Stephen Fry discusses his new book about the siege of Troy | 7.30

stephen fry it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the program it's a pleasure to be here stan all the way reaching from london to australia technology is still wonderful isn't it you've you've aimed high haven't you if you're going to take a story on just go for homer did you approach this writing about troy did you approach this with some trepidation you know that the great story had been written well yes and no in a way i think um one of the issues with homer is that anyone who who reads a good translation or listens to an audiobook of a good translation of the actual homer in a in their own language will agree that the storytelling is supreme and despite the slew of greek names and genealogies that go on it's nonetheless incredibly compelling and doesn't have the reek of what you might call the school room and i think that was what i was really determined to do was at least to try and take it out of the arena of of classical studies and latin and greek and old-fashioned teachers with chalk on their gown telling you how to conjugate the verb luo and so on which is a whole other world now i mean i can't believe it's the world i grew up in but it's true i did and that's probably what gave me my passion for these stories um but i was aware that for some people they're a bit off-putting i mean just the names you know yeah platinestra sounds probably more like a sexually transmitted disease than a person and a lot of these agamemnon sounds even something you have to apologize for [Laughter] yeah just this clip in necessary it's going to clear up in a week apparently so let me hold off till then yeah what what what attracted you to it it is such an eternal story and there must have been something in contemporary times that you were looking for as well was there something that it could tell us about now yes i think so i mean the the story that i just adore which is the kind of one of the propelling moments that causes the war is is a scene that is known that in painting and art and literature as the judgment of paris nothing to do with the city paris was a shepherd boy on mount ida outside troy and he was chosen for various reasons but we won't go into those now but he was chosen because of his honesty uh to be a judge between the three goddesses uh hera the queen of heaven known as juno to the romans and uh athena the goddess of wisdom known as minerva to the romans and aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty um because there was a golden apple that was rolled at a wedding and it had to the fairest on it and suddenly these three gods were in competition as to who was the fairest it's the old fairy tale question who is the fairest of them all is it hearer goddess of you know the queen of heaven and god is a matrimony and power and respectability or is it the goddess of wisdom of god it's with beauty and paris is offered power and and might and riches by hero if he gives her the apple and athena offers him wisdom and insight into the hearts of men and the minds of the gods even if he gives her the apple what's what's a greater prize than wisdom and aphrodite says i've got nothing gran to offer you all i can offer you is love and she shows him a little um scallop shell and says open it and he opens the scallop shell and there he sees a face that sends flames into his cheeks and his heart to stick in his throat he's never seen so beautiful a face in his life his breath goes from his body who is that and aphrodite says her name is helen if you give me the apple i will give you heaven so of course he's a young man is he going to give it to the goddess of power is he going to give it to the goddess of wisdom no he gives it to aphrodite so that's a lovely story it's a fable but if you think about it also it's saying in human life we have choices and it's true about what subject you study at university you can choose what's going to give you power and riches you can choose what's going to make you wise and clever or you can choose what is your passion what is what drives you what is the love the lust and that's a choice that all humans face because we are all riven by you know freud called them the super ego the ego and the id but you know different appetites and impulses one is one is you know agreed for power each of them can lead in their own way um to disaster and disaster and and we see in this of course this is this is love this is a love story but it's also a story of war it's a story that's still that's still taught in in war military colleges today this you know the the generals of tomorrow are learning about this today they are and and its depiction of war is second to none i mean the brutality i i i thought when i was retelling that the bits i would least like to have to retell are the battle scenes that homer paints during his depiction of of the the final year of the final month really of the of the war and um but i found that actually there was something strangely moving about it there's so much sort of sacrifice and he always gives even in the smallest snapshot a kind of identity to someone you know i mean it's it's physically their spears go into helmets and brains burst out of the helmets and blood shoots out of the sockets of the helmets it's pretty you know x-rated the violence of it but it it somehow makes the you know the pity of war as well foreign all the more apparent and and of course the other thing is that this was this took place in what we you know archaeologists called now the bronze age before humankind had learned to to to smelt iron it was copper and tin made made bronze which is hard and made for good weapons and this was it was a pre-literate age as well and and yet what's sort of interesting is the war seems to show humanity jostling for what quality is most important in solving a problem and there are the great warriors achilles and ajax and hector whose swords and whose speed and whose athleticism and power and courage seem to be about to win the war but they're not enough it takes the craft the wilyness the subtlety of odysseus to dream up the famous trojan horse so what wins the war is not the great warriorship not great strategy or