NICOLETTA PIREDDU European Ulyssiads: Claudio Magris, Milan Kundera, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt D’Itaca varco le fuggenti mura —Giuseppe Ungaretti, “Canzone” Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets! —Arthur Rimbaud, “Le Bateau ivre” I F THE IDEA OF EUROPE as a geographical and cultural entity did not hold particular signiicance to ancient Greece, 1 ancient Greece has meant a great deal to Europe. Indeed, even if one agrees with Edgar Morin that the only essence one can extract from Europe is an evanescent and aseptic spirit (33–36), this minimal assertion of cohesiveness has prompted a consistent investigation into the Greek cultural roots of the Old Continent. Consider, for instance, Edmund Husserl’s proclamation that spiritual Europe had a birthplace in the forma mentis of ancient Greece, where philosophy developed as a “science of the world as a whole” (159) able progressively to modify “the organism formed by the nations united together as Europe” (160) thanks to the “common interpersonal endeavor” of individuals who, “not isolated but with each other and for each other” (165), pursued knowl- edge for its own sake. In a similar fashion, George Steiner attributes the “human- ized” (19) nature of the European landscape and sensibility to the Greek “onto- logical legacy . . . of questioning” (25), which can still foster a European “secular humanism” able to reconcile the ideal of European unison with the heterogeneity of European particulars in the name of tolerance and “an ironic indiference” (34) towards past and present fundamentalisms. For his part, Denis De Rougemont cor- roborates the Greek core of Europeanness with his “morphological” sketch of Europe (42), where tangible realities further highlight the continuity from Greek to modern European spaces. Hence, for example, the town square conirms com- 1 The myth of Europa raped by Zeus and taken to Crete did not promote consistent geopolitical awareness or elicit emotional reactions to well-deined quest ions of boundaries among Greeks, whose vision was mainly shaped by a still vague opposition between East and West (Hay 2–3). Comparative Literature 67:3 DOI 10.1215/00104124-3137216 © 2015 by University of Oregon