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Updated: May 24, 2025
The reclamation of Epirus is perhaps the most honourable achievement of the Greek national revival, but it is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Western Europe is apt to depreciate modern 'Hellenism', chiefly because its ambitious denomination rather ludicrously challenges comparison with a vanished glory, while any one who has studied its rise must perceive that it has little more claim than western Europe itself to be the peculiar heir of ancient Greek culture. And yet this Hellenism of recent growth has a genuine vitality of its own. It displays a remarkable power of assimilating alien elements and inspiring them to an active pursuit of its ideals, and its allegiance supplants all others in the hearts of those exposed to its charm. The Epirots are not the only Albanians who have been Hellenized. In the heart of central Greece and Peloponnesus, on the plain of Argos, and in the suburbs of Athens, there are still Albanian enclaves, derived from those successive migrations between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries; but they have so entirely forgotten their origin that the villagers, when questioned, can only repeat: 'We can't say why we happen to speak "Arvanitik
By founding so many urban communities of Greek type the Macedonian kings of West Asia undeniably introduced Hellenism as an agent of political civilization into much of the Ancient East, which needed it badly and profited by it. But the influence of their Hellenism was potent and durable only in those newly founded, or newly organized, urban communities and their immediate neighbourhood.
Only Greek science, and the scientific spirit, were almost completely lost, and a beginning de novo had to be made when the West shook off its fetters. Hellenism then is not the mind of a particular ethnic type, nor of a particular period. It was not destroyed, though it was emasculated, by the loss of political freedom; it was neither killed nor died a natural death.
It was a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism; and it powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of what we call a Hebraising turn, with a signal affinity for the bent which was the master-bent of Hebrew life. This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history for the last two hundred years.
Perhaps the actual difference here would, rightly estimated, be less than we have been led to believe, though certainly few would lift the Carolingian crest to the level of that of Hellenism or of the Middle Ages, nor assign to the end of this latter period as low a fall as that accomplished during the tenth century in continental Europe.
It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations into one whole completely in the field of intellect, and to a certain extent also in that of politics; and, now when the same task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she took over Hellenism along with the rest of the inheritance of Alexander the Great.
When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical purpose; the speaker's whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as a foil and to enable him the better to give effect to his purpose. Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism which is thus reduced to minister to the triumph of Hebraism.
The state-party on the other hand relied for support on intelligence brought into contact with the influences of Hellenism, on the army, in which numerous Pisidian and Cilician mercenaries served, and on the abler kings, who here strove with the ecclesiastical power much as a thousand years later the Hohenstaufen strove with the Papacy.
An unclouded clearness of mind, an unimpeded play of thought, is what this bent drives at. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience. Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing.
It was only after a most vehement struggle that the Italian farmer abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic frock, so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a tendency which opposed the influence of Greece on principle, in a fashion altogether foreign to the earlier centuries, and in doing so fell pretty frequently into downright follies and absurdities.
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