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PΩΜΑΙΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ ≠ ROMAN OCCUPATION: (MIS)PERCEPTIONS OF THE ROMAN PERIOD IN GREECE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2019
Extract
The Roman period in Greece has had a relatively short history of inquiry compared to other epochs of the country's long history and, as a result, very little has been written about modern perceptions of this period. For various reasons, neither modern Greeks nor foreigners have been particularly concerned with the country's Roman past, a period which has often been relegated to a negative realm. As a result, misperceptions about the Roman period in Greece are rampant, with many fallacies being perpetuated by labels and displays in museums and archaeological sites throughout the country, as well as by pedagogical institutions and the media.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 2019
Footnotes
Funding for fieldwork that led to the writing of this article was provided by the Craven Committee and Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Further research and writing were made possible by the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection Library Research Fellowship and the Elios Society at the State University of California, Sacramento. Thanks are due to Ewen Bowie and Sophia Zoumbaki for fruitful discussions on the topic and to the anonymous reviewer for suggesting several improvements. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania for discussing the material with me and granting me permission to publish images.
References
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3 Most of the scholarly works on the reception of antiquity in Greece focus on modern perceptions of the Greek past, particularly the classical period. The Roman period hardly figures in articles and books on the history of Greece. See e.g. Y. Hamilakis, ‘‘Learn History!’ Antiquity, National Narrative, and History in Greek Educational Textbooks’, in K. S. Brown and Y. Hamilakis (eds.), The Usable Past. Greek Metahistories (Lanham, MD, 2003), 39–67; Y. Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins. Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford, 2007); K. Vlassopoulos, ‘Acquiring (a) Historicity: Greek History, Temporalities and Eurocentrism in the Sattelzeit (1750–1850)’, in A. Lianeri (ed.), The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts (Cambridge, 2010), 156–78; J. K. Papadopoulos, ‘Inventing the Minoans: Archaeology, Modernity and the Quest for European Identity’, JMA 18 (2005), 87–149; I. Damaskos, ‘Archäologie und nationale Identität im modernen Griechenland: Aspekte einer Wechselwirkung’, in E. Koszisky (ed.), Archäologie und Einbildungskraft. Relikte der Antike in der Moderne (Berlin, 2011), 75–88.
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5 The ‘Troika’ is the trio of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, which have been responsible for Greece's bailout programmes since 2010.
6 Vlassopoulos (n. 4).
7 Note that the periods before the classical – i.e. the Minoan, Mycenaean, and, to a far lesser extent, the geometric and archaic – were almost unknown before the twentieth century, as archaeological remains from these periods had not yet come to light or, in cases where they had done, had been misattributed to later periods.
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10 Stobart (n. 1), 265.
11 Damaskos (n. 3).
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13 Cited in ibid., 394; translated in Y. Hamilakis and E. Yalouri, ‘Antiquities as Symbolic Capital in Modern Greek Society’, Antiquity 70 (1996), 122.
14 In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a great number of sculptures from the Roman period were exhibited, as the first catalogues attest: P. Kavvadias, The Sculpture of the National Museum. Descriptive Catalog (Athens, 1890–2), and P. Kastriotis, Γλυπτὰ τοῦ Ἐθνικοῦ Μουσείοu (Athens, 1908); see also S. E. Katakis, Athens, National Archaeological Museum. 1. Attic Sarcophagi with Garlands, Erotes and Dionysiac Themes (Athens, 2018). I thank the anonymous reviewer for bringing this fact to my attention. Note, however, that some recent exhibitions have gone in the right direction by either giving more credence to the Roman period, or, as in the case of the 2017–18 exhibit on Hadrian and Athens, organized by the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in collaboration with the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, have featured the Roman period exclusively.
15 Damaskos (n. 3).
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21 Nowhere is this notion more apparent than in the various rallies organized by Greeks in Athens, Thessaloniki, and many other cities both within and outside Greece in order to emphasize the Greekness of Macedonia in relation to the neighbouring nation known officially as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The most recent rallies took place in February 2018 and drew more than half a million people according to Greek media.
22 Lowenthal (n. 20), 45. The restitution of the Parthenon marbles and the years-long dispute between Greece and the British Museum is perhaps the best-known case.
23 J. Assman and J. Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique 65 (1995), 130 (emphasis in original).
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27 I saw this brochure in a tourist agency during my visit to Paros in 2011 but have not been able to photograph it and reproduce it in this article.
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30 Papadopoulos (n. 29), 115.
31 See Damaskos (n. 3).
32 The Ottoman period, which spanned five centuries and transformed the Acropolis, fares worse than the Roman period as it is only represented in a series of extraordinary maquettes, which are exhibited at the entrance hall of the museum. Some early Christian finds from the Parthenon are on display in the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
33 Tejirian, E. H. and Simon, R. S., Conflict, Conquest and Conversion. Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East (New York, 2012), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, note that Constantine required a translator for Greek as his primary language was Latin. Although his mother, Helena, was, according to Procopius, born in Bithynia in Asia Minor and may have been a Greek-speaker, it is evident that Constantine did not grow up speaking the language.
34 For the economic and political implications of the Amphipolis excavation, see Hamilakis, Y., ‘An Oneiric Archaeology of the Crisis: The Amphipolis Saga’, in Botanova, K. and Cryssopoulos, C. C. (eds.), Archaeology of the Future (Basel, 2017), 16–36Google Scholar.
35 P. Jones and C. S. Graves-Brown, Cultural Identity and Archaeology (London, 1996), 6.
36 Ibid.
37 See Damaskos (n. 3).
38 Bodnar, E., ‘Athens in April 1436’, Archaeology 23 (1970), 97Google Scholar.