On 20 July 1974, Turkish forces invaded Cyprus. Five days earlier, the military dictatorship governing Greece had organised a coup against President Makarios. Turkey invoked the Treaty of Guarantee to justify its intervention. Yet after the coup failed and constitutional order was restored, a second Turkish offensive began on 14 August. By the end of it, Turkey controlled approximately 36.2 per cent of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus. Around 170,000 Greek Cypriots had been displaced from their homes. Families were divided. Villages were emptied. Churches, cemeteries, houses and fields remained on the other side of a line which turned into an apparently permanent frontier.

And there are still the missing. More than half a century after the invasion, 746 Greek Cypriots remain unaccounted for. They are not just names preserved in archives. Each absence left a family grieving between hope and mourning, unable to bury its dead, yet unable to continue waiting without them. Mothers died without learning what had happened to their sons. Children grew old without knowing where their fathers lay. An empty chair remained empty for fifty years.

Across both Cypriot communities, 939 people on the official list are still missing: 746 Greek Cypriots and 193 Turkish Cypriots. The suffering of one community does not erase the suffering of the other, nor does acknowledging both alters the historical responsibility for the invasion and occupation. It reminds us that when history is left unresolved, it continues to haunt ordinary homes, family photographs and graves that have never been found - or even dug.

Cyprus is therefore not only divided geographically. It remains divided between the living, the dead and those who have never been permitted to become either.

An Island Between Worlds

Cyprus has always been desired. It has known many conquerors, not because it had no identity of its own, but because of the position it occupies.

It stands at the meeting point of Europe, Asia and Africa, near the coasts of Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, looking towards the Aegean while commanding routes across the eastern Mediterranean. Copper made it valuable in antiquity. Geography made it indispensable thereafter.

Mycenaean Greeks settled on the island during the second millennium BC, establishing the linguistic and cultural foundations of its enduring Greek character. Cyprus was subsequently ruled or contested by Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, the Ptolemies, Romans, Byzantines, Lusignans, Venetians, Ottomans and British. Empires changed. The island remained somewhat occupied by someone.

Under British administration from 1878, and formally annexed by Britain in 1914, Cyprus became independent in 1960 after the anticolonial struggle of EOKA. The new Republic attempted to accommodate its Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities within an intricate constitutional system. Intercommunal violence, external interference, incompatible national aspirations and the strategic interests of Greece, Turkey and Britain made that settlement fragile.

Then came 1974.

To describe what followed simply as the “Cyprus problem” is already to place a layer of administrative language over human experience. A problem certainly invites management but a wound demands healing. The occupation demands a resolution. Most importantly, a people demands return to its home.

Cyprus has now been divided for more than half a century. What was once treated as an emergency has been absorbed internationally as into one more instance of ordinary time. Generations have been born for whom the occupation is not an event they remember, but the landscape into which they arrived, to people who remembered what life was before the invasion.

This is one of the silent laws of history: what remains unresolved does not necessarily remain urgent. It may become normal. And that is the tragedy and reality of History.

The Men at Deryneia

In August 1996, that normality was momentarily shattered.

On 11 August, during a demonstration against the occupation in the buffer zone at Deryneia, a Greek Cyrpiot, Tassos Isaac became trapped in barbed wire. He was surrounded by turks and beaten to death. Three days later, following Isaac’s funeral, another Greek Cypriot, Solomos Solomou walked towards the Turkish position. With a cigarette in his mouth, he began climbing the flagpole from which the Turkish flag flew in an attempt to take it down.

He was shot and killed before the cameras.

The European Court of Human Rights subsequently found Turkey responsible for violations of the right to life in both cases. The judgements established legal responsibility. They did not undo the deaths. Nor did they erase the deeper impression left upon those who watched them. I was one of them.

I did not know personally Isaac or Solomou. Yet their deaths formed part of my political education. I belonged to the generation that saw what could be done to a Greek in full public view, before UN soldiers, observers, journalists and cameras. We also saw what followed: condemnation, diplomatic representations, commemorations, legal proceedings, and eventually the return of ordinary political life.

Years ago, writing about Solomou, I described him “climbing towards death with the taste of life already in his mouth. He had roots”, I wrote. “He fell, but the root held the soil.”

Today, I would not withdraw those words.

What moved us in the image of Solomou was not a rational calculation. It was the appearance of thymos. A thymos that we have been taught to supress, individually and as a nation. What is this feeling then, that lead Solomos to attempt the impossible?

For the Greeks, thymos was not simply anger. It was the spirited part of the person, the seat of courage, indignation, pride and the demand for recognition. In Plato’s account of the soul, it stands between reason and appetite. It is the force that rises when something unworthy is imposed and must be endured. Properly ordered, it becomes courage. Suppressed, distorted or detached from reason, it can become rage.

Solomou’s action may be judged reckless. It cannot be understood through prudence alone. He acted at the point where a symbol was no longer merely a symbol. The flag represented the power that had expelled families from their homes and placed their towns beyond reach. To climb the pole was to reject, for a few fatal moments, the command to accommodate oneself to the accomplished fact.

This does not mean that every act of defiance is wise. Nor does it mean that death proves the justice of a cause. It means that human beings do not live by safety alone. There is a point at which the defence of life and the defence of dignity cease to be separable.

“Master, Remember the Athenians”

Herodotus, the Father of History, understood that political action begins with memory.

During the Ionian Revolt, Athens sent ships to assist the Greek cities of Asia Minor against Persian rule. The Athenians participated in the attack on Sardis, during which much of the city was burned.

When King Darius heard of this, Herodotus tells us that he asked who the Athenians were. He took up his bow, shot an arrow into the sky and prayed that he might be permitted to punish them. He then instructed one of his servants to repeat three times whenever dinner was placed before him:

“Master, remember the Athenians.”

The scene appears in Book V of the Histories. Whether it occurred exactly as Herodotus describes is less important than what its preservation tells us. The ancient imagination recognised political memory as an active power. Darius feared not only the Athenians, but forgetfulness itself. An injury that disappeared from memory could no longer guide policy. And that should not happen.

More than two thousand years later, schoolchildren in the free areas of Cyprus were given notebooks carrying photographs of occupied towns and the words:

ΔΕΝ ΞΕΧΝΩ - I do not forget.

Those notebooks formed part of the education of generations of Cypriot children. They taught that Kyrenia, Famagusta, Morphou and the villages of the north were not abstractions on a negotiating map. They had names. They contained homes, churches, gardens, graves and lives that the turkish invasion interrupted.

The notebooks were later withdrawn as part of the effort to create a more conciliatory climate between the two communities. It did not.

The contrast is striking.

Darius ordered a servant to remind him of the Athenians three times at every meal. Greek Cypriot children were once reminded of occupied Cyprus each time they opened a school notebook. Then even this act of remembrance came to be treated as an obstacle to reconciliation.

The ancient ruler feared that he might forget an injury. The modern Greek and Cypriot states fear that children might remember one.

Alexander and the Long Memory of History

Almost a century and a half after Xerxes invaded Greece, Alexander crossed into Asia at the head of a Macedonian and united Greek army - apart from the Lacedemonians. His campaign was, among other things, a Panhellenic war of retribution for the Persian invasions and the destruction of Greek cities and sanctuaries.

