MARCO RUBIO AND THE GREECE HE INVENTED

 

Had Marco Rubio visited ancient Athens, he would probably have been greatly impressed by Alcibiades. Ambitious, intelligent, charismatic and incurably competitive, the Athenian statesman embodied many of the virtues extolled by the American Secretary of State in his address at the Pnyx. The two might have enjoyed a lengthy discussion about the projection of power and the importance of resoluteness in international affairs. Their conversation might  however have become rather less congenial upon reaching the Sicilian Expedition, of which Alcibiades was an enthusiastic advocate. This is because Greek history has an inconvenient tendency to undermine the certainties of those who invoke it.

Rubio recently chose the site of the ancient Athenian Assembly to present a magnificent genealogy of Western civilisation. According to his account, that civilisation was born in Athens, came of age in Rome, was baptised in Christianity, forged in medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty and reborn in America. This itinerary displays an admirable geographical consistency, inasmuch as every road leads, apparently inevitably, to Washington. Greek antiquity thus becomes the glorious prologue to a historical narrative whose ultimate meaning is revealed in the exercise of American power.

Cultural inheritance, of course, transcends national boundaries. Americans are perfectly entitled to recognise Greek influences upon their political thought, just as Greeks may acknowledge the contributions of other civilisations to their own. Difficulties arise however, when cultural influence is transformed into historical succession, and then in turn, into political legitimacy. The engagement of America's founders with Plutarch and the classical philosophical tradition suggests a genuine intellectual affinity. To proceed from this observation to the proposition that contemporary American geopolitics constitutes the authentic fulfilment of the Greek spirit, however, requires a leap of logic for which history provides remarkably little assistance.

Almost entirely absent from this genealogy are the Greeks themselves. Between Pericles and Philadelphia stand centuries of Greek intellectual and cultural production. Byzantium was Roman in its political identity, Greek in its language and much of its intellectual expression, and Christian in its religious constitution. It developed through sustained encounters with the Persians, the Egpytians, the Islamic world, the Slavs and the Armenians. There followed the centuries of Ottoman rule, the establishment of the modern Greek state, the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the tragedy of Cyprus, experiences that continue to inform Greek historical consciousness and geopolitical sensitivities. Such a history sits rather awkwardly within the neat division between East and West upon which Rubio's Manichaean account depends.

Even the ancient Greek civilisation that Rubio places at the fountainhead of the West emerged through continuous interaction with other peoples.  Herodotus, with his inexhaustible curiosity about the customs, beliefs and accomplishments of foreign peoples, exemplifies an intellectual tradition whose creativity was nourished by encounters with difference. Seen in this light, Rubio's suggestion that the Greeks pursued knowledge while other civilisations remained inward-looking presupposes a rather peculiar history of humanity, one in which the rest of the world apparently waited for the Greeks to discover human curiosity on its behalf.

The transformation of Greek antiquity into an exclusively Western inheritance recalls an older European habit. During the nineteenth century, admiration for classical Greece frequently coexisted with the conviction that modern Greeks were inadequate custodians of their own ancestral civilisation. Antiquity was proclaimed the spiritual property of Europe, while living Greeks were expected to conform to the expectations of their foreign admirers. Something of the same asymmetry can be discerned in Rubio's address. Greece’s primary function is to supply historical prestige, while America reserves for itself the authority to determine its contemporary political significance.

There is, nevertheless, an element of historical truth in Rubio's interpretation. The ancient Greeks celebrated ambition, competition, courage and excellence, recognising in rivalry a creative force within their political and cultural life. The weakness of his approach lies in elevating these qualities into the defining essence of Greek civilisation, while setting aside an equally important intellectual tradition devoted to examining their consequences.

Aristotle associated virtue with practical wisdom, while the tragedians explored the limits of human ambition. Hubris encompassed the arrogant conduct of those who sought to humiliate others through demonstrations of their own superiority. The ethical problem of power consequently extended to the treatment of those subjected to its exercise. Even Achilles, whom Rubio invokes as an exemplar of heroic glory, acquires another moral dimension when, confronted by Priam, he recognises in his enemy a fellow human being capable of suffering.

The Christian tradition, which Rubio incorporates into his narrative of Western ascendancy, introduces further complications. Christianity elevated humility, compassion for the vulnerable and a profound suspicion of worldly glory. Rubio's disparagement of societies supposedly preoccupied with the welfare of their less capable members sits uneasily beside this inheritance. The encounter between Hellenism and Christianity proved intellectually fertile precisely because it involved conflict, accommodation and the reappraisal of established values. To present their relationship as an uninterrupted progression towards power is to overlook much of the spiritual complexity that gave it meaning.

