Book Description
This book contains five essays on the reception of Voltaire, Montesquieu and Réal de Curban in the context of Modern Greek ideology, and presents fresh insights and original interpretations regarding a) the literary and ideological origins of a Greek text contradicting Voltaire’s ideas that was published in Venice in the late 18th century, b) the second and partial translation into Greek of Montesquieu’s work, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, published in Venice in 1796, c) the reception of yet another work by Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, which Rigas had only “half translated”, as he put in 1790. The book closes with a riddle concerning the presence of a fourth thinker of the 18th century in the context of Greek ideology: Rousseau. The riddle concerns those works of the citizen of Geneva explicitly mentioned by Christodoulos Pablekis.