When Persepolis was burned in 330 BC, ancient writers connected the act with the burning of Athens by Xerxes in 480 BC. Arrian states that Alexander wished to avenge what the Persians had done to the temples and cities of Greece. Other traditions describe the fire as an impulsive act during a celebration, encouraged by the Athenian courtesan Thaïs. Alexander is also said to have regretted it afterwards.

That uncertainty matters. History rarely offers the moral simplicity later generations impose upon it.

Alexander was not an avenger. He negotiated, incorporated Persian administrators into his government, adopted elements of Persian court practice and arranged marriages between members of his army and Persian women. His political imagination eventually exceeded the Panhellenic justification with which the campaign had begun.

Negotiations with Persia were not unknown before him. Alcibiades sought the support of the Persian satrap Tissaphernes during the Peloponnesian War. Greek cities alternately fought, negotiated with and accepted money from Persian rulers. The ancient world knew diplomacy, compromise, intelligence and duplicity as well as war, pride and heroism.

The difference is not that ancient people always fought while modern people negotiate. It is that negotiation in the ancient world took place within cultures that had not renounced thymos. Diplomacy was an instrument of political action. It was not expected to replace the desire to continue existing.

Alexander’s vengeance may trouble modern sensibilities. The destruction of Persepolis was an act of destruction, whatever its symbolic justification. Yet the distance of 150 years between the burning of Athens and the burning of Persepolis reveals something that our own age finds increasingly difficult to understand: political memory can outlive the individuals who first experienced and carried it.

The dead had not been restored. The temples of Athens had long since been rebuilt. Yet the earlier invasion remained part of the moral vocabulary through which the campaign was understood by thousands of people.

History had not expired merely because the live witnesses were gone.

When Anger Is Forbidden

Aristotle defined anger as a painful desire for retribution arising from an undeserved slight. His definition does not command to obey anger. It tells us that anger contains a judgement: something has happened which ought not to have happened, and the balance between persons and states has been violated.

Anger can be unjust, disproportionate or manipulated. It can destroy the person who carries it. But to eliminate anger entirely would require eliminating the human perception of insult, injury and injustice.

A healthy political community must therefore do something with anger. It can translate it into law. It can turn it into defence, commemoration, restoration, negotiation, the projection or protection of future generations. It can perform mourning. It can pursue justice. Under certain circumstances it may consciously forgive, but a forgiveness worthy of the name requires that the injury first be acknowledged.

What it cannot do without consequence is demand remembrance to forgiveness while prohibiting every possible response.

The analogy is bodily, humanly and primordial. Energy is aroused, carried towards expression, and then ordered to retreat. This may happen once. It may happen many times. But energy denied resolution does not vanish. It remains in the body and changes its character. To what, is the question.

So it is with political communities. A people is reminded annually of invasion, occupation, displacement and death. It watches a ceremony and hears speeches. It is told that it must not forget - because it does not want to. At the same time, it is taught that the desire for restoration is unrealistic, that anger is primitive and dispised, that pride is dangerous and that resistance risks disturbing the peace.

But what peace is this?

If grief is not allowed to complete its movement, it becomes melancholia - a literal black liquid substance running through the human body. Freud distinguished mourning from melancholia by observing that, in mourning, the world has become poor and empty, while in melancholia the impoverishment enters the self. The lost object casts its shadow upon the ego.

The comparison between an individual and a nation must be made cautiously. Peoples are not patients, and history is not a consulting room. Yet something analogous occurs when collective loss cannot be acknowledged or acted upon. The community gradually turns the judgement against itself. Perhaps we were always weak. Perhaps what was lost was never worth defending.

The occupation of the land is followed by the occupation of the collective imagination.

Greek myth repeatedly returns to the idea that blood, guilt and injury demand a form of resolution. Penthesilea came to Troy after accidentally killing Hippolyta. In Quintus of Smyrna, she enters battle seeking to cleanse her soul of the pollution of the killing and appease the Erinyes.

Another tradition has Priam purify her before she fights.

The importance of the story lies here not in the particular form of its violence, but in the ancient conviction that guilt could not simply be ignored. It had to be acknowledged, ritualised and transformed. What remained unanswered would continue to pursue the living.

Ressentiment

Nietzsche gave the name ressentiment to the moral world created by those who are unable to act upon their hostility and must therefore seek an imaginary revenge. It is not ordinary resentment. It is anger prolonged until it becomes a system of values.

This is precisely why the suppression of thymos does not necessarily create gentle people.

A civilisation without the capacity to answer injury may become outwardly compliant but inwardly bitter. It may turn its hostility against its own history, its own symbols and its own inherited forms of being. Unable to confront the power that wounded it, it begins attacking whatever reminds it that it was once capable of standing upright.

What cannot be defended is first relativised. It is then ridiculed. Eventually it is surrendered.

This is one of the dangers of unanswered historical injury. It does not always produce a desire to recover what was lost. Sometimes it produces the desire to prove that nothing valuable was lost at all and nothing is valuable enough to be defended.

The child is no longer taught to remember the occupied town. The town becomes a negotiable concept. The church becomes a monument. The ancestral house becomes a property claim. The homeland becomes a museum.

But a homeland is not made for museums. It is made for its people.

The Appeasement in One Direction

Peace requires reciprocity.

Reconciliation cannot mean that one people retains its memory, appetite, symbols and ambitions while the other is asked to forget, concede and apologise for experiencing its own dispossession as an injury.

Compromise is indispensable to political life. No community can survive by treating every negotiation as betrayal. No serious statesman confuses maximal demands with effective power. Prudence is a virtue precisely because courage without judgement can squander what it intends to defend.

Prudence is not passivity. Compromise is not the gradual adoption of the adversary’s interpretation of events. Reconciliation is not achieved by asking the injured party to regard its own memory as a form of aggression.

Appeasement becomes pathological when it is addressed in only one direction.

If every gesture of restraint is met with a new demand, if every concession becomes the starting point for another concession, then conciliation does not moderate the conflict. It alters the psychological constitution of the conciliating people. They learn that dignity is dangerous, that boundaries are embarrassing, that historical memory must be hidden whenever it troubles those who violated it.

Eventually they cease to recognise submission because they have learned to call it maturity.

The Decline of Virility

The word virility will make some readers uncomfortable. That discomfort is part of the reason to use it.

By virility I do not mean brutality, machismo, bellicosity or domination. Women possess thymos no less than men, and history offers no shortage of men who have preferred comfort to courage.

Virility, in its civic meaning, is the capacity to act, to protect a boundary, to assume responsibility and to bear the possible cost of remaining free. It is the quality that prevents prudence from degenerating into fear and peace from becoming an alibi for surrender.

The opposite of virility is not peace, but impotence.

A virile civilisation can negotiate because it knows that negotiation is a choice. A politically impotent civilisation negotiates because it has persuaded itself that no other course of action is imaginable. The first may compromise without losing itself. The second begins compromise with its own existence.

Ancient politics was frequently violent and merciless. We should not romanticise it. But the ancients understood that a political community must preserve the capacity to act, even when it chooses restraint. They did not mistake the absence of response for moral superiority.

Our age often does.

We have developed a political language rich in management, process and de-escalation, but poor in courage, honour and spiritedness. We speak endlessly about avoiding provocation, rarely asking what is provoked by the visible inability to respond. We regard anger as a failure of civilisation, although civilisation itself depends upon people who become angry when its limits are violated.

