Pavlos Kalligas (Smyrna 1814 – Athens 1896) was educated in Geneva at a Protestant college (1828-30) and in Munich (1834-36), where he made the acquaintance of Schelling and of the Philhellenic educationalist and classical philologist Friedrich Thiersch. He studied law, philosophy, and history at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg. In Berlin, he attended lectures by Ranke, Savigny, and Savigny’s jurisprudential adversary Eduard Gans. An adept of legal historicism, he defended a jurisprudential thesis in Heidelberg in 1837; only then did he travel, for the first time, to Greece.

Kalligas established himself as a lawyer in Athens, intervened in press debates, and translated Ranke’s Die Venezianer in Morea (on Venetian rule in the Peloponnese). In 1839, he began teaching Roman law at the University of Athens and contributed to the codification of Greek civil law. Kalligas was opposed to the view that saw the new Greek state as the continuation of the Byzantine Empire, criticized political corruption, and opposed the government of Prime Minister Iōannīs Kōlettīs. After the Revolution of 1843, he expected a democratization of political life, against King Otto’s absolutist tendencies; it was in this context that he evoked the English struggle between parliamentarianism and Crown prerogative in his History of the English Revolution of 1640, published in the opposition newspaper Karteria.

In 1862, he was elected deputy for Attica, and in the following decades held numerous official positions, such as Minister of Foreign Affairs, of Justice and of the Economy, President of the Parliament, and Governor of the National Bank.

Among Kalligas’s writings are books and articles on law (his Treatise of Roman Law, in five volumes, was completed in 1876), philosophy, and history, as well as a biography of Evgenios Voulgaris (1849); his realistic novel Thanos Vlekas (published in the literary journal Pandora) criticized contemporary Greek society while displaying his interests in popular culture and poetry. In 1847, he published in the newspaper Athena a history of ancient theatre.