By a stroke of luck, La lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”), Book IV of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s fictional saga, La traverse des temps (“Crossing Time”), takes place in Greece in the fifth century BC in the year Paris is hosting the Olympic Games. Indeed, two chapters are devoted to “the invention of sport and the Olympic contests”. Schmitt elaborates on the formidable challenge he has set himself and fully embraced, and places it in the context of our contemporary everyday lives.

Livres Hebdo: La lumière du bonheur is the fourth volume in your fictional saga, La traverse des temps. It could have been called La légende des siècles (“The Tale of the Centuries”). Where did such a wildly ambitious idea come from?

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: I was a young philosophy lecturer at university. The years I’d spent studying had been formative and exciting but entirely cerebral and they hadn’t involved much imagination. I felt that fiction had this extraordinary power. Novels can breathe new life into the past, they can revive what’s vanished and put us in touch with distant times. I immediately had a vision of my main character, Noam, a man condemned to immortality, like the wandering Jew, who would tell us our own story by telling his down the millennia.

Did you know from the start how you were going to split up the civilisations or that there would be eight books? Or did the structure come to you in the process of writing?

I couldn’t have done it when I first had the idea at 25. Over the decades, I’ve acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge that’s enabled me to make these divisions and pick out the tipping points when humanity has gone from one age to another.

How far do you go in this latest volume?

Up to our near future, with a slight difference. Up to what you could imagine about the critical changes happening in our own time, you know, eco-anxiety and the “growth” of humankind through state-of-the-art technology.

How did you achieve the subtle balance between history and fiction? Are you more comfortable in some periods than in others?

I have to lay the foundations of my knowledge about a period early on so they’ve got time to settle, and I can move about comfortably in an ancient world the way I move about in Paris or San Francisco. After that, my imagination takes o@ spontaneously. I have to say, though, the time of La lumière du bonheur, fifth century BC Athens, Delphos, Lesbos and Olympia, was particularly gratifying for me. I started learning Greek and Latin at the age of 13, and I’m fanatical about philosophy, the theatre and sport. In fact, I’m really very Greek!

“Writing this novel changed the way I think about crisis.”

The book coming out today takes place in Athens’ Golden Age. How do you regard the “mother” of western democracy now, when we’re at a crisis point and the model it represented is under siege, even in Europe, and other countries are challenging it, particularly in the global south?

When I describe the confrontations between Athens and Sparta in the novel, I feel as though I’m describing western democracy in the face of Putin’s Russia or fundamentalist religious leaders.

The past reveals the structures of the present in a very transparent way. And I also show the reactions of the Greek philosophers to the notion of crisis: for some, it was inherent in society; for others it needed to be suppressed. Those who thought it was inherent in how groups relate to each other conceived of politics as a way of managing tensions; they saw crisis as the galvanising force of democracy, so necessarily without end and needing to be controlled. People who wanted to end a crisis definitively invented totalitarianisms. Like Plato... Writing this novel changed the way I think about crisis.

When you write about the past, are you also writing about the present?

To write about the past is to write from the standpoint of today and to question what has led to our current situation. To write about the past is also to write for the present: you shed light on the past and show that what is might not have been and also that what is might vanish. It means grasping the historicity of things, and thus, their frailty.

Did you bring out this Greek volume in the year of the Olympic Games by chance or was it part of a carefully planned and deliberate strategy?

Chance is often the clothing of fate! The project has been simmering in me for years and the possibility of such a coincidence never once occurred to me. I think readers will be fascinated by the two chapters on the invention of sport and the Olympic contests.

Your next book is called Les deux royaumes (“The Two Kingdoms”) and deals with Roman civilisation and the birth of Christ. When is it coming out?

In 2025, for sure. I designed the collection of novels from the outset, as well as what happens to my recurring characters (Noam, Noura and Derek), but I write the books gradually. I need a year for each book. If I can use a metaphor from sport, I’d say it’s a marathon run like a sprint! I end up shattered each time. Then the impetus returns. It always does.

The three recurring heroes in the saga, Noam the narrator, Noura the beautiful refugee and excessive, shadowy Derek are all immortal and now enter Ancient Greece in the fifth century before Christ.

The setting is Athens, the city of Pericles, the Parthenon, Alcibiades, Phidias, Plato, and Socrates the first writer to be persecuted, sentenced and forced by politicians to commit suicide for his ideas, speeches and freedom of thought. A splendid age that was also a time of fratricidal conflicts between Greek cities, especially Athens and Sparta. “Metic” Noam (i.e., a fee-paying foreigner, and in its etymological meaning, “he who lives with”) will have to fit into Athenian society, a census-taking democracy, exclusive and inegalitarian. Any resemblance to contemporary characters and issues is probably no accident, because “to write about the past,” as Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt explains, “is to write for today in order to shed light on the present.”

In La Lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”), Eric-Emmanuel’s immortal hero turns up in Greece in the fifth century BC. He witnesses the birth of democracy and prepares for the Olympic Games. His trajectory sheds light on our own.

You’ve explored the Neolithic, Mesopotamia and Egypt. You seem very much at home in Book IV of La traversée des temps (“Crossing Time”).

I’m in my element! Ancient Greece brings together my passion for philosophy and the theatre. It’s a time when you see thought being freed from religion and debate taking precedence over strength. Socrates questions the world as he walks about the city, hence his sobriquet, “Athens’ street-corner philosopher”. Citizens elect their representatives; the Acropolis celebrates the gods and the Agora celebrates conversation; actors get up on stage to question the human condition. I’m not the only one who’s at home here: this home is ours. We’re still living in a Greek age. Athens is our mirror.

More precisely, was Athenian democracy anything like our own?

It was the total opposite. In Athens, the electoral body only involved a third of the population; it left out women and foreigners (who were deprived of Athenian citizenship), as well as slaves. Democracy didn’t aim to establish equality between people: it conferred on a group the mission to decide for everyone. We’re more virtuous today.

It was still a great leap forward...

