Are Modern Greeks Descended from the Ancient Greeks?

One thing I’ve discovered from reading questions and answers on Quora is that people are bizarrely obsessed with the question of whether modern Greeks are descended from ancient Greeks. It’s a subject that inevitably sparks a great deal of heated debate, with various non-Greek westerners on one side insisting that modern Greeks are not true Greeks at all while Greek people and various others insist that modern Greeks are truly descendants of the ancient Greeks.

The question of whether modern Greeks are truly descendants of the ancient Greeks has a long, sordid history that goes all the way back to the nineteenth century. I have decided to weigh in on this discussion to give some relevant background information, correct some prevailing false assumptions, and, finally, give what I consider to be a sound answer on the matter.

The popular obsession with the ancestry of modern Greeks

First, just to show how widespread the public interest on this subject is, here are just a few of the questions I’ve encountered dealing with this subject on Quora:

• “Are Modern Greeks related to Ancient Greeks?”
• “Is the DNA of modern Greek people similar to that of the ancient Greeks?”
• “How did the ancient Greeks physically look like compared to the modern Greeks?”
• “Are modern Greeks just descendants of the Vlachs?”
• “Are modern Greeks “Romioi” (Romans) or Hellenes?”
• “Why do modern Greeks consider themselves the descendants of the ancient Greeks, although it’s well known that there have been lots of migrations and invasions in Greece since the ancient times?”
• “How mixed are Greeks? With what races have the ancient Greeks mixed? How close are modern Greeks genetically related to ancient Greeks?”

A wide array of answers have already been written to all of these questions. The question “Are Modern Greeks related to Ancient Greeks?” alone already has seventy-two answers as my writing of this. Meanwhile, the question “Is the DNA of modern Greek people similar to that of the ancient Greeks?” already has thirty-five answers. Some of these answers are actually pretty good, but a lot of them are, unfortunately, incorrect—either wholly or in part.

One lamentable fact about this whole discussion is that it is often couched in a lot of pretty blatantly racist terms. You quite often have Greek nationalists on one side often vehemently insisting that they are of “pure Greek descent.” On the other side, you have all sorts of western racists insisting that modern Greeks aren’t descended from the ancient Greeks and therefore aren’t true Greeks, but rather a different race, which is nearly always implied to be inferior.

The origin of the idea that modern Greeks aren’t really Greek

The racist aspect of this debate isn’t too especially surprising, considering that racism has been present in the debate ever since it first began nearly two hundred years ago. The idea that modern Greeks aren’t descended from the ancient Greeks was vigorously promulgated in the nineteenth century by the notoriously racist German writer Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (lived 1790 – 1861).

Fallmerayer claimed that modern Greeks have absolutely no relation to the ancient Greeks and are not really Greeks at all, but rather barbarous mischlings born of miscegenation between various Arvanitic, Vlachic, Slavic, and Turkish peoples. Fallmerayer wrote in volume one of his book Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters, originally published in 1830:

“Das Geschlecht der Hellenen ist in Europa ausgerottet. Schönheit der Körper, Sonnenflug des Geistes, Ebenmaß und Einfalt der Sitte, Kunst, Rennbahn, Stadt, Dorf, Säulenpracht und Tempel, ja sogar der Name ist von der Oberfläche des griechischen Kontinents verschwunden…. auch nicht ein Tropfen echten und ungemischten Hellenenblutes in den Adern der christlichen Bevölkerung des heutigen Griechenlands fließet.”

Here is my own literal English translation of this passage:

“The race of Hellenes has been totally exterminated in Europe. [Their] beauty of the body, brilliance of the spirit, harmony and simplicity of custom, art, competition, city, village, majestic columns and temples, yes even their name is vanished from the face of the Greek continent… Not even a drop of true and unmixed Hellenic blood flows through the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.”

Fallmerayer’s hypothesis that modern Greeks are not descendants of the ancient Greeks was later used by the Nazis during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II to justify atrocities against Greek people while simultaneously praising the ancient Greeks for their achievements.

Fallmerayer is also known for his promotion of the idea that there are two entirely distinct civilizations: a glorious, ever-changing, and forward-looking western civilization best exemplified by the classical Roman Empire and a backwards, superstitious, unchanging, and barbarous eastern civilization best exemplified by the Byzantine Empire. This false idea of there being two distinct civilizations is, unfortunately, still prevalent today.

