"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "2 OLYMPICS or Imaginary Greece" "On July 21st 1936 the Olympic flame was lit and the Greece was where 14 year old schoolboy Cornelius Castoriadis lived." "He was born in Constantinople like Elias Cazan, then 27 years old and just arrived in Hollywood." "Vasilis Vassilikos two years older and precacious saw the flame cross Thessaloniki on its way to open the games in Berlin, just 38 months prior to the start of Second World War." "Just as in the ancient times Greeks from all around the Mediteranean gathered at Olympia, visitors from all around the world would gather in Berlin." "Many would come from France, where Michel Serres was 6 reading Jules Verne, where George Steiner was 7 and watched through his window as right-wing groups paraded on their way to the left bank, where Jean-Pierre Vernen waited them for a good punch up," "other would come from the States, from Japan." "Others from England where Oswyn Murray was just minus one year old." "And the flame would wander over that now forgotten Europe, made out of imaginary kingdoms and fragile republics." "It would brush the border of Romania, where 14 years earlier the Greek Iannis Xenakis was born and where 21 years later a young lady would appear Manuela Smith." "My relationship with antiquity started at school." "At first I hated it, because it was imposed on me." "Eventually I began to study alone and to see things for myself." "I tried to discover the secret within this language which when no longer imposed assumed an incredible beauty." "School made us proud to be Greek but also put us off certain things." "The way they taught Greek history made us lose all interest in it." "There was a feeling of mystery of secrecy and beauty." "It was fascinating." "When I started making films it all came back to me." "When I made my first film" "I discovered that it drew on Agamemnon's return" "his faithful wife and her lover." "But it wasn't intentional." "I think there are two attitudes." "The enlightened philhellen is one." "It makes me...uncomfortable because of its blindness." "They tend to dismiss modern Greece as being unimportant or even anecdotal." "They prefer to ignore it." "So they dream of Ancient Greece through us - imaginary descendants o its culture," "seeing modern Greeks as its upholders whereas in reality we may not be as we're of such mixed origins..." "Being Greek, I'm not in position to say..." "I think these strange beasts are so in love with Ancient Greece that they ignore the modern Greeks and see us as part of a myth." "It annoys me and makes me want to kick them, to destroy this imaginary edifice." "It's people that count, above all." "It's the living who matter." "So the living whether imaginary or real must be guardians of something." "Every European era has formed its own image of Greece." "Made up from its own imagination." "There's so much self-projection and misinterpretation" "There's so much self-projection" "Christianity was the first example." "It started with the Church Fathers who implied that Greek philosophy paved the way for Christ's message." "Christianity.." "Christianity needed a code." "A written code, not a spoken one." "They used the written Greek code known as Kalos Airethein there were times when Christians were persecuted." "They were even accused of eating children, etc." "So the Christian Apologists drew on the Greek texts." "One Apologist, Justin Martyr," " in the second century AD - ...even alleged (that is the Kalos Airethein)" " Would you translate please?" ""All that is worthy in the world comes from the Christians."" "Plato was a Christian Socrates, Heraclitus, and Parmenides were all Christians in a sense" "It must be said that the West has done marvellous work on Greece." "We would know nothing without it." "The monks on Mount Athos are still withholding documents." "We don't even know what's in them." "Maybe there are texts lost to us." "There are also misrepresentations." "And it is blatantly obvious" "that eminent philologists cling to the imagination of the time." "The word Polis is one distortion." "Cite in French...and in English" "...but the Germans..." " masters of Greek philology - translate Polis as Der Staat." "The Germans discovered us" "in the 18th or 19th century and imposed their own views" "their ideas of Tragedy and Comedy." "Yet they never came here too afraid of our germs." "They made it all up in their labs." "I have a copy of an SS Jugend Journal dated July or September 1939." "The Nazis also played this game." "They tried to present themselves as upholders of the Greek essence." "A huge hoax." "Take Pericles' famous epitaph to the dead warriors of the first year of the war." "If you replace Polis with State it becomes a fascist discourse." "Pericles said