The result is not serenity. It is a slow decline in collective self-respect.

To Remember and to Avenge

None of this is an argument for war.

The ancient model cannot simply be transferred into the present. Burning another Persepolis would not heal Cyprus. Violence cannot resurrect Isaac or Solomou, restore the dead or return childhood to those who were driven from their homes.

But the alternative to vengeance cannot be oblivion.

Between vengeance and forgetting lies an entire field of political and moral action: defence, education, cultural continuity, demographic confidence, legal persistence, historical truth, economic strength, strategic alliances, protection of sacred places, care for displaced communities and the refusal to allow occupation to become invisible.

Memory must be given a form of outward expression that goes beyond yet another speech.

Otherwise, the annual commemoration of a wound can become another way of experinecing it. Speeches are made. Wreaths are laid. The dead are praised. The living return to their new homes. The ritual repeats itself, but nothing passes from memory into will.

“Remember Cyprus” must mean more than remember that Cyprus was invaded. It means:

Remember what a house means to the family unable to enter it.

Remember that Famagusta was a city before it became a phantom and symbol.

Remember that graves are not archaeological objects and that there are beloved humans buried in them.

Remember that Isaac was beaten to death.

Remember Solomou climbing the flagpole, the cigarette in his mouth, carrying his life towards the place where fear would have told him to stop.

Remember also that courage without purpose can end in death, while prudence without courage can condemn an entire people to a slow disappearance.

The Work of Memory

A nation cannot live indefinitely from anger.

Nor can it live without the capacity for anger.

The task is not to preserve rage in its raw state. It is to give it form and direction. This is what culture, education and statecraft are meant to do. They transform instinct into an act of continuity and suffering into an obligation towards the future.

The fire must not be extinguished nor allowed to consume the house.

The Greeks did not always achieve this balance. Neither do we. But they understood that memory, honour and action belonged to the same moral world. Darius feared forgetting the Athenians. Alexander justified a campaign by injuries inflicted before his birth. The Greeks negotiated with Persia, served Persian interests, fought one another and eventually incorporated elements of the world they had conquered. But their diplomacy existed alongside, not in place of, the will to remain themselves.

That is the distinction we have lost.

The question before Cyprus, and before Greece and Europe more broadly, is not whether we should reproduce the vengeance of antiquity. It is whether we can recover the force that made both resistance and meaningful reconciliation possible.

For only those who retain the capacity to defend themselves can truly choose peace.

A people forbidden to answer an injury may eventually turn the injury against itself. It may lose not only territory, but the belief that it has the right to possess territory. Not only memory, but confidence in the moral legitimacy of memory.

This is how an unanswered wound reaches the soul of a nation.

And this is why we must say, not as a call to hatred, but as a summons to consciousness:

Μέμνησο της Κύπρου.

Remember Cyprus.

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I have never understood why Latin and Ancient Greek are often called “dead languages.” The phrase has always struck me as something worse than inaccurate. It felt like a subconscious command, an instruction: approach this language as one approaches a body on a morgue table, with instruments, at a clinical distance, expecting and hoping that you get nothing back.

This is teaching for an autopsy, not for connection.

Nothing about walking into a room to greet a cherished relative, however changed by the years, resembles walking into a morgue. The two postures could not be less alike, and it has always seemed to me that we owe Latin and Greek the status of a relative we share.

The reasoning behind this is not sentiment. A language dies when the community who spoke it disappears without issue: no descendants, no continuation, nothing carried forward. That is not what happened to Latin or to Greek, and it is worth being exact about why. Latin did not vanish. It changed, as living things change, into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, and a wide constellation of regional tongues still spoken by hundreds of millions of people who inherited its case system in their mouths as children, long before they ever met it as a subject on a timetable.

Greek did not vanish either. Modern Greek is not a reconstruction or a scholarly resurrection; it is the same language, spoken by the same people in the same landscape, evolved continuously for at least three thousand years.

Peoples do not, as a rule, simply disappear, and neither does the language in which they conduct the business of living. This is transformation, the ordinary work of time on any living tongue, Latin and Greek included.

Call a language dead and you license the autopsy. Call it a language survived by numerous grown children, and you are obliged to go and visit the family.

Did The World Grow Stupid?

There is a second thing I have never been able to explain, and it is closely related to the first.

If Latin and Greek are now so widely dreaded, approached by pupils, with something closer to fear than curiosity, why did people spend so many centuries wanting to learn them?

Renaissance humanists competed for the prestige of a Ciceronian sentence. Monastic and cathedral schools for a millennium treated fluent Latin as the passport to the whole of learned Europe. Diplomats, scientists and clergy conducted the ordinary business of their lives in it. It cannot be that the grammar of Cicero or of Homer suddenly became more difficult sometime in the last hundred and fifty years, nor that whole populations suddenly became less capable of learning it.

Languages do not change their difficulty. Something else changed. And it was in the company of scholars who share both of these suspicions, about the false metaphor of death, and about this inexplicable reversal from longing to dread, that I found some of the clearest answers I have yet encountered.

On an October morning in 2025, forty people gathered in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and some two hundred and thirty more logged in from elsewhere in the world, to spend a day discussing how children should be taught Latin and Ancient Greek. The occasion was modest, even niche, by the standards of academic conferences. And yet buried in the papers that emerged from that day is an argument that answers both of my suspicions at once and carries implications well beyond the classroom, bearing, in fact, on the health of the polis itself.

Decoding Is Not Reading

The pedagogical debate in question concerns what linguists call Comprehensible Input: the proposition that a language is acquired not by memorising its rules but by encountering it, again and again, as meaningful communication pitched just above one’s current level of understanding.

For decades the opposite premise governed classical education. Latin and Greek were taught as codes to be cracked, declensions drilled, sentences dismantled into their grammatical parts, comprehension arrived at only after translation had been completed.

The result, as more than one contributor observed, was generations of pupils who could parse a subjunctive with precision and yet could not read a paragraph of Cicero for pleasure or sense. One researcher found that pupils beginning Tacitus, having passed their GCSE, recognised barely a tenth of the vocabulary in his opening sentence. They had learned an apparatus for decoding Latin. They had not learned to read it.

What is being diagnosed here, if one steps back from the specifics of case endings, is a particular and very modern impoverishment: the treatment of language as information to be extracted rather than as a medium of shared understanding. The comprehensible input movement is explicit that this is not merely inefficient but psychologically corrosive. English students, brave and willing enough to learn the Classics, can analyse Latin silently but feel a visceral, almost bodily reluctance to speak a single word of it aloud, because the language had only ever been theirs to solve.

The Century That Taught People to Fear

This is where the second suspicion I began with, finds its answer. The dread was manufactured, not inherited to the languages. Nothing intrinsic to Latin or Greek requires that a pupil meet them with anxiety rather than desire, and, as I have already noted, for most of their history nothing did.

The languages did not suddenly become harder somewhere in the last hundred and fifty years. What changed was the apparatus built to teach them.

The nineteenth century’s new national school systems, and above all the German gymnasium tradition of exhaustive grammatical dissection transmitted into Flanders, for instance, through Adhemar Geerebaert’s widely used grammars, reorganised both languages around the parsing of forms rather than the reading of sense. Pupils devoted “substantial weekly hours” to Latin under this regime and “frequently emerged unable to read fluently or compose effectively.”

