Roderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

THE TIMES

TLS

THE SUNDAY TIMES

07/04/2011 11:59

TIMES+

The new TLS website is under construction and will be online in the near future. Click here for the TLS homepage

From The Times Literary Supplement

MY PROFILE

April 6, 2011

Adamantios Korais doctor of the Greek

Revolution
Korais' goal was the emancipation of his fellow Greeks from the hated
tyranny of the Ottoman Empire
Roderick Beaton

It wasnt only Byron who dreamt that Greece might still be free.
In England, as long ago as 1690, John Locke thought it
reasonable that the Grecian Christians, Descendants of the
ancient Possessors of that Country, may justly cast off the
Turkish Yoke they have so long groaned under, whenever they
have a Power to do it. Throughout the long eighteenth century,
however, the Power was lacking. The explanation for this was
handed down, from north of the border, by another famous
philosopher: The ingenuity, industry and activity of the ancient
Greeks have nothing in common with the stupidity and indolence
of the present inhabitants of those regions. That was David
Hume, writing in 1748. In the same year, in Smyrna (now Izmir,
on the Aegean coast of Turkey), Adamantios Korais was born.
Korais would live to see his countrymens efforts crowned with
success. News of the arrival of Prince Otto of Bavaria to take up
the throne of newly independent Greece (on February 6, 1833)
can only just have arrived when he fell at his home in Paris and
broke his hip. He died, just short of his eighty-fifth birthday, on
April 6, and was buried with some ceremony, in the cemetery of
Montparnasse. Korais would have hated more than anything to
see his beloved Greece a monarchy. But in most other respects,
the freedom that had been won for Greece, after a decade of
horrific violence, was of the sort that Korais had been urging on
his fellow Greeks since the start of the new century. How far that
achievement was due to his influence is just one of many timely
and important questions raised by this new collection of essays
that seeks to re-assess his career.
Korais had arrived in Paris on the eve of the storming of the
Bastille. A doctor by professional training and a self-taught
classical scholar, he lived through all the stages of the
Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Restoration. He had left
Smyrna in his twenties, worked unsuccessfully as a merchant in
Amsterdam, and returned home again in his thirties, before
embarking on his new career. After that, he never returned to
Smyrna. In a long life dedicated to the resurgence of Greece as
a modern, independent nation, he never set foot in any part of
todays Greece. Korais was always proud of his family
connections to the nearby island of Chios, but although he wrote
about the place, he never went there.
In France he was known as Adamance Coray. Under that name,
he corresponded with the leading French classical scholars of
the day. As we learn for the first time from this book, he was also
for many years in correspondence with the Clarendon Press,
received a regular stipend from Oxford, and was even considered
for a Chair at the University. Quite impressive, when one
considers that Britain was at war with France for many of the
years in question.
Baulked of the possibility of establishing himself as a scholar, or
perhaps from choice, by the turn of the century Korais was ready
to embark on a civilizing mission of a rather unusual kind.
Although for himself he seems never to have contemplated
leaving Paris, his goal was nothing less than the emancipation of
his fellow Greeks from the hated tyranny of the Ottoman Empire.
The way for Korais was not the obvious one of revolution. At
least, not immediately. The lesson he had learned from living

EXPLORE THE TLS

TLS SELECTIONS
TLS ARCHIVES
TLS ARGUMENTS
TLS WRITERS
TLS LETTERS
POEM OF THE WEEK
THEN & NOW

TLS SELECTIONS
Select

Subscribe today

The leading paper in the world

for literary culture;
get the TLS for less

IT'S A DON'S LIFE

Mary Beard of Cambridge

and the TLS on culture
ancient and modern
Work inexperience: the
Clegg plan
The Haldane Principle -and the next Mellon
lecture
Mellon lectures and the

