Hellenic

The Hellenic tradition is the longest continuous literary, philosophical, and linguistic tradition in Europe. The same language — modified, but recognisable — runs from Mycenaean Linear B in the second millennium BC, through Homeric epic, classical Athens, Hellenistic Alexandria, the thousand-year Eastern Roman Empire we call Byzantium, the Ottoman centuries, and the modern Hellenic Republic. No other European tradition carries that depth of textual continuity.

What it produced is foundational. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, which gave Europe its enduring vocabulary for thinking. The dramatic literature of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. The historiography of Herodotus and Thucydides. The Septuagint and the Greek New Testament, which carried the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian gospel into the broader Mediterranean. The Byzantine theological and liturgical synthesis that anchors Orthodox Christianity to this day. The folk traditions of Greek music, dance, and household craft, carried through Ottoman rule and the great twentieth-century displacements.

We cover archaic and classical Greece, Hellenistic culture, Byzantium, the Greek folk and Orthodox traditions, and the contemporary cultural life of Greece and Cyprus.