ABSTRACT
At first sight, the creation of an independent Greek state, during the 1830s, seemed to be an episode of no special significance in the long history of Hellenism. Actually the modern Greek state, far from embodying the eternal triumph of Hellenism, can be seen as a threat to its spirit. The Greeks and Romans based their power and the influence of their civilisation on two opposing models of political and territorial organisation. For the Greeks, the poleis and their colonies were independent entities which were often in conflict, continually forming alliances and counter-alliances, linked to each other historically and economically. In the middle of the ‘barbarian’ universe, the stars of the Greek cities thus formed their own galaxy. In the Roman Empire, in contrast, a single centre dominated the whole of the space; from an administrative point of view, it was the trunk which was then subdivided into branches and sub-branches, regions and provinces. This form of monocentric and hierarchical organisation, based on a model reminiscent of a tree, leads to call it dendritic. As a result, the opposition between Rome and Constantinople was not an opposition between two competing centres but between two opposing visions of the organisation of the Church. The division of the Hellenic diaspora between the East and the West during the first centuries of the Ottoman Empire prepared it for its mission as an intermediary between the two worlds. The two main elements of Hellenic galactic organisation were their community organisation and a feeling of cultural superiority in relation to the surrounding peoples. The centralism of the Greek state destroyed the first of these. The introduction of a concept of the state based on territory, and thus contrary to the ethnocultural idea of the nation, eradicated Hellenistic distinctiveness within the territory of the state at the end of the twentieth century, the two faces of Hellenism continue their parallel lives, but the signs of aging are becoming more and more obvious. The only remaining vestige of the old Greek system of galactic organisation is the Greek diaspora.
