This book was prompted by the Greek economic crisis, but it is not entirely about it. At its heart lie two intertwined stories. The first involves attempting to answer the question of how the West came to invent the idea of its symbolic debt to Greece. The second deals with the impact of this idea on the rocky course of modern Greek history. The idea of this debt is traced back to classical Athens and the idealization of its past due to its defeat of the Persians and the cultural gifts the city had given to Greece. The Athenians consciously created an idealized vision of themselves and their city which became the West's secular Eden. The book goes on to discuss the early travellers to Greek lands, the postclassical vicissitudes of the Parthenon and the rise of antiquarianism, arguing that disillusionment with Greece dates back to the late 1600s, when travellers from northern Europe set out to see Greece for themselves. Travelling collectors and travel writers planted stereotypes about the Greeks and their failure to be worthy successors of the ancient inhabitants of their land in Western minds. Antiquarianism was closely connected with the ambition of empire and collectors declared the Greek past their own possession, initiating Europe's metaphorical colonization of classical antiquity. More emphasis could have been placed here on the intellectual climate at the end of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which fostered the rediscovery of Greece at the expense of Rome and the different attitudes between the Germans, who hardly visited Greece yet contributed the most to its idealization, and other western travellers (e.g. British and French).

The fourth chapter (From State of Mind to Nation-State) deals with how foreigners went from dismissing Greeks as mere shadows of their ancestors to championing their independence. The idea that the long-suffering Greeks, whose ancestors had first brought the light of civilization to Europe, were owed their liberation contributed to the invention of the West's notional debt to the ancient Greeks. How western philhellenism came to accept the premise that Europe owed a great debt to Greece is explored by discussing the role of influential figures such as Winckelmann, Wolf, Korais, Rigas, Elgin, Byron and Shelley. Though there is reference to Korais’ Mémoire sur l’état actuel de la civilisation dans la Grèce, surprisingly there is no mention of references to debt in this Memorandum. Korais states explicitly that the Greeks ‘never considered the Europeans as other than debtors who were repaying with substantial interest the capital which they had received from their own ancestors’.

The next chapter takes us on a rapid tour of modern Greek history, pausing at some key moments involving the classical past and the respect owed to the country because of it. In her attempt to highlight the classical debt, the author tends to sidestep other factors (e.g. Byzantium or religion) and ends up with rather one-sided statements such as ‘Greece shaped its modern identity to the mold of the ancient fantasy cast by European scholars, travelers, and philhellenes’ (p. 150). She also places more emphasis on monuments, archaeology and material culture and makes very little reference to texts (apart from a few paragraphs on Seferis).

In the last two chapters Hanink moves to the period of the crisis as the latest manifestation of the West's long-standing accusation that the Greeks have disregarded their ancient patrimony and raises the question ‘Does the current Greek monetary debt effectively erase the abstract classical debt that both Greece and Western countries had long been happy to agree was owed to Greece?’ (p. 198). She answers the question by demonstrating the tenacity of the symbolic debt as a rhetorical trope during the crisis and by discussing a number of sources ranging from cartoons and op-eds in the western press to the surprising use of ancient metaphors by Varoufakis and Tsipras because they play well with foreign audiences. These two chapters contribute to the increasing literature on the crisis and offer a nuanced analysis of its representation in the western media, though it is pointed out that ‘Greek antiquity has not played as prominent a role in the refugee crisis as it has in coverage of the financial one’ (p. 254).

This is a book about Western fantasies of Greece as well as about Greece's fraught relationship with Europe. It explores the assumption that Greece is an intrinsic part of Europe and yet does not belong there. The author presents the idea of a symbolic debt owed to Greece as universally accepted and ignores those who have challenged it by separating ancient from modern Greece. The connection resurfaces only in periods of crisis or as a tool to denigrate the moderns. Even classicists themselves have been doing this for years, using the term ‘Greek’ to apply only to Ancient Greek as if the modern period hardly existed. The notion of debt could also be seen as a strategy to deterritorialize and idealize classical Greece by elevating, distancing and disconnecting it completely from the modern country and thus making its appropriation by the West easier. This rupture with the past and the idea that Greeks are unworthy descendants of their ancient ancestors is touched upon briefly in the sixth chapter, but is not properly considered as the counter-narrative to the notion that the West owes Greece a symbolic debt (nor is the view that Greece does not belong to Europe). The author acknowledges this briefly by saying that ‘this book has largely neglected the long and complex history of resistance within Greece to European models and fantasies of Hellenism’ (p. 212). The philhellenic narrative that relies on the notion of debt seems to be presented as unchanging over the years and therefore any anti-Hellenic trends, ruptures and resistances are insufficiently explored. Philhellenism is not just an image of Greece derived from Winckelmann's ideal or some sort of benign charity offered to Greece but also a sentimental approach deployed by Greeks themselves, who tend to divide foreigners into philhellenes and anti-hellenes. It is not just about how Westerners have constructed an image or a fantasy of Greece; how the Greeks themselves internalize or resist this image is equally important.

In the past you could find classicists who had turned their attention to modern Greece and particularly its language and culture, yet in recent decades this has become increasingly rare. Therefore, it is refreshing to see a classicist engaging with the history and culture of Greece, covering a considerable time span stretching from antiquity to the present Greek crisis. This is an engagingly-written book, which uses the notion of classical debt (though it might have been more pertinent to use the words ‘Greek debt’ in the title) as a connecting thread to produce a wide-ranging yet concise narrative. Both accessible to the general reader and useful to scholars of classical and modern Greece, it constitutes a valuable contribution to classical reception and the role of Greece in the western imagination. It charts western claims to Greek antiquity and the story of modern Greece as a ‘disappointment’ cogently and convincingly.