ABSTRACT
This essay seeks to chart the various uses of an ancient stereotype about Greeks as eloquent fraudsters in early modern Europe. Encapsulated in the Virgilian figure of the mendacious Sinon, this Latin trope re-emerged in Renaissance literature in order to illustrate the dangers of rhetoric. As scholarly interest in the study of Greek texts revived, genius was transformed into an appreciation of the subtlety inextricably linked to the use of the Greek language in the arts or theology. The glorified linguistic ingenuity of classical Greeks highlighted the predicament of their descendants, who were being weighted by standards of yore and found wanting in culture and mores. Their morally questionable behaviour came to be reappraised as an inherent feature of Greek character in Enlightenment encyclopaedias, histories and analyses of contemporary events. Conversely, as a positive feature of both ancient and modern Greeks, the thesis on Greek ingenuity in words and deeds was incorporated in Philhellenic propaganda and, eventually, Greek national ideology.
