07/04/2011 11:59 ΜΜRoderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

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April 6, 2011

Adamantios Korais – doctor of the GreekRevolutionKorais' goal was the emancipation of his fellow Greeks from the hatedtyranny of the Ottoman Empire

Roderick Beaton

It wasn’t only Byron who dreamt “that Greece might still be free”.In England, as long ago as 1690, John Locke thought itreasonable that “the Grecian Christians, Descendants of theancient Possessors of that Country, may justly cast off theTurkish Yoke they have so long groaned under, whenever theyhave a Power to do it”. Throughout the long eighteenth century,however, the “Power” was lacking. The explanation for this washanded down, from north of the border, by another famousphilosopher: “The ingenuity, industry and activity of the ancientGreeks have nothing in common with the stupidity and indolenceof the present inhabitants of those regions”. That was DavidHume, 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 countrymen’s efforts crowned withsuccess. News of the arrival of Prince Otto of Bavaria to take upthe throne of newly independent Greece (on February 6, 1833)can only just have arrived when he fell at his home in Paris andbroke his hip. He died, just short of his eighty-fifth birthday, onApril 6, and was buried with some ceremony, in the cemetery ofMontparnasse. Korais would have hated more than anything tosee his beloved Greece a monarchy. But in most other respects,the freedom that had been won for Greece, after a decade ofhorrific violence, was of the sort that Korais had been urging onhis fellow Greeks since the start of the new century. How far thatachievement was due to his influence is just one of many timelyand important questions raised by this new collection of essaysthat seeks to re-assess his career.

Korais had arrived in Paris on the eve of the storming of theBastille. A doctor by professional training and a self-taughtclassical scholar, he lived through all the stages of theRevolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Restoration. He had leftSmyrna in his twenties, worked unsuccessfully as a merchant inAmsterdam, and returned home again in his thirties, beforeembarking on his new career. After that, he never returned toSmyrna. In a long life dedicated to the resurgence of Greece asa modern, independent nation, he never set foot in any part oftoday’s Greece. Korais was always proud of his familyconnections to the nearby island of Chios, but although he wroteabout 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 ofthe day. As we learn for the first time from this book, he was alsofor many years in correspondence with the Clarendon Press,received a regular stipend from Oxford, and was even consideredfor a Chair at the University. Quite impressive, when oneconsiders that Britain was at war with France for many of theyears in question.

Baulked of the possibility of establishing himself as a scholar, orperhaps from choice, by the turn of the century Korais was readyto embark on a civilizing mission of a rather unusual kind.Although for himself he seems never to have contemplatedleaving Paris, his goal was nothing less than the emancipation ofhis fellow Greeks from the hated tyranny of the Ottoman Empire.The way for Korais was not the obvious one of revolution. Atleast, not immediately. The lesson he had learned from living

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07/04/2011 11:59 ΜΜRoderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

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least, not immediately. The lesson he had learned from livingthrough the Revolution in France was that education was thekey. In France, the way had been opened by the Enlightenment.Having lived through the Terror, he had no illusions about theexcesses into which a revolution could descend. But all that wasbest in the France he saw in action during the Directorate andNapoleon’s consulship, he put down to the preparations laid bythe philosophes. Several of the idéologues were his friends.

Korais, almost single-handedly, determined to perform the sametask for Greece. Revolution could wait. He once predicted that by1851, the Greeks would be sufficiently primed to rise against theirtyrannical masters. As every Greek schoolchild knows, his guessfell thirty years too late. In his seventies, Korais had to set aboutadjusting to the new reality of the Greek Revolution.

But it was during the two decades before revolution broke outthat Korais’s civilizing mission was largely accomplished. Thetask he had set himself, in the early 1800s, was to educate hiscompatriots in the literary and philosophical tradition that hebelieved was rightfully their national heritage – that of ancientGreece. The project was initiated in 1805, and funded by awealthy Greek family with business connections in Russia. It isoften said that Korais translated ancient texts into Modern Greek.What he did was exactly the opposite. Insisting that the Greeklanguage has always been one and indivisible, he wanted Greeksonce again to become proficient in the language of theirancestors, but not through the mindless rote-learning that hadbeen inflicted on him in Smyrna. He made no compromise overthe ancient texts, which he published in the original. But these heprefaced with long disquisitions in Modern Greek, in which heheld forth on matters dear to his heart. In this respect his editionsanticipate the plays of George Bernard Shaw a century later: themain text becomes a pretext for the “prolegomena”.

These editions were then subsidized for sale within the OttomanEmpire. Curiously, no one seems to have tried to find out whoread them, or what impact they had. (Would fostering arevolution and contributing to the formation of a new nation-statecount, today, as “impact” in the assessment of academicresearch in the Humanities? And how would you be expected toprove it?) Byron, for instance, recently returned from Greece,had heard of “Coray” in 1812 – but his source seems to havebeen the Edinburgh Review rather than anything he had pickedup on his travels. Among Greek intellectuals, Korais’s ideas andactivities were much discussed – usually in the agonistic spirit forwhich the ancients were also famous. These circles were mainlyrestricted to the higher levels of the Ottoman bureaucracy, to theItalianeducated aristocrats of the Ionian Islands, and to families,such as Korais’s own, with mercantile connections abroad. Didany of the future military leaders of the Revolution, before givingup on the speeches of Isocrates, Plutarch’s Lives, or theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius, ever sit down on a winter’sevening to construe Korais’s own meditations and exhortations onethics, patriotism and language, written in an idiom closer to hisown?