A revolution. You go from the rule of the strongest to the rule of laws that had been debated, voted on and amended. In Athens, to govern was to speak. Nothing was more highly prized than argument and eloquence. Policymakers were elected to take charge of public, political and military aOairs. A lottery system was operated which gave every citizen, whoever they were, the power to decide. Our climate and end-of-life citizen consultations are based on the same model.

But speech can also be instrumentalised.

Yes, because, if democracy is going to work properly, it requires democrats like the famous orator Pericles, who spoke not for himself but for the city. His aim wasn’t to respond to opinion but to create it. But, in Athens, the same as today, demagogues can abuse speech to serve their own interests. Donald Trump is an example. Despite that risk, I think, like Churchill, that we still haven’t found a better system. Even authoritarian regimes try to make themselves look like a democracy. Take the sham presidential elections organised by Vladimir Putin, for example...

Sparta was ruled by an oligarchy and accused Athens of decadence...

Sparta was an authoritarian city, and it claimed that Athens, which was a democracy, was fragile, eOeminate and corrupted by comfort and games. It thought that prosperous populations wouldn’t vote for war. Pericles convinced the Athenians to confront Sparta so as to uphold their values. You can’t fail to be reminded of what’s playing out between Europe and Russia in the world today.

Do you think teaching philosophy is enough to enable people to live together?

That was Socrates’ Achilles’ heel! By asking “why”, he taught his interlocutor how to present an argument. He created a citizen but he overlooked the passions explored in the Greek art of

drama – the theatre –, which represented the peak of intelligence. In the tragedies, good isn’t pitted against evil. Antigone wants her brother to be buried, but Creon refuses because he is bound to punish anyone who disobeys the law. The law of emotions versus the law of the State: tragedy recognises these insoluble conflicts.

How should we confront tragedy?

Like Athens, our era has its drama dealers: demagogues who claim you can stop migrants by building walls, fundamentalists who want one State to destroy the other in the conflict between Palestine and Israel. A binary vision of the world that creates more bloodshed than the search for complex solutions.

This year, Paris is hosting the Olympic Games. What was the original idea behind them?

In 776 BC, Athens decided to establish games as a way to diOuse tensions between enemy communities through sport. The truce was long enough to create a community bigger than the warring States. In Olympia, every four years, men laid down their arms while they met in a noble contest that transcended aggression. Like the Athenians, I think you’ve got to put people above conflict. I wonder: is it really advisable for our Olympic committee to exclude Russian athletes from the opening ceremony? The spirit of concord at root of the contest should transcend our divisions.

A compelling, uplifting novel.

Noam has experienced the Neolithic, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Now, he discovers Greece, philosophy, democracy and drama through the eyes of a fee-paying foreigner in Athens. How will a free man acquire Athenian citizenship and compete in the Olympic Games? Thrilling and light-hearted, La lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”) fully lives up to its title. A must-read for its exposé of our origins and for the light it sheds, through the lens of Ancient Greece, on the troubled times we live in.

In his new book, La Lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”), Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt distils the quintessence of Ancient Greece in 600 pages – the ideal opportunity to discuss democracy, the Olympic Games and tragedy.

In Greece, the Olympic track is simply a sandy sports pitch. On its 192 metres the Olympic Games first saw the light of day, 3,000 years ago. Now, as young people in shorts bound away in a spontaneous race this April day 2024, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt smiles. There are shouts of encouragement and he laughs. “This is the site of the world’s first alliance. Participants and spectators would arrive from all over. The Olympic Games was a cultural event for 900 years before disappearing then being revived,” he aUirms.

Striding across the sports pitch where he’s come to talk about La Lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”), his new book published on 17 April, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt travels back in time. The author of numerous bestselling novels and plays, he’s been on course to tell the story of humanity in a light-hearted way since 2021, a kind of encyclopaedia for dummies in the form of a thrilling eight-part series.

“The civilisation of speech”

This time, Noam, his immortal hero, has arrived in Athens, where he discovers the birth of a system he can scarcely believe: democracy. “We owe Ancient Greece a lot,” says the author, as he walks among the columns where the flame has just been lit. “Most significantly, the civilisation of speech.” Greece was the centre of debate for experts but also ordinary residents, who would exchange ideas and were ready to have theirs challenged by the people they heard, an attitude which excites this former philosophy lecturer, a graduate of the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and now a member of the Goncourt Academy. “The Greeks sought harmony and the union of mind and body,” he asserts. “Courage was prioritised over strength. That meant being neither over-cautious nor reckless.” A way of life that seems a far cry from our current crises.

“We’re putting one foot in front of the other all the time, but are we making any progress? That’s the question at root of my books,” sighs Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. He’s impressed by Aeschylus, Euripides and all the authors who put words to human suUering. “The Greeks invented tragedy to describe the world’s complexity. Dramas were staged to show everyone that there’s no easy solution.”

“A play of mirrors between the ages”

This was the origin of literature, the theatre and film. Fiction became a means of talking to the public about real life. “It’s something we badly need if we’re to understand the things going on around us.” That was true for Athens and Sparta, at war with each other when those early plays were written. “And it’s still true today for Israel and Palestine.”

Brussels-based Schmitt has been translated into some 50 languages. His works are studied in schools throughout the world and his plays are regularly performed in Europe and the US. His is a contemporary French voice that can boast an international audience, and he knows he can spread the word.

A true scholar who brings to his novels the same humour and tenderness that he brings to life, in this series Schmitt has found a new way to build bridges. “There’s quite clearly a play of mirrors between the ages. History is always a window on to the past which can illuminate the present.”

Now in his 60s, Schmitt doesn’t have much time for nostalgia, but he can’t help recalling the spirit that infused those first athletes. “Conflicts stopped during those initial Olympic Games. A truce was called, and men confronted each other symbolically in play. There wasn’t a cult of achievement, it was just a matter of ‘may the best man win’!”

“The body was neither scorned nor glorified.”

Victory was prized because it galvanised and transported the spectators. “Olympia was where sport began to win people’s aUection,” Schmitt goes on. In his book, Noam is a fee-paying foreigner oUicially barred from participating in the Olympic Games. But his protector soon realises that he’s good: the citizens will all approve and accept him as one of them without more ado. Any resemblance to existing or past facts or people... is entirely intentional!

