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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. The sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly, he sees the country through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience and insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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The Hill of Kronos
PETER LEVI
For Deirdre
Contents
Introduction
Ihave found this book hard to begin because life has made me very happy and my own past history is becoming as distant as the mountains of the moon. There is too much to write about. Hungrier travel writers than I am often write better books. When I first went to Greece I thought I was discovering everything at once, five things a day. My hunger for the monuments of antiquity, for museums, for people, for light and shade, for mountains, woods, islands and seas, seemed to me insatiable. Indeed it has never been sated, but now I feel that I know Greece almost too well to write about it, and time meanwhile has washed away my footprints from those tracks. Greece has been the air I breathed and the life I lived, yet I can no longer easily recapture that young self to whom it was strange. Nor can I quite shake him off, and I am afraid that he will dog the reader through this book as he dogs me. Today I can answer nearly all of the naive questions he began by asking, but he is still asking questions and I have lost my shame about his naivete.
The best books in English about Greece, as a personal discovery, are by Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Kevin Andrews, Dilys Powell. They have something in common, which I take to be Greek reality, not just a similar temperament, though most of them have been a close friend of at least one of the others, and a quality of the same generation marks all of them. The Greece they discovered was hardly born until 1930, and in the last ten years it has been transformed. There were earlier discoveries, by Wheler at the end of the seventeenth century, by Chandler in the eighteenth, by Leake and by Edward Lear in the nineteenth. There are Schliemann’s diaries and Byron’s letters. In all of them, the same, continuous Greece, what Durrell calls ‘the distinctive form 8and signature of things Greek’ can be recognised. Whoever discovers Greece today can hardly rank with Columbus.
Although I could not hope to rival what has already been so sharply and well recorded, and although I suppose this book that I have such a passion to write will be unlike anyone else’s, if only because my life has been different from theirs, yet the continuous attraction of Greece for me has been something quite simple, and I am sure that I share it with many who will never write a book and some of those who have. It was the light, the physical sunlight. It was thyme-scented hillsides and plains of toasted thistles. It was the fragments of the marble architecture. It was spring at Pylos and at Sounion and in the Cretan mountains. It was the charcoal-burners in the pine woods and the donkeys and goats and anemones in the olive groves. It was autumn at Olympia, winter in the Arkadian mountains, the annual snowfall of wild cyclamen on the Hill of Kronos. But above all it was the people. Most of the best friends I ever expect to have are Greek, and we have fifteen years of our lives in common.
But I came late to Greece, at the age of thirty-two, in 1963. I had started to learn ancient Greek as a schoolboy, at a school where Greek was hardly taught. All I knew about Greece then was the Elgin Marbles, of which I treasured some sepia-tinted and forbidding postcards, and the fact that Oscar Wilde, who in the summer of my fourteenth birthday had just become my literary idol, said the Greek text of the Gospels was the most beautiful book in the world. So I demanded to learn Greek, and changed schools in consequence. From that time I have never ceased to study the Greek language. There were some ups and downs, of course. One of the ups was Oxford, where I was lucky enough to be taught some medieval and modern, as well as ancient Greek. There I discovered, like flowers on a slag-heap, the few wonderful Byzantine writers. And there I discovered George Seferis. I venerated him then as an immensely great poet; later I came to love him as a friend, almost as a father, and to respect and admire him more than I can express.
Coming so late in the day to Greece seemed at the time to be an impoverishment, but I take some consolation from hindsight. The terrible sufferings and the heroism and determination of the Greek 9people in their resistance to Hitler have transformed forever the way we look at Greece. Short of having known Greece before the war and fought through it in the Cretan mountains, as some of the English did, I prefer a Greece who knows herself and whom we know to all the privileges of pre-war Europe, and I am glad not to have lived through the disasters of the two anti-communist civil wars that followed Hitler’s war. I am even more glad not to have lived in Greece or had friends there during the catastrophic mismanagement of the Cyprus crisis by Great Britain. By 1963 that was to some degree forgiven, though it was not forgotten. On the other hand, I did live through the seven nasty years of the Colonels, from 1967 to 1974, and I am glad I was there. I am a witness to what happened, to the dignity and obstinacy of the Greeks, to their gallantry and their decency in a period of nightmare and of darkness.
My work in Greece was that of an archaeologist of some kind. I took part in excavations, but I spent some years translating and annotating Pausanias, who wrote in the second century A.D. a description of all the surviving monuments of ancient architecture and religion; and then many more years working at a full commentary on his writings in the light of modern archaeology. I chose him because of his reality, and because by studying Pausanias I could hope to know Greece as I longed to know it. The commentary is still unfinished, indeed hardly started, but I owe Pausanias a loyalty deeper than that of scholarship. Through him I got to know landscapes and sanctuaries and villages and mountains I would not have seen otherwise. And work is peace after all; I have found it a resource in bad times and a pleasure in good.
