Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)
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The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.
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The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS.
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Brooding, simmering, and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?
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“I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me.
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Somehow then, by accident and error, man alone of all mortal creatures was given qualities from Olympus—not so that he could rival the gods, but merely so that he could fend off the more perfectly equipped animals. Prometheus’s name means, as I have said, “forethought.” Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1945) has this to say: The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future ...more
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For some it reinforces the terrible nature of Zeus’s curse on man. All the ills of the world were sent to plague us, they argue, and we were denied even the consolation of hope. The abandoning of hope, after all, is often used as a phrase that preludes the end to caring or striving. Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope. How terrible then to believe that hope might abandon us. Others have maintained that Elpis means more than “hope,” it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending ...more
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So while they may have been far from perfect, the ancient Greeks seem to have developed the art of seeing life, the world, and themselves with greater candor and unclouded clarity than is managed by most civilizations, including perhaps our own.