Roderick Beaton’s book The Greeks. A Global Story”

Ea global history of Greece? Today’s state around the capital Athens, with almost eleven million inhabitants, makes up just over one per thousand of the world’s population. It has only existed for less than two hundred years, and initially with a much smaller territory than today. Nonetheless, Roderick Beaton, a professor in London and adept at Byzantine and modern Hellas, spans his narrative from the Bronze Age to the present. He looks for the core of historical continuity in the people, more precisely: the speakers of the Greek language.

However, he largely ignores the question of the far-reaching processes of change in the ancient Hellenic idiom during the Byzantine era and the four hundred years of 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 analyzing place and river names in an attempt to prove that the people of his time settling in the Peloponnese were not descendants of the ancient Hellenes, but came from Albanians and Slavs who found a new home there during the Middle Ages. According to his thesis, modern Greek nationality is based on a Slavic-Balkan-dominated mixture of peoples that is completely different from the ancient Greeks.

Even if Fallmerayer faced angry criticism or was ignored, he had hit a point. For a long time it was in fact disputed 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 is reflected in lexis and morphology strongly aligned with ancient Greek. Formally, this special bilingualism existed until almost fifty years ago; however, practical requirements had long brought about a rapprochement, and the Koini Neoelliniki in use today is a synthesis of the two paradigms that have long opposed one another.

The weakness of the shrinking empire

Even if one would like to learn more about the development of the language, Beaton handles the question of identity undogmatically and pragmatically. Because his Greeks are characterized by a remarkable willingness to adapt and curiosity – a determination that is close to that of Edith Hall for antiquity. Their ability to constantly reinvent themselves under changing conditions not only resulted in changed identities across time and space, it also opened up the Hellenes, who were usually few in number and only provided with scarce resources, to constantly find new ways, spaces and possibilities .

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