Greek myths mean more to modern children than Bible stories
‘I’m Odysseus and you’re the Cyclops and I’m going to spear you in the eye.” “No, I’m Circe and I’m going to turn you into a pig.”
Archeologists have just unearthed a clay tablet bearing what may be the oldest written fragment of the Odyssey ever found in Greece. Unearthed near the temple of Zeus in Olympia, it dates from the third century AD.
Of course, Homer’s epic poem had been passed down by word of mouth for many centuries before that. And even today, on a trampoline in Hackney, its stories are being acted out by a new generation.
So much of Western civilisation – our greatest art, literature, architecture and drama – rests on the twin pillars of Christianity and classical civilisation. Unless you have a basic grounding in both, you will always be culturally blinkered, missing half the references in a Victorian novel or a Renaissance painting.
Yet back in the Seventies and Eighties, when I was at school, progressive educationalists booted Greek, Latin and classical civilisation out of state schools on the grounds of “irrelevance”.
Never mind that this was so obviously an inversion of the truth: it somehow, through a flabby submission to fashionable thinking, became the accepted wisdom.
The classical myths have never regained their rightful position in Britain’s education system. But at least pop culture has seen the light.
In recent years, the Greek gods have been popping up all over: in the blockbuster Percy Jackson books and films (featuring an American schoolboy with ADHD who turns out to be Poseidon’s love child); in Maz Evans’s hugely successful series of children’s books, starting with Who Let the Gods Out?; and in computer games such as Gods of Olympus, where you get to be an online deity and lay waste to your rivals’ city states.
As a result, my state school-educated children speak near-fluent Greek mythology.
“That’s not right,” they’ll tut swottily at Disney’s version of Hercules. “It was Bellerophon who rode Pegasus.”
Or: “There ought to be nine muses, not five!”
Eavesdropping on one such conversation the other day, aglow with parental pride, I suddenly had a nasty thought. My children know far more about, say, the labours of Theseus than they do about the miracles of Jesus. I’m not sure they could name a single parable.
Despite being christened Catholics, they have only ever been to church for funerals. Like most modern schoolchildren, they have secular assemblies with no hymns or prayers. They couldn’t begin to spell catechism, let alone recite it. They don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.
Without faith, there are only stories to keep a culture alive. In a panic, I dug out my old book of Bible stories for children and tried to get them interested.
It didn’t go well. They were shocked by the bad-tempered God of the Old Testament, and frustrated by Jesus’s humility and reluctance to show off his superpowers.
My children are fairly typical: a poll by the Bible society found that three in 10 British children don’t know where the Nativity story comes from, and the same proportion had never heard of the crucifixion.
The first pillar of Western culture is being patched up by popular culture; but the second is crumbling fast.