Antiquity as a Trophy: Classical Heritage and Anticommunism in Cold War Greece

This article examines how modern Greece drew on its ancient heritage to speak about the Cold War and the Greek Civil War in 1944–74. It shows how classical Hellenism was used by the official anti-communist discourse of Ethnikofrosyni to justify the fight against domestic and international communism. It argues that war was verbally, visually, and spatially constructed as an idealized notion of heroic and spiritual distinction by Western bearers of classical civilization over the ‘barbaric’ forces of the ‘East’, while on the ground, it was fought in a brutal manner that disregarded classical conventions of ‘just war’ and ‘respect for the defeated’. The analysis, finally, contrasts the official state discourse with alternative receptions of the classical past among avant-garde Greek artists, like filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis and playwright Iakovos Kambanellis, who used the country’s classical heritage to criticize war and challenge the bogus neoclassicism of the postwar Ethnikofron state.