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.
