The best books on Modern Greek History

We’re talking about books about modern Greek history, which, according to you, started with this very violent period in the early 19th century. For people who don’t know much about Greece’s past, can you give an outline of both the traditional view and what you’re arguing in your book?

It’s about the Greek Revolution and the formation of the Greek nation. It’s about how we think of nations, how they come into being and how we belong to them. It happens everywhere and it begins around this time. The Greek Revolution is prototypical. The reason why it’s prototypical is because almost immediately after the revolution began, historians and philologists, politicians and fighters, were all making the case that this nation already existed.

We take that for granted everywhere, with any nation. When a nation comes into being, it’s because the people acquire some kind of sovereignty, claim their rights, and overthrow whatever it was that’s oppressing them. It’s the logical and inevitable outcome of a longer historical process.

The Greeks can make the case—and almost anyone would agree—that they have existed since Classical times, if not Mycenaean times. You have 2000 years during which this nation has traveled through time and space. It was oppressed, especially by what they call the Turks, which was the Ottoman Empire. Greece claimed its freedom, overthrew the foreign yoke, expelled the foreigners, and created a nation-state.

That’s the standard narrative, and it’s pretty simple. There’s not a lot of difference between what we’re taught in grade school in Greece and what adults are saying. This is problematic. We’re supposed to grow up at some point, not only as nations, but as individuals.

If you begin to look at it more closely and go into the archives, you have a problem that’s both methodological and interpretive, which is that there’s no Greek state to create archives. So, where are the Greeks before there is a Greece? If you don’t have a Greek nation yet, which I don’t think we do until the 1820s, where are you going to find your archives? This is a world of empires; of, first and foremost, the Ottoman Empire, joined over time by the Russian, and then the French and British empires. Those we call Greeks were subjects of one or another autocrat or monarch. You have to go to those archives to piece together this game of find the Greeks, which is what I did.

So there were those serving in the Russian government, those serving in the Merchant Navy for Britain, those serving in the French army, and those serving in the higher echelons of the Ottoman Empire. What we’ve done in the past is just melded them together and said, ‘If you add all those people together, you’ve found the Greeks. That’s where they are.’

That’s not true. The Greeks were subjects of these empires and often profited immensely from being members of them. Aside from a local label, they would also call themselves British because of the Ionian Islands. They would call themselves French because of, again, the Ionian Islands. They would call themselves Russian around the Black Sea because places like Odessa and Taganrog had been settled by Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire.

I don’t see a Greek nation. I see people who were unified by the fact they were Orthodox Christians. There were divisions among them. There were the ones in the east in the Ottoman Empire, the ones in the north in the Russian Empire. They had no reason to understand each other. They didn’t even speak the same dialects or languages, sometimes. Some of them spoke Albanian at home. Some of them spoke Vlach. Some of them spoke Rumeo-Greek, which was the Ottoman dialect. Others spoke a variation of Greek from the Ionian islands. There was no reason for them to know each other or communicate with each other, and they didn’t.

What I’m piecing together in my narrative is how, from this dispersion, you arrive at this moment where it becomes natural to think that there’s a Greek people and a Greek nation that’s unified. You create something and claim that it’s eternal, that it has always existed. All nations do this, to some extent. I’m saying, ‘No. This nation was put together in particular historical circumstances with particular contingencies and choices, and what we ended up with was the Greeks of today.’ It’s a Greece of which I’m a part and that I appreciate. It has a lot to offer: citizenship, rights etc.

But for this to happen, it had to go through this transformative process where the people who were Christians came forward en masse and, for the first time, in 1821, called themselves Greeks in order to defeat, kill and expel those who they were calling Turks, which meant any Muslim. This was a violent process. What happened wasn’t simply the overthrow of a regime. These Muslims had lived in these places for 300, 400 years. They weren’t foreigners. They often spoke Greek, which was the lingua franca of the region. They often spoke Albanian, as did the Christians. They spoke Vlack, though less so. Christians were becoming Greek, and so they labelled the Muslims as Turks.

