additional letters from Diotima, the guiding female Wgure, inset
within Hyperion’s letters. Hölderlin’s choice of form combines the
Bildungsroman and novel of letters with the confessional tradition, all
genres allowing for a high degree of reXection on subjectivity.73 The
‘healing anamnesis’74 mirrored in the letters implies that Hyperion’s
German exile is a necessary stage, and hence a structurally functional
location both in spatial and temporal terms. His return to the Greek
‘Vaterlandsboden’, his home ground, is predicated upon his sojourn
in a place temporally, spatially, and cognitively removed, an Archi-
medean lever to ascertain Hyperion’s identity, and the novel, indica-
tively, Wnishes with Hyperion recollecting his contemplation of
nature in Germany. The German perspective, maintained in the
framework of establishing a German addressee for his letters, is a
condition for recalling his origin and his progress across Greece,
marking Greece as a place of memory.
Hölderlin outlined his plans for the novel Hyperion in a letter to
his friend Caspar NeuVer in 1793: ‘What you have said so well about
terra incognita in the realm of poetry, pertains especially to a novel.
Predecessors enough, few who chanced upon new and beautiful
72 For the textual evolution of Hyperion see the critical apparatus in the Grosse
Stuttgarter Ausgabe (GStA), iii. 295–335. I quote from Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche
Werke und Briefe, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt/M., 1994), vol. ii, based on the GStA
with a slightly modernized orthography. Page numbers cited parenthetically.
73 For the genre of confessio and its eVect on Hölderlin, see Ulrich Gaier, Hölderlin:
Eine Einführung (Tübingen, 1993), 113–19; on Hyperion as a poetic novel see Lawrence
Ryan, ‘Hölderlins Hyperion—ein romantischer Roman?’, in Über Hölderlin, ed. Jochen
Schmidt (Frankfurt/M., 1970), 175–212.
74 The expression is Gaier’s, Hölderlin, 120.
territory, and still immeasurable realms to be discovered and worked
on!’75 The image of territorial exploration, already coloured by
anxiety that territory is always somebody else’s, is not accidental:
one of the characteristics of Hölderlin’s style is his use of geographical
or landscape metaphor to show individual and artistic progress and
in the process trace a philosophy of subjective identity. In a letter to
NeuVer the following year, Hölderlin again stresses the spatial aspect
of his philosophical and aesthetic project when he insists that what is
needed is the ‘step across the Kantian borderline’.76 In the spatial
aspect of the landscape image, in the ‘beautiful land’ that is Greece,
the experience of transcendence is verbalized. The view becomes a
Wgure for the act of cognition. Or, in Eckart Lobsien’s words: ‘What
happens in descriptions of landscape is something akin to a verbal
reconstruction of what the conditions of cognition of landscape as
landscape are. This means that descriptive sequences yield less a
representation of landscape than they thematize the cognitive Weld
from which landscapes arise.’77 Hyperion’s ideal is a synthesis, a
completeness of nature that signiWes both return, or rejuvenation,
and maturation, a completion which Hölderlin captures in the spa-
tial image of ‘the eccentric course, which man covers, in general and
in particular, from one point (of more or less pure simplicity) to
another point (of more or less complete Bildung)’.78 So, too, in his
description of the ideal at the outset of the novel, spatial vantage-
point and metaphor merge: ‘To be one with all . . . this is the summit
of thoughts and pleasures, the height of the sacred mountain’ (p. 16).
This ascent is inscribed in the nature of Greece as experienced by
Hyperion. ‘What once was nature will become ideal’ (p. 73), he insists
75 ‘Was Du so schön von der terra incognita im Reiche der Poesie sagst, trifft ganz
genau besonders bei einem Romane zu. Vorgänger genug, wenige, die auf neues
schönes Land geriethen, u. noch eine Unermessenheit zu’r Entdeckung und Bearbei-
tung!’ Letter to NeuVer, 21 July 1793, GStA vi. 87; the English translation is that of
Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany,
NY, 1988), 122.
76 Letter to NeuVer, 10 July 1794, GStA vi. 137. At the time Hölderlin envisages a
philosophy of the subject that sets nature, spirit, and freedom as principles manifested
in the subject; he does so by having recourse to Platonic ideas of the Beautiful, so as to
surpass Kant’s and Schiller’s Transcendental Idealism; see Gaier, Hölderlin, 81–7.
77 Landschaft in Texten: Zu Geschichte und Phänomenologie der literarischen Be-
schreibung (Stuttgart, 1981), 84.
78 Prologue to ‘Fragment von Hyperion’ (1794), 177.
later, to express the inevitable process of growing beyond nature. In
the same speech, Hyperion speaks of this process also as one of
fermentation (‘Gärung’), one of his favourite organic metaphors
for the natural and sometimes violent process of transformation.
The growth ‘out of ’ nature is reminiscent of Schiller’s overcoming
of the naive, which is only constituted in the very process. On the
level of setting and imagery to describe Hyperion this means that the
Greek landscape is realia and metaphor at the same time. A mean-
ingful speciWc natural environment, that of Greece, with additional
nature imagery as metaphor for the development of subjectivity
superimposed upon it, emerges as one of the structuring principles
in the treatment of landscape and locality in Hyperion, and it is the
focus of analysis here.
To make sense of Hölderlin’s locating the Greek land, it helps to
understand better Wrst his own system of how antiquity and mod-
ernity are related. Within that framework, the site of modern Greece
can, and more speciWcally has to, function as the link between an
ancient, Greek ideal and a modern, Western identity. Increasingly
in Hölderlin’s thought this relationship between antiquity and mod-
ernity is fuelled by a consciousness of their essential diVerence, and
by 1801, at the end of writing Hyperion, he declares that ‘I have
laboured long over this and know by now that, with the exception
of what must be the highest for the Greeks and us—namely the
living relationship and destiny—we likely have nothing in common
with them’.79
Hellas, or antiquity, is not a model in the sense that modernity
could ever be built upon its imitation. Like Schiller’s analysis of
modernity vis-à-vis nature, or Bhabha’s split national subject gener-
ating its own narration from a distance to itself, Hölderlin’s claim
rests on the same basic, but far-reaching, structure of relating to the
similar but not identical, an argument that leaves a modern Greece
exactly and deliberately on that fault-line.80 In Hölderlin’s theory of
79 ‘Ich habe lange daran laborirt und weiß nun, daß außer dem, was bei den
Griechen und uns das höchste seyn muß, nemlich dem lebendigen Verhältniß und
Geschik, wir nicht wohl etwas gleich mit ihnen haben dürfen.’ Letter to BöhlendorV, 4
Dec. 1801, GStA vi. 426.
80 Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Mod-
ern Nation’, in id. (ed.), Nation and Narration (London, 1990), 292–322.
culture, aspiring to the ideal means for each, ancient and modern, to
realize (or to have realized) its own character freely. As he has it in the
same letter to BöhlendorV: ‘we cannot imitate [the Greeks] as regards
especially what is proper, what is national to us. As I said, the free
employment of what is proper to us is the most diYcult.’81 Com-
parison and observation are built into what it means to be modern,
though. Hellas was not a place of nature as opposed to art, but it
underwent its own reXexive and hence artistic development, its
‘nature’, in that sense, but also in a literal sense, expressing harmony
and fullness.82 It reached its own maximum, with a modern new
maximum to be achieved on a diVerent plane.83 Again, here is the
familiar recasting of a wavering, spiralling line of history into three-
dimensional space.84 Hellas, in its beauty once supremely free, is
beyond retrieval, as the conditions triggering its character have
irreversibly changed; yet Hyperion’s Greek land is still supremely
beautiful, and the episode of Hyperion’s visit to the ruins of Athens
expresses the temporary hope of a new Xourishing on its grounds:
‘Lie still, I thought as we returned on board, lie still, you slumbering
land! Soon fresh young life will sprout from you to grow towards the
blessings of the sky. Soon the clouds will not rain in vain any longer,
soon the sun will Wnd the old pupils’ (p. 101). The realization of
Hyperion’s visions is, however, inWnitely deferred by the turn of
events, summarized in the closing words of the novel: ‘These were
my thoughts. More soon’ (p. 175). It is the present Greek nature that
allows a glimpse of the link between the ancient and the modern
ideal, diVerent as they are, yet there is no structural provision for the
glimpse to become an open view.
81 To BöhlendorV (as n. 79). See also Peter Szondi, ‘ ‘‘Überwindung des Klassizis-
mus’’—Der Brief an BöhlendorV vom 4. Dezember 1801’, in his Hölderlin-Studien: Mit
einem Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis (Frankfurt/M., 1967), 85–104; also stressing
the essential diVerence of Greece is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Hölderlin and the
Greeks’, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 208–35.
82 Hyperion’s letter on the visit to Athens includes his outline of the ancient
inclusiveness of religion, art, and philosophical reXection (pp. 88 V.).
83 The scientiWc notion of a maximum, i.e. a balance of powers, repeated on
diVerent levels, was prevalent in contemporary theories of culture, including that
of Greek antiquity; it is found, for example, in Herder’s Ideen (bk. 13) and Schiller’s
Über die ästhetische Erziehung (6th letter); also Gaier, Hölderlin, 94 f.
84 Here again is the ‘exzentrische Bahn’ Hölderlin speaks of famously in the
preface to Hyperion, the eccentric trajectory that distinguishes our modern life.
Throughout Hölderlin’s poetry, ancient Hellas’s main attribute is its
active, fully realized, semi-divine or heroic character.85 Merging with
the Wgure of the semi-divine hero, it is also inscribed in the modern
Greek landscape of Hyperion. In the opening vista over the Corinthian
Isthmus, as just one example, one of the gulfs lies ‘like a victorious hero’
(p. 14). Yet in its active character lies also Hellas’s (self-)destructiveness,
accelerated by the immediate contact with the sacred. Its opposite,
which characterizes Hesperia (Hölderlin’s quasi-mythological West
representing the ideal of modernity), is a self-consciousness implying
mediation. This establishes Hyperion’s contemporary Greece as the site
of a necessarily superseded past. The point of reference is Hyperion’s
modern subjectivity, which is shaped by and expressed in the natural
environment surrounding him. The landscape, made up of material,
natural objects aesthetically perceived, bears traces of the ancient Greek
spirit in the sense of a non-modernity necessary for a modern identity;
the aesthetic perception of landscape as shaping (and shaped by) the
subject is an expression of that modern identity. There is in Hyperion a
longing for the reuniting of poetic expression with a material nature
that is its original condition yet resists simple imitation or integration.
On the plot level, this re-emerges as the longing for the political
uniWcation of a Greece independent of Ottoman rule. These longings
mirror the relation Hölderlin assumes between modernity and the
ancients. In that sense, the character of Hyperion conWrms the ascrip-
tion of the landscape as ‘Greek’, or, to be precise, as Greek from the
standpoint of modernity.
As the work is built on the principle of a spiritual progress enhanced
by a geographical one, the course of Hyperion’s path across Greece, as
he recounts it himself, oVers a good enough line for analysing Höl-
derlin’s Greek landscape. Hyperion’s opening vista is that of the Gulf of
Corinth, a raised viewpoint at a major crossroads on Greek territory
(between Attica, the Peloponnese, and Roumeli); the view takes in
plains, the sea, and Mounts Helicon and Parnassus (both sacred
mountains of the Muses and obvious topoi of poetic inspiration in
addition to their material bulk). Hyperion’s internal state, however,
that corresponds to this setting of multiply inscribed contemplatio or
85 See Paul de Man, ‘The Image of Rousseau in Hölderlin’, in The Rhetoric of

Romanticism (New York, 1984), 19–45, 35 V.
theoria, is one of sharply felt loss and desolation, only reinforced by the
prospect: ‘Happy the man whose heart can take pleasure and strength
from a Xourishing fatherland! I feel I am drowned in a swamp, I feel
the coYn lid is thrown shut above my head when I am reminded of my
own’ (p. 14).
The Wrst words of the novel, likewise, are programmatic for the
relation between interior and exterior nature: ‘The dear ground of
my fatherland gives me, once more, pleasure and pain’ (p. 14). By the
same logic, Hyperion’s aesthetic experience of nature implies its
potential to overcome the sorrow it causes: ‘My entire being falls
silent and listens when the tender wave of air surrounds my chest.
Lost in the deep blue I often look into the aether above and into the
sacred sea, and it is as if a kindred spirit would open its arms, as if the
pain of solitude was resolved into the life of the divinity’ (p. 16).86
Hyperion’s vision edges onto Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur
solitaire, a work describing the desire to melt into nature, relived in
writing.87 But as opposed to Rousseau’s local nature, the prospect of
the surviving natural conditions of the Greek land oVsets the feeling
of exclusion. The combination of the ‘authenticity’ of the Greek
environment, well known from travel discourses, with the erotic
desire for that nature, and the parallel state of desolation and regen-
eration mirrored in Hyperion, add to the identiWcation of Hyperion
with the Greek land. The correspondence between exterior and
interior nature, aesthetically represented, is not one of strict syn-
chronization, though, but obeys a staggered pattern of adaptation
and development. It is from this jointly mental and geographical
vantage-point, then, that Hyperion is led to relate the story of his life.
His older friend Adamas is a Wrst mentor Wgure to appear in his
educational biography. To him Hyperion owes not only guidance and
inspiration, but together they repeat the traditional model of the
educational journey, cast in the language of the Grand Tour, and with
86 ‘Mein ganzes Wesen verstummt und lauscht, wenn die zarte Welle der Luft mir
um die Brust spielt. Verloren in’s weite Blau, blick ich oft hinauf an den Äther und
hinein in’s heilige Meer, und mir ist, als öVnet’ ein verwandter Geist mir die Arme, als
löste der Schmerz der Einsamkeit sich auf in’s Leben der Gottheit.’
87 J.-J. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in Oeuvres complètes, i (Paris,
1959), 1065, speaks of ‘me fondre pour ainsi dire dans le système des êtres, à
m’identiWer avec la nature entière’.
the localities to match. They travel to Mount Athos, the Hellespont,
and to the ancient sites of Elis, Nemea, and Olympia; not only in
their itinerary but also in their activities they comply with the
expectations of the classical traveller in search of (dis-)continuity.
Nature in spring reminds Hyperion that
man’s glorious nature is hardly present any more, like the fragment of a
temple or in memory, in a picture of the dead—and there I sat next to him,
sadly playing and picking moss oV the pedestal of a demigod, from the
rubble I would dig the marble shoulder of a hero and from the half-buried
architraves I would cut oV the briars and weeds, while my Adamas was
drawing the calm and soothing landscape that surrounded the ruin, the hill
of wheat, the olives, the herd of goats suspended on the mountain rocks, the
elm forest tumbling from the summits down to the valley. (pp. 20f.)88
In this tableau reminiscent of the aristocratic Grand Tour (and
undoubtedly owing to Choiseul-GouYer), Hyperion’s mentor ap-
proaches his environment through art. Landscape is its result, and
the statue of a hero, half-buried and sheltered in this landscape, is the
materialization of Hölderlin’s notion of the semi-divine character of
the ancient Greeks; we view the scene vertically, the herd graphically
‘hanging’ on the rock and the forest hurling itself down the slope.
What is more, this, as will become clear, is a spatial movement
consistent with the act of consciousness as described by Hölderlin
repeatedly throughout the novel.
The period of Adamas’s tutorship Wnishes when Adamas decides
to travel further east. Hyperion instead turns toward Smyrna, a
direction (of both travellers) in accordance with Hölderlin’s belief
in the origin of modern civilization in the East, and its later spiritual
movement westwards.89 The latter is echoed in the deliberate choice
of Nio, the island of Homer’s tomb, as their place of farewell, that
88 ‘daß des Menschen herrliche Natur jetzt kaum noch da ist, wie das Bruchstück
eines Tempels oder im Gedächtnis, wie ein Totenbild—da saß ich traurig spielend
neben ihm, und pXückte das Moos von eines Halbgotts Piedestal, grub eine mar-
morne Heldenschulter aus dem Schutt, und schnitt den Dornbusch und das Hei-
dekraut von den halbbegrabnen Architraven, indes mein Adamas die Landschaft
zeichnete, wie sie freundlich tröstend den Ruin umgab, den Weizenhügel, die Oliven,
die Ziegenherde, die am Felsen des Gebirges hing, den Ulmenwald, der von den
Gipfeln in das Tal sich stürzte.’
89 Constantine, The SigniWcance of Locality, 41 V.
leads Hyperion to the coast of Asia Minor in search of Homer’s
birthplace. He Wnds it in the vicinity of Smyrna, the place that is also
a meaningful locale to be reading in. As Robert Wood had experienced
before him (and a host of classical scholars had experienced by proxy,
reading Wood’s descriptions), and as Hyperion can conWrm, to read
Homer in his proper setting qualitatively changes the understanding:
‘I found him. Every sound was silenced in me. I opened his divine
poem and it was as if I had never known it, so diVerently it came alive
in me now’ (p. 27). But again, and stronger than the implication in
Wood, it is a new Homer who emerges from the pages read on site, an
alien, unknown Wgure rather than a rediscovery.
Hölderlin’s Greece is never a place of early revivalism or renais-
sance: its discovery marks a radical break from identity, in all its
unsettling extent. Importantly, this experience of landscape also
brings to the surface a moment of speechlessness. The inability or
insuYciency of authorial utterances vis-à-vis signiWcant nature is an
undercurrent that is inseparable from Hyperion’s progressing aes-
thetic consciousness. The same, repeated oscillation between initial
enthusiasm and a feeling of deWciency structures Hyperion’s experi-
ence of Smyrna. To him, having fully internalized the beauty of
nature, the city appears as a paradise, and Smyrna responds to his
enthusiasm in turn: ‘My heart was too full of the agreeable and could
not but lend from its abundance to mortality. I had captured in me
nature’s beauty all too happily and could not but Wll the cracks of
human life with it. My needful Smyrna put on the clothes of my
enthusiasm and stood there, like a bride’ (p. 29).90
The clothing of Smyrna in his own colours, however, turns into its
own parody, the analogy is corrupted: ‘the paradox of their manners
gave me delight, like a child’s play, and because I was naturally above
all the introduced forms and customs I played with all of them, put
them on and took them oV like fancy costumes’ (p. 29). The imme-
diate Anschauung, combined with Hyperion’s experience of Homeric
literature and the Smyrniots’ lack of interest in the literary and
cultural signiWcance of their (once Homeric) environment, leads
90 ‘Mein Herz war des Wohlgefälligen zu voll, um nicht von seinem ÜberXusse der
Sterblichkeit zu leihen. Ich hatte zu glücklich in mich die Schönheit der Natur erbeutet,
um nicht die Lücken des Menschenlebens damit auszufüllen. Mein dürftig Smyrna
kleidete sich in die Farben meiner Begeisterung, und stand, wie eine Braut, da.’
him to acknowledge eventually that their childlike character and his
own enthusiasm are out of tune with his already more advanced stage
of consciousness: ‘How my heart delighted in it! How faithfully
I interpreted those friendly hieroglyphs! But I experienced almost the
same as with the birch trees in spring. I had heard of the juice of those
trees and thought what a marvellous drink they surely must produce.
But there was neither strength nor spirit enough in them’ (p. 29).91
His conclusion, formulated in analogy to an experience of nature,
echoes the belief in the less advanced childhood stage represented by
the East as it was suggested, for example, in Herder’s universal
history. More than that, Hyperion’s act of judgement is triggered by
a speciWc, appropriate location and is expressed through a metaphor
taken from nature. In addition, this assertion of Hyperion’s identity
in front of a signiWcant environment is predicated on the Smyrniots’
absence of self-reXexivity by comparison. Overall, Hyperion’s in-
crease in knowledge and consciousness is mediated by nature in a
double sense: the aspect of nature, its aesthetic perception and
reXection, is instrumental in maintaining Hyperion’s progress; in
turn, the progress is charted through images taken from that very
same nature, locking an environment whose signiWcance ostensibly
rests on its independent materiality even further into a structure of
expected, transcendent meaning.
The central Wgure, however, to guide Hyperion’s winding course is
that of Diotima, who, like her namesake in Plato’s Symposium,
appears as the female representative of a completed, physical and
spiritual ideal. In contrast to the closely deWned world of a classical
symposium, into which the Socratic Diotima enters only by way of
recollection and narrative, Hölderlin’s Diotima is radically put in a
place whose very reality and materiality drive Hyperion’s path, as
much as his despair. Not only is she an actual love object, as opposed
to a teacher of love, but she is situated in a spatially and temporally
signiWcant environment. The sheltered home of Hölderlin’s guiding
Diotima, and the initial meeting-place with Hyperion, is Kalaurea,
91 ‘Wie hatt ich meine herzliche Freude daran! wie gläubig deutet ich diese
freundlichen Hieroglyphen! Aber es ging mir fast damit, wie ehemals mit den Birken
im Frühlinge. Ich hatte von dem Safte dieser Bäume gehört, und dachte wunder, was
ein köstlich Getränk die lieblichen Stämme geben müßten. Aber es war nicht Kraft
und Geist genug darinnen.’
or, by its modern name, the island of Poros, a small island oV the
Eastern Peloponnese in the Saronic gulf, which is separated from the
mainland by only a very thin waterway (the Greek poros of its name).
That Poros, whose ancient Greek name signiWes a strait as much as
resourcefulness, is in Plato’s mythology also the father of Eros, about
whom his Diotima is the acknowledged expert and master, means that
Hölderlin eVectively spatializes the mythical, Platonic genealogy of that
most persistent and present of deities, Love, who is characterized as
constant longing and deWciency, on a Greek map of modernity, as
much as on a map of modern Greece. Within the speciWc repertoire
of information on contemporary Greece, moreover, Hölderlin not only
selects a site which earlier and contemporary travel accounts, such as
Chandler’s, had singled out for its beauty and fertility;92 Diotima’s
natural environment is also that of a secured and separated, individual
island which is at the same time geographically as close as possible to
the revolutionary mainland: the site of Hyperion’s greatest hopes,
disappointments, and reXections towards which Diotima guides him.
Hyperion’s memory of Kalaurea is triggered indirectly, by the
mountain view across the nearby island of Salamis, which he enjoys
at the opening of Book II. The evening view extends to the shore and
the sea, as far as Attica. Hyperion’s interior and his exterior sur-
roundings bear each other’s mark; the landscape induces a mental
process, serving as its visual mirror image: ‘Or I look out at sea and
reXect on my life, its rising and falling, its bliss and its sadness,’ just as
the landscape, in its entirety and particularity, adopts the emotional
colouring of the psyche: ‘I love this land of Greece above all else. It
has the colour of my heart.’ This vantage-point leads Hyperion to
remember the mountain view he frequently shared with Diotima
from the top of her island, where ‘one could live in more freedom
than anywhere else’ (p. 57). Later on, Hyperion tries to salvage the
vision of Kalaurea as his blessed island, inhabited by himself and
Diotima, from the ruins of Athens: ‘What is the shipwrecking of the
world to me when I know only of my blesssed island?’ (p. 98). Like
Diotima, Hyperion himself hails from an island (Tenos), a signiWcant
origin in the light of the privileged character that distinguishes the
islands of the Aegean archipelago in Hölderlin’s elegy of the same
92 Commentary in GStA iii. 456.

name, written around the time when the Hyperion project was
drawing to a close. In ‘The Archipelago’ (1800/1) the sea is the
unifying factor linking the personiWed daughters of the Archipelago,
those ‘mothers of heroes, the islands’ (l. 19), that have survived since
the heyday of a Greece uniWed and blossoming after the Persian wars.
The island world, the site of a transcendent, deiWed nature, that is still
present now and promises a fulWlled future, diVers from Hyperion’s
view though; despite the grief at the incompleteness of the present
and the solitary distance from the harmony of the past, the unnamed
speaker of ‘The Archipelago’ foresees an unspeciWed future renewal.
Hyperion, even if he follows an analogous cycle of reXection, seems
quite literally more entangled in the material and the geopolitical
realities of his Greek setting, in a speciWc historical period—quite in
line with the fact that what keeps Greece in place for modern
Hellenism is exactly the peculiar symbiosis of placeness and histor-
icity, that is envisaged not as peculiar but as natural.
To Hyperion, Diotima is identiWed with both her real and his
visionary island: ‘Like the ocean wave lapping the shores of the
blessed isles, so did my restless heart Xood the peace of this heavenly
maiden’ (p. 68). Again, the landscape framing the scene is reintro-
duced through the door of metaphor, this time to express the prom-
ise of unity between Hyperion and Diotima, yet not without the
threat of an overpowering, destructive force of nature. The talks with
Diotima follow the same fashion: ‘Our talks Xowed softly, like a sky-
blue river, its gold blinking here and there among the sand, and our
silence was like the silence of the mountain tops where, high above
the sphere of thunderstorms, in glorious solitude, only the divine air
rushes through the locks of the daring wanderer’ (p. 85).93
In the fold between literal and metaphorical use, the identity of
Diotima, the ideal Wgure, and the real world is total: ‘because our
world is your world too. Your world too, Diotima, for it is a copy of
you. Oh you with your Elysian calm, if only we created what you are!’
(p.127). Through her association with Hyperion, however, who links
them both to nature through poetic metaphor and his reXexive view,
93 ‘Unsre Gespräche gleiteten weg, wie ein himmelblau Gewässer, woraus der
Goldsand hin und wieder blinkt, und unsre Stille war, wie die Stille der Berggipfel,
wo in herrlich einsamer Höhe, hoch über dem Raume der Gewitter, nur die göttliche
Luft noch in den Locken des kühnen Wanderers rauscht.’
her ‘naive’ immediate relation to nature is already lost, just as
deWciency is inscribed in landscape by the act of aesthetic represen-
tation. When the Wgure of Diotima is interpreted from the stand-
point of her location within nature and landscape, hers is an ideal
position of calm and freedom, which she alone is able to sustain.
Compare the following two passages. Poised on the edge, overlook-
ing the island from the point of her home ground, Diotima’s soul
expands up into the open ‘as if she was to soar up into the clouds’, yet
she can equally sustain the view down below: ‘She stepped closer now
and looked down the steep face of the rock. She took delight in
measuring its horrible depth and in losing herself in the night of the
forests stretching their tops from the rocks and foaming rivulets
towards the light’ (p. 64).94 Contrast Hyperion’s description of his
farewell exchange with Diotima: ‘Diotima stood like a marble sculp-
ture and I could feel her hand die in my own. I had killed everything
near me, I was alone and I felt dizzy in the face of such limitless silence
where my life found no hold’ (pp. 113 f.).95
The motif of vertigo (‘Schwindel’) is never far from the ascending
movement that governs Hyperion’s perspective. Expansion of view,
like the expansion of meaning implied in the Romantic image, can
just as easily reveal the void beyond it. The end of Book I, that is, the
passage directly preceding Hyperion’s view from high on Salamis,
evokes the mythological ascent of the Titans to overthrow Zeus’
residence on Mount Olympus (which doubles as a real landmark
elsewhere in the novel) by linking it to the spiritual Xight and fall of
Hyperion and his companions: ‘and our spirits too thronged up-
wards, bold and exultant, and broke through the limit, and when
they turned around, alas, there was an inWnite void’ (p. 54).
Diotima’s ‘Xight’, in contrast, is restricted, or rather secured, by a
low fence of the garden demarcating her sphere. The garden appears
many times, especially as a site of the encounters with Diotima; and
94 ‘Nun trat sie weiter vor, und sah die schroVe Felswand hinab. Sie hatte ihre Lust
daran, die schröckende Tiefe zu messen, und sich hinab zu verlieren in die Nacht der
Wälder, die unten aus Felsenstücken und schäumenden Wetterbächen herauf die
lichten Gipfel streckten.’
95 ‘Diotima stand, wie ein Marmorbild und ihre Hand starb fühlbar in meiner.
Alles hatt ich um mich her getötet, ich war einsam und mir schwindelte vor der
grenzenlosen Stille, wo mein überwallend Leben keinen Halt mehr fand.’
again, in Hyperion’s early discussions with Alabanda it is used as a
particularly poignant metaphor: ‘The state is nothing but the rough
shell around the core of life. It is the wall fencing in the garden of
human fruits and Xowers.’ The sheltered existence of Diotima’s island
where the garden is integrated into the broader environment is one
actual, material development of Hyperion’s metaphor; it is envisaged
as a mode of living which is in keeping both with nature and with a
political, social framework. Yet, in other contexts, the garden can
become an image of deWciency or displacement alike. Hyperion, at
the end of Book I, asks: ‘If your garden is so full of Xowers, why does
their aroma not give me pleasure?’ (p. 55), and Alabanda, towards the
end of the novel, tells of his own exile when, shipwrecked in his youth
near Trieste, he was confronted on shore by a garden (and social
community) which stands in stark contrast to the Greek soil: ‘I
followed the road towards the town. Before I reached its gates I saw
a cheerful crowd in the gardens, I entered and I sang a cheerful Greek
song. I did not know of any sad ones. All the while I burned with
shame and pain to have to show my unlucky fate so publicly’ (p. 170).
During the crucial visit to Athens, gardens too oVer the grounds
for decision-making (‘we went out into the nearby gardens’, p. 97).
Here, next to the ruins, Hyperion, in dialogue with Diotima, is free to
develop his vision of rejuvenation and his role in it. Here also, the
sight of Athens’s ruins triggers Hyperion’s new awareness that ‘I am
an artist’ (p. 100). Yet the plans to become a modern educator of
Greece are cut short by the actual mobilization of forces on the
Peloponnese and Hyperion’s decision to join them. As in Heinse’s
case, there is a certain thrill with the invasion of historical ‘real time’
and events into a signiWcant landscape, which ultimately proves
Greece’s structural function as a material symbol. The desire for the
(untimely) realization of his ideal, which will lead to political failure
and Diotima’s death, is expressed in territorial terms. ‘The new bond
of like minds cannot live in the air, the sacred theocracy of beauty
must live in a free state; that state wants a place on earth and we will
surely conquer that place’ (p. 108). Hyperion recounts his journey
across the country to join Alabanda in the Southern Peloponnese: ‘I
am happy once more. I wandered through the land as if walking
through Dodona’s grove, where the oak trees resound with oracles
foretelling glory’ (p. 117). Once more, we Wnd the strategy that a level
of nature imagery and metaphor, in this case pertaining to the spe-
ciWed Greek locale of Dodona, the nature oracle in Northern Greece, is
superimposed on the level of geographical description, locality, and
spatial order which are already signiWcant in their own right.
Nature metaphor makes a reappearance in the description of the
Greeks preparing for freedom: ‘The mountain people are Wlled with
powers of revenge, they sit like a silent storm cloud waiting for the
wind to set them on their way’ (p. 117). The natural imagery already
suggests the duplicity of this threatening energy, anticipating its later
destructiveness. At the same time, the released forces of nature relate
back to the original friendship of Alabanda and Hyperion: ‘We
encountered each other like two streams rolling from the mountain,
pushing aside the weight of earth and stone and rotting wood to
force their path towards each other, until they break through to the
point where they merge, sweeping and being swept along by the same
power, united in one single stream, and begin their journey towards
the wide sea’ (p. 34).96
The episode precedes their painful separation, and the image of the
powerful stream is subsequently turned onto its more sinister axis when
Hyperion accuses those of the Greek people who lack spirit (Geist) and
greatness: ‘—oh take your sons from the cradle and throw them into the
river, at least to save them from your disgrace!’ (p. 36). This threatening
aspect of ‘real’ powerful nature is continued in Hyperion’s letter to
Bellarmin that tells of Diotima’s confession of love: ‘I see, I see now how
this must end. The rudder has fallen into the sea and the ship, like a
child gripped by the ankles, will be seized and smashed on the rocks’
(p. 86). In this dark parallel image, the identiWcation of Hyperion with
the Greek country is revalidated; and to the vertigo of space is added
that of time, in more than one direction: temporally, the violence of
nature, like the violence to a child gripped by the ankles, echoes
the mythical history of Astyanax’s cruel death, in the Trojan War,
at the hands of the Greeks. In the future, and at a spatial distance,
this identiWcation in failure will be realized back in the Peloponnese.
96 ‘Wir begegneten einander wie zwei Bäche, die vom Berge rollen, und die Last
von Erde und Stein und faulem Holz und das ganze träge Chaos, das sie aufhält, von
sich schleudern, um den Weg sich zueinander zu bahnen, und durchzubrechen bis
dahin, wo sie nun ergreifend und ergriVen mit gleicher Kraft, vereint in Einen
majestätischen Strom, die Wanderung ins weite Meer beginnen.’
The unsuccessful Wghting at Mistra marks the disintegration of the
insurrection, and Hölderlin deliberately emphasizes the Greeks’ active
role in their abandoning of the cause. While the historical reasons for
the Greek defeat in 1770 surely were manifold (structural weaknesses,
lack of Russian support, only localized conXict), Hölderlin even sur-
passes contemporary accounts of the insurgency in laying the blame
squarely on the Greek side. Hölderlin here intensiWes a bias already
found in Reichard’s partial translation of Chandler’s Voyage pittor-
esque. Chandler is one of the few to give a detailed description of the
political upheavals in 1770, including the Wghting at Mistra. In Reich-
ard’s translation, the weak and disunited Greek contingent, facing an
opposition outnumbering them by far, as Chandler had portrayed it,
becomes a band of degenerate, corrupt, and greedy good-for-nothings
unable to withstand even a small number of enemies. And while it is
internal splitting, or disunity, of the Greeks as a body that is causal, it
is recognizable only from an outside perspective, doubling and in that
sense validating the splitting of the subject. The involution of desire,
the wilful destruction of the ideal by Hyperion’s men themselves, runs
parallel to Hyperion’s decision to abandon both Diotima and a period
of further education, and thus his failure to reach, or alternatively, to
stop at, a level of consciousness that can express its unity with nature.
The result for him is exile—and, with it, the reXective act of writing.
Writing in turn propels Hyperion once more onto the path, or
‘eccentric course’, of both rejuvenation and maturation. In his de-
scription of the search for the materialization of his ideals, there is
awareness that the transcendent is realized in language, including the
very language describing landscape. At the same time, this language
describing landscape, that is to say, the imagery of nature, is under-
stood to be deWcient. For Hyperion, and with him for Hölderin,
landscape is not only a way of seeing but also a way of writing. The
topos of the ineVable, of what is incommunicable by language, is a
recurring one; this is certainly not surprising for the fabric of Ro-
mantic poetry, but in Hyperion’s landscapes natural scenes come to
replace the need, or, more strongly, the ability, to speak. The insight
familiar from the cultural criticism of Schiller, that the alienation
from nature is a condition of modern artistic expression, is exem-
pliWed in Hyperion’s insight regarding the description of Diotima as
the copy of the world: ‘Only now and then can I speak a word about
her. I must forget what she is in her entirety if I am to speak of her at all’
(p. 76). This rift has even more profound consequences: Hölderlin
admits that the simple equation of the objective correlative, ‘interior
corresponds to exterior’, is insuYcient when it is put into words and
images: ‘Nothing can grow and wane so deeply as man. He will often
liken his suVering to the darkness of the abyss and his bliss to the aether,
and how little has he said by this?’ (p. 55). Hölderlin’s text is—among
other things, and again like other Romantic writing—a case study in
critiquing the use of poetic language through engagement with the
natural world. What distinguishes Hyperion is the interlacing of imagery
and objective reality: nature imagery is employed to express the ideality
and the failure of such poetic language oriented toward nature, and
Greek nature speciWcally.97 At the same time, this tension is considered
an inevitable part of artistic identity. At the end of Book I, Hyperion
expresses it through another, again vertical, metaphor taken from na-
ture: ‘Believe me and consider what I tell you from the bottom of my
soul: language is a great abundance. The best will always remain on its
own resting in its depth, like the pearl at the bottom of the sea’ (p. 148).
Linking the emancipation of consciousness to the artistic represen-
tation of nature is in many ways a hallmark of the period. Hölderlin,
though, integrates his use of nature imagery and his own reXections
upon it into a deliberately and particularly Greek setting, much as
his aesthetic representation relies also on earlier artistic traditions.98
Hölderlin maintains the polarity of regeneration and irreversible
decline out of which the contemporary site of Greece emerged in
the late eighteenth century; but Greece is also understood as the
appropriate landscape to represent, in turn, the issues involved in
the self-positioning of the artist. The appropriateness of landscape
97 De Man develops his own interpretation of the Romantic image from Hölderlin’s
line ‘nun müssen dafür Worte, wie Blumen, j entstehn’ (‘Brot und Wein’). He identiWes
a longing of poetic language for the ontological (natural) status of the object: ‘At times,
romantic thought and romantic poetry seem to come so close to giving in completely
to the nostalgia for the object that it becomes diYcult to distinguish between object
and image, between imagination and perception, between an expressive or constitutive
and a mimetic or literal language.’ ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’, 7. The
same could be said of the use of nature imagery in Hyperion.
98 Port, Schönheit der Natur, 11 f., notices the classical and Renaissance tendencies
of Hyperion and its aYnity with the tradition of ideal landscape that belongs to the
seventeenth century and the classicism of the eighteenth century.
metaphor for artistic self-understanding is perhaps most immediately
expressed in Hölderlin’s letter to his brother of 1 January 1799. Here he
compares the relation of philosophical and political understanding to
poetry, as it is found in Germany, to the relation of a perspectivally
correct sketch to a landscape painting of the same model:
for, regardless of everything else, the philosophico-political education al-
ready contains in itself the inconvenience that it knits together the people in
the essential, inevitably necessary relations, in duty and law; yet how much is
left then, for human harmony? The fore-, middle-, and background, drawn
according to optic laws, is far from being the landscape, which, at most,
would like to place itself at the side of nature’s live creation.99
Hölderlin’s own artistic metaphor then concludes: ‘Yet the best
among the Germans still think that if the world was only neatly
symmetrical everything would be done with. Oh Greece, with your
genius and your piety, whereto have you come?’100
The lifeless symmetrical plan as opposed to the landscape paint-
ing, which does justice to nature, is not as such identiWed with the
misguided German priorities and the lost Greek spirit respectively.
Yet they create meaning as they are bound together in a rhetorical
parallel that is consistent with Hölderlin’s artistic programme, mani-
fest in the imagery of Hyperion.101
De Man speaks of the transcendental aspects of Hölderlin’s writ-
ings as ‘the ascending movement . . . by means of which the poetic
99 ‘denn, alles andere abgerechnet, so hat die philosophisch politische Bildung

schon in sich selbst die Inkonvenienz, daß sie zwar die Menschen zu den wesentli-
chen, unumgänglich nothwendigen Verhältnissen, zu PXicht und Recht, zusammen-
knüpft, aber wieviel ist dann zur Menschenharmonie noch übrig? Der nach optischen
Regeln gezeichnete Vor- und Mittel- und Hintergrund ist noch lange nicht die
Landschaft, die sich neben das lebendige Werk der Natur allenfalls stellen möchte.’
Hölderlin, GStA vi. 306 f.; tr. Pfau, Essays and Letters, 139 f.
100 ‘Aber die besten unter den Deutschen meinen meist noch immer, wenn nur erst
die Welt hübsch symmetrisch wäre, so wäre alles geschehen. O Griechenland, mit
deiner Genialität und deiner Frömmigkeit, wo bist du hingekommen?’ Ibid. 307; tr.
Pfau, 140, slightly amended.
101 A literary scene, which transposes Hölderlin’s view on the deWcient relation
between philosophy and art deliberately back into a landscape setting, is found again
in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloı̈se. In the well-known 23rd letter of part I, St Preux
comments: ‘J’admirois l’empire qu’ont sur nos passions les plus vives les êtres les plus
insensibles, et je méprisois la philosophie de ne pouvoir pas même autant sur l’âme
qu’une suite d’objets inanimés.’
imagination tears itself away, as it were, from a terrestrial nature and
moves toward this ‘‘other nature’’ ’. In relation to material reality and
the natural environment, this is ‘the ascent of a consciousness
trapped within the contradictions of a half-earthly, half-heavenly
nature’.102 The natural imagery relating to these philosophical stages,
those of suspense and ascent, abound in Hyperion. And yet, especially
as regards Greece, the material grounding is a structurally indispens-
able, and in itself valuable, even if highly ambivalent, part of the
movement of transcendence. If, compared to the visionary speaker of
‘The Archipelago’, Hyperion is caught, and, as I argue, has to be
caught, on the ground of his Greek land, Hölderlin, in the letter to his
brother on New Year’s Day 1799, superimposes the curious image of
verticality onto the diVerence between modernity and antiquity, and
the progress engendered by that diVerence. This is the very remark
quoted at the beginning of this study: ‘I, too, with all good intentions
can only stumble behind those singular [Greek] people in everything
I do and say, and often I do it all the more clumsily and out of tune,
because I, like the geese, stand Xat-footed in the waters of modernity,
Xapping my powerless wings up towards the Greek sky.’103
The Greek sky above Hyperion may be marginally closer than that
above Hölderlin’s geese, but Constantine has rightly termed Hölder-
lin’s Greece still a ‘landscape of longing’.104 In its impression of
wholeness, it is the initiator of an inWnite longing, as well as a place
that consoles for the failure of its achievement, by being that: a real
place, aesthetically perceived and represented. The pain of the restless
expansion towards unity is the general theme and it is through the
dynamic of loss that spiritual freedom is achieved: ‘True pain en-
thuses. He who steps on his misfortune, rises higher. And it is
glorious that we should feel the true freedom of the soul only in
suVering’ (p. 133). The loss, apart from the real loss of Hyperion’s
companions and his beloved Diotima, is implied in the landscape
that evokes feelings of incompleteness and separation. In this sense,
too, the character of the landscape matches the character of its
protagonist. In the Prologue to Hyperion, Hölderlin explicitly states
102 De Man, ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’, 14 f.

103 GStA vi. 307.
104 Constantine, Hölderlin, 86.
that Greece, while already a literary topos, is the proper place for his
main character, even if there again looms the threat that the location
of Greece is never ‘new’ but always somebody else’s already: ‘The
location where the events took place is not a new one, and I admit
that I was foolish enough once to consider a change with the book;
I became convinced, though, that it is the only place that is appro-
priate for Hyperion’s elegiac character.’105
Elegisch is best understood in Schiller’s sense of the term as a category
of poetic perception, proposed in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry:
If the poet should set nature and art, the ideal and actuality, in such
opposition that the representation of the Wrst prevails and pleasure in it
becomes the predominant feeling, then I call him elegiac. This category too,
like satire, comprehends two species. Either, nature and the ideal are an
object of sadness if the Wrst is treated as lost and the second as unattained.
Or, both are an object of joy represented as actual. The Wrst yields the elegy
in the narrower sense, and the second the idyll in the broader sense.106
For Hyperion, such loss of nature also leads to the extreme of a
landscape devoid of people, Wtting his status as that of an ‘Eremit in
Griechenland’. The Greek landscape not only charts and reciprocates
his development as an ‘idealist’, but also as a writer; the choice of Greece
as a suitable aesthetic setting for the poetic mind returns us to the
important question of the position of the poet within his society, and
the potential to address this role through landscape imagery. The Wgure
of the hermit is certainly not inconsistent with the self-positioning of
the German artist of the period. The social role of the writer as a
professional was in the making and still characterized by a high level
of dependency and insecurity, at a time that was equally formative for
disputing a national identity—meaning that the issue of isolation and
the role of the intellectual as a solitary Wgure were negotiated, and
negotiable, on both a social and an aesthetic level.107
105 ‘Der Schauplatz, wo sich das Folgende zutrug, ist nicht neu, und ich gestehe,
daß ich einmal kindisch genug war, in dieser Rücksicht eine Veränderung mit dem
Buche zu versuchen, aber ich überzeugte mich, daß er der einzig angemessene für
Hyperions elegischen Charakter wäre.’
106 Schiller, Werke, v. 728.
107 H. J. Haferkorn, ‘Zur Entstehung der bürgerlich-literarischen Intelligenz und des
Schriftstellers in Deutschland zwischen 1750 und 1800’, in Bernd Lutz (ed.), Deutsches
Bürgertum und literarische Intelligenz 1750–1800 (Stuttgart, 1974), 113–275; Ludwig
Despite the loss of nature as a condition of modernity, the Greek
landscape embodies the sheer potential for realization, however
fractured or unachievable this realization may be. In order to sustain
the position of potentiality, the rift between its success as the surviv-
ing environment of the ancients and its present ambiguous state of
deWciency must, of necessity, defy closure. The Greek land as both
authentic materiality and imagery bridges that rift while keeping the
divide open. In that way it can continue to be a ‘landscape of longing’,
conforming to the aesthetic positions that have turned attention
towards it in the Wrst place. Hyperion, of course, is a modern man,
and it is the free self-realization of the ‘Western’ identity that is in
question. For Hölderlin, the site of contemporary Greece is his
Archimedean point of leverage, just as Germany is for Hyperion.
This leads us on to consider the artistic responses when contem-
porary Greece became a stronger material presence, not only on the
metaphorical or cognitive maps, but on the political and geograph-
ical ones too, especially around and after 1821. The principal struc-
ture, underpinned by aesthetic tenets, perseveres: the rift that marks
the Greek land as both authentic and deWcient is kept open. So does
using the site of Greece as an intrinsically suitable foil for the
concerns of individual and national artistic identity. With the politi-
cization of the topos after 1821, dynamism and decline remain the
deWning features in depicting the Greek land. The stress on the
former element increases, without the latter being discarded. How
this is achieved in detail is the topic of the next chapter.
Fertig, Die Hofmeister: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Lehrerstände und der bürgerlichen
Intelligenz (Stuttgart, 1979), 3–99; Bernd Giesen and Kay Junge, ‘Vom Patriotismus
zum Nationalismus. Zur Evolution der ‘‘Deutschen Kulturnation’’ ’, in Bernd Giesen
(ed.), Nationale und Kulturelle Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven
Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit 2 (Frankfurt/M., 1991), 255–303; Henri Brunschwig,
Gesellschaft und Romantik im Preußen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/M., 1976),
344–74. Hölderlin, as a privately employed teacher, belonged to that rank of intellec-
tuals particularly prone to exploitation, dissatisfaction, and isolation.
3
Nature in Arms: German Philhellenism,
its Literature, and the Greek War
of Independence
The old hypothesis that comets are the revolutionary Wrebrands

of the universal system is surely true of another kind of comet
too, one that periodically revolutionizes the spiritual system of
the universe and makes it young again. The astronomer of the
mind has long noticed the force of such a comet over a large
part of the planet of the mind that we call humankind. Mighty
deluges, changing climates, a moving centre of gravity, a com-
mon tendency for diVusion, and strange meteorites are the
symptoms of this violent incitation, which will result in a new
world age. As necessary as it may be to mobilize everything
periodically so as to create new, necessary combinations and
prompt a new and more pure form of crystallization, it would
be as inconceivable not to shore up such crisis and thereby
avoid complete diVusion, so that a root might remain, a kernel
on which new matter can be grafted, to develop around it in
beautiful new shapes.
(Novalis, Faith and Love, fr. 21)
By the second decade of the nineteenth century the sheer vertigo of
modernity, which Hölderlin had so painfully experienced, had in
some respects given way to a more manageable incline, at least as far
as the position of Hellenism, and its institutions, was concerned. As
for Hellenism as the study of ancient Greece, classical scholarship, in
the wake of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational reforms in the
1800s, had become Wrmly established as a foundational subject in
94 Nature in Arms
schools and especially in the universities, feeding from there into all
other institutions of state and the civil service.
Literary Romanticism (and Classicism), at the same time, was
giving way to a growing eclecticism, even if the symbolizing practice
of landscape representation continued in the discursive framework
that linked it to the employment of the imagination and to poetic
activity as an exercise of freedom. In the world-view which German
literary history has termed Biedermeier, but which has been extended
beyond Germany as the general phenomenon of what Nemoianu has
called a ‘tamed Romanticism’, individual and nature are treated as
part of a single higher order, going hand in hand with increased
attention to local realism and religious symbolism.1 At the same time
as local realism is invested in, increased political realism enters
literary production too. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) after
the Napoleonic Wars, the establishment of the German Federation
(Deutscher Bund) in 1815, and the so called Karlsbad Decrees in
1819, which reinforced censorship and the restrictive climate of
Restauration, all made politics an issue both for the conditions and
themes of literary productivity.2 In addition, Greece, through the
development of its own political situation, now became an entity that
existed more Wrmly in the present than ever before. The main
argument put forward in this chapter is that, regarding the represen-
tation of Greece by way of its landscape, the focus of the period after
1821 shifts from characteristic and reXexive nature more widely to a
concentration, or a shorthand, of speciWc locations, of rhetorical and
literal topoi, without, however, abandoning the structure of aesthetic
landscape and Romantic nature imagery. I will argue that this
abridgement occurs not coincidentally at the same time as topoi, or
clichés, an air of citation, become part of Romantic poetics and its
self-awareness. The literary output occasioned by the Greek War of
Independence held a fragile position already in its own time between
1 e.g. Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld

zwischen Restauration und Revolution, 1815–1848, Bd. i (Stuttgart, 1971); this is not
to be understood as an opposition to Romanticism, but instead as a reassessment and
modiWcation of the elements of Romantic aesthetics.
2 T. Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat
(Munich, 1983), 569–79; Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, i. 110–256, for the diVerent literary
tendencies and their degree of politicization.
Nature in Arms 95
inspiring admiration and uneasy derision in its readers in almost
equal measure. As the classical historian Bartold Niebuhr expresses it,
with appalled delight, in a letter to Hensler in 1826: ‘Did you read
Tiedgen’s poem ‘‘The Battle of Greece against Barbary’’? I should not
have thought he had it in him; no matter how many imperfections
the verses as such may have. The sentiment is frightfully beautiful
(die Gesinnung ist grässlich schön).’3 Repetitive much of the occa-
sional poetry may be, but it is not simply ‘bad verse’, or rather it may
be bad verse for a good reason, if we take into account the reduction
that put images of Greece into a Wrm place, despite the insistence on
unleashed freedom and upheaval as the proper content of that
poetry. At the same time this strategy is accompanied by a politiciza-
tion of nature imagery, and a corresponding naturalization of its
political aspects. In capturing the Greek War of Independence, the
imagination of the Greek land and its natural environment merges
with a tradition of nature metaphor to describe historical and polit-
ical events. This tradition was certainly not new, but it had gained
momentum throughout the period of the French Revolution, Jaco-
binism, and the Wars of Liberation. If, once the insurrections in
Greece had been given the name of a War of Independence, images
of Greece appear to become more formalized, it is because concrete
political events were now contained not only within the relative
security of lasting, particular place, but also within tested aesthetic
and artistic models and imagery to describe them.
The case of Hölderlin shows how at the turn of the nineteenth
century national identity was increasingly part of the question of
authorial identity, and how, pondering on both, Hölderlin could
draw argumentative strength from the designation of his poetic land-
scapes as Greek. Hyperion, the displaced Greek, is painfully conscious
of his position and, in contrast to his beloved Diotima, he cannot
sustain the look into the abyss. A good twenty years on, the Greeks re-
enter the scene with a new assurance, populating poetry occasioned by
the Greek War of Independence. It is in images like that of the
mountain-dweller thundering down into the plain to raise freedom,
‘free, like my mountain streams, like the eagle in the sky’, that violence
3 Karl Dieterich, Aus Briefen und Tagebüchern zum deutschen Philhellenismus

(1821–1828) (Hamburg, 1928), 315.
96 Nature in Arms
is suggested, yet still kept at bay.4 This chapter looks at a phase of more
obvious politicizing of content and imagery in German poetry about
contemporary Greece. Among other things, this aVects particularly the
employment of nature metaphors and the use of location. Wilhelm
Müller’s poems, in particular, not only reXect contemporary political
and literary issues, but they do so by positioning Greek-speakers
within their natural environment. ‘Greece’ provided a value system
transcending historical and geographical space, while the establish-
ment of a Greek nation state would come to pose a challenge to both
German and Greek notions of a national landscape.
Overall, it is important that although the description of Greece is
speciWc, as far as signiWcant location and general ambience go, it is
broad enough to allow identiWcation and transfer to the German
perspective, quite in line with the pattern whereby Greece stands in
for a privileged location to combine the particular and the universal
with maximum transparency. Roger Paulin has rightly argued that
it is unfair to treat all political poetry of the time as a surrogate for a
German situation that could not be openly expressed or discussed.5
By the same token, not every philhellenic sentiment was ‘mixed
with a Hellenic Teutonocentrism’ (‘griechische Deutschtümelei’), as
Varnhagen von Ense suspected (although he has a point).6 Greece
may share some of the German concerns brought to its revolution
with those brought to the liberation movements of Spain, Italy, or, a
little later, Poland. Yet Greece is not a random choice, and it is
certainly not one free of ambivalence. It is Greece, especially in its
contemporary material manifestation, that is considered particu-
larly entitled to represent and to regain freedom, and to a large
extent this conviction is bolstered in writing through the use
of nature imagery, although an imagery now turning in its
dynamic towards the extremes of the static and the violent, often
combining both.
4 Wilhelm Müller, Werke, ed. Maria-Verena Leistner (Berlin, 1994), i. 245.