All these things have contributed to Fallmerayer’s reputation as a Greek-hater par excellence. The Greek writer Nikos Dimou, a prominent progressive known for debunking national myths, wrote that he had been led by the Greek education system to imagine Fallmerayer as a “αιμοσταγή ελληνοφάγο” (aimostayí ellinofágo) which means “a blood-dripping Hellene-eater.”

ABOVE: Photograph taken in around 1860 of the German author Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who is known for promoting the hypothesis that modern Greeks have absolutely no relation to the ancient Greeks

The modern racist obsession with Greek ancestry

Fallmerayer’s ideas have, unfortunately, found fertile ground in the English-speaking world. The eminent British classicist Mary Beard quotes a particularly racist example of a westerner regarding modern Greeks as foreign and un-Greek in her article “Don’t forget your pith helmet!” originally published in August 2005 in the London Review of Books. She writes:

“Is the modern population of Greece the direct descendant of the ancient? Or is it a Slavic newcomer, as J.P. Fallmerayer in the 19th century or Romilly Jenkins in the 20th notoriously had it? The level to which this controversy has occasionally descended can be seen from a marginal comment scrawled by a racist reader in a copy of the first (1966) edition of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece held by the Cambridge University Library. Where Leigh Fermor refers to the modern Greek language as being the ‘undisputed heir of ancient Greek’, the anonymous scribbler has added: ‘Nonsense. It is the barbarous pidgin of the Albano-Slavs who defile the land of their occupation with the deformity of their “dago” bodies and the squalor of their politics.’”

A Greek person once left a comment under one of my Quora answers about a saying his father used to tell him: “Westerners have always loved Greeks—but only the dead ones.” I have gotten into something of a habit of quoting this phrase because I think it perfectly encapsulates the general attitude that most westerners have historically had towards Greeks: an attitude of praising long-dead Greek philosophers and writers in exuberant terms while treating contemporary Greeks with scorn and derision.

Partly in response to these racially-motivated ideas promulgated by western racists such as Fallmerayer, Greek racists and nationalists have embraced the idea of modern Greeks as the racially pure, direct descendants of the ancient Greeks. The Golden Dawn, an extreme right-wing Neo-Nazi political party in Greece, is especially obsessed with this idea of Greek racial purity. They believe that Greeks are the supreme race and non-Greeks are filthy, impure barbarians who quite literally deserve to die.

The Golden Dawn has so many delusions about the purity of Greek blood that, at least according to Greek Reporter, in 2012, they literally set up an initiative in Athens to collect blood from “pureblooded” Greeks to be used by “pureblooded” Greeks alone so, that way, those of pure Greek ancestry would not have to fear that they might inadvertently receive blood donations from foreigners, whom they regard as filthy non-Greek barbarians.

ABOVE: Photograph of Golden Dawn supporters in Thessaloniki in June 2012 holding flares. The Golden Dawn is obsessed with the idea of Greek racial purity.

“Greek blood” is not a thing

One thing that proponents of the idea that modern Greeks are not Greeks at all and the proponents of the idea that modern Greeks are the racially pure descendants of the ancients have in common is an absurd obsession with the whole idea of “Greek blood.” Fallmerayer spoke of modern Greeks as not having not even a single “drop of true and unmixed Hellenic blood” while the Golden Dawn is so confident in the purity of their “Hellenic blood” that they only want blood donations from other supposedly “pure” Hellenes.

I suppose both sides will be outraged to hear that “Greek blood” objectively isn’t a thing. It does not exist, it has never existed, and it never will exist. Biologically speaking, there is absolutely nothing that makes someone inherently a “Greek.” “Greek” is a national identity and, like all national identities, it is a social construct. There’s nothing that makes blood from a Greek person any inherently different from the blood of a Turkish person, an Albanian person, or a Slavic person.

I’m sure people will object that, while there may not be such a thing as “Greek blood,” there is such a thing as “Greek DNA.” This belief, however, is also mostly incorrect. One of the most common misconceptions about DNA is the idea that all members of a certain national group share certain genes in common and that people who aren’t in the national group have different genes.

