The present economic crisis in Greece would not have surprised the goddess Athene's champion scoundrel. Odysseus's commanding officer at Troy, Agamemnon, was as shameless as any modern Greek politico in diverting the spoils into his own coffers. How else was Mycenae a golden city? Go there early on a sunny morning and it still is; even if, as happened to us, the men who guard the ruins are on strike (the Greek word for it, apergia, away-from-workness, is a lot more honest than "industrial action"). Anyone who loves Hellas, and especially Greek literature, ancient and modern, should know better than to imagine that those in high places have ever been reluctant to do a spot of golden fleecing. Barbarians were there to be fooled, and so were other Greeks, if you could put your thumb on them.

Today's Hellas was willed into unity only in 1821, when — inspired by Lord Byron's dream that Greece might yet be free — northern European Philhellenes funded its rebellion against the Ottomans. The liberated Hellenes promptly reneged on the loan. Greece specialises in old, old stories. In 1831, the first president of the new state, Ioannis Kapodistridas, was assassinated, in the then capital of Nafplion, when he tried to make the brigands of the Mani into proper, tax-paying citizens. A year later, Otto of Bavaria, a Roman Catholic, was imposed on Orthodox Christian Greeks as their king by a northern European consortium of the peevish and the well-intentioned. No more welcome and no more able to put their house in harmonious order than today's Empress of Europe, Angela Merkel, Otto abdicated after the Greeks hinted that they had had enough of him by trying to kill his queen. 

According to the economists who run our modern oracles (their predictions are no better than those in ancient Delphi), Greece is a debtor state whose inhabitants must agree to suffer, indefinitely, for their alleged extravagance. No one whom I know on Ios would accept that he had got rich by any means but hard work. It's true that, for years, none of them paid taxes if they could possibly avoid it, but nor did a single member, Left or Right, of the Greek parliament.  Where else in Europe do you find people so privately generous and so publicly irresponsible? Greece is a land of rascals and poets, notable, in one way or another, for their unbalanced books. The theatre on Ios is named after the poet Odysseas Elytis, the Nobel laureate of 1979, who sang of the Cyclades and hated the colonels who hijacked Greece, with the connivance of the West, for seven increasingly cruel years. The sad, if seldom acknowledged, paradox is that the disgraced Papadopoulos and his fellow tyrants did more to improve basic living conditions in provincial Greece than any "democratic" government.