Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume One:The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 by Martin Bernal

Author:Martin Bernal [Bernal, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: education, history, philosophy, History & Surveys, Ancient & Classical, Ancient, Greece, Social Science, Race & Ethnic Relations, Historiography, General, Modern, Europe, France, Discrimination
ISBN: 9781448138159
Google: wcIPP_ghwqcC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-12-31T23:56:00.524273+00:00

DIRTY GREEKS AND THE DORIANS

The Philhellenes were more concerned with the Classical Greeks than with their heroic, but superstitious, Christian and dirty ‘descendants’, whom some tried to explain away as ‘Byzantinized Slavs’.41 Philhellenes sought the pure essence of Greece before it had been tainted by Oriental corruption, and with their apotheosis – as we have seen in Humboldt and Shelley – even the Ancient Greeks themselves began to fall short of the new exalted standards. These standards increasingly began to call for cultural, linguistic and finally ‘racial’ purity, and such new paragons had been found as early as the 1790s by Friedrich Schlegel in the Spartans or the larger tribal grouping to which they belonged, the Dorians. Elizabeth Rawson, the modern historian of the image of Sparta, has described Schlegel’s writing about them:

From the start, however, language reminiscent of Winckelmann on the Greeks in general is used for the Dorians; we are told of their milde Grossheit, ‘serene greatness’, and indeed in contrast to the more easily Orientalized Ionians they form the older, purer and more truly Hellenic branch chiefly responsible for those two essential procedures for the Greek spirit, music and gymnastics.42

Notice that Schlegel and many other later writers took these two nonverbal, irrational and – dare I say it – ‘German’ aspects of Greek culture as the essential ones. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, in which music and Dionysian tragic passion are emphasized over Apollonian reason, is often seen as a radical break away from Winckelmann’s view of the ‘serene greatness’ of the Greeks. In fact it belongs to a German tradition which goes back through the poems of Heine in the 1840s, to Heyne and the playwright Wieland in the 18th century.43

During the 19th and 20th centuries the German cult of, and identification with, the Dorians and Lakonians continued to rise until it reached its climax in the Third Reich.44 By the end of the 19th century some völkische (populist, nationalist) writers saw the Dorians as pure-blooded Aryans from the north, possibly even from Germany, and they were certainly seen as very close to the Germans in their Aryan blood and character.45

Such enthusiasm was not restricted to Germans. As John Bagnell Bury wrote in his History of Greece, first published in 1900 and still considered standard,

The Dorians took possession of the rich vale of the Eurotas, and, keeping their own Dorian stock pure from the mixture of alien blood, reduced all the inhabitants to the condition of subjects … The eminent quality which distinguished the Dorians … was that which we call ‘character’ and it was in Lakonia that this quality was most fully displayed and developed itself, for here the Dorian seems to have remained most purely Dorian.46

It is interesting to note that Bury – like many of the leading British Classicists of the turn of the 19th century, including John Pentland Mahaffy and William Ridgeway – came from the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. All three men were enthusiastic about the pure northern, and possibly Germanic, blood of the Dorians.

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