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Greece
Why Syriza and Golden Dawn are feuding over the classics
In a polarised Greece, classical writers are being weaponised by right and left

Kostas Nikouli in ‘Lessons of War’ © Charis Akriviadis

Alev Scott 4 HOURS AGO

Three figures in black suits stand within the legs of an upturned conference table, like prisoners
in a dock. In the shadows at the back of the stage, a cellist plays a low, unbroken note. All eyes
are on a forceful-looking teenager under the spotlight as he prepares to lay down the law.

“We both know that the strong impose and the weak retreat and accept,” he booms. The line,
paraphrased in modern Greek, comes from the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides’ famous depiction
of Athenian hardball diplomacy in his History of the Peloponnesian War. The unfortunate
Melians are being told they have no choice but to bow to superior force — basic realpolitik that
is of course as relevant now as when the words were written.

Lessons of War, an adaptation of Thucydides’ history of the fifth century BC war between
Athens and Sparta, has been a wild success in Athens this year. Produced by Dramaticus, a not-
for-profit institute focused on the dramatisation of ancient Greek history, the show played to
sold-out audiences in May at the city’s best-known venue, the Athens Concert Hall, and
returned by popular demand on Friday.

“Thucydides is our contemporary,” the playwright Yiannis Lignadis tells me over an ouzo in a
stiflingly hot central Athens café.

At face value, the Peloponnesian war might seem to have little resonance today: Greece is now a
nation-state, and naval battles are somewhat passé. Yet the themes of power and populism are
more current than ever in the wake of the country’s recent crises, and in the run-up to the next
election classical writers are increasingly being dragged into the contemporary hurly-burly.

The musician Theodore Economou, who composed the eerie score, told me he had a lightbulb
moment when re-reading the Melian Dialogue in the original. “I was reminded of my emotions
sitting in front of the TV in 2015, waiting to see the results of the bailout discussions [Germany
refused to soften Greece’s conditions]. I felt exactly the same emotions. Thucydides shows us
how people think, what people do for money, for power, and how strong people always want to
be stronger. It’s a story that goes on and on — we can also see it in Europe and America today.”

Politics and theatre have shared a stage in Greece since the fifth century BC. Walking through
Athens today, I am struck not only by the riot vans stationed outside Prime Minister Alexis
Tsipras’s residence but also by the theatre flyers pasted on the walls of bars and cafés. Political
protest is a theatrical act, requiring an audience; buying theatre tickets during an economic
crisis is an act of protest against reality.

“Greeks are politically confused,” Lignadis says. “Things happen which are very . . . paradoxical.”
Wary of playing the role of political commentator, he hesitates while attempting to explain his
play’s popularity. “For example, the rise of the [ultranationalist] Golden Dawn party and [the
radical left] Syriza, we could not have predicted. The Golden Dawn politicians are hilarious
guys, they are not educated, but people continue to support them — because of frustration,
disappointment, I don’t know.”

As elsewhere in Europe, Greece’s political right has profited from turmoil to the east and south.
In May 2012, Golden Dawn entered parliament with 7 per cent of the vote, riding a wave of
support that owed much to growing resentment at the nascent refugee crisis, as well as
economic gloom. The party’s website, along with other supremacist groups and blogs, promotes
the idea of Greece’s superior ethnic pedigree by quoting passages by ancient writers, particularly
those who have immortalised wars between the ancient Athenians and their perceived inferiors.
Herodotus, who wrote about the invasion of Greece by “barbarian” Persians in the fifth century
BC, is a particular favourite among anti-immigration activists.

“To the Golden Dawn mind, modern immigrants become Persians or infidels trying to invade
Greece just like the Persians did — even down to Persians coming in boats across the Aegean,”
explains Dr Andronike Makris, academic director of the Hellenic Education and Research
Centre.

Partly in response, the far-left Syriza government has sought to downplay the classics by
replacing them with more “inclusive” subjects in schools. In 2016, the education minister
announced that some texts would be removed from the high-school curriculum, including
famous passages of Thucydides and Herodotus, on the grounds that such texts promote the idea
of empire and exclude immigrant children in schools. After a public outcry and formal
complaints from academic unions, the ban was overturned in 2017, but the government’s anti-
classics agenda continues: this month, it was announced that Latin would be replaced by
sociology in high schools by June 2020.

These bans signal an intensifying battle between left and right in Greece — one in which ancient
texts have been weaponised. While the politicians grapple with one another, Greek educational
bodies have assumed the role of referee, stepping in to defend the classics while acknowledging
the danger of their misuse at the hands of ultranationalists. In response to this month’s ban on
Latin, the Philosophy School of the University of Athens pointed out that banning classical texts,
Greek or Latin, could prove counterproductive by confirming the “one-sided admiration” by
conservatives for ancient writers, “with all the unpleasant consequences this may have”.
Pericles’ funeral oration was singled out for elimination by the Greek education minister in 2016
and then defended as “essential” reading for children by the Society of Greek Philologists.

