FROM THERMOPYLAE TO TEHRAN: THE GEOGRAPHY OF AN ANCIENT RIVALRY

 

The missiles exchanged between the United States and Iran appear to belong entirely to the technological imagination of the modern age. Aircraft carriers patrol the Persian Gulf, ballistic missiles arc across the night sky, and commentators debate deterrence in the vocabulary of nuclear strategy and international relations theory. The confrontation between Washington and Tehran nonetheless, belongs to a geopolitical pattern far older than the technologies through which it now manifests itself. Along the ancient corridor that stretches from the Aegean littoral across the Anatolian plateau toward the plains of Mesopotamia, rival political systems have confronted one another for more than two millennia. As such, the present conflict emerges as the most recent expression of a strategic rivalry that has shaped the eastern Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau since antiquity, a rivalry in which the Greek world, in its various historical incarnations, repeatedly encountered the imperial power of Persia.

An appreciation of this continuity lies in the deeper structures that shape political behaviour across centuries. Fernand Braudel described such structures as belonging to the longue durée, the slow rhythm of history in which geography, climate, and patterns of settlement exert subtle dominion over human affairs. Dynasties and regimes may collapse with startling speed, but strategic landscapes persist with stubborn durability. The corridor between the Mediterranean basin and the Iranian plateau constitutes one of the great geopolitical hinges of Eurasia, a landscape where the maritime world of the Aegean encounters the continental interior of Asia. On its western side developed a civilisation of cities whose orientation toward the sea fostered trade, navigation, and a political culture grounded in civic autonomy. On its eastern side arose expansive imperial formations organised around territorial administration, cavalry warfare, and bureaucratic hierarchy. These contrasting political ecologies pressed against one another along the Anatolian frontier with relentless regularity.

The first dramatic manifestation of this tension occurred during the Persian invasions of Greece in the early fifth century before Christ. The empire founded by Cyrus and extended by Darius had already incorporated the Greek cities of Asia Minor into its administrative system, and the Ionian revolt against Persian authority provoked a campaign of imperial retribution. Herodotus recounts these events in the earliest surviving masterpiece of historical prose, describing how the Persian kings sought to extend their dominion across the Aegean and impose imperial order upon the fiercely independent communities of mainland Greece. The political map of the Greek world at this moment presented a spectacle of fragmentation, with Athens and Sparta regarding one another with suspicion, while Corinth, Thebes, and numerous smaller poleis pursued their rivalries with passionate determination. Persia thus confronted a landscape whose disunity appeared to promise easy conquest.

The Persian invasions produced a transformation whose logic later found expression in the realist tradition of political thought. Faced with overwhelming imperial power, the Greek cities suspended their quarrels and formed a defensive coalition. The Hellenic League arose albeit out of necessity, rather than sentiment. Thucydides, reflecting upon the ruthless dynamics of interstate competition, observed that relations between powers ultimately rest upon capacity rather than moral aspiration. In the stark language of the Melian Dialogue, the strong exercise their power where they can, while the weak accommodate themselves to necessity. Greek statesmen recognised that isolation meant subjugation. Cooperation, however, offered survival.

The victories that followed revealed the strategic consequences of this alignment. At Salamis the Athenian commander Themistocles persuaded the allied fleet to engage the Persian navy within the narrow straits between the island and the Attic coast. The confined waters neutralised the numerical superiority of the Persian fleet. Greek triremes rammed and manoeuvred within a maritime corridor where discipline and seamanship determined the outcome. Aeschylus, who fought in the battle and later commemorated the event in his tragedy Persians, portrayed the defeat of Xerxes as the moment when imperial arrogance encountered the stubborn autonomy of the Greek polis. Thermopylae offered a parallel demonstration on land. There a narrow mountain pass compressed the invading army into a constricted space where vast numbers could not deploy effectively. Geography revealed its capacity to transform weakness into advantage.

Modern military theorists describe such engagements as examples of asymmetric strategy. The weaker combatant selects terrain and circumstances that diminish the advantages of the stronger adversary. Iranian strategic thinking displays a similar awareness of geographical leverage. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a large proportion of the world’s energy supply must pass, forms a maritime bottleneck whose proximity to Iranian territory creates opportunities for disruption. Mines, missiles, and fast attack vessels transform narrow waters into instruments of strategic pressure. The technologies may differ dramatically from those of antiquity but the underlying logic of geography remains strikingly familiar.