By describing key moments in the history of humanity, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt shines a light on issues as old as time. His hero is stronger than artificial intelligence, and he’s astonished by what he sees. “Today, we’re threatened by regression in so many areas. It’s refreshing to be curious and kind and not to be opinionated about everything.”

One final positive to take away from Ancient Greece? “The body was neither scorned nor glorified. Being naked wasn’t sexualised. In the next book, I’ll show how Rome and Christianity changed everything.”

Schmitt is thoroughly imbued with this culture. “I’ve always needed firm foundations before I can give my imagination free rein. And I adore finding material right there under my nose!” He doesn’t have to look far: outside the Temple of Zeus, tourists are taking selfie after selfie with their phones, pretending to be living gods. Narcissus was Greek, after all...

On the west side of the Peloponnese, among the olive trees in the pleasant valley of the River Alpheus, lies the site of Olympia where the first Olympic Games saw the light of day in 776 BC. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt first came here when he was 15. As he wrote his latest novel, he travelled back in his imagination to a living Olympia full of the noise of crowds and the smell of cooking fat and smoke. So, in his mind, this is his third visit to its ruins and its magical light. Marble columns rise amidst pines, cypresses and brilliant blossoming Judas trees in the splendour of a Mediterranean springtime. A broad ancient road divides the site in two. To the right is the gymnasium where the athletes would train for months in the simplest of garbs – “gymnos” means “naked” in Greek – beside the pillars of the arena where the competitors met.

To the left are the remains of the Temple of Zeus, who was venerated for the nine centuries the classical games lasted, because the place was also a vast sanctuary to the ruler of the Greek gods. And beyond is the Olympic stadium, where the arch of the tunnel through which the spectators entered is still visible, opening on to the edge of the 200-metre track (or 600 steps of the hero Heracles) where the athletes competed, an esplanade still used today: teachers from all over the world get their pupils to race along it, cheered on by crowds of young spectators.

According to custom, the Olympic flame is lit in the ruins of the Temple of Hera adjacent to the Temple of Zeus, although, let’s be clear, the ritual was not part of the Games of Ancient Greece. In fact, it was a German academic, Carl Diem, who started the tradition of the Olympic torch relay at the Berlin games in 1936, in other words, during the Nazi era, which later sparked controversies that have since been forgotten about...

Why did you choose Olympia out of the five places where you have your Greek hero develop?

Because the Greeks invented sport, which was the prerogative of citizens who had time to devote to leisure pursuits. Sport was a mark of social success. Contrary to what some historians say, sport wasn’t intended as preparation for war, not in Athens anyway. Initially, the athletes wore clothes. The story goes that one of them tripped over his own toga, so clothing was later removed to avoid accidents. Another version tells how the fastest runner had run naked, and everyone else copied him hoping that it would help them to win. These myths were already in circulation in the fifth century BC when my novel is set. Remember that the Olympic Games in the Ancient World went on for nine centuries. Athletes would smear themselves in oil for protection and to get a suntan, which was a sign of social standing – all very contemporary!

Doing sport in Ancient Greece gave you a harmonious body not a powerful one. The idea was to show that your body was at peace. Virility involved harmony. You can see it in Greek statues, which express serenity and balance. Heightened feelings were avoided and equanimity was prioritised – a kind of benevolence. Nudity wasn’t sexual, it was an outfit. The body expressed both physical and spiritual harmony, a link that was essential to the Greeks through the phrase I have Socrates repeat in my book: beauty and wisdom (“kalos k’agathos”), a concept that didn’t exist at all for the Egyptians, who represented dwarves as attractive. Whereas for the Greeks, the canon of beauty ultimately generated exclusion. A fat barbarian without muscles came to be considered as sub-human.

Your hero is one of the fee-paying foreigners, but he manages to become a full citizen through sport...

Only citizens were allowed to compete in the Olympic Games. Others sometimes got in, however. There were cases of citizenship being awarded so that Athens could benefit from the glory a valiant man might bring through his achievements, a process that’s not unknown today: top athletes and footballers can acquire a nationality by virtue of the records they may bring to the country, as was the case for the Greek cities. As a general rule, though, citizenship was certainly not linked to merit but was passed down from father to son. The history of Athens nevertheless opened up citizenship (then pinned it) to the vagaries of History. In time of war, citizenship was broadened out for the purpose of recruiting soldiers. Because, while a citizen was a privileged being, he was also someone who fought. The city gave him a lot and he owed it something in return.

What made the Olympic Games unique compared with other games the Greeks loved?

Unlike the Nemean, Pythian and Isthmian Games, only the Olympic Games were devoted entirely to sport. The others involved contests from several disciplines, like poetry, eloquence and painting. The Chrematistic Games were standardly what athletes did to earn money. In Olympia, glory was all that mattered, but the Olympic Games were paradoxically the most prestigious games in the whole of the ancient world. So, of course, orators would arrive in the wake of the athletes to show off their talents, historians told stories and musicians played. There was a vast influx of people: 40,000 people would suddenly turn up in a place inhabited by a few priests and goatherds the rest of the year. An extraordinary encampment would be set up, a massive showcase. It was totally crazy. The athletes and trainers would begin by saying prayers to Zeus. There was something at once cautious and desperate in the Greeks’ prayers, as though they were giving in to a kind of cheerful fatalism: not everything depends on us. The same people later ended up inventing stoicism. You did your human duty, which included prayer, but at the end of the day it was Zeus who decided.

Olympia is a place where you get a sense of a spirituality that’s somehow both impressive and soothing. It’s very different from Delphi, a restful sanctuary on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. At Olympia, by contrast, you get a sense of power, of rectitude. It’s no accident that the most popular sport was chariot racing, which Alcibiades exploited to win political glory. Otherwise, the pentathlon was the queen discipline because it meant displaying very different physical skills. When it came to the long jump, recent archaeological research has shown that long jumpers carried halteres or weights to propel themselves to a distance of 15 metres. Archaeologists have also discovered that every place where great sporting competitions took place had its own criteria as well as its own equipment (the disc didn’t weight the same in Olympia and Nemea) and distances, and the dimensions of the stadium varied from 150 to 180 metres.