The German reformer Georg Rosenthal, writing from inside that very tradition in 1924, gave the failure its sharpest epitaph: Gesehenes Latein ist kein Latein: seen Latin is no Latin. A century of schoolchildren were not defeated by Cicero or by Homer. They were defeated by a method built, to elevate the teacher and to stand between them and them.

This transformation did not occur in isolation. It belonged to a broader nineteenth-century confidence that education could be made scientific, standardised and measurable.

The same age that built the modern bureaucracy also rebuilt the classroom in its own image. Knowledge became something to be classified, examined and certified; language became an object to analyse. It produced administrators at the expense of citizens capable of judgment.

We inherited schools remarkably efficient at teaching pupils to identify the parts of a sentence, yet increasingly uncertain for the far more difficult task of entering a conversation about the common good.

The reduction of Greek and Latin to grammar was not an isolated pedagogical mistake. It was one expression of a much larger civilisational habit: replacing participation with procedure, understanding with technique, and wisdom with administration.

It is worth pausing on how familiar this impoverishment now feels outside the classroom. The instinct to treat language as an extractable payload (skim for the headline, mine the transcript for the quotable line, let the algorithm summarise the argument so that one need not sit with it) has migrated from the Classics classroom into the entire architecture of contemporary public discourse.

We have built a civic culture preocuppied with decoding for usefulness rather than reading and understanding. We decode speeches for scandals, skim interviews for headlines, debates for social media clips and books for sharable quotations. We no longer linger long enough inside the language for the meaning to land and possibly change us.

The current civic culture processes political speech for its retrievable content while remaining strangers to the deliberative act that speech is meant to enact. The parallel is not incidental. It is, I want to suggest, the same reduction wearing different clothes.

Before “Word” Meant Word

The Greeks did not have a separate term for language as opposed to reason, or reason as opposed to public speech. Logos did the work of all three. For Aristotle, the human being was not simply zoon politikon, the political animal, but was political precisely because it was zoon logon echon : the animal possessing speech, capable of declaring not merely pleasure and pain, as other animals can, but the just and the unjust, the advantageous and the harmful, in common with others.

The polis, in this account, is not first a set of institutions. It is a community constituted by the shared act of meaningful speech about how to live. Citizenship is inseparable from the capacity to use logos with others, not merely to decode it alone.

This is why the recovery of “living” Latin (Rouse’s Direct Method at the Perse School in 1902, the interwar dream of Latin as a neutral, unifying European lingua franca, the Jesuit school dialogues in which pupils actually greeted, argued with, and teased one another in the language rather than merely construing it) carries a weight beyond antiquarian curiosity.

Each of these movements, in its own century, was an attempt to restore language to the condition Aristotle assumed it should have: a medium held in common, not a corpus held at arm’s length. Cato’s motto, beloved of Latin revivalists, captures the same intuition in six words: rem tene, verba sequentur : grasp the matter, and the words will follow.

Meaning precedes and generates language; language does not precede and generate meaning. Reverse that order, as grammar-translation pedagogy did, as much of our public discourse now does, and one produces fluent-seeming output that has never actually been understood by anyone, least of all its author.

Small Republics of Speech

What is striking about the practitioners of this new old approach to Greek and Latin is how deliberately they have reconstructed the conditions of a small polis within the classroom in order to solve this problem.

At the Open University, students are given “incomprehensible” literary Latin they cannot yet translate and asked to make what sense of it they can through community, discussion, and parallel translation, before returning to it years later with earned competence, a pedagogy that treats interpretive struggle in company as more valuable than premature, solitary certainty.

At Haileybury, texts are read aloud in chorus, so that understanding is verified not by silent test but by the audible confidence of a room of pupils speaking together.

At the University of Oxford, Cressida Ryan’s inclusive-design argument makes explicit what the others imply: that a “high face-saving” environment, one that does not punish the vulnerable act of trying language aloud with the twenty thousand small humiliations that a certain kind of pupil has already absorbed by adolescence, is not a nicety but a precondition for anyone to risk speech at all.

None of these are technical fixes. They are re-descriptions of the classroom as a place where meaning must be built together, aloud, at the risk of error, rather than assembled privately and submitted for marking.

It is hard not to notice that this is precisely the capacity that contemporary political life has been shedding: the willingness to risk one’s half-formed view aloud, among others, in the expectation that understanding will be reached through the exchange rather than possessed before it.

We have not lost the capacity to transmit information. We have lost, in alarming measure, the practised comfort of using logos together in public, at the pace and vulnerability that genuine deliberation requires.

The Real Corpse

Latin was never the body on the table. What we have actually been performing an autopsy on, these past two centuries, is our own willingness to use language together, in public, at any risk to ourselves, and that patient, unlike Cicero’s tongue, may not have living descendants waiting in the wings.

The irony is that this recovery arrives precisely when machines have become extraordinarily good at the very skills schools spent two centuries cultivating. Artificial intelligence can now translate, parse, and summarise faster and more accurately than any pupil. The machine is not wrong to do this, but the pedagogical task has shifted in consequence: what remains for the human learner to cultivate is not retrieval but interpretive judgment, the capacity to sit with a text or an argument, and ask what it means, what follows from it, what it asks of the reader.

This line of thought applies with equal force to citizenship. A public that has outsourced the labour of understanding to a summarising machine, like the TV, while retaining none of the practised capacity to interpret, deliberate, and speak for itself, has reproduced in the whole of civic life the very failure that Comprehensible Input was invented to correct in the Latin classroom: fluent-seeming output, uninhabited by comprehension.

It is the same discussion as to whether a fourteen-year-old should meet the ablative absolute through a graded story about Ariadne or through an isolated grammar drill. The underlying wager, that a shared tongue is either lived and spoken into common understanding or merely decoded and left inert, is the same wager on which the health of the polis ultimately rests.

A civilisation that has forgotten -or suppressed- how to use its own language together, in the vulnerable, provisional, communal way, should not be surprised to find that its political speech, however voluminous, no longer persuades, no longer binds, and no longer means very much at all.

Rem tene, verba sequentur.

The recovery of Greek and Latin is not, in the end, about Greek or Latin.

It is about remembering what language is for. Communication.

Before there can be institutions there must be speech. Before there can be politics there must be logos.

A civilisation is held together not only by its laws or its markets, but by its shared capacity to search for meaning aloud.

That is why the Classics matter.

Not only because they teach us ancient words and concepts, but because they remind us how a free people learns to speak.

Wonder, Inquiry and the Desire to Understand

We possess an extraordinary capacity to wonder and to enquire into the stories we are told and the world around us.

As children, we have questions, and we ask them. Nothing is banal. Nothing in the world is obvious. We want to know more about it.

Then we are taught to stop asking too much and, eventually, to stop believing in heroes, quests and happy endings.

We learn to place value on remembering names and dates, to accept uniform explanations, and to mistake familiarity for understanding.

For some of us who were drawn to the humanities from an early age, philosophy was the one path that allowed us to search for answers uncensored.

The philosophical mind is set in motion when we recover that first sense of wonder: when we dare to look again at what we thought we already knew.

History begins in exactly the same place.

ὄλβιος ὅστις τῆς ἱστορίας ἔσχε μάθησιν.
Happy is the one who has gained knowledge through inquiry.
— Euripides, Fragment 910

The phrase is often translated as: “Happy is the one who has learned from history.”

