Epilogue

Summary

In the Epilogue Christoforou offers an impressionistic essay on encounters with ancient Greek epic in modern Greek lands. In an alternative, personal perspective on the political account provided in Hanink’s chapter, he explores the problematic ownership of the past in Greece and how the central place held by Greek antiquity, and in particular epic, in the construction of western civilisation has created a strange distance between Greeks and the Greek past and its literature. Reflecting on his own experience as a Grecophone classicist, Christoforou shows how the story of Greekness and epic is now played out in the background of Greeks performing their Hellenicity in a world that does not always trust their inheritance.