THERMOPYLAE FOR HIRE

There is a particular pleasure in being told that one’s ancestors have finally been admitted into the official mythology of the nation. It produces that warm and almost childish sensation of approval, the comforting illusion that the host society has turned towards the migrant and murmured: your past matters to us. For many within Melbourne’s Greek community, the Shrine of Remembrance’s new exhibition Spartans & ANZACS may well provoke precisely this response. Here, beneath the solemn geometry of Victoria’s most sacred commemorative institution, Thermopylae appears in state-sanctioned splendour. In that hallowed space, Leonidas is invited to stand shoulder to shoulder with the digger, and ancient Greece is carefully inserted into the liturgy of ANZAC remembrance.

The exhibition draws an elegant and emotionally persuasive parallel between the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC and the ANZAC rearguard action at Thermopylae and nearby Brallos Pass in April 1941. In both narratives, a smaller force delays a stronger invader. In both, tactical retreat is elevated into moral triumph. Again in both, sacrifice acquires an almost Eucharistic dignity. Spartan helmets are juxtaposed with Australian slouch hats, constructing a visual genealogy of courage that stretches from Leonidas to the Commonwealth soldier, as though separated only by an unfortunate clerical delay of two and a half millennia.

It is, one must admit, a superb curatorial conceit. It is also an act of acquisition.

For what is occurring here is less an exercise in remembrance than an annexation of symbolic territory. Australia, we are told, had its own Thermopylae. The phrase sounds harmless enough, even generous, until one notices what it accomplishes. Thermopylae ceases to be a Greek site of memory embedded within the longue durée of Hellenic history and becomes instead, an Australian moral metaphor, available for national use, like borrowed silver at a respectable dinner party.

Antonio Gramsci would have recognised the operation immediately. Hegemony is rarely maintained through coercion alone. Far more effective is the cultivation of consent, the subtle process by which the worldview of the dominant class comes to be accepted as common sense, as natural order, as civic virtue. Institutions such as the Shrine, rather than simply preserving memory, regulate the grammar through which memory becomes publicly respectable, teaching us not merely what to remember, but how remembrance ought to feel.

Thermopylae is ideal for this purpose. It is among the purest currencies in the moral economy of the West: courage without embarrassment, sacrifice without emotional abiguity, heroism sufficiently ancient to be politically unthreatening. To attach the ANZAC myth to Thermopylae is to increase its symbolic value immeasurably. A military withdrawal within an imperial campaign acquires the halo of civilisational defence. A strategic delay becomes a sacred act of democratic preservation. Leonidas, one suspects, would be surprised to discover that he died for the Commonwealth.

What disappears in this elegant comparison is the Greek experience of 1941 itself. The ANZACS fought bravely, delayed the German advance, withdrew, and carried the memory home. The Greeks remained. They endured occupation, famine, reprisals, village burnings, executions and the brutal administrative violence of survival under Nazi rule. Thermopylae, in Australian remembrance, becomes the story of ANZAC sacrifice. In Greek memory, it belongs to the beginning of a national catastrophe. One commemorative tradition departs by ship; the other stays behind to bury its dead. Meanwhile, the Greeks are expected to feel honoured because the source material is theirs.

Frantz Fanon, writing of colonial psychology, understood the peculiar hunger for recognition that power produces in those positioned at its margins. The colonised subject, and by extension the migrant subject, is encouraged to seek validation from the very structures that render him peripheral. Inclusion becomes a form of discipline, ehere one learns to experience selective recognition as gratitude. Greek Australians are thus invited to interpret the exhibition as proof that they have been admitted into the moral centre of Australian civic life. Your history matters, provided it can be made useful to ours.

Thermopylae is thus welcomed because it is safe. It is noble, ancient, flattering and conveniently deceased. It offers no awkward contemporary demands. Leonidas asks for no grants, lodges no planning objections, and does not insist upon bilingual storytime. Ancient Greece reassures the settler nation of its civilisational sophistication. Modern Greece, with its economic crises, political ambiguities and difficult insistence upon remaining alive, is rather less decorative.

This is hardly new. European philhellenism has long loved Greece most intensely when Greeks themselves were absent. Ruins were admired, marbles catalogued, Byron romanticised, and classical antiquity elevated into the moral childhood of Europe, while actual Greeks were treated with alternating paternalism and suspicion. The Greek was welcome as ancestor far more readily than as neighbour. One might say that philhellenism often loved Greece best when no Greek was present to complicate the fantasy.

