Hellenism: Forwards, Backwards, and Sideways

My guest interview on the Diogenes' Lamp podcast

Hello everyone,

My interview on the Diogenes’ Lamp Podcast is up! You can go listen to it over at Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Talking with Tom and Basil was a ton of fun. Three Greeks together—what could go wrong?! No wooden horses were built during the recording of this podcast, I promise.

This was a great crossover for both our podcasts. Hearth of Hellenism aims to examine Hellenism from antiquity to modernity, while Diogenes’ Lamp covers more recent Greek history and culture. I have mainly dealt with matters relating to the ancient world, and Diogenes’ Lamp focuses on more modern events, such as the Greek Civil War and figures like Ioannis Metaxas.

The conversation covers many topics and moves back and forth in time; it is not a linear discussion. Imagine opening a box and finding a jumbled ball of wires and cords that you need to untangle. The ball of wires in this talk represents Hellenism, and we did our best to untangle topics like cultural misappropriation, ancient history, the reception of Hellenism, polytheism, white supremacy, and whatever digressions we fell into.

One of my primary goals for the conversation is to raise awareness within the Greek diaspora that much of what they may perceive as “anti-Greek,” such as Netflix’s Cleopatra, has less to do with us as a people since we are never the intended audience when our history appears in media. Our history is often merely a backdrop, a stage, for modern issues to unfold for a contemporary audience. I want Greeks not to fall into the binary trap set up in these situations where we unknowingly support white supremacy, an ideology that Greeks should be better educated about. You’ll hear more about this in the podcast.

I suggested the name of the episode “Hellenism: Forwards, Backwards, and Sideways” in homage to Margaret Alexiou. In her After Antiquity, she writes:

There are links among these apparently disjunctive parts. The chronological range of texts discussed under the term ‘Greek,’ together with their generic diversity, is deliberate, even if it transgresses boundaries. I wish to challenge the appropriation of ‘Greek’ as defining only the ancient part of the tradition, to the exclusion of its medieval and modern inheritors; to question the validity of universalist, archetypalist, or reductionist theories; and to replace one-way Hellenist perspectives on continuity with a dynamic understanding of interaction, both across various stages of Greek and with contiguous cultures. In other words, we must look forward, backward, and sideways.

Alexiou challenges the strict division of Greek history into distinct eras—Classical, Byzantine, and Modern. She promotes a comprehensive view of Hellenism that incorporates Classical, Byzantine, and Modern Greek in an ongoing dialogue. She emphasizes the interconnectedness of these periods and rejects rigid separations, asserting that linguistic and cultural developments often do not fit neatly into historical divisions but instead evolve through dynamic interactions over time.

This is what I aim to do with my work here on Hearth of Hellenism, and part of this work is talking to the diaspora about these divisions in our history and holistic ways.