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In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote , was “the strangest and most momentous” event of his academic career.

By eight o’clock the next morning, Whitmarsh was north of Beijing at the palatial Yanqi Lake international convention center. The venue, reportedly part of an almost six-billion-dollar construction project, had previously hosted the APEC summit. Whitmarsh was ushered into a side room with distinguished guests, among them Lina Mendoni, the Greek minister of culture. The presiding politician was one of Xi Jinping’s closest confidants: China’s propaganda chief, Li Shulei. Li shook hands with Whitmarsh and exchanged platitudes with the other guests. It wasn’t until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he’d signed up for: “a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,” as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China’s ministries of culture.

Inside a conference hall roughly the size of a football field sat hundreds of people—ambassadors, politicians, and scholars. At the podium, Li read out a letter from Xi, which described ancient Greece and China as two civilizations that have shaped humanity’s development from opposite sides of Eurasia. Xi went on to encourage their cultural exchange and announced the establishment of a Chinese School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Whitmarsh, who, with other Western-trained scholars, had led a group called the Postclassicisms Collective , realized that he had prepared the wrong speech. In the years since Donald Trump entered politics, emboldening fascists and white supremacists who held rallies deploying Roman imagery, Whitmarsh and the others had come to repudiate a traditional view of their field that he summed up as the “passing of a baton, down through the ages from like-minded person to like-minded person.” When it came time for Whitmarsh to speak, he argued that ancient texts didn’t spring from some timeless ur-culture, and that they should not be treated as such. “ ‘Classical Greece,’ ” he said to the Chinese and Greek dignitaries, is “an invention of the classical Greeks themselves.”

When we met for drinks two months later, Whitmarsh wondered whether he might have accidentally offered a warning for China: “Maybe it was the right speech after all,” he told me.

The World Conference of Classics had all the signs of a typical political spectacle, intended to cultivate appreciation for Chinese culture abroad. Yet Li and other scholars—many of whom can recall a time when their own intellectual traditions were denounced by Mao Zedong as “feudal dross”—also expressed admiration for the Western classics. One keynote at the conference was delivered by Liu Xiaofeng, one of the most prolific translators of ancient Greek thought into Chinese, and the gathering’s official theme was about “mutual learning.” The enthusiasm, in China, for Western classics also comes from below. In the years before Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas, nearly three hundred thousand Chinese enrolled at U.S. universities each year. Thousands learned ancient Greek and Latin. Many returning Chinese scholars brought their Western training and methodologies back to the Chinese academy, prompting university officials to find ways to categorize—and make use of—their skills.