Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Impact of Ancient Greece on Modern Culture 309
The mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea:
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamt that Greece might still be free. (Don Juan 111.86)
As Richard Jenkyns (The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 14f.) has
observed, the European philhellenic movement appealed all across
the political and religious spectrum. The Romantic poet Shelley
called the Greeks “Glorious beings whom the imagination almost
refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind.” The Victorian
poet Algernon Charles Swinburne called Greece “the mothertongue
of thought and art and action.” The English radical and revolutionary
Thomas Paine saw “more to admire, less to condemn, in
that great . . . people than in anything which history affords.”
The Foundation of Modern Greece
The decision by the European powers to choose Athens as the
capital of the newly created kingdom of Greece when the Greek
War of Independence came to an end in 1832 is further evidence of
the mesmerizing effect of Classical Greece on the European imagination
in this period. At the time, Athens was merely a provincial
town in what had been a backwater of the Ottoman Empire
with a population of about four thousand. It had already sunk into
obscurity by the period of late antiquity. The decision to choose
it as the capital was therefore made in deference to its erstwhile
role as cultural capital of ancient Greece. Hardly surprisingly, the
favored style of architecture for the new capital was neoclassical.
The revival of the Olympic Games, which the city hosted in 1896
in the refurbished Panathenaic Stadium, was further testimony to
Athens’s importance in the European intellectual tradition.
Contemporary with Greece’s liberation from Ottoman rule, Greece
acquired a new official language, known as katharevousa, meaning
literally “the purified one,” which had been devised by a classical
scholar and revolutionary named Adamantios Korais. Katharevousa
was based on the grammar of the ancient Attic dialect—the
dialect that was spoken in Athens and its environs. It was introduced
in opposition to dêmotiki, or demotic Greek, meaning popular
Greek—the Greek that was currently spoken in Greece and that
was thought to have been corrupted by borrowings from Turkish.
As a result, many new words were coined based on ancient Greek