Greek mythology is one of those subjects that has always almost fascinated me. We studied it quite extensively, if necessarily superficially, in first year at Secondary School, both in History and in English, where we read an abridged child-friendly version of Homer's Odyssey. We also alluded to it in Political Theory at University when studying the Great Philosophers, notably Aristotole, Socrates, and my favourite, Plato. However, it has never fascinated me enough to do any serious reading.
have seen various references to Sisyphus, both in the blogosphere and on Usenet, and today I discovered that the gods set Sisyphus the task of rolling a stone up hill; when he got near the top it rolled back down again. It serves as an apt metaphor for so many futile tasks. I found a thought-provoking use of the metaphor on Thor's China Diary.
I was also quite shocked to find out a few days ago that Odysseus had sex with a woman other than Penelope on his Odyssey. I think they cut that from the abridged version. I think I deprecate abridged versions; you tend to think that they allow you to tick the 'Read already' box, but by arbitrarily cutting the sexual bits they omit the bits about real life, and, arguably, only tell part of the story.
