ROMAIC REQUIEM

 

Kyr Yiannis, whom I encounter most Sundays at church, despairs of the Greek race, past, present and emerging. So much so in fact that every time he sees me, he invariably quotes James Madison, the fourth president of the United States of America, who reputedly observed: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly still would have been a mob.”

My response, to the effect that they may well have been a mob, but still, they are our mob, cuts no ice with him, even when I point out that the ruminations of a politician who opposed the African slave trade throughout his career only to later argue in support of a motion to place a duty on the importation of slaves as part of a broader import duty bill, cannot be given any credence. As far as I know, no modern Greek politicians have ever supported slavery, at least not openly.

Kyr Yiannis, for all his regular church-going, is a neo-pagan, who attributes his attendance to his abiding love for the Greek language in all of its gorgeously manifold forms. Accordingly, he is possessed of the unswerving conviction that the Orthodox concept of the Holy Trinity, like much else associated with Orthodox theology, is naught but a cheap knock-off of the ideas of the great neoplatonic philosopher, Iamblichus. Around about the same time that Saint Nicholas, full of holy zeal, was lending the heretic Arius an almighty head-slap, while arguing the nature of the Trinity, Iamblichus developed a system of belief, at the head of which he placed the transcendent incommunicable "One", the monad, whose first principle is intellect, nous. Immediately after the absolute One, he positioned a second superexistent "One" to stand between it and 'the many' as the producer of intellect, or soul, psyche. This he considered the initial dyad. The first and highest One (nous), which the Neoplatonist Plotinus represented under the three stages of (objective) being, (subjective) life, and (realized) intellect, was distinguished by Iamblichus into spheres of intelligible and intellective, the latter sphere being the domain of thought, the former of the objects of thought. These three entities, the psyche, and the nous split into the intelligible and the intellective, kyr Yiannis triumphantly points out form a trinity and he muses that the fate of Hellenism would have been markedly different had we stuck to neoplatonic ruminations and not adulterated them through the medium of Christianity.

I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about but I am keen to point out that Iamblichus, , was an Arab, descended from the royal line of the Arab kings of Emesa and according to credible sources, an ancestor of Lebanese chanteuse, Najwa Karam. For kyr Yiannis, who does not recognise any races not described in Herodotus’ Histories, the Arabs do not exist.

Yet Kyr Yiannis is not alone in sticking fast to the conviction that Greece would see better days if only she would revert to her pagan ways. In his “Athens: An Ode”, ostensibly written to bolster the Greeks for a confrontation with the Turks in 1881, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne urged: “the sons of them that fought the Marathonian field,” to return to a time when “Gods were yours yet strange to Turk and Galilean, Light and Wisdom only then as gods adored. Pallas was your shield, your comforter was Paean, From your bright world’s navel spoke the Sun your lord.”

While we do not know whether the Pallas referred to was an allusion to a budget-biting Victorian treasurer, we do know that to a friend, Swinburne wrote: “I am writing an anti-Christian ode on Athens. Watts says that the astute and practical Greeks will laugh at it and me. Let them laugh, in their God’s name and so prove that modern Hellas is an annexe of the Kingdom of Bulgaria.”

Considering Kyr Yiannis hails from Florina, his sentiments towards the Bulgarians are complex  and context-driven, even when I point out that one of their khans, who ruled in the eighth century was  called Pagan and that a religion known as “Thracian Hellenism” based on the worship of the Olympians has a following in that country. Instead, he shrugs and places the blame for the woes of Greece and the Greek community of Melbourne squarely upon the shoulders of his generation. In his opinion, the older generation is guilty of poisoning the latter ones with their Romaic contagion and the sooner he and the rest of his ilk shuffle off this mortal coil and allow their successors to purge themselves of their contagion, the better for all concerned.

I hasten to inform him that he is not alone in this persuasion and that as far back as 1834, English poet and member of the ruling class Baron Richard Monckton Miles cautioned all those who thought that Greece, “having at last attained the means of free action,” would quickly develop “anew in all its pristine energy… Until then this generation be extinct,  and carry along with it its wild instincts and savage virtues, the atmosphere in which Grecian politics are to work must be turbulent and dark.”

