The historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1815-1891) is best known for his multivolume History of the Hellenic Nation from Ancient Times to the Present (1860-1874). As the title of this work and the excerpt above suggest, the author sought to portray the Greek nation as a community of descent whose genetic continuity had remained largely unbroken over time. Although Paparrigopoulos did not deny that some mixing of ‘races’ had taken place throughout the eastern Mediterranean since antiquity, it was clear to him that in those areas where the Greek language prevailed, the Hellenes had absorbed rather than been absorbed by the others. The arguments of the Austrian philologist Jakob Fallmerayer (1790-1861) notwithstanding, the modern Greeks were exactly who they claimed themselves to be: the descendants of that storied race whose wisdom and works remained among the most sacred possessions of European civilization. If such a connection appeared doubtful, even ridiculous, given the state of material and moral destitution that long reigned over the lands once home to such a people, Paparrigopoulos would bid his readers to think again. Indeed, the regeneration of Greece proved, as Korais declared in his Mémoire sur l’état actuel de la civilisation dans la Grèce (1803), ‘that if unhappy circumstances can devastate the most fertile soil […] they cannot deprive it of its natural fecundity; a light rain and a little cultivation will suffice for all the riches which once covered it to germinate anew.’