This week

A note from the Editor

In the next TLS

Fiona Green:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7173998.ece

Page 1 of 4

Roderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

least, not immediately. The lesson he had learned from living

through the Revolution in France was that education was the
key. In France, the way had been opened by the Enlightenment.
Having lived through the Terror, he had no illusions about the
excesses into which a revolution could descend. But all that was
best in the France he saw in action during the Directorate and
Napoleons consulship, he put down to the preparations laid by
the philosophes. Several of the idologues were his friends.
Korais, almost single-handedly, determined to perform the same
task for Greece. Revolution could wait. He once predicted that by
1851, the Greeks would be sufficiently primed to rise against their
tyrannical masters. As every Greek schoolchild knows, his guess
fell thirty years too late. In his seventies, Korais had to set about
adjusting to the new reality of the Greek Revolution.
But it was during the two decades before revolution broke out
that Koraiss civilizing mission was largely accomplished. The
task he had set himself, in the early 1800s, was to educate his
compatriots in the literary and philosophical tradition that he
believed was rightfully their national heritage that of ancient
Greece. The project was initiated in 1805, and funded by a
wealthy Greek family with business connections in Russia. It is
often said that Korais translated ancient texts into Modern Greek.
What he did was exactly the opposite. Insisting that the Greek
language has always been one and indivisible, he wanted Greeks
once again to become proficient in the language of their
ancestors, but not through the mindless rote-learning that had
been inflicted on him in Smyrna. He made no compromise over
the ancient texts, which he published in the original. But these he
prefaced with long disquisitions in Modern Greek, in which he
held forth on matters dear to his heart. In this respect his editions
anticipate the plays of George Bernard Shaw a century later: the
main text becomes a pretext for the prolegomena.
These editions were then subsidized for sale within the Ottoman
Empire. Curiously, no one seems to have tried to find out who
read them, or what impact they had. (Would fostering a
revolution and contributing to the formation of a new nation-state
count, today, as impact in the assessment of academic
research in the Humanities? And how would you be expected to
prove it?) Byron, for instance, recently returned from Greece,
had heard of Coray in 1812 but his source seems to have
been the Edinburgh Review rather than anything he had picked
up on his travels. Among Greek intellectuals, Koraiss ideas and
activities were much discussed usually in the agonistic spirit for
which the ancients were also famous. These circles were mainly
restricted to the higher levels of the Ottoman bureaucracy, to the
Italianeducated aristocrats of the Ionian Islands, and to families,
such as Koraiss own, with mercantile connections abroad. Did
any of the future military leaders of the Revolution, before giving
up on the speeches of Isocrates, Plutarchs Lives, or the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, ever sit down on a winters
evening to construe Koraiss own meditations and exhortations on
ethics, patriotism and language, written in an idiom closer to his
own?

07/04/2011 11:59

Elizabeth Bishop and the fact

checkers
Jonathan Barnes:
Thoroughly modern murder
Ethan Pollock:
Soviets in space
Caroline Moorehead:
Sybille Bedford, leisure and
pleasure

How to advertise
This week's classified ads
More classified ads
Rate card 2011

SIR PETER STOTHARD

The latest posts on books,

people and politics from the
Editor of the TLS
'Jordan Codices' just another
fake from the souk
Person misses census
Lines of Work
Midsomer Murders: a
suspension of disbelief
Before and after the flood

CONTENTS PAGE

This week's contents in full

TLS INFORMATION

About us
Contact us
Syndication details
FAQs

Koraiss ideas did have an effect on the outcome of the

Revolution, even if it is impossible, now, to tell whether his was
the articulation of them that carried the day. He was one of the
first, if not the first, to express Greek aspirations for emancipation
from the Ottomans in terms of the nation, as that term had been
redefined first in the writings of Rousseau, then in the rhetoric of
the French Revolution. He was no tub-thumping nationalist
though he could turn up the volume when he felt the occasion
warranted, as in the Martial Trumpet-Call of 1801, an exercise
in patriotic doggerel over which the volume under review passes
in tactful silence. More seriously, as Paschalis M. Kitromilides
shows in one of his two contributions to the book he has also
edited, Koraiss nationalism was grounded in a carefully thoughtout, unwavering position on the normative primacy of individual
and civil liberty. This owed more to Montesquieu and Constant
than to the Nicomachean Ethics that were Koraiss first present
to revolutionary Greece.
During the 1820s, when the future direction of the Revolution
hung in the balance, it was the modernizing faction led by
Alexander Mavrokordatos that won out over the warlords.
Mavrokordatos had the support not only of the iconic and much
misunderstood Byron, but of a close-knit cadre of intellectuals,
some of whom, like Georgios Praidis and Konstantinos
Polychroniadis, had previously belonged to Koraiss circle in
Paris. It was thanks to this group that Greece did not become,
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7173998.ece

