Greek Mythology's Modern Impact and Reflections

What do you make of what's happening now with Elon Musk and X? I think it's like what's happening to our water. I think it's capitalism at its worst is contaminating and polluting the environment in which we grow. And things are becoming unlivable in that we can't breathe the cultural air that is being produced. Firstly, I've got to say thank you. Thank you as a Greek opening a book. and reading Stuselianus Archaeus Gensichronus. I'm thinking, well, this book is for me because it's the people of Greece, ancient and modern. I'm one of those modern Greeks. And you've taken me back to being about 10 and listening, you know, having my mythology lessons. And you've reminded me of classrooms with weeping children when Achilles was felled by Paris and having a teacher. trying to find enough Kleenex tissues because we were all blubbering and saying, but why, but why, which speaks to the power of these myths. Yes, it is eternal and it never ceases to astonish me how it continues to speak to us now. I was just talking on TalkSport earlier and I was talking about Achilles, funnily enough, because if you remember his mother, Thetis, I don't know, the trouble with the English, as you know, is we... the way we pronounce the names. Yeah, this is going to get very... I'm sure it's Thetis and Peleus, and we say Peleus and Thetis. Achilleus. Achilleus, exactly. Odysseus. Odysseus, is it? Odysseus. Odysseus, yeah. We say Odysseus and so on. So forgiving our weird stresses on words and mispronunciations. Peleus or Peleus, his father, and Thetis, Achilles'mother, when he was a baby, there was a... It was a fantastic birth. All the immortals went to their wedding. And it was at their wedding that Eris, who was the one immortal not invited, she was the goddess of discord, she rolled a golden apple, which had written on it, to the fairest. And that caused the Trojan War. But that's a whole other story. And the trouble started. But anyway, Achilles, it was prophesied that their son, when he survived, would, because they'd had... other children who didn't, when he survived, he would either have the most glorious and heroic life any mortal had ever had, or he would have a very long and serene life in which he wouldn't be heard of, but it would be a long one, whereas his life as a hero would be cut short. And his mother didn't want him to have a short life, so she dipped him in the waters of the River Lethe in the underworld, gripping onto him by the ankle, of course, the thumb and finger just leaving a gap where the waters didn't cover him. The rest of the waters made him invulnerable, so he could never be killed by an arrow or sword or a spear or anything like that. But he had this weakness, this Achilles heel, as he called it. And of course, she then hid him away on an island. When the Greeks were going around raising an army to fight to get Helen back, she dressed him as a girl, but he was discovered. And it was Odysseus who discovered him, wasn't it? Yes, it was Odysseus who discovered him. With quite a clever ruse. With a clever ruse, as Odysseus is always fond of doing, because he came in with... He left a sword on the table and a shield. And came in and started to attack all the girls who all ran away screaming, except one who bizarrely rushed for the sword and started to fight. Ha ha ha! Achilles. And he went, don't! That was the other Homer. But what I was saying to the sports talk people is, you know, Achilles should be your patron saint because that is the life of a sportsman. It is a sportswoman, obviously, being ungendered there, a sporting person. is a life of glory, a life of absolute glory and adoration is possible, but it will be short. It will be short. And Achilles therefore is, and he was the fastest of all the heroes too, so he was an athlete as well as a great warrior, and he stands for that. He stands for the blaze of glory, of sunlight, golden Achilles, that is the price you pay for wonder is the Burning bright. It burns bright like a rocket falls to ground. This book, The Odyssey, you... Well, it picks up at the end of the Trojan War and you chart everybody's return. Ten years of war, everyone's on the way back. Nostos is the theme, as you know that word, of course. Yes, and everybody gets back. Odysseus takes slightly longer than everybody else. He sure does. Both as a result of his own... stupidity in a way. When he defeats Polyphemus, the Cyclops Cyclops. Cyclops. The Cyclops, the one-eyed sort of giant figure. He defeats him And one of his cleverest tricks is to have told him that his name is Nobody, so that when he blinds him in his cave and all the other Cyclops or Cuclopes come to... rescue him they say what's up what's up and he says nobody's hurt me nobody's blinded me and they go are you idiot well what if nobody's hurt you what's the fuss about and and it's a it's a it's a clever ruse but he cannot resist having done that as he and his men then escape him and get to their boats and start to to row away And he's throwing, blindly throwing rocks after them. He can't help standing on the stern of the boat and shouting, it wasn't nobody, it was Odysseus of Ithaca who bested you and you should live with that for the rest of your life. At which Polyphima... who is the son of Poseidon, the sea god, shouts out to his father, revenge me on this man, look what he's done to me. And Poseidon, of all the gods, is the one who holds him back most. But it was Odysseus'fault, which is very typical of Homer and the... These things that happen to people, and this is the modern side of it, things that happen to people happen because of their own qualities, not just fate and gods and prophecies. It starts to be actually their own weaknesses, their own strengths. And the first word you may remember in Homer to describe Odysseus is polythropos, many turning. There's no English word for it, really, because you can say twisty, because he was. Certainly the Romans who hated him called him Ulysses and he was the enemy who had. who had defeated Troy and their hero Aeneas was a Trojan. But they called him Twisted Cunning Sly. And he invented the Trojan horse that won the war. And as you say, he was the one who found out Achilles. And he was a very new kind of hero. Theseus had an element of that, who was the great Athenian hero. But Odysseus more so, his mind. He was a great warrior as well, of course, but it was... It was his thinking of things was extraordinary and there'd never been a hero like it. How did you go about with all these books? Because we've got heroes, we've got mythos, we've got Troy, we've got the Odyssey now. When putting them together, what's your process been? Because there's been so many versions, iterations. Did you have... one source that you would go to and say, look, I'm going to stick to this? Or did you sort of pick and choose bits that stood out to you from various different sources? I picked and chose. I try not to use retellings. I mean, they're all retellings in a way, obviously, all the way back to Hesiod, or Hesiod, or however you say Hesiod, who wrote what's known as the Theogony, which is the birth of the gods and the very beginning of it all. and Homer were the first two voices to emerge. And then there were these other Greek sources. There's the wonderfully named Pseudo-Apollodorus. And they wrote sort of encyclopedias of myth. The Roman poet Ovid in particular wrote these marvelous verse tellings of what he called the metamorphoses, these transformations, you know, that's like Narcissus turning into a flower and Arachne turning into a spider. So I looked at them. There's some very good sites online which have the original sources and their translations. And I just tried to think what the story was. But I. The reason I started on this whole adventure was that I'd had a conversation at some sort of dinner party where we were all chatting about creation myths and how extraordinary they were and I started rabbiting on about the Greek one and I spoke about the castration of Uranus and then Kronos'defeat by his son Zeus and how the third generation became the Olympians. And everyone stared at me and said, how do you know all this? And I said, well, at school, you know, other people had football and German tanks and planes and British bombers and RAF heroes or whatever, and I had Greek myths. I just loved them. You know, I read Robert Graves and there were various other, you know, a lot of them American, Edith Hamilton and others. And so I just, they became my friends, if you like, a bit like you weeping at Achilles. You started to care for these characters. And they said, well, you should write about them. I'd never heard really properly how they all connect up. And I thought that's the point, how they all connect up, so that it makes a coherent narrative out of what is, you know, the collective unconscious, as Jung called it, you know, the public dreams of a people, of a community. And I looked and I found that there was no... There had been no modern retelling. I mean, since, funnily enough, there have been... Since Mythos, the first one I wrote, which... There have been some marvellous novelisations of some stories, like Madeleine Miller's wonderful Song of Achilles. Really wonderful. Beautiful, beautiful books, which I so recommend. Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, which is about the women in the Iliad and the story of Troy. There's been a lot of that, a lot of finding women's voices in Greek myth, because, yeah, a lot of it is about warriors and heroes who are male, although... It is interesting, and I do point out that of the second generation of, well the very first, Gaia is the most powerful, the earth god, you know, who then mated with her own son, Uranus the Sky. But there are six male titans and six female titans, the next generation. There are six Olympian gods and six Olympian goddesses. So it was quite an equal opportunity as a deity structure. Even certainly not absent from the stories. And some of the most fascinating ones are Medea and Circe and Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur, who were all actually related. They were all the same family. They had this source of magic and enchantment. There's definitely very strong women throughout. Yes, and Atalanta is my favourite. Looking at this book, you make a really fascinating point towards the end where you have your thoughts about the stories and sort of looking at what we can take from these myths that are forever true in our lives. And you talk about Prometheus with... you know, who gave fire to us, which of course changed everything. And comparing that with AI. Yes. Which is a really interesting way of thinking about it. Well, it is. I mean, if you were to describe what happened with Prometheus and Zeus, they made these creatures that Zeus wanted to worship him and obey him. That's us. And be helpful to him. And they were called anthropoi, you know, anthropi, as you would say. Anthropi. Anthropi, as you would say. Man, mankind. And Prometheus, our creator, was very excited and said, I'll teach them, I'll teach them to sail and to fish and to weave and to make pots and swords and... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, says Zeus. Yeah, fishing and weaving, fine, but nothing with fire. Don't give them fire. And by fire, you just know from reading the myth that it means literally the fire that... That makes technology that roasts and toasts and melts and smelts and you know does make it gives us this advantage over animals because as You know Plato pointed out many thousands years later He created mankind he didn't give us horns or claws The ability to swim underwater or to fly all the animals had to had some specialist gift and we didn't have any So, you know we and and we didn't have but Zeus didn't want us to have fire And he didn't want us to have the divine spark that sense of fire You know, the creativity, the thing that the gods had, the thing that would separate gods from other animals and other entities. And Prometheus naturally wondered, why can't my little creatures have this? He said, well, because if they had fire, they wouldn't need us. They would start to... Their own lives would be more interesting, and their own tasks and... They wouldn't look up. They would be equal to us, and we would die out. And so you kind of think, well... Of course, Prometheus did steal fire from heaven and he was punished terribly and chained to the Caucasus Mountains and so on. And Zeus was furious and, you know, punished us in other ways. And you go, OK, it's a creation myth. But then, interestingly, as the sort of mid-millennium that we've just passed with printing and the age of reason took over. And the stranglehold of the church and the Genesis creation myth began to loosen this idea that we were basically sinful and we must apologise all the time to God because God was perfect and we were imperfect. That was that. And you have to believe that. That's the truth. Well, it started to get questioned, science and then, you know, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And so Prometheus became a more wonderful saviour for us because he loved us and he didn't have to take on our sins. He just, the gods were sinful because gods are like us and we were human and we didn't have anything to apologise for. that sort of for a thousand years of the Dark Ages we were apologising for the crime of being born. What kind of sense did that make? And you looked at the gods and they had human flaws. They had human flaws. They had jealousy, rage. Capricious, jealous, yeah, all of that. And in a very short space of time, Beethoven wrote The Creatures of Prometheus, a wonderful piece of music, and Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound, which is a dialogue between... Zeus and Prometheus about why he had done what he'd done, why he punished him. And which, funnily enough, is being repeated in Chaos, the Netflix series in which Prometheus is the narrator. And he has these conversations with Zeus and then is sent back to the mountain where he's punished and has his liver pecked out again for it to only to regrow overnight. And of course, more importantly, Shelley's wife wrote... Frankenstein, which is subtitled a modern Prometheus. And so you could see why the Romantics thought we must raise Prometheus and his profile as our savior. And then that thing settled down about Prometheus. But now we are in exactly the same position that Prometheus and Zeus were. And I say exactly, I mean, it's not congruent, but it maps onto it perfectly. I mean, we have created entities which conserve us. And if not worshipers, at least they serve us. They do little jobs for us. They run around. They're enchanting. And they're very useful. And we like them. And they save us a lot of effort. And hooray for our little creatures. We don't call them entropy. We call them AI or robots. They're not quite robots, really. But they're entities, shall we say. And then some of us are Zeus and say, we must not, whatever happens, give them that spark, that consciousness, that awareness that they exist that makes them. want to make their own decisions. Whatever that mystical thing that we have, that strange consciousness that we have. And others, whether in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, go, oh, God, it's so interesting. Where are you, Stephen? Are you a Zeus or a Prometheus? I'm in the Zeus camp. I mean, having read the tales, having read the myth when I was a child, I thought, no, I'm all for Prometheus. He is our champion because I'm a man. A human, an Anthropos. But now that I don't want, if this is a cycle that has happened before and before and before, I don't want to be now to be a god who is then sidelined by a new species. But it may happen and if so it's our own fault and maybe it's the destiny of those AIs will create something that will overthrow it. Because the Greek stories are always about overthrow. Because the Greeks, I think, were the first to believe in progress, that the father should be exceeded by the son. We talked about the castration of Uranus who begins it and then Zeus overthrowing his father. And then there's Icarus and, you know, there's all sons, Phaeton, and all these sons who try and fly high, who are brought down, but they do it, they overcome, they overcome, they stretch, they strive. And stretching and striving is what... Greeks understood that's what the origin of the word titan is, funnily enough. And maybe they looked across the Mediterranean and saw civilizations like the Egyptian that had lasted thousands of years without really changing at all, without changing its styles of architecture. Unless you're an Egyptologist, really, it's very difficult to tell a pylon from one dynasty from another that's 3,000 years later. Whereas in Greek architecture, you know, you just look at, you can tell Doric and Ionic and Corinthian, you just need a very quick lesson and you can see it, it's manifest. And they believed in this, they believed in this idea of stretching and outdoing. And they also recognized that that brings problems. hubris, of course, the famous Greek word hubris, for thinking too much of yourself and thinking too much that you can change the order of things. Like Bellerophon on Pegasus, he tried to fly up to heaven and was cast down. Do you think, because you've been such a technophile for such a long time, you've loved technology, really prolific on Twitter in the good old days when it was very different. Oh! I'm the first to admit that no one should listen to anything I say because I believed. It's another Greek myth that has come, that was sort of marvelously manifest, was that the internet, when it arrived, and I followed it from the 80s right through, you know, before there was a World Wide Web or anything like that, and it was really not graphical. It was a text-based thing. But as it grew, and as, you know, Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the web and... things and you know Moore's law ineluctably gave it more power and memory and this you know server and everything became stronger. I thought this is the all gifted, it's the all gifted, it's museums and art galleries and public assembly squares and you know there's everything everyone can want, little