Persian imperial policy during the classical period was also notable in that it demonstrated an appreciation for indirect influence. Military invasion represented only one element within a broader strategic repertoire, the Persian rulers recognising that the turbulent politics of the Greek world could be shaped through diplomacy and financial patronage. During the Peloponnesian War Persian subsidies helped finance the construction of Spartan fleets capable of challenging Athenian naval supremacy. Greek civil conflict thus intersected with Persian imperial calculations, its empire achieving strategic objectives through the manipulation of rivalries within the Greek political system. Such policy anticipates the dynamics of proxy conflict that characterise the contemporary Middle East, where regional struggles frequently unfold through local actors whose ambitions intersect with the interests of larger powers, in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and beyond, causing untold misery.

The disappearance of classical Greece did not terminate the strategic encounter between the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau. Alexander the Great shattered the Achaemenid Empire in a series of campaigns that carried Macedonian armies from Asia Minor to the frontiers of India. Xenophon had earlier revealed to Greek readers, through the narrative of the Anabasis, the vulnerabilities that lay within the Persian imperial structure: the structural vulnerabilities of the Persian imperial system: the political fragmentation of the satrapal provinces, the reliance upon mercenary forces, and the difficulty of defending an empire stretched across enormous distances. Yet the destruction of the Achaemenid state altered the political configuration of the frontier rather than eliminating the rivalry itself. Hellenistic monarchies may have ruled territories that had once formed the core of Persian imperial authority, but the strategic corridor between the Mediterranean and the Iranian interior continued to generate conflict between successor states. Rome eventually absorbed these territories and inherited the same geopolitical dilemma. Roman legions confronted Parthian and later Sasanian forces across the plains of Mesopotamia and the highlands of Armenia. Languages changed, religions evolved, and dynasties disappeared, while the strategic landscape remained constant.

Byzantium went on to sustain this ancient rivalry with Persia for centuries, the conflict reaching its most dramatic intensity during the reign of the emperor Heraclius in the early seventh century. The Sasanian ruler Khosrow II launched a series of campaigns that overwhelmed Byzantine defences with astonishing speed. Syria and Egypt fell to Persian armies. Jerusalem itself was captured, and the relic of the True Cross was carried away from the Holy City as a trophy of conquest, an event sent shockwaves through the Christian world, transforming a geopolitical conflict into a civilisational crisis. Heraclius responded with a strategy whose audacity astonished contemporaries. Instead of defending the shrinking frontiers of his empire, he carried the war into the Persian heartland. Byzantine armies marched across the Caucasus and descended into the Iranian interior, striking at the logistical foundations of the Sasanian state. In 627 Heraclius defeated the Persian army near Nineveh, precipitating the collapse of Khosrow’s regime.

Heraclius’ campaign stands among the most daring counteroffensives in military history. It also revealed the tragic logic of prolonged imperial rivalry. Decades of warfare had drained the economic and institutional strength of both empires. Their armies were exhausted, their treasuries depleted, and their political systems fragile. Within a few years Arab armies emerging from the Arabian Peninsula swept across the same territories that Byzantium and Persia had contested for generations. Persia vanished from the map of the Near East and Byzantium survived only by retreating westward toward Anatolia and the Balkans. Historians later described this phenomenon as imperial overstretch. Prolonged rivalry between great powers can erode the very foundations upon which their strength depends.

The confrontation between the United States and Iran unfolds within a technological environment vastly different from that of antiquity. Nuclear deterrence, cyber warfare, and globalised financial systems shape the instruments through which power now operates. The structural patterns that governed earlier encounters between the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau remain recognisable. Geography continues to impose its discipline upon strategy. Just as the narrow waters of Salamis once neutralised the numerical advantage of the Persian fleet, the confined passage of the Strait of Hormuz transforms maritime geography into a lever of political pressure. Coalition politics likewise persists as a determining force. The Greek poleis that united against Xerxes find their distant analogue in the alliance structures through which contemporary power is organised in the Middle East. Indirect conflict also echoes ancient precedent. Persian gold once flowed into Spartan treasuries during the Peloponnesian War, shaping Greek rivalries without the presence of Persian armies on the battlefield. Modern competition between Washington and Tehran frequently unfolds through regional actors whose struggles intersect with the interests of larger powers, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to the militias of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces and the Houthi movement in Yemen while regional powers aligned with Washington, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, form a countervailing coalition reminiscent of the alliances that once gathered against Xerxes. The names of the participants have changed and the weapons they wield would astonish ancient strategists, yet the deeper strategic logic continues to move with a rhythm that historians of the Persian frontier would recognise immediately.

Narrative and memory add another layer to this enduring encounter. Herodotus framed the Greek resistance to Persia as a defence of freedom against imperial domination, a narrative that entered the intellectual bloodstream of Western civilisation. Iranian historical consciousness preserves its own traditions of resistance to foreign interference and cultural subjugation. Scholars of international relations emphasise that states act within frameworks of identity as well as calculations of material power. Historical memory shapes the political imagination through which societies interpret the present.

