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A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Suddenly, we are awash with classical references and those blank-eyed marble statues are talking through the millennia.
A controversial film version of the Odyssey is one catalyst even as its timeless themes elude those who need them most.
But Christopher Nolan's version of Homer's epic is only part of it - a response to the political, moral and terrestrial mess of modernity.
Somehow, we missed the irony that in our enlightened rejection of mystical realms, we assumed godly powers only to visit a more comprehensive version of chaos on our world.
New gods were subbed in for those of antiquity - markets, technology, consumption, and the fatal illusion of mastering the planet itself.
The ancients saw the capricious hand of the Gods in natural phenomena. Zeus, the King of Gods fired lightning bolts from Mount Olympus and unleashed tempests.
We ditched the name but took the job global making it infinitely more destructive.
And so, the planet bakes and stressed ecosystems succumb to viruses, extinctions, algal blooms.
In the northern hemisphere, countries including the UK, swelter in their warmest summer on record, replacing last year.
Nuclear power stations are taken offline as the mighty Danube runs so low it cannot keep them cool. Europe's second-longest river becomes unnavigable. Ditto the Rhine. Wildfires rage in leafy England, Europe and beyond.
Clueless, we cast about for explanations as to why the rational world feels dangerously loose, unruly. We sense doom but struggle to see it clearly, this terrible fraying.
The great Barry Jones - turning 94 in a matter of weeks - defies his own entropy to pen a typically adroit piece in yesterday's Saturday Paper. Musing about democracy, he cites the role of the philosophers, Solon and Cleisthenes, in working up the earliest forms of democracy in Athens around 600 BCE.
"Male citizens who had done some military service could vote to determine priorities, to reduce the power of the nobility, create a rule of law that could be enforced by the courts and set priorities for great public buildings, notably the Parthenon," Jones states.
"The Athenian model was adopted by hundreds of city states. Pericles (circa 495-429 BCE) is associated with the Golden Age of Athens, based on this model."
Just days before, in an unreported dinner address marking the 20th anniversary of the Crawford School in the 80th year of ANU, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, also reaches for Pericles.
Explaining that the writings of Thucydides were not his area of specialisation, he told guests it is "the parallel that matters".
"Pericles led Athens for over thirty years, through war and plague, a time of enormous political and strategic difficulty. He found Athens's real anxieties - and spent his authority trying to steady the city through them, with candour and with courage."
But all that changed when an opportunistic successor took the reins.
"Cleon found the same anxieties, the very same genuine and legitimate grievances, and worked out how to capitalise on them rather than address them. That fear, amplified and given a target, was more use to him than fear explained and managed and alleviated."
Chalmers' message was both broad and sharp. Populism is a trickery as old as democracy itself. There have always been candidates willing to ratchet grievance for personal advancement, exacerbating fear and deepening problems.
"When I studied here, the fault lines in politics were the obvious ones," he reminisced. "Left and right. Open and closed. Progressive and conservative."
Now though, the dividing line in politics is between "those who seek to prey on genuine discontent - to find real grievances in a community and fuel division with them - and those who want to address and alleviate them".
As critique, this is hardly novel, but the emphasis placed on the hard grind of leadership, speaks to an anxiety which extends across Labor that the growing right-wing populist wave makes governing harder. More so in a time of pandemics, wars, natural disasters, and a wider loss of faith in institutions.
These themes of governing properly versus cheaply are nowhere more obvious than in the gaudy circus of Trump's America.
Nolan's Odyssey has been widely criticised but most have missed an embedded point writes Ezra Klein in a brilliant analysis for the New York Times.
Boiled down, Klein says, Odysseus is actually a trickster and Nolan himself has used trickery to smuggle into the epic, "the core of Judeo-Christian ethics" which advocate care for others, including migrants, because it is right.
"Elon Musk did not understand what this movie was. But this movie understands what Musk is."
Finally, Klein writes, Odysseus cannot avoid his own immorality.
"What Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him ... Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians; they were the barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity."
Pericles, Barry Jones, wrote, "resisted - and sometimes provoked - other city states, and in his time, Greece faced the threat of invasion from the Persians".
In our time, it's the Persians, aka Iranians, weathering attacks from a mere mortal convinced he has the powers of the Gods - which is the ancient Greeks' definition of hubris.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.