I was recently showing an English visitor around Corfu; we came to the garden commemorating Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, who lived here in the 1930s and wrote extensively about the island. (Gerald’s book, My Family and Other Animals, is a favourite with many readers, and to a considerable extent responsible for much of the tourist influx). My guest pointed to the plaque on the gate that described the brothers as “writers and philhellenes” and asked “what does that last word mean?”
I was surprised at the question, and explained that it describes people who love Greece and the Greeks. This still puzzled my visitor. “Hellenes?” I then pointed out that “Greece” isn’t a “Greek” word – that Greeks regard themselves as “Hellenes” and that the official name of the country is “Hellenic Republic”. I joked that “philhellenic” was a subspecies of “philanthropic” and this, too, confused my visitor, simply because he was unaware that so much of our vocabulary is in fact derived from classical Greek. Where would we be, I joked, if we could not “telephone” to our “psychiatrist”? My visitor at this stage lost his temper and asserted that, whatever about antiquities and ancient languages, Greece was, for him and millions of others, just a warm place to go on holidays.
The fact that so much of the modern Greek state was under foreign rule until very recently – Crete and Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, until 1913 and Rhodes right up to 1947 – is not apparent to today’s tourists. Nor is Greece’s proximity to so many trouble-spots in the Balkans and Middle East, or its continuing burden as a point of arrival for refugees and asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and other locations.
My visitor wasn’t embarrassed by his lack of awareness. Nor was he at all concerned by the fact that, on the domestic front of politics, Greece continues to display many of the birth-pangs originating in its war of independence from Turkey, more than two centuries ago. Greece – especially its islands, such as Corfu, Rhodes, Crete, Santorini and Mykonos – is seen as a “destination”, rather than a place where real people, with a real history, speaking a language that is thousands of years old, actually live and work.
I decided to play on my visitor’s lack of vocabulary. How would we travel if it weren’t for the kilometre? How would a camera work if we didn’t have the science of photography – “writing with light”? Physics, geometry and mathematics would have to be reinvented. What would the United States do without Philadelphia or the Pentagon? The pharmacist and the physiotherapist would still be waiting for a job description.
Philosophy – the love of wisdom – seems quite harmless, but I’m not sure anyone today would want to live in Plato’s Republic. The Hellenic Republic, whose existence surprised my visitor, is rather different. As for “democracy”, we should perhaps hesitate before embracing it as a Greek legacy. Any society that practices slavery and infanticide, and puts a philosopher (Socrates) to death for worshipping false gods and corrupting the minds of youth, sounds more like the word Paul Krugman used in his farewell column in the New York Times: “kakistocracy” – by which he meant “rule by the worst”. He had in mind Donald Trump, supported by billionaires like Elon Musk.
But Greece, with Kimberley Guilfoyle (Trump’s future daughter-in-law) as the new US ambassador, doesn’t live on its past. Several universities – including the Ionian University here in Corfu – are highlighting “digital” as the way forward in attracting students, who are wary of the old-fashioned humanities. The crisis in falling numbers of applicants has led to some faculties in the humanities to be redesignated as “digital”. If the new courses are a means to “integrate artificial intelligence with humanities”, as the University of Crete claims, then it is reinventing something that Greece already had back in the second century BC, with the so-called “Antikythera mechanism”, described as the world’s first analogue computer.
Meanwhile, we read that today’s ministry of the interior has devised “a sweeping plan to eliminate long-standing ambiguities in government responsibilities”. A cynic, brought up on Monty Python, would respond with “howls of derisive laughter”. This is something we hear every so often – an acknowledgment of “overlaps that lead to inefficiencies and confusion”, which is a Greek speciality, then and now.
I could have explained to my visitor that back in the fourth century BC, the land we know as Greece was not unified, but was dominated by a spread of small city-states such as Athens, Corinth, Thebes and Sparta, which were often at war with each other. Today, the “overlaps” and “ambiguities” are much the same, with different government ministries and agencies jealous of each other’s remits and responsibilities. Any “sweeping plan” to harmonise their areas of operation would first have to disenfranchise their vested interests. And that is as likely as hen’s teeth.
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