Iakovakis Rizos Neroulos

Iakovakis Rizos Neroulos (1778-1850). Iakovakis Rizos Neroulos was born in Constantinople. At the age of four, he lost his father and was placed under the guardianship of his uncle, the Metropolitan of Ephesus, Samuel. He completed his basic education and was appointed as an aide-de-camp to Alexander Ypsilantis in Moldavia. His wife was from the Ypsilantis family. In 1801, he was appointed as a chargé d'affaires of the Sublime Porte by the new ruler, Alexander Soutsos. He also worked at the court of Ioannis Karatzas in Constantinople as an interpreter and finally at the court of Michael Soutsos. A member of the Filiki Eteria since 1816, he was prevented from participating in the Greek War of Independence, partly due to the military prohibition by the authorities of Bessarabia, where he had taken refuge after the Ottoman troops invaded Moldavia, and partly due to his wife's chronic illness. In 1825, his eldest son, Alexander, died of tuberculosis. Neroulos traveled to Geneva, where he gave a series of lectures on modern Greek literature in French (published in 1828 by Jean Humbert under the title "Cours de litterature grecque moderne"), Paris, and London. In London, he met Ioannis Kapodistrias, who persuaded him to return to Greece with him. During Kapodistrias' governance, Neroulos served as the extraordinary commissioner of the Cyclades, secretary of the National Assembly of Argos, secretary of the Interior and the Merchant Navy, ambassador to Constantinople, and held other governmental positions. He died in Constantinople in 1850. Neroulos' literary works include the tragedies "Aspasia" (1813) and "Polyxene" (1814), the comedies "Interrogative Family" and "Newspaper-phobic" (1837), the satirical epic "Kourkas' Abduction," and two other epics that remained unpublished and were lost in a fire in 1817, "The Passage of the Alps" and "The Conquest of Egypt by Napoleon." He also published lyrical poems in various magazines and newspapers in Vienna and Greece. His most significant work, the three-act comedy "Korakistika or the Correction of the Romaic Language," published in 1813, is a scathing satire of Korais' linguistic theory and the dominance of local dialects in the Greek region. It is part of the author's effort to defend the intellectual dominance of the Phanariots in subjugated Hellenism and is considered the first committed work of modern Greek theater. For more biographical details on Iakovakis Rizos Neroulos, see Nikolaos Laskaris, "Iakovakis Rizos Neroulos," Great Greek Encyclopedia XVIII. Athens, Pyrsos, 1932. (Source: Archive of Greek Writers, E.KE.BI.).