CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Venetian Empire’s Origin Myth

Image by Philipp Thelen.

You can learn something about a culture from its origin myth. Like most boys growing up in Southern California, I believed the founding myth of the United States. Coming to a continent with just a few native tribal people, European settlers took control of an almost empty land, letting the few remaining ‘Indians’ have a chance to live on reservations. ‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’: So the poet Robert Frost famously declared in a poem at the inauguration of President J. F. Kennedy. Even if you don’t know the political history, it’s easy to see that there had to be more to this story. Some Germans who sought to create a ‘living room’ for themselves in Central Europe by ethnic cleansing thought that they were emulating the activities of these American pioneers. Like the United States today, the Venetian Republic ruled an empire. And so we can learn something about our situation by considering the origins of the Venetian state.

For this purpose, I have found a well-known book by the French classicist Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (1988) most instructive. When those mythical stories are far-fetched, as are many Homeric stories, it’s hard to know in what sense they were believed. After all, nowadays people who enjoy James Bond films don’t believe that he exists— or even that someone like him could exist. By contrast, the mythical actions of the founders of the Venetian Republic are less surprising and so seem to raise fewer problems. As the endlessly repeated story found in every history of Venice tells, in 826, enterprising Venetian merchants obtained the relics of St. Mark, which were in Islamic Alexandria, where he had been martyred, and brought them to Venice. Mark thus........

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