![]() ![]() These two authors were telling the stories in completely different ways and taking different aspects of them. One was The Heroes by Charles Kingsley and the other was A Wonder Book/Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Scarlet Letter fame. I read two particular books, which I haven’t chosen because I think for modern readers they’re a bit too bowdlerised and preachy. How did you, personally, get interested in them? ![]() They’re a guide to life as well as being stories. So, for instance, Ixion, who commits the first murder, ends up in a fiery pit, tied to a wheel, forever revolving, because that was not a good thing to do. The stories also, perhaps, help explain how to behave and the consequences of certain actions - a bit like the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not…” or something terrible will happen. They have a lot of quirks and foibles and they do all the things that humans do: Zeus cheats and lies and he is the most appalling serial adulterer. ![]() ![]() They’re in Olympus but they’re recognizable to us. What’s so fascinating about the Greek myths in particular is that the gods are terribly human. It was easy to make a myth about it, and to say that it was down to the gods. What is a Greek myth? What is it about Greek myths that has attracted us to them down the ages?Ī Greek myth is basically a way of explaining the world, or it was a way of explaining the world to a primitive people who didn’t have any explanation of the sun or the moon or the disasters that happened - like earthquakes and floods and fire.
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