The History of the World In One Unfinished Chapter

My friend Gordon thinks that this (from the Thessaloniki Archaeological  Museum) pretty much sums up the human condition:

He: Oh look, my dear!  Shiny objects!

She: Well, I don't know...

Have a Nice Time, Boys

You've seen this, right?

It's the Mycenaean Warrior Vase.  About 12C BC,or maybe 7C BC. In a lot of schoolbooks (and the National Archaeological Museum at Athens). They're going off to war. She is waving a sad farewell.

But wait a minute. Would anybody go off to a real war in that goofy getup? And that sad farewell--don't I detect at least the hint of a smirk?

My guess is that they are off for an afternoon with the Society for Creative Anachronism. And she is relieved to get them out of the house, so she can finally get some work done.

Let's See, Iridanos....

The river that runs through the Keramikos cemetery in Athens is called the Iridanos.  Sounds entirely unfunereal to me;  belongs in some kind of pastoral frolic:

By the banks of the River Iridanos,
In a manner not seldom forbidanos,

We disported ourselves
Midst the faeries and elves

Lascivious, lewd and libidanos.

If This Won't Kill the Euro, What Will?

Feta cheese rolled in sesame seeds and deep fried.  With honey. And complementary chest spreader.

Greek Miscellany: Wealth, Ephialtes, Rent, etc.

Greek loose ends:

• Thoughts while gazing down onto the Bay of Corinth, from Delphi: these suckahs were rich. No, silly, not last week. But in the 5C BC. All the classical stuff that gins up the modern tourist trade: Delphi, but even more the Parthenon, Olympus, Delos. They are splendid displays of wealth in their own right: somebody had to csrt in all the stone, roll it uphill, carve it, put it in place. And shrines were loaded down with treasure--not just coins but vases, statues, whatever, all fine materials in fine handiwork. And I suspect whatever they may have given to the gods, we can assume they kept the good stuff for themselvea (recall Homer: they sacrificed cattle, but the gods got the smoke; they saved the meat for themselves). All this implies--what? Right, slaves. And mines. But Athens (at least) was a great trading empire, sending out triremes and hauling back loot, all presented in ensemble as a great projection of power.

• In the foothills below Delphi, olive trees.  Everywhere.  Apparently not just a marketing choice: the government limits tillage to olives so as to please the eye of the tourist. The EU picks up (part of?) the tab.  And FWIW, Armenians do the scut work.

• Found in the ruins of the ancient Delphic stadium: a mandate imposing a fine of five drachmae for taking wine out of the premises.  Go figure.

• My friend Gordon wonders what it would take to buy the American licensing rights for the Cult of Dionysus. There's not a town bigger than Podunk where we couldn't find some self-starter fit to franchise the wanton ecstasy of the flesh. All we ask is three percent of the gross.

• You remember  Ephialtes of Trachis?  Sure you do.  Or at least you remember Thermopylae, the pass in Northeastern Greece where the Spartan Leonidas and his forces kept the Persians at bay until some snake-in-the-grass led the Persians round by the back way.  Ephialtes is the snake in question; Kieron Moore played him in the movie. Anyway, I learn that the name Ephialtes survives in modern Greek as the word for "nightmare." 

• And speaking of nightmares, here is my word for the day: ενοικίαση, aka ενοικιαζόμενα, and kindred.  That's "rent," as in "for rent," as in "store for rent," as in "hundreds of stores for rent in just about every town I've been through."  Whether or not Greece is holding its own, you'd have to say that retail is dying.

Macedonia/Makedonija Again

I'm here in Thessaloniki in Northern Greece again tonight, my first time in this part of the world and specifically in what is a pleasant and to all outward appearances prosperous city.  If you like to kick old rocks, I find there is some wonderful stuff in the vicinity, more engaging and challenging than I expected.  I gave some hints about Philippi yesterday--aside from the battlefield,  they've got the conventional site of St. Paul's prison and the remnants of a Bishop's Palace that would seem to bid fair as competition with anything in modern Europe (Mrs. B, who grew up Catholic, knows how to say: "we have our better halves, they have their better quarters).

On other side of Thessaloniki, there's a remarkable museum-in-a-tumulus--literally, under the grave mound--although you might reserve judgment as to occupancy: no matter what the signs say, it appears that there is a  tooth-and-toenails conflict among archaeologists over just who is buried where.  

But perhaps most interesting of all is Pella, billed as the capital of ancient Macedon.  Taken on its own terms, it is s fascinating mess: a grid-pattern metropolis more or less plunked down in the middle of a plan, seemingly overbuilt from the start,.  Evidently we can picture veterans of Alexander's conquest army, trooping home fat with the loot of the greatest foreign invasion campaign the world had ever known.  Too much money and not enough to do with it: the ancient Dubai.

