If you’re looking for a great read and an even greater listen, pick up Stephen Fry’s book Heroes. Look, I wouldn’t normally recommend book two of a four book (so far) series, but I’ve not read the others so I can’t recommend book one first. I can, however, say that this book is excellent. Even better, Fry reads the audiobook himself, and does a superb job.
This volume collects Fry’s tellings of the ancient Greek myths about the heroes. His earlier book covers the gods, and the next two cover the Iliad and the Odyssey. (I assume, again I’ve not read them!) Found here are the stories of Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, and the other great men of old. Fry draws on the primary sources and gives us his thoughts on them along the way, and does so in a way that is engaging and readable even for non-scholars. I assume (possibly wrongly) that he is not only influenced by the original sources, but also by various popular retellings along the way. It is very hard not to think of the 90s masterpiece Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and a book I had growing up about Hercules and the heroes.
But that’s probably just a case of all these stories having the same sources in the ancient world. Where Fry’s telling is interesting is in the obvious decency and respect with which he handles these materials. Fry has his opinions about the people involved and isn’t afraid to share them. But he leaves his famous atheism on the cutting room floor (or whatever the written equivalent of that is). Instead he treats these myths in a way Christians can learn from. The myths are attempts to understand the nature of the world without a Biblical reference point. That has value for a Christian because we need to understand how people try to fill in the blanks.
I won’t go as far as some Christians have and argue that these myths are the Old Testament for the Greeks (neither was Plato or Homer, for that matter), but both the sources and Fry’s tellings are fun tales that will help us wrestle as believers with the concepts and events that all human beings have to wrestle with.
Dr. Coyle Neal co-hosts the City of Man Podcast and is an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog). He teaches Political Science, Philosophy, and History in Southwest Missouri.
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