The trouble was that my interest constantly spilled over, into the history of these same monuments in the Middle Ages, into the Greece of the first archaeological explorers, into modern and recent history, into the people among whom I was working, and finally into prehistory, which for years of obstinate stupidity I had resisted as an irrelevance. Perhaps the explanation was just that I had too many professions. From 1964 I was a priest, but a priest without local duties. I taught the classics in Oxford but I had to be abroad in winter, originally for reasons of bad health, so I took up classical 10archaeology. Yet the underlying condition and the force and momentum of my life were to be found in neither of these full-time professions, but in poetry. And there was still my unending love affair with the Greek language. I also had an average educated curiosity about birds, flowers and landscapes. As middle-age approached, the curiosity became a passion.
What I liked about Greece was not just poems and not just books, but the impressive force of the language itself, unconfined by dictionaries, spoken in the streets, in cafés, and in the country. Greek has a longer continuous history than most languages; its written records go back nearly four thousand years, and its alterations in that time have been gradual and seldom ruinous. Under the Roman empire, it was almost a world language. Under the Turkish empire it sank back into its own roots, and recovered what it had lost, the beautiful behaviour, the suppleness and bite of country speech. In the last generation poetry has been written in Greek as powerful, as memorable, and as individual as the best English or Russian poems of this century. The modern Greek language has hardly been charted, it can be learnt only by listening. It has an astonishing range of tones and resources and slowly learning and relearning to speak it has been one of the most satisfying pleasures in my life.
In the end I came to write poems of my own in Greek, not by choice, which would have been freakish and perverse, but when I had begun to dream and to think in Greek, and the pressure to write poetry had become irresistible. Those poems have no part, really, in this book, but I do not think they are worse than what I might write in English. I mention them because they represent the furthest point for me of identification with ‘the distinctive form and signature of things Greek’ without any loss of identity. The loss of one’s national or professional identity in the pursuit of a love affair with a foreign country is always a mistake, I believe. There is something phoney about ‘going native’ anywhere in the world. Equally, of course, it is better not to amaze the inhabitants of another country with Bermuda shorts or a bowler hat, nor was I tempted to do so. I travelled in the wildest places I could find. I was a friendly bachelor. I drank deeply the wine of the country. But if 11ever anyone took me for a Greek, it was by chance, and only because so few foreigners speak the language.
After many years of study and of a monastic religious life, my first visits to Greece were like a delayed spring, a breaking of the ice. At one moment, I even thought or pretended to myself that I had fallen in love, but it was only a ballet of love. Since then I have known the real thing, which is a very different matter. But in 1965 I had just finished a long and often depressing course of training that had lasted seventeen years. It had included so many illnesses that the training itself seemed like an illness. Now the air glittered and smelt of leaves. I was both sophisticated and innocent, and I was very hungry for life. Greece treated me kindly. It was not a mythical or exactly a romantic place for me; what I was searching for and hungry for was reality. All reality is historical, I suppose; it always descends from history, and the history continues.
If I were to try to thank my Greek friends, and all the others to whom I am indebted and this book is indebted, the list would be terribly long. I once worked on a combined book with two Greek scholars and we thought of a note of thanks to the institutions which had tolerated us. That is rather treacherous ground. But I must express a more personal gratitude at least to Nancy and Betty Sandars, and to Philip Sherrard, who encouraged my first steps in Greece, to Patrick and Joan Leigh-Fermor who have been so good to me for many years, to Nikos Gatsos, Charles Haldeman, Takis Loumiotis, George Pavlopoulos, Takis Sinopoulos, Iannis Tsirkas, to Maro Seferis, to Vanna Hadzimichalis, to Joy Koulentianou, to Athina Kaloyeropoulou, to Amalia Fleming, to Jane Rabnett, to Francis Bartlett, to Niko and Barbara Ghika, to Constantine and Aliki Trypanis. No one has ever been better treated by life than I have been; no one has ever has so much more from life, or from Greece, than they offered it. But most from Deirdre, to whom I dedicate this book.
1
A Taste of Greece
Heythrop College was an enormous, four-square eighteenth-century mansion which had suffered lamentable alterations. It stood high up in the wind, its park was bald and ragged, and the Cotswolds heaved around it. Orchids and bluebells grew undisturbed in the more distant woods. Every prospect was a green desert. In summer you could hear the cry of vixens at night and in winter you could hear the snow falling. It was a walk of a mile or two across fields to the nearest country bus stop. The dullness of the theological lectures was beyond expression; it was absolutely unrelieved, and there were four or five a day, many of them delivered in fluent, incompetent Latin. But the worst enemy was the dampness and the cold. I was thirty-two and coughing my infuriated heart out.
