Greece

GREECE. - The kingdom comprising the southern, more articulated part of the Balkan region, the Ionian and Aegean islands (except Imbros and Tenedos), Crete, eastern Macedonia and western Thrace.

I. GEOGRAPHY.

It is the southernmost and most insular state in Europe: 132,562 sq km, of which 108,707 (82%) are on the mainland.

The country is almost entirely covered with mountains (Olympus 2,985 m; Pindus 2,575 m), among which open a few small plains, more often in the form of closed basins, which difficult communications isolate from one another. The climate is Mediterranean or sub-littoral, with mild and rainy winters, hot and dry summers, to which the pronounced relief, the nearby sea and the frequent breezes impart a less extreme character. More than with forests, the limestone mountain is covered with scrub and meager pastures: arable land represents barely 10% and tree crops 3% of the territorial surface. Agriculture nevertheless remains the basis of the Greek economy; cereals being insufficient for internal consumption, the most important products are tobacco (first place in Europe), the olive and above all the vine (Corinth currant and Cretan sultana). In livestock raising, goats and sheep predominate. Fishing is of modest importance. Mineral resources are not lacking (iron, lead, silver, zinc, etc.), but their industrial exploitation is hampered, besides by the deficiency of capital, by the insufficiency of motive power (little lignite, modest hydroelectric capacity). The imbalance of the trade balance is attenuated by the proceeds of maritime commerce, favored by a good merchant marine (1.3 million tons of tonnage), very active especially in the eastern Mediterranean.

After the Second World War, the Italian Aegean islands were assigned (Sept. 15, 1947) to G., incorporated into the Kingdom and divided into four provinces (Rhodes, Kalymnos, Karpathos and Kos).

The population (7.8 million inhabitants) is 87% Greek, with Turkish, Albanian, Slavic and Armenian minorities. A third of it is considered urban; but of the inhabited centers only two exceed 100,000 inhabitants (Thessaloniki and Piraeus) and two exceed 50,000 (Patras and Volos), while the capital has now exceeded one million (if considered united with its port, Piraeus).

G. has been constituted as an independent Kingdom since 1830 (republican interlude 1923-24); the Constitution of 1911 is now under revision.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. PREHISTORY AND HISTORY UP TO CHRISTIANITY.

FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE ROMAN CONQUEST

The Paleolithic is almost entirely absent; Greek prehistory begins with the Neolithic (from about the middle of the 4th millennium), whose sites are located in the eastern part of the mainland, in the northeastern part of the Peloponnese and in Crete. The Cretan civilization is notably different from the mainland one (v. EGEA, RELIGIONE) and the latter (whose principal monuments are the ceramics) can be divided with relative approximation into two epochs, the first of which, named after Sesklo in Thessaly, seems to derive from immigration, the second, named after Dimini, also in Thessaly, rather from evolution from the first, without this excluding a new influx of peoples. The homeland of the Neolithic peoples (Thracians, Pelasgians) would be sought, for the first wave, in Asia Minor (and the itinerary would have followed the routes of Thrace and Macedonia), for the second, in Mesopotamia (entry into Greece would in any case have occurred from the north).

The Neolithic culture disappears with the age of metals (from about the middle of the 3rd millennium): new invaders now come from the southern and eastern seas (Carians, Leleges, Cyclopes of later Greek mythology), and, subsequently, from the north. These last are the Aryo-Europeans (or Indo-Europeans), who from about the 12th century constituted the Mycenaean civilization, under the cultural and, for at least three centuries, also political influence of Crete. Having become a great power, the Mycenaeans (Achaeans), from about the middle of the 15th century, conquered the islands of the Aegean Sea and Crete itself, and came to settle on the coasts of Asia Minor (the Trojan War at the beginning of the 12th century).

With the Iron Age (from about the 12th century), perhaps following new migrations ("Dorian invasion"), the Mycenaean civilization disappears (not suddenly) and a dark period begins (the Greek Middle Ages, between about 1000 and 800) in which the political configuration and the civilization of historical Greece gradually took shape. The first political unit was formed by the villages which, grouped by region, formed a State of which the region itself was the eponym. Soon, first in the eastern portion of the mainland, in the islands and on the coasts of Asia Minor, the villages united within fortified enclosures, and thus the polis, the city-state, was constituted. The patriarchal monarchy, which was the first form of government, rapidly and without conflict gives way, through the evolution of economic and social conditions, to aristocratic government, which in turn, through the territorial expansion of the States, through the development assumed by commerce and industries, new social classes having formed alongside that of the landowners, ends by transforming itself into democratic government. One of the most important determining causes of the change is the codification of law (legislations of Draco, Solon, Phaedo, Philolaus, etc.), by which, since all are equal before the law, every citizen has the right to participate in the administration of public affairs. Sometimes democracy was, through the relaxation that follows every harsh political struggle, in crisis, and there was, for more or less long periods, the government of one man (tyranny): such as Pisistratus at Athens. All the city-states passed through this political-social development, with the sole exception of Sparta (v.).

While the Hellenic territory was troubled by the formation of the poleis, which governed themselves and the surrounding region, the process of diaspora in the Aegean basin, begun some centuries earlier by the first Aryo-European invaders, did not halt, and neither did it throughout the Mediterranean: between the 8th and 6th centuries the coasts of Asia Minor, Sicily, and southern Italy were populated with Greek colonies, which, independent of the motherland, nonetheless preserved with it an almost filial relationship. The independence of those in Asia Minor (Ionia, on account of the great number of Ionian colonies) was in danger from about the middle of the 6th century. Croesus (561-46) imposed a tribute in exchange for independence. But once Croesus was defeated by the Persians and the Lydian empire had disappeared, the domination became effective and harsh. An attempted revolt, led by Polycrates of Samos and ending miserably, offered Darius the occasion for an expedition to the mainland, an expedition that ended with Persian control over the Hellespont, over Thrace and, perhaps, over Macedonia. A new revolt, more substantial through the participation of the cities of Aeolis and the Hellespont, of Caria and of Cyprus, led by Aristagoras of Miletus and suppressed after the naval battle of Miletus, advised Darius to attempt the conquest of Greece outright. But the attempt foundered with the defeat of the Persians by the Athenians and Plataeans led by Miltiades on the plain of Marathon (590). The same fate befell the subsequent expedition of Darius's son and successor, Xerxes. This time he had to clash with a league formed by Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians and others. After the success at Thermopylae which opened for the Persians the way to the capture and destruction of Athens, Xerxes suffered a grave naval defeat at Salamis, a defeat that forced him to retreat. The general Mardonius remained in Greece, but he too was defeated and killed by the Spartans at Plataea (479), while at the same time the Greek fleet once again dispersed the Persian fleet near the promontory of Mycale. The victory was perfected with the conquest of the islands and the Greek cities of Asia Minor (Cimon's victory on the Eurymedon, about 469), and sanctioned by the Peace of Callias (about 448), by which the successor of Xerxes, Artaxerxes, recognized the independence of the Asian colonies. In parallel, Greek dominion was consolidated in Sicily and in southern Italy at the expense of the Carthaginians and Etruscans.

Meanwhile Athens, to which command of the war had been entrusted shortly after the battles of Plataea and Mycale by the Delian-Attic League (478), in which the Peloponnesians took part and in which the individual cities held the position of autonomous allies, suppliers of ships and monetary contributions, by virtue of this very pre-eminence within the League, was moving toward becoming a great power. After the battle of the Eurymedon the League, formed by Euboea, the Ionian Cyclades, the Ionian and Aeolian cities of Asia Minor, those of the Hellespont, of the Propontis, of the Thracian and Macedonian coast, of Lydia and of Caria, was slowly transformed into an Athenian empire, and Athens, now conscious of its position as mistress, entered into conflict with Sparta. Joined with those of Thebes, the Spartans defeated the Athenians at Tanagra (457). Athens hastened to conclude an armistice with Sparta, in order to devote itself to the subjugation of Boeotia and of other countries of central Greece. But, when Boeotia rebelled once again and the Athenians were defeated at Coronea (447), central Greece regained its independence. After subsequently subduing a revolt led by Euboea, Athens concluded with Sparta a thirty years' peace (446-45), by which the statu quo between the two adversaries was recognized. Hostilities resumed in 431: on one side Athens with few allies, on the other Sparta, with the Peloponnese, Megara, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris and the Corinthian colonies of the Ionian Sea, a very broad following that Sparta had managed to procure for itself by setting itself up as champion of the oppressed. The war had alternating fortunes, and ended in 421 (Peace of Nicias) with a new recognition of the pre-war statu quo. This was once again disturbed by the outbreak of a conflict between the Athenian colonies of Magna Graecia and Syracuse. Athens and Sparta intervened one against the other, and the campaign ended disastrously for the Athenians (413), also giving the Ionian cities subject to Athens the opportunity to rebel with the help of Darius II of Persia and of the Spartans. The fortune of arms was at first favorable to the Athenians (naval battle of Cyzicus, 410), but soon the Spartans recovered at Notium (407), and, though defeated at the Arginusae (406), were able to defeat the Athenians definitively at Aegospotami (405). The war ended (404) sanctioning the clear predominance of Sparta in the Greek world. It was a change of master, not liberation from Athenian tyranny, as the cities that had turned to Sparta for help had hoped. Hence new discontent, which Sparta did not trouble to quell, instead damaging its relations with Persia, and indeed breaking them in order to bring help to the Ionian cities threatened by Tissaphernes. The Persians were defeated at Sardis (395). In Greece, meanwhile, an anti-Spartan League was forming, favored by the Persians, in which Boeotia, Athens, Corinth and Argos took part, besides Sparta's former allies in central and northern Greece. After the League was defeated at Coronea (394), the Spartan victory was undermined by the naval defeat suffered shortly before at Cnidus at the hands of the Persians. All then abandoned Sparta, and Athens was able, with the help of the Persians precisely, to reconstitute part of its Empire. But two powers evidently could not coexist in Greece, and a new clash therefore loomed between Sparta and Athens. This time the Persians entered the conflict as moderators, obtaining by the Peace of Antalcidas dominion over the Greek cities of Asia Minor, the dissolution of all leagues except the Peloponnesian one, and reconfirming the autonomy of the individual Greek States. Sparta, advantaged by this situation, sought in the following years to extend its power at the expense of Thebes. The plan succeeded at first, but from it there then arose a war between Spartans and Thebans, the latter supported by a league in which the Athenians also took part. After the Spartan fleet was defeated at Naxos (376), Athenian power revived in parallel with Theban power, and, jealous of it, the Athenians sought to draw closer again to the Spartans. But after the latter were defeated in 371 at Leuctra by the Theban Epaminondas, the Athenians too emerged weakened from it shortly thereafter. To complete the work of conquest Epaminondas attempted an expedition in 362 but fell at the head of his men. Thus the Theban hegemony came to an end and a general peace was then concluded, from which "Sparta and Athens remained weakened, the Peloponnesian League broken, Greece disorganized."

While the peninsula was troubled by continuous conflicts, in the north the Macedonian State was taking shape. Having ascended the throne, Philip II (360) turned his attention to the conquest of Greece. Philip began hostilities in 357 by occupying Amphipolis in Thrace and continued the action for several years, bringing it toward conclusion when, in 349, he turned against Athens. The Macedonians succeeded at first in entering officially into the Greek world (346), then in defeating at Chaeronea (338) a Boeotian League, and finally in concluding the Peace of Demades with the Athenians, by which Philip remained the effective master of the peninsula. He was then preparing to begin an expedition against Persia when he fell slain (336). He was succeeded by his son Alexander the Great. The stages of the his lightning campaign, after all the cities of G. had made an act of submission, against Persia are noted: in a short time he subdued all of Asia Minor (334); he defeated Darius III at Issus (333), thereby opening the gates to the conquest of Phoenicia, Palestine and Egypt; he again defeated Darius at Arbela (331), and, Darius having been killed by the satrap of Bactria, he subjugated the whole Empire and the north-western part of India. Having returned from the expedition (324), while he was pondering the organization of the vast Empire, he died at Babylon (323). Of Alexander's successors (Diadochi), Antipater retained the kingdom of Macedonia and of G. After Antipater's death, following a series of struggles in which the unity of the Empire was lost among various dynasties, the kingdom of G. passed to Demetrius Poliorcetes, who was succeeded, after Pyrrhus king of Epirus had taken Macedonia from him (288), by his son Antigonus Gonatas. In 272 the latter was once again master of Macedonia and of G., but his position was by then weakened by the formation of new leagues: among these the Aetolian and the Achaean. A series of wars took place between the successors of Antigonus Gonatas and the two leagues. In the end Doson, having defeated the federates at Sellasia (222), united under himself a large part of G. in a new Hellenic league, in which the Achaeans also took part, while the Aetolians and Athenians held aloof from it.

At the end of the 3rd century Philip V, successor of Doson, in agreement with the Seleucid Kingdom, turned against the Ptolemies of Egypt. This fact provoked Roman intervention. Philip II having been defeated at Cynoscephalae (197), Macedonia became a vassal state of the Romans and in G. a system of independent leagues was organized. Having put down a rebellion that broke out in G., at the head of which Antiochus had placed himself, and having defeated Perseus, son of Philip, at Pydna (168), Macedonia was divided into 4 vassal states of Rome, and twenty years later (148-47) reduced to a province, while the Achaeans, taking advantage of the troubled situation in Macedonia, stirred up G. Intervening to quell the revolt, the Romans first made G. a part of the province of Macedonia (146), later a province of its own under the name of Achaea. Hellenic political independence thus came to an end within the Empire of Rome. But Greek culture did not set, rather it animated with itself the entire Mediterranean world that had become Roman (v. also ELLENISMO).

Mario Camozzini

III. RELIGION

The Greek religion is born from the fusion of the culture of the Aryan-European invaders with the autochthonous one, which, according to an expression current today but conventional, is called Mediterranean (for the Cretan territories, Minoan). Beyond its literal meaning, however, this classification has no deeper ones, and it solves none of the problems that an attempt to penetrate the inner essence of the Greek religion poses to the scholar.

If it is true that the Aryan-European civilization was of the patriarchal type and the Mediterranean one matriarchal, it is equally true that the terms "patriarchy" and "matriarchy", where they are not applied to a culture known in its elements and in its development, indicate simply a category with very vast limits within which notable differences can be found, and are found, which are realized in the process of individuation of those cultures which, in a very broad sense, may be said to be included in the aforementioned categories. Thus the Aryan-European culture was evidently a well-defined type of patriarchal culture, to which, since we know absolutely nothing of it for the pre-diaspora period, that is, for the whole age in which only a "pure" Aryan-European existed, it is not possible to apply a priori the categories of a patriarchy constructed for the most part on the elements offered by the so-called present-day "primitives". The same holds for the Minoan culture, and the observation is meant to emphasize the difficulty of a "historical" understanding of the Greek religion, a religion that becomes appreciable only in historical age, when G. is born, and nevertheless does not present itself as a complex of "primitive" beliefs and norms, but as a whole already fixed by a very long and unknown travail. To this difficulty of a historical order is added another, equally troubling and common to the study of many ancient religions, of a psychological order. Accustomed (and one might even say conditioned) for about 2000 years to a religion which, although revealed, is rich in rational elements and even possesses a philosophy of its own, it is very difficult for moderns to approach a wholly arational religion and to understand it in its intimate essence without distorting it and without assuming, at least in the act of understanding, an attitude of more or less self-sufficient criticism, justified by the conviction that that type of religiosity is "outdated".