These Turks didn’t know they were Turks. They just called themselves believers. That switch took place in 1821. This whole infrastructure of persuasion spread out among the populations locally and all across Europe, to say that these Muslims, who have been here for hundreds of years, were foreign conquerors who never really belonged.

I think that’s a stretch. When the outbreak took place in 1821, it happened for complex reasons, many of them accidental, as many things are in history. When the Christians finally decided to take up arms and attack the Muslims, it was not just the overthrow of a regime. It was a demographic reordering by which the Greeks came into being as a unified Christianity, and the Turks came into being for the first time. And the Greeks claim that this is their land exclusively, and the only way that this place can survive is if the Muslims go.

So we’re talking about exile, murder, enslavement and conversion. This is what happened in the region. That’s what made the Greek Revolution possible and was the premise of everything else that followed. So you can talk about heroic moments, about putting together a nation-state and a modern state, but it’s based on this trick that’s carried out, which is to label Muslims as Turks and foreigners. That’s the basic outline of my argument.

That’s why the title of your book refers to “the violent birth of nationalism.” It was extremely violent, wasn’t it?

It was. The usual way of understanding why the Greeks rose up is because they were oppressed by the Turks. They weren’t allowed to carry out their religious practices or build churches. They weren’t allowed to build schools and learn Greek letters. None of that is true. The Ottoman regime—because that’s what we’re talking about—was not singling out non-Muslims. On the contrary, it was a multi-confessional regime. The Christians, the Franks (meaning the Catholics), the Armenians, the Jews, all lived in communities called dhimmis. They were supposed to be protected.

That’s where the problem arose. The Ottoman regime was fracturing and couldn’t mobilize resources. There was a mad grab locally, with people trying to find some sort of alliance in Constantinople to help push out their competitors. And because there was no law and order, that usually meant killing them.

The leaders were the upper echelons of the Ottoman administration, which included both Christians and Muslims. Together, they ruled all these territories with fierce exploitation. There were attacks and looting of villages, and the torture of people who didn’t pay their taxes. This was carried out by both Christians and Muslims because they were a unified force: they both had an interest in perpetuating this regime. So you would have an alliance of local landowners and tax collectors of Muslims and Christians against another alliance of Muslims and Christians. The axis of division wasn’t religion.

The price of losing a battle was that you’d be arrested and your head cut off. There are long descriptions in the local literature about who was picked up, whose head was cut off, how they were presented as a trophy. This arbitrary violence had been going on for decades. The best that the Sultan could do was to mediate, but it was always an imperfect and impermanent outcome. People would just be waiting for the next outbreak of violence of factions against other factions.

What happened in 1821 was that, because of a variety of local circumstances, the Christian elites were faced with an uprising of the peasantry. The peasants were happy to kill both Muslim and Christian overlords and didn’t see any distinction. Both were squeezing them for rents, lending them money at extortionate rates, looting villages and torturing them. In a moment of instability, the peasantry picked up arms to attack all the elites.

At that point, the Christian elites turned to peasant leaders and said, ‘You can’t carry out this war by yourself. You can kill us off, but then how are you going to supply your armies? How are you going to get goods from point A to point B? How are you going to take out loans and finance this whole thing?’ So they came to an agreement that the peasants could attack the elites, but only the Muslim elites. If they did that, then the Christian elites would give them logistical and financial support. So what had been a straightforward class war was now given a vertical resonance as well.

That led to what was unprecedented in the region: a generalized mass mobilization from the elites all the way down to the poorest peasants who picked up arms, attacked their neighbors and looted them, exiled them, killed them, enslaved them and forced them to convert. This would then be called a ‘national’ uprising. This is when they started calling themselves Greek for the first time, with all the classes united under one banner, which is Christianity, and, later on, language.

