Sing It Like Homer

Eugenios Voulgaris, whose Greek translation of Virgil’s epic is the subject of this chapter, is another example of how translation was used for cultural ideology. Voulgaris, who was invited by Catherine the Great of Russia to serve as archbishop of Cherson and Slaviansk, translated the Aeneid into Homeric Greek. This odd translation also had a pronounced pedagogical mission for an intended audience that was not Russian, but rather belonged to the Greek diaspora. Furthermore, as Papaioannou shows, Voulgaris’s strange undertaking was closely intertwined with Catherine’s political and cultural aspirations: her ‘Greek Project’, which aimed at projecting Russia both as a Western military power in the likeness of Rome and as the heir to Greek Orthodox Byzantium.