Viewed through the long perspective of history, the conflict between the United States and Iran appears as the latest chapter in a geopolitical drama rooted in the landscapes of the Near East. The corridor between the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau has served for millennia as a zone where maritime coalitions encounter continental empires. Empires may pass across the stage of history, technologies evolve, and ideologies transform themselves in response to changing circumstances, but geography endures. The Greeks who once confronted the armies of Xerxes could not have imagined aircraft carriers cruising the Persian Gulf or missiles streaking across the sky above the Strait of Hormuz. They would nevertheless have recognised the deeper logic of the confrontation. The structures of rivalry that shaped their world continue to echo across the centuries, a reminder that the landscapes of the Near East retain the imprint of rivalries that successive empires, to their folly, imagine to be new.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 March 2026

CIRCE AS FEMINIST ICON: RE-ORDERING SOVEREIGNTY IN THE ODYSSEY

 

To speak of Circe as a feminist icon is to recognise that within the Odyssey there exists a fully articulated alternative juridical and epistemic order grounded in techne, oath, hospitality and foresight, an order that precedes the hero’s arrival, reshapes his embodiment, and conditions his survival. Long before Odysseus’ men behold her, they encounter her governance in sound and craft: “Circe’s sweet voice singing inside, as she went to and fro in front of a vast divine tapestry, weaving the finely-made, lovely, shining work of the goddesses.” The loom measures continuity and feminine labour; her voice establishes presence and command. Together they signify jurisdiction, a domain where female craft, knowledge and transformation assert themselves. Within this domain Circe governs the fundamental conditions of heroic existence: the body, hospitality, speech, knowledge and even time itself.

Hospitality in epic poetry functions as sacred aristocratic code, binding host and guest in reciprocal obligation and invoking Zeus Xenios as guarantor. Circe chooses to receive strangers within that patriarchal framework, yet she transforms xenia into instrument. Food and wine carry pharmaka, substances that blur remedy and punishment. Her ritual of welcome becomes mechanism of discipline and hospitality shifts from courtesy to sovereign tool. In that shift, masculine expectation (of dominance, of untrammelled mobility) encounters a recalibrated domestic authority that neither abandons ritual nor submits to it. The oikos becomes the site of judgment, where the stranger’s body is remade according to the hostess’s terms.

The epithet polypharmakos (“of many drugs”) intensifies this sovereignty. The semantic doubleness of pharmakon, remedy and toxin (as later philosophers from Plato to Derrida would explore), situates Circe within a tradition of female knowledge historically treated with suspicion once it acquires efficacy. Her art rather than appearing as chaos or mere sorcery manifests as disciplined expertise, learned from her divine lineage and honed in exile. When her wand descends, Homer preserves the philosophical sting: “Now they had the shape and bristly hide, the features and voice of pigs, but their minds were unaltered from before.” Their metamorphosis therefore exposes the dependence of heroic identity upon visible form. Circe suspends these signs while leaving awareness intact. The men remain witnesses to their own displacement, weeping in the sty as they retain every human memory and regret. Rather than being an annihilation, the punishment she metes out to Odysseus’ crew becomes a precise interrogation of the body as the seat of power.

Circe occupies a liminal position within the cosmology of the Odyssey. A Titaness whose lineage predates the Olympian order, she belongs to a tradition of knowledge that moves along the boundaries between worlds. Her presence places Aeaea beyond the ordinary structures that organise heroic society, transforming the island into a threshold where the categories sustaining epic identity begin to loosen. Human and animal, mortal and divine, male authority and female domesticity lose their stability. In such a landscape the heroic body can no longer function as a secure foundation of identity, for the transformations Circe performs reveal that the form upon which masculine prestige depends remains open to alteration and reconfiguration. Flesh itself becomes mutable rather than fixed, an unstable surface upon which status can no longer securely rest. What emerges from the episode is a cosmology in which heroic identity appears provisional, subject to forces that precede the political order of the polis. From this deeper domain of knowledge and transformation Circe’s authority derives, granting her the capacity to reshape the very forms through which power and identity are recognised.

Odysseus’ fear crystallises the political dimension of this ontological disturbance. Guided by Hermes, he dreads the moment when, naked and disarmed, he might suffer what his men have: “lest when you are naked she robs you of courage and manhood.” The language of unmanning marks exposure to female jurisdiction. Masculinity appears contingent, dependent upon the maintenance of bodily signs and social recognition. Circe’s techne interrupts that maintenance. A regime of knowledge reveals the fragility of heroic embodiment, showing that the vaunted autonomy of the polytropos hero dissolves when confronted with a power that rewrites the very signs of manhood.

