Even today, 2,000 years after Christianity tried to consign them to the waste bin labelled "wicked pagan fictions", the myths of the ancient Greeks live and breathe.

Perhaps you have had a difficult day at work. A lot of energy has been spent on a big project. When you get home your partner asks how it went. Which adjective do you reach for to mythologise your labours? Were they: a) Herculean? You were called on to make heroic efforts to surmount seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but eventually succeeded; b) Sisyphean? Your boss ordered you to take on a long-term and ultimately hopeless task; or c) Augean? It was your turn to clean everything up.

You are having trouble getting through a newspaper book review. What is the problem? Is it because the argument is of labyrinthine complexity? Or is it because the author's Procrustean tendency to shoehorn classical metaphors and similes into every sentence is becoming irksome?

You are interviewing candidates for a senior position in your company. This one seems to have the Midas touch. But his achilles heel is that he was doing so well in his previous job that he will be suspected of being a Trojan horse, bringing the company into chaos in readiness for a cheap takeover. You don't want to be a Cassandra, but the appointment would be like opening a Pandora's box. Yet your boss was adamant and she can be a bit of a Gorgon.

It is not just in English that these allusions to ancient Greek myths survive, though they are used in different languages in subtly different ways. The chimaera was a mythical fire-breathing monster – part lion, part snake, part goat – and when Ratna Lachman in a recent Guardian blog referred to "The chimaera of an Asian woman influencing the levers of Tory power" (the reference was to Baroness Warsi), she was drawing on the word's connotations of monstruous and implausible incongruity. But the French chimère and Spanish quimera have a gentler and more sympathetic meaning, referring to idle fantasies or pipe dreams. The Spanish use the wonderful termanfitrión, after Amphitryon, Heracles's foster father, to refer to a (good) host, while the French use the name of his slave Sosia to refer to a double – sosie, an allusion that will mystify the British readers of Luc Ferry's The Wisdom of the Myths, as it briefly mystified me.

Ferry lists several other examples of Greek mythology in everyday speech in his prologue, but he is worried that we make these references without any longer knowing the stories from which they derive. We tend to use the term Cassandra, for instance, to refer to someone forever predicting doom and gloom rather than someone whose warnings are always ignored and always proved right. Most of his book is devoted to correcting this general ignorance by recounting the Greek myths at length, starting with the cosmogony outlined in Hesiod's Theogony: in the beginning was Chaos, then out of Chaos popped the goddess earth, Gaia, then the nearly bottomless depths of Tartarus, then Love, then Heaven … He finishes 300 pages later with the suicide of Oedipus's daughter Antigone and the destruction of her city by the sons of the Seven Against Thebes.

Sometimes he lingers over particular episodes, recounting the tales at length; at other times he feels the need to move a little more quickly. On the voyage of Odysseus: "The episodes that follow are so well known, and so often told that there is no need to do more than summarise them here." Generally he is sure-footed and reliable, and confident enough to cite different versions of myths in the work of different authors. For this he acknowledges the assistance of Timothy Gantz's essential collection Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources.

But some of the most famous of Ferry's "Greek myths" barely feature in Gantz because they are not really Greek. Pygmalion is a Phoenician name and the story of his love for a statue comes from Phoenician Cyprus. Midas is from Phrygia in central Turkey, as is the Gordian knot, the cutting through of which is not a "myth" in any traditional sense, but one of the more memorable deeds of Alexander the Great. And the excesses of the sybarites may have been exaggerated into mythic proportions, but the city of Sybaris belongs to history. As for the magnificent host Amphitryon and his slave Sosia, they are not so much timeless figures of age-old stories with deep roots in Greek cultural memory as characters in a popular play by Molière, ultimately based on a mythological comic burlesque of the fourth century BCE, in other words the products of singular satirical imaginations.

He also acknowledges the influence of Jean-Pierre Vernant, one of the greatest scholars of the ancient world who towards the end of his life published The Universe, the Gods and Men, a retelling of Greek myths in the manner in which he had told them to his grandchildren. Ferry's book, too, emerges from the practice of telling Greek myths to his children, and some French critics and readers of the book objected to what they thought was a condescending tone – in other words the tutoiement used in addressing inferiors – of which English readers will be mostly oblivious. Yet this is very much a "Greek Myths for Grownups", and although there is room for amusement and wry exclamation marks – "Cronus must be given something to swallow instead of a baby!" – the general mood is a serious one. The chapter that includes the myths of Sisyphus and Orpheus and the rape of Persephone has the forbidding title: "Hubris: The Cosmos Menaced By a Return to Chaos – Or, How the Absence of Wisdom Spoils the Existence of Mortals", and the author is not afraid to sprinkle the text with references to Nietzsche and Spinoza.

Brad Pitt in Troy Photograph: Allstar

If his first ambition is to reconnect us with myths and reawaken the metaphors that are sleeping in everyday language, his next goal is to mine the myths for things to teach us, lessons that are still applicable today. At first sight this would seem to be a more difficult selling point. What are the lessons of Greek myth? Always carry a mirror in case you bump into Medusa? If a shower of gold appears suddenly in your prison cell avoid the temptation to gather it into your lap? Don't have sex with bulls, no matter how sexy they seem, or your children will suffer the consequences? If you have to award an apple labelled "To the Fairest" to one of three goddesses, always give it to Hera or slice it in three?

What, for instance, is the life lesson in the story of Achilles' heel? When you are trying to immortalise your babies by burning off their mortality in a fire, make sure you lock the door to stop your husband interrupting? And what is the lesson of the story of poor unwitting Oedipus? Don't murder anyone old enough to be your father and don't marry anyone old enough to be your mother?

Nothing so trivial. Instead Ferry draws out deeper meanings of myths about how the world works and of the place of mortals in it. Mortality is indeed one of the great themes of Greek myth. Stories about Orpheus, the crime and punishment of Sisyphus and the fate of Achilles reflect on the great gulf that separates us from the immortal gods in a way that is quite foreign to salvationist religions, which emphasise immortality and afterlife, our similarity to the divine and the closeness of the divine to us – thus dodging, Ferry would suggest, the facts of death.

Indeed The Wisdom of the Myths is part of a grand enterprise to revive practical wisdom and secular humanism. In certain respects, Ferry is a more philosophical and more French version of Richard Dawkins. In another part of his astonishing curriculum vitae, he was a minister for education, responsible for implementing the law on secularity in schools limiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols – otherwise known as the French headscarf ban.

In fact this element of his commentaries on Greek myth is subtle and full of wisdom. In particular his chapter on Oedipus and those who suffer terrible misfortunes through no fault of their own is full of pathos and humanity. For that reason alone this book is worth reading, and those who need one will also get a refresher course in Greek mythology as part of the bargain.

What is more difficult to grasp is Ferry's notion that through the wisdom contained in Greek mythology, through its understanding of the essential balance between kosmos (order) and chaos, we can rise above the vacuity of modern consumer society. Can Greek mythology throw light on the mortal condition and our place in the world? Yes. I think so. Can it inoculate us against excessive shopping and channel-hopping? Probably not.

• James Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love is out from Pheonix.