So the beginning of the revolution in 1821-2 was violent. The number of dead may be similar to the Ottoman period, if you stretch it over time. But this was the absolute violence of a nation, where you create absolute belonging, hurled against an absolute enemy which could only lead to absolute destruction. That is exactly what it did. It was the real, penetrating, molecular violence that went from village to village and house to house. In the usual history, they say, ‘Yes, there were some excesses.’ No, these are not excesses. This was the point of the warfare. This is why they were fighting the war. The mass killing was not accidental. It was not because they were inexperienced. This was the point: to create a homogeneous population of Christians.

Then there’s more violence later in the decade. There was another wave when the Greeks fell out with each other. That’s a contest between the landowners who thought that they could just perpetuate their rule without the Muslims and keep all the revenues for themselves and the peasantry and people from other parts of the world who come to Greece, and said, ‘You’re monopolizing power. Even if you recognize a Greek nation, you’re not recognizing a Greek state, you have to give something back.’ The landowners refused, and that led to the Greek civil wars of 1824.

Those ended with the establishment of a national authority, but before that, there was more violence, because outsiders came in and razed villages. There was sexual violence, physical violence, arson—all aimed at destroying local culture and local hierarchy and replacing it with the idea of a nation.

Then, just as that seemed to be settling down, the Ottomans finally got their act together. Up to that point, the Europeans had been putting down revolutions in Spain and in Italy. They had expected the Sultan to do the same with the Greeks, but he couldn’t, because he couldn’t mobilize resources. He was facing his own problems and, in 1826, had to slaughter his own Janissaries. So the Sultan struck a deal with the vizier of Egypt, Mehmed Ali, that he could put down the Greek Revolution and it would be his territory, under the sphere of influence of the Sultan.

Mehmed Ali organized a good, strong, disciplined army and navy along European lines, but with Egyptian fellaheen. They came in and carried out a process of retribution and arson all the way across the Morea (the Peloponnese), village by village, town by town. Masses of people were enslaved, put into ships and taken to Egypt to work in the quarries and in construction in the economic boom there. We don’t know exactly how many, but certainly tens of thousands of men, women and children were sent to the slave markets in Egypt. There was a glut and the price of slaves collapsed.

The arson, the murder, the enslavement, the sexual violence, all of these things were happening over the course of 1825 and into 1826. The Greek Revolution was over at that point: the Sultan had finally restored order using this proxy. So that was the third wave of violence.

And then something happened that, from the Greek point of view, was miraculous. The allies—meaning the French, the British and the Russians—put together a joint fleet to put an end to the anarchy which was affecting the trade routes. The Black Sea spills into the Aegean Sea, and had become a sea of pirates. The Egyptians, having defeated whatever there was of a Greek government on land, had left the privateers at sea, following nobody’s orders. Things had gotten worse, not better. At this point, in mysterious circumstances, the fleet led by Edward Codrington, the British admiral, entered the bay where the Egyptians were moored and destroyed the joint Ottoman-Egyptian fleet. He sank just about every ship there, probably because the Egyptians were taken completely by surprise. It was the last major battle of sailing ships (after that, the technology moved to steam) and ended any possibility of putting down the Greek Revolution.

The Greeks were still not getting along. They were still killing each other, but the allies were coming. They landed a French army to represent all the allies, who began to restore order and introduced a government. Over time, they succeeded. By 1829, things had calmed down a little bit. They brought in the old Russian foreign minister, who now claimed he was Greek. He was from Corfu. He’d been at the Congress of Vienna and served Alexander I. He came in as the first governor of an independent Greece, with ideas about moderate liberalism, hierarchy and citizenship etc. This didn’t go down very well with the local elites, especially, who were a combination of old landowners and bandits. So they assassinated him. All hell broke loose again, with a last wave of violence.

At that point, the allies said, ‘We’re not going to let you decide what your government is going to be.’ The Greeks agreed because they wanted to stop killing each other. So the Allies imposed a monarchy headed by a Catholic king from Bavaria who was chosen precisely because he had nothing to do with Greece or Greek politics. He became the first king of Greece, Otto I.

If there’s one thing a nation-state is supposed to do, it’s to put an end to violence and introduce some kind of stability along with rights. That happened. From around 1831 to 32 things began to quiet down and the Greeks began to build a nation-state.