The contradictions inherent in this selective reading of Greek civilisation are perhaps nowhere more striking than in the history of Athenian democracy itself. A city that grounded its political identity in the liberty of its citizens simultaneously constructed an empire serviced by slaves and sustained by the subjugation of other Greek communities. In the celebrated Melian Dialogue, Thucydides captures with chilling clarity the moment at which power claims exemption from moral restraint and liberty ceases to be a universal principle, becoming instead the privilege of those sufficiently powerful to enjoy it. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

The modern American conception of international leadership offers some intriguing parallels with this Athenian experience. The belief that American institutions and values possess universal significance can transform the expansion of American influence into a moral obligation, while resistance by other societies is interpreted as a threat to international order. In Rubio's address, the celebration of national sovereignty coexists with the assumption that American strategic primacy is an indispensable condition of Western security. This raises a question that the interlocutors of Thucydides would have readily understood: to what extent can a great power invoke the liberty of nations while regarding its own supremacy as essential to their preservation?

When Rubio turns from antiquity to contemporary Greece, the birthplace of democracy acquires a rather more practical function. It emerges as an exemplary ally, an energy hub and an indispensable component of the Western defence architecture. Such cooperation undoubtedly serves Greek interests as well, given Athens' desire to secure American support in confronting the challenges of its region. Yet the shared invocation of democracy and classical heritage can obscure a fundamental reality. The two countries possess vastly different degrees of international influence, and their strategic priorities coincide only insofar as their respective interests permit. American policy towards Turkey offers a particularly instructive example, since Washington's determination to retain Ankara within the Western alliance may conflict with Greek objectives. The quality of an alliance, after all, may be measured partly by the freedom of its members to disagree.

Rubio's reference to the Greek War of Independence and the American philhellene Daniel Webster provides a historical illustration of the complicated relationship between national independence and the protection afforded by powerful states. American public sympathy for the Greek revolutionaries was genuine, although it produced no corresponding official American intervention. The establishment of an independent Greek state, by contrast, was decisively shaped by the intervention of the European Great Powers, whose involvement helped secure liberation from Ottoman rule while simultaneously imposing limitations upon Greek autonomy. Greek political leaders exploited rivalries among these powers, seeking support and opportunities for diplomatic manoeuvre. From its inception, therefore, the modern Greek state has confronted a persistent dilemma: how to obtain the protection of the powerful while retaining the capacity to determine its own future.

he experience of postwar Greece exposes the limitations of this purported civilisational kinship with particular force. Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States acquired a decisive influence over Greek political life, while anti-communism furnished the justification for a security apparatus that subjected substantial sections of the population to exclusion, surveillance and persecution. The crisis of July 1965, which brought down George Papandreou's democratically elected government, revealed the extent to which Greek parliamentary politics had become entangled with the calculations of the American embassy, the Palace and the country's military establishment. Washington was no disinterested spectator of the ensuing struggle for power. The dictatorship that followed in 1967, and the subsequent American accommodation with its rulers, exposed an even more profound contradiction. The country celebrated as the birthplace of democracy could remain indispensable to American strategic interests even when its democratic institutions had been extinguished. The significance extends beyond an accusation of hypocrisy. It reveals a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship Rubio celebrates: Greek antiquity could be invoked to confer moral legitimacy upon American leadership, while the political aspirations of living Greeks remained subject to the calculations of that leadership. For those whose experience of American power was shaped by the Civil War, the postwar security state and the dictatorship, the proposition that America represents the historical fulfilment of Greek democratic civilisation must have a distinctly bitter resonance.

It would, admittedly, be convenient to attribute exclusively to Rubio the tendency to employ antiquity as a means of validating contemporary political aspirations. Greeks themselves are frequently accomplished practitioners of precisely this form of historical selectivity. We invoke democracy while tolerating authoritarian practices, extol dialogue while treating disagreement as a threat, and search among our ancestors for certificates of collective superiority. Criticism of the American appropriation of Greek antiquity acquires greater credibility when accompanied by a willingness to scrutinise our own uses of history.

