On a cold winter's day in Paris, Adamantios Korais (Adamance Coray) delivered a lecture about the current cultural state of Greece in front of distinguished French academics, who were also members of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme. On this day (6 January 1803), the enlightened reformer projected his construction of a soon-to-be modern nation to a European audience, by accentuating the European identity of Greece, and especially by emphasising the ties of his country with France. Korais wanted to place modern Greece – or at least his notion of modern Greece – in the spotlight, instead of repeating neoclassicist commonplaces about ancient Greece. Korais's sense of Greece's cultural continuity was realised through his publication programme, ‘The Greek Library’, and his essays on the modern Greek language. However, the reception of the 1821 Revolution and the romanticised classicism of the early nineteenth century in Europe (and then in Greece), couldn't give up the ghost of an idealised classical past, and of a Gibbonian sense of history.

In the years 1800 to 1840, European philhellenes searched for the ancient grandeur among the ruins of Greece. They insisted on seeking for glorious apparitions in the figures of the bedraggled people who resided on the fringes of Acropolis. From Lord Byron's renowned verse, ‘Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!,’ to the exclamation of the French Hellenist, Jean-François Stievenart, ‘Hellas! c’était une illusion!,’ modern Greece was always compared to the ancient one.