Stephen, thank you so much for give us 
some time to talk to you.
Will, a real pleasure.
I had a very warm feeling of recognition when I started reading your book; on the first
page you talked about encountering a
book of Greek myths when you were
younger and I remember that same
moment for myself and I suppose more
importantly for my sister, because she
became obsessed with them,
absolutely obsessed them but I wonder if
you could talk about that moment,
what was it about those Greek myths that
really hooked you?
It is one of those childhood things where something about this world that its detail
I think children respond immensely to a
detailed world that they can enter and
discover, I guess it's one of the secrets
behind Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkein
and George R. R. Martin and all those kinds of writers who create a fully realized,
peopled world and the Greeks did it, but not from a single author but from a
whole kind of you know mythology and
unlike almost any other mythology I've
ever come across it has a timeline,
you know, it begins with the creation of
the universe and and it goes through
these rather elemental, primordial
deities and slowly they acquire color
and character and absolute definition.
I compare it a bit to the early days of
video gaming when you had Pong you know
a little black and white screen on an
old television and an oblong going up and
down and a square ball going [great Pong impression] like that. That's all it was and that's like the
early gods you know they don't really
have much you know they're called Ouranos,
which to this day - Uranus/Ouranos is the
Greek word for sky. And Gaia - Earth
And so they were sort of principles
of what they stood for but slowly by the
third generation when you have Zeus and
Hera and Poseidon and Hades and Demeter
and then Apollo and all the others,
they take on absolute, full, rounded
character and you know them and you know
what they stand for, what their
job is, you know each God has a
sort of portfolio if you like,
and each God represents a side of us. These
are stories about us rather than aliens
or you know these gods are not distant, they are just facets of our own character
People will read them and in
fact as you have done with the book here
by retelling those stories will find
ways in which they are absolutely
applicable to the world we live in.
I absolutely agree, I was thinking of one quite recently
I begin the book with the creation of the
universe according to Greek myth and the
first generations of gods and then after
the Olympic deities, the twelve gods
under Zeus you know the famous ones,
Apollo and so on, Poseidon, they create
man and Prometheus the Titan, who's a great
friend of Zeus, creates these little
creatures that are like the gods but
they have certain things that they are
not allowed to have, Zeus won't let them
have fire and Prometheus steals fire from
heaven to give to man because he loves mankind
and Zeus, part of Zeus's
punishment, it gets even bloodier but his
original punishment, he's so furious, and this is where the Greeks are wonderful
because they realized if there were gods
the gods were jealous of us they didn't
like the fact that we were so close to
them that we shared their curiosity,
creativity, their difference from the
other animals. We, like the gods had this
fire, this inner fire as well as the
actual fire that makes you know metal
and the rest of it. So part of Zeus's punishment was to create this all gifted creature who was
a woman, the first woman, so it's bit
like the Eve myth, you know, only she's
given all these gifts, all the various
gods give them you know so she's given
the poise of Hera and the command of
Hera and the you know the intelligence
of Athena and all these other things and
the beauty of Aphrodite the goddess of
love and beauty and she sent down with this
box that Zeus gives her. It's actually a jar
but it's become a box in modern parlance
and her name is Pandora which means 'all gifted'.
She arrives and she marries Epimetheus, Prometheus's brother and
she puts the box at the end of the bed and
she can't bear it and she
buries it in the garden and eventually
one night when Epimetheus is out
with friends or something she can't help
herself she digs it up and she opens the
lid. Now, this is what I was thinking of
How extraordinarily like the internet
Pandora is. That when the internet
arrived I embraced it with such fervor
and optimism I I thought it was the all
gifted thing that man had invented it
had all the gifts. It had art, science,
knowledge, communication, technology. It had so much going for it and I thought this
is going to melt down the barriers
between human beings, it's gonna be
an end of tribalism and, you know,
nationalism and nativism and rivalry and
hatred. Suddenly people will understand
each other, will communicate with each
other, no tyrant will be able to flourish
because truth will out they won't be able
to lie to us anymore,
everything will be fabulous.
And similarly Pandora, how perfect she was,
but when she opened the box out came
disaster of every kind: war, lies, murder,
theft, pain, starvation, hardship, disease,
all the ills of the world
flew out of the box like this buzzing
leathery-winged, scaly creatures and she
slammed the lid down terrified and the
one little creature left inside to beat
its wings against the sides of the box
was Elpis: Hope. And that's, isn't it,
there was the internet and it was this
Pandora's box but suddenly with social
media when thinking this was going to be
the most perfect thing that would end tyranny and dissolve barriers
Out came the trolls, out came the abusers and
the thieves and the tricksters and the
bullies and everything seemed to go
wrong and it is you know you could not
find a better analogy for the dark side
of what happened with the wonderful gift
of the internet than Pandora's box.
And similarly Prometheus you know it's
no accident Mary Shelley called
Frankenstein the modern Prometheus
because it was
creating a new life-form and we're about
to do that by the end of the century we
will be intelligent designers
who have made our own species of robotic,
augmented, intelligent creatures. It's a weird thought.