5 Roger Paulin, ‘Some Remarks on the Occasion of the New Edition of the Works
of Wilhelm Müller’, Modern Language Review, 92/2 (1997), 363–78, 364.
6 Letter to Oelsner, Nov. 1821, in Dieterich, Aus Briefen, 313 f.
Nature in Arms 97
PHILHELLENISM
As a term, Philhellenism carries connotations of revolution in appeal to

tradition, and it is this double vision that informs the imagery of
philhellenic writing as well. Just as the sheer abyss between Greek
antiquity and German modernity seemed to have receded a little into
the background, so had the curious tension that characterized percep-
tions of modern Greece. At the same time, during the Wrst decades of the
nineteenth century the nature of German knowledge of contemporary
Greece had developed, and so had the perception of Europe among the
Greeks, that is to say, mainly the educated Greek-speaking, Orthodox
subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The latter half of the eighteenth
century had seen considerable change in the social structure of Greek
territory under Ottoman rule, with an increase in (maritime) trade
enterprises in Europe and a decided orientation towards Western Euro-
pean models by the inXuential educated classes of Greek (or more
broadly Balkan) society and those living in Greek communities outside
the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire.7 Greek commercial communities
in Leipzig, Breslau, Trieste, or Vienna, to name but a few, also provided
the ground and means for much publishing activity. In addition, the
inXux of Greek students to German universities and academies in-
creased in the last decades of the eighteenth century (as Italy lost its
monopoly in attracting Greek students), and led to personal acquaint-
ances which very often proved the initial trigger for voicing what,
especially following the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821,
was now a more active interest by German scholars.8 Social changes for
Greek strata of the Ottoman Empire meant that its decline coincided
with an increase in revolutionary potential.9 In March 1821, Alexander
7 For the development of an Enlightened intellectualism across the Balkans, see
e.g. Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy: Studies in the
Culture and Political Thought of South-Eastern Europe (Aldershot, 1994); Victor
Roudometof, ‘From Enlightenment to Romanticism: The Origins of Modern Greek
National Identity, 1453–1878’, Thetis, 7 (2000), 149–67, esp. 149–60.
8 On the Greek communities in the German-speaking areas, Emil Turczynski, Die
deutsch-griechischen Kulturbeziehungen bis zur Berufung König Ottos (Munich, 1959)
and Giorgios Veloudis, Germanograecia: Deutsche EinXüsse auf die neugriechische
Literatur (1750–1944), 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1983), 21–46.
9 Gunnar Hering, ‘Zum Problem der Ursachen revolutionärer Erhebungen am
Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Ch. Choliolčev et al. (eds.), Nationalrevolutionäre
98 Nature in Arms
Ypsilantis, aide-de-camp to Tsar Alexander I, led a short-lived uprising
in Moldavia, followed shortly afterwards by episodes of violence in the
Peloponnese, which took on the form of all-out revolt. To the observing
German public, the new Xaring-up of insurrection against Ottoman
rule had similar eVect to that after the events of 1770, only greater; the
same constituents were there: an interest in the physical and spiritual
condition of the Greek land, connected with the hope of Wnding in
Greece a paradigm for a country liberating itself. The political scene in
Germany and Europe in general had of course changed drastically since
1770: in 1776 America had given Europe the example of a successful
attempt at establishing a new independent nation state. The subsequent
experience of the French Revolution and the Terror had left Germany
with a diVerent set of political and cultural expectations. The Napo-
leonic Wars, fought in the name of liberation both by and against the
French, had since 1792 acted as a catalyst for national movements
across Europe. Hence there was a strong liberal-democratic, ultimately
national, side to support for the Greek cause. An example are the
Griechenvereine (Greek Associations) and their fate: established to
enlist Wnancial and military support across Germany, they became
almost immediately suspect as hothouses of revolutionary activity,
and many of them, especially in Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria, were
closed down by the authorities in the autumn of 1821.10 Fervour for the
Greek cause slowly diminished over the next years, to be reignited after
1826 with the fall of Missolonghi, when also the balance of power in a
European contest was changing. Russia now paid renewed attention to
the Balkans, and the other Great Powers too began to show more
sympathy for the Greek struggle.11 Philhellenism slowly became so-
cially acceptable and hoVähig.
Bewegungen in Südosteuropa im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1992), 17–30; also Barbara

and Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920
(Seattle, 1977), 3–25.
10 For the social-political role of organized Philhellenism in Germany see, pro toto,
Christoph Hauser, Anfänge bürgerlicher Organisation: Philhellenismus und Liberalismus
in Südwestdeutschland (Göttingen, 1990). A critical appraisal of whether the appeal on
grounds of charitable obligation did much to further the development of political
consciousness among the broader population or not is found in Dieter Kramer, ‘Der
Philhellenismus und die Entwicklung des politischen Bewußtseins in Deutschland’, in
Kontakte und Grenzen: Probleme der Volks-, Kultur- und Sozialforschung. Festschrift für
Gerhard Heilfurth zum 60. Geburtstag (Göttingen, 1969), 231–47.
11 Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 364.
Nature in Arms 99
By 1821 Philhellenism no longer denoted only the valuing of clas-
sical Greek culture, but a positive attitude towards the political aspir-
ations of the contemporary Greeks.12 Without doubt, this, just like
Hellenism, was a European phenomenon;13 what distinguished Ger-
man Philhellenism was the way in which it continued to be aVected by
the structural relation between Greek antiquity and a German, or
certainly non-Greek, modernity at the centre of German Hellenism.
In its practical manifestations, the movement of German Philhellen-
ism divides into that of ‘the sword, the open hand, and the pen’:14 there
were those who went to Greece to participate in the military struggle,
the donators of money following the appeals for charity, and the
writers.15 These are not hard-and-fast categories: some of those who
went out to Greece returned to write memoirs, some of the writers
donated their proWts, and Wilhelm Müller himself outlines his exem-
plary situation as the professional writer who pledges to contribute
both in poetry and cash, while his personal circumstances (a young
family and safe employment in the ducal educational system) unfor-
tunately keep him from joining the expeditions, appealing though the
prospect may be: ‘Fortunate I am that my home and the Muse bring me
comfort in times such as these. Were I unmarried I might well be now
standing ready and armed in Greece’ (emphasis his).16
Of the writers’ response there was, right from the beginning of the
Greek revolutionary movement, a steady Xow of German publications
12 ‘Philhellene’ is in Germany Wrst attested in the sense of ‘support for fellow Christian
Greeks’ by Martin Crusius (Turcograeciae libri octo, 1584), and in the later seventeenth
century; see Lambros Mygdalis, ‘Der Philhellenismus in Deutschland’, in E. Konstanti-
nou (ed.), Europäischer Philhellenismus. Die europäische philhellenische Literatur bis zur
1. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1992), 63–72, 63; Gerhard Grimm, ‘Studien
zum Philhellenismus’, unpublished habilitation ms., Munich (1965), 2. The OED deWnes
‘Philhellenism’ as the ‘love, friendliness towards, or support of the cause of Greece or the
Greeks (especially in relation to national independence)’, 2nd edn. (1989), xi. 679.
13 Concise overviews are found in Gerhard Grimm, ‘ ‘‘We are all Greeks’’. Grie-
chenbegeisterung in Europa und Bayern’, in R. Baumstark (ed.), Das neue Hellas.
Griechen und Bayern zur Zeit Ludwigs I, exhibition catalogue (Munich, 1999), 21–32;
Gunnar Hering, ‘Der griechische Unabhängigkeitskrieg und der Philhellenismus’, in
A. Noë (ed.), Der Philhellenismus in der westeuropäischen Literatur (1780–1830)
(Amsterdam, 1994), 17–72.
14 Grimm, Studien, 2.
15 A solid overview in Regine Quack-Eustathiades, Der Deutsche Philhellenismus
während des Griechischen Freiheitskampfes 1821–1827 (Munich, 1984), 55–89.
16 Letter to P. D. A. Atterbom, 2 May 1822 (Werke, v. 221).
100 Nature in Arms
dealing with the Greek question, often in the shape of newspaper and
journal articles or as separate political pamphlets.17 Overall, the re-
sponse of the pen to the events in and after 1821 was Wrst and foremost
an academic and a journalistic one. Despite the variety of political
attitudes, the writers mostly came from the same social background,
and although philhellenic sentiment cut across all sections of German
society, its most vocal supporters were members of the educated
middle classes.18 The intellectual foundations of the philhellenic ven-
ture lay Wrmly with the Bildungsbürgertum, even if diVerent arguments
for support found favour with diVerent social groups.19 The authors of
the Wrst pamphlets and articles rallying support for the Greeks were
university professors, philologists, or theologians, who often had per-
sonal contacts with educated diaspora Greeks, and who through their
personal acquaintance with each other established a strong network.
The Wrst wave of pamphleteers in early 1821, for example, was almost
entirely made up of university teachers, professors Krug, Tzschirner,
and Jörg, and another anonymous author, all connected with the
University of Leipzig.20
It is diYcult to identify a single political alignment in these
publications. The Greek cause was argued for and against by liberals
and conservatives alike, but in each case the main line of argument
concerned the question whether the Greek revolution was a legitim-
ate act. Argument concentrated on the one hand on the theme of
‘Dankesschuld’, that is, the obligation towards Greece as the founda-
tion of European Bildung. Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch, in an article
in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in September 1821, writes of the
obligation ‘to pay oV, even if only a little, the sacred duty of old’.21
17 For a detailed list of 34 pamphlets see Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Phil-

hellenismus, 155–63.
18 Johannes Irmscher tellingly calls it a true ‘movement of the people’, Der
Philhellenismus in Preußen als Forschungsanliegen (Berlin, 1966), 44.
19 The religious argument, for example, was advanced mainly by the clergy and
was well received in the lower strata of society, see Walter Puchner, ‘Die griechische
Revolution von 1821 auf dem europäischen Theater: Ein Kapitel bürgerlicher Trivial-
dramatik und romantisch-exotischer Melodramatik im europäischen Vormärz’,
Südost-Forschungen, 55 (1996), 85–127, 94.
20 Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Philhellenismus, 164 V. On Krug’s personal
acquaintance with Greek students see Roxani Argyropoulou, ‘O W. T. Krug ŒÆØ Ø
‚ºº ’, ˇ ¯æÆØ, 10 (1972–3), 267–73.
21 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 Sept. 1821.
Nature in Arms 101
Another anonymous pamphlet was entitled The Rescue of Greece, the
Task of Grateful Europe (Die Rettung Griechenlands, die Sache des
dankbaren Europa, Leipzig, 1821). On the other hand, it was the
appeal to a Christian obligation to support fellow Christians against
Ottoman unbelievers that accounted for the strong religious over-
tones encountered in many publications, literary or not. F. G. Nagel’s
gorily entitled pamphlet How Much Longer Will the Turkish Slaugh-
terhouses Fume with Greek Blood? And Shall the Hereditary Enemy of
the Cross Continue to Taunt Christianity? (Werden die türkischen
Schlachtbänke noch länger von griechischem Blute rauchen? Oder soll
der Erbfeind des Kreuzes die Christenheit noch länger höhnen?, Braun-
schweig, 1821) is only one of the more colourful examples of this
religious tendentiousness. In any case, what is crucial is that whatever
the political stance of the commentator, or his views on the Wtness or
unWtness of the Greeks to succeed, Greece is almost unanimously
singled out as diVerent in kind from other instances of revolution.
From these comments and from the corpus of poetry, drama, and
prose of the Griechendichtung, one impression emerges strongly: they
express an apparent desire to see a country that is well described in its
physical reality and conditions complemented by a people ripe for a
revolutionary challenge, increasingly morally responsible and (hence)
predisposed towards freedom, at the same time dynamic, forceful,
untamed, courageous, and maintaining a revolutionary momentum.
In short, German publicists appeared in search of a people Wt to inherit
and inhabit a land and a landscape distinguished by its history,
tradition, beneWcial climate, geographical variety, yet also cohesion
and, most of all, continuity. Patterns of landscape imagery and nature
metaphor are thereby given a framework of political signiWcance.
P OLITICIZING NATURE: GREEK NAT URE LIBERATED
With 1821, history in the sense of the past and of current, contem-
porary events, and space in the sense of meaningful location and of
political territory come together more intensely than ever, a constel-
lation that feeds into the particularly close associations of perception
of natural space and history that mark modern Greece’s position.
102 Nature in Arms
Comments about the political nation are imbricated with aesthetic
expectations of Greek places and environments as symbolic and
meaningful beyond themselves.
For the phenomenon of justiWcation by way of natural environ-
ment, Kaufmann and Zimmer have coined the catchy phrase ‘na-
tionalising nature and naturalising the nation’.22 DeWning the nation
as a ‘cultural order with a certain set of values, symbols and myths’
which legitimizes in its wake a certain political order (the state), they
understand a nation not as a static entity, but as an entity in an
ongoing process of aYrmation, a process of national identity.
According to their model, the symbolic analogies between landscape
and nation can take either of two forms. In the process which they
term ‘nationalising nature’, distinctive national characteristics are
seen to be reXected in a particular nature; alternatively, in the com-
plementary process of ‘naturalising the nation’, ‘nature in general,
and speciWc landscapes in particular, are depicted as forces of moral
and spiritual regeneration capable of determining the nation and
giving it a compact, homogeneous, uniWed form’.23 Identifying ‘au-
thenticity’ as one of the key issues in the establishment of national
identity,24 they see two processes involved in the endeavour of au-
thentication, one being the establishment of a historical continuity,
the other the creation of a sense of naturalness.
The deWnition of nation put forward by Kaufmann and Zimmer is
arguably too broad, but nationalism as a theoretical problem is not my
main concern here. What is more problematic, but a feature shared
with many other accounts of the symbolic work done by the creators of
national identity in the modern period, is that they, too, rely on a rather
timeless and under-deWned notion of the symbolic, as well as a rather
too reductive notion of Romanticism as counter-Enlightenment with
a search for natural determination and a preference for ‘primitive’
nature as its main characteristic.25 This underestimates the conscious
22 Eric Kaufmann and Oliver Zimmer, ‘In Search of the Authentic Nation: Land-
scape and National Identity in Canada and Switzerland’, Nations and Nationalism, 4/4
(1998), 483–510.
23 Ibid. 487.
24 Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, 1995),
65–7.
25 Kaufmann and Zimmer, ‘Authentic Nation’, 488.
Nature in Arms 103
complexity of nature as a term in currency, and the diVerence between
nature and nation that creates and generates resistance, as much as it
enables representation of the nation as natural. What is useful about
their argument, though, is the notion of a deliberate mutual reinforce-
ment of nature and nation (in the sense of political community) as a
legitimizing strategy, expressed through nature imagery, as it bears out
the observations about the potential of nature imagery made so far.
Metaphors to describe history are as varied as they are long-
established, and among them nature metaphor has had a stable
place in images of organic growth, of gardens, forests, water, seasons,
or weather.26 From the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth
century, and mirroring the increased complexity and challenge of a
new understanding of nature in every area of the arts and sciences,
there is a noticeable increase in nature metaphor, and in violent
nature imagery in particular, to represent moments of historical
importance. On the one hand, of course, there were still mental
aftershocks felt, across European writing and reasoning, of the dev-
astating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, where violent nature had itself
become a historical event.27 On the other hand, there were the no less
earth-shattering implications of the French Revolution, which pro-
voked self-characterization and echoes across Europe with a strong
programmatic reliance on nature imagery.28 The ambivalence of
nature, the liberation from nature and towards it, its appropriation
and taming, is repeated in its violent potential when it comes to the
interpretation of history through nature imagery—or the interpret-
ation of nature by aligning it with intelligible historical processes.29
26 For examples, Alexander Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und
Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken (Munich, 1978).
27 On the conceptual reorientation of the nature of good and evil and the good and
evil of nature triggered by the Lisbon earthquake, see Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern
Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, 2002), 240–50; Wolfgang
Breidert, Die Erschütterung der vollkommenen Welt: Die Wirkung des Erdbebens von
Lissabon im Spiegel europäischer Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt, 1994); R. H. Brown, Nature’s
Hidden Terror: Violent Nature Imagery in Eighteenth-century Germany (Columbia, SC,
1991), 23–55.
28 Hans-Wolf Jäger, Politische Metaphorik im Jakobinismus und im Vormärz (Stuttgart,
1971), 32 V; Helmut Koopmann, Freiheitssonne und Revolutionsgewitter: ReXexe der Fran-
zösischen Revolution im literarischen Deutschland zwischen 1789 und 1840 (Tübingen, 1989).
29 Brown, Nature’s Hidden Terror; Olaf Briese, Die Macht der Metaphern: Blitz,
Erdbeben und Kometen im Gefüge der Aufklärung (Stuttgart, 1998), stresses the use of
nature metaphor to tame threatening nature, rather than interpret history.
104 Nature in Arms
In the conceptual web that connects the critical subject to his or her
environment, nature is keyed to the semantic Welds of politics, reli-
gion, and aesthetics. With the prominent use of nature imagery to
structure historical narrative, nature appears in eVect politicized
while politics is at the same time naturalized. Novalis’s vision, open-
ing this chapter, is paradigmatic for the political vocabulary of revo-
lution and upheaval integrated into a world vision of organic,
scientiWc, and poetic conXuence, and Schlegel’s well-known dictum
that ‘the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister
are the greatest tendency of the age’ bears out the mutual reinforce-
ment of momentous political, subjective, and poetic generation.30 Yet
from nature as the objective correlative that translates political situ-
ation into corresponding landscape, as some have argued, nature is
now not only politicized but it comes back to infuse political com-
mentary with the force of nature, especially so in the case of Greece.31
The point that the semantic Welds of nature and of history with its
events impact upon each other recalls the important reinforcement
that takes place in the act of representing one fact or image, and its
semantic range, with another one; in short, in the act of metaphor.
Following Max Black’s classic analysis that metaphor creates a cross-
over of meaning from both semantic areas involved, metaphor (like
metonymy and allegory) is not a matter of simple similes or of
vehicle and tenor smoothly and silently passing each other in the
night; cultural knowledge is Wltered in semantic clusters, and the
semantic range of the two Welds or ‘systems of implication’ which are
engaged in a metaphor, overlaps, that is to say, each set of images
aVects and changes the other.32 This not only opens the three-
dimensional space of the image from the verticality of the symbol
to the lateral eVect of metaphor; it also releases the mutual enforce-
ment of the two halves of Wgurative speech into the interpretation of
nature imagery, especially when positive legitimizing power is drawn
from the act of relating natural factors and conditions to historical
30 Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 216.

31 On the absorption of political context into the moods of Romantic nature poetry,
and the afterlife of that argument in scholarship, see Frances Ferguson, ‘Romantic
Studies’, in S. Greenblatt and G. Gunn (eds.), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Trans-
formation of English and American Literary Studies (New York, 1992), 100–29.
32 Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, in Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY, 1962), 25–47.
Nature in Arms 105
events. Regarding Greece, history is thought inscribed into nature and
space especially prominently and compellingly, and what better place,
therefore, for history in the making, that is, the revolutionary events
around 1821, to have an appropriate, justiWed fertile ground—history,
disruptive and signiWcant, being made naturally. This happened in the
writings commenting on the Greek War of Independence.
In the case of the Greek Revolution, the use of forceful nature
imagery to legitimize the historical events it describes, and which
were otherwise not always so easily justiWed in the climate of Restau-
ration, is indeed a prominent strategy. One of the supporters making
that case was Carl Iken (1789–1841), a private scholar from the
north of Germany and a philologist by training, although with a
strong research interest in the sciences too (his editorial repertoire
included fare as varied as collections from contemporary Greek and
classical Persian writings, and translations from English treatises on
steam technology). Of his writings on contemporary Greece, the Wrst,
after the Greek War of Independence, is his Hellenion. Ueber Cultur,
Geschichte und Literatur der Neugriechen (Leipzig, 1822), following
his earlier doctoral thesis entitled De statu Graeciae hodierno deque
Neohellenum seu Romaicorum historia tam politica quam literaria
(Jena, 1817), as well as a catalogue of travellers, Tabelle der Reisenden
in Griechenland seit 1453 (1817).33 Hellenion, published by Brock-
haus in 1822 (page references below are to this edition), consists of
two parts, a ‘general introduction’, and a translation of Adamantios
Korais’s lecture Mémoire sur l’état actuel de la civilisation dans la
Grèce, presented to the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme in Paris
almost twenty years earlier in 1803. Iken’s introduction, dated July
1821, follows the same argument a great number of contemporary
political pamphlets relied on, namely, that current Greek events were
not to be treated as a revolution in the common sense; instead, the
insurrection at hand was a token of regeneration and liberation from
illegitimate oppression. Iken’s plea displays many of the regular
features of justifying the Greek revolution. The bold tone in
which Iken Wrst of all viliWes the satanic character of Ottoman rule
right at the beginning of his pamphlet underlines the other large
33 On Iken see Wilhelm Kosch, Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, 3rd edn., Bd. viii
(Munich, 1981), 353 f.
106 Nature in Arms
argument that made up the philhellenic portfolio, namely, the Chris-
tian duty to come to Greece’s aid: ‘[it is] the attempt to break the
heavy iron chains of a despotism that oppresses to the utmost degree
and to put that demon of darkness, who has wielded power in this
area for 400 years, back in chains and send him down into the realm
of shadows forever’ (pp. 1 f.). It is also worth noting that with the
Wgure of Satan bound in chains and thrown into Hell, Iken may well
be acknowledging the apocryphal story of the Descensus that is part
of the canon of the Orthodox Church, which, as Iken likes to stress,
entertains close aYnity with the Protestant one (pp. 40 V.). The
argument for Christian sympathy with the Greeks is further bolstered
by reference to Greece as the holy ground of the Apostle Paul. With
the satanic Turk removed from the earthly realm and territory, to
create anew the rightful space of hallowed Greek ground, there is an
underlying appeal to the appropriateness of place; and beyond the
argument from Christian duty, the overriding strategy of Iken’s text
lies in his crafting an argument from nature.
In this frame, where spaces jostle for emergence, the force of
oppression triggers the counter-force of Greek insurrection, and
Iken goes on to develop an even grander-scale system of natural
balances within which Greece’s reaction is legitimated. To describe
the force of progress, which has brought Greece to its present state on
the brink of revolution, Iken enlists both natural events and natural
imagery to support his argument. An earthquake that aVected the
island of Zante and the Morea two months before the insurrection of
March 1821 is to Iken a portentous sign: ‘Nature and mankind joined
hands to become the vanguard of an extraordinary phenomenon’
(p. 5). Likewise, an earthquake near the Moldavian town of Iassy
(a contemporary centre of activity for Greek learning and politics)
early in the same year had proven that ‘earth and sky gladly signaled
their approval’ (p. 6). Comparing it to the impact of the Lisbon
earthquake of 1755, Iken foretells a similar disturbance (‘Erschütter-
ung’) of the Ottoman Empire, while linking the event to the earth-
quakes and a volcanic eruption at Naples in the previous year:
On the ninth of February of this same year, at three o’clock in the morning,
the capital of Moldavia was shaken by three serious tremors of three seconds
each, accompanied by loud underground rumbling; the direction of the
Nature in Arms 107
earthquake from north to south was to the Greeks all too clearly an intim-
ation of the direction their undertaking would take across their fatherland.
The crumbling of uncountable buildings on the island of Zante and in
Morea seemed to preWgure the trembling, if not the actual downfall, of the
rotten structure of the Ottoman state; in short, nature herself announced in
clear signs what was to come, just as she had spoken a year earlier through
Vesuvius’ mouth about the events to come in Naples. (p. 6)
The analogy with political events is made clear: local revolutions in
Naples, the Piedmont, and Spain, to which Iken frequently refers, had
broken out in 1820–1, but although his use of violent nature imagery is,
as we saw, not an uncommon practice, Iken is not simply conXating the
geographically literal and the metaphorical. Instead, he explicitly defends
his method, and when he states that, ‘to the poet, nature is neither dead
nor without intention’ (p. 7), he in fact insists on the poet’s privilege to
derive meaning from the sign language of natural events. This assertion
is couched in a scientiWc framework of natural global balances. In a grand
chain of natural forces, including electric conductivity, tectonics, thun-
derstorms, volcanoes, Wres, the currents of the sea, avalanches, and
meteorites, Greece is the last stage in a worldwide release of liberating
forces, spreading from West (the Americas) to East and from North to
South (pp. 14 f.). Actual geography is interwoven with imagery, as the
waves of revolution break upon the shores of Greece and the echo is
multiplied from Spain to the mountains of Greece (p. 16), locating
freedom, and providing a ‘natural’ justiWcation for the case of Greece:
Almost in the same instance now that the thunderstorm broke loose above the
Spanish peninsula, an electric spark was Xaring on the Italian peninsula with
such explosive power that it had to jump across to the Greek peninsula. Just as in
music, when a harmonious chord is audible to the sensitive ear well in advance
even when only two notes are sounded and the third one is not touched, so did
this phenomenon of well-tuned strings reveal itself in the realm of the spirit too:
as soon as Hesperia and Magna Graecia put forth a sound, Hellas followed suit,
as a relative, yes, as the original motherland of both; and even before she began
to stir herself and turn to manifest action, she joined joyfully in the resounding
harmony of her Wrstborns, even if she herself could rightly have given the Wrst
impetus, judging by her suVerings and her fate. (p. 10)
Like the unsounded note that could also justiWably have been the
origin of the domino eVect of natural phenomena, Greece’s power of
liberation is an almost parthenogenic, autonomous one that chimes
108 Nature in Arms
well with a global balance: it is a carefully crafted sequence of images
through which Iken insist that the Greek insurrection (explicitly not
a rebellion) is diVerent in kind and genesis. Given the musical
analogy, the third unsounded note that is heard in the chord of
political revolution leaves Greece as the origin of that global har-
mony, aVected again in turn, thus squaring its history, yet itself
‘untouched’. In that musical dream of an aesthetic eVect—the
sounded harmony—that is totally natural, Greece appears touched
indirectly by both space and time, as it is the eVect of its own origins,
which return to the land and make it audible, rather than visible.
The link between the sound of continuity and a complex natural-
ness is repeated in other depictions of Greece by German authors.
One such example comes from the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm
Thiersch (1784–1860), the classical philologist and leading Wgure of
the philhellenic movement in Bavaria.34 An inXuential neo-humanist
and educational reformer at the Bavarian court, he had expressed
hope for the regeneration of the Greeks as early as 1812, and was
instrumental in the establishment of the Munich Athenaeum in 1815,
a school for the future Greek political elite. Educated at the univer-
sities of Leipzig and Göttingen, he was linked by multiple bonds to
other members of the philhellenic circles such as Krug, Cotta, von
Haxthausen, and Ukert.35 From early on he maintained contact with
the Greek intelligentsia and the Philomousos Etaireia in Vienna, and
on the occasion of a visit to Paris in 1813 he met Korais.36 In 1831 he
took it upon himself to travel in Greece, where he established a
reputation as a mediator between the warring political factions
after the assassination of the young country’s Wrst prime minister,
Ioannis Kapodistrias, in 1831—a mediator in skill and intention, it
would appear, rather than in eVect.37 Of his many publications it is a
lecture on Greek poetry, delivered before the Bavarian Academy of
34 Ludwig Spaenle, Der Philhellenismus in Bayern (Munich, 1990), 45 V.

35 H. W. J. Thiersch, Friedrich Thierschs Leben (Leipzig, 1866).
36 Johannes Irmscher, ‘Friedrich Thierschs philhellenische Anfänge’, Neo-Helle-
nika, 2 (1975), 160–80; Hans-Martin Kirchner, Friedrich Thiersch. Ein liberaler
Kulturpolitiker und Philhellene in Bayern (Munich, 1996).
37 Despite his eVorts, his practical assistance, and his wide-ranging publications,
Thiersch never quite achieved the oYcial position or demand as an adviser with the
Regency he had hoped for.
Nature in Arms 109
Sciences in 1828,38 which will concern me here, as it is instructive for
the way it expresses the relation of Greek culture to its natural
environment, across time. In this lecture Thiersch identiWes the
animation or personiWcation of nature as a strong guiding principle
of Greek folk poetry and folk song, and he traces it back to the
ancient practice of perceiving nature as numinous and divine:
Regarding those images which relate to the ‘personiWcation of nature’, the
reason [for comparison with antiquity] is clearly more deeply rooted; we
have to look for it in the intense and fresh feeling for the abundant splendor
of that particular sky and earth, which had already in antiquity clothed the
phenomena of all creation in human form so as to worship them as images
of the divine and even as divinities themselves. (p. 30)
His account of the naturalness and sense of belonging, which allegedly
characterizes Greek song, borrows from familiar artistic vocabulary:
sensuousness, the longing, gracefulness, and the sublime:
It is that same intense and pure feeling . . . sometimes like a longing for the
homeland which makes every separation seem a calamity, every foreign
place a place of grief; a feeling for the life that softly shines with twice
its charms in such a homeland, under the dark clarity of its sky, in the
ethereal spirit of its balsamic air, above the blue waters of the inWnite sea,
in the gracefulness of luscious valleys, in the majesty of sublime moun-
tains, under the smell of Xowers and the majesty of most noble fruits, and
that quickly makes the blood pulse stronger to preserve the vigour
and youthfulness of mind in its unhappy inhabitants, even in deepest
distress. (p. 31)
The folk song, the fairy tale, and the ballad are examples of what
Susan Stewart calls a ‘distressed genre’, reproduced, made antiquated,
and valorized in the process in order to emphasize their nature as
artefacts, and, like nature, threatening, with a strong undercurrent
rather than a Wrm base.39 The terminology around ‘folk song’ and
oral, or naive, culture, in other words, rests on a deep and often
ambivalent awareness of modernity. Steward’s subtle wordplay of the
38 Über die neugriechische Poesie, besonders über ihr rhythmisches und dichterisches
Verhältniß zur altgriechischen, ed. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich,
1828). Page numbers in text are to this edition.
39 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation
(Oxford, 1991), 66–101.
110 Nature in Arms
distressed genre takes on its full literal meaning here. Over and above
the memory of a timeless, static scene caught and remembered in
song, the actual, deep distress of Greece’s inhabitants is indicating the
movement and violence of time and history.
Thiersch further postulates a regional determination of songs
(‘they each reXect the character of their people and the landscape
from which they originated’, p. 32), such as the ferocity of the songs
of Souli, Mount Olympus, and other parts of Northern Greece, as
opposed to the peaceful scenes of the islands, Smyrna, and Thessa-
loniki, ‘where the softness and gentleness of the Ionian sky often
spreads across language, images, and metre’ (p. 33). He concludes:
What then is Modern Greek poetry but the poetry which roots in the people
itself, welded to its innermost nature and immediately grasping the events of
life, that original poetry of Greek antiquity? . . . it inspires and creates within
a range of views and fantasies that is analogous to that of the faraway past, yet
it is new and peculiar. . . it is the most recent revelation of the indestructible
Greek spirit that breaks forth intact from any misfortune that could befall it, it
is the most profound conWrmation of the hopes for Bildung which were tied to
the resurrection of that most famous and most original nation. (p. 35)
Although context makes it clear that Thiersch is Wrst and foremost
talking about the development and progress of the Greek nation, the
syntax is ambiguous as to whose Bildung exactly is being described:
his non-Greek readership, in other words, is proWting just as much, if
not more, from vicarious participation in Greece’s resurrection from
and into its own nature. The inalienable Greek spirit breaks forth
with a natural force that echoes the river images of Hölderlin, and
Thiersch derives similar argumentative power from linking the nat-
ural character of the Greeks, expressed in their folk poetry, to their
equally natural political aspirations and the hope for progress. The
connection between Greece and folk poetry by way of nature is thus
inalienable.
To understand the basis for his argument more fully, we need to
elaborate the framework of the aesthetic and political interest in folk
poetry that allowed Greece to take up a position within that framework.
How, in other words, could nature, regeneration, and emancipation,
not without their proper ambivalence, the stop and start between stasis
and violent motion, be linked to the attention to folk poetry?
Nature in Arms 111
THE NATURE OF FOLK SONG
Of course, the terminology of folk song, folk poetry, and folk culture
is, not only in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context, a
highly loaded one, and one which requires a careful approach. I use
the term ‘folk song’ therefore not to represent the varied popular
culture and song practice of Greece (or any other country), with its
intricate relationship to both oral and written expression. Instead of
pursuing the slippery, and in any case methodologically misplaced,
question of presumed ‘authenticity’, which is certainly still alive in
studies of Greek folklore,40 I use ‘folk song’ to indicate the hopes and
expectation attached to the practice and the re-creation of what were
considered paradigms of a native, oral poetic culture. The most
cherished aspect of folk songs, after all, was their potential to evoke
authenticity and immediacy, and it is this awareness of their formal
character, as much as of the distance separating them from the
modern author, similar to that powering nature imagery, that inter-
ests me most. As in the case of Greek nature in this study, it is neither
the reputed ‘essence’ of folk song, nor their constructed character,
hidden under an idealist veneer, that needs disclosing, but their
enabling and sometimes troubling dynamic—of which the Roman-
tics were all too aware—that is thought to beneWt those who care for
their survival and experience. And like nature imagery, folk song, and
Romantic poetry reXecting on it, is a medium of historical cognition.
The ‘discovery’ of folk culture and forms as artefacts, in the sense of
their being collected in writing or in imitation, involves, and to the
Romantics fruitfully involves, the distance that separates them from
the present literary culture; yet more, it even enhances that rift. The
more it is collected, the more it seems endangered. ‘In other words,
the writing of oral genres always results in a residue of lost context
and lost presence that literary culture, as we have seen, imbues with a
sense of nostalgia and even regret.’41 Or even, to take its logic further,
of impossibility and grief; Müller, at the end of the trajectory begun
40 On this, see Margaret Alexiou, After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth and
Metaphor (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 172–83.
41 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 104.
112 Nature in Arms
in the eighteenth century, proclaims in a review essay on Béranger: ‘A
printed folk song is the gravestone of a dead voice.’42 While folk song
had, especially from the late eighteenth century, created potential for
a new role of the author as editor, this role, as Stewart so perceptively
expresses it, ‘was destined to collapse into self-parody because of its
impossible claims of authenticity’.43
In Germany, the term Volkslied was Wrst coined by Herder as a
translation of the English expression ‘popular song’.44 It derives from
Bishop Percy’s slightly earlier Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765), which, together with Herder’s publications, paved the way
for the literary appraisal of folk poetry in the later eighteenth century.
Percy’s collection was enthusiastically received in Germany, especially
by the poet-scholars of the Göttinger Hain circle (Boie, Stolberg,
Voss), the group mentioned above for their contacts with von Halem,
the writer of Wctional travel accounts to Greece.45 In the tradition of
Herder, folk poetry is a form of creative expression that is less an art
form and more a conduit for the natural creativity of a people
preserved through history.46 The truly free expression of a free nation
is in its songs: ‘Every unpoliced nation sings. . . . Nature has created
man as free, serene, full of song: art and customs make him locked in,
suspicious, silent.’47 Just as the perception of nature is an act that
furthers humanity, the creation of song is part of the same process.
Herder’s interest is in an ideal humanity; within that process, artistic
expression has to be readjusted to historical and natural conditions
as well as to the stages of Bildung. Folk song is an indicator of
historical development as well as a lever to recover the free artistic
42 Müller, Werke, iii. 138.

43 Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 125.
44 Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (1773); it
was developed as a technical term Wrst in the (unpublished) collection Alte Volkslieder
(1774), then in his enlarged annotated collection Volkslieder (1778/9).
45 Gonthier-Louis Fink, Naissance et apogée du conte merveilleux en Allemagne:
1740–1800 (Paris, 1966), 337–56; Heinrich Lohre, Von Percy zum Wunderhorn:
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Volksliedforschung in Deutschland (Berlin, 1902), 2–10.
Boie’s journal Deutsches Museum became a forum for folk-material collections and
their literary-aesthetic discussion.
46 Herder, Alte Volkslieder (1774), in Werke, Bd. iii, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt/
M., 1990), 60.
47 ‘Alle unpolicirte Nationen sind singend. . . . Natur hat den Menschen frei, lustig,
singend gemacht: Kunst und Zunft macht ihn eingeschlossen, mißtrauisch, stumm.’ Ibid.
Nature in Arms 113
expression of humankind. Folk poetry (Naturpoesie) is not necessar-
ily an alternative to art (Kunstpoesie) proper, but is considered its
historical and spiritual foundation. However, the awareness of
artiWciality remains part and parcel of all subsequent appropriation
of folk poetry, and it is this strand that is still strong when the
Romantics of the early nineteenth century take a renewed interest
both in collecting and (re)creating songs, as for example in the three-
volume collection by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des
Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–6), part collected folk song and part
platform for the editors’ own attempts to reformulate its presumed
spirit. The artistic editing of older works or their new creation in
line with contemporary aesthetic expectation had of course been
accepted practice since Macpherson’s phenomenally successful
Ossian (1760–3), and it continued in Percy, ballads and ballad schol-
arship, the German collections, and eventually in the Wunderhorn.
But editorial practice springs from the shared assumption that it
was the awareness of the artiWciality of art that made the appropri-
ation of the simple Romantic forms of folk songs and ballads pro-
ductive for the writers’ own work.48 It is in this sense that attention to
folk poetry signiWes an emancipatory act, too. It carries associations
of renewal and education, be it in an artistic, political, or individual
sense, and we have seen so far that the aesthetics of the period
assumes an intrinsic connection between these three Welds. The
discourse of folk song does not only follow that of nature imagery,
which both refers to phenomenal reality and operates in a metaphor-
ical sense, but folk song and its history can also be described through
nature imagery. Nature as environment and its unencumbered, but
always past relation to a Volk are understood as the content and basis
of folk poetry; at the same time nature metaphors are used to
describe this relation itself and its historical development. Müller,
for example, in an essay on contemporary German poetry, summar-
izes the state of aVairs as follows: ‘There is no doubt that we have to
view the invigorating stream of the older German folk song as a
blessing with a rich yield: it has watered the dry ground of reXection
48 The writer’s own work and that of the nation. For Ossian and his lasting eVect
see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire
(Princeton, 1997).
114 Nature in Arms
and it has washed out the overgrowth of declamatory phraseology
from the soil of German poetry.’49
The ‘natural’ character of folk poetry, of its ‘poets’ expressing an
immediate relation with nature, is carried over into nature metaphor
in the description of poetic practice. In an anonymous review of
Müller’s translation of Fauriel’s collection of Greek folk songs, the
features of Greek nature reappear as a metaphor to describe the
aesthetic process characteristic of the folk song: ‘There lives an
imagination of the brightest colours in almost all those songs, as if
an eternal midday sun fell on everything those people see.’50
The motif, or issue, of close interaction with a natural environ-
ment as the basis of free artistic expression plays a central role in the
perception of Greek folk song. And indeed, in the Greek literature
translated as part of the philhellenic endeavour, folk poetry was
dominant.51 Some Greek folk songs had already been transmitted
in travel accounts; Herder’s folk-song collection of 1778/9 also con-
tained a few labelled as simply ‘Greek’, although their provenance
certainly leaves scope for argument about their folk nature: they are
mainly examples of highly literary sympotic poetry taken from
Athenaeus’ Scholars at Dinner (Deipnosophistai).52 The earliest col-
lections of Greek folk songs were initiated by the Swiss and German
scholars Sismondi and von Haxthausen in the Wrst decade of the
nineteenth century, although they had only limited circulation in
manuscript.53
49 ‘Ohne Zweifel ist der belebende Strom des ältern deutschen Volksliedes als ein
überaus befruchtender Segen zu betrachten, der den trocknen Boden der ReXexion
befeuchtet und das Wucherkraut der deklamatorischen Phraseologie auf dem Gebiete
der deutschen Lyrik ausgeschwemmt hat.’ ‘Über die neueste lyrische Poesie der
Deutschen. Ludwig Uhland und Justinus Kerner’, in Werke, iv. 299–342; originally
published in Brockhaus’s periodical Hermes, 4 (1827).
50 ‘Fast durchweg wohnt in diesen Liedern eine Anschauung in den hellsten Farben,
es ist als Wele ein ewiges Mittagslicht auf Alles, was diese Menschen sehen.’ Literaturblatt
des Morgenblattes 1826, no. 20 (10 Mar. 1826) and 21 (14 Mar. 1826), 79.
51 Karl Goedeke, ‘Übersetzungen aus dem Neugriechischen’, in Grundriß zur
Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, xvi (Berlin, repr. 1985), 713–17.
52 Herder, Werke, v. 194 f., 1042 f.
53 Roderick Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1980), 3 V; Alexis
Politis, ˙ `ÆŒºıł ø ¯ººØŒ æÆªıØ (Athens, 1984), 87–121. Part of
Haxthausen’s collection circulated in manuscript at the time, but was only published
in 1935.
Nature in Arms 115
The central (and best-remembered) Wgure is Charles Fauriel, whose
Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne was published in two volumes,
with a long introductory essay, in 1824. Fauriel, a philologist, had
been provided with some material by Korais and other Greek intel-
lectuals (Typaldo, Moustoxidis, and Tommaseo), who all shared with
him a link to Neapolitan intellectual circles and an interest in the
historical philosophy of Vico.54 A German translation of Fauriel’s
popular collection, by Wilhelm Müller, appeared in 1825. In the
wake of the philhellenic sentiment emerged a belief that a song
tradition and literary form which stresses the immediate analogy or
original relation between a people and their environment and which
operates with motifs of a personiWed nature exerting direct inXuence
on the human agents, was a valuable key to representing the tradition
of the Xedgling Greek nation state; this belief bore fruit on both the
German and the Greek sides. For a state such as Greece, whose
territory was still in a process of (re)deWnition and whose geograph-
ical as well as social unity was far from stable, the folk song promised
both an identiWable regional origin and an analogous nature unspe-
ciWc enough to allow for the designation of almost any area as ‘Greek’.
Müller himself, in his introduction to Fauriel’s collection, formulated
this particular appeal of the folk songs’ setting, when he stresses the
strength of their schematic and fragmentary character: ‘We are given
only sketches in those songs, but clearly deWned sketches, of intense
coloration, which mirror the lights and shadows of the Greek earth
and sun’ (p. lxii).55 Likewise, the appeal of a broadly Greek natural
setting, together with attention to signiWcant location, was also
the principle organizing the representation of Greek landscape
and locality in Müller’s own poetic collections, Lieder der Griechen
(1821–7).56
54 Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern
Greece (New York, 1986), 24–30; Politis, `ÆŒºıł, 238–85.
55 ‘Wir erhalten in diesen Liedern nur Skizzen, aber scharf umzogene Skizzen, mit
kräftigen Farbenstrichen, in denen die Lichter und Schatten der griechischen Erde
und Sonne sich abspiegeln.’
56 Such a pattern of the natural setting is somewhat reminiscent of the reception of
Ossian and his wild and sombre landscape across Europe; here the lack of speciWcity
and the reliance on stock features in descriptions of the natural setting proved a
positive advantage for a widespread reception, by virtue of its ‘compatibility’; see
Howard Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 21/4
(1994), 643–78, 672.
116 Nature in Arms
WILHELM MÜ L L E R’ S GRIECHEN L I ED ER
Although the responses of the pen to the Greek War of Independence

were by and large of a journalistic nature, there was also a sizeable
more strictly literary reaction. A case in point are the memoirs of
those philhellenes returning from active participation in Greece,57
another a smallish number of translations from Greek literature,58
together with the collection and translation of Greek folk songs.
Lastly there was the Griechendichtung proper, which consisted largely
of poetry and plays, published mainly in periodicals, newspapers,
and almanacs59—and showing no less signs of the distress which the
genres of folklore and collection exhibit.
Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827) is to many best known as the author
of poems set by Schubert as the song-cycles Die Winterreise and Die
Schöne Müllerin. With the Wfty-two poems of Griechenlieder, how-
ever, published in six small volumes between 1821 and 1827, Müller
appeared as a popular supporter of the Greek cause. If the French
critic Gaston Caminade could call him ‘le plus grand philhellène de
l’Allemagne’,60 it is because he expressed in his work the particular
blend of political, religious, and artistic concerns which distinguishes
the discourse of German Philhellenism in the 1820s.
57 Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Philhellenismus, 90–124, on the memoirs, the
quasi-Wctional character of some of them, and the selective reception they met with at
home. She concludes that negative portrayals of Greece and the philhellenic venture
were usually discarded when the memoirs were published, which apparently was a
cross-European phenomenon; see Wallace, Shelley and Greece.
58 Goedeke, ‘Übersetzungen aus dem Neugriechischen’, mentions some samples of
the patriotic poetry of Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos, as well as translations
of Athanasios Christopoulos. For the latter see also Lambros Mygdalis, ‘ˇØ æ
ª æ ÆØŒ Æ æ Ø Ø ø ı `ŁÆØı æØ ºı (1821–22)’,
ÆŒ ØŒ, 17 (1977), 194–211.
59 For an overview of the philhellenic literature, which was often of rather ephemeral
value, see R. F. Arnold, ‘Der deutsche Philhellenismus. Kultur- und literarhistorische
Untersuchungen’, Euphorion, 2 (1896), 71–178, and ‘Zur Bibliographie des deutschen
Philhellenismus’, Euphorion, 11 (1904), 735–41; Loukia Droulia, Philhellénisme: ouv-
rages inspirés par la guerre de l’indépendance grecque, 1821–1833: répertoire bibliogra-
phique (Athens, 1974); Goedeke, ‘Griechendichtungen’, in Grundriß, viii (2nd edn.,
1905), 282–93; Puchner, ‘Griechische Revolution’; Hans-Georg Werner, Geschichte des
politischen Gedichts in Deutschland von 1815–1840 (Berlin, 1969), 112–46.
60 Gaston Caminade, Les Chants des Grecs et le philhellénisme de Wilhelm Müller
(Paris, 1913), 8.
Nature in Arms 117
In general, Müller is valued as a poet typical of the versatility and
eclecticism characterizing his period.61 According to Paulin, Müller
belongs in his aesthetic orientation, as do Heine and Byron, ‘fairly
and squarely in the century that gave them birth, and yet (allowing
for Müller’s lesser stature) they are associated with revolutionary
movements that are part of the political tissue of the nineteenth’.62
Compared to Heine or Byron, though, Müller has had a less charit-
able press. His poetry, and in particular the song-cycles, though
commended for their attempt to fuse simplicity with intellectual
depth, are considered successful only in a few cases,63 and he is
mainly commended for his career in literary journalism, and as a
perceptive critic of contemporary poetic practice.64 He also shared a
great interest in the manifestations of folk literature and folk song,
evident from his 1825 edition and translation into German of
Fauriel’s important collection. The poetic principle he sought for
and discovered in song is simplicity of tone, and he points out the
need for reXectiveness on the part of the poet in order to (re)create
it.65 Whatever its literary success, Müller’s choice of imagery is in all
cases deliberate. This is relevant to a balanced evaluation of Müller’s
Griechenlieder, if we want to avoid an interpretation which gets all
too easily bogged down in questioning the literary merit of occa-
sional (political) poetry. Pride of place in that category surely
goes to Goethe’s uncompromising evaluation: ‘ ‘‘Kill him! Beat him!
Bring laurels! Blood! Gore!’’. . . That surely cannot yet be called
61 Gernot Gad, ‘Wilhelm Müller: Selbstbehauptung und Selbstverleugnung’, doc-

toral dissertation, Berlin (1989); Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, ii. 517–18.
62 Paulin, ‘Some Remarks’, 365.
63 A. P. Cottrell, Wilhelm Müller’s Lyrical Song-Cycles (Chapel Hill, NC, 1970);
Erdman Waniek, ‘Banale Tiefe in Wilhelm Müllers ‘‘Winterreise’’ ’, Jahrbuch des Freien
Deutschen Hochstifts (1994), 141–89.
64 Most scholarly interest in his person in the last decades was concentrated in
German Studies in the GDR from the 1970s and 1980s onward, maybe as part of a
general surge of interest in the Romantics as (political) poets between tradition and
history. On his publications Gad, ‘Müller’, 57–65, and Maria-Verena Leistner, ‘Müller
als Literaturkritiker’, 47–55, who knows of c.70 articles until 1826, on subjects ranging
from German Baroque literature, which he also edited, to Lord Byron and contem-
porary poetry. Among his pieces are also several reviews of Greek travel accounts and
German philhellenic poetry.
65 See his essay on Uhland and Körner mentioned above (and below); also, Gerd
Hartung, ‘Wilhelm Müller und das deutsche Volkslied’, Weimarer Beiträge, 23 (1977),
46–85; Gad, ‘Müller’, 75 V.
118 Nature in Arms
poetry.’66 It would be misjudging Müller’s critical acumen, though, to
separate the playful from the political.67 Recently, attention has been
redrawn to his self-understanding as a political author and, as a key
to it, to the acknowledgement of Müller’s critical work, especially his
careful discussion of Byron.68
As for his philhellenic career, Müller was given the opportunity, in
1817, to accompany the Prussian Baron von Sack on a trip to Greece.
Following his classical studies in Berlin, where he was admitted to the
circle of the retired (and embittered) classical philologist F. A. Wolf
and the up-and-coming scholar August Boeckh, he was recom-
mended by the Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften as an academic
companion for the Baron’s intended journey. Despite two months in
Vienna in order to establish contact with Greek intellectuals and to
learn Modern Greek, Müller never went to Greece.69 The journey
proceeded as far as Rome, where the two men’s ways separated, and
from where Müller two years later returned to Germany and a ducal
librarian’s career, juggling a large number of journalistic projects at
the same time—among them, to write popularly and at length about
his Italian experiences.70 During the publication of his Griechenlieder
Müller kept courting censorship, since some of them attacked very
explicitly the Restauration powers, at the time very reluctant to inter-
fere in the Greek conXict. He published mainly with Brockhaus in
66 Goethes Gespräche, ed. Freiherr von Biedermann and Wolfgang Herwig (Stutt-
gart, 1965–84), iii. 699.
67 Gad, ‘Müller’, 119–22, makes a particular case for a possible reading of Die
Winterreise in the light of Müller’s recent return from Italy to the German climate of
the Restauration in 1819.
68 Ibid. 29–38, 57 V.; Andreas Klenner, ‘Kein Sänger der WeltXucht: Wilhelm
Müller als kritischer Beobachter seiner Zeit’, in Norbert Michels (ed.), Wilhelm
Müller: Eine Lebensreise (Weimar, 1994), 71–5; Günther Blaicher, ‘Wilhelm Müller
and the Political Reception of Byron in Nineteenth century Germany’, Archiv für das
Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 223/1 (1986), 1–16.
69 Vienna was a good place to prepare for travel to Greece. Between 1787 and 1814
the number of Greek residents had risen from 600 to an estimated 4000; between
1801 and 1820 about 25% of Greek printed books were published in Vienna. It had
also provided a home for the Wrst Greek newspaper, the Ephimeris (1790–7), and the
inXuential bi-monthly periodical Ermis o Logios (1811–21), which, under the pat-
ronage of Korais, published a wide range of articles and excerpts from German
thought and literature, the sciences, medicine, and philology.
70 Bernhard Leistner, ‘Wilhelm Müller: Leben und Werk’, in Michels, Lebensreise,
11–31.
Nature in Arms 119
Leipzig, who dutifully stood by him through the frequent censorship
cases (imposed after the very restrictive Karlsbad Decrees of 1815).
The poems were a success. The mixture of lightness of song, honest
anger, and a compliance with public taste and commercial needs was
recognized, not least by Müller himself, who prided himself on
hitting the right note.71
In Vienna Müller had spent a few months on the fringes of an
intellectual circle where he may have had contact with the ‘Philiki
Etairia’, the Society of Friends, a secret society on a Masonic model
founded in Odessa in 1814 with the aim of ‘liberating the mother-
land’ and with great inXuence in the promotion of Greek interests.72
While Ermis o Logios announced Müller’s impending trip,73 as we
have seen, Müller never got to Greece. He proceeded as far as Italy,
where he stayed, felt himself adopted by the circle of young German
artists in Rome, and only after a two-year residence returned to
Germany to settle back in Dessau.74
The publication of his Griechenlieder followed quickly on the heels
of the Greek War of Independence. Like his Wrst collection of poetry
in Bundesblüthen (1816), a co-production by Müller and his friend
Kalckreuth under the impact of the German Wars of Liberation
71 Lohre, Wilhelm Müller als Kritiker und Erzähler: Ein Lebensbild mit Briefen an
F. A. Brockhaus und anderen Schriftstücken (Leipzig, 1927), 141, 190.
72 Thus the version proposed by B. Leistner, ‘Müller’, 23. Leistner relies on Gustav
Schwab’s biographical sketch of Müller accompanying his edition of Müller’s poems
in 1837. Johannes Irmscher, ‘Der Dessauer Dichter Wilhelm Müller und der Deutsche
Philhellenismus’, ¯ººØŒ, 21 (1968), 48–74, makes reference only to the inXuence
of the Society of Philomouson, also founded in 1814, whose most prominent
founding member was the CorWote Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, who had served as
the Russian legate at the Vienna Congress in 1814–15. Kapodistrias was very active in
winning new and inXuential members for his cause (amongst them Thiersch in
Bavaria), and it is very likely that Müller made Wrst and foremost contact with this
Etairia. There are, generally, strong allusions in Müller’s work to ideas and imagery of
the Freemasons, and archival work has identiWed him as a member, even if not one
with a great Masonic career, of a Lodge in Leipzig; see Ulrich Hartung, ‘Wilhelm
Müllers Beziehung zur Freimaurerei—eine ReXexion der Winterreise’, in U. Brede-
meyer and C. Lange (eds.), Kunst kann die Zeit nicht formen. 1. internationale
Wilhelm-Müller-Konferenz Berlin 1994 (Berlin, 1996), 174–82.
73 Philip Buttmann, ‘Brief an die Hellenen’, a letter of reference for Müller by a
prominent member of the Berlin Academy, appeared in the journal both in German
and in Greek in November 1817; a copy of the letter is printed in the appendix of
Lohre, Wilhelm Müller.
74 B. Leistner, ‘Müller’, 18 f.
120 Nature in Arms
against Napoleon (in which they had both fought), the Lieder der
Griechen (Wrst published under this title in 1821, then reissued in
1825 with the collections Neue Lieder (1822/3) and Neueste Lieder der
Griechen (1824)) were no less fervent or politically outspoken. Pre-
dominantly framed as Wrst-person narratives, they are uttered by a
variety of Greek personae, from the Phanariot Greek to the island
boy and the Maniot mother, and some of them attacked very
explicitly those who were reluctant to interfere in the Greek conXict.
Poems like ‘The Greeks addressing the Austrian Observer’ (‘Die
Griechen an den Österreichischen Beobachter’, October 1821), the
latter being a conservative political magazine published in Vienna,
made censorship quickly aware of Müller. After Metternich’s at-
tempt to clamp down on political agitation such as Thiersch’s
plan for a German Legion,75 the atmosphere became even more
hostile.
Müller’s second collection, Neue Lieder der Griechen (1822/3), con-
tained more poems courting trouble, such as ‘Pestilential Freedom’
(‘Die Verpestete Freiheit’), which accused the European ‘Pharisees’ of
shying away from the prospect of a Greece liberated at all costs, or
‘Pontius Pilatus Washing his Hands’ (‘Pontii Pilati Händewaschen’),
which very outspokenly attacked Friedrich von Gentz, a loyal member
of Metternich’s cabinet, and also a stout Roman Catholic.76 The fact
that Müller also decided to change his allegiance from his publisher
Ackermann in Dessau to Brockhaus in Leipzig could not save him
from censorship, even if Brockhaus loyally stood by him.77 By 1824,
75 Spaenle, Philhellenismus in Bayern, 51–69.

