The Wisdom of the Myths

An alternative strategy was therefore needed, one that Hannah Arendt shows as coming to occupy a central position in Greek culture: namely heroism, and the glory it procures.

in the sense that, through our children, something of us will survive our own demise, physically as well as spiritually: our facial features or physical resemblances, just like our traits of character, are preserved more or less intact in those we have raised and loved.

And we are quite alone in this predicament, alone to perceive with unparalleled sharpness that there is in our lives

Unremittingly, we feel the passage of time. This, no doubt, sometimes brings us happiness—the proof of which is that we love life

Our principal characteristic as mere mortals is quite the reverse. Contrary to the gods and the beasts, we are the only sentient beings in this world to have full consciousness of what is irreversible: the fact that we are going to die.

but on the contrary are seen as stories full of meaning and, beyond their poetic lightness, the bearers of a profound and coherent body of wisdom.

The fundamental characteristic of the gods is that they escape death

the Olympians are at the same time utterly inaccessible: they leave mankind alone to resolve, in lay terms, the question of “how to live”—in stark contrast to the Immortals themselves, and with no hope of joining their ranks, but with full knowledge of the limits to their own mortal condition, which they must try to make sense of as best they can.

It is within this same perspective that I now approach mythology: as a prehistory of philosophy, its moment of origin, or, put differently, as the matrix that alone explains the birth of philosophy in Greece in the sixth century BC—a cataclysmic event that we are in the habit of referring to as the “Greek miracle.”

An effort of lucidity as the ultimate condition of serenity, understood in its simplest and strongest sense: as a victory—no doubt relative and fragile—over our fears, in particular the fear of death, which so insidiously and under so many forms prevents us from living a full life.