The five papers collected in this special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition show some of the ways in which scholars in early modern Europe shaped, used and gave meaning to Greek learning. Instead of starting from one single perspective or discipline, the articles approach early modern Hellenism from diverse viewpoints, such as the history of classical scholarship (Gerald Sandy), book history (Natasha Constantinidou), philology and literary history (Filippomaria Pontani) and Oriental and Jewish studies (Asaph Ben-Tov and Bernd Roling). The title of the collection, Constructing Hellenism, has a double meaning: it not only denotes the various ways in which scholars in early modern Europe shaped and used Greek learning, but also refers to how we, as modern scholars, build and articulate our own perceptions of Hellenism in this period. Before presenting the individual articles, I shall first introduce the general theme of the collection, briefly discussing the early modern notion of Hellenismus, how ‘Hellenism’ has been treated in recent scholarship on the early modern history of Greek learning and the way in which the term is used in this collection and may be used beyond it.

***


In Antoine Birr’s revised edition of Robert Estienne’s Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1740–1743), the word Hellenismus was defined as ‘litterarum Graecarum notitia’: knowledge of, or familiarity with, Greek letters, or Greek learning.Footnote 1 In current scholarship, too, ‘Hellenism’ is often used to refer to Greek erudition, with shifting emphases according to the context, whether Byzantium, Classical Islam or German Romanticism. In Renaissance and early modern studies, the term has been used casually, and in a mostly unreflective manner, to denote the increasing knowledge of ancient Greek and Greek literature in humanist circles.Footnote 2 While Petrarch (1304–1374) was still ‘deaf to Homer’ (Epistolae familiares XVIII.2), two centuries after his death, most of the major Greek authors had been rediscovered and had become more widely available in translations and editions. From the end of the fourteenth century onwards, Greek studies spread from Florence to other Italian cities, mainly Venice and Rome; from there, Greek learning was carried beyond the Alps, not only by travelling Greek scholars such as George Hermonymus (fl. 1475–1508) and Janus Lascaris (c. 1449–1535), but also by Northern European scholars such as Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) in the German-speaking lands and Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) in France. This period also saw pioneering work in the critical study of the ancient Greek sources themselves and in making this study productive for so many domains of art and knowledge, from literature and history to medicine and geography. Whereas early students of Greek concentrated mainly on ‘classical’ literature and (to a lesser extent) patristics, two centuries after Petrarch’s death, the improved knowledge of Greek in learned circles, and the renewed interest in the Greek New Testament, had even stimulated a serious critique of the Latin Vulgate.Footnote 3

In this context, modern scholars sometimes use expressions such as ‘Venetian Hellenism’ or ‘Florentine Hellenism’ to indicate local varieties of the study of ancient Greek literature.Footnote 4 The term Hellenism also refers to a particular school of medical thought (‘medical Hellenism’) which was fuelled by the publication of Galen and Hippocrates in Greek (by Aldo Manuzio in 1525 and 1526 respectively) and which promoted a return to the ancient Greek sources in the original instead of relying on the medieval medical tradition, which was heavily indebted to Arabic translations, summaries and commentaries.Footnote 5

What Greek learning, or Hellenismus, meant to early modern scholars becomes apparent if we take a quick look at some of the ways the word was used in the Republic of Letters. The Renaissance borrowing of the Greek term Ἑλληνισμός and its Latin rendering encapsulate the ancient linguistic meaning of Hellenism, while also adapting it and adding a wider, cultural dimension to the ancient notion.Footnote 6 In ancient Greek, Ἑλληνισμός had denoted the use, and especially the correct use, of the language, and several works entitled On Hellenism (Περὶ Ἑλληνισμοῦ) reportedly circulated in antiquity.Footnote 7 When the term was adopted by Latin authors, it denoted the imitation of Greek constructions in Latin poetry, mainly Virgil.Footnote 8 The humanists took over this ‘linguistic’ meaning of the term, and Ἑλληνισμός/Hellenismus for them referred to the Greek language,Footnote 9 in particular to the use of a good Greek style and idiom, following the example of approved ancient Greek authors.Footnote 10 As such, the term represented a Greek counterpart to the humanist ideal of Latinitas, or a set of normative criteria for language correctness.Footnote 11 Additionally, and more specifically, the Latin word and its vernacular cognates came to mean what we would now call a Graecism: an (allegedly) Greek idiom or grammatical feature, or the imitation of Greek constructions, in Latin or any other language.Footnote 12 This kind of Hellenism had a special cultural significance, especially for humanists who tried to demonstrate the affinity of their native languages to ancient Greek, as did Andreas Althamer (d. c. 1539) for German and Henri II Estienne (1531–1598) for French.Footnote 13 By demonstrating the affinity between ancient Greek and their own languages, they tried to lend dignity to their native tongues: Hellenism becomes a cultural Kampfbegriff of sorts directed against Italian claims to ‘Latin’ and ‘Roman’ cultural primacy.Footnote 14