I was reading your book earlier and thinking about it. On the one hand, you’re saying there’s nothing there, beforehand. But as Greece becomes a nation-state, nationalism becomes a powerful force. It’s clearly something that appeals to us as human beings.

Nation-states are formed of modern states. If you take away the nation part, what does a modern state look like? It provides security, order, routine, it opens and guards the trade routes, it protects your property. This model was attractive to Greeks up and down the social hierarchy because it was a good alternative to the Ottoman order, which didn’t offer stability and security.

But states can be multinational, multiethnic, multi-confessional. Greece was not. It was the first example of an ethnic nation-state. They accepted the state, but said it had to be a nation-state, so it would be comprised only of Orthodox Christians. The French carried out a revolution in the name of the nation, but that was a civic nation. It wasn’t pretty either. No nationalism is pretty. They have their dark moments and moments of mass violence. In Greece, there was a problem with the Catholic minority in places like Naxos, Tinos, and Andros. They weren’t going to be allowed to be citizens, but the French insisted, so they became Greeks. But no Muslims were allowed.

We have an ambiguous relationship with the nation-state and with the modern state. On the one hand, we’re saying it’s too much, we push it away, and ask it to leave us alone. On the other hand, we’re asking it to do very positive and constructive things: security, maybe even a roof over your head, depending on which kind of state we’re talking about. The European model says not only do you have rights and immunities, but you also have certain material rights. You have the right not to starve.

We want the state to do good things over time, so to this general dismissal of nations as always violent, I say, ‘Well yes, by definition, any state is violent and nations can be violent. On the other hand, we’re asking for these states to give us a space where we can develop individually, collectively and with a degree of stability and some sense of hope for the future. Nation-states do that as well.’

But the pride in being Greek is strong, based partly on the ancient heritage…

Yes. Famously so.

Let’s talk about the books you’re recommending. First up, we’ve got a novel, Liberty or Death (1953). Do you want to say what it’s about and why you chose it?

This is a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, who is the serious modern Greek novelist. If you’re in Greece on holiday, and you have good lighting at night and no young children, this is the book to read. It’s thought-provoking and rich in descriptions. It recreates the moment of the Cretan revolution, which came later. There was a Muslim population on Crete, all of it Greek speaking, none of whom had ever been to what today we call Turkey.

Kazantzakis appreciates that the Greeks have a national cause, but also that the people they’re calling Turks, the Muslims, are very human. Everyone can see what the end is going to be, that these people are going to be expelled. He is writing about people who do not have a future.

So it’s heroic and also tragic, both at the same time. The story centers around the friendship of two people—a Greek community leader, who is a sort of bandit, and one of the Ottoman rulers. They had been friends, but slowly the friendship becomes impossible, because they cannot get past these mass mobilizations on both sides.

Most people will have heard of Kazantzakis’s novel, Zorba the Greek, even if they don’t know that he’s the one who wrote it. There are all the taverns named after it, there is the movie—have you seen it?

Not recently. I love the theme tune and I’ve been thinking I need to watch it again.

It’s really good. It’s not dumb at all. It’s with Alan Bates, Anthony Quinn and Irina Papas. It’s a serious film in black and white. But Kazantzakis also wrote other books. He had this empathy toward the people who he knew were doomed. He narrated their doom and the victory of the Christians (who now called themselves Greeks).

I like that subtlety, that ambiguity. He is describing for a later period what I’m trying to capture for the earlier period. This mix of, ‘Yes, the nation gives us this righteousness. It gives us rights, it gives us immunities, all these things.’ But in this particular circumstance, it came at a tremendous human cost. The nation does both things, it creates and it effaces, and Kazantzakis captured that.

Was this just happening in Crete, or was there a wave of it going on elsewhere at that time?

It happened all up and down the Balkans and across Anatolia. This process began in the 1820s and spread to the rest of the Balkans and then, later on, to Crete. It was finally resolved by the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, whereby the Christian populations of all these territories rose up against the Ottomans, created independent states that were explicitly Christian, and did away, almost everywhere, with their Muslim populations. They sent them ‘home’ to places they had never been, speaking languages they didn’t know, to what was going to become Turkey.