76 Von Gentz’s critical articles on the Greek War of Independence were published
mainly in the Österreichischer Beobachter ; see also I. D. Dimakis, O Österreichischer
Beobachter ´Ø ŒÆØ ¯ººØŒ ¯ÆÆØ (Athens, 1978).
77 The Wrst volume of Neue Lieder der Griechen, which Müller had commended to
Brockhaus in September 1822 as ‘hymns of freedom’ and ‘poetic-political ware’
(Lohre, Wilhelm Müller, 168 f.), was rejected by the publisher and the censors; the
third volume, which contained poems like ‘Die neuen Kreuzfahrer’ (the Christian
powers joining in a crusade against fellow Christians) and ‘Die Pharisäer’, was
likewise rejected by the censors in Leipzig in 1823 and instead published in the
Deutsche Blätter in Breslau. On the publication history, see James Taft HatWeld’s
introduction to his edition of Müller’s Gedichte (Berlin, 1906). The poems, which did
not appear in the collections of 1821–6, are added in Max Müller’s edition in a section
misleadingly entitled ‘Letzte Lieder der Griechen’.
Nature in Arms 121
however, a tone of pettiness begins to creep into their correspondence.
Sales, so promising at Wrst, were Xagging, and Brockhaus became
reluctant to produce new Griechenlieder, because the ‘poetic and
political hotcakes’, as Müller had termed them, were becoming ‘Maku-
latur’. This was generally the time, across Germany, when the original
fervour for the Greek cause was diminishing, to be reignited only after
1826 and the fall of Missolonghi, when the European balance of power
was changing. In 1824, let alone in 1821, that was still some distance
away, and by and large the Lieder were a big success. The mixture of
lightness of song, honest anger, and a compliance with public taste and
commercial needs were recognized, not least by Müller himself.78
Beyond their fairly overt political criticism, however, expressed
through support for the Greek cause, the Griechenlieder illustrate the
complexities of two concepts mentioned earlier: the establishment of
continuity as legible in the natural environment, and the process of
‘naturalization’ as a key features in the representation of a nation. The
signiWcance of environment in relation to Müller’s characters is mainly
reXected in three motifs: locations of classical signiWcance, the moun-
tains, and the sea.79 As opposed to the range and the allusive nature of
place-names, as, for example, still in Hölderlin, the Greek land is now
deWned more directly through names and mainly by names with a
military association. At the same time, the range of natural features
narrows: mountains (mainland or island) and the sea dominate the
Greek landscape. By way of only a few, strong topoi Greek freedom is
located; and again, Wxed reference points are mixed with an aesthetics
of transcendence (on which more below).
What is more signiWcant, though, is that the internal echoes
between Müller’s poems not only unite and multiply the voices of
his Greek characters and their supporters, but they seem to move
from self-referentiality to straight self-quotation. Thomas Pfau, in
the context of arguing for melancholy vis-à-vis history as the pre-
dominant mood of late Romanticism, has suspected, with regard to
the folk tone of German high Romantic lyric, that ‘this unsettling
78 Lohre, Wilhelm Müller, 141, 190.

79 It is noteworthy that apart from the Griechenlieder there is only sparse use of
mountain imagery in Müller’s other poetry; Philip Allen, ‘Wilhelm Müller and the
German Volkslied, II: Nature-sense in the Volkslied and in Müller’, English and
German Philological Quarterly, 3 (1901), 35–91, 69.
122 Nature in Arms
proximity of poetry to outright citation or cliché may indeed consti-
tute the underlying aesthetic and ideological signature of European
writing during the era of the Regency in Britain and the Restauration in
Germany’.80 The citational character, though, he argues, may express
the very fear of Wnding language lacking in resonance, especially as it is
so often, in that same lyric poetry, oVset by inversion, qualiWcation, or
doubt about the cliché. Müller’s topoi, accordingly, are not simple
attempts to evoke a past glory, but, in line with the dynamic form of
the Romantic nature image, they are complex and ambivalent com-
mentators on the availability of freedom and the availability to express
it: both in Wghting for it, and in writing about it.
A Wrst heroic location of repeated and repetitive signiWcance is the
site of Thermopylae, the natural landmark of ostensibly one of the
most consequential battles of Greek antiquity, that of few Spartans
against the Persians in 480 bc. Alongside Marathon, it is the favourite
example of an ancient battle site in the literature (German, Greek,
and generally European) surrounding the War of Independence. It
was so precisely because it was not only a location which proved the
Spartans’ military valour and courage, but also a place whose topo-
graphical character (a narrow pass) seemed to give active support to
their military prowess.81 The battle of Peta, for example, one of the
few actual Weld battles between the Greeks and the Turks in the War
of Independence, was fought in 1822 on a hillside near the village of
Peta in Epirus, and resulted in the large-scale and traumatic defeat of
the Philhellenes’ Battalion.82 In the newly founded German period-
ical The Greek Struggle for Liberty (Der Freiheitskampf der Griechen) it
was reported as a (new) victory at Thermopylae.83 Even if this is a
somewhat contrived and uneasy use of Wgurative speech, it is at least
fully consistent with the familiar treatment of place and nature: it
shows a military action in accordance not only with a tradition, but
80 Thomas Pfau, ‘Conjuring History: Lyric Cliché, Conservative Fantasy, and

Traumatic Awakening in German Romanticism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 102/1
(2003), 53–92, 69.
81 On the popularity of the theme across Europe and the arts, see Emma Clough,
‘Loyalty and Liberty: Thermopylae in the Western Imagination’, in T. Figueira (ed.),
Spartan Society (Swansea, 2004), 363–84.
82 Dakin, Greek Struggle, 92 V; W. St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The
Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Oxford, 1972), 97–101.
83 E. Klein (ed.), Der Freiheitskampf der Griechen: 3. Heft (1822), 314.
Nature in Arms 123
with its environment. Müller too makes frequent use of the topos of
Thermopylae, most explicitly in the poem of that name, where the
chorus of the buried Spartans appeals to their descendants, and in
‘Alexander Ypsilanti auf Munkacs’, where an apparition of Leonidas
conjures up the vision of Thermopylae as a site of contemporary
victory to the Greek commander imprisoned in Hungary: ‘In dem
engen Felsenpasse . . . [h]aben über die Barbaren freie Griechen heut
gesiegt’ (‘In the narrow rocky pass free Greeks today were victorious
against the barbarians’, ll. 16–18). As in the battle report on Peta,
Thermopylae becomes a landscape marker that, although topograph-
ically determined, is not geographically limited. To Müller’s German
reader it is likely to become even more of a portable entity as it
parallels a motif from the patriotic poetry of the German Napoleonic
Wars of 1813, in particular that of the resurrected Prussian troops of
Frederick the Great, such as it was used, for example, in the collab-
orative collection Bundesblüthen.84
Müller’s second favourite imagery centres around the Mani, the
southernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, and its inhabitants. In
line with the focus on Sparta and the Spartans as the most militant
manifestation Greece has to oVer, it seems the location best suited to
accommodate the transition to Greece present. The Maniots had not
only taken part in the uprisings of 1770 and 1821, but they were
perceived, much as they perceived themselves, as the descendants and
successors of the ancient Spartans;85 hence, since classical times, the
Mani had had a reputation, still reXected in nineteenth-century
travel accounts, as an unapproachable, wild, and dangerous territory,
populated by a Wercely freedom-loving people.86 No doubt, the Mani
is and was remote and harsh, but during the period of Ottoman rule
leading up to the insurrection it was among those areas of Greece
comparatively well populated, with a high degree of cultivation,
84 e.g. Georg Graf von Blankensee’s ‘Kriegslied für 1813’, Bundesblüthen (Berlin,
1816), 24, or Wilhelm von Studnitz’s ‘Die drei Worte des Preußen’, ibid. 235.
85 Petrobey Mavromichalis, the Maniot leader of the 1821 insurrection, issued
an appeal to the European powers as the ‘general of the Spartiate forces’ from
the ‘Spartiate camp’ (repr. in Spyridon Trikoupis, æÆ ¯ººØŒ ¯ÆÆ-
ø (London, 1853–7), i. 368 f.).
86 From the latter half of the seventeenth century the Maniots’ liking for bravery,
liberty, and robbery had become a set piece in travellers’ reports; Augustinos, French
Odysseys, 113 f.
124 Nature in Arms
especially when compared to the rest of the Morea, and in addition
enjoying a degree of relative independence.87 This standing, coupled
with the rather conservative, very self-contained and clan-oriented
social structure of the Maniots,88 might easily have reinforced the
image, in native and foreign eyes alike, of an area that was distin-
guished by forcefulness and continuity. Small wonder, then, that
references linking the Spartans and the character of the Mani became
leitmotifs in the poetry dealing with the Greek revolutionary move-
ment,89 where Spartan discipline and courage, itself with a long
tradition in the Western perception of Greece, now gathered new
political signiWcance.90
Sparta, in many ways, stood for an essentially un-Athenian, more
Doric, and in this sense pre-classical and more ancient element of the
Greek world, which extended even further the time-scale of continuity;91
a concentration on the less perfectly balanced yet more dynamic style
associated with the Spartan tradition rendered the imagery highly suit-
able for representing a Greece in action. A notion of Greece was now
needed which could justify the revolutionary and seditious movement,
and maybe also deXect its political explosiveness into a natural, and
hence less contentious, link between an essentially wild and free land-
scape that is striving to regain its freedom, and the Wghters it breeds. In
87 Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of Greek Revival, 34 V., quotes statistical and demo-

graphic material, according to which up to 50% of arable land in Greece was left untilled,
especially on the Peloponnese, where Turkish landownership and an uneven distribu-
tion of the population rendered cultivation more often than not barely self-suYcient.
Maniots had served as Venetian mercenaries from the Wfteenth century; from the
seventeenth century the Mani had been infamous for piracy and brigandage, and in
1777 the region eVectively maintained autonomy, even if contested, from the Porte; see
Peter Greenhalgh and Edward Eliopoulos, Deep into Mani (London, 1985), 17–43.
88 A recent summary of enduring Maniot social structures is C. Nadia Seremetakis,
The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago, 1991), 16–46.
89 Apart from Müller, one other such example is Harro Harring’s drama Die
Mainotten (Luzern, 1825), which also comes complete with thundering rivers and
Spartan blood. Wilhelm Waiblinger’s novel Phaeton (1823), taking up motifs from
Hölderlin’s Hyperion, has the father of the heroine be revealed as a ‘descendant of the
ancient Spartans’ and the son of a ‘wild Maniot’ (Werke und Briefe, ii. 85).
90 Rawson, Spartan Tradition, 306–43.
91 This could associate a positive value: the young Friedrich Schlegel, for example,
in Von den Schulen der griechischen Poesie (1794/5), identiWes the Doric lyrical style
(not only as historical but as a more general classiWcatory term applicable to diVerent
literary, political or cultural periods) as altogether more truly Hellenic than that of
the more orientalized Ionians.
Nature in Arms 125
Müller’s intellectual environment and literary repertoire there was no
shortage of writings to assert such a characterization. Ewald Dietrich’s
Griechenland und die Türkey, for example, one of the accounts which
emerged to Wll the information gap in German public opinion following
the events of spring 1821, states in the section on Greek national
character: ‘The Maniots (Spartans) are distinguished among all others
by their nobility, independence and courage.’92 Pouqueville’s Histoire de
la regénération de la Grèce (1824), of which Müller owned a copy, dwells
extensively on the Maniots and their Spartan heritage;93 Nagel’s pamph-
let Werden die türkischen Schlachtbänke . . . (1821), similarly knows of the
Maniots as descendants of the Spartans, keeping themselves free of the
Turkish yoke in their mountain fastness (p. 20); F. A. Ukert’s Gemälde von
Griechenland (1810), part of Müller’s library, stresses the impression of
freedom and independence which the traveller gained from his encoun-
ter with the Maniots;94 his hopeful description of Spartan women,
moreover, as ‘blond, free, and strong’ (pp. 115 f.) is even more remark-
able when it is seen next to his repeated analogy—in regard to natural
environment and character of inhabitants—between Sparta/the Mani
and Switzerland. The link between the past tradition and the future
prospects of the Spartans/Maniots and the Swiss may conjure incongru-
ous images of Germanic utopianism seen at work here, but the link is not
accidental: the Swiss Alpine environment was as much a cause of aes-
thetic fascination to European literati as it was held responsible for their
authentic simplicity and republican liberty, especially on the way to a
new national consciousness after the demise of the old Swiss Confeder-
ation in 1798.95 Arcadia, too, was thought to be reminiscent of the Alpine
republic. Bartholdy, for example, notes that ‘this region looks very much
like Switzerland’, and although historically and geographically clearly
diVerent from either Sparta or the Mani, those three areas are often
conXated in a general geographical impression of a rough, mountainous,
and valiant unity. The philhellenic pamphleteering did not hold back
either, but followed through the political implications of the comparison.
92 Ewald Dietrich, Griechland und die Türkey (Annaberg, 1921), 43 f.

93 Excerpts in Caminade, Les Chants des Grecs, 39–42.
94 F. A. Ukert, Gemälde von Griechenland (1810), 115 f.
95 See Kaufmann and Zimmer, ‘Authentic Nation’, for further bibliography; on the
Alps as the seat of ‘Helvetic freedom’, see Jacek Wozniakowski, Die Wildnis: Zur
Deutungsgeschichte des Berges in der europäischen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/M., 1987), 238–58.
126 Nature in Arms
Krug, for example, in 1821, envisages a ‘Confederation on a Swiss model’
as the ideal solution for the Greek political make-up.96
Another historical curiosity that had bathed the Mani in the light
of political activism and European relevance was that of a seven-
teenth-century Maniot colony apparently established on Corsica.
When, during his Italian campaign, Napoleon was approached by
the Bey of Mani, he pledged his support to the area in case of an
extension of the campaign to Greek territory. To secure the Mani’s
alliance in a possible confrontation with the Ottomans, Napoleon
sent an envoy there in 1797, headed by two members of the Stepha-
nopoli family from Corsica, Napoleon’s birthplace, which claimed
descent from the founders of the Maniot settlement, and, further
into the past, descent from the Byzantine imperial family into the
bargain. According to one account of the venture, ‘the occasion was
one for an orgy of Spartiate sentiment on both sides’.97 Iken, in his
historical-scientiWc account of Greece’s awakening, goes so far as to
claim a Maniot origin for Napoleon himself, who, through what we
have to assume is an osmosis of courage, soaks up the displaced
Maniot valour on his home ground in Corsica, even if, according to
Iken, he does in the end fail to live up to the Maniot ideal. Greek
character, arising from territorial realities, is in this context atmos-
pheric enough to be transposable and to have an impact upon sign-
iWcant political events and their participants, in an act of natural
cross-fertilization. In other words, the groundedness of Greek char-
acter, movable to the territory it has colonized, goes to shape the
human actors and decision-makers of fast-moving, volatile history,
no matter how tenuous that link is.
In turn, the appeal to and of Spartan origins aVected Maniot self-
presentation to its European supporters. A letter from Petrobey
Mavromichali, the Maniot leader of the 1821 insurrection, to Jean
Eynard, the director of the Griechenverein at Geneva, invokes the
Maniots as the descendants of the Spartans and the guardians of
freedom, also by virtue of their natural habitat. Mavromichalis
96 Bartholdy, Bruchstücke, 241; Krug, Letztes Wort über die griechische Sache, 21.
97 Rawson, Spartan Tradition, 293. The account was published in 1800 as Voyage
de Dimo et Nicolo Stephanopoli en Grèce, pendant les années V et VI [1797/1798],
d’après deux missions, dont l’une du gouvernement français, et l’autre du général en chef
Buonaparte; rédigé par un des professeurs du Prytanée (Paris, 1800).
Nature in Arms 127
bolsters his appeal for Wnancial support in this way: ‘Be assured that
your generous help will be rewarded by the deeds of the Spartans.
They live a life almost conforming to the primitive state of nature.
Forced to retire to their dry and steep mountains, in order to preserve
freedom, they were extremely poor and not in a state to establish
schools for the education of their children there.’98
The habitat of those latter-day Spartans, as it is represented to the
outside observer, is deWcient and in need of support, but in that way
it literally lays bare the foundations of why it is worth rescuing.
Almost conforming to the primitive state of nature is exactly what
seems to entitle them, in the eyes of their projected readership, to
progress towards the political state that thrives on the stereoscopic
vision of progress and an originary, timeless naturalness. While this is
the dynamic and paradoxical tension which Homi Bhabha, promin-
ently, has identiWed for almost any act of modern national (self-)
representation, natural environment, in the case of Greece, slots
particularly smoothly into that structure.
Against this background it is not surprising that Müller’s dramatis
personae should feature a number of Maniot characters: poems such
as ‘The Maniot Woman’, ‘The Teaching of the Maniot Woman’, ‘The
Maniot’, ‘The Maniot Boy’, and ‘The Maniot Widow’ spin a web of
family continuity and aYliation across the volumes of the Griechen-
lieder. ‘The Maniot’, from his third collection of September 1822, is
one such example. The perspective is that from a mountain-top, and
a reiWed freedom is inscribed into the natural features of the Mani:
freedom lies buried in the plain but the rallying-cry, in a reverse
upward movement, is to bring freedom down from its mountain
refuge in triumph (‘Do you want to regain your freedom? Come up
with sharpened swords! From the mountains we will bring her down,
united’). The Maniot as freedom Wghter comes to personify a vital
freedom that, as opposed to its buried namesake, thrives in a natural,
organic fashion. His image as a mountain-dwelling hero, descending
98 ‘Soyez persuadé que vos généreux secour seront récompensé par les exploits des
Spartiates. Ceux-ci mènent une vie presque conforme à l’état primitif de la nature.
Forcés de se retirer sur leurs montagnes arides et escarpées, pour conserver la liberté, ils
étaient extrêmement pauvres, et hors d’état d’établir chez eux des écoles pour l’éduca-
tion des enfants.’ Documents oYciels sur les secours envoyé en Grèce par Monsieur Eynard,
et sur l’etat de la Grèce à la Wn de juillet 1826 (Geneva, 1826; repr. Athens, 1975).
128 Nature in Arms
like a rushing river onto the plain where freedom lies buried, renders
the action of the Maniot factually indistinguishable from that of
nature: ‘Free, like my mountain streams, like the eagle in the sky, j I
thunder down into the plain, where freedom lies buried’ (‘Frei, wie
meiner Berge Strom, wie der Adler in den Lüften, j Stürz ich brau-
send in die Fläche, wo die Freiheit liegt in Grüften’). The classical
(and maybe expected) continuity and heritage that are alluded to by
reference to ‘old heroic dust’ and the ‘grey rubble’ (l. 5) burying
Greek freedom, are exchanged in favour of a living tradition: the
reference to his children—as inheritors of the contested freedom—
places the Maniot in a continuous line of predecessors and descend-
ants, while his own actions are invoked as continuity of resistance:
‘never, never did a slavish yoke bend my strong neck.’
The image of the Maniot also does something else; the fashioning
of the mountains as a place of freedom, which is a recurrent theme in
German as well as Greek poetry and prose, deliberately evokes, and
integrates into the fabric of a volatile and violent natural continuity,
the klefts, the groups of irregular brigands who, particularly during
the last century of Ottoman rule had determined the social structure
of areas of Roumeli, Epirus, and Thessaly, as well as some of the
Morea.99 Existing on the edge of both legality and society, owing no
Wxed allegiance to the authorities, yet marked by a strong sense of
group loyalty, they were not only a staple of travel accounts in
circulation, but they became identiWable with the potential for
achieving freedom. To link them, moreover, with the imagery of
personiWed nature not only strengthened the coherence of Müller’s
poetic imagery, it also established a link to the kleftika, the particular
group of Greek folk songs treating this group of social bandits, which
had developed during the eighteenth century.100
Müller’s Griechenlieder, in fact, need to be seen in an emerging
folk-song tradition not only on the German side, in that they also
consciously evoke formal characteristics of the Greek folk song: the
99 See John Koliopoulos, Brigands With a Cause: Brigandage and Irredentism in
Modern Greece 1821–1912 (Oxford, 1987), 20–35.
100 The so-called kleftic songs, using the same stylistic and structural elements as
other (older) folk songs, take as their topic the Wghting of groups of brigands against
the Turks and were composed mainly during the course of the eighteenth century,
particularly in the area of Roumeli. See Alexis Politis, ˜ ØŒ æÆª Ø:
˚º ØŒ (Athens, 1976), introduction; Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece, 102–11.
Nature in Arms 129
Wfteen-syllable verse (with a caesura after the eighth syllable) mirrors
the politikos stichos, the ‘political verse’, a standard metre of, among
other things, the Greek popular or folk song. Müller, fully engaging in
the logic of the distressed genre, is keen to bring the model to his
readership’s attention. In a review of recent Griechenlieder in Brock-
haus’s Literarisches Conversations-Blatt in 1824, Müller commends the
exemplary character of his own songs, claiming that the ‘well chosen
metrical form is developed from Modern Greek models’, models he in
turn likens to the ‘Nibelungen verse’ of medieval German epic.101 In a
second review of 1825, this time of recent translations of Greek folk
song into French, English, and German, the last being his own trans-
lation of Fauriel, Müller oVers a more precise deWnition of the ‘heroic
verse’ of Greek folk songs, as a Wfteen-syllable line, separated by a
caesura into one eight- and one seven-syllable section, and with the
main accent of the Wrst section on the sixth or eighth syllable, of the
second section on the sixth syllable.102 Although Müller is very con-
scientious in following this metrical pattern in his translation of Faur-
iel’s collection, his own Griechenlieder are much less conceived as
faithful adaptations. Here Müller follows the model of the Wfteen-
syllable line with a caesura in about half of his Lieder, yet without
ever fully succeeding in a complete metrical reconstruction. In some
poems he attempts the dactylic ending of the Wrst half-line, but without
consistency and with a change of the main stress to the Wfth or seventh
syllable.103 It is no less important that he insists on the use of regular
rhyming couplets, which deviates from the Greek norm of largely
unrhymed lines and brings his poems much closer to European ex-
pectations of versiWcation.104 More than a concession to taste, Müller
101 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 59 (10 Mar. 1824), 235. The review, of three
recent German collections of poetry in support of the Greeks, is not signed, but is
almost certainly by Müller himself, given the comparisons he draws with Müller’s
poetry, the nature of analysis of metre, and his characteristic and immensely readable
style of damning with faint praise, familiar from his other reviews.
102 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 122 (27 May 1825), 485. Müller claims that
English and French are not suited, nor willing, to break with their strict traditions
and render an unrhymed Wfteen-syllable verse as precisely that.
103 In more detail Gad, ‘Müller’, 149 V.
104 In his translation of Fauriel’s collection Chants populaires de la Grèce (1824) in
1825, Müller keeps as close as possible to the unrhymed original. His own poetic
translations of folk material as Reime aus den Inseln des Archipelagus, on the other
hand, are free adaptations using a standard rhyme form.
130 Nature in Arms
also aligns Greek song with the popular precedent of the rhymed ballad.
It creates familiarity with a foreign, ostensibly more organic and ori-
ginal relation between the individual (or the group) and its environ-
ment expressed in the songs, in which the reader may participate to a
degree. Müller hints at the particular predisposition of the German
reader in his assertion that the language particularly suited to render
the Greek originals is German, ‘whose nature made it possible to follow
the peculiar metrical form of the original almost word for word,
without distorting or forcing the free and natural character of folk
song’.105 Again, naturalness here provides the necessary translucency
that allows the diYcult translation from one nation in the making
(Greece) to another (Germany).
At the centre of the folk ‘tone’ lies its immediate relation with
nature. The adequate expression of feelings or internal processes
through the images provided by nature is not merely artistic practice,
but the prerogative of the poet who has grasped this very relation to
nature that is characteristic of folk song. Müller’s comment on his
contemporary, Kerner, another poet making use of folk elements,
reiterates his basis for the analogy between interior sentiment and
exterior environment:
Moreover, Kerner’s Muse is never indoors: for joy and sorrow, in longing
and contemplation, in dreamy solitude and playful sociability she is sur-
rounded by free nature all around, above and below. And yet, she would
never care to represent nature like a landscape painter. She takes in nature
and returns it from inside her through her thoughts and feelings. For this
her nature is so peculiar and yet so simple and so true. Shapeless longing
clothes itself and its object in images of nature, and even the sun and the
moon are mere carriers of the poet’s love.106
105 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 122 (27 May 1825), 485.

106 ‘Überhaupt ist Kerners Muse nie in der Stube: in Lust und Leid, in Sehnsucht und
Andacht, in träumender Einsamkeit und spielender Geselligkeit hat sie die freie Natur
um sich, unter sich und über sich. Dennoch aber fällt es ihr nie ein, die Natur als
Landschaftsmalerin darstellen zu wollen. Sie nimmt die Natur in sich auf und gibt sie
aus ihrem Innern mit ihren Gedanken und Gefühlen wieder heraus. Daher ist ihre Natur
so eigentümlich und doch so einfach und so wahr. Die gestaltlose Sehnsucht kleidet sich
und ihren Gegenstand in die Bilder der Natur, und selbst Sonne und Mond sind für den
Dichter oft nur Träger seiner Liebe.’ ‘Über die neueste lyrische Poesie’, 329 f.
Nature in Arms 131
Against the reWned inventory of stylized landscape painting, Mül-
ler’s work espouses the ideal of artistic simplicity implied in folk
song.107 Some aspects singled out by Müller are particularly relevant
to the tone of the Griechenlieder : the untamed Xow of both Greek
freedom and mountain rivers in his songs echoes the metaphor of his
own musings on the reviving ‘stream of folk song on the dry ground
of reXection’. Yet the regenerative force lies precisely in the use of
‘authentic’ imagery, not in the emulation of archaizing language or
form.108 The turn away from merely imitating older forms ties in
with Müller’s credo expressed in the same essay that new folk songs
had to be contemporary (‘zeitgemäß’).109 The stylistic feature to
achieve that end, which Müller commends in Uhland’s writing, is
the use of personae or dramatic monologue;110 the fact that he
himself uses the same device, that is, the various representative
Wrst-person speakers in his Griechenlieder, lets him claim the same
naturalness and immediacy he values highly as a poetic quality; not
only does the Wrst-person perspective facilitate identiWcation; the
ultimate beneWciary is again the individual (and the poet) who, in
the act of reading or re-creating folk songs and the original direct
relation between individual and environment expressed in them,
furthers his own (poetic) understanding and human character.
The ‘contemporary’ character of his (Greek) folk songs—and the
political applicability to their German reader’s present situation—is
further strengthened by Müller’s awareness of the unbridgeable gap
between the past and the present, whether between older folk-song
models and modern imitations, or between ancient and modern
107 Heinrich Heine, in an often-quoted letter to Müller in 1826, praises the latter’s
collection Sieben und siebzig Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden
Waldhornisten (1820), which contained the song-cycle Die schöne Müllerin, as exem-
plary in achieving the authentic voice of natural simplicity; Nigel Reeves, ‘The Art of
Simplicity: Heinrich Heine and Wilhelm Müller’, Oxford German Studies, 5 (1970),
48–66.
108 ‘Über die neueste lyrische Poesie’, 304. Müller’s attitude betrays the inXuence of
his teacher F. A. Wolf, who was one of the Wrst scholars to stress the importance of
oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Homeric epic. Müller himself
wrote a treatise Homerische Vorschule (1824), modelled on Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad
Homerum (1795); Wolf himself had relied on Herderian ideas of poetic composition
and had stressed the, in the last analysis, irretrievable nature of ancient texts.
109 Müller, ‘Über die neueste lyrische Poesie’, 304.
110 Ibid. 309.
132 Nature in Arms
Greece. On the one hand this concerns the evaluation of contempor-
ary Greek events by the European public. The opening poem of the
Griechenlieder, ‘The Greeks to the Friends of their Antiquity’ (‘Die
Griechen an die Freunde ihres Altertums’), uncovers the failure of the
professed Philhellenes (and, one wonders, the professed poets?) to
integrate the present situation into their idealizing view:
Das Alt’ ist neu geworden, die Fern ist euch so nah,
Was ihr erträumt so lange, leibhaftig steht es da,
Es klopft an eure Pforte—ihr schließt ihm euer Haus—
Sieht es denn gar so anders, als ihr es träumtet, aus?
(ll. 23–6)
What was old has become new, what was far away has come close, what you
had dreamed is, at long last, standing before you alive; it is knocking on your
door—and you barricade your house—Well, does it look so diVerent from
your dream?
On the other hand, and despite the repeated appeal to the ancient
glory revived in the present Greek struggle, there is a strong sense
within the scenes of the individual poems and in the views of the
individual speakers that the material remains of antiquity are degener-
ating and beyond recovery. The personiWed ‘Ruins of Athens to Eng-
land’ (‘Ruinen von Athen an England’) predict their ultimate downfall,
‘The Maniot’ deWes the ancient rubble which has buried freedom, and
the voice of ‘Temples Old and New’ (‘Alte und neue Tempel’) summar-
izes the vain attempt to salvage the monuments of old:
Laßt die alten Tempel stürzen! Klaget um den Marmor nicht,
Wenn die Hand des blinden Heiden seine schöne Form zerbricht!
Nicht in Steinen, nicht in Asche wohnt der Geist der alten Welt,
In den Herzen der Hellenen steht sein königliches Zelt . . .
(ll. 1–4)
Let the old temples come tumbling down! Do not lament the marble, when
the hand of the blind heathen destroys its beauteous shape! The spirit of the
ancient world rests not in stones or in ashes, but in the Hellenes’ hearts, and
here it has put up its royal tent . . .
The continuity between the ancient and the contemporary spirit is
constantly sought throughout the poems, yet Müller warns against a
false sense of continuity which, like the contrived use of formal aspects
of folk poetry, does not recognize that the historical past is beyond
Nature in Arms 133
retrieval. If continuity is to be established, it is in the memory of the
past. The surrounding nature, with the locations and markers of
memory, is simultaneously the complementary dynamic setting
which reXects the actions of its inhabitants. ‘The Maniot Woman’,
who challenges her fellow women to search out the ruins of Sparta so
as to gather stones to pelt those of the returning sons who have achieved
nothing in the Wght for freedom, indicates Müller’s understanding of
continuity: material locality includes, yet of necessity transcends, the
fragments of the past, while the continuity of a cultural tradition
(Spartan maternal pride and manly honour) comes at the cost of
destroying quite another, immediate continuity, that of the family
and the sons’ lives. Müller’s strong views on the potential of folk song
(and its potential for failure) echo in the violence that is enabled by his
Greek nature: stones become weapons to quench false continuity, while
mountain refuges house appropriately independent spirits, whose
character is set loose with unforeseen consequences, as much as it is
cautiously contained by the trust in the justiWcation of politics by way
of natural habitat.
The repeated apostrophe by parts of the Greek land itself must, as a
rhetorical strategy, have hit the right note. Müller’s collective review of
philhellenic poetry speaks with approval of poems by Heinrich Stie-
glitz, that ‘the individual moments of the Hellenes’ struggle, which the
young poet has singled out to sublimate, are well chosen, and he, like
Wilhelm Müller, seeks to Wnd characteristic images of this great strug-
gle in speciWc locations and nationalities’.111 Together with place,
though, the most consistent attention across contemporary reviews,
is to folk songs as paradigms and as collectibles in a landscape.
With the translation of Fauriel’s collection, Müller began to have
extensive contact with the Greek folk-song tradition, and there are
instances, especially after 1824, of very direct literary inXuence too.
Two poems from the later volumes of the Griechenlieder, ‘On the
Death of Markos Bozzaris’ and ‘On the Death of Georgis’, are more or
less straight translations of Greek songs quoted in Voutier’s Lettres
sur la Grèce. Notes et chants populaires extraits des portefeuilles du
colonel (1826). Motifs like the following, from the beginning of ‘Song
before Battle’ (‘Lied vor der Schlacht’):
111 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 59 (10 Mar. 1824), 235.

134 Nature in Arms
Wer für die Freiheit kämpft und fällt, des Ruhm wird blühend stehn,
Solange frei die Winde noch durch freie Lüfte wehn,
Solange frei der Bäume Laub noch rauscht im grünen Wald,
Solang des Stromes Woge noch frei nach dem Meere wallt
He, who Wghts and dies for freedom, his glory will Xourish as long as the
winds blow in the free air, as long as the leaves of the trees are free to rustle in
the green forests, as long as the river surges in freedom towards the sea
are reminiscent of certain topoi from the kleftika, as in the following: ‘As
long as the mountains are covered in snow we are not going to bow to the
Turks!’ (‘ˇ Øı Æ !ı; æŒı æŒı " ).112
Yet the repeated application of the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ to a
plethora of natural features is Müller’s own doing. Still, it is likely that
he had had some exposure to Greek models before 1824. Many travel
accounts, amongst them those of Ukert and Pouqueville, whom Müller
is known to have read, contain examples of Greek songs. Moreover,
Baron von Sack, who after their falling out continued his travels from
Rome to Egypt without Müller, was himself a collector of Greek folk
songs, and both in Vienna and Rome there was no shortage of oppor-
tunities for Müller to hear, at least, about the growing interest in the
systematic collection of the songs.113
After the mountains and the historic battle site, the third and last of
the topographical motifs mentioned above, which Müller uses to relate
the Greek speakers actively to their environment, is the sea. As a place
of freedom and a site of memory and tradition, the sea is not only the
natural feature seen as most characteristic of Greece since antiquity, it
also tends to suggest the search for freedom, as its horizon is ever
expanding. The sea’s unlimited expanse and the transgression of
bounds can mirror an expansion into the past without, however, the
prospect of attainability, the pattern familiar from Romantic aesthetics
as outlined in Chapter 1. In poems like ‘The Phanariot’ or ‘The Slave
Girl in Asia’ (‘Die Sklavin in Asien’), the sea is a carrier of voices from
the past, even though—evoking lost family—a very recent one:
Hör ich eine Woge rauschen, ist es mir, als ob’s mich ruft,
Ja mich rufen meine Eltern aus der tiefen weiten Gruft,
112 ‘ı æªØ ’, Fauriel, i, no. 24.

113 On the role of von Sack in the procurement of Greek folk songs, see Politis,
˜ ØŒ æÆª Ø, 28 f.
Nature in Arms 135
Rufen Rache—und ich schleudre Türkenköpfe in die Flut,
Bis gesättigt ist die Rache, bis die wilde Woge ruht.
When I hear the sound of waves, my parents, I feel, are calling to me from
their grave, calling for revenge—and I hurl Turkish heads into the sea until
revenge is done and the waves are calmed.
‘The Athenians Embarking’ (‘Die EinschiVung der Athener’) moves
beyond this temporal frame as the ‘free’ sea not only contains the
promise of a future free Hellas, but is supposed to carry the Athe-
nians, retreating from the Turks, back to the island of Salamis and the
Athenian victory against the Persians. The seafaring tradition, and
hence the assurance of the sea’s favour, Wnd further expression in the
education of ‘The Little Boy of Hydra’ (‘Der kleine Hydriot’). Con-
tinuity lies in the passing on across generations of knowledge of how
to attain a harmonious relation between man and sea. For the
importance of locality in representations of Greece and her inhabit-
ants liberating themselves, the combination of nature imagery with
the little Hydriot boy that oVers a natural form of schooling and
Bildung, could not be more exemplary.
Let me conclude with a brief look at the poem ‘Hydra’, which
appeared in the collection Neue Lieder der Griechen in January 1823.
The island of Hydra, which had a strong seafaring and mercantile
tradition and was relatively independent of the Ottomans,114 features
in a number of Müller’s poems. The naval support from Hydra, and the
spiritual support deriving from Hydra’s history (after 1770 the island
oVered asylum to a substantial number of Peloponnesian refugees),
were a regular feature in the rallying-cries to advance the Greek liber-
ation movement: Ukert knows of the ‘Vaterlandsliebe’, the patriotic
feelings of the islanders in general; Korais’s 1803 lecture, published in
Iken’s Hellenion, praises their progressive strength of character and
spirit, and he quotes an example from Hydra, where the earliest
education of the mariners’ children is in (local) geography; Theodor
Kind, in his Contributions To Better Acquaintance with Modern Greece,
with Regard to History, Literature and Geography (Beiträge zur besseren
Kenntnis des Neuen Griechenland, in historischer, literarischer und geo-
graphischer Beziehung, 1831), devotes ten pages alone to the island of
114 Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of the Greek Revival, 67; Vakalopoulos, æÆ
ı ı ººØ , 8 vols. (Thessaloniki, 1961– ), v. 409–18.
136 Nature in Arms
Hydra, singling out its proximity to European standards and its com-
parative freedom from Ottoman intervention, and cross-referencing
his observations to earlier works by Iken, Leukothea (1822), Korais,
George Waddington, and Pouqueville.115
The rocks of Müller’s Hydra, as the natural seat of Greek liberty,
are surrounded by scenes of violent onslaught. Nature let loose is at
the same time not only the force of opposition but also the bearer of
Hydra’s memory and glory. The permanence of the coastal rocks
surpasses even the traces of continuity implied in the material re-
mains of Athens and Thebes: ‘Let towers and walls fall down; what is
built must perish: j The rock of freedom will stand in the free sea for
all times!’ (‘Laßt die Türm und Mauern stürzen; was ihr baut, muß
untergehn: j Ewig wird der Freiheit Felsen in dem freien Meere
stehn!’). At the same time the opening vista of the seascape brings
about the mental liberation of the spectator: ‘When I see your
clouded summits, my heart races and my blood surges j . . . and on
the wings of your sails my spirit soars out above the wide sea’ (‘Seh
ich deine Wolkengipfel, steigt mein Herz, und wallt mein Blut
j . . . Und mit deiner Segel Fluge schwebt ins weite Meer mein Geist’).
Müller’s use of locality shows that for the Greek narrators in the
poems it is the locality and character of the present environment that
activates liberation: it evokes the past and in so doing authenticates
the present aYnity between nature and individual. The spectator of
the poem ‘Hydra’, however, is unspeciWed, in contrast to many of the
other poems which create a distinct persona, yet is more involved in
the scenery than the anonymous ‘I’ of the very openly critical poems.
It is the spectator of the political events and history acted out within
a signiWcant environment rich with associations, whose spirit is lifted
up and drawn out to sea. As in the other poems, the particular
environment bears the traces and memory of a culture and past
that have a particular aYnity with freedom. Here, however, the
spectator, the witness and reader, is himself at the centre of the
115 Ukert, Gemälde von Griechenland, 117; Korais, in Iken, Hellenion, 161 V.;
George Waddington, A Visit to Greece, in 1823 and 1824 (London, 1825), translated
into German as Besuch in Griechenland (Stuttgart, 1825). The actual extent of Hydra’s
relative independence is quite another matter; what is relevant is that a network of
texts reinforces the image.
Nature in Arms 137
poem, which Müller considered one of his best.116 There seems a
consensus among Müller’s critics and biographers that his Griechen-
lieder thinly veil his own political agenda and that there is a remark-
able similarity with the sentiment of the poems of Bundesblüthen: the
French of the earlier poems are now the Turks, and the imagery of
rousing battle-cries and sabre-swinging youths is little diVerent. The
scene of Greece, however, as opposed to France and Germany, oVered
a diVerent scope to the German reader; much as Greek writing and
self-understanding of the period were reliant upon a positive image
of Greece and a Greek heritage imported from the Western European
tradition, Germany was equally reliant on the image of a Greek state
whose aspirations were founded upon and reXected in its own
natural habitat, at the same time a habitat which still left enough
scope to reXect the German reader’s own position.
As Müller characterized the German Griechendichtung in his re-
view in 1824: ‘From the land of reality, German enthusiasm for the
freedom of the Greeks took wing toward the higher reaches of
poetry.’117 Nevertheless, Greece is not a dream-world but a reality,
eVective by its naturalness and the fusion of material and spiritual
factors put into artistic form. Although the perception of Greece is
on the one hand Wrmly connected to the features of a Greek locale,
the Greek environment remains on the other hand a transposable
entity, a symbolic colony without geographical restriction. Winckel-
mann’s Gedanken opened with the address to the elector August,
under whose government the arts were ‘as a foreign colony’ intro-
duced to Saxony, and in whose time the search for the pure springs of
art ‘meant travelling to Athens; and Dresden from henceforth will be
an Athens for artists’.118 After 1821 the search for a national identity
still means ‘travelling to Athens’; an Athens with the power to
become in turn a Dresden, a Jena, a Berlin, or a Munich for writers.
In the imagery favoured by philhellenic literature, it is the topos of
(political) unity that is foregrounded as one of Greece’s overriding
aspirations in liberating itself. It is a topos that perfectly matches the
centrality—and structurally necessary elusiveness—of unity to the
116 In a letter to Brockhaus of 4 Jan. 1823 Müller calls the poem ‘the best of all four
volumes’; Werke. i. 323.
117 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 59 (10 Mar. 1824), 233.
118 Winckelmann, Gedanken, 4.
138 Nature in Arms
workings of the Romantic image. For Germany, and a Europe in general
that was preoccupied with the issue of nationhood and the relation
between the state and the individual, the motivation of the Greek events
seemed to rest in the Greeks’ desire to establish a stable form of national
unity and territorial cohesion on Western European models. Whether
this was indeed the case is a diVerent story altogether.119 In all this, it is
important to remember that the conditions in Greece were not just
those of a clan-oriented microcosm, but had been that of a linguistic-
ally, ethnically, and territorially highly complex area with much scope
for diVerent interpretations, objectives, and strategies of becoming a
uniWed polity.120 In terms of the local military action the Philhellene
battalions met with, their objectives and tactics bore the mark of
regional power-struggles and small-scale warfare, motivated often by
demands diVerent from those imputed to them; in an uneasy mixture
of Western-trained military units, mostly composed of non-Greeks,
aristocratic Greek military leaders, and bands of armed brigands under
the guidance of local captains, unity against the common enemy was
diYcult to achieve.121 Social and regional diVerences practically led to
civil warfare waged in parallel with the Wght against Ottoman rule, and
prevented the rise of any permanent authority. Early successes of the
insurgents in the Peloponnese had led to the setting up of three
provisional regional governments, and in early 1822 a constitution
was adopted. A year later the constitution was revised and the three
governments merged into one central authority, which did nothing to
stop, and in fact even advanced, the factionalism. Still, many of the
Western-educated and -oriented Greeks who were involved in the early
government did exert a substantial intellectual inXuence on Greece’s
self-understanding and self-deWnition towards the outside world and
119 For an in-depth description of the practical expressions of illusion and disil-
lusion on both sides, see St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free.
120 Peckham, Natural Histories; S. Petmezas, ‘The Formation of Early Hellenic
Nationalism’, Historein, 1 (1999), 51–74.
121 There is a rather Xuid subdivision into armatoloi (Greek or in any case non-
Muslim irregulars licensed and employed by the Ottomans to ascertain a certain
degree of security and state control in the pashaliks) and klefts (brigands living in the
mountains, not in the service of the authorities); both groups participated in the War
of Independence with diVering, and often unclear or conXicting motivations, but
their shared aim was essentially to maintain the old social system with its network of
powers, security, and inXuence. See Koliopoulos, Brigands, 20–35.
Nature in Arms 139
the rest of Europe; and one must not underestimate the increasing need
for a national rhetoric during and after the War of Independence,
especially after the establishment of the Greek state proper, which
followed the battle of Navarino in 1827, the granting of statehood by
the Western ‘protecting powers’ in 1829 in the Treaty of Adrianople and
conWrmed by the London protocol in 1830, and the establishment of
the Greek kingdom under a Bavarian monarch in 1833.
The brittleness and the ambivalence of unity is not merely political,
but it Wnds expression in the works and in the poetic self-understanding
of the Wrst generation of Greek writers after 1821, who are the topic of
the next two chapters. If Greek nature proved portable across to Ger-
many and Europe through representation and its beneWts for the ob-
servant reader and writer, then how is that system of transposition, of
looking at Greece as an object that functions by not being one’s own,
going to work for Greek writers themselves? The literary contact zone
provoked by that retranslation, I suggest, left Greek writers facing an
aesthetic structure in which Greece was Wrmly held in place as an
entity—and, by extension, a landscape—that was necessarily and func-
tionally suspended above an abyss of non-representation, or rather of no
need for rethinking representation. All this at a time when the claim
became pervasive in literature and other cultural institutions of the new
state that its content and narratives must needs be national, investing
that claim with authority and impotence in equal parts. Where Peckham
described this dilemma in terms of social-historical structures, I suggest
that the aesthetic structures of that claim add to the overall eVect. As the
next two chapters show, the extreme responses to that challenge appear
to be either an eventually paralysed pastiche or all-out refusal to make
the Greek landscape, as a place of freedom, visible.
4
The Ambivalence of Nature: Poetry for the
New Greek State
In the infancy of art, its productions are, like the handsomest of

human beings at birth, misshapen, and similar one to another,
like the seeds of plants of entirely diVerent kinds; but in its
bloom and decay, they resemble those mighty streams, which,
at the point where they should be the broadest, either dwindle
into small rivulets, or totally disappear. . . . But, among the
Greeks, the art of drawing resembles a river, whose clear waters
Xow in numerous windings through a fertile vale, and Wll its
channel, yet do not overXow.
(J. J. Winckelmann, History of Greek Art)
In 1867, as Greek ambassador to Washington, Alexandros Rizos
Rangavis (1809–92), poet, scholar, and diplomat, lays out the fol-
lowing account of the condition of his homeland:
[The Greek’s] nationality is a spring of exhaustless waters; it may run
concealed under mountains of oppression, as certain rivers of his own
country disappear for miles beneath the surface, to break forth at last, as
they do, with undiminished force and freshness. If these waters be pent
up, they will inevitably overXow their banks, and deluge the land which
they would otherwise fructify and adorn. The Grecian stream of know-
ledge, civilization, freedom, if permitted to pursue its natural course, will
penetrate the provinces, now dry and gaping beneath the barren sceptre
of the Mussulman, and make them productive of the best interests of
humanity.1
1 Rangavis, Greece: Her Progress and Present Position, 156.

