The two major cultural sources of Western Civilization are the Greek and the Hebraic. I was very young when I noticed how fundamentally different the attitudes of these two traditions were on the subject of knowledge. In the Old Testament, God punishes Man – ALL men, forever and in perpetuity – for the crime of taking fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It is our Original Sin.

In Homer, put down as a poem about the same time as Genesis, Odysseus has his crew tie him to the mast so he can hear for himself the sound of the ‘Sirens sweetly singing’.

When I was just a child, my mother took me to see that wonderful old sword-and-sandal epic “Ulysses” with Kirk Douglas. She made no comment or explanation, she just told me “it was a very old story, sort of like the Bible”. Its amazing how things like that stick with a kid.

Its one of the oldest tales in human history, and it still has the power, even after being viewed through the blurred lens of a bad Italian movie, to change a child’s life forever three thousand years later.