What does this poem convey about modern Greece, especially its relationship to the ancient mythical past?

Yiannis Ritsos's poem, "In the Ruins of an Ancient Temple," is a brief, evocative portrait of people living in the literal shadow of their history. That history pervades every aspect of these people's lives. They graze their sheep among the ruins; they hang their washing on ancient sculptures. Things that were once sacred, like "the long, / richly embroidered veil of the goddess," are now simply useful, "cut up" by the people's thoughts and actions into mere materials—not a temple courtyard, but a pasture, not a statue of a deity, but a drying rack.
To the non-Greek observer, this might seem like shocking disregard of the importance of the Ancient Greek legacy to the world. The poem nods at this sensibility in its opening line, with the "museum guard [...] smoking in front of the sheepfold." There is, technically, something to guard here, against thieves, vandals, and the depredations of time. But the guard is having a cigarette and he makes no moves to scatter the sheep, or remove the "washed clothing [from] the shrubs and the statues." The people who live among the ruins of this ancient temple are not stealing from it or defacing it, they are simply living in it. All modern Greeks must live this way, surrounded by the relics of their past, but it is not a past which is "separate" from them; it is not a past to be cordoned off in museums. The relationship of modern Greeks to the past is one of "foreign, peaceful, silent intimacy," the organic growth and change of any society as "years on years" pass by.