The Ambivalence of Nature 141
The familiar, philhellenic imagery of nature as a liberating force
supporting national character here too appeals to the powerful dyna-
mism that is natural, positive, and justiWed because it is embedded
in a Greek environment. Rangavis’s account, over thirty years after
the Greek state’s coming into existence, was written at a time when
the Megali Idea, the expansionist ‘Great Idea’ that promoted the
redeeming of Greek territory in the East, was well under way.2 His
early work, though, as representative of literary production in the new
nation state, is of a diVerent character. In the prologue to a volume
of Selected Poems (1837), he describes the trail-blazing, lawgiving
function of the Romantic poet through the familiar image of the
comet, as it attaches to the trajectory of historic events and individual
character alike: ‘Rules do not drive or tug along genius, but follow it
at a distance, describing its course, just as the compass does not
draw the comet behind it, but instead measures its heavenly path.’3
In the poem ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ (‘Œł Ø æ Æ’,
1837), published in the same volume, the speaker recounts how, in
the past, the gaze of his beloved had once propelled him on to
unknown paths: ‘But when your gaze struck me, j like a Wery comet
I turned my course into the unknown wilderness’ (ll. 44 f.).4 But now
that her eyes and favour are turning away, self-imposed solitude
provokes in him a desire for extinction: ‘My youth is extinguished
as a footstep in the sand, j and at the same time my beautiful dreams
are extinguished. j . . . Leave me to the wilderness where, crying,
I shall die (ll .57 V.)’. This is a far cry from the dynamic Wt between
the Greeks and the natural features representing them in Rangavis’s
report written for a foreign readership. The role which the young
poets of the 1830s had to confront was a precarious one: facing an
uncooperative society, threatened by disunity, most chose to base
2 The term Megali Idea was Wrst coined by Ioannis Kolettis in a parliamentary
speech in 1844. Its translation into policy gained momentum throughout the second
half of the nineteenth century, and eventually ended in the attempt to annex parts of
Greek Asia Minor, and subsequent defeat in 1922.
3 ‘ˇØ ŒÆ ª Ø ı æı ıºŒ Ø ı ıÆ; Æºº
ÆæÆŒºıŁ Ø ÆŒæ Ł ; ØÆªæ æ Ø Æı; ø ØÆ! æ Ø
Œ ŒÆ Ø ı; Æºº ŒÆÆ æ ıæÆÆ ı’ (p. 22).
4 First published in Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, ˜Ø æÆ —Ø ÆÆ, ed. Andreas
Koromilas (Athens, 1937), repr. in A. R. Rangavis, ` ÆÆ Æ #ØººªØŒ, 19 vols.
(Athens, 1874–89), i. 225–32, under the title ‘In the Wilderness’ (‘¯ ¯æ ı’).
142 The Ambivalence of Nature
themselves on a poetic programme that placed the artist in an
exalted, borderline position, on the cutting edge; from this position
they tried to visualize an ideal state on a real basis, grounded on Greek
territory, and a poetry to match. It was also a deeply paradoxical
position: writing for the nation, and highly aware of models that
insisted on the impossibility of its complete aesthetic realization, all
this at a time when the Romantic imagery of Greece outside Greece
was already verging on the clichéd, even though it was infused with
new political vigour. The relative dynamism or restfulness of Greek
nature rests on the distance of the observer; the position of the writer,
in other words, has to be that of an outsider. The position of the
inside writer, subsequently, of a writer representing a new, speciWcally
Greek literature, clashes with the (nature) imagery that is used to
represent the activity of the writer too; the function of Romantic
nature imagery, at the same time, pre-structures its usefulness in
representing the nation as a material, signiWcant environment.
In 1833 the young Greek poet Alexandros Soutsos, a cousin of
Rangavis, published a book entitled Panorama of Greece, or Collection
of Mixed Poems. Alexandros, born in 1803, and his younger brother
Panagiotis, born in 1806, had Wrst arrived in the new rump state of
Greece in 1825, after being educated in Italy and Paris to where they
returned for a while two years later. Nafplio, the place of publication,
was then capital of the Greek state, which itself had been in existence
for only three years. By 1830 the Protecting Powers had been ready to
grant independence to Greece, albeit in the form of a monarchy, with
Otto von Wittelsbach, the underage second son of King Ludwig I of
Bavaria, eventually chosen as the new king to be; Otto set foot on
Greek soil, at Nafplio, in January 1833, and transferred the capital to
Athens several months later, in 1834. The Panorama includes a verse
‘Letter to Otho, King of Greece’, in which Soutsos, explicitly writing
as both a poet and a citizen, presents a whistle-stop tour of Greek
literary history that has the following to say about the contemporary
writing scene:
˙ Æ ºÆ! ŒÆØ æÆ Œ" ıªºøÆ
ı ˇØ æı ºÆ æ ŒÆØ æÆªØŒ ÆÆ.
ˇ ˇØ æ; ŁÆıæ ØŒºø ø
˚ÆØ Œ Ø ; ØŒ ø Œ" ÆØŁ ø.
Our poetry has gained both new vigour and new eloquence in the brilliant
and tragic frenzy of the Wayfarer. The Wayfarer is a treasure of manifold
thoughts and a new world of ideas, of images and of feelings.
The Wayfarer referred to is a lyrical drama by his brother Panagiotis,
published in 1831, that, in the rather small literary world of Nafplio,
had been very successful;5 to create new worlds, to be sure, was not an
unusual concern of the time, and clearly no less so for Greece. Nor was
an increased awareness of the role of the poet. What would the Greek
poet’s ‘new world’ look like? How was it related to the phenomenal
world, and how, in what way, and with what means could it be repre-
sented? One might expect that writing about home ground, so to speak,
might further or facilitate making landscape and place meaningful in
aesthetic representation. The familiarity with this newly created territory,
however, is relative for those writers, too, both literally and Wguratively
speaking. While ‘inhabiting’ is part of the imaginary of Hellenism,
being on the ground does not per se change its underlying logic.
PERIOD DRAMA: EVALUATING THE LITERATURE

O F T H E 1 8 3 0s
The building of a new world, for sure, was not an empty metaphor in
the new state of Greece: it was a literal as much as a Wgurative
undertaking. Although plans were grand, space, in the Wrst instance,
was scarce. For one thing, the provisional territory of the Greek state
in 1832 did not include more than the Peloponnese, Attica, and
mainland Greece no further north than the imaginary line from
Arta (near Missolonghi) to Volos (a little north of Euboea). Athens
itself, in 1834, before its redesign as a modern and classical capital,
was a provincial and, after the war, heavily damaged town of only a
few thousand inhabitants, while Nafplio was a more thriving, but
still minor port city;6 both places in any case were unprepared to
5 See the testimony given in later editions of the work by Koromilas (1864) and by
Zervos (1915).
6 See further Eleni Bastea, The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth
(Cambridge, 2000).
accommodate the sizeable foreign and then mainly Bavarian military
and administrative contingents.7 What was more, in the narrow
circles of the newly forming society there was, in the 1830s, no
structure of an established middle class, nor of an established artistic
proWle integrated (or, for that matter, opposed) to it. The social strata
taking up the functions of the upper and middle classes were com-
posed of foreigners, administrators and functionaries, captains of the
local bands and members of the local elites (with no small amount of
animosity between them). The wealthy merchant communities that
had gradually formed abroad in the late eighteenth century largely
continued to stay abroad, and it took several more decades before the
hierarchies of the upper and middle classes were Wlled and deter-
mined by new groups of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and
intellectuals.8
Writing from a location that was provisional while ostensibly
indicating continuity, and operating in the small, albeit international
circles of Nafplio and later Athens, the authors of the new Greece
moved also in a rather ill-deWned Weld of professional activity. This
leads one to ask to what extent the role of the poet-Wgure in society
and the relation to his environment was thematized in their works.
Despite their attention to the canons of the Western European arts,
the question, if it is to yield any insights about the logic of literary
transmission, is obviously not one of verbatim inXuences from
European literature, and whether they constitute a dead-end qua
imitation; rather, it is to ask how imagery familiar from European
Romanticism and Hellenism is functional in the context of establishing
a new Greek state, a new Greek literature, and a role of the individual
within it at the same time. A reading of some of the nature imagery of
Alexandros Rizos Rangavis and Panagiotis Soutsos, as it appears in
their early works, shows how the degree of self-awareness which
7 On the lack of space and infrastructure, see e.g., apart from Bastea, the striking
account found in the letters of Bettina von Savigny, Leben in Griechenland 1834 bis
1835: Bettina Schinas, geb. von Savigny, Briefe und Berichte an ihre Eltern in Berlin, ed.
R. SteVen (Münster, 2002).
8 John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis, Greece: The Modern Sequel: From 1831 to
the Present (New York, 2002), 194 V.; Paul Sant Cassia, The Making of the Modern
Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth Century Athens (Cambridge,
1992).
distinguishes the poet vis-à-vis his environment, as modern and
Romantic, includes an awareness of the indeterminacy inherent in
this role—an ambiguity that ultimately threatens conXict with the
environment and with integration into it, and one that Wlters out in
tropes of alienation from nature and of feeling severed from familiar,
signiWcant surroundings. In the case of the poet and author this is
the social environment; in the case of the Wctional heroes, who often
share attributes of the poet, this concerns their relation not only to a
social but also to the natural environment and its problematic
representation. Rather than a readily adopted Romantic conceit,
the imagery of solitude and of deserted nature thereby becomes an
integral element in the self-understanding of the poetic and political
persona of the Greek writer. At the same time, this poetry, with a
Greek setting, belongs to the Wrst writings that visualize the contem-
porary Greek state—and they do so through narratives and settings
that feed on the strain which the past (personal and national) imposes
on the space of the present. The ambivalent relation between nature
and the protagonists, as necessarily existing, yet also potentially non-
harmonious, disruptive, and even illusory, gains added poignancy
when the literary works insist on a contemporary historical, political,
and geographical setting. This is the case in Greek writing of this
period, where new (young) authors deliberately introduce themselves
as contributors to a national literature in a national context.
The poetry of the Wrst decade of Greek statehood has received
comparatively little attention, both within the overall scheme of
Greek literary history and within studies of individual authors.
This poetry, usually treated in terms of its relation to models of
European Romanticism and the aesthetic of a folk-song tradition,
has traditionally been interpreted as a short-lived moment in the
quasi-organic development towards the formal and linguistic rigidity
of an ‘Athenian Romantic School’ in the mid- and late nineteenth
century.9 Internally marginalized, it is, however, also the literature of
relative outsiders in a sociological sense—in a period where the
question of boundaries between inside and outside was as pressing
9 e.g. K. Th. Dimaras, ¯ººØŒ $ø ÆØ (Athens, 1982), 141–56, 167–241,

and æÆ ˝ ººØŒ ¸ª Æ (Athens, 1968), 271–88; Linos Politis,
æÆ ˝ ººØŒ ¸ª Æ (Athens, 1978), 168–79, and ‘¯ººØŒ
in territorial as in cultural terms. The writers of this earlier period,
sometimes labelled the ‘Old Athenian School’, share their origins in
the well-connected, intellectual cultural world of the Phanariots, that
is, the Greek aristocratic class dominating representative administra-
tive oYces in the Ottoman Empire, clustered around Constantinople
and the Danubian principalities in particular.10 They were usually
educated abroad and arrived in the new Greek state—and a society
by no means settled or necessarily welcoming to outsiders—at an age
which made them just a little too young to have fought actively in the
long-drawn-out War of Independence. For them, and given their
usually Western-oriented education, the tendencies of Phanariot
literature towards the forms and rhetoric of a learned neoclassicism
were fused with knowledge of European Romanticism and then
applied to a situation of great social and literary precariousness.11
Despite, or in consequence of, this literary genealogy, Greek Ro-
manticism has, since its early stages, largely been deWned through the
old opposition between Romanticism and Classicism, following the
$ ÆØ (1830–80)’; ¨ ÆÆ ºª Æ Æ, ii (Thessaloniki, 1976),

99–132. For a view less set on the future development of Athenian Romanticism
but instead on its origin as one of the several paths taken by literature of the Wrst
decade after the Greek War of Independence, see Alexis Politis, ‘˙ ººØŒ
ÆÆÆØŒ æ’, Æ æØŒ, 13/24–5 (1996), 129–38.
10 On their political and intellectual inXuence, see G. P. Henderson, The Revival of
Greek Thought, 1620–1830 (Albany, NY, 1970); Paschalis Kitromilides, Enlightenment
as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(Princeton, 1992); J. A. Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece
1833–1843 (Princeton, 1968), 24–7; for their ambivalent stance towards a Greek
national cause Cyril Mango, ‘The Phanariots and the Byzantine Tradition’, in
R. Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence (London, 1973), 41–66; also
C. Papacostea-Danielopoulou, ‘État actuel des recherches sur ‘‘l’époque phanariote’’ ’,
Revue des Études Sud-Est Européennes, 27/4 (1989), 305–11.
11 The literature available on Phanariot literature is painfully slim. A starting-
point is Peter Mackridge, ‘The Return of the Muses: Some Aspects of Revivalism in
Greek Literature, 1760–1840’, ˚ , 2 (1994), 47–71. Rangavis’s father Iakovos
Rizos Rangavis, himself the author of an archaeological and topographical account
titled Greek AVairs, translated Virgil’s Aeneid and dramatic works by AlWeri, Cor-
neille, Racine, and Voltaire. His uncle, Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, although the author
of some works inspired by French classical tragedy, was mainly known for his satirical
poems and plays. Formerly a minister in Moldavia, he became in the new state a
Minister of Education, and published histories of Greece and of Greek literature,
Cours de littérature grecque moderne Geneva, 1828; translated into German as Die
neugriechische Literatur: In Vorlesungen gehalten zu Genf 1826, übersetzt von Christian
Müller (Mainz, 1827).
parameters of the debate on the Classical and the Romantic which
had been instigated by the representatives of European Romanticism
themselves, even if this was and is not always a helpful dichotomy,
and even if, from the point of current Comparative Literature, this
might seem a gently outdated binary—or at least one with few
critical teeth nowadays;12 what makes this self-ascription, dutifully
repeated in the literary histories, especially deceptive now is its
application to a form of artistic production that was highly eclectic
and that wilfully exposed itself to a wide range of literary styles and
inXuences, indigenous or not, was always conscious of doing so, and
was, by virtue of the desire to create a Greek poetic voice and a
tradition (increasingly so from the end of the eighteenth century),
experimental to a paradoxically high degree.13
Soutsos’s Wayfarer (1831) is, together with Rangavis’s narrative
poem Dimos and Eleni of the same year, commonly read as the
earliest example of Greek Romanticism, which then steers, increas-
ingly using the archaizing katharevousa (literally ‘puriWed’ language)
as its medium of choice, towards a dead-end of rhetorical excess and
linguistically rigid formalism by the 1880s. Literary production and
literary criticism have been (and still are) especially tightly inter-
woven in Greece, and the voice of the critic in the reception of the
literary text has over the last two centuries been extremely instru-
mental in establishing canonical readings.14 More recently, however,
attempts have been made that reassess the grounds for such a rigid
12 Elizabeth Constantinidis, ‘Towards a RedeWnition of Greek Romanticism’, Jour-

nal of Modern Greek Studies, 3/2 (1985), 121–36, 125 f., referring to Wellek’s Concepts
of Criticism for the unsatisfactorily broad range of deWnitions for the terms ‘Roman-
tic’ and ‘Classic’.
13 For the need of a national literary tradition see also Roderick Beaton, ‘Roman-
ticism in Greece’, in Roy Porter and Mikulaš Teich (eds.), Romanticism in National
Context (Cambridge, 1988), 92–108; on its complexity Gregory Jusdanis, ‘Greek
Romanticism: a Cosmopolitan Discourse’, in Esterhammer, Romantic Poetry, 269–86.
14 The received chronology regarding Romanticism owed much to the criticism of
Kostis Palamas, who deWned the poetry of his own generation of the 1880s against
Athenian Romanticism, overcoming its restrictions through the invigorated use of
the demotic language. For the language question as interpreted by the generation of
the 1880s, see Dimitris Tziovas, The Nationism of the Demoticists and its Impact on
their Literary Theory (1888–1930) (Amsterdam, 1986). On the combination of dem-
otic and katharevousa in Palamas’s own poetry, see C. D. Gounelas, ‘Neither Kathar-
evousa nor Demotic: The Language of Greek Poetry in the Nineteenth Century’,
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 6 (1980), 81–107.
chronology,15 and the attendant division into two largely incompat-
ible schools within Romanticism, namely Athenian and Ionian (on
which see the next chapter), distinguished by a slightly diVerent
time-frame and contextual and stylistic diVerences.16 Still, the rela-
tionship, often considered imitative or derivative, with European
Romanticism remains the dominant paradigm. The wider European
‘compatibility’ of Greek literature has played a major part in Greek
literary criticism since the early nineteenth century, and much of that
literature’s subsequent evaluation has hinged on it. Literary Roman-
ticism has in this case usually been equated with the imagery of
violence, rupture, and poetic self-centredness, associated with
Byronic literature in particular and, more generally, with what has
been termed a ‘dark Romanticism’.17 The consequence is a persistent
tendency to blame a European Romantic aesthetic and imagery as a
foreign element, which, despite Wnding a fertile and receptive ground
in Greece, remains essentially alien and ultimately detrimental. It is
as if, in continuation of the dream of Greece’s privileged access to
what is natural, the modernity of Romanticism (the excessive and
unbridled individuality of a solitary Byronic hero, and by analogy a
writer, alienated from and alien to a social order) cannot come home
to roost in Greece without doing it damage.
This argument from incompatibility has often been a staple in the
argument for a Greek exceptionalism; incompatibility for a long time
15 Constantinidis, ‘Towards a RedeWnition’, argues for a beginning of Romanticism

in the 1820s, with Solomos and Kalvos as exemplary Romantic poets, and suggests
that the generation of Palamas marks a late Xowering of (lyrical) Romanticism in
Greece. David Ricks, ‘Alexandros Rizos Rangavis’s ‘‘The Voyage of Dionysus’’ ’,
¯ººØŒ, 38 (1987), 89–97, shows how the prejudice against katharevousa has
inXuenced the evaluation of poetry, which, in the case of Rangavis, is far less
archaizing and linguistically opaque than assumed.
16 On the contested classiWcation into ‘Ionian’ and ‘Athenian’, Mario Vitti, æÆ
ººØŒ ºª Æ, 2nd edn. (Athens, 1987), 237 V., argues more strongly
for a connection of the two ‘schools’; on the Ionian islands as a distinctive cultural
area before 1821 and the problem of separation, Beaton, Introduction, 29–33, 47;
Venetia Apostolidou, ‘˙ ÆØÆŒ º Ø Øæ ººØŒ
ºª Æ’, in ¸ı —º (Thessaloniki, 1988), 197–208; similarly
Nasos Vayenas, ‘ˇ ºø Æ Æ ı `ŁÆı ŒÆØ ı ¯Æı’,
´ Æ (29 Nov. 1998); the debate is competently summarized by Euripides Garan-
toudes, ˇØ ¯ÆØØ ŒÆØ ºø : …ł Ø Æ Ł Ø 1820–1950
(Athens, 2001), 47–64.
17 The term is that of Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1951).
has been unhelpfully analysed in terms of mentality, especially in
literary studies, but now also, much more helpfully, in terms of socio-
cultural and political factors peculiar to Greece.18 Still, it can also be
analysed in terms of the framework (i.e. logic) of aesthetic represen-
tation, which Greek literature faced, and of its shaping power. This
may also steer a little away from the question of essential character, as
that claim is such a large part of the framework of exceptionalism.
Dimaras, for example, credits the Greek mental disposition with a
particular aYnity for the melancholic element of Western Romanti-
cism: ‘We are right to believe that this current came from abroad; yet
it found a receptive ground to stay in; nostalgia for the past, a
melancholy disposition, the euphoria of freedom are some of the
essential components of Romanticism, and, at the same time, points
made to attract the Greek soul.’19 Mastrodimitris, twenty years later,
claims the opposite, without discounting the organic metaphor: ‘the
melancholic and pessimistic disposition, which had come about as
an echo of the declining Romanticism of the West . . . was something
alien to the reality created by the new conditions of life.’20 The result
of this organicism is a strong sense, not just in the attention paid to
any given Greek author’s biography, to forge a biography of Greek
national literature, a teleological, natural ‘story’ of Greek writing,
which means in turn a need to single out certain, national writers as
its protagonists. In what follows I hope to be able to isolate this
language of criticism and look back at the imagery of Romantic
critical and literary writing itself as it seeks to create an appropriate
‘environment’ for the Greek author—a continuation of Hölderlin’s
choice of the Greek landscape as appropriate for his Hyperion.
T H E C O M E T ’ S TA I L : RA NG AV I S ’ S U ND E RS TA N DI N G
OF TH E ROM ANTIC POET
Rangavis has received attention, if at all and only of late, for his
prose works and their part in the rise of the novel in mid- to late
18 As done e.g. by Jusdanis, Belated Modernity, or Peckham, National Histories.

19 Dimaras, æÆ, 272.
20 Matrodimitris, ¯ØÆªøª ˝ ººØŒ #ØººªÆ (Athens, 1994), 144.
nineteenth-century Greece.21 Compared to the early years of state-
hood, this is a period that sees positions on national continuity
(including that of the Byzantine period to link antiquity and the
present) and national expectations harden into more clearly deWned
(even if contested) tracks. Yet in his early literary work, as in that of
his contemporaries, the parameters of the language of nationalism
are not yet set, and it is this Xuid period that is still somewhat lagging
behind in attracting scholarly attention.
Like that of most of his peers, Rangavis’s approach to Greece was
of a gradual nature in cultural and geographical terms. Foreign or
foreign-educated Greeks, they could enjoy the prestige which that
education brought, yet at the same time had to contend with a lesser
degree of power and inXuence compared to the local elites, when they
returned to a theoretically liberated Greece to take up administrative,
governmental, or academic positions, to write, to reform, and to
establish and deWne a position for themselves as Greek poets. Ran-
gavis’s career, in that sense, is paradigmatic for a generation preoccu-
pied with progress, education, the appeal to and of the West, and the
Western model that had developed an elaborate cross-projection
between the material and ideal aspects of Greek culture.
After family wanderings from Constantinople to Bucharest and
Odessa, Rangavis, in 1825, took up a scholarship at the Military
Academy in Munich, spending the initial months in the house of
Friedrich Wilhelm Thiersch, with whom he established a lifelong
connection.22 In 1829 he returned to Greece, where, in Nafplio, he
rose in the ranks of the administration.23 Following appointment as
Director of the National Press and a period at the Ministry of Foreign
AVairs, he had to step down in 1844 when a new law rendered all
21 See Tziovas’s recent edition of Rangavis’s collected short stories ˜Øª ÆÆ,
2 vols. (Athens, 1999).
22 On biographical data Litsa Chatzopoulou in A. R. Rangavis, Æ Ø Æ
(Athens, 1995); Efthymios Th. Soulogiannis, `ºÆæ $ $ÆªŒÆ! (1809–1892):
˙ ø ŒÆØ æª ı (Athens, 1995). Also Rangavis’s memoirs, ` ÆÆ,
4 vols. (Athens, 1894–1930).
23 For the political landscape of Greece and Nafplio, and the frictions between the
local and the more Western-inXuenced and -educated rival parties with their resent-
ment against the Phanariots, see Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft, 107–50; Elli
Skopetea, % —æ ı ´Æº Ø" ŒÆØ ªº Æ: ˇ ł Ø ı ŁØŒ
æ!º Æ ¯ººÆ (1830–1880) (Athens, 1988), 87–92; F. W. Thiersch, De
l’état actuel de la Grèce (Leipzig, 1833).
Greeks who were not born within the liberated provinces of the
Greek state (‘heterochthons’) or were not active veterans of the war
ineligible to hold state positions.24 For the next twenty-three years
Rangavis held a chair as Professor of Archaeology at Athens Univer-
sity, while from 1856 onwards, under a new government, he was
rehabilitated to serve as Minister of Foreign AVairs. Between 1867
and 1874 he was ambassador to the United States, France, Turkey,
and Germany, retiring from diplomatic life in 1887, Wve years before
his death in Athens. His literary work spans an equally broad range:
political essays, archaeological and historical treatises, educational
books, translations, poems, prose Wction, plays, and a history of
modern Greek literature, published in three diVerent languages.25
The Wrst volume of his Collected Poems (Athens, 1837 and 1840)
contains the narrative poem Dimos and Eleni (1831) and the drama
Phrosyne, which he began while studying in Munich, and is comple-
mented with a prologue that has been considered a manifesto of
Greek Romanticism. Besides, the collection includes ten poems
under the title of Folk Songs (˜ ØŒ æÆª ØÆ), which show the
internal force of Romantic imagery, and its underestimation so far.
The motif of the wanderer and the close attention paid to a natural
environment with strong supernatural features is usually and rather
elusively referred to as a general catalogue of Romantic imagery,
whereas little attention has been paid to what function textual par-
allels, with German writings in particular, assume in Rangavis’s
24 Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, 1992), 48, 51; Petro-
poulos, Politics and Statecraft, 491, 510. The conXict between ‘heterochthons’ and
‘autochthons’ had been brewing since the early days of the revolution. Exempted
from the bill were the military, the consular service, and the teaching profession.
25 The history of Greek literature was initially serialized in the journal Spectateur
de l’Orient (1853–6). It was republished as Précis d’une histoire de la littérature néo-
héllenique (Berlin, 1877) and in the same year as Histoire littéraire de la Grèce moderne
(Paris, 1877). A German version, co-authored with Daniel Sanders, was printed in
Leipzig, probably in 1884, as Geschichte der neugriechischen Literatur von ihren
Anfängen bis auf die neueste Zeit. A last revised edition appears in Greek as
— æºłØ æÆ ˝ ººØŒ ¸ª Æ, probably printed in 1887. See
G. Valetas, ‘¯Œ Ø ŒÆØ Ł ˝ ººØŒ ˆæÆ ÆºªÆ ı
`ºÆæı $ı $ÆªŒÆ!’, ˝Æ ¯Æ, 19 (1936), 837–42; Eleni Kovaiou,
‘ ‘‘Geschichte der neugriechischen Litteratur’’ von A. R. Rhangabé und Daniel
Sanders: ˙ ı !º ı ˜: Æ æ Æ ø ºª ØŒ ÆØºł ø
ı `:$: $ÆªŒÆ!’, in Argyriou et al. (eds.), ˇ ¯ººØŒ ˚ , 353–67.
poetic programme.26 What is more, such Romantic imagery has
often, explicitly as much as implicitly, been equated with the imagery
of Byron—no less than with Byron’s image: his persona of poet and
activist resonates particularly well with the desire to carve a role of
the poet that is dynamic and eVective on the cusp of rebelliousness.27
Byron’s descriptions of Greece, however, are far more ambivalent
than his reputation as a hero of the Greek cause lets one assume.
Appealing to Greece’s physical beauty and ancient splendour now
gone, he frequently likens the country to a dead or dying loved
woman, and despite or because of his Philhellenism, Byron belongs
precisely with those who uphold the image of contemporary Greece
as marked by an unbridgeable rift.28 Framed by his landscape of
violent beauty are Byron’s male heroes, paradigmatically so the
Giaour (1813). Driven by a guilty past and retiring to solitude, the
character acquires a new lease of life in Greek writing in the double
Wgure of the lonely hermit and the kleft,29 and it is in Rangavis’s
writing in particular that we Wnd the transformation of the Byronic
amant fatal into the fated Greek freedom Wghter, himself often linked
to the Wgure of the poet.
The ten poems ostensibly classiWed as Demotika, or folk songs,
may serve as a good example of the nature imagery attributed
to Rangavis and the Athenian School, and help to pinpoint some
26 e.g. Linos Politis, æÆ, 174: ‘The Romanticism of Rangavis seems to be

inXuenced by the German poets, and this gives it a special character’, or ‘The settings
are deserted spaces, terrifying, where the winds are blowing and the ghosts are
wandering—something between the physical and the metaphysical world’ (Linos
Politis, ‘¯ººØŒ $ ÆØ ’, 119).
27 The remarkable reputation of Byron himself as a Wgurehead of Philhellenism
and literary Romanticism, both in Greece and across Europe, is quite another topic;
on the movement of his reputation as part of both those movements, see Constanze
Güthenke, ‘Translating Philhellenism. Comments on the Movement of a Movement’,
in E. Konstantinou (ed.), Forms of Expression of International Philhellenism, 17th to
19th Century/Ausdrucksformen des Internationalen Philhellenismus, 17.–19. Jahrhun-
dert (Frankfurt, forthcoming).
28 An argument cogently summarized by Margarita Miliori, ‘The Greek Nation in
British Eyes 1821–1864: Aspects of a British Discourse on Nationality, Politics,
History and Europe’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford (1998), 109–124.
29 Athena Georganta, `Ø ´ıæø Æ: ˇ Œ ı Byron ŒÆØ Æ ººØŒ
(Athens, 1992), 53–73; also Robin A. Fletcher, ‘Byron in Nineteenth-century
Greek Literature’, in Clogg, Independence, 224–47.
of the aspects that have featured in the critical evaluation—and
underestimation of the diYcult and conXicting nature—of Ranga-
vis’s poetry. ‘The Kleft’ (1837) transforms the Wgure of the folk and
freedom brigand into the solitary hero par excellence. First published
in 1834 as ‘The Free Greek’ (‘ˇ º Ł æ ‚ºº’),30 the poem opens
with a natural scenario:
Æ æ" " ŒÆ " Æ !ı
" ı !æ ı Ø Ø Ø.
" " " ªæØÆ Æ Œ Ø,
" æ Ø æ ; " Æ ,
Œº ÆŁ Ø.
" æØ ªı
!Æ Ææ ºŒØ.
—ÆºØ Ø !ı
ŒÆ ŒÆ Æ ıæÆ ,
Œ" ºÆ ı ŒØ.
Black is the mountain night and snow falls on rocks. Among the wilds, the
darkness, the craggy rocks, the passes, the kleft draws his sword. With his
bare right hand he wields a bolt of lightning. The forest is his palace, the sky
his cover, and his riXe is his hope.
The nature imagery is thought to conform to the expectations of a
Romantic ‘setting’, in so far as it stresses the wild and threatening
aspect of nature, with a tendency toward the supernatural, which in
turn is reminiscent of the use of nature in demotic (folk) poetry.31
Allusion, however, does not equal imitation. While the pattern of
substituting one item (here ‘palace’ or ‘cover’) with another is famil-
iar from folk songs, Rangavis’s particular choices do not Wnd an
equivalent in them, especially not such abstract terms as ‘hope’ or
30 The 1834 version appeared in the anthology Ø æøØŒ ŒÆØ æøØŒ by
Ioannis ChristoWdis (Aigina, 1934), now repr. in Rangavis, Æ Ø Æ, 42.
The noticeable diVerence between the 1834 and 1837 versions is the replacing of
‘Greek’ with ‘kleft’, a change that stresses the representative national character of the
latter.
31 e.g. Athina Georganta, ‘ ‘‘ˇ ˚º ’’ ı `: $: $ÆªŒÆ!: ‚Æ ÆÆ
æøÆ ŒÆØ Æ º ØŒ !ÆæØ’, ø, 13 (1991), 25–47. The poem opens with
the epigrammatic description of the physical landscape accommodating the outlawed
hero. By intensive accumulation nature is presented in all its wild Romantic splen-
dour: dark night, black woods, snow-covered rocks, craggy stones, wild and dark
passes (p. 40).
‘freedom’.32 The poem ends with the death of the kleft in battle and
the assertion: ‘the kleft lives free, and free he dies.’ The harsh land-
scape answers the choice of freedom or death (an explicit motto of
the War of Independence) with freedom in death as its only solution.
The poem also has a subtitle ‘Tune: Schiller’s Robbers, A, no. 30’; the
numbers refer to a contemporary Greek anthology of songs, and
the ‘tune’ indicates that ‘The Kleft’ is to be set to music, following
the same tune as that of Schiller’s chorus ‘A Free Life We Lead’
(The Robbers, IV. 5).33 Karl Moor, thereby, the generically rebellious
protagonist of Schiller’s 1781 play, joins forces with the later Byronic
warrior hero, to be transposed to the natural setting that expressed
the Greek revolution. There are diVerent ‘places of freedom’ invoked
though. The dark forest hideout of The Robbers feeds an emancipa-
tion from social oppression that is nevertheless cut through by a
professed amorality (as expressed in the robbers’ song). ‘The Kleft’,
on the other hand, ostensibly throws into relief the ferocity, hardi-
ness, and virtue of the Wghter. And yet, even if Rangavis’s kleft seems
to follow the dynamic path of the Philhellenes, Rangavis’s poetry
also consistently undermines any easy identiWcation of the Greek
character with his natural (and national) environment.
The language of images prevailing in Rangavis’s early poetry
indicates that any mode of integration or a harmonious relation
with the natural (and social) environment is either presently un-
attainable or can be achieved only through loss, death, or disintegra-
tion. In Dimos and Eleni, or in the poem ‘Thoughts in Desolation’
(1837), the motif of integration is taken to the extreme, by envisaging
the melting or total vanishing of the characters into nature through
death. There is a recurring link to the dream as the site of possible
attainment, while there is highly deliberate play with the notion of
forceful, active destruction or negation of a dream state by the acting
individual himself. Rangavis himself draws attention to this dynamic,
in the most prominent places of generative self-reXection as a Greek
32 See e.g. songs nos. 32, 42, and 58 in N. G. Politis, ¯ŒºªÆ Æ Æ æÆª ØÆ ı
¯ººØŒ ¸Æ (Athens, 1914). Here, instead of abstract nouns, we Wnd earth,
stones, and sword replacing wives, brothers, and the Pasha.
33 Georganta, ‘ ‘‘ˇ ˚º ’’ ’, 28 V., for details of the various later musical
settings of Schiller’s play. The tune in question is probably that of the student song
‘Gaudeamus Igitur’.
writer, where self-positioning pulls against the insistence on loss or
sheer obstructiveness of space: in the commentaries on his own
literary production, such as the original prologue to Dimos and
Eleni (not reprinted in either the 1837 or 1874 editions), in his
memoirs, or in the prologue to the 1837 edition. As with the question
of a self-evident Greek place, in the writing matter too we Wnd no
immediacy: we need prologues and introduction to see where Greek
writing resides. In both prologues we Wnd the shattering of dreams
linked to the conceit of failure or even wilful destruction of his
(material) literary work. In the poetic self-image constructed in
those prologues, however, we see how Rangavis develops a notion
of the Romantic poet who is at the same time a poet for the nation—
whose material survival may be just as threatened as that of his
papers.
The 1831 prologue to Dimos and Eleni is an ironic play with
notions of literary convention and etiquette, illustrating the precar-
ious standing of the Greek poet in a fragile society. Rangavis begins
his comments on the Romantic poet and his function by pointing to
the futility of such a debate, and he opens the prologue by confessing
his intense distaste for prologues. Likening the genre—spatially—to
‘antechambers of the palaces of the mighty’, he ties literary conven-
tion to socio-political convention of hierarchy and of servility to
form. The only exception he is willing to make are the prologues of
Korais’s classical text editions, which constitute ‘the only valuable
philological memoranda of our people during the centuries of its
enslavement’. The benchmark of usefulness, in other words, is an
uncompleted project of Hellenism that avoids mention of any spe-
ciWc Greek territory: Korais’s educational project, begun in the early
1800s and run from Paris, was based on re-editions of ancient
authors as a series entitled ‘The Greek Library’, complemented with
detailed introductions containing his views on the present state of
Greek culture and learning, and advice for its future improvement.
The Wrst publication under that heading was an edition of Helio-
dorus’ prose narrative Aithiopika (1804), a work of the third century
ad, that is, the period of Greece under Roman rule, when Greek
culture was a question of transfer as much as of territory; in addition,
it is a work set on the margins of the Greek world as it was known
then. Rangavis confesses that he himself could have elaborated on the
history and origins of the Greek language in his prologue, the
language of poetry, and the notions of Classicism and Romanticism,
beginning from ancient literature. Yet, he claims, this would render
his book inaccessible to a broad readership. Pedagogy is counterbal-
anced by market forces. The very existence of the prologue, he
continues, was the result of an accident: it became necessary after
he spilt ink across the Wnished poem while enthusing about the
imaginative qualities of the Greek people and its good government.
Phrased in that way, aesthetic sensitivity, which emerges from a
tentatively hopeful political context, is seen to engender an act of
destruction. The fragmentation of the literary work, he continues,
jeopardizes the author’s hope for success: ‘The spilt ink and the
extinguished light enraged me to such a degree that the light of my
golden hopes was extinguished within me too.’ Disillusioned by the
‘accident’, he reXects on the illusion of a keen readership whose
economic situation, he claims, barely allows them to live, let alone
to read. Faced with such doubtful prospects, the author tells of his
decision to burn his work. Yet reading over some pages before
embracing them, ‘as Brutus [embraced] his son’, he falls asleep, to
awake refreshed and strengthened by his sweet dreams and to hand
the poem over to the printer instead of relegating it to the Xames.
With the act of quasi-republican martyrdom not carried out, the
illusions of sweet dreams are suggested as the real reason that ensures
publication and circulation.34 Not to forget, the prologue serves as
the introduction to a poem (on which more below), whose charac-
ters, displaced from their social order and expectations, are just as
much faced with an environment of changing and ambivalent reality,
narrated in a poetic voice that Xags the experience of ambivalence as
part of the act of narration itself.
Rangavis repeats this kind of role-play in the prologue to the
volume of Collected Poems (1837); here, in the dialogue between an
authorial ‘I’ and an opposing ‘He’ about a work ready to be pub-
lished, the Wrst-person speaker argues for the need for new poetic
forms, especially at a time of political innovation when education of
34 We can only speculate about the content of those ‘sweet dreams’. On the
structural similarity of dream work and the process of nation building, Gourgouris,
Dream Nation, esp. 10–46.
the people is needed. Poetry is the most basic and most ancient form
of expression for man’s own perception of himself in relation to
nature. Therefore Greece, like a child, is Wrst and foremost in need
of ‘songs to pacify her’, and he supports his claim by the following
argument:
While nature, in singing, greets with the melodies of the awakening birds,
with the sacred songs of the pious, the dawn of every day, so is the awakening
of every community celebrated with odes, and the Wrst epoch of the litera-
ture of each people begins in poetry. The son of nature, still artless, echoes in
his virgin soul the great harmony before which he exists and the products of
this harmony which surround him on all sides, and he feels the urge for
harmonious outpourings, and he rejoices in odes and writes poetry.35
The argument that every epoch has its own mentality (nous),
expressed in its literature (Wlologia), recalls the determinism of Herd-
er’s, or, slightly earlier, Montesquieu’s theory of history, which never-
theless pair the shaping force of environment with the task and
power of human inXuence to extend or correct that relationship.
Literature, therefore, has to adapt (as politics and legislation do)
to new needs and a new focus on the individual (p. 19). Besides
juxtaposing the processes and aims of literary and political creativity,
which is an issue continually Xying the creased banner of unity,
Rangavis claims that creativity must be based on a composite struc-
ture and its varied formal principles. What is a version of the call for a
mixture of genres, part of a general Romantic aesthetic programme,36
is presented in terms of a natural and hence realistic representation of
nature. As a corollary, but a paradigmatic one, the Greek case can be
35 ‘ŒÆŁ Ø łººıÆ ÆØæ Æ ºøÆ ø ı ø ;
Æ ŁæŒ ıØŒ ø ı ! ÆÆ; Æıª Œ æÆ; ø ŒÆØ Œ
ŒØøÆ; æø Æ Æªıæ ÆØ; ø; ŒÆØ æ ØººªÆ
Œı Łı æ ÆØ Æ Ø ø: ˇ ºÆ ØØ ıØ ø;
ÆÆÆŒº Ø ÆæŁ łı ı ªº Ææ Æ Ø Æ
ıæ Ø; ŒÆØ Æ ÆæÆªªı Æı Ææ Æ ÆØ ÆÆ Ł æØØ ;
ıÆØŁ ÆØ ÆªŒ Ææ ø Œ ø; ŒÆØ æ ÆØ Ø ø; ŒÆØ ªæ ÆØ
Ø Ø’ (p. 7).
36 ExempliWed in Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie, which, in its
dialogic genre and content, bears comparison with Rangavis’s prologue. It is likely
that the ‘intermediary’ between the two dialogues is one of Victor Hugo’s program-
matic prologues either to his Odes et Ballades (1824) or to his play Cromwell (1833).
read in terms of nature, because it is universal, the natural realm
again bridging the gap (when it is not opening it) between the
particular and originary, and the transferably universal: ‘[Poetry],
relating both to actually existing nature and the human being and
thus, so to speak, ‘‘humanized’’ by us, presents the comical next to
the serious, just as nature in its shadow-writing connects light and
shadow; it ties in the base with the sublime, since otherwise light
would not be light, the sublime not the sublime and nature not
nature.’37
The resulting poetic program and the function of the poet are
reformulated in political imagery:
I do not know the emblem of faith of either the Classicists or the Romantics.
But if the former are arrayed under the banner of tradition, I suppose that
the latter carry protest as their sign. . . . a Romantic on the other hand is one
who concentrates on the idea itself, searching out its true contemporary
expression and undertaking on his own to draw it out in all its effects
according to the entire individual nature of his sensibility, limited only by
the natural borders of good taste [lit.: love of the beautiful]. The Classical
writer is a loyal and obedient subject, the Romantic a legislator and
reformer.38
This, it should have become clear, is not mere illustration by way of
metaphor. Rangavis postulates a necessary and analogous natural
development of both poetic and political expression. For sure, this
line of thought, the claim of a moral and hence political function of
art and aesthetics mediated by the artist and poet, is not peculiar
to Rangavis. To link the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere with
both autonomous subjectivity and the political state—in a kind of
37 ‘˜Ø ÆŁæøØŁ Æ; ø Ø ; " ; ŒÆØ Ø ıÆæŒ
Æ æÆ Ø; ŒÆØ Ø ø Łæø; æºÆ ! Ø Ø Æ ÆæÆ Ø
ØºÆæ º ı !æØŁ ; ø Ø Ø Æ ŒØÆªæÆ Æ ıªŒØæ ø
ŒØ; ı Ø Æ ı ıłº ; Ø Ø ººø ø ŁÆ
ø; ı ıłº ıłº ; ı Ø Ø’ (p. 19).
38 ‘˜ ªøæø !º ø ø ŒºÆØŒ ŒÆØ ø æ ÆØŒ: `ºº"
Æ Ø øÆØ ı ÆÆ ø ÆæÆ ø; Ø Ø ººØ ıØ
Ł Æ ØÆ Ææ æØ: . . . æ ÆØŒ Æ!ºø Ø ØÆ Æı;
æ ı ÆºŁ Æı ª æ Ø; ŒÆØ ÆÆØŁ Ø Æı ŒÆØ Æ
Æ Æı Æ ı ØÆ ŒÆ Æ ı ıÆ ı Æ ØŒ Æ; ŒÆØ
æØæØ ı ø ø ıØŒ æø ØºŒÆºÆ: ˇ ŒºÆØŒ ÆØ
ıŒ Ø ŒÆØ Øº ; æ ÆØŒ Ł ŒÆØ ÆææıŁ Ø’ (p. 21).
‘aesthetic statism’39—is a familiar feature from current European
aesthetic discourse as exempliWed in the theoretical writings of
Schiller—whose treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man was a
reply to the political and social situation after the decline of the
French Revolution as much as a contribution to the philosophical
discussion of how reality is constituted. The latter was a debate of
great consequence in determining the role of the artist, and Schiller’s
work became paradigmatic insofar as it suggested the aesthetic as the
central operator in the moral education of free individuals consti-
tuting, and even in its literal sense constructing, the political state:
[W]hen the spirit of philosophical inquiry is being expressly challenged by
present circumstances to concern itself with that most perfect of all the
works to be achieved by the art of man: the construction of true political
freedom. . . . [I]f man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he
will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is
only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.40
The aesthetic, and with it the work of art, is the one sphere that
partakes of both worlds: that of natural forces and material condi-
tions, and that of reason and ideas.41 In its detachment, it can freely
reconcile the spheres of the sensuous and the rational which have
become separated, or at least unbalanced, in modern, civilized soci-
ety; art reconciles the particular and the universal, and, by analogy,
the development of both the individual and the political ‘state’, in
Schiller’s wording even more strongly underlined in the spatial
metaphor of the construction (‘Bau’) and the making of one’s path
to freedom. To reform society is therefore an act structurally linked
to the creation of a work of art.
Why should Schiller be important to Greek literature of the 1830s?
Its Wrst generation of national writers fashioned themselves as
39 The term is that of David Aram Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism
(Cambridge, 1999), 4 V.
40 ‘[Da] der philosophische Untersuchungsgeist durch die Zeitumstände so nach-
drücklich aufgefordert wird, sich mit dem vollkommensten aller Kunstwerke, mit
dem Bau einer wahren politischen Freiheit zu beschäftigen. . . . Daß man, um jenes
politische Problem in der Erfahrung zu lösen, durch das ästhetische den Weg nehmen
muß, weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert.’ Werke,
xx. 311.
41 Schiller’s object of aesthetic perception and creation is the beautiful object. It is
worth noting that aesthetic thought after Kant largely neglects natural beauty in
favour of artistic beauty and artistic creation.
engaged in constructing a path to freedom based on linking two
worlds, with a particular resonance on the territory of present-day
Greece whose appreciation had come to rest on the attractive prom-
ise to integrate the particular in the universal and vice versa. The
intention is not to make an argument about the immediate inXuence
of Schiller’s theoretical writings on Rangavis, although there is,
incidentally, enough evidence of Rangavis’s long-lasting engagement
with his poetry and drama, from very early on.42 What is certain is
that the respective programmes of the German and Greek poets,
however diVering in their degree of sophistication they may be,
share their concern about the role of the poet and of art in a society
perceived as cultured, hence unbalanced, and therefore in need of
moral improvement, and both decide to do so through images that
deliberately relate to the Greek world as a (once or future) material
presence. Linking Rangavis, who is so obviously determined by the
political reality of his time, to this particular aspect in the genesis
of Romantic thought may help us Wrst of all to dispel the idea of the
Romantic poet as being caught in a self-imposed solitary conWne-
ment and a deliberate shunning of the political sphere, an idea that
still appears to have purchase in the perception of Romanticism.43
More importantly, however, both authors share a diYculty in visu-
alizing clearly the future state they have in mind. Of course, the
‘states’ in question are of a diVerent kind. For Schiller, the aesthetic
education will inXuence the Stand of the individual in such a way as
to make possible the true political Staat. Yet it is notoriously diYcult
to determine whether this ‘state’, as it is envisaged by Schiller, can be
realized and to what extent it is tantamount to a political or a cultural
nation.44 Rangavis is engaged in the diYcult task of staking out a
literary space within an uncertain geographical territory. He returned
42 Rangavis mentions his avid reading and watching performances of Schiller’s

plays in his memoirs, ` ÆÆ, i. 80, 168–70, 182. He also translated, much
later, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (Wrst published in the collected works of 1880).
43 Classic accounts of Romanticism, such as M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernatur-
alism (New York, 1971), foreground the separation of subjectivity from society and
the isolation of the subject as programmatic, as do also some later Deconstructionist
critics. Incidentally, Abrams’s works in particular are frequently drawn on in available
Greek literary criticism, which nonetheless remains very concerned with the national
and social involvement of individual authors.
44 Kaiser, Romanticism, 54 V. SuYce it to say that the pursuit of the free balance
implied in the aesthetic state is one of approximation rather than fulWlment.
to a liberated, new Greece that was sounding its position, after he
had received his education in a country where Schiller’s inXuential
question: ‘But does such a State of Aesthetic Semblance really exist?
And if so, where it is to be found?’ still had repercussions. Schiller’s
answer underlines the need not for imitation but for free re-creation,
a statement compatible with Rangavis’s own advocacy of the artist as
shaping, not following rules: ‘As a need, [the aesthetic state] exists in
every Wnely attuned soul; as a realized fact, we are likely to Wnd it, like
the pure Church and the pure Republic, only in some few chosen
circles, where conduct is governed, not by some soulless imitation of
the manners and morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature we
have made our own.’45
Even if the contaminating and undeniable proximity of social and
political growth and shedding would render Rangavis’s state still too
far oV Schiller’s baseline of the realizable aesthetic state, it is still
fruitful to read Rangavis in the light of such a poetic self-under-
standing, as it emphasizes the necessity of aesthetic and hence artistic
perception—and, in turn, shaping—of the natural, phenomenal
world as the basis for social progress. At the same time, there is a
sense in Schiller’s aesthetics that the path to an ‘aesthetic nature’ is
predicated upon the non-identity between the perceiving individual
and his surrounding nature.46 Rangavis’s poetry focuses on the
aspects of destructive and deserted nature not only as a readily
adopted European Romantic conceit, but as a similarly integral
part in the self-understanding of the poetic as well as political
individual. What is more, he does so in the context of a new state
of Greece, whose external image is already heavily shaped by the
imagery and dynamic of a Romantic Hellenism that does insist on the
materiality of the ideal, because it allows for structures of transcend-
ence and readability, even if it is speciWcally not a materiality
that makes correspondence to a clearly visible or bounded Greek
territory easy or indeed possible: that dynamic is realized and
45 ‘Dem Bedürfnis nach existiert er in jeder feingestimmten Seele; der Tat nach
möchte man ihn wohl nur, wie die reine Kirche und die reine Republik, in einigen
wenigen auserlesenen Zirkeln Wnden, wo nicht die geistlose Nachahmung fremder
Sitten, sondern eigene schöne Natur das Betragen lenkt.’ Werke, xx. 412.
46 Schiller contrasts wirkliche Natur, the real forces of material nature, with wahre
Natur, true nature, discovered in the aesthetic act (Werke, xx. 716 V.).
revisualized again in Greece, compounded with a painful awareness
of the impossibility of creating something entirely new.
IN THE WILDERNESS
The insistence of Rangavis’s poetic choices, and their indulgence in

