Why am I so passionate about the Greeks? I don't think, I don't believe in what you
might call Greek exceptionalism, you know what I mean, that I don't
believe the Greeks were uniquely genetically somehow greater than any
other species, any more than the British were in the 19th century when we had an
empire, it's just for some reason there was a period in history and I say for
some reason you can actually try and think clearly and logically about what
those reasons might be, when the spotlight as it were was just on this
area of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese and the islands around it
and Ione, what we now call Asia Minor - Turkey - you know and bits of North
Africa, these people they were trading together. The Phoenicians who came from
really Tyre and the Holy Land as we would now
call it, Palestine area, they were the great traders and they brought the
alphabet. And the Greeks were the first people, as far as I can tell, who
thought let's try and be better than our parents.
I know it sounds like a silly thing to say but what I mean is they actually
believed in progress. And there's no real evidence that anyone before them
ever had. Indeed they had evidence across the Mediterranean at the great Egyptian
civilisation, which for 3,000 years basically didn't change. You or I could go into a
temple and look round it, an Egyptian temple and then go to another
one and say well those two temples are more or less the same and they would
be 2,000 years apart. Now that to us is insane, I mean you can't go to a house
that's a hundred years apart in Britain without being able to tell the
difference. The difference between twentieth century house and a Victorian
house, or a Victorian house and a Georgian house, it's obvious. But they had a
thousand years, 'This is the way we live, no reason to change.' But the Greeks did
feel a reason to change. And at the same time their trade and things were
settling down, the coast lines had settled. And that's a very important
thing to remember - for a long time the sea levels weren't stable so
you couldn't have a port. How can you have a port if
if you don't know that the sea level is going to rise up and flood it
in six months? But once you suddenly notice the sea levels were the same you
could have a port, you could suddenly start trading, talking with other people,
communicating using this new gift of the Phoenicians - the alphabet - and all of
these sort of things happened at round about the same time. And there was enough peace
and stability and ideas of thought and telling stories. I mean all myths say
why we here? Why do mountains rumble?Why does lightning flash in the
sky sometimes? And, you know, we were young as a species, we attributed such
things to agencies. You know there must be a figure who throws the lightning
down, lightning bolt, it's a god, a god of lightning. And there's a god of
sky and of rain and one of earthquakes, volcanoes, all the things
that we couldn't control, why food burst out of the ground, had a god behind it.
All the things that as I say we couldn't say 'I did' were done by gods.
And so we invented them and then slowly the Greeks began to understand more and
more about how they could shape their own destinies. And how they didn't
need to bow and sacrifice and apologise. And that the gods, if they
did exist, must be like us: capricious, mean,
unjust, jealous, wrathful, lustful. All the faults that we have, as well as the great
qualities we have of courage, fortitude, pity and so on. And so with the
Greeks because they were written about so quickly, the poetry was created out of
their myths, you have these stories that emerge that are like public dreams.
That have this fantastic resonance. They tell us about ourselves in ways that are
not preaching, it's not religious, it's not like religious parables. They don't
say this means you must behave like that. Some of them of course are like warnings,
you know, Icarus flying too close to the Sun and the wax of his wings melting
and plummeting to his death. You can see that as a classic warning of
hot-headed youth not listening to the sound advice from their elders. But
they're not like that, the Greeks, you also admire Icarus. You know that the
Greeks did. There's something glorious about trying to fly to the Sun even if
it is doomed, it's wonderful. And the Greeks are full of that. I could go on
forever as you can probably tell so I won't bore you too much but I just say I
think it was really important for me to tell the stories but not try and explain
them. I have my theories and you as readers will have your theories about
what that story means or what it is, if you like, if you think of myth as being
the stories of a kind of collective unconscious, of a society and the
culture sort of trying out, rehearsing, playing with ideas, deep thoughts about
themselves; we can all say they're doing this with this story and that with that
story, all this speaks to something. You know Freud did it after all famously
with the story of Oedipus. He saw it as a Greek expression of something very
profound that we feel about our parents and so on. And you can agree with
that or disagree with it but it's not for me in telling the stories to guide
you to a particular interpretation. I think part of the pleasure of them
is like going around an art gallery. You don't want someone telling you what a
painting means, it means what it is. And you look at it and yes you can see
in that painting gosh that, to me, that painting is all about
how pitiful we are compared to nature. Or it tells us about how death is
in the midst of even the youngest life. Or whatever the painting seems to
suggest to you but the painting isn't limited to that. That's just what you're
seeing in it at that time and I think in these stories
you can either treat them as a like a comic book, superhero stories
that are just adventures, because they work as that like none other. Or you can
say gosh I've been thinking about that story about Bellerophon flying up on his
winged horse and the more I think about it the more it just says something to me.
And I hope that's what people will feel because that's what I feel while writing them.
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