This book traces the remarkable achievement of modern Greece: over the past three hundred years, a modern nation has been built, literally almost on the ruins of a vanished civilization. "Greece, Biography of a Modern Nation" is the history of the Greek nation-state, but it is primarily, and more importantly, the history of the collective identity that accompanies the nation-state. It is the history of events and high politics, but also the history of culture and the arts, of people and ideas.