the sheer destructive potential of Romantic nature imagery, may
seem contrived in retrospect. But the aporia of creating a new
literature was apparently acutely felt. In his extensive memoirs Ran-
gavis mentions how, as an aspiring writer and just arrived in Nafplio,
he was advised, by a local notable well-versed in the expectations of
philhellenic sentiment, to go out and converse with the ancient
monuments so as to write, in this environment, on the recent heroes
of the War of Independence. Much as he tries, though, Rangavis
admits, all his honest eVorts to make continuity and revolution
converge on a common Greek ground come to naught.47 The tone
of gossipy melancholia that characterizes his memoirs, makes the
bewilderment created by the dynamic of Hellenism grotesquely, and
individually, realistic; yet this should not detract from the structural
challenge of representing Greece more generally, as it translates into
the themes of this Wrst national poetry.
Rangavis’s early works render problematic both the integration of
his characters into their environment and the role of the poet, vis-à-vis
the nature he represents and the society or readership he presents it
to. The early ballad ‘The Travelling Girl’ (‘˙ ÆØ æØÆ’) is a
variation on the plot of the young girl in search of her lover, calling
him up from the dead and accompanying the revenant on a night-
ride back to his grave,48 and is heavily indebted to folk-song themes,
although not exclusively to Greek ones.49 In line with the European
faible for folk traditions, Rangavis carefully grafts a selection of verses
47 ` ÆÆ, i. 273 V.
48 Rangavis includes the group of poems modelled on folk songs in the Wrst
volume of his complete works (1874), albeit in a form slightly more adapted to
katharevousa; ‘The Travelling Girl’ appears in the second volume, grouped under
‘Narrative and Dramatic Poetry’.
49 See Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1986) on the ballad of the
Dead Brother.
taken verbatim from a variety of Greek folk songs (whose collection
and constitution, of course, was itself to a large extent the result of
that very interest in them) onto a set of his own, new, demotic lines,
modelled on known songs and a Western European Romantic
repertoire.50 Most of those passages correspond to material from
Fauriel’s collection,51 where they are grouped as ‘chansons Roman-
esques’ or tragoudia plasta, a category comparable to the ballad
and as such undoubtedly understood by Rangavis with regard to
‘The Travelling Girl’.52 The farewell dialogue between the girl and her
lover, who joins the band of pallikaria, is also reminiscent of the
parting scene between two lovers in the early seventeenth-century
Cretan verse romance Erotokritos.53
Beyond the paradoxical dynamic of artistry already inscribed in the
act of collecting, Rangavis’s ‘folk poems’ diVer signiWcantly from
those folk models available to him. One such diVerence is the prom-
inent use of argument and reasoning. The detailed accounts and
justiWcations of their actions which all participants oVer, ghosts,
girl, and hero-lover alike, Wnd no equivalent in the folk ballads
(paraloges) and their more curt presentation of narrative facts.
Likewise, the internal motivations are shifting. The paraloges usually
portray a social unit or community, most often that of the household,
as disturbed or out of balance due to the improper action of one of its
50 Ilias Anagnostakis and Athina Georganta, ‘Æ ‘‘ ØŒ’’ Ø ÆÆ ı `ºÆ-
æı $ı $ÆªŒÆ!; `’: ‘‘˙ ÆØ æØÆ’’ ŒÆØ ª ÆºªÆ ’, ºı!Œıº-
º Œ, 1 (1989), 56–73; Georganta, ‘ ‘‘ˇ ˚º ’’. Rangavis’s linguistic changes
lie especially in his frequent use of (abstract) nouns as well as the addition of adjectives,
which stands in contrast to the rather more economical use of descriptive epithets in the
traditional folk songs.
51 Anagnostakis and Georganta, ‘˜ ØŒ Ø ÆÆ’, 61–5. Apart from the song
‘The Travelling Girl’, from which Rangavis has probably taken the title, if not much
else, there are linguistic parallels to the songs ‘The Evil Mother’, ‘The Farewell’, ‘The
Stranger’, ‘The Snatching’, and ‘The Sound from the Grave’. The most obvious parallel
is to ‘Song of the Dead Brother’ (in Fauriel under the title ‘Le Voyage nocturne’).
52 Rangavis, Histoire littéraire de la Grèce moderne (Paris, 1877), ii. 69: ‘La ‘‘Voya-
geuse’’ est la ballade d’une jeune Wlle qui meurt sur la tombe de son Wancé tué à la
guerre. C’est un reXet de chants populaires. Elle est écrite dans la même langue et le
même rythme de vers, mais rimé.’
53 Anagnostakis and Georganta, ‘˜ ØŒ æÆª ØÆ’, 64; the Renaissance work,
written in a highly literary idiom based on the Cretan dialect, was one of the few
‘popular’ literary works available; a rewritten New Erotokritos was published by the
Phanariot Dionysios Photinos in 1818 in a more learned Greek register, indicating the
contentious nature of what was considered demotic.
members in relation to the others.54 It is this disruption of social order
which provokes the overturning of the natural order, that is, the
element of the supernatural, be it that of animals endowed with a
human (warning) voice or other miraculous events. Although it can
be argued strongly that the nature of Rangavis’s poems does also
correspond to an unbalanced or destroyed social order, his characters
are nevertheless presented in isolation and without any social context
whatsoever. The village or the house has no place in his ballad, and the
setting is exclusively a nature devoid of society.55 In ‘The Travelling
Girl’ it is the commitment of the young man to join the brigands that
leads him to desert his bride; in other words, it is the aspiration itself
towards freedom which is oVered as the cause for both protagonists’
isolation. For the female character, too, is roaming a landscape of
desolation and wilderness, after three years spent alone, matching her
interior state to the inhospitable environment into which she has been
propelled and which forces her outside her usual bounds.
Like Bürger’s popular ballad ‘Lenore’ (1773), which Rangavis
almost certainly knew,56 ‘The Travelling Girl’ builds on the motif of
the girl’s night-ride with death disguised as her lover, who is pre-
sumed lost in a war; but such a comparison is not far-reaching
enough where the function of the motif is concerned.57 The furious
54 See e.g. Margaret Alexiou, ‘Sons, Wives and Mothers: Reality and Fantasy in
Some Modern Greek Ballads’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 1/1 (1980), 73–111.
55 The only other two ballads in Fauriel’s collection which share the motif of a
single girl travelling or wandering are ‘The Travelling Girl’ and ‘The Lovers’. In the
Wrst case, the independent sea-journey of the girl is brought back to a social context
when her dead body colours the waters of the local village well blood-red; in the
second case, it is the girl friend of the female lover who travels to the male lover’s
home village to bring him back. Thus, there remains a close social framework.
56 Giorgios Veloudis, Germanograecia, 220; Linos Politis, ‘¯ººØŒ
$ ÆØ ’, 119, links especially the natural settings of Rangavis’s poems to the
German ballad. Apart from ‘Lenore’ he mentions Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’, a translation of
which by Rangavis was published in the second volume of his Selected Poems (1840).
For the many translations and adaptations of ‘Lenore’ in Greek literature in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Kirke Kefalea, ˇæª ¨ : ˇØ ººØŒ
Œ Ø ‘¯º æÆ’ ı æªŒ æ (Athens, 1999).
57 Critics and scholars of folk poetry have been equally keen to point out the
parallel between the ‘Song of the Dead Brother’ and Bürger’s poem, among them
Fauriel (Chants, ii. 405) and Wilhelm Müller in an essay ‘Bürgers ‘‘Lenore’’ und ein
neugriechisches Volkslied’, in Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 26/7 May 1825. See
also Katerina Krikos-Davis’s critical bibliography ‘The Song of the Dead Brother’,
Mandatoforos, 6 (1975), 23–30.
ride towards the grave in Bürger’s closing turn of the ballad is
the deserved punishment for blasphemy (Lenore doubts her lover’s
return and God’s wise judgement). ‘The Travelling Girl’ pronounces
the cataclysmic overturning of nature, when, on the lost lover’s
appearance from his grave (and a wild, natural grave it is too,
as opposed to a graveyard), the stars fall and the earth shakes. As
the couple, united in death, sinks into the ground, though, the
violence of nature is not accompanied by admonishing ghostly voices,
as is the case in ‘Lenore’; instead, nature’s voices are rising to Heaven:
ˇı! ˇ Æ æ !Øº Æ ŒıÆæØÆ æ Ø!
ˇı! ˇ !æØ ºÆ ææØø Ææ Ø!
˚ÆØ Œº ÆÆ; ŒÆØ ! ŒÆØ ! ! " " Ø ªæıØı;
ŒÆØ łÆº ıØ " !æØ &łØ ı;
ŒÆØ Æ ŒÆ ÆıæÆ ıæı ŒØ Ææ ı:
(ll. 129–34)
Ah! how the whirlwind beats the cypresses! Ah! how the northern wind
uproots the plane! Groaning and clamouring, oh! ah! in the wind of the
south, and in the northern wind psalmodies are praising the Highest, while
deep black clouds whistle and Xash.
As opposed to the Last Judgement awaiting Lenore, ‘The Travelling
Girl’ envisages the joint transition from the realm of the living to that
of the dead as the only possibility to reward a true love, in a unity
which cannot be fulWlled in this present life, nor, by extension, in this
present space: ‘Leave them; they loved with virtue and in faith. They
are at least united in the grave, if not while they lived’ (ll. 137–8). It is
not the supernatural encroaching upon the real, but rather the
benevolent (Christian) otherworld, indicated by the songs of praise,
that appears as the only place where union and order can be realized.
A future vision for the needs of a contemporary environment is
reformulated through images of a spiritual beyond. This translation,
whereby the Christian otherworld becomes the only real place for
(Greek) freedom, emerges as a general alternative to making space
for the contemporary world, and not just for Rangavis. Where does
this leave the Greek poet facing the task of accommodating his real
environment within a national literature? Besides the indication that
a social order, disrupted by the struggle for liberation, is irreversibly
suspended and expressed through a threatening nature, it is also the
kleft as the singer of natural and immediate poetry,58 and by proxy
the contemporary author relying on such poetry, who cannot be
integrated and who may not be compatible with the idea of successful
unity.
An even stronger subversion of the theme of the kleftic hero
singing and Wghting for freedom is found in Rangavis’s 1837 poem
‘The Singer’ (‘ˇ 'º’). The opening lines repeat the motif of the
lonely wanderer (‘Alone walks the singer, and alone he roams, alone,
in the world, alone’). It is, however, not the solitude of a nature
conducive to poetic expression: ‘he sighs, he calls to glades and
mountains, mute is the answer of the rock.’ Nature remains unre-
sponsive and silent, as does the singer poet to her supernatural
charms and threats. Nor is his environment the free wilderness,
where he seeks and Wnds companionship, in opposition to oppressive
society. The singer, in his deliberate decision from unrequited love
not to live any longer, joins a band of brigands whose Wghting he
takes part in without real conviction or participation, to die while his
mind and song are still straying elsewhere.59 Rangavis’s treatment of
the role of the poet within a framework claiming to emulate the
poetic tradition of the folk song is notably self-reXective. Not only is
he in favour of adapting the older form of the folk songs to diVerent
circumstances (a procedure he had justiWed in the 1840 prologue),
but his poetry also renders the function of the poet as a mediator of
(any) literary tradition problematic in itself. Folk poetry, as an
ostensibly authentic medium of Greek (national) poetic expression,
rooted in its soil, is attributed a positive value, while at the same time
it is perceived as historically superseded and strangely uncoupled
from any contemporary place. This notion is responsible for some of
the ambivalences pertaining to the Wgure of the singer as he corres-
ponds to his natural environment, or fails to do so. Rangavis’s
58 Rangavis’s (dead) hero is characterized as a singer even before his identity as a

freedom Wghter is revealed: ‘and like a nightingale he sang on the lyre he played’
(l. 14).
59 There are historical precedents from Crete and Cyprus of professional singers in
the service of a band’s captain at the time of the revolution. See D. A. Petropoulos,
‘ˇØ —ØæØ ˚æ ŒÆØ ˚ æ’, ¸ÆªæÆ Æ, 15 (1954), 374–400, 389.
Rangavis, however, makes the role of the singer within that social context his central
theme.
Histoire littéraire de la Grèce moderne contains an account of Greek
literature after the fall of Constantinople and before the 1821 insur-
rection, where some of this is echoed:
Meanwhile, in this bleak desert, the attentive eye could still on occasion
discern a light murmur, which showed that life there was not entirely
extinguished; and on the withered trunk some feeble shoots, stroked by a
short-lived ray of light every now and then, would appear and come to a
sickly Xowering, making it clear that the sap, which had withdrawn at the
frosty onset of winter, was not dried up beyond return. Like liberty reXecting
on the steep mountain tops or on the cities alive with the industriousness of
the Greeks, we could witness the emergence both of rustic songs, which are
like a fresh mountain breeze and a distant echo of heroic antiquity, and also
of attempts at a learned literature to predict and at the same time prepare the
future.60
Despite their encouraging aspects, he captures the poetic forms of
the Ottoman years in a natural imagery that frames the nature of
Greece as a (spiritual) wasteland (ce morne désert), where literary
eVorts are likened to remote refuges, and that also stresses the threats
of decline and sickliness which result from confrontation with an
unaccommodating nature. The originary simplicity and natural
primitivism of song, and the degenerated natural Weld from which
it arises, are themselves dangerously close when compared with the
somewhat more external arrival of ‘attempts at learned literature’.
Peckham has laid out the dilemma of institutionalized folklore in the
second half of the nineteenth century to square notions of national
culture as originary and popularly emergent with notions of ‘encul-
turation’, that is, modiWcation and education. This debate is accom-
panied by equal worries over backward Greek culture on the one
hand, and education and social development eventually undermin-
ing the basis of folk song on the other.61 In the early poetry of the
nation state, preceding the institutionalization of folklore, we already
glimpse an expression of that dilemma: the artist Wgures populating
those poems, such as the singer, fail to respond to their environment,
and vice versa. In Dimos and Eleni we Wnd the point reiterated, as
early as 1831, that nature is not the seat of a distancing and hence
60 Rangavis, Histoire littéraire de la Grèce moderne (Paris, 1877), 145–6.

61 Peckham, Natural Histories, ch. 6.
emancipating creative solitude, nor of an otherwise positive corres-
pondence, but that it is marked by inherent ambiguity about the
sterility of the poetic voice in the face of nature. Dimos, a young
monk-turned-freedomWghter, abducts his beloved Eleni from a
Turkish harem and takes refuge with her at the hut of the old hermit
Liakos, a former kleft too. When Liakos refuses to wed them, Dimos
kills him in anger. Dying, he reveals that both Dimos and Eleni are
his children. Within the space of two more years, so the epilogue
implies, Wrst Eleni and then Dimos, who stay in the wilderness to
tend Liakos’s grave, follow him in death. The opening words, ‘Hide,
shepherd, your Xute, and cease your songs’, that introduce the reader
to the harem garden where Eleni is praying alone, beyond a nod to
the ostensibly context-free world of pastoral poetry, immediately
signal the potential of disruption which poetic song or expression
will have to contend with.62 The male hero, Dimos, is not a singer
this time. Nor is he, for that matter, a ‘proper’ kleft: from a monas-
tery where he was biding his time, likening his unfulWlled life to a
river running through a desert and mirroring an empty sky, he is
propelled into the kleftic existence of his dreams only after his sacred
abode is plundered and burned down by the Turks. Life as a fugitive
in the wilderness, in consequence, is not goal-directed and meaning-
ful, but instead driven by chance; the bleak rocks are not his bed and
shield, as they are in the kleftic songs, but markers on the road to sin
on which to wreck his life—and that of others. The only true
representative of a once kleftic existence, Eleni’s father Liakos (to
the sound of whose name nature is now unresponsive, we are told)
has retired in repentance and has in similar fashion turned to the
solitary life of a hermit. Neither does Dimos react to the promise of
unity in or through the solitary kleftic community: when his men
come to his rescue he sends them away. His wilful separation from
them, he argues, will lead him on to a new life in society—‘I’ll be
returning to society (kosmos), friends. I shall live’ (l. 527)—yet in fact
it leads him to the guilty solitude of shattered dreams. Not even the
remote hermitage is a place where union or peace is possible any
62 This may also echo the line ‘Cease war, my Yanni, and cease shooting’ (‘—ł ;
ˆØ " ; º ; ŒÆØ ł Æ ı ŒØÆ’), from the kleftic song ‘On Boukovala’,
Fauriel, Chants, i. no. 2.
longer. The Wgures that roam the early poetry of the Greek nation
state are constantly in motion, set in motion by their past, yet they
have quite literally nowhere to go; as in ‘The Travelling Girl’, con-
fused social relations match a lack of any real ground on which to
play them out, and any resolution of conXict is deferred to a spiritual
otherworld.
Implications for the role of the poet are not lacking either. The
narrative perspective shifts throughout the nine sections of the poem,
interrupting the Xow of events by frequent addresses to the reader
and the reXections of a strong-voiced Wrst-person narrator. Most
noticeable is the tendency of that voice to call into question the
accuracy of sense perception, while at the same time appealing to
the imagination (fantasia) of the reader (ll. 331–4). Incidentally, it is
also imagination, which, in the prologue to the poem, was said to
distinguish the Greek people: ‘what could hinder [my work’s] suc-
cess? The poetic imagination of my nation is well-known and fam-
ous’. With the poem itself, imagination now somehow has to
compensate for insuYcient perception. This quality of uncertainty
echoes in the structural motif of question and answer, familiar from
the folk songs. Rangavis’s usage diVers from his model, though.
Using the trope of the ‘false question’, a folk song would open with
a wrong assumption about either a natural event or the setting,
which is then corrected. Here is the example of ‘Death and the Souls’:
% ÆØ Æ æÆ Æ !ı ŒÆØ Œı !ıæŒø Æ:
" Æ º ; !æ Æ æ Ø;
˚Ø" " Æ º ; ŒØ ı !æ Æ æ Ø:
ØÆ!Æ Ø æÆ ı ÆŁÆ ı.
Why do the mountains stand so dark and gloomy; is it wind Wghting them
or rain beating them? Neither wind is Wghting them, nor rain beating them;
but Death is passing by with his dead.63
Rangavis, on the other hand, exchanges such deWnite answers for a
vagueness overlying the perception of events and places and their
description. In the opening section he takes the play with such
insecurity to extremes: the identiWcation of the shadow of Eleni as
Eleni and not as alternately a cloud, a nymph, a mist, or a houri is
63 Fauriel, Chants, ii. no. 27.

drawn out along well over Wfty lines. He adds one more qualiWer,
once she has Wnally been identiWed: that his account of the interior
state of his characters depends on physiognomy being able to mirror
the soul of man.64 Both aspects together, the ambivalence of percep-
tion and the question of an accurate analogy between outward
appearance (landscape or face) and internal state, are matched in
the description of old Liakos: he recognizes Eleni, yet he hides his
feelings, while the strength of his suppressed emotions is linked back
to natural upheaval, in the image of a violent storm: ‘As winter
clouds, brimful with storms, redden the evening, so do rushing
feelings colour the brow marked by the furrows of time; but who
can know the soul, who knows language, that traitor of physiogno-
my? . . . Since he himself does not discern what he feels, how can
I discern it?’ (ll. 565–70; 578–9). Although Rangavis presents his
characters and his settings as conforming to the familiar correlation
of exterior (natural) world and interior state, the stress is Wrmly on
the destructive aspects of nature as mirroring and mirrored in the
state of the characters. Dimos is introduced following a scene of
desolate and sterile nature, without hope for regeneration—a highly
evocative and provocative gesture at a time when political and
national regeneration was a central issue. It continues: ‘And such is
man; once passions’ storms have withered his heart and life’s struggle
dries up its sap and burns it to ashes, it will never bring forth yet
another gentle feeling’ (ll. 68–71).
Eleni, who appears to be the only viable exception to this account
of human nature, in nature, is herself introduced as having been
uprooted at a (too) young age. Although she is visualized by the
narrator as the young bloom still susceptible to nature, her only hold
on the world surrounding her, so to speak, lies in the harmony,
achieved through prayer, conWned to the environment of the garden
enclosure. The opening scenario of the poem implies that stability
can be attained solely in an act of transcendence. Eleni’s natural grave
marking the end of the poem conWrms that this will have to amount
to separation altogether from the material world.
64 ‘If the face of man does paint an image of the soul’ (l. 189). Even stronger, later:
‘and if his heart shows the world as a mirror does, neither in his heart nor in the world
will a steady trace remain’ (ll. 248–9).
Similar imagery conveys the death-in-life of man deprived of
human contact and love, in a state of solitude (ll. 252–62). Not
only is it a destructive and rather desolate nature here that corres-
ponds to the human condition; the possibility that human emotion
is unresponsive altogether to any outer stimulus casts doubt on the
analogy with nature, as the objective correlative, as a means of
expressing the human condition. In other words, the disharmony
that is the object of literary representation is itself on the line when it
comes to its viability in the Wrst place. The narrator Wnally oVsets the
life of man deprived of feeling with a vision of life shared with a
companion, enabling him to brave life’s storms and to replace them
with a calm and steady sailing through a sequence of permanent
springs and summers (ll. 267–80).
That prospect of a harmonious union with and in nature, however,
remains potentially a delusion too: the poem ‘Thoughts in Desola-
tion’ (1837), which neither shares content nor structural motifs with
the folk songs or kleftic songs, is the monologue of a young male
speaker, who seeks refuge in nature (physis) as opposed to society
(kosmos). While harmonious nature, as the open book of creation, is
given a positive value, the self-perception of the speaker is one of
estrangement from nature, rather than solitude, of a mirror reXecting
the world, yet in itself stripped of all qualities and cut oV from its
surroundings:
`ºº" ª; ŒÆŒ øÆ Ø ªÆ º,
Ø º ø Æ æıŁ æ ŒÆØ Æø,
ØıæªÆ ÆØ ÆŒ Œ º,
Œ" æ ŒÆØ Ø Œ .
¯ ÆØ Ø " Œ ŒÆŁæ ø ıø,
Ø º!ø ØŒ Ø ı æ ÆÆ ØŒºÆ
ŒÆØ " Æ æ æÆ ; ŒÆØ ı Ææ Æ ººÆ,
Æºº" Ø æ ÆØ ØŒØºÆ ŒÆØ æø ø.
(ll. 20–7)
Yet I, a discord in this great harmony, a useless and gaping rhythm in the
song of creation, I am a limb cut oV from the creation, alone and solitary
within it and a stranger to its melody. I am like the mirroring surface of
water, which glitters and reXects a variety of colours, the airy clouds, and the
foliage of spring, yet is itself deprived of all variety and colours.
The imagery of the speaker as an out-of-tune element in the song of
creation, rendering him of little usefulness for its aims, echoes Ran-
gavis’s exploration of the value of poetry in his prologues: there,
dreams, albeit shattered dreams, are marked as a deWning feature in
the perception of the poet (subjective and objective genitive). In
‘Thoughts in Desolation’ the dreams are no longer mentioned as
positive, even if failed, visions; now they are identiWed as part of the
mistaken and self-deluding perception that characterizes society
(ll. 111–17).
In summary, the aspects of solitary individuality and of a change-
able (physical) nature seem to overstep the boundaries of Rangavis’s
Romantic poetic programme, just as the pent-up waters of Greek
character, as he has described them, will overXow their banks, when
need be. They are not merely a poet’s building-blocks for a mixed
genre, where opposite elements can stand alongside each other as
they do in nature: instead, under the pressure of writing in and for a
new state that relies on the signiWcance of its unresolved territory as
an active agent in its national genesis, they turn to foreground
destructiveness and instability. Likewise, and despite the positive
role attributed to literature as national expression within society
and the political process, the relation of the individual both to nature
and to society as areas of reference and representation are beset by a
threat of irreversible disintegration and sterility. The deWnition of the
poetic role is inseparable from the instability that besets the percep-
tion of the natural environment. The locale deliberately associates the
natural environment of the klefts, as it would be rough and un-
accommodating, yet a refuge and a basis for future liberation. At
the same time it is a locale that stakes out a literary territory: that of
the modiWcation of the folk song, a genre full of associations with the
ostensibly authentic voice of the people tied to their native soil. This
locale, modiWed as it is, provides the foil for a variety of imagery
taken from the realm of nature that conWrms the correspondence
between exterior world and interior state, but that subverts it into a
corresponding dissolution. In other words, the locale of Rangavis’s
early poems only alludes to the Greek nature of the freedom Wghters.
An unclear or unspeciWc description of place goes hand in hand with
a use of nature imagery pointing to Xawed representation. In the
course of his attempt to forge a positive role for the Greek poet, his
ethics and aesthetics, Rangavis encounters diYculties that Wnd an
equivalent in the struggle to represent an appropriate setting.
PA NAG I OT I S S O U TS O S ’ S WA N D E R E R S
In his memoirs, Rangavis mentions, not quite in passing, a passing

judgement by the German philologist Christian Brandis, who had
evaluated Rangavis’s play Phrosyne as simply another Romantic
work, thereby showing, it would appear, too little appreciation.65
Brandis’s remarks are worth a closer look, as they state clearly one
of the deWning features of Greek writing of the 1830s: the close link
and overlap between the topics of political and emotional unrest and
their consequences for Wnding an appropriate Greek setting for them.
His detailed chart of Greek literature of the previous decade is part of
a larger, three-volume account of the state of Greece, with the section
on literature following that on the character of the Greek people.
Interestingly, Brandis makes a point of not tracing the ancient in the
contemporary, but instead warns against the fallacy of analogies
based on locality, climate, and surroundings.66 What he does identify
as a continuous trait is the Greek talent for speech, or rhetoric, with
the implication that literature, as an expression of this gift, is closely
bound up with national, even if this time not so much natural,
character. In this way, he comes to describe Greek literary produc-
tion, shaped as it is by national events, as its most characteristic
feature:
65 ` ÆÆ, ii. 45 f.; Christian A. Brandis, Mittheilungen aus Griechen-

land (Leipzig, 1842), 197 (page references in text are to this edition). Brandis was a
classical scholar, of Aristotle and of the history of philosophy in particular, who
was appointed one of the Wrst Professors of Philosophy at the newly founded
University of Athens; see Ch. A. Brandis, Autobiographie (n.p., 18——); Fritz Valja-
več, Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu Südosteuropa, 5 vols. (Munich,
1953–70), iii. 145.
66 ‘. . . da es sehr schwer ist, in solcher Vergleichung das Zufällige vom Wesentli-
chen, und durch Analogie der Verhältnisse, durch Gleichheit der Localitäten, des
Himmelsstrichs und Klimas hervorgerufene Ähnlichkeiten von den durch Stamm-
verwandtschaft bedingten zu unterscheiden. Noch weniger kann es uns einfallen, in
den gegenwärtigen Athenern, oder gar in den Thebanern, Argivern u.s.w. die alten
wiederWnden zu wollen’ (p. 13).
The events of the past two decades could provide immediate subject-matter
only for war lyrics and political song, and they certainly did inspire those.
The regeneration of the people had grown from a new dynamic force and, by
necessity, this force was mirrored Wrst and foremost in poetry; more spe-
ciWcally, it showed itself in the double form in which it had originally
manifested itself: Wghting both an outward and an inward struggle, at once
unifying and corroding. The destructive force of the interior struggle,
however, was founded on a blind, uncontrolled passion that has inXicted
such deep wounds on the country. When love was added as the third topic of
poetic inspiration . . . it comes as no surprise that it was at Wrst presented as a
form of passion that paralyses all energy and action. From this point of view
it was closely related to inner-party strife; the only diVerence is that passion
applied to hatred cannot be rid of motivation and energy, whereas the
passion of love, as pure passion, can paralyse all movement. (pp. 88–9)
For Brandis, the political regeneration of the Greek people, mirrored
Wrst of all in its literature, is of a twofold nature: the uniting force of
defence and liberation on the one hand, and the disruptive force of
(political) internal strife on the other, which both, in literature, are
complemented by the topic of love.67 Brandis next applies to prac-
tical literary criticism his insight that both an activating and a
paralysing eVect are at work in the literary conXation of the political
and emotional forces; he sees his thesis proven by works such as
Panagiotis Soutsos’s verse drama The Wayfarer or by Alexandros
Soutsos’s equally lengthy narrative poem The Roamer, published
eight years later (1839). On Alexandros Soutsos’s work, Brandis
stresses the destructive force of freedom; the idea of freedom is
reduced to ‘an empty phantom’ (p. 136) and leads in consequence
to a shadow existence of the mobile yet mentally unfree wanderer, the
title hero. The physical and mental state of Panagiotis Soutsos’s
protagonists, on the other hand, reveals a stagnation which leads to
a death-in-life existence unable to articulate itself, as they attempt to
regain the lost paradise of their love.68
67 Brandis summarizes the nature of the literary development of the preceding

decade in his introductory paragraph: ‘the forms most peculiar to them are the war
songs, the political party songs, and the representation of unhappy, invincible
passion’ (p. 88).
68 ‘Both [the wayfarer and Ralou] resemble those unhappy characters who live,
perceive and feel, yet are unable to give note of their lives by means of any reaction or
any recognizable sign’ (p. 138).
Following on from Brandis’s observations, what distinguishes
this illusory reality of The Wayfarer and The Roamer is indeed the
vehemence with which a causal link is established between a political
death in a speciWc environment, linked to historical events, and their
internal, emotional counterpart: lack of spiritual freedom is a direct
result of political unrest, enacted in a real, speciWcally recognizable
Greek world which at the same time has the potential to signify a
general, all-encompassing loss. The contemporary Greek scene, in
which this losing battle is enacted, is at the same time the repository
of antiquity. As opposed to the Greek landscape of European Hel-
lenism, however, this present environment is not created through
dynamic oscillation between nostalgia and an elusive future that
makes modernity. Spatially, the Greek present is seemingly pulled
between opposite, linked, and yet mutually exclusive directions, to
the point of annihilation.
In 1834 Panagiotis Soutsos published the novel Leandros, the Wrst
of its kind in the new nation, so he claimed, which sheds light on the
self-deWnition of the poets of his generation. In the (often quoted)
prologue, Soutsos suggests a map of literary reciprocity:
The greatest writers, poets and philosophers have written novels; Rousseau
in France, Walter Scott in England, Goethe in Germany, Foscolo in Italy, and
Cooper in liberated America, either because works of that nature were
considered valuable, as they combine the delightful with the useful, or
because raging imaginations need to Wnd an outlet for their burning im-
pressions. In regenerated Greece we are the Wrst to dare and so we present
Leandros to the public.69
The classic Horatian formula of ‘delight and usefulness’ implies an
educational role for the poet; but there is also a strong appeal to the
imagination, a self-understanding in other words that is similar to
that of Rangavis, straddling Enlightenment and Romantic poetics.
69 ‘˙ ªÆº æØ ıªªæÆ ; ØÆ ŒÆØ Øº Ø ıªæÆłÆ ıŁØæØŒ
ÆÆ: $ı Ø ˆÆººÆ; ´Æº æŒ Ø `ªªºÆ; ˆŒ
Ø ˆ æ ÆÆ; # Œº Ø ÆºÆ ŒÆØ ˚ıæ Ø º ıŁæÆ
` æØŒ: Ø Ø ŒæŁÆ º Ø Æ Æ ØÆ ø ÆÆ; ø
ı Øª Æ ı ø º ı; Ø Ø ÆÆªŒÆÆ Æ!Æ Ø Ø
æªÆ ÆÆÆ Œ ı ø ºª æ ø ı ø.
¯Ø ÆÆª ø ¯ººÆ º æØ Æ ø Ø ŒØ
¸Ææ’. ˇ ¸Ææ, ed. A. Samouil (Athens, 1996), 43. References in the text
are to the page-numbers of this edition.
Leandros, however, ‘is also a Greek, and he lives around 1833 and
1834’ (p. 45).
Incidentally—and surprisingly—it is only recently that the polit-
ical nature of the novel has been suggested more forcefully.70 Further
on in this programmatic prologue, Soutsos explicitly links the ideas
of his work to its natural setting, or rather he transforms ideas into
natural imagery as the appropriate setting: ‘The existence of God, the
immortality of the soul, the love of a rural life, the love of freedom,
these are the ideas and feelings of Leandros; the rising of the sun and
moon, the calmness of spring, the high mountains, the stormy sea,
amongst such images is set the scene of Leandros.’71 Far from being
mere images setting the scene for Leandros’s emotional wanderings
and reXecting his moods, the novel appears at a point when Greek
nature is being mapped onto Greek territory, while territory becomes
the dominant sign of nationhood.72 ‘In the same period that nature
and landscape become a physical scene the meaning of the word
nation is also imperceptibly transformed so that it comes to be
applied to a politically deWned territory, rather than to the native
race of people inhabiting that territory.’73 The closing reprise of the
prologue addresses Soutsos’s target audience: the new generation,
whose duty is to continue what his generation has accomplished. In
the phrasing he uses, the identity of his generation as one of Wghters,
politicians, or poets becomes multiple and indistinguishable: ‘Youth
of Greece! What you could have demanded from our own generation
has been done. We wonder-workers have built you a future, given you
a homeland and freed the earth of your ancestors.’74
70 See Alexandra Samouil’s introduction to her edition of Leandros, or Nasos

Vayenas’s introduction to Alexandros Soutsos’s novel The Exiled of 1831 (ˇ
¯ æØ ı 1831) (Athens, 1996); Peckham, National Histories, 22–5.
71 ‘˙ ÆæØ ı ¨ ; ÆŁÆÆÆ łı ; Æª æ ÆªæØŒ !;
æø º ıŁ æÆ; Ø ÆØ ØÆØ ŒÆØ Æ ÆØŁ ÆÆ ı ¸Ææı: ÆØ ÆÆºÆ ı
ºı ŒÆØ º; ªÆº ı Ææ; Æ ıłº æ; ÆØ æØŒı ÆØ; Ø ø
ø ØŒ ø Ł ÆØ Œ ı ¸Ææı’ (p. 46).
72 On the circulation and large number of publications of largely foreign books on
geography, see Peckham, National Histories, 1–20.
73 Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology’, 319.
74 ‘ˇ ºÆÆ ¯ºº; ; Ø Æ " ÆÆØ Æ ØØŒ Æ ª
ºŁ: ŁÆı Æıæª " ºÆıæªÆ ºº; " ŒÆ ÆæÆ; ŒÆØ
ª ø æª ø ı ºıæÆ ’ (p. 47).
The blurring continues beyond the margins of the text. With the
direct address to the new generation, recounting the labours of his
own, Soutsos uses almost verbatim material from a speech he deliv-
ered before King Otto, on the occasion of a memorial being erected
in the Argolid, in January 1834.75 Given the dating, as much as the
role of the public poet Soutsos implies, it is futile to debate which
manifestation of the sentiment came Wrst: the material occasion,
itself shaped by ideals, or the reinsertion into a literary product
that deals in materiality. The overlap of functions, the uncertain
footing of Leandros, as character and text, on shifting political
and literary platforms, characterizes the genesis of the novel as a
whole. Sections of the novel, particularly the observations on the
state of agriculture, industry, and the political life of Greece, were
pre-serialized in November 1833 as travel letters in the periodical O
Helios, founded and edited by the brothers Soutsos.76 The fatal love
story that makes Leandros comparable to the literary models the
prologue invokes, was then only gradually imposed as the framework
to turn social and geographical observation into narration.77
The novel is the story, told in a series of letters, of Leandros, who,
born in Constantinople but through his involvement in the Greek
insurrections displaced throughout the Balkans, Europe, and Greece,
eventually has arrived in Athens. Here he chances upon his childhood
love Koralia, who is now married and a mother. Their love is resus-
citated by the encounter, yet Koralia holds to her marital vows; the
impossibility of their reunion and Leandros’s suVering lead Lean-
dros’s friend to trick him into making a journey through Greece, on
75 ¸ ª Œ øŁ Ø Æ ªæ ø ı ŒÆ" `æªºÆ ı
(Gennadius Library, Athens, phyll. 69 T.6 no 19), 2. The Soutsoi were part of a
politically very active family; one brother was killed in the battle of Dragatsani right
at the beginning of the War of Independence, another cousin was a judge in Nafplio.
Alexandros, the activist and satirist, viewed the monarchy as necessary, yet remained
scathingly critical of it, which led to multiple lawsuits against him.
76 The sections were published under the title ‘My Wanderings’ and signed ‘The
Traveller’. As a publication with a literary as much as a socio-political agenda,
the paper oVered a forum for social criticism and political ideas, particularly along
the lines of the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon. His communitarian ideas were
widely discussed during the time the brothers Soutsos spent in Paris in the late 1820s.
Some French Saint-Simonists were also resident in Nafplio at the time; see Vayenas,
‘ˇıØŒ ØÆºØ ’, 11 V.
77 Ibid. 23 f.
an itinerary that includes memorial sites of classical as well as of
recent political signiWcance. His route commemorates the Greek War
of Independence by explicit comparison with the desolate contem-
porary situation of chaos and corruption, and it mirrors the mem-
ories of the short past and prematurely failed future with Koralia.
Leandros returns to Athens to Wnd Koralia dying of her conXicting
emotions and her moral steadfastness. After her death, Leandros, like
a good Wertherian, commits suicide. The novel is clearly written with
Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Ugo Foscolo’s Wertherian The
Last Letters of Jacopo Ortiz in mind, both of which Soutsos had read
(Werther, at least, in French translation) and unapologetically makes
reference to in his prologue. And yet, the theme of the fulWlment of
the past made impossible not just in the present but because of the
present, and its interference in the romantic union, is also what
distinguishes Leandros from his ‘models’. Although the unsuccessful
relationship and the suicide of the protagonist are the themes both of
Werther and Jacopo Ortiz, the past is given less of a motivating and
hampering role in either of the two novels. Werther and Lotte are
ostensibly kept apart by a social code, and although the Werther story
of Jacopo Ortiz, told around the fate of a dissident in the secessionist
upper Italian provinces of the Napoleonic era, is already of a more
openly political nature (here too it is the state of a disuniWed country
that mirrors the impossibility of a happy match), neither of the
literary ‘models’ equates a tale of intertwined erotic tension, terri-
torial disorientation, and political situatedness between East and
West, ancient and modern, quite so explicitly as Leandros does.
What is more, Athens is a foreign place for both characters. Here
the past is suddenly foregrounded again: just as Athens is the place
that is quite literally rediscovered as the capital, and awaiting rebuild-
ing, so Leandros and Koralia rediscover each other in a situation of
displacement. Quite apart from the excavation of a personal past
throughout the novel, there is abundant direct reference to archaeo-
logical sites. Ruins, as ‘memorials’ of the ancient past, serve as
settings for a number of signiWcant meetings between the protagon-
ists, who oscillate between positive and negative interpretations of
the scene, stressing the value of memory or the absence of past glory,
depending on whether the predominant mood is one of hopefulness
or despair. This is the place where the lovers are free and able to
communicate their past, their present desire, and the impossibility of
their future. Nature is on the one hand the ostensibly harmonious
environment, which, as opposed to the restrictions of social space,
allows the meetings of the protagonists to take place, if only for a
time (Leandros and Koralia meet for long walks around Athens), and
which also lets them experience their meeting of minds in the light of
the material remains of ancient Greece and the natural, unchanged
beauty of Greece present. The aspect of Athenian nature, on the other
hand, in which its ruins are embedded, precipitates both the pas-
sionate longing and the impossibility of union between the two.
Koralia is directly aligned with the past, both the individual past
and the national past: in a night walk which they take around the
ancient sites of Athens, her ideal beauty is set next to the temples’
ideal beauty:
Looking at the memorials of antiquity, I said: ‘See how man vanishes, yet
how his great works persist. Temple of Theseus! How smooth, how recent
your two-thousand-year-old marble! . . . And the Parthenon, how fresh still
his substance!’ The ancient and grand ground on which she stood inspired
her with great ideas too, and when she formulated them with enthusiasm,
her eyes were sparkling Wre. I could not keep silent but had to tell her:
‘Koralia! From the very earliest beautiful days of my youth I formed for
myself the idea of the perfect woman; this type I only found in you, wherever
and everywhere I went. I do not know the secret decisions of fate; but if these
moments when I can see you are the last stage of my life, then, Koralia,
I accept my future and death will be sweet’ (pp. 58 f.).
The impossibility to re-create the past is, however, the overriding
(European) mode(l) and there are other scenes where the absence
of ancient grandeur is foregrounded, while in another vignette of
Athens attention is drawn to the Parthenon marbles taken away by
Lord Elgin (p. 78).
Happiness, or any form of liveable or representable experience, are
impossible inside and outside the capital alike. It is the combination
of Leandros’s desire and Koralia’s resistance which eventually sets
him, against his will, onto the path to roam the territory of the new
state and the material traces of its ancient past. The itinerary, which
takes up a good part of the book, doubles as a foil for the paradoxical
emotions of its observer (rich with memory, or derelict, as was the
case with Athens) and as an educational survey for the good of the
reader. It is the education of the reader, and the role of the writer,
after all, on which Greece’s competitiveness in relation to Europe
depends. Outside Athens, and the force-Weld of Koralia’s presence,
and in a territory that is more compatible with the tenets of admir-
ation for unconWned Greek nature, Leandros engages in repeated
praise of the country life, once more far from society, that is pre-
sented as the home of freedom and innocence: ‘O innocent freedom
of farmers! . . . Freedom! O sweetest and glorious leader of men! You
live in the mountains and your snow-white gown is unblemished’
(pp. 53 f.).
Still, Leandros’s wanderings and reXections on nature, even more
so because he is essentially cheated and wheedled into them, cannot
console him. Nature, the sphere of protection for the loving couple
and the matter that separates them, is prominently characterized
through its force of enchantment (mageia), the threat of illusion
that borders imagination, in other words, not far from its power to
charm and transform. The concept which binds together the char-
acters and events of the book is that of memory (and, by its extension
in either direction, the trust in immortality), and Leandros himself
integrates that memory with Greece’s panorama as its mode of
representation and expression: ‘In Greece, of the intellectual powers
only memory Wnds nourishment, and of the senses only sight: the
view that is lifted up to the extraordinary sky and comes down on the
equally extraordinary nature’ (p. 52). As with Rangavis, for Soutsos
imagination (fantasia) is the linking mechanism that has the power
to connect and progress against the background of Greek nature. The
familiar transcendence is still in the oYng, while the stress remains
on the absence of a future vision as the plot unfolds against a
landscape whose momentum seems to grind slowly to a standstill.
The imagination of this Wrst Greek novel lays bare the idle machinery
of a saturated symbolic environment.
While Leandros’s rovings recall the trajectory of the Grand Tour-
ists, the Greek travellers, as opposed to their European counterparts,
are not just itinerant but are propelled onto a path of Xight because
they have—and quite literally, too—nowhere to settle. Leandros has
his own progenitors, further distressing that same theme of Xight,
within the work of Soutsos. The Wayfarer is one of them: a lyrical
drama written in 1827 and Wrst published in Nafplio in 1831, it is
the story of a Constantinople-born freedom Wghter and wayfarer
who has sought exterior and spiritual refuge in the community of
Mount Athos. Here he encounters Ralou, his former love whom he
had deserted in Constantinople when joining the uprising, and
whom he had, upon his return to the city, believed dead. The
Wayfarer leaves Constantinople, aimlessly roaming the world in
consequence. The drama portrays their eventual encounter; their
mutual recognition, however, is beset by failure, doubts, delusion,
and a hint of blasphemy, Wnally leading to their joint suicide.
The alien character of the Wayfarer and his sudden arrival on
Mount Athos are captured in the familiar image of the comet that
so naturally aligns the violent and visible aesthetic momentum of the
political and poetic spheres, and that Rangavis re-employs only a few
years later: ‘Where is the newly arrived, the strange wayfarer? Like a
meteor he suddenly appeared on the Mountain’ (I. 1).78 The setting
throughout is the undisturbed and sparsely inhabited spring nature
of Mount Athos, which, in personiWed form, reaches from the sky to
the underworld, pronouncing the smallness of human cultivation
from an elevated point of view both in terms of location and ances-
try: Mount Athos has seen the history of mankind (I. 2). In that,
Mount Athos also enforces the eVect of verticality that, despite all the
desperate roaming across space, seems to characterize the settings of
the 1830s. The desertion and loneliness of surrounding nature,
outside the boundaries of human society, mirror the protagonist’s
alienation from his time, from contemporary society, and from his
place of origin: ‘The present poisons me (me pharmakeuei) . . . I am a
loner in the wilderness and a stranger in foreign lands’ (I. 2). The fact
that pharmako, in modern as in ancient Greek, semantically covers
the remedial as much as the poisonous, makes the challenge of the
present yet more pressing. The alienation is formulated even more
explicitly in the Wayfarer’s Wrst words:
`ı !º Ø Ø
…ı æ Ø Łºø ;
`ı !º Ø ŒÆº Ø
78 The Wayfarer is quoted after the edition by K. Th. Dimaras (Athens, 1954),
76–111. Numbers in brackets indicate act and scene numbers.
æ Œıæø ;
¯ª ÆØ ŒÆº Ø.
" " ø ı
˚ÆØ ºº ı; ÆØ Ø
æ Æı æ ı.
(I. 2)
Do you see this river, which runs along, muddied; do you see the reed, dry
and bent? I am the reed, the river is my life, and my future is the sands of this
dry desert.
Like the Wayfarer, Ralou characterizes herself as being in a state of
simultaneous inner and outer exile: ‘Recognize me, I have lived so
many years a stranger in foreign lands, and in the desolation of my
soul I carried my pain’ (V. 3). Eremos (‘solitary’) and erēmia (‘deso-
lation’), a favourite term also in Rangavis, appear here over thirty
times in total, usually in the self-characterizations of the two prot-
agonists.79 In the case of Ralou, there is a pronounced tendency on
her part to reverse the organic analogy between exterior and interior
in her wish to become an inanimate, unfeeling object (such as a
stone). Likewise the Wayfarer: he captures his state by analogy with
destroyed nature (likening himself, for example, to a torn-oV
branch); but he also, driving that analogy over the edge of its logic,
describes the discrepancy with his environment as the failure to
correspond to nature at all:
(; Ø ŁºÆÆ ŒÆŁæ! . . . (; Ø ªºÆ ıæÆ !
` " Ø ØÆ Æ º ı Ø !ı,
!º ÆÆ Œæ!ı Æ " Æ ı æØºÆ:
ˇ ı Œ ı " ı æÆ Ø:
; Œæ Æ łı ı Ø ª Æ Œºº Ø.
(III. 2)
Oh what a mirror the sea is! . . . how azure the sky! From woods to the plains,
from hills to the mountains my eye casts deathly, extinguished glances. Not a
being in the world delights me; my soul remains alien and cold towards the
beauties of the earth.
79 The wilderness and the desert (indicated by the same word) as an ambiguous
place denoting a paradisial solitude and a spiritual threat is also a particularly strong
concept in the patristic writings of Eastern Christianity; the hermit is its suitable
inhabitant.
The speciWc location of Mount Athos itself, in its most literal
materiality, highlights the utter impossibility of realization, as op-
posed to the hope for a romanticized world (in Schlegel’s sense of
infusing reality with a new perception of it). It is not only removed
from society as the home ground of a spiritual community (in the
shape of several monastic communities), it is also, for that reason, a
place which had remained a semi-autonomous unit outside the
unfree territory of the Ottoman Empire.80 Soutsos is certainly
aware of the strictly enforced monastic regulation, which denies
women entry to the peninsula.81 To make his characters meet here
is therefore hardly an oversight on the part of Soutsos (it seems to
have exercised some of his critics), but rather a deliberate pointer to
the impossibility of a successful union, inscribed into the material
setting. We are faced with a real, yet geographically and politically
removed, environment, whose part-realistic, part-Wctive selection
identiWes the ideal of a diVerent spiritual cosmos beyond and behind
(or rather, above) the visible world; this potentially ideal location,
however, cannot be claimed by the Wayfarer and Ralou, since it is
already founded on a principle of exclusion.82
Just as the correspondence between exterior and interior states is a
correspondence of failure, so the mutual recognition of the protag-
onists can only be completed or fulWlled in the act of suicide. The
element of lethal failure is also repeated on another level of analogy,
that between the protagonist’s feelings for the Greek country and his
love for Ralou. In the present and the future now lost to the Wayfarer,
Ralou would have been his world: ‘I would have forgotten the whole
earth in your wondrous beauty, your sweet embrace would have been
my universe (kosmos)’ (II. 5). Their happy courtship was interrupted
by the War of Independence, caught in the imagery of the wind
turning to a storm, and, with good philhellenic precedent, the
80 It had retained that status after the cessation of Athos to the Ottomans in 1430,
and continued to keep it after the founding of the Greek state.
81 Giannis Lephas, —ÆÆªØ (Athens, 1991), 162 f., puzzles over
Soutsos’s problematic choice and suggests his family history as an important factor.
Soutsos’s father spent some time in exile at Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos in
1803–5, together with Patriarch Grigorios V; Athos would therefore be a place
commemorating the author’s ancestral political credentials.
82 Her presence on Athos has no disciplinary consequences for Ralou, although
her visit is surely described as something extraordinary (I. 4).
‘support’ by nature in the act of liberation translates into nature not
impeding the course of the aspiring Wghter: ‘No river bed, no ridge or
rock, did ever stall the course of a Greek’ (I. 3).
Although the success of the political campaign is implied, the
consequential paths of the two main characters, linked in the motif
of the developing national course, throw doubt on the idea of
stability. The assumption of Ralou’s death (which, it turns out, has
been an illusion), has propelled the Wayfarer into a series of roam-
ings across Europe and Arabia which have eventually brought him to
the wilderness of Mount Athos, where he does not even integrate
himself into a monastic community but remains outside its (physical)
conWnes—‘A strange monk . . . Why does he shun his fellows and hide
in the unlit spaces of caves?’ (I. 1). Liberated Greece, in fact, is only
described either by reference to the smallness and insigniWcance of
human society or by the Wayfarer’s reminiscences of the Wghting,
which are not presentable other than in the mediated form of a
dream address to his fellow Wghters, appealing to the ancient patri-
mony of Sparta and the Persian wars (IV. 4). The implications of
Ralou’s fatal delusions are her love and her seeking for a country that
likewise end in an out-of-place, if not to say unreal, location—
Athos—as close to an implied ‘other world’ as possible.
Not only, then, is the dichotomy between the material world and a
spiritual otherworld constantly articulated, but the main character is
fashioned as a builder of new worlds himself, a task and a personal
quality which appears a distinction as much as a threat to the
Wayfarer and the poet alike. When the monk Paisios compares
the Wayfarer to the dying Byron, whom he himself once attended,
the parallel to the poet of the new state is deliberate: ‘Your large
forehead encloses a world of ideas; your Werce and melancholic
character reminds me of Byron who, when Xeeing the Almighty’s
gaze, opened before me the Hades of his soul’ (I. 3).
This not only ranks the Wayfarer and his creator with the literary
and political authority of the poet, but also hints, through the Greek
confessor, at a newly appropriated and privileged access to interpret
Byron the mortal Wgure. The Wayfarer’s reply remains within the
same semantic Weld of artistic production: like a mis-tuned lyre, he is
unable to articulate his mind: ‘As when the strings of a lyre loosen
and the instrument does not produce a tuneful voice, but pours out
the wailing and howling of unordered sound, so all strength of my
mind has gone and none of my thoughts has order or rhythm’ (I. 3).
The Wgure of Byron, in fact, authorizes the analogy between political
and poetic activity. Military energy and creative imagination justify
each other, as we can see plainly in the introductory remarks by
Koromilas, in the 1864 edition of the work: ‘Whom does the Way-
farer present in the play? A soldier of the Greek Struggle, like Byron,
and like Byron melancholy and full of imagination; thus the grand
drama of Greece is touched upon and at the same time it excuses the
wealth of images in the expression of the Wayfarer.’83
What distinguishes the world-making of the Wayfarer from that of
Byron, be it Byron the poet, the Wghter, or the literary Wgure, is its
added religious element. Soutsos himself, in a dedicatory letter to
Stourdza that accompanies the Wrst edition, calls his poem ‘a product
of a new and Christian poetry’.84 The ‘other world’ suggested as a
solution, so to speak, is close to the other world of Christian meta-
physics, and Paisios’s Augustinian ‘two-worlds’ speech in Act V, scene
3 is its climactic vision. A quasi-political vision for the Wayfarer, as
he lives in 1827, is thus not simply reinforced by a religious parallel;
on the contrary, a deferral to the spiritual beyond is envisaged as the
only possible result. The invisible world is the real patris, the real
homeland. Koromilas further claims that the Christian aspect distin-
guishes the poem from the Byronic model. However, Soutsos’s spir-
itualized other world is as much tied up in a Romantic aesthetic and
imagery as is the Byronic one. Not even a place as close to the
spiritual other world as Mount Athos is any longer a ‘heaven on
earth’ or a place of easy transition. Instead, it is a place of confused
boundaries.
Beaton has concluded about these Wrst works of Greek Romanti-
cism that ‘in [The Wayfarer and Dimos and Eleni] a recognizably
imported confection is solidly anchored to the Greek world’.85 Quite
apart from the question of what the economic model of importation
83 ‘ˇ Ø ø æ ÆØ ÆæÆÆØ ˇØ æ: æÆª ı ¯ººØŒ
Æª ø ´ æø ºÆª ºØŒ ŒÆØ ºæ ÆÆÆ: ø Łª ÆØ ªÆ
æ Æ ¯ºº ŒÆØ Æ ıª øæ ÆØ ºæ ØŒ ø Œ æÆØ ı ˇØ æı.’
Andreas Koromilas, preface to his edition of The Wayfarer (1864), 9.
84 Panagiotis Soutsos, —Ø Ø (Nafplio, 1831), 1.
85 Beaton, Introduction, 41.
does for a conception of literary crossings, it is certainly true that the
setting and characters are deliberately signposted as belonging to the
contemporary Greek world. The very solidity of this Greek world,
though, is constantly put to the test, and usually found wanting, if
one considers the choice of location and use of nature imagery to
reXect characters and events.
The Wrst young generation of and in the Greek state develops a
proWle for their literary characters as much as for themselves against
the mobile backdrop of political and geographical realities. The
sketches of their Wctional heroes double as exercises in political and
national autobiographies, which need to be written into existence.
Their professional lives are very much taken up with professing and
cultivating a certain function within their new, national environ-
ment, where not only do they have to choose, but where they have
to establish the nature of their choices in the Wrst place. For those
writers who literally had to move into new territory and who saw
their territory come into focus through the images of Greece already
available and necessary to hold it in place, the building of Greece, its
realization as a material and an aesthetic and representational under-
taking, is beset with the same diYculties which the Philhellenes of
neighbouring Europe encountered.
Twenty-Wve years of poetry- and state-making on, and a stone’s
throw away from the deposition of the Bavarian king in 1862, Greek
literature had kept the basic stock of imagery recruited partly from
European literary models (mainly French and English literature,
especially Byron) and partly from Greek literature, especially the
folk song and folk tale tradition. What had changed was the lan-
guage, moving from spoken Greek, with a ‘folk simplicity’, to a
puriWed, more constructed Greek following strict rules and patterns.
Panagiotis Soutsos went on to become the writer of Christian dramas
and a tract on a new poetics in favour of a puriWed language, and had
at the time of his death rewritten The Wayfarer Wve times, with a
growing tendency towards a formal and archaizing style. By the
1860s Romanticism had earned itself a bad name. Rangavis, who in
his early poetry had experimented with models from the folk-song
tradition, enriched with and shaped according to Romantic aesthetic
elements, claimed in 1860, as the chairman of a regular poetry
contest held by the University of Athens, that ‘Byronism’, with its
destructive poet-warrior heroes, had been detrimental to the shap-
ing and the uniWcation of a new society and ought to be replaced
once more by the function of poetry as a link to morality and
ethics.86 He comments on the evaluation of one of the poems
submitted:
[T]herefore civilized societies have a need not only of material, but also of
spiritual nourishment, and they improve morally when they taste the noble
delights of the beautiful and the sublime. . . . Maybe we would not have spent
so much time relating the anguished adventures in this poem, if we did not
think it good to remark that in time most of the heroes of our poets, having
fought for better or worse for their homeland, Wnd their lover, who has
arrived in male disguise to Wght along with them, then they become monks,
then they confess, next they discover that they are the brothers of their
lovers, then that they are the sons of their confessors, and then they die. They
all have a related physiognomy, they all seem to have been born under the
same star, a star, however, whose rays dissolve the atmosphere surrounding
it of cold rhetoric and improbabilities. . . . And apropos of passions, let us
remind ourselves that amongst our young poets there is a great use, and
over-use, of the passions, a sentimental inheritance of the Wayfarer, that
stepson of Byron.87
86 The poetry contest, called Ralleios Diagonismos after its founder, was Wrst
established by the University of Athens in 1851 and continued until 1861. During
its eleven years, the literary forum it sought to provide became a small yet prominent
battleground of linguistic debate and a foundation for later critical works; see
Panagiotis Moullas, Les Concours poétiques de l’Université d’ Athènes (1851–1877)
(Athens, 1989).
87 % ˇ ø ŒÆØ ÆØ ıª Ø ÆØ ŒØøÆØ ıØ ÆªŒ ı ıºØŒ æ ;
Æºº ŒÆØ ØÆØŒ; ŒÆØ ŁØŒ ! ºØ ÆØ ª ı ÆØ ø ıª ÆºÆ ø
ŒÆº ŒÆØ ı ıłº : . . . ø ŁÆ Ø æ! Ø Ø æØ ø
Æªøø æ Ø ı Ø Æ ı; Æ ŒÆº Æ
ÆæÆæø Ø æ ı Ø º Ø ø Ø æø ; Æ ŒÆ
ºº º Ø ıæ Ææ; ÆØ æø ø;
æ ı ÆæØŒ ı Æ Æ ı º " Æı; ØÆ ªÆØ
Æ ; ØÆ ºª ÆØ; ØÆ ÆÆªøæÆØ Æ º ø æø ø ø
ŒÆØ ıØ ø ºªØ ø; ŒÆØ ØÆ ÆŁŒıØ: " ˇºØ ıØ ıªª ØŒ
ØÆ ıØªø Æ; ºØ ÆÆØ ı Æı ª Ł ÆæÆ; ÆæÆ ø ı
ÆØ ÆŒ ØÆº ıØ æØ!ººıÆ Æı Æ ÆæÆ łı æºªØ ŒÆØ
ÆØŁÆø: . . . ˚ÆØ Ø æ ÆŁ º ª; Æ Łı ø Ø Ææ Ø
Ø ØÆ ª ª ÆØ æØ ŒÆØ ŒÆ æØ ø ÆŁ ŒÆØ ø
ı æ; ÆØŁ ÆØŒ Œºæ Æ; ; ı ˇØ æı, Ł ıØ ı
´ æø.’ Rangavis, ‘ˇ ØØŒ ØÆªøØ ı 1860 ı’, —ÆæÆ, 242
(1860), 26–33.
We do not know well enough what social life in the literary circles
of Nafplio was like, but it is unlikely to have aspired to the eccentri-
cities of high Romantic France, where Gérard de Nerval reputedly
took a lobster for a walk on the streets of Paris.88 Not only was Greek
Romanticism less exhibitionist; most of the Greek Romantics did not
share the fate of the Byronic hero in quite another sense: they lived to
an old age. What is more, as opposed to the ambivalent promise of
liberation and the promise of Greek materiality we Wnd in Romantic
Hellenism, the Greek writers saw themselves confronted with a place
that now was, technically, considered liberated. Still adhering to the
notion that the poet can and must form his environment and his
nation, a notion which had engendered the Romantic aesthetic and
imagery they engaged with, they had to struggle beyond a Byronic
youth to cope with its eVects and to create a new world which ought
to be steady and inhabitable. Literary history, later, has sweepingly
accused them of ending in a poetic world that came to a paralysed
standstill in a linguistic prison and that, by the late nineteenth
century, was once more not free.
When Rangavis reminisces on Brandis mentioning him only in
passing as an author of Romantic works, we should attach import-
ance not to his dissatisfaction but rather to Brandis’s inclusion of his
writing within that category. (Incidentally, one suspects that not even
the alleged slight is out of tune, since it chimes in with Rangavis’s pet
motif of possible failure and destruction of his own work.) Brandis
marks out the political urgency as an intrinsic, dynamic part of the
literature as well as its characters, and Rangavis’s characters are
often shown as involved not only in the act of necessarily political,
but also indirectly of poetic activity, thus responding to the question
of the self-deWnition and positioning of the (national) poet. The
undercurrent of professed anxiety as regards the response to his
poetic activity points to the central issue of the role and function of
the poet within an unsettled state that is faced with the challenging
task of establishing a future vision and a national tradition at the
same time. To give his characters a ground of liberated Greece to
88 The accounts by Bettina von Savigny, Briefe and Ludwig Ross, Erinnerungen und
Mitteilungen aus Griechenland (Berlin, 1863) give vivid impressions of lively and
gossipy intellectual and social circles, set on establishment, however, rather than
innovation, which was a creative and innovative act no less.
stand on, Rangavis does not simply operate with a generic and
vaguely deWned ‘Romantic imagery’; he chooses elements of a nature
and locale that are supposedly ‘authentic’, but inherently unstable.
The ‘combination and hasty averaging of features’89 that Nemoianu
singled out as a character of the ‘tamed Romanticism’ of Eastern
Europe leads not to a weakening, but to a stretching of Romantic
aspects of nature to their limit: to the point of illusion.
At the same time it is the present situation, that is, the political and
historical situation that has made a continuation of the past into a
fulWlled present (with Koralia and Leandros as a couple) impossible.
Not only has it caused both protagonists’ displacement from their
homeland and Koralia’s social reorientation. It is the world of the
new state in general that reXects the instability of social relationships.
The present situation is one of internal strife and a young society not
just in a state of Xux, but already in a process of corruption before
any stability has been achieved, and in those passages Koralia, on the
verge of dying, is also allied with Greece present. Partly, this instabil-
ity is attributed to the intrusive, undermining inXuence of European
fashions. Hope and fearfulness mark the ambivalent stance towards
the new point of reference for Greece’s acts of self-reXexivity. The
new literature, envisaged by its young authors, displays a highly
ambivalent attitude towards the models of its land, which it found
in foreign accounts. Their use of some of the philhellenic motives is
often complex, but they cannot avoid the necessary split into a Greek
antiquity and a German, French, or English modernity, which leaves
Greece in a limbo where it tries to stake a claim to both sides.
‘Belatedness’ has been suggested as a trope of Greek literature, and
of Greek literary self-conceptions in the nation state; and a strong
awareness of reaction as an operative mode is certainly one part
of the complex interchange of external and internal images that
distinguishes the case of Greece faced with the precepts of Hellen-
ism.90 What is visible in the literature of the 1830s is an aporia to
resume the thread of Hellenism such as it was available in the
Western European texts, which is altogether in line with the aporia
89 Nemoianu, Taming Romanticism, 127.
90 Jusdanis, Belated Modernity; Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Look-
ing-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987)—on the
paradoxical interdependence of external and internal image, esp. 95–122.
that is written into them. Calotychos, with reference to Leandros,
speaks of the ‘exhaustion of a particular Ideal that has structured the
Greek experience’, with Leandros’s hope that it might be overcome in
the future.91 The spatial dynamic of Romantic Hellenism, however,
makes a mapping of this future unexpectedly diYcult. The result
seems to be a shift to a vertical line of past, present, and spiritual
‘other world’, rather than any horizontal extension. The vistas and
roamings there are merely conWrm the impossibility of living in
them. Responsiveness and inXuence continue to be used as persistent
models for situating Greek Romanticism. It is ironic, then, but not
without precedent, that an unresponsiveness, reXected in Greek
nature, is the extension of Romantic Hellenism and its aesthetic
that should become most manifest in those writings of the 1830s.
Rangavis includes a sonnet in his Collected Works (1874), entitled
‘The Poet’, and subtitled ‘after Schiller’;92 in it, the god Zeus distrib-
utes from on high human fate and qualities to all mortals, while one
character, the singer, remains standing aside. In the Wnal round of
divine distribution the poet is told:
‘ Œ ’, , % øŒÆ: ÆÆÆ
ºÆ!; ŒÆØ º Œ ºº.
Ø Ø: ¯
˚ºÆ Œ" Œ ŒÆŁ ; º ŒºÆø ıÆØ Ø’.
‘The world’, [Zeus] said, ‘I gave; imagination only is left. Take it to keep, and
build another world. Cry there, as you do here, but in your crying happily
fulWl your fate.’
It seems, however, fatal suVering that has gained the upper hand in
the world built by the new Greek poets. The new world is highly
ambivalent about its revealed foundations, and there is a subtle irony
when Dimaras, in his history of Greek literature, entitles the chapter
on the Athenian Phanariots ‘To Telos enos Kosmou’—the end of a
world.
91 Calotychos, Modern Greece, 117.
92 If Rangavis refers to a speciWc poem by Schiller, it is most likely ‘Die Teilung der
Erde’ (1795), which shares the same plot. Schiller’s poem (not a sonnet) diVers
insofar as Zeus does not bestow upon the poet the gift of imagination and the
order to ‘build a new world’; rather he reprimands the poet for having escaped to
the ‘land of dreams’ instead of asking for his share; when the poet defends his absence
as having taken refuge in the god and his immaterial world, Zeus grants him access to
heaven in return.
5
Between Idyll and Abyss: The Greek Land,
as seen from the Ionian Islands
Poetry, in friendship, binds all minds that love her with insol-
uble bonds. . . . In this region they are all one and at peace
through a higher force of magic. Each Muse searches for and
Wnds the others, and all the rivers of poetry Xow together into
the one common sea.
(Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie)
As if to reinforce the point about the sometimes ill-Wtting contours of
signiWcant landscape emerging from materially determined territory,
the Ionian islands lie precisely on the other side of where we might
expect them: as remote from Ionia (i.e. the Levantine coast) as is
possible. Geographically speaking, the Ionian, or Heptanesian, islands
lie oV the West of the Greek mainland, halfway to Italy, towards which
they were strongly oriented at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Since the Wfteenth century the islands had by and large continued to
stay outside the Ottoman Empire, mainly so under Venetian rule. The
language of culture, commerce, and education, predominantly used by
the upper and middle classes, continued to be Italian, reXecting the
close contact with Italy in those Welds (for many of the local elite it was
the unquestioned choice to attend Italian universities). In 1797 the
islands were ceded to Napoleonic France, although only a year later
they came back under Ottoman and Russian suzerainty, a moving back
and forth which was to continue for the next two decades until the Wnal
establishment of a Septinsular Republic or ‘United States of the Ionian
Islands’ under a British protectorate in 1815. It was only in 1864 that
the Ionian Islands were eventually ceded to the state of Greece to
192 Between Idyll and Abyss
become part of its national territory. To categorize Heptanesian litera-
ture in terms of its geographical location and therefore cultural context,
as has been the case in Greece, is therefore not unreasonable. After the
Venetians ceded Crete to the Ottoman Empire in 1669, the Ionian
Islands took in a sizeable number of refugees who brought with them
a vibrant literary and cultural tradition that, in turn, had been shaped
through interaction with the Italian presence that had lasted in Crete
since 1204. The literary culture of the Ionian islands knew, therefore,
about well-developed literary traditions in Greek that were less prom-
inent in the culture of the Greek state-in-the-making, which renders
the islands not only what we would now tend to call a hybrid culture,
but a culture whose components already had a rich history of exchange
and interaction.1 Maybe not surprisingly, the exponents of Heptanesian
literature who witnessed the War of Independence also diVer consid-
erably in style; the poetry of Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos,
both born on the island of Zakynthos, in that sense represent two
choices within the experimental climate that the political changes
inaugurated, which also brought the Greek state into being. By way of
introduction and contrast, let me begin with Kalvos, who, although less
prominent than Solomos in the Greek canon, has at the same time been
more openly praised for his representations of Greek nature.
THE CONTESTED HOME GROUND OF