But after a while you notice a curious back-story.  That is: the Greek government seems to have poured a remarkable amount of money (back when they had money, yes) into these remote northern sites which will be visited not by Euro- and dollar-bearing foreigners but by hordes of neighborhood schoolchildren.

And why, exactly?  Unencumbered  by hard evidence, I bet I know th answer to this.  I suspect what we have here is one more thrust or parry in the ongoing conflict between "Macedonia," as in Greece, and "the Republic of Macedonia," known to the UN as "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," just next door.  Recall: there is a long-running and seemingly irreconcilable dispute between the Macedonians (Gr) and the Makedonijans (not Gr) next door.  I haven't any instinct at all to take sides in a fracas about which I know so near to nothing, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that what we are seeing here is one of the most venerable forms of a projection of power.  Be interesting to know how they will keep it up if, as and when, they can no longer afford to pay the wages of the guards and ticket-takers.

Philippi

I've never read Appian before and could easily have confused him with Arrian,.  This source calls Appian "one of the most underestimated of all Greek historian," and his account of the Battle of Philippi, which left Octavian and Antony victorious and led to the demise of Brutus and Cassius,  is dense with plausible incident. The conflict began with Brutus and Cassius in far the stronger position.  Brutus attacked and broke Octavian's line.  But Antony drove back Cassius.  Appian elaborates, in the Loeb translation by Horace White:

113  When Cassius was driven out of his fortifications and no longer had even a camp to go to, he hurried up the hill to Philippi and took a survey of the situation. As he could not see accurately on  account of the dust, nor could he see everything, but only that his own camp was captured, he ordered Pindarus, his shield-bearer, to fall upon him and kill him. While Pindarus still delayed a messenger ran up and said that Brutus had been victorious on the other wing, and was ravaging the enemy's camp. Cassius merely answered, "Tell him that I pray his victory may be complete." Then, turning to Pindarus, he said, "What are you waiting for? Why do you not deliver me from my shame?" Then, as he presented his throat, Pindarus slew him. This is one account of the death of Cassius. Others say that as some horsemen were approaching, bringing the good news from Brutus, he took them for enemies and sent Titinius to find out exactly; that the horsemen pressed around Titinius joyfully as a friend of Cassius, and at the same time uttered loud hurrahs; that Cassius, thinking that Titinius had fallen into the hands of enemies, said, "Have I waited to see my friend torn from me?" and that he withdrew to a tent with Pindarus, and Pindarus was never seen afterward. For this reason some persons think that he killed Cassius without orders. 

 

Thus Cassius ended his life on his birthday, on which, as it happened, the battle was fought, and Titinius killed himself because he had been too late;  

114 and Brutus wept over the dead body of Cassius and called him the last of the Romans, meaning that his equal in virtue would never exist again.

 Some twenty days pass.  Brutus, believing tht his adversaries will run short of provisions, undertakes to wait them out.  But the adversaries provoke a fight.  Brutus tries to  hold his force in defense but his soldiers, impatient and hot for blood, erupt into an attack.  At first they seem to prevail, but then instead of consolidating their victory, they fall to pillaging  Octavian's camp.  Again Appian:

128 The day was consumed in preparations till the ninth hour, when two eagles fell upon each other and fought in the space between the armies, amid the profoundest silence. When the one on the side of Brutus took flight his enemies raised a great shout and battle was joined. The onset was superb and terrible. They had little need of arrows, stones, or javelins, which are customary in war, for they did not resort to the usual manoeuvres and tactics of battles, but, coming to close combat with naked swords, they slew and were slain, seeking to break each other's ranks. On the one side it was a fight for self-preservation rather than victory: on the other for victory and for the satisfaction of the general who had been forced to fight against his will. The slaughter and the groans were terrible. The bodies of the fallen were carried back and others stepped into their places from the reserves. The generals flew hither and thither overlooking everything, exciting the men by their ardour, exhorting the toilers to toil on, and relieving those who were exhausted so that there was always fresh courage at the front. 

Finally, the soldiers of Octavian, either from fear of famine, or by the good fortune of Octavian himself (for certainly the soldiers of Brutus were not blameworthy), pushed back the enemy's line as though they were turning round a very heavy machine. The latter were driven back step by step, slowly at first and without loss of courage. Presently their ranks broke and they retreated more rapidly, and then the second and third ranks in the rear retreated with them, all mingled together in disorder, crowded by each other and by the enemy, who pressed upon them without ceasing until it became plainly a flight. The soldiers of Octavian, then especially mindful of the order they had received, seized the gates of the enemy's fortification at great risk to themselves because they were exposed to missiles from above and in front, but they prevented a great many of the enemy from gaining entrance. These fled, some to the sea, and some through the river Zygactes to the mountains.

