Ancient philosophy has returned to our cultural imagination as a lens through which we can understand the modern world. In recent years, a new wave of popular movies and novels depicts students diving into dusty old texts in search of lost wisdom, emerging with insights that reshape their lives.

There is nothing especially new about this turn to the ancients to escape modernity. Philosophers have returned to Athens again and again, not to recover a tradition intact but to unlock new ways of thinking.

This Athenian know-how enters modern philosophy as a mode of ethical understanding. Aristotle is typically our source for practical wisdom, which he names phronesis, although it is in Plato that we see its roots most vividly, expressed through the physical desires that animated the political imagination in classical Athens.

We can trace this line of thinking in many places, but perhaps nowhere more evocatively than in the Phaedrus, Plato’s dialogue that develops an understanding of practical wisdom through an encounter with the landscape of Athens. For centuries, readers have puzzled over its meaning. At first it seems to be about nature, then about love, until suddenly it veers into a theory of the soul, a critique of writing and an analysis of political speech.

Yet it remains one of Plato’s most enduring works, and one of the most vivid ways to explore modern Athens. Its disparate elements have inspired poets from Virgil to Byron. It helped scholars of the Renaissance imagine the ascent towards divine love. It has generated thought experiments for countless philosophers, and modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

What ties these interpretations together is not a single philosophical idea but a single place, along with the question of how we might place ourselves within its territory. In this way, the meaning of the Phaedrus, and ancient philosophy more generally, may be inseparable from the landscape of Athens.

A Soul Led Towards Beauty

The dialogue begins with a small gesture. Socrates encounters Phaedrus at the city gate and notices a scroll tucked under his cloak. It’s a new speech on love composed by Lysias, one of the leading orators of Athens. Of course, Socrates wants to hear it.

Phaedrus, a young aristocrat always ready to indulge his thirsts, suggests they walk to the Ilissos River and sit beneath a plane tree where there is cool shade, gentle breeze and soft grass to lie down.

The details seem incidental, but it is the key to the whole text. How did Phaedrus decide that this plane tree would be the right place to be?

Socrates draws this out. As they walk, he interrogates not only the speech Phaedrus carries but the impulse that led him towards this particular tree as the right setting for their conversation. It is right, he says, because the soul moves towards a particular beauty that it takes to participate, in some small and incomplete way, in universal beauty.

To help Phaedrus understand, Socrates invents one of the most remarkable images in all of literature. He says that the soul is a charioteer pulled by two winged horses, one a noble spirit and the other unruly desire. They fight each other as they glide upward. The charioteer glances briefly over the rim of heaven, the dwelling place of true being, but inevitably loses balance and falls back to earth.

The charioteer is every human, pulled between appetite and aspiration, striving towards beauty but never fully in control. This is the condition of anyone attempting to choose well in the world.

The Landscape of Athens

The path followed by Socrates and Phaedrus kept them far from heaven. But the terrain is still legible today, even if it’s changed almost beyond recognition. The pair left the city through the Themistoclean Wall near the Olympieion where the gate foundations remain visible on the northeast side. They walked towards the Ilissos along what is now the tram line on Vassilisis Olgas Street. Phaedrus’s plane tree likely stood at the foot of Ardittos Hill, near the slope that today frames the Panathenaic (Kallimarmaro) Stadium.  The Ilissos River would be at the end of the street but now it’s vanished underground nto a concrete storm drain. The spring where Socrates and Phaedrus stepped ankle-deep into the river was covered after WWII during sanitation projects funded under the Marshall Plan.

Yet the changed landscape doesn’t diminish Plato’s argument. Quite the opposite. The disappearance of the river forces us to confront the real lesson of the Phaedrus: it is not the particulars of the setting that guarantee thinking, but the soul’s ability to recognize the good wherever and however it might appear.

Modern Cities

Where Socrates and Phaedrus once oriented themselves towards water and trees to sense something more enduring than themselves, today we make a similar move through urban infrastructure. Nature has been replaced by the modern city and its symbols; concrete apartment buildings line the roads, cars rumble by and park across our path, and commercial brands on every surface compete to satisfy desires of all kinds.

