Sure, fill your boots, as the saying goes.

  “Are you not entertained?!!” Challenged Maximus to the bloodthirsty Roman crowd taking in the gladiatorial slaughter. 

  But let’s not pretend an epic tale sung 2800 years ago has some profound meaning for us moderns today. Especially as we haven’t a clue as to the actual context from which it sprang. It was plain and simply a different place and a different time. 

  And a different civilization as well. An earlier Indo-Aryan cousin to us Westerners you could say. 

  But those differences and vague relatability due to prehistoric blood and culture lines have always made Greek poetry, fable and myth safe for us Westerners. Notice how once the Medieval straight-jacket of the Bible and the drama of Christ’s death on the cross was cracking Greek poetic themes, its gods and heroic tales flooded into the rapidly awakening Renaissance art.

  As I said, they were safe. They didn’t challenge church dogma and belief and therefore didn’t get the artist in hot water, or worse, tied to a stake above hot burning faggots. 

  It all has to do with the near universally held belief that other peoples’ and other civilizational myths are creative fiction while our own is the living unassailable Revealed Truth. Western artists and Shaman-Types quickly learned they could play with fiction all they liked but come close to the heart and soul of our own unquestionably Divine Truth and they did so at their own peril! 

  And so millions will undoubtedly crowd into theatres in the coming months to take in the spectacle of the latest retelling of Homer’s great epic hero’s journey. 

  Here’s an interesting sociological and psycho-spiritual question I think worth asking if we are ever to learn something of ourselves and where we have come from: any reasonably educated and moderately literate Westerner today is at least passingly familiar with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but what percentage of those people can name our own Western European civilization’s equivalent epic heroic poem? 

  Hmmm, not many I’d venture. 

  Why is that? 

  Can it be that our own unique epically heroic tale has been ignored or suppressed because it unveiled a little too much about our own purportedly Revealed foundational Truths? 

  And understand, I am not talking about the sanitized and indeed sterilized church approved version.