#hellene

PHILIPPUS & DIANA OF THEMYSCIRA in WARRIORS AND A WEE WONDER (2025)

Greeks, or Hellenes, are best understood as an ethnocultural people whose identity has been shaped by a very long historical continuity: in antiquity they were not a single centralized nation but a constellation of city-states that shared a language, religion, and broader cultural inheritance, even while speaking different dialects and often competing politically. The ethnonym “Hellenes” comes from a deep classical tradition and is tied in myth to Hellen, from whom later Greek groups were said to descend, while the term itself has carried shifting historical meanings across time. Linguistically, Modern Greek descends from Koine Greek through Byzantine-era developments and is the mother tongue of Greece and Cyprus; it also belongs to the Indo-European family and preserves one of the longest continuous written traditions of any living language. Religion has also been a major marker of communal life: ancient Greek religion organized ritual, sacrifice, myth, and public piety, and in the modern era Greek Orthodoxy has remained the dominant religious tradition in Greece through the Church of Greece. Greek identity is therefore not just about ancestry, but also about language, historical memory, religious inheritance, and shared cultural forms, which is why Greeks have remained recognizable as a people across very different political worlds—from the classical Mediterranean to Byzantium and the modern nation-state. That identity is also global rather than purely territorial, because sizable Greek heritage communities exist across Australia, Europe, North and South America, and Turkey, with the largest outside Greece concentrated in Australia and the United States.

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Nicola Scott’s art goes crazy in Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons #3

The Sweet Siesta of a Summer Day, John William Godward, 1891

Wonder Woman #22 (1988) by George Pérez