Greece Books

William Wright's charting of the life and sadnesses of the late Christina Onassis makes compulsive reading. A wealth of detail is coupled with a racy narrative style to produce a book that is for once, in that much overused phrase, unputdownable.

It would be easy to dismiss Christina as an empty-headed, affluent and cocooned woman. What Wright does is to shine a light into all the corners of this complex woman's life - her battles with the megalomaniac shipping tycoon who was her father, the war which ensued with Onassis's last wife the profligate Jackie Kennedy, her failed attempts at love and acceptance and the volatile dynamic that made up the Onassis clan - while allowing Christina to emerge as a vulnerable and very human figure and not the spoiled, hedonistic brat of popular acceptance.

A riveting read of unusual dimensions - the glitz and glamour more the habitat of Jackie Collins suffused with a bible-black Greek tragedy - a tragedy that was to cast its shadow across the entire Onassis dynasty and which threatens to darken Christina's daughter Athina, the richest little girl in the world.

There is much more to this book than the title suggests. While reviewing the triumphs and travails of the ambassador class from the ancients to the renaissance, the reader receives a superb review or solid primer on the great political and religious events of the time. In the days before near-instantaneous communications, the ambassador was more often than not the face of nations. Rulers were often solely reliant upon the ambassadorial depiction of foreign lands as their only means with which to plot their strategies beyond their borders. These depictions were often peppered with prejudices of social systems deemed inferior to that of the ambassador's home populace, but for better or worse, these narratives were often the defacto source of knowledge of outsiders for decades or longer.

Mr. Wright's own narrative is a pleasure to read. I particularly liked the flow between chapters. My personal favorite sections included the discussions on the origin of diplomatic immunity; something we simply take for granted but it was interesting to discover how it came to be. The end of the book also contains a well-summarized discussion of the theory of diplomacy but the book is definitely at its best as a tour guide to the centuries long pursuit of man discovering man.

Forde's book far outstrips any other current treatment of the career of Alkibiades in Thucydides' History. In fact, it may be the best scholastic treatment of Alkibiades, period. The interpretive slant taken is A.'s effect on the political context of the city-state, and a continuous stream of provocative insights reveal the depth of this effect. What you will not find here is an analysis of the private aspects of Alkibiades' life, such as his supposed seduction of a Spartan Queen, or the extent of his own licentious behaviour. Neither does Forde expand his perspective beyond Thucydides, but these limitations in no way should be accounted as faults of the book. This is a scholar staking out his territory, and then giving a rigorous and creative solution to problems encountered within it. His analysis of Thucydides' use of the word "eros" is not to be missed, and his deft treatment of a comparison between the psychology of Sparta and Athens is also excellent. I highly recommend this book for both experienced scholars and anyone with an interest in Thucydides.

One of the most important events in the beginning of the cold war was Harry Truman's demand for American support for the government of Greece in its war with pro-Communist guerillas. In fact, as Wittner shows, the history of the Greek civil war was far more complex than this. The Communist forces were not Soviet puppets. In fact, Stalin freely gave Greece to Churchill as a British sphere of influence. In fact, as a direct consequence of Chruchill's actions, the wartime resistance of the EAM was savagely and treacherously attacked by the Greek right, many of whom had been Nazi collaborators. Intimidation and electoral fraud made civil war inevitable and when the British had to leave in early 1947, the Americans had to take over. Wittner, relying on more than 75 sets of private papers, gives us many fine details on the process that lead to "victory." The United States lied when it claimed it was looking for UN mediation. American officials approved of the exectution of Jehovah's Witnesses, and even denounced them as Communists. Greek military tribunals were so unjust that one American official was called to testify against two people accused of murdering him. Greek politics were crudely manipulated, economic injustice was ignored, and trade union elections overriden. And the consequence of this "victory" was the establishment of a psuedo-democratic government, and later dictatorship. Not until 1974 would Greece securely become the democratic republic it had wished to be when the war ended. This is a book no student of the period should ignore.

I was delighted to come across Gatsos book while perusing the bookshelves of the University of Arizona. But why are the best poets like Gatsos rarely found on the bookshelves of stores? Who knows, and I suppose it will always be that way. Notwithstanding, Gatsos proved a real treasure of intoxicating verse. He is right up there with the best of the modern Greek poets: Seferis, Eyltis, Tsatsos, Kindinis, Ritsos. For a truely enjoyable alternative to the Beats and the New York school, try Gatsos and his kin.

The late Miss Grace was the foremost authority on ancient wine jars, amphorae, and worked for many years at the Agora in Athens. This book is the result of years of experience and therefore gives the reader all the benefit of her wide knowledge. Nowhere else can one find such a succinct look at these very interesting jars. The pamphlet is particularly valuable for the non-expert who just wants to know which type of jar is which, how they were used and what they contained. Very well done!

Eric Buzetti's introduction and Wayne Ambler's translation and notes remind one how important Xenophon is. It seems to me to be an excellent entry to the writings of this 'gentleman' general who also wrote Socratic dialogues, which I now hope to revisit with renewed interest.

Anabasis: The March Up Country is a great book. It is considered to be a classic for good reasons: it is a good read, it deals with really important matters, it is superb literature and it is a landmark in the history of civilization.

For about two thousand years, it has been on the reading list of most educated people in the Western Hemisphere. Undoubtedly, it will still be part of the curriculum at most of the world's colleges and universities two thousand years from now. You just can't consider yourself to have received a proper education without having read this great Greek classic.

While you are at it, you should also read:
Aristotle - Ethics and Politics
Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey
and
History of the Peloponnesian War

Classics like these are not stuffy, pompous, overblown literature that some ignorant anti-intellectuals might think. They are genuine looks at life by excellent writers who had something important to say - and said it well.

