This chapter traces the shadow that ancient Greek epic, and the Homeric poems most particularly, have cast over the modern nations of Greece and Turkey, using case studies with a specific focus on how the epics came to figure in the nation-building work of both countries. Greece presents a unique case for the reception of these poems for two related reasons: Homeric Greek can be integrated into modern Greek literature without transl(iter)ation, and a long-standing national discourse casts the Greek heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey as the ancestors of Greeks living today. On the other hand, Turkey, whose borders encompass the ancient site of Troy, made different use of the Homeric tradition. During the self-conscious process of Westernisation in the twenty-first century, the Homeric poems were among the first great works of ‘Western’ – not Greek – literature to be translated by translators working in the employ of the state. Hanink uses these contrasting studies of the national receptions of ancient epic in the ‘Homeric lands’ to point to the range of ways that Homeric poetry has been invoked in modern nation-building projects.

We discuss the important – but rarely scrutinized – role of archaeology in the constitution of Greece and Israel as contemporary crypto-colonized states, defined by Herzfeld as countries with a strong national sentiment that serve as buffer zones and whose political independence is accompanied by massive economic dependency. We elaborate on what this crypto-colonizing process means for the two societies.

This chapter turns to the analysis of the practice of justifying force in the ‘semi-peripheries’, i.e., in non-‘European’ States. The purpose is to see whether legal arguments were also developed and whether they differed from the ones brought forth to justify bellicose endeavours in the ‘centre’. It focuses on four case studies: the European intervention during the Greek War of Independence (1827); the French expedition in Lebanon and Syria (1860); the western intervention during the Boxer Revolt in China (1901); the Monroe doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary with special attention to their application in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century (1909–1912). It argues that, although these interventions rarely gave rise to full-blown wars, the justifications brought forward did not substantially differ from the ones used in the ‘centre’. States, in fact, carefully developed legal arguments and evidenced how their actions were meant to redress a previous offence.

The nineteenth century has been called the ‘heyday’ of ‘humanitarian intervention’,1 the time from the early nineteenth century through to the end of World War II an age of ‘imperial humanitarianism’.2 The period is revisited time and again to draw lessons for the present.3 Given this use of the past, for the purposes of a history of the legal instrument, the nineteenth century might be considered as the canvas of a picture of ‘humanitarian intervention’ painted in the twentieth century. While the distinct legal concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ did evolve late in the nineteenth century, drawing on the evolution of international law from a form of natural law to its own specific legal system, the humanitarian and legal dimensions of the historic events claimed for this development were rather marginal. It is only in writing about the nineteenth century that these events have gained their significance for the history of a legal concept.