The pivot unfolds in negotiation rather than conquest. Odysseus approaches with sword raised and Circe answers with invitation: “Come, sheathe your sword, and let us two go to my bed, so we may learn to trust one another by twining in love.” Erotic encounter proceeds only after oath. The archaic horkos binds speech to divine sanction, giving utterance ontological force. Desire is articulated within juridical form. Within this exchange, a model of power emerges grounded in articulated consent. Feminist ethics attentive to the politics of vulnerability, echoing later thinkers on asymmetrical reciprocity, find in this scene an archaic dramatisation of negotiated intimacy under conditions of radical power imbalance. Circe does not submit; she conditions the terms.

The divine herb moly, supplied by Hermes, introduces a second layer of tension. Circe’s pharmaka encounter counter-techne sanctioned from Olympus. Two regimes of knowledge converge: one rooted in female craft and exile, the other in patriarchal divine intervention. Survival depends upon the navigation between them. Odysseus’ autonomy continues, yet its continuity rests upon submission to the conditions established within Circe’s hall, and upon her subsequent goodwill.

Restoration follows transformation. The men stand “younger and handsomer and taller by far than they were before.” Sovereignty here extends across the full arc of metamorphosis, from degradation to restitution. The authority that imposes humiliation also commands the process and method of recovery. Circe governs the plasticity of form without extinguishing subjectivity; consciousness remains intact even as the body is remade. Her abode becomes a site of rebirth, where male bodies return altered and heightened under female oversight.

A year unfolds on Aeaea in feasting and repose: “day after day, eating food in plenty, and drinking the sweet wine.” During this interval the propulsion that ordinarily governs heroic narrative subsides. The voyage toward Ithaca remains suspended beneath Circe’s roof, where Odysseus and his companions inhabit a rhythm of abundance sustained by her provisions. Temporal order itself appears recalibrated within her domain. The hero whose life is measured through movement, ordeal and return lingers within a world regulated by Circe’s cadence rather than his own. Departure occurs only when she grants release and imparts the knowledge necessary for the continuation of the journey, permitting the epic’s trajectory toward nostos to resume.

Instruction consummates her authority. Exact ritual prescriptions regulate the descent to the dead: the trench must be cut, libations poured, the black ewe and ram sacrificed. Further counsel anticipates the perils that await the traveller. Survival depends upon adherence to the knowledge Circe confers. From an island removed from the councils of warriors and kings emerges the epistemic framework upon which Odysseus’ return depends. The path toward Ithaca unfolds according to the coordinates first articulated by her voice.

A narratological tension nevertheless attends this sovereignty. The episode reaches its audience through Odysseus’ retrospective narration, recollected through the consciousness of the hero who endured it. Circe’s dominion therefore arrives mediated through male storytelling. The narrator recounts her power while presenting himself as the figure who negotiated its conditions. Yet the structure of the narrative cannot obscure the depth of his reliance. The very act of recounting acknowledges dependence, for Odysseus must concede that without Circe’s oath, her bed and her instructions, Ithaca would have remained unattainable.

Later receptions register persistent cultural unease before the form of authority Circe represents. Roman and early modern traditions frequently diminish or neutralise her sovereignty. Ovid intensifies jealousy and metamorphosis, recasting the enchantress as a cautionary figure whose passions destabilise the male world around her. Renaissance moralists pursue the same strategy, reducing Circe to an emblem of seduction and vice. Such interpretations displace the political implications of her authority by translating it into moral allegory. The early modern persecution of witches reveals a more violent response to the same anxiety. Figures accused of witchcraft were often women whose knowledge of herbs, healing, and transformation resembled the techne attributed to Circe. The repression of such knowledge sought to confine precisely the kind of autonomous female power that her figure embodies.

Modern reinterpretations approach the problem differently. Writers and poets return to Circe in order to recover the authority earlier traditions attempted to contain. H.D. grants her interiority and psychological depth in poems that explore solitude, desire, and the consciousness of exile. Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy allow the enchantress to speak in her own voice, transforming the figure once treated as a threat into a witness and critic of masculine violence. Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel Circe completes this movement by granting full narrative authority to the witch herself. The marginal antagonist of Homeric epic becomes the centre of the story, a woman exiled for compassion, subjected to violation, and gradually forged into power through experience and knowledge. Miller describes Circe as the embodiment of male anxiety before female authority, observing that the fear lies in the possibility that women who possess power might overturn the hierarchies that sustain masculine identity.