The first summer I spent in Greece was not achieved without a skirmish. I had fluttered my wings in that direction as a Jesuit undergraduate at Oxford, in the middle nineteen-fifties, but every request for permission was met with well-phrased silences, and the journey never took place. I am glad now that I never went then, because perhaps if I had I might have got Greece out of my system too early. By 1963 I was very hungry for it. The fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century was as real to me as the 1914 war. Homer was as powerful and as god-like in my ears as Shakespeare. I knew that George Seferis was one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of all the European poets of this century. It was time to go.14
Things fell out luckily in the end. We used to translate the psalm Beati immaculati in via at Heythrop as ‘Blessed are they that are not spotted on the way out.’ I was spotted too often, and for this among other middle-aged delinquencies I was summoned to the Rector’s office and told, quite kindly I must say, that my ordination as a priest, which ought to have been that summer, was postponed until I amended my irregularities. This made me an awkward figure to have around during everyone else’s celebrations. In the atmosphere of sympathy always created by that sort of public disgrace among Jesuits I suggested they should send me to Greece. They agreed at once. There was a difficult moment later, when someone counter-proposed a Jesuit retreat house on the lake of Annecy, but I mustered such arguments against that as I blush to recall, and to Greece I went, planning my own journey.
It was June. The first sentence in my journal is: ‘Thunder crumbling into rain. Enterprises and places having a dogged air.’ But that was North Oxfordshire, which I was leaving. There follow some notes about poems, and the phrase ‘lumpy provincial chinoiserie’, which someone had used about Claydon. Then a few sentences from a Greek novel, meticulously copied out. It is not a novel I would recommend now, and the style of the landscape passage I copied is exaggerated almost to self-parody. But it seemed significant at the time; I suppose it was what I expected Greece to be like:
A blue line over the soil of the earth, where there are trees, tombs, flashes of lightning written and extinguished, it drowns in the sea, beyond everything is the silence which is the final limit of the world…From the east, from the line of hills, the dawn star balancing over the bare earth of Anavysso like a hawk watching his prey.
When I did catch my first sight of Greece, it was not like that at all; it was like the poems of Seferis. But that was a resemblance I had for some reason never expected. I would prefer, as most people would, to live in a landscape of Edward Lear. I knew, or thought I knew, that classical landscapes were irrecoverable. In fact there still are 15times and places, which await those who need and deserve them, where Edward Lear’s landscapes still exist in reality. Even the landscape of antiquity is not absolutely irrecoverable, though that demands a patient and scholarly dedication, and the rewards are rare. Greece has touches even of the landscape of my novelist, an old Athenian banker called Venezis who must by now be dead. Anavysso is no longer a refugee settlement, it has hotels and bungalows; there is nothing romantic about it. But I recognize the silence, and the star that hovers like a hawk.
My notes must have been written in a train, because just after them comes a query about the horse-shoe shape and the loud echoes of certain railway tunnels, and then something indecipherable about the leaves in Green Park. Every stage of the journey seemed easier than the last. The most difficult was getting myself driven from Heythrop to Banbury station. London, even so short a time ago, was a splendid and flowering city. Aeroplanes were new to me, and the fact that mine, which should have left at midnight, was delayed until a quarter to four in the morning, gave me romantic pleasure. I roamed around Heathrow in the hot air, gazing at red and green groundlights and at huge aeroplanes like mechanical beings without human purpose or animal instinct. Dawn was ragged and stormy, a wilderness of red far away to the east. There was fog in Italy; we landed at Milan and I spent a long, hot morning in a train to Genoa.
This being my first, and for all I knew my last Greek adventure, I was determined to see as much as possible on the way. The ship from Genoa called at Naples, and from Naples it passed between Sicily and Italy to the Gulf of Corinth. There are a lot of ways of getting from England to Greece; by now I have tried most of them, but the first had its merits. A quick break south is the beginning of wisdom, Genoa and Naples are not negligible, and the sea is the sea. I took the advice of an old central European exile: ‘You must not descend on Athens for the first time from the air, like a gangster or a salesman of stockings.’ Later, I came to prefer that long train that pulls out of Victoria on winter afternoons, the small ferry like a coal-scuttle, Joyce’s ‘mucus-coloured, scrotum-tightening sea’, and dinner on the way to Paris. I liked dawn in the Po valley, looking 16back at the Alps and longing for coffee, and the old-fashioned luxury of a ship from Venice.
