En Grèce, one of the early essays of Barthes published in 1944 and based on his summer trip with the Groupe de Théâtre antique of Sorbonne in 1937, is a remarkable amalgam of enthusiasm and repugnance towards Ancient and Modern Greece. The novelty of the text can be seen one part in its fragmentary way of writing which announces the future courte écriture Barthesian: the sequence is formed by ten short units detached from each other, where the alternation of description and narration realizes a circle of textual islands. On the other part, the piece astonishes by its naturalistic and disrespectful tone which highly differs from traditional philhellénisme. From the Romanticism on, Greece is considered by France as the noble cradle of Western civilisation, the two countries respect each other as main sources of liberty, knowledge and arts. |is sense of kinship and mutual affinity can be detected also in the Parisian review Le voyage en Grèce published in 1934-1939 and realized by the main figures of French Avant-garde, whose view of Greece is, of course, influenced by Nietzsche as well. |e approach of young Barthes, student of classical philology, is remarkably different from this modern perception of Greece as well. |e aim of the study, focusing on the chapters Athens and Museums, Statues, is to shed light on the religious and metapoetical background of this text full of elliptic references to literary criticism and personal poetical initiation.