Within the architecture of the Odyssey, however, Circe’s authority already assumes a more complex form. Her island constitutes an alternative juridical and epistemic order grounded in craft, oath, hospitality and foresight. The transformations she performs expose the contingency of masculine embodiment, while her instructions supply the knowledge upon which Odysseus’ survival depends. The hero ultimately returns to Ithaca bearing wisdom he cannot institutionalise within the structures of his restored household. Patriarchal stability resumes beneath his roof, Penelope’s loom replaced by his bow, yet that restoration rests upon submission to a law external to it: a feminine law articulated in song and techne, sustained through oath, and transmitted through knowledge. The epic therefore preserves within its own narrative the trace of another sovereignty whose authority persists beyond the hero’s departure.

Seen from this perspective, contemporary feminist retellings do not invent a new Circe so much as illuminate a dimension already present in the Homeric text. The enchantress emerges as an archetype of female sovereignty, a figure who demonstrates that power exercised by women need not annihilate the masculine world but may discipline, instruct and transform it. Aeaea reveals a domain in which consent is negotiated, knowledge confers survival and the body itself remains open to revision. The Odyssey ultimately restores Odysseus to his throne, yet that restoration depends upon submission to a form of authority that lies beyond the structures of heroic kingship. The poem therefore preserves within its narrative the memory of another order, one in which sovereignty is exercised not through conquest but through female knowledge, transformation and the capacity to reorder the conditions of human life.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 14 March 2026

KRITIKAKOS ON GENOCIDE AND AUSTRALIA

 

There are works that catalogue atrocity and works that interrogate the afterlife of atrocity. Dr Themistocles Kritikakos’ Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocide Recognition in Twenty-First-Century Australia: Memory, Identity, and Cooperation belongs firmly within the latter category. It is a study concerned less with rehearsing established narratives of 1914–1923 than with tracing how those events persist, mutate, and acquire political meaning within contemporary Australia. In doing so, it makes a substantial contribution to genocide studies, memory studies, and the historiography of the Australian diaspora.

Kritikakos situates the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides within the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the violent unravelling of imperial rule. He frames this period as a sustained continuum of anti-Christian persecution, mass violence, displacement, and dispossession culminating in the population exchange of 1923. Drawing upon genocide studies debates concerning intent, victimhood, and the longue durée consequences of mass violence, the book develops a carefully constructed conceptual architecture. Genocide is treated as a critical analytical category through which language, representation, and remembrance may be examined. Legal definition alone does not circumscribe the inquiry. Instead, the study is animated by a sustained examination of how traumatic pasts are interpreted, structured, and transmitted across generations.

The comparative framework constitutes one of the book’s most significant achievements. International recognition of the Armenian Genocide has achieved a degree of visibility that the Greek and Assyrian experiences have seldom enjoyed. Kritikakos resists any hierarchy of suffering and instead positions the Greek and Assyrian genocides as constitutive elements within a broader Ottoman genocidal process. This comparative gesture advances scholarship by drawing attention to relational histories, shared experiences of persecution, and the interwoven legacies of violence that continue to shape diasporic identity. However, comparative genocide analysis carries ethical risks, since it can flatten difference or encourage competitive hierarchies of victimhood and Kritikakos navigates this terrain with care, neither collapsing distinct communal trajectories into a single undifferentiated narrative nor isolating them within mutually exclusive silos. Instead, he traces structural continuities alongside divergent mnemonic developments. The result is a relational model of remembrance that foregrounds shared vulnerability while preserving historical specificity. Such an approach contributes to an ethics of comparison grounded in solidarity rather than rivalry.

The Australian context especially provides the study with its distinctive focus. Australians witnessed, reported, and responded to atrocities between 1915 and 1930. Humanitarian initiatives, fundraising campaigns, and sponsorship schemes formed part of a civic culture that engaged with distant suffering in concrete ways. Kritikakos excavates this humanitarian history and situates it within broader Australian historiography, demonstrating that engagement with Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian suffering once occupied a visible place within public life. Beyond its contribution to genocide scholarship, the book thus intervenes decisively in Australian historical writing. Recent decades have witnessed a gradual incorporation of migrant narratives into the national story, yet these inclusions often remain framed as supplementary rather than constitutive. Kritikakos advances a more demanding proposition. He shows that the histories of Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian suffering are interwoven with Australia’s own moral and civic development through humanitarian mobilisation, public advocacy, and parliamentary debate. Consequently, genocide recognition emerges as part of Australia’s ethical self-fashioning. In this respect, the study reframes diaspora memory as integral to the nation’s historical consciousness.