Venice is not exactly halfway to Greece, it is more like halfway to Byzantium. Once or twice I have taken the old route of the Oriental Express, overland beyond Venice through the endless length of Yugoslavia, with through-carriages from Calais to Athens. But that route always did involve resourceful shopping for food, wine and water, knowing where the hidden baker was near the station at Venice, and the smoked meat shop at Milan. It was always an exhausting adventure, and there is now so little to eat on that train that no one over twenty-five ought to travel on it. I remember a knife fight being narrowly avoided somewhere south of Belgrade between Greek and Turkish immigrant workers, and someone being taken off the train at night for attempted rape, and then being quietly put back a few carriages down. I once nearly died on the railway somewhere near Tito Veles, of severe blood-poisoning, contracted from a hasty injection in Athens and marinated in the sand and sea-water of an excavation on the coast of Libya.
The commonsense method with a car is either to drive all the way or to go south to the heel of Italy and take a ship from Brindisi. I have done this both by car and by train and both were arduous. There are only four advantages in the Brindisi route, which are the four cities of Rimini, Ancona, Bari and Brindisi. Rimini has the finest marble decorations of the Renaissance, Ancona is full of shadows and dramatic monuments, Bari is one of the strangest and most haunting cities in Europe, twin sister to Palermo, and Brindisi is where Virgil died. The flight of stone steps with the ruined columns above the harbour is where the Appian Way dropped at last into the sea. Horace once travelled there with Virgil and Maecenas on an embassy to Mark Antony; Brindisi fills the last line of his poem, ‘the end of this long paper, this long road.’
The intellectual and the spiritual distances that separate our world from the ancient Greeks are terribly great. However close they seem to be, it is not really possible to know them by simple intuition, although as a schoolboy, like many generations of European schoolboys, and even as an undergraduate, I thought I 17could. I would read something for the first time or devour some piece of Greek drawing with my eyes, and all the centuries would seem to drop away. But each of those centuries has marked us. It is no bad thing to explore such a long historical gap through a long physical experience, and to move slowly towards Greece. The sea and the islands, as they first appear out of their distances, are still Homeric. That is some comfort.
At Genoa the sea was black, but the next morning it was a deep, brilliant indigo blue. I made friends with a young Greek sailor and two London Greek hairdressers, who shared the cabin I was in. The sailor was going home to Athens for a new ship, after an emergency operation for appendicitis. I recorded a few fragments of his conversation.
‘I’m from Chios. All Chios men are sailors. Tomatoes? Best in the world. The Greeks can do nothing without a tomato. Seagulls, look at them. Seagulls are the company a sailor has.’
He sang himself an old popular song with a dialect word in it, the word for the twanging of a guitar-string. ‘Sit and listen to this twang, on my own heart-string.’ The tune was mournful and passionate, drifting away into a long eddy of notes. We passed Calabria, painted green and hung out to dry for a thousand years. The sun sank exactly behind us, and the ship sailed under stars that sparkled like sea-salt into the dark.
And for the first of many, many times I came on deck at dawn in the cold, while the ship was edging her way round the blue and grey silhouettes of rocks and islands, past the flashy white huddle of the port of Patras on the right, and through the narrows into the Gulf of Corinth. The gap must be less than a cannon-shot between northern and southern Greece, between low twin promontories, each with a tiny fort like a snail on a sand-spit, Rion and Antirion. All morning I was mesmerized by the coast of a wonderful inland sea as it widened, by mountains receding and advancing, by the walls of Lepanto like a diagram, by the tall rifted mountains to the south with their feet in lemon groves and almost in the sea, by the distant line of Parnassos to the north, with its monumental grace and bulk, by the ancient citadel of Corinth, which is a castle on an eyebrow of rock that has never been 18stormed in all its history. Then the lighthouse of Perachora, a sanctuary of Hera dug by the British before the war. Then the Corinth canal.
‘It smells Greek,’ said one of the hairdressers, ‘now you can smell it, thyme and pine trees.’ The other hairdresser wept, and put his hand on his heart. ‘Les pins de la patrie!’ he said. The canal is a long straight slit between cliffs, two or three miles long, I suppose. It does smell very strongly of wild thyme and pine trees, at least in the heat of summer, but all that overpowering heat and clarity draw their resinous force at water level from one small pine growing out of the side of the cliff. It resinates the whole air. At the far end of the canal a priest was sitting under a vine eating olives. The whole ship cheered him.
My record of that day is meagre. ‘The constant redefinitions of hills, mountains, capes. Itea in the mist, everything bluish.’ And then: ‘All these bare, exact words. Barren hillsides enmeshed with story-telling. Attica even more bare. Dusty and smoky Piraeus. The yellow akropolis marbles look as if they would crumble.’ Seen from a distance, that must mean, from out at sea through the heat-haze of the city.
Now the factories and refineries on shore start miles to the west of Athens, now the inshore water around Salamis is crowded with old, rusted shipping, now you can smell the Piraeus smog an hour’s sailing time to the south. The fumes crept up year by year from the docks and the industrial area. Twenty years ago they concentrated their power in a yellowish local haze; ten years ago they began to climb inland. Now there is no height in central Athens out of their reach. The ancient coastline near the city has disappeared under dumped rubbish and car parks that extend far out to sea. Many distant views of the akropolis where it was glimpsed between houses from a market garden or swam into sight from the Eleusis road, are seldom seen now, or seen in a livid apocalyptic light, when a ray of sunlight strikes downwards through the haze.
