Citation:
Abstract:
In June 1946 George Seferis, the eminent Greek poet who was going
to become the Nobel-laureate patriarch of Greek modernist poetry by
1963, witnessed the re-excavation of the statues and vases until then
hidden in the vaults of the National Museum in Athens in order to
prevent their damage, or looting, by the Germans during the occupation.
As he observes the bronze statue of Zeus, a fifth-century BC work that
is still considered one of the masterpieces in the Museum’s collection
and of Greek art at large, the poet fantasizes the god’s lovemaking with
a woman whom Seferis himself “would love”, as he unashamedly informs
us in his diary from that day. In the paper, I use the concept of
homosociality in order to explore the ways in which Seferis and many
of his contemporaries view classical antiquity and proceed to deploy it
as a bio-political tool in order to claim a centralized role in Greek
intellectual and political life. To this end, I re-visit Seferis’s two chief
“archaeological” poems –The King of Asine and Engomi – in an effort
to investigate the ways in which his sensory archaeologies manifest
themselves.