This is a study of the cosmopolitan intellectual life of Athens, a city on the margins of Europe, recovering from the repressive rule of a military junta. Drawing inspiration from Athens and its cultural elite, the author explores the meaning of modernity. He finds it not in the singular character of "Western civilization", but instead in an increasingly diverse family of practices of reform. He analyzes an especially instructive example. A circle of Athenian reformers, reclaiming the continuity of an ostensibly discontinuous heritage while charting a course for change, realize their modernity in the practice of what Faubion terms "historical constructivism" - the synthesizing of history, or the absorption of the past into the present.