THE MUSES: ANDREAS KALVOS’S ODES
Kalvos is the Ionian whose name and main work has in Greek
criticism been most closely associated with the discovery of the
Greek landscape.2 When, at the end of the nineteenth century, Kostis
Palamas rediscovered Kalvos as the poet most susceptible to the
1 On Italian culture as the dominant factor in the environment of the Ionian poets,
see Erotokritos Moraitis, ˜Ø Ø ºø : Æı Æ ŒÆØ —ØØŒ (Kerkyra,
1999); Sokratis Kapsaskis, Æ ØŒ Æıæı Ø — æØÆ ˚æŒıæÆ:
˜Ø Ø ºø —`æÆ ˚º! (Athens, 1998).
2 The small size of his literary oeuvre has not prevented an extraordinarily large
bibliography of criticism: see George Andreiomenos, ´Ø!ºØªæÆ Æ `æÆ ˚º!ı
(1818–1988) (Athens, 1993).
Between Idyll and Abyss 193
beauty of the Ionian island nature, the tone was set for a tradition of
choice appreciation: Kalvos became identiWed by a certain exclusiv-
ity, a somewhat alien but alluring literary style and a linguistic
idiosyncracy that rendered him attractively oV-canonical.3 In the
1940s the poet Odysseas Elytis identiWed Kalvos’s ‘consciousness of
the sea’—an immediate, almost mystical understanding of nature
expressed in daring, idiosyncratic poetic language—as the origin of
the detailed references to the archipelago in the Odes and as the
source of Kalvos’s (as well as of Elytis’s own) poetic inspiration.4
Like the more or less contemporaneous poets of the ‘Old Athenian
School’, Kalvos is usually discussed within the categorical parameters
of Classic and/or Romantic;5 but while his poetry acknowledges a
Romantic spirit, it draws from a rich and diverse repertoire of styles
whose imagery owes much to classical and neoclassical models,
biblical language, and the idyll. The imagery of landscape, locality,
and nature are likewise inspired by these sources. Again, if we think
of the exchange with the language of Romantic Hellenism as a
dialogue, there is a sense of reduction, of clipped speech and partial
engagement, that leads to compression and a sense of involution, a
shorthand, where stenography really means ‘writing narrowly’:
Greece, while its extent and sheer presence is the condition of
writing, is narrowed down to the point of invisibility.
Born on Zakynthos in 1792 and brought up in Italy from the age of
10, Kalvos lived from 1812 as a private secretary to the poet Ugo
Foscolo (1778–1827). Foscolo, a native of Zakynthos too, himself
enjoys a rather varied and instructive history of literary classiWcation:
Greek literary histories have claimed him as the ‘third’ Ionian poet
(besides Kalvos and Solomos), writing in Italian and deeply rooted in
3 Kostas Palamas, ‘˚º! ˘ÆŒ ŁØ’, ¯Æ, 726–9 (1889), repr. in Nasos
Vayenas (ed.), ¯ØÆªøª — ı ˚º!ı (Heraklio, 1999), 1–34.
4 Odysseas Elytis, ‘˙ ÆºŁ ıØªø Æ ŒÆØ ºıæØŒ º ı `æÆ
˚º!ı’ (1946), in Vayenas, ¯ØÆªøª, 71–119, 108; in the same volume also
Nasos Vayenas, ‘˙ ÆæÆ æ ø ı ˚º!ı’, 293–315.
5 Some classic studies are K. Th. Dimaras, ‘—ª ı ı ˚º!ı’, in
¯ººØŒ $ø ÆØ (1982), 76–115, who terms Kalvos’s stance a ‘Romantic
puritanism’; Dimitris Tziovas, ‘˝ ŒºÆØŒ Æ Ø ŒÆØ øı ØŒ Ø
( ı ˚º!ı’, in Vayenas, ¯ØÆªøª, 241–78, stresses neoclassical tendencies; for
the antinomy informing Kalvos’s work, Mario Vitti, ‘ˇ ˚º! Æ Æ Ø
ÆØ ı ŒÆØæ ı’, ibid. 197–211.
the neoclassical idiom; recent Italian criticism, on the other hand,
classiWes him as a liminal but still Italian Wgure, born on the margins
of the territory of later Italy, and posed equally precariously between
Classicism and Romanticism, although nearer to the latter.6 When
Foscolo, in 1816 and in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, sought
political exile, Kalvos accompanied him over the next four years, Wrst
to Switzerland and then to Britain. Shortly after their arrival there,
Kalvos, for reasons that are not entirely clear, severed the ties with his
mentor and eventually returned to Italy by way of Switzerland and
France. After earlier attempts at neoclassical poetry and tragedy in
Italian,7 and a Greek translation of The Psalms of David (from the
Greek of the Septuagint) in 1820, Kalvos published his Greek Odes in
two volumes of ten poems each, the Wrst in Geneva in 1824 (under
the title Lyra), the second in Paris in 1826 (Lyrika). In 1826 he visited
the Greek mainland for a short while, but eventually he settled on
Kerkyra, employed as a teacher of philosophy by the Ionian Academy
that had been established under the British. He returned to Britain in
1852, where he set up as a schoolmaster until his death in 1869; after
the publication of the Odes his literary activities apparently ceased,
with the exception of grammatical and liturgical writings, as well as
his teaching on philosophy at the Ionian Academy.8
Kalvos’s literary development reXects an interplay of values of the
Greek Enlightenment with a neo-Hellenism that promoted linguistic
archaism, a French classicism with a strong didactic tone and appeal
to virtue, and Italian neoclassical rhetoric, with its disdain for rhyme
and a tradition of politically didactic odes. In addition to his classical
schooling in Italy and the particular interest he expressed in Homer
and Pindar, it is likely that he was brought up on the literary tenets of
English sentimental poetry (particularly the works of Edward Young)
and the still-potent fashion for Ossian, partly through his longer stay
in Britain, and partly because of its general European prevalence.9
6 See e.g. Paula Ambrosino, Ugo Foscolo (Naples, 1993).
7 Kalvos’s Italian works are edited by G. Zoras, Andrea Calbo: Opere Italiane
(Rome, 1938).
8 Now edited by P. Alibrandis as `æÆ ˚º!ı ÆŁ ÆÆ #Øº Æ (Athens,
2002).
9 Dimaras, ‘—ª ı’; earlier Giorgos Seferis, ‘—æ ºª ªØÆ ØÆ
Œ ø ˇ" (1942), in ˜ŒØ , i (Athens, 1974), 56–63; on Ossian’s fashion-
ability, Gaskill, ‘Ossian in Europe’, 643–78.
Moreover, with Foscolo as a mentor, Kalvos was inXuenced by a
writer who himself was working from within the tension of Classi-
cism and Romanticism to deWne the role of the young intellectual in
a changing social and literary world. Political liberation and aesthetic
emancipation and the redeWnition of core values that came in the
wake of the decades following 1789 are issues carried over into
Kalvos’s own work. The Odes are essentially a poetry addressed to
the places and people of Greece, making political freedom condi-
tional upon virtue, clothed in a Homeric imagery and Pindaric
allusions, borrowing from Classicism, Romanticism, and the Bible,
and spoken by a post-1789 prophetic voice. Kalvos’s topographical
desire, in other words, is expressed through a repertoire of images
from diVerent traditions, while the diYculty of approach to the
homeland is mirrored in the uncertainty, or rather indeWnite char-
acter, of style and genre. A range of largely foreign approaches results
in a fragmented representation. The images of Kalvos’s islands,
accordingly, in a similar variety of styles, form a topography of
both personal and artistic development, and political aspiration
played out on a real geographical plane. Kalvos’s nature, and islands
in particular, too, cater to a variety of literary tastes and expectations,
which include the appeal to the artiWce of nature as much as the
appeal which is exerted by their sheer, rough materiality, and
the appeal to the metaphorical quality of nature imagery as much
as the real local concern. Despite Kalvos’s ostensible ‘consciousness of
the sea’, that implies, with Elytis, a natural and somewhat more
immediate foundation of his art, I suggest that Kalvos can be read
proWtably within the frame of an ‘aesthetics of distance’10 as it
characterized the appeal of the Greek islands for their philhellenic
audience, before and during the War of Independence. Kalvos, too,
uses the potential of islands to play out the distinction between
nature and art. The opening ode ‘The Lover of the Homeland’ (‘ˇ
#ØºÆæ’) addresses itself to Zakynthos as the source of Kalvos’s
life and of his poetic gift: ‘you gave me breath, and Apollo’s golden
gifts!’ The ode is interspersed with references to the poet’s life in
other climes, and it oVers Zakynthos as both a seat and an object of
10 The term is Nigel Leaske’s, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840
(Oxford, 2002), 23.
poetry, owing much of the imagery with which he pictures this past
and future homeland to the classical idyll:
˘ÆŒ Łı Æ ,
ŒÆØ Æ !ı ŒØ,
Œı ÆÆ
Æ Ł Æ `æ Ø
Ææªıæ Æ.
˚ÆØ æ Æ æÆ,
ŒÆØ Æ ª !ÆØ
æ æ Ø Ø :
Æı ºÆÆØ ÆŒ Æ
˝æ .
(st. 13–14)
The woods of Zakynthos, her shadowy mountains, were once echoing with
Artemis’ divine silver bows. Even today the shepherds venerate the trees and
the cool springs; the Nereids still wander there.11
Kalvos was undoubtedly familiar with idyll as a genre,12 but the
tradition appears in the Odes not only in classical allusions: the genre
also Wgures in the laments on Chios and on the death of Byron,
reminiscent of nature’s lament on the death of a shepherd, and in the
awareness of artiWce in general.13 Pastoral idyll, of course, has a
particularly high degree of self-referentiality, and is a genre that
traditionally allowed the possibilities of literature to be exploited.14
Kalvos’s pastoral, though, is a shorthand that signposts its pedigree
all right, but that cuts away at some of its strongest components,
leaving a bared, starkly minimalist setting without turning that
setting into an interactive stage. His Greek world has no living
populace and no microcosm of shepherds reXecting their environ-
ment: although shepherds, at least in passing mention, still populate
the Zakynthos of the Wrst ode, these poems are not pastoral in the
11 The odes are referred to by their translated title. Greek quotations are given
following the edition by Stefanos Dialismas (Athens, 1988), the numbers indicate
stanzas.
12 Apart from his classical education he had translated a selection of idylls by
Giovanni Meli (1740–1815) from the Sicilian dialect into Italian in 1814.
13 A well-rehearsed motif with classical precedent in the Greek bucolic poets,
Theocritus, Idylls 1; Bion, ‘Funeral Lament for Adonis’; Moschos, ‘Epitaph for Bion’.
14 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago, 1996).
sense of pretending to an artful normality of shepherd reality or of
the ‘simple people’. The life of delightful simplicity and a Xowering
earth are for the most part visions of the past or the future, and in the
ode ‘To Psara’, for example, such scenes of blissful and playful nature,
full of memories of its classical past, are Wrst elaborated and then
rejected as inappropriate for the present situation. Similarly, the
barren landscape of ravaged Greece is also the place where literature
has been uprooted and exiled. Poetry is implicated in the landscape it
describes and promises to re-create.
Poetry is, likewise, implicated in a dialogue with Europe, its
literary and political language, and its perceived audience. The lack
of a broad and sympathetic readership, inside or outside the bound-
aries of Greece, may be one of the reasons for Kalvos’s neglect prior to
his rediscovery by Palamas.15 And yet his Odes did not emerge out of
a vacuum; they were mainly responding to an intended readership
and sponsorship found in Swiss and French philhellenic circles (a
French glossary was attached to the 1824 edition, and the work was
translated into French the same year, while a French translation was
attached to the edition of 1826).16 Of the Ionian poets engaged with
the Greek War of Independence, Kalvos is therefore probably the one
who is most immediately attuned to the European philhellenic dis-
course.17 Athina Georganta, who places the Odes, especially the
second volume, Wrmly within the climate of philhellenic Paris and
its Romantic aYnities (and its minor poets), particularly after the
death of Byron, here identiWes also the fertile literary ground for
projecting the poet-warrior motif onto political activism in the name
of Greece.18
15 SoWa Skopetea, — ÆŁ ÆÆ ªØÆ `æÆ ˚º! (Athens, 1985), 23 f.;
on the reception of Kalvos’s work in his own time and by Palamas, Vayenas, ‘ˇ
Ø ø ŒæØØŒ : ˇ `ºÆæ ; —ÆºÆ ŒÆØ ı ˚º!ı’,
˜æ, 67–8 (1992), 50–74.
16 ‘His odes he wrote mainly for the Philhellenes and maybe for himself ’, Nikolaos
Andriotis, ‘˙ ªºÆ ı ˚º!ı’, ˝Æ ¯Æ (Christmas 1946), 157–67, 159; on
Switzerland, Nikolaos Veis, ‘˚º!ı æªÆ ŒÆØ æÆØ ¯º! Æ’, —æÆª ÆÆØ
`ŒÆ Æ `Ł, 23/2 (1959).
17 On the philhellenic sentiment of Kalvos’s mentor Foscolo and his Hellenism as
an artistic and political stance see S. Skopetea, — ÆŁ ÆÆ, 18.
18 Athina Georganta, ‘`æÆ ˚º!: ª ı Ø---º Ø ŒÆØ
Øæ ÆæÆ’, in ˇØ Ø ı ˆ: —: Æ!! (Athens, 1998), 227–76.
The appeal of exchanging the lyre for the sword, a frequent topos of
philhellenic writing, becomes no less of a guiding image in Kalvos.19
The poet speaks as a witness, on behalf of a Greece waiting to be
liberated, and there are several instances where the encounter with
Greece (in its geographical as well as its cultural sense) enables the
poetic voice to come forth in the Wrst place (as in ‘Lover of the
Homeland’ or ‘To Death’). The poet, charting the Greek land, comes
to fulWl a function equal to that of the active Wghter. Greece is the old-
established (and hence natural) seat of freedom to be regained by the
Wgure of Liberty. Freedom in turn is equated with virtue. Freedom and
virtue are linked to the Greek earth through myth, memory, and
poetry, with speciWc locality and people as points of contact.
Within this framework, it is especially islands as a seat of freedom
that are a familiar topos of the philhellenic discourse. The islands and
places addressed in the Odes, in addition, conform to the catalogue of
locations of speciWc philhellenic signiWcance. In ‘Okeanos’, the god of
the sea, personiWed in Homeric style, is appealed to by Liberty, who
has become his daughter: classical citation and neoclassical allegory are
intertwined. Hydra, Spetses, and Psara, although not names ringing
with classical allusions, are familiar from philhellenic literature and are
praised in the same ode as proud rocks that have stood free of fear. ‘To
Chios’ is a lament on the ravaged island whose destruction by the
Ottomans in 1826 did so much to reinvigorate the European interest
in the Greek cause. Parga on the coast and Souli on mainland Epirus,
names synonymous with the Christian Albanian resistance against the
Ottomans, provide the titles of two further odes. In the ode ‘To Glory’
mention is made of the Persian wars and the battle-sites at Marathon.
Samos and its surrounding isles, although not evocative of military
fortitude, are marked as the proper home ground of classical poetry,
particularly that of Anacreon and Homer. With this last case, in
addition, the chart of Kalvos’s own (standard) literary education is
superimposed on the map of Greece.
19 The prevalence of the motif would also account for the tone of Kalvos’s letter
‘Au Général Lafayette’ which introduces the second volume of the Odes: ‘Je quitte la
France avec regret; mon devoir m’appelle dans ma patrie, pour exposer un coeur de
plus au fer des Musulmans.’ Georganta, ‘˚º!’, 234 V., interprets the letter as a
concession to literary expectations rather than as true intention.
Kalvos was well read in the classical authors, and the nature simile
as a rhetorical Wgure of his choice is another element of the Homeric,
and later of the neoclassical, traditions. The simile is a Wgure of
speech which openly Xags its status as an artiWcial agent, and openly
indicates the comparison between, not the conXation of, two dis-
tinctly diVerent elements. Thus, even if the content of the nature
similes found in the Odes may be similar to some aspects of Roman-
tic lyrical nature,20 the degree of comparison is a diVerent, and more
gratingly outspoken, one. In ‘To Victory’, for example, the enemy is
likened, in an elaborate syntactic structure, to a preceding image of
reeds quickly cut down and scattered to the wind:
—ıŒ; ıŒ ø ŒÆº ØÆ
Æ Ø Æ !ºÆ
" Æ ŒØÆØ Ø ı Œ ı Æ
ø º ø Æ " æ ÆÆ,
Œ" Æ ºÆ.
(st. 9)
Thick, dense like swaying reeds we saw them moving on our Welds, the arms
of our enemies, and they all fell.
Compare to this simile the anguished poetic identity conXating the
boundaries of outer and inner world in the following lines from
Soustos’s Wayfarer, analysed above:
`ı !º Ø ŒÆº Ø
æ Œıæø ;
¯ª ÆØ ŒÆº Ø,
" " ø ı:
(I. 2)
Do you see that reed, bent and dry? I am that reed, that river is my life.
Kalvos’s engagement with the language of Romantic nature is more
reluctant in other respects as well. Images featuring prominently in his
similes are lions and eagles, animals with a Wrm place both in the
biblical and the Homeric canons, and weighing on the side of the
emblematic tradition rather than that of Romantic nature poetry,
20 Georgia Farinou, ‘Æ æ ÆØŒ Ø Æ Ø Ø ı `æÆ ˚º!ı’,
—ÆæÆ , 18 (1976), 104–15, with particular reference to similes.
while still achieving a great sense of self-referentiality as a writer of
Greece (e.g. ‘To Death’, ‘To the Muses’, and repeatedly in ‘Okeanos’).
The eagle in particular is an emblematic animal of authority, that of
Matthew, the evangelist most strongly characterized as a writer, or that
of the classical poet (e.g. Pindar, Ol. 2. 91). What is more, it opens a
perspective that stresses height and a distanced far-sightedness over a
position within the place that is, notionally, at the centre of these odes.
In the places where the strong paraenetic quality of the odes combines
with a Wrst-person voice assuming a bird’s-eye perspective to survey its
real and poetic ground, height and images of verticality are equated
with sublimity and freedom. ‘To Parga’ provides one such example, that
is interesting in more than one respect. The location already answers to
a philhellenic interest. Originally part of the ‘United States of the Ionian
Islands’, Parga, on the mainland, was in 1819 ceded by the British to Ali
Pasha of Ioannina, the Albanian Muslim pasha of Epirus, while the
subsequent exodus of the Pargiots to the nearby island of Kerkyra
quickly became part of the philhellenic repertoire.21 The ode opens
with an appeal to the lyre for a hypselon tonon, a sublime tone; man is
endowed, among other virtues, with the ‘wings of the mind’, so that,
when faced with the fall of fortune’s chariot over the precipice of life,
‘we’ (man and poet) can assume the position of the eagle soaring on
high, its cries echoed by the clouds above or by the torrents and rocks
below (st. 3–6). Not only is the view over a landscape Wrst linked here
with the metaphor of life’s abyss and then sublimated into the free
vision of the poet; in the following section Parga itself is introduced as a
site overlooking the land in motion, thus instantly elevated to a place of
sublimity and liberation:22
&Œı ÆØ ı
ÆÆ ºÆØÆ
—æªÆ ıłºŒæ
21 Foscolo himself was involved, through correspondence, in political matters

regarding Parga on Kerkyra; see Elizabeth Constantinides, ‘Language and Meaning
in Kalvos’s ‘‘Ode to Parga’’ ’, Journal of Modern Hellenism, 1 (1984), 1–14.
22 The lofty view corresponding to a free mental state is also reminiscent of
Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloı̈se (see Ch. 2 above). Kalvos, judging from his letters,
engaged with Rousseau’s writings around 1814 while still in Italy. For the intertwining
of language and imagery to stress the loftiness of poet and Pargiots alike, see
Constantinidis, ‘Language and Meaning’, 11 f.
!º Ø: ŒÆØ Æı ¢æ
ı æ º Ø.
(st. 7)
Upon the olive-groves swaying down below looks Parga seated high above;
Ares loved her especially too.
Kalvos does not stop here but develops the image of Parga to make
plain the position of Greek poetry: no verse or echo in praise of
freedom was heard across the land when servitude reigned; now is the
time for the exiles to return. The images of verticality, underlining
the free soaring of virtue, recur in the opening conceit of the ode ‘To
Samos’. Icarus’s Xight to sublime heights, driven by virtue and free-
dom, took place here, as did his fall:
` " ıłº ø ,
ŒÆØ ÆŁÆ º Ł æ.—
` ª ªØ Ø
ıæı; Ø
æØŒ .
Æ ŒæØ ºÆª
Ø ªø : ˝Æ —
Æ ÆØ ˚æÆÆØ; Œ" ˚ºı Æ
ı æ Ø Æ ºÆ
" ÆŁæØÆ Ł.
(st. 3–4)
Yet he fell down from high and died a free man.—Whereas when dying
honourless, slaughtered by a tyrant, know your grave to be terrible. Muse,
you know the Icarian sea well. Here is Patmos, the Corassian islands, and
Calymnos feeding the bees with unharvested Xowers.
In defence against tyranny, Kalvos raises the islands in return from
the free grave of the Icarian sea and marks them at the same time as
sites of poetry. In ‘The Volcanoes’ (‘Æ ˙ ÆØÆ’), the natural scene
becomes the substitute for the description of a battle scene. All that
can be heard and seen is wind and waves:
ÆŒ ø Æ
ı Æ ı æÆ
Ø Æ ŒÆæØÆ Æ Æ
ŒÆØ Ø Æ ØÆ Ø
!ØÆø ıæ Ø.
ÆŒ ø ŁºÆÆ
ı ø ªÆ Ø
Æ Æ Ø ı !æ ı
Œı Æ ıæ ıæ Ø
ª æø Ø Æ Œ .
(st. 33–4)
All I hear is the blowing wind whistling ferociously through masts, torn by
the sails. All I hear is the sea, like a big river hurtling past rocks, surrounding
the ships.
The pattern is repeated in ‘To Souli’:
`Œ ø; ÆŒ ø Ł æı!
ø Ææ :
Œı !æ Ø Ø ø,
ø Ø ı !æ ı
æ ÆØ ŁºÆÆ.
˜ ! Ø Ø ø,
Æ Æ ª Æ
Œºæ æ Ø :
æ Æ ººÆ ªıØ
Ø ÆæÆ.
(st. 21–2)
I hear, I hear the sound as of a battle beginning; thus the sea thunders when
it hurls itself against the rocks. Thus the forest roars when through the
clouds the wind whips it ferociously; the dry leaves take Xight in the air.
This is Kalvos’s version of the ‘nature in arms’ motive found in
philhellenic literature. It is also what Elytis has called Kalvos’s ‘acous-
tic imagination’;23 the stress on aural images, apart from visual ones,
is in keeping with the aesthetic preferences of Romantic writing; yet
this is not so much metaphorical speaking, envisaging a correspond-
ing nature in arms, as it is a choice of metonymy: items of nature
serve as substitutes for a larger scene of battle, just as much as the
roll-call of places opens the question whether there is a unity behind
these excerpts at all. The metonymic selection may, like the emperor’s
new clothes, be in fact the total of what of Greece is representable,
and the synaesthetic combination of sense perception may likewise
23 Elytis, ‘`ºŁ ıØªø Æ’, 99.

betray a disturbing absence, or ab-sense, of vision, applying Caloty-
chos’s terminology to Greek writing itself.
Within Kalvos’s cosmos of partial perception, the focus on wind
imagery, in particular, may well relate to its centrality in other
Romantic (especially British) poetry too, where the breeze is the
element that mediates between the external world and the spiritual
world of the poet; as ‘inspiration’ it is the link between the physical
and the metaphysical, the ‘correspondent breeze’.24 As an aspect of
the physical world that is inseparable from the projection of poetic
identity, the references to air and wind are particularly numerous in
the Odes.25 Yet despite its steady blowing, the scene reviewed in most
odes has a static and emblematic quality. Kalvos’s nature does not
follow the dynamic of the Romantic symbol. Despite all their Ro-
mantic borrowings, the Odes never lose a feeling of daring, but still
allegorical composition. The partial and complex organicism of
allegorical personiWcation, however, is not the same as the generative
nature–nation equation; for all the particular and all the direct
naming of Greek places that structures Kalvos’s poetry, there is a
strong sense of the emblematic to suggest that, beyond the enabling
frame that holds and creates the emblem, there really ‘is no there
there’, to quote Gertrude Stein.
Kalvos’s imagery is not easily subsumed under the Romantic
challenge of representation. Dimaras, arguing for the inXuences of
a European pre-Romanticism on Kalvos, has presented a compre-
hensive count of Romantic keywords;26 yet, as Skopetea points out in
a study on the ‘centripetal’ poetic voice of Kalvos as constantly
‘Xeeing’ or witnessing scenes of Xight and retreat, not every night is
a Romantic night and not every roaring lion and foaming river is an
instance of inimical nature.27 The image of nature and landscape of
the Odes is not one to be ambivalent in itself. It is not the challenge of
24 M. H. Abrams, ‘The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor’, in id.,

English Romantic Poets, 37–54.
25 Athina Georganta, ‘˙ æ ÆØŒ Æºł ; ø æ ÆØŒ
ŒÆØ Ø ( ı `æÆ ˚º!ı’, in M. Stephanopoulou (ed.), ˇ $ ÆØ
¯ººÆ: ¯Ø ØŒ ı Ø (Athens, 2001), 69–85.
26 Dimaras, ‘—ª ı’, 106 f.
27 SoWa Skopetea, ‘ˇ ˚º! Æ $ ÆØŒ æ’, — æºı, 34/5
(1993), 138–44.
appropriate representation as symptomatic of poetic self-deWnition
mirrored in nature. Here the confusion and indeterminacy of per-
ception that we saw in Rangavis is not experienced by the speaker,
but instead wished upon the enemy:
Æ ÆæÆª
ø Łæ Ææ ı
Æ º ! æ
ªªÆÆ; ŒÆØ Æ Æ ÆØ
Æ Æ ÆæÆ.
(‘To Souli’, st. 10)
May the confused mind of the enemies of my country fabricate horrible
giants and imagine knives all around.
Neither do we Wnd the dream reality associated with that form of
Romantic ambivalence. The visions of Kalvos’s Odes come and go
with clearly marked transitions. The opening sequence of the ode
‘The Spectre’, for example, indicates the kind of Romantic perceptual
confusion that we encountered in Rangavis and will again meet in
Solomos:
Æ ı Œ ÆØ:
ª ı Æ æØÆ ı
ªæ Ø: ÆŁ ºø æ ø
ø Æ Æ æÆ
!ı ; Ø ºÆªªØ.
(st. 1)
My spirit is confused; the earth beneath my feet moves; involuntarily I run as
if from a mountain top into a valley.
Yet the scene is framed by the end of the preceding ode ‘The Prayers’:
‘No passion can blind me; I strike the lyre and stand erect,’ while by
the end of ‘The Spectre’ the apparition has disappeared like a dream,
replaced by the freshness of air reviving body and soul; the main
horriWc vision of the interlude thus stands between the claim to clear-
sighted steadfastness of the poetic ‘I’ in ‘The Prayers’ and his reassur-
ing look upon the real Greece still Wghting in ‘The Spectre’:
‘O Greece! . . . I see you still alive and Wghting, and I take new spirit’
(st. 18). The spectre of disunity, which hovers over the visionary
scene, is more reminiscent of Virgil’s black-feathered fama and the
apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament than of the Romantic night-
mare, where the border between dream and reality is blurred.28 The
visions of Greece and Greeks caught in inWnite slaughter are signiW-
cant, yet they are emphatically not suggested as an alternative reality
from which the poetic ‘I’ has diYculty in disentangling himself.
Far from moving towards the spectre of empty exhortatory verse,29
Kalvos fully integrates his awareness of the workings of poetry into
his thematic programme. The penultimate ode, ‘To Victory’, opens
with a concession to the artiWce of the imagination; man always
envisions victory as a person:
ˇ; ı ı ÆÆÆ
ºª ø Ł
" Æ æø !º Ø
ÆæŁ % ÆæÆ,
ıæØ æª.
(st. 1)
You, whom the Wery imagination of mortals sees as a winged virgin in the
air, heavenly creature.
Yet this is not the Romantic delight and agony over the discovery of
self-reXectiveness and the involvement of the imagination perme-
ating all levels of reality. It is an assured gesture towards artiWce and
poetic diction as a Wxed convention.
Like his contemporaries, Kalvos too is engaged in the struggle to
Wnd a shape for his vision of a Greek land, and there is in the Odes a
very real, material aspect to his representation of Greece. The word gē
is used most often to indicate the Greek earth, as the material world
opposed to a spiritual one (in ‘To Death’), as the ‘earth of the Gods’
in ‘Okeanos’, and as the site of virtue and freedom. The places or
28 Kalvos was well acquainted with biblical language and imagery; in 1820 he had
translated and published part of the Psalter of David. See also Giannis Dallas’s
introduction in Andreas Kalvos, ˇØ 'Æº ı ˜Æ! (Athens, 1981). The import-
ance of nature imagery, especially in the personiWcation of nature, in the Psalms and
in Kalvos would warrant a detailed study. By the late eighteenth century, of course,
some biblical writing, especially prophecy and the Psalms, had seen a positive re-
evaluation as lyrical poetry.
29 Philip Sherrard, ‘Andreas Kalvos and the Eighteenth-Century Ethos’, Byzantine
and Modern Greek Studies, 1 (1975), 175–206, thinks there is a lapse into the empty
phrase overriding ‘real’ poetic-Romantic sentiment towards the end of the Odes.
topoi chosen are described in their precise environment, yet they also
relate to a philhellenic literary discourse. They are concrete images set
in a carefully crafted frame. Undoubtedly, Kalvos is concerned with
the present political situation and its immediate eVect on a geo-
graphical territory, but his choice of images and the line of his poetry
are shaped by literary expectations of several kinds. It is therefore
futile to try and press him into either category of Classic or Roman-
tic; instead, each reading has to examine anew the balance and the
eVect produced by his considerable repertoire of literary styles,
according to the questions posed by interpretation. As far as the
representation of locality and landscape and the use of nature im-
agery are concerned, Kalvos diVers from the young writers of the
Athenian circle. Theirs is a struggle with the logic of the objective
correlative and with the structure of analogy, both that between
nature and observer and that between Greek writing and European
writing. In Kalvos’s case, by contrast, we have a diVerent tendency,
which tallies with privileging neoclassical forms and Wgures that are
rewritten into Romantic discourse. Tziovas has claimed that Kalvos’s
imagery is largely metonymic rather than metaphoric,30 thus locating
him within a neoclassicist aesthetic more than a Romantic one,
conforming more to a harmonious parallel between the physical
world and the human being—even though the formality of neoclas-
sical Wgures of speech may leave as much of a void at the centre of
representing Greece as the tension of Romantic analogy does. Over-
all, though, the Odes oVer evidence allowing for neoclassical and
Romantic readings alike. Kalvos’s use of landscape and location may
be one of appropriateness rather than of approximation, the latter in
the sense of striving to Wnd a symbol or image to represent ideas, a
striving that can never be entirely achieved. The high degree of
aesthetic consciousness, though, that the Romantics problematized
in nature imagery, appears in Kalvos as an awareness of artiWce and
aesthetic values, which manifests itself in the corresponding artiWce
of nature imagery. That imagery, in turn, is occasioned by
the real locations oVered by the Greek homeland. Instead of a
material symbol, the Greek land, as a topos of freedom, may be
a material metonymy—yet be no less signiWcant for that.
30 Tziovas, ‘˝ ŒºÆØŒ Æ Ø’, 258 V.

T H E TO P O S O F F R E E DO M : I D E A L I S M ,
RO MANTIC LANDSCAPE, AND THE
P OE TRY O F D I O NYS I O S S O LO M O S
In contrast to the diYcult and intermittent reception of Kalvos,

Dionysios Solomos is and was regarded as one of the founding
poets of the Greek state, with the lasting and undoubtedly cumber-
some stature of a ‘national poet’, even though the course of true
national poethood did not run smooth in his case either.31 Certain
features of his work, however, for example the treatment of land-
scape, suggest both that this is a problematic role for him, and that he
shares diYculties with the European Romantic movement in general,
and its German variety in particular. Solomos is known to have had
access to some of the theoretical and poetic works of Idealism and
Early Romanticism, among them those of Schiller and Schelling,
whose philosophical dilemmas Wnd an equivalent in Solomos’s rep-
resentations of a Greek landscape and the subsequent question of its
contribution to a national identity. The result is a stuttering logic of
representing Greek space as signiWcant nature, national or individual.
As with Kalvos, we see a breaking down of the imagined Greek land
into its components and into modes of perception, exposing its
parts, and intensifying the logic of the Romantic symbol.
Like Kalvos, Solomos was born on the Ionian Island of Zakynthos in
1798, a mere year after the Ionian islands had been ceded to France.32
(The overwhelming lack of evidence, incidentally, that the two poets
ever met continues to exercise Greek writers and critics.) The son of a
Zakynthian aristocrat and a Greek-speaking local servant (Solomos’s
father married her on his deathbed, thus bestowing legitimacy and the
title of count on his son), he was sent to Italy in 1808, to be educated at
Cremona and Pavia. In 1818, with a half-hearted law degree and
whole-hearted poetic aspirations, he returned to Zakynthos, by then
31 e.g. Dimaras, æÆ, 27 V.; Beaton, Introduction, 34.