 The next day Brutus followed the example of his companion and himself fell upon his sword.  Shakespeare (deploying an English translation of a French translation of Plutarch's Greek), in the play Julius Caesar compresses it all into two days, and into  single act.  In the play, Caesar's ghost pays a call on Brutus "to tell thee thou shlt see me at Philippi."  "Why," responds Brutus, "I will see thee at Philippi then." 

Greek Phrasebook Essential

I learned this one in 1987, and have never found cause for regret.

η γυναίκα μου θέλει άλλη μια μπύρα

Go ahead, Google it.

It's Quiet...Too Quiet

Anon asks me for my "sense of the situation on the ground" in Greece.  Anon flatters me.  Recall that I'm a tourist which means that I have about as much "sense on the ground" as I would if I stayed home and read The Economist--which is to say, as much as Thomas Friedman on a good day ("one Athens taxi driver said...").
 
But of course, invincible ignorance never stopped a pundit so I venture this thought: from my vantage, you'd never guess we were gazing into the abyss. The place seems almost on the edge of a little spooky.  It could just be the tourist biz: it is perhaps a tad early in the season, and I gather they are doing a roaring trade out in the islands but here on the mainland people (not just taxi drivers) do complain that business stinks.  Apparently the Germans are staying home which doesn't sound like much of a surprise, except if they are really feeling unwelcome, why would things be going well in the islands?   But whatever: traffic is light, restaurants are often empty.  And in particular, nobody seems crabby or frantic or on edge.  They're just happy to scoop up our tourist Euros with the usual air of stoic acceptance.

In short, you could be excused for thinking that the Greeks have decided that either (a) Angela will blink; or (b) it won't be so bad after all.  Of course I have not the foggiest notion whether (a) Angela will blink.  As to whether (b) it won't be so bad after all:   I surprise myself by thinking that you could actually make a case for that view.  Short term, the Greeks would have a hard time.  The new Drachma would trade at confetti prices, and the won't be buying much of anything from overseas.  But they could still ship farm products--or eat them, which is not the worst fate.  And if tourists are staying away now, at new-drachma prices, they certainly wouldn't stay away for long.

The 900-pound moussaka in the room is, of course, the domino effect.  If Greece then Portugal and Ireland blah blah---leaving Germany high and dry like those monasteries around Kalambaka.  And it is hard to see why one of the world's great export economies would want to try subsisting on a diet of nothing but the world's most overpriced currency.  Which makes me think that (a) Angela will blink may not be all that crazy, I'll be passing through Frankfurt next week, I must try to find a cabbie.

Still Looking for the Hat

The last time I came to Greece--twenty years ago--I knew exactly one person in all of Athens.  I  bumped into him crossing the street.  He was kind enough to take us to lunch out at Piraeus.  In those days I  wore a big old straw hat, but when I got back to the hotel, the hat was not with me.

This year I came back optimistic that I would run into him again crossing the street, and that he would have my hat.  

I have now departed from Athens.  No dice.  But who knows, maybe he will show up in Thessaloniki.

Tirtaios on Spartan Virtue, and a Critique

τεθνάμεναι γὰρ καλὸν ἐνὶ προμάχοισι πεσόνταBut
ἄνδρ' ἀγαθὸν περὶ ᾗ πατρίδι μαρνάμενον·
τὴν δ' αὐτοῦ προλιπόντα πόλιν καὶ πίονας ἀγροὺς
πτωχεύειν πάντων ἔστ' ἀνιηρότατον,
πλαζόμενον σὺν μητρὶ φίλῃ καὶ πατρὶ γέροντι
παισί τε σὺν μικροῖς κουριδίῃ τ' ἀλόχῳ.

It is beautiful when a brave man of the front ranks
falls and dies, battling for his homeland,
and ghastly when a man flees planted fields and city
and wanders begging with his dear mother,
aged father, little children and true wife.

--Translation, Willis Barnstrone, Greek Lyric Poetry 38 (1975).

 But compare Archilochos of Paro

Ἀσπίδι μὲν Σαΐων τις ἀγάλλεται, ἥν παρὰ θάμνῳ

ἔντος ἀμώμητον κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων·

αὐτὸν δ' ἔκ μ' ἐσάωσα· τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκείνη;

Ἐρρέτω· ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω.

Well, what if some barbaric Thracian glories
in the perfect shield I left under a bush?
I was sorry to leave it--but I saved my skin.
Does it matter?  Oh hell, I'll buy a better one.

--Id., 28.