Page 2 of 4

Roderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

07/04/2011 11:59

Paris. It was thanks to this group that Greece did not become,
like Serbia at the same time, a semi-autonomous dependency of
the Ottoman Empire, but would instead be recognized, in
February 1830, as a sovereign state, enjoying all the rights . . .
of complete independence. Ever since then, this first newly
created nation-state in the Old World has existed as a blueprint
throughout Europe, even if the fact has rarely been
acknowledged. Consider the completion of unification in Germany
and Italy three decades later, or the fragmentation of the former
Yugoslavia in our own time. This was Koraiss legacy to Greece
and perhaps even beyond: the concept of a centralized nationstate carved out of a multi-ethnic empire, claiming legitimacy
from a long-vanished status quo, defined by a common language
and inherited traditions, and founded on Enlightenment principles
of individual rights and responsibilities.
The essays that make up Adamantios Korais and the European
Enlightenment perform a valuable task in situating this neglected
figure squarely within his European and Enlightenment context.
As Kitromilides argues, the case of Korais shows the
Enlightenment to be a much more open-ended and pluralist
phenomenon by comparison with the phenomena connected with
the cultural agendas of national states. Unlike many more
famous exponents of the movement in the West, Korais had a
benign, almost a tender, regard for religion witness his fictional
creation, the patter-priest Papatrechas, who earns his nickname
by gabbling the psalms at record speed, but is a kind and wise
soul at heart. And in the emphasis he placed on tradition, as
Kitromilides also acknowledges, Korais seems to carry the
Enlightenment project forward into the century that saw the rise
of both nationalism and Romanticism.
Among other contributors, three write in French, the remainder in
English. Vivi Perraky, Ioannis Evrigenis, and Michael Paschalis
explore Koraiss achievement as a classical scholar of his time.
Peter Mackridge gives an authoritative account of Koraiss
proposals for an overhaul of the Modern Greek language, while
Roxane Argyropoulos, Kitromilides again, and Vassilis
Mourdoukoutas in rather different ways set out the case for
treating Korais seriously as a philosopher of the late
Enlightenment. Only Anna Tabaki, in a consideration of Korais as
a literary critic and stylist in his own right, approaches her subject
with the warmth that might be expected to win new converts. She
may be overstating the case when she credits Korais with de
vritables dons narratifs, but it is refreshing to see his
Papatrechas compared to mile or Candide. I cant quite see
Korais allowing a character to have one buttock cut off by pirates,
even if worse things did happen in Chios during his lifetime. But
he is at least as readable as Rousseau.
Even if his high moral tone seems austere by modern standards,
and his didacticism irritates, Korais seems to have had an
admirable weakness for fiction. Two of the first ancient texts that
he edited were novels. He was the first ever to coin a word in
Greek for the new genre, which he rightly claimed as the
invention of the ancients. To have thought of combining the roots
meaning myth and history/story to produce mythistoria, he
must have understood something of what fiction is about. Slightly
tweaked, as mythistorema, Koraiss coinage is still the Greek
word for novel.
And if there are no buttocks to be found in the elevated Modern
Greek of his prefaces, he did in his last years edit some of the
raciest Greek written since Aristophanes. The satirical fictions
known as Poems of Poor Prodromos are not only our best
evidence for the language of the kitchen sink in Constantinople
in the twelfth century, they are also great fun. Korais deplored
the morals almost as much as he deplored the language. But in
spite of his principles, as Anna Tabaki also shows, his choice of
works to edit reveals a fascination, even if it is a horrified one,
with the many varied stages through which Greek had passed
between antiquity and the early nineteenth century.
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, editor
ADAMANTIOS KORAIS AND THE EUROPEAN
ENLIGHTENMENT
278pp. Voltaire Foundation. Paperback, 65.
978 0 7294 1002 1
Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and
Byzantine History, Language and Literature at Kings College
London and the co-editor, with David Ricks, of The Making of
Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the uses of the
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7173998.ece

Page 3 of 4

Roderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

07/04/2011 11:59

Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the uses of the

past, which appeared in 2009. He is working on a Leverhulmefunded book provisionally titled Byrons War: From Frankenstein
to the Greek Revolution.
YOUR COMMENTS

(Displaying 1-10)
Order By: Newest first

Oldest first

Most recommended

HAVE YOUR SAY

Would you like to post a comment? Please register or log in

Login

Submit

Terms and conditions

Contact us | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy | Site Map | FAQ | Syndication | Advertising
Times Newspapers Ltd 2010 Registered in England No. 894646 Registered office: 3 Thomas More Square, London, E98 1XY

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7173998.ece

Page 4 of 4