Alcibiades would probably have recognised in Rubio an admirer of his virtues. The Athenians, however, also discovered their cost. Perhaps therein lies the most important distinction between invoking Greek history and learning from it. The former supplies the powerful with illustrious ancestors. The latter obliges them to consider whether they themselves embody the very excesses against which Greek civilisation left us its most formidable warnings.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 October 2026

MINOTAURING IN SYDNEY

 François Sicard's Theseus Defeating the Minotaur, standing somewhat incongruously within Sydney's Archibald Fountain, appears at first glance to commemorate one of the defining triumphs of Greek mythology. A victorious Theseus stands naked above the creature he has just slain, one hand gripping the Minotaur's horns as the defeated body collapses beneath him in its final agonies. Sicard leaves little doubt where the viewer's sympathies are intended to lie. The hero's body is complete, idealised and emphatically masculine, his exposed genitals proclaiming the civilised virility that nineteenth century classicism habitually associated with moral superiority. Beneath him, the Minotaur possesses no corresponding sexual identity. His body, although overwhelmingly human, has been stripped of every visible marker of manhood. Only the great curling horns remain in parody of his emasculation, reducing him entirely to animality, as though his humanity has already been extinguished before Theseus delivers the final blow.

The longer the eye lingers upon the composition, the less persuasive Sicard's moral certainties become. The defeated creature gradually begins to attract a sympathy that the sculptor almost certainly intended for the triumphant hero standing above him. Such a reversal owes less to sentiment than to language itself. Greek mythology has preserved this episode almost exclusively through the eyes of kings and heroes, with the consequence that the fallen creature survives in memory under the title bestowed upon him by those who imprisoned him. We know him as the Minotaur, Minos' Bull, Minos' Beast, names that define ownership rather than identity. Ancient tradition, however, preserves another name entirely: Asterion, or Asterios, "he who belongs to the stars." There is a cruel irony in the circumstance that a being whose very name evokes the heavens should spend his entire existence imprisoned beneath the earth, wandering a labyrinth from which neither sunlight nor starlight could penetrate. The transformation from Asterion to Minotaur is therefore far more than a change of nomenclature. It is the first act of his dehumanisation, where an innocent child is subsumed into the identity imposed by his captor, remembered thereafter only as an extension of Minos himself. Before mythology has even begun to explain who Asterion is, it has already denied him the right to exist as himself.

From the outset, he is the unwilling victim of the transgressions of others. Minos breaks his oath to Poseidon after refusing to sacrifice the magnificent white bull sent by the sea god. Poseidon, however, never directs his vengeance against the oath breaker. Instead, he elects to punish Minos through the person whom the king regards as his own. Pasiphaë, despite being the daughter of Helios himself, is a mere woman and thus enjoys no protection from divine caprice. Seized by an irresistible passion imposed upon her by Poseidon, she couples with the very bull her husband had refused to sacrifice, conceiving Asterion. Euripides' Cretans strips away any suggestion that she acted willingly. Confronted by Minos' accusations, she responds with devastating irony. What conceivable attraction, she asks, could a bull possibly have possessed? Was it his handsome robes, the fire in his eyes or the colour of his beard? The true offence belongs to Minos alone. Yet neither Minos nor Poseidon must endure its consequences.

The consequences instead descend upon the only participant in the entire catastrophe whose innocence is beyond dispute. Conceived through an act intended not to punish him but to wound Minos, born illegitimate, the bastard child of divine vengeance rather than human desire, Asterion enters the world already carrying upon his own body the visible consequences of another man's impiety. Greek mythology, however, displays remarkably little interest in that injustice. His hybrid form rapidly ceases to be understood as the consequence of Poseidon's punishment and becomes instead the explanation for Asterion himself, so that before he has performed a single voluntary act, exercised the slightest degree of moral agency or revealed virtue, cruelty, pity or malice through conduct rather than appearance, the verdict has already been delivered. The bull's head no longer signifies what has happened to him. It becomes sufficient evidence of what he is presumed to be.

From that moment onwards, Asterion undergoes a progressive narrative dispossession. The surviving tradition preserves with meticulous care the motives of Minos, the violated innocence of Pasiphaë, the ingenuity of Daedalus and the heroism of Theseus, yet almost never pauses to consider Asterion as a consciousness in his own right. Ancient authors repeatedly describe his body whilst displaying remarkably little curiosity about his mind, reducing him to what one modern scholar has aptly called "a prisoned body and a dynastic embarrassment" rather than a fully agentic character. His appearance therefore ceases merely to distinguish him physically and begins instead to replace biography, motive and interiority altogether. From that moment onwards, Asterion undergoes a progressive narrative dispossession. The surviving tradition preserves with meticulous care the motives of Minos, the violated innocence of Pasiphaë, the ingenuity of Daedalus and the heroism of Theseus, yet almost never pauses to consider Asterion as a consciousness in his own right. Ancient authors repeatedly describe his body whilst displaying remarkably little curiosity about his mind, reducing him to what one modern scholar has aptly called "a prisoned body and a dynastic embarrassment" rather than a fully agentic character. His appearance therefore ceases merely to distinguish him physically and begins instead to replace biography, motive and interiority altogether. Once that substitution has taken place, Asterion can no longer exist within the narrative as a son, a brother or even a child. He has become an identity constructed almost entirely from his usefulness to others. The next stage of the myth is therefore not simply to imprison him but to preserve that construction.