But, in terms of shared values, did the Olympic Games bring about some unity?

There was genuine respect for the rules and for the oath which the judges and athletes swore to Zeus on arrival at Olympia. A cheat was an absolute pariah and a judge who accepted a bribe was a traitor. An ideal of honesty was established, as well as ideals of courage and determination. Athletes could pull out during preparation. On the other hand, it was dishonourable to give up during the contests.

The Games were the chance to share a culture: actors would sell their services, poets would recite Homer and Hesiod. On the instant, a common culture united the Greek cities, which had different ways of pronouncing the language and even sometimes used different vocabulary. Not everyone spoke Attic Greek, the language of Athens. Many people spoke Doric Greek, Milesian and other dialects. The Panhellenic dream was alive at this time with Greek settlers turning up, including from non-Greek territories.

Everyone gathered together for a month’s preparation before the Games and then for the week-long contests.

And did people just go back home afterwards with their crown of olives?

Glory was one of the most important concepts of Ancient Greece. Men knew they were ephemeral and only glory could give them immortality: by dying in combat or by having won at the Games – Achilles on one side, Milo of Croton on the other. There are statues of him at Olympia. He was a great athlete. Mind you, he ended up falling prey to “hubris”, a Greek word meaning “excess”. He was the strongest man, but he died of it because he was too convinced of his own prowess. The story goes that he wanted to split an olive tree. He got trapped in it and wild animals devoured him. The moral of the story is that you may want to be a Hercules, but you shouldn’t overstep the mark.

And that’s another Greek ideal: the happy medium, which later became one of the overarching themes of the philosopher Aristotle. For instance, courage is a happy medium between recklessness and cowardice. A reckless person is someone who is unaware of risk and a coward is someone who runs away from it. A brave man is someone who is fully aware of risk and who confronts it. That ideal of self-control, theorised in the fourth century by Aristotle, tells us something important. We could learn a lot from it today...

Why did the Emperor Theodosius outlaw the Olympic Games in 394 BC?

Theodosius wanted to abolish pagan cults. And as polytheistic pagan religion and sport were intertwined in the Olympic Games, he killed off sport by killing off polytheism. There then followed centuries of contempt for the body, demonstrated in Platonic philosophy and taken up by some of the early Church Fathers. I find that hostility towards the body a regrettable aspect of Christianity – it’s not written down anywhere, it’s just an interpretation. Sport could have been retained even while polytheism was abolished. But the misinterpretation meant that the one disappeared with the other. And the other thing that happened was that the ideal of truce emphasised by the Olympic Games of Ancient Greece also vanished. Even when there’s a war, a truce can be observed... Greece was frequently at war. In fact, the spirit of concord and peace is one of the most important lessons of political philosophy. So, I think that even Russian athletes should be allowed to come to Paris. I don’t understand why they’re being kept out by the current Olympic Committee. In the light of History, a truce should exist.

But to get back to the third century BC: it’s a shame they threw out the baby with the bathwater and abolished an extraordinary event that united the whole of the Mediterranean basin. The games suppressed ill-feeling between the cities in a truly Freudian process of sublimation: raw violence was driven out by transferring it to symbolism, games and ritual. You’ve got to realise how small we are with our Olympic Games reconstituted a mere 120 years ago compared with the 900 years they lasted in the Ancient World. I’m still impressed: what other cultural event went on for almost a millennium only to be reborn 1,500 years later? The torch burns brightly!

After the Neolithic and the Flood (Paradis perdus – “Paradise Lost”), Babel and Mesopotamia (La Porte du ciel – “Heaven’s Gate”), Egypt under the pharaohs and Moses (Soleil sombre – “The Sun Goes Down”), Book IV of La Traversée des temps (“Crossing Time”) propels Noam, its immortal hero, into fifth-century BC Greece.

We traced his steps in the shadow of Olympia and the Acropolis.

“I feel pretty much at home here,” comments Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. “Here, you’ve got an era and an epoch (the century of Pericles), a country (Greece), Olympia and Athens.” Together with this sunny member of the Goncourt Academy, I basked in the intense light of the gods and wallowed in the shadow of the philosophers. A trip back in time underpins Schmitt’s fictional and metaphysical fresco begun in 2021 but maturing over decades in the bestselling novelist and playwright’s mind. “Plato used to say that the first virtue of the philosopher is surprise, awe even, at what is but might not have been.” Noam, Schmitt’s immortal hero, exudes that sense of awe as he travels through the centuries. Through his eyes, every ruin comes to life, and democracy, so diXicult to establish, looks as though it was invented yesterday. On every street corner, Noam stumbles across Aristophanes, Euripides, Socrates, Hippocrates or Plato. “This period is our home, but it also challenges our diXerences and creates novelists and philosophers. We have this ancient civilisation to thank for western modernity. It invented the reign of the word – “logos” – and reason with which to combat violence and stave oX the chaos of the world. It freed thought from religion and invented science, philosophy and critical thinking. It also came up with the concept of theatre, the most perfect way of comprehending the world and turning it into fiction. Beauty came into being and with it, the fine arts uncoupled from every divine or sacred function.”

Olympia then the Acropolis of Athens: Schmitt says he gets as much enjoyment from his memories as he does from reading and his imagination. “I came here with my memory, which is also a kind of memory of humanity based on all the books I’ve read. I fill it with ghosts so that it echoes with the noises of the past.” He first visited Olympia when he was 15. “To come to Olympia is to find the spirit of truce. The spirit of peace and concord constitutes a major philosophy lesson.” And, of course, he’s thinking of the imminent Paris Olympics, which had their origin in 776 BC and continued until 393 AD: 1,169 years, during which the Games took place every four years in honour of Zeus at the time of the second full moon after the summer solstice. They embodied ideals of perseverance and endurance and highlighted a time of exchange between citizens from diXerent backgrounds and cities. Greeks would come from as far away as Sicily or Thrace. Some 40,000 people would gather here. The only glory came from winning, although medals and the flame didn’t exist back then, and the winner took away a simple laurel wreath. Those conventions persisted until the Christian Emperor Theodosius banned the Games in the fourth century on the grounds that they were dedicated to the gods.

