Nearly 100 Chinese scholars will attend the second World Conference of Classics in Athens on Tuesday and Wednesday. Their presence is symptomatic of a broader intellectual movement unfolding in contemporary China: the rediscovery of the classics not as relics of distant antiquity, but as part of a living tradition that is not just of relevance to contemporary China but to the world as a whole.

Increasingly, Chinese scholars are arguing that the classical thought that helped to shape the modern world should not be confined to the Greco-Roman canon alone. Chinese, Mesopotamian, Indian and other civilizations have all contributed to the long civilizational effort to confront enduring questions about human existence and society.

For much of the modern era, Western science, military technology, political institutions, and industrial systems have been the primary sources of practical knowledge; to "learn from the West" was seen as modernization. Today, however, for many Chinese classicists, engagement with Western thought is part of the effort to understand how other societies have answered the question of how to live.

In fact, classical writings are valued precisely because they ask questions that modern societies, despite their immense technological sophistication, still struggle to answer: What is the good life? What is the relationship between law and morality, individual desire and civic responsibility, personal fulfillment and collective harmony?

One reason these questions have regained urgency is the realization among intellectuals that technological progress and material development alone have not produced moral clarity or civilizational confidence. In fact, some of the greatest catastrophes of modern history emerged within highly advanced societies.

While earlier generations encountered Western civilization through the pressures of colonialism and modernization, Chinese scholars today engage with Greek and wider classical traditions grounded in China's own intellectual inheritance.

The value of comparative classical studies lies not in erasing differences, but in illuminating them. Classical Greek tragedies dramatized conflict, individual heroic endeavors and the instability of political life. Confucian thought emphasized harmony, relational ethics and moral cultivation through ritual. Comparative perspectives can open new ways of approaching both Greek antiquity and Chinese classical thought.

There is also growing recognition that civilizations understand themselves more clearly through encountering others. Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, leaves Ithaca and returns transformed through his encounters with foreign worlds. Confucius spent 14 years traveling among the competing states of his age in search of moral order and wise governance. Both traditions suggest that stepping beyond one's own world provides the distance necessary to reflect upon it more deeply.

In an increasingly fragmented global landscape marked by geopolitical rivalry, technological disruption, and ideological polarization, the classics offer something increasingly rare: long traditions of reflection on human nature, political order, moral responsibility, and the conditions of civilized life itself. They remind us that civilizations are not sustained by power or wealth alone, but by their capacity to preserve, reinterpret and transmit meaning across generations.

The gathering in Athens thus represents an emerging attempt to recover a genuinely global humanism — one grounded not in cultural uniformity, but in serious dialogue among the foundational civilizations of humanity. At a time when the world often appears divided by distrust and competing narratives, that aspiration may itself be among the most important lessons the classics still have to offer.