Cockerell invested most of his twenties in his travels in Greece and Greater Greece, and in a substantial spell in Italy, staying considerably longer than intended, in part at least because of the lure of Greece. He went out with a knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, with technical architectural skills, which he had learnt in his father's and Smirke's offices, and with a natural hand for sketching, together with his considerable native abilities. During his time away, he worked very hard indeed, if somewhat intermittently, on his studies of Greek material. His landscape sketches and his direct knowledge of genuinely Greek temples and their sculptures brought him a dazzling reputation, especially in Italy, but it was the brooding consideration of his work, more substantial and more detailed than any which had been brought to Britain since Stuart and Revett, at the Parthenon, Aegina, Bassae and Agrigentum, among others, which generated his deep responses to ancient Greek culture, and it is these which will be discussed here.

The ‘lure of Greece’ could be described as the grand idea in European early nineteenth-century culture. For the fortunate few of Cockerell's generation, the first to wander relatively freely in Greece and come to know it for themselves, Greece was the love of their lives. It had a wonderful light and climate, particularly delightful to people from the north; it had dramatic mountains, valleys and sea coasts; its cities and plains could be joyfully recognised as the real places where events which the travellers had known about all their lives had actually happened. These travellers wanted to experience the ‘spirit of the place’, part of the new romantic feeling for the specific and the historic, experiences which Greece offered in abundance.

Philologists argued that Greek, like Indo-European languages in general, had a privileged capacity for fine meaning through its complex systems of tenses and inflections. This was bound up with the view that the Indo-European homeland lay somewhere north of Caucasus, from which proud warriors and noble women had descended into Greece and western Europe to become the ancestors of the ancient and present populations; western Europeans, especially Germans, therefore, not only shared Greek ideals, moral and aesthetic, but were their close blood kin, and their natural heirs.