Outside the Temple of Hera, where, since 1936 the flame has traditionally been lit, Schmitt says, “I’m glad Courbertin re-established the Greek ideal in 1896, but I worry that today not everyone, including the Olympic committee, has understood the Olympic values of truce and concord.”

Th Greek miracle still hovers over Athens and its Acropolis celebrating the gods. Grandiose without grandiloquence, the Acropolis looks as if its columns were hewn from the very rock it stands on and perfectly illustrates the proportion and harmony that informed Greek thought. A few metres below, like an image of the hierarchy between mortals and deities, stands the Agora

dedicated to the people, where men determined the principles that would guide society. “When democracy emerged, it invented both demagoguery and democracy. The first panders to ready- made opinions; the second tries to construct them,” says he who could be either Callicles or Socrates from one of Plato’s Dialogues. “The whole of Greece carries the flame for humanity. I could live here if I weren’t afraid of becoming lazy! There’s still a kind of serene way of living that endures here,” concludes the secular flâneur.

In the fourth volume of the mammoth literary series imagined and written by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, we meet back up with the saga’s heroes, Noam, Noura and Derek, five years before the start of our era in what was then the cradle of civilisation, Greece.

The breathtaking impetus which has been driving the author on since the start is still just as intense. Thanks to him, readers have so far experienced the Neolithic, the Flood, the construction of the Tower of Babel, Egypt under the Pharaohs and the flight of Moses.

As in every episode, Noam is quick to learn. Gifted with a capacity to adapt and confront new situations, after a few restless years he lands on Lesbos, where he is catapulted into one of the greatest manmade maelstroms in history – a maelstrom of intellectual thought. As a doctor, Noam meets Hippocrates, who tells him of the oath he wants the young people to take, whom he is planning to teach in his future college. Socrates befriends him and initiates him into the subtleties of philosophy. He is moved and shocked by the first theatrical performance he sees, a Greek tragedy that leaves him speechless. With his exceptional physical characteristics (although no one in his entourage knows he’s immortal), he undertakes the training and succeeds in qualifying for the Olympic Games. Back then, competitors participated naked, while married women were denied entry to the stands. Javelin, discus, track events: Noam passes all the tests. Above all, he is stunned to discover the manner in which the city is now governed: he discovers democracy!

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has an extraordinary talent for bringing to his readers the public- speaking jousts and interrogations of society’s future. In his telling, the Athenians wonder whether they should go to war with Sparta, Pericles speaks and we hear him, Socrates cogitates as he walks and we walk with him. Noam takes the name “Argos”, becomes a citizen and observes the power games, as well as the games of seduction. In this country dominated by the Acropolis and subject to the gods, learning about freedom could give people wings but elicit jealousy and hatred. A kind of history of humanity and totally thrilling!

La Traversée des temps (“Crossing Time”) is quite simply the history of humanity. Its hero, Noam, was born 8,000 years ago. Endowed with immortality, he time-travels his way across the centuries all the way to the present time, at which point he sits down and writes up his story. A kind of scribe for his main protagonist, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has already produced three books in the series: Paradis perdus (“Paradise Lost”) takes place in the Neolithic and during the Flood; the Tower of Babel and Mesopotamian civilisation are the setting for La porte du ciel (“Heaven’s Gate”), while Soleil sombre (“The Sun Goes Down”) revives Moses and Ancient Egypt. Book IV in the series, La lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”) is set in fifth- century BC Greece, where Noam runs into Socrates, Hippocrates, Alcibiades, Pericles and Aspasia and Sappho, among others.

We’re in the world of the adventure story here, complete with intrigues, plot reversals and heroes and villains, but the backdrop is the azure sky that saw the birth of theatre, philosophy and democracy. Who better than Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt to deliver such a swashbuckling, pitch-perfect and thrilling novel? We eagerly await the next volumes in the saga, which will probably run to nine, the author tells us. “The fifth will be called Les deux Royaumes (“The Two Kingdoms”)”, he says. “The terrestrial Roman Empire and the celestial empire of Jerusalem.”

What made you take on a crazy enterprise like this saga?

It began as a tribute to the novel. Unlike ruins, fiction has the power to resuscitate ancient worlds and recapture the sights, smells, sounds and spiritual life that animated their vanished cities. Novels make time-travel possible like no other artform. I wanted to interrogate the present by delving into the past and home in on the periods when humanity changed, when it tipped from one age into another and started looking more like the world we live in now. Human society is not a hive. Noam is blown away by events in Athens, but by the end of the book, he can’t cope anymore and he stays with the bees, the way Plato, traumatised by the death of Socrates, saw the hive as the model of a perfect society where everyone has their natural place.

But society isn’t actually a natural phenomenon: it’s a historical and human phenomenon. It’s important to question periods of upheaval and change, and it’s equally important to recover a sense of awe at what was built, in this case, democracy. Today, we take democracy for granted, although less than we did. Noam, however, has never known anything other than regimes founded on might. Suddenly, men are relinquishing their might and saying that now, in their group, everyone is equal and responsibilities are going to be divided up either by election or randomly by lottery. This is a revolution. Noam doesn’t believe it’ll work because it’s not a system based on strength. He looks at democracy with the eyes of Vladimir Putin. But it does work. It may not be perfect, as you’ll read throughout the book, but it exists.

Is the book a lesson for today?

I think so. Also, like a pure chemical precipitate, you can identify the categories that have activated our life. Democracy creates three types of character: the democrat, the demagogue and the man with ambitions. You can fit all our politicians into that schema. The democrat embodies democracy, outlines a common future for everyone and is concerned with the common good not with the good of groups. Characters like that are rare in history – Churchill, de Gaulle, Pericles... The demagogue plays to the opinions of a group. He doesn’t bring people together; he divides them and he depends on those divisions for his own existence. The person

with ambitions comes in where power is assumed through neither strength nor heritance. Napoleon and Macron are in that category: men who realise that democracy is about the rule of opinion and they set out to use it.

