Alejandro Gándara
Dioses contra microbios. Los griegos y el Covid 19 / Gods Against Microbes. Eros and Covid-19
Non-fiction , 2020
Ariel
Pages: 224
A dazzling, provocative essay that revisits the ancient world to draw the lessons that this century cannot give us.
In the 5th century BC, any Athenian who reached the age of 50 was a born survivor: he would have participated in two or three wars and survived a plague in which half the population perished, seen his city burnt to ashes, rebuilt and destroyed again, and misery and hunger were part of the natural cycle of life.
In the 21st century, we take change badly, from a simple house move to a divorce or illness. We think we have fixed personalities and yet, to understand life, we cannot always remain the same. The Greeks had a word for this change, which is often painful and leaves a mark: metamorphosis. And for the person who fully accept life's challenges they had another: hero.
For a teacher of the history of ideas such as Alejandro Gándara, the return to the wellsprings of the ancient world, from Homer to Ovid, imposes itself as an urgent, inescapable task, not only in order to learn about a way of being in this world that we have forgotten and misrepresented, but also to deal with the intellectual indoctrination and dominant thinking that so often comes hand in hand with global crises.