That our culture is stagnant has become an often-repeated trope. It offers no more than retellings of recent events, critics claim—Prince Andrew’s “car crash” interview of 2019 has already been dramatised twice—or merely churns out the same stories featuring the same characters, unable to think beyond the boundaries of its major commercial franchises.

Much the same could be said of Classical Athens—Aeschylus’s Persians retells the story of the Battle of Salamis, which took place eight years earlier, while his Oresteia extends Agamemnon’s story beyond the Trojan War. Sophocles’ Ajax fills in details missed out in the Homeric Fictional Universe while Euripides’s Bacchae gives the origin story of the god Dionysus.

An Athenian who did not fancy the latest offering at the theatre might engage a rhapsode, an individual who had memorised the Iliad and the Odyssey and would perform them on demand. There is, as those who often return to their favourite books know, a certain comfort in revisiting a story and characters one knows well. And there is always a certain freshness to the experience as well. To misquote Heraclitus, the book you re-read is not the book you once read, and you are not the person who read it.

In this light, we might see the recent French cinematic adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo as less a sign of stagnation than of continuity. In making it the country’s second most-watched film last year, audiences behaved in a way that would be familiar to any Greek of a couple of millennia ago. For Alexandre Dumas’s novel has become part of our cultural furniture, just like Hamlet or the tales of the Trojan War. Even those who have not read the book, which is understandable given its length—1,243 pages in my Penguin Classics translation, not including notes—often know the story: Edmond Dantes is unjustly imprisoned, escapes, turns himself into the Count of Monte Cristo, and sets out to obtain retribution. It is an archetypal revenge tale.