Another riff on those myths

 The Greek myths are a bit like jazz.

It’s not the story — it’s what an artist does with it. A terrible person in Aeschylus might be a sympathetic character in Euripides. The basic story admits different points of view.

In jazz, an old tune might be resurrected in one way by Louis Armstrong and in quite another way by John Coltrane. It’s not the old tune — it’s the riff on it that’s distinctive, that jolts us into thinking for ourselves.

I live in Texas, a place that has always taken property rights to the extreme. (It’s now illegal, as I read a Texas Supreme Court ruling, for Mother Nature to infringe on the rights of property owners by eroding beachfront lots. I’m waiting for the court to send law enforcement out with Tasers and restraints to accost the Gulf of Mexico.)

I wonder what the Ancient Greeks’ fluid approach to “owning” stories would mean today in terms of copyright laws. To the Ancient Greeks, the stories of gods and heroes were common heritage, common property. All artists — poets, playwrights, sculptors and pottery makers — worked and reworked the ore from those mines.

The Ancient Greeks assumed there would be different points of view. Different people will see things differently. That seemed completely natural to them.