The smouldering centre of Athens yesterday provided the latest evidence of a propensity to political violence that has characterised the Greeks since Homeric times.

Watching the hooded hordes of anarchists torching public buildings at will for three days, it was hard not to agree with Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who wrote famously that “the Greeks, the most humane men of ancient times, have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate ... that must strike fear into our hearts throughout their whole history and mythology.”

Ironically, it is this very Greek consciousness of having been once a great civilization that lingers in the modern public mind and erupts in paroxysms of frustration. Add to this the consistently bad economic news pouring from the national media, with its implicit criticism of Western capitalism, and the youthful anarchic tinderbox, itching for a blow-up, was ready to be ignited. Last Saturday night's fatal shooting of a teenager by the police provided the spark.

Ever since gaining their independence in 1829, the Greeks have remained torn between trying recreate the glories of classical Athens and having to accept a minor position in a Western-dominated world. They share with the fellow-Orthodox Russians and other East Europeans a love-hate relationship with the West: a slavish adherence to Western music, films and fashions, compensated for by a fashionable hatred of Western policies.

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Athens must be the only European capital where mass marches on the American embassy, a Cold War memory elsewhere, are still regularly staged, with the Government not daring to halt them. The trait of “tsambouka”, a term derived from the Turkish and meaning a hooliganish readiness to fight, has been valued in the Greek male world for 3,000 years.

This is the attitude underlying Greece's blocking the bid of neighbouring Macedonia to join Nato and the European Union. The rationale in Athens, going back to a Homeric mentality, is that “Macedonia” is a sort of Greek copyright, and if that is given up, the whole imaginary structure of modern Greece as a continuation of Alexander the Great's laddish aggressiveness collapses.

Perhaps it was no accident that last month, when a Greek Sunday newspaper offered free copies of the film 300, the blood and gore-spattered portrayal of the Battle of Thermopylae released last year to enthusiastic audiences of Greeks and American Marines, the issue was sold out in less than two hours.

A few weeks later, as Athens burned, some indeed “dined in hell”.

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