ABSTRACT

As philosophers from Locke onwards have argued, a sense of historical continuity-whether sustained by memory, belief, imagination, or narrative-is a crucial factor in the establishment of personal identity. A similar insistence on the diachronic preservation of key features also sustains collective identity claims. Proponents of modern Greek national identity, for example, have built up a narrative of cultural continuity stretching back to ancient Greece. Most recently, there have been strategic attempts to convince the international community to refer to the country as Hellas,2 thereby clarifying and re-asserting the claim to descent from the ancients.