Drawing Conclusions: Greek Antiquity, The €conomic Crisis, and Political Cartoons

The recent economic crisis in Greece has generated endless debate, heated discussions, protests, and an outpouring of articles, blogs, and op-ed pieces in newspapers. Just as powerful, but less noted, are a spate of political cartoons that comment on the current turmoil from a satiric perspective. Examples published in the Western media often feature well-known icons, deities, and heroes from Greek antiquity cleverly resituated into the unsettled state of contemporary politics. For the most part, this visual discourse suggests that modern Greece has not only been fiscally irresponsible but has disgraced its patrimony. Viewed as squandering the precious symbolic capital of their past, modern Greeks are cast as wayward descendants of a vaunted ancestry. Attempts to decipher these images raise questions about the deceptively simple nature of the genre as well as embedded ideas about Western Hellenism and Modern Greek identity.