in terms of military deployment of you know finances of troops but it's a cunning and deceitful ploy and so it's as if mankind is just stretching the muscles that make us the species because after you know a thousand or so years 2000 years after the trojan war that's when greece arose in into its great form of the power of athenia the sorry athenian you know democracy logic music justice all these elements were suddenly important it's become fashionable in fact to look back to ancient greece as as a way of explaining where we're at there's a a lot of discussion around the thucydides trap and the peloponnesian war and the the war of athens and sparta rising power waning power and again looking at say china and the united states where where what are your thoughts on where we are at today with what looks like a return of great power rivalry that is reshaping our world they they seem to to to revolve around the the very reason that made the greeks so extraordinary was they came like so many other tribes and peoples and clans and groups from around the mediterranean they just came together but they came together at a time when it seems sea levels were becoming stable enough to have ports and harbors that wouldn't flood so you could start to get lines of trade and they traded with the phoenicians who gave them the alphabet and um and they became a kind of what we would call a western democracy i mean give or take a lot there was slavery there was all kinds of things we would have found a totally unacceptable but within you know what considering what a new idea it was and they had drama and art and music pythagoras divine these wonderful music rules of harmony and and and and they were aware that they were unique and they weren't sure why but they realized and this is when nietzsche gave a brilliant description of them they realized that they were compounded of two impulses especially one was represented by their god apollo it was reason and order and harmony and logic and music and oration you know rhetoric and and all things to do with reason mathematics as well and then there was another god dionysus who was a god of impulse and frenzy and addiction and passion and their their plays as this is how nietzsche put it in his book the birth of tragedy that plays where their dramas were playing out of these two opposing impulses and then in history it happened to them because the spartans across the the gulf in in peloponnesia in the peloponnese they were much more militaristic much less interested in art and drama and poetry and music they were interested in conquest they were like klingons in star trek if you like they were you know famous for that we use the word spartan of conditions that are absolutely you know brutal um and they went to war with athens which was coming you know you might say with freedom of speech to some extent with philosophy and art and music and open discussion and open voting and the jury system for your law comes weakness some people believe that and we look at you know putin and the china they think the west is soft because of our institutions that we think guarantee freedom and openness and exchange and development and progress those very things that we most cling to as an advantage can be seen as a weakness and the trojan war plays that out too stephen are we also contributing to that when we look at what is a decay or what is seen as a decay in western society challenging you know things i know you've spoken a lot about this but the ideas of identity and what we can say and what we can't say and what we can write and what we can't write and what we can think and what we can't think and the policing of these things and of course how this gives rise to a political tribalism and you've seen elements of that in the uk with brexit with trump in in the us the rise of the far right across across europe but i know you've been concerned about what you see is this identity that may erode um our own societies i think i think that's right i think there is a there is an impulse for people to to retreat in into very fixed identities and and to identify as this or as that and um i can understand a lot of it we all can we all we all know how how brutally people from my various minorities have been treated and how much they you know all of us you know feel the need sometimes to band together and to have movements and show pride in this but there is a danger there is a danger when that it stops us from thinking freely about ourselves and allowing ourselves to to leak from one identity to another to be to be ambiguous to be more than ambiguous which is just two-sided but to be poly big equity to have contradictions clearly there isn't of yes i am exactly like like wolf whitman you know we are masses of contradiction we contain universes we are multifarious and and we shouldn't be afraid or embarrassed by that we we should say i used to think this in fact only yesterday i thought this but today i don't or i wonder or i doubt myself but that requires us to to stop and and think it also requires us to be honest and what we're seeing so much now is is identity and politics feeding into even the notion of truth we can invent our own facts and our own truths which is of course horrific and and a lot of it is a lack of confidence and lack of education and a lot of uh you know lack of real self-respect that if you are fortunate enough to to to have a confidence in your own doubt then your own human makeup is armor enough against anything you don't need to put on the armor of an identity whereas those you know find it much easier to put on the armor of this kind of feminist this kind of trans activist this kind of gay person this kind of white angry you know that's their armor and it protects their real self underneath which is a mixture of all kinds of things he's actually a bit sympathetic towards this understands that that may be going too far wonders if this is truly the answer all these weak bleating liberal things that seem to be a weakness are strength of a free mind ranging over issues and allowing itself to change and allowing itself to feel differently about things and realizing you know that there are contradictory impulses that we have on the one hand