32 On Solomos’s life and work see, in English, Peter Mackridge, Dionysios Solomos
(Bristol, 1989); Theodore Stavrou, ‘Dionysios Solomos: The Making of a National
Poet’, in Louis Coutelle et al. (eds.), A Greek Diptych: Dionysios Solomos and Alexan-
dros Papadiamantis (Minnesota, 1986), 3–37.
a British protectorate. Thus he too witnessed the struggle for Greek
independence from a distance—by all accounts, more cultural than
geographical. The publication of Solomos’s Wrst volume, Rime impro-
vizzate, in 1822, a collection of sonnets and largely religious poetry
composed in Italian, coincides—at least as far as the biographers are
concerned—with his encounter with the Greek historian and polit-
ician Spyridon Trikoupis. Whatever the exact nature and degree of this
key scene may have been, Solomos after 1822 shifted his attention to
the Greek language, literally his mother tongue, as a poetic medium
and a political issue alike.33 The debate over Dante, especially his
advocacy of the vernacular, that was gaining momentum in Italy
prepared the ground for Solomos’s prose Dialogue (1824), which—
against the backdrop of the roaring cannons over at Missolonghi in the
distance—treats the Greek-language question in the context of polit-
ical freedom, leading the narrator to side emphatically with the demo-
ticist position. Those sounds from the mainland remain the backdrop
for most of his early poetry in Greek (this particular image of geo-
graphical distance and proximity alike is still enjoying a healthy after-
life in critical accounts of Solomos); among them the ‘Hymn to
Freedom’ (1823), ‘On the Death of Lord Byron’ (1826), and early
satires, most famously ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’ (begun in 1826),
which are concerned, at least as a foil in the last case, with political
freedom and the call for political unity.
In 1828 Solomos moved to Kerkyra. However one wants to con-
struct the development of his writing, what seems certain is that
metaphysical abstraction in his texts becomes more pronounced. The
triptych of poems ‘The Free Besieged’ (‘ˇØ ¯º Ł æØ —ºØæŒØ Ø’),
in three consecutive drafts dating from 1823 to 1847, ‘The Cretan’
(1844), and ‘The Shark’ (1847–9) employ diVerent poetic forms,
but share the theme of spirituality and transcendence, albeit in very
diVerent manifestations: as moral freedom in ‘The Free Besieged’, the
contact with divine love in ‘The Cretan’, and (lethal) self-knowledge
in the face of natural beauty in ‘The Shark’. After 1849, however, and
until his death in 1857, Solomos, who had continued to use Italian in
33 For a view which attempts to assess Solomos’s bilingualism not as a linear heroic
struggle away from Italian towards his ‘native’ Greek, but instead as a symbiotic yet
precarious balance of the two, see Peter Mackridge, ‘Dionisio Salamon/Dionysios
Solomos: Poetry as a Dialogue Between Languages’, Dialogos, 1 (1994), 59–76.
parts of his manuscript drafts and comments, returned to the exclu-
sive use of Italian for his last shorter poems.34
READINGS OF SOLO MOS
Since the Wrst publications of Solomos’s poems, and certainly since

the Wrst edition of his works in 1859, two years after his death, by his
disciple Iakovos Polylas, any reading of the literary and philosophical
inXuences on Solomos has been shaped by a reading of his artistic
personality. Polylas’s edition not only established authoritative ver-
sions of the poems from the unpublished and overwhelmingly frag-
mentary manuscripts, such as there were;35 it was also prefaced with
a long biographical account—the ‘Prolegomena’—which has
remained a foundation-stone for all further readings, both to build
upon and to stumble over. Polylas’s ‘Prolegomena’ oVers essentially
the structure of artistic education and acculturation familiar from
the Künstlerroman.36 He sketches the development of the young
poet’s sensibility and imagination, Wrst in his Italian education,
while in their overall structure the ‘Prolegomena’ are teleologically
directed towards Solomos’s readings of German thought and litera-
ture. The study and assimilation of German philosophy in his mature
period (whose beginning Polylas marks by Solomos’s move to Ker-
kyra in 1828) is presented as the high point of his moral and
intellectual education, complementing the ‘essential Greekness’ of
his character and art, which would have crumbled under the impact
34 Solomos’s manuscript drafts and comments, edited as `ı ªæÆ Æ ‚æªÆ (fur-
ther shortened, AE), 2 vols., ed. Linos Politis (Thessaloniki, 1964), are literally a
mosaic of drafts, fragments, and translations in Italian, Greek, and French. For the
diYculties of the transcriptions by Polylas and Politis see Peter Mackridge, ‘ˇØ
Æ æ Ø ø ‘‘¯º Ł æø —ºØæŒØ ø’’: Æ Æ Øæ ªæÆ Æ Ø
Œ Ø’, ¯ººØŒ, 51 (2001), 109–39.
35 The fragmentation of Solomos has incurred a large range of interpretation,
from biographical circumstance, to deliberate Romantic programme, to, most re-
cently, Vangelis Calotychos’s analysis of Solomos as a complex ‘oral’, performative
poet; a concise summary of the positions in Calotychos, Modern Greece, 73–87.
36 Vassilis Lambropoulos, ‘The Fictions of Criticism: The Prolegomena of Iakovos
Polylas as Künstlerroman’, in Literature as National Institution (Princeton, 1988), 66–84.
and ‘moodiness’ of German thought had it been encountered at any
stage before.37
Polylas concentrates speciWcally on the inXuence of Schiller’s aes-
thetics and ethics on Solomos, and, what is more, he uses a Schillerian
model to describe and evaluate Solomos’s environment and his re-
sponse to it. Schiller is seen to be attributing to man an essential,
limitless freedom, manifesting itself in human will as it conquers or
transcends nature (in the sense of natural determination). Polylas
reads Solomos’s conscious choice to return to the Ionian islands
after his education in Italy as just such an act of moral will: ‘The
same gratitude . . . he now felt as a sacred duty towards the land that
had instilled in him his great love for the Beautiful and the True . . . a
debt he was later to repay not with empty words but with deeds and
benefactions . . . He chose to decline a brilliant career as a poet that was
temptingly beckoning to him in Italy. And he did this of his own
will.’38 Identifying beauty and morality, Schiller is held to be calling for
an aesthetic and hence moral re-education of man, with the Wnal goal
of an aesthetic state, composed of free, that is, morally autonomous
individuals. The deWcient society, which is responsible for the present
alienation, can also provide its remedy in the form of the aesthetic.
Polylas projects this model of history onto the contemporary political
situation; moreover, he uses it to explain and justify Solomos’s refusal
to actually visit the state of Greece, when he continues an extensive
quotation from Schiller’s On Aesthetic Education, regarding the anti-
aesthetic nature of the state, as follows: ‘It was mainly due to his
awareness of all this that he had restrained himself from setting foot
on the liberated part of Greece, knowing very well that he wouldn’t
have been able to remain indiVerent to the many improper actions that
always characterize the behaviour of a newly created nation.’39 Solo-
mos’s choice of life in a Greek land is thus identiWed with an aesthetic
concern for, and representation of, Hellas as the objective correlative to
his artistic and personal inner world.
The identiWcation of Solomos as a national poet, which set in soon
after his publication, kept him especially tightly linked to the question of
37 Polylas, ‘Prolegomena’, in Solomos, ¢ÆÆ, i, ed. Linos Politis (Athens, 1948), 11 f.

38 Ibid. 13. 39 Ibid. 29.
the realization and location of the idea of freedom.40 Polylas’s account
makes Solomos relate, as far as this is possible, to a political and
geographical reality by making use of the historical aspect still quite
prominent in Schiller. The interpretation of his reading of the German
Idealist sources that is put forward here focuses on spiritual-moral and
aesthetic freedom in so far as freedom is still somehow linked to a
material reality. Solomos’s poetic activity—since the publication of his
works by Polylas, almost inevitably considered in relation to his German
readings—has usually been interpreted as coming from within a context
concerned with the re-evaluation of freedom and the redeWnition of
national space. Although the emphasis on Schiller as an important
source for Solomos is to a large extent justiWed, this concentration
results in a lop-sided account of Schiller’s thought, for one thing, and
consequently of his relevance to Solomos, for another. The tradition of
Idealist thought is not wholly compatible with this focus on ‘real’
territory, and this tension, which lies beneath the surface not only of
Schiller’s work, but also of other Idealist and Romantic writing, has
often been eased by elevating Solomos to the status of founder of a true
spiritual culture, whose work represents a second step of neo-Hellenism
after the initial political liberation.41 However, the tension remains
unresolved, especially since the poems explicitly concerned with free-
dom (such as the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, the ‘Ode on the Death of Lord
Byron’, and ‘The Free Besieged’) treat very recent historical events and
their historical locations, which were quickly adopted as quite literal
landmarks in the imagination of the Greek state.
Criticism, then as now, has been Wrmly determined by the string of
replies to the exegetic tradition beginning with Polylas, who inter-
preted Solomos’s sources in relation to the question of artistic and
Hellenic integrity and authenticity.42 The ‘German problem’, and a
40 One of the earliest examples is probably Spyridon Trikoupis’s review of the

‘Hymn to Freedom’ in the General Newspaper of Greece (21 Oct. 1825). Trikoupis not
only praises Solomos for his service to Greece in his international success, he also
links the rehabilitation of freedom—charted in poetry—to the rehabilitation of
Greek poetry as such. By following Solomos’s image of freedom as having been
buried in the bones of the ancients, he reaYrms the alignment of Solomos’s poetry
to the Greek (material) land.
41 See e.g. P. Charis, ‘ Æ ¯º ıŁ æÆ æª ı ˜Øıı ºø ’,
˝Æ ¯Æ, 104/1253 (1978), 47–54, 48.
42 On the interpretation of Solomos as a ‘national poet’, see Dimitris Tziovas, ‘The
Reception of Solomos: National Poetry and the Question of Lyricism’, Byzantine and
‘German murkiness’, which many take to epitomize the intellectual
traditions he studied,43 has since been a constant feature in that
critics have made Solomos’s ‘Germanism’ a criterion of literary and
political value. Zambelios’s attack, circulated around the same time
as Polylas’s edition, puts it bluntly: ‘I am grieved indeed that I am
bound to give the repulsive name of apostasy to the desertion of the
author of the Hymn to Germanism, foreign in substance and in
shape.’44 Whether later critics were endorsing or condemning this
turn, they shared the focus on the period after 1830, giving pride of
place to the translations of foreign, especially German, works carried
out for Solomos by the brothers Nikolaos and Ermannos Lountzis.45
To see how important the German sources were, though, they ought
to be placed within the overall context of Solomos’s studies, includ-
ing evidence for contact that preceded or transcended this important
yet limited perspective on the Kerkyra period. Juxtaposing Solomos’s
work and his German ‘sources’, as sharing and, in Solomos’s case,
Modern Greek Studies, 23 (1999), 164–94. Tziovas claims that European-Romantic

and national tendencies of interpretation maintain a balance: ‘The historical and the
aesthetic approaches to Solomos, although often opposed to each other, sustained in
eVect his image as national poet since they supported the two basic components of
this constructed image: the celebration of the national struggle and the demotic
literary and linguistic tradition on the one hand, and the Romantic belief in the
genius of the great and lonely artist on the other. It was the latter with its aesthetic,
idealistic and European dimensions which prevented the former from sliding into
ethnocentrism and ultra-patriotism’ (p. 190).
43 Giorgos Veloudis, ˜Ø Ø ºø : $ ÆØŒ ŒÆØ ØØŒ: ˇØ
ª æ ÆØŒ ª (Athens, 1989), 13.
44 Quoted by Coutelle, ‘Dionysios Solomos: Poetry and Patriotism’, in Coutelle et
al. (eds.), Diptych, 38–59, 57. In the 1890s, while debunking the Athenian Romantics,
Palamas was at the forefront of restoring Solomos as a national poet; see e.g. Venetia
Apostolidou, ˇ ˚ø —ÆºÆ ØæØŒ ººØŒ ºª Æ (Athens,
1992). Varnalis’s important Solomos Without Metaphysics (1925) approached the
problem of both the work and the idolization of Solomos (exempliWed by Aposto-
lakis, ˙ ø Æ (Athens, 1923)), by way of an openly Marxist-inXuenced
reading, diverting the focus on to the historical-material background, yet still iden-
tifying Schiller and Hegel as inXuential sources. The last pairing is probably that of
Veloudis, who sees Solomos as strongly inXuenced by German Romanticism, and
Louis Coutelle, Formation poétique de Solomos (1818–1833) (Athens, 1977), who
stresses the early formation of the poet in an Italian neoclassicist environment.
45 The brothers Lountzis, of half-Ionian and half-Danish parentage (their grand-
father was the Danish consul in Venice), had both spent time at German universities,
with a particular aYnity for Hegelian circles. See Zisimos Synodinos, ‘æºªØŒ
ØªæÆ Æ ¯æ ı ¸ ’, — æºı, 38–9 (1994), 23–38.
intensifying a dynamic of spatial signiWcance in aesthetic represen-
tation, allows us to examine the communication between German
aesthetics and the spatial dilemmas of Solomos’s representation of
Greece.
The focus on Schiller’s theoretical works in analysing Solomos’s
later writing does not do credit to the scope of his reading, which
spans a far broader period, to begin with. If we look outside the
period between the mid-1830s and the late 1840s, there is ample
evidence for Solomos’s earlier contact with German thought and
literature, ranging from the fashion of Sturm und Drang to early
Romanticism, which had already been received (and translated) in
Italy before and during the decade of his studies there.46 The twenty-
Wve now-extant manuscript notebooks of translations by Nikolaos
Lountzis almost certainly do not represent the complete corpus.47
Among the volumes are selective translations of Kant’s and Schiller’s
philosophical works.48 This is matched by a corpus of poetry from
the same period, ranging from poems by Klopstock and Bürger to a
selection of Schiller’s poems and ballads. There is an equally repre-
sentative range of Goethe’s writings, but, as with Schiller, there seems
a stronger interest in the lyrical rather than the dramatic works. In
addition, there are also excerpts from Goethe’s diaries, correspond-
ence, and, interestingly, a signiWcant number of selections from such
46 There is evidence that Solomos maintained contact with literary developments
through the Italian reception of German thought and literature. A letter to a
bookseller from Solomos’s friend Besenghi degli Ughi in 1830, for example, shows
an order, on Solomos’s behalf, of Italian translations of Schlegel and Schiller, together
with a request for a French copy of Lessing’s Laokoon; repr. in Linos Politis, ˆ æø
ºø : º ŒÆØ æŁæÆ (1938–1982) (Athens, 1985), 324 f. Stylianos
Alexiou, ‘ˆ æ ÆØŒ Øæ Ø ºø : ˙ ‘‘# ªªÆæı ’’: ØæØŒ
ı !ÆŁæ ı ‘‘˚æØŒ ’’ ’, in ºø ØŒ (Athens, 1994), 17–32, sees traces of Klop-
stock’s and Schiller’s poems as early as the ‘Hymn to Freedom’ and ‘Lambros’.
47 I follow the lists in Politis, ˆ æø ºø , 331–9 and Veloudis, $ ÆØŒ
, 43–8. Also Louis Coutelle, ‘`Ø Æ æ Ø ı ˝: ¸ ªØÆ ºø :
ˇØ ŒØŒ ˘ÆŒ Łı’, ˇ ¯æÆØ, 3 (1965), 225–48. These translations, often
excerpts of varying length and scattered over a number of Greek research institutions,
have so far not been published or researched in depth, although they certainly deserve
close attention.
48 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. I. Abschnitt: Analytik des Erhabenen, and Schiller’s
Philosophische Briefe, together with his essays ‘Über das Erhabene’ and ‘Über naive
und sentimentalische Dichtung’. Polylas mentions another three works, namely Über
die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, and the essays ‘Über den Grund des Vergnü-
gens an tragischen Gegenständen’ and ‘Über das Pathetische’.
short forms, verging on the fragmentary and collective, as the aphor-
isms, the lyrics of the West-Eastern Divan (West-Östlicher Divan), and
the Tame Invectives (Zahme Xenien). Further, there is good evidence
for readings of post-Kantian Idealism, all works characterized by
religious and aesthetic themes.49 Literary works of the early Romantic
period complement these theoretical writings, among them chieXy
Novalis’s poetry (Hymnen an die Nacht, Gedichte, Geistliche Lieder),
his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and the fragmentary novel The
Apprentices of Sais (Die Lehrlinge zu Sais), together with a great
number of his theoretical fragments. From the same period there are
excerpts from Ludwig Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbald’s Travels (Franz
Sternbalds Wanderungen) and poems by Uhland and Körner.
The collection of philosophical works also contains substantial
excerpts from Hegel’s own writings and reviews.50 To complement
Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, Solomos also had avail-
able sections from Wolfgang Menzel’s history of German literature
(Die Deutsche Literatur), especially those on Schelling, Novalis, and
German philosophy. Beyond those primary texts, a number of book
reviews are included with the translations, among them a very long
account of Fischer’s Somnambulismus, while he could Wnd further
information on German thought and literature in volumes of the
Italian periodical Biblioteca Italiana, which included regular reviews,
for example, of Schiller’s dramatic works (1828), Lessing’s Laokoon
(1833), and recent theoretical writings of Italian Romanticism.
Are there general conclusions to be drawn about Solomos’s read-
ing of German Idealism and early Romanticism? German sources
were not his only Romantic models and precedents; these are cer-
tainly not restricted to any one national inXuence only, especially if
‘inXuences’ here implies conceptual inXuences and shared tendencies
rather than speciWc textual parallels. Given the evidence of the
49 e.g. translations of Fichte’s Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten and
Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, as well as Schelling’s Vorlesungen über die Methode
des akademischen Studiums, Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zur Natur, and
System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Erster und Sechster Hauptabschnitt.
50 Of Hegel, there are excerpts from Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaf-
ten, Phenomenologie des Geistes, and Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie;
untitled reviews by Hegel of works by F. H. Jacobi, K. W. F. Solger, and J. G. Hamann,
further the DiVerenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, as
well as the introduction to his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik.
manuscript translations, Solomos would likely have appreciated
Goethe’s essay on the literary meteors and the imagery of movement,
literary tendencies, and moods transmitted ‘in the air’ (as quoted in
the Introduction), and Solomos, no matter how thoroughly he may
or may not have read the translations, took an interest in them at
least to the extent that he likely found them reminiscent of his own
concepts.51 Criticism on Solomos, keen on synthesis and reconcili-
ation itself, has tended to identify those elements as inXuential which
relate to the theme of unity. Beginning with Leibniz’s harmonious
relation of the particular and the universal, through to a Kantian
notion of consensus and moral community, we arrive at the heights
of Idealism with Schelling’s philosophy of identity and Hegel’s system
of the Absolute and One. An image of Solomos emerges that portrays
him as an artist concerned with new artistic form, searching for the
particular symbol to represent an underlying universality. The aspect
of deferral, however, inherent in the Romantic concept of symbolic
representation, as well as the question of the representation and
realization of the ideal in general, is in that scheme easily underesti-
mated. Theories of transcendence, unity and synthesis in general are
taken to be the overriding characteristic and main motif of Solomos’s
sources, sometimes without proper acknowledgement that the Ger-
man Idealists and Romantics, and Solomos after them, were fully
aware of the diYculty of such synthesis and often struggled in vain
to achieve it. In this light it is preferable to aim for an interpretation of
Solomos’s imagery, especially regarding nature and Greek locality, that
derives insight from those works corresponding in some respects to
the poetic concerns raised in Solomos’s texts; I will limit the discussion
to his poems ‘The Free Besieged’ and the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, although
‘The Cretan’ and especially ‘The Shark’ could proWtably be analysed in
the light of Idealist and Romantic concepts of nature and self too.
Those are also the poems most closely linked to claims about Solo-
mos’s standing as the poet of the Greek nation, dealing with the literal,
material landmarks of Greek national understanding.
51 Coutelle, ‘ Æ æ Ø’, concludes from his examination of the notebooks that
little use was made of most of them; the choice of material, though, with a large focus
on themes of poetics, friendship, and the link between the author and his society, may
yield new insights into the mechanism of selection by Solomos or, more likely, his
translators’ circle.
Beaton argues that ‘Solomos, like many Greek writers after him,
resists and so modiWes the abstract separation between soul and body
that he found in Schiller and the German Romantics’. In ‘The Free
Besieged’, the besieged citizens are, in a distinct echo of Schiller, ‘sub-
jected to a Wnal temptation by the beauties of nature in spring, in order
for their souls to achieve true freedom in the renunciation of all earthly
things’.52 Precedent is found, for example, in Schiller’s treatise ‘On the
Delight in Tragic Subjects’ (‘Über den Grund des Vergnügens an
tragischen Gegenständen’), where he summarizes moral free will as
the act of sublimating natural forces.53 Under natural forces Schiller
subsumes everything that is not moral, that is, not governed by the laws
of reason: desires and emotions, as much as physical nature and fate. In
other words, this is again the ambiguity and increased hermeneutic
complexity of ‘nature’ as a generative concept in that period: by
locating nature, and oneself in relation to it, by assigning nature a
place, nature is also overcome. As for ‘The Free Besieged’, to judge
from the extant fragments sketching the end of the poem, ‘there is no
‘‘other world’’ in this poem. The ideal of absolute freedom is attained
only in this world, in the decision of the defenders . . . to lay down their
lives in an act of heroic deWance.’54 The question of an ‘other world’ and
‘this world’, and, more importantly, what the character and appearance
of the ‘one world’ would be, is best addressed by looking at the way an
ideal vision is translated into images of the real, material world. Here
too, the relation between the ideal and real place is essentially predi-
cated on the relation between subject and object, and the way they
constitute reality; Romantic nature, subsequently, as both material and
spiritual reality, came to be understood as an extension of the interior
mind. As a space of the imagination, nature is shaped by it and shaping
it in turn, mediated by the autonomous act of artistic representation. In
the inWnite longing expressed in Romantic nature imagery, nature and
art move closer together to the point of being indistinguishable: Solo-
mos’s poetry partakes in this exploration of the relation between art

53 ‘Diese moralische Zweckmäßigkeit wird am lebhaftesten erkannt, wenn sie im
Widerspruch mit anderen die Oberhand behält; nur dann erweist sich die ganze Macht
des Sittengesetzes, wenn es mit allen übrigen Naturkräften im Streit gezeigt wird und
alle neben ihm ihre Gewalt über ein menschliches Herz verlieren.’ Werke, xx. 139.
and nature, between divine spirit and mundane variety, or between
freedom and death.
Schiller’s aesthetic writings, if we extend the line of interpretation
that willingly casts Solomos as a Greek Schiller, were foundational in
formulating that condition of modernity in which ‘ ‘‘nature’’ as an
aesthetic objectivation . . . always presupposes its loss or absence’;55 it
marks its diVerence from the perceiving subject. His proposal of
aesthetic education sought to combine the sensual and the rational
and to achieve an aesthetic reality, pointing the way towards an
increasing aestheticization of the way reality is perceived and repre-
sented. The aesthetic representation of concrete space in the form of
landscape corresponded to the free (moral) action overcoming nat-
ural forces. In Solomos’s ‘Free Besieged’ we Wnd the same overcom-
ing of nature as an act of emancipation. It is remarkable, however,
how much literary care and attention, in what there is of the poem, is
lavished on the point that here it is the beauty of nature that is the
truly tempting element. The section describing nature in spring as it
appears before the eyes of the besieged is entitled ‘Temptation’ and it
appears in two versions in the second and third drafts (B2, C6).56 The
opening section shows the allusions to formal elements such as
allegory (the dance of April and Eros) or the idyll, as the beauty of
nature is shaped into a work of art:
¯" ‚æøÆ æ ÆŁ `æº,
˚Ø" Ø æ ŒÆº ŒÆØ ªºıŒØ æÆ,
ŒÆØ ŒØ ı ø ŒÆØ Œº æØ ŒÆØ ı
ÆŒı ŒØºÆØØ ŒÆØ ºØŁı Ø .
Love is treading a dance with fair-haired April, and nature’s good and sweet
time has come round, and in the shade all swollen with cool and musk the
exotic and swooning song of birds.
Beautiful nature, as artiWce, is liberating only insofar as it acts as a threat
to be overcome: it diverts the Missolonghians’ attention from the
situation and its moral duty at hand. In a movement that Solomos
might well have found anticipated in Schiller, the aesthetic element
55 Schneider, ‘Nature’, 94.

56 For Solomos’s published works I rely on the edition by Politis (Athens, 1961),
vol. i. For ‘The Free Besieged’ I use the standard short reference to the fragment or
section numbers of the three drafts A, B, and C, with line-references added.
eVects the sublimation that is necessary to overcome the temptation.
The sublimation of the real to the ideal is of special political signiWcance
if we remember Schiller’s explicit references to actual historical situ-
ations. Aesthetic education is necessary since the cultured contempor-
ary state does not allow free aesthetic activity. Hence the aesthetic state
assumes a utopian quality, with a regulative function. Schiller does not
necessarily see this state as a realizable goal, but rather as an extrapo-
lation into the realm of the ideal. This does not make his an apolitical
vision. Instead, it displaces the actual, phenomenal, political reality in
favour of an ideal vision of the aesthetic. In this light, the strong
Schillerian thrust of a reading of Solomos’s life and works ever since
Polylas underestimates the structurally and functionally necessary dis-
tance between the political reality and the ideal vision. Polylas’s inter-
pretation gives the impression of a poet who is hindered only by an
unappreciative and anti-aesthetic society, but nevertheless devotes his
work to the presentation of national themes, yet it overlooks the rift
between the ‘real’ extension of the nation and the ideal vision that is of
necessity programmatic in Schiller’s theory. In ‘Über das Pathetische’,
Schiller repeats the contention that it is the ideal aesthetic vision which
overrides and consumes, as form, the content of real places and events:
Even concerning historical events and real people, it is not their existence but
their potential, expressed through their existence, that is truly poetic . . . We
believed for a long time that we would do our national literature a service if we
recommended national subjects for its themes . . . only a barbaric taste needs
the sting of private interest to be drawn towards beauty. . . Poetry . . . should
aim for the heart because it comes from the heart, and it should not aim for
the citizen in man, but for man in the citizen.57
Freedom is located in the aesthetic, that is, in the ideal vision of the
real. The fact that Schiller too seems to operate with two concepts of
freedom gives extra support to this tendency. First, there is the
57 ‘Selbst an wirklichen Begebenheiten historischer Personen ist nicht die Existenz,

sondern das durch die Existenz kund gewordene Vermögen das Poetische . . . Man hat
lange geglaubt, der Dichtkunst unsers Vaterlands einen Dienst zu erweisen, wenn
man den Dichtern Nationalgegenstände zur Bearbeitung empfahl . . . Nur ein barbar-
ischer Geschmack braucht den Stachel des Privatinteresse, um zu der Schönheit
hingelockt zu werden . . . Die Poesie . . . soll das Herz treVen, weil sie aus dem Herzen
Xoß, und nicht auf den Staatsbürger in dem Menschen, sondern auf den Menschen
im Staatsbürger zielen.’ Werke, xx. 218 f.
concept of freedom as the capacity for moral self-determination;
secondly, the freedom of balance between sensuousness and intellect.
Schiller seems to elevate the latter, the freedom inherent in aesthetic
harmony, to the more inXuential position.58 With the Wrst concept—
which has to do with morality—being incorporated into the second,
the ideal aesthetic vision, subsuming reality, becomes the true and,
quite literally, representative place of freedom.
Solomos attempts to capture the idea of freedom in the real site of
Missolonghi as its topos of freedom. Missolonghi is the material
symbol, Novalis’s Ding to represent the Unbedingte, the thing found
instead of the unconditional absolute. The artistic representation of
the place of Missolonghi is governed by concerns parallel to those of
Romantic aesthetics; Romantic Seelenlandschaften, the correspond-
ing exterior and interior worlds, ranged from expansion and Entgren-
zung, that is, the disappearance of boundaries, to the reduction and
compression of space, as outlined in Chapter 1 above. The dissol-
ution of the boundaries between the phenomenal and the transcend-
ent opened up the landscape; just as the positing of an absolute which
can never be quite reached sets in motion an almost magnetic
sequence of movements, just as the mental horizon of the conscious
‘I’ expands, this dynamic of constant deferral is repeated in a land-
scape which stresses longing and movement. Likewise, it is not only
the boundary of the horizon which gets pushed backwards; the limits
transcended in the experience of space and its narrative or lyrical
materialization are not only located in the horizontal view, but also
between the natural and the supernatural world: nature is ultimately
a dream, or else the dream, with its language of images, is the true
reality.59 Dreams, apparitions, and the mystiWcation of the natural
had acquired a new proWle and new purchase in Romantic literature,
and they are all of them elements which will reappear with frequency
in Solomos’s work.
58 For textual references regarding the diVerent concepts of freedom see Leslie
Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge, 1991), 163.
59 G. H. Schubert, Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg, 1814), 33, calls nature an
‘embodied dreamworld’; Schubert’s concept of dream reality was inXuential, espe-
cially on painters and theorists (C. D. Friedrich, C. G. Carus); see also Ernst Busch,
‘Die Stellung Gotthilf Heinrich Schuberts in der deutschen Naturmystik und in der
Romantik’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 20 (1942), 305–39.
For the German Romantics, the eye of the beholder experiences
space as landscape; by contrast with Schiller, however, their guiding
principle was not to overcome nature’s unordered state in the act of
aesthetic vision, but instead to reincorporate it into a holistic view,
since nature eternally points beyond itself. Schelling, for example,
developed a highly inXuential philosophy of nature: in nature we can
trace the return towards the initial unity with spirit, nature is its
space and art shares in the quest as the attempt at interpreting
nature.60 Accordingly, a new theory of mimesis and aesthetic repre-
sentation emerges, which draws attention to the semantic polyva-
lence inherent in the experienced space. Schelling’s anti-naturalistic
concept of mimesis, which is probably more accurately called a
super-naturalistic concept, is perhaps most succinctly expressed in
the following excerpt from his System of Transcendental Idealism,
section 6, a passage that is included in Lountzis’s translations:
The view of nature, which the philosopher achieves by way of art, is for art
the original and natural view. What we call nature is a poem encoded in a
secret, wondrous script. The riddle could unveil itself were we to recognize
in it the odyssey of the mind, which, marvellously deceived, searches its self
while turning from it. Through this world of the senses, as through words,
meaning is glimpsed, and through a half-transparent fog we glimpse the
world of the imagination (das Land der Phantasie) which we so long for.61
With the institution of a land of fantasy or imagination behind the
real, sensible world, the Romantic search for unity cannot disguise
the fact that it rests on the old dualism of the ideal and the real as
opposites. Despite the opening of the phenomenal and immanent
towards the transcendental, the experience of space becomes again
Wrmly aYxed to the space or land behind the phenomenal—just as in
60 Schelling’s Naturmystik and that of others is informed by Neoplatonism and the

mysticism of Böhme; Solomos took an interest especially in the latter, see Veloudis,
$ ÆØŒ , 102–9.
61 ‘Die Ansicht, welche der Philosoph von der Natur künstlich sich macht, ist für
die Kunst die ursprüngliche und natürliche. Was wir Natur nennen, ist ein Gedicht,
das in geheimer wunderbarer Schrift verschlossen liegt. Doch könnte das Räthsel sich
enthüllen, würden wir die Odyssee des Geistes darin erkennen, der wunderbar
getäuscht, sich selber suchend, sich selber Xieht; denn durch die Sinnenwelt blickt
nur wie durch Worte der Sinn, nur wie durch halbdurchsichtigen Nebel das Land der
Phantasie, nach dem wir trachten.’ F. W. J. Schelling, Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, ii
(Munich, 1927), 628.
the logic of Hellenism there is not an ‘ab-sense’ of Greece, but a
necessary place for it, even if it is a conXicted one. We can sense a
distrust in Schelling, which cannot quite remain contained, of the
enigmatic and unclear ‘scripture’ of the phenomenal world, and
ultimately it is the ideal preferred to the real, or rather the search
for one world in which the real becomes almost, but only almost,
superXuous. Schelling’s account of the ideal within the real and vice
versa shows a bias towards alternative representation that is charac-
teristic of Romantic nature imagery. On the sliding scale of real and
ideal and its necessary mutual inWltration, the full range of the
sensual is to be acknowledged: ‘This [implantation of the ideal within
the real] is the case with matter, where the corporeal soul is revealed
by colour, by lustre, by sound; this [repetition of the real within the
ideal] is the case with light, which for that reason, as the Wnite
represented in inWnity, is the absolute schematism of all matter.’62
We can see that both the fear of non-intelligibility and the simul-
taneous attempt to provide an all-encompassing sensory panorama
have a bearing on the landscape represented and must, eventually, tear
at the fabric of phenomenal reality. The attempt to achieve complete-
ness allows a concentration on pure sensory elements, such as colour,
sound, or light, to an almost exclusive degree. The phenomenal world
is broken down into a collection of individual, almost independent,
and in their pure concentration abstract items and images. Solomos
too employs techniques that explore such ‘alternative’ representations
of place. My contention is that the problem of commensurability
between the ideal and its manifestation in images of real place appears
in Solomos’s work not in a strongly utopian, but in a positively
a-topian sense, breaking any vision of Greece down into partial,
intensiWed, and unhinged senses, into vignettes of containment, com-
pression, and reduction, which render the siege of Missolonghi the
appropriate subject-matter of Solomos’s form of representation,
62 ‘Jenes ist in der Materie der Fall, wo die der Leiblichkeit eingebildete Seele in der
Farbe, im Glanz, in Klang oVenbar wird, dieses ist in dem Licht der Fall, welches daher,
als das Endliche im Unendlichen dargestellt, der absolute Schematismus aller Materie
ist.’ Ibid. 109. See also Helmut Rehder, Die Philosophie der unendlichen Landschaft: Ein
Beitrag zur Geschichte der romantischen Weltanschauung (Halle a.d.S., 1932), 109 V. For
the Romantic use of colour and sound to describe landscape see also Marianne
Thalmann, Zeichensprache der Romantik (Heidelberg, 1967), 31–54.
rather than the other way around. As a result, in his attempt to
visualize totality and uniWed absoluteness in one symbolic image, the
vision of the autonomous free land is only ever implied and remains,
of necessity, not described, while its image is condensed to the point of
collapse into a single concentrated point, teetering on the brink of
annihilation. The Romantic symbol represents the semantic expan-
sion, if not explosion, from the (phenomenal) signiWer to the (tran-
scendental) signiWed, but leads, when we reverse the direction, to such
saturation of the phenomenal world with meaning that representation
as such verges on the impossible. The two-way dynamic inherent in the
symbol, the dialectic between the part and the whole, is one of
expansion and contraction, as the following excerpt from Novalis’s
fragmentary novel The Apprentices of Sais captures:
Whatever man intends, he has to turn his undivided attention or his Self on
it . . . and when he has done so, soon thoughts will arise, or a new kind of
perception, which seem nothing but the gentle movements of a colouring,
clattering pen, or the peculiar contractions and Wgurations of an elastic
Xuid, and which will appear to him in wondrous fashion. From the point
where he Wxed the compass of his impression, they will expand vividly in all
directions, and they will carry his Self with them.63
Solomos’s Missolonghi tries to visualize that very dynamic.
T H E LO S S O F L A N DS C A P E A ND
ALTE RNAT IVE L ANDSCAP ES
The overriding perspective of ‘The Free Besieged’ is the narrator’s

visionary view of Missolonghi and its besieged citizens. As in Kalvos,
the poetic voice appears in the form of the quasi-apocalyptic, and
63 ‘Auf alles, was der Mensch vornimmt, muß er seine ungetheilte Aufmerksamkeit
oder sein Ich richten . . . und wenn er dies getan hat, so entstehen bald Gedanken,
oder eine neue Art von Wahrnehmungen, die nichts als zarte Bewegungen eines
färbenden oder klappernden Stifts, oder wunderliche Zusammenziehungen und
Figurationen einer elastischen Flüssigkeit zu sein scheinen, auf eine wunderbare
Weise in ihm. Sie verbreiten sich von dem Punkte, wo er den Eindruck fest stach,
nach allen Seiten mit lebendiger Beweglichkeit, und nehmen sein Ich mit sich fort.’
Schriften, i. 96 f.
spatially indeterminate, eyewitness account: the visual structure
relies heavily on the perspective of the narrating ‘I’, which is not
directly part of the scene or events, but instead recounts the visionary
experience of witnessing the last stages of the siege (A1 and C2). The
prophetic quality is enhanced if we consider that the opening
description of ‘The Free Besieged’ is developed out of a sketch that
is part of the earlier satire ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’; the speaker of
this verse poem, modelled on biblical prophecy, is the anchorite
Dionysios, who is transported to Missolonghi in a vision.64
Coutelle labelled the poem ‘an imaginary frieze of individual
heroes’,65 and it has long been recognized that immobility and com-
pression of one kind or another is a recurring motif (even if the focus
of analysis has so far not been on the representation of space). The
embodiment of the ideal, in this case of ideal freedom, takes place in
the human Wgures and their behaviour. Such an indirect (artistic)
representation of freedom as sublimity, with the sublime appearing
in the human Wgure, is certainly true to some of the formulations in
Schiller’s essays Über das Pathetische and Über Anmut und Würde.
The supremacy over natural or non-rational forces by way of moral
force and moral will is expressed on the level of the phenomenal
world by dignity (Würde). Thoughts are expressed, exceeding their
verbal communication, on the faces of the people:
Æ ØÆ ŒÆØ æ ø Æ" Ø Æ ı:
ı º Ø ªºÆ ŒÆØ ºº æ!ÆŁ łı ı.
(B9, 5–6)
In their eyes and on their faces their thoughts show through; their soul tells
them many great things.
Dignity is found in the portrayal of the women of Missolonghi. There
is ample evidence in the printed drafts and the manuscripts that
64 The role of the priest as poet may not only echo biblical precedence, but it may,
in Solomos’s case, also connect to the importance given to the status of the poet. In a
prose fragment on Schiller’s ballad ‘The Count of Habsburg’, at whose centre is a
court singer who is really the eponymous count turned priest, Solomos points to
Schiller’s indication of the noble rank of the poet: ‘Si presenta il cantore in mezzo ai
principi—due tratti bastano a Schiller per farlo a noi venerato, senza dirlo.’ ‘Idee sulla
ÆÆ, ii: —Æ ŒÆØ ÆºØŒ (1955), 183.
ballata di Schiller ‘‘Il Conte di Habsburg’’ ’, `
65 Coutelle, Diptych, 56.
Solomos had intended a very detailed portrayal of the group of
women, for example:
tutte sedute una stava presso al Wgluolo morto, un altra moribondo. Terza la
piu giovane . . . Ed ora stava presso al letticciuolo del Wgluolo moribondo, ad
ogni tanto posava la mano sul suo cuore. (AE 417A 19–24)66
all are sitting down, one is holding her dead little son, another her dying one.
The third is the youngest . . . And so she stands by the bed of her little one
who is dying, every now and then putting her hand above her heart.
And, a little later:
E tutte l’altre assentirono e circondarono con amore il di lei Wglio ch’era
spirato (AE 417A 23–5)
And all the others agreed and surrounded with love her son who has
breathed his last.67
This sample shows not only the extent of detail, but also the tableau
character and statuesque quality of the scene, which is quite possibly
indebted to Schiller’s discussion of character portrayal.68 Solomos’s
narrative is guided by conWgurations: the static character of the scene
described above is highlighted explicitly in fragment C12, 4: ‘mo-
tionless, without sighing, tearless, untroubled they all remain’
(‘ÆŒ ; ÆÆ ; ø Æ æı Œæı’). This concentration
on the motionless human form, however, although easily explicable
by reference to Schiller, shows the direction ‘The Free Besieged’ is
taking. Although the favouring of the human image would be in line
with Schiller’s indiVerence towards the content of the physical world,
that is, a concrete landscape, there is still a dynamic implicit in the
ideal that seems immobilized in Solomos’s world. The utopian vision
of Schiller’s aesthetic state is, if anything, essentially temporal. If
aesthetic education is a process towards the future fulWlment and
mending of the present aesthetic and political situation, any future
vision that could relate to any real or political situation is rejected in
‘The Free Besieged’. The only option of future life grounded in
66 Unless otherwise indicated, AE refers to vol. 1.
67 The case made for communication through love, exceeding language, carries
overtones of the Romantic ideal of absolute love.
68 In Über das Pathetische he himself has recourse to the models of Lessing and
Winckelmann, who centred their accounts on the Laokoon group and other examples
of classical sculpture.
physical nature would consist in the surrender to the power of
natural beauty and, implicitly, the besieging Turks. In both cases
the option is identiWed with heteronomy, of a moral or political
kind. Just as there is literally no complete vision of the past, other
than in fragmentary Xashbacks and visionary appearances, there is
no prospect of an autonomous free land either. Its vision is only ever
implied and its description is never attempted.
The perspective of ‘The Free Besieged’ goes beyond the focus on the
human form; yet in the poem the beyond is a surrounding that is
fragmentary, threatening, and seductive only insofar as its future
absence is the deWning part of its temporality: it is already lost. The
proud panoramic views that are a necessary part of the philhellenic
repertoire Wnd no equivalent in Solomos. If there are any expanding
views they are reduced to the narrow eye of the narrating source, from
which they are communicated. The impression of such immediate
involvement is mirrored in the manuscript notes, where almost all the
descriptions and narrative sketches take the shape of a Wrst-person
account (usually by a Wctional sentinel, though, not the poet): the
description of the women, for instance, opens ‘io le vedevo’ (‘I saw
them’; AE 417A 9–10). The overall framing of spatial experience is not
unlike the view over someone’s shoulder, familiar from the perspective
of Romantic painting. The view over the shoulder of Solomos’s overall
narrator, however, does not give access to a progressively expanding
vista. Instead, it directs us downwards into chaos and the abyss of an
overturned cosmos: what was, or is supposed to be, Missolonghi.
What is more, the catastrophic view is almost devoid of content, at
least as far as the visual sense is concerned:
ŒØ" ıæŁŒÆ Œ Ø ŒÆØ !æ æ ; ı ŒØæ Æ Œºø æØ
º ı ÆºŁ Ø ºªºªæÆ; ø º æ ı ÆÆ!æ Ø:
ŒÆºÆ!Æ ø Œ Æ º ªªØ: Æºº !º Æ
Œæ; æÆ ; º ; ŁºÆÆ; ª
ı ıÆ; ıæÆ : ŒÆÆŒÆ ºÆ Æ Æ ÆıæºÆ ŒÆØ
Æ; ªØ º ł; !æ ŒÆØ Ææ ºŒØ. (A1, 2–8).
Then I found myself in a gloomy and thundering place that was shaking like
a handful of wheat in a fast-grinding mill, like the bubbles in boiling water.
Then I realized that this place was Missolonghi. But I could see neither
fortress nor camp, nor lagoon, nor sea, nor the earth I was treading, nor the
sky. Everything was covered by pitch darkness mixed with sparks, thunder,
and lightning.
The loss of space, as conveyed by the general conWnement and restriction
in the image of the besieged town and the recurring motif of emptiness,
preWgures the actual loss of place implied in the citizens’ voluntary
death. This death, signiWcantly, will be the consequence of an attempted
exit through the barricades—another expansion cruelly thwarted.
Although this is reconcilable with a type of sublimation echoing
Schiller, it is also framed by a natural environment that is heavily
indebted to the categories of Romantic aesthetics. References to
empty space surrounding the ‘iron circle’ (B4, 12) around the be-
sieged city are frequent. Only hope can traverse the horrible empti-
ness (B 46); in C8 the orphan girl addresses an angel, whom she has
seen in a vision oVering her wings:
¢ªª º ; " Øæ ı Ø Æ æ ı;
" " `ı ı " Æ " ºÆ ; " Æªª Ø æ Ø Æ Łº Ø.
(C8, 1–2)
Angel, are you giving me wings in my dream only? In the name of Him who
made them for you, this vessel of desolation needs them.
Also, there is a corresponding passage of verse variants in the manu-
scripts, making mention of the ‘empty houses’, which dominate a scene
of ruined Missolonghi (AE 395, 13–14). Even the musket of the soldier
at the opening of the second draft is addressed with the epithets
‘desolate’ and ‘dark’ (B1, 5). In the ‘Thoughts of the Poet’ with
which Polylas prefaces his edition of ‘The Free Besieged’, a collection
of scattered reXections and notes gathered from Solomos’s manu-
scripts, Solomos deliberates the manifestation of the ideal in the real:
Ma per poter giungere a questo è necessario meditare l’ombra sostanziale
che deve buttar fuora i corpi, a traverso i quali essa si manifesta con
essi uniWcata. Nei quali corpi si veda di esprimer per tutti le condizioni
dell’esecuzione—la nazionalità il più che potrassi estesa.
Cosı́ la metaWsica è fatta Wsica. (AE 425)69
69 I quote in the following not from Polylas’s Greek translation, but from Solomos’s
original Italian. The ‘Thoughts’ or ‘ Æ ’, i.e. Solomos’s fragmentary prose
comments on ‘The Free Besieged’, are reprinted, with a scholarly apparatus, from AE
in ˜Øıı ºø Æ , ed. Massimo Peri et al. (Athens, 1999), here p. 30.
But to arrive there it is necessary to consider the substantial shadow that the
bodies have to push outside, through which [the Idea] manifests itself united
with them. In those bodies make sure that, within all the limits of execution,
nationality is expressed, as far-reaching as possible.
In this way the metaphysical becomes physical.
Although it is certainly true that Solomos acknowledges and incorpor-
ates the element of physical nature as inseparable from spiritual nature
and vice versa, this unio mystica, that is, the transposition of the
supernatural and divine into the natural, does not have to correspond
to a spatial expansion. Often it is implied in the Wgure of the ‘Moonclad
Woman’ bearing the features of a real person.70 A similar Wgure recurs
in several of Solomos’s poems (most famously in ‘The Cretan’), and she
is not absent from ‘The Free Besieged’ either, where she appears at the
end of the ‘Temptation’ section in C6, at the height of the description of
nature’s beauty. Importantly, however, such an apparition, connected
as it may be to a corporeal model, is independent of any spatial
environment, in the sense that there is no need for a corresponding
landscape, real or imaginary. In a second fragment of the ‘Thoughts’,
however, Solomos seems more clearly intent on the aesthetic creation of
a physical world to represent its metaphysical content:
L’anima incorporea del Componimento che parte da Dio, e fatto il giro
corporizzata negli organi di luogo, di tempo, di nazionalità, di lingua, coj
varj [sic] pensieri, aVetti, sensazioni, etc. si faccia un piccolo universo
corporeo atto a manifestarla possibilmente, di nuovo ypartey di tutto questo
<e> torna a Dio (AE 402)
The incorporeal soul of the Composition, which begins from God, when she
has made the round of embodiment in the organs of place, time, nationality,
language, with its diVerent thoughts, sensations, impressions, etc., in this
way is created a little embodied universe capable of maybe manifesting her
[the soul], ystartsy again all over and returns to God.
70 For the Wgure of the Moonclad Woman as the indicator of a unio mystica see e.g.
Roderick Beaton, ‘The Tree of Poetry’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2 (1975),
161–82. For German precedent of the veiled woman in, for instance, Schiller’s poem
‘Das Verschleierte Bildnis zu Sais’ or Novalis’s The Apprentices of Sais, see Veloudis,
$ ÆØŒ , or Alexiou, ºø ØŒ, 17–28. See also Eleni Tsantsanoglou, ‘˙
‘‘Æı Æ’’ # ªªÆæı ‘‘˚æØŒ ’’ ı ºø ’, in ¸ı
—º (Thessaloniki, 1988), 167–95, and Peter Mackridge, ‘Time Out of Mind: The
Relationship Between Story and Narrative in Solomos’ ‘‘The Cretan’’ ’, Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies, 9 (1984–5), 187–208.
Place, in this cycle of quasi-religious incarnation, serves as the par-
ticular, concentrated image that can capture the universal, reduced or
abstracted to a degree of no visuality at all.
In the rare cases where Solomos draws an explicit analogy between
an internal process and a corresponding landscape image, for example
in B9, 8: ‘[t]heir guts and the sea never Wnd rest’ (‘[]Æ ºª Æ ı
ŒØ" ŁºÆÆ ı ı’), the image is drawn from a
landscape to which access is, for the human subject(s) in question,
conspicuously barred. Beyond the Romantic longing for the sea which
would be within visual distance of the besieged, we have turned to a
natural object that is out of reach, because of the siege, and is, too,
marked by a void: the supporting Xeet expected does not appear on the
horizon. Alternatively, the correspondence is with positively aggressive
nature. The prose section introducing B2 (3–6) states the relation
between physical nature and the soul as follows:
˙ø ÆŒæÆØ, da tutte le parti della natura che tende ad aVranger l’anima.
Fusione di mare, cielo, terra, superWcie e profondità fuse che a loro volta
attaccano superWcie e profondità umana.
All of life, from all parts of nature, wishes to lay low the soul of man: sea,
earth, sky blended together, surface and depth blended together, besiege the
nature of man on the surface and in its depth.
Far from subjective expansion, the direction is reversed. Moreover,
nature, threatening in its wholeness, appears stiXing and indistin-
guishable rather than as an ordered space. To sum up, no element of
longing or restlessness is translated into a dynamic movement to-
wards exterior space, unless it occurs in a dream. The dream se-
quence of the women is the only frame for the description of a
movement that is expressed in corresponding nature:71
<˚ÆØ Æ > ‘A me <parea> che tutti noi uomini e donne fanciulli
e vecchi fossimo Wumi di varie grandezze <ŒØ æ Æ > per luoghi
luminosi—cupi—per valli e per I dirupi su giù—giungessimo poi concordi
al mare con impeto, ŒÆØ ŁºÆÆ ªºıŒ !Æ Æ Æ æ Æ.’
One said: ‘It appeared to me that all of us, men and women, children and the
old, were rivers, some small, some big, and we were Xowing through places
71 I quote the passages here again from the mainly Italian draft (AE 402 B34–9),
more characteristic of Solomos’ writing process than Polylas’s Greek translation.
of light, places of darkness, narrow valleys, over precipices, now up now
down, until we all reached the sea together in a powerful Xow, and within the
sea our waters were kept sweet.’
Incidentally, the passage bears a remarkable resemblance to the
poetic and topographic vision in the opening words of Friedrich
Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (Dialogue on Poetry, 1800),
although there is no immediate evidence for Solomos’s familiarity
with the work: ‘All minds which love her, poetry binds in friendship
with indissoluble bonds. . . . In this region they are all one and at peace
by a higher force of magic. Each Muse searches for and Wnds the other,
and all the rivers of poetry Xow together into the one common sea.’72
Unsurprisingly, Solomos’s landscape of Missonlonghi houses a com-
munity whose ideal, like the ideal of a society of like-minded artists, is
transposed into the immaterial sphere of dreams, creating alternative
modes of spatial experience and its representation.
To evaluate the modes of representation in ‘The Free Besieged’, the
content of dreams and visionary images has to be distinguished from
the representation of besieging nature and the besieged place. As in
the example of the women’s dreams, the realm of ideal space is
removed to a thoroughly immaterial level. The ‘intellectual and
moral Paradise’, which Solomos envisages in the ‘Thoughts’, is, if at
all linked to a visual experience, connected to the community of the
shared dream vision. It is here that freedom, as will, is located:
‘concordi nei sogni come nella volontà e nel dovere’ (‘united in
dreams as much as in will and duty’; AE 417A 22). At the same
time we Wnd a similar tendency for compression of totality into one
image, when Solomos tells himself: ‘Fare che il Sogno della Bella sia la
Totalità dei sogni’ (‘Make it so that the Dream of the Beautiful be the
Totality of dreams’; AE 417A 7).
As for the place of siege and besieging forces, experience and
representation are subjected to similar techniques of Romantic per-
ception. Solomos seems to hold a belief in an anti-naturalistic mimesis
72 ‘Alle Gemüter, die sie lieben, befreundet und bindet Poesie mit unauXöslichen
Banden. . . . [I]n dieser Region sind sie dennoch durch höhere Zauberkraft einig und in
Frieden. Jede Muse sucht und Wndet die andre, und alle Ströme der Poesie Xießen
zusammen in das allgemeine große Meer’ (p. 283). From Besenghi degli Ughi’s letter we
only gather that Solomos ordered a copy of Schlegel’s Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der
alten und neuen Literatur (1815); on further ‘traces’ of Schlegel’s thought in Solomos
(without mentioning the above passage) see Veloudis, $ ÆØŒ , 174–7.
that echoes with Schelling. A section from the manuscripts, this time
opening the space of the page to French, reads:
Pour la rendre (la Pensée) il invente mille(s) [word deleted] moyens d’expres-
sion que son modele (la nature) ne lui donne pas; e [sic] s’ecartant sans cesse
du Vrai Visible, pour s’approcher mieux du vrai de l’art, au moyen d’une
copie inWdele il cree un [sic] imitation sublime (AE 483A 1–7)
To render it (the Thought), [the poet] invents a thousand [word deleted]
means of expression which his model (nature) won’t give him; and he
distances himself without cease from the Truly Visible, in order to approach
better to the truth in art, by means of an unfaithful copy he creates a sublime
imitation.
As in the poetics of Schelling and Novalis, the creation of space by
means of other senses, especially sound, features strongly. The terrain
between Missolonghi and the enemy camp, for instance, is deWned by
the sound and faint echo of the guards’ bugles (A3 and B3–4), later
mirrored in the whistling of the approaching enemy soldier (A4, 1–2).
SigniWcantly—as an indicator, perhaps, of spatial expansion—the
bugle-call of the besieged is too weak to cover the distance. Similarly,
nature in its onslaught on the soul and senses spins a web of echoing
sensory stimuli (e.g. B 23–4), brought to its most compressed in the
‘Temptation’ section, where the line of images moves from the visual
(including frequent references to light) to the acoustic, the olfactory,
and the sense of taste. At the same time, however, this movement is
overridden by a strong sense of stillness and immobility:
øæ ª; ıæÆ ŒÆØ ŁºÆÆ Æ ,
ˇı" Œ" ºØÆ Œ ºıºıŒØ,
ˆ æı ŒØ ÆæÆ " Ææ Ø º ,
ÆÆŒÆŁŒ æªªıº ªªæØ.
(C6, 16–20)73
No breath of wind on earth, on sea or sky, not even as much as a bee makes
close to the tender petals, all around an unmoving whiteness on the lake, the
round moon mingled with it alone;
The all-pervading impression of silence as deadly is conveyed in the
loss of echo: to the approaching enemy soldier of A6 not a single dog
73 For the recurrent motive of the calmness of nature in other poems by Solomos
see Beaton, ‘The Tree of Poetry’, 169 V.
is audible,74 and the beginning of B1: ‘Utter quiet of a tomb reigns
ŒæÆ ı ı Øø Œ !ÆØº Ø’) is of a
over the plain’ (‘`
programmatic quality.75
Colour, part of the Romantic aesthetics that magniWes nature by
breaking it down into its sensory elements, is equally employed as
part of, eventually, a dynamic of reduction. The presentation of
nature in spring in C2, 1–3 is reminiscent of Hölderlin’s outburst
of colour, as Solomos juxtaposes the poet’s thoughts and the hues of
the natural scenery:
‚æªÆ ŒÆØ º ªØÆ; Æ —Œ ÆØ ŒÆØ ŒØø—
¸ ºıÆ æØÆ; ºıÆ; ı Œæ !ı ææØ,
˚Ø" æÆ; ªÆºØÆ; Œ ŒŒØÆ ŒÆº æı ºØ.
Deeds and words, thoughts—I stand and stare—thousands of Xowers,
blossoms, covering the grass, the white, blue and red inviting a golden
swarm of bees.
Yet it continues with a restriction: ‘there with brothers, here with
death’ (‘¯Œ Ł ı Æ º ; Ł æ’; C2, 4). In a
similar way, the colours of nature become aYxed to the immaterial
dream vision. B6 mentions ‘the most golden dream of all’ (‘
æı æ Æ Æ æÆÆ’), echoed in B27 by ‘the golden dream
Xed’ (‘ ıª æ " Øæ’). The appeal of the speaker to his
fatherland, put in an image of reduction, is possibly the only, wishful,
attempt to relate this immaterial vision to material space: ‘Your black
rock and dry grass shine as if golden’ (‘˙ Æ æ æÆ ı æı ŒÆØ
æ ææØ’; B6, 23).
Contrast the building-blocks of Romantic sense perception in
Hölderlin’s Greece:76 the opening of the second book of Hyperion,
74 The implication is that all the dogs have starved or have been eaten, for lack of food.
75 The extent of desolation captured in Solomos’s imagery becomes apparent
when it is compared with the scene of desolate, yet intact, Greek nature sadly
depopulated in Kalvos’s ode ‘The Volcanoes’: ‘Your forests and groves, where the
voices of hunters echoed, are silent; only dogs without masters are barking there now.’
76 Comparison between Hölderlin and Solomos has had a small but steady follow-
ing. Vassilios Lazanas, ‘ºø ŒÆØ Hölderlin’, ˝Æ ¯Æ, 104/1253 (1978), 213–32,
identiWes similarities in both poets’ contemporary concern for freedom as, on the one
hand, children of the French Revolution and, on the other hand, educated in the
writings of German Idealism (concentrating on Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Archipelago’).
He focuses especially on the shared symbolic character regarding the Wght for higher,
sublime ideals. Stefanos Rozanis’s more recent comments on the similarities between
for example, parades the Romantic eVect of wholeness and all-en-
compassing sensuous completeness achieved by including particu-
larities of sight, sound, and smell: there is mention of his hut situated
on a promontory on Salamis, made of mastic branches, moss
and trees surrounding it, the smell of thyme. Like the sound of stringed
instruments playing, the personal past emerges into a harmonious
atmosphere, ordered despite its contradictions, incorporated into the
environment distinguished by green earth, open Welds, unlimited
stretches of yellow wheat and cornXowers, together with treetops
and chains of mountains rising in gradual succession towards the
sun. In the clear sky of white light even the moon shows faintly. Yet
the expansion can just as easily reveal the void beyond it. There is
a notional borderline, as a recurring theme, the ‘Kantische Gränzlinie’,
to step beyond this world. In Solomos, there is almost no world to
step out of.
T HE R ED U CE D LA N DS C APE O F
THE ‘HYMN TO FREEDOM’
Solomos’s earlier ‘Hymn to Freedom’ (1823) is the piece that upon

