Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, ou Lettres sur les Grecs, anciens et modernes, avec un parallele de leurs moeurs, Troisieme Edition revue, corrigée, considérablement augmentée, & ornée de dix belles Planches. On y a joint divers Voyages & quelques Opuscules du même

Pierre-Augustin Guys (1721-1799), an amateur archaeologist and poet, a merchant by profession, a member of the Academy of Letters and Sciences of Marseilles (since 1752), was a first-hand connoisseur of the East, having settled in Constantinople. In 1748 he began to travel in Greece proper and spent the last years of his life in Zakynthos, where his son had a career as consul of France.

Guys’s work, dedicated to Voltaire, was published immediately after the Orloff Revolution (1769-1770), by which time interest had shifted to modern Hellenism and its historical fate. Guys comments, in the form of letters and travel diaries, on the human mosaic of the Ottoman Empire, and in particular on the Greek world.

As the title indicates (“A Literary Journey in Greece, or Letters on the Greeks, Ancient and Modern, with Parallels of their Folkways”), he contrasts the daily life of his contemporary Greeks, whom he knows intimately, with that of their ancestors, through ancient literature, seeking to highlight their historical continuity, critically examining such issues as social events, housing, material culture, worship practices, superstitions, language, poetry, songs and dances.

He focuses especially on the female world, as in the illustrated page with the dance of Greek women in the countryside, a subject commented on by Madame Chenier (Elisabeth Santi Loumaki, 1729-1808), an intellectual of Cypriot origin, known for the literary salon she maintained in Paris, the centre of the philhellenic movement.

Guys’ work was a great success (with reprints and translations, in English already in 1772), as it was the first work entirely devoted to the comparison – and identification – of ancient and modern Greeks, laying the foundations of Philhellenism.

This approach would become commonplace in the relevant literature, which would seek to recognize the historical continuity of the Greek nation from Antiquity to modern times, and would continue with works such as Frederick Sylvester North Douglas’s An Essay on Certain Points of Resemblance between the Ancient and Modern Greek (London 1813).

This two-volume edition, of 1783, is the third (first: 1771, second: 1776), revised, with expanded text and illustrations, featuring drawings by Antoine Favray and engravings by Laurent.

Library of the Hellenic Parliament