we want to stand alone and be an individual i am who i am i want to stand apart from the tribe the muddy tribe uh i'm myself glorious me i am me but another part longs to to be accepted into a group and to belong to a group and that's a tension but it's a i think attention that's creative and exciting and part of the nature of being human that that we are in a space between individualism and group to be only one it seems to me not how humans are and of course so much of this if this is feeding into issues like climate change where they stop being issues of science and become issues of ideology politics or identity do you see do you see us coming out of this are we in a process of emerging from this or is this or is this type of polarization and ideology and rejection of truth or rejection of science really seeping into our societies it seems to be more than ever but i think that's partly because there are more more vents to to release that steam than there ever were so we know more about it in the past people might have doubts about this that the other but they couldn't disseminate them they couldn't sort of broadcast them they couldn't poison the the the wells of discourse um um quite as as much as now people can and no matter how much you know youtube may tamp down this account and and and facebook will ban them and and twitter will put a warning sticker on on those people nonetheless there's always ways out for these uh anti-scientific and um sometimes malevolent things sometimes just muddle headed um but generally speaking i'm a little bit optimistic i do think it's whether it's three steps forward and two back or two steps forward and one back i do think we inch towards um an improvement in general understanding that leads to the final thing i wanted to talk to you about and that was covered of course we have seen great kindness and great empathy but we've also seen a a rejection of the threats of of covert and the rejection of science that is that has cost lives how has that changed us what is the post-covert world going to look like it's it's it's a really good point i i i've given up being able to claim even any sort of prophetic gift uh the last few years have made fools of any profits that i've come across and opinion polls yeah i mean i do think one of the sciences that is most interesting partly because it's a little bit nebulous but it is a driver of so much policy in all countries of the world i've sort of looked into this and all the scientific um cabals and and and groups and advisory bodies that governments have i'm sure there's you know plenty in australia at a state level at a federal level and same in in britain and america these and people talk about immunologists and virologists and epidemiologists but they ignore the fourth science which is behavioral science it's how people as a group behave and how they behave as individuals it's a strange fact of humanity that's been known about for a long time which is that you can predict to an astonishing degree of accuracy how a group of people an average group of people will behave under certain circumstances but you can never predict what an individual is going to do so it's a strange science that's a little connected to game theory and higher forms of statistics and psychology and old-fashioned uh you know behavioral science some of which in the 50s and 60s became quite unfashionable it became you know as we move towards a genetic explanation of human behavior rather than a conditioned one but the fact is there are lots of scientists sitting down and and advising government and the government's uh uh obeying advice not really on the basis exactly of science as we're thinking at medical science but on the basis of no if you do that that week it'll it'll mean there'll be two and a half weeks of this which is just too much for most people to bear they're more likely to be riots and demonstrations if you phase it out this way people and nudge them so that the science of the nudge and you know a lot of it is as i say it's kind of dark arts but it is vital and it's a bit like actuarial tables it's just a prediction of how people behave yes that he's not based on any moral sense of what whether people are good or bad it's just people will you know what we don't want to use an australian scenario which we've all been frightened of is a kind of mad max world to develop you know where there are really genuinely frightening figures there brutal leader who who will just go for the jugular and go for greed and and so on it brings it brings us back that's a long way of saying i don't know what's gonna happen it does bring us back to to the it does bring us back to troy doesn't that we still face the choice of paris don't we is it is it rich's richest wisdom or love that we give the apple yes and just a thing that shocked me when i was you know sort of looking at it again is i'd forgotten that at the very beginning of homer's iliad um the thing that propels the entire story of the iliad is a plague is infection that runs through the greek camp there's disease and and amazingly and and and homer must have known that this was a viable and truthful observation the plague starts with the animals the animals get sick and they pass it on to the humans and we now know of course that it's very likely coronavirus might have stand with animals and and we know that you know smallpox and all kinds of diseases that have that have destroyed humanity over the centuries have transmitted from animals to humans so troy even has that truth buried inside it stephen has been a delight thank you so much for taking some time out of your day and uh to share that time with us thanks for giving me so much time and all the very best lots of love thank you go australia bye-bye hi i'm lee sales thanks for watching this story if you'd like to watch more of 730s stories they are on the left of your screen and tap on the button below to subscribe and get the latest from abc news

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 20,880

Keywords: news, abc, abc news, australia, stephen fry, troy, ancient greece, stan grant, book, history, ancient history, 7.30

Id: F7zQsPLHshM

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020