"Despite his enthusiasm for the character and institutions of the Aryan Hellenes, Gobineau was convinced that Ancient Greece as a whole had been thoroughly ‘blackened’ and ‘Semitized’. He was among those who maintained that the modern Greeks were so mongrelized that they could no longer be considered as descendants of the Ancients. Indeed, his belief in the Phoenician influence on Greece was part of his general belief that Southern Europe had been irredeemably ‘Semitized’ and that only the Germanic peoples of the north had retained their ‘white’ purity. In this, however, he was clearly in the minority. While they were coming to share his views on Aryan superiority, most Northern Europeans were not prepared to give up Greece and Rome."