2017
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Maciej Junkiert, « Polish Reflections: The Reception of the Defeat of Athens in the Works of Gottfried Ernst Groddeck and Joachim Lelewel », Ktèma (documents), ID : 10.3406/ktema.2017.1519
This article describes how the Polish intellectuals G. E. Groddeck (1763– 1825) and Joachim Lelewel (1786– 1861) referenced and analysed events connected with the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. It aims to show how treatments of ancient Athens changed after 1795, when the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to be an independent country and disappeared from the map of Europe. This transition resulted in the promotion of Greek history as a model for Poland’s modern national identity, but only in the period after Poland had already been defeated. The defeat of Athens was therefore a topic of great interest for Polish scholarship, and scholars such as Groddeck and Lelewel disagreed fundamentally about its significance for Poland in this situation.