Beyond the linguistic level, Ἑλληνισμός/Hellenismus in humanist discourse also referred to the worldview of the ancient Hellenes in both its philosophical and religious aspects. This wider usage of the term, too, at least partly had roots in Greek sources, where Ἑλληνισμός could refer to the philosophy or the religion of the ancient Hellenes. With this meaning, it was normally used polemically in religious contexts to denote the opposite of what was seen as ‘orthodoxy’ (from either Jewish or Christian perspectives) and thus came to mean paganism or heresy.Footnote 15 This usage of the word survived in humanist discourse, but not without modification. We see this happening in Guillaume Budé’s treatise De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum (1535), which is perhaps the first time the word was used in a wider cultural meaning in a manner not attested previously. In this work, the term Hellenismus refers to ancient pagan Greek culture or ancient civilization generally. As such, Budé understood Hellenism as sometimes being in discord with Christianity, and sometimes as foreshadowing or anticipating it, depending on context. Moreover, in Budé’s hands, the term seems to have gained, for the first time, a more generalized meaning, not linked to a specific historical culture or period, but expressive of a worldview oriented towards ‘the world’, rather than towards God, in the word’s biblical sense and carrying negative overtones.Footnote 16

A much more profound exploration of the history of the notion of Hellenism, and how it eventually reached us in the twenty-first century, is a desideratum of Begriffsgeschichte and the history of scholarship. Even a brief glance at its early modern usage, however, reveals the principal awareness of scholars of this period that ancient Hellas was not confined to the remote past but stood in a meaningful relationship to their own languages, literatures and cultures – a relationship which some perceived as constructive and formative, while others regarded it as inherently problematic and even dangerous.Footnote 17

***


In order to capture something of the complexity of Greek learning in early modern Europe, the term ‘Renaissance Hellenism’ has sometimes been used in recent Anglophone scholarship as a retrospective label which yokes together, for analytical convenience, a whole range of early modern engagements with the Hellenic tradition.Footnote 18 As such, the term is used to mean not just knowledge of ancient Hellas but also refers more broadly to the ways in which this learning was built up, used and valued in new contexts. This is also how the word is used in the title of this small collection of papers. Thus, importantly, it does not represent a unified view of Greek civilization; it is not the culture of the historical period which is known, with different emphases, from the work of Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), nor the philosophical notion which is found in the work of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888).Footnote 19

As indicated above, the term ‘Hellenism’ tends to be used rather unreflectively in Renaissance and early modern studies. Although it is commonly recognized that the notion of ‘transmission’ captures the cultural dynamism involved only very imperfectly,Footnote 20 there is hardly any methodical reflection on how we can understand the manifold aspects of early modern Hellenismus, or Greek learning, in a more systematic and comprehensive manner. This silence contrasts with discussions of the reception of the Greco-Roman heritage within classical reception studies and scholarship on the classical tradition generally.Footnote 21 It also contrasts with discussions in adjoining areas of scholarship where Hellenism has been studied intensively (for example, in imperial Rome and late antiquity) and in which scholars have developed a rich – even if sometimes bewildering – vocabulary for discussing the various cultural processes which lurk behind the tidy façade of the word ‘Hellenism’, such as Hellenization, cultural fusion, appropriation and so forth.Footnote 22 Scholars of early modern Hellenism are, by contrast, at the beginning of the discussion.

To define early modern Hellenism more precisely, we can start by looking at the ways in which Greek learning has so far been studied. Roughly distinguished, there are three main objects of research: the various ways of transmission and dissemination of ancient Greek, as well as Greek texts, objects and ideas; the ways in which they were interpreted and studied; and the many different ways in which they were used in new contexts. As previously mentioned, early modern Europe was a key period in all these respects.

