In 416 BCE, Pericles’ nephew Alcibiades, the Baddest Bad Boy of moralising ancient historians, was hustling in his now dead uncle’s footsteps when he urged the Athenians to go for broke by sending a fleet to conquer Sicily. As a young man, Alcibiades is said to have come upon Pericles frowning over the financial accounts that he was due to deliver to the scrutiny of the Assembly. The young smart-ass said, “You’d do better to work out how not to have to present them at all.” And yet not a few bandwagon jumpers insist that there is no real connection between ancient and modern Greeks! If literature matters (it ain’t mentioned here a lot), the continuity of Greek poetry — Cavafy, Seferis and Yannis Ritsos — alone refutes the notion of absolute rupture between then and now.

The notion that the Greeks “invented” democracy lies at the heart both of the praise lavished on them and of journalistic disappointment in their modern performance. In her alpha-gamma knockabout style, Hanink serves a buffet of gossipy mezes sprinkled with naughty iconoclasm. She claims, for instance, that Byron was “terribly unqualified” as leader of the “military expedition” sent out in November 1823 by the London philhellenes. Did it occur to her that the Athenian demagogue Cleon was also unqualified when he went to the island of Sphacteria, captured more than two hundred Spartiates and gave Athens the best chance it had, during the long war, to quit while it was ahead? In fact, Byron went off his own bat to Missolonghi and had to recruit a squad of dodgy Suliot auxiliaries by paying them from his own treasure chest. When a proper soldier — Lieutenant-Colonel Leicester Stanhope — turned up, the principal ammunition he brought with him to scarify the Turks was a stack of bibles. Byron was a true lover of the Hellenes (and their boys), but he saw their contemporary faults clearly enough. When a skirmish ended ignominiously, he observed: “The Greeks, it seems, have run away from Xerxes.”

Hanink devotes a fat chunk of prose to the arguments for (and especially against) the genetic connection between today’s Greeks — often said to be Slavs or Albanians — and those of the fifth century. We have had a house on a Cycladic island since 1962. Depopulated when we purchased our then ruined spiti, Ios now gleams with new building to lodge the summer influx of tourists. Facing our house is the island of Sikinnos, which Solon recommended to those who wanted nothing better than a quiet life. I asked our neighbour Kosta why the people on “our” island had grasped the opportunity to prosper, while those across the water had not. “Tha se po, Frederikos,” Kosta said: “We come from here and who knows where else, but they — they are one hundred per cent Greek!”