Abstract: Given that the rhetoric about Greece had been established by Byron, this chapter argues that the only real developments on the perception of the Greeks since were an expansion of that Byronic rhetoric by Gladstone and other liberals to include the Balkan Christians generally and a simultaneous narrowing of philhellenic rhetoric to cover only those pure Greeks of unmixed blood who lived on remote islands and mountains. Both of these developments had deleterious effects on the perception of the Greeks. On the one hand, when lumped with the other Christians of the East, they were viewed as Balkan or Levantine; on the other, a preserve of real Greeks was created by disenfranchising the majority of Greece's inhabitants.

Keywords: Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, philhellenism, Balkan Christians, Gladstone,