“Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí.”

The vanity of a genius?

Vanity, full stop?

I suspect both are mistaken.

Dalí was not celebrating himself in this affirmation'; he celebrated existence itself.

He woke up curious. Curious about what the day would bring. About what he might create. About what he might become. In that sense, Dalí possessed one of the rarest qualities in any age.

We, on the other hand, who collectively call ourselves “the West”, seem to suffer from a peculiar condition.

Many of our young people are not young. Some are burdened by a frantic ambition. At twenty-five they speak like ministers or corporate executives. Every decision is strategic. Every relationship is networking. Every experience must justify itself through utility.

Others move in the opposite direction.

They retreat. They observe, comment, criticise. They do not commit.

The ancient Greeks had a word for such withdrawal: idiōtēs. It did not originally mean a fool. It referred to a private individual who confined himself to his own affairs and refused participation in the common life of the polis.

From this ancient word eventually came our modern “idiot”.

The linguistic evolution may seem unfair. The civilisational warning remains.

One group rushes toward power. The other withdraws from responsibility. Yet both share a surprising characteristic. Neither truly belongs to youth.

Youth is not an age. It is not energy. It is not optimism.

Youth is the willingness to enter the world without guarantees.

To begin before certainty appears. To attempt something whose outcome cannot be known in advance. To risk embarrassment. To risk failure. To risk being wrong.

Dalí understood this better than most. In Diary of a Genius, he wrote:

“Errors are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”

This is not merely artistic advice. It is civilisational advice.

Every person makes mistakes. Every institution does. Every nation does. The question is what follows.

Today we oscillate between two equally sterile attitudes.

The first is the cult of infallibility.

Mistakes must be hidden, explained away, managed. No error can be admitted because mistakes are no longer treated as opportunities for learning but as grounds for permanent condemnation.

The second is cynicism.

A mistake becomes proof that everything is corrupt, everything is doomed, everyone is compromised.

One side refuses to learn from mistakes. The other refuses to build upon the ruins. Neither grows wiser.

A mature civilisation studies its failures. It learns from them. It transforms mistakes into experience, like an artist transforming a failed sketch into a masterpiece.

Many institutions Europeans now take for granted emerged from failure. The welfare state did not appear because one ideology triumphed completely over another. It emerged because conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike were forced to confront realities they could no longer ignore.

Marxism offers an instructive example. Its history is filled with failures, contradictions, disappointments, and catastrophes. Yet for nearly two centuries it remaines one of the most influential ways of interpreting society. Not because every experiment succeeded. Quite the opposite. It survived because generation after generation continued to wrestle with the questions that it raised.

Serious conservatives still read Marx. Serious socialists still study the disintegration of socialist states. Serious liberals still examine the blind spots of markets. The purpose is not self-justification. It is learning.

The SYRIZA experience in Greece, between 2015-2019 offers a more recent example. One may approve or disapprove of its choices. But reducing the entire episode to success or failure misses the point. It was one of the first genuine experiments in radical democratic politics within the post-Cold War European order. And experiments produce knowledge.

The same is true of nations. The same is true of civilisations. A civilisation becomes irrelevant not only when its population grows demographically old.

When every risk is deemed unacceptable. When every failure becomes a scandal. When every ambitious project is dismissed before it begins. When vision gives way to management.

For most of history, societies assumed that authority and responsibility should eventually converge. The Roman Senate itself derives its name from senex, “old man.” The Spartan Gerousia was literally a council of elders. Across Europe and far beyond it, councils of notables were founded on a simple assumption: that experience matters.

Today we often lean in the opposite direction. We celebrate the youngest president, the youngest prime minister, the youngest entrepreneur, as though youth itself were a qualification. Yet youth and competence are not the same thing, nor are age and wisdom. The question is not whether a society is led by the young or the old. The question is whether it produces adults. Men and women capable of carrying responsibility without losing imagination. Capable of exercising judgment without becoming cynical. Men and women capable of building.

This is where Generation X, rather than Generation Z, may become the crucial pivot. Not because it is wiser, nor because it is morally superior, but because it occupies a unique historical position and must assume its responsibility.

It remembers a world before the digital revolution transformed everyday life. It remembers institutions before their legitimacy was questioned. It remembers a time when the future still appeared as a promise rather than a problem.

