Classics Day - Furman - Peripatos

Christopher Blackwell

November, 2025

Contents

  • Our Project, 2022–2025
  • Antecedents: Byron, Elgin, Hammond
  • The World of Odysseus

The Project

The Greek word, περίπᾰτος, peripatos, can mean just “walking around”, like for healthy exercise, but over time it came to mean “walking around and talking about stuff.” This gives the “Peripatetic Philosophers” their name.

Our Goals: Mostly ignore the big tourist sites; get out in the country; walk and take boats…

Trying to get the big picture of Greece, over the past 3,000 years. What it was like back in the day, and what it is really like now.

Map (so far).

Possible role-models for our project?

Probably not Thomas Bruce, the 7th Lord Elgin, who came to Greece in 1802 and removed the sculptures from the Parthenon to England?
Maybe George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, who swam the Hellespont.

In Greek mythology, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, lived in a tower in Sestos. Every night, her lover, Leander from Abydos, swam across the Hellespont to see her, guided by a lamp she lit.

On May 3, 1810, Byron reproduced this feat and wrote poem about it.

Getting oriented.
The Hellespont. Dangerous currents!
Also, maybe, Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, who was the British liason to the Greek underground fighting the Nazis in World War II. Hammond became a great scholar of ancient Greek history,
The Second World War hit Greece hard. Every town has a sign like this.

In the Footsteps of Odysseus!

The Islands of Western Greece. (Context)
In keeping with our principles of traveling by foot or boat, we took a boat around.

…and a pretty good sense of the Odyssey…