ABSTRACT
We Greeks today have great difficulty in grasping that the sense of the continuity of the nation, as we encounter it in the general climate or at school, was an invention of the mid-nineteenth century, and that the overwhelming majority of Greek intellectuals who envisioned, and saw the realization of, an independent Greek state felt a cultural and political affinity with the ancient Greeks alone, and considered the entire Byzantine period to be part of the history of the Greeks under foreign subjugation, a mere continuation of Roman rule.