that young men died for the good of the Polis" "by which he meant the Athenians their fellow citizens." "In German they died for the State." "A Greek could say to us" "'You don't understand anything we had our own tradition" "but you have transformed it into European metaphysics since the 18th century - the revolution of German idealism.'" "A Greek could also say:" "'You reintroduced into our past all this conflict, murkiness unhealthy sophistry and dialogue" "so that The Great Dialectic which derives from Hegel and Marx doesn't come to us, Greeks.'" "So, paradoxically, maybe it was us who imposed on Greek mythology our modern European metaphysics" "and we're stuck with it." "I thik that the imaginary Greece is part of our European heritage." "For all Western countries" "Greece has a kind of imagery" "a phantasm, something that has haunted many centuries, many thinkers many ideas and political trends." "For Germany particularly" "I think that the model of Greece played a large role in its history." "Because they saw in Greece a model of political unity" "which for them didn't exist." "This liberation movement was inspired by the Greeks and especially by Greek art." "Not so much by their literature as plastic arts and painting." "But the fascinating thing is that the suggested identity between the model to be emulated" " that is the Greek model - and Germany this model was based on some innate relationship." "The topic of conversation in Paris in the media and on the streets is the argument about Heidegger." "He effectively said that Germany alone has a direct rapport with Greece especially pre-Socratic Greece." "A rapport with the dawn of Greece and the pre-Nietzsche times." "You tend to say: 'That's stupid No one has privileged access'." "Every language, every nation has translated the Greeks their myths and philosophers, so his theory is invalid." "I would like to say to this sinister and great man that this chauvinistic rubbish is politically dangerous." "That would be the rational answer." "But having answered that, I say:" "'But...but...but!" "' with a rising uncertainty." "German philosophy since Herder and Hegel since Schelling and Fichte through Nietzsche and Heidegger has had a kind of affinity" "with the substance of Greek myth with the character of the sophists and with their internal struggles." "That is part of the German tragedy." "You know the famous English book by Miss Butler 50 years ago about the grip of the Greek dream its tyranny over the German soul." "And remember the saying:" "'A rusty memory is false nostalgia'." "But nevertheless, there's no doubt that two great European poets could have been Pindar's peers his equals in sensitivity and in their views on poetry." "They were Holderlin and Rilke." "The fascinating thing about Greece was the opportunity to develop a new faith" "even a new religion inspired by Ancient Greek religion." "A book was published in 1935 by an English expert on Germany Miss Eliza Butler." "The book was titled 'The Tyranny of Greece over Germany'" "This book explained" "that what had been most detrimental to German philosophical progress was the faith in imaginary Greece." "All the German metaphysics, all German philosophy, even the criticism of idealism as was the case with Nietzsche" "or even the relentless criticism of all languages, logic and grammar, as was the case with Heidegger" "all this was a result of the faith in the Ancient Greeks." "It's not well known in France but at the turn of the century" "some intellectuals used to gather in Munich and elsewhere to reinvent Dionysian rituals along with Nietzsche and Holderlin." "This sort of belief became a neopaganism." "At first it paved the way for a movement of irrational ideas which eventually led to Nazism." "When the Nazis took power in 1933 the German poet Gottfried Benn" "was already greatly inspired by Greek and Roman traditions." "He wrote a sort of charter for pro-Nazi intellectuals called The Dorian World" "in which he depicted Dorian Greece that is, the Spartan state, as the future Nazi Germany." "Apollo was wrongly presented as the ultimate Dorian God" "but also as the god of the Nazis." "In 776 BC a man named Koroibos won a race in the first Olympic games." "This was the first recorded date in Europe." "He would be no much than Ben Johnson but European history begins with Koroibos." "The games of 1936 were a meeting of imaginary Greeces, after all didn't Cooper Turn say 'Sport is war reduced of its virtues'." "This was extreme example." "But the fact remains that Greece, or at least the idea of Greece, has been used to fuel the spirit of totalitarism and it still does now and then." "All the more need then to look for that Greek word which is, theoretically, the safest antidote to totalitarism, the word - democracy."