What can we say about Hellenism and Empire? Not very much, to judge by the attention given to the subject in contemporary scholarship. Although the works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and others have had some influence on classical studies in the past two decades, the implications of their writings for the study of antiquity in general and Hellenism in particular have not been well appreciated. While some of their claims, and this is especially true of Edward Said, have been adopted in broad terms or as vague generalities by teachers and scholars of antiquity, few classicists or Hellenists have directly engaged this body of work with an eye to the shaping of their discipline. Thus, it is surprising that, despite the recent increased interest in the history of classical scholarship, relatively little consideration has been given to colonial and postcolonial studies, fields which have dealt with the politics of knowledge. Any account of Hellenism and of the reception of the Hellenic past in the modern period remains substantially incomplete without an understanding of European colonialism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In this essay, I would like to offer some reflections on Said’s work and examine its pertinence for the history of Hellenism. We shall explore the challenges posed by his writings and ask where these might contribute to a revaluation of the Greek past and to the development of the discursive practices that have surrounded it in the last two hundred years. As we shall see, classical scholarship’s evasion of colonialism has far-reaching implications for the understanding of Hellenism today. While Said’s work has been used and explored by several scholars of ancient Greece, scholars frequently appear to mention his name only then to forget his larger claims and to practise unchanged their scrutiny of antiquity, as if invoking Orientalism were a sufficient gesture in itself or as if the context of modern European colonialism were irrelevant.
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