At the same time, it has spent the last three decades adapting to unprecedented technological, economic, and cultural change. It belongs to both worlds: To inheritance and innovation, to both civilisational memory and technological disruption. That is why its responsibility is greater not to preserve the past unchanged, which is both impossible and sterile, nor abandon it carelessly, but to carry forward what is valuable while building what does not yet exist. It needs to be the legitimately grown up in the room.

Someone must think beyond the next election, the next quarter, the next trend.

Civilisation is a conversation between the dead, the living, and the unborn.

The generation in the middle is responsible for carrying the conversation forward.

There is a remark often attributed to Dalí:

“The greatest misfortune of today’s youth is no longer belonging to it.”

Whether he actually said it remains uncertain. But perhaps the deeper tragedy of our time is not becoming older. It is that youth itself no longer belongs to youth. That we have become afraid of mistakes. Afraid of uncertainty. Unwilling to initiate new beginnings. Afraid even to try.

Which brings us to a question I often ask on these pages.

What civilisation do you wish to belong to?

Part of my answer is this:

A civilisation that still believes it can build.

A civilisation that learns from its mistakes.

A civilisation that still possesses the courage to attempt things whose outcome is uncertain.

A civilisation that still has the courage to try.

And perhaps, if Dalí were sitting among us, beneath the portrait of José Antonio forever captured in youth and surrounded by the shells collected over a lifetime, he would simply smile.

Then he would remind us of the thrill of waking each morning and experiencing what he called “the joy of being Salvador Dalí.”

Not because he knew what the day would bring.

But because he did not.

Sino-American rivalry became one of the defining questions of international politics. Policymakers and scholars on both sides repeatedly find themselves discussing a Greek historian who died twenty-four centuries ago.

Thucydides.

The question is not whether his analysis remains correct. The more interesting question is why rising and established powers alike continue to believe it is worth consulting him. Why a fifth-century BC Greek historian is invoked by American strategists, Chinese scholars, military analysts, and political leaders seeking to understand the emerging relationship between a dominant power and a rising one.

The phenomenon became known as the “Thucydides Trap,” after the historian’s observation that the rise of Athens and the fear this inspired in Sparta made conflict more likely.

Whether one accepts the concept or not is ultimately secondary.

What matters is a simpler question.

Why are twenty-first century powers turning to a Greek historian at all?

The answer reveals something important about the nature of civilisation, political judgment, and the purpose of education.

Beyond Nostalgia

The contemporary discussion surrounding Classical Studies is often framed incorrectly.

Supporters frequently defend the Classics as cultural heritage.

Critics dismiss them as relics of a vanished world.

Both positions miss a very interesting question.

States do not invest in institutions simply because they are old.

Nor do serious policymakers consult ancient authors out of sentiment.

The enduring relevance of Classical Studies lies elsewhere.

The Greek and Roman traditions constitute one of humanity’s longest-running laboratories of political experience.

Questions of power, legitimacy, civic cohesion, elite formation, war, peace, ambition, corruption, democracy, oligarchy, and imperial expansion were examined with remarkable clarity long before the emergence of the modern state.

The names change.

Human nature does not.

The Chinese Question

This is why developments in China deserve closer attention.

Over the past decade, Chinese universities have expanded Classical Studies programmes. Ancient Greek is taught. Research centres have been established. The Chinese School of Classical Studies now operates in Athens. Academic exchanges continue to deepen.

This is not mere cultural curiosity.

It is a strategic choice.

A state does not allocate resources indefinitely to activities it considers irrelevant.

China is not becoming Greek.

Nor is it attempting to become Western.

Rather, it appears to have concluded that the classical tradition contains forms of knowledge useful to understanding power, order, governance, and civilisation itself.

Whether that conclusion is correct may be open to debate.

What is beyond debate is that the investment is taking place.

The more revealing question is why.

Classical Studies and Elite Formation

Historically, Classical education was never primarily vocational.

Its purpose was not employment.

Its purpose was judgment.

For centuries, the study of history, rhetoric, philosophy, and political thought formed part of the preparation for public life.

The objective was not simply to produce knowledgeable individuals.

It was to cultivate citizens, statesmen, diplomats, administrators, and leaders capable of interpreting and navigating the complex realities of governance.

A person who had encountered Thucydides entered political life having already reflected on fear, honour, interest, alliance, faction, and the dynamics of power.

A person who had read Aristotle had already wrestled with questions of citizenship, constitutional order, friendship, moderation, and the purpose of political community.

Those texts were not decorative ammunition for aspiring dandees. They were formative. They were civilisational infrastructure.