Sometimes I think modern Athens is a wilderness of monkeys living their busy and warm lives around the skeleton of some mighty dinosaur; yet I have come to prefer the modern Athenians to the skeletal grandeurs. Surely the akropolis, and the Parthenon 19in particular, is the noblest work of man. It has the restrained geometry, the impressive and deliberate size, the harmony and proportion and the splendid physical impact that we call classical. It has the animal, not only the spiritual, qualities of man. It has the peace and the subtlety that oriental buildings have. At the same time there is something naive and stark naked about that wonderful white marble. Is it white? Is it cream? Not a dead white or a salt white, but fresher than milk or cream, fresher than a white cloud, crisper than white silk. The marble exists because of the light, because of the blazing purity and strength of Greek sunlight. That light does still exist, more brilliant than the sun or the sea or any stone or mineral. The akropolis belongs more to the sky than to the earth; it is made of light and of white marbles, dark marbles, pillars, shadows.
On the night of every full moon, it used to be on the three nights, the akropolis opens until midnight. It was full moon on my first evening in Athens, and I first entered the akropolis by moonlight. It was an eerie, shadowy place. The pillars rearing above one’s head glimmered slightly as trees do in the woods at night; they draped their heads in darkness and moon shadows, and pools of bright moonlight lay underfoot on the marble pavements. The marble was cool to the hand; in colour and texture it was like moonlight petrified. People, rather few in those days, appeared and disappeared out of a darkness disturbed here and there by camera flashes. The whistles of the guards made furious noises in the distance. The interior of the Parthenon was august and silent and very empty. It felt like a holy place.
Indeed it was holy, for nearly two and a half thousand years. When it was built it was the self-expression of the confidence of Athens, but it was not the most sacred building on the akropolis. It was partly a state treasury, partly a stone monument, a delight for gods and men; principally it was the house for a colossal new statue of the goddess Athene. On one great gable she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus, on the other she disputed with Poseidon for the territory of Athens, and inside she stood roof-high with a marble snake rearing up beside her. The Parthenon frieze was her procession winding round the walls. But that ceremony ended at a 20smaller temple on the north edge of the akropolis rock. The holiest statue of Athene was an old wooden idol that lived in the smaller temple, where it shared its house with Poseidon and a sacred snake. The print of Poseidon’s trident was in the rock over there, and the first olive tree that Athene gave to mankind, ‘miracle born out of the living rock’, grew nearby. The smaller temple, the Erechtheion, stood in the ruins of a Mycenean palace.
But the Parthenon was also a holy place. When it ceased to be a temple it was transformed at once into a Christian church, and that is how it survived so long. The last traces of wall-painting are still visible on the marble walls, and the outer wall at the west end carries a long Latin epitaph, almost illegible now, in Gothic script, and a simple thirteenth-century painting of the Annunciation, high up to the south of the door, below what is left of the Parthenon frieze. In the Middle Ages the akropolis was a fortified village. In the fifteenth century Italian princes held their court in the big range of marble buildings at the west edge, the state entrance planned by Perikles. When Athens fell to the Turks, the Parthenon became a mosque. When the mosque was destroyed by Venetian gunfire in 1687, a smaller mosque was built at once inside the pillars that survived. It was desecrated in the end by a stray Englishman, on the day of the Turkish surrender in the Greek war of independence. He rode his horse into the building and did all that the Turks had done in Greek country churches.
On my first night in Athens I would not have known all these details. They and many more have accumulated like dust from years of reading and of pleasure. The Parthenon has had strange visitors. Another Englishman called Francis Vernon, who saw it in 1676, a member of Christ Church and an early correspondent of the Royal Society, who was murdered for his pen-knife the next year in Persia, is the only witness we have to the design of its innermost columns. His travel diaries, which are full of the names of plants and sketches of fortifications, are still unpublished. Hugo Favoli, an imperial diplomat, produced at Louvain in 1563 his Journey to Byzantium in three books of catastrophic Latin verse. He mistook Dubrovnik for Epidauros, and he greatly admired the sober whitewash with which the Turks had smothered Hagia 21Sophia. On the subject of a long-bearded Gospodar in his cups, liveliness makes the low standard of the verses forgivable. But what excited him was Athens, an Athens otherwise unrecorded.
