"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "1 SYMPOSIUM or Accepted Ideas" "It all began in summer 1987." "The idea for the television series based on Greek culture had just cristallized and we were facing the spectre that haunts the realm of cultural documentary that Chekov defined for eternity:" "'To say things that clever people already know and that morons will never know'." "Our friend Jean Pierre-Vernant had the idea of banquets around the world." "In Paris, the great ++++++ suited our purpose particularly well hanging as it does over the caves where antiquties rest, in shape of plaster +++ waiting for the old clear signal." "What does it mean to you?" "What is a banquet...a symposium?" "What is 'drinking together'?" "Symposium means drinking together and discussing things together." "We have a choice:" "Listen to music, recite poems, choose a topic to discuss, behave well or badly." "It could be wild or wise." "We shall see." "There is a ritual:" "The wine is passed round in roughly the same order as the sequence of conversation." "As in Georgia today..." " in highly civilized countries - every meal has a 'host'." "The banquet master." "Once the meal has started the host chooses a subject to which he proposes a toast" "and to which, in turns, the others must respond." "Food - well, one must eat..." "But wine is on a different level, a spiritual level, I would say, the civilized level." "...our feast had a forerunner:" "Plato's banquet during the plague" "Diotima, what causes you sadness?" "What confidence stops oblivion?" "The alley-ways of the heart drive away the desert darkness open the door for friendship." "Are these the spells of Mary the Harpist?" "Coiled in her hands, by a trick of fate" "The Arabian hurricane plays on her harp." "The last pledge, perhaps, of immortality " "(A poem by Pasternak)" "Symposia are taking place in France, Russia and America" "but we are doubly priviledged." "The location for our symposium is the heart of ancient Greece " "the cradle of world civilization." "We also speak the same language in spite of certain changes." "The Owl's Legacy is the title of our series." "The contribution of Ancient Greece to our modern world" "and the means of finding out how Athens or Greece in general became the culture of the world." "The more I get to know Americans the more I love Greece." "It's the kind of love it's mystical." "When I look at this civilization, a civilization of open spaces a mass society of modern communication, the more I feel that a least we can find refuge in memories" " true, as false as they may be - and a sense of belonging." "People often talk about 'roots' and when I look for mine" "it's emotionally, first and only then, intellectually." "Greece is my mother." "It's not something I say every day maybe because my generation still studied Greek and Latin." "When I was a schoolboy of 13 or 14" "I was amazed during my brief Greek course" "I suddenly came face to face with the poetic." "I had never found it in Latin." "Latin is about as poetic as..." "...as accountancy, while each word in Greek has a Mediterranean vibrancy which I found indispensable." "There are some Greek sayings that are as old as the world," "like Antigone's saying:" "'I wasn't born to hate but to love.'" "I can even say it in Greek." "I know it's just a small asset but it's enough." "I don't want to enter a debate be it chauvinist or racist" "but at certain times in history there have been incredible fusions in human intelligence" "that have filtered through history" "to blend with other innovations by people from other ages." "They were like signposts." "These periods of Ancient Greece" "from the 7th century BC to the 3rd BC or even later" "have produced ways of thinking and their consequences left their marks everywhere." "That is the essence of 'Greekness'." "A much more general concept not limited by time or space." "A diffused way of being based on judgement and rationality and on all human mental processes some of which are yet unknown." "This amalgam fascinates me." "Plato's dialogues describe Man as riding the 'Chariot of Life' where one horse represents Reason" "but it's Man who must determine what direction to take." "He can pull the reins either way for things to take their course." "The notions of internal complexity and consciousness already existed." "People cannot grasp the fact..." "that the individual" " and this is the truth - the true individual can only exist in a certain kind of community." "Of course, we are all individuals even the poor Chinese peasant" " subject of Emperor Song - he has a name, he is himself, his fingertips are unique to him" "but he isn't an individual as long as he apes the others, doing exactly what he has taught." "In order to be a real individual the community must evolve." "And it can only