The different aspects of early modern Hellenism – the transmission and dissemination, the study and interpretation, and the use of ancient Greek sources – have for the most part been discussed in different branches of a rich body of scholarship, ranging from traditional reception history or Überlieferungsgeschichte via the history of scholarship and education, and of printing and reading, to the study of the classical tradition or, in more recent decades, classical reception studies. The reception history of individual manuscripts and the fortunae of specific authors have been traced, the activities of individual scribes charted and the role of editors, translators and printers in the dissemination of Greek texts explained.Footnote 23 There is an ever-growing interest among scholars in the teaching and learning of Greek in the early modern period as, for instance, the recent volume edited by Federica Ciccolella and Luigi Silvano shows.Footnote 24 Studies have moreover been devoted to how scholars expanded their knowledge of ancient Greek literature and history, including Greek antiquities such as inscriptions, coins and monuments, as well as of various branches of Greek thought, both pagan and Christian: the Greek philosophers, grammarians and philologists, the Church Fathers and theologians.Footnote 25 The early modern study, interpretation and edition of the ‘rediscovered’ Greek New Testament and its implications have also been studied intensively.Footnote 26 The ways in which writers, thinkers and artists used their knowledge of Greek letters beyond Greek studies strictly speaking have been explored from many different perspectives and in various fields of scholarship including the history of science and political thought, art history and literary studies, among numerous others.Footnote 27 Generally speaking, however, the uses of Greek learning have been studied less systematically than the transmission and dissemination of Greek learning, probably because these uses were so manifold that it is difficult to systematize them. Scholarly attention has been distributed unevenly over the different areas of early modern Europe, with Italy attracting most interest, followed by France and Germany, although the situation is gradually changing in favour of a more inclusive picture also covering, for instance, Eastern and Central Europe as well as Scandinavia and the Baltics.Footnote 28

Apart from the aspects of Hellenism mentioned so far, another, less intensively studied, question is: how did scholars themselves reflect upon Greek leaning? The different, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints scholars have expressed about the role and value, as well as the scope and limits, of Greek studies can bring interesting perspectives to our understanding of early modern Hellenism. Dissenting voices are particularly relevant in this respect: from the earliest critics and ‘Hellenophobes’ of Quattrocento Italy to Counter-Reformation reservations about Greek and, towards the end of the period, the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’.Footnote 29 Such contested views shed light on the social and political struggles in which Greek learning was implicated as well as the cultural tensions involved. In the scholarship, this perspective has sometimes been eclipsed by the humanist enthusiasm for Greek – or even ‘Grecomania’ – and triumphalist discussions of the subject explaining how, from Manuel Chrysoloras (d. 1415) onwards, Greek learning flourished and expanded in the Latin West.Footnote 30

The various perspectives early modern writers took on Greek learning also shed light on another important question which is, perhaps surprisingly, seldom posed rigorously: what exactly was Greek learning in the early modern period? Modern scholars have been inclined to concentrate, often tacitly, on the reception of what they regarded as ‘classical’ literature. The transmission, interpretation and use of, for instance, Hellenistic, late antique and especially Byzantine Greek texts have been studied less intensively and often in more or less unrelated branches of scholarship. Early modern readers and writers were, however, differently selective and presumably made connections different from ours. This sparks the question of how they saw the relationships between the various ‘Greek archives’ – not only between pagan and Christian Greek literatures but also, for example, between ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Byzantine’ materials. And perhaps even more importantly: what are the implications of their views about the scope and limits of Greek learning for the ways in which we, modern scholars, understand early modern Hellenism as well as the range of our field of study? These questions cannot be pursued here, but they deserve a more serious treatment elsewhere.

The different facets of Hellenism discussed so far can seldom be treated in complete isolation from one another. Whoever examines the study and use of, say, Ptolemy’s Geography can hardly ignore the ways in which the work reached the Latin West and how it was transmitted and disseminated there.Footnote 31 Beyond the level of such specific case studies, concerted attempts in recent scholarship to produce a more integrative overview of early modern Hellenism, of its multiple channels of transmission and diffusion as well as its diverse uses and meanings, are few and far between.Footnote 32 Perhaps it is simply too early to arrive at such an understanding of the phenomenon given the state of research in the field. Indeed, a good deal of work still needs to be done to smooth out the imbalances and fill lacunae in our knowledge of the subject.Footnote 33 The relative lack of general, more integral accounts probably has to do with the fact that researchers in this field have generally worked in relative isolation from each other. To bring together scholars from different backgrounds who study early modern Hellenism in workshops and conferences (of which we have seen many in the last couple of years) is an important step to identify the main lacunae and imbalances and to find common perspectives on both the subject and the field of study. The articles collected here were presented at such a meeting.Footnote 34

