RHIGAS, CONSTANTINE, known as Rhigas of Velestinos (Pherae), or Rhigas Pheraios (176o-1798), Greek patriot and poet, was born at Velestinos, and was educated at Zagora and at Constantinople, where he became secretary to Alexander Ypsilanti. In 1786 he entered the service of Nicholas Mavro genes, hospodar of Wallachia, at Bucharest, and when war broke out between Turkey and Russia in 1787 he was inspector of the troops at Craiova. Rhigas then became interpreter at the French Consulate at Bucharest, where he wrote the famous Greek version of the Marseillaise, well known in Byron's paraphrase as "sons of the Greeks, arise." He founded the patriotic society called the Hetaireia. He went to Vienna to organize a revolution ary movement among the exiled Greeks and their foreign sup porters in 1793, or possibly earlier. There he founded a Greek press, but his chief glory was the collection of national songs (posthumously printed 1814) which, passed from hand to hand in MS., roused patriotic enthusiasm throughout Greece. While
at Vienna Rhigas entered into communication with Bonaparte, to whom he sent a snuff-box made of the root of a laurel tree taken from the temple of Apollo, and he set out to meet him at Venice. But before leaving Vienna he forwarded papers, amongst which is said to have been his correspondence with Bonaparte, to a com patriot at Istria. These fell into the hands of the Austrian government, and Rhigas was arrested at Trieste and handed over with his accomplices to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade. His five companions were secretly drowned, and Rhigas was shot.
See Rizos Nerofilos, Histoire de la revolution grecque (Paris, 1829) ; I. C. Bolanachi, Hommes illustres de la Grece moderne (Paris, 1875) ; and Mrs. E. M. Edmonds, Rhigas Pheraios (London, 189o).