A third and final difficulty of a preliminary order presents itself to the scholar: there is no trace in G. of sacred books or of a markedly religious or canonical literature. "There is not even, not even in the philosophical schools, a doctrinal speculation that has taken as its object a more or less official and fixed formulary of beliefs; there is, finally, in Hellas no record of the constructive activity of prophets and religious reformers" (Picard, v. bibl., p. 10). Theology was for the Greeks the doctrine of the persons and works of the various gods, a doctrine that was fixed only once (by Cornutus), and which the only personality who could have systematized it (Plato) disdained.

Nevertheless the sources for the knowledge of the Greek religion are not lacking: in literature there are historical-religious references in every author, references that find confirmation in archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics, which, taken together, constitute the most abundant material for research and study.

The first author who has significance in the history of the Greek religion is Homer. Within his orbit lives Hesiod, who however, and perhaps by way of reaction, repudiates the Homeric ideals in his preoccupation with systematizing the religious data in the light of his personal tendencies. The elegiac poets, the lyric poets and the tragedians give abundant information about myths and rites, and the specific contribution of the latter is of particular importance for the knowledge of the religiosity and morality of ancient Attica (Aeschylus above all). A markedly ethical motive is detectable in Pindar, while the mythical material already of Aeschylus and Sophocles finds in Euripides an excessively subjective interpreter. A rationalistic preoccupation is appreciable in Herodotus's attempt to systematize religion according to a preconceived historicism, by which Hecataeus too had allowed himself to be guided. But the historians, especially after history, from Thucydides onward, becomes truly critical, are a source of great value.

Among the mythographers, who prove to be the most worthy collaborators of the poets and the exegetes, besides the already mentioned Hesiod, we should remember Pherecydes, Hellanicus and, in the 5th century, when mythology had in a certain sense become specialized, Herodorus, Socrates and Stesimbrotus. Occasional mythographers are the philosophers, especially the rationalist critics of the mythical systematization, the grammarians, who use historical-religious material as a means for the explanation of the ancient authors, and the historians, polygraphs, etc., of the Hellenistic age. The figurative tradition in turn preserves the most notable documentary value; indeed, the most ancient sources on gods, heroes and cults are constituted precisely by the material offered by archaeological discoveries, which are continually enriched with new results. The excavations of Athens, of Eleusis, of Olympia, of Delphi, of Epidaurus, of Pergamon, etc., have brought to light documents of fundamental importance comparable to those offered by numismatics (divine types, Olympian and heroic legends, festivals and ceremonies). Epigraphy, finally, also provides rich material for investigation: "acts of consecration, accounts of the construction of buildings of worship — temples, treasuries, altars, etc. — sacred laws, chronicles of temples, official decrees of the founding of cities, or those of pious associations, whether in the private cultic domain or in others close to religion; to these are added rituals, oracles, catalogues of priestly personnel, calendars, minutes, etc." (Picard, v. bibl., p. 19). In this material, which represents in substance the entire Hellenic cultural heritage, the Greek religion is enclosed. And this religion, while it does not seem to have been subject to a development — since the principal beliefs found in Homer are valid for the citizen of the 5th or 4th century B.C. (it is the individual's attitude toward religion, if anything, that changes, not the religion) — is composed, like most religions, of a mythology and a cult. The subject matter of mythology, which is "a manner of expression in whose place no other could be chosen because it is the only manner of expression conformable to the times" (thus according to K. Kerényi), are the works of the divinities, in which the divine figures realize and assume their personality. The principal of these is Zeus (v.), the sky god of the Indo-European koine, king of gods and men. Dweller, with his divine court, of Olympus, he is the protector of society, of the family, of the clan, of the city and of the State.

His consort is Hera (v.), sister and spouse, probably a pre-Hellenic divinity, as would attest her function as protectress of Argos, the localization at Mycenae of her most famous temple, and the placing in the Argolid of the unfolding of her most important myths. Her function is exhausted in protecting marriages and married women. Also of pre-Hellenic origin would be Athena (v. J. van Windekens, Éléments d'origine pélasgique dans la religion grecque, in Le muséon, 63 [1950], p. 97 ff.), daughter of Zeus (already in the Mycenaean age there is the representation of an armed goddess, covered by a shield), who, for the Hellenic world, is the goddess of active but not exclusively warlike force: protectress of cities, of artisans, of women who wish to adorn themselves and of many other activities in which wisdom is necessary.

Brother of Zeus is Poseidon (v.), god of the sea and of all waters (springs, rivers, lakes), but also, once, lord of the earth (he was, according to a very ancient tradition, the spouse of Demeter), a divinity who derives all his importance from the natural world; a fact that deprives him of the moral value that is proper to the other gods of G. Beside Zeus the most significant Greek god is Apollo (v.), he too, perhaps, of non-Greek origin, the "pure" and the "holy" par excellence; he who superintends the norms that rightly regulate the coexistence among men, the musician, the inspirer of singers and also the revealer of the future, of the unknown, brother of Artemis (v.), the goddess symbol of female liberty, she too probably of non-Greek origin, queen of the woods where she lives hunting and where she hides her coyness, to which she renounces in order to assist women in childbirth (but also to bring them death), or to care for newborns.

Also non-Greek is Aphrodite (v.), whose homeland is perhaps Mesopotamia, the goddess of love, of the peace of the sea, from whose foam she is born, and of tranquil navigation. All are slaves of her arts, men and gods, with the exception of Artemis, Athena and Hestia.

Far off, but not for this reason extraneous to the world of the Olympians, is Hermes (v.), a very ancient divinity, whose name is perhaps connected with the heap of stones (herma): dispenser of gifts to men, whose gain he protects, especially the unexpected, but also the calculated or that attained by means not all lawful. He is a thief from birth, and it was he who placed in the heart of woman "lies, flattering words and wiles." But he is also protector of herds and shepherds: a twofold spirit that generates in men uneasiness and a sense of protection at the same time.

Personification of brute force, god of war as an end in itself, is Ares (v.): of scant spiritual content, whose small importance is equaled by that of Hephaestus (v.), the god of fire, and, at the same time, the artisan god, who inhabits the volcanoes (Etna above all), and by that of Hestia, daughter of Rhea and Cronus, the personification of the hearth, a divinity "represented in an imperfect manner in her human figure, so much so that it is always evident that the respect and veneration go to the hearth itself and to its fire, not to the goddess" (Nilsson).

Besides these (Olympian) divinities, great importance was attained, but extraneous at first to the official religion, by Demeter (v.) and Dionysus (v.).

Better than in mythology, the beliefs of the Greek nation as a whole can be discerned in the cult, which is the unfolding of the social side of religion: all the more so in G., where religious practice is under the control of the State. It is precisely from the point of view of the cult that the ever more clearly delineated connection between the foundation of the official religion and the foundation of the State comes to light, so much so that the Greek religion ends with the end of the polis. Its long persistence was facilitated by the paradoxical position in which the critics of the religious tradition placed themselves, critics who flourished also in the period of the full splendor of the Greek nation, a position of detractors who do not cease to pay their homage to those very divinities against which they aim their barbs.

There is no trace in G. of the existence of a priestly class: the priests of Dodonaean Zeus (v. DODONA, oracle of) are perhaps an exception, as are those officiating in the mystery cults, where religious brotherhoods foreign to the official religion also appear. At Eleusis (v. ELEUSINI, MISTERI) the high priest and other subordinate officials were supplied exclusively by a particular γένος. But there was nothing of this in the civic religion. In it religious authority was exercised by the people, who, having elected or chosen the priests by lot, mostly for a limited time, delegated them to carry out the decisions of the assemblies or of the magistrates. This naturally did not entail incompatibility between the function of priest and any other activity: it was sufficient that during the celebrations the officiant devote himself solely to the sacred activity. Some cults were presided over by priests, others by priestesses, others still by both together. But on certain occasions it was the civil and military authorities themselves who directed the rite. The place of worship is naturally subject to a certain evolutionary process: originally every altar is the seat of the divinity when it is invoked, and the primitive altar is nothing but a rough square, round or elliptical stone. Subsequently two types of arae are distinguished: the βωμός and the ἐσχάρα, while a third type, the βόθρος, served in the practices for the chthonic divinities. These altars are then placed at the center of a sacred enclosure (τέμενος) surrounded in turn by a wall (περίβολος), and enclosed within the temple, which thus becomes the true and proper residence of the divinity. The image, which has before it a table for the offerings, is placed in a cella (ναός) sometimes containing within itself an ἄδυτον, which could be penetrated only by the priest and under determined circumstances, while the influx of the faithful into the sacred enclosure is subject, according to the rites and the divinities, to precise rules: access limited to determined occasions, sometimes only annual, although, as a rule, entry is permitted daily. The temple is usually dedicated to a single divinity, and the most important sanctuary was originally on the acropolis, but this probably only in the epoch in which the acropolitan seat was the only enclosed temple, while sacred places in the open air were preserved: in woods, near springs, rivers, mountain peaks, etc.

The cult practices did not differ much from one another: among them were included sacrifices and offerings, hymns and prayers, ceremonies of expiation and purification. Usually the god was first implored to make himself present with a ὕμνος κλητικός, and then the sacrifice was performed. This could be bloody or bloodless, sacramental, if the divinity was incorporated by the faithful by means of a meal, or sacrificial, if the offering was left to the divinity. Different animals were sacrificed according to the different divinities; to the Olympians white animals were offered, to the chthonic ones black. The rite was usually performed to obtain something (this was also the case with purifications), under determined circumstances. This was also true of the processions, which were practiced especially in connection with the "agrarian" divinities. The intensity with which the rite is performed in honor of a god is attested by the fact that, in the act of worship, the individual divinity sums up in itself the whole θεῖον, a realization that is at least henotheistic.

To complete the schematic picture of the Greek cult it should be noted that the rites, the calendar, the very types of cult never went beyond the circle of the city walls. The extremely particularistic spirit of the Greek people meant, therefore, that if, roughly speaking, the beliefs were the same for all, the pinpointing of faith and reverence in this rather than in that divinity depended exclusively on the arbitrium of the citizens. Perhaps only a determined type of cultic organization assumed Panhellenic value, namely the oracle. In the most ancient times that of Dodona which, situated in the northern part of G., "could have guided the immigrations of the Dorians," in a more recent age that of Delphi (v.). Here Apollo was venerated, who had probably replaced an autochthonous divinity, and who constituted, at a determined moment, a common place of assembly for all the Greeks. From Delphic Apollo derive the traditions concerning the seven sages and the collection of Delphic precepts, the poetry of Pindar, and all that radiance of wisdom that emanates from the spiritual equilibrium of Apollo: here Socrates finds his γνώθι σεαυτόν.

Among the official festivals of the Athenian calendar, there should be remembered in honor of Zeus the Dipolieia (v.), in honor of Athena the Plynteria (v.), in honor of Apollo the Thargelia (v.), the Munichia (v.), the Brauronia (v.) and the Tauropolia (v.) in honor of Artemis, and still others.

Alongside the official religion, of which poets, philosophers, historians and polygraphs are the spokesmen, a "popular religiosity" can be found in G., which, without ceasing to exist alongside the civic religion, will know how to rise to notable sublimation. Leaving aside the mysteries (v.), the point of arrival, despite their most ancient origin, of popular religiosity, remnants of beliefs and practices of a less precise nature can be ascertained especially through Pausanias. In his Periegesis there is talk of stones (ἱεροὶ λίθοι), believed, perhaps, originally to be endowed with magical virtue, and later connected to some divinity; of the veneration of trees (the olive on the acropolis of Athens, for example) and of their connection to determined divinities (Zeus, Dionysus, Artemis, etc.); of an original theriomorphism, documented both by the appellations that certain gods bear in the historical age, and in the myths in which the divinities transform themselves into animals or in the cults in which the priest bears the name of an animal. More conspicuous elements of popular religiosity are the rites of clearly magical character: those for summoning rain; the annual sacrifices to the Winds, to the Clouds, to the Thunders; the rites that intend to provide for the fecundation of the earth and of men, etc.

To the magical sphere belongs also a series of beliefs, which entail eliminatory rites, in a kind of maleficent fluid (μίασμα) that would emanate under determined circumstances from persons and things, an idea that generates the formation of a concept of the pure and the impure, concepts however divided by a rather fluctuating boundary line. It is certain that whoever has come near certain persons or certain things, whoever has performed determined acts is invested by the fluid that emanates from them, and must be purified of it. Particularly under precise circumstances: sacrifices, for example, must be offered ἄγνως καὶ καθαρῶς. And the μίασμα must be removed that emanates from having shed or having been touched by blood; from having been — for a woman of childbearing age — at a funeral ceremony; from having come near a pregnant or menstruating woman; from the wholly physical filth that comes from carnal conjunction; from having committed a crime or having come near the guilty person, etc. The practices for freeing oneself from the μίασμα were various: lustrations with water, fire, fumigations, serve this purpose, which is attested also by the presence of a water crater placed at the entrance of the temples, so that one may, before entering, purify oneself, given that one may have been struck by the μίασμα even without knowing it; and, on the other hand, the μίασμα can be transferred onto an animal, a man or an object.

The characteristic of all these rites has led some to speak of a certain "predeism" in them, not wishing by this to assert that they belong to a stage of Greek religion in which gods do not appear, but that they do not imply any god, the implication not being essential to the rite. It is rather the idea of tabu that is manifested in the belief "in supernatural forces, useful or harmful, that act by contact or contagion; one seeks to capture the good forces directly as well as to repel or destroy the bad ones."

In the primitive religious environment the cult of the ancestors must also have flourished (v. ANTENATI, culto degli; DEFUNTI, venerazione dei), from which derives the cult of the hero (v.), as the mystery cults reveal, which, perhaps originally "agrarian" rites, reach back in their foundation to the most distant times, are maintained alongside the civic religion and then blossom in the great Orphic and Eleusinian manifestations. A continuity of relations between the deceased and the living is attested by the annual festival celebrated in honor of the dead: on that day the deceased visited the living and stayed with them, to return in the evening to his sad dwelling. Here arises the idea of the soul that survives death and that is represented in material form, often under the appearance of an animal, such as the serpent or a bird. But the cult of the deceased was paid as if he continued to maintain a bodily figure, even when the practice of cremating the corpse was introduced, a practice that should have led to a more spiritual conception.