The labyrinth nevertheless serves a purpose that extends well beyond concealment. Hiding Asterion from public view removes the visible evidence of Minos' shame, yet concealment alone cannot restore the king's authority. So long as the being beneath the palace continues to be recognised as an abandoned child, sympathy remains capable of attaching itself to the victim rather than to the ruler. Asterion must therefore become something other than a child. He must become the monster whose imprisonment appears not merely understandable but necessary. The labyrinth provides the conditions under which that transformation can occur. Removed from family, companionship, language, education and every ordinary relationship through which human beings acquire identity, he is progressively deprived of those qualities by which others might continue to recognise him as one of themselves. When the ancient sources finally encounter the creature within the labyrinth, they describe a beast whose savagery appears self-evident, yet display almost no curiosity concerning the decades of abandonment that preceded it. Brutality is treated as the cause of his imprisonment when it is equally possible to regard it as one of its consequences. The myth thereby completes one of its most subtle inversions. It presents the humanity Asterion has lost as though it had never existed.

Theseus therefore inherits rather than creates Asterion's monstrosity. Long before he descends into the labyrinth, the essential work has already been accomplished. By the time the Athenian prince confronts him, scarcely anything remains except the monstrous identity that others have patiently constructed. The death within the labyrinth therefore represents less the destruction of a beast than the final obliteration of a human being whom the narrative has progressively rendered incapable of being perceived as such.

François Sicard's sculpture faithfully perpetuates that tradition. Standing before the bronze in Sydney, the spectator is invited to celebrate the triumph of civilisation over savagery, reason over appetite and humanity over brute instinct, yet the composition depends upon precisely the same assumptions that have shaped the myth from the beginning. The defeated figure possesses no history beyond his monstrosity, no identity beyond the name imposed upon him by the man who imprisoned him and no claim upon our sympathy except that which gradually forces itself upon us despite the sculptor's intentions. Sicard does not simply represent an ancient story. He inherits an ancient judgement.

Perhaps that is why Sicard's sculpture becomes increasingly difficult to behold the longer one remains before it. The bronze appears to commemorate the triumph of civilisation over monstrosity, yet it preserves without question the very assumptions that first made such a triumph possible. The creature lying beneath Theseus is denied even in death the humanity that had been progressively stripped from him throughout his life, his body continuing to speak more loudly than his name, his birth, his innocence or his suffering. The spectator is invited to admire the hero whilst overlooking the long sequence of dispossessions that rendered heroism possible in the first place, for Theseus does not confront Asterion as he was born, but as kings, gods, imprisonment and memory have patiently remade him. Standing before the monument, one gradually realises that the greatest violence in the story was never the stroke of the hero's sword. It was the slow destruction of a human identity until nothing remained but a monster, and the still more unsettling realisation that, almost three millennia later, we continue to participate in that destruction every time we call him the Minotaur.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 10 October 2026

PLACING DEMOCRACY

There is something decidedly Cavafyesque about the spectacle of Victorian politicians assembling behind Parliament House to unveil a place intended to honour the contribution of the Greek community to this State, when the contribution selected took place in Athens some two and a half millennia before Victoria, Australia or, in any historically meaningful sense, Greek-Australia existed. Past and present are collapsed into each other until cultural descent begins to resemble historical participation and something inherited from antiquity becomes, almost imperceptibly, something we apparently accomplished here.

The distinction between inheritance and contribution is a significant one. Greek Australians can reasonably regard classical civilisation as part of the immense and often contradictory inheritance from which modern Greek identity has been fashioned. A contribution to Victoria is something else. It must arise from the encounter between Greeks and Victoria, from lives lived, institutions created, conflicts endured and changes wrought here. Democracy Place was expressly presented as recognition of such a contribution, yet its name commemorates an achievement for which no Greek-Victorian can plausibly claim responsibility.

