 In 1988 a public competition was opened for the chair of the History of Modern Greece in the University of Athens - i.e. the most important teaching-History post in Greece. There were two candidates, Antonis Liakos, a Trotskyist, and myself, a right-wing person. Both of us were then assistant professors at the University of Salonica. The chair was occupied by Liakos, but illegally. In point of fact, instead of being elected by a three-members committee, he was by two-people one. For the left-wing regime wished him to teach History, but they could not find three persons for him to be elected. I had recourse to the Council of State, the supreme Court of Greece as far as public administration matters are concerned.And in 1996, i.e. after eight years, was issued the decision 3138/1996 that did justice to me. For according to this decision, Liakos had to lose his post and the competition should be repeated between him and myself. The regime, nonetheless, did not accept this very decision to be applied. And afterwards I lost all my posts - professor of History at the Naval Academy, and the Naval War College as well as my directorship at the Museum of the City of Athens. As a result, I was jobless during four years (2000-2004). Now, the nationalist movements in Greece ask a public request for the application of the decision No 3138/1996 of the Council of State to be signed. Everyone who wishes to sign has to send an e-mail, with his full name and a valid e-mail address, to : epitropi1978@gmail.com You may find the relevant site in : http://www.ethnikonthematon.blogspot.com, on the right side, under the Greek flag and the Stassinopoulos' photography.If you agree, please send a message.(You may write it in English: I wish the decision No 3138/1996 of the Council of State to be applied; and add in Latin characters: Na efarmostei i apofasi 3138/1996 tou Symvouliou tis Epikrateias.) Dimitris Michalopoulos
Gentlemen, Though
not an Irishman, I feel obliged to seek the indulgence of your newspaper; for
the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is assuredly an international
issue, the impact of which will be critical as far as the future of our Old
Continent is concerned. Therefore,
as a Greek, i.e. a citizen of a European Union country, I cannot see the reason
why a second referendum must be held in your country. One has already taken
place; and the majority of voters clearly expressed themselves: a resounding No
to the Lisbon Treaty! And if one wants to labour the relevant question, one has
to recognize that there was no reason
for even the first referendum to be
held. In point of fact, even before the first Irish referendum was held, the
French and the Dutch had already rejected, through their vote, the essence of
the famous Lisbon Treaty. In other words, it is clear that a
nucleus of power is pushing for
referendum after referendum to be held, simply to render the Peoples of Europe
exhausted; and in that way to gain the
Peoples’ consent to the adoption of the
Lisbon Treaty. So, as I see it, the main point is : Why? As a matter of fact, today The second point concerning the application of
the Lisbon Treaty is that it will bring about the total destruction of national statehoods. As a matter of fact, such are already
–partially- destroyed; and the corollary is that one is entitled to ask, when Monsieur
Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the Nonetheless,
the total destruction of national statehoods may still be regarded by a lot of
people as a merely theoretical issue; but it cannot be regarded as a merely
theoretical issue if one has in mind that such a development would jeopardize
the very existence of the middle social strata, which, truth to tell, had by
means of their sacrifices built up Europe’s national statehoods in the first
place. Were these statehoods destroyed, Europe’s population would be divided
into two social strata: that of the very rich, who would be able, thanks to
their wealth, to protect their property and life; and that of the very poor,
i.e. the vast majority, who despite their skills (or, rather, because of them) would
form an enormous ‘pool of slaves’ at the disposal of the rich ones. Symptoms of a development in that sense and
direction are already visible in Southern Europe: young people, and especially
the skilled ones, are doomed to take on and perform humiliating jobs, which
they agree to undertake because of the Damoclean Sword of unemployment hanging
over them; and needless to say, those humiliating jobs as a rule imply humiliating social conditions and thus a
humiliating existence. Having this in mind, one can easily grasp the point that
the riots which, from last December on, are continually taking place in Alas!