The authors of the papers presented here do identify some lacunae and imbalances in the current scholarship, as they themselves make clear. They also invite scholars to explore the less trodden paths of this field of study and to connect various strands of scholarship to arrive at a more balanced understanding of early modern Hellenism. On the premise that the story of Greek learning in early modern Europe cannot be written exclusively in terms of textual transmission, in their own ways, these articles address how it was shaped, used and given meaning at various important moments in European history, from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, and in diverse areas, including Italy, France, Germany and England. They do not focus exclusively on the philological minutiae of intellectual history, but consistently connect detailed analyses of sources with a consideration of the specific social, cultural or political settings of Greek learning. Thus, they present an attempt to give historical substance to the premise that ‘the story of Hellenism’s transformation in Europe … is a story of acquisition, appropriation and domestication’.Footnote 35 Together they illustrate that, if we want to arrive at a fuller understanding of early modern Hellenism, the transmission and dissemination of Greek texts, their interpretation and study, and their use in entirely new contexts should not always be treated as separate fields of interest but must be ‘thought together’ as communicating vessels.

While the first paper in this collection concentrates on how Italian humanists used ancient Greek to create a Hellenic literature of their own, the second and third papers discuss, from different perspectives, how scholars in the sixteenth century helped to build up Greek learning in France and tried to integrate it into French and European intellectual culture. The two final papers then explore some of the ways in which knowledge about Greek history was used beyond the limits of Greek language and literature studies, focusing on two illuminating early modern episodes, one from England, the other from Germany. In the next section, I shall briefly lay out the main arguments of each paper and relate them to the general theme of the collection.

***


In terms of how humanist scholars used Greek learning, one of the more astonishing effects of the renewed interest in ancient Greek in the Latin West was the emergence of a Greek literature outside the Greek world, which, starting from Italy in the fifteenth century, spread all over Europe. Writing Greek letters, poems and speeches became a characteristic of the more sophisticated branches of European humanism, not only in Italy but also in France, Germany and even as far north as the Baltic and Scandinavian lands. In ‘Hellenic Verse and Christian Humanism’, Filippomaria Pontani sheds light on this (understudied) aspect of Renaissance Hellenism, showing how Greek learning was exploited to ‘construct a plausible Hellenic poetry in a learned Christian world’. Discussing the production of ancient style Greek poetry from late antiquity via Byzantium to the Italian Renaissance, Pontani focuses on the perceived conflict between Hellenic forms and Christian content. How can Christian notions be expressed in ancient forms? Do Hellenic forms eclipse the tenets of Christian thought, or does an allusive Hellenic style, by contrast, ‘ennoble’ Christianity? Concentrating on a selection of Greek poems by Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), Marcus Musurus (c. 1475–1517) and Janus Lascaris (c. 1445–1534), Pontani demonstrates how, and explains why, these Renaissance poets used Greek poetic models to express Christian ideas. His analyses go beyond tracing textual affinities and draw our attention to structural analogies between the culture of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and the Italian Renaissance, on the other: ‘two changing worlds, where the tension between Hellenism as form and Hellenism as content is a paramount element for the shaping of a new poetic texture’. Accordingly, Pontani argues, any future exploration of humanist Greek literature will benefit from a comparison with late ancient and medieval literatures, in which we find similarly controversial appropriations of Hellenic sources in Christian milieus. By inviting scholars of Renaissance Hellenism, more generally, to explore new ways to relate their findings to previous and other ‘Hellenisms’, this article also contributes an important methodological point of its own to the discussion.

