Are we done with the Greeks?

[milo]

Greek myths are quite terrible and not fit subject matter for modern poetry. The characters lack depth and and nuance, or have the bare minimum of these. Greek myths work only because of the several centuries of allusion. For instance, Milton drew heavily upon Homer in using his similes, and any allusion to either Homer or Milton could reflect two separate literary traditions.

Likewise, Greek drama is quite terrible by modern standards. Look at Antigone. It couldn’t be performed today without considerable reinterpretation.

Greek literature has no depth.And no, it’s not because it was all a long time ago.

It’s because intelligent Greeks didn’t write poetry and drama. The hacks did, for the lowest of the low masses who flocked the theatre. The highbrow ones wrote philosophy and history, or maths and science.

In the western tradition, only the Bible is worth reading as a source of myth and literature, from the ancient world. There is depth and pathos. Unfortunately, for long west made the Bible unusable as a source of myth because America believed the world was created in 6 days.

Coming back to the Greek myths - they are terrible. Use others.

PS - I’m certainly better than Socrates. Archimedes, no. Socrates didn’t know partial differential equations. No one before Newton was fully human, with only a handful of exceptions.

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Edited a few lines. Terrible typing on the phone.

The whole rant is pretty good but I mostly loved the part about being superior to Socrates because he didn't know DifEq