evolve when each member becomes different." "These two conditions go together." "That is what happened in Greece." "But people still think" "'Well, Greek democracy wasn't bad." "Sure, the Parthenon is very nice." "But the price was the absorption of the individual by the community', which is absurd." "I wish our society had individuals as Sophocles, Aristophanes or Socrates." "Bruno Snell wrote a great book in which he alleged that the Personality, the Ego was discovered by the Greeks," "it doesn't occur in other cultures." "Ego, egoism, egotism, the psyche of the individual were all Greek inventions." "Others deny Snell's theory:" "The subconscious of all men is more or less identical." "We don't know." "Take dreams, for example." "The dreams of the Ancient Greeks as illustrated in their poems, their literature and treaties, begin to resemble our dreams" "the wake of our dreams is Greek." "We knew this before Freud but he emphasized the relationship between Greek myth and dreams." "What was the unconscious for them?" "Socrates called it his Daimon:" "A voice heard from within himself at difficult or perplexing times, an irrational internal voice, the other person within oneself." "The Greek told terrible stories about duality and schizophrenia which is another Greek discovery." "Rimbaud's 'I is someone else' is a pre-Socratic Greek concept:" "A feeling of being possessed, daimonia." "Something rose to the surface there in that blinding flash of daylight" "emphasizing the mystery of night." "We have this horrid image of Greece as a land of light and harmony." "Abysmal nonsense." "Greece is a land of incest, murder, where Oedipus blinded himself on discovering the truth." "The symbol should be obvious." "The instant he discovers the truth he pokes his eyes out." "He killed his father and slept with his mother." "And that's the true Greece." "In Greece, moderation and order are won against reality and not as their birthright." "Hence their obsession with aphorisms 'be moderate', 'do not exaggerate'." "I can't imagine a Swiss or a Dutch with such obsession for moderation." "The Greeks are obsessed by it." "Obsessed by going too far because it's their natural tendency." "They defined the idea of freedom." "Yet they know there are limits." "Those limits are not fixed." "There are no Tables of Law." "There are moral rules, of course, but you can't tell in advance if you're going too far." "Yet you're expected to know." "If you go too far, it's hubris, it's immoderation, and the hubris is punished by an impersonal world order" "which keeps dragging back anything that exceeds the limits, pulling it back and destroying it" "by throwing it into the abyss." "Catastrophe and creation are both part of the Greek world." "It's hard to get out of this maze." "The myth of the Labyrinth itself confirms Greek irrationality." "Ariadne's Clew didn't help at all." "It only led to another maze." "Man's exploitation by technology, by the inhuman reasoning of economical profit-making." "These Greek words: 'economy' of life 'to economize irrational values'" "Plato's 'eudaimonia' or happiness - the great Greek poetry - seeks an equilibrium between reality and dreams, between logic and poetry." "Some golden souls in history have experienced this balance." "Take for example Paul Valery who was fascinated by the Greeks." "Between the works of Da Vinci, between intuition and exact science between techne and song, this man reached a true serenity amazingly Greek in its quality." "There have been some happy souls but not very many." "There again nostalgia deceives us." "Still, Greece sets the parameters." "She imposes choices on us." "She forces us to question ourselves." "And the most disturbing part is Oedipus had three paths, not two." "And today on the dusty plains" " between Thebes, Epidaurus and Corinth - you can still see the traces of these three paths." "Other cultures might have opted for a myth with two paths." "Greek myth alone posits three." "Not as Hegel crudely suggested 'thesis, antithesis and synthesis'." "The third is not the golden way." "This is not the Greek promise." "The third leads to the unknown, to ambiguity." "Man is forever at the crossroad of these three mysterious paths." "And when I thank Ancient Greece it's for the complexity of life, the Unknown - as the Unknown God, the god of the Corinthian altars which honours us profoundly by posing question after question to which we have no real answers." "Greek civilization enhances the whole human race." "You can still see the three-way crossroads down in the Theban plain." "This third road, where it's so easy to get lost, many mistook for the road to eternal Greece, when it led nowhere but to imaginary Greece." "An ultimate example of that road and that loss has left its traces:" "the date is 1936, the place is Olympia."