The same selective appetite is visible in the mythology of Gallipoli itself. ANZAC memory has no difficulty appropriating the peninsula as sacred national terrain, a place of Australian becoming, a baptism of nationhood written in blood upon foreign soil. Yet scarcely any attention is given to the approximately 35,000 native Greeks of the Gallipoli peninsula who were expelled, terrorised and ethnically cleansed by the Ottoman authorities in the years preceding the campaign, precisely in order to secure and fortify the Straits against anticipated conflict. Their villages were emptied, their churches abandoned, their presence rendered administratively inconvenient long before Australian soldiers arrived to consecrate the landscape for imperial memory.

It is therefore not merely at Thermopylae that Greek history is borrowed while Greek people are forgotten. Gallipoli itself stands upon the silence of displaced Greek communities whose suffering rarely enters the ANZAC liturgy. The peninsula is remembered as the birthplace of Australian nationhood, while the destruction of the people who had inhabited it for centuries remains largely invisible. In a grim historical irony, part of the very terrain upon which the ANZAC myth was founded had first to be cleared of its indigenous Greek population.

Walter Benjamin’s observation that every document of civilisation is simultaneously a document of barbarism is worth recalling. Official commemoration is never innocent. It selects, arranges and polishes fragments of the past until they reflect the moral face the present wishes to admire. The exhibition does not preserve Thermopylae so much as it domesticates it.

For Greeks, Thermopylae has never been merely a polished parable of heroic sacrifice. It carries within it the bitterness of betrayal, the name of Ephialtes, the uneasy recognition that catastrophe often enters through internal fracture as much as external invasion. It is remembered not only for Leonidas’ courage, but for the tragic knowledge that civilisations rarely fall to enemies alone. The exhibition prefers a cleaner version: courage without ambiguity, sacrifice without treachery, a morality play fit for national reassurance. Greek historical memory is rather less tidy.

One sees the same process every year during the commemorations of the 25th of March on the margins of the Shrine itself. Greek Independence Day, a revolution born of blood, civil war, genocide, anti-imperial violence and occasional internecine absurdity, is translated into a carefully supervised multicultural ceremony about “freedom” and “democracy.” The speeches are managed with vigilance and the symbolism is calibrated. One is less encouraged to reflect upon British strategic interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, the ambiguities of philhellenism, or the rather awkward fact that liberation movements are rarely tidy enough for ministerial applause.

This explains why Spartans & ANZACS fits so comfortably within the Shrine’s commemorative architecture. Thermopylae flatters everyone. There is, tellingly, no corresponding search for an Aboriginal Thermopylae, no anxious effort to anchor national virtue in the resistance of Indigenous peoples against invasion, for such a comparison would force remembrance to confront the settler nation’s own foundational violence rather than comfortably borrow the moral prestige of somebody else’s dead. Australians inherit classical heroism. Greek Australians receive symbolic recognition. Governments obtain multicultural harmony and excellent photography. Nobody is required to confront the less agreeable questions of empire, dependency, or the curious tendency of settler nations to adopt other people’s dead as honorary ancestors.

This is where the neo-colonial instinct becomes most visible. Ancient Greece is embraced because it can be safely universalised as part of Western civilisation; modern Greeks are tolerated only insofar as they perform that symbolic ancestry in acceptable ways. The migrant community is invited to provide colour, continuity and ceremonial legitimacy, while interpretative authority remains elsewhere. One may carry the flag, dress the children in national costume, and lend one’s ancestors to the national myth, but the terms of remembrance are set by the institution that hosts it. The Evzone is welcomed. The insurgent remains politely offstage.

Unoubtedly, there was genuine courage in the 1941 campaign. ANZAC soldiers fought with discipline and dignity under impossible conditions. Their memory deserves honour. Yet honour does not require annexation. Respect for sacrifice does not depend upon the symbolic naturalisation of Leonidas into the Commonwealth. These events do not belong to the same moral grammar. To collapse one into the other produces emotional satisfaction at the expense of historical seriousness.

For the Greeks of Melbourne, the temptation to feel flattered should be resisted. Recognition offered through appropriation is merely dispossession with better manners. One is invited to applaud the moment one’s inheritance becomes useful to someone else’s foundational myth. The applause is sincere. The transaction remains unequal.

Leaving the exhibition, one admires the courage of soldiers across centuries. One also perceives a quieter lesson, whispered beneath the glass cases and interpretative panels: the past belongs most securely to those who possess the institutions capable of narrating it. Empires have always understood this. The modern ones simply employ better curators.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 9 May 2026