Modern Greek Heraldic Mottoes A Revival of Classical or Classicizing Latin Language and Style (original) (raw)

2021, Medioevo greco Rivista di storia e filologia bizantina 21 (2021)

I. Deligiannis, N. Tompros, «Modern Greek Heraldic Mottoes: A Revival of Classical or Classicizing Latin Language and Style», Medioevo greco Rivista di storia e filologia bizantina 21 (2021), p. 313-335, 531. This study examines the heraldic mottoes (forty in number, originating from more than 1.220 coats of arms) composed in Latin and mostly owned by Greek families from 1204 to 1864 in territories formerly having belonged to the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires (Athens, Peloponnesus, Chius, Naxos, Crete, Cyprus, Constantinople, Trebizond), as well as the Ionian Islands (Corfu, Zakynthos, Cephalonia). Their analysis shows that most of them appear to have a Classical provenance (in the form of excerpts from classical authors and texts, including Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Vergil, Plautus, Juvenal, etc.), while some derive from ecclesiastical and/or Christian texts and authors (Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, the Psalms, etc.), some others can be traced to sources contemporary or chronologically closer to the families they owned them (Marcantonio Colonna, Miklos Zrinyi, Paolo Sarpi), whereas a few are per se compositions imitating the language and style of classical Latin. This intentional revival of classical or classicizing Latin served as a premeditated mechanism and method of the mottoes’ owners to identify themselves as members of an upper social and intellectual class, especially in areas where Venice or other western rulers had influenced the cultural and intellectual world of their subjects; it may also have been the result of the movement of archaeolatry under the influence of Renaissance classicism.