What have you learnt from writing this saga?

It’s forced me to reflect on history. And what I think about above all is fragility. I feel I’ve understood the meaning of historicity, you know: things happen but those things are fragile, they vanish. Athenian democracy became nothing more than a memory in the history of humankind before the 18th century revived it. So, what I’ve taken away from writing the series is a strong sense of the fragility of progress, and I think that’s a contemporary feeling. We experienced a hiatus in history – at least, we did in Europe – and then history returned, and we realised that everything we thought was solid and that we took for granted is fragile.

The main theme running through this saga is surely the search for freedom...

It’s clearly a humanist search. Noam is a healer, a doctor. For him, all men are equal. His ethics are ahead of all the ethics that were to develop. Even the ethics of Ancient Greece didn’t include the rights of individuals. Greek democracy was programmed very dicerently from ours. It was based on the group in which it tried to organise equality. For us, democracy is based on the individual and his or her rights. Noam seems to be programmed more in the Judeo-Christian mould, which we inherited through the rights of man. But, as I said earlier, we should also be open to feelings of awe. According to Plato, the first virtue of philosophy is awe. So, in this book there’s awe at the advent of theatre, democracy, sport, the Olympic Games, philosophy and thought liberated from religion.

You return to the contemporary era in every book, the era when Noam is writing.

Noam sat down to write because he’s been seized by a new anxiety. Throughout his life, he’s kept coming across theories about the end of the world. People used to fear the end of the world would come from the gods, from God or from nature, and now, suddenly, the idea that’s unique to the 21st century is that humans themselves can trigger the end of their world. We’re in an era of eco-anxiety, the idea that there are too many of us, we’re abusing the world, changing the climate, exhausting resources and destroying life. In this novel, I show how the political categories of the Ancient World activated today’s civilisation but at the same time they were hijacked, because there are more demagogues than democrats and the tyrants now make themselves look like democrats by organising pseudo-elections.

Book IV of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s saga about humanity, La lumière du bonheur (“The

Light of Happiness”), is set in Ancient Greece.

If you’d lived in Ancient Greece, what would your house have been like?

(Silence). I hope I’d have been able to a5ord a house in Athens in the Mosaic District with a gigantic patio and just live on the first floor.

Your favourite Greek statue?

There are several. (Long silence). I don’t know if it’s Greek, I think it’s Greco-Roman, but it’s a bust of Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. It’s a sculpture that represents the Greek dream of eternalising beauty in stone.

If you hadn’t been a poet and philosopher, what profession would you like to have had in Ancient Greece?

If I couldn’t be a poet or a philosopher, I’d have been a playwright. I’d have been like Sophocles and Euripides and taken some of the roles. Greek theatre allowed men to play the female and children’s parts because they wore masks.

Do you wish you could have acted in your plays?

No. For years, I refused to think about it and then, 10 years ago, I became an actor when I had to stand in for someone and I think it’s wonderful. Now, I do it, but I’m also reconciled to my body. When I was younger, I used to like having another person’s body.

What was wrong with yours?

It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, I found it incongruous. (Laughs). When I see myself on TV or in the mirror, it doesn’t seem to match who I am. (Laughs).

Your mother was a French athletics medallist and your father was a university boxing champion. What’s your sport?

From my mother, I inherited the ability to sprint. Well, at least, I can run very fast. And I’m good at high jump. I did it until my baccalaureate. Otherwise, I’m like a lazy grass snake!

Could you have been a champion?

My parents would have loved it, but they respected the fact that I wasn’t interested.

How many hours do you sleep per night? If you sleep...

I get eight hours sleep. I used to say “like a baby”; now I have one, I’d say I sleep better than a baby!

How do you organise your time to publish so much?

I dream about my books for a long time, years sometimes. But when I write, I’ve got an iron discipline. I write from 9 am until 8 pm. I stop for lunch and to walk the dog, but it’s 9-8.

What’s the strangest thing a reader has said to you?

(Silence). A guy in his thirties once came to see me to tell me he’d seen me on TV talking about La part de l’autre (“The Alternative Hypothesis”), my book about Hitler. He said, “I realised it was a book for me. I’ve failed everything in my life and I don’t want to turn into a monster.” He read The Alternative Hypothesis and after that he never stopped reading. He wanted to thank me for giving him the motivation. It was bonkers. When you write, you don’t think about things like that...

Your book is called La lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”). How many times have you seen that light?

I think I’m good at happiness (laughs)! The other day, Paule Constant, another author on the Goncourt jury, sent me this really nice text message. I’ll read it to you. (He scrolls through the texts on his mobile). She wrote, “You chose happiness and you’re good at giving it back.”

Volume IV of La Traversée des temps (“Crossing Time”), titled La Lumière du bonheur (“The Light of Happiness”), finds Schmitt’s immortal heroes in fifth-century BC Greece. We followed the French-Belgian author to the Hellenic peninsula to hear about his passion for this fascinating period.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt used his trip to Athens to catch up with his local publisher who has translated many of his novels, most recently La Rivale (“The Rival”), a delightful portrait of Maria Callas, the famous Greek soprano. Sporting a blue pinstripe suit and pristine white trainers, the 64-year-old novelist and author of some sell-out plays then set out on foot for the Veaki Theatre, where a Greek-language revival of his play Enigma Variations was being performed.

In his hand was a cool bag containing Belgian chocolates from the Brussels chocolatier Marcolini, which Schmitt was about to present to the actors Giannis Bezos and Pygmalion Dadakarides, who were taking the roles first assumed by Alain Delon and Francis Huster at the play’s first performance at the Théâtre Marigny in 1996.

