…Every pagan pantheon embodies a psychology; or at least a role-set of behaviours and drives characteristic of a spectrum of human motivations, fears and desires. The more developed pantheons have elaborate myths and legends which reveal much about what humans can do or what they should do, and why they choose to do it or not.

Thus the study of Classics equips us to understand ourselves and our fellows at least as well, if not better, than any passing fashion in any number of incomplete modern psychological theories. Rather oddly, we actually lost a lot of our psychological knowledge during the period of dominance of monotheist religion, and recent attempts to recover it using the techniques of scientific reductionism have produced rather unsubtle and frequently useless ideas that only work on rats or people confronted with questionnaires.