The future of the country, he predicted, in line with Kyr Yiannis, rested with bright youths whom the revolution had “detached from Oriental modes and habits.” When I point politely in the direction of Alexis Tsipras, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Ilias Kasidiaris, Kyr Yiannis hastens to opine that the Intelligent Designer has more evolution in mind for our tribe, agreeing with Monckton that whereas the ancient Greeks were the originators of Western culture, the modern Greeks are only “the pensioners of the culture which the rest of Europe has learnt by labour and the fruition of the ages; they have to think with other’s thoughts, almost to feel with other’s feelings,” which paradoxically enough, precisely describes my emotional response when exposed to the dissonant styling of Notis Sfakianakis.

Kyr Yiannis develops his idea further, referring to modern Greece, not as a country but as a statelet, slavishly emulating the functions of a western country, without any reference to its indigenous traditions of governance. I am reminded of E F Benson’s “The Princess Sophia” a novel in Ruritarian mould, set in a fictional Balkan principality called Rhodope, on the Adriatic coast, filled with picturesque peasants and an upper class in their first apings of Western civilisation, which is turned into a casino by a Monte-Carlo loving ruler. He describes Greece as: “an astonishing little kingdom the like of which, outside of pure fiction, will never exist in Europe.”

In 1833 British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli on the other hand, was quite reconciled to the existence of a small but aesthetically pleasing Greece when he wrote his seventh novel: "The Rise of Iskander," about the fifteenth century chieftain Skenderbeg, who he casts as a Greek. The novel opens in Athens where:

"a solitary being stands upon the towering crag of the Acropolis, amid the ruins of the temple of Minerva, and gazed upon the inspired scene...'Beautiful Greece,' he exclaimed, 'Thou art still my country. A mournful lot is mine, a strange and mournful lot, yet uncheered by hope... Themistocles saved Greece and became a satrap; I am bred one, let me reverse our lots and die a patriot." Kyr Yiannis has no innate love of Disraeli, who he considers to be anti-Greek owing to his support for the tottering Ottoman Empire and his opposition to Russia, a realm which Kyr Yiannis admires greatly, considering its satrap a misunderstood visionary who just wants to be our friend.

In his more cynical moments of despair, Kyr Yiannis laments that modern Greeks are Chihuahuas bred from Plato's archetypal ideal form of a wolf. I, on the other hand see us as wolf puppies: playful, yappy, nippy, scrappy and utterly irresponsible. One day, I am convinced, we grow up and eat our owners, or at least cause serious damage to their handbags and designer shoes.

Week after week, I take my leave of Kyr Yiannis, bemoaning the αδικία (injustice) of being born a modern Greek. Granted, we are possibly the only tribe that has deified Adikia as the goddess and personification of injustice and wrong-doing. In keeping with the condition hellenique that characterises our collective discourse, not even she could catch a break. In times ancient she was depicted as a hideous, barbaric woman covered in tattoos being dragged by her opposite, Dike, the goddess of justice with one hand, while in the other she held a staff which she beat her with. Being unjust is not all that it is cracked up to be. On the other hand, Adikia also translates as a state of non-litigiousness, a disposition that Kyr Yiannis finds intolerable considering that he has been at loggerheads in the courts with his neighbour, who also happens to be his brother-in-law, regarding a matter of misaligned boundaries back in the village, for the past fifteen years.

"A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because he is Greek, because he is an Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and illustrious ancients. Merely seeing him you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him speak."

Thus wrote one of the Italian pupils of the great Renaissance scholar Dimitrios Chalkokondyles, who died far from his homeland in 1511. Kyr Yiannis is quick to interject that neither of us are Athenian, nor are we called Demetrius. Yet it is fair to say that we are both Greek and both of us are destined to die far from our homeland, to whom our existence is as remote as it is incomprehensible. And in that, there is infinite consolation.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 24 June 2023