Greek philosophy and classical civilisation holds a fascination for us moderns. Books about the Romans; TV programmes about Socrates; and discussions about ancient philosophy abound. And yet, I think they commonly miss an essential element that was fundamental and core to figures such as Plato and Aristotle, or schools like the Stoics and Sceptics: the transformative quest to know the transcendent. Without that, they'd have thought philosophy was rootless or aimless. And yet, their philosophy is routinely now presented without that ground. Here are three common errors that you hear from the mouths of historians and presenters of today, and why those errors matter so much.

1. The Greeks invented secular philosophy.

The first misleading story being told is of a crucial shift in human thought that crystallised in fifth century BC Athens. Before then, in the time of Homer and Hesiod, ancient Greeks had resorted to myths to guide them through the world. Now though, with the pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato in particular, a new generation of Greeks developed the capacity to think about the world without referencing their multiple divinities.

Instead they turned to cool, godless reason. Logic helped them derive arguments about what's true. No longer need things be believed because deities said so. Instead, humanity began to build knowledge on the basis of proofs.

This is wrong. It's right that the philosophers deployed new methods to investigate how to live, the nature of the cosmos, the way to rule cities. Those methods included reason and empirical investigation. But it was also a standard assumption amongst the ancients that true knowledge was true because it reflected divine knowledge. Reason and experience are gifts by which we can participate in divine life. Knowing came to be understood as a receptive capacity that reason serves by discerning. Nature came to be experienced as showing itself to us, if we attend to it aright.

Hence Thales, often called the father of philosophy, could exclaim, “All things are full of gods”. This is what his wondrous investigations revealed. For Plato, reason was a tool that could lead to divine insight, but if and only if accompanied by myths, reverent invocations, and the hard work of personal transformation.

This is a very good way of doing philosophy, which after all is the desire for a wisdom that often seems beyond human reach. And it has very little to do with contemporary secular philosophy that often seems stranded on a desert island of soulless logic. Plato might, in fact, help restore it to life.

2. Ancient philosophy opposed the spirit to the body.

There is a second erroneous story going around. One version of it goes like this: Plato held the body to be a prison for the soul that, with luck, the soul could flee at death. This meant that he denigrated the body and idealised the soul. He set up a dualism that we still experience in forms such as sexual prohibitions and women's oppression.