The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner

get back to you.”
    First Aristotle. Now Plato. Any moment now, I think, and I’ll be meeting a Socrates.
    We nibble a bit more on our food, then, in typically generous Greek fashion, Joanna picks up the tab. She pays by credit card, which the waiter gladly accepts. It’s the restaurant’s one concession to the twenty-first century.
----
    Plato sends his regrets. He’s on a business trip and won’t be able to meet with me. Why are these Greek philosophers so difficult to nail down? Joanna is completely out of live philosophers and tries again to foist a dead one on me, but I demur. I make a few queries elsewhere and, sure enough, stumble upon a real live Greek philosopher. His name is Nikos Dimou, and he is a minor celebrity in Greece. Back in the 1970s he wrote an essay called “On the Unhappiness of Being Greek.” It hit a nerve when it was first published and continues to hit various Greek nerves as the nation mines ever-deeper reservoirs of unhappiness.
    Nikos lives in a far northern suburb of Athens, so he suggests we speak by phone. I call him at the appointed time, pleasantly surprised that Tony’s phones work. Nikos is friendly but sounds a bit stressed. Being a son of Socrates isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, he says. “We’re all very proud of our ancestors and we love to say that philosophy and drama were born here, but we haven’t actually read any philosophical books or plays. It’s terrible—not only to be unable to surpass your father’s work, but not to understand it either.”
    Nikos, though, understands it. As I said, he’s a philosopher, and a good one.
    “What does it feel like to be a twenty-first-century Greek philosopher?” I ask.
    “Hungry. It feels very hungry.” He’s joking. Sort of. The sophists of ancient Athens may have made a killing, but in today’s Athens philosophy doesn’t pay well, and meanwhile the ghosts of Plato and Socrates haunt the academic corridors.
    Nikos is most acutely aware of “this awful burden,” as he calls it, when he attends seminars abroad. “If you say you are Greek, they say,‘Aha, you are coming from the land that created philosophy,’ so you better be good. If you are good, it is very good, but if you are not good, it is very bad,” he says philosophically.
    The philosophers of ancient Athens—unlike, say, the pharmacists of ancient Athens—still have much to teach us. “Each great philosopher is like a monument that stands on its own, and it never gets old,” he says. “You can read Plato and he is as alive now as he was two thousand years ago. But, actually, I don’t read Plato. I don’t like him.”
    Whoa. Did I hear correctly? You don’t like Plato? You are a Greek philosopher and you don’t like the philosopher king himself? Isn’t that like being a classical musician and not liking Mozart, or a New Yorker and not liking bagels?
    Nikos laughs, his voice crackling over the phone line. He’s clearly not afraid of Plato’s ghost. “Plato was a good writer but not a very good philosopher. He was an aristocrat and he hated democracy. Also, he separated the body and the soul. No, I don’t care for Plato.”
    This is an advantage, one of the few, of being a Greek philosopher in the twenty-first century. You can say things like “I don’t like Plato” and get away with it. Heritage has its burdens but its privileges, too.
    Before saying good-bye, I’m curious about something. Philosophy is a big tree with many branches. What did Nikos specialize in?
    “The Skeptics,” he replies. “My PhD dissertation was on the Skeptics.”
    Of course, I think, hanging up the phone. Of course.
----
    The next morning, I find myself in need of inspiration when I discover that not far from Tony’s Hotel is a place called the Hill of the Muses. I like the way this sounds. What writer wouldn’t? Most Greeks considered the muses minor deities, but not the poets. For the poets, and other “creative types,” the muses were definitely