Glenn Peers
Syracuse University
This paper argues that Hellenism is more than a millennia-old cultural tradition: it is also media, which is the ablative condition of humans’ formation in this world. Greek as medium performs ablative in its constant, long-term formation of what we know about ourselves. Hellenism is the ultimate recursive media; new outcomes always, but the same alphabet. This paper examines the media that made (Friedrich Kittler’s) ‘so-called man’ in the Byzantine world and beyond. The strong grip of Hellenism continues, as media does, to perform and pre-form history, both true and false, for example, the mirror and man in the moon of Triclinius and Astrapas in the fourteenth century, the infamous nineteenth-century forgeries of Constantine Simonides, and Friedrich Kittler’s recent search for Odysseus’s Sirens. So, the ongoing discoveries of the ever-latent truth events of Hellenism. Greek has for a long time spoken and made its human subjects in its media image.