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To Make a New Thermopylae: Hellenism, Greek Liberation, and the Battle of Thermopylae*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Ian Macgregor Morris
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Extract

In the eighteenth century, attitudes towards ancient Greece were changing from an antiquarian interest in literature and art, into a wider emotional affiliation that permeated many aspects of artistic and political life. With this new attitude came an interest in contemporary Greece and an awareness of and concern about her state under Turkish rule which, by the early nineteenth century, culminated in growing sympathy for the cause of Greek liberation. Of all the characters and incidents of ancient Greek history, none played such a central part in this tradition as those involved in the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C., so that by the very eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 Byron could call on his contemporaries to ‘make a new Thermopylae’. The history of Thermopylae in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, in many ways, the history of contemporary hellenism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , October 2000 , pp. 211 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2000

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References

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36. Canto II, stanza 73.

37. Terence Spencer wrote that ‘of all the philhellenic poets of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the one who was most cruelly crushed out of existence by the reputation of Byron was William Haygarth… [his poem] was published, a splendid quarto, in 1814 – too late; for the sun of Byron was already above the horizon.’ (Fair Greece, Sad Relic, 2nd ed., 1974, 281). The effect of this ‘crushing’ out of existence seems all the harsher when one discovers that Haygarth wrote much of his poem in 1811 while still in Greece, before Byron completed Childe Harold, and did not publish until 1814 merely because of what he described as ‘the natural apprehension which the Author feels for the fate of a first performance’ (Greece, a Poem, preface, v).

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