For all too many people, ATHENS is a city that happened two-and-a-half thousand years ago. It's true that even now a glorious past looms large – literally, in the shape of the mighty Acropolis that dominates almost every view, as well as every visitor's itinerary. Yet the modern conurbation is home to over four million people – more than a third of the Greek nation's population – and has undergone a transformation in the twenty-first century, partly thanks to the stimulus of the 2004 Olympics, that has made it far more than a repository of antiquities and lifted it beyond the cliche's of pollution and impossible traffic that blighted its reputation in recent years.