The irony is compounded by the fact that the democracy bestowed upon us as an honour is already claimed by virtually the entire Western political tradition as part of its own inheritance. Parliament House itself belongs to a political culture that traces part of its democratic genealogy to ancient Greece. We are therefore being honoured with something the society “honouring” us already considers its own. Democracy belongs to everybody because it came from the Greeks and is then, for the purposes of multicultural commemoration, handed back to the Greeks as though it were peculiarly theirs.

Even the Premier’s generous proposition that democracy constitutes Greece’s greatest gift to the world warrants some qualification. The democracy invoked is principally Athenian, the product of a particular society whose political arrangements differed profoundly from modern representative democracy. Subsequent Greek history encompasses monarchy, empire, oligarchy, foreign rule, constitutional experimentation and dictatorship. To make democracy an essential attribute of Hellenism therefore requires one extraordinary moment to be extracted from a long and contradictory historical experience and allowed to speak for the whole.

The Premier’s further amusing suggestion that an ancient Greek god might eventually be placed upon the site is revealing for much the same reason. A space ostensibly dedicated to Greek Victorians immediately sends the commemorative imagination several millennia backwards in search of an unspecified deity capable of making it sufficiently “Greek.” If I were a classical scholar I would suggest a statue to the titular god of the cult of the eternal Epitimos Proedros, for that truly is a local, home-grown deity.

A counter-suggestion involving the erection of a likeness of St Paul addressing the Greeks recalls another formative strand of Greek historical experience and complicates the easy identification of Greekness with classical antiquity. Yet the exchange itself is wonderfully revealing. Pagan antiquity is answered with Christian antiquity, while Greek-Victoria remains conspicuous by its absence. One begins to wonder how far through the historical archive we must travel before a monument dedicated to Greek-Victorians finally encounters said Greek-Victorians themselves.

There is a reason classical democracy presents itself so readily. Western Europe progressively incorporated an idealised ancient Greece into its own civilisational ancestry, particularly with the emergence of bourgeois capitalist modernity. The paradox was that the West could claim the ancient Greeks as its forebears while treating living Greeks as uncertain heirs to a past it had already appropriated. Modern Greek nationalism embraced this classical genealogy in turn, and the diaspora inherited both its prestige and its contradictions.

Recognition, however, is also an exercise of power. Institutions inevitably influence which aspects of a culture become publicly visible and worthy of commemoration. Democracy Place thus illustrates how a complex community can become publicly understood through categories selected largely by those possessing the authority to recognise it.

Greek Australians have hardly been passive in this process. For migrants confronting prejudice and condescension, classical ancestry provided valuable cultural capital. The wog, factory hand or uncultivated foreigner could claim descent from the very civilisation the society patronising him had been taught to revere. There was dignity in that assertion and, under the circumstances, considerable strategic value as well.

Danger arises however, when this strategy hardens into a habit. A community repeatedly recognised through the greatness of its ancient past can become accustomed to approaching power through the forms of Greekness that power finds flattering: we are welcomed as the descendants of philosophers, democrats and the founders of Western civilisation, and learn to value recognition accordingly. Praise then begins to take the place of equality, while honours and affirmations make accommodation with prevailing structures easier to accept. There is something profoundly undemocratic in such a relationship. A democratic community engages power as an equal, capable of criticism, disagreement and demands upon it; it does not require power continually to assure it that it is ancient, exceptional and worthy before it feels recognised.

All of which makes the recourse to antiquity now unnecessary. Victoria has no shortage of Greek contributions of its own, although they possess considerably less marble about them. Greek migrants entered the labour movement and participated in struggles for workers whose language, migration status and economic vulnerability could leave them poorly represented. They entered politics, established welfare and charitable structures, created schools and cultural institutions and formed organisations through which newcomers negotiated an unfamiliar society. Slowly, unevenly and amid the arguments and schisms without which Greek communal life would scarcely be recognisable, survival acquired a civic dimension.

There is little purpose in replacing one consoling mythology with another and turning Greek migration into an uncomplicated progress from poverty to prosperity. Postwar Australian industry benefited enormously from migrant labour, while many of those providing it occupied positions of limited status and bargaining power, including people whose overseas qualifications counted for remarkably little. Exploitation was hardly confined to the Anglo-Australian employer either. Later prosperity can cast a flattering retrospective light over circumstances in which Greek migrants often occupied a distinctly subordinate position.

That subordination was sometimes reinforced from within the community itself. Greek communal institutions could be rigidly hierarchical, while established figures counselled migrants to remain deferential towards Australian authority, grateful for their acceptance and reluctant to challenge the social and political order around them. Those who rejected such expectations and sought to engage politically, challenge exclusion and demand equality could encounter considerable pressure and even repression. The struggle was therefore also over the place Greeks were entitled to claim in Australian society: whether they should remain compliant outsiders or participate as equals in shaping the society in which they lived.

