THE GREEK PALIMPSEST: ALFRED ZIMMERN AT THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS, 1909–10

This article analyses the significance of the British School at Athens for the development of Alfred Zimmern’s famous 1911 monograph, The Greek Commonwealth , which was largely written at the School during Zimmern’s residence as an Associate Member in 1909–10. The article sheds light on the composition and goals of Zimmern’s book and on his other activities during his year in Greece, including journalism for the Manchester Guardian. Throughout, it introduces previously unused evidence for the School in the early twentieth century. Successive sections explore: the social atmosphere of the School, including the collegiate tone of its members, most of whom had been educated at public schools and Oxford and Cambridge; their intellectual interests, in particular archaeology and pre- and post-classical Greece; and their attitudes to modern Greeks, including the use of the derogatory expression ‘dago’. Through detailed analysis of interactions among non-Greeks and between Greeks and non-Greeks in this specific institutional setting, the article argues that the breadth of the intellectual culture at the School had some influence on the evolution of Zimmern’s book even though its focus is firmly classical. It also highlights Zimmern’s sense of distance from some of the elite English attitudes he found at the School and relates his experiences there to the ideas of nationality he later developed in his internationalist thought.