This title, in two volumes, covers the vast sweep of Asia Minor's history, from Alexander to the height of the Byzantine Empire. The first volume concentrates on two major periods; the early part of the 3rd century BC when Celtic tribes settled throughout the interior, and the coming of the Romans and their colonisation of the eastern flank of their empire. Mr Mitchell has crafted an enormously readable history of the region. The detail is extraordinary but the prose never becomes turgid or obtuse. By examining the intertwined complexities of people's relations to the land and their Gods, Mr Mitchell has broken new ground and produced a book that is that most unusual of beasts, both readable and scholarly.

Written for various periodicals over the course of about thirty years, eighteen richly informative articles are brought together in this volume on Modern Greek history, all by the famous and highly respected historian-scholar Richard Clogg. The articles try with great success to throw some much needed light on what was going on in the "greater" Greek world of the 18th and19th centuries to the east of the tiny but later enlarged Greek state that came into being in 1830 after the Greek War of Independence.
The first chapter, written, unlike the others, specifically for this volume, lays out all the themes and issues to be cover in the rest of the book. It starts by examining the very Greek and historically realistic notion of "our East" that later developed (once the Greek state was firmly established) into the notion and political goal of the "Megali Idea" as first coined and elaborated by the wheeler dealer manipulator Ioannis Kolettis, Ali Pasha's onetime personal physician, in 1844. Both notions came to an inglorious end in 1922 with the ignominious defeat of the Greek military by the Turks and the sad exchange of populations that followed.

Chapter II traces the history of the Greek millet in the Ottoman Empire, which was actually a grouping for administrative and fiscal purposes of all Orthodox Christians under the Patriarch of Constantinople without much regard for national or ethnic origins. Within the Greek millet one "party," including church hierarchs, lay bureaucrats, and wealthy merchants were unalterably in favor of maintaining the status quo, while another group, the protagonists of Hellenism, composed mainly of intellectuals, lower clergy and Diaspora folk, promoted the idea of armed of armed rebellion to gain independence immediately. A. Korais was in favor of raising arms should it become necessary but he insisted that the Greeks, whom he considered mostly ignorant savages, should prepare and educate themselves to fight and then to govern themselves. The sole objective the two "parties" had in common was their desire to instill a sense of "Greekness" into those members of the Greek millet who considered themselves primarily Christian and Greek only as a kind of afterthought if at all. In this chapter Clogg deals with the question of Greek schools and teachers, most of whom were trained at the University of Athens and despite whose best efforts many Greek-speaking villages became entirely Turkophone in the course of the 19th Century. The millet ceased to exist in 1919 and it is pointed out that what is surprising is that it should have lasted (as it did) for nearly a century after the establishment of an independent Greek state.

Chapter III begins by analyzing one of the major problems at the talks (Britain, Greece, and Turkey) that culminated in the tragic exchange of populations following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. This relates to the large number of Turkophone (ethnic) Greeks in the Ottoman Empire who wanted (and should have been allowed to) stay put but were eventually shipped off to Greece (large numbers of Greek speaking Turks were also uprooted from their homes in Greece and shipped eastward). A major difficulty here for the historian resides in determining how the "karamanlides" (monolingual Turkish speaking Greeks who wrote Turkish in Greek characters) actually identified themselves, with the plot being thickened by Fallmerayer's claim about the non-Greekness of most Greeks, which Clogg reminds us is futile and beside the point. These people, he points out, adopted Turkish as their only vernacular language, surprisingly, as early as the fifteenth century.

Chapter IV is titled "The Byzantine legacy ..." but it is actually a brilliant analysis and description with possibly universal application of how myth, image and symbol can be manipulated and instrumentalized to bring about desired political goals, in this case the Megali Idea, the dominant (some would say only) ideology of the young Greek State. Here Clogg discusses in detail the contributions of Ioannis Kolettis (Hellenized Vlach and onetime personal physician to Ali Pasha), Neophytos Doukas and Rigas Velistinlis (for obvious reasons Korais does not figure in this essay), but the author concentrates on perceptions of the Megali Idea at a more popular level among the unlettered mass of Greeks under Turkish domination and later on, so he explores several of the "prophecies" about the imminent end of the Ottoman Empire that made life bearable for the lower classes and furthered the expansionist interests of Greek politicians. Interestingly, the klephtic warrior Theodore Kolokotronis admitted to having been reared on such prophecies. (This essay should be read in conjunction with Chapter XI).

In Chapter V we are given a valuable introduction to the "Fatherly Instruction" of 1798, and then the Dhidhaskalia itself, integral, in English. The sixth chapter is an exploration of the Greek Enlightenment that preceded the War of Independence in relation to Greek cultural life under the Turks. The contributions of the wonderful Korais are examined in this and later chapters (VII, VIII, XVI).

Chapter VIII deals with 18th and 19th century anticlericalism in the Greek world. The author shows that it was widespread at the popular level but the factors causing it (priestly ineptitude, ecclesiastical corruption) had been effectively eliminated by 1830. The next essay connects a certain attitude of "envy" on the part of Greek merchants with regard to Western Europe (and to the Smyrna rebellion of 1797). What awakened their envy was, of course, the conditions of endemic disorder and institutionalized rapacity under which they themselves were forced to operate within the Empire.

The remaining essays in this volume, while interesting and well written, are mostly of specialist interest. Richard clog has been the preeminent scholar-historian of Modern Greece for several decades and frequently manages to write with what I would consider brilliance. It is hard to imagine that anyone with a serious interest in modern history (not just Greek or Turkish history) would be without this volume.