It can be. But the Greek word historia did not originally mean the orderly account of past events that we understand by the word today. It meant inquiry, investigation: the attempt to discover through questioning and examination.

In the fuller fragment, Euripides praises the person who seeks to understand the enduring order of nature rather than being drawn towards injustice or harm against fellow citizens. Knowledge, therefore, he seems to argue, is not only about the past, but about nature’s eternal and ageless order: the way it was formed, and whence and how it came into being.

That is cosmology and natural philosophy, and the blessed man of the fragment is a proto-scientist, a mystic of both Athena and Apollo.

This clarification matters.

History is not merely what happened.

It is the disciplined effort to understand why it happened, how we know that it happened, and what meaning we may legitimately draw from it.

It is not enough to remember dates, recite the names of rulers or identify battles on a map. Nor should knowledge of the past become another way of displaying how cultivated or clever we are.

The purpose is not to impress one another with what we know.

It is to learn what to look at and how to see.

The Facts Do Not Arrange Themselves

In 1961, E. H. Carr posed the deceptively simple question that became the title of his most influential book:

What Is History?

For generations of students like myself, this relatively small volume has served as an introduction to one of the fundamental problems of historical thought: the relationship between the event, the evidence and the person attempting to understand them.

Carr famously wrote:

“The facts speak only when the historian calls on them.”

He continued that it is the historian who decides which facts are given the floor, and in what order or context.

This does not mean that facts are unimportant, or that the historian is free to invent the past. Facts matter. Evidence matters. Accuracy matters. But facts do not arrive already arranged into an explanation. They do not tell us by themselves which voices were silenced, which choices remained possible or which consequences were unintended.

Someone must ask the question.

Someone must compare the evidence.

Someone must decide what belongs beside what.

History is therefore neither the mechanical collection of facts nor the unrestricted projection of our own opinions onto the past. It is a demanding encounter between evidence and interpretation.

Carr described it as:

“A continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”

That dialogue is not an academic luxury.

It is one of the ways in which a society learns to understand itself.

Why Do We Turn to History?

Carr’s formulation describes the method of history. But there is another question behind it:

Why do we turn to history at all?

In an interview about the historian Dominique Venner, his widow and collaborator, Clotilde Venner, recalled that throughout the years in which he withdrew from political activity and devoted himself to study, he continued to ask himself two questions:

“What to do?” and “What to pass on?”

She says that it was in the study of history that he sought his answers:

“History, if questioned with active thought, is an inexhaustible source of reflection.”

She distinguishes his approach from that of the scholar preoccupied with insignificant detail. Venner approached history as a thinker, seeking through it to understand a crisis of civilisation and meaning, and to find some response to that crisis.

That distinction is central.

The problem is not scholarship. Serious scholarship is indispensable. Without evidence, accuracy and disciplined study, historical thought becomes fantasy and speculation.

But learning must lead somewhere.

It must return us again and again to the questions:

What are we to do with what we have understood?

What are we responsible for passing on?

History becomes alive when it is questioned by an active mind. Not when we ask the past to provide instructions, nor when we recruit it to confirm our politics, but when we allow it to deepen our judgement about the present.

This is very close to the purpose of Demos & Polis.

We do not return to history in order to take refuge in it. We return because our own time is suffering from a crisis of meaning, and because other human beings, in other periods of similar crisis and consequence, have also confronted disorder, loss, responsibility, courage, inheritance and renewal.

The past cannot necessarily give us a formula.

But it can enlarge the range of what we are able to see.

History as Judgement

A serious encounter with history asks difficult questions.

What did people believe?

What did they fear?

What could they see, and what were they unable to see?

What pressures shaped their decisions?

What possibilities were open to them?

What did their institutions encourage, tolerate or prevent?

And what, despite all the distance between their world and ours, remains recognisable and pertinent to contemporary human beings?

History teaches us to examine evidence and understand context. It teaches us to distinguish between what we know, what we infer and what we merely wish to believe. It teaches us to recognise recurring patterns without forcing false comparisons.

It also teaches humility.

The past does not exist simply to confirm our moral superiority.

Sometimes it reveals that societies we dismiss as primitive understood something we have forgotten. At other times, it warns us against romanticising worlds sustained by violence, fear and suffering.

Sometimes it gives us examples.

Sometimes it gives us warnings.

Very often, it complicates the story we would prefer to tell.

History does not flatter us.

It enlarges the field of our judgement.

The Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

For years, the humanities have been treated as though they were an indulgence.

Students have been asked what practical job history, philosophy or literature could possibly lead to. Schools and universities have been placed under growing pressure to prioritise subjects that appear immediately vocational and measurable.

Ten years ago, young people hoping to enter the technology sector were given one piece of advice:

Learn to code.

Now, some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence laboratories are recruiting philosophers.

A June 2026 report in The Economist examined this development: AI companies are seeking people trained to question assumptions, identify contradictions and think through concepts such as fairness, harm, responsibility and human autonomy.

The irony is difficult to miss.

At the very moment when educational institutions are being encouraged to reduce the place of the humanities, the most advanced technology companies are rediscovering their practical value.

The labour-market figures cited in connection with the report are equally striking. Recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York placed unemployment among recent American philosophy graduates at 5.1%, compared with 7% among computer-science graduates.

One set of figures cannot establish a permanent trend, but it certainly challenges the assumption that a narrowly technical degree is always the safer choice.

AI can already produce code.

The harder question is whether we are educating enough people capable of deciding what that code should be allowed to do.

What does fairness mean when it must be translated into the behaviour of a system?

What constitutes harm?

Who carries responsibility when decisions are dispersed between designers, companies, users and machines?

What should remain under human judgement?

Which assumptions have been built invisibly into the model?

These are not merely technical questions.

They are philosophical, historical, political and anthropological questions.

They concern the kind of society we are creating and the understanding of the human being upon which it rests.

Information is not understanding.

Calculation is not judgement.

And intelligence, however powerful, is not wisdom.

From Publication to Conversation

This is why Demos & Polis will begin a new series of seminars, conversations and small gatherings in autumn 2026.

The purpose will not be to defend the humanities abstractly.

It will be to put them back into practice.

The series will explore the living usefulness of history, classical thought, mythology, philosophy and political anthropology in understanding the present.

Some meetings will take place online, allowing people from different countries to join.

Others will take place in person, beginning in Brussels, around an actual table.

There will be different formats.

Demos & Polis Seminars will offer structured introductions to important texts, thinkers and historical questions.

Demos & Polis Conversations will bring together invited guests and participants around a subject of contemporary civilisational importance.

Demos & Polis Reading Circles will begin with a short text—a passage from Homer, Euripides, Plato, Thucydides, Carr or another relevant writer—and ask what it allows us to see in our own time.

Demos & Polis Salons will be smaller, in-person gatherings devoted to thoughtful exchange, without the formality of an academic conference and without the aggression of a political debate.

These will not be lectures in which one person displays knowledge while everyone else listens politely.

Nor will they be arenas in which people arrive determined to win an argument.

They will be meaningful reunions.

Places where we read, question and listen.

Places where disagreement does not immediately become hostility.

Places where evidence matters, context matters and changing one’s mind is not treated as defeat.

Each meeting will begin with a text, an event, a myth, a historical analogy or a political concept.

But the question will always return to the present:

What does this help us see?

