‘They rose from nothing and changed everything.’  This fantastic, fawning, fallacious guff introduced a 2016 PBS documentary on ancient Greece, and the biography of the sentiment behind it forms the subject of this unusual social history. Irritated by the fact that almost every media report, political speech, and cartoon about Greece’s current travails plays on the contrast between modern Greece and the glory that was Athens, Johanna Hanink has produced a wide-ranging and thoroughly researched analysis of Western attitudes to Greece from classical times right up to the current financial and refugee crises.