ABSTRACT
Modern Greece is a broad concept, itself challenged by at least one well-known historian, but nonetheless useful. It is a wider concept than the Greek nation state, encompassing state, nation, culture, religion, language, literature, and ways of life. The Philiki Etaireia, the Phanariotes, the philhellenes and professional soldiers, could none of them, collectively, have brought to pass what the statesmen of Europe were determined to prevent, without the divine fire that had entered into the Greek people at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The modern Greece which they made has combined a complex relationship with antiquity with a powerful drive to be modern, progressive, civilized, and European. The notional end point of the book is 1896. This has an extraordinary appropriateness in that the 1896 Olympic Games were crafted by the Greeks in order to assert both the ancient heritage and, the modern credentials of Greek state and its place potential among the civilized states of Europe.