What he saw of Attica was devastated; there was little cultivation of the earth. Above the akropolis hovered a little swarm of glittering golden crescents. It might have made me angry, but I would like to have seen that. Visually, the Turkish period in Greece was more attractive than anything that has followed it. On that first night, and often afterwards, I dined in the courtyard of a rustic, tumbledown building of some dignity, high up in the Plaka, the old village Athens under the akropolis rock. It has been restored now, and I preferred it as it was, overgrown by jasmine and overrun by cats and children, and much visited by barrel-organs. The barrel-organs were owned by Greek refugees from Turkey; when the labyrinth of their squatters’ huts was pulled down the other day, the last remnant of a dialect of the Greek language perished. The tavern was called the old university. It was once the first university of Athens, founded immediately after independence, with old peasant generals sitting on the same benches as their soldiers.
I was overwhelmed with happiness. I had never been in a world where a waiter in a café offers a cigarette to a client. I had never seen most of the business of a restaurant done by tiny boys who should have been in bed. I had never heard such dramatic voices, such quarrels and such affection. I had never known such grandeur treated with such familiarity, the ancient stones built into houses, and the akropolis with all its monuments like the local castle in an English provincial town. I had never seen pepper like gunpowder and salt like snowflakes. I had never drunk retsina from a barrel. I had never been so drunk. I had never been so clear-headed.
I find I have some notes of tea-time conversation at the British School of Archaeology where I was staying. It seemed all to be about the processes of change and decay. Greek dance music had never been any good since the thirties, those lovely old waltzes. No one can draw nowadays. The German occupation and just after it was the time to live in Athens, when there was no floodlighting of monuments, only decent moonlight. The old pure air and the famous sunlight and the starlight exist now only 22in Australia. ‘I went to see if any of the tripods had died, of bronze disease … Not the old stairway but the one they use, or used to use, though that’s abandoned too now, unless it’s been quite eaten away, by the silver fish.’ We argued about a stuffed white Athenian owl in a common-room at Balliol presented, I think, to Benjamin Jowett by the people of Athens. ‘I don’t think I would have missed a stuffed bird.’
The British School was a sympathetic institution, and by no means unfunny. Most of the work done there was everyday, scholarly hard work, but it had its eccentricities. Once it had been a Victorian marble mansion in a vast garden outside Athens, but the city engulfed it and new buildings have covered too much of the garden. Still, it remains an oasis of peace and greenness, and the library is big and cool and well-stocked. I am sure the tea must be as weak as ever, The Times as out of date, the bedrooms as bare and hot bathwater as restricted. Still, if the older archaeologists are still as kind to novices as they were to me, life is worth living. The summer was not a typical time at the British School. The students live there in winter; summer is reserved for excavations and the School fills up with travellers. I remember an aged schoolmistress who vanished one summer and had to be looked for by the police. She was run to ground in a tavern in the Piraeus, sitting on a sailor’s knee and calling him a silly boy; she was quite in command of the situation. It was not an unfunny place.
Looking back on that first visit, I seem to have crammed an immense variety of things into a very few weeks: poetry and poets, museums, long expeditions on foot, and over and over again the sea, over and over again the streets of Athens. Most of my reading was in Greek; I had a Sophokles, a Homer and a pocket Pausanias. Apart from that concentrated nourishment I remember only Falconer’s ‘Shipwreck’, a pleasant enough eighteenth-century poem which is not quite as good as I then thought it was, and of course the Guide Bleu to Greece, which begins with the harsh sentence, ‘La Grèce n’est pas un pays de raffinement gastronomique.’ With that I disagree, but not as strongly as I would have done in the summer of 1963. Mediterranean food suited me. The fields smelt of rigani and the mountains of wild tea. I liked the cheese and the wine and the fresh 23eggs, and I was hungry. I liked the mullet and the lemon juice and squid and octopus and sucking pig. I drank enough retsina to know a range of difference between the best, which is fresh and appetizing and delicious, and the worst, which is like ship’s paint from the Balkan war of 1912.
My journal was an excited jumble. It records more sorts of capitals of columns, more sorts of palmettes, and more tones and colours of marble than I could comprehend. I never pursued the formal stone flowers, either the palmettes or the capitals, but I wasted a great deal of disorganized energy over years in studying the sources of ancient stone. I came to no conclusions. The variations of marble inside the same quarry or in two quarries on one mountain can be so great as to confuse classification. Anyway, the scholar in any young person is often slave to an aesthete, and in my case the aesthete was satisfied without much scholarship. He was happy with the surface appearance of things:
Akropolis by moonlight, night of an eclipse, very strange misty and stormy evening. The thing itself is indescribable and incommunicable. Sweet-smelling white flowers grow on the base. Two or three cypresses.
National Museum. The gold death mask of Agamemnon reduces everyone in the way that the suffering of a servant or a peasant makes a whole society seem unreal.
Qualities of the Parthenon not expected: it is higher, stronger (consciously stronger, the pillars from the west are almost crowded), cooler; part of a complex of buildings and sanctuaries now perished. It utterly annihilates other buildings that survive. Creamy almost yellow marble.
