I’ve finally got around to reading Gates of Fire, the Steven Pressfield novel recommended to me so many times by so many people for about five years now. I’m only about halfway through, but it is definitely as good as everyone said. Pressfield is astonishingly adept at evoking the whole feel of classical Greece. Although I’ve never been an admirer of Sparta, this book captures much of the fundamental glory and beauty of our ancient ancestors—so like us, and so unalike. On his website, Pressfield also expresses beautifully what it is about ancient Greece that is so compelling:
what appeals to me about the ancient world as opposed to the modern is that the ancient world was pre-Christian, pre-Freudian, pre-Marxist, pre-consumerist, pre-reductivist. It was grander, it was nobler, it was simpler. You didn’t have the notion of turn-the-other-cheek. You had Oedipus but you didn’t have the Oedipus complex. It was political but it was not politically correct. It's refreshing. The first time I read Thucydides I felt like a fresh breeze had blown into the room. At last someone was giving me human nature without the bullshit. I find almost all the works of the ancient age to be like that. From Aeschylus’ Agamemnon:
And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God.
You ain’t gonna find that in any work written in our era…. I find the ancient conception of who we are and why we do what we do much closer to reality than any modern interpretation or explanation.
Our age has been denatured. The heroic has been bled out of it. The callings of the past—the profession of arms, the priesthood, the medical and legal professions, politics, the arts, journalism, education, even motherhood and fatherhood—every one has been sullied and degraded by scandal after scandal. We’re hard up for heroes these days, and even harder up for conceiving ourselves in that light. That’s why I’m drawn to the ancient world. It’s truer, in my view, to how we really are. The ancient world has not been reductified [sic] and deconstructed as ours has; it has not been robbed of all dignity. They had heroes then. There was such a thing, truly, as the Heroic Age. Men like Achilles and Leonidas really did exist. There was such a thing, truly, as heroic leadership.
Comments policy