Philhellenism ("the love of Greek culture") was the intellectual fashion at the turn of the 19th century that led Europeans like Lord Byron to lend their support for the Greek movement towards independence from the Ottoman Empire. The artistic movement of Neoclassicism idealized Greek art and architecture, very much at second hand, through the writings of the first generation of art historians, like Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. A revival of interest in the shadowy Scythian philosopher Anacharsis was sparked by Jean Jacques Barthelemy's fanciful Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece (1788), a learned imaginary travel journal, one of the first historical novels, which a modern scholar has called "the encyclopedia of the new cult of the antique" in the late 18th Century; it had a high impact on the growth of philhellenism in France at the time. The book went through many editions, was reprinted in the United States and translated into German and other languages. It later inspired European sympathy for the Greek struggle for independence and spawned sequels and imitations through the 19th century.

In the period of reaction after the fall of Napoleon, when the liberal-minded, educated and prosperous bourgeois class of European societies found the romantic revolutionary ideals repressed by the restoration of old regimes at home, the idea of the re-creation of a Greek state on the territories sanctified by a view of Antiquity that was reflected in the furnishings of their own parlors and the contents of their bookcases offered an ideal, at a romantic distance.

Under these conditions, the Greek uprising constituted a source of inspiration and expectations that could never actually be fulfilled.

Related Topics

• Philodorian