Nowadays forgotten are truisms like the one that democracy does not mean
freedom; and another one that wealth does not imply prosperity; and above all
the principle accredited to Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 BC), that speculation alone does yield a lot of money, but
the wealth so accrued is like a
feather in the wind. In point of fact, only toil may provide a given society
with a solid basis. A naïve
truism? Yes, of course…
but we must bring this once and for all in mind. Nonetheless,
the vast majority of European citizens have the impression that the application
of the Lisbon Treaty will not have any impact on their everyday life. Quite the
contrary will be the case. For the political scene will be completely changed,
if the Lisbon Treaty is applied: in the Europe envisaged by that famous Treaty,
instead of a rather weak executive power, European countries will be run by a
very strong one, which will have virtually
no bond with the Peoples’ will. Today it is still possible for a citizen to
complain to a Member of “his” Parliament, to a minister of “his” government, to
“his” prime minister, Irish, Greek, whatever, if necessary; but tomorrow whom
will we Europeans address? An unapproachable, immovable power? This may well be
so. The future does seem dark; not only for us
citizens but for Europe, too.Were our
Old –and glorious- Continent to be
united through forced polls, the result
would likely be a fast collapse, like
the one that befell the Hebrew Kingdom after the death of Solomon. In other
words, we have had enough of Dimitris Michalopoulos Dimitris Michalopoulos
DIVINE CONNECTIONS, ETERNAL LIFE? AGAMEMNON, MENELAUS AND THE AFTERLIFE
Abstract: Though Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, was impiously murdered by his wife’s lover, he was nonetheless consigned to Hades, abode of eternal sorrow. On the other hand, it was foretold that Menelaus, his brother and the husband of Helen, that most famous femme fatale, would never die; for he would be transported to Elysium, the dwelling place of the Blessed, simply because Helen was the daughter of Zeus. But was this divine connection enough to explain so radical a departure from Agamemnon’s condemnation to Hades? Surely not. The most probable explanation seems to be that of a racial mixture in Greek lands with every race’s conception of an afterlife being reflected in Homer’s Odyssey.
Preliminary considerations
As far as Ancient Greece is concerned, Homer’s Poems had not merely a literary significance, but a religious one as well. For as far as we know, the Dodekatheon archetype is to be found in the Homeric Poems; and it is well known that Hellenes’ souls were dominated by Dodekatheon until this ‘domination’ weakened thanks to the teaching of Socrates, Plato, and their epigones. Literary value, nonetheless, does not help researchers to produce a clear idea about Homer and his work. Do the Iliad and Odyssey ‘reflect’ the culminating point of a Hellenic Civilization, of which the Classical Era is merely a pale reflection? Or are the Poems just the beginning of a cultural process that was not to be stopped by Macedonian and Roman conquests? In other words, the Homeric issue is still an open one; and becomes even more complicated if the two contradictory concepts of the afterlife presented by Homer are taken into consideration.
I
Afterlife in the Homeric Poems
Let us examine first the case of Menelaus. When the King of Sparta succeeded in catching, on the Pharos island, offshore of Alexandria, Egypt, the sea god Proteus, he, Proteus foretold him: But for thyself, Menelaus, fostered of Zeus, it is not ordained that thou shouldst die and meet thy fate in horse-pasturing Argos, but to the Elysian plain and the bounds of the earth will the immortals convey thee, where dwells fair-haired Radamanthus, and where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor even rain, but ever does Ocean send up blasts of the shrill-blowing West Wind that may give cooling to men; for thou hast Helen to wife, and art in their eyes the husband of the daughter of Zeus. Agamemnon i.e. Menelaus’ brother, nonetheless, after he was slaughtered “like an ox” by Aegysthus, the lover of his wife Clytemnestra, was thrown into Hades. The situation there was eloquently expressed by Achilles himself to Odysseus: How didst thou dare to come down to Hades, where dwell the unheeding dead, the phantoms of men? And did the Iliad’s greatest hero continue: Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as a hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livehood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished. The data are neat and clear: Menelaus, after his death, will be in the Elysian Plain immortal and blissful, whilst Agamemnon, after having been tragically killed, is thrown into Hades, wherein there is life, but a life so circumscribed, of such base quality that Achilles would prefer to be hired by a poor man on earth than to be king of the dead in the Hades. The explanation, moreover, of this differentiation is rather facetious: Menelaus was the Zeus’ son-in-law, whilst his brother Agamemnon who, all things considered, had lost his life for Menelaus’ sake, had not so important “connections”. Thus, the first point is morality; and one has to admit that the moral standards offered in the Homeric Poems are not of the highest. The beautiful Helen, for instance,had not only abandoned her husband but had tried, shortly before the fall of Troy, to disclose the stratagem of the Trojan Horse. She returned, nonetheless, to Sparta in glory and honour and did not suffer the consequences of the disasters she had provoked. The corollary is that Agamemnon’s descent in Hades –given the value system of Homer- should not make an impression. The parallel, moreover, with the Mahabharata, one of the major epics of ancient India should be instructive. When, in fact, Yudhisthira the protagonist of the Kurukshetra war dies, he finds in –so to speak- paradise the soul of impious Duryodhana, his enemy; and in the horrible hell-hole his beloved ones. This was a flagrant violation of justice – committed, as usual, under pretext of hatred having been erased. Yudhisthira, nonetheless, prefers to stay in the hell-hole with his beloved -and the righteous ones, to staying in the paradise made the home of the unrighteous and impious. But happily all this proved to be the “last temptation” of the good ones, who are destined to find the peace and happiness to which every righteous soul aspires.
