Page 76 - Beholding Liberty!

Greece enslaved
engraving, illustration (frontispiece) in the publication Fearless of Marathon [Adamantios Korais],
Salpisma Polemistirion
[A Trumpet Call to War], Alexandria [Paris] 1801
Library of the Hellenic Parliament
The Acropolis of Athens seen from the Kastella hill
lithograph from the album of Karl Krazeisen, Bildnisse ausgezeichneter Griechen und Philhellenen nebst einigen Ansischten und Trachten
Munich 1828-1831
13. Adamantios Korais, Σημειώσεις είς το Προσωρινόν Πολίτευμα
της Ελλάδος, second edition,
ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilidis, Athens 2018. See pp. 11-49 regarding the nature of
the liberal constitution in Korais’ political thought.
in free nations about the just struggle of his own nation. From this crusade the publications of Aristotle’s Politics and Ethical Nikomacheis in 1821 and 1822 respectively emerged, in the intro- ductions of which Korais sets out his political theory regarding the organization of the country of liberated Greeks.
Within the turmoil of the Revolution, Korais introduced with political and logical precision his vision of freedom in the detailed commentary that he drew up in 1823 in the Temporary Consti- tution of Greece which had been approved in a vote by the First National Assembly of the Greeks at Epidaurus in 1822. In this significant foundation of Greek political speech, Corais set out his theory of democratic liberalism that he hoped would prevail in organizing the institutions of the fledgling state. He particularly insisted on ensuring the citizens’ political liberties and on safe- guarding equality before the law and general equality in the new nation.13
Korais finally became the interpreter of envisaging freedom for which the Greeks fought during the Revolution. With his political thought and the political advice he gave them, he attributed the specific political content to the announcement by the legal “Advocates” of the “Greek nation”, declaring before God and man, its Policy of existence and independence.
76 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!