Lemon and black butterflies on the hill of Philopappos. The last light on the west end of the akropolis. Apricot cream distant marble. The bright white broken thing and the bright blue unbroken sky. Heat. Smell of pines and sage and thyme. Creaking cicadas. Bright, warm moon and stars like woodworm. Archaic painted snakes in the museum, tartan or striped black and red. Marble where some colouring has survived; it appears not so much coloured and faded, rather as if it had restrained its 24colours. Hair of statues as dense as foliage, like flowerless, unscented jasmine.
The Parthenon this morning seemed terribly scarred and battered. Creamy crags and apricot streaks and stains. Yellow butterfly blown over by the wind from Philopappos. One dusk an owl flew up from the trees under the akropolis rock. Athene’s bird?
The mythology of the ancient Greeks meant little to me, at that time, unless it was a clue to the landscape, something that revealed a secret about daily life. And yet I see now that I was making my own mythical Greece. The blue-haired stone horse in the akropolis museum had for me a simple relationship with Poseidon and the blue sea, and the gate of Hades in the sea-caves of southern Greece where white horses were sacrificed from the cliffs. That was a piece of almost scholarly naivete. But there was worse. Every traveller has his traveller’s tale, his weird experience, the confirmation of suppressed, extravagant expectations. Mine was the small white owl at dusk. For someone else it was a white-bearded shepherd in a white kilt, riding a white horse. I had a friend who sheltered from a thunderstorm in the ruins of Mycenae, and in the last dramatic edges of the storm found a shepherd looming above her who seemed older than Agamemnon. Another friend found a peasant in the mountains near Larissa who claimed he had met the nymph Calypso at a water-spring. Two or three times, he said. He had never read The Odyssey.
These things do happen. I climbed a hill in Crete once with an old man who told me the story of the Cyclops. He said it was a local story and he could show me the cave. Years later on Corfu, in the ruins of the temple of Athene, I came across a ninety-year-old nun, the great-niece of Capodistria, first prime minister of Greece; she remembered the excavation of the Gorgon pediment, which is now in the museum a few miles away. ‘Six Kings came, and nine princes. Lemonades they drank in the convent. And ropes they brought, and took her away, away, away in a lorry.’ That excavation was in fact visited by six monarchs and their children, on one of those royal yachting parties that still took place fifty years ago. The old nun offered to show me the tomb of the Four Brethren. This turned out to be the old stone 25altar of the temple rotting away in its field. ‘These they did not disturb. These are saints.’
‘What saints are they?’
‘Saint Gorgo, Saint Athena, Saint Kerkyra, and Saint … and another Saint. Four brethren.’
Kerkyra being the Greek name for Corfu, I wondered if she knew the fourth name.
‘Saint Napoleon, that’s it, Saint Napoleon. They were four brethren, holy martyrs.’
I was saved from all this pleasant craziness partly by an industrious habit of mind, and partly by poetry, an even more powerful and coherent mythology. The landscapes were those of George Seferis. The countryside was that of Nikos Gatsos, ‘a little wheat for the festival, a little wine for remembrance, a little water for the dust’. And all over the south I charted the villages where old men told me in confidence of an ancient buried treasure. It was usually a golden sow with twelve golden sucking pigs. Occasionally there were only three or only seven. Once, in the hills behind Nemea, it was a golden duck with twelve golden ducklings.
I used to be fascinated by a monument on the top of a mountain between Argos and Arkadia: three great cairns of stones. Its ancient name was the Hermai, plural of Hermes, and a piece of an inscribed altar to Hermes was found there. Its modern name is Stous Fonemenous, the Murdered Men. Hermes is the shepherd of the dead, so speculation was tempting. But the origin of the name turns out to be a fourteenth-century romantic tale in verse that was popular in this part of Greece. Many local monuments are named after different parts of the same story: the Castle of the Beautiful Princess is where her father imprisoned her, and the Murdered Men are the graves of her suitors. If any readers should think this explanation unlikely, I assure them I have been shown at Kardamyli a ledge of cliff where the local prince used to drink coffee with Menelaus, and a stone on which Lord Byron, who never went there, played draughts with General Kolokotronis, whom he never met. In an eighteenth-century Turkish account of Greece, the Sermon on the Mount was 26preached on a hill near Nauplion and the temple at Sounion was a pleasure house built by Solomon for the Queen of Sheba.