This humanitarian memory coexists uneasily with the dominant Australian narrative structured around the Gallipoli Campaign. The Anzac legend has become a foundational myth of national identity, shaping diplomatic relations with Turkey and framing a discourse of reconciliation. Within this symbolic landscape, campaigns for genocide recognition encounter structural tension. Kritikakos analyses how recognition efforts by Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities must navigate an environment in which Gallipoli functions as a sacralised narrative. His study reveals how national mythologies can marginalise alternative histories while simultaneously offering unexpected avenues for reframing. The Australian humanitarian response and the Anzac experience thus become sites through which communities seek to inscribe their histories into the moral fabric of the nation.

The book rests methodologically on oral history, memory studies, and cultural history. Through interviews with descendants of survivors, Kritikakos traces the intergenerational transmission of trauma and the subtle ways inherited experience shapes identity. Silence, fragmented storytelling, grief, and displacement emerge as structuring elements within family narrative. Among Greek and Assyrian families in Australia, memory moves unevenly across generations, at times carefully guarded, at times released in moments of ritual or crisis, always shaped by distance from the original rupture and by the pressures of settlement in a new society.

These patterns speak to established currents within memory studies. They echo Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, where descendants inherit affective traces rather than lived recollection. They also recall Jan Assmann’s distinction between communicative memory sustained within intimate circles and cultural memory formalised through ceremony and monument. Commemorative sites assume the character of lieux de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense, anchoring dispersed histories within public space. Throughout, Kritikakos maintains analytical restraint, allowing lived testimony to converse quietly with theory rather than forcing it into abstraction.

In the study, acts of remembrance emerge as dynamic processes rather than static rituals. Commemorative events, monuments, and community gatherings operate as sites in which memory is negotiated and rearticulated. Kritikakos demonstrates how these practices evolve over time, responding to political developments, generational change, and the shifting priorities of community leadership. Memory appears as a living practice, continually reconfigured through dialogue, contestation, and coalition-building.

Particularly valuable is the study’s attention to internal tensions within the Greek community. Recognition activism has often been associated with particular subgroups whose historical experience is most directly connected to the events of 1914–1923. These tensions are illuminated within a broader sociology of diaspora identity. Greek communal life in Australia has long been structured around language preservation, ecclesiastical continuity, and a transnational attachment to the Hellenic state. Genocide memory constitutes a comparatively recent axis of mobilisation, unevenly distributed across sub-communities with distinct historical genealogies. Descendants of Asia Minor, Pontic, and Eastern Thracian refugees frequently carry different mnemonic intensities and political priorities. Generational distance, processes of assimilation, and anxieties concerning diplomatic repercussions further complicate communal consensus. By mapping these internal divergences, Kritikakos resists homogenising narratives of collective will and instead portrays recognition activism as a negotiated and sometimes contested project.

Such candour strengthens the work. By charting both commitment and apathy, Kritikakos situates genocide recognition within the broader sociology of diaspora life. Community priorities extend beyond memory politics to encompass language maintenance, economic advancement, religious institutions, and transnational ties. Recognition campaigns must therefore compete for symbolic and organisational capital. The study’s sensitivity to these dynamics enhances its analytical depth.

The exploration of intercommunal cooperation represents another major contribution. Dialogue among Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities in Australia has intensified over recent decades, resulting in joint commemorations, collaborative lobbying, and shared public statements. Kritikakos reconstructs the history of this cooperation, tracing its origins in the late twentieth century and its consolidation in subsequent years. Coalition-building emerges as both pragmatic strategy and ethical project. Shared histories of violence provide a foundation for solidarity, while differences in narrative emphasis, institutional structure, and global recognition status require negotiation. Through careful analysis, the book shows how communities that once remembered separately have begun to articulate convergent narratives. This convergence has strengthened campaigns for state-level recognition in South Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania. It has also illuminated the obstacles encountered in pursuit of federal recognition, where diplomatic considerations and national myth continue to exert influence. Recognition politics appears as a field shaped by persistence, adaptation, and strategic alliance.

The significance of Kritikakos’ intervention is heightened by his position within the field. He does not emerge from those sub-communities traditionally regarded as custodians of genocide memory within the Greek diaspora. His scholarship therefore occupies a space that bridges established memory activism and broader academic inquiry. That vantage point allows him to approach the subject with intellectual independence and methodological rigour. His contribution underscores that the study of genocide recognition need not be confined to inherited identity. It can also arise from scholarly commitment to historical justice and analytical clarity.

