Onassis's new golden egg

Anyone in Her Majesty's Government inclined to doubt the work-rate and stamina of academics could have usefully spent the past four days in the splendid golden egg of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens.

From nine in the morning till nine at night hundreds of classicists and neuro-scientists, byzantinists and mathematicians, political theorists and genome pioneers have talked to each other - and to amazed onlookers - about what Greek thought, through these Athens Dialogues, can offer for the economic crisis and other crises of Europe and the globe.

By the end of each session, when the governmental orthodoxy for such affairs is of extended Retsina sessions and tax-payer funded souvlaki, the commonest sight has been of professors heading swiftly for their pillows, satisfied that those whose disciplines rarely bring them together have made connections they might otherwise never have made.

This post is being written in the aftermath of a still undigested diet of Euripides and Huntington's Chorea, Socrates and Steinbeck, the Euro and the attraction of lazy thinking, high-energy  finance and low-energy memory. Hardened TLS readers - and there are many here and many more to come, I hope - have occasionally complained that the experience has been like having our paper in hand and not being able to turn the pages when an article is too unfamiliar, too hard, too unexpected or simply not what one wants to read at that moment. 

But there is virtue in this sort of endurance. And it is already bringing rewards - with more of them too to come, I'm certain. Those who still think that endurance of dialogue in pale sunny Athens is nothing to enduring the snows of England may be unconvinced. At the moment I'm judging this first event at the new Onassis Centre a success. It may seem an untimely building, an extravagant egg of gold in a box of glass, but it is built without call upon the empty coffers of the Greek State. The spend-thrift, the greedy, the selfish, the thoughtless - almost any politican in fact - could have done worse than join us here this week.

It is against the spirit of the event to give particular praise to one's own compatriots. But when the criterion is crispness, clear direction, absence of unnecessary ornament and application of theory to practice, it sems to me that Cambridge politics and classics, Oxford pharmacology and London literary history offers exemplary lessons to other domains. Maybe that would have been better unsaid.

More importantly (and here there are names appropriately recorded, not least so that I don't forget them myself) I am determined to read and hear more from the Korean classicist, Hyun Jin Kim, the historian from Turkey Edhem Eldem, the Americans David Elmer, Peter Meineck and Sara Monoson. When I get back to London I will try to organise some links to show why.