This was the model for all the Balkan states, with some exceptions. Kosovo is still problematic today, as is Sarajevo. There was also a steady stream of Bulgarians leaving and going to Turkey, because they had no place else to go. The big exception was Albania, which some people treat as if it’s not really a model for anything—because of poverty, corruption etc. But it’s the one place in the Balkans that maintained its multi-confessional character: Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims. And it does so to this day, with relative success compared to other models. One should look more carefully at Albania, I think.

Later on, in his other books, Kazantzakis has something to say about what happens up north, in Salonica, in what the Greeks call Macedonia.

It’s a 100-year process, and it ends with Turkey itself. It’s the Turks who overthrow the archaic Ottoman Empire to create a national republic, modern Turkey. To do this, they used the Greek model of 1821, except in reverse. In 1922, after a failed Greek expedition to capture territory, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk mobilized the Muslim population against the Christians, expelling the Greek army, and forcing a population exchange whereby the Christians all had to leave, including the surviving Armenians, most of whom had already been killed off in 1915.

The terms of this treaty were that if you were a Christian, you had to go, no matter what your role had been. So 1.5 million people left, and there was a smaller number who came in the other direction. That was the big population exchange of 1923. Kazantzakis is describing something that was happening everywhere.

As I said, the Turkish Revolution and the Anatolian war of 1922-3 were, in some ways, a culmination of the process begun by the Greeks in 1821—except now they’re the victims. Does that make sense?

It does. I’m not sure your Greek colleagues will be very happy with that analysis, though.

I’m in a lot of trouble.

Let’s turn to your next book, which is a detective novel. Tell me about Che Committed Suicide by Petros Markaris.

So on this imaginary trip to Greece, if you have young children and you’re mainly on the beach, this is the book to read. You can read a chapter at a time, a page at a time, put it down and pick it up. It’s your classic whodunnit detective story. The protagonist is a detective who is normally investigating a series of murders. His job is to figure out who’s doing it and uncover the context. Nearly every time, it’s something to do with modern Greek society, with its neoliberal elements, that’s uncovered in the process of trying to solve the crimes.

Che Committed Suicide is one of his earlier ones and was very successful (‘Che’ refers to Che Guevara). For complicated reasons, a series of highly successful entrepreneurs are forced to commit suicide in public. It’s a form of blackmail, and he doesn’t know why. [SPOILER ALERT]. It turns out that they had all been left-wingers in the 70s. They’d been at the forefront of overthrowing the junta, demonstrating against the police state, etc. Then, through the left, they made their way into the higher echelons of society. They made lots of money, threw away their morals, and sacrificed their comrades and society as a whole in order to gorge on the wealth of Greek society at the expense of everybody else. These former left-wing radicals are now entrepreneurs who eat sushi and things like that.

The detective is very Greek and lower middle class. He likes his food. He has a traditional marriage with his wife, with the usual back and forth. He’s completely dedicated to his daughter. With his traditional Greek eye, he uncovers this new society that’s unfolding around him.

Later on, Petros Markaris did another series about the economic crisis, which was catastrophic for Greece. All of his books have a tendency to be about uncovering something rotten in the socioeconomics of modern society. In his case, it’s about Greece, but it’s pretty much recognizable to anybody.

Let’s go on to That Greece Might Still Be Free by William St Clair. What’s this one about, and why did you choose it?

William St Clair decided he was going to write about the ‘philhellenes,’ the people who flocked to Greece in order to aid with the Greek Revolution and the war of independence. They usually met with terrible fates, but they’re considered to be heroes both in Greece and in Europe in general. The French, the British, the Germans, the Italians, will all say, ‘Yes, we too contributed to your revolution.’

But as William St Clair began to do his research, he discovered the things I’ve been telling you about: the mass violence, what happened to these poor philhellenes, who arrived thinking they were going to see people in togas and sandals standing for lofty philosophical ideals. What they found it what you’d expect to find—peasants, bandits, landowners, tax collectors, etc. It was pretty prosaic stuff and ugly too.

