Tom Sawyer is always getting up to some mischief on the banks of the Mississippi River or engaging in crazy feats such as balancing on a fence to impress his sweetheart in the pages of Mark Twain. Victor Hugo’s Gavroche roams the streets of Paris, joining forces with Les Misérables in protest and penning scathing verses against the tyranny before falling in a hail of bullets… But Madcap Anthony – or Trelantonis, as the most popular childhood hero of modern Greek literature is known – need not be sought in books. Just walk down from Lycabettus Hill towards the National Garden and there, on Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, diagonally opposite the side entrance to Parliament, you will find the repository of his spirit in a 19th century mansion.

For all his mischievousness, the boisterous Trelantonis was known for hating lies and injustice. But this precocious and courageous pea-jacketed boy was not a figment of the imagination of his creator, Penelope Delta. He lived, traveled, fought and loved, from 1873 to 1954. He was Antonis Benakis, the founder and creative force – even to this day – behind one of Greece’s finest museums: the Benaki.

The small state formed in 1830 in the southern Balkans did not simply represent the ideal of a handful of visionaries who – initiated in the spirit of the Enlightenment – despised Ottoman domination. It was not even a vindication of the local population that took up arms against the hated pashas and sultans, shouting “Freedom or Death,” and decimated in the 10-year War of Independence.

New Greece saw itself as the embodiment of a tradition that went back thousands of years, picking up the thread of its interrupted history from the rhapsodists who sang of the Siege of Troy; the thread Ariadne gave Theseus to help him escape from the clutches of the Minotaur…

Through the gate, across the garden, up the marble steps, brings you to the museum’s ground floor and immerses you in the long-distant past. Cycladic figurines and miniatures of female deities whose enlarged breasts denote a matriarchal period of human history. Spearheads, grave offerings and funerary steles dedicated to warriors and maidens. Objects of day-to-day use – reminders that ancient times were not inhabited just by poets and philosophers, but also by simple folk who knew how to enjoy and beautify their lives – such as children’s toys, jewelry, cups and cookware. Coins depicting hegemons and illustrating the skill of their craftsmen. A whole world opens up as you wander from room to room. A sculpted head from Afghanistan marks the outer border of Alexander the Great’s sphere of conquest and an epigraph from Phrygia proves the reach of Greek: “Our Common Greek Language / which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians,” as C.P. Cavafy puts it.

In the next room we see a pre-Christian stamp used to sanctify bread in Egypt; an ivory comb engraved with the figures of two beautiful women embodying the two queens of the time, Rome and Constantinople; icons of the Virgin holding or kissing the infant Jesus on wood, cloth and papyrus, and we wonder: how many tears are soaked into these materials? The next cases hold icons of the warrior saints: George, Demetrius, Archangel Michael, reincarnations we could almost say, with their curled locks and swords, of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector.

The first floor contains what is probably the museum’s most exciting exhibit: young Domenikos Theotokopoulos, before he left his birthplace of Crete for the West, before he became El Greco, paints the Apostle Luke painting the Virgin Mary – an image within an image, a destiny within a destiny.

In the meantime, the Ottomans are sweeping through the Eastern Mediterranean, tolerant of the different religions and customs under their dominion, so long as taxes are paid and the Sublime Porte worshipped.