Ancient Models for a New State: Hellenic Antiquity and Political Legitimacy in the Metaxas Regime (1936–1941)

August 4, 1936, was a turning point in Greek history. On that day, former military officer and royalist politician Ioannis Metaxas, who had been appointed Prime Minister by George II a few months earlier, dissolved the parliament and suspended key provisions of the constitution. The dictatorship that Metaxas established was thereafter called the 4 August regime or, to mark the regime’s break with the immediate democratic past and to advertise its agenda of “national regeneration”, the New State. Yet, despite its self-proclaimed novelty, the regime nurtured a profound relation with antiquity, at times to the point of identification.

Although, at first glance, a twentieth-century dictatorship may strike the observer as having little to do with antiquity, the ancient past has often served modern states as a powerful source of legitimacy. Much like other regimes of the interwar era with similar ideological orientations, the Metaxas dictatorship has actually been frequently linked with antiquity in the literature. Unlike other regimes, however, this link remains rather an axiom for the Greek case without having become the object of focused and systematic study thus far.

In order to examine the ways Hellenic antiquity was mobilized by the regime for legitimation purposes, my research project employs an interdisciplinary approach relying on methodologies and conceptual tools developed in various fields. These include Classical Reception Studies (e.g. Hardwick, 2003; Fleming, 2006; Martindale, 2007; Hardwick and Stray, 2011), Critical Archaeology (e.g. Hamilakis, 2002, 2007), and particularly Fascism Studies, with a focus on fascist instrumentalizations of antiquity (e.g. Nelis, 2011; Arthurs, 2012; Chapoutot, 2016; Roche, 2019) and transnational fascism (e.g. Costa Pinto and Kallis, 2014; Kallis, 2021).

The source material for the study comprises official regime publications; articles by pro-regime journalists and intellectuals published in newspapers, magazines, and journals; personal papers of regime functionaries; cultural productions and related surviving ephemera; National Youth Organization published and archival materials; archaeological documents; as well as clandestine pamphlets and newspapers.

The project seeks to address the following research questions, which remain underexplored: (1) How did the regime deploy different ancient models? Was this for overlapping or for complementary political purposes? (2) How did intellectuals co-shape the regime’s reception of antiquity? What role did they play in mediating between the regime and the public? (3) What were the ruptures and continuities with earlier antiquity-related Greek discourses and practices? (4) How did the transnational context of the “Fascist Era” affect the regime’s reception of Hellenic antiquity? (5) How did opposition groups and critical intellectuals approach the regime’s appropriation of ancient models? This line of inquiry is particularly fruitful, as it proves the dispersion and significance of these discourses during the regime, as well as their synchronic deconstruction by a portion of the population. Oppositional contestation opens a rare window onto the synchronic reception of the regime’s construction of antiquity in a tightly managed discursive space.

The research project deals with the four most important ancient models deployed by the New State, namely the Minoan civilization, classical Athens and Sparta, as well as the kingdom of Macedon. Alongside the long-used paradigm of Athens, which was reworked to shed its democratic credentials, less used models –or even models whose Hellenicity was disputed– were mobilized to endow the regime and its authoritarian political innovations with a legitimizing genealogy.

The first major ancient model in chronological terms was Minoan Crete. A recurring theme in the presentation of the Minoan civilization within the New State was its designation as the first European civilization. Following Arthur Evans’s Eurocentric framing that served to undercut earlier discoveries in West Asia and North Africa (Schoep, 2018), this allowed Greece to reclaim its position as a place of origins and the cradle of Western civilization. The Minoans were portrayed as a strong but artistic people, upholding the regime’s own defensive and cultural nationalism. The centrality of culture in New State ideology was encapsulated in the principal ideological construct of the regime, the Third Hellenic Civilization. This was a new Greek civilization that would selectively appropriate and adapt elements from the previous two Hellenic Civilizations of antiquity (including the Minoan) and the Middle Ages (Byzantium) while synchronizing Greece with the demands of modern times (Stamos, 2022). Crucially, the regime adopted the Minoan double-axe (labrys) as the emblem of its National Youth Organization. The latter was its main fascist experiment, a novel institution inspired by the youth organizing innovations of interwar ultranationalist movements and regimes, which had been entrusted with the mission to create the Third Hellenic Civilization (Petridis, 2000).

The prominent position of ancient Athens in both the modern Greek and the Western imaginary meant that the regime could not ignore this model. Its long-standing connection with modern Greek identity and its even longer international appeal were associated with its cultural achievements. The New State’s emphasis on culture as a means of legitimacy and its overarching agenda of a Third Hellenic Civilization was a further reason to appropriate the Athenian model. However, the dictatorship constricted the reception of Athens, dislodging its connections with democracy and linking its acme with Periclean authority. While promoting this authoritarian reading of ancient Athens at home, it utilized its legacy abroad as a benchmark of modern Greece’s civilizational status.

