A global history of Greece? Today's state around the capital Athens accounts for just under eleven million inhabitants, just over one per thousand of the world's population. It has only been around for less than two hundred years, and initially with a much smaller territory than today. Nevertheless, Roderick Beaton, a professor in London and a connoisseur of Byzantine and modern Hellas, spans his narrative from the Bronze Age to the present day. He looks for the core of historical continuity in the people, or more precisely: the speakers of the Greek language.

However, he largely ignores the question of the profound processes of change in the ancient Hellenic idiom during the Byzantine era and the four-hundred-year Ottoman rule over the southern Balkans. Not mentioned is the learned outsider Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who disturbed the philhellenic zeitgeist of the nineteenth century by trying to prove through the analysis of place and river names that the people of his time settling in the Peloponnese were not descendants of the ancient Hellenes, but descended from Albanians and Slavs who had found a new home there during the Middle Ages. According to his thesis, the modern Greek nationality rests on a mixture of peoples dominated by the Slavic and Balkans, which is very different from that of the ancient Greeks.

Even though Fallmerayer received angry criticism or was ignored, he had hit a point. For a long time it remained controversial whether the new Greeks, including the elite, should use the language spoken in the country (Demotiki) with its dialects or a 'pure' language created by philologists, the Katharevusa, which was strongly oriented towards ancient Greek in lexicon and morphology. Formally, this special bilingualism existed until almost fifty years ago; however, practical requirements had long since brought about a rapprochement, and the Koini Neoelliniki in use today is a synthesis of the two paradigms that have long been opposed.

The weakness of the shrinking empire

Even if one likes to learn more about the development of language, Beaton handles the question of identity undogmatically and pragmatically. For his Greeks are characterized precisely by a remarkable willingness to adapt and curiosity – a determination that is close to that presented by Edith Hall for antiquity. Their ability to reinvent themselves again and again under changing conditions not only led to changed identities across time and space, it also opened up the possibility for the Hellenes, who were usually not very numerous and only provided with scarce resources, to always find new ways, spaces and possibilities.

From the expanding Mycenaeans to the Greek communities in Astoria in the New York borough of Queens, in Boston, Chicago and many other cities around the world outside the heartland: Beaton's Greeks prove to be cosmopolitan because they are mobile, willing to reorient themselves, and yet always remain recognizable as Greeks and know how to use the forces of family and ethnocultural cohesion – even if most of them no longer speak Greek at all speak. Because they have arrived almost everywhere, according to the simple and apt quintessence, they have recently been able to play a prominent and unmistakable role in the emergence of global culture.