It is the rejection of that marginality that belongs to the democratic history of Victoria. Greek Australians petitioned and challenged institutions, entered political and civic life and asserted a right to participate on equal terms. They now sit in parliaments, serve as ministers and councillors and participate throughout public life with a visibility that can appear unremarkable only because the struggles enabling it are receding from memory. Victoria’s institutions did not simply discover diversity. Rather, their transformation also reflects the efforts of those once kept at their margins to enter them and demand an equal voice.

This democratic engagement also extended to events in Greece itself. Greek Australians opposed the Metaxas dictatorship during the 1930s and, a generation later, organised against the military junta of 1967 to 1974, supporting resistance and campaigning for the restoration of democracy, while other sections of the diaspora supported or accommodated authoritarian rule. Both regimes invoked their own versions of Greek national authenticity, so those opposing them were choosing between competing visions of Greece and of the political values Hellenism was supposed to represent. Democracy was something argued over, defended and fought for, including against other Greeks. Had it simply passed through the bloodstream of Hellenism since the fifth century BC, these struggles would scarcely have been necessary.

Here lies the hollowness at the centre of Democracy Place, notwithstanding the evident goodwill with which the honour has been conceived. There is little reason to question the sincerity of the desire to acknowledge the Greek community. Indeed, that sincerity makes the assumptions behind the gesture more revealing. Commemoration acquires meaning through specificity. It tells us why particular people, in a particular place, matter. Ancient democracy asks little of the society doing the commemorating because everybody can admire it without being implicated by it. Migrant labour, assimilation, prejudice, industrial struggle, political mobilisation and welfare are less comfortable subjects, because Victoria must then enter the story as a participant rather than a benevolent spectator. Before we are honoured, we must all engage in a collective amnesia.

Premier Ben Carroll’s injunction that those assembled “should be proud” captures this economy of recognition particularly well. The State selects the symbol, provides its interpretation and even proposes the emotion with which it should be received. Greek-Victorian politicians can then be marshalled to authenticate the connection. After more than a century of organised Greek life in this State, we should possess sufficient confidence to appreciate the goodwill while still examining the terms upon which it is offered.

If antiquity must nevertheless be invoked, perhaps the wrong antiquity has been chosen. They should have called the place the Pnyx, after the hill upon which the Athenian popular assembly met and democracy was actually practised. For a Labor Premier, the democratic hill carries an additional resonance. Ben Chifley bequeathed to the Australian labour movement the enduring metaphor of the “light on the hill,” the distant objective towards which politics should strive in the service of a better life for ordinary people. There would be a pleasing symmetry in allowing Greek democracy a hill of its own behind Parliament, even if present circumstances might occasionally render the light difficult to discern.

The name Pnyx possesses further advantages. The word carries the sense of something closely packed or constricted, an etymological felicity of some relevance both to the Victorian economy and to anybody attempting to traverse Melbourne by road. To the modern Greek ear it also offers the irresistible phonetic association with πνίγω, to choke or strangle. Democracy Place could thereby unite two venerable political traditions: the Athenian assembly upon the hill and Chifley’s light shining from it. And whenever the economy constricts, the traffic congeals and another hidden tax materialises, the demos below might make its own modest contribution to democratic practice by gazing towards the hill and exercising that most direct form of popular sovereignty: «άει πνίξου».

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 3 October 2026

 

EV-ZONED OUT

 

It seems that the Evzones are coming to Australia again and this time, in an egregious affront to the natural order of things, they will be visiting Sydney and Canberra while bypassing Melbourne, a city which, depending upon the enthusiasm of the master of ceremonies, is either the third largest Greek city in the world, the largest Greek city outside Greece, the most Greek city outside Greece, or the only place outside Greece where one has reasonable prospects of obtaining a something that resembles a souvlaki after 2am, although I suspect Thessaloniki retains a considerable advantage in all four categories.

The news has caused consternation, with questions being asked, letters being written and feelings apparently hurt as members of our community attempt to comprehend how the motherland can dispatch its exquisitely accoutred Presidential Guard all the way to Australia and then permit them to pass Melbourne by. Sydney apparently merits a visitation, as does Canberra, whose principal contribution to Hellenism as far as I am aware consists of providing a convenient location in which Greek ambassadors may reside while contemplating how long it will take before they can return to Athens, yet Melbourne, home to generations of Greeks, countless organisations, churches, schools, brotherhoods, federations, festivals, factions and self-appointed fuhrers, must somehow struggle on without the consoling sight of tall young men goose-stepping in short skirts. I too am attempting to summon the requisite sense of outrage, although so far it has proved elusive.

