Mr. Beaton calls his book a “biography” rather than a “history.” Both are Greek words, of course, reminding readers how deeply the Greek language has influenced us over three millennia. He structures his narrative as one might tell the life of a single person, with chapters running from “A Seed Is Sown” and “Born in Blood” to “The Self Divided” and “Coming of Age in Europe.” Europe, too, is a Greek word, and the modern country’s fraught relationship to that protean entity lends Mr. Beaton’s story an urgent relevance.

“We are all Greeks,” wrote the poet Shelley in the first days of the Greek War of Independence (1821-30). Just as Greek contributions to literature, politics, history, philosophy, art and science fertilized European and American culture, the revolutions in America and France would inspire Greek intellectuals who conceived of liberating their country from the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled them for 400 years.

But what defines a nation, and who were these Greeks? Certainly not a single ethnicity, even in ancient times. Mr. Beaton quotes the poet George Seferis’s speech upon winning the Nobel Prize in 1963: “I do not say we are of the same blood [as the ancient Greeks]—because I have a horror of racial theories—but we still live in the same country and we see the same mountains ending in the sea.” The region is rich in irony: Seferis was born an Ottoman subject in Asia Minor, while the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), was born in Thessaloniki, now part of Greece. In the formation of modern borders, millions of refugees traded places. Mr. Beaton describes two identities in tension: the Greek nation, loosely defined as people who speak the language and share other cultural characteristics, and the Greek state, the political entity constructed and constantly adapted after 1830. The nation is enduring, while the state with its many governments has changed nearly every decade, forcing Greeks to adjust to its permutations. Mr. Beaton quotes the historian Thanos Veremis on Greek attitudes toward this fickle entity: “For Greeks, unlike the concept of the nation, the state had always been an object of popular derision.”

Greeks have refined their stoic humor through these wars and changing governments, but have rarely spoken with one voice. They were intensely divided even when they rose up against the Ottoman Turks in 1821, a period Mr. Beaton calls “a descent into savagery.” Early Greek victories against the pasha, or local Ottoman governor in the central Peloponnese peninsula, resulted in the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Jews, the eradication of villages, heaps of severed heads. Once the sultan’s troops had put down rebellions in the northern provinces and focused on the Peloponnese, they swiftly matched atrocity for atrocity. Only with the help of the Great Powers England, France and Russia did the Greeks finally prevail. Now “Greece existed as a political entity on the map of Europe.” But defeating the Turks meant contending with themselves. The first governor of the new state, Ioánnis Kapodístrias, an aristocratic modernizer with ties to Europe, was assassinated by rival Greeks in 1831. “Born in blood,” indeed.

The Great Powers imposed a Bavarian monarch, Otto, upon the fledgling country, and when he was forced out by advocates of parliamentary rule in 1862, a new king was imported from Denmark to form a constitutional monarchy. Though occasionally compromised or out of favor, the monarchy survived until the military junta of 1967-74. In 1913 King George I was assassinated in Thessaloniki, a city recently acquired via the Balkan Wars. During World War I, the new king, Constantine, argued for restraint—after all, those other warring monarchs were his relatives. But Greece’s charismatic prime minister, Elefthérios Venizélos, had already been negotiating with Britain to join the war effort. Unfortunately, Venizélos also advocated the sentimental “Grand Idea,” a notion that Greece might regain its lost territory in Asia Minor, and laid the groundwork for an invasion of Turkey in 1921. Greeks marching toward their symbolic city, Constantinople, ran up against the new Turkish army under the future Atatürk. The conflict ended after a Turkish assault on the city of Smyrna (now Izmir) marked by slaughter, mass deportations and a fire (its cause debated) whose effect “was to cleanse the city of almost all visible signs of a Greek, Christian and European presence that went back centuries.”

Previous histories of modern Greece by C.M. Woodhouse, Richard Clogg and Thomas Gallant have gotten bogged down in this Balkan complexity, but Mr. Beaton’s biographical conceit keeps the narrative focused, lively and clear. His accounts of the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-41), the Axis occupation and subsequent civil war are both gripping and remarkably balanced. Historians have seen the rise of the Communist Party in Greece and its violent suppression, with the help of Britain and the U.S. under the Truman Doctrine, as the start of the Cold War. But Mr. Beaton allows that Greek communists were not a monolithic force under Stalin’s control. They were terrible, but they represented a more local struggle against fascism and monarchy.

Except for the junta years and the occasional spasm of terrorist activity, contemporary Greece has become increasingly peaceful and prosperous under relatively moderate governments, joining the European Union in 1981 and adopting the euro in 2001. The economic crisis of the past decade has been devastating, to say the least, but Mr. Beaton reminds us that “Greeks have been here before. Generations have lived through far worse conditions in the two-hundred-year history of the Greek state.” The people who gave us the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 continue to give us music, literature and art of great beauty. The tragic vitality of their story endures.

—Mr. Mason’s latest books are “Voices, Places: Essays” and “The Sound: New and Selected Poems.” He teaches at Colorado College.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-review-the-cradle-of-nationalism-11571409793