The ancient spring has been replaced by Kallirrois Street, named for the ancient flow of the Ilissos. It was in this landscape of the 20th century that philosophers sought to renew the search for the good. The city itself became a medium through which the soul, in Plato’s sense, could be trained.

We could track the shift from ancient to modern by beginning our own dialogues amid this new infrastructure. One afternoon, while walking near the remains of the Ilissos, I fell into a conversation with Stan Draenos, an astute observer of the changing political landscape from the moment he arrived in Athens in 1974. Draenos had been a scholar of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and public intellectual remembered for her work diagnosing the 20th-century embrace of totalitarianism. What began as a training in philosophical investigation became training in the life of democracy.

Arendt had herself been struck by the Greek landscape on a 1955 visit, writing that the union of temple and earth gave each column “the eternity of nature.” But she did not read ancient philosophy because of nostalgia. She was extracting from the ancients a new way of thinking about the modern world.

“She felt the inherited traditions of political and moral thought no longer offered a reliable guide to the perplexities of modern politics,” Draenos told me. “The crises of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries had exposed the fragility of traditional philosophy, and totalitarianism had brought it to an end.”

Where Plato thought the soul could orient towards the good, Arendt thought that inherited orientations had collapsed and could no longer be trusted. She described thinking as an internal dialogue that was restless and self-questioning. “The wind of thinking,” as Arendt put it, echoing Socrates, can leave us with nothing but perplexities, and the most we can do with them is to share them with each other.

So, when Draenos and I crossed Kallirrois Street in the spot where Socrates and Phaedrus once waded across the Ilissos, the soundscape was not Plato’s cicadas but motorbike engines and the ticktock of the crosswalk. We were not reenacting a classical scene but engaging in a kind of Socratic dialogue in a modern setting. Our heads lifted not towards a plane tree but towards the Panathenaic Stadium and a glimpse of the trademark Olympic rings floating over the rim of a marble bowl.

Our task was to judge all these particular things as good or beautiful, and to share our perplexities with each other in dialogue. “And this indeed may prevent catastrophes,” Arendt wrote, “at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.”

21st-Century Ancients

At the turn of the 21st century, ancient philosophy re-entered public life. Greek tragedy became a mirror for modern society. Martin Crimp’s staging of Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis ”recast Hercules as a warlord suffering from PTSD. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay urged clinicians to read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to help veterans understand psychological trauma. Lately, in Silicon Valley, Stoicism was reborn as an operating system for the mind, a technique for personal mastery and Jedi strength.

Into this climate the classicist Paul Woodruff introduced another way of bridging the gap between ancient and modern. His 2001 book “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue,” published shortly after the 9/11 attacks, drew on decades of experience translating Greek philosophy, including his influential edition of Plato’s Phaedrus. Reverence, he said, is what marks the distance between ourselves and the virtuous ideals we take to be transcendent. It’s a civic virtue, not a religious teaching or devotional commitment. It’s the discipline of remembering that we are not gods.

Democracy requires a humility that isn’t always natural to us: the willingness to accept that our own view is partial, provisional and dependent on the judgment of others. Reverence names this virtue and, like Arendt’s own warning, alerts us to the ever-present possibility of tyranny in democratic life.

Woodruff looked to Athens and the first political thinkers who distinguished good leaders from tyrants – but not because the Greeks of literature were always the most reverent. In the Iliad, Woodruff writes, Agamemnon was a tyrannical general and Achilles describes himself as a beast and desecrates the bodies of his enemies. For all their guts and glory, those epics served as a warning of what not to become.

“The cliché, of course, is power corrupts. But what the Greeks are noticing is that it corrupts in a very particular way,” Woodruff said in a 2003 interview. “You think that you can’t go wrong. You think that you can’t be mistaken. You think that because you are not likely to be mistaken, you don’t have to listen to other people. And those are all signs of tyranny and they’re all signs of hubris.”

Just as Socrates and Phaedrus once oriented themselves by a plane tree and a river, and as Arendt treated thinking as a restless dialogue shaped by the crises of her century, reverence gives us a modern stance. Athens, when read with devoted attention, continues to teach these lessons. It may yet offer a modern safeguard for democratic life.