Before the outbreak of the 1821 War of Independence, the Greeks read and revived Aeschylus' Persians of 472 B.C.E. as a revolutionary hymn to Greece and its ancestral ideals. Initially, encouraged by famous philhellenes (such as Byron), they saw it as a patriotic play about their land and its people, about 'inherited' masculine virtue and 'still-to-be-recovered' territory. In the course of the nineteenth century, they would exploit the multiple (trans-)historical, cultural and literary dimensions of the play and, in particular, the stirring battle-cry of Persians 402-405, in the difficult process of nation-building and state consolidation. Over the years, the Greeks recast Aeschylus' tragedy as an ideological and deeply performative battle-cry, making it serve various symbolic and/or propagandistic aims. They condensed the play's dramatic characteristics and historical content into multi-purpose slogans. Although these slogans had to capture the often strained symbolism of self-aggrandizing military victory, they nonetheless provided an enduring paradigm for the patriotic commitment that would be sorely needed in the frequently recurring Greek struggles for freedom (from resistance activity against foreign occupation, to the fight against domestic dictatorship and exclusionary 'patriotism'). Some Greek exponents of the tragedy thus transformed the popular 'patriotic' paean of Persians 402-405 into a device which they added to the mythopoetic toolkit of modern Greek cultural and literary identity; others realized that these lyrical lines could be commercially successful as well. The use and abuse of these lines has laid bare the various strands of translation and non-translation approaches, of intralingual rendition, and of the by turns satirical or subtle, but always thoroughly questioning modes of evocation practised under censorship restrictions.