Greek religion, as already noted, dissolves with the dissolution of the political unity of the country. The dispersal of Hellenic culture throughout the Mediterranean world and the ease with which the Greeks identified their divinities with those of foreign countries leads to the loss of the genuine character of the divinities themselves and of the cults connected with them. Not only that: with Alexander's expedition new cults were imported, and the people, by then become skeptical, turned to these, as to the mystery cults—Greek, to be sure, these latter, but placed outside the official religion, which was increasingly neglected in their favor (v. also ELLENISMO).

Mario Camozzini

IV. CIVIL HISTORY FROM CHRISTIANITY TO THE PRESENT.

I. IMPERIAL ERA

From the beginning of the imperial era, Greece, its territory devastated (the last battles of the Republic had been fought there: Pharsalus, Philippi, Actium), its population decimated, its wealth impoverished (Strabo in Book VIII of the Geography gives a pitiful description of it), was able to hail its restoration with the accession of Augustus to the Empire. In 27 B.C. the latter detached the Peloponnese from Macedonia, reconstituted the local administrations, especially those that had a Panhellenic significance, such as the amphictyony of Delphi, and established new ones, such as that proper to the populations of Achaea, with its seat at Argos, headed by a "helladarch," almost a symbolic resurrection of the ancient Achaean League; and he revived the court of the Areopagus, substituting election, however, for selection by lot.

It was Rome's policy to be generous in local autonomies, while centralizing in imperial hands the general government of the country, whose holder was appointed by the Senate. Athens, Sparta and Rhodes enjoyed the privilege of free cities, that is, exempt from the control of the Roman governor.

During the first two centuries of the Empire the history of Greece presents no facts worthy of note. The life of the country is entirely taken up with the business of administration and with ambitious municipal rivalries, shut within the memory of its glorious past, averse to participating with its men in the government of the Empire, even when the edict of Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to the Greeks as well. Greekness is felt above all in the celebration of the Olympic games, the traditional symbol of Panhellenism, which from 776 B.C. onward were always celebrated (serving also, from the 4th century onward, to fix the reckoning of time) until 393 A.D., when Theodosius I prohibited their further celebration.

Nor from the religious point of view, except for Corinth, destroyed by Sulla and rebuilt by Caesar through the influx of foreign colonists, was there any interpenetration between the Latin and the Greek element, notwithstanding the sympathy that the emperors showed for Greece. Claudius (d. 54), steeped in Hellenism, did not stint his sympathy for it; Nero (d. 68) gathered easy laurels there; Hadrian (d. 138) dwelt for a long time in Athens, in 131 consecrated the new Olympieion and founded in the city a common assembly (synedrion) of the Greeks around the temple he had built to Zeus Panhellenios, with an annexed imperial cult, a priestly college, festivals and games.

But in the 3rd century, during the crisis of the Empire, the tranquillity of the region begins to be disturbed. Under Decius (d. 245) the Goths threaten its frontiers, so much so that under Valerian (d. 260) the walls of Athens had to be raised, and in 267, under Gallienus (d. 268), the city was occupied by Goths and Heruli, driven back by the Greek general Dexippus. In 396 Alaric again appears before Athens, and he does not assault it because he was deterred by the statue of Athena Promachos dominating from the Acropolis, but he destroys the sanctuary of Eleusis (395) and devastates the Peloponnese, from which Stilicho drives him back.

The provincial organization established by Augustus lasted until the reform of Diocletian, who assigned Greece, under the name of Achaea, to the praetorian prefect of Illyricum. The only survivor of classicism remained the University of Athens, faithful to the traditional Platonism, always alive even in its Neoplatonic interpretation, hostile to Christianity. Its closure, ordered by Justinian in 529, marked the death of cultural paganism in Greece.

II. MIDDLE AGES

Under the domination of Byzantium, which, begun with the founding of Constantinople (330), assumed its specific character under Justinian (527-65), the position of Greece became secondary. By virtue of the division into themes, which he put into effect in the various provinces of the Empire, carrying out the arrangement he had already established for the exarchates of Ravenna and Africa — whereby the civil and military administration that Diocletian had entrusted to two different officials was once again united in the hands of a single governor (strategos) — the province of Achaea was abolished and replaced by two districts: 1. Hellas, which comprised Attica, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris and Thessaly, with Thebes as the residence of the strategos; 2. Peloponnese, with its seat at Corinth.

The invasions from the north by the Vandals (467-77) and the Slavs (549, 588) into the Peloponnese, where the latter eventually settled permanently, altered the ethnic composition of the population, although the Greeks, with their superior culture, managed to absorb the preponderant Slavic element. The ancient cities were reduced to villages and large landed estates spread over lands that had once been cultivated. These sad conditions of the Greek people eventually culminated in an open rebellion, soon suppressed, which broke out in Athens in 727, when Leo III the Isaurian began the iconoclast struggle. Nor did the tribulations of Greece end there, for in 746-47 a grave pestilence depopulated Athens; the country had to sustain continuous struggles to stem the progressive invasion of the Slavs into its territory; the incursions that the Muslim Arabs, settled in Crete from 823, carried out on the islands and coasts of Greece; the invasion of the Bulgarians, whom Basil II, called for this reason the Bulgar-Slayer, defeated in 1018 near Athens, and the sack that Roger II of Sicily carried out in Acarnania and Aetolia in 1147-49, occupying the two commercial centers of Corinth and Thebes.

The capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204) brought a profound upheaval in the situation of Greece, upon which the Latin commanders, especially from France, imposed the feudal system as they occupied it. Thus arose the principality of Morea, ruled by the dynasty of Godfrey of Villehardouin, and the duchy of Athens, which passed from Boniface III of Montferrat to Othon de la Roche, to Walter of Brienne and finally to the Acciaioli of Florence. Nor should one forget the relations, both commercial and political, which, because of the importance of the Adriatic shore, southern Italy always maintained with Greece; whence it may well be said that the catastrophe of Constantinople in 1453 was a catastrophe not only for the Greeks but also for the Latin world, driven out of the region along with its Western culture.

The Ottoman Turks of Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453 and in 1456 took possession of Athens. Greece was divided into six districts organized militarily: Morea, Boeotia and Attica, Thessaly, Aetolia and Acarnania, Epirus, Euboea. Thus its territorial unity was reconstituted and the country under Turkish rule was able to enjoy a wretched but effective peace. This, however, brought no civil improvement, because the Ottoman government, modeled on that proper to nomadic hordes, was as it were encamped in the occupied territories, governing by the law of the desert, ignorant of civic administration. During these long centuries of Ottoman rule there are no internal political events to record, except for the progressive occupation, to the detriment of the Venetians, of Euboea (1470), of Lepanto, Corone, Modone, Navarino (1499-1501), that is, of almost all of Greece, by the Turks.

Hostilities between Venetians and Turks, despite the peaces of 1503 and 1573, continued always until in the long war from 1645 to 1669 the Venetians lost, after a heroic resistance, the island of Candia, and in that from 1685 to 1689 the Peloponnese. It was during this war that the Parthenon, used by the Muslims as a powder magazine, was almost destroyed by a bomb launched by the Venetians of Francesco Morosini (Sept. 27, 1687). With the help of Emperor Leopold I, Morosini was able to take possession of the Peloponnese once again, and its possession was confirmed to him by the peace of Carlowitz (1699), but only for a few years, because in 1718, by the peace of Passarowitz, it passed again to the Turks, without regret on the part of the Greeks, who declared they preferred the Sultan to the Venetians and the Greek patriarch of Constantinople to the Latin pope of Rome.

III. NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE

The French Revolution, by causing the rise of nationalisms everywhere, in addition to those of the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians of the Balkan peninsula subject to the Turk, also stirred up that of Greece, encouraged (here as among the other populations mentioned) by Russia, which from Peter the Great onward has always felt itself the natural protector of the Orthodox populations.

Opposition to this movement of liberation came from Metternich's Austria, opposed, in the name of the principles of the Holy Alliance, to any spirit of nationalism which, had it prevailed, would have ended up by crumbling, as in fact later happened, the Austrian State itself; but it was platonically encouraged by Russia, which supported the secret associations (heteries) and welcomed into the ranks of the army and the civil offices the Greeks who had fled from Turkey; and more effectively by England, which, once the insurrection had broken out, sent its fleet in support. The revolution broke out at Jassy through the initiative of Alexander Ypsilantis, aide-de-camp of Tsar Alexander I, and developed in Achaea under the leadership of P. Mauromikalis and T. Kolokotronis, with the blessing of the archbishop of Parrassos, who raised the banner of the insurrection within the walls of Kalavryta, and with the effective action of M. Bötzaris and of the admirals Kanaris and Miaoulis.

The first effect of the insurrection was the assembly at Epidaurus, on 1 January 1822, of a gathering of the insurgents which proclaimed the independence of Greece and elected a council of five members and a senate of 59 members presided over by Demetrios Ypsilantis, brother of Alexander. While the powers received the insurgents' appeal with coldness, illustrious European liberals rushed as volunteers to the call: it suffices to recall Lord G. Byron, who later fell at Missolonghi, and Santorre di Santarosa, who fell at Sphacteria. Greece meanwhile, to soothe internal discords, had established a dictatorial regime under the Corfiot Count John Capodistria (1827), formerly a minister at the court of Tsar Alexander I, soon killed (1831) for his authoritarian conduct.

In defense of the Sultan, the viceroy of Egypt Mehmet Ali, named for the occasion pasha of the Morea, took his stand, sending his son Ibrahim to occupy Navarino, Tripolitza, and Missolonghi (1827). The three powers interested in the events (France, England, and Russia) interposed their mediation, but Ibrahim, after accepting it, refused to submit to the conditions of armistice, and then the English fleet, having entered into action, annihilated the Egyptian one, thus obtaining the liberation of Greece from the Turks. The Treaty of Adrianople (Sept. 1829), confirmed by the London Conference (1830), recognized the independence of Greece within the limits of Hellas, the Peloponnese, Euboea, and some islands of the archipelago, fixing the northern boundary along a line, from the Gulf of Volos to that of Arta, which excluded the populous provinces of Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia, as well as the large islands of Crete, Rhodes, Samos, and Chios.

The crown of the new Kingdom was offered to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and he having refused, it was offered to Otto, second son of Louis of Bavaria, who made his solemn entry into Nauplia, the provisional capital, in 1833 and fixed the capital of the Kingdom at Athens. Because of his system of government, too centralizing in the German manner, a revolution broke out in 1862 which persuaded Otto to return to Bavaria. He was succeeded by Prince George of Denmark, favored by England, which on that occasion ceded to Greece the Ionian Islands (1864), which it had held since 1815.

The new Constitution, which gave the monarchy a democratic character, inasmuch as the sovereignty of the people was recognized in it through the parliamentary system, came into force in 1864.

Under the reign of George I, Greece improved its internal condition; thanks to the two Balkan wars it increased its territory with the conquest of Salonica made by the diadochus Constantine, who ascended the throne (as the twelfth of this name, to link himself to the last of the Palaeologi who fell beneath the walls of Byzantium in 1453) after the assassination of his father at Salonica (1913). But the prosperity attained was annulled by the vicissitudes of the First World War, in which the Cretan Venizelos wanted Greece to participate, against the opinion of the King, who wanted neutrality, and who had to go into exile (1917), from which he was recalled, following a plebiscite, in 1920. But the defeat inflicted on him by the Turks in Asia Minor (1922) forced Constantine XII into a definitive abdication in 1922. He was succeeded, Alexander I having predeceased him (who reigned from 1917 to 1920), by the other son George II, who, following the republican revolution led by Plastiras, had to abdicate in 1924.

The republican regime lasted until 1935, when the National Assembly, by an overwhelming plebiscite, recalled George to the throne. The unstable equilibrium of the parties persuaded the new president of the Council Metaxas to assume a dictatorial attitude. Events meanwhile involved the country in the Second World War: attack on Greece, moving from Albania, by inadequate Italian forces, which the able defense of General Papagos got the better of (1940-41); intervention of Germany in Greece (1941); landing of the Anglo-American allies (1944); withdrawal of King George to England; regency of the archbishop Damaskinos (1945); bloody guerrilla warfare between the national front (EAM) and the Soviet-obedient popular liberation army (ELAS), under the leadership of Markos; institutional plebiscite (1946) which votes the return of the King. He dies in 1947 and is succeeded by his brother Paul II. After the cession to Greece of the Dodecanese islands (1946), a treaty of friendship between Italy and Greece was signed at San Remo on 5 Nov. 1948.

Nicola Turchi

V. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

I. FROM THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY UP TO THE 20TH CENTURY

1. Apostolic age

The Hebrew Bible calls the Greeks Jāwān ("Ionians"). Jāwān was a descendant of Japheth; the Septuagint (Ἰωάν) and the Vulgate (Iavan) transcribe his name in the genealogies (Gen. 10:2, 4; 1 Chron. 1:5, 7); elsewhere they translate it as Ἕλληνας and Graeci, or Ἑλλάς and Graecia. In Assyrian it was rendered Jāmn, Jāman, Jāvan ("Ionians"). In Isa. 66:19 Yahweh promises that he will bring the Israelites as far as the Greeks and the "islands." Ezek. 27:13, 19 and Joel 3:6 (Heb. 4:6) speak of the slave, vessel and metal trade that the Tyrians carried on with the Greeks. Dan. 8:21 ff. and 11:2 describe the power of the ram, or Alexander "king of the Greeks" ("first king of the Greeks": 1 Macc. 1:1; 6:2). The Seleucids too are "kings of the Greeks" (Dan. 10:20; Zech. 9:13; 1 Macc. 1:11; 8:18: against them the Jews ask help from the Romans, that they may free them from the "yoke of the Greeks").

The first political relations between the Jews and the inhabitants of Greece proper took place (1 Macc. 12:20-23) under Areus I, king of Sparta (309-265 B.C.), and the high priest Onias I (325-300) or II (ca. 265). Jonathan Maccabeus (168-142 B.C.) appeals to a very ancient kinship between Spartans and Jews (1 Macc. 12:6, 21; 14:20; cf. 2 Macc. 5:9, and Flavius Josephus, Antiq. Iud., XIV, 10, 22); Simon (142-134) renewed the alliance at Sparta's wish (1 Macc. 14:16-23).