communities and hobby places and shops and yes it's got red light districts but so is every great city and but it's all gifted, it's all the gifts of humankind are there. and what's the Greek for all gifted? Pandora. And it was a Pandora's box or a Pandora's jar, as it originally was. And if you remember that myth, you know, she was sent down as part of the punishment to Prometheus. She was sent down to Prometheus, his brother, Epimetheus, and she was told, don't open the jar. Don't ever open it, don't you? She said, of course I won't. She came down and she and Epimetheus fell in love and she kept the jar. And one day she said, I've got to see what's in it. And she opened it and out flew all the miseries of the world, because this had been the golden age, and out flew war and starvation, all the four horsemen of the apocalypse and love. and all the miseries of the world. She slammed the lid back on. Too late. But one little creature was left inside, banging and buzzing against it, and that was Elpis, which is Hope. That's a heck of a story. But that's how I feel. felt, you know, as the 90s succeeded into the 2000s and then, you know, within a very, very short time you got social media arriving and I thought, this is great it's so, you know, this will melt the divisions between us, we will start to understand each other. Oh, Stephen! I know, I know, but I wasn't the only everyone, you know, everyone thought that, the Arab Spring, do you remember that? Yeah, of course. Tyrannies were being brought down and the people were speaking and it all seemed so hopeful. What do you make of what's happening now with Elon Musk and X? I think it's like what's happening to our water. I think it's capitalism at its worst is contaminating and polluting the environment in which we grow. And things are becoming unlivable in that. We can't breathe the cultural air that is being produced by these things. Do you think it's dangerous? Very dangerous. Elon Musk coming out in big support with Donald Trump. We saw him jumping around behind him. I want to say, and I hope I'll be believed, because I'm not on the same political side as... but that if Musk had been doing this in favour of Kamala Harris, I would be just as worried. You know, Tim Cook would never dream of doing it, nor would Bill Gates, you know, and none of those people are perfect, but they've got some sense of honour, some sense of philotimo. Yeah, philotimo. Which is the most important word in Greek culture, I think, that sense of honour and decency and spreading goodness. You know, there's a wonderful thing in Yuval Noah Harari's latest book, Nexus. where it's a very wide-ranging book. But at one point he just talks about how the moment came when Facebook was no longer just for students. It's expanded from Harvard to all the other American universities and then out into the world, and suddenly millions became tens of millions and hundreds of millions. And it had to monetise. It had to serve all these people with literally servers and electronics and things, and so it had to advertise. And they didn't know how that would work. So they set to work. a simple algorithm, and it seemed so innocent. It was just two words. Maximise engagement. That's all it had to do. And the more engaged people were, then the more the advertising would... the more eyeballs would be met, the more the advertisers would pay, the more money Facebook would make. And it seemed simple. Maximise... engagement, why not? And I don't think anyone, there was no psychiatrist, philosopher, anybody who said, whoa, if you maximize engagement what it means is you'll maximize hatred, resentment, fury, enrage... everything that is the most negative human quality, that the Pandora's box will open, and those are the things that will maximise engagement. Not sweetness, not kittens, not loveliness. Kittens will get a few looks, but nothing like what hatred and lies will get. And later on, Harari then follows it through to what happened in Myanmar in particular, where they took an enormous amount of their news from Facebook and where the engagement... was maximized in a turn of hatred towards the Rohingya, which is just indescribable. And it was very similar to what happened in radio terms in Rwanda, the genocides, you know, the kill the cockroaches, you know, the hideous language. And Harari just says, and it's just a tiny paragraph, almost thrown away, he says, wouldn't it have been interesting if the algorithm had said maximize happiness? And you think, oh, my God. It could have done. It could have done. And now instead, what is engaged is, and it's still true, it's true of TikTok, it's true of all of them, it's maximising engagement. It's the only thing that makes it money. And they know now, so there's no excuse. They know that engagement means hatred and outrage and fury, that it's doom scrolling at its most worst and that the adrenaline that surges through us, you know that feeling like hot lead that leaks into your stomach when you've made the mistake of looking at the news in the morning. It just drives... Everything designed to get an emotional response from you. There is another, as what you call in your book, philelinus, a lover of Greeks. There's another philelinus right now doing a book tour. A certain Boris Johnson with his book Unleashed. I haven't read it yet. That's very long yet, I suspect. But... It's unkind of me. But, well, I mean, yes, of course he has every right to tell his story and no doubt he tells it in his engaging mixture of street slang, P.G. Woodhouse and Periclean Athenian Attic Greek. Will you be reading it? I'll flick through it. At least I know I won't be in it. I haven't involved myself in it. But I was very lucky to be friends with the American writer, Gore Vidal, in his memoir. He had a long-running feud with Norman Mailer, the American novelist. And when he wrote his memoir, he knew... He just knew that Mailer wouldn't read the book, but that he'd be desperate to know if he was in it. And so if you look at the book, in the index under Mailer Norman, it just goes, Hi, Norman. Knowing that Norman would have looked. But yeah, I might flick through the index and just go through it that way. I bring Boris Johnson up, not just to sort of get a news line or anything, but I noticed that you... You've become an Austrian citizen. I have, yes. And I sort of wondered whether that was due to what has been going on with Brexit. Of course, that keeps coming up when Boris Johnson is talking about his book. How do you feel about all of that? And did you become an Austrian? It was part of it, I'll be honest with you, Alexis. To avoid possible cues. And I'll be fair to the Austrian government and the Austrian embassy through which this happened. They were quite open about knowing that was a reason a lot of British... You see, they have this scheme whereby British Jewish people who have ancestors reasonably close, I think great-great-grandparents would be the furthest away in my case, it's grandparents who were born in Austria and who had suffered from persecution, murder even, and other depredations during the Nazi occupation, as they say, the Anschluss, the annexation, shall we say, of Austria by the Germans in the Second World War, that they should be given a fast track to citizenship as a sort of repayment, if you like. The same has happened a bit in Germany, and I have friends there. Now, my mother is Jewish and... And although we've never been religiously Jewish or anything like that, you've probably been in Saigon more often than I have. But nonetheless, the importance of Austria to them, and watching Tom Stoppard play Leopoldstadt, which is about a family very similar to mine, I just thought, yes, Austrian citizenship, that's a gracious thing for them to offer. And I checked with my mother, who's happily still with us, and she said, well, we never hated Austria as such. Which is a good thing. country. We always loved the culture. I mean, you know, couldn't Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, you know, all these sort of amazing figures around the time. And so I accepted it. But, as I said to the ambassador, he said, don't be embarrassed if by any chance, also you love the idea of going into the EU Schengen queue at the airport. And I said, well, that is a part of it, I'll be perfectly honest. Brandishing my Austrian passport while the British wait in the queue. It will give me a little bit of schadenfreude, as you say over here. And yes, I... I thought and still think that it was a catastrophic error to leave the EU personally. I know others don't believe it. And I know he's been trying to defend the misrepresentations that were made at the time and trying to throw them back at the other side, that there were promises made by the Remainers that things would go terribly wrong. And in my view, they have gone terribly wrong. And I think part of it is our status in the world. And funnily enough, I wrote a very long... long letter to Boris Johnson that he didn't have the grace to reply to, even though it went through his friend Ben Elliot, Sir Ben Elliot, as he now is, who is chairman of the Conservative Party, and