Book review: Gods and Swaggering Heroes: Swashbuckling Tales from the Greek Myths

This is a very funny book about the Classical Greek Outback 3,000 years ago. Where we Australians have bunyips, rainbow serpents and Min Min lights, the Greeks had nymphs, flying horses, gods in winged chariots, monsters with six heads and sphinxes.

The average Australian thinks that the classical Greek myths are only for white-bearded scholars and academic eggheads. This need not be so. The myths are the greatest fantasy stories ever told and here they are presented with comedy and suspense and down-to-earth language by short story writer David Myers.

When I first read Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes I was reminded of the controversy following the publication of Robert Graves's I Claudius, which immediately became a best seller. The surest way to infuriate the critical or the academic establishment is to write a best seller on a topic which those two institutions regard as their exclusive domain.

The fact that the book may be earning an author large royalties only aggravates the angst. Those who claimed to know, said of I Claudius, that it was merely the retailing of the cheap gossip of Suetonius. Graves's riposte when the sequel to I Claudius, Claudius the God, was published, was to include in it his bibliography for both of the books. His critics immediately rushed to those sources but to their dismay found that Graves had, in all ways, been true to them.

David Myers has not made the same mistake with his Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes. Generously he has acknowledged all of his primary and secondary sources at the outset. It is only to be hoped - he deserves it - that Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes enjoy the same success as Graves's and becomes a much watched television series featuring the same stellar actors as the Claudius series did.

In writing Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes, David Myers demonstrates the breadth of his learning and the facility and the versatility of his writing. This book joins a veritable caravan of works by him: essays on English and German; numerous editorial contributions to other books; the picaresque semi-autobiographical novel, Benjamin Blauenblum; other novels including Cornucopia County; anthologies of short stories; Mudmaps to Paradise; the Secret Sins of the Suburban Swaggy; as well as many learned papers and monographs.

He is also an amusing correspondent although his fine letters have yet to be published. It is better that that not happen until, say, five years after his death, because the law of defamation precludes an action against a dead man.

Gods and Swaggering Heroes presents Greek mythology in a readily accessible and easily readable form. The presentation is informed and enhanced by David's broad general knowledge and deep readings of history and philosophy. As he says in his introduction, "Myths are retold because they mean different things to each new generation."

He adds, "Think, for example, of Jean Paul Sartre's atheistic satire on Zeus's cruel authoritarianism in his play The Flies, or of existentialism's championing of Prometheus and Sisyphus as the champions of enthusiasm against the Olympian gods. My awareness of these philosophical clashes has shaped the ambivalence and irony with which I re-tell the myths."

I must say that I did not myself detect too much ambivalence in David's representation of the stories, but I did enjoy his ironical approach to them. It is not always appreciated that most, if not all irony, includes satire, but that irony is the more refined art and that the converse does not always apply.

I think the particular attractions of the book are not just that it tells the old stories in a modern, lively and amusing way, but also that it does it in a painlessly erudite way. Indeed, there is something to be learned on every page.

"Psychopomp" may not be a word that one needs to use in every conversation, but we learn in Chapter 10, which is on Hades, that Hermes should be described as a psychopomp because he conducted all ghosts immediately after death down to the underworld.

We learn that the first gathering place there of the ghosts is the Asphodel Fields. Asphodel, he observes, may sound melodious but there is nothing melodious about its meaning which is that it is the meadows of whatever was not reduced to ashes.

After describing the other geography of the entrance to, and of the underworld itself, he points out that at a place where three roads meet and three judges convene every day to sit in judgment on the dead.

The courts were convened on a racial basis, one taking the Asian ghosts, and the other the European ones. Cases of doubt were referred to a third judge and, as David says, they would not get away with that today because of its obviously racially discriminatory procedures.

Each of the chapters of the book vividly captures the caprice, amorality, immorality and the almost universal selfishness of the gods. The truth, which David pretty fairly implies, is that the myths were invented by mortals who would dearly have loved to behave the way in which the gods did, if they themselves were immortal and infallible and could have got away with it.

One chapter is on the well-known story of the siege of Troy. David Myers thinks that the real enemy of the Ancient Greeks was as much the Greeks themselves as the Trojans. "They postured," he writes, "like peacocks showing off their tails. They squabbled among themselves for status. When they thought they had secured enough status and recognition for this life, they postured for posterity and history."

David also betrays his scepticism about the Helen's allures. It was not, he thinks, her face but Greek belligerence that launched a thousand ships. The family squabbles of the gods of Olympus were even more undignified than those of the Greek kings.

In the course of retelling the stories, David Myers cannot resist making a modern detour. He writes that they remind him of a modern anecdote about Baroness Thatcher. A new Conservative MP apparently came to take his seat in parliament and sat facing the Opposition across the chamber. "There is the enemy," he thought, "With them I must grapple." But the Lady, his prime minister, told him he was wrong, that his real enemies were seated beside him: they were his fellow Conservatives. From them, he would suffer far more subtle treachery, envy and betrayal than he would ever from the Opposition.

And so it was, David Myers says, with the Greeks. Zeus was inclined to side with the Trojans but his nagging wife Hera was with the Greeks. David Myers argues that had modern marriage guidance counselling been then the vogue, and Zeus able to attend some seminars on anger control, matters might have ended more happily. The gods never could resist interfering in human affairs. Who knows what the result might have been had there not been discord between Zeus and Hera.

One virtue - the use of the word "virtue" in the context of Greek Gods does rather sound like an oxymoron - of David Myers's book is that you can dip into any part of it at any time for amusement and information. It is a book that can assuage the pain of either a short or a long journey.

It is also attractively and originally produced with an irreverent cover, and reproductions of elegant drawings at the beginning and end of each chapter. I can assure you that the short summary under its ISBN classification is entirely accurate. "Gods, Greek - Humor" (although humour is misspelled), "Mythology, Greek - [misspelled] Humor", "Mythology, Classical - [misspelled] Humor".

I am unable to pass over the misspelling because it has become a tradition for David and me to expose any grammatical error, misspelling, or heresy that either of us can find in a work of the other. Mention of the word "heresy" also reminds me that there are a few of these in this book, and that if Zeus were to descend into this room today David's despatch to the Asphodel Fields in the company of Hermes would be quick and sharp. Indeed, I think that they would get him on three counts, frivolity, heresy and blasphemy, and the third god at the crossroads wouldn't be called upon to intervene.

"Blasphemy" reminds me of another anecdote about David. Before I tell it however I am bound to say that his conduct, as an author, is far from unique. Soon after Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes was published he made his way to all the bookshops that he could find, and when the shop assistants were distracted by paying customers, carefully replaced those books on the booksellers' shelves with his own with the covers facing outward.

His next excursion was to the libraries. At the first library that he visited he searched for about an hour for Glorious Gods and Swaggering Heroes. Dejected and angry at finding nothing, as he was leaving he passed the religious section of the library and was astonished to see his book, some four copies of it - the other six being out with anxious readers - boldly placed on the shelves of the section for religion.

That, it seems to me, is a fitting punishment for his blasphemy. The novelist, essayist, scholar, editor, publisher, belletrist and reviewer has now become a religious icon in the libraries.