At the mighty offices of Faber & Faber in London, there was a frisson of self-congratulation. "It's brilliant," one young publicist cooed. Ted Hughes, Faber's reclusive star author, had done it again. His volume of poetry, Tales From Ovid, had carried off the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Meanwhile, critics were falling over each other to praise his latest work, Birthday Letters, which addresses the suicide of his first wife Sylvia Plath.
That Hughes's newly-published poems on his late ex-wife should cause a literary sensation is not unexpected. More surprising is the quiet, stealthy success of his Tales From Ovid - based on the 1st-century Latin author, who found himself exiled by the Emperor Augustus, eked out his final days alone on the Black Sea and died in AD17.
In the past eight months, 22,000 copies have been sold. The Guardian's Nigel Spivey called the book "a stomp, a grasp, an assurance of timbre and ring"; while Faber has obligingly pointed out the book is not a translation of Ovid but a vigorous "treatment" of his work.
Why, then, the success? The highbrow answer, it would appear, is that the rolling structure of classical myth still touches a primal chord, deep down somewhere in our post-modern psyche. The more frivolous Hollywood answer is - well - great plot, guys.
Already a website has sprung up explaining the finer nuances of Greek myth. Zeus, King of the Gods, the website points out helpfully, "was incapable of keeping his toga closed"; a Clintonian figure, then.
Indeed, were President Clinton to turn to page 133 of Tales From Ovid, he might recognise himself in the tragic figure of Hippomenes, who falls in love with the willowy Atalanta. "What fool," he laughed, "would wager life itself simply to win a woman" - But even as he spoke he saw the face of Atalanta./ Then as her dress opened/ And fell to her feet/ He saw her dazzling body suddenly bared . . . Hippomenes's brain seemed to turn over./ His arms,/ As if grabbing to save himself as he slipped,/ Were reaching towards her. For Atalanta read Monica Lewinksy; for Hillary Clinton read the vengeful Aphrodite. (She turns Hippomenes and Atalanta into lions after she discovers them fornicating in the precincts of the temple - the Oval office perhaps.)
Following a similar line of reasoning, Britain's foreign secretary Robin Cook emerges as a figure of Odyssean stature. On his ministerial travels he navigates between the Scylla of tabloid opprobrium and the Charybdis of political expendiency. All the while his loyal wife Penelope - or Mrs Cook - spends time at home.
Admittedly, Odysseus eventually returns to Ithaca and promptly slays all his wife's suitors. But the point about myths is that each generation is free to adapt them for its own purposes.
Certainly, the classics have recently enjoyed a massive middle-brow resurgence in the US. Last summer Hercules, Disney's most ambitious cartoon since the Lion King, burst into cinemas, following a successful television series. In the Disney version, Hercules is a valiant, swashbuckling hero. The more unfortunate aspects of his character are avoided, which is probably fair enough. Audiences are not treated to the bit where Hercules brains one of his fellow-pupils with a lyre; nor is there any allusion to the unfortunate episode when he shoots his three sons with a bow; or to when Queen Omphale of Lydia makes him dress up in women's clothes . . .
Some $30 million, meanwhile, and the executive production talents of Francis Ford Coppola, have been spent by NBC on producing a television version of The Odyssey. And now Xena, Warrior Princess, is screened by Sky 1, RTE and Channel 5. Clad in a black bustier, boots, and a rather odd, tasselled skirt, Xena has worked miracles on the latter, fledgling channel's dismal ratings.
"It's one of our best shows," a spokeswoman says cheerfully. And what of Xena and her place in the classical pantheon? "She defeats the baddies with a frisbee weapon-thingy. The baddies are all from Ancient Greece and Rome. It's a spoof with real lesbian undertones," she explains.
Herodotus, the Greek historian born in 484 BC, shot on to the bestseller list after his work was featured in the novel and later Oscar-winning film The English Patient - quite an achievement for a man who has been dead for 2,500 years. ("One dead Greek guy is enough," a Hollywood producer muttered, at the suggestion other ancient writers might enjoy a similar renaissance.)
At the Ted Hughesian end of the literary spectrum, a new translation of The Odyssey by Robert Fagles, a Princeton professor, has sold tens of thousands of copies. Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen, meanwhile, can be heard reading audio tapes of The Iliad and The Odyssey respectively. In his introduction to his version of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hughes writes of how "different aspects of the poem continue to fascinate Western culture, saturating literature and art".
Temperamentally, though, Hughes is no Ovid. Ovid, marooned in the halfbarbaric town of Tomi, near the mouth of the Danube, spent his last years petitioning friends and patrons to lobby Augustus to allow him to return to Rome.
By contrast, the hermetic Hughes rarely strays from his Devon farmhouse. He even sent someone else to collect his Whitbread award, the ubiquitous Melvyn Bragg. Ovid would never have done that.