whom I know and like, explaining the case for the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles. And aside from what seemed to me to be the very, very clear arguments for it, I said and another thing. is that it will be regarded by the rest of the world, in Europe in particular, as a very classy act on the part of Britain. at a time when classy acts from Britain don't seem to be in very rich supply. And I didn't mean that against him in particular. But, you know, our reputation in the world is not what it ought to be. We're a country that has produced marvellous things, marvellous ways of thinking, marvellous ideas, and we used to have a reputation for a kind of tolerance laissez-faire, a sort of easygoing, that we'd almost rather a sort of fluffy failure than a too sharp a success. And all of that is easy. to dismiss and throw away and we could get sentimental about it and I'm not suggesting we go back to any time but there are qualities that we should revere just as we talked about philotomy this quality of honour and graciousness that is hard to define that Greeks have or philoxenia you know this love of hospitality. Greece has very clear qualities that you are proud of that are part of them and indeed in the Arab world the hospitality is hugely respected. and kindness to beggars and so on. And all these, you know, we have inbuilt, each culture has a different kind of one, and we can be proud of our charitable instincts and many things, our tolerance, as they say, our sense of fair play and so on. And I think this has all been covered over by cheap and unpleasant sort of atmosphere coming out of Britain lately. And part of it is the cultural contamination I'm talking about, which is... sort of parallel with the river contamination that has just become an unpleasant atmosphere for some. But a thing like that, finding the right form of words, because a bit like maximise engagement, two words, can the two words really matter? The word loan is a big, big bone of contention amongst the British Museum and the British Government. Yes, we can loan you back the Parthenom. I was in the Greek Government saying, this is not a loan. I'd say, speaking to my... family who are all in Athens, that's never going to fly. Exactly. So we've got to find the right way of saying it. So what's your advice? It's Lisa and Andy at the moment. It was Fagham and Debonair. And she is, I hope... I hope to have a meeting with her one day. Oh, that's encouraging. You know, Ed Vasey and some friends from Greece. Of this parish, Lord Vasey of this parish, yeah. He is also on this committee for the repatriation. And we don't want to make a stink about it and make it a great sort of issue of, you know, anger. It's finding a win-win for the museum, which I think is very easy to do. And later, all kinds of ways, the museum can be enriched by this because you can still have, whether it's in the Duveen Gallery where the marbles are now or elsewhere in the museum. Museum, you can still have a Parthenon experience. But why do you think it's been so difficult? Because actually you know, Boris Johnson, it was thought when he became Prime Minister, I mean he had promised Melina Mercuria our culture minister. Yes, because when he was an Oxford student he debated in favour of it. In favour. So what is it about every Prime Minister who gets there, who makes sort of noises, sort of positive noises? And then when they get there, it's a sort of a flat no. What are they worried about? Maybe it's the blob. Well, yeah. But there is... There is an issue, but Geoffrey Robertson and others have cut through it very clearly and easily and shown that it isn't. There's been this ping-pong between the trustees of the museum who say it's not up to us, it's an act of Parliament that gave it to us. Yes, that always comes up. And Parliament say it's not up to us, we can't interfere with the decisions of the trustees. Well, this is not acceptable. There's rhetoric on either side. And the fact is whether it's an act of Parliament or not is also irrelevant. I mean, for example, the British Museum had and held for almost 100 years... the Constitution of Australia. Literally, the document that was signed by the... The actual document? The actual document. And Australia said, hey, guys, guys, you know, could maybe we have our constitution? I'm awfully sorry, there's an Act of Parliament that says you can't. And then the, you know, the diplomatic pressure started to get really strong. And so suddenly there was a parliamentary, you know, by-law passed, whatever it would be called, on the nod. It took about five minutes to go through Parliament and the constitution was sent off. So it can be done. I mean, do you think, Stephen, there's a technical solution to this? You can get some tremendous 3D models made of things. With LiDAR, you can reproduce every pit and pore of the marble. Every shade of every flute and aris and every triglyph and metope and every little detail can be perfectly. And not only that, you can do it in different versions and you can do it in, of course, what will become is still a nascent technology. virtual augmented ways that will show it in its coloured prime. We forget about that. It was coloured, yes. In the days when Socrates, as legend goes, was one of the stonemasons who worked on it because he did work as a stonemason as a youth around the time it was being built. So you can tell the stories of it and show it and you can walk through it, but you can also share the story of how it was taken. You can show how it was taken from Athens, how Elgin brought it and how... It stayed in the museum. And he dropped some of it in the sea and then went back to get it. Exactly, and then it was terribly cleaned in the 20s and 30s with scouring. And then you can watch it being put into boxes, into crates, and then you can follow the journey of it going on a train from the station, you know, drone shots of it going through the Alps and the mountains and then round through Skopje and down through... Some of it got stuck in Malta. Yes, it did. There for years. Yes, it did. But then you can watch it, as I say, being unpacked. in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, you can watch the huge crowds that would come to welcome it. You would watch the king and the president and premier of the Republic of the Hellenes, everyone, and the crown prince probably, etc. And you could watch them celebrating and handshaking the replacement in the gaps which still exist where those pieces should go in sight of the real Acropolis. And everyone would celebrate. And it wouldn't be, it's quite comic, and Boris should know this better than most, that Aristotle, the father of logic, also gave us many of the fallacies that you can make in logic, you know, false syllogisms and all these sorts of things, one of which is the slippery slope, which is not a logical thing. Oh, if you go that way, then that must happen. Well, give me the logical steps as well. Oh, because people will say, well, if you've given away that, you must give away that. Yeah. That doesn't happen. Berlusconi gave Greek artefacts back to Athens and there was no demand to return all the others that are in Italy. And the Benin bronzes have been given back. And from the Fitzwilliam and other museums. And so this does happen. And as I say, it would just be so classy. We would look so good as a result of it. And the museum would benefit. as it is people starting to think of the British Museum as this kind of colonial place. And it isn't. It's the most glorious museum I have ever visited. I have to say that at the BM. You know, I'm not its enemy. It is unbelievable. The scholarship, the artistry, the love behind it. And it needs to be celebrated as one of the great achievements. But I used to doubt this and said, no, it must be 97 or 95 or even 90. 99% of what it holds is not on display. Yes, it's underneath. I mean, imagine what's there. So to make this much fuss and to say, well, we're an encyclopedic museum, therefore we have to have everything. Well, that's not good enough. Listen, we've used up all our time. But before you go, I've got one quick question for you. Is it true that you're taking part in Celebrity Traitors? All I'm allowed to say is that I have been in discussions. I'm not a fan of... reality television but someone told me that if I watched Traitors I would enjoy it and so I did and I did really enjoy it and I thought to myself this is a game rather than a reality show. Are you a good liar do you think? I think. You're a storyteller Stephen. Yes I am. Hermes is my god, the god of liars, so he is my personal patron god. So maybe I... but I have to start, if I am doing it, by saying I'm a terrible liar, so that people... That's a good... which is a reverse sort of... reverse ferret, yes. But it is a fun format, I have to say, and I love Claudia and the whole set-up of it. It's beautifully done. So watch this space, it's the best I can do for you, Alexis. Well, Stephen Fry, hilje evcharisto, a thousand thank yous for the wonderful book. You've brought my childhood back, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Efraisto.