For scholars of genocide, diaspora, and Australian history, Kritikakos provides a model of careful comparative analysis. For the communities whose histories he examines, the work offers recognition of complexity and agency. Remembrance appears as a process forged through dialogue, disagreement, and perseverance. In tracing that process with nuance and intellectual integrity, this book secures its place as an essential contribution to the study of genocide recognition in Australia.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 7 March 2026

THE ILIAD: A BARBEQUE IN HEXAMETERS

 

Long has it  been the cherished misapprehension of classical scholarship, perpetuated by tweed-clad dons, elbow-patched pedants, and a suspicious number of Germans with umlauted surnames, that Homer’s Iliad is a weighty tome of high moral gravitas, a sort of bronze-age Ethics of War, or, for the more Freudian among them, a sprawling meditation on the anguished human psyche cunningly disguised as men shouting in dactylic hexameter. But this, dear reader, is precisely the sort of delusion we must now, once and for all, roast on a spit and serve medium-rare.

Let us cast off our academic sandals, and set our feet squarely upon the warm, olive-oil-glistening turf of Homeric reality: The Iliad is not, and never was, a poem about honour, fate, or man’s eternal struggle with his own mortality. It is, quite unapologetically, an exquisitely seasoned pretext for a ten-year-long open-air banquet. Not a war. Not a literary monument. A continuous, ox-roasting, fat-dripping, god-appeasing, thighbone-charring, amphora-draining, tent-to-table culinary extravaganza, briefly and somewhat inconveniently interrupted by the occasional spear-throwing and light homicide.

In short, The Iliad is less a martial epic than a Mycenaean MasterChef episode, one in which Achilles may well be the world’s first celebrity chef with anger management issues, and the central conflict arises not from the abduction of Helen, but from a grave disagreement over who gets the lion’s share of the petsa.

Let us open with Book I, where Homer famously sets the tone:

“Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles…” a wrath, one submits, not just provoked by the theft of Briseis, but by the distinct lack of properly roasted meat at the Greek camp following Agamemnon’s bureaucratic debacle. Is it not suspicious that the first thing the Greeks do after consulting Calchas is not to form a battle strategy, but instead, to fire up the spit?

“They stood in a circle round the sacrificial victim, and they washed their hands and took up the barley-meal. Then Achilles drew his knife, cut off the firstling hairs, and cast them on the fire, and they poured wine and laid the thigh-bones wrapped in fat upon the flames.” (Book 1)

The above, is not piety. That’s mezedakia in verse. The gods, particularly Apollo, are hangry. And the only way to restore divine order is to serve up an entrée. The plague? A clear case of food poisoning from undercooked goat. The cure? A respectable souvlaki offering. This is not theology. This is food safety.

Fast forward to Book II and the “Catalogue of Ships,”  traditionally interpreted as a grand account of Achaean military mobilisation, is actually the guest list. One hundred thousand men, all ready not for glory, but for grilled glory. Why else does Homer painstakingly enumerate how many ships came from each region, down to the last Thessalian rowing enthusiast? So that everyone knows how many sheftalies to prepare.

And now to the heart of the matter: the sheer volume of culinary episodes scattered throughout The Iliad is enough to make a dietician weep and a cardiologist reach for his stethoscope:

Book IX, for instance, is a masterpiece of gastro-epic. Odysseus, Phoenix, and Ajax are sent as envoys to Achilles, not with battle plans or political strategies, but with snacks.

“And they came to the tent of the son of Peleus, and they found him delighting his soul with the sweet notes of a lyre, and beside him sat Patroclus, roasting a sheep’s loin over the fire.”

That, mes enfants, is not just casual background activity. Instead, it is the Iliadic version of firing up the Weber before guests arrive. Achilles is not sulking. He’s meal prepping. His emotional turmoil takes second place to ensuring his lamb is evenly cooked. He even personally carves the meat and serves it to his guests. The man is less of a warrior and more of a butcher-in-residence.

Consider too Book VII, when Ajax and Hector engage in a duel so evenly matched, it ends not in death, but dinner. The gods, clearly bored, induce a draw. And what happens?

“They broke up the contest, and the warriors went their ways. Then the Achaeans feasted in their huts, and the Trojans likewise in the city, and many oxen’s thighs were burned in sacrifice.”

“Many oxen’s thighs.” That’s not mourning. That’s a symposium. And the meat, always the thighs, wrapped in fat, gets its own lines. These thighs, lovingly roasted, become recurring characters, like the chorus in a tragedy. Only greasier.

By Book XXIII, the carnivorous crescendo is reached. Patroclus is dead. Achilles is devastated. The mood is sombre. And the solution?

“They brought forth the victims for the fire, and slew many sleek sheep and shambling oxen before the pyre. They cast in jars of honey and oil, and Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan youths and laid them beside the body.”