On the way, he passed the Hellenic Parliament just as the Evzones were changing guard in a stunning bit of choreography by those elite members of the Presidential Guard in full regalia of red beret and white skirt. Then he walked past the café terraces where the young people of Athens were soaking up the spring sunshine.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt was excited and intrigued, as he prepared to watch the new adaptation, but he was also anxious: “I’ve seen my works performed all over the world, but it makes no difference, I’m always apprehensive,” he owned, as he crossed the threshold of the theatre. He needn’t have worried: at the end of the performance, the audience rose to its feet. His play never fails to bring the house down, and Schmitt, all smiles, was soon signing autographs. Schmitt has immense popularity in a country for which he professes unbounded admiration since childhood and his first Greek lessons. “Ancient Greece was for me an intellectual, an aesthetic and a sensual pleasure from the start.” In adolescence, Schmitt immersed himself in Homer, Aristotle, Euripides, Plato and Sophocles. He marvelled at the sculptures and the Greek ideal of beauty. From the age of 15, he became a frequent visitor to the peninsula, continuing to inform his passion for the culture with further studies at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. A playwright with a PhD in philosophy, he owes a lot to the civilisation that invented his two major obsessions: the theatre, which highlights the human condition, and philosophy, which questions it. “Athens also saw the birth of democracy, the Olympic Games and medicine,” he adds. “Think how much Western modernity has inherited!” So, it’s no surprise to learn that it brought him enormous pleasure to (re)introduce readers, in Book IV of La Traversée des temps, to the era of the strategist and orator Pericles in fifth-century BC Greece. As in earlier books in the saga, Noam is the hero whose discovery of a fascinating period of history helps to illuminate the present.

The ambition of this monumental eight-volume series is to tell the history of humanity, from the end of the Neolithic to the beginning of the industrial era, an epic involving three immortal characters, as well as plenty of love, sex, betrayal and conflict. It also involves a constant back-and-forth between past and present to shine a light on our own turbulent times. This slightly crazed idea came to the author 40 years ago, when he found himself wondering: “How did we get where we are: from hunter-gatherers to societies that are destroying the flora and fauna?” The project is colossal, like the writer’s imposing stature, and, too, like his oeuvre: 42 books translated into 48 languages with over six million copies sold and 32 plays regularly performed across more than 50 countries. Schmitt is one of the most widely read French-language writers in the world.

“When I was 25, I couldn’t have written all this. So, I made a pact with myself that I’d come back to it when I was ready. In the meantime, everything I’ve done has informed what I hope will be my life’s achievement.” Five years ago, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt felt the time had come. The trigger? The death of his mother, which made him realise that his days were numbered. Then came Covid-19 and the opportunity to chain himself to his desk. Since then, he has written the first four volumes without, however, relegating his other activities: he is the director of the Théâtre Rive Gauche in Paris (14th arrondissement), he sits on the Goncourt Academy jury, and he treads the boards and attends regular meetings with theatre producers. Currently, he is writing a play about Mozart’s relationship with his father. Nothing if not a workaholic!

Walking among the monuments of Athens with its statues and remains of the Agora, the public space where political life was played out in the Ancient World, we can easily imagine Noam, his immortal hero, being blown away by what he found there two and a half thousand years ago. In Book I, he survived the Flood; in Book II, he witnessed the fall of Babel; in Book III, he hobnobbed with the Pharaohs. In those past civilisations, Noam had previously only ever known power seized by force. In Book IV, he turns up in the Athenian democracy. Suddenly, everything looks possible. He is captivated by this extraordinary way of organising social life. “It was a key moment. Thought was liberated from religion; speech took over from strength; power was shared, and citizens elected their representatives. I wanted the reader, like Noam, to marvel at the beauty of this system, which in Greece, let’s not forget, excluded women, “metics” [foreigners with permanent residency but without citizenship] and slaves. Today, we’re more virtuous. And even though speech can be instrumentalised by demagogues like Donald Trump to serve their own interests, I still don’t think we’ve found a better organisation.”

Noam is a metic, but he wins citizenship through his athletic achievements at the Olympic Games. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, the son of a champion track athlete, to whom he owes his love of the Olympic Games (he even commentated at the Games in Rio in 2016 for France Télévisions), could hardly omit a trip to Olympia in the western Peloponnese. While Noam takes a week to reach the city on foot, we got there by bus in four hours, taking in the Corinth Canal, the mountains of Arcadia and the olive groves on the gentle slopes of the Alfeios Valley. It was here that the first Games were held in 776 BC. Marble columns rise amid the pines, cypresses and Judas trees with their spectacular purple blossom. “What moves me particularly here is the light,” he enthuses, outside the Temple of Zeus, ruler of the gods, whose power and tranquil strength pervade the ruins. “Greece was often at war. But every four years, a month before and a month after the five days of the Games, enemy Greek cities would lay down their arms to compete. Olympia flew the flag for the ideal of truce. The spirit of concord and peace is a major political lesson. I’m sorry that the idea hasn’t been understood by the Olympic Committee, which decided to exclude Russian athletes from the opening ceremony this summer.”

The last time Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt visited the site was when he was 15, apart from in his imagination where he pictured a vibrant, almost tangible Olympia full of the din of 4,000 spectators and the smell of sweat and cooking fat, of sensuality and the beauty of bodies in movement. He goes on: “Novels have the power to bring ruins back to life.” But they can also revive illustrious characters. What a pleasure to come across the doctor Hippocrates, the statesman Pericles, the philosopher Socrates, the orator Aspasia, the strategist Alcibiades and the poet Sappho! These people, who left their mark on western civilisation, here become loveable because we see them in their private lives. “I write to try to make the human condition acceptable and to get used to the idea of mortality. My hero’s immortality becomes unbearable to him. My dream is that, when people read this story, they’ll come to accept their vulnerability in life and think that they need to live intensely because life is a temporary gift.”

In Schmitt’s novels, everything is researched and checked. His erudition is truly encyclopaedic: history, the sciences, medicine, the religions... And he insists on doing the research himself, hoping to happen upon salty anecdotes which he can then enjoy weaving into his novels.

We go on our way and enter what remains of the tunnel the athletes used to reach the stadium and the track, which measures 600 Heraclean steps (Heracles was the god of athletes), or 192 metres.

