About the event

The Greek Revolution of 1821 fired the European imagination. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, it was also a test of political conscience. Written in 1821 and published in 1822, Hellas is not a decorative exercise in Hellenism. It is a dramatic poem aimed at its own moment, an attempt to enlarge moral imagination, to persuade, to warn, and to hope. It can also be read as a radical work, sceptical about easy Philhellenism and more invested in social change than in nationalism. This programme invites a general audience into that world and then asks what remains alive in it now.

Graham Henderson begins with a short scene-setting talk for non-experts. Rather than biography, he sketches Shelley as a political animal, explaining the sources of his radicalism and why he continues to attract modern left-wing readers. He also touches on the story of Shelley’s death and cremation, and on the way that moment helped to reshape Byron’s intentions towards Greece.

Roderick Beaton then offers the historical and intellectual frame. He situates Philhellenism in the revolutionary decade, clarifies how Byron’s public role differed from Shelley’s, and shows how Hellas sits inside the political and literary arguments of 1821.

Orpheas Apergis, poet and modern Greek translator of Hellas, turns to the poem from the inside. I am very taken with the line of argument he has proposed: that Hellas is best approached as a radical poem rather than merely a Philhellenic one, and that Shelley emerges as a sceptical Philhellene, more invested in social change than in national liberation, nation-building, or nationalism. He reflects on what changes when Shelley’s rhetoric and music are carried into modern Greek, and on how the poem’s afterlife in Greece speaks to cultural memory today. The evening ends with a short bilingual reading in Greek and English.

About the speakers

Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London and Chairman of the British School at Athens. He is one of the leading historians of modern Greece writing in English, with a career devoted to the interplay of literature, politics, and national identity. He is the author of Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (2019), which received the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, and The Greeks: A Global History (2021). He is also the author of Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (2013), the definitive account of Byron’s involvement in the Greek struggle. His chapter “Re-imagining Greek Antiquity in 1821: Shelley’s Hellas in its Literary and Political Context”, in Dimitris Tziovas (ed.), Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture (Oxford University Press), remains a landmark account of the poem’s literary and political setting.