In reality, things are more complicated than that. First of all, all humans on the planet are approximately 99.99% genetically identical. Only an extremely tiny percentage of all genes actually vary from person to person. Those genes that do vary from person to person, however, actually vary drastically within every population. In fact, there is usually far greater genetic diversity within any single given population from any given part of the world than there is between two different populations from two different parts of the world.

This tremendous genetic diversity within populations is actually a good thing, because greater genetic diversity within a population makes it more likely that the population will be able to effectively adapt to changing circumstances. Nonetheless, the fact that populations are so diverse makes it impossible to speak of “Greeks” as a collective possessing any particular genes, since all people—including all Greeks—have different genes.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of venous blood (upper) and arterial blood (lower). “Greek blood” isn’t a real thing.

How DNA really works

Now, there are some DNA sequences known as “genetic markers” that usually tend to be associated with people whose ancestors came from certain general regions of the world, but these markers are not very exact. A DNA test can tell you based on certain genetic markers that an individual probably has some kind of ancestors who lived at some point in the general region of southeastern Europe, but it can’t tell you whether any of those ancestors were classical Greeks.

Furthermore, these genetic markers are not even always 100% reliable, since the same mutation can have occurred in multiple places at different times. For instance, the MTHFR C677T mutation is a genetic marker that is common in people of Mexican ancestry, but also in people Chilean, Chinese, and Italian ancestries. It’s also less commonly found in other populations of people from all over the world, including western Europe, Britain, Ireland, and Colombia.

If a geneticist looks at someone’s DNA and finds they have the MTHFR C677T mutation, they have no way of knowing whether the person carrying that gene inherited it from a person of Italian ancestry, a person of Chinese ancestry, a person of Mexican ancestry, or some other person from some other part of the world who just happened to have the mutation. This is the case with many genetic markers. In many cases, the marker itself is present in people from all different populations from all over the world, but it happens to be particularly common in people from a certain part of the world.

Unfortunately, the idea that DNA testing can tell you your exact ancestry is an idea that has been irresponsibly promoted by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com. Advertisements produced by these companies often show people with pie charts showing that a certain percent of their DNA comes “from” some region or another. If you actually take one of these DNA tests, they will give you your own pie chart. This simplistic way of presenting the data is deeply misleading and serves to reinvigorate a lot of old, debunked racialist ideas.

The reality is that DNA tests can tell you some very basic information about the general part of the world that some of your ancestors probably come from, but, when it comes down to exact percentages, they are highly unreliable. When a company tells you that you are a certain percent “from” a certain region, what they really mean is that that percentage of the genetic markers they identified within your larger genome are often associated with members of a reference group composed of people with known ancestry in that part of the world.

These tests can be helpful if you really don’t know which part of the world your ancestors come from, but they really can’t tell you anything specific with a high degree of accuracy. For more information here is a fairly recent article from Vox talking about the limitations of DNA ancestry tests as well as some of the ways DNA companies can mislead people through their overly simplistic presentations of data.

ABOVE: Screenshot from an advertisement for a DNA ancestry test from Ancestry.com, showing a man looking surprised to find out “52%” of his DNA comes from “Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.” What that percentage really means is that 52% of the genetic markers the analysts found in his DNA are often associated with reference populations of people with known ancestry in that part of the world.

The problem as it applies to the question at hand

Now, DNA ancestry tests are already not especially reliable when it comes to determining the exact ancestry of living people, but they get even more unreliable when it comes to the relationship between entire populations of living people and entire populations of people who have been dead for centuries.

Most DNA ancestry tests like the ones offered by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com rely on large reference populations of living people with reliably documented ancestries. This means they are working with what is essentially the most reliable and detailed data available. We don’t have anything even remotely approaching that level of reliability or detail when it comes to the genetic composition of the population of ancient Greece.

When it comes to the DNA of the ancient Greeks, all we have is DNA collected from a handful of remains that happen to be well-preserved. In most cases, we know next to nothing about the ancestry of the people from whom this DNA is collected and we don’t know if these people are truly representative of the overall population, but their DNA is quite literally the only DNA we have to work with. In many cases, the DNA collected from these sets of remains may not be in very good condition or it may be fragmentary.

