Philhellenism

It contributed to the sentiments that led Europeans such as Lord Byron, Charles Nicolas Fabvier and Richard Church to advocate for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.

[citation needed] Horace's contemporary lyric poets, Virgil and Ovid, both produced magnum opuses (the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses, respectively) which were substantially founded upon Hellenic references and culture.

In the period of political reaction and repression after the fall of Napoleon, when the liberal-minded, educated and prosperous middle and upper classes of European societies found the Romantic nationalism of 1789–1792 repressed by the restoration of absolute monarchy at home, the idea of the re-creation of a Greek state on the very territories that were sanctified by their view of Antiquity—which was reflected even in the furnishings of their own parlors and the contents of their bookcases—offered an ideal, set at a romantic distance.

Under these conditions, the Greek uprising constituted a source of inspiration and expectations that could never actually be fulfilled, disappointing what Paul Cartledge called "the Victorian self-identification with the Glory that was Greece".

It had a high impact on the growth of philhellenism in France: the book went through many editions, was reprinted in the United States and was translated into German and other languages.

In German culture the first phase of philhellenism can be traced in the careers and writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the inventors of art history, Friedrich August Wolf, who inaugurated modern Homeric scholarship with his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) and the enlightened bureaucrat Wilhelm von Humboldt.

It was also in this context that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Hölderlin were to compose poetry and prose in the field of literature, elevating Hellenic themes in their works.

The groundswell of the Philhellenic movement was result of two generations of intrepid artists and amateur treasure-seekers, from Stuart and Revett, who published their measured drawings as The Antiquities of Athens and culminating with the removal of sculptures from Aegina and the Parthenon (the Elgin Marbles), works that inspired the British Philhellenes, many of whom, however, deplored their removal.

Many well-known philhellenes supported the Greek Independence Movement such as Shelley, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, Cam Hobhouse, Walter Savage Landor and Jeremy Bentham.

The Massacre at Chios by Eugène Delacroix reflects the attitudes of French philhellenism.
Coin of Mithridates I of Parthia from the mint at Seleucia on the Tigris . The Greek inscription reads ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΥ ΑΡΣΑΚΟΥ ΦΙΛΕΛΛΗΝΟΣ ("[coin] of the great king Arsaces, friend of the Greeks")
Emperor Julian
The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi by Theodoros Vryzakis
Victor Hugo , a well-known philhellene
Friedrich Nietzsche , was one of the most staunch philhellenes. [ 14 ] He wrote that: "the Greek is the man who has achieved the most", "the Greek people are the only people of genius in the history of the world", "the Greeks have never been overestimated", "the Greek antiquity is the only true home of culture" and that "the Greek world is seen as the one truly profound possibility of life". Nietzsche was convinced that "the knowledge of the great Greeks" educated him. [ 15 ]