The story begins in Sparta, but in Sparta Wisconsin. From Athens to the American Mid-West, the Greeks are part of the modern lives we lead. The geography they dominate is the geography of our imagination.
The myth of Oedipus, through Freud, has had far more effect on us than it ever had on the Greeks. Freud linked myth to the movements of the consciousness. Jung called the collect unconsciousness a myth - producing part of the mind.
Ancient Greek myths involve endless tales of seduction. In ancient Greek pottery, painting and poetry you find exuberant sexuality and uninhibited sexual activity in abundance.
Architecture is the most public of the arts, shaping the way we live. Polyclitus said that proportion is not a matter of personal taste, but depends on mathematical laws of harmony, which can only be broken at the expense of beauty.
Twenty six hundred years ago, in an ancient Greek town called Miletus, the first scientific question was asked: is there a rational basis for the way the world works? As men looked at the world more and more carefully, it seemed to make less and less sense for there are certain things that man intrinsically cannot know.
The most famous statue from antiquity is a beautiful naked woman with no arms - Venus de Milo. In the museum of our imagination there is an ideal beauty of wishful sensuality and almost mystical ecstasy which she represents.
What is real? To that deceptively simple question, Plato, the greatest of Greek philosophers came up with a startling answer - one which has had incalculable consequences. His answer was: "Nothing is". Man's search for truth started with the Ancient Greeks and we have been asking questions ever since.
Can man learn to live without war? In the nuclear age he has to, but history is against him. War is as old as civilisation itself and the greatest war epic, The Illiad, has survived for nearly 3,000 years of retelling but the rules have changed in a world where Homer's poetic similes of destruction have become a reality.