This is largely because I adore the Evzones, having written about them, dressed like them, pursued them around community events and generally comported myself in their presence with all the dignity expected of a middle-aged solicitor and man of letters confronted by exceptionally tall men wearing four hundred pleats. During one of their previous Melbourne sojourns I found myself helping some of them change before an appearance, at which point one, weary of being photographed, admired and generally treated as though temporarily removed from a vitrine in the National Historical Museum, complained that people treated them like dolls or male models. “We have degrees, you know. If only you people loved us for our intellect,” he told me, leaving me chastened, for here was a highly educated young man seeking recognition for his mind while I was helping him adjust his foustanella, an inversion of the Platonic ascent in which, rather than proceeding from the contemplation of bodily beauty towards Beauty itself, we Greek-Australians appeared perfectly content to stop somewhere around the pleats.

His complaint exposes a magnificent contradiction, for we become indignant when Australians reduce Greek culture to Zorba, souvlaki, islands and men in skirts, yet whenever said men in skirts arrive, we descend upon them in our thousands and disseminate photographs of ourselves beside them with such intensity that an anthropologist could reasonably conclude that the principal purpose of the diaspora is the conservation of the ceremonial male thigh. The ideological versatility involved is even more impressive, for people who oppose militarism, nationalism, standing armies, NATO, American bases and most varieties of imperialism become positively Alcibiadean when an Evzone enters the room, whereupon rifles acquire the innocence of folk accessories and hardened anti-imperialists capable of detecting fascism in the seating arrangements of a community dinner blush, swoon and request selfies. If Circe transformed the companions of Odysseus into swine, the foustanella performs a gentler metamorphosis upon the Greek-Australian Left, transforming committed dialectical materialists into breathless maidens of Brauron at approximately the speed required to unlock an iPhone camera.

The irony becomes richer when one remembers that Greek political vocabulary still contains the term Germanotsolias, for the collaborationist Security Battalions of the Occupation appropriated elements of the Evzone tradition, leaving behind a word capable of evoking one of the darkest fractures of modern Greek history. The costume can therefore summon revolutionary heroism, the Balkan Wars and the mountains of Epirus while carrying, through its appropriation, the shadow of collaboration, for Clio has always been an inconvenient Muse, more interested in recording contradiction than assisting communities with their commemorative programmes. Yet place six feet three inches of immaculately groomed Presidential Guard before a Greek-Australian audience and even Clio appears prepared to close her tablets and admire the spectacle.

The distress caused by their absence consequently tells us rather more about ourselves than about them, for somewhere within our diasporic consciousness persists the suspicion that authentic Greekness has a metropolitan issuing authority and that our certificates require periodic renewal. The Evzones arrive as bearers of that authentication, reassuring us that Greece remembers us and that despite generations spent speaking English, marrying people from Folegandros when our grandparents expressly forbade it and developing the conviction that Oakleigh constitutes an extraterritorial possession of the Hellenic Republic, we remain members in good standing of the greater Greek world. Their diversion to Sydney consequently assumes the dimensions of yiayia gifting the better χωράφι to a cousin.

Perhaps, however, their absence is a compliment, for after more than a century and a half of Greek settlement in Victoria, Athens may finally have concluded that we can be trusted to remain Greek without supervision. Someone may have examined Melbourne and observed churches, schools, newspapers, radio programmes, festivals, archives, libraries, writers, musicians, academics, poets, artists, choirs and enough committees to administer the late Byzantine Empire, before deciding that another shipment of foustanellades can safely be sent elsewhere. After all, Seferis never came to Melbourne, Elytis somehow neglected us, went to the trouble of travelling halfway around the world while inexplicably failing to drop into Oakleigh. We have survived these successive acts of metropolitan indifference with Hellenism more or less intact, so there is at least a reasonable prospect that we can endure the Evzones spending a week in another polis.

A more serious issue arises from the habit of seeking metropolitan authentication, because it teaches the next generation that cultural legitimacy resides elsewhere. Children smell weakness, and if we tell them that Greek-Australian identity is rich, self-sustaining and worthy of inheritance while behaving as though Athens can diminish it merely by sending the Evzones to Sydney, they will identify the contradiction immediately. We become rather like the inhabitants of Plato's cave, awaiting the next procession of metropolitan shadows across the wall and arguing furiously over which constitutes the most authentic representation of Greece, while overlooking the culture already being produced around us.

