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Dimitris Liantinis was a Greek philosopher and professor who believed that ancient Greeks were so preoccupied with the idea of death that it formed the basis of their entire culture. He then disappeared very mysteriously, with some positing that he committed suicide.
Dimitris Liantinis was a professor of the School of Philosophy at the University of Athens, where he taught a class in the philosophy of education and the teaching of Greek language and literature. He also authored nine books, all written in Greek and focused on philosophy and education.
His last name at birth was Nikolakakos, but he changed it to Liantinis to honor his place of birth, the village of Liantina in the prefecture of Laconia.
He completed his high school education in Laconia and, in 1966, graduated from the Department of Literature of the School of Philosophy at the University of Athens. He taught literature at secondary education level from 1968 to 1970 and from 1973 to 1975.
From 1970 to 1972, Liantinis was in Munich, Germany, learning and studying the native language. At the same time, he worked there as a teacher of classical literature at the private Greek high school Otto Geselschaft.
In 1975, he embarked on graduate studies in the School of Philosophy at the University of Athens and was appointed a teaching assistant at the Laboratory of Education. He got his PhD in 1978 with honors. The subject of his thesis was: “The presence of Hellenic spirit in the Duino elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke.”
As a professor, he gave many training seminars and lectures to teachers of secondary education level in Greece.
Liantinis’ ideas were strongly influenced by the philosophy of ancient Greece, as well as the ideals of the Romantic movement and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The professor made several references to the scientific progress of his time, particularly in the area of cosmology, and he made efforts to formulate a connection between that and the existence and nature of God.
He wrote at great length about education, and some of his work focused on what he considered to be the moral and intellectual decline of modern Greeks compared to their ancestors.
To further solidify his position, Liantinis devoted large parts of his body of work to defining exactly what the real value of ancient Greece was, as well as the actual worldview that they held. He argued against the notion that ancient Greece, although ahead of its time for most of antiquity and possibly the Middle Ages, was eventually superseded by the advancements of Renaissance Europe.
In contrast, he believed that the Greeks possessed a complete culture, a kind of super-set for all Western cultures, past and present. As an example, in his book Gemma, he argued that “the Greeks did not need psychoanalysis because they had tragedy.”
This period of intellectual magnificence was short-lived, and Liantinis wrote that “it would be a sign of honesty if the Greeks were to stop philosophizing right after Aristotle.”
He added that today, Greeks are completely unknown as “for the Europeans, we, the ‘New-Greeks,’ are but a faceless bunch, something of a Balko-Turkish Arab. We are the Orthodox with the Russian-like writing and the domes on our village houses.”
Death was also central to the professor’s work and, as he claimed, that of the ancient Greeks. He refuted the idea that ancient Greece was a culture of playful joyfulness and argued that the Greeks had instead presented us with a world of infinite melancholy, a proposition that is consistent with that of Nietzsche, whom he greatly admired.
Their philosophy was a study of death, according to Liantinis, and their conclusions were absolute and hard to accept since they saw death as a final end with no afterlife or moral rewards for the life lived on earth.
Liantinis believed that death as a topic occupied the ancients to such a degree that one could see their whole culture arising from the radical views they held on the subject.
The professor believed the ancient Greeks saw death as an unchanging cosmic law and did not associate whatever afterlife they had conceived with a system of divine punishment or reward like the Abrahamic religions. Although individual myths, such as that of Sisyphus who was condemned to eternal punishment in the realms of Hades, did exist, they were largely exceptions to the rule and never developed into a proper system of beliefs on life after death.
In one of his lectures,[5] Liantinis said Homer describes a scene where the hero, before engaging him in battle, says to his opponent, “The race of men is related to that of leaves, as we momentarily stand fresh on the tree branch, then quickly surrender to the wind and rain.” The lyric poet Pindar also questions in his works: “What are we [men] but dreams of shadows.”
On June 1, 1998, Liantinis disappeared, leaving a letter for his daughter, Diotima, where he revealed his decision to vanish on his own free will after lifelong consideration and preparation.
Liantinis’ disappearance evoked many speculations from the public, with some believing he had taken his own life in protest against what he saw as the lack of values in modern Greek society.
Seven years after the professor’s death, Panagiotis Nikolakakos, his cousin, showed Diotima to the crypt where her father lay in the area of the Greek mountain Taygetos. Nikolakakos had been instructed to do this by the late professor before his departure.
Several thorough forensic tests and analyses proved the skeleton in the crypt to be that of Liantinis, but the exact date and cause of his death remain unknown since no lethal substance was detected.
Despite his will stating that his bones should remain on Taygetos, he was finally buried at the cemetery of Kechries near the city of Corinth.
In his last letter to his daughter, he wrote: “My last act has the meaning of protest for the evil that we, the adults, prepare for the innocent new generations that are coming. We live our life eating their flesh. A very bad evil. My unhappiness for this crime kills me.”