The various ways in which Greek learning was shaped and given meaning beyond the Alps is the topic of ‘Guillaume Budé and the Uses of Greek’, in which Gerald Sandy discusses the key role of the famous French philologist in the establishment of Greek studies in sixteenth-century France. He illustrates Budé’s contributions by following the career of Jacques Amyot (1513–1593): an early student of the Collège de France (established in 1530), whose translations of Heliodorus and Plutarch, among others, helped to reorient Europe’s literary history and emancipate European literature from Neo-Latin. After outlining the state of Greek studies in France before Budé, Sandy discusses how the French philologist helped to overcome the three main obstacles to studying Greek: (1) the absence of competent teachers of Greek, (2) the absence of Greek manuscripts and printed editions and (3) the lack of reference works such as reliable dictionaries. Budé’s contributions, Sandy argues, transformed France into a centre of Hellenic studies, in which a scholar such as Amyot could flourish. Thus, the article shows the construction of Hellenism in its most fundamental form: the implementation of Greek studies in French scholarly culture by teaching, editing and translating activities. At the same time, it also shows how learning Greek became implicated in wider cultural discourses, beyond scholarship: French Hellenism, this article reminds us, was also regarded as the principal way to snatch cultural superiority away from the Italians, so that, by 1517, as Sandy reminds us, Erasmus could write that he did ‘not believe that there is any Italian at this time who is so perverse or arrogant that he would be foolhardy enough to join arms and do battle with Budé for recognition of this field of accomplishment’.

The establishment of Greek studies not only involved producing language study tools such as grammars and dictionaries but also relied on editing and publishing Greek works. This obviously involved processes of selection, and the choices made in the process reflected, as well as well as helped to shape, specific understandings of what Greek learning meant. In ‘Constructions of Hellenism through Printing and Editorial Choices’, Natasha Constantinidou discusses how the French scholar Adrien de Turnèbe (1512–1565) constructed his view of Hellenism through the Greek works he edited and published during the short period in which he served as royal printer in Greek (1551–1555). Unlike members of his circle such as J. J. Scaliger, Montaigne and Ronsard, Turnèbe’s work has generally remained understudied, so Constantinidou’s article fills a conspicuous lacuna in the history of French Hellenism. During his time as royal printer, Turnèbe published about twenty Greek volumes, covering literature and philology, natural philosophy and medicine, as well as religious syncretism and Neoplatonism. Distinguishing between publications for students, editions intended for Turnèbe’s own classes and books mainly serving his own philosophical interests, Constantinidou reveals that there was an intellectual programme behind the printer’s selections. Drawing on the paratexts to his editions such as prefaces and dedicatory epistles, she maintains that Turnèbe’s publications often served the purpose of promoting ancient Greek philosophy as a handmaid of the Christian faith. For instance, she shows that Turnèbe coupled his study of Theophrastus’s De odoribus – which he translated into Latin – with thoughts about the role of perfumes in the contemplation of God and religious worship. In particular, the editions centred on Plato’s Timaeus reflect Turnèbe’s profound interest in Christian Platonism, prisca theologia and Christian apologetics. Constantinidou interprets his editions of works by Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Plutarch, Philo of Alexandria, Synesius of Cyrene, Apollinaris of Laodicea and Gregory Palamas, as well as his edition of the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, as part of the printer’s attempt to project an interpretation of Greek philosophy as ‘prefiguring’ Christianity. According to her, Turnèbe attempted to harmonize Greek thought and Christian doctrine along the lines set out by Italian humanists, most famously Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), as well as French colleagues such as Guillaume Budé. In order to bring out the specificities of Turnèbe’s use of Greek learning, Constantinidou finally compares his editorial activities with the intellectual programmes of Rutgerus Rescius (Rutger Ressen, c. 1495–1545) and the French scholars Robert Estienne (1503–1559) and Jacques Toussain (1490–1547).

While some humanists addressed the tension between Hellenism and Christianity by revealing affinities between Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine, or by showing that Christian ideas could be expressed in ancient Hellenic forms without ‘disintegrating’, others had recourse to other means of aligning Hellenism and Scripture. With the flourishing of the studia orientalia in the seventeenth century, some scholars insisted on the cultural primacy of the Near East – especially Hebrew writings – and regarded the civilization of ancient Greece as having freely adopted and adapted elements from the East.Footnote 36 In a work called Homerus ἑβραίζων, Zachary Bogdan (1625–1659), for example, ‘revealed’ manifold Homeric and Hesiodic borrowings from the Old Testament in an attempt to show that the founding father of ancient literature had been familiar with Scripture. Such dazzlingly learned arguments entailed a profound revaluation – and not, as one might suspect, a devaluation – of Greek antiquity.

