Wrong Turn

Socrates

Robert Graves, author of The Greek Myths--the book that single-handedly raised Greek mythology out of kiddiedom and restored it to its rightful place as the granddaddy of it all--believes there was a point when it all went wrong. That point, he says, was Socrates.

Socrates had a way of trivializing the myths on his way to introducing us to rationalism. He was the beginning of Western civilization, the progenitor of Western thought as we know it.

So Mr. Graves, in seeking to right the wrong Socrates did, is also telling us that when we made the right turn into Western thought, we made a very wrong turn indeed.

SEE: In Search of Genius by William Fifield for more on this.