In the "Greek" or "Hellenistic" period, which began after the conquest of Alexander the Great (d. 323 B.C.), Palestine, after a brief period of Ptolemaic rule, was under the "Greek" empire of the Seleucids, kings of Syria. It was then that the pagan customs of the "Greeks" spread among the Jews, especially under Antiochus IV (v.), despite the resistance of the faithful remnant (2 Macc. 4:15; 9:24); the Hellenistic language and Greek coinage came into circulation (v. BIDRAMMA; DRAMMA). But the encounter of Judaism with Hellenism (v.) took place principally in Alexandria (v.), and later had other centers in Antioch, Cyrene and Smyrna. For the Jews called "Hellenists," because they spoke Greek, scattered throughout the diaspora (v.), the Greek versions of the Bible were made, the oldest and most important of which is called the Septuagint; moreover an important Judeo-Hellenistic literature developed, whose principal exponent was Philo

(v.). At the time of the apostolic preaching, Greece proper was the Roman province of Achaia. Conquered in 146 B.C., it was at first attached to Macedonia; it was raised to the rank of a senatorial province by Augustus in 27 B.C., with Corinth (v.) as its capital, "totius Graeciae lumen" (Cicero, Pro lege Man., 5). Gallio (v.; Acts 18:12) was proconsul of Achaia, distinct from Macedonia (Acts 20:2), when St. Paul arrived there, a fugitive from Thessalonica, at Athens and Corinth. Jewish communities and synagogues flourished there (Acts 18:1-4); the Apostle introduced Christianity there.

The books of the New Testament mention numerous Hellenistic Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 6:1; 9:29): ἑλληνιστής (from ἐλληνίζειν, "to live like the Greeks" or "to speak Greek"), translated by the Vulgate (wrongly) as Graecus, is the Jew who speaks Greek (Acts 21:37-39) because he was born or domiciled in the world of Hellenic language and culture. The term Ἕλλην (Vulg. Graecus) is equivalent in the New Testament to "pagan" (John 7:35; Acts 11:19; 14:1; 18:4; Rom. 1:14, 16; 2:9 ff.; 3:9; Gal. 3:28) as opposed to Ἰουδαῖος; οἱ Ἕλληνες is equivalent to τὰ ἔθνη (cf. Acts 13:47), with explicit reference to the Greco-Roman cultural world. Greco-Roman civilization and power were in fact identified with paganism (1 Cor. 1:22-24). But in Christianity, once every distinction except faith in Christ is removed, there is no longer any distinction between Jews and Greeks (Rom. 10:12; Gal. 3:28), nor between Greeks and barbarians (Rom. 1:14; Col. 3:11). Greece was the hearth from which civilization spread throughout the ancient world ("oikoumène"). Its philosophical and religious thought contributed indirectly, and more often negatively, to preparing humanity for the universal and personal Christian message. A.-J. Festugière sets out, in a rich synthesis, the deep currents, not infrequently esoteric, that reveal the travail underlying the restless Greek inquiry into God, the soul and the cosmos at the time of the appearance of Christianity.

The faith brought by St. Paul to Greece developed rapidly there. St. Clement of Rome (1st century) presupposes numerous communities there. Many bishops were already there in the first three centuries. Athens again became the center of learning for the West; the pagan Academy there was closed only in 529. From the time of Constantine the greater part of ancient Greece passed to the prefecture of Illyricum; from Valentinian I Greece was united to the prefecture of Italy; in 379 it passed again to the Eastern Roman Empire.

Antonino Romeo

2. Sub-apostolic age

The subsequent external development of the Greek Church is manifested in the participation of its bishops in the ecumenical councils. Already at the Council of Nicaea (325) there were present 4 or 5 bishops of Macedonia and Thessaly, 3 of Achaia, 4 of the islands. At the Council of Ephesus (431) one notes the presence of 5 bishops of Macedonia and Thessaly, one of whom also represented the bishop (papal vicar) of Thessalonica, of the metropolitan of Corinth with 6 suffragans, of the metropolitan of Old Epirus with 2 suffragans, and of the metropolitan of Rhodes with 4 suffragans. At the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) there are found the synodals of Greece, that is, the metropolitan of Thessalonica, the metropolitan of Gortyna with 9 suffragans, the 5 bishops of the islands of Corfu, Zante, Cephalonia, Aegina and Lemnos, the metropolitan of Nicopolis (Epirus) and 3 other bishops of the Peloponnese and of other Greek regions.

The entire ecclesiastical organization of the Eastern Illyricum, into which the dioceses of Greece were incorporated — except, however, the bishoprics of the metropolis of Rhodes — comprised, at the end of the 9th century and even later, about sixty dioceses. This development was due, at least in very large part, to concord with the Roman See, to which those dioceses belonged by right and also in fact until 732; to the sacrifices made in the early persecutions by martyrs such as Dionysius, Publius, Leonidas, Cyril of Crete, Demetrius, Isidore, the Ten of Crete; to the apologetic and dogmatic theology taught by the apologists Aristides and Athenagoras, by the master Theodore, the future archbishop of Canterbury, by Andrew of Crete, by Joseph of Thessalonica, brother of St. Theodore Studites, and by the future apostles of the Slavs, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, who came from Thessalonica; to the zeal and good example of Nicon Metanoeites (d. 998) and of the founders of famous monasteries, Luke (d. 946), Athanasius the Athonite (d. 1000; v. Athos), and Christodulus of Patmos (d. 1093). The separation of Byzantium from the Catholic Church (v. COSTANTINOPOLI, I, The patriarchate) dragged the Greek Church into the same sad fate. The two ecumenical councils of Lyons (1274) and of Florence and many other attempts by the popes had only a temporary success. Indeed, after the rejection of the attempts at union, hatred against the Catholic Church often grew, as is shown by so many writings of the Greek controversialists. In the 14th century, moreover, the new heresy of Palamism, propagated by Gregory Palamas, metropolitan of Thessalonica, and by his followers and successors Nilus and Nicholas Cabasilas, added a grave obstacle to the Union. The Latin domination which from the 13th century embraced many parts of modern Greece benefited the Union little; indeed, because of the methods used by the governments, it often turned out to be an advantage for the dissidents, although their bishops were not officially admitted to their sees. When the domination of the Latins ceased, it became possible to ascertain more clearly the grave losses suffered by the Catholic Church, especially on account of mixed marriages. A characteristic example is offered by Crete, occupied from the 13th century until the year 1669 by the Venetians; there originated the patriarchs most hostile to the Catholic Church, such as Meletius Pegas and Cyril Lucaris. Under Turkish domination, the Greek hierarchy was able to reorganize itself anew. Nevertheless, its culture and its influence were certainly not flourishing, mainly on account of the sad situation of their patriarchs. Precisely in those times, as will be seen below, the dissident Greek Church requested and quite willingly accepted the services of Catholic missionaries and of the Roman See. It is not intended, however, to deny that even in those times, particularly through the help of "Orthodox" benefactors from abroad, schools were established, for example, at Mount Athos, at Athens, Chios, Patmos, Janina, Missolonghi, in the Ionian islands, etc.

After the liberation from the Turks, the Greek government promoted elementary and secondary schools and in 1837 founded the University of Athens with a faculty of theology. Certainly the Greek Church drew from these institutions of the State several advantages but also losses, on account of the liberal state-worship of the rulers of that time. The Greek Church itself underwent a transformation, in that the liberal government, with the consent of an assembly of bishops, proclaimed in 1833 the independence of the Greek Church from the Byzantine patriarchate. Other facts of capital importance followed, such as the suppression of many bishoprics and of many monasteries, both male and female. On these and other difficulties v. ATENE, ARCUDIOCESI di.

Gregory XVI, in strenuously defending religious principles in the internal struggles of Greece (first half of the 19th century), certainly rendered services to the cause of holy liberty against state-worship. He instituted the apostolic delegation. In the second half of the 19th century the influence of the Protestants, which had already begun earlier, continued; also the fact that many professors of theology had been trained in German universities, particularly under Protestant teachers, had unhealthy effects. The encyclical letters of Pius IX and Leo XIII, which invited the dissidents to the Union, met in Greece with strong opposition, including in the press. Yet even in sad days the trust of "Orthodox" parents who entrusted their children to Catholic institutes run by religious and by sisters was not lacking.

II. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, FROM THE 13TH CENTURY TO THE 20TH CENTURY

Pope Innocent III created in 1209 the Latin archbishopric of Athens with 11 suffragan sees. Other Latin bishoprics were created around the same time in Crete and elsewhere. Indeed the Greece of that time presented a great ecclesiastical organization. Those few bishops who took the oath of obedience to the Pope and to his representatives were left in office. Western religious also came to the aid of souls.

Thus the monastery of Daphni came into the hands of the Cistercians. The Dominicans, Franciscans and other religious founded residences in Greece, especially in Crete. But the conversions of the Greeks were not numerous. The Latin domination did not lead the native inhabitants to the Catholic faith of their masters. It was not the Church's fault that several of the lords and even some ecclesiastics were not of exemplary conduct. Fortunate was the initiative promoted, especially after the Council of Florence, of gently attracting the dissidents to the Catholic Church by means of Catholic priests of the Greek rite: indeed perhaps the principal cause of the scant result of Catholic apostolate in the preceding centuries was precisely Latinism. In Crete, in Methone and in Korone strong groups of Catholics formed under priests of the Greek rite. The Catholic bishop of the Greek rite Joseph, who previously bore the name John Piusideno, was a valiant writer and exemplary prelate, who died among his flock at the capture of Methone in 1500. The cardinals Bessarion and Isidore of Kiev supported the Catholics of the Byzantine rite with their authoritative influence. In the 17th century many dissident prelates of Greece addressed letters to the Roman Curia requesting help; the Greek monasteries of Athos, Nea Mone (Chios) and Patmos did the same. The Holy See was benign and charitable toward such supplications, although at times it showed itself reluctant as a consequence of some sad experiences with the Orientals. Conversions of dissident prelates were also obtained; some nevertheless did not persevere. In any case the apostolate of Catholic missionaries in Greece often found trust among the "Orthodox." The schools of the Jesuits, Capuchins and Lazarists were attended by not a few children of dissident parents. When in the 19th century a flourishing of charitable and educational foundations began with all the modern equipment in Athens, in Piraeus, in Thessalonica, in Crete, in Chios, in Naxos, in Syros, in Santorini, in Tinos, in Corfu and elsewhere, the "Orthodox" parents showed very great trust toward these schools and toward other institutions of the kind. Thus it has remained until today although in the course of time attacks against Catholic works have not been lacking. For the cultural contribution of Greek Catholics in the West, v. COLLEGI ECCLESIASTICI (IX. Greco, Pontificio).

III. IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The Greek "Orthodox" Church received a new Constitution in 1940. Until 1923 it had been governed by a permanent Synod of 5 members presided over by the Archbishop of Athens. The Statute of 1923 replaced this Synod with another composed of all the bishops, leaving the handling of ordinary affairs to the Archbishop of Athens. This arrangement lasted until 1925. A new Statute in 1931 established a General Assembly of all the bishops to be convened at least every 3 years and a permanent Synod of 8 members. The Statute of 1940 retained these two bodies, only reducing to 6 the members of the Synod, to which it entrusted the task of electing new bishops, to be done by presenting 3 candidates to the government, which would then choose one. Some dioceses were suppressed and others merged together, so that there resulted 65 dioceses and the archdiocese of Athens, subject to the Synod of Greece, while the province of Crete, subject to the Byzantine patriarch, numbers a metropolitan and 7 suffragan bishops.

In 1938 Archbishop Chrysostomos Papadopoulos was succeeded upon his death by Chrysanthos Filippides, who in turn had as his successor, in 1941, Damaskinos, who later became regent of the Kingdom until the return of the king; he died in 1949 and was succeeded by Spyridon.

In the last 20 years the "Orthodox" Church has had tense relations with the Catholic Church and instead very friendly ones with the Protestant churches. The tension, whose cause was the arrival in Greece of numerous Catholics of the Greek rite together with their bishop after the war against Turkey (1921), has manifested itself in numerous legislative acts against "proselytism," in the constant refusal to recognize the Latin Archbishop of Athens, in the opposition of the clergy against the institution of civil marriage (the law recognizes only the "Orthodox" marriage of the "Orthodox," so that a "mixed marriage" performed in the Catholic Church is held to be invalid), in the new law of 1938 which sets out the constitutional clauses on religion, and finally in the effective opposition to the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

The Greek Church had itself represented at all the principal pan-Christian conferences (Lausanne 1927; Edinburgh 1938; Amsterdam 1948). Relations with the Anglicans are particularly close. Upon invitation, delegates were sent to the Lambeth Conferences of 1920, 1930 and 1948. In 1931 there were official discussions on doctrine and on the possibility of intercommunion with the Anglicans and the Old Catholics. But only in 1938 did the Greek Church recognize Anglican ordinations, which was then imitated by other "Orthodox" Churches.

The level of education of the clergy in the Greek Church is, by reason of its great poverty, rather low. The majority of students in the theological faculty of Athens do not aspire to the priesthood but only to some career connected with the Church (e.g., chancellorships in the dioceses, chairs of theology almost all held by laymen). The adoption of the new calendar in 1924 gave rise to local dissensions that still continue.

In 1907 there was founded, mostly by laymen, an association called Ζωή (Life) with a monastic-type rule for the formation of catechists and for the promotion of Sunday schools. It publishes a weekly paper of the same name. In 1938 the Christian Union of Graduates arose to raise the level of religious life; it publishes Ἀκτίνες (Rays). After the First World War other movements have had a life especially through the initiative of laymen for religious renewal.

The situation of Latin Catholics in Greece during the 20th century has not undergone changes worthy of note. Catholic Action has been organized according to modern directives. In 1947 the diocese of Chios was placed under the administration of the Archbishop of Naxos and that of Santorini under that of Syros.

Giuseppe Gill

IV. THE GREEK RITE

Until a few years ago, this term was always used to designate the rite of the Byzantine Church observed in various regions. To distinguish the languages and countries of this rite, one said Greek-Russian, Greek-Bulgarian, Greek-Georgian, Greek-Melkite (Arabic), etc. Now the expression Byzantine rite has become established; v. BIZANTINA, LITURGIA.

Placido de Meester

VI. THE κοινή.

The κοινή ("common") or ἑλληνική διάλεκτος designates the Greek language from the time of Alexander (ca. 330 B.C.) until the Byzantine period; it is post-classical Greek which, from Alexandria (v.), spread throughout the entire Roman world. A language of conversation and commercial relations, it lasts until 500 A.D., when the phase of Modern Greek begins; it is also called "Hellenistic," since ἑλληνισμός was the name given to the grouping of the entire Greek people, beyond the barriers of individual States, into a common cultural world (400-200 B.C.). The κοινή extends to the various forms of Hellenistic literary production (inscriptions, private letters, historical and biblical works); it remains a compromise between the spoken language and the tradition of classicism.

This international language, convenient for transactions, breaks up the existence of the Greek dialects. The literary language, which differed appreciably from the spoken language and remained under the influence and imitation of classical Greek, from the 1st century B.C. strives to draw close again to the ancient classical models (Atticism); while the spoken language develops on its own account, and has Modern Greek as its endpoint of development. The Atticist tendency did not affect the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, although a sporadic Atticization of the Synoptics can be detected in individual manuscripts or groups of manuscripts (Michaelis).

