Venizelos was an intensely public man, consumed by politics. By his own admission he had no personal life, he only lived for politics, which he understood as a service to his country. Yet this pervading political commitment, the intense politicisation of life at the expense of personal feeling and motivation, could by no stretch of the imagination be equated with the attitude and mentality of latter-day populist politicians, who appear similarly consumed by politics, but lack Venizelos' moral understanding of the character of public life. Venizelos was not evincing a twentieth-century posture of the public man; rather he could be seen to be carrying on a nineteenth-century tradition of statesmanship. With a host of great nineteenth-century political leaders he also shared another characteristic of European statesmanship, the immersion of the public personality in historical culture, understood as a kind of training-ground of responsible political action and decision. Incidentally, this had been the understanding of the purposes of their task by many nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historians as well. The understanding of history as a reading of the past detached from the commitments of the present had to wait for the critique of the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ in order to come into its own.

The clearest evidence of this orientation of Venizelos' intellectual interests comes from the composition of his library, which, despite its dramatic adventures survives in large part to provide the modern scholar with clues and hypotheses. The collection is made up of many categories of books, including a remarkable section of modern European literature, mostly books of French literary works which apparently belonged to Madame Venizelos, who was responsible for the removal of the library from their residence in Athens to the family home in Chania following her husband’s death.