H.’s title plays on two interpretations of the word ‘debt’: on the one hand it evokes the financial debt which has enormously burdened the nation of Greece since 2008; on the other there is the ‘cultural debt’ that western scholarship of recent centuries has perceived the ‘western world’ as owing to the civilisation of ancient Greece. This second debt, H. argues, was foisted upon the nation of modern Greece at its birth in 1828 and has put upon it wholly unrealistic expectations ever since. As a result, modern Greeks are frequently chided for not living up to the supposed examples and achievements of their ancient forebears. However, H. lays out why this is both unfair and inaccurate: ancient Greece was never any more enlightened or sophisticated than any other ancient society; the perception that it was is largely the result of myth-making which started in Athens in the fourth century bce and picked up apace again in the eighteenth century.

H. explains in her prologue that the inspiration for the book came during a period she spent in Greece during 2014 and 2015. She saw at first hand both the country's sufferings and how pejoratively these were perceived and projected by the media abroad. She leaves the reader in no doubt that the book was written both from the head and from the heart, something that lends it a layer of depth and authenticity. She writes superbly, moving effortlessly between references to modern popular culture and to the ancient past. Readers will find much of interest and much to provoke considered thought, not least in the second chapter, ‘How Athens Built its Brand’, and in her analysis of how the media portrayed the Greek debt crisis with familiar ancient Greek tropes.

If the book has a weakness, it would seem to stem from the fact that it was necessarily written in haste; although this adds spontaneity, there is at times the sense that arguments and examples should have been developed or checked more carefully. Most notably, readers familiar with E. Hall's work will be surprised to see one line from her 2015 Guardian article on the place of Classical Civilisation in UK state schools quoted on pages 115–16 to illustrate a supposed direct link between a modern argument that Classics has something exceptional to offer to students of all backgrounds and a nineteenth-century chauvinist belief that the Classical world possessed a higher intellectual culture than did other ancient peoples. Hall is not named in the text at this point, but elsewhere she is named and credited on page 49 for her research that led to her writing Inventing the Barbarian (1989); the two passages sit incongruously. Such moments detract from what seems to be an important and interesting thesis.

The book leaves a feeling that H. is onto something important, but that it represents the opening to a conversation that ought to be developed more widely and fully.