The κοινή was formed on the basis of Attic, whose phonology and inflection it for the most part preserves; the Doric influence is minimal or nonexistent, while the contribution of Ionic is abundant. The choice of α or η, the vocalism of certain words, the cases of aspiration, the laws of contraction, declension and conjugation adhere, with few exceptions, to the rules of Attic; while Ionic, having penetrated only accidentally into the inflection and vocalism of the κοινή, influenced the vocabulary more, leaving a trace of this even in Modern Greek, whose foundation belongs to the κοινή.

In the 4th century B.C., vase inscriptions, stone inscriptions, and oath formulas adopt foreign terms, especially Ionic in current speech and in literary compositions, Doric in epigraphy. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries the κοινή gains ground, spreads, and has its actual birth; but already in the 3rd century B.C. Ionia presents Hellenistic inscriptions, and its islands work for the diffusion of the κοινή. In the 1st century A.D. in Rhodes the language is Doric, but the epigraphy is that of the κοινή.

According to Thumb, the Ionic-poetic terms are vulgarisms, due to the high number of Ionic soldiers and merchants who contributed to Hellenizing the East; according to Mayser, those terms are due to particularistic tendencies of certain authors of Ionic origin, and to the conscious imitation of the poetic language.

In the elaboration of the κοινή, influences foreign to the Hellenic world intervened: 1) from Phoenicia; 2) from Asia Minor (Phrygia, Lycaonia, Lydia), where the Greek and native elements fused in phonetics (modifications in the vowel system, loss of labial articulation, consonants softened after a nasal, tendency to level the quantity between long and short, etc.); 3) from Egypt, where however, apart from the names of months and persons, the vocabulary remains essentially Greek, as regards worship, the military, weights, measures, and coins.

Present in Egypt as a superior language, rich in vocabulary and suited to rendering the nuances of thought, the κοινή will influence the natives, who, when they wish to restore their own language to honor, will make use of Greek letters and many Greek words.

Biblical Greek is nothing but "common" Greek, or κοινή, as it was spoken and written in non-literary and purist circles. After the discovery of the papyri, one cannot doubt the existence and development of a non-literary κοινή, spoken or written, current at that time in the Hellenic world, although it may not have been entirely identical from province to province. Biblical Greek has a relative originality of its own only because it was used to translate Semitic originals or because of the nature of the new teaching of which it is the vehicle.

The Septuagint (v.) impresses a particular character on the κοινή in its version. Thus the immoderate use of forms, locutions, and phrases that are certainly Greek, but whose frequency is explained only by coincidence with Hebrew (theory of "accumulation"): secondary Hebraisms. Primary and properly so-called Hebraisms, avoided when the Hebrew locution is accommodated according to the spirit of the Hellenistic language (Pentateuch), consist of forms not of the κοινή, through superstition of the letter (II Kings, etc.).

The Semitisms of the New Testament are either Hebraisms (conscious or unconscious imitations of the literalism of the Septuagint), or Aramaisms, that is, servile translation of oral or written Semitic sources, including conceptions according to the form of the writer's Semitic spirit, rendered servilely into Greek.

Latin terms had entered into circulation in the East, following the Roman conquest. The integrity of the Hellenistic language was not affected by the "Latinisms" introduced into the lexicon of the κοινή (administrative, military terms, etc.).

Emmanuele da San Marco

VII. THE GREEK VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE.

Since the Greek language and culture had spread throughout the civilized world (v. HELLENISM), the Jews, especially those of the diaspora residing in Alexandria (v.), took care to provide a translation (v. SEPTUAGINT) of the Hebrew Bible and an interpretation accessible to the Hellenistic world. But in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. the old Alexandrian Greek version gradually lost all esteem among the Jews for two reasons. Having, with the destruction of the Temple, lost the center of worship, the Jews needed a new bond of spiritual unity; they obtained it by subjecting world Judaism to rabbinism. In this struggle for internal unity an important part was played by the unification of the biblical text, which began around 100 A.D., mainly through the influence of the great Rabbi 'Aqiba (v.), who, in order to base the entire Jewish oral tradition on Sacred Scripture, attributed a meaning to every smallest word and syllable; such hermeneutics required a well-fixed text. Now the Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint disagreed among themselves in many points and also with the official Hebrew text. The aversion to the Septuagint that resulted from this grew because of the use the Christians made of it in their Christological controversies against the Jews. Official Judaism therefore rejected the Alexandrian Greek version. But Hellenistic Jews, not knowing Hebrew, needed a Greek version.

Therefore, around 140 A.D. a Greek proselyte named Aquila (Akylas) made one. He knew Greek very well and also acquired good knowledge of Hebrew. Imbued with the hermeneutical method of Rabbi 'Aqiba, he sought to reproduce the official Hebrew text in Greek with all exactness, even in the smallest minutiae. He accomplished this task with great virtuosity, though not without doing violence to the Greek language. A completely new version, independent of the Septuagint, it was highly esteemed by the Jews and used for a long time in their synagogues.

But not all Jews felt able to repudiate the venerable Septuagint version. Therefore, shortly afterward, perhaps around 180, another proselyte, named Theodotion, made a version from the Hebrew that followed the ancient Alexandrian version as much as it could, or rather made a revision of it, harmonizing it with the Hebrew text. This version, less welcome to the Jews than that of Aquila, was all the more esteemed by the Christians.

A third interpreter, the Ebionite Symmachus, perhaps around 200, set about translating the Hebrew Bible, but following a different norm from his predecessors. He strove, that is, to express not word for word, as Aquila did, but rather the sense of the Hebrew phrases. He did so in good Greek, often happily adapting to the genius of the Greek idiom.

The Christians nevertheless retained the Septuagint version, even though they felt the great differences among the individual codices and its discrepancy from the Hebrew text. The first who attempted to remedy this inconvenience was the great Origen, who in an immense work (v. HEXAPLA) harmonized the Alexandrian text with the Hebrew text by means of the three aforementioned Greek versions, from which he took words and entire phrases to replace less exact expressions and fill gaps in the Septuagint. These insertions, drawn almost entirely from Theodotion, are particularly numerous in Job and are found, as in the oldest manuscripts, still in the editions of the Septuagint, though marked in that of A. Rahlfs with asterisks. In the book of Daniel the version of Theodotion almost entirely supplanted the original Alexandrian version.

Lucian, who made another famous recension of the Septuagint, also used the "Three," as they were customarily called, but preferably Symmachus, whose elegant Greek pleased him greatly. Thus so many hexaplaric readings, that is, readings of the "Three," invaded the codices of the Septuagint, to the point that one can understand neither the work of Origen and Lucian nor the further history of the text of the Septuagint, and much less critically restore its original form, without continual comparisons with the remains of the later versions.

These versions deserve particular interest for the influence they had on our Latin Vulgate, since St. Jerome, in order to accomplish the difficult work of a translation from the Hebrew, consulted them many times; he esteemed the "Three" greatly, but gave special trust to Aquila, whom he considered "verborum diligentissimum explicatorem." From Aquila he took, for example, the overly literal expression of Moses' "horned" face (Ex. 34, 29).

Besides the influence of these versions of the whole Old Testament, there existed other partial and anonymous versions, the Fifth, the Sixth and perhaps even a Seventh. In ancient Christian literature there are also cited the Syriac, which is a Greek version made from the Hebrew by an unknown Syrian, the Samaritan, of which some fragments still exist, and the Hellenic.

Most of these Greek versions were lost. Remains of them are found, for example, in the commentaries of St. Jerome and of other Fathers, in the margin of cod. Marchalianus (Q), of cod. 86 and 710 and of the Syro-Hexaplaric version. In 1875 the fragments then known were collected and edited with great care by Fr. Field, but since he could not make use of the manuscripts, he does not always merit trust. Meanwhile new fragments have been found, scattered in various publications.

In Venice there exists a codex with an incomplete Greek translation of the Old Testament made from the Hebrew. It is written in Attic Greek, but the Aramaic parts of Daniel are translated into the Doric dialect. G. Mercati has proved that the author of this "Venetian Greek" is Simon Atumano, archbishop of Thebes. It was published by O. Gebhardt (Leipzig 1875), but it has no value for textual criticism.

Isaias, ed. I. Ziegler 1939, pp. 106-15, e XIII. Duodecim Prophetae, ed. J. Ziegler 1943, pp. 102-109; E. Kantz, A fresh Aquila fragment recovered from Philo, in Journ. of theol. Studies, 47 (1948), p. 31 sgg. - 2) Altri libri ed articoli: G. Mercati, L'età di Simmaco interprete e s. Epifanio, Modena 1892; M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Aquila, Vienna 1896; A. Bludau, Die Apokalypse und Theodotions Danielübersetzung, in Theol. Quartalschrift, 79 (1897), pp. 1-26; G. Mercati, D'alcuni frammenti exaplare sulla V° e VI° edizione greca della Bibbia (Studi e Testi, 5), Roma 1901, pp. 28-46; H. B. Swete, An introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, Cambridge 1902, pp. 29-56, 62 sg.; A. Rahlfs, Quis sit & S'heog, in Mitteil. d. Sept. Unternehm., 7 (1915), pp. 404-12; J. Reider, Prolegomena to a Greek-Hebrew and Hebrew-Greek Index to Aquila, Filadelfia 1916; G. Mercati, Se la versione dall'ebraico del codice veneto Greco VII sia Simone Atumano arcivescovo di Tebe (Studi e Testi, 30), Roma 1916; A. Rahlfs, Über Theodotions-Leartern im NT und Aquila-Leartern bei Justin, in Zeitschrift f. neut. Wissenschaft, 20 (1921), p. 182; Th. Zahn, Herkunft und Lehrrichtung des Bibelübersetzers Symmachus, in Neue kirchl. Zeitschr., 34 (1923), pp. 197-209; W. W. Cannon, Jerome and Symmachus, some points in the Vulgate translation of Kakeleth, in Zeitschrift f. neut. Wissenschaft, 45 (1923), pp. 191-99; A. E. Silverstone, Aquila and Onkelos, Manchester 1931; J. Ziegler, Textkritische Notizen zu den jüngeren griechischen Übersetzungen des Buches Isaias, Gottings 1939; id., Die jüngeren griechischen Übersetzungen als Vorlagen der Vulgate in den prophetischen Schriften, Braunsberg 1943; M. Johannessohn, Hieronymus und die jüngeren griechischen Übersetzungen des Alten Testamentes, in Theol. Lit. Zeit., 73 (1948), pp. 145-52.

Ernesto Vogt

VIII. LITERATURE

I. ANTIQUITY

At the origins stands the legend that attributes to the mythical Orpheus, priest of Apollo, and to his disciples and continuators, Musaeus, Eumolpus, Linus, poems celebrating the life of the gods and heroes. The legend confirms them as representatives of a religious poetry also by the fact that their memory is always joined to the cult of some god. According to Pausanias (I, 18, 5), the Lycian Olenus was the first to compose a hymn to Eileithyia that the Delians used to sing at the festivals of the goddess.

In the continuity of this tradition is to be sought the origin of the 34 hymns that have come down to us under the name of Homeric, of varying length and composed in different epochs (8th-4th centuries). The longest exalt, in epic form, the deeds of the god and the legends relating to his life, of which a vivid example remains the hymn to Hermes; or they narrate the origin of the sanctuary as in the hymns dedicated to Apollo and to Demeter. The shorter ones are a simple prelude to a more extensive epic narration. The descriptive element, while distinguishing the Homeric hymns from the concision and fervor of the Orphic ones - as Pausanias already noted (IX, 30, 12) - never goes to the detriment of their content.

As a whole this collection may be considered the first document of a religious poetry, as well as an important testimony on the cults that arose in the different centers of G.

For Homer and Hesiod, v. the respective entries.

In the 7th century, elegy marks the passage from the epic, exhausted in the jumbled poems of the cycle, to lyric. Elegy and iambus were born among the Ionians, and the former became warlike and political with Callinus and Tyrtaeus, amatory with Mimnermus, gnomic with Solon and Simonides. Archilochus of Paros, perfecting pre-existing popular metrical forms, expresses in iambics his swaggering aggressiveness, and in the same meters Hipponax his often plebeian virulence.

In the islands of the Aegean, on Lesbos, flourished the passionate song of Sappho and the warlike one of Alcaeus, according to the Aeolic tradition of expressing in verse every impulse of the heart.

Light and smiling, on the other hand, was the muse of Anacreon of Teos.

On the mainland, adapting itself to the religious nature of the Dorian stocks, lyric becomes choral, and one of the first melic poets was Terpander, author of severe religious hymns, sung to the sound of the cithara (végas).

Other lyric poets were Alcman, a native of Sardis, delicate author of partheneia, the mythical Arion, and some born in Magna G., such as Ibycus of Rhegium and Stesichorus of Himera. The poetic images of the latter came closer to the epic form.

Besides being the expression of a personal sentiment, lyric mirrors the changed political conditions of G., with the affirmation of democratic institutions in the face of the decline of the aristocratic ruling class. Many of these poets are banished from their homeland, like Theognis who in the pessimistic tone of his poetry cannot forget the injustice he suffered. His poetry represents an extreme attempt to stiffen on the positions of the ancient noble morality. He too attributes to the gods the predestination of men's fortunes (133 ff.; 1029 ff.) and bows to their will (441), yet he becomes the interpreter of the anxieties of his time when he asks Zeus how it is that the wicked can enjoy the same fortune as the just (373 ff.). The motif of the omniscience of the gods and of the smallness of mortals before the wills of the divinity is also found in Pindar, but the approach is different. The gods represent for Theognis the inevitable; Pindar considers them from one side with more severe religiosity. In his work, which ideally concludes the archaic age, the Orphic demand for an order established in the afterlife is strongly felt: reward for the good and punishment for the reprobate.

By virtue of this loftiness his lyric detaches itself from that of his contemporaries Simonides and Bacchylides, also authors of epinicia.

Pindar's religious faith is frankly monotheistic; the poet sings, through the valor of the athletes, the virtue of the individual (ἀρετή). Man, under penalty of decay, must know how to preserve it, venerating the gods who granted it to him and taking care to avoid their wrath (φθόνος). Moreover he must respect earthly laws. In the Homeric hymns too recurs the invocation: διδὼν δ'ἀρετήν, and the fulcrum of Herodotus's stories is this valor of the Greeks which, nourished by wisdom and by observance of the laws (VII, 102, 1), succeeds in defeating the brutal thousands of Persians (VII, 103, 4), while the gods break the ὄβρις of Xerxes, oppressor of the liberty of the Hellenes.

After the Persian wars, in the 5th century, at Athens, under the enlightened guidance of Pericles, the splendor of the arts is matched by that of the various literary genres, especially in tragedy and comedy, both originating from the cult of Dionysus. The flourishing of the school permits a wider diffusion of culture which soon becomes a spiritual ideal.

