Greek Fire

"This is quite an old one, by an Oxford friend and colleague Oliver Taplin. I’ve been looking at it again recently. It was a Channel 4 series originally, extremely well illustrated and extraordinarily wide-ranging. I chose it because of its interest in not only the Greek world—though it says many true things about the Greek world—but what later generations have made of the Greek world in different ways and how they have responded to it creatively. He himself draws the analogy of Orpheus going down into the underworld. As you burrow into ancient Greece, you’re in a sea with all the interest and knowledge and ideas that you have gained, but you can’t stay there and you can’t bring it all with you. All you can do is be different from the experience. It’s a very good analogy. He talks about many things—aesthetics, tragedy (he’s an expert on tragedy), politics, ideas, architecture, art. It’s very rich and beautifully written. He’s also extremely good at giving an idea of what travelling through modern Greece is like. It’s an almost poetic response to the great landscape and Greece as it now is. He clearly loves Greece and knows it very well. There’s a feeling of some sort of contact, a very filtered and distilled contact, that you might still get when you’re there. I love that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s also interesting on the ideas. An example that struck me is where he is talking about the difference between what Plato called the Sophists—the philosophical thinkers who are particularly interested in rhetoric—and what Plato taught about truth and truthfulness. It’s a balance between what was later called ‘homo rhetoricus,’ the rhetorical man, who is interested in persuasion, and ‘homo philosophicus,’ the man who cares about wisdom and the truth. It’s the clash between persuasiveness, what you can get away with saying, and truthfulness, what is actually true. It’s a book written in the early nineties but this may have even more relevance today, with post-truth societies. The great Byzantine historian Steven Runciman was fond, so we’re told, of wondering whether it wouldn’t have been a good thing if Persia rather than Athens had won the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. Then we would be thinking about Zoroastrianism and dualism—and all sorts of other Persian ideas. It doubtless is an accident of history that the Greek legacy, largely through the Romans, has come to us. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Romans did what they did to it, which wasn’t straightforward, and then it came via Byzantine culture as well. So it may well be right that some of these ideas just seem very meaningful to us; they’ve never stopped being meaningful. Equally, with science, we can’t neglect the way in which Islam was extraordinarily important. Around the millennium, it was Islamic scholars who were translating Aristotle , responding to Aristotle, taking Aristotle a lot further, at a time when Christianity was pretty frozen. And there were a lot of other things coming in as well, which make the channel from the ancient world to us anything but straightforward and straight. There was that feeling of intellectual enquiry, I think, which is what appeals so much to so many of us— especially, inevitably, to people in my neck of the woods [Oxford] and academics in general. It’s this feeling that Socrates is said to have said, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” You look very carefully at things and you don’t take anything for granted. That feeling of energetic, vigorous, and open-minded enquiry is something that does appeal in ways that are not simply a matter of direct inheritance."