What can the Peloponnesian War tell us about fear, interest and power?

What can tragedy teach us about responsibility when every available choice carries human loss?

What does Rome reveal about citizenship, expansion and decline?

What can myth tell us that political language can no longer express?

What does Carr’s dialogue between past and present require of us in an age when machines can generate convincing narratives in seconds?

And above all:

How can knowledge become judgement?

The Demos & Polis Circle

The first programme of meetings will be announced before the beginning of autumn.

It will include online seminars, open conversations and a small number of in-person gatherings in Brussels.

Some will be introductory and accessible to anyone with curiosity.

Others will involve closer reading and sustained discussion.

No specialist degree will be required.

What will be required is seriousness, openness and the willingness to think beyond slogans.

Demos & Polis was founded around a question:

What civilisation do we wish to belong to?

That question cannot be answered by writing alone.

At some point, people must meet.

They must read together, speak together and recover the difficult art of thinking together.

Because history should not merely tell us where we have been.

It should help us understand where we stand.

And, perhaps most importantly, where we are choosing to go.

“The polis comes into being for the sake of living,

but exists for the sake of living well.”

- Aristotle, Politics I.2 (1252b)

Europe has no shortage of programmes. This is true across the political spectrum.

It also has no shortage of institutions, directives, regulations, reports, strategies, agencies, committees, and experts.

The majority of its leaders don’t lack vision, either for themselves or for the people. One reason ruling classes remain ruling classes is that they possess a vision of the world.

Those who lack a vision are the people. Some may have a personal one, a vision for their business or their football club. What people lack is a collective vision, an aspiration, a reason for what they do. They lack meaning.

The knowledge of the past teaches us that this quest for meaning is occoupied by religion and warmongering. These two domains have a privileged postion: they offer a concrete pathway from education to death and a hold on people’s very souls. They leave little unanswered, and where answers prove insufficient, indoctrination and fear take their place.

Thus political leaders who aren’t actively religious or actively engaged in the imagining and practicing of warfare, lack a compelling answer to a simple question:

What kind of life are we trying to make possible?

For decades, political movements outside government have become remarkably skilled at criticism. We know what many people oppose. We know what they fear. We know what they wish to prevent.

We hear far less about what they hope to build.

The non-governing Left criticises markets. The non-governing Right criticises immigration. Liberals criticise nationalism. Conservatives criticise progressivism. Each side can produce an impressive catalogue of errors committed by the other.

Yet beyond the criticism lies a more difficult task: a description of the future they propose as an alternative.

What does a flourishing Europe and its world paradigm actually look like?

Not a Europe of policy papers, statistical projections, globalised consumers and dutiful tax-payers, but a Europe that its people would genuinely and fully wish to inhabit and contribute their lives towards.

A Europe that its young people would choose to live in and parents would be proud to leave to their children.

This question is not a distraction from politics. It is the question that gives politics its purpose.

Before we debate policies, we must know who and what they are for.

Before we discuss economic growth, we must ask “Growth toward what end?”.

Before we discuss the institutions, we must ask what kind of civilisation we want those institutions to support.

The ancient world understood and phrased this both instinctively and through an elaborate thought and action process. Much of the testimonies have been lost, but a part of them, what survived through the judgement of scribes and monasteries, neoplatonists and Byzantine emigrés, has reached us and is available to us.

In an age of instantaneous gratification, reading through the reasoning of earlier centuries is often dismissed as an inefficient use of time. Yet many of the individuals shaping the technologies of the future draw inspiration from the thinkers of the ancient world. Classical education, once considered an essential component of formation across Europe’s secondary education, is becoming again the domain of the elites and increasingly the preserve of those willing to undertake the difficult task of building themselves from the ground up.

Thus, Aristotle did not begin by asking how a city should be administered. He asked what kind of life a city should make possible.

That distinction matters. A society can become wealthier without becoming happier. More efficient in production, more connected and more technologically advanced while leaving people isolated, anxious, indifferent or depressed.

The question therefore is not whether Europe will have a future.

It will.

The question is whether that future will be desirable by Europeans.

People are mobilised by imagination, not spreadsheets. This is true whether we speak of entrepreneurs, nations, religions, or civilisations. The most influential projects of our age all possess a vision of the future. They offer a story large enough for people to project themselves and inhabit, whether it is the latest gadget, car or a house on Mars.

Europe currently suffers from a shortage of attractive myths.

Not myths in the altered sense of falsehoods.

Myths in the older sense: stories that orient a people toward a shared horizon.

Stories that answer the question of why we should be here and not somewhere else and where we are going as a collective.

Perhaps this explains why so many debates feel both exhausted and exhausting before they even begin. Politicians argue endlessly about management while avoiding touching on meaning.

Yet human beings do not flourish in abstraction.

We flourish in places and in homes. In families and friendships. In schools and in workshops. In gardens and neighbourhoods and within landscapes that become part of our being and our memory.

Civilisation is the accumulation of millions of lived experiences that teach people what is worth loving and worth preserving.

Which brings us to a question that will occupy part of this publication:

To what civilisation do you wish to belong?

Not merely what party or faction, for these are constructions of the moment.

Not even what ideology, for ideologies become corrupted once they attain power.

What civilisation?

The answer to this question will shape how we think about education, housing, technology, family life, beauty, work, citizenship, memory, and belonging.

Demos & Polis is a space dedicated to reopening a debate that Europe needs.

In the essays that have preceded this one, and in those that will follow, I shall explore some of the conditions that make our European civilisation worth inhabiting.

For now, a single question is enough:

What kind of life are we trying to make possible?

For Europe is not merely a bastion to defend.

It must once again become something that people wish to love, inhabit, and carry forward.

“When did you first become interested in politics?” the Englishman sitting next to me at dinner asked.

“Fourteen,” I replied.

“Me too. What was it?”

“Hiroshima.”

Political consciousness rarely begins with policy papers, party programmes, or constitutional debates.

It begins with a moment when we realise that something in the world is not as it should be.

Anger is often the first political emotion. The first awakening. What makes us revolt against the injustices and the ugliness of the social landscape we inhabit or read about. It alerts us that something is wrong. It calls for our attention. It is a sign of health: white blood cells rushing to the rescue of our embedded ethical understanding before conditioning, party politics, cynicism, and fear have had time to intervene.

Before we are conservatives or progressives.

Before we are nationalists or internationalists.

Before we belong to parties, movements, tribes, or ideologies.

We possess an instinctive sense that some things are unjust.

The citizen who feels nothing in the face of corruption, disorder, insecurity, loneliness, declining trust, or cultural disorientation is not necessarily more enlightened than the one who feels anger. He is probably morally asleep.

Anger awakens. Anger mobilises. Anger gathers together people who sense that something valuable is being lost.

But anger is not enough. No civilisation has ever been built on anger alone. Anger is a poor architect. It can identify what is broken, but it cannot tell us what should be built or how it should be built.

Political slogans have their place in the process. They perform an important function. They condense diffuse anxieties into language that people can recognise and rally around. Every age has its rallying cries. The mistake comes when the slogan is mistaken for a programme.

A slogan answers a relatively simple question:

What are we against?

The harder questions remain.

What exactly will we build?

Who will build it?

How long will it take?

Who will pay?

What trade-offs are involved?

What institutions must be reformed?

What unintended consequences follow?