The information we have about ancient Greek genetics, then, isn’t especially good to say the least. This is the reason why it is possible to have one DNA study that claims to show that modern Greeks are extremely closely related to ancient Greeks and another DNA study that claims to show that modern Greeks have little genetic relationship whatsoever to ancient Greeks. Our data is just all-around not very good.

My point here is that anytime you see any kind of study based on DNA collected from any kind of remains from any kind of ancient people, you should always take the results of that study with a huge pinch of salt. I’m not going to say that these studies are entirely useless, but they are the sort of thing we should be very careful in dealing with.

ABOVE: Photograph from Forbes of the skeleton of an ancient Greek athlete on display in Taranto, Italy. When people talk about ancient Greek DNA, they’re talking about DNA extracted from human remains, such as skeletons. We don’t normally know very much about the ancestry of the individuals DNA is collected from or their representativeness of the broader population.

Nationality—a cultural, not biological phenomenon

Ultimately, a person’s genetic ancestry is really irrelevant to the question of national identity. People are the ones who decide whether someone is “Greek” or “Turkish” or “Albanian” or “Slavic”—not genetics. We may like to pretend that nationality is about ancestry and genes and so forth, but the reality is that national identity is purely a cultural phenomenon.

If someone has lived in Greece their whole life, they speak the Greek language as their native tongue, they identify themself as “Greek,” they feel a strong sense of kinship with other Greeks, and they are a part of Greek culture, then, frankly, who (apart from the racists and Neo-Nazis out there) really gives a care in the world whether their distant ancestors came to Greece four hundred years ago and weren’t around when classical Athens was at its height in the fifth century BC? That person is Greek, regardless of their ancestry.

The funny thing is that at least some people in ancient Greece actually realized this. The ancient Athenian rhetorician Isokrates (lived 436 – 338 BC) writes in his Panegyrikos, section 50:

“τοσοῦτον δ’ ἀπολέλοιπεν ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν περὶ τὸ φρονεῖν καὶ λέγειν τοὺς ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους, ὥσθ’ οἱ ταύτης μαθηταὶ τῶν ἄλλων διδάσκαλοι γεγόνασι, καὶ τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι, καὶ μᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας παρὰ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως μετέχοντας.”

This means, as translated by George Norlin for the Loeb Classical Library:

“And so far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and in speech that her pupils have become the teachers of the rest of the world; and she has brought it about that the name ‘Hellenes’ suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, and that the title ‘Hellenes’ is applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood.”

In other words, according to Isokrates, those who are a part of Greek culture are Greeks—regardless of their ancestry.

As much as people in the United States tend to get bogged down over race, the fact that nationality is a cultural rather than biological phenomenon is something that at least progressives over here have realized for a very long time. Very few people in the United States today can trace their lineage back to the time of the Founding Fathers and prove that all their ancestors were living here when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Nearly all of us have ancestors who came here as immigrants, but that does not make us any less American.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Parthenon on the Athenian Akropolis. It would be silly for someone to make a law saying that, if you cannot prove all your ancestors were living in Greece at the time when the Parthenon was completed in 432 BC, then you cannot be Greek.

The scale of the question

Nonetheless, because people are so obsessed with question of the ancestry of modern Greeks, I will delve a bit further into this question and look at some historical evidence. Before I do, though, I want to give everyone some further impression of just how complicated this question is by illustrating just how many ancestors each person has had since the time when classical Athens was at its height.

Let’s assume that it takes twenty-five years for one generation to reach maturity and produce the next generation. The height of classical Athens was in the fifth century BC. Based on my assumption that a generation lasts about twenty-five years, that means approximately ninety-seven generations have passed since the year 400 BC.

Each time you trace a person’s ancestry further back into the past by a single generation, the number of ancestors that person has doubles. That means that, if we assume every ancestor reproduced with an individual with whom they themselves had no ancestors in common, the number of ancestors that any infant born this year in 2020 has that were alive in 400 BC would be approximately somewhere around two raised to the ninety-seventh power.

It is really hard to convey just what a colossally huge number two raised to the ninety-seven power is. That number is vastly larger than the entire human population on the planet has ever been at any point in human history. It is a number so huge that it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

Now, obviously, in reality, no one on Earth has ever had that many ancestors alive at a given time in human history because it is inevitable that at least some of their ancestors must have had the same ancestors as each other, meaning there would be a great deal of repetition in their family tree. My point, though, is that, if you went back in time to the fifth century BC to the part of the world where your ancestors came from, probably just about anyone living in that part of the world who has living descendants would be one of your ancestors.