publication shot to international fame, and that came to stand for the
Greek undertaking of national self-representation:77 yet this piece
already operates the strategies and aporias of absence and non-re-
presentation that uphold ‘The Free Besieged’. The ‘Hymn’ precedes
even the earliest drafts of ‘The Free Besieged’ by several years, yet it
shows already in Solomos’s early poetry techniques of representation
of Greece familiar from the later poem. This suggests that his artistic
treatment of Greek places shows tendencies that are intensiWed in his
mature poetry and possibly found conWrmation in his readings of
foreign sources. In ‘The Free Besieged’ the black rock and dry grass,
Hölderlin and Solomos (‘‘‘ ØŒØı Æ’’ æª ı ˜Øıı ºø ’, ˝Æ
¯Æ, 144 (1998), 1302–6) focus instead on their common struggle, as poets
between the divine and the human, to express the ideal in human form and language.
77 On the circulation of the ‘Hymn’ and its quick translation abroad, see Katerina
Tiktopoulou (ed.), ˇ ‘& Ø ¯º ıŁ æÆ’ ı ˜Øıı ºø ; ŒÆØ Ø
ªºø Æ æ Ø ı (Thessaloniki, 1998).
as metonymic substitutes for the Greek land and a common motif
pervading all of his poetry, become the sole coordinates in the
representation of national space too. This pattern of a schematic
reduction, which we see mirrored in the metonymic images reducing
Missolonghi to an alonaki (a little threshing Xoor; A1) and a kalyvaki
(a small hut; C2), is pre-empted in earlier poems prominently men-
tioning speciWc Greek places.78 The ‘Hymn to Freedom’ pictures the
Wgure of Freedom retreating over rock and grass (st. 13), and it
illustrates quite strikingly the similarity of representation and the
shared tendency in earlier and later works towards a threatening
nature surrounding a place whose visuality is, if not suspended,
then at least reduced.
As in ‘The Free Besieged’, the landscape of the ‘Hymn’ is essentially
one of desolation (st. 7). Outer nature poses a threat to freedom
whose plight in the face of a lack of support from abroad and
disunity from within recalls the threatened destruction of a stone
by the natural elements (st. 30). In evaluating the land’s situation
(given the sense of restricted vision here too one would hardly want
to call it an ‘overview’) Solomos introduces the image of the Eagle (as
the emblem of Austria this time), who has already conquered Italy,
circling in the sky and ready to pounce (st. 26). Outer movement is
already associated with a positive threat, as in the mirror image of the
Eagle (st. 33), where Freedom, roaming the woods like a wild beast,
spreads terror and waste. The loss of a visible space is anticipated too.
The night battle at Tripolitsa, clouded in lightning and thunder, is a
highly formalized description of a scene that takes place but is
accessible to hearing only (st. 41–5):
`Œ ø Œ ØÆ Æ ı ŒØÆ,
`Œ ø Ø ÆŁØ,
`Œ ø ºÆ; ÆŒ ø ºŒØÆ,
`Œ ø æØ Ø.
(st. 44)
I hear deafening guns, I hear clashing of swords, I hear wood and I hear axes,
I hear the gnashing of teeth.
78 e.g. the 1825 poem ‘The Destruction of Psara’. In this epigrammatic poem, the
personiWed Wgure of Glory treads on the desolate scene, crowned with a wreath ‘Made
from some little grass that has remained on the desolate soil’.
For the Wghters,
ˇıæÆ ªØ" Æı ÆØ,
ˇı ºÆª; ı ª:
ˆØ" Æı ºı Æ ÆØ
Æø Æ Æ Œ .
(st. 62)
There is no sky, no sea nor earth; for them everything is gathered together in
this place.
Apart from a general atmosphere of claustrophobia in the scenes
describing the series of sieges, we Wnd a growing sense of spatial
concentration that anticipates the topos of Missolonghi. Already in
the ‘Hymn’, nature is shaped by the events it hosts. The scene of
hampered perception mirrors that introducing the siege of Corinth,
where there is no sun or light nor any echo or sound on the plain (st.
75). Like the Wgure of Hope in ‘The Free Besieged’ (B 46), only the
Wgure of Freedom can traverse the empty plain (st. 82); but even
though Freedom seems, in this sense, able to be actually localized in a
landscape, she is not only out of reach but also moving across a space
which is either hostile or lost to visualization.
Undoubtedly, the imagery of the ‘Hymn to Freedom’ owes some-
thing to other philhellenic literature, by Greek authors such as those
of the thourioi (war-songs), or by authors of Western European
provenance.79 More importantly, the nature of the ‘Hymn’, too, is
distinguished by its threatening character, familiar from the ‘nature
in arms’ motif of philhellenic literature, stretching its intimations of
violence to a structural extreme. A powerful example is the long
sequence describing the River Achelous at the Wrst siege of Misso-
longhi (st. 105–17), where the river envelops and drowns the retreat-
ing Turks;80 the episode incidentally leads on to another instance
where the biblical voice—together with a biblical place—is recalled;
79 For comparison of motives between the ‘Hymn’ and Shelley, see Emmanuel
Frangiskos, ‘ˇ ºø ØŒ ‘‘& ’’ ŒÆØ ºıæØŒ æ Æ ‘‘Hellas’’ ı P. B. Shelley
(1822)’, ˇ ¯æÆØ, 11 (1974), 527–67. On the war-songs see Alexis Politis, ‘˙
Ø ø ÆÆÆØŒ Łıæø’, ˜ØÆ!ø, 235 (1990), 66–70.
80 The episode is described again by Trikoupis, æÆ, ii. 377–9; in comparison
with Trikoupis’s rather more factual account of the successive failure of the Turks to
cross the swollen river, it becomes clear how pronounced the personiWcation of the river
as natural agent and how inescapable its overpowering encircling force are in Solomos.
it reminds the poet of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea
(Exodus 15: 1–21), and prompts him to launch into exultation
comparable to ‘the voice of Moses’ and the ‘song of the prophetess
Miriam’ (st. 118–22). At a time when the classical past should, by
Western standards, reveal itself in the nature of Greece, it is signiW-
cant that Solomos ostensibly, but in any case deliberately, forgoes
another, maybe more ‘appropriate’, precedent of the episode: the
rising of the River Skamander against Achilles’ unreasonable rage
(Iliad 21).81 From the biblical topos that is part of the liberation
narrative of the people of Israel, Solomos turns back to the (Greek)
sea as a place as well as an image of freedom (‘And [the sea] is your
bright image (eikona)’, st. 123 f.).
Still, in its symbolic tendencies the ‘Hymn’ also preWgures a
conception of natural and, by extension, national space, which Solo-
mos will develop through his later readings of philosophical works,
literature, mysticism, and science. There is a distinct move away from
any spatial expansion towards extreme reduction and condensation,
to the point of the complete vanishing of a concrete landscape that is
actually within the reach of representation. As an artistic principle
this pattern of concentration is verbalized in the prose comments to
‘The Free Besieged’, where, as so often, Solomos addresses himself:
Bisogna fare che il circolo piccolo in cui si muove la Fortezza [apra] nel
fondo anzi nell’Atmosfera sua i piu grandi interessi della Grecia (per la
posizione materiale) . . . e per la posizione Morale i piu grandi interessi
dell’Umanità. Cosı́ è posto l’Argomento in rapporto col Sistema dell’Uni-
verso. (AE 406B, 3–7)
Make sure you do it so that the little circle, in which the Fortress moves,
[opens up], by way of the place where it is grounded, or rather in its
atmosphere, the greatest interests of Greece (for its material position) . . . and
for the moral position the grandest interests of mankind. And so the
proposition is in relation to the System of the Universe.
Regardless of whether the reference to a System of the Universe
owes more to the models of German Idealism or Solomos’s experience
81 That Solomos had a certain familiarity with, and an interest in, the Iliad is clear
from a number of fragmentary translations, probably related to the great interest
which some of Solomos’s contemporaries in Italy took in Homeric translation. See
ÆÆ, i. 316 f.
`
of a particular school of poetry in Italy,82 the notion of the condensed
image implying and representing an underlying totality strongly
recalls the theory of the symbol favoured in Romantic aesthetics.
Tzvetan Todorov’s remark about the concentration of Romantic poet-
ics in the concept of the symbol83 captures both the inherent dynam-
ics of this mode of representation and the corresponding need of the
Romantics to utilize it. The encapsulating of the spiritual idea of
freedom in the symbol of Missolonghi leads to the downward view
into the abyss: an exaggerated proof of Barthes’s claim that percep-
tion in terms of the symbolic correlates to a vision of depth.84 This
aspect of a vertical expansion (or downward condensation) is an
active part of the process of materialization of the ideal as envisaged
by Solomos, in place and in the national (luogo and nazionalità, AE
402) and in its corresponding poetic tone:
Il tuono fondamentale tenga fermo il centro profondo della Nazionalità, e si
sollevi perpendicolarmente ed allargandosi nel grado il Pensiero della Poesia
per il quale è composta. (AE 474)
The basic tone should sustain and hold down the profound centre of
Nationality, and the Thought of Poetry, for whose sake it has been com-
posed, should rise vertically while broadening little by little.
The result is a space that mirrors the drive of the symbol towards
self-eVacement in its attempt to reach out. The permanent deferral
caused by and reXected in the symbolic (i.e. indirect) mode of
representation creates in its wake a landscape determined by the
withdrawal and impending loss of space and, in its extreme, even
its total dissolution. The inward-directed movement of the focus
grinds to a visual standstill.
Optical perspective normally sets the horizon as organizing the
relation between the whole and the fragment. We have, however, no
such attempt at ordering spatial vision in Solomos, quite the contrary.
82 See Coutelle, Diptych, 53 f., for reference to the philosophy of light, a particular
poetic tradition with neoplatonic inXuences, taught by Giovanni Pini at Cremona.
83 Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (Oxford, 1982), 155.
84 In ‘The Imagination of the Sign’ (A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London,
1982), 211–17), Barthes identiWes three modes of imagination visualizing diVerent
sign relations. According to his theory, vision of depth corresponds to the symbolic as
perspective does to the paradigmatic; the third, stemmatic (netlike) vision correlates
to the syntagmatic.
There is no horizon. The extreme condensation implied in the image
of the encircled, stiXed, small space of Missolonghi has often been
attributed to Solomos’s preference for a Hegelian pattern of opposition
and synthesis, with reference to the following passage by Solomos: ‘Fa
in tutto il seguito del poema ferma l’Idea della piccolezza Wsica del
luogo perche risulti la grandezza morale e la yWsicay grandezza in
mezzo a cui si trova’ (‘Make strong in all the rest of the poem the
idea of how small the physical space is, because the moral greatness
and the yphysicaly one, in the midst of which it is found, rely on it’; AE
404A 15–17). However, the resulting aesthetic agoraphobia is diYcult
to explain by appealing to Hegelian (or any other Romantic) synthesis
alone. A temporal, historical perspective and a future-oriented dy-
namic, as found in Hegel’s thought, are hard to detect in Solomos. A
spatial utopia is immaterial and cannot be represented; a temporal
utopia, past or future, seems likewise out of reach.
The question of inXuence is therefore best replaced with one about
the intensiWcation and obstruction of similar structures. It is futile to
look for, let alone to blame, one inXuence. The retreat and disap-
pearance of concrete landscape, for example, is clearly a motif drawn
from more than one source, and of course in Solomos’s case there can
always be found models besides the aesthetics of the poetry and
philosophy of German Idealism and Romanticism. The visionary
account of the empty space of Missolonghi and its fall, for example,
are anticipated in Solomos’s ‘The Woman of Zakynthos’ (1826). The
biblical forms of prophecies of apocalypse and paradise chosen by
Solomos in this prose work (and elsewhere) do, however, already
visualize spaces where all boundaries between a spiritual and material
world are dissolved.85 Religious literary models (and contents) cer-
tainly have an impact on his poetic form, as do folk poetry and earlier
modern Greek sources.86 In exemplary fashion Eratosthenis Kap-
somenos illustrates the range of literary antecedents or intertexts:
85 Such allusions are not missing from the German models either, be it in
Hölderlin’s prophetic vision still showing traces of Pietist religious utopianism
(strong at the time of his youth), or in the religious overtones of many German
Idealists.
86 For Greek inXuences on Solomos see Emmanuel Chatzigiakoumis, ˝ ººØŒÆ
ªÆ ı ºø : ˚æØŒ ºª Æ; ÆØøØŒ Œ Æ; ØŒ
(Athens, 1968).
in the line ‘#ø ı Æ Ææ ` ŒÆØ æ (‘the light
which steps gladly on Hades and Death’; B 44), he identiWes a
folkloristic motif (the wrestling with Death), a Christian aspect
(victory over Death through death), a Hegelian perspective (setting
of the Absolute spirit over matter), and an allusion to Schiller’s
sublime.87 It is not suYciently emphasized, however, that all these
forms share the schematic and somehow reductive representation of
space. Folk poetry relies on few landscape markers and recurring
motifs (the rock and dry grass), the prophetic biblical voice conXates
the real and immaterial in visions of the beyond, and the German
Idealist perspective wrestles to identify a concrete space to incorpor-
ate the ideal. What is important, therefore, is that the incompleteness
and refusal of representation of Greek space, the shorthand of reply
to European precedent that leaves only the barest of coordinates to
delimit a Greek territory, whatever its debt to Greek precedents too,
is an extreme response entirely in line with the structural require-
ments of Romantic representation, and it is a response that tallies
also with a repertoire Solomos otherwise chose to draw from. In
other words, it does not matter so much in and by itself whether
Solomos’s imagery stems from a more or less ‘own’ (personal or
national) or ‘foreign’ source; what matters is that his choice corres-
ponds on a formal and functional level with the needs and challenges
implied in the Western European representation of the Greek land,
allowing for a reading that lays bare their foundations—and the
diYculty to respond to them at all.
Where does this function of landscape and represented nature Wnally
leave us vis-à-vis the nation? In Solomos’s writings its importance
seems to lie in the awareness of its absence, its incomplete representa-
tion, its character as an image once removed. The awareness of absence
might be part of the awareness of its identity, as Schiller’s and Goethe’s
famous question exempliWes: ‘Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß
das Land nicht zu Wnden’ (‘Germany? Where is it to be found? I cannot
tell the country’s place’).88 Hölderlin expressly felt that only the distant
Greek landscape oVered enough space, and the necessary oblique angle,
87 Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, ‘˚Æº " ÆØ Æ æ æÆ ı’, in ¯æ ıØŒ

Œº ØØ ºø (Athens, 1992), 165.
88 ‘Xenien von Schiller und Goethe’, no. 95, in Schiller, Werke, i. 320.
to help negotiate its (absent) German sibling image. Just as he and
many others had never actually seen and experienced the Greek land-
scape of his imagination, Solomos describes a Greece which, although
in many respects closer, is literally unknown to him. He too never set
foot on the mainland that made up the body of the newly founded
Greek state. The absence, and more strongly the destruction and
impossibility, of a Greek landscape in Solomos, incidentally, is as
conspicuous as the absence of Solomos himself from recent discussions
of the diYcult Greek process of nation-building in its artistic manifest-
ation.89 The diYculty of reconciling Solomos to a real Greek landscape
seems to persist. Is Solomos, looking at the precedents of German
Idealism and Romanticism, a victim of the idealization of space we
saw there? Or is he not rather following through the Romantic placing
of Greece to its extreme? Recent work on nation and narrative, or
literary, representation seems to have focused on the nation as neces-
sarily a stranger to itself, whether this is the specular subject, the split
subject, or the (internal) self-colonizing eVect, all this linked to
the perception of modernity. In Solomos’s case, though, we get to the
point of national space or any other space virtually and literally dis-
appearing into itself.
Remembering Polylas’s contention that Solomos’s poetic sensibil-
ity was at home only in a milder Mediterranean ambience, the notion
that he is a poet shaped by the landscape seems to have guided the
interpretation of Solomos’s relation to spatial representation. How-
ever, landscape depends on the eye of the author and beholder. In this
sense Solomos is, despite his apparent theme, much more of a typical
European (especially German) Romantic than a national poet. If
there is, indeed, no ‘other world’ in Solomos’s poetics, then maybe
it is not the abstract spiritual world that cannot be reconciled with
the material world except in death, but the material world that
cannot be incorporated into the aesthetic. Perhaps the imagination
had to refuse a space for the mainland and the territory of the Greek
state, which he did not want to visit. From a de-territorialized Italian
‘lacking any organic relationship with his native place’,90 Solomos
89 Both Leontis and Gourgouris, for example, give short shrift to Solomos, mainly
because of the time-frames of their respective studies.
90 Mackridge, ‘Dionisio Salamon/Dionysios Solomos’, 67.
turns into a Greek, who de-territorialized the object at hand almost
altogether: by condensing it to the point of non-existence, through
speaking the language of Romantic Hellenism enough to make its
destructive logic visible. To keep the nation as a represented, mean-
ingful place suspended, that language, spoken by the Romantic
philhellenes of Europe, had been appropriate; to represent the
Greek nation from the inside, that same logic made the destructive-
ness of place the appropriate response.
In 1865 Solomos’s earliest and only Wnished version of a danger-
ously non-visualized Greece, the ‘Hymn to Freedom’, became Greece’s
national anthem.
Epilogue
Think of the noise that Wlls the air

When autumn takes the Dnieper by the arm
And skein on skein of honking geese Xy south
To give the stateless rains a miss
(Christopher Logue, The Husbands)
In Christopher Logue’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, it is the Trojans
exiting the city who are likened to geese starting for their journey
south. Over and above the Wght of two speciWc nations, carried out on
the small territory of the plain of Troy, hovers the image of the stateless
rains, future and past in their recurring annual cycle. Logue’s melan-
choly image captures the double vision of nature and history that
moves Romantic Hellenism, too. Nature functions to denote the
particular, the determinant and characteristic inherent in environment
and place; at the same time, nature is transparent and translatable,
shared, mobile, stateless. It is this double function that made Greek
nature such a proliWc category, as it promised an eVect on the self
through observation of another place. Unlike the geese escaping south,
but like Hölderlin’s geese, grounded against the Greek sky by their very
modernity, the Trojans will be grounded on the battleWeld, the spe-
ciWcity of place winning out over the vision of stateless, adaptable
nature. That Logue’s simile plays out in the context of peoples clashing
over a highly signiWcant landscape underlines how nature can be both
particular and nationally speciWc, but also a shared category, a poten-
tially liberating zone free from such particularity. It is a translation
zone, while remaining potentially a ground for national identity.
Writers such as Stathis Gourgouris or Michael Herzfeld have
described in detail the logic of external and internal representation
242 Epilogue
of Greece.1 On the one hand there is the wish to display aYliation
with a (classical) past in terms that are thought in line with a Western
Enlightenment-based understanding of the nation—which comes
with an understanding of the European tradition that makes classical
Greece its origin, but that also makes the translatability away
from Greece its asset, as much as a necesssity, while still relishing
the fact that some of its staying-power can be seen residing in
modern Greece’s material presence. On the other hand, there is
resistance to such a model, in the shape of insistence on Greece’s
non-Western, diVerent, exceptional status. There is, in other words, a
multiplicity of tensions, in which Greece is a placeholder, standing in
for its past or someone else’s present, and not quite ‘itself ’. What is
more, this is not only a tension between the ‘outsider’s’ perspective
on Greece as opposed to an insider’s view: it is a tension, and
an availability of positions, that is brought into play both on the
Greek and the non-Greek side. Herzfeld has focused on how this
dynamic tension is not part of Wxed, stable categories, and on its
context-dependency instead, in stacked frames of ‘outside’ and ‘in-
side’: the local community as opposed to another community or the
larger national unit, Greece as opposed to the West, and so on.
Gourgouris has pointed out that this tension is a Wrm part of the
Enlightenment project in the Wrst place, whose discourse of sover-
eignty keeps lapsing into dreams of perfect heteronomy, and patterns
of self-colonization.
This basic Enlightenment predicament of squaring the universal
with the particular had special purchase in the Greek process of
national fantasy, where both claims were equally strongly, and para-
doxically, insisted upon. In this light especially, the representation
of Greece in terms of a deWning nature and landscape is, I have
suggested, one of the areas where those claims, and the expectation
of transference between them, meet. One of the main factors in
appreciating the diYcult relationship between European Hellenism
and Greece’s place in it and with it, is that being modern and creating
or intimating modernity are not the same thing. From the German
point of view, for example, being modern meant an awareness of the
1 Gourgouris, Dream Nation; Herzfeld, Ours Once More; Cultural Intimacy; An-
thropology Through the Looking Glass.
Epilogue 243
past, which involved an awareness of what was lost or changed; a loss
of immediacy, visible only in retrospect, that was especially legible in
regard to material nature and its representation. Seeing, quite liter-
ally, contemporary Greece as oscillating between a valued past and a
deWcient modernity, gave the Greek land a functional position from
which it was not really meant to change, and from which it was
diYcult to change. To deWne Greece by the qualities of its place and
material nature became the carrot in front of representing modern-
ity: both outside Greece, and in the new state itself, whose writers
faced an aesthetics of distance that was supposed to be squared with
an insistence on being on home ground. Greek place, in the frame-
work of European Hellenism, works best when seen on the ground,
but still from a distance, as it were: just as the travellers’ and artists’
Claude glass worked through indirect vision, but depended on
standing on site. Translating such distance onto the Greek writers’
position, the passages in their works that pay particular attention to
landscape and spatial environment are motivated by a context either
of paralysis before fatal exit (Solomos’s free besieged) or of Xight
(Soutsos’s restless wayfarers).
Appearing as a territorial nation state at a time that privileges
nature as a necessary, if ambivalent, motor in the understanding of
modernity, Greece soon became deWned, and in turn deWned itself,
by its ‘placeness’; this imposes a rigid frame that claims the stabiliz-
ing, determining force of that nature, but renders representation
highly unstable at the same time. Why is it important to describe
this paradox? One reason is that a result of the systemic diYculty of
representing Greek landscape and nature may have been the desire,
within and outside literature, to Wx that image of Greek nature and
its position as much as possible. This can be seen in the insistence,
again both outside and inside Greece, on the timeless continuity
of certain natural elements (colours, light, sea, climate, and so on),
as much as in the focus on the institution of archaeology as a locus
of national pride and a means to establish (material) continuity, as
the nineteenth century wore on, and a process that is still continuing.
Another reason is that the perception of Greece in terms of its
signiWcant environment has fostered a false sense of security that
nature is a self-explanatory category in the ‘ideal’ versus ‘real’ blame
game of writings about Hellenism, one of whose problems may be
244 Epilogue
the reassuring transcendence that has been inscribed into Greek
nation and nature alike.
Modern Greece is not just (falsely imagined as) a weightless
simulacrum of antiquity, a colonized ideal disturbed by the physical
presence of the modern Greek, as Calotychos suggests; it ‘matters’, in
that its materiality anchors it within the structure of Hellenism,
making it functional within an aesthetic pattern in which the physical
presence of Greek landscape enables that ‘autoscopic project of
identity that tends to read a diVerent yet recognizable Other for a
deWnition of the Same’.2 Calotychos argues that ‘[t]his project
expressly excludes and denies the modern Greek any identity. For it
is the modern Greek, that ‘‘dirty descendant’’, who disturbs this
colonization of space for those who read or appropriate Greek
landscape as a symbolic capital and who then elevate it through the
lens of diachrony onto a temporal plane and back to an ideal Ur-
Text.’3 I suggest that it is exactly the aspect of descent, of a material
presence, that is tangible and visible, but ‘dirty’, that is, tainted or
lesser than its original, the messiness of Greek place, rather than its
‘ab-sense’, that puts modern Greece into the diYcult structural
position it holds.
The materiality of the Greek ground proved to be a veritable, and
sometimes also a literal, stumbling-block in the new Greek nation state.
The German archaeologist Ludwig Ross, overseer of Greek antiquities
in the Peloponnese, described the arrival from Germany of King Otho’s
bride Amalia as the new, young queen of Greece, in 1834:
With the advent of Western civilization and its true beneWts in Greece also
came its obligatory inanities. The Athenian authorities, whether it had
occurred to themselves or whether it had been suggested to them, had
decided to present the young queen upon arrival with a speech and the
symbol of the city in the form of a living bird of Minerva, legs and wings
bound with white and blue silk ribbons. No sooner had the queen set foot on
Greek soil than she almost fell over the great number of olive branches
strewn in her way, only then to have to attend to that poor little screech owl
that by then was practically frightened to death.4
2 Calotychos, Modern Greece, 32.

3 Ibid. 32.
4 ‘[M]it der westlichen Civilisation, mit den wirklichen Segnungen derselben waren
auch die obligaten dummen Einfälle über Griechenland gekommen. Die Behörden von
Epilogue 245
Are we, like Amalia, ‘grounded’ with talk of place and space when it
comes to studying Greece? Must we, talking about Greek writing,
keep talking about nation and nature and place?
Leontis, in her Topographies of Hellenism, has argued for adopting
the position of a theorōs, a spectator and literally a participant
observer, in order to investigate the relationship between knowledge
and place (as a power relationship) by way of a critical ‘topology’.5 By
looking at the period from the late eighteenth century to the Wrst
decade of the Greek state, I argue that ‘theory’ is exactly at the core of
Hellenism: the act of observation gives Greece its particular meaning
and it does so through attention to space. The attention to form as
describing the inner workings and dynamic attached to the authority
of nature, an interest in the logic of topos rather than a topology, may
lift a theory of Hellenism, as articulated within and outside Greece,
beyond the ‘natural’, that is, self-evident, attention to space and may
help create a vocabulary that eventually critiques space as an exclu-
sive theoretical focus. Laying bare the assumptions of European (and
undoubtedly Eurocentric) Romantic Hellenism, we might want to
question its traces in current critical thinking that gives pride of place
to a spatial model, even if it focuses on its constructed and at times
constructive character. Place, and the act of ascribing meaning to
place, while it is interrogated in a critical mode of topology, may not
necessarily be the only approach, even if or because ‘placing’ has been
such a powerful and appealing pursuit, especially in regard to the
nation state. Of course, we cannot not talk about space, but we
should acknowledge that one of the legacies of Romanticism for
modern criticism is the way of seeing nature and place as a staple,
and as a ‘natural’ component of viewing others and other cultures; in
other words: of cultural comparison.
Athen, sei es, dass sie selbst diesen geistreichen Gedanken gehabt hatten oder dass er
ihnen eingeXösst worden war, hatten beschlossen, der jungen Königin als Wahrzeichen
der Stadt einen lebendigen Vogel Minervens, mit weissblauen seidenen Bändern an den
Fängen und Flügeln gefesselt, zur Begrüssung unter einer geeigneten Anrede zu über-
reichen. Kaum hatte die Königin den Fuss am Lande, wobei sie fast über die reichlich
gestreuten Oelzweige gestolpert wäre, so musste sie sich mit dem armen halb zu Tode
geängstigten Käuzchen beschäftigen.’ Ross, Erinnerungen, 104 f.
5 Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 14.
246 Epilogue
For the writers of the new Greek state, the role of nature was a
recognizable medium of communication. Whether it was a proWtable
one is a diVerent question altogether. If the task and the potential of
‘theory’ is to assume a higher view, at least for a time, it should also
allow for putting place as a critical concept in its own place, context-
ualizing its critical potential, and enriching the analysis of placings
and imaginations of place or territory by throwing light on its
boundaries and the modes of translation between places. Now that
the question of modes of comparison is once more at the centre of
cultural and literary studies, maybe we should be willing and curious
enough to move away from place as a self-evident and deWning
category of studying modern Greece, and to look more towards the
interaction of place and topos with other discourses. In this way we
may avoid a little more the fate of that German queen, stumbling
over the symbolic branches strewn on Greek ground, clinging on to a
distressed owl unable to take Xight.
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Index
Ali Pasha 200 ‘tyranny of Greece over

America, United States of 98, 107, Germany’ 1–2, 19, 46
151, 175 Byron 2, 40, 117, 118, 148, 152, 154,
Arcadia 125 184–5, 186, 188, 196, 197
Athens 76, 82, 85, 136, 137, 142–4,
151, 177–80 Calotychos, V. 11, 190, 203, 209
‘Athenian School’ 145–8, 152, 193, n.35, 244
206, 212 n.44 Capodistrias, see Kapodistrias
Amalia, queen of Greece 244 Cephalonia 66–7
Aristotle 48, 173 n.65 Chandler, R. 49, 60 n.41, 61, 67, 72,
Arnim, A. 113 82, 87
Athos, Mt. 79, 181–5 Chios 67 n.57, 196, 198
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung 100 Choiseul-Gouffier 49, 59–61, 63,
Austria 233 69, 72, 79, 82
Classicism 11–12, 198
Barthélemy, Abbé 58–9, 72 Classic(ism) vs
Barthes, R. 236 Romantic(ism) 94, 146–7,
Bartholdy 55–7, 125 156, 158, 193–5, 206
Bavaria 98, 108, 139, 119 n.72, 142 Claude glass 44, 243
Beaton, R. 185, 216 climate 46, 47–9, 53, 59, 173, 243
Berlin 13, 137 comets 93, 141, 149,
Bhabha, H. 75, 127 Constantine, D. 90
Biedermeier 94 Constantinople 146, 150, 167,
Bildung 12, 13, 27–9, 55, 58, 62, 177, 181
74, 100, 110, 112, 135 Corfu, see Kerkyra
Bildungsroman 73 Cotta, J.H. 108
Black, M. 104 Coutelle, L. 213 n.47, 215 n.51, 223
Boeckh, A. 118
Boie, H.C. 60, 69 n.62, 72, 112 Dessau 119, 120
Brandis, C.A. 173, 188 Dimaras, K.T. 149, 190, 203
Brentano, C. 37–8, 113 Diotima 73, 81–5, 87, 90, 95
Bucharest 150 Dubos, J.-P. 47
Buffon, G.L.L. 47–8
Bürger, G.A. 164–5, 213 eco-criticism 9
Butler, E. i Elytis, O. 193, 195, 202
272 Index
Epirus 122, 128, 198, 200 Heine, H. 117, 131 n.107
Ermis o Logios 29 n.21, 118 n.69, 119 Heinse, W. 69–71, 85
ethno-symbolism 8–9 Helicon, Mt. 77
Eynard, J. 126–7 Heliodorus 155
Heptanesian Islands, see Ionian
Fabian, J. 41 Islands
Fauriel, C. 114–5, 117, 129, 133, 163, Herder, J.G. 28–30, 48–9, 50 n.15,
164 n.55, 168 n.62, 169 n.63 66 n.52, 68, 81, 112, 114, 157
French Revolution 95, 98, 103, 104, Herzfeld, M. 4, 241–2
159, 231 n.76 Hesperia 72, 107
folk song 18, 65–6, 109–14, 130–1, Heyne, C.G. 50
145, 162–3, 172 Hölderlin, F. 1, 5, 19, 71–2, 93, 95,
Greek folk song 109–10, 114–15, 231, 237 n.85, 238, 241
128–9, 133, 153, 166–7, 186, Hyperion 46, 63, 73–92, 149
237–8 ‘The Archipelago’ 83, 90,
Foscolo, U. 175, 178, 193–5, 197 231 n.76
n.17, 200 n.21 letter to Böhlendorff 75 n.79, 76
letter to Neuffer 73–4
Gentz, F. 120 Homer 23, 31, 50, 131 n.108,
Goethe, J.W. 2, 16, 41–2, 50 n.15, 194–5, 198, 199, 235, 241
104, 117, 164 n.56, 175, 213, Homer’s burial place 67, 79–80
215, 238 Hugo, V. 157 n.36
Sorrows of Young Werther 13, Humboldt, W. 13, 65 n.50, 93
178 Hydra 134–6, 198
Göttingen 108, 112
Gourgouris, S. 16, 156 n.34, 239 idealism 9, 10, 19
n.89, 241–2 German 13–4, 207, 211, 214,
Grand Tour 44, 51, 78, 79, 180 215, 235, 237, 238
Greek Romanticism 17, 146–7, idyll 193, 196, 217
151, 188 Iken, C. 105–8, 126, 135–6
Greek War of Independence 15, 18, imagination 54, 57–8, 60–1, 66, 72,
67, 94–5, 97, 105, 116, 119, 90, 94, 169, 180, 185, 190,
122, 139, 146, 154, 162, 178, 205, 220
183, 192, 195, 197 Ionian Islands 66, 191–2, 207
Guys, P.A. 53–4, 57, 61, 67 ‘Ionian School’ 148
Ios 67, 79
Halem, von G.A. 69 n.62, 112 Iser, W. 35, 58
Blüthen aus Trümmern 60–8 islands 52, 68, 82–3, 195
Haxthausen, von W. 108, 114 archipelago 52, 63–4, 67–8, 70, 82
Hegel, G.W.F. 212 n.44, 214, as place of freedom 67–8, 136,
215, 237 198, 201
Index 273
Italy 14, 63, 69, 96, 97, 119, 142, Lobsien, E. 74
178, 191–2, 193, 194, 207, 210, Logue, C. 241
213, 214, 233, 236 Lountzis, E. 212
Lountzis, N. 212, 213, 220
Jusdanis, G. 17 Ludwig I, king of Bavaria 142
Kalaurea, see Poros Man, de P. 77 n., 88 n.97, 89–90

Kalckreuth, von F. 119 Mani, see also Sparta 62 n.44, 123–6
Kalvos, A. 116 n.58, 148 n.15, 207, Maniots 62–3, 65, 120, 123–8,
222, 231 n.75 132–3
Odes 192–206 Macpherson, J., see also Ossian 113
Kant, I. 33–6, 48, 74, 159 n.41, Marathon 122, 198
213–5, 232 Marchand, S. 12
Kapodistrias, I. 108, 119 n.72 Mavromichalis P. 123 n.85, 126
katharevousa 147, 148 n.15, 162 n.48 metaphor 9, 56, 64, 65, 67, 74–5,
Kerkyra 200, 208, 209, 212 83, 86, 89, 103–5, 113, 202
Kerner, J. 130 Metternich 120
Kind, T. 135 Missolonghi 98, 121, 143, 208, 217,
klefts 65, 128, 138 n.121, 152, 154, 219, 221, 222–6, 229, 230, 233,
166, 168 234, 237
kleftika 128, 134, 171 Mistras 87
Korais, A. 105, 108, 115, 118 n.69, Moldavia 98, 106, 146 n.11
135, 136, 155 Montesquieu 47, 53 n.25, 157
Koromilas, A. 185 Morea, see Peloponnese
Krug, W.T. 100, 108, 126 Morlachs 65
mountains 66, 82, 86, 109, 121, 153,
landscape 30–2, 44, 70–1, 72, 79, 167, 176
87–92, 133, 139, 175, 176, 180, as place of freedom 84, 95,
192–3, 229, 237, 239, 241–3 127–8, 131, 134, 180
theoretical approaches 4, 6–9, Müller, W. 96, 99, 111, 113, 115
22–4, 74 Griechenlieder 116–37, 164 n.57
Romantic landscape 32–43, 94, and publisher Brockhaus 105,
153, 219–21 114 n.49, 118–19, 120–1, 129
Leipzig 97, 100, 101, 108, 119 n.72, Munich 137, 150, 151
120
Leontis, A. 10, 16, 22 n., 239 n.89, Naples 106–7, 115
245 Nagel, F.G. 101, 125
Lessing, G.E. 213 n.46, 214, 224 n.68 Nafplio 142, 143, 144, 150, 162, 177
Lisbon earthquake 103, 106 n.76, 181, 188
Literarisches Conversations-Blatt Napoleon Buonaparte 66–7, 94, 98,
129–30, 133 n., 137, n.117 120, 123, 126, 178, 191, 194
274 Index
nation 15, 47, 95, 102–3, 115, 138, Peloponnese 45, 85, 86, 98, 106–7,
141, 145, 149, 155, 172, 176, 123–4, 128, 138, 143
188, 203, 207, 215, 238–40 Percy, B. 112–3
nationalism 102 Perrault, C. 21
nature Pfau, T. 121–2
and freedom 20, 24–5, 33–6, 40, Phanariots 134, 146, 150 n.23, 163
48, 52–4, 56–7, 67, 84, 124, n.53, 190
140–1, 172, 184, 217 Philhellenism 6, 11–13, 15, 18,
politicized 95–6, 101–2, 104 97–101, 114, 116, 125, 132, 137,
Navarino 139 152, 162, 189, 197, 198, 200,
Naxos 69 206, 225, 234
Nemoianu, V. 14, 94, 189 Piedmont 107
Neroulos, J.R. 146, n.11 Pinkard, T. 13
Nerval, G. de 188 Plato 68, 69, 81, 82
Niebuhr, B. 95 Poland 96
Nio, see Ios politikos stichos 129
Novalis 14, 20, 21, 25, 37, 93, 104, Polylas, I. 209–11, 218, 226, 239
214, 219, 222, 227 n., 230 Poros 81–2
Pouqueville, F. 125, 134, 136
ocean, see sea Psara 198, 233 n.
Odessa 119, 150
Olympia 79 Querelle, see Perrault
Olympus, Mt. 84, 110
Orthodox Church 45, 97, 106 Rangavis, A.R. 5, 18, 141–2, 144,
Ossian 113, 115 n.56, 194 149–73, 180, 182, 186–9, 204
Otho, see Otto Dimos and Eleni 147, 151, 154–6,
Otto, king of Greece 142, 177, 167–71, 185
186, 244 ‘The Kleft’ 153–4
Ottomans 20, 45, 61, 69–70, 77, 97, Phrosyne 151, 173
101, 105, 107, 123, 128, 135, ‘The Singer’ 166
136, 138, 146, 167, 183, ‘Thoughts in Desolation’ 141,
191–2, 198 154, 171–2
‘The Travelling Girl’ 162–5, 169
Palamas, K. 147 n.14, 148 n.15, 192, Reichard, H.A.O. 49, 60, 87
197, 212 n.44 Restauration 94, 105, 118, 122
Parga 198, 200 Ross, L. 244
Parnassus, Mt. 77 Roumeli 77, 128
Paros 69 Rousseau, J.-J. 63, 66, 78, 89 n.101,
Patmos 62–3, 67, 201 175, 200 n.22
Paulin, R. 96, 117 ruins 64, 85, 132–3, 178–9
Peckham, R.S. 17, 139, 167 Russia 45, 62, 87, 98, 191
Index 275
Sack, von baron 118, 134 Sparta 62 n.44, 122–7, 133, 184
Salamis 82, 84, 135, 232 de Staël, Mme. 14
Samos 198, 201 Stafford, B. 23
Schiller, F. 30–1, 33, 36, 75, 87, 91, Stein G. 203
154, 159–61, 190, 207, 210–11, Steward, S 109–11
211, 212 n.44, 213–14, 216–19, Stieglitz, H. 133
223, 224, 227 n., 238 Stolberg, F. 60, 68–9, 112
Schelling, J.W.F. 207, 214, 215, Switzerland 69, 72, 125, 194, 197
220–1, 230 symbol 8–9, 102, 104, 206, 219
Schlegel, F. 36, 37, 42, 65 n.50, 104, in Romanticism 4, 6, 18, 32,
124 n.91, 157 n.36, 183, 191, 35–40, 68, 94, 203, 207, 215,
213 n.46, 229 222, 236
Schlözer, A.L. 55
Scott, W. 175 Taheiti 68–9
sea 66, 83, 107, 109, 121, 176, Thermopylae 122–3
201–2, 228–9, 243 Thiersch, F.W. 100, 108, 119 n.72,
as place of freedom 67, 134–6 120, 150
Shelley, P.B. 11, 234 n.79 Tieck, L. 214
Simmel, G. 32 Todorov, T. 236
Sismondi, J.C.L. 114 travel writing 43–58, 72, 125
Smyrna 79–80, 110 Trikoupis, S. 208, 211,
Solomos, D. 18, 116 n.58, 148 n.15, 234 n.80
192, 193, 207–40, 243
Dialogue 208 Uhland, L. 114 n.49, 117 n.65,
‘The Cretan’ 208, 215, 227 131, 214
‘The Free Besieged’ 208, 211, 215, Ukert, F.A. 108, 125, 134, 135,
216, 217, 222–32 136 n.
‘Hymn to Freedom’ 208, 211, 213
n.46, 215, 232–5, 240 Varnhagen von Ense, K.A. 96
‘Ode on the Death of Lord Venice 67 n.56, 69, 191
Byron’ 208, 211 Vico, G. 115
‘The Shark’ 208, 215 Vienna 94, 97, 108, 118–19,
‘The Woman of Zakynthos’ 208, 120
223, 237 Voltaire 63, 146 n.11
Souli 110, 198, 202 Voss, W. 60, 72, 112
Soutsos, A. 142, 174, 176 n.70, 177 Voutier, colonel 133
Soutsos, P. 18, 142, 143, 144, 147, Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis, see
173–86, 243 Barthélemy
Leandros 175–80
The Wayfarer 147, 180–5, 199 Waddington, G. 136
Spain 96, 107 Waiblinger, W. 124 n.89
276 Index
Wallace, J. 11 Ypsilantis, A. 98, 123
Wieland, C.M. 64–5 Young, E. 194
Winckelmann, J.J. 1, 25–9, 40,
47, 52–4, 224 n.68 Zakynthos 106–7, 192, 193, 195,
Wolf, F.A. 51, 118, 131 n.108 196, 207
Wood, R. 50, 57, 58, 80 Zante, see Zakynthos

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Note on Translations and Transliterations x

Introduction: Realizing the Ideal 1

In a letter to his brother in January 1799, Friedrich Hölderlin resorts

2 Written in 1935, her study of the strongly canonical tradition of German

14 Blair, ‘Cultural Geography’, 544.

19 e.g. as presented in A. D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cam-

24 Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca, NY,

27 Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Oxford, 2004).

30 Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in

36 Leontis, Topographies; Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Col-

38 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National

Nature, Klingsohr replied, is to our feeling mind what a body is to

2 On the rediscovery of classical sites, e.g. Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece; on

7 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (Basel, 1939).

We can now begin to see, returning to Novalis’s dictum, what was

14 Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, iv. 19.

Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Zur anthropologischen und semantischen Struktur der Bildung’,

RO MANTIC LANDSCAPES AND ROMANTIC SYMB OLS

These features of Greece, I suggest, bear great resemblance to the

28 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen’ (1795), in

31 Kant, introduction to Critique of Judgement, sec. ix.

34 Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford, 1995), 92.

43 Clemens Brentano, Godwi, in Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp, 4 vols. (Munich,

47 W. K. Wimsatt, ‘The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery’, in M. H. Abrams

2 On Catherine’s Enlightenment hopes for establishing Russia as a new Byzantium

TH E LEGAC Y OF TH E TRAV ELL ERS:

It would be impossible to characterize period travel accounts without

TRAVEL ACCOUNTS AND IMAGINARY TRAVEL

This is not the place to introduce systematically the range and

31 On the openness of organic imagery, in the context of German debates about

34 Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 2–21.

36 For a comparison of the two Anacharses, see François Hartog, Memories of

45 Choiseul-GouYer, Voyage pittoresque, i. 165. Von Halem himself mentions the

50 Conrad Wiedemann, ‘Römische Staatsnation und griechische Kulturnation: Zum

63 ‘Das besondere Geheimnis unserer Staatsverfassung, welches nur denen anver-

H ÖLDERLIN’S HYPE RION: T H E GRE EK

The work of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) in many ways exem-

68 David Constantine, The SigniWcance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Höl-

85 See Paul de Man, ‘The Image of Rousseau in Hölderlin’, in The Rhetoric of

92 Commentary in GStA iii. 456.

99 ‘denn, alles andere abgerechnet, so hat die philosophisch politische Bildung

102 De Man, ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’, 14 f.

The old hypothesis that comets are the revolutionary Wrebrands

1 e.g. Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld

3 Karl Dieterich, Aus Briefen und Tagebüchern zum deutschen Philhellenismus

4 Wilhelm Müller, Werke, ed. Maria-Verena Leistner (Berlin, 1994), i. 245.

As a term, Philhellenism carries connotations of revolution in appeal to

Bewegungen in Südosteuropa im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1992), 17–30; also Barbara

17 For a detailed list of 34 pamphlets see Quack-Eustathiades, Der deutsche Phil-

P OLITICIZING NATURE: GREEK NAT URE LIBERATED

30 Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, no. 216.

34 Ludwig Spaenle, Der Philhellenismus in Bayern (Munich, 1990), 45 V.

THE NATURE OF FOLK SONG

42 Müller, Werke, iii. 138.

WILHELM MÜ L L E R’ S GRIECHEN L I ED ER

Although the responses of the pen to the Greek War of Independence

61 Gernot Gad, ‘Wilhelm Müller: Selbstbehauptung und Selbstverleugnung’, doc-

75 Spaenle, Philhellenismus in Bayern, 51–69.

78 Lohre, Wilhelm Müller, 141, 190.

80 Thomas Pfau, ‘Conjuring History: Lyric Cliché, Conservative Fantasy, and

87 Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Eve of Greek Revival, 34 V., quotes statistical and demo-

92 Ewald Dietrich, Griechland und die Türkey (Annaberg, 1921), 43 f.

105 Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 122 (27 May 1825), 485.

112 ‘ı æªØ ’, Fauriel, i, no. 24.

9 e.g. K. Th. Dimaras, ¯ººØŒ $ø ÆØ (Athens, 1982), 141–56, 167–241,

$ ÆØ (1830–80)’; ¨ ÆÆ ºª Æ Æ, ii (Thessaloniki, 1976),

26 e.g. Linos Politis, æÆ, 174: ‘The Romanticism of Rangavis seems to be

65 ` ÆÆ, ii. 45 f.; Christian A. Brandis, Mittheilungen aus Griechen-

23 Elytis, ‘`ºŁ ıØªø Æ’, 99.

30 Tziovas, ‘˝ ŒºÆØŒ Æ Ø’, 258 V.

31 e.g. Dimaras, æÆ, 27 V.; Beaton, Introduction, 34.

37 Polylas, ‘Prolegomena’, in Solomos, ¢ÆÆ, i, ed. Linos Politis (Athens, 1948), 11 f.

87 Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, ‘˚Æº " ÆØ Æ æ æÆ ı’, in ¯æ ıØŒ