II The Hebrew sheol
However, after the Golden Age of Greek Civilization, the afterlife concepts did change. Hades is no more the Homeric one, with the souls of righteous and unrighteous thrown pell-mell into eternal sorrow. The human souls are now judged and are destined to different places accordingly to their actions in this world. This new concept of afterlife reminds of the Rich Man and Lazarus parable, while the Hades of Homer looks like the Hebrew sheol. Let us see, therefore, what this sheol was: a subterranean place where the dead ‘dwelled’. Of course the dead were conscious of their existence in sheol; this self-consciousness, nevertheless, was by no means proof of life after the death. For life therein was regarded as a “shadow of life”, rudimentary, without energy or light; and hopeless – an eternal condemnation, the very essence of which is to be found in the already-quoted Achilles’ words to Odyssseus. The relevant passages of the Old Testament are eloquent on the subject as well: And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness. And also: They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish. Even God cannot expect anything from the dead in the sheol: For the grave can not praise thee, death can not celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. And also: For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks? As foretold, nonetheless, the Hebrew sheol was expressively described in the Odyssey. Moreover, it is noteworthy the change concerning sheol that took place in a train of Jewish thought. According to Flavius Josephus, in fact, Hades, wherein the souls of the righteous and unrighteous are detained… is a place in the world not regularly finished; a subterraneous region, wherein the light of this world does not shine; from which circumstance,…it cannot be but there must be in it perpetual darkness. This region is allotted as a place of custody for souls, in which angels are appointed as guardians to them, who distribute to them temporary punishments, agreeable to every one’s behaviour and manners. And also: In this region there is a certain place set apart, as a lake of unquenchable fire, whereinto we suppose no one hath hitherto been cast, but it is prepared for a day afore-determined by God, in which one righteous sentence shall deservedly be passed upon all men; when the unjust, and those that have been disobedient to God, and have given honour to such idols as have been the vain operations of the hands of men, as to God himself, shall be adjusted to this everlasting punishment, as having been the causes of defilement; while the just shall obtain an incorruptible and never-fading kingdom. These are now confined in the Hades, but not in the same place wherein the unjust are confined. The resemblance to the Rich Man and Lazarus parable is evident.
III Explanation
What is going on? A path to the explanation of these paradoxical resemblances is opened thanks to Constantine Paparrigopoulos and Patrick Leigh Fermor. The former considered the Greeks to be a branch of the Indo-European/Caucasian race, who, nonetheless, were strongly influenced by Semites and semitized peoples. A typical case is provided by the etymon of the famous toponymy “Salamis” that is no other than the well-known semitic word salam (= peace); and by the name of the demi-god Heracles, who was the Phoenician deity ΜΕΛΚΑΡΘ, whose name had been read by the Greeks in the reverse order. This is, moreover, the Homeric Hades’ description by Paparrigopoulos: “The soul, having slipped out of the body through the lips or the wound, is not dispersed into the aether, but keeps the shape of the body to which was previously giving life. Earth’s surface, nevertheless, is no more a fit habitation for this powerless and sad phantasm, whose useless existence is prolonged in the dark light of the subterranean world... Homer [in fact] never considered that the spiritual power of the soul is increased, once the latter has been relieved… from earthly bonds. On the contrary, he thinks that [the soul], when defeated by death, falls into a situation of unspeakable atonia.” As far as Patrick Leigh Fermor is concerned, he refers in his book Mani. Travels in Southern Peloponnese to a widely accepted popular belief, according to which the dwellers of two Taygetus villages are of Jewish stock and also to the -rather overlooked- Old Testament passage, where is put forward the relationship between Spartans and Jews: Ἄρειος βασιλεὺς Σπαρτιατῶν Ὀνίᾳ ἱερεῖ μεγάλῳ χαίρειν. εὑρέθη ἐν γραφῇ περί τε τῶν Σπαρτιατῶν καὶ Ἰουδαίων, ὅτι εἰσὶν ἀδελφοὶ καὶ ὅτι εἰσὶν ἐκ γένους Ἀβραάμ. It is beyond any doubt, of course, that explanations of the above biblical passage have been contradictory so far. As a result there is not yet a universally accepted conclusion. But it is doubtless that in the Old Testament there are details of the Spartans’ everyday life and that when Saint Nikon (930[?]-1000[?]) arrived in the Southern Peloponnese, there was in Sparta a considerable Jewish community. This community was annihilated thanks to his sermons – and its remnants took shelter on the slopes of Mount Taygetus – and perhaps in the Mani, too.