St Clair was outraged by this saying, ‘This is not at all what we were told it was!’ And he describes in graphic detail the violence, the betrayals, the disillusionment. It was a visceral reaction.

He was right to write this book. It was on the bookshelf of just about every educated Greek when it came out. It was hardly recognized at all in public but everyone knew it and read it. There’s this tendency to have one public voice and one private voice. My problem is that my private voice became my public voice, but that’s another story.

That Greece Might Still Be Free is very good at opening up this view, and it did for me as well. What he wasn’t good at doing—and couldn’t because it was too soon—was to say why. Why did this take place? In his descriptions, what it comes down to is that these were nasty types. OK, maybe they’re not nice people but still, there has to be more of an explanation…

I pay tribute to William St Clair with this recommendation. He did a good job at the time, and now we can take it further and ask, ‘How do you explain this?’

In the introduction of the edition I was looking at, another author wrote, “If I had to recommend one book to pack on a holiday on a Greek beach or in the Greek mountains, it would be That Greece Might Still Be Free.”

It might be a bit heavy for the beach. Don’t read it aloud to your children because they’ll be crying at the end of it. But it’s a very good book.

Let’s talk about your next book recommendation, A Concise History of Greece by Richard Clogg. So does this cover the whole period from 1820?

Yes, and even a bit before. Clogg is a British intellectual and a very good historian. He’s considered the ‘professor father’ of historians of Greece, in Britain and even abroad, including in Greece itself. He’s very well respected and probably deserves even more respect than he gets, particularly in Greece.

Clogg has a good feel for Greece without the temples. He writes about daily life and the laboring poor alongside the great historical events. It’s a straightforward, unadorned narration of modern Greek history, with all the major events stopping along the way to consider what it was like to live at that time, depending on what class or region you came from. He has a very good eye for that, and it’s a very enjoyable read. This one I would take to the beach, definitely. It’s very short.

Yes, I was going to ask because history books can be very long…

This is his concise history. He’s written other histories, but this is the short one. He’s a good historian and it’s a good read. He’s also a very nice man, which sometimes happens. So if you’re in Greece, for the first, second, third time, and you want a general sense of where you are in this place, this book would be the one to read.

We’ve talked about the Greek Revolution, about Crete, and you mentioned the military junta in the 1970s. What other important events should we be aware of in the history of modern Greece?

The basic geopolitical outline is that Greece begins as a little speck which includes what is today the Peloponnese, the area north of it up to around Athens, and then some of the islands. The Ionian islands are British. The rest is Ottoman Empire. That Greece was formed in that spot was an accident. Nobody knew where Greece was supposed to be because the Greeks were everywhere.

The Greek Revolution actually began in what is today Romania and failed. It took hold, though, in the south. So most story of what happened to Greece after that, over the next 90 years, would be how it took on its present form as a sort of irredentism.

There were diplomatic arrangements that gave them part of central Greece, Thessaly. There was a new king in the 1860s. The British gifted him the Ionian islands, including Corfu, and that became part of Greece as well.

Then there were a series of wars. They failed in the 1890s but were successful in 1912-1913 when Greece conquered the territory that it has today, with some minor exceptions that were added later. The other Balkan states also took on their present form, ending up with the big ones like Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, etc. There were some squabbles over Thrace. This was when the Ottomans were finally expelled from Europe, except for the sliver of land in Thrace near Istanbul.

The next big event was the belief among a lot of Greeks and Greek politicians that it shouldn’t stop there and that Hellenism, going back to ancient times, went as far as the Black Sea and all the way towards the Caucasus, including what is today Georgia. After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, there were a series of diplomatic manoeuvres whereby the British and the French countenanced a Greek presence in what would become Turkey. They marched all the way to Ankara to take over this territory and annex it to Greece. It’s at this point that Mustafa Kemal found a way to mobilize the population into a Turkish nation, expelled the Greeks, and the new borders were then established. That’s called the ‘Great Catastrophe’ here in Greece.

