The Elgin Marbles and other treasures of ancient Greek art in the British Museum are the subject of this program. Tyrone Guthrie is the guide—a world-acclaimed theatrical director perhaps most famous for his staging of Oedipus Rex; neither an archaeologist nor a classicist, he tries (like many another wanderer in the galleries of the past) to perceive the greatness attributed to badly deteriorated pieces. But aside from the stunning masterpieces—the program moves out of the Museum to the Parthenon, to Ephesus, and to other classical sites—the program is infused with life by Guthrie’s belief that Greek art and Greek thought have remained vital because of the consciousness of divinity: not, says Guthrie, the literal acceptance of the conventional belief in the magical powers of hundreds of divinities, but the belief in the totality and completeness of the world and the effort to understand the place of humankind within it. (27 minutes)