Sean Mathews’s ‘The New Byzantines’ argues that Greece’s apparent marginality within Europe is not a failure of modernization but a misreading of history. Drawing on Greece’s renewed engagement with the Eastern Mediterranean, Mathews contends that the country is rediscovering its Byzantine inheritance not as sentiment, but as strategy. In a multipolar world where Europe’s coherence is no longer guaranteed, Greece’s cultural memory, religious tradition, and regional fluency reemerge as assets rather than liabilities.
I did not come to Sean Mathews’s The New Byzantines cold. I came to it carrying Byzantium already in my head, and perhaps in my blood. Years ago, I read ‘Sailing from Byzantium’ by Colin Ellis and absorbed its central lesson, that Byzantium was not a failed afterlife of Rome, but a civilizational engine that transmitted Greek reason, Christian theology, and administrative habit to the Latin West, the Islamic world, and the Slavic East. Byzantium was not a bridge. It was a source.
With that in mind, Mathews’s book felt less like discovery than recognition. Page after page, The New Byzantines articulates something many Greeks sense instinctively but rarely state aloud, that Greece is not European in the narrow Brussels sense, not Balkan in the ethnographic sense, and not Middle Eastern in the confessional sense, but culturally antecedent to all three. Modern categories obscure that lineage, but they do not erase it. Civilizations remember, even when states try to forget.
Mathews’s achievement is to show that this continuity is not merely cultural history. It is newly strategic.
What Mathews Argues
At its core, The New Byzantines is both a journey and an argument. Mathews moves through Athens, Piraeus, Thessaloniki, and the Eastern Mediterranean as a participant-observer, attentive to café conversations, property transactions, diplomatic salons, and the texture of everyday life. He encounters Armenians from Aleppo, Israelis buying apartments, Gulf investors underwriting redevelopment projects, and Greeks who insist, sometimes sardonically and sometimes with conviction, that Greece is a Middle Eastern country that happens to sit in Europe.
From these encounters, Mathews develops his central claim, that modern Greece is rediscovering its Byzantine inheritance not as nostalgia, but as a pragmatic response to a rapidly changing geopolitical environment. Greece’s apparent position between worlds, so often framed as weakness, becomes a source of resilience.
A key pillar of this argument is Orthodoxy. Mathews does not treat Greek Orthodoxy as mere theology or ritual, but as a lived moral system that shapes social behavior and collective psychology. Orthodoxy, he suggests, organizes society differently from both Western Christianity and Western secularism, not by enforcing a catalogue of prohibitions, but by placing responsibility squarely on the individual to consider whether a chosen action can stand scrutiny on Judgment Day. Even Greeks who rarely attend church still mark Easter, baptize their children, and define themselves as Orthodox in conscious distinction from Western Christianity. Language and Orthodoxy together have given the modern Greek state a cultural coherence outsiders routinely underestimate.
The middle chapters trace Greece’s recovery from the financial crisis and its reemergence as a geopolitical hinge. Mathews shows how Athens has repositioned itself through pragmatic diplomacy with Israel, Egypt, the Gulf states, and the United States. Ports, energy corridors, shipping, naval facilities, and diplomatic fluency in Arab settings restore a role Greece once played through Smyrna, Alexandria, and Constantinople. This turn eastward, he insists, is not a rejection of Europe, but an acknowledgment that Europe alone is no longer sufficient.
Crucially, Mathews situates these developments within a longer historical arc. Ottoman rule did not erase Byzantium but absorbed it. Greeks functioned as merchants, administrators, and intermediaries within a pragmatic imperial system that valued survival over ideology. Modern Greece inherited that instinct. The ‘New Byzantines’ are not empire-builders; they are navigators of overlapping worlds.
by Sean Mathews
Hurst, $29.99, 304 pages
Civilization Before Geopolitics
Where Mathews is most persuasive is in his insistence that civilizational memory precedes strategy. Geopolitics follows culture, not the other way around. Greek strategic behavior cannot be understood without reference to Greek historical consciousness.
Even today, among urban and Western-educated Greeks, one still hears references, sometimes half-joking and sometimes not, to Aghia Sophia and the priest who vanished into the walls to save the Holy Eucharist. Greece accepted geopolitical reality after 1922; the Megali Idea died in Smyrna – but civilizational memory did not. Turkish rhetoric and symbolic gestures reopen old anxieties not because Greeks expect reconquest, but because historical trauma does not disappear on command.
Identity, as Mathews implicitly understands, is not a switch. It is a continuum. Greece does not see itself as a bridge between civilizations, but, in its own historical consciousness, as their progenitor. Slavs and Arabs may not share Greek enthusiasm for that genealogy, but it lingers in collective memory and surfaces under pressure.
Music as Evidence, Not Ornament
This continuity appears not only in diplomacy, but in culture. Greek popular music offers a parallel narrative to the one Mathews describes geopolitically.
Between 1930 and 1950, Sofia Vembo, the national voice of Greece, sang of Allah, the Nile, and eastern longing. Greek popular culture looked eastward instinctively. World War II and its aftermath ruptured those connections, pulling Greece forcibly into Europe. Western musical forms followed. Postwar stars such as Nana Mouskouri and Demis Roussos achieved global fame largely through Western idioms, even as they retained Greek elements.
Yet the eastern undercurrent never vanished. Today, younger Greeks crowd nightclubs devoted to rebetiko and zeimbekiko. Singers such as Glykeria have found international audiences precisely by reasserting music’s eastern roots. Culture, like geopolitics, bends but does not break. Mathews gestures toward this continuity; the music makes it unmistakable.
The Western Problem, 1204 and After
No account of Greece’s civilizational positioning is complete without confronting the Fourth Crusade. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 remains the original sin in Greek perceptions of the West. It was not Islam that destroyed Byzantium’s capital, but Latin Christendom.
History reinforced the lesson. Western powers repeatedly shifted positions to Greece’s detriment. Support came late or not at all, as in the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and during Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, events astonishingly absent from the historical awareness of many educated Western observers. Admiration for Western accomplishments therefore coexists with deep mistrust. Greece survived not because of Western reliability, but because of its own endurance.
Mathews understands this ambivalence, though his elegant prose sometimes softens its implications. Popular memory often outweighs documented fact, and memory continues to shape alignment choices.
Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean Whole
Here The New Byzantines points beyond Greece to Europe itself. For most of European history, especially in the south, the primary lines of connection ran across the Mediterranean, not northward beyond the Alps. The Mediterranean was a single civilizational space, commercially, culturally, and strategically integrated from Iberia to the Levant. Northern Europe was peripheral to this world for centuries.
Europe’s current difficulties stem in part from forgetting this reality. A Europe that defines itself narrowly, administratively, and continental is ill-suited to a multipolar age. A Europe that understands the Mediterranean as a shared civilizational core stands a better chance of survival. Greece, by history and habit, belongs to this older and wider Europe.
This is where Greece becomes indispensable. Not as a bridge, but as a civilizational anchor. Trade, diplomacy, cultural fluency, and historical memory remain Europe’s most effective tools. Greece can make Europe intelligible to the East and the East intelligible to Europe because it helped shape both.
Conclusion
The New Byzantines succeeds because it touches something true. Nearly every example resonates. Its charm occasionally obscures causality, but that too reflects reality. People act on stories as much as on facts.
Mathews reminds readers that Greece’s destiny has always been maritime, mediatory, and resilient. The question his book implicitly raises is whether Europe understands how much it needs Greece, and the Mediterranean world it anchors, to survive what comes next.