While classical Athens had long occupied this prominent position, Sparta was a rich but largely untapped source for Greek nationalism when the New State came along. It quickly became the most important model for the regime. It was deployed for youth organizing, legitimizing the enlistment of the majority of the country’s children and young adults into EON as an autochthonous practice hailing from ancient Sparta rather than an imitation of foreign institutions. It provided cover for the dissemination of militarism and discipline not just among the youth but throughout the population. In general, Sparta was a model that had a particular bearing on the regime’s biopolitical agenda, focusing on athletics, hygiene, and bodily regimentation. The model’s relevance remained high in wartime, as self-sacrifice and heroic death were extolled by revoking the historical example of Thermopylae.

Ancient Macedonia was mainly mobilized as an exemplar of national unity. Its strong leadership was eulogized and presented as the cause for the unification of the Greeks and their submission to central authority. Aside from the first case of Hellenic unity and centralized statehood in a millennia-old line that stretched all the way to the New State, the Kingdom of Macedon was associated with the regime’s goal for cultural influence beyond the bounds of Greece. In this view, Macedonia had exported the First Hellenic Civilization to the East and played a major role in disseminating it across space and time, as well as in “civilizing” other parts of humanity. It was thus an inspiring precedent for the mission civilisatrice and the global radiance the Third Hellenic Civilization was intended for.

In some cases, the regime’s appropriation of antiquity also had clear regional motives. Macedonia and Crete had become parts of the Greek state approximately two decades before the August 1936 coup. This was a very short and turbulent period in which integration and assimilation had not been completed. Furthermore, both regions, located at the northern and southern borders of the country respectively, were problematic for central authority. Macedonia was home to considerable ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities, as well as a contested territory which aroused fears of secession or annexation from neighboring states. Crete was a liberal bastion with a long tradition of guerrilla warfare and rebelliousness – and it was indeed the only place where a revolt, though anemic and poorly organized, erupted against the regime in 1938. The unprecedented foregrounding of Macedonia’s and Crete’s ancient heritage in official ideology was a way to integrate them more fully in the national imaginary while forming a special bond between the regime and their inhabitants.

Since the past was mobilized to satisfy the needs of the present, its selective deployment was dynamic and shifted with time. As WWII erupted in Europe and eventually entangled Greece itself, the use of the ancient past for the regime’s agenda of cultural regeneration at home and cultural hegemony abroad did not disappear but was definitely overshadowed by the justification of intensified militarization and the idealization of self-sacrifice and heroic death. In this context, not only the model of Sparta but also that of Macedonia was used to familiarize the youth with active military duty and warfare (Spanaki, 2011).

For the leading expert in Fascism Studies, Roger Griffin, fascist temporalities can be understood as responses to the fluidity and lack of transcendence of modernity, which he sees as possessing, already in the early 20th century, the liquefying characteristics of “liquid modernity” theorized by Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman, 2000; Griffin, 2015). It is little wonder that in conditions of deep and prolonged instability, where old certainties are collapsing and all meaning appears contested, there arise aggressive attempts to anchor collective life in an idealized past, not necessarily as an endeavor of return but as a way to infuse the present with types of meaning that appear eternal. In this context, the past is not a goal in and of itself but a means for reentering the plane of signification where eternity resides: the myth (Barthes, 2012). In other words, ultranationalist appropriations of antiquity are intended to reestablish the “national mythscape” (Bell, 2003). This is a potent legitimizing strategy that aligns with the Gramscian notion of hegemony. And it is precisely what the New State attempted to do in its engagement with the ancient models of Minoan Crete, Athens, Sparta, and Macedonia.

More broadly, the question of legitimacy can be seen as two-pronged, with a domestic and an international aspect. At home, these ancient models assisted in the formation of a new dominant ideology (or national mythology). They also furnished the conceptual framing of the regime’s biopolitical agenda, most conspicuously its fascist experiments pertaining to youth organization, bodily discipline, and its “anthropological revolution” that would create a New Greek (Wo)Man grounded in national tradition and instinctively geared towards self-sacrifice. Abroad, the models helped secure diplomatic and symbolic recognition from the “civilized”/Western world. In both cases, antiquity was paradoxically coupled with modernity: it was the worthy custodianship of Hellenic (or retroactively Hellenized) antiquity in the present and the supposed fertilization of novel sociopolitical arrangements with selectively reactivated aspects of antiquity that was expected to prove both to domestic and international audiences that the New State was a modern state that was successfully steering Greece towards (an alternative) modernity.

The CHS Early Career Fellowship has been of immense benefit to this project, offering access to a plethora of resources along with an inspiring academic environment. I would like to express my gratitude to CHS and Harvard library staff for their assistance, as well as to fellow CHS researchers for our stimulating conversations. Now that the Fellowship has concluded, I hope to continue a fruitful engagement with this research area, building upon the material and discussions I had the privilege of accessing over the academic year 2025-2026.