About us - Mind The Greeks

Mission Statement

A living archive of thought, language, and imagination.

Founder's Note

Aspiring to fulfill a cultural and, ultimately, a national mission.

Endorsements

A dialogue that reaches all the way to us.

A historical initiative

In the summer of 1991, when KAKTOS Publications launched the collection of Ancient Greek Literature entitled “The Greeks,” our ambition was to offer a body of work that could be read by the broader public and that would finally break through the barrier of distance separating modern Greeks from their classical heritage.

At the time, we argued that this distance was mainly the result of the way Ancient Greek was taught in secondary and higher education, of our barren effort to seek self-validation by proving our worth independently from antiquity, and of the translations then in circulation, most of which presented ancient discourse either as something obsolete and dry, or, at best, as a subject reserved for a small circle of specialists.

These and other factors, we maintained, had kept the classical Greek authors remote from modern readers, preventing them from becoming beloved reading for all Greeks, even to the same extent that this had happened with many foreign authors – although, in truth, the Greek classics should have mattered far more: one of the principal axes meant to guide our intellectual life, to nourish the way all of us think, and to draw Greek youth into the ideals of a tradition embraced by the whole world and upon which what we call democracy and civilization itself was founded.

Thus, in the summer of 1991, the KAKTOS initiative began, with the plan to publish all the works of Ancient Greek literature , not only those well-known -insofar as they were known- from schools and earlier translations, but also, and above all, the texts that had never reached the general reader, the authors whose very names we had almost forgotten. The aim was to avoid the sense of incompleteness that would arise from the endless re-chewing of what had already been done. But what had been done before? In fact, efforts to present the works of the ancients to the Modern Greek public date back to the first decades of the century now past. If one were to look further back, to the dawn of the modern age that began with the invention of printing, one would see that the publication of Ancient Greek authors was among the highest priorities of the enlightened minds of that era.

Greek classics and early Philhellenism

The foremost Italian printer and publisher of the Renaissance, Aldus Manutius (1450–1515), was the first to conceive the idea of making the Greek and Latin classics accessible to a broad readership.

One could even say that this purpose was what led him into the art of printing itself. From Venice – a hub from which his books could easily circulate throughout Europe – and with the collaboration of Greek and Italian scholars who undertook the copying, editing, and annotation of Greek manuscripts, and with the financial support of rulers and patrons who grasped the importance of his undertaking, he produced, between 1495 and 1515, forty first editions of the most important philosophers, poets, and orators of Greek antiquity.

Among these stand out his editions of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Homer, and Plato. Among Manutius’s collaborators, alongside circles of distinguished Hellenists, were figures such as Marcus Musurus and Erasmus.

From Venice, which for many years became a center of classical studies, Greek thought spread across Europe – though still accessible only to the few who had access to the manuscripts. Manutius’s editions, outstanding both scientifically and technically, met with enormous success and prompted printers in other countries to copy them and even issue pirated imitations. After his death, his work was continued by his son and grandson, as well as by numerous Greek and Italian printers who appeared in Venice, though none achieved the success of the great printer of the Renaissance.

Ancient Greek classics, reimagined

Three centuries later, the great Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), linking the rebirth of the subjugated Greek people directly to their baptism in the light of classical learning, devoted himself, during his long residence in Paris from 1788 to 1833, to the systematic study of the Greek language and philology. Among the fruits of his work were the seventeen-volume Greek Library and the nine volumes of the Parerga to the Greek Library, containing prefaces and reflections on Greek education and language.

Korais proclaimed his faith in the principle that the teaching of Ancient Greek to the young must be carried out through books written in a clear and simple manner, containing the necessary tools for the interpretation of the authors and maintaining a constant connection and parallelism between the ancient and the modern language.

Free Hellenism came to be linked with its ancient past through a peculiar relationship. The tracing of the ethnic roots of modern Greeks back to the most glorious period of Ancient Greece sometimes expressed genuine national self-awareness and at other times took the form of awkward anachronisms. This ambiguity was reinforced by the fact that the direct sources of classical Greek culture and spirit – the ancient texts themselves – never reached the Greek people in a proper way or in their full scope.

This note does not aim to be a historical study and therefore does not attempt an exhaustive account of the fortunes of ancient authors in print and translation. It merely recalls some of the major milestones of that long journey, from which the thread leads to modern times, to the free Greek state, and ultimately to our own day.