Defending the Right to Take Poetic License With a Myth

Although I understand Ellen Finkelpearl’s viewpoint regarding the treatment given to stories from ancient Greece on TV (“Homer’s Essential Insights Lost in Mix,” Counterpunch, May 26), I would like to make a slight digression here.

I believe that the media have the obligation to inform and, to some extent, to educate, and it is up to the viewer or listener to go on investigating on a subject that may have interested him or her. Therefore, I strongly disagree with her in her comment that production quality and misrepresentations harmed “The Odyssey” or “Hercules” in any major way.

I come from Buenos Aires, and there is a radio show there that has been on the air for more than 10 years now, under different titles. It’s supposed to be a humoristic show, but it is also a cultural show. It has 95% of the audience in its time share (between midnight and 2 a.m.) and has contributed largely to the education of hundreds of teenagers and quite a few adults, myself included.

The main characteristic of the show is that the host gives a different talk every day either on a story from ancient Greece, or a historic event, or some other kind of myth, and he puts those events in everyday language, even using some slang for the conversations attributed to the protagonists. This is how I became more familiarized and interested with everything regarding Greece, not because of what I heard on the radio, but rather because it interested me so much that I went out and got some books on the subject for myself.

I’ve read the three great epics (“The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” and “The Aeneid”) more than once and, though I’m not an expert, I could see that some of the passages in “The Odyssey” were mixed up (e.g., the lotus eaters and Circe). Though it bothered me somehow, I also understood that maybe they had to do so because of time restrictions, and maybe some monetary restrictions as well.

The same basic premise applies to “Hercules.” It is a known fact that the relationship between Hercules and Iolaus was not as it is depicted in the show, and also that the hero was not the good-natured man we are led to believe; in reality (if such a concept can be applied to myths), he was a reckless and violent man, who lacked real intelligence. But one only learns that after the hero has been presented to us, and has interested us enough so as to go on investigating and reading everything about him.

If there is an objective behind the presence of ancient Greek stories on TV nowadays, then maybe it is to introduce them to the audiences in general. It is up to us, after all, to decide if we want to know more about them or not.

MARIA A. GONZALEZ

Eagle Rock