This is part of why the idea of there being a single surviving family directly descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene—an idea I debunked in this article from October 2019—is so ridiculous. The fact is, if Jesus had any living descendants today, then he would almost certainly have millions of them. The same would be true for anyone else who lived in antiquity who has living descendants.

ABOVE: Diagram from the Coop Lab of Population and Evolutionary Genetics at University of California Davis showing how the number of ancestors each person has doubles each time you trace their ancestry back a single generation

Greek cultural continuity

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer claimed that the ancient Greeks were totally exterminated in late antiquity and that they therefore have no living descendants, but there is no historical evidence whatsoever to support this conclusion and, in fact, this notion is wildly implausible.

It is true that various non-Greek peoples have invaded and even ruled Greece since late antiquity, but we have no evidence to suggest that Greek people ever completely ceased to exist and, in fact, we have great deal of strong evidence for cultural continuity from the Greeks of the classical period to the Greeks of the present day.

The only reason why people like Fallmerayer and his supporters can’t see the obvious continuity from classical times into modernity is because they have such a ridiculously romanticized and inaccurate view of what ancient Greece must have been like that, in their eyes, anything other than an idyllic land where pale-skinned philosophers in himatia sit around all day debating the nature of the cosmos can’t possibly truly be Greece.

Greek linguistic continuity

Let’s start out with the most obvious example of direct cultural continuity from classical Greece to the present day: the Greek language, which, in various forms, has been continuously spoken in Greece ever since the second millennium BC. It has changed significantly since ancient times, but that’s because that’s what all languages do. The English language as it was spoken in the fifth century AD would be incomprehensible to any speaker of Modern English who hadn’t studied Old English extensively.

With Greek, the situation is not quite so drastic. Native speakers of Modern Greek can easily understand the Koine Greek of the Christian gospels, which were originally written in the late first century AD. The language does seem archaic to them, but they can understand it about as well as a Modern English speaker in the twenty-first century can understand the archaic Modern English of the King James Bible.

Modern Greek speakers can likewise still understand Classical Attic Greek, albeit with more difficulty. Reading Classical Attic Greek for a Modern Greek speaker is about as difficult as reading the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is for Modern English speakers; it is possible, but it is difficult and it takes a certain amount of training and practice.

Classicists have long marveled at the similarities between Classical and Modern Greek. The classicist B. E. Newton writes in his paper “Ancient and Modern Greek,” originally published in 1960:

“Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greek is that in the period over which our written records extend—in over three millennia, since the decipherment of Linear B—it has changed so little. Whereas a student of Latin would be ill-equipped to read a modern Italian newspaper, a person with a good working knowledge of classical Greek would not only find an Athenian newspaper intelligible for the most part, but would be amazed at the remarkable likenesses between the ancient and modern languages. For the vocabulary of a Greek newspaper is probably of 99 per cent. of classical origin and modern Greek has retained much of the cumbersome grammar of the ancient language—and ancient Greek has got a cumbersome grammar, when we consider that its verb has over four hundred forms as compared to sixty or so in French or two in Afrikaans.”

It is likely that the Greek newspapers Newton was reading back in 1960 were written in Katharevousa, a deliberately archaizing form of the Greek language modeled after Classical Attic Greek that has since fallen sharply out of favor. Nonetheless, what he says here is not entirely untrue for Dimotiki, the standard form of the Greek language spoken throughout Greece today.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble stele from Athens with an inscription in Classical Attic Greek dated to between c. 440 and c. 425 BC. The Greek language has been continuously spoken in Greece ever since ancient times.

Greek literary continuity

Likewise, just as the Greek language itself has survived in Greece, the study of classical Greek literature, philosophy, and history has survived as well. Ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and history was widely studied by scholars in Byzantine Greece. Indeed, as I discuss in this article from January 2020, the Byzantines are primarily responsible for having copied and preserved most of the ancient Greek literary, philosophical, and historical texts that have survived to the present day.

