Delphic Maxim 3: Respect the Gods

The challenge I’ve set myself — in order to get in the habit of writing regularly — is to respond to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes every morning, and the paste it unedited into Medium. The Delphic Maxims were carved on stones around the Oracle at Delphi in Ancient Greece. They’re a kind of guidelines for living your life. Now, just because an ancient culture made these prescriptions for life doesn’t mean that they’re still relevant today. A lot of young men (Jordan Peterson fans) worship Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And there’s a lot that’s admirable about Stoic philosophy — but there’s also a lot that’s missing or dated. And even more importantly: any ethical guide to life is of its time. There might be some principles you can carry forward — and definitely with each translation some of that work gets done — but in the main, life has changed dramatically over time.

So let me attempt to unpack the Delphic Maxims and translate them, in my own terms, for a contemporary world.

3. Respect the Gods

I want to tack in a different direction than you might expect for this one, because the first maxim already referenced ‘following God’, and I think ‘respect the Gods’ needs to be qualitatively different.

For me, ‘the Gods’ hearkens to the pagan gods — the pantheons of Greece, Rome, even the Vikings. What does it mean to say ‘respect the Gods’ when I refer to these? I think it’s about respect for the stories and myths that have existed for thousands of years. I say this because I’ve been reading through those myths with my friends of late, and they’re beautiful and timeless.

In the introduction to his brilliant book Why Read The Classics?, Italo Calvino argues that the classics are stories with which we feel intimately familiar, and that we return to time and time again. It’s a similar idea to the central thesis of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces: there are fundamental stories about the world that seem to recur in different times and cultures, in completely different parts of the world.

Calvino points out that each time you read these stories, you take something new away from them, despite their familiarity. If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Both stories have a good dose of cautionary allegory about the downside to not respecting the Gods. (If you want an even more horrifying take, consider Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The Gods are capricious, jealous, vain and violent. Not the best sort of people to offend!) But, like the Bible, these stories don’t have to be taken as literal recounts of the truth — in fact they shouldn’t.

The reason I think you should read them is because a healthy respect for the classics enriches your own perspective on life. It nourishment for your intellect and imagination — you don’t have to be a latin-reading genius, these are the sorts of stories that underpin the culture we’re used to (Disney, fantasy, science fiction, all of it). The tales — which often weave the Delphic Oracle herself into the mix — carry moral weight, and their heroes are flawed and all too human at the same time as they are inspiring. This, I imagine, is how the timelessness creeps into the stories.

They’re also not what you’d expect. I think a lot of people expect these stories to be dry, boring, tedious — probably because at some point we’ve felt compelled to study something we didn’t want to study. It’s refreshing to choose to read something that you might otherwise have been forced to read when younger, to read something ‘difficult’ for pleasure. And it enriches your life.

Says Calvino:

“A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.”

This is where the value lies: you filter these narratives through the lens of your modern life, but at the same time these stories function inside brackets. You step outside the grind of the world and into the fantasy of another — and yet it feels familiar (it is, after all, bracketed — not wholly apart from the prose of your life, but not within it either).

Those are stories — and Gods — worthy of respect.