Isocrates, one of the most celebrated heads of the school of rhetoric, will be able to write later, in admiration, that Hellenes were by then those who had the same community of culture rather than those born in the same G. (Paneg., 50). The sophistic preaching, begun at the middle of the century, establishes political interest, consequently favoring individualism, pushed with Critias to the most extreme theories. From this interest in real values historiography will benefit which, after the geographical and genealogical tendency of Herodotus, will find in Thucydides the most acute judge and investigator of human events. The studies of linguistics and rhetoric, begun with the Syracusans Corax and Tisias, benefit prose and judicial and political eloquence. This, in the 4th century, will reach perfection with the series of Attic orators among whom Demosthenes excels.

But, behind this undeniable stylistic and cultural progress, a crisis of religious and moral values is taking shape, of which the premonitory signs can be grasped in the dramatic theater. After the severe religiosity of Aeschylus, who respects the omnipotence of the gods and the laws of the State, the Sophoclean drama is more detached in the contemplation of human passions.

The concept characteristic of archaic morality whereby children atone for the faults of their fathers, already appearing in the elegy of Solon (12-31 ff., Diehl) and rooted in Aeschylus, in Sophocles begins to lose much of its importance. The State too is called into question, and in the Antigone appears the contrast between the codified norms of the πόλις and the unwritten ones of natural law (ἄγραφος νόμος). The dramas of Euripides, finally, denounce the doubt that was insinuating itself into human actions and their relations with the divine. Comedy, then, held the gods up to open caricature, as in the Birds of Aristophanes, even if this poet followed a conservative ideal. The satyr play had brought onto the stage the burlesque adventures of a god, albeit a minor one, Heracles, and had made him its hero.

The equivocation in which Athens struggles at the end of its power, and of which Thucydides has left a suggestive picture (I. III, chaps. 82-83), will find its epilogue in the trial and death of Socrates, whose isolated reaction against the sophists will be judged an offense to the divine values that were now being attempted to rehabilitate after having let them wither in consciences. A world built solely on human values soon demonstrated its transience, so that Plato in the course of his philosophical speculation, as well as spiritual revision, will come to reject this reality to fix himself anew toward the divine.

The work of Plato sums up all the experiences and aspirations of the Attic age. From the 3rd century onward, as a result of Alexander's conquests, Greek civilization, in contact with the countries of the East, absorbed and modified their various spiritual currents. The rise of new cities, first among them Alexandria and Antioch, the economic progress of the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, the affirmation of a bourgeois class devoted to trade and commerce, the language that had become common (κοινή), are among the elements of a civilization no longer Greek but spread throughout all the countries of the Mediterranean, which Droysen, with a happy expression, called Hellenistic.

Athens, fallen from its ancient political and commercial prestige, became a city of rhetoricians, to whose school one went in order to specialize. Religion too was transformed with the entry of numerous Egyptian and Oriental divinities, and people now turned to those gods they believed best suited to their own protection. The magical papyri give a clear idea of the religious syncretism that was taking shape and of the murky mixture of the different rites. The individual tended to withdraw into himself — "live hidden," recommended Epicurean ethics — and to avoid any spiritual conflict by following the precepts of a morality shaped by practical utility. Even fortune (τύχη) was understood not as the protectress of the community but of the individual. In the light of these factors one understands how literature acquired its own particular expression, variable across the different literary genres. The old forms of elegy, tragedy, and epic came back to life, but their content was different.

The religious hymns of Callimachus are executed with a refined stylistic technique, skillfully expanded with mythological images, but they do not possess a genuine and spontaneous feeling. Apollonius of Rhodes, with his Argonautica, introduces the theme of love into epic. In general, art adapts itself to human reality, grasping its immediate value but without transfiguring it. Thus the comedies of Menander capture the petty-bourgeois situations of his age in their intimacy, and the mimiambi of Herodas represent the most trite and vulgar aspects of life. The latter have almost a correlation with the sculpture of the period, which was not averse to depicting wrinkled fishermen or drunken old women. Only the idylls of Theocritus constitute an exception, even if the bucolic reality that he idealizes sometimes falls into preciousness.

Instead, literary forms such as the novel and the epigram are born; the latter, preferred for its brevity, bears witness to a more refined predilection for a state of mind that it knows how to capture with smoothness and concision. The greatest merit of the Hellenistic age is constituted by the fervor of scientific and philological studies, to which the founding of the Museum of Alexandria gave great impetus, with the work of its learned librarians who prepared the editions of the classical texts and, with Herodotus and Aristarchus, laid the foundations of the Homeric question. Geographical and ethnographic studies assumed the dignity of a science, especially with Eratosthenes and later with Posidonius. Alongside national histories were ranged those of the peoples of the East, with Megasthenes, who wrote on the peoples of India, and the history of ancient Egypt by Hecataeus of Abdera, conducted with philosophical and erudite intentions. Polybius of Megalopolis, the greatest of the Hellenistic historians and one who lived in the Roman age, gives his Histories a pragmatic direction, that is to say, one whose subject is political actions; he himself, criticizing the method of Timaeus of Tauromenium, says that no one can fulfill his office as a historian who is formed only from books and lacks political and military experience and direct knowledge of the places (XII, 25 h).

With Roman domination (1st-2nd century A.D.) literature continued to tread the paths already traced by the flourishing activity of the Hellenistic period, but without any conviction anymore. Among the many authors with which this period abounds in the various literary genres, there stand out Plutarch with his fifty biographies of men who were illustrious in Greek and Roman history, written with didactic and moralizing intentions; the unknown author of the Περί φόρος, a fine aesthetic treatise, and the fresh pastoral novel Daphnis and Chloe by Longus Sophista. Of an erudite rhetorical movement known under the name of the "Second Sophistic," the most notable representative is Dio of Prusa, called Chrysostom, author of numerous discourses. The last representative of this Hellenism in decline is Lucian of Samosata with his brilliant, unprejudiced, and irreligious work. In his Dialogues the names of the gods serve no other purpose than as a literary pretext. The times were by now ripe, and to hasten their conclusion there had already risen, according to tradition, in the Areopagus of Athens, the voice of the apostle Paul.

Among the works that consider Greek literary expression under the urgency of the various moral problems, the following are significant: J. Girard, Le sentiment religieux en Grèce d'Homère à Eschyle, Paris 1869; R. Hirzel, Themis, Dike und Verwandtes, Leipzig 1907; U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Der Glaube der Hellenen, 2 vols., Berlin 1935; W. Jaeger, Paideia, I. Berlin 1935, II-III, Oxford 1943-44 (Italian trans. vol. I, Florence 1936); W. Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos, Stuttgart 1942; F. Heinemann, Nomos und Physis, Basel 1945; C. Del Grande, Hybris da Omero a Cleante, Naples 1947; H. I. Marrou, Histoire de l'éducation dans l'antiquité, Paris 1948; W. Chase Greene, Moira, Fate, Good,

Exil in Greek thought, Cambridge (Mass.) 1948; M. P. Nilsson, Greekish Religiosities, Italian trans. edited by C. Diano, Florence 1949, Lanfranco Fiore

II. MIDDLE AGES

The period of transition between the twilight of the imperial age and the Byzantine age is called the "late empire" and runs from Constantine to Justinian. It is a period of transition in which, among the writers of the Greek language, one counts as historians Eusebius of Caesarea (v.), Socrates and Sozomen; as scholars Stobaeus; as rhetoricians Libanius and Julian the Apostate; as orators the great Cappadocian Fathers St. Basil (v.), St. Gregory of Nazianzus (v.), St. Gregory of Nyssa (v.); as philosophers Proclus and the epigones of the school of Athens; as poets Nonnus of Panopolis, Quintus of Smyrna and Musaeus.

Justinian is the emperor who gives his stamp to Byzantine civilization, which reveals itself in his Christian conception, grand in the monuments of art, rigidly theological in the exposition of religious truth, hostile to free philosophical investigation, not conducive to severe inquiry in matters of history, conscious of the five centuries of Christian thought and practice that had left their mark on the culture of the Empire.

Byzantine literature is characterized by the contrast between respect for the ancient form and the new currents brought by Christian thought. The Byzantines, in fact, read the ancient authors a great deal and especially the Alexandrians, more erudite than inspired, and are therefore led to place the new content within the ancient forms. This content is made up of various elements, namely the solemn Romanitas of the Empire, on which the administrative life and the customs of the court are modeled, and the Christian vision in thought and practice, of a Christianity already adult and dogmatically fixed, and which had indeed become, with its creed, the badge of unification and recognition among the various Christian peoples who make up the Empire. The latter, now projected toward the East, has taken from it religiously the manifestations of a heavy asceticism often taking pleasure in strange external displays, and politically a servile deference toward the despot who reigns at Byzantium.

Setting aside the period of transition, the Greek literature of the Middle Ages, or Byzantine literature, can be divided into three periods: 1) from Justinian (6th century) to the rise of the Macedonian dynasty (9th century); 2) the age of the Macedonian emperors (10th-12th centuries); 3) the age of the Comneni and the Palaeologi (12th-15th centuries), under the last of whom Byzantium falls into the hands of the Turks.

For the strictly theological and moral production of these three epochs v. BIZANTINA, LETTERATURA. Here a brief panoramic sketch will be given of non-ecclesiastical literature, arranged according to the aforementioned epochs, referring to the individual entries for the most important figures.

1. In the age of Justinian the historians stand in the foreground. Procopius (d. ca. 562; v.), author of the History of the Wars of Justinian: Persian, Vandalic, Gothic, in 8 books; Agathias of Myrina (d. 582), who continued the history of the Emperor from 552, the year in which Procopius had left it, to 558, and which was in turn continued by Menander Protector (mid-6th century) up to 582; Malalas of Antioch (mid-6th century), author of a Chronography from the origins of the world to the death of Justinian.

Also to the age of Justinian is in all likelihood to be assigned the hymnographer St. Romanus (v.) of Emesa in Syria, to whom are owed those admirable kontakia, poems modeled on a fixed scheme (irmos) with a metric that is not quantitative but syllabic. Romanus was followed by more recent melodists, authors of kanons and not of kontakia, among whom the most notable are St. John Damascene (v.) and his brother Cosmas the Melodist, Theodore Studites (v.) and his brother Joseph of Thessalonica. The epigram too, once the glory of the Alexandrian poets, flourishes in the 6th century, but naturally transformed by Christianity, which frees it from the overshadowing mythological imitation and allows it freer personal expression. The most celebrated epigrammatists of the time are Rufinus, Paul the Silentiary and the scholastic Synesius.

2. The age of the Isaurian emperors, wholly taken up with the iconoclast struggle, did not favor the development of letters; but with the advent of the Macedonian dynasty, which inaugurated the most glorious epoch of the history of Byzantium, a great reflowering also occurs in literature. Its illustrious representative is Photius (d. 897). The emperor Constantine VII (d. 959) is rather an erudite compiler, to whom are owed the books De thematibus, De administrando imperio, precious for the history of the Slavic peoples, the Biography of his ancestor Basil I, De caeremoniis aulae Byzantinae. To Suidas (or Suda) is owed an encyclopedic Lexicon full of information of historical, geographical and philological interest.

It was Constantine VII who ordered the great logothete Symeon to translate into Greek from various languages (whence the epithet Metaphrastes) the lives of the most notable saints: whose content, often novelistic, brings back to life the religious-social environment of Constantinople. From the age of the emperor John Tzimiskes (969-76) is the Philopatris, an anti-Arab dialogue, of nationalist spirit, in imitation of Lucian.

Special mention must be made of the popular poem entitled Digenis Akritis. The protagonist of the anonymous poem is called Digenis because he was born of a Muslim emir and a Greek princess, and has the epithet Akritis because he has the task of defending the frontier (akra) of the Empire toward the East. According to the widespread demand of the popular age, he is very handsome, a valiant warrior, is the reciprocated lover of a maiden whom he abducts and makes his wife, is honored by the visit of the emperor, and dies at the age of thirty-three a glorious death. This epic is a mirror of the brilliant and eventful life that was lived by the Byzantine barons on the eastern frontiers of the Empire.

3. The 11th century is that of the Comnenian emperors, which begins with Isaac I (d. 1059) and ends with Andronicus I (d. 1185). During the 126 years of their reign, thanks to the temporarily improved political-military conditions, a literary movement takes place which on the one hand manifests the increased influence of the Latin West, to whose cultural ideal the king Manuel I is inspired, and on the other a return toward the models of the past, a recalling of the great figures of the classical poets and philosophers, the use in composing of a purer language than the usual one (Atticism).

Anna Comnena (1083- d. at an unknown date), eldest daughter of Alexius I, wife of the historian of the Comneni, Nicephorus Bryennius (d. 1137; whose narrative stops at 1079), narrates in the Alexiad, a work in 15 books, the warlike exploits carried out by her father against external enemies from 1069 to 1118. The work is rich in classical reminiscences, historically documented, Atticizing in style and language.

Special mention must be made of Michael Psellus (d. 1078; v.), a versatile polygraph, secretary to four emperors, wholly imbued with Hellenic culture, whose work as a writer (exegesis of Greek texts, philosophical, juridical, historical questions, funeral eulogies, letters, eulogies of the living) has a very notable value, especially where he evokes Greek classicism. His Chronography, which runs from 976 to 1077, besides its historical merit, also has a literary one of the first order.

In the 12th century there is no lack of either historians or philologists. Among the historians are to be remembered George Cedrenus (end of the 11th century), author of a Chronicle from the origins to Isaac Comnenus, and John Zonaras (v.), who wrote a Universal History from Adam to Alexius Comnenus. As philologists and scholars are to be mentioned Eustathius bishop of Thessalonica, scholiast of Pindar and commentator on the two Homeric poems, the latter a precious work because it reports older scholia; John Tzetzes (d. after 1158) who wrote in political verse (that is, popular, plebeian, based not on quantity but on the number [15] of syllables and on the final accent) a series of stories of various content which were then distributed into twelve groups of a thousand, whence the name Chiliades.

The 13th century, inauspicious for Byzantium, opens with the founding of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, an era certainly not favorable to the development of letters. Particular mention should be made, also because it comes from Athens, of the poetic work of Michael Choniates, who was archbishop of that city from 1175 to 1204. He sings of its ancient glory and beauty, evokes the banks of the Ilissus and expresses the joy of being able to contemplate the Acropolis. His brother Nicetas, who lived at the court of Theodore Laskaris at Nicaea, in the time of the Latin Empire, wrote in 20 books a History from 1118 to 1206, covering the age of the Comneni down to Baldwin of Flanders.

At this same time Nicephorus Blemmydes (d. 1272) wrote a work of autobiographical content, Synoptic Geography, the fruit of his travels throughout the Eastern Empire, as far as Athos. His pupils were George Acropolites, to whom we owe the History of the Empire of Nicaea (1203-61). George's student was Theodore Metochites, a great scholar and author of a Philosophical and Historical Miscellany. Moreover, under the Empire of Nicaea, as a reaction to the political fragmentation that followed the catastrophe of 1204, there was a great intellectual development, oriented toward the models of antiquity.