The heady delights of these stories were no stranger to me than life in the street. I came to know every street market, every bazaar, almost every tavern. I wandered among smells wailing like saxophones, or rushed about in clapped-out American taxis, (they were bigger and more battered in those days) with their tyres screeching like gangster films. The shoe-cleaners still had boxes with glittering brass fittings. Shoe-cleaners came, for some reason, from Kephallonia. They looked like farmers from Normandy. The best cooks came from Alexandria, but an Alexandria that disappeared before my day. The businessmen had yellow, dignified faces as if they were all about to be seasick. In the afternoon you could see fishmongers layed out on their own slabs. Late at night, as café after café closed down, everyone in Athens who was still awake homed in on the same few tables, and conversations mingled. A film producer I had never met was wandering about looking for someone, anyone, to write an English script for a film called Zorba the Greek. We all refused; no one liked Kazantzakis.
Nor do I like him now, though I think that was his best book. His verbiage is too dense, his exaggerations falsify, he is too poetical, too rhapsodical altogether. The best modern Greek writing is as pure as lemon juice. It is also highly critical. I was not able to isolate all that was best at once. The language was still difficult, so I liked simple lyric poems, not all of which look so wonderful today:
Eros
the archipelago
and the prow of his spray
and the seagulls of his dreams
on his topmost rigging the sailor whistles
a song.
Eros
his song27
and the horizons of his journey
and the echo of his homesickness ….
Those lines must be from an early work of Elytis, a distinguished writer at least as old then as I am now. I knew little or nothing about him, but it was not difficult to meet poets in Athens, since they all went to the same three or four cafés and bars. When I arrived I walked straight to Flocca and left a message with a waiter for Nikos Gatsos. He was in the café, and he came over. He was the most enchanting and unexpected friend I had ever made. His appearance is that of an elephant of brilliant intelligence and extraordinary kindness. In forty years he has moved cafés once, when the old one was pulled down, and tables twice. His smile is seductive, his shoulders hunch, his eyes are hooded but distinctly mischievous. His conversation, which ranges widely, is humourous and subtle, pausing like a river to take in any strange object that presents itself. He knows more about poetry than anyone else I have ever met. He is admirably mysterious.
He makes his living as a song-writer, which means that over many years the Greeks have had better-written songs than anyone else, and by translations. As a poet he claims to have been on strike for forty years, but his long early poem, ‘Amorgos’, named after an island he has never seen, is one of the master works of this century; and if ever I knew a poet, and a great poet, he still is one. He was the son of an innkeeper in what was then a remote village in Arkadia. George Seferis once said to me that the only person alive he envied for his grasp of the Greek language was Gatsos. There is an element of surrealism in ‘Amorgos’, like cold water so refreshing that it makes one gasp. But his language, the form of his speech, has a continuity with folk-songs. In his childhood that was still a living language:
And because of this I would have you, young men, to go down naked into the rivers
With wine and kisses and leaves in your mouth
To sing of Barbary as the carpenter follows the track of the wood’s grain
As the viper moves out from the gardens of 28the barley
With her proud eyes furious
And as the strokes of lightning thresh the young
The translation I quote is by Sally Purcell. When I first came to Athens I had never seen a complete translation, and the poem itself was out of print. Now there are three or four. I wanted to make one myself, but I despaired and still despair of the freshness and sharpness of his Greek. I did write a poem of my own, dedicated to Nikos, which was meant to be a substitute, but it was a poor one. So distant an imitation is hard to class as the sincerest form of flattery. ‘Amorgos’ has stayed in my head and resounded through many re-readings for nearly twenty years. It never loses its freshness. It is like a new coastline, a new continent:
How much I have loved you I alone know
I who touched you once with the eyes of the Pleiades
And embraced you in the wild hair of the moon and we danced in the summer fields
On the stubble after harvest, and we ate the cut clover
Dark and great sea with so many pebbles round your neck so many coloured stones in your hair
But this beautiful poem takes us too far. We are in Athens and I am a distinctly green young poet and novice archaeologist on a spree. Nikos is drinking coffee. ‘Talent is nothing,’ he says. ‘We have hundreds of talents. What we need is something else.’
I spent much of my time in museums, teaching myself to draw a few details from Greek vases, teaching my eyes to see them. I remember as a theological student going to see Sir Maurice Bowra in Oxford, when I knew I was destined to teach there. I wanted to know how to behave, what sort of teacher to be. God knows what I wanted. He asked what my main interests were. I said literature, and within literature rather Greek than Latin, though both, and rather poetry than prose, but also Greek vase-painting. It came out in a sort 29 of stutter. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Pots and poetry. Like me. Pots and poetry. No way to pay and promotion. No way to pay and promotion.’ So between the notes about conversations in my journal come the drawings, and the ceaseless observations of light and stone:
Some days the stone seems not only hard but harsh. An unexpected window where you see harsher marble with sun on it; the sky with sun on it looks harsher. A deep blue tan. The gorgon is a grinning boy with his tongue out tying a reef-knot in a snake. Convolvulus elegantissimus. Hermodactylus tuberosus like a widow iris.