Korais’s ideas did have an effect on the outcome of theRevolution, even if it is impossible, now, to tell whether his wasthe articulation of them that carried the day. He was one of thefirst, if not the first, to express Greek aspirations for emancipationfrom the Ottomans in terms of the “nation”, as that term had beenredefined first in the writings of Rousseau, then in the rhetoric ofthe French Revolution. He was no tub-thumping nationalist –though he could turn up the volume when he felt the occasionwarranted, as in the “Martial Trumpet-Call” of 1801, an exercisein patriotic doggerel over which the volume under review passesin tactful silence. More seriously, as Paschalis M. Kitromilidesshows in one of his two contributions to the book he has alsoedited, Korais’s nationalism was grounded in a carefully thought-out, “unwavering position on the normative primacy of individualand civil liberty”. This owed more to Montesquieu and Constantthan to the Nicomachean Ethics that were Korais’s first presentto revolutionary Greece.

During the 1820s, when the future direction of the Revolutionhung in the balance, it was the “modernizing” faction led byAlexander Mavrokordatos that won out over the warlords.Mavrokordatos had the support not only of the iconic and muchmisunderstood Byron, but of a close-knit cadre of intellectuals,some of whom, like Georgios Praidis and KonstantinosPolychroniadis, had previously belonged to Korais’s circle inParis. It was thanks to this group that Greece did not become,

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07/04/2011 11:59 ΜΜRoderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

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Paris. It was thanks to this group that Greece did not become,like Serbia at the same time, a semi-autonomous dependency ofthe Ottoman Empire, but would instead be recognized, inFebruary 1830, as a sovereign state, enjoying “all the rights . . .of complete independence”. Ever since then, this first newlycreated nation-state in the Old World has existed as a blueprintthroughout Europe, even if the fact has rarely beenacknowledged. Consider the completion of unification in Germanyand Italy three decades later, or the fragmentation of the formerYugoslavia in our own time. This was Korais’s legacy to Greeceand perhaps even beyond: the concept of a centralized nation-state carved out of a multi-ethnic empire, claiming legitimacyfrom a long-vanished status quo, defined by a common languageand inherited traditions, and founded on Enlightenment principlesof individual rights and responsibilities.

The essays that make up Adamantios Korais and the EuropeanEnlightenment perform a valuable task in situating this neglectedfigure squarely within his European and Enlightenment context.As Kitromilides argues, the case of Korais shows “theEnlightenment to be a much more open-ended and pluralistphenomenon by comparison with the phenomena connected withthe cultural agendas of national states”. Unlike many morefamous exponents of the movement in the West, Korais had abenign, almost a tender, regard for religion – witness his fictionalcreation, the “patter-priest” Papatrechas, who earns his nicknameby gabbling the psalms at record speed, but is a kind and wisesoul at heart. And in the emphasis he placed on tradition, asKitromilides also acknowledges, Korais seems to carry theEnlightenment project forward into the century that saw the riseof both nationalism and Romanticism.

Among other contributors, three write in French, the remainder inEnglish. Vivi Perraky, Ioannis Evrigenis, and Michael Paschalisexplore Korais’s achievement as a classical scholar of his time.Peter Mackridge gives an authoritative account of Korais’sproposals for an overhaul of the Modern Greek language, whileRoxane Argyropoulos, Kitromilides again, and VassilisMourdoukoutas in rather different ways set out the case fortreating Korais seriously as a philosopher of the lateEnlightenment. Only Anna Tabaki, in a consideration of Korais asa literary critic and stylist in his own right, approaches her subjectwith the warmth that might be expected to win new converts. Shemay be overstating the case when she credits Korais with “devéritables dons narratifs”, but it is refreshing to see hisPapatrechas compared to Émile or Candide. I can’t quite seeKorais allowing a character to have one buttock cut off by pirates,even if worse things did happen in Chios during his lifetime. Buthe 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 anadmirable weakness for fiction. Two of the first ancient texts thathe edited were novels. He was the first ever to coin a word inGreek for the “new” genre, which he rightly claimed as theinvention of the ancients. To have thought of combining the rootsmeaning “myth” and “history/story” to produce mythistoria, hemust have understood something of what fiction is about. Slightlytweaked, as mythistorema, Korais’s coinage is still the Greekword for “novel”.

And if there are no buttocks to be found in the elevated ModernGreek of his prefaces, he did in his last years edit some of theraciest Greek written since Aristophanes. The satirical fictionsknown as “Poems of Poor Prodromos” are not only our bestevidence for the language of the kitchen sink in Constantinoplein the twelfth century, they are also great fun. Korais deploredthe morals almost as much as he deplored the language. But inspite of his principles, as Anna Tabaki also shows, his choice ofworks to edit reveals a fascination, even if it is a horrified one,with the many varied stages through which Greek had passedbetween antiquity and the early nineteenth century.

Paschalis M. Kitromilides, editorADAMANTIOS KORAIS AND THE EUROPEANENLIGHTENMENT278pp. Voltaire Foundation. Paperback, £65.978 0 7294 1002 1

Roderick Beaton is Koraes Professor of Modern Greek andByzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s CollegeLondon and the co-editor, with David Ricks, of The Making ofModern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the uses of the

07/04/2011 11:59 ΜΜRoderick Beaton reviews "Adamantios Korais and the European Enlightenment" in the TLS

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Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the uses of thepast, which appeared in 2009. He is working on a Leverhulme-funded book provisionally titled Byron’s War: From Frankensteinto the Greek Revolution.

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