Once the Greeks had returned, with Michael VIII Palaeologus, to the throne of Byzantium, there appears, for the 14th-15th centuries, a series of writers who devote themselves especially to learned philology or to history, not from the origins as once before but limiting themselves more or less to the era in which the authors lived. Thus we find Maximus Planudes (d. after 1310), author, among other things, of an Anthology of epigrams in seven books; Demetrius Triclinius, a good philologist, scholiast of Hesiod, of Pindar and of the tragedians; George Acropolites (d. 1282), who narrates the history of Constantinople during the Latin occupation; the emperor John VI Cantacuzenus (who became a monk, after having for 14 years, from 1341 to 1355, occupied the throne by usurpation), who wrote, under the pseudonym of Joasaph, in his monastery where he surrounded himself with a circle of men of letters, philosophers and poets, a Byzantine History from Andronicus Palaeologus to himself, which is essentially an apologetic autobiography; George Pachymeres (d. ca. 1310), author of a History of the Palaeologi from Michael VIII to Andronicus; Nicephorus Gregoras (d. ca. 1359), to whom we owe a History of Constantinople, in 37 books, from 1204 to 1359. Mention should also be made of Demetrius Cydones, a theologian and rhetorician who translated into Greek the Summa of St. Thomas, took part in theological controversies and left a voluminous correspondence.

The series of Byzantine men of letters is closed by George Phrantzes (d. ca. 1477), who after the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks went to Italy, settling later at Corfu, and wrote in four books a Chronicle that runs from 1258 to 1476; and Laonicus Chalcocondyles (d. after 1480), an Athenian who did not go, like his brother Demetrius, to Italy, but remained in Greece where he wrote a Chronicle in ten books from 1298 to 1463.

With these authors the history of Greek-Byzantine secular literature comes to a close, of which historiography constitutes the most continuous and abundant material, beginning as it does with Zonaras, who narrates the life of Constantine, and reaching with Laonicus Chalcocondyles the fall of Byzantium; philosophical thought, while respecting the strictly dogmatic side, fixed by the long series of theologians, moralists, sacred orators, feels in the decadence of the present the need to turn back to the past, disinterring Plato, commenting with loving solicitude on the great classical poets, adopting the learned and pure language of the ancient authors and avoiding the usual language employed by the people, stuffed with foreign words derived from contacts with Slavs, Turks, Italians, Franks, but alive and effective. Thus is born and develops that dualism between written language and living language that is still alive in the literature of modern G.

Nicola Turchi

III. MODERN GREEK LITERATURE

From 1453 to the beginning of the nineteenth century every manifestation of Greek culture is stifled by the tyrannical oppression of the Turks, but the linguistic and literary tradition does not die out. The spiritual island of the Fanar (patriarchate of Constantinople) preserves the classical and ecclesiastical tradition and is not exempt from Western influences, but an original artistic activity takes place only in the islands, Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete, in a climate of greater freedom (Venetian predominance). Here, and especially in Crete, the new popular language is fashioned and a literary heritage of great historical and poetic interest is constituted. Western chivalric models are felt and recast by a fresh and vigorous sensibility in the Cretan poem Erotocritos, of eleven thousand decapentasyllables, by Vincenzo Cornaros (16th century), extremely popular everywhere, while the anonymous Sacrifice of Abraham and the Erofili of Chortatzis bring dramatic poetry back to life. Throughout the period, and throughout all of G., popular poetry flourishes with exceptional quantitative and qualitative luxuriance (v. the translations of Tommaseo), loved and imitated in the West in the Romantic and post-Romantic age: this poetry, evocative of the whole life of the Greek man, reaches heights of ingenuous lyricism, intimacy of dramatic pathos, and mirrors, even in the transfiguration of art, the Greek soul in its perennial characteristics.

The awakening of great poetry, precocious in the Heptanese, coincides with the heroic war of independence (1821-1828). The figure of the "Modern Greek Dante," Dionysios Solomos (Zante 1798-Corfu 1857), imposes itself. Educated in Italy (a vast production in Italian), he laboriously conquered for himself the new expressive instrument of the modern Greek language, into which he poured a world of supreme ideals (fatherland, faith, freedom) intimately felt. Having acquired, especially with the Hymn to Liberty, which was dear to patriots of every country in the period of the national revolutions, the dignity and fame of a bard, Solomos progressively freed himself from rhetorical residues and from turbid romanticisms (Lambros, an unfinished poem), and in the verses of a poem on Missolonghi, The Free Besieged, fatally fragmentary, he gave the highest measure of his suffering and thoughtful inspiration. The exaltation of Areté (virtus) inspires the patriotic lyre of the Zantiot Andreas Kalvos, a friend of Foscolo, with singular linguistic and metrical attitudes. On the margins of the ideal circle of Solomos and his followers (Marcoras), the exuberant and charged poetry of the Leucadian Aristotelis Valaoritis flourished, influenced by Victorian romanticism and colored with patriotism.

An ideal filiation of the Fanar was represented by the so-called "first Athenian school," which contaminated a cheap romanticism with a formal archaism, and oscillated between an often conventional pessimism and a catchy facility of little song (the brothers Soutsos, Paraschos). From such inferior characteristics, which estranged Greek poetry both from popular lyric and from the noble Heptanesian tradition, Paparrigopoulos and Vasiliadis, prematurely dead, were not immune.

The age-old and bitter linguistic polemic between the supporters of katharevousa (the "pure," archaizing language) and dhimotiki (the language of use and of the major poetic works) seemed to find a solution in the work My Journey (1888) by John Psycharis (1854-1929), an attempt to overcome diglossia, of capital importance. The quarrel instead worsened to the point of bloody struggle after the translations of the New Testament into the popular language, but Psycharis and Alexandros Pallis (translator of Homer) determined the affirmation of dhimotiki, which, albeit with various temperings and attitudes according to the individual creative personalities, is today the uncontested instrument of literary expression. But to this affirmation the poet Kostis Palamas (1859-1943) contributed powerfully, in whose multiform work more than sixty years of Greek literary life are summed up. His poetry (The Immutable Life, The King's Flute, The Dodecalogue of the Gypsy) is the fruit of a vast assimilation of every sort of voice, from Hesiod to the Parnassians, but is also the expression of an authentic poet's soul.

Palamas exercised a preponderant influence on several poetic generations, even where (the "Rumeoliot" poetry of Malakasis and Athanas; Porfiras, etc.) genuine artistic natures were able to assert their own originality. The poets of the so-called "generation of '20" attempted to make a Greek experience of certain Western currents, but did not rise above mediocrity. To Palamas there is opposed in a certain way the "minor," crepuscular poetry, traversed by a bitter humour, of Kostas Karyotakis (d. by suicide in 1928), but the true "anti-Palamas" was the great Constantine Cavafy (Alexandria in Egypt 1868-1933), who, in his practical and literary isolation from the Hellenic poetic currents, in a shadowy solitude barricaded by sexual anomalies, gave voice, in little more than 150 poems, to a tragic world of morbid passion, of exile, of "condemnation," revived from the pages of Alexandrian, Byzantine, Roman history figures and events illuminated with ambiguous light, engraved as in the severe clarity of marble epigrams worthy of the Palatine Anthology, drew from personal memory evocations of intoxications and torments, of anxieties or of satiety, and intoned his most singular lyric with shy movements far from "song," but sustained by a restrained vibration and of powerful originality.

Today, after the death of Palamas, the scepter of poet-bard is attributed to the Leucadian Angelos Sikelianos (b. 1888), he too of international renown, especially for the conception of a Delphic center of spirituality and universal brotherhood inspired by the perennial ideals of humanity. In the vast lyric and dramatic work (in verse) of Sikelianos one finds, alongside enthusiastic accents of paganizing panism, rethinking of ethico-religious motifs that lead the poet to syncretistic metaconfessional visions (Orphism-Dionysism and Christianity). The poetic world of Sikelianos is rich and interesting and the poetry reveals an exceptionally gifted temperament, but often lacking the sovereign measure of great art. A complex and interesting figure, but without profound resonances and ignorant of the heights despite great ambitions, is that of N. Kazantzakis. The field of poetry is today, however, validly held by a group of young poets ("generation of '30"), who, with an intimate experience of European and world poetry (from symbolism to surrealism, to hermeticism, to Eliot), but with a Greek and Mediterranean soul, have renewed the tradition freeing themselves from every moralistic and descriptivistic residue and from every facile catchiness, and in "contemporary" modes (analogical and evocative values moving from the rediscovery of a poetic language) have expressed a "contemporary" sensibility. The greatest living Greek poet is George Seferis (b. in Smyrna in 1900).

Modern Greek prose, which flourished later than poetry, had in the past its major representatives in Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911; peasant verism) and in Gregorios Xenopoulos (b. 1867 and still living), a "society" man of letters of great popularity and fecundity, creator of the novel of milieu and at times a good delineator of characters, rich in the most varied tones. A subtle and elegant verve animated the chronografimata ("feuilletons") of Pavlos Nirvanas. After the First World War prose had a flowering of extraordinary intensity and richness. The best contemporary narrators are Stratis Myrivilis (Life in the Tomb) and Ilias Venezis (Number 31328), very fecund, especially Venezis, exceptionally read in recent years. Many excellent writers of novels and short stories (Cosmas Politis, Theotokas, Petsalis, etc.) are in full creative activity.

Modern Greek theater is very poor. After the Cretan mysteries and dramas, mention should be made of Vasiliadis's Galatea and Palamàs's Trisévieni. Xenòpulos also achieved brilliant successes as a playwright; but the most significant Greek dramatist remains perhaps Spiro Melàs (b. 1881), who, despite Ibsenian and Russian influences and social "theses," achieved powerful effects in some works. Pantelis Chorn and the younger Demetrio Bogris should also be mentioned. The copious output of boulevardier theater, vaudevilles, etc. is not worthy of account.

In criticism, quite young, after Palamàs, who was almost its founder, G. Apostolakis (1886-1947) should be remembered. Among the living, I. M. Panaiotòpulos, E. Churmusios, C. Paraschos have established themselves among others for information and taste, and Papanutzos for seriousness of philosophical culture. Enormous in every age is the activity of journalism.

Filippo Maria Pontani

IX. ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART.

I. ARCHAEOLOGY

The ancient buildings of Christian worship in G. were for the most part destroyed between the 7th and 8th centuries by the invasions of the Slavic peoples. The flourishing of basilicas and Christian churches in all the places where Christianity had soon established itself is such that in the western regions of G. remains of Christian basilicas have been discovered at Corcyra, at Dodona, at Nicopolis (two) and at Paramythia. In the Peloponnese they have been found at Argos, at Corinth (v.), at Epidaurus, at Geraki, at Mantinea, at Nemea, at Olympia and at Tegea; nine have been identified in Athens (v.), five in Attica, three in central G., six in Thessaly, seven in Macedonia, two of which are very notable at Philippi (v.). In the islands of the Aegean they have been found at Chios, at Cos, at Crete (v.), at Aegina, at Euboea (two), at Kythera, at Lemnos (two), at Lesbos (four), at Melos, at Rhodes, at Samos, at Scarpanto and at Thera.

A characteristic of the ancient Christian basilicas of G. is the bema (v.) which extends from the apse to a quadrangular area enclosed within the central nave; it is bounded on three sides by cancelli or transennae which take the generic name of τέμπολον.

Another characteristic use in the sacred buildings of G. is that of the vela or veils which concealed the mensa, and were fastened around the bema or between the columns, as can be seen, for example, in the ivory casket of Samagher.

G. Sotiriou, deserving of praise, together with A. Orlandos, for the discoveries of the ancient Christian basilicas of G., divided these into three main groups:

1) Basilicas with a transept, as at Corinth (v.), at Daphni (v.), at Dodona, at Epidaurus, at Ilissos, at Nicopolis, where there is also a basilica with five naves, at Paramythia (with a triconch), at Thebes (v.), at Thasos, at Thessalonica (St. Demetrius, in the form of a cross).

2) Basilicas of the Hellenistic type, that is, with a semicircular apse, an interior with three naves separated by columns and with a narthex, preceded by an atrium. Such are, for example, the basilicas found at Argalaste, at Chios (two), at Demetrias, at Dion, at Aegina, at Eleusis, at Glyphada, at Halimous, at Hypate, at Kalyria, at Lauretikos, at Lemnos (two), at Lesbos (four), at Olympia, at Paleopoli, at Scarpanto, at Sepia, at Stobi, at Thebes (v.), at Thessalonica (St. Paraskevi) and at Touba.

3) Buildings of Christian worship adapted within earlier buildings, as at Athens in the Parthenon, in the Erechtheion, in the Theseion and at Olympia.

The church of St. Paraskevi of Chalkis, built in the 4th century, was reduced in the 14th century by the Crusaders to a Gothic cathedral.

For Christian epigraphy there are the publications of C. Bayet, De titulis Atticae christianis antiquissimis, Paris 1871; in the Corpus inscriptionum Atticarum (Berlin 1882); G. Dittenberger published the Tituli sepulcales Christianorum et Iudaeorum (pp. 240-253; nos. 3435-3547); later Christian inscriptions of Thessalonica were published by P. Pedrizet: Inscriptions de Thessalonique, in Mélanges d'archéol. et d'histoire, 20 (1900), p. 229 ff.; recently other Christian inscriptions of G. were published by R. D. Meritt, Greek inscriptions 1896-1927 (Corinth's Excavations, VIII, 1), Cambridge 1931, no. 136 ff.; still others were edited by N. Giannopoulos, in A. Sotiriou, Αἱ Χριστιανικαὶ Θῆβαι καὶ αἱ παλαιοχριστιανικαὶ Βασιλικαὶ τῆς Ἑλλάδος, Athens 1931, p. 139 ff.

Enrico Josi

II. SACRED ART

1. Architecture

The subsequent political vicissitudes did not allow Greek art to develop in the centuries immediately following the 6th: nevertheless, fidelity to tradition remained constant, since it is also revealed in the buildings of the Byzantine era, where the Constantinopolitan architectural manner turns out to be moderated by memories of the classical shrines. Even the placement of religious buildings, generally beside springs and sacred groves, or near ancient sanctuaries, continues the Hellenic tradition. The church of St. Theodore (1049) has three very projecting apses; the vault covering the central part of the narthex is lower than that of the western arm of the cross, and each part ends with an isolated pediment. It too is built of squared blocks. The dome, in the western part, does not rest on columns, but on the very piers of the bema. In the church of the Kapnikarea, with its walls of dark stone, one again finds the dome supported by four columns. It was enlarged in the 13th century with a parekklesion, an exonarthex and a portico.

