Donald J. Robertson has long been the doorway through which a new generation wanders into the marble colonnades of classical philosophy. The Scottish cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist is behind a string of best-selling titles – How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and, most recently, How to Think Like Socrates – that have turned Stoicism into something you can pack beside your sunglasses. Yet what drew us to him was not only the reach of his bibliography or his standing-room-only lecture schedule; it was the fact that Robertson has chosen to anchor the next chapter of his life in Greece.

He now splits his time between Montreal in Canada and the pellucid Attic sky, exploring the city’s neighborhoods (when we met for this interview we sipped iced beer in Kypseli) and blending with their histories and people. Living here, he says, sharpens the edges of the philosophy he teaches; the city is both an ideal writing spot and muse.

That regularity of visits was never incidental. Robertson is the founder of the Plato’s Academy Center, an ambitious plan to create a cultural hub on the very grounds where Plato once taught, turning a half-forgotten archaeological park into a twenty-first-century agora. In short, he is working to give Athens back a piece of itself, one that still shapes how the world thinks about ethics, resilience and the examined life.

For a travel portal devoted to the Greek experience, it is a pleasure to sit down again with the man who has made Greece not merely his subject but his home, and whose itinerary for the future begins where philosophy itself first set out on its journey.

Read more at Travel.gr/en