Byzantine scholars were highly engaged with the classical tradition, producing commentaries on ancient works and even their own works of literature inspired by them. Eustathios of Thessaloniki (lived c. 1115 – c. 1195 AD), the archbishop of the city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, famously wrote extensive commentaries on the Homeric poems, incorporating a great deal of material from earlier commentaries.

The twelfth-century Byzantine satirical work Timarion—one of my favorite surviving Byzantine texts—is about a Christian man who dies suddenly after eating a huge meal. The man discovers, to his astonishment, that paganism was true all along. He is taken by demons to the Greek Underworld, where he finds the dead are being judged by ancient Greek kings and philosophers. He is gratefully informed that the judges are absolutely impartial and do not discriminate against Christians.

ABOVE: Detail of an icon of Eustathios of Thessaloniki dating to c. 1312 from the Vatopedi Monastery at Mount Athos. Eustathios wrote exhaustive commentaries on the Homeric poems, which have survived to the present day.

Religious continuity

It has been claimed that the Byzantines and modern Greeks are totally religiously divorced from the religion of the ancient Greeks, but it is actually rather uncanny the extent to which aspects of Greek Orthodox Christianity resembles ancient Greek religion. Most noticeably, the veneration of cult images of deities was central to ancient Greek religion just as the veneration of icons of saints and holy figures is central to Greek Orthodoxy today.

As I talk about in this article from March 2019, in late antiquity, the traditional roles and attributes of many Greek deities were given to Christian saints. For instance, the Virgin Mary came to fill the role of the ancient Greek virgin warrior goddess Athena. One of the most remarkable examples is a Greek account from the seventh century AD of how, when the city of Constantinople was under siege by the Avars, the Virgin Mary appeared on the ramparts of the city, dressed in full battle armor and brandishing a spear, urging the people to fight.

Demeter, the ancient Greek goddess of the harvest, was still worshipped at Eleusis in Attika as late as the nineteenth century under the name “Saint Dimitra.” The British traveler Richard Chandler visited Eleusis in around 1765 and wrote an account of how the locals claimed that Saint Dimitra protected the harvest and that she had a daughter who had been abducted by a malevolent Turk. It is impossible to imagine that this story is anything but a genuine remembrance of the ancient story of the abduction of the goddess Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, by Hades, the god of the Underworld.

In many cases, even the buildings used for worship remained the same. During the period of late antiquity, ancient Greek temples were converted into Christian churches. The Parthenon, originally constructed in the fifth century BC as a temple to the Greek goddess Athena Parthenos, was converted into a church of Parthenos Maria—the virgin Mary. Likewise, the Temple of Hephaistos in the Athenian Agora was converted into a church to Saint Georgios Akamates and remained as such until after the founding of the modern Greek nation-state.

ABOVE: Modern photograph of the Acropolis of Eleusis, with a chapel to the Virgin Mary atop the hill

A continuous Greek national identity

There has even been a continuous national identity of some kind that has existed for Greek people since antiquity. For most of the early part of their history, the Byzantines did not usually call themselves “Ἕλληνες” (Héllēnes), or “Greeks” since the term Ἕλληνες was inextricably associated with paganism; instead they usually called themselves “Ῥωμαῖοι” (Rhōmaîoi), or “Romans.”

Nonetheless, from the way the term Ῥωμαῖοι is used in Byzantine texts, it is fairly clear that, at least in most cases, this term specifically referred to Greek Romans, since non-Greek peoples living in the Byzantine Empire such as Slavs, Vlachs, and Armenians weren’t generally considered “Ῥωμαῖοι.”

The Byzantines also sometimes called themselves “Γραικοί” (Graikoí), a Latinizing term for speakers of the Greek language roughly equivalent to the English word Graecians. The use of the word Ἕλληνες as an ethnic term rather than as a generic word for “pagans” was actually revived in the Byzantine Empire in around the eleventh century. The Byzantine princess and historian Anna Komnene (lived 1083 – 1153 AD), for instance, repeatedly refers to the Byzantines as “Ἕλληνες” in the ethnic sense.

Later Byzantine writers use the term Ἕλληνες similarly as a name for the Greek-speaking Christians of the Roman Empire, showing that many Byzantines from the Komnenian Period onwards saw themselves as Hellenes, Christians, and Romans and that these terms were thought of as compatible with each other.