On a superficial level, it is easy to find pro-war sentiments in Thucydides’ work. The Athenian
commander Pericles, for example, argues in his funeral oration that war is inevitable, and must
be pursued despite its cost — a sentiment that complements the popular “might is right”
interpretation of the text.

Academics have long pointed out that Thucydides

In the States, when appeals
are made to the Bible at
least half of the country
groans. In Greece they all
seem to buy it — except the
far-left
frustrates such simple interpretations. The Melian
negotiations fail, and although the Athenians
annihilate the Melians as threatened, they later lose
the war. Pericles is a democrat but also a skilled
manipulator; Thucydides tells us that “in his
speech, Pericles tried to appease the anger of the
Athenians towards him and to distract their
thoughts from the present affliction”.

But we are not living in an age of nuance, and the

work of Thucydides remains obscure for most people, even Greeks who study him in school. I
studied the History of the Peloponnesian War at a British university and remember very little
beyond the terror of having to translate Pericles’ oration under timed conditions. Most Greeks
who studied it in school confess to a similar amnesia, and many Europeans and Americans
know Thucydides only as an obscure ancient name. It is unsurprising that rightwing politicians
have been able to reduce his work to belligerent soundbites without being challenged.

With a lack of real understanding has come an almost religious reverence for Thucydides, and
little scrutiny of the interpretation of whoever can quote (or misquote) his work. An American
academic I interviewed compared Greek politicians’ invocation of ancient writers to American
politicians’ invocation of the Bible. “In the States, when appeals are made to the Bible at least
half of the country groans. In Greece they all seem to buy it — except the far-left.”

The beauty of adapting a difficult text for stage is that its complexities — lost on a bored teenage
student, and seldom voluntarily revisited in adulthood — are brought to life.
“Most readings of Thucydides’ work in Athens appeal to people who like to see an idealised
image of themselves and their city,” says Kaiti Diamantakou, associate professor of Theatre
Studies at the University of Athens. “The peculiar thing about Lessons of War is that it shows
things in a more global and critical and dialectic way, like Thucydides himself. I think, contrary
to many interpretations, perhaps Thucydides was fed up with the war.”

Why does this resonate today, I ask her — surely Greece is not in danger of going to war? “There
is always a fear, I think. I don’t think war is too far off — not only because of our ambivalent
relations with Turkey, but because of the international state of things these days. Everything is
out of control, I have that impression.”

Yiannis Lignadis tells me his most important decision in adapting the work was to stage the
plague of Athens straight after Pericles’ endorsement of war in his funeral oration — the order in
which Thucydides himself writes those chapters.

“I think this order is absolutely deliberate on Thucydides’ part,” he tells me. “If I’m right, the
plague illuminates the content of the oration and undermines it at the same time — it shows the
consequence of war. People don’t like to connect these two because they think that the oration is
just the praise of democracy.” Then, to my surprise, he looks slightly nervous. “Perhaps what
I’m saying is sacrilegious.’’

Intriguingly, neither Yiannis Lignadis nor his brother, the director Dimitris Lignadis, who
collaborated with him on Lessons of War, see themselves as leftwing. I meet Dimitris in a café
near Syntagma Square and, a few minutes into our conversation, a woman sitting nearby
interrupts to express her admiration for his work. The director smiles before launching into a
critique of Syriza’s “excessively liberal agenda”. He sees Thucydides as neither left- nor
rightwing, but as someone who can illuminate the problems of our times.

“Our play was sold out from the very second day. The moving thing was that after each
performance, the audience came to me and they didn’t say congratulations — they said thank
you.”

For me, reconnecting with Thucydides’ work has been as personal as for Greek theatre
audiences. I find myself drawn to a line in which Thucydides seems to be pointing out that the
charisma and power of Pericles raise worrying questions about the nature of democracy itself.
Athens “was in name a democratic state, but in fact a government of the principal man”.

Who in the year AD2018 cannot recognise “a government of the principal man”? As a Turk, I
certainly can. Talking to Greeks about their country, it seems to me they are, as ever, a step
ahead of the rest of us — they see universal truths where we see temporary phenomena. Two
and a half millennia of watching theatre makes you quick to spot familiar players on the world
stage.
Alev Scott’s ‘Ottoman Odyssey: Travels through a Lost Empire’ is published by Riverrun on
October 4

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