These are governing questions. They are usually less exciting than slogans, but they are where the vision and the future of a civilisation actually dwell.

Over the years I have watched movements of different political colours arrive at the same threshold. Some identify genuine problems. Some attract sincere people. Some even gain power.

Then they discover that reality is far more stubborn than slogans.

Political adulthood begins at precisely that moment, the moment we move beyond identifying problems and begin asking what kind of world we are prepared to create.

The question that separates the activist from the statesman is not:

“What are you against?”

It is:

“What are you building?”

Or perhaps even more fundamentally we need to ask:

“Where are you taking us?”

Because before I entrust my future to your vision, I would like to know where you are taking me. Before I ask my children or the children of others to inhabit the world you propose, I would like to know what that world looks like.

Many people today can tell us what Europe they reject.

Far fewer can tell us what Europe they desire.

And those are the ones who are building it.

Yet desire poses the harder question. The adult question. The statesman’s question. The builder’s question.

For desire commits us.

Desire asks us to move beyond criticism and into creation. Beyond reaction and into responsibility.

Desire makes the impossible possible.

Once you answer the question, “To what civilisation do you wish to belong?”, you can no longer remain comfortably in critique. You must begin describing. You must begin choosing. You must begin building.

Every generation inherits a Europe it did not create. It may criticise it. It may reform it. It may reject parts of it. But sooner or later it faces the same responsibility as every generation before it: To decide not merely what must be opposed, but what deserves to cross Time. To decide what is worth carrying forward and what new forms of living and flourishing must be created.

Because the living are not the sole owners of civilisation.

We inherit it from the dead and borrow it from the unborn.

Civilisation is a conversation between all three.

Our task is neither blind preservation nor reckless destruction.

It is stewardship.

To receive an inheritance, enrich it, and pass it forward.

Aristotle understood this, more than two thousand years ago when he observed:

“The polis comes into being for the sake of living, but exists for the sake of living well.”

— Aristotle, Politics I.2 (1252b)

The distinction is profound.

We often speak of security, prosperity, and survival as if they were the ultimate goals of political life. Yet for Aristotle they were only the beginning. A society may succeed in keeping people alive and yet fail to offer them a life worth inhabiting.

An old saying attributed to Alexander the Great captures the same spirit. Alexander the Great thanked his father, Philip of Macedon, for giving him life, and his teacher, Aristotle, for teaching him how to live well.

Civilisations face a similar challenge. It is not enough that they survive. They must become (and remain) capable of teaching people how to live well.

A civilisation cannot survive merely by preserving itself. It must remain capable of offering a way of life worth inhabiting. A home worth dwelling in. A culture worth transmitting. A future worth preparing for.

Perhaps this is why thinkers as different as Karl Marx, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Roger Scruton all identified, in their own language, a similar malaise.

Marx spoke of alienation.

Simone Weil wrote of uprootedness as one of the deepest needs of the human soul.

Hannah Arendt worried about the erosion of a durable common world.

Roger Scruton defended what he called oikophilia: the love of home.

Different diagnoses. A similar intuition about humanity.

Human beings do not flourish in abstraction. They require places. They require belonging. They require continuity. They require participation in a world they experience as their own. And when those things begin to disappear, anger naturally follows.

But anger cannot be our destination.

Sooner or later every serious political project must answer a different question.

Not what it fears. Not what it opposes. Not even what it wishes to reverse.

What it loves.

Because nobody plants a rose garden out of resentment.

Nobody builds a beautiful house out of resentment.

Nobody creates a civilisation out of resentment.

At some point affection enters the picture.

At some point we must decide what deserves to be cultivated, inhabited, protected, and handed forward.

For beyond anger lies the harder task.

To become worthy stewards of what we have inherited.

To leave something beautiful behind.

To give the living, and the unborn, a reason to build.

And perhaps, in doing so, we may begin to answer the question:

After the anger, what Europe?

Great civilisations encounter the world not with fear, nor with naïve surrender, but with confidence grounded on the reality they build. Such civilisations do not shut themselves in their shell where they eventually die out. They possess something which escapes our times and thinking patterns:They own a living centre, a fertile core that breeds into the future with confidence. This is what they protect at all costs but do not barricade themselves in it.

The Greeks offer one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon, both in its expansion and in its contraction.

Much contemporary discussion about identity and civilisation oscillates - in extremis - between two poles. On one side lies the fantasy of total openness: the idea that all cultures are interchangeable, that continuity is irrelevant, that rootedness is suspect of extremism. On the other side lies a defensive rigidity: the belief that cultures survive only by sealing themselves against contact.

The Greeks suggest a third possibility.

They distinguished themselves sharply from others. They defended the polis, valued and rarified citizenship, cultivated laws, rituals, and educational forms that were distinctly their own. Yet they also travelled, traded, questioned, absorbed, compared, metabolised and transformed. Their civilisation was neither shapeless like the current West mush, nor closed either. It was permeable with experience, without being weak.

This balance deserves renewed attention.

The Greeks were deeply conscious of cultural difference. The distinction between Greek and “barbaros” was real and meaningful. Yet the term originally referred less to origin than to language and intelligibility: the speech of foreigners sounded like incomprehensible “bar-bar” sounds to Greek ears tuned to the highest octaves of the mathematical harmony of the cosmos. Over time, especially after the Persian Wars, the term acquired political and moral dimensions.

Still, even when the Greeks judged other peoples, they rarely ceased to observe them. This curiosity is one of the foundations of Greek civilisation.

Herodotus, the father of history, did not merely recount wars. He travelled through Egypt, Persia, Scythia, Lydia, and beyond, recording customs, beliefs, funerary practices, political systems, and myths. His Histories are not only a chronicle of conflict between Greece and Persia; they are among the earliest great works of comparative civilisation.

At one point, Herodotus recounts that the Greeks burned their dead while certain Indian peoples consumed the bodies of their parents ritually after death. Each group regarded the customs of the other with horror.1 Herodotus concludes that custom as nomos reigns supreme among human beings. The passage is remarkable because it demonstrates something rare: the recognition that human societies experience their own ways of life as natural. This is a recognition most societies and religious groups fail to do to this day.

The Greeks did not inhabit a world without hierarchy or judgement. They could be arrogant, imperial, exclusionary, and violent. Athens itself could behave ruthlessly toward allies and rivals alike, including other Greeks.

Greek civilisation was not innocent. And yet, unlike many later systems, the Greeks rarely sought total erasure of The Other.

This distinction matters.

Greek civilisation spread across the Mediterranean through colonies, trade routes, sanctuaries, language, philosophy, and prestige. Yet Egypt remained Egyptian under the Ptolemies. Phoenician cities retained their character. Anatolian cults survived and mingled with Greek forms of worship. Foreign gods were often interpreted through Greek eyes rather than annihilated outright. The Greek instinct frequently leaned toward translation rather than obliteration.

This reveals something important about the Greek mentality.

The Greeks appear to have possessed a sufficiently strong civilisational core to risk encounter.

Their confidence did not emerge merely from military strength or economic success, but from a deeper conviction about the intelligibility of the world. Greek civilisation rested upon an idea of the kosmos: not simply order, but a meaningful order. The world could be contemplated, interpreted, measured, adorned, discussed.

This orientation produced extraordinary cultural consequences. The Greek achievement was not seclusion and a claim to purity. It was selection. Or perhaps more precisely: transformation.

