Tomos Evans
Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-2025
- DegreePh.D., English Literature and the Classical Tradition, University of Birmingham, 2023DissertationMilton’s HellenismResearch Project‘When the Greeks Ceased to be Greek’: John Milton and Early Modern Greece
Tomos Evans (b. 1994) is an Early Modernist, specializing in the life and works of John Milton, Neo-Latin Literature, and Hellenism in Early Modern Europe. At Princeton, he is completing a major article titled “John Milton, Leonard Philaras, and Advocating Greece’s Liberation in the Seventeenth Century” and he is working on his first monograph, Milton’s Hellenism. This book comprehensively explores Milton’s intense and creative engagement with Greek literature, thought, and culture. It investigates the poet’s encounters and interactions with Greek texts in England and Italy, ranging from the Homeric epics through to Early Modern Greek texts such as the works composed in Ancient Greek by his closest friend, Charles Diodati, and the writings of Leonard Philaras: a Greek diplomat and scholar whose powerful advocacy for the liberation of Ottoman-ruled Greece significantly influenced Milton’s own political Philhellenism.
Tomos has numerous publications in journals and edited volumes, including “Milton’s Diodatian Poetics” in Milton Studies. Together with John Hale (Otago University), he is editing Milton’s Latin and Greek poems for the new, third edition of Milton’s Complete Shorter Poems in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Also, Tomos is writing the Milton volume in Reaktion Books’s Renaissance Lives series. He is working with Olivia Montepaone (Università degli Studi di Milano) on a critical edition of an unpublished, unedited Latin translation and commentary of Longinus by the Greek-born scholar and Librarian of the Vatican Library, Leone Allacci. The Baroque Sublime: Leone Allacci’s Criticism on Longinus’ Περὶ Ὕψους will be published by Brill in the series Sources in Early Poetics (SEP). Tomos has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Innsbruck’s Institute for Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies and he has held a Hellenic Research Fellowship at California State University, Sacramento.
Tomos received his B.A. from the University of Bristol. During his undergraduate studies, he was also an Erasmus student at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. He holds a M.St. in English (1550–1700) from the University of Oxford as well as a M.A. in Classics from Birkbeck, University of London, which was fully funded by the Eric Hobsbawm Postgraduate Scholarship. Tomos received his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham and his doctoral research was generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Before undertaking his doctoral and postdoctoral research, Tomos was a high school teacher for several years. He taught English and Latin at Tonbridge School in Kent, Godolphin & Latymer School in West London, and Eastbourne College in West Sussex.
About the Research Project
‘When the Greeks Ceased to be Greek’: John Milton and Early Modern Greece
In a 1637 letter to his friend Charles Diodati, John Milton describes his intense program of study at home in Horton, remarking that he has “by uninterrupted reading brought the affairs of the Greeks to the point when the Greeks ceased to be Greek” (Graecorum res continuata lectione deduximus usquequo illi Graeci esse sunt desiti). But when do the Greeks cease to be Greek? This throwaway comment offers a revealing glimpse into the young Milton’s view of Early Modern Greece, reflecting the typical perspective of Northern European humanists whose Philhellenism centered on a deep appreciation of Ancient Greek literature while largely ignoring the struggles of contemporary Greeks under Ottoman rule. However, by 1652, Milton's attitude had shifted dramatically, as evidenced by one of his letters to Leonard Philaras: an Athenian scholar and ambassador who served as the Duke of Parma’s agent in London and Venice during the 1650’s.
While much scholarship has examined the rhetoric of political Philhellenism following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and during the Greek Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid to the political Philhellenism of the intervening seventeenth century. This research project explores how Milton's views on Early Modern Greece evolved by situating them within the broader context of Philaras's pan-European and radical network.
Geographically, this research project spans from Haiti to Moscow, tracing Philaras’s extensive political and scholarly connections and his efforts to bring about a revolutionary uprising in Ottoman-ruled Greece. Drawing on archives from Italy, England, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden, the project highlights Philaras’s central role in these efforts. It also examines the important roles of other prominent Greek figures from across the diaspora, such as the Greek-Italian scholar Leone Allacci in the West and the enigmatic “Daniel the Greek” (also known as “Daniel Oliveberg de Graecani,” “Abbot Daniel,” “Daniel the Athenian,” and “Daniel Kaluger”), the envoy of the commander of the Ukrainian Cossacks Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in the East.
By studying Philaras’s appreciation of English regicidal and revolutionary texts — not least Milton’s Defensio Prima — and his social and intellectual circle in 1650’s London, and by examining Philaras’s Latin and Italian letters and his Greek and Latin poetry in the archives, the project demonstrates Philaras’s significant influence on Milton’s and other Northern Europeans’ evolving views towards contemporary Greece and explains the ideological, religious, and political motivations for advocating a revolutionary uprising in seventeenth-century Greece.