And I think Greek myth is probably
teaching us more about that than any system since
I just wondered whether there were
any stories that you had found
personally, particularly helpful in
providing comfort or instruction at a
difficult time in life perhaps, or when you just needed something that said it just right?
Well you know there's no
question that some of the psychological
insights of the stories, there's a group of stories that
I've put together, but I'm hardly the
first to do it
the best-known version is the Roman poet
Ovid who took the Greek myths that are
about transformations and the Greek for
transformation is metamorphosis and so
they're called the Metamorphoses or
Metamorphoses of Ovid and these are
the stories of young girls or boys who die or are killed and turned
into flowers or you know like Adonis for example, whom
Aphrodite falls in love with, Shakespeare
wrote about that and there's you know
smaller ones like Crocus and Smilax,
we know what Crocus was turned into and
Apollo and Daphne, Daphne was
turned into a laurel but you know the
one that most people know and I think is
perhaps most interesting in our own time
is that of the very, very beautiful youth
Narcissus. A nymph had been
cursed by Hera because she lied to Hera.
She'd been cursed to have her voice taken
away so she could only speak the last
words said to her. Sees Narcissus and
falls passionately in love with him
because he's so beautiful but he can't
bear this because all his life he's had
people paying attention to him. He once had a
youth hang himself outside his window on
a pear tree because this youth was
so in love with him and he just hated
the fact everyone stared at him. You can
imagine that - I mean for me it would have
to be imagination -  but if you were so
beautiful that people just constantly
stared at you and wanted
to be with you and felt that you were
the one and you would feel it if only
you knew them better.
You'd just get very distrustful.
So he rejects her but then what happened to Narcissus was that finally,
having got rid of this nymph he thinks
he'll you know strip off and
swim in the stream. And he
looks into the stream and he sees the most
beautiful face he's ever seen in his
life, he's astounded, he falls completely
in love with this youth that he sees in
the water, he's never seen anything like it
he leans forward to kiss it and the
youth leans up to kiss him, and they get
closer and closer and just as they kiss
it all breaks up his image disappears
into a thousand rippling pieces and the
boy seems to be inside the water and
Narcissus looks at him and calls to him
and at the same time this youth calls at him.
And of course, you and I know what he's
looking at is his reflection but he's
insanely in love with the sight of himself
and he stays there and he doesn't eat and he
fades away and the Gods take pity on
him and turn him into the flower that
bears his name, narcissus, the daffodil.
And what is so interesting is that over the
last year there have been so many
articles in newspapers questioning
whether or not Donald Trump has
narcissistic personality disorder
because it has entered the language;
narcissism, this vanity of seeing
yourself reflected and falling in love
with it and having no time for anything
else, is a very interesting, and it's
never been better expressed and
of course there's a Dali painting and a
Waterstone painting
Those sort of things really,
they still resonate incredibly and
obviously the Oedipus Complex is very
well known one as well, Oedipus who killed
his father and married his mother.
They tapped into something so
absolutely primal about us but also the
Greeks being the kind of people they
were at this particular time, they
thought if there are gods
then those gods are no better than
us you know because look what they've
done with the world, they've screwed it up
you know they make things bad for us and
they're jealous of us because we
are gods in our world you know
we have faults, we're terrible, we
can be cruel, we have wars but we're
different from animals,
you know it doesn't matter how much of
an animal lover you are and I'm a great animal lover, we recognize that we
have some element of consciousness,
curiosity, creativity, that is different
from that of animals. Animals don't make
films about us; they don't gather around
and stare at us, they don't put us in a
zoo to look at us and find out -
they don't say wow what is it, look at those
humans, have you seen them, they're
amazing - they just run like hell when
they see us, for very good reason because
we're dangerous but we are, you know, look at Blue Planet II, we spend years
studying these beautiful things,
animals, and yet although we know we're an animal
we know we've got DNA as they
have, we know we're also different,
that something happened in our brain
that gave us this thing we call
consciousness. In the Hebrew myth it's of
course the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil that gives
man this sense of moral something
awareness and a difference and a guilt
and shame, suddenly thinking it's naked.
But the Greek one I think is more
convincing to me, which is that the gods
made us and Prometheus who
actually modelled us and who loved us
more than the gods did, disobeyed the
gods and stole fire from heaven and gave
it to us and gave us this fire which is
both a physical fire that burns furnaces
and forges steel and iron, but also the
inner, divine fire that we have that
makes us separate.And it's not
divine in the sense that it's perfect
like a Christian God, it's divine in the
sense that it's flawed and jealous and
capricious and wicked and lustful and
treacherous and all the other things
that gods are and humans are.
I could literally talk to you about this all day
unfortunately I can't, but I think
that your knowledge and your
passion shines through not only in this
conversation but through the book and
makes it a joy to read so Stephen, thank you so much for your time
It's been a real pleasure Will, thank you so much.
