Could Education Make a Hellene? The Enlightenment's Own Answer

There is a question that sounds impertinent today but was perfectly ordinary in the decades around the Greek Revolution: could a person become a Hellene by studying? Not by proving descent, not by producing a genealogy stretching back to Pericles, but by acquiring the language, the letters, and the loyalties of the classical inheritance. The question sounds impertinent now because the modern national narrative has trained us to hear “Hellene” as an ethnic designation — something one is born, not something one becomes. Yet if we listen to the people who actually built and inhabited the category in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the answer they gave was strikingly consistent, and strikingly different from the answer the later national histories would insist upon. In practice, education could and did make Hellenes. The Enlightenment’s own protagonists said so, the revolutionary state acted accordingly, and the record they left behind is one of the most useful instruments we have for understanding what Greekness meant before it was retrofitted with an ethnic pedigree.

An aristocracy of the classroom

Michael Herzfeld, in his study of how folklore and ideology combined to make modern Greece, noticed the phenomenon at the level of the Balkan elite. Classical education in this period was the common prestige culture of the peninsula’s upper classes — Orthodox, polyglot, and mobile — and its effect on self-description was direct. It was, Herzfeld writes,

“that superior education, perhaps, that made many Balkan aristocrats of the period refer to themselves as Hellenes”

— Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece

The most instructive case he records is that of Dora d’Istria, the Romanian-Albanian writer and one of the era’s celebrated women of letters. Her services to Greek national aspirations were rewarded in the most formal way a state can reward anything: as Herzfeld notes, “she was granted Hellenic nationality by a special decree of Parliament.” A parliament does not legislate what already exists by nature. The decree is a small document with a large implication: Hellenic nationality was understood, by the Hellenic state itself, as something that could be conferred — earned by intellectual and political service, ratified by vote. And d’Istria herself felt no contradiction in simultaneously invoking her Albanian ancestry when it suited her purposes. She could be of Albanian descent and a Hellene by decree, because the two claims operated on different registers: one was genealogy, the other was membership in a high culture and a political cause.

Deeds, not descent, in the revolutionary decades

If education could make a Hellene in the salons, participation could make one on the battlefield. The scholarship collected by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks on the making of modern Greece shows that during and after the war, within the political vision associated with Kolettis’s Great Idea, the operative test of national belonging was contribution to the common struggle. The formulation is unambiguous:

“participation in the war effort against the Turks was the most important argument for belonging to the Greek nation”

— Roderick Beaton & David Ricks (eds.), The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896), p. 141

And the consequence followed immediately, in the same passage: “Therefore Slav-, Turkish-, and Albanian-speakers were most often received with open arms.” One could hardly ask for a cleaner statement of what kind of thing the nation was understood to be at its founding moment. A community that admits members on the strength of their deeds, whatever language they learned at their mother’s knee, is a community of adherence — closer in structure to a church or a citizenship than to a lineage. The Slav-, Turkish-, and Albanian-speaking fighters who were welcomed into Greekness were not being absorbed despite the nation’s criteria; they were satisfying the nation’s criteria, which were participatory and cultural rather than ethnic.

None of this diminishes the achievement. It simply describes it accurately. The revolutionary generation assembled a nation out of the materials actually available — Orthodox faith, a prestigious classical education, commercial networks, and a shared war — and the openness of its membership rules was a source of strength, not an embarrassment. The embarrassment came later, when Romantic historiography decided that the nation needed to have been eternal and ethnic all along.

Honour without a name: the Enlightenment’s distinction

The most precise formulation of the older understanding comes from within the Greek Enlightenment itself. Dimitrios Katartzis, the Phanariot scholar writing in the generation before the Revolution, considered the relationship of his Romaic-speaking, Orthodox contemporaries to the ancient Hellenes and drew a line that his successors would spend a century erasing. As Peter Mackridge records, Katartzis held that the fact that

“we had the Hellenes as our ancestors is a very great honour, without claiming their name”

— Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, p. 51

The sentence deserves slow reading. Katartzis does not deny the ancestral connection; he claims it as an honour. What he declines to do is collapse honour into identity — to say that because the ancients stand somewhere in the ancestry, their name is ours by right and their being is our being. As the historian of ideas K. Th. Dimaras observed of this passage, Katartzis was distinguishing identity from descent. One may revere ancestors, learn from them, even boast of them, without thereby becoming them. It is the distinction any educated person of his era would have recognised, and it is exactly the distinction that Romantic nationalism, a generation later, would declare unthinkable.

Here, then, is the Enlightenment’s own answer to our impertinent question. Yes — education could make a Hellene, because Hellenism was understood as an acquired high culture: a curriculum, a cause, a standard of letters that Balkan aristocrats could adopt, that a parliament could confer on a woman of Albanian descent, and that fighters of any mother tongue could earn through service. The people closest to the making of modern Greece treated Greekness as something joined rather than inherited, and they said so without embarrassment. The ethnic reading of the nation — Hellene as bloodline, membership as biology — was not the foundation on which the edifice was built. It was a renovation, carried out later and for different purposes, on a structure whose original architects had answered the question differently. Recovering their answer is not an attack on the nation they built; it is a restoration of the builders’ own blueprints.