The Greeks rarely copied mechanically. They absorbed, recomposed, proportioned, and made things recognisably Greek.

This same spirit appears in philosophy itself.

Aristotle writes that all men by nature desire to know. Wonder, thauma, becomes the beginning of philosophy. Curiosity is not treated as weakness or destabilisation, but as the starting point of civilisation.2

This may explain why Greek civilisation produced not only art and politics, but inquiry itself as a cultural ideal.

The agora was not merely a market.
It was a space of encounter and cross-fertilisation.

The symposium was not merely entertainment.
It was a ritual of disciplined conversation.

Tragedy did not merely distract from reality like an online series.
It examined the limits between humans, gods and Nature that rules all, suffering, hubris, release, and the fragility of what we see as untouchable order.

Greek civilisation educated its citizens to the meaning of perception.

This is perhaps why Greece continues to haunt Europe. Not because Europe “descends” from Greece in a simplistic linear sense, but because the Greek world formulated questions that continue to be relevant to this day:

How should human beings live together?
What constitutes citizenship?
How does a society remain open without losing itself?
Can curiosity coexist with continuity?
What allows encounters to produce civilisation rather than chaos?

These questions may indeed define the twenty-first century.

A civilisation endures not only by law but by what it dares to embody and celebrate.

What This Is

We have been taught and increasingly grown accustomed to thinking of politics as management, administration and economics. We have been told that technocrats are the ones who must lead the way of our societies across cultures and continents.
We think of states and supranational entities as systems designed to prevent societies from falling apart.

But we have equally and increasingly been experiencing that this approach is not enough to make us peaceful and content deep inside with our ways of living.

This is to be expected. Human beings do not seek only to survive.
They seek a life that feels worthy of being lived.

This is where politics must be redefined and begin again.

The First Principle: Life as Gift

To be alive is not a neutral state.

It is a gift, one that is granted, unearned, embodied and vibrant. One that we earn as we enter our physical existance through our genitors, and we fight for growing in the womb and exiting it.

We are given life to feel, to desire, to create, to love. These are not distractions from life. They are Life. They are its very substance.

A civilisation that mistrusts joy will slowly but certainly turn against itself.

The Second Principle: The Necessity of Physicality

Experiencing the physical world is not possible without a physical form.

Without the bodily structure we cannot experience the rhythm of the days and the seasons. The meaning of existence is impossible to grasp. Fear and anxiety take its place

The Greeks named the physical existance κόσμος: order made harmonious.

The physical form is not oppression. It is what makes the sensation of life inhabitable.

The Forgotten Meaning of Kosmos

But κόσμος carries a deeper meaning still.

It is also adornment.

The same word that names the structure of the universe, also names the act of embellishing, arranging, beautifying. This is not accidental. For the Greeks understood something we have forgotten:

Order must also be beautiful.

A world may be efficient, stable and functional and yet be unliveable.

It becomes a κόσμος only when it is also worthy of love: Loving it and being loved by its parts.

The Third Principle: Attraction is Cohesion

No social or political system can be held together, unless it is desired.

The Greek polis is created by Aphrodite and we are identifying the necessity for her return in the civic life, not as an ornament, but as a foundational necessity.

According to the Greeks, Aphrodite governs attraction, desire and the invisible bonds between beings.

Without her, all senses of order become cold and lifeless, any civic structure becomes mechanical, and as a result the sense of community and the communities themselves fall apart.

The polis must not only function. It must also draw people toward it.

The False Divide

Modernity and Technocracy have separated what should never have been divided. Pushing philosophical and religious schemes to their extremes, they advocate that joy is irreconciliable with discipline, beauty is against function, and pleasure and legitimacy do not go hand in hand.

This is a fundational mistake. A living civilisation must be:

Dionysian in vitality
Apollonian in form
Aphroditic in creation

Reframing Power

Power, in this view, is not domination. It is:

the capacity to give an external form to a world worth inhabiting

A true political order:

• aligns structure with beauty

• aligns authority with meaning

• aligns power with life

What We Oppose

• sterile technocracy

• purely economic visions of society

• moral systems that deny life

• chaos disguised as freedom

What We Affirm

• life as a gift

• beauty as necessity

• order as enabling freedom

• joy as a political indicator

The Aim

This is neither utopia nor mere stability, but something more demanding:

A world fully habitable.

A world where:

• the body is not denied

• the soul is not suffocated

• beauty is not superficial

• order is not oppressive

A civilisation flourishes when it orders life beautifully and allows it to be joyfully lived.

A Political Anthropology of Joy advocates for a civic life
Dionysian in vitality. Apollonian in form. Aphroditic in cohesion.

What holds a political order together when laws are feared but no longer trusted by the people?

In a previous reflection, we traced the Greek cycle of regimes, the fragile oscillation between order and dissolution.

But there is yet another, older question. Not Greek, but Roman.

Not about who governs, but about what gives authority its weight.

In Roman thought, imperium did not simply mean to command. It was not reducible to administration, decorum, or electoral legitimacy. It referred to something axial: a principle of orientation. A force that aligned the visible and the invisible, the political and the symbolic, the human and the transcendent.

To hold imperium was not merely to rule. It was to embody a centre.

This distinction matters today more than we might think. Because Europe, in its current form, has largely perfected governance, but struggles to articulate authority.

The Administrative Continent

The European Union represents one of the most sophisticated systems of coordination ever devised. It regulates, harmonises, stabilises. It has, undeniably, preserved peace.

And yet, it has long ceased to offer an aspirational vision and now rarely inspires in any way or form. Its language is procedural, its legitimacy technical, its horizon managerial. “Brussels bureaucracy” has become a standard synonymus to long corridors of equally long-winded laws.

The EU is seen as governing, and increasingly orienting its machine towards a down slide of authoritarianism by non-elected bodies, dressed in institutional procedure.

The Vacuum

Where there is no perceived centre, a centre must emerge. There may also be chaos, but nature quickly searches to fill the void.

There is a search for figures, movements, or narratives that seek to restore direction, even at the cost of societal tension that most probably is already in place.

This helps explain why parts of Europe turn toward leaders who appear to embody decision, clarity, and a certain verticality, figures who promise not just effective management, but even more importantly, bringing back meaning.

This is not because Europe seeks strife, though it can be said that it has consistently done so in the recent past, but because its people sense a void, a certain sheepedness among its leadership.

Imperium, Revisited

To speak of imperium today is not to advocate a return to empire in its historical form.

It is to reopen a question:

Can the current political order endure without a shared sense of centre? And what will that centre be?

The Romans understood that authority required more than laws. Governance required civic form, symbolism, and a lived sense of cohesion, often built on a vision of Us VS Others.

Modern Europe, by contrast, has often sought to neutralise these dimensions, in favour of procedural neutrality. But neutrality, when extended too far, risks losing all possible sense of weight.

We may therefore be entering a time where the question is no longer:

How should Europe be governed?

But rather:

What gives Europe its raison d’ être?

Between the bureaucratic continuity supported by the up and coming technocracies and the re-emergence of more assertive political figures, between European unity and societal fragmentation, between administration and meaning, Europe is unmistakably search of meaning.

Every civilisation must decide whether it will merely function or whether it will stand in its identity and its power, and create a lasting legacy for its people. Which way will the Western world embrace?