Where Greek myths match today’s reality. (2015)

“Might the best guide to what is happening in Greece now be the heaving underbelly of Greek myth, that repository of the unimaginably cruel, disgraceful and disastrous aspects of human character and destiny?

Harry Eyres, ‘The Slow Lane’
Financial Times, 30 January 2015

“The coverage of events in Greece has repeatedly reminded us that the Greeks (albeit of an earlier vintage) gave us the words politics, democracy, drama, comedy and tragedy.

“I have heard less talk of hubris (the overweening pride of those who devised a single currency encompassing the rather different economic modes and attitudes of Schleswig-Holstein, Sicily and the southern Peloponnese) and nemesis.

“By focusing on the relatively respectable side of the Greek legacy, I wonder whether those commentators are missing the point. Might the best guide to what is happening now not be the bright Apollonian tradition of Greek rationality, the belief in logos and logic, but the dark Dionysiac side – the heaving underbelly of Greek myth, that repository of the unimaginably cruel, disgraceful and disastrous aspects of human character and destiny?”

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