Mataioponēmata: the politics of failure in translating the Aeneid in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greece

The composition of translations of Classical texts in the nineteenth-century Greek state was a complex issue entwined with politics, ideology, and the cultural identity of the new nation that sought to construct its identity by looking back towards its glorious Classical Greek past. It is, moreover, an issue tied to the so-called ‘language question’, the ardent debate on the type of the national Greek language (archaizing Greek, katharevousa, or demotiki). The intellectual elite of the new nation-state, led by the professoriate of the newly founded Ottonian University and a number of influential Greek intellectuals of the Diaspora tried to acquaint the newly-liberated Greeks with the classical writers of antiquity primarily through education. Since these elites favoured the katharevousa, a conservative construct of the spoken Greek language fashioned as a compromise between Classical Greek and the spoken vernacular of the time, the produced translations of the ancient authors had limited appeal across time, and they never aspired to address an audience beyond academia. Thus, all translations of the Aeneid published in Greece during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were literary failures. They were never meant to be read independently from the original Latin, and, inevitably, were largely forgotten following the death of their authors.