Korais

Adamantios Korais was born in Smyrna in 1748 to Chian parents, and he considered himself a Chian all his life, which is the important thing about him for the purposes of this book and very nearly the least important thing about him generally.

His father was a merchant. The boy was educated at the Evangelical School in Smyrna, learned Latin from the chaplain of the Dutch consulate, and was sent to Amsterdam in his twenties to represent the family business. He was a catastrophic businessman. What he did in Amsterdam instead was read, learn Dutch and French, encounter the European Enlightenment at first hand, and decide that commerce was not going to be his life.

He went to Montpellier to study medicine, took his degree, and in 1788 moved to Paris — arriving, as it happened, in time to watch the French Revolution from the inside. He stayed for the rest of his life, over forty years, living in genteel poverty on a small income and the proceeds of his scholarship, and he became the most consequential Greek intellectual of the modern era.

What he actually did was edit texts. Beginning in 1805 he produced the Hellenic Library, a long series of editions of the Greek classics — Isocrates, Plutarch, Strabo, Aristotle, Longus, the Homeric poems — funded by wealthy Greek merchants of the diaspora, and prefaced with essays addressed to modern Greeks. The scholarship was serious and internationally respected. The prefaces were the point. In them, over decades, Korais made an argument that changed the way a nation understood itself.

The argument, in outline, was this. The modern Greeks are the direct heirs of the ancient Greeks. They have been degraded by centuries of subjection, and their degradation is real and should not be denied or excused. But it is not innate; it is a product of ignorance, and ignorance is curable. What is required, therefore, before anything else, is education — the recovery by the Greeks of their own inheritance, and their reconnection with the European civilisation that their ancestors had founded and that had gone on developing without them. Only an educated people can be free, and only an educated people can stay free once they are. Political liberation attempted by an ignorant population would produce not a nation but a mob, and then a tyranny.

This made him, in the years before 1821, a cautious figure — much criticised by more impatient men — and it made him, after 1821, the indispensable one, because the arguments he had spent thirty years making were the arguments on which the new state built its schools, its language, and its idea of itself.

He also took a position on the language question that shaped Greek public life for a hundred and fifty years. Spoken Greek had drifted far from the ancient tongue; some purists wanted to write in something as close to Attic as possible, while others argued for the vernacular as it was actually spoken. Korais proposed a middle way: a "purified" Greek, katharevousa, which would take the living language and correct it toward the ancient, removing foreign loanwords and restoring older forms, on the theory that a people should be gradually raised toward its inheritance rather than either abandoning it or being forced into a costume. Katharevousa became the official language of the Greek state, and the resulting quarrel — the glossiko zitima, the language question — ran, sometimes violently, until the 1970s.

He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to him about constitutions with the enthusiasm of a man who enjoyed the subject. He wrote fierce pamphlets. He watched from Paris as the revolution came and went wrong and was rescued, and he died in 1833, the year the new kingdom got its king, at the age of eighty-five.

He left his library to Chios. It is there still, and it forms the core of the Korais Library in Chios town, which is one of the largest libraries in Greece — an institution sustained for two centuries by exactly the pattern this book keeps returning to: money made abroad, sent home, and spent on the island.