Conclusion
Several presumptions on the common origin of Greeks and Hebrew/Jews were put forward in the past; and recently such ‘allusions’ have become clear. But no evidence of the common origin of the two peoples has been produced so far. As a result, identification of the two peoples is most unlikely. On the other hand, one must accept a great deal of Semitic and Hebrew/Jewish influence on the Greeks, which is already apparent in the Homeric Poems. The following -also overlooked- passage of Diodorus of Sicily is interesting from this point of view: Now that we are about to record the war against the Jews, we consider it appropriate to give first a summary account of the establishment of the nation, from its origins, and of the practices observed among them. When in ancient times a pestilence arose in Egypt, the common people ascribed their troubles to the workings of a divine agency; for indeed with many strangers of all sorts dwelling in their midst and practising different rites of religion and sacrifice, their own traditional observances in honour of the gods had fallen into disuse. Hence the natives of the land surmised that unless they removed the foreigners, their troubles would never be resolved. At once, therefore, the aliens were driven from the country, and the most outstanding and active among them banded together and, as some say, were cast ashore in Greece and certain other regions; their leaders were notable men, chief among them being Danaüs and Cadmus. Having all this in mind, moreover, one is led to conclude that Slavic invasions and settlement in the Peloponnese during the Middle Ages ‘constituted’ a conditio sine qua non for the recovery by the Greeks of their initial racial character. And this should be taken into consideration in the research.
References
a) Sources
Ἡ Παλαιὰ Διαθήκη κατὰ τοὺς ἑβδομήκοντα. 1939. Athens: Ἀδελφότης Θεολόγων «Ἡ Ζωή». The Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version. 1989. New York: World Bible Publishers. The Odyssey, with an English translation by A. T. Murray, 1953. London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press.
And also:
An Extract out of Josephus’ Discourse to the Greeks concerning Hades, translated by William Whiston. Diodorus of Sicily, with an English translation by Francis R. Walton, 1967. London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press. Plato, Phaedo, with an English translation by H. N. Fowler, 1914. London: Heinemann; New York: The Macmillan Co. Vyasa Βh., Mahabharata. Translated into Greek by K. Stefanidis, 1963, Athens: Νέα Ἐποχή.
b) Secondary sources
Fermor, P. L. 1973. Μάνη. Translated into Greek by Tzannis Tzannetakis, Athens: Κέδρος. Kitromilides, P. 19982. «Ἰδεολογικὰ ρεύματα καὶ πολιτικὰ αἰτήματα: προοπτικὲς ἀπὸ τὸν ἑλληνικὸ 19ο αἰώνα», in Ὄψεις τῆς ἑλληνικῆς κοινωνίας τοῦ 19ου αἰώνα. Edited by D. G. Tsaoussis. Athens: Ι. Δ. Κολλάρος, 19982. Loukas, I. 1991. Ἱστορία τῆς ἑλληνικῆς Μασονίας καὶ ἑλληνικὴ ἱστορία. Athens: Παπαζήσης, 1991 Macalister R. A. S. 1925(?). A century of excavation in Palestine. London: The Religious Trust Society. Paparrigopoulos, C. 1969. Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους, book I. Athens: Γαλαξίας.
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