After recent events in Athens, where ideology was painfully absent, violent outbursts of popular action materializing in a manner of unscripted theater of the absurd, reading a book on renaissance Florence and the adoption of Platonism, and more specifically of Georgios Plethon's reading of Plato, by the Florentine political elite, comes as a welcome break from the painful news of more depoliticized and politics. I have only begun reading Brigite Tambrun's "Pléthon: Le Retour de Platon" and the notion of a late medieval political operator staging his presence in the world of city politics on the basis of Platonic blueprints appears reassuring, not because I espouse in any way Plethon's oligarchic vision, magnificently progressive as it was for its time, but rather because it speaks of governance that reads. Of elites that study and of sons of privilege that listen to their professors. Tambrun describes a society that cherishes knowledge and even if cynically seeking to use it for political advantage, nevertheless in the process engages with the intellectual implications of different forms of political ideas. I am not sure I see that in the Athenian riots, and I have yet to see similar engagement on the part of politicians in the left and the right in western societies. The current crisis may force us back to the drawing boards and the reading rooms where old ideas and others new or renewed will once again inspire generations of citizens. Till then I will only hope for our collective renaissance and pray that the thinking of Keynes will be our new Platonic corpus.