Today, it may be more accurate to describe them as strategic infrastructure.

The Western Assumption

Much of contemporary Western education operates on a totally different assumption.

Education has long been understood through the language of employability, skills acquisition, and economic productivity.

All legitimate objectives, but not the only objectives a civilisation requires.

A society may produce highly competent specialists while simultaneously struggling to produce citizens capable of exercising judgment in moments of uncertainty.

Technical expertise and civilisational confidence are not identical.

Nor are technological innovation and political wisdom.

This distinction matters particularly at a time when technological capabilities are expanding faster than our collective understanding of how they ought to be used.

The Return of the Permanent Questions

Perhaps this explains why the classical world continues to attract attention far beyond Europe. The attraction is not linguistic or archaeological. It is anthropological.

The Greeks asked questions that remain stubbornly resistant to obsolescence.

What makes a political order legitimate?

How does a democracy decline?

What corrupts elites?

What holds a society together?

Can power be exercised without hubris?

What kind of life is worth living?

No technological innovation has rendered these questions irrelevant. If anything, their urgency has increased.

Artificial intelligence may transform economies, but it cannot determine what justice is.

Data may inform decisions, but it cannot tell us which ends deserve pursuit.

Efficiency can optimise means, but it cannot provide purposes.

The Geography of Intellectual Confidence

The significance of China’s engagement with Classical Studies therefore extends beyond academia. It points toward a broader question.

Where in the world do societies still believe that civilisational continuity crosses borders and fertilises our limited understanding? Where is conscious transmission a choice? Where do states continue to invest in the formation of judgment, not merely the production of administrative expertise?

The issue is not whether Europe should imitate China. Nor is it whether China has correctly interpreted the classical tradition. The issue is that different civilisations appear to be reaching different conclusions about the relationship between education, statecraft, and cultural inheritance. And they are not European. That fact alone deserves serious attention.

In Conclusion

The debate surrounding Classical Studies is often presented as a dispute between tradition and progress. This is a false choice. The more important distinction lies elsewhere. Between societies that regard civilisational knowledge as a strategic asset and those that regard it as an optional luxury.

When policymakers in Washington and Beijing sought frameworks for understanding the future, both found themselves consulting Thucydides.

That fact should give us pause.

The question is no longer whether the classical world remains relevant. The question is why some societies appear increasingly convinced that it is.

In June of 2026, Greece will host the Second World Conference of Classical Studies, co-organized by the Academy of Athens and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The first Conference took place in November 2024 with more than 400 scholars gathering in Beijing. This meeting is an interesting academic development. It is also a civilizational and geopolitical signal through the creation of a new cultural axis.

I. The displacement of the center

For centuries, the classical world had a European geography. From Heidelberg to Oxford and Cambridge, from Athens to Paris and Rome, Classical studies were guarded, interpreted and transmitted by the West.

Today, that center of is moving to the East. Across China, Depaqrtments of Classical srudies are expanding, Ancient Greek is being studied with dedication by Chinese youth, scholars are trained and funded, and a Chinese School of Classical Studies has been established in Athens.

This is not a historical curiosity. It is a conscious commitment. And it unfolds at the exact moment when the West doubts and even condemns the value of its own inheritance.

II. The European paradox

A strange inversion defines our time: Europe and the US deconstruct the classical paradigm. China reconstructs it

In Western universities the canon is questioned, the disciplines shrink, the legitimacy of the past becomes a burden universitarians seek to banish.

In China the Classical world is approached as something that is central to the human meaning. It may not be sacred in the religious sense, but it is far from being not disposable.

Nature abhors a void. The expansion of classical studies elsewhere, comes after decades of their retreat, banishment even, at home.

Across Europe, and notably in France after the May 1968 protests, the classical languages that once formed the backbone of intellectual education were gradually displaced. They were not prohibited nor attacked directly, but they were made optional.

The intention was not to abandon them, but to democratize education, to make it more accessible, more aligned with contemporary life. There is an oxymoron here: banishing the texts that constructed democracy, in the name of democratisation.

In this dramatic shift of perception, something less visible was also set aside. For these texts were not only carriers of knowledge. They were exercises in judgment.

Antigone asked where law ends and conscience begins.
The History of the Peloponnesian War exposed the language of power and its consequences.
Aristotle’s Politics insisted on measure, on balance, on the fragile equilibrium between democracy and oligarchy.

To remove them from the center of education is not merely to change a curriculum. It is to alter the formation of the citizen.

