Remaking Persian War Heroes

Abstract

Thus Rene Canat writing with a flourish, as he explains how the nineteenth-century philhellenic fervor drove the artificial creation of a new classical Greece, a Greece that would uphold its Persian War triumphs, battle sites, and heroes. If Barthélemy had reinvented (the topography of) ancient Greece, Marcellus was willing and eager to help populate it. In his story of the reading of Aeschylus’s Persians, the diplomat unveiled some of those Greeks, “tenderly heroic” and “elegantly patriotic,” who, in the distant past, had defeated the Persian invader and now prepared to fight his perceived reincarnation, the Turkish host.

One wanted Greeks, one wanted Miltiades, Leonidas, … and their entire brigade; one wanted them to be alive, and there was no way that Europe would pass up on that. It was therefore agreed that one had to find Greeks, save Greeks, free Greeks, because the Greeks were the most tenderly heroic and the most elegantly patriotic people that one could dream up. But did Greeks exist? Certainly.

—René Canat, L’Hellénisme des Romantiques: La Grèce retrouvée