In ‘Joshua Apollo: Edmund Dickinson’s Delphi phoenizantes and the Biblical Origins of Greece in Seventeenth-Century England’, Bernd Roling shows how one of Bogdan’s contemporaries, the English physician, alchemist and antiquarian Edmund Dickinson (1624–1707), attempted to demonstrate that ancient Greek culture had been built on Phoenician foundations and on the soil of Israel. In his demonstration, he ‘de-Hellenized’ one of the hallmarks of ancient Greek paganism: the famous oracle at Delphi as well as its mythic founder, Apollo, whom he identified with Joshua. Anticipating one of the central arguments of Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio evangelica (1694), Dickinson argued from the assumption that the mysteries of Scripture were echoed in the myths of the Greeks and Romans. Roling offers a detailed account of how Dickinson expanded this general idea by using, among other things, comparative etymology and mythological archaeology as his principal tools. Whereas Turnèbe, as Constantinidou reminds us, still found that the Hebrews had ‘inherited the Platonic Muse and admitted her to their innermost sanctuary’, Roling explains how Dickinson changed this picture by making Hellenism look thoroughly Semitic. From today’s viewpoint, this might seem a deconstruction of what we now commonly see as typically Hellenic, yet Dickinson’s ‘de-Hellenization’ of Delphi constitutes a shrewd and erudite attempt to construct Hellenism alternatively on Semitic foundations in order to re-evaluate ancient Greece as a venerable branch of the Elect Nation. ‘Delphi revealed’, Roling writes, ‘that the events of the history of salvation had been burned into the memory of the Hellenes and that this knowledge, which saved the honour of the “pagan” Greeks, had simply been waiting to be freed once again from obscurity.’

Throughout the early modern period, the use of Greek learning was not necessarily oriented towards the scholarly ‘reconstruction’ of Greek antiquity. From Pontani’s article, for instance, we learn that some Italian humanists used their Greek learning to create a Greek literature of their own. The concern for ancient Greek texts, as expressed by Italian humanists, was multifaceted and, at the same time, often mainly Latin-oriented. They took a special interest in the Greek historians, above all, for what they had to say about Roman history; they studied Greek grammar, style and rhetoric in order to improve their competence in Latin, from matters of orthography to rhetorical issues of textual organization; they worked their way through Greek literature and Byzantine commentaries to emend corrupt passages in Latin authors (so that Greek learning appears as the handmaid of Latin textual criticism); and they mined the ancient Greek philosophers and theologians for solutions to the more theoretical problems which haunted their minds, for example, the need to bring pagan ideas into harmony with Christian doctrine.

The use of Greek learning outside the direct context of Greek philology was not restricted to Italian or Latin humanism, nor to the fifteenth century, though the Italian context of Greek studies has been researched much more intensively than have the Northern European uses of Greek learning. Especially for the study of Oriental history, Greek authors such as Herodotus and Plutarch were indispensable sources. As Roling’s article already showed, the increasing awareness of Oriental cultures and languages also catalysed new questions about the cultural and historical connections between ancient Greece and the Near East. In the final paper of the collection, ‘Hellenism in the Context of Oriental Studies’, Asaph Ben-Tov demonstrates how Greek learning was used in this way by Johann Gottfried Lakemacher (1695–1736), professor of Greek (from 1724) and Oriental languages (from 1727) in German Helmstedt. Ben-Tov shows how Lakemacher broke with the notion of Oriental or Hebrew primacy exemplified by Dickinson’s Delphi phoenizantes, discussed by Roling. Placing Lakemacher’s ideas on ancient Greece and its role in Oriental history against the background of the controversial ideas of his colleague Hermann von der Hardt (1660–1746), Ben-Tov argues that Lakemacher ‘desacralized’ the ancient past by tracing biblical antiquity to ancient Greece instead of vice versa. Specifically, he argues, Lakemacher attempted to demonstrate that the Jews were not the origin of other religions, cultures and languages but rather ‘were part of a network of ancient cultures, and were often the imitators rather than the source of inspiration’. Although Lakemacher kept his distance from the provocative ideas about the Greek origins of the Oriental languages, voiced by von der Hardt, he did trace various other cultural phenomena to ancient Greece and Greek literature. Ben-Tov demonstrates, for example, how Lakemacher interpreted the traditional carrying of the lulav during Sukkot, against the authority of Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), in terms of Josephus’s θυρσοφορία (‘carrying of the thyrsus’). For Lakemacher, the carrying of the lulav was just one example of how Bacchic rituals had entered post-biblical Jewish ceremonies. By uncovering and contextualizing the specificities of Lakemacher’s argument, Ben-Tov shows how he transferred his Greek learning beyond the limits of Greek philology stricto sensu and merged traditional textual antiquarianism with his own observations of a neighbouring Jewish community.Footnote 37