Then there was the arrival of the refugees. If you go to any Greek city, you’ll see neighbourhoods called new this and new that—new Smyrna, new Ionia, new Philadelphia. These were all refugee neighborhoods. So the neighborhood surrounding the center of Athens was all refugees. Whenever you see a football team founded around the same period, and they have the two-headed eagle as their emblem, again it’s refugees. Some of them still call themselves the Athletic Union of Constantinople. Nearly every family in Greece has some refugee background. So that was the next wave, assimilating this population as Greeks, and the end of the idea of a greater Greece.

The next events were fascism, the Great Depression, and then World War Two, the invasion and occupation of Greece by Germany. After the Greeks defeated Italy, the Germans then came down and occupied the country, which was a time of famine followed by a civil war. There was a continuum of violence from around 1940 until 1949, when the nationalist Greek government defeated the communists and the left, and Greece became capitalist, authoritarian and joined NATO. There was a great burst of economic development that lasted all the way to the 1970s, when Greece went into a slump the way that most of the world did. Greece deindustrializes and becomes this country of tourism, of agriculture and agricultural exports. It joins the EU, and there is massive development.

The next big moment, I would say, was the economic crisis of 2015 in particular, which impoverished the country, stripping away about 25% of GDP, and casting 25% of the population into unemployment in the name of…we still don’t know what. We still don’t know why. It was a punishment, but there was no material gain for anybody.

The country is still suffering today. We like to come to Greece. We go to the taverns, but take a look at the waiter who’s running around frantically to keep his job serving customers, getting paid a wage that would not be acceptable in Britain. We’re still in that moment now.

We’ve reached your final book. What can you tell me about Byron’s War by Roderick Beaton?

Beaton is another historian of modern Greece. He’s also written about global Greece—Greeks, wherever they might be found. He’s very smart and a very good historian. I think he’s retired now. What surprised me about this book is that there was still more to say about Byron. I couldn’t believe it! I thought, ‘Here we go again, more Byron. As if we didn’t have enough portraits, books, poetry, biographies, etc.’

Beaton did something different. He stripped Byron of our assumptions that he belonged in Greece and would die in Greece for Greek liberty, and asked what he was doing before. I don’t know whether Beaton would agree, but the way I understand what he’s writing, Byron was experiencing some sort of midlife crisis and ennui. Byron’s thinking, ‘I’ve inherited now, I’ve had a very good sex life with both genders. I’ve lived in Italy. I’ve met the Shelleys. My body is not what it used to be. Now what?’

Byron is a certain kind of liberal. He begins to contemplate going to Spain, where there’s a revolution. He thinks about Italy, which also has revolutions going on. He wants adventure. He wants to be alive again. He wants to feel and be seen as vital. In the end, he decides on Greece because of its Classical past. As Beaton says, ancient Greece was always Greece’s trump card.

So Byron dons the very colorful uniforms—both European military and Greek traditional, as he understands them—and goes to what will become modern Greece. He begins to fund factions of the revolution as his way of becoming relevant and feeling masculine again. Beaton narrates this very well, both as a historian and as a writer. It’s a very good read.

Byron had a lot of money, both his own funds, because he’d inherited his wealth from Scotland, and also money from a loan that had been put together in the London bond market to fund the Greek Revolution. But nobody knew who the Greek government was, because they were all killing each other. So Byron arrived as the emissary and made the decision to give the money to anyone except the Peloponnesian landowners. He funded them with money, which to them was unprecedented, spectacular and unimaginable. They then used this money to hire mercenaries to crush the old elites and tip the balance of the Greek Revolution.

Usually, we think that Byron came to help the Greeks. But he decided who the Greeks were and then gave them spectacular sums of money to do it. Then he died, as you would expect from a Romantic poet.

Wow. So Byron had a real effect on the outcome, you would say?

That’s what Beaton is getting at. It was something really specific. It wasn’t just Greece, it was that Greece.