And so another paradox emerges: at the very moment when Europe speaks of the retreat of democracy, it distances itself from the texts that once trained the habits necessary to sustain it. Democracy remains as vocabulary, as institution, but its inner discipline becomes less certain. And in that space, almost imperceptibly, comfort and ease begin to replace the vigilance of the citizen.

III. Culture as geopolitics

Why would a rising power invest in Ancient Greece?

Because it understands that culture is not optional decoration. Culture provides civilisational and political orientation. This awareness is not abstract.
It is shaped, in part, by historical experience. The Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976) marked a profound rupture in China’s relationship to its own past, a moment in which tradition, texts, and cultural continuity were deliberately and violently broken. The consequences of such a rupture are not only historical. They are civilizational.

A society that has experienced the fragility of its own cultural transmission does not easily treat culture as secondary.

This pattern is not unique to China.

Across Central and Eastern Europe, countries such as Poland, shaped by decades under Soviet influence, often display a heightened sensitivity to questions of sovereignty and geopolitical pressure. What has been experienced once, is rarely perceived as abstract thereafter.

In different ways, both cases point to the same underlying dynamic: that rupture, whether cultural or political, leaves a trace, and that this trace transforms how a society understands what must be preserved.

Under the framework articulated by Xi Jinping, ancient Greece and ancient China are placed side by side, not as teacher and student, but as co-originators of civilization.

This is a profound repositioning. It allows China to step into history not as a late participant in Western modernity but as an important civilization right next to the most influential civilization that shaped the values of the world, and of the West in particular.

Classical languages and civilisation become, therefore, a means of civilisational and geostratigic equivalence.

IV. The classical as knowledge of the human

But geopolitics alone does not explain this return. There is something deeper. The classical world endures because it speaks - relentlessly - about the human condition: desire, power, beauty, order, tragedy.

As Richard Janko, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan has suggested, we may understand the physical world with unprecedented precision, yet we increasingly fail to understand ourselves.

The Greeks may not have our technology. But they asked, with clarity:

What moves the human being?

And they answered not with systems, but with figures: Achilles, Antigone, Odysseus.

V. A field under construction

China’s engagement with the classical is not monolithic. It unfolds along two lines: one seeking continuity, order, and civilizational grounding; another seeking inquiry, plurality, and intellectual openness. This tension is not a weakness. It is a sign that the Classica and Classical thought are still very much alive.

Classical thpught is not a fixed relic. It can be interpreted, contested and inhabited by all humanity at all times.

VI. What the West has forgotten

The most unsettling question is not what China is doing. It is what the West has stopped doing. For the classical world was never merely a curriculum, a body of texts or a cultural inheritance.

It was a way of forming the human being. A way of aligning beauty with discipline, desire with measure, the individual and the polis.

The Greeks did not just study themselves and others. They lived.

VII. Aphrodite and the polis

This is where the question becomes more intimate. Because the classical world is not only about politics. It is about Eros. About the force that draws us toward beauty, harmony and recognition. Toward life itself.

The Greeks knew that a city cannot exist without bonds. And that those bonds are not only legal or rational. They are also aesthetic, emotional, erotic and passionate.

To forget this is to reduce civilization to administration. To remember it is to understand that

Culture is what makes life desirable enough to be shared.

VIII. Greece as a meeting ground

And so Greece reappears as origin, but also as desitable presence.

The upcoming Athenian conference is not simply an academic gathering.

It marks a relocation:

the classical world is alive and circulates once again.

IX. The Greek question

What makes this moment more complex is not only what China is doing,
but what Greece is not - yet - doing.

As observed by Eugenia Manolidou, Head of Studies at Elliniki Agogi School of Ancient Greek, the revival of classical studies is not abstract.

It is structured, funded, and integrated into long-term educational strategies.

A country leading in artificial intelligence is simultaneously investing in Ancient Greek language and thought, not as part of its heritage but as intellectual infrastructure.

This creates a shocking inversion: Those who inherit this tradition hesitate to embody it. Those who encounter it from afar, invest in it.

Closing remarks

The Ancient world is not disappearing.

It is moving toward those who appreciate it because they sense that it can fill the gap of something essential that is missing from our current global civilisation: We do not miss information, progress or power; we miss understanding and orientation.

The Greeks once conceived and gave names to these notions.

Others are now learning them.

The question is no longer whether the classical world will survive.

The question is: who will be transformed by it into grandeur next?