The name of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer is not widely known, and I have no wish to promote it from obscurity. Yet some resonance lingers in academic circles. Fallmerayer was the Austrian scholar who in the 1830s published his theory that the demographic composition of Greece underwent substantial ethnic change during the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. On the basis of certain Byzantine chronicles, and his studies of comparative philology, Fallmerayer argued that Slavs and Albanians had effectively overtaken not only the northerly regions of Greece, but also the entire Peloponnese and parts of Attica too. His analysis was stark, and irresistibly quotable: “not the slightest drop of undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.”

Aside from its racial fixation—at the time not controversial as such—Fallmerayer’s manifesto was calculated to cause offense. In particular it would offend King Ludwig of Bavaria, who was poised to install (in 1832) his second son, Otto, as the first monarch of the newly established nation-state named “Hellas”—land of the “Hellenes.” More generally, it tilted at all those who supported the cause of Greek independence in the belief that some right to political self-determination was an overdue inheritance from classical Athens. According to this sentiment, the constitutions of Britain, France, the United States, Bavaria, and elsewhere ultimately owed their existence to that classical model: why then should it be denied to the natural descendants of Pericles and Demosthenes?