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    Homer's Present

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Valderredible, Cantabria (1949).

Journalist and writer.

His last book,

Zeus and family

(edited by Ariel), is a synthesis, half fictionalized, half personal and comic chronicle, of the world of the Greek gods.

Why are there so many recent books on Greco-Latin mythology? Because it is a natural response of society that compensates for the absence of the classics in the curricula. And what use is this knowledge to us? The moment of maturity of the myths coincides with the moment of maturity of philosophy, art and democracy.

I doubt very much that we can understand anything in a museum or an opera house, or even in a democracy, without that knowledge.

In the medium term, suppressing the humanities is cultural suicide. There is an idea in your book: discovering Ulysses at the age of 17 is not the same as discovering Ulysses at the turn of life. At 17 we see a comic character.

Ulysses seems like a pirate to us, a very cunning guy, a bit of a braggart. Now, what I notice the most is that, unlike Achilles, that he wanted to die because he wanted to enter glory,

Ulysses rejected the nymph who offers him immortality... And the explanation he gave made him the first modern man.

Ulysses comes to say that he prefers the freedom of the last moment of his life to being lost in immortality for an eternity.

He is the man who has challenged the cultural subjugation of the gods, the one who has been in a thousand battles, the one who has won and been defeated, the one who does not boast of anything but chooses freedom. And that is a sense of heroism that we it appeals directly in 2022. It is the essence of what Greco-Latin culture has bequeathed us.

Let's say that we Europeans are the product of the mixture of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Latin culture.

Unlike the Judeo-Christian world, the myths did not generate a sacred and unassailable text or a priestly caste to watch over orthodoxy.

What I remember,

There is only one case of priestly structure around the mysteries of Eleusis, which were, among other things, a training to overcome the fear of death. to those who had strength. And what does that remind you of?... To all the school bullies that there have been in the world.

The myths are symbolic stories that portray the relationships of men: generosity, hatred, envy, desire... The important thing is that attitude of Hades, not the idea of ​​hell, because that idea is not in the Greco-Roman tradition .

There is the horror of the dark, not the punishment. It seems to me that nobody believes in hell anymore, not even the most ardent believers. The fear of hell has been a great tool of power for 20 centuries and now it has apparently disappeared.

It is one of the characteristics of our times.

But do not rule out what Voltaire said: the greatest proof of the devil's intelligence is having made us believe that he does not exist. We all see the Greco-Latin world with great sympathy, but if people decided to become Christians, that pagan life had to cause problems. But it is that they did not elect him, it was a political decision.

Constantine, of whom it is doubted that he would convert, authorized the cult under the influence of his mother, who later became Saint Helena.

Until the moment in which it became the official religion, there were moments of small setbacks in its expansion.

Until Theodosius converted Christianity into the state religion and built a chain of transmission of power through religion.

Religion is politics by other means. Tell me about Dionysus.

He had a bad birth,

He was the son of an adulterous Zeus whose life was made impossible by Heras.

And he was very unattractive.

We associate him with the joy of living, but he is a tragic character.

Because Dionysian is one who follows his instincts and that is going against conventions and also against power.

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