Back in Athens in the evening, we head up to the Acropolis, a rocky plateau dominating the city and vying with the Taygetos mountain range. A steep path leads up to the “Propylaea”, the monumental doors to the Parthenon. The religious processions of Ancient Greece have been replaced by processions of tourists here to visit one of the most iconic buildings of the Ancient World. The Parthenon was a place of power, both a temple dedicated to the cult of the Goddess Athena and a bank, since it housed the treasury.

“I’m sorry I’m a pilgrim of the modern and not the old world,” confides the author, as dusk gently gilds the marble. “It’s beautiful in a grandiose but not a grandiloquent, overwhelming way. The Greeks had a sense of harmony,” he sighs. “It’s wonderful to see how humankind managed to bring out the full grandeur of this place. I feel as if I’m walking in an expression of human achievement, which has lasted two and a half thousand years...”

In your global saga, the reader follows the adventures of Noam, the immortal narrator of the history of the world.
What’s the aim of your project?

I’m using fiction to describe those first times which we’ve lost forever. In Greece, you see the first stages of democracy, the first plays and the first competitive sports. I love being able to wallow in wonderment and newness in historical moments.

The first volumes dealt with the Flood, Mesopotamia and Egypt. What does Greek civilisation tell us?

The fifth century BC was when speech and words replaced might, or strength. Democracy was born with the emergence of texts which were discussed, amended and adopted, and that was diCerent from the law of tyranny, the law of the strongest. Suddenly, the potential of thought emerged with arguments which could be expressed and used to counter other arguments. Ancient Athens was where the foundations were laid for the system we’ve got today. Even tyrannies, like Putin’s Russia, try to make themselves look like democracies.

Sport and the first Olympic Games...

It blows my mind to think that an athletic and a cultural event could last for nine hundred years! The Greeks oCered truce: let’s stop fighting and sublimate it through athletic confrontation. That was real political thought. War is contingent, really: there shouldn’t be any! The games were a symbol of the ideal of concord which was established every four years with no exceptions. The Russian athletes should be allowed to come to Paris – under the Russian flag, what’s more.

Getting back to Greek democracy: did it really emerge?

The whole of human history is about the enlargement of “us”. With the emergence of democracy in Greece, a group put paid to tyrants and organised itself by establishing equality among its members. Public positions were divided up randomly among citizens; they were chosen by lot. You get that today at citizens conventions on the climate or assisted dying. Now, however, when we talk about democracy, it’s mostly to confirm the rights of the individual.

Did democracy ultimately involve elections?

Every era has been troubled by the question of otherness: in Ancient Greece, residents without citizenship (“metics”) were respected and could get rich, but they weren’t citizens and neither were women or slaves. Now we’ve got migrants and we can’t decide how to welcome them. We need a tragic awareness of the human condition. And I’m a tragic optimist: there are problems that have no solution. It’s not a question of good and evil: there are good things that clash and are irreconcilable. Israel and Palestine are both legitimate. We need to be alert to folk who peddle shock stories and want simple solutions to complex problems. In reality, it’s not truth that wins out, it’s always force that carries the day.

You’re a philosopher. Isn’t the quest for truth what underpins philosophy?

Literature is an exploration of complexity, unlike philosophy which is based on the attempt to explain and resolve complexity. Then there’s debate: in Plato, I side with Socrates, who thinks

that other people can also come up with philosophical reasoning. There’s this belief in the sharing of reason and in methods that question and weigh up arguments for and against. That’s the Socratic “maieutic” method, which teaches by question and answer. At the same time, many Socratic dialogues end with an “aporia”, which is to say, it’s clear that there’s no solution. I very much like the way Socrates makes thought more about questions: too much rationality and reasoning can be fatal.

Your next book is going to be about Rome and the birth of Christianity. What can we learn from this journey through history?

My first book in the series was called Paradise Lost. The common thread in my story is eco- anxiety. I’ve placed my hero in a kind of contemporary anxiety which will take him right up to our era. Humanity now is wondering whether it’s gone too far. It’s the first time the question has been seriously asked. Humankind creates problems with its own genius. Science and technology make progress; humanity doesn’t. We need to make a hole in the wall of the present to give us a window on to the past. We’re living in a time that’s a tipping point.

In the shadow of the Acropolis.

Noam, the immortal narrator, travels through time (see the preceding episodes in the series La Traversée des temps – “Crossing Time”) and lands on the island of Lesbos where he discovers Greece. There he meets Pericles, Socrates, Sappho and Alcibiades in an initiation trip for a young man keen to take part in the Olympic Games and who aspires to become a citizen of Athens. Based on historical research, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s novel is nevertheless a genuine epic. In the shadow of the Acropolis, battles and conquests are played out prefiguring western civilisation.

“HUMANITY THRILLS ME”: ERIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT, HIS INSPIRATION, HIS TIME TRAVEL

Is revisiting the history of humanity a source of inspiration for Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and for us today? The renowned playwright, writer and director, whose books have been translated into 48 languages and whose plays and adaptations have been performed in over 50 countries, reveals the background to his literary saga, La Traversée des temps (“Crossing Time”).

Schmitt scrutinises our own time by questioning the past: “We’re made of the same stuM whatever era we’re living in. We’re “brothers in questions” (...) I’m writing this great novel so people can say “we, Humanity”.

What can we learn about our own times by revisiting the past? Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt answers: “Observing times of great change in the past makes me even more passionate about our own era. Humanity only goes forward by way of catastrophes, but it does progress”. The playwright hints at his sources of inspiration:

“What inspires me most? When I was young, it was books. These days, it’s people. Human diversity is fascinating. Human beings fascinate me.”

When I ask him about the aim of this great saga across the centuries, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m writing this great novel so you can feel closer to your Neolithic ancestors, so you can feel you’re Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and Roman. I want to widen the vision of “us”, enlarge the circle. I want people to think like one humanity.”

Schmitt is already working on Book V of La Traversée des temps (“Crossing Time”), Les deux royaumes (“The Two Kingdoms”), which takes readers up to the Roman empire and introduces Jesus of Nazareth.