The new doesn’t always shake off the old. That the Hellenic world yielded to rising Rome at Actium, that Great Britain yielded to the nascent US at Yorktown, or that France yielded to the insular Great Britain at Waterloo, did not mean that the old disappeared. Roman nobles still sent sons to study in Athens, Washington socialites still aped Georgian and then Regency and then Victorian conventions, and London intellectuals still look wistfully at a continental sophistication founded in the salons of Paris. In Poe’s language, the grandees and the wannabee grandees of a Rome usually decline to isolate themselves from the glory of a Greece.
A latter day Roman with imperial ambitions was Benito Mussolini. He drew on the Latin “fasces”, a bundle of wood carried before lictors as a symbol of power, to forge a fascism where the freedom of the people was secured not by themselves but by the state.
Mussolini took office in 1922 and there was significant Roman grandeur making over the next two decades. The beginning of his end was the glory of a Greece, or at least the glory of an outnumbered Greek army, who stymied the Roman invasion on 8 November 1940 at the Battle of Elaia-Kalamas, 130 km to the northwest of Augustus’s defeat of Mark Antony – and of Hellenic supremacy – 2,000 years before.
Hellenic supremacy itself had commenced three or so centuries before, when Phillip II of Macedon conquered Greece and provided the base for his son Alexander to conquer most of the known world. On 8 November 1977 a Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos uncovered what many believe to be Phillip’s tomb.
In 1977, Greece had recently come out of the military junta. One of the principals of the junta, Stylianos Pattakos, was born on 8 November 1912 and served during the Greco-Italian war commenced by Mussolini. It was Pattakos who made the decision to revoke the citizenship of the actress and activist Melina Mercouri. Although her uncle was a founder of the Greek National Socialist Party her father was a founder of the Resistance, so her retort to Pattakos has richness:
I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists and they will die fascists.
Glory 1, Grandeur 0.