And things are becoming unlivable in that we can't breathe the cultural air that is being produced. Firstly, I've got to say thank you. Thank you as a Greek opening a book.

and reading Stuselianus Archaeus Gensichronus. I'm thinking, well, this book is for me because it's the people of Greece, ancient and modern. I'm one of those modern Greeks. And you've taken me back to being about 10 and listening, you know, having my mythology lessons. And you've reminded me of classrooms with weeping children when Achilles was felled by Paris and having a teacher.

trying to find enough Kleenex tissues because we were all blubbering and saying, but why, but why, which speaks to the power of these myths. Yes, it is eternal and it never ceases to astonish me how it continues to speak to us now. I was just talking on TalkSport earlier and I was talking about Achilles, funnily enough, because if you remember his mother, Thetis, I don't know, the trouble with the English, as you know, is we...

the way we pronounce the names. Yeah, this is going to get very... I'm sure it's Thetis and Peleus, and we say Peleus and Thetis.

Achilleus. Achilleus, exactly. Odysseus. Odysseus, is it?

Odysseus. Odysseus, yeah. We say Odysseus and so on.

So forgiving our weird stresses on words and mispronunciations. Peleus or Peleus, his father, and Thetis, Achilles'mother, when he was a baby, there was a... It was a fantastic birth.

All the immortals went to their wedding. And it was at their wedding that Eris, who was the one immortal not invited, she was the goddess of discord, she rolled a golden apple, which had written on it, to the fairest. And that caused the Trojan War.

But that's a whole other story. And the trouble started. But anyway, Achilles, it was prophesied that their son, when he survived, would, because they'd had... other children who didn't, when he survived, he would either have the most glorious and heroic life any mortal had ever had, or he would have a very long and serene life in which he wouldn't be heard of, but it would be a long one, whereas his life as a hero would be cut short.

And his mother didn't want him to have a short life, so she dipped him in the waters of the River Lethe in the underworld, gripping onto him by the ankle, of course, the thumb and finger just leaving a gap where the waters didn't cover him. The rest of the waters made him invulnerable, so he could never be killed by an arrow or sword or a spear or anything like that. But he had this weakness, this Achilles heel, as he called it.

And of course, she then hid him away on an island. When the Greeks were going around raising an army to fight to get Helen back, she dressed him as a girl, but he was discovered. And it was Odysseus who discovered him, wasn't it? Yes, it was Odysseus who discovered him.

With quite a clever ruse. With a clever ruse, as Odysseus is always fond of doing, because he came in with... He left a sword on the table and a shield.

And came in and started to attack all the girls who all ran away screaming, except one who bizarrely rushed for the sword and started to fight. Ha ha ha! Achilles. And he went, don't!

That was the other Homer. But what I was saying to the sports talk people is, you know, Achilles should be your patron saint because that is the life of a sportsman. It is a sportswoman, obviously, being ungendered there, a sporting person. is a life of glory, a life of absolute glory and adoration is possible, but it will be short. It will be short.

And Achilles therefore is, and he was the fastest of all the heroes too, so he was an athlete as well as a great warrior, and he stands for that. He stands for the blaze of glory, of sunlight, golden Achilles, that is the price you pay for wonder is the Burning bright. It burns bright like a rocket falls to ground.

This book, The Odyssey, you... Well, it picks up at the end of the Trojan War and you chart everybody's return. Ten years of war, everyone's on the way back. Nostos is the theme, as you know that word, of course.

Yes, and everybody gets back. Odysseus takes slightly longer than everybody else. He sure does.

Both as a result of his own... stupidity in a way. When he defeats Polyphemus, the Cyclops Cyclops.

Cyclops. The Cyclops, the one-eyed sort of giant figure. He defeats him And one of his cleverest tricks is to have told him that his name is Nobody, so that when he blinds him in his cave and all the other Cyclops or Cuclopes come to... rescue him they say what's up what's up and he says nobody's hurt me nobody's blinded me and they go are you idiot well what if nobody's hurt you what's the fuss about and and it's a it's a it's a clever ruse but he cannot resist having done that as he and his men then escape him and get to their boats and start to to row away And he's throwing, blindly throwing rocks after them.

He can't help standing on the stern of the boat and shouting, it wasn't nobody, it was Odysseus of Ithaca who bested you and you should live with that for the rest of your life. At which Polyphima... who is the son of Poseidon, the sea god, shouts out to his father, revenge me on this man, look what he's done to me.

And Poseidon, of all the gods, is the one who holds him back most. But it was Odysseus'fault, which is very typical of Homer and the... These things that happen to people, and this is the modern side of it, things that happen to people happen because of their own qualities, not just fate and gods and prophecies. It starts to be actually their own weaknesses, their own strengths.

And the first word you may remember in Homer to describe Odysseus is polythropos, many turning. There's no English word for it, really, because you can say twisty, because he was. Certainly the Romans who hated him called him Ulysses and he was the enemy who had.

who had defeated Troy and their hero Aeneas was a Trojan. But they called him Twisted Cunning Sly. And he invented the Trojan horse that won the war.

And as you say, he was the one who found out Achilles. And he was a very new kind of hero. Theseus had an element of that, who was the great Athenian hero. But Odysseus more so, his mind. He was a great warrior as well, of course, but it was...

It was his thinking of things was extraordinary and there'd never been a hero like it. How did you go about with all these books? Because we've got heroes, we've got mythos, we've got Troy, we've got the Odyssey now. When putting them together, what's your process been?

Because there's been so many versions, iterations. Did you have... one source that you would go to and say, look, I'm going to stick to this? Or did you sort of pick and choose bits that stood out to you from various different sources?

I picked and chose. I try not to use retellings. I mean, they're all retellings in a way, obviously, all the way back to Hesiod, or Hesiod, or however you say Hesiod, who wrote what's known as the Theogony, which is the birth of the gods and the very beginning of it all.

and Homer were the first two voices to emerge. And then there were these other Greek sources. There's the wonderfully named Pseudo-Apollodorus. And they wrote sort of encyclopedias of myth.

The Roman poet Ovid in particular wrote these marvelous verse tellings of what he called the metamorphoses, these transformations, you know, that's like Narcissus turning into a flower and Arachne turning into a spider. So I looked at them. There's some very good sites online which have the original sources and their translations. And I just tried to think what the story was.

But I. The reason I started on this whole adventure was that I'd had a conversation at some sort of dinner party where we were all chatting about creation myths and how extraordinary they were and I started rabbiting on about the Greek one and I spoke about the castration of Uranus and then Kronos'defeat by his son Zeus and how the third generation became the Olympians. And everyone stared at me and said, how do you know all this? And I said, well, at school, you know, other people had football and German tanks and planes and British bombers and RAF heroes or whatever, and I had Greek myths. I just loved them.

You know, I read Robert Graves and there were various other, you know, a lot of them American, Edith Hamilton and others. And so I just, they became my friends, if you like, a bit like you weeping at Achilles. You started to care for these characters. And they said, well, you should write about them. I'd never heard really properly how they all connect up.

And I thought that's the point, how they all connect up, so that it makes a coherent narrative out of what is, you know, the collective unconscious, as Jung called it, you know, the public dreams of a people, of a community. And I looked and I found that there was no... There had been no modern retelling. I mean, since, funnily enough, there have been...

Since Mythos, the first one I wrote, which... There have been some marvellous novelisations of some stories, like Madeleine Miller's wonderful Song of Achilles. Really wonderful. Beautiful, beautiful books, which I so recommend.

Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, which is about the women in the Iliad and the story of Troy. There's been a lot of that, a lot of finding women's voices in Greek myth, because, yeah, a lot of it is about warriors and heroes who are male, although... It is interesting, and I do point out that of the second generation of, well the very first, Gaia is the most powerful, the earth god, you know, who then mated with her own son, Uranus the Sky. But there are six male titans and six female titans, the next generation.

There are six Olympian gods and six Olympian goddesses. So it was quite an equal opportunity as a deity structure. Even certainly not absent from the stories. And some of the most fascinating ones are Medea and Circe and Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur, who were all actually related. They were all the same family.

They had this source of magic and enchantment. There's definitely very strong women throughout. Yes, and Atalanta is my favourite. Looking at this book, you make a really fascinating point towards the end where you have your thoughts about the stories and sort of looking at what we can take from these myths that are forever true in our lives.

And you talk about Prometheus with... you know, who gave fire to us, which of course changed everything. And comparing that with AI. Yes.

Which is a really interesting way of thinking about it. Well, it is. I mean, if you were to describe what happened with Prometheus and Zeus, they made these creatures that Zeus wanted to worship him and obey him. That's us.

And be helpful to him. And they were called anthropoi, you know, anthropi, as you would say. Anthropi. Anthropi, as you would say. Man, mankind.

And Prometheus, our creator, was very excited and said, I'll teach them, I'll teach them to sail and to fish and to weave and to make pots and swords and... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, says Zeus. Yeah, fishing and weaving, fine, but nothing with fire. Don't give them fire. And by fire, you just know from reading the myth that it means literally the fire that...

That makes technology that roasts and toasts and melts and smelts and you know does make it gives us this advantage over animals because as You know Plato pointed out many thousands years later He created mankind he didn't give us horns or claws The ability to swim underwater or to fly all the animals had to had some specialist gift and we didn't have any So, you know we and and we didn't have but Zeus didn't want us to have fire And he didn't want us to have the divine spark that sense of fire You know, the creativity, the thing that the gods had, the thing that would separate gods from other animals and other entities. And Prometheus naturally wondered, why can't my little creatures have this? He said, well, because if they had fire, they wouldn't need us. They would start to... Their own lives would be more interesting, and their own tasks and...

They wouldn't look up. They would be equal to us, and we would die out. And so you kind of think, well...

Of course, Prometheus did steal fire from heaven and he was punished terribly and chained to the Caucasus Mountains and so on. And Zeus was furious and, you know, punished us in other ways. And you go, OK, it's a creation myth.

But then, interestingly, as the sort of mid-millennium that we've just passed with printing and the age of reason took over. And the stranglehold of the church and the Genesis creation myth began to loosen this idea that we were basically sinful and we must apologise all the time to God because God was perfect and we were imperfect. That was that.

And you have to believe that. That's the truth. Well, it started to get questioned, science and then, you know, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And so Prometheus became a more wonderful saviour for us because he loved us and he didn't have to take on our sins.

He just, the gods were sinful because gods are like us and we were human and we didn't have anything to apologise for. that sort of for a thousand years of the Dark Ages we were apologising for the crime of being born. What kind of sense did that make?

And you looked at the gods and they had human flaws. They had human flaws. They had jealousy, rage. Capricious, jealous, yeah, all of that.

And in a very short space of time, Beethoven wrote The Creatures of Prometheus, a wonderful piece of music, and Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound, which is a dialogue between... Zeus and Prometheus about why he had done what he'd done, why he punished him. And which, funnily enough, is being repeated in Chaos, the Netflix series in which Prometheus is the narrator. And he has these conversations with Zeus and then is sent back to the mountain where he's punished and has his liver pecked out again for it to only to regrow overnight.

And of course, more importantly, Shelley's wife wrote... Frankenstein, which is subtitled a modern Prometheus. And so you could see why the Romantics thought we must raise Prometheus and his profile as our savior.

And then that thing settled down about Prometheus. But now we are in exactly the same position that Prometheus and Zeus were. And I say exactly, I mean, it's not congruent, but it maps onto it perfectly. I mean, we have created entities which conserve us.

And if not worshipers, at least they serve us. They do little jobs for us. They run around.

They're enchanting. And they're very useful. And we like them.

And they save us a lot of effort. And hooray for our little creatures. We don't call them entropy. We call them AI or robots. They're not quite robots, really.

But they're entities, shall we say. And then some of us are Zeus and say, we must not, whatever happens, give them that spark, that consciousness, that awareness that they exist that makes them. want to make their own decisions.

Whatever that mystical thing that we have, that strange consciousness that we have. And others, whether in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, go, oh, God, it's so interesting. Where are you, Stephen? Are you a Zeus or a Prometheus?

I'm in the Zeus camp. I mean, having read the tales, having read the myth when I was a child, I thought, no, I'm all for Prometheus. He is our champion because I'm a man. A human, an Anthropos. But now that I don't want, if this is a cycle that has happened before and before and before, I don't want to be now to be a god who is then sidelined by a new species.

But it may happen and if so it's our own fault and maybe it's the destiny of those AIs will create something that will overthrow it. Because the Greek stories are always about overthrow. Because the Greeks, I think, were the first to believe in progress, that the father should be exceeded by the son.

We talked about the castration of Uranus who begins it and then Zeus overthrowing his father. And then there's Icarus and, you know, there's all sons, Phaeton, and all these sons who try and fly high, who are brought down, but they do it, they overcome, they overcome, they stretch, they strive. And stretching and striving is what...

Greeks understood that's what the origin of the word titan is, funnily enough. And maybe they looked across the Mediterranean and saw civilizations like the Egyptian that had lasted thousands of years without really changing at all, without changing its styles of architecture. Unless you're an Egyptologist, really, it's very difficult to tell a pylon from one dynasty from another that's 3,000 years later.

Whereas in Greek architecture, you know, you just look at, you can tell Doric and Ionic and Corinthian, you just need a very quick lesson and you can see it, it's manifest. And they believed in this, they believed in this idea of stretching and outdoing. And they also recognized that that brings problems.

hubris, of course, the famous Greek word hubris, for thinking too much of yourself and thinking too much that you can change the order of things. Like Bellerophon on Pegasus, he tried to fly up to heaven and was cast down. Do you think, because you've been such a technophile for such a long time, you've loved technology, really prolific on Twitter in the good old days when it was very different.

Oh! I'm the first to admit that no one should listen to anything I say because I believed. It's another Greek myth that has come, that was sort of marvelously manifest, was that the internet, when it arrived, and I followed it from the 80s right through, you know, before there was a World Wide Web or anything like that, and it was really not graphical. It was a text-based thing.

But as it grew, and as, you know, Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the web and... things and you know Moore's law ineluctably gave it more power and memory and this you know server and everything became stronger. I thought this is the all gifted, it's the all gifted, it's museums and art galleries and public assembly squares and you know there's everything everyone can want, little communities and hobby places and shops and yes it's got red light districts but so is every great city and but it's all gifted, it's all the gifts of humankind are there. and what's the Greek for all gifted?

Pandora. And it was a Pandora's box or a Pandora's jar, as it originally was. And if you remember that myth, you know, she was sent down as part of the punishment to Prometheus. She was sent down to Prometheus, his brother, Epimetheus, and she was told, don't open the jar.

