June 22-Stepping above the furious confrontation with banking powers over "Greek debt," Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras observed on June 15: "I'm certain future historians will recognise that little Greece, with its little power, is today fighting a battle beyond its capacity, not just on its own behalf but on behalf of the people of Europe."
Touching the same idea two centuries ago, the great English poet Percy Shelley wrote lines quoted many times since, though never by the current German Chancellor, French President, or the IMF Managing Director.
"The apathy of the rulers of the civilized world,"
Shelley wrote in 1821, when Greece was a captive nation in revolt against the Ottoman Empire, "to the astonishing circumstances of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilization, is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shows of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks.
Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.
"The human form and the human mind attained a perfection in Greece," Shelley continued, "which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to enoble and delight mankind. . . ."