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.