Know thyself

“Know thyself” is the Delphic maxim that turns a visit to Delphi into a question about how to live. In the novel, it connects Athina’s attempt to understand herself beyond a well-paid banking career with Ellie Thomas’s later consideration of whether to return to London. The phrase offers no prophecy or ready-made solution: its force lies in making each woman attend to what she already knows but has not yet acted upon.

The Delphic maxim

The words are presented as the inscription supposed to have stood above the doorway of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. Athina recalls their Greek form, “Gnothi s’eafton,” and glosses it as “Know yourself.” The narrative preserves the distinction between the remembered saying and the uncertainties around ancient guidance: Delphi’s priest and prophetess are long gone, while the site remains a place people visit and a point of reference for those seeking direction.

For Athina, the maxim is familiar before it becomes personal. Like every Greek schoolchild, she has learned that people once went to Delphi seeking guidance about the future. On her flight, she reads a horoscope in an inflight magazine and considers how its confident instructions might serve as a contemporary substitute for consulting an oracle. Astrology, like the ancient practice she recalls, depends on faith in a system that can tell a person what to do. Her reflection sets that external authority against the more demanding implication of the Delphic words: guidance may begin not with a prediction, but with self-understanding.

Athina’s return to the question

A month before telling her story, Athina is working on the twenty-eighth floor of an office block in Düsseldorf. From a tinted window she sees other tinted windows; around her, glass towers house corporations and the bankers, lawyers, brokers, hedge-fund managers, and financiers whose work sustains one another. In the boardroom, business phrases circulate across the table. Athina observes that the language is not difficult to master; what seems to matter is how something is said rather than what is said. The polished vocabulary of work supplies a sharp contrast to the plain demand to know oneself.

Athina has left Greece for employment, and banking pays well. Yet the professional world that surrounds her appears self-referential, and a tentative relationship with a colleague has fizzled out. When a long weekend approaches, she has little reason to remain in Germany. She books a return flight to Athens before a conference has ended, but does not plan to go home: she expects her father to be upset if she is unhappy in Düsseldorf and does not want her mother to mistake the visit for a decision to return to Greece. Instead, a poster saying “Find yourself” revives the lesson about Apollo’s temple. Athina has never been to Delphi; she chooses to go partly for the time to think and the chance to see blue sky.

At breakfast after visiting Delphi, Athina tells a fellow traveler that she came to find herself. She recalls the inscription and says she thinks that, for the first time in her life, she understood herself. Her serious manner gives way to excitement as she tells the story, culminating in her declaration that she saw into her future. The scene does not set out a detailed prediction. Its emphasis is on the change in Athina as she speaks: the maxim has become an occasion for a recognition she can express, rather than a formula that dictates what comes next.

A question passed to Ellie

The phrase returns later in a conversation between Athina and Ellie Thomas. Ellie faces an opportunity that would take her back to London, where her family and friends would expect her to return, while her heart tells her to stay where she is. Athina leans across the table and emphatically tells her to know herself. Ellie remembers the inscription at Delphi and considers whether it is now her turn to act on its meaning.

The advice does not decide Ellie’s choice for her. She gets up to think, moves to the balcony railings to look at the view, and has next month’s rent on her mind. Then she takes out her phone and calls her landlady. The practical pressure of rent sits alongside the inward question, preventing self-knowledge from becoming an abstract ideal detached from the circumstances of daily life. The scene leaves her considering what to do rather than presenting the maxim as a guarantee of an easy answer.

Recurrence and significance

“Know thyself” links two women at different points in their lives through an idea first encountered as inherited knowledge. Athina remembers what she learned at school; later, she gives the words to Ellie, who recognizes the inscription from Athina’s account. The maxim thus travels through conversation as well as across the narrative, changing from a lesson about an ancient place into a prompt directed at someone facing a present choice.

Its recurrence also distinguishes self-examination from the search for instructions. Athina compares horoscopes with the authority once sought at Delphi, but her account centers on understanding herself rather than receiving a prescribed course of action. Ellie, in turn, must weigh her own wish against expectations and the concrete question of rent. The novel makes the saying consequential not because it resolves either woman’s future in advance, but because it brings the choice into focus. Even the closing contents of Anthony’s notebook include a section titled “Know Thyself,” extending the phrase’s presence into the book’s arrangement and recalling it as one of the narrative’s recurring subjects.