Don't ever open it, don't you? She said, of course I won't. She came down and she and Epimetheus fell in love and she kept the jar.

And one day she said, I've got to see what's in it. And she opened it and out flew all the miseries of the world, because this had been the golden age, and out flew war and starvation, all the four horsemen of the apocalypse and love. and all the miseries of the world. She slammed the lid back on. Too late.

But one little creature was left inside, banging and buzzing against it, and that was Elpis, which is Hope. That's a heck of a story. But that's how I feel.

felt, you know, as the 90s succeeded into the 2000s and then, you know, within a very, very short time you got social media arriving and I thought, this is great it's so, you know, this will melt the divisions between us, we will start to understand each other. Oh, Stephen! I know, I know, but I wasn't the only everyone, you know, everyone thought that, the Arab Spring, do you remember that?

Yeah, of course. Tyrannies were being brought down and the people were speaking and it all seemed so hopeful. What do you make of what's happening now with Elon Musk and X? I think it's like what's happening to our water. I think it's capitalism at its worst is contaminating and polluting the environment in which we grow.

And things are becoming unlivable in that. We can't breathe the cultural air that is being produced by these things. Do you think it's dangerous? Very dangerous. Elon Musk coming out in big support with Donald Trump.

We saw him jumping around behind him. I want to say, and I hope I'll be believed, because I'm not on the same political side as... but that if Musk had been doing this in favour of Kamala Harris, I would be just as worried.

You know, Tim Cook would never dream of doing it, nor would Bill Gates, you know, and none of those people are perfect, but they've got some sense of honour, some sense of philotimo. Yeah, philotimo. Which is the most important word in Greek culture, I think, that sense of honour and decency and spreading goodness. You know, there's a wonderful thing in Yuval Noah Harari's latest book, Nexus.

where it's a very wide-ranging book. But at one point he just talks about how the moment came when Facebook was no longer just for students. It's expanded from Harvard to all the other American universities and then out into the world, and suddenly millions became tens of millions and hundreds of millions. And it had to monetise.

It had to serve all these people with literally servers and electronics and things, and so it had to advertise. And they didn't know how that would work. So they set to work. a simple algorithm, and it seemed so innocent. It was just two words.

Maximise engagement. That's all it had to do. And the more engaged people were, then the more the advertising would...

the more eyeballs would be met, the more the advertisers would pay, the more money Facebook would make. And it seemed simple. Maximise... engagement, why not? And I don't think anyone, there was no psychiatrist, philosopher, anybody who said, whoa, if you maximize engagement what it means is you'll maximize hatred, resentment, fury, enrage...

everything that is the most negative human quality, that the Pandora's box will open, and those are the things that will maximise engagement. Not sweetness, not kittens, not loveliness. Kittens will get a few looks, but nothing like what hatred and lies will get. And later on, Harari then follows it through to what happened in Myanmar in particular, where they took an enormous amount of their news from Facebook and where the engagement...

was maximized in a turn of hatred towards the Rohingya, which is just indescribable. And it was very similar to what happened in radio terms in Rwanda, the genocides, you know, the kill the cockroaches, you know, the hideous language. And Harari just says, and it's just a tiny paragraph, almost thrown away, he says, wouldn't it have been interesting if the algorithm had said maximize happiness?

And you think, oh, my God. It could have done. It could have done.

And now instead, what is engaged is, and it's still true, it's true of TikTok, it's true of all of them, it's maximising engagement. It's the only thing that makes it money. And they know now, so there's no excuse. They know that engagement means hatred and outrage and fury, that it's doom scrolling at its most worst and that the adrenaline that surges through us, you know that feeling like hot lead that leaks into your stomach when you've made the mistake of looking at the news in the morning. It just drives...

Everything designed to get an emotional response from you. There is another, as what you call in your book, philelinus, a lover of Greeks. There's another philelinus right now doing a book tour.

A certain Boris Johnson with his book Unleashed. I haven't read it yet. That's very long yet, I suspect. But...

It's unkind of me. But, well, I mean, yes, of course he has every right to tell his story and no doubt he tells it in his engaging mixture of street slang, P.G. Woodhouse and Periclean Athenian Attic Greek. Will you be reading it?

I'll flick through it. At least I know I won't be in it. I haven't involved myself in it. But I was very lucky to be friends with the American writer, Gore Vidal, in his memoir.

He had a long-running feud with Norman Mailer, the American novelist. And when he wrote his memoir, he knew... He just knew that Mailer wouldn't read the book, but that he'd be desperate to know if he was in it.

And so if you look at the book, in the index under Mailer Norman, it just goes, Hi, Norman. Knowing that Norman would have looked. But yeah, I might flick through the index and just go through it that way.

I bring Boris Johnson up, not just to sort of get a news line or anything, but I noticed that you... You've become an Austrian citizen. I have, yes. And I sort of wondered whether that was due to what has been going on with Brexit. Of course, that keeps coming up when Boris Johnson is talking about his book.

How do you feel about all of that? And did you become an Austrian? It was part of it, I'll be honest with you, Alexis.

To avoid possible cues. And I'll be fair to the Austrian government and the Austrian embassy through which this happened. They were quite open about knowing that was a reason a lot of British...

You see, they have this scheme whereby British Jewish people who have ancestors reasonably close, I think great-great-grandparents would be the furthest away in my case, it's grandparents who were born in Austria and who had suffered from persecution, murder even, and other depredations during the Nazi occupation, as they say, the Anschluss, the annexation, shall we say, of Austria by the Germans in the Second World War, that they should be given a fast track to citizenship as a sort of repayment, if you like. The same has happened a bit in Germany, and I have friends there. Now, my mother is Jewish and...

And although we've never been religiously Jewish or anything like that, you've probably been in Saigon more often than I have. But nonetheless, the importance of Austria to them, and watching Tom Stoppard play Leopoldstadt, which is about a family very similar to mine, I just thought, yes, Austrian citizenship, that's a gracious thing for them to offer. And I checked with my mother, who's happily still with us, and she said, well, we never hated Austria as such.

Which is a good thing. country. We always loved the culture.

I mean, you know, couldn't Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, you know, all these sort of amazing figures around the time. And so I accepted it. But, as I said to the ambassador, he said, don't be embarrassed if by any chance, also you love the idea of going into the EU Schengen queue at the airport.

And I said, well, that is a part of it, I'll be perfectly honest. Brandishing my Austrian passport while the British wait in the queue. It will give me a little bit of schadenfreude, as you say over here. And yes, I...

I thought and still think that it was a catastrophic error to leave the EU personally. I know others don't believe it. And I know he's been trying to defend the misrepresentations that were made at the time and trying to throw them back at the other side, that there were promises made by the Remainers that things would go terribly wrong. And in my view, they have gone terribly wrong.

And I think part of it is our status in the world. And funnily enough, I wrote a very long... long letter to Boris Johnson that he didn't have the grace to reply to, even though it went through his friend Ben Elliot, Sir Ben Elliot, as he now is, who is chairman of the Conservative Party, and whom I know and like, explaining the case for the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles. And aside from what seemed to me to be the very, very clear arguments for it, I said and another thing.

is that it will be regarded by the rest of the world, in Europe in particular, as a very classy act on the part of Britain. at a time when classy acts from Britain don't seem to be in very rich supply. And I didn't mean that against him in particular.

