Woven into the fabric of life – the Greek myths as tapestries

From Medea to Helen of Troy, Greek myths still speak to the modern world. Classicist Charlotte Higgins explores stories that weave together the fabric of our existence

Among my most treasured books as a child was a volume of Greek myths. My eldest brother, a sleep-deprived junior doctor at the time, bought it for me from a warren-like bookshop near his flat in London. The shop, sadly, is long gone, but I still have Children of the Gods by Kenneth McLeish, illustrated by Elisabeth Frink. It infiltrated my childhood imagination - it was one of the things that set me on the path to studying classics, and becoming a writer. The stories were strange and wild, full of powerful witches, unpredictable gods and sword-wielding slayers. They were also extreme: about families who turn murderously on each other; impossible tasks set by cruel kings; love that goes wrong; wars and journeys and terrible loss. There was magic, there was shapeshifting, there were monsters, there were descents to the land of the dead. Humans and immortals inhabited the same world, which was sometimes perilous, sometimes exciting. The stories were obviously fantastical. All the same, brothers really do war with each other. People tell the truth but aren't believed. Wars destroy the innocent. Lovers are parted. Parents endure the grief of losing children. Women suffer violence at the hands of men. The cleverest of people can be blind to what is really going on. The law of the land can contradict what you know to be just. Mysterious diseases devastate cities. Floods and fire tear lives apart.

For the Greeks, the word muthos simply meant a traditional tale. In the 21st century, we have long left behind the political and religious framework in which these stories first circulated - but their power endures. Greek myths remain true for us because they excavate the very extremes of human experience: sudden, inexplicable catastrophe; radical reversals of fortune; seemingly arbitrary events that transform lives. They deal, in short, in the hard basic facts of the human condition. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, myths were everywhere. The stories were painted on the pottery that people ate and drank from; they were carved into the pediments of the temples outside which they sacrificed to the gods; they were the raw material of the songs they sang and the rituals they performed. Myths provided a shared cultural language, and a tentacular, ever-branching network of routes towards understanding the nature of the world, of human and divine life. They explained the stars. They told of the creation of plants and animals, rocks and streams. They hovered around individual locales, explaining the origin of towns, regional cults and families. They reinforced customs and norms - sometimes offering a narrative justification for habits of oppression, not least of women and outsiders. For a people scattered liberally across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea - Greek culture flowed out well beyond the boundaries of the modern Greek state - they also provided a shared sense of cultural identity.