![]() ![]() Oedipus the King opens at the National Theatre in a couple of weeks – aside from being an almost perfect play in terms of the relentless logic of its structure, it is also the world's first detective story, one in which the detective and the perpetrator, horrifyingly, turn out to be the same person. The dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides still lay down a ridiculously high standard for playwrights today – which is why directors and actors keep returning to them. Plato's Republic (more often discussed than read cover-to-cover) is one of the most terrifying, challenging and bold thought experiments ever to have been dreamed up – and you certainly don't need to be a professional philosopher to be gripped by it. The storytelling of Homer – whose humanity, whose deep understanding of love and loss is utterly unmistakable – is unmatched, for my money, in later literature. They should be as widely enjoyed as Jane Austen or Charles Dickens – and it saddens me that they are not. These authors have left us vivid, exciting, provocative, often devastating, often hilarious reads. ![]() What underpins the book is my profound belief that the great writers of Greece – such as Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Sappho – are not worthy-but-dull, forbidding authors of dusty, unreadable tomes. ![]()
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