High life | 11 June 2015

There’s nothing to add to Martin Vander Weyer’s item about Hellas of two weeks ago in these here pages except a Yogi Berra pearl, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ The Greek drama will go on and on until the brinkmanship is exhausted. The EU has blinked, as I thought it would.

Although Greek accounting arabesques have been known to shame the Bolshoi — Goldman Sachs taught the modern Hellenes how to legally cook the books and screw Brussels, something we are now paying the price for — we Greeks have contributed a few things apart from cheating and not paying our taxes. As Michael Daley wrote in a letter to the Telegraph, Greeks ‘divined architecture in the human body and the proportions of humanity in their architecture’. That singular creative explosion of the 4th and 5th centuries BC has never been equalled. Modern Italians, ashamed of the Roman copycats, suggest that the ancient Greeks even discovered sex, but it took the Romans to include women. Boo! I guess Pericles has to be the greatest statesman-leader ever, his idealistic patriotism free from all sordid and selfish motives. (Just look at the Clintons and weep.) Cimon of Athens, Miltiades, Themistocles, Pheidias, Praxiteles, Socrates, Plato, Aristides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Thucydides, Hippocrates (and Taki?); you name them, we had them.

OK, OK, I know that is all in the past (even Taki), but we are the only small western European nation to win two Nobel Prizes for Literature, with Seferis in 1967 and Elytis in 1974. We were the last European country to stage a military coup and overthrow a quasi-democratic government, in 1967, and the last to abolish a monarchy after an extremely dubious referendum overseen by prime minister Constantine Karamanlis, the most undemocratic peasant and most ungrateful politician who has ever existed, and that’s saying something.