nationalism

nationalism

Greece, Archaic and Classical

D. M. Lewis has observed that ‘to say that the Athenians built the Parthenon to worship themselves would be an exaggeration, but not a great one’ (Cambridge Ancient History 52 (1992), 139). Such self-worship would make 5th-cent. bc Athenians into ‘nationalists’ by one modern criterion (cf. E. Gellner, drawing on E. Durkheim: ‘in a nationalistic age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly’: Nations and Nationalism (1983), 56)). But in the strong sense familiar from the history of the 19th-cent. rise of certain European nation-states, nationalism was hardly a feature of, or problem experienced by, the Classical Greek world. City-state particularism (see polis), and the consciousness of the religious and linguistic differences between Dorians and Ionians, are not the same as nationalism. Such feelings are best considered under the heading of [The entire page is 740 words long]

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