[Marullus] “becomes the first poet who identifies as Modern Greek or Graecus“, surrenders to an unprecedented nostalgia that pushes the borrowed Latin language to conceive the terms genus, patria of the emerging modern notion of nation. The experience of displacement births a novel Modern Greek patriotism. Seeking new ways to relate to the community he lost, the exile moves towards a community that doesn’t yet exist.
Having fled the collapsing Byzantine Empire as an infant, mercenary poet Marullus conjures modern ideas of homeland and nationality some 400 years ahead of schedule. The catch: he longs for a place that no longer exists — indeed, a place he is too young to really remember.
At the same time, he develops an erotic poetry obsessed with unrequited lust, devoted to women who seem to be literary concoctions webbed in references to the classics as well as the curious Renaissance subgenre of epigrams addressed to dead prostitutes. What Siniossoglou calls the Lady of Reflections exists to make life a slow, self-fulfilling burn; in her indifference, she mirrors the old gods.
What remains of the nation but this enchanting phantasm, romantically betrothing us to the distant and the dead? Marullus posited that you can’t go home again, but the nation is an imagined community. There was hardly a home to begin with.
Read the words to any national anthem, though, and you will find the betrothed longing to join the beloved in glorious soldier martyrdom. And a country is hardly ever a true patria to cradle the genus. More often, it’s a bad fit for the shadow of some Platonic Republic. Too many deviants and undesirables.
It’s not long then, before the Lady of Reflections is perverted into a Lady of Horrors.
the Budafoki amended 