The Greek word, περίπᾰτος, peripatos, can mean just “walking around”, like for healthy exercise, but over time it came to mean “walking around and talking about stuff.” This gives the “Peripatetic Philosophers” their name.
I’m Chris, a Professor of Classics at Furman University. My wife is Amy, who has been a historian, a lawyer, a botanist, and an expert in Artificial Intelligence. I do one thing; she does many.
In the autumn of 2024, we’re going to walk around Greece and try to learn about stuff. We’ll post stories and essays in this space, and videos as we make them. Please follow along!
We aren’t the first to have this idea. Because I am a teacher, these blog posts are going to be didactic; that’s how I am. But I’ll try not to waste your time.
It is a real shame that, for some reason, people in Europe and America always need to distinguish “Ancient Greece” from “Greece”. The place is still there! Fully inhabited! When you land in Athens, the country name is “Hellas”. There is no moment when “Ancient Greece” turned into “Modern Hellas”.
We could be like Thomas Bruce, the 7th Lord Elgin, who came to Greece during the Treaty of Amiens, in 1802. Despite being a skilled international diplomat, he seemed little interested in the Hellas of the time (which, to be fair, was merely one province of the Ottoman Empire). He loved the Greece of the past, and his love took the form of the (now very controversial) removal of sculptures from the Acropolis of Athens and shipping them back to London.
Or we could be like George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, friend of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and brief boyfriend of the computer-science pioneer Ada Lovelace. As a super famous poet based on his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in 1823 he was recruited by the Greek rebels who planned to wage war agains their Ottoman rulers. Not content to be merely a P.R.-guy, he joined in the fighting, even selling his estate to raise funds. While helping wage a seige at Leopanto, which is now the modern city of Nafpaktos, ancient Ναύπακτος, Byron caught malaria and died. So while Elgin was pillaging ancient Greece, Byron died to create a new, independant Greece.
We probably can’t be like Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, who joined the Special Operations Executive, formed in 1940, and was the British liason to the Greek underground fighting the Nazis in World War 2. Hammond became the world’s greatest scholar of ancient Greek history. The fact that he crept the length and breadth of mainland Greece and Crete, at night, often under fire, probably helped.
We will not be creeping at night, and ideally not under fire, but this project is based on the assumption that the way to learn a place, past and present, its history and natural surroundings, is to walk around. So, Peripatos. We invite you to follow along, as you have time, and we hope you may find our stuff amusing or even informative.
Peripatos: Travels with Amy and Chris Blackwell © 2024 by Amy G. Hackney Blackwell & Christopher W. Blackwell is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.