text: Greece’s oldest literary society, the Parnassos cultural club, stands opposite a church on one of Athens’s oldest squares. Its neoclassical facade and monumental columns were designed to impress. The society, named after the home of the Muses, had a single objective: to promote the nation’s “intellectual, moral and social improvement” as Greeks, newly freed from the shackles of Ottoman rule, sought to pursue the course of other European states.