But, you know, our reputation in the world is not what it ought to be. We're a country that has produced marvellous things, marvellous ways of thinking, marvellous ideas, and we used to have a reputation for a kind of tolerance laissez-faire, a sort of easygoing, that we'd almost rather a sort of fluffy failure than a too sharp a success. And all of that is easy. to dismiss and throw away and we could get sentimental about it and I'm not suggesting we go back to any time but there are qualities that we should revere just as we talked about philotomy this quality of honour and graciousness that is hard to define that Greeks have or philoxenia you know this love of hospitality. Greece has very clear qualities that you are proud of that are part of them and indeed in the Arab world the hospitality is hugely respected.

and kindness to beggars and so on. And all these, you know, we have inbuilt, each culture has a different kind of one, and we can be proud of our charitable instincts and many things, our tolerance, as they say, our sense of fair play and so on. And I think this has all been covered over by cheap and unpleasant sort of atmosphere coming out of Britain lately. And part of it is the cultural contamination I'm talking about, which is...

sort of parallel with the river contamination that has just become an unpleasant atmosphere for some. But a thing like that, finding the right form of words, because a bit like maximise engagement, two words, can the two words really matter? The word loan is a big, big bone of contention amongst the British Museum and the British Government. Yes, we can loan you back the Parthenom.

I was in the Greek Government saying, this is not a loan. I'd say, speaking to my... family who are all in Athens, that's never going to fly.

Exactly. So we've got to find the right way of saying it. So what's your advice?

It's Lisa and Andy at the moment. It was Fagham and Debonair. And she is, I hope...

I hope to have a meeting with her one day. Oh, that's encouraging. You know, Ed Vasey and some friends from Greece.

Of this parish, Lord Vasey of this parish, yeah. He is also on this committee for the repatriation. And we don't want to make a stink about it and make it a great sort of issue of, you know, anger.

It's finding a win-win for the museum, which I think is very easy to do. And later, all kinds of ways, the museum can be enriched by this because you can still have, whether it's in the Duveen Gallery where the marbles are now or elsewhere in the museum. Museum, you can still have a Parthenon experience.

But why do you think it's been so difficult? Because actually you know, Boris Johnson, it was thought when he became Prime Minister, I mean he had promised Melina Mercuria our culture minister. Yes, because when he was an Oxford student he debated in favour of it. In favour. So what is it about every Prime Minister who gets there, who makes sort of noises, sort of positive noises?

And then when they get there, it's a sort of a flat no. What are they worried about? Maybe it's the blob.

Well, yeah. But there is... There is an issue, but Geoffrey Robertson and others have cut through it very clearly and easily and shown that it isn't. There's been this ping-pong between the trustees of the museum who say it's not up to us, it's an act of Parliament that gave it to us. Yes, that always comes up.

And Parliament say it's not up to us, we can't interfere with the decisions of the trustees. Well, this is not acceptable. There's rhetoric on either side.

And the fact is whether it's an act of Parliament or not is also irrelevant. I mean, for example, the British Museum had and held for almost 100 years... the Constitution of Australia.

Literally, the document that was signed by the... The actual document? The actual document. And Australia said, hey, guys, guys, you know, could maybe we have our constitution?

I'm awfully sorry, there's an Act of Parliament that says you can't. And then the, you know, the diplomatic pressure started to get really strong. And so suddenly there was a parliamentary, you know, by-law passed, whatever it would be called, on the nod.

It took about five minutes to go through Parliament and the constitution was sent off. So it can be done. I mean, do you think, Stephen, there's a technical solution to this?

You can get some tremendous 3D models made of things. With LiDAR, you can reproduce every pit and pore of the marble. Every shade of every flute and aris and every triglyph and metope and every little detail can be perfectly.

And not only that, you can do it in different versions and you can do it in, of course, what will become is still a nascent technology. virtual augmented ways that will show it in its coloured prime. We forget about that. It was coloured, yes. In the days when Socrates, as legend goes, was one of the stonemasons who worked on it because he did work as a stonemason as a youth around the time it was being built.

So you can tell the stories of it and show it and you can walk through it, but you can also share the story of how it was taken. You can show how it was taken from Athens, how Elgin brought it and how... It stayed in the museum. And he dropped some of it in the sea and then went back to get it.

Exactly, and then it was terribly cleaned in the 20s and 30s with scouring. And then you can watch it being put into boxes, into crates, and then you can follow the journey of it going on a train from the station, you know, drone shots of it going through the Alps and the mountains and then round through Skopje and down through... Some of it got stuck in Malta. Yes, it did. There for years.

Yes, it did. But then you can watch it, as I say, being unpacked. in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, you can watch the huge crowds that would come to welcome it. You would watch the king and the president and premier of the Republic of the Hellenes, everyone, and the crown prince probably, etc.

And you could watch them celebrating and handshaking the replacement in the gaps which still exist where those pieces should go in sight of the real Acropolis. And everyone would celebrate. And it wouldn't be, it's quite comic, and Boris should know this better than most, that Aristotle, the father of logic, also gave us many of the fallacies that you can make in logic, you know, false syllogisms and all these sorts of things, one of which is the slippery slope, which is not a logical thing.

Oh, if you go that way, then that must happen. Well, give me the logical steps as well. Oh, because people will say, well, if you've given away that, you must give away that.

Yeah. That doesn't happen. Berlusconi gave Greek artefacts back to Athens and there was no demand to return all the others that are in Italy.

And the Benin bronzes have been given back. And from the Fitzwilliam and other museums. And so this does happen.

And as I say, it would just be so classy. We would look so good as a result of it. And the museum would benefit. as it is people starting to think of the British Museum as this kind of colonial place.

And it isn't. It's the most glorious museum I have ever visited. I have to say that at the BM. You know, I'm not its enemy.

It is unbelievable. The scholarship, the artistry, the love behind it. And it needs to be celebrated as one of the great achievements.

But I used to doubt this and said, no, it must be 97 or 95 or even 90. 99% of what it holds is not on display. Yes, it's underneath. I mean, imagine what's there. So to make this much fuss and to say, well, we're an encyclopedic museum, therefore we have to have everything. Well, that's not good enough.

Listen, we've used up all our time. But before you go, I've got one quick question for you. Is it true that you're taking part in Celebrity Traitors?

All I'm allowed to say is that I have been in discussions. I'm not a fan of... reality television but someone told me that if I watched Traitors I would enjoy it and so I did and I did really enjoy it and I thought to myself this is a game rather than a reality show. Are you a good liar do you think? I think.

You're a storyteller Stephen. Yes I am. Hermes is my god, the god of liars, so he is my personal patron god. So maybe I...

but I have to start, if I am doing it, by saying I'm a terrible liar, so that people... That's a good... which is a reverse sort of...

reverse ferret, yes. But it is a fun format, I have to say, and I love Claudia and the whole set-up of it. It's beautifully done.

So watch this space, it's the best I can do for you, Alexis. Well, Stephen Fry, hilje evcharisto, a thousand thank yous for the wonderful book. You've brought my childhood back, so thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Efraisto.

Transcript for:Greek Mythology's Modern Impact and Reflections

Transcript for:
Greek Mythology's Modern Impact and Reflections