ABOVE: Photograph of a twelfth-century AD Byzantine manuscript of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, in which she repeatedly describes the Byzantines as “Hellenes” in the ethnic sense

Ironically, even though there had continuously been speakers of the Greek language in Greece calling themselves “Ῥωμαῖοι” as well as sometimes “Γραικοί” or even “Ἕλληνες” from antiquity all the way up to Fallmerayer’s own time, Fallmerayer insisted that the Byzantines and later Greeks were neither Greeks nor Romans, but rather some other people. He saw the Byzantines not only as non-Roman, but the exact opposite of everything the Romans stood for, which is, of course, a blatant mischaracterization.

Given the fact that Greek-speaking people with some form of Greek identity have continuously existed in Greece ever since antiquity, statistically speaking, it seems almost impossible that a person whose ancestors come from Greece could not have any ancestors whatsoever who were living in Greece during classical times. Quite simply, it seems almost inevitable that the vast majority of Greeks must have at least some ancient Greek ancestors.

At the same time, it is almost statistically impossible that anyone could be solely descended from ancient Greeks. There have been all kinds of different national groups that have settled in Greece over the years and intermingled with the native population. Thus, it seems inevitable that every Greek person must have at least some ancestors who came from outside of Greece at some point. The exact numbers of ancestors from outside of Greece are not knowable and, in any case, would vary drastically from person to person.

ABOVE: Scene of everyday agricultural workers from an eleventh-century Byzantine Greek manuscript of the gospels

The ancient Greeks: already “mixed”

Clearly, the evidence indicates that Greek people did not go extinct in late antiquity and that the vast majority of people whose ancestors come from Greece probably have a substantial number of ancestors who lived in Greece in ancient times. At the same time, however, anyone with ancestors from Greece almost certainly also has ancestors who came to Greece from the outside at some point since antiquity.

Now, the racial purists out there will try to insist that this means modern Greeks are not “pure” and are therefore not “true Greeks.” The problem is that a person being Greek has never really been about them having “pure” Greek ancestry. Indeed, the ancient Greeks themselves were certainly not “pure” in any sense.

We have abundant evidence that Greek civilization arose from a melding of Indo-European-speaking proto-Greeks, who arrived in Greece from the north, and non-Indo-European-speaking pre-Greek peoples, who lived in the Balkan Peninsula long before the linguistic ancestors of the classical Greeks arrived. When these cultures melded, the populations doubtlessly interbred.

The use of the word Ἑλληνικός (Hellēnikós) to mean “Greek” did not arise until long after the proto-Greek and pre-Greek populations had intermingled and interbred to such an extent that the distinction between them had been completely lost. In other words, Greeks were already thoroughly “mixed” before they even started calling themselves “Greeks” to begin with.

The entire concept of “racial purity” is ridiculous and meaningless because no “pure race” has never existed at any point in human history. If modern Greeks are not true Greeks because they have non-Greek ancestors, then the classical Greeks weren’t true Greeks either.

ABOVE: Photograph of the reconstructed “Prince of the Lilies” fresco from Knossos. The Minoans, who made this fresco originally, were a pre-Greek people whose culture thrived in the Aegean 3,500 years ago. When proto-Greeks arrived in Greece, they doubtlessly interbred with peoples like the Minoans.

Conclusion

There are strands of direct cultural continuity from ancient Greece to modern Greece and there can be no doubt that the vast majority of people of Greek ancestry today have at least some ancestors who lived in Greece in ancient times. The Greek nation has never at any point been wiped out and replaced with a new population. New populations have come and settled in Greece over the course of the past 2,400 years, but they certainly did not wipe out the earlier inhabitants of the region.

Nonetheless, it is essential to emphasize here that modern Greeks certainly are not at all “racially pure” in the way that Golden Dawn supporters and other Greek right-wingers like to pretend. So-called “racial purity” does not exist. It’s not a real thing; it’s totally made up. Nationality is a cultural phenomenon, not a biological one.

Furthermore, with every nation, if you trace its history back far enough, you can find that it inevitably arose from the intermingling of earlier nations. It is perfectly natural for people of different ethnic backgrounds to intermingle and produce offspring together. There’s nothing wrong with it.