Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria

Lecturer: Dimitris Gonis
Entry: FREE

Synopsis

Ancient sources on the Hellenism of the ancient Macedonians are not always clear.  They sometimes paint a picture of people who lived on the fringes of the Greek world, and who were not always considered Hellenes by their southern kin. 

People like Demosthenes called Philip II a ‘barbarian’, while Isocrates referred to him as a man ‘beyond any of the Hellenes’ and a man of the ‘blood of Hellas’.  We have little evidence regarding what Philip exactly thought of himself.  All his actions point to his Hellenic self-identification. However, we do not have the unmistakable declarations we find in Alexander.

Alexander unambiguously self-identifies as a Hellene.  All the sources we have available to us speak of an Alexander who repeatedly affirms his Hellenic roots and intrinsic Hellenism.

This lecture focuses on the self-identification of Alexander the Great as presented in the Hellenistic writings of both Greek and Roman writers.  It also examines Alexander’s self-identification, but also identification by others, in the 3rd century CE folkloric tradition of Pseudo-Callisthenes.

Bio

Dimitri Gonis is a freelance writer and poet as well as a translator of academic articles and one book. For the past seven years he has worked as a sessional lecturer at La Trobe University, where he teaches he teaches a number of subjects: ‘Ethnic and Civil Conflict in Southern Europe and in Cyprus’, ‘Transterritorial Hellenism’ and modern Greek. He has recently completed his PhD which is titled: The Politics of Memory and Nationhood: Neo-Macedonism in Australia.

Sponsors

We'd like to thank the following donors: AIMS (Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies).

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