Rebetika is being played at Triakosia by musicians treating the tradition as something living, books are being written here by people articulating experiences that could have arisen nowhere else, while increasingly sophisticated discussions concerning Greek-Australian history, language, literature and identity are taking place. We even possess hordes of people monitoring one another on social media, identifying subversive remarks and conveying them to their respective superiors for immediate ghosting, proving that Athenian ostracism has survived transplantation remarkably well, save that the ostrakon has been replaced by the screenshot and ten years of exile by removal from the friends list. With such fidelity to ancestral political practice, exactly how many additional Evzones does our civilisation require?

Years ago I suggested that rather than repeatedly spending considerable sums importing Evzones, we should establish our own guard composed of Greek-Australian young people, allowing them to learn the history, wear the costumes and become stakeholders in their community rather than spectators applauding authenticity flown in from Athens. Demosthenis Manasis actually did something about it, creating the ‘Froura’ and thereby demonstrating the dangers inherent in taking one of my suggestions seriously. His initiative matters because the young people wearing the costumes are ours and inhabit the same hybrid cultural world as those watching them; in this respect Manasis has performed something resembling the theft of fire by Prometheus, save that the sacred technology wrested from the metropolitan gods consists principally of pleats, tsarouchia and the capacity to stand motionless for considerable periods.

Indeed, if Evzones are indispensable, the only ones I particularly want to see are those who have reconciled the foustanella with denim, as their counterparts in Albania have done in the accompanying photograph, where traditional dress is magnificently interrupted by blue jeans protruding beneath the pleats. Here, finally, is a Hellenism I can embrace, sufficiently secure to survive contact with denim, a sartorial synthesis worthy of Heraclitus, in which foustanella and jeans, permanence and change, coexist while the river flows on and the clarinet keeps playing. If our identity cannot withstand such innovation, the absence of the Presidential Guard constitutes the least of our problems.

There is also the question of frequency, for nobody is suggesting that the Evzones should be banished permanently from our shores and the sight of them once in a while is splendid. The problem begins when a ceremonial visit acquires the regularity of a touring franchise and the Presidential Guard starts to resemble the Hellenic answer to Cirque du Soleil or Disney on Ice, returning annually with the same costumes, the same choreography and an audience eagerly awaiting the moment when somebody performs the difficult manoeuvre involving the pom-pommed ice-skate. At some point we are entitled to discuss production values. If the Evzones are to become a fixture of the Greek-Australian entertainment calendar, surely each season requires fresh material, a revised programme or at least the occasional guest performer, because even Cirque du Soleil understands that one cannot tour the same spectacle indefinitely merely by changing the dignitaries in the front row. The Panathenaic procession itself occurred only once every four years, which suggests that even the ancient Athenians, hardly a people deficient in ceremonial self-regard, understood the dramatic importance of leaving the audience wanting more.

Such repetition also inadvertently vindicates the young Evzone who complained to me that they were being treated as dolls and male models, because somewhere along the way soldiers invited here as symbols have become performers whose absence from the next season causes patrons to demand explanations. Affection for a symbol, however, can become dependence upon it, allowing such visits to perform cultural labour that properly belongs to us.

The ancient Greeks, whom we invoke whenever convenient and return respectfully to storage whenever they become troublesome, understood this rather well, for their apoikiai remained recognisably Greek while developing institutions, cults, dialects and identities particular to their own circumstances. Syracuse required no annual delegation from Corinth to reassure its inhabitants of their Hellenicity, nor did Massalia suspend its Greekness pending the arrival of appropriately credentialled Phocaeans. The Greek world expanded precisely because Greekness proved capable of adaptation, and after generations in Australia we might finally concede ourselves the same privilege rather than measuring our cultural vitality according to the frequency with which representatives of the metropolitan centre come to inspect us. Faced with such abundance of natic cultural capital, I remain uncertain how much more Hellenism one city can safely withstand.

Besides, Cavafy understood better than most the melancholy truth that male beauty is transient, however fervently one attempts to preserve it through memory, poetry and art, and thus the Evzones will grow older, the immaculate symmetry of their youthful forms will pass and even those magnificent legs must eventually submit to Chronos, while the culture we create here, provided we possess sufficient confidence to make it our own and sufficient wisdom to entrust it to our children, has at least the possibility of enduring. Until then, Sydney is welcome to contemplate the foustanelles on our behalf, while we shall console ourselves, in appropriately Cavafian fashion, with his immortal words, θυμήσου σώμα.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 26 September 2026