Near Athens, on Mount Hymettus, numerous monasteries rise. Among these, the monastery of Kaisariani, in a small valley, has a church with a dome supported by four columns taken from a pagan temple. The external decoration is scanty. The same exterior bareness is characteristic of the monastery of Asteri and of the church of St. George, near Athens, of the basilical type. The most beautiful little church of Attica is that of Omorphi, in the Athenian style.

In the Morea there are three churches of the 12th century, at Argolis, at Merbaca, Areia, and Chonica, structurally similar. Far more celebrated, however, in the region are the sacred buildings of Mistra, a typical dead city that during the principality of Achaea rose to the rank of capital, enriching itself with very important and sumptuous constructions, among them the Imperial Palace. The church of the Evangelistria, from the beginning of the 14th century, that of St. Sophia (of ca. 1350) and that of the Peribleptos belong to the Greek-cross type. In all of them the western arm is slightly prolonged. The Evangelistria must have been a cemetery chapel; St. Sophia was a court church, in imitation of the great Constantinopolitan constructions. In the Peribleptos especially there are notable influences of Western art, with decorations of rosettes and fleurs-de-lis, and a Gothic arch in the bell tower.

Numerous other churches, particularly of the Greek-cross type, are scattered through various villages of the Morea. In Phocis, near the monastery of St. Luke, there are two churches of the 11th century, the smaller of which, dedicated to the Panaghia, has the dome supported by four columns, of the Constantinopolitan type; the hexagonal drum, with double windows, is enriched with sculpted marbles in its lower part. Through influences of Mount Athos the building possesses a double narthex and an exonarthex. The larger building is the one dedicated to St. Luke, whose central part is enclosed by 12 piers, with arcades, and is transformed into an octagon by means of the corner pendentives: above, other pendentives transform the parallelepiped thus formed into a circle, to support the dome. The arms of the building are covered by vaults and enriched by galleries. Only the central apse projects, and it is enriched with niches.

Like other buildings, the very famous church of Daphni (v.) as well, on the sacred way leading from Athens to Eleusis, is analogous to St. Luke; it has, however, the bema covered with cross vaults, and three projecting apses instead of one.

The church of St. Theodore at Mistra (1295), again of the same structural type, has its arms covered by barrel vaults. At Monemvasia, St. Sophia, which rises beside military towers, has a narthex preceded by a loggia of Venetian character. The type of St. Luke also served as a model for the church of St. Nicodemus (ca. 1044) in Athens. So too the Parigoritissa of Arta, the royal church of the despot of Epirus, which is formed of a massive cube crowned by five domes on drums. It possesses a triple sanctuary, and the central dome rises to a great height, through the influence of Gothic verticalism.

Characteristic are the convents of the Meteora, perched on the summit of isolated rocky cones. Their churches generally have a Greek-cross plan, and show traces of Arab influence. These are very picturesque constructions, closely bound to the adjacent monastic quarters.

At Athos, as in all of Greece, the Byzantine architectural style persists even to our own day: notable only are the interruptions caused by the spread there too of a rationalistic neoclassicism, in the mid-19th century, followed by traces of other European movements, even of the neo-Gothic revival.

2. Painting

a) The mosaics. - Greece too, in the second half of the 4th century, participates in that Christian pictorial language which, with very few variations, during the Justinianic period turns out to be widespread as much at Ravenna as at Nicaea and Thessalonica as at Constantinople. Nevertheless, despite the almost total loss of the monuments, one may think that there existed some artistic centers, almost autonomous: one of them must have been precisely Thessalonica, which would therefore have effectively contributed to the formation of Byzantine art, as it manifests itself from the 6th century onward.

The oldest surviving decoration is the conch of the apse of the church of St. David, katholikón of the monastery of Latomu. Despite the gaps, the mosaic is still legible, and includes at the center the Apollonian Christ who holds a rotulus in his left hand and raises his right as if for an allocution. Beside him the symbols of the Evangelists and of the Prophets. The composition, executed with a still compendiary technique, it is linked to the Roman milieu, albeit with traces of a surviving Hellenism. A comparison with the mosaics of St. Mary Major in Rome allows one to note their common Early Christian characteristics. The round church of St. George must have possessed in the dome a decoration analogous to that of St. Constance in Rome; of it there remains the outer ring, divided into eight panels very rich in decorative elements (birds, vases, flowers, foliage, architectural elements). In each of them, against a background of almost scenographic architectures, a saint is presented, in the traditional attitude of the orant, with arms outstretched. The admirable coloristic and decorative refinement of the vault of St. George is found again in a few scanty fragments preserved in the arch soffits of the nave and of the narthex of the much-reworked church of Eski Giuma. In these last two pictorial monuments there is the expression of another artistic current, more turned toward the East. Of Roman derivation, like the mosaic of St. David, were the votive panels, likewise of the 5th and 6th centuries, that decorated the church of St. Demetrius, and that were completely destroyed during the fire that devastated the church in 1917. Three panels, representing Sts. Sergius and Demetrius among bearded figures and St. Demetrius with two children, seem to go back to the rebuilding of the church, which took place after the fire that devastated it in 634, and therefore belong to the art of the first golden age, to which they also refer for the particular refinement of technical execution, with minute tesserae regularly arranged. They are a very important document of this art and, although a century later, must be brought close to the panels in the decoration of St. Vitalis at Ravenna, which represent the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora with their retinue. Admirable is their coloristic splendor, the figures are absorbed by the abstract, two-dimensional space that surrounds them. With these, Byzantine art appears constituted in its fundamental characteristics. The fourth surviving panel, with two male figures that have been identified with the prefect Leontius and the bishop John, is even more closely linked than the previous ones to the mosaics of S. Vitale.

Greek mosaics datable to the era of iconoclasm that have come down to us are scarce: that of the apse of St. Sophia in Thessalonica, with the Virgin and Child, seems to be from the 8th century. It is a work of uncertain and crude technique, with strange provincial contributions. The accentuation of movement and of linearism is also present in a vast vault mosaic with the Pantocrator, the Virgin, angels and Apostles in a circular arrangement (perhaps from different periods [8th-9th centuries]). Once the iconoclast movement had ceased and the representation of images had resumed, the provincialisms that had spontaneously surfaced in Greek art, finding itself isolated from the artistic center now definitively constituted by Constantinople, did not entirely cease, if they are found again in the mosaic decoration of the church of the monastery of St. Luke in Phocis (998-1050), which iconographically presents one of the most complete systems of Byzantine art. The Pantocrator occupied the center of the dome; remaining instead in the calotte is the Pentecost, in the apse the Madonna, in the tribunes and in the narthex the feasts, while saints, martyrs and prophets cover every wall of the building. Noteworthy are the echoes of the mosaics of St. Sophia in Thessalonica, due to the common presence of those provincial contributions that give almost a pre-Romanesque character to these images. However, the special character of the mosaic decoration of St. Luke is given by its relations with icon painting, from which it derived an accentuated coloristic energy. The influence exercised by this art is vast: close relations bind it to the later mosaic covering of St. Sophia in Kiev, of 1073.

The mosaics of the church of Daphni, of 1080, belong to the courtly current of Byzantine painting of the second golden age, and are related to those of the lunettes of St. Sophia in Constantinople and of the churches of Nicaea and Chios.

From the second half of the 12th century, despite the devastation caused by fires, the apse of the church of Serres, in Macedonia, is preserved, with the representation of the Communion of the Apostles: the provincial characteristics are once again most accentuated, and a plastic illusionism is even attempted, with a notable sobriety of linear play. Contemporary with these are numerous portable mosaics, some of which are still preserved in the monasteries of Meteora and of Athos. The reflowering of Byzantine art in the third golden age finds Greek mosaic art almost completely extinguished: perhaps only in Thessalonica did workshops of mosaic masters still survive. One of the last monuments of their art is constituted by the decoration of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessalonica, with Story of the Virgin and figures of saints (1312-15), in which dependence on Constantinopolitan models is joined by traces of Macedonian art.

b) Fresco painting. — Very few documents relating to fresco painting are available: the oldest surviving vestiges, in St. Demetrius in Thessalonica, date back to the 7th century. From the 11th century, some frescoes of provincial and Eastern tradition are preserved in the crypt of the church of the SS. Anargiri in Kastoria, in St. Luke in Phocis, and in the diaconicon of the basilica of Kabaka in Thessaly. Recently the decoration of the church of the Madonna dei Fabbri, in Thessalonica, was discovered and restored, of intellectualistic taste, with a study of the antique and with late-Hellenistic effects, close to the mosaics of Daphni. This exceptional discovery, providing a very rare document of the courtly wall painting of Thessalonica, in which an intense pictorial activity is attested as early as the end of the 9th century, also allows inferences to be drawn about what fresco painting in the capital itself must have been. Contemporary with these are a fragment of the church of the Keravlidena in Chios and remains of paintings in the Parthenon, transformed into a church in the 6th century, also of refined elegance.

From the 14th century onward, the influence of Cretan fresco and icon painting becomes predominant in Greece. This spreads through the Morea, into Attica, reaches Thessalonica itself and Kastoria. Its major monuments are preserved at Mistra, near Sparta, in the church of St. Demetrius (14th century), in the church of the Madonna of the Vrontochion (c. 1350), and above all in the two churches of the Peribleptos and of the Pantanassa, respectively of the 14th century and of 1428. Another series of paintings, securely datable, is held by the monasteries of Meteora, in the southern Morea. Similar paintings are found in the monasteries of Mount Athos, where, however, the Macedonian artistic current reaches greater prominence, and achieves a very notable affirmation there with the painter Emmanuel Panselinos, of Thessalonica, deeply imbued with Italian artistic culture and widely imitated despite the prevalence of Cretan art.

With the founding of the Academy of Fine Arts of Athens, there took place what was called the rebirth of national art, which after the experiences of the neoclassical and romantic movements constituted artistic groups in the major European capitals, especially in Paris.

3. Sculpture

Although they too are of the greatest importance, the works of sculpture of Greek origin from the Early Christian and Byzantine periods do not for now allow us to determine precisely the importance of the Greek contribution to the constitution and development of the Byzantine art of the Empire of the East. One can note in them very numerous influences and considerable stylistic variations: but they remain absorbed by the common development of medieval sculpture. From the Arch of Galerius at Salonica (298) to the ambo from the same city (Museum of Constantinople), plasticism weakens, becomes pictorial and clothes itself in fantastic and immaterial decorations, poured over the plastic elements without regard for their structure. A masterpiece of this taste is the admirable portal of the basilica of St. Demetrius at Salonica, now in the Byzantine Museum of Athens, where the decorative laces cut into the pillars and the archivolts as in a bobbin-lace embroidery or a lace. Similarly to what happens in the interior of St. Sophia and St. Sergius at Constantinople. Traces of architectural decoration are abundant almost everywhere: the St. Demetrius of Salonica preserves, among other things, magnificent capitals with vine and acanthus tendrils. Sculpture in the round is also present in the Museums of Sparta and Athens, where statuettes of the Good Shepherd are comparable in style to the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus in Rome. From the 4th-5th centuries is a fragmentary relief with The Nativity and the Flight into Egypt, from the Museum of Athens, and a depiction of Christ in the guise of Orpheus taming the wild beasts. While the decoration of the churches proceeds (capitals, chancel screens, etc., especially with floral motifs), damascened sculpture spreads widely, which allows ample decorative possibilities and corresponds to the lack of a plastic consciousness. At the same time, in the 8th and 9th centuries, in the slabs inserted in the walls of the small cathedral of Athens, in the churches of Athos, in the churches of Skiipou and of Thebes, decorative designs of barbarian theme and zoomorphic compositions are introduced from the East. During the periods of decline of Constantinople, Greece seems to welcome more Western elements, even Lombard ones. In the second golden age, damascened sculpture attempts monumental effects, of a distinctly courtly character (St. Luke in Phocis, Daphni). In the decline, the borrowings from the West are accentuated and, for the decoration of religious buildings and for devotional images, precious materials are replaced by wood sculpture, which also produced authentic masterpieces of a decorative character.

For sculpture too, as for painting, the founding of the Academy in 1837 favored a resumption of contacts with the Western world: the tradition of classical and Hellenistic sculpture, especially in funerary monuments, is relived with traces of neoclassical taste, while the new generations participate in the formation of the international or European taste that is current in modern art.

Eugenio Battisti

X. SCHOOL SYSTEM.

Modern Greece, born with the Treaty of Adrianople after the Turkish defeat at Navarino in 1827, understood that only a strong generation of intellectuals could preserve the independence, or at least the aspirations to independence, of the Greek people. With the founding of the Archaeological Society of Athens in 1837 an attempt was made to turn the mind to the glorious past of the ancient Greeks, and for the same reason the founding of the German Archaeological Institute of Athens in 1872 was favored, as well as that of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1882, of the School of Archaeology of Athens in 1909 and of other archaeological schools. It was soon understood that in the education of an independent Greek people it was not possible to disregard its Greek Orthodox religion. With the passing of the years, a third pillar was associated with these two pillars of education: the teaching of morals, which can be defined as the teaching of civic life, which must not be in contrast with the ancient ideal of ancient Greece and with the Greek Orthodox religion but a kind of practical application of both. Greek education is free and compulsory from 6 to 14 years of age and is divided into state and private. The teaching of gymnastics, Greek history, morals and religion is compulsory in all types of schools. The entire school system comprises kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools and higher schools.

The kindergartens (νηπαγωγεία) last 2 years. The elementary schools (Δημοτικαί) last 6 years and are divided into sections if the number of pupils is greater than 40. These schools are divided into day and evening schools. The establishment of evening elementary schools is provided for those pupils who have not been able to complete the daytime elementary school. A number of 5 pupils is sufficient for the establishment of this school. Secondary education is imparted in the gymnasia (Γυμνώσια), in the lyceums (Διτάξια Λύκεια), in the commercial schools ('Εμπορικαί Σχολαί') and in the city schools ('Αστικαί Σχολεία'). The gymnasia are divided into gymnasia of the old type and gymnasia of the new type. The commercial schools comprise: the public schools (Σχολαί Δημοσυντήρητοι), the autonomous schools (Ιούτιμοι προς Δημοσίας), the subsidized schools ('Ομοταγείς προς Δημοσίας'), which are divided into middle and practical, and finally the commercial technical institutes (Πράκτικαι 'Εμπορικαί Σχολαί'). The city schools last three years and follow these directions: agricultural, industrial, commercial and domestic economy. The higher schools comprise: National Academy of Physical Education, Higher School of Agriculture, School of Economic and Commercial Sciences, National Metsowos Polytechnic, Pantios School of Political Sciences, School of Fine Arts, the University of Athens founded in 1837, the University of Salonica founded in 1926 and the University of Corfu founded in 1824 and renewed in 1865. - See plates LXXVII-LXXIX.

Miroslav Stumpf