Now, ignoring the minor detail of the human sacrifice (a most unfortunate misstep in catering etiquette, which ,I f you believe our community neo-pagans never actually happened), we cannot overlook the fact that even funerals are excuses for meat-based pageantry. There is a veritable food court of mourning around Patroclus’ bier. Achilles is grieving through grilling. The man apparently cannot shed a tear without skewering something and there is a school of thought, DNA testing pending, that contends that it is his direct descendants in Melbourne who are responsible for the introduction of meat courses in catering for sundry mnemosyna around town.

Even the so-called games that follow the funeral are less athletic and more gastronomic in motivation. The prizes include tripods, cauldrons, and  a fattened ox. Not only is the barbeque central to Iliadic culture, it is also its highest reward. The moral lessons of The Iliad? Courage. Loyalty. And a good marinade.

And then, of course, there’s the divine peanut gallery, the Olympians, those supposedly lofty arbiters of fate, virtue, and cosmic justice, who in reality spend the entire war behaving like uninvited relatives hovering near the barbeeque, pretending to be interested in the conversation while mentally calculating how many lamb chops are left.

The gods, we are told, meddle in mortal affairs out of concern for justice, honour, or divine prerogative. But let us not be fooled. Their involvement in the Trojan War is, at best, metaphysical window-dressing for what is clearly a sustained campaign of buffet-crashing. Hera does not throw a celestial fit because cities are sacked or children orphaned. No, she goes incandescent when Zeus, that thunder-wielding pot-bellied patriarch, keeps helping himself to the choicest burnt offerings without so much as a divine «παρακαλώ».

Athena, described endlessly as “eager for war,” maintains this martial enthusiasm with all the sincerity of someone who only arrives at the battlefield after the ceremonial ox has been filleted, basted, and lightly blackened on both sides. One imagines her descending from Olympus, nostrils flaring, eyes fixed not on the phalanx formation but on the sacred thighbones sizzling over the fire like divine bacon. Her so-called “battle fervour” is suspiciously correlated with the aroma of medium-rare entrails.

Even Apollo, that allegedly high-minded bringer of plague and poetry, seems to show up largely in response to undercooked goat. His retribution is less divine punishment and more the righteous fury of a health inspector disappointed by insufficient charring.

Zeus himself, in Book IV, lays out the divine culinary hierarchy:

“For unto me men offer sacrifice first and last, and pour the choicest wine, and lay the fat upon the fire.”

Note the divine order: not prayers, not hymns, meat first, then talk. Even the king of the gods operates on a strict no-offering, no-audience policy. He's basically the bouncer at an exclusive heavenly taverna.

Let us now consider the Trojans. For all their poetic nobility, their one true innovation was the indoor barbeque. When Hector returns to Troy and visits Andromache, she begs him to stay home , not out of fear, but because they’ve just bought new charcoal.

“You, Hector, are my father and my honoured mother, my brother, and my strong husband. Stay here upon the wall. Do not go forth to the fight, and let us roast the kid your father brought from Ida.” (a quote, one must confess, improved slightly in translation).

Even Priam, the venerable patriarch, when he journeys to Achilles to reclaim Hector’s body, does not forget the first rule of Homeric diplomacy: always bring food. Achilles, moved not by pity but by hunger, relents, and the next scene is yet another culinary interlude.

“Then they laid ready the supper, and put bread and meat before Priam, and they ate.” (Book XXIV)

Thus, the entire poem concludes not with vengeance or triumph, but with dinner. War, grief, fate; these are mere garnishes. The true telos of The Iliad is digestion.

And so, let us at long last banish forever those among us who insist upon reading The Iliad as a tedious litany of wrath, carnage, and solemn heroics. Instead, let us embrace the far juicier truth whispered by every Greek uncle wielding a skewered lamb over a crackling fire on Easter Sunday: that it is meat, gloriously marinated, expertly turned, and bountifully distributed, that alone holds the divine alchemy to reconcile the living, the dead, and those notoriously picky Olympians who are never satisfied unless there’s a platter of gyros in front of them.

Homer, far from being a staid poet ensnared in lofty metaphor and tragic grandeur, was in fact the original μαγειρεύς, a highbrow σουβλατζής, a spit-wielding bard of blistered flesh and smoking embers, a Homeric maestro of meaty masterpieces. The Iliad is less sombre epic and more the world’s inaugural and finest menu dégustation, a twelve-thousand-line tasting tour de force of sacrificial feasts, slow-roasted ambitions, and the meat platter for two at your local Greek restaurant. In recognition of such, let us raise your kylixes, loosen our belts, and join in the ancient chorus that echoes through time and grease-streaked tents alike:

«Pass the τσόπια».

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 February 2026