Lucky Nauplia

It seems to me that Nauplia  on the Argolic Gulf in the northeast Peloponnese, has enjoyed at least one great stroke of luck, maybe two. The first, political: Nafplio was the first capital of Greece in War of Independence; it occupied the role from 1821 to 1834. But then classical fervor superseded and it fell to Athens to suffer the noise, the smog, the overcrowding and the general air of seediness that the state of modern capitalhood so often seems to require. And second tourism: Nauplia has some, but it doesn't have the beaches and attendant enticements that so often induce the hordes of German, English, whatever, down into the Mediterranean sun. The result is a perfect gem of a little resort town, with just enough by way of gemütlich to make it interesting, with little or none of the overload that so often makes modern tourism a form of betrayal. 

Life around Nafplia seems generally to have calmed down a bit from what it was a century and a half ago, when the back-country around here was infested with bandits.  Here the subject is treated appears in an odd mix of decorum and savagery:

The evening of our sojourn in Argos saw an excitement much like that which blocked the street at Nauplia.  The occasion was the same--the bringing home of a brigand's head; but  this the very head and fount of all the brigands, Kitzos himself, upon whose head had been set a price of several thousand drachmas.  Our veteran with difficulty obtained a view of the same and reported accordingly.  The robber chief of Edmong About's "Hadji Stauros", had been shot while  sighting at his gun.  He had fallen with one eye shut and one open, and in this form of feature his dissevered head remained.  The soldier who was its fortunate captor carried it concealed in a bag, with its long elf-locks lying loose about it.  He showed it with some unwillingness, fearing to have the prize wrested from him.  It was, however, taken on board of our steamer, and carried to Athens, there to be identified and buried.


All this imported to us that Mycenae, which we desired to visit, had for some time been considered unsafe on account of the presence of this very Kitzos and his head.  But at this moment the band were closely besieged in the mountains.  They wanted their head, and so did Kitzos.  We in consequence, were fully able to visit the treasure of Atreus and the ruins of Mycenae without fear or risk from those acephalous enemies.

 The memorialist is, of all people, Julia Ward Howe, she of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," in From the Oak to the Olive (1868).  Richard Stoneman, he of A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece (1984), from which I pillaged this excerpt, says she was "one of the first American travellers in Greece."   This seems a bit of a stretch, but she is very likely one of the first travel writers. But--"they wanted his head, and so did Kitzos":  do we hear an echo of Dickens' Pickwick Papers? That is:

'Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother's head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking.'

Athens Fragments

Some loose ends  from around  Athens:

• The last time I set foot here was about 20 years ago. Changes: much less smog and traffic, many more graffiti, especially around the University.  I have no good ideas about the graffiti, but I wonder about the smog and the traffic.  Is it better fuel processing efficiency?  The price of gas (calculating in my head, I think about $12 a gallon for premium)?  Economic doldrums (everyone staying home?)?

• Those  boar tusks on Minoan helmets--I am assured that they were not merely decorative, but fully weaponized. I wonder. You'd have to be awfully close, and the strap would have to be mighty tight.   Anyway, I have an operatic Wagnerian horned helmet which I wear to class on silly days.  Twenty years and I've never yet gored a student. 

• The new(ish) Parthenon museum: indeed it is a prodigy of political theatre, demonstrating so emphatically that yes, we can provide a home for the Elgin marbles, long so unjustly (so they say) withheld in London.  It's an impressive showing, although I never thought Elgin  was quite the bad boy as which he is often cast--look at the frieze panels in place here and you get some sense of just how shabby the London pieces would look if they, too, had been left just lying around on the ground for another century or more. But beyond that--if it is so important to move the Elgin marbles back from London to Athens,wouldn't it be just as important to move the Minoan Boxers back from  the Athens Archaeological Museum home to their source on the Island of Santorini?

• And while we are taking on current politico/cultural controversies: it dawns on me that there really were lions in Greece, well into the Iron Age (where else did Hercules get his lion suit?).   Now that we  we have reintroduced wolves to Yosemite, is there anyone lobbying for the reintroduction  of lions to Greece?

• A final thought: Israel had 12 tribes and lost ten, some time before the end of the 6C BCE.  Just a few years later, Athens emerges with ten tribes.   Just sayin'.

Update: That last one is a joke OK? I do not believe the 10 tribes are the ten lost tribesl

Pericles' Funeral Oration

Delivered at the Keramikos, the cemetery at Athens, in the shadow of the Parthenon:

We have a form of government, not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states; (nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us); which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few, but to the multitude, is called a democracy. Wherein, though there be an equality amongst all men in point of law for their private controversies; yet in conferring of dignities one man is preferred before another to public charge, and that according to the reputation, not of his house, but of his virtue; and is not put back through poverty for the obscurity of his person, as long as he can do good service to the commonwealth. And we live not only free in the administration of the state, but also one with another void of jealousy touching each other’s daily course of life; not offended at any man for following his own humour, nor casting on any man censorious looks, which though they be no punishment, yet they grieve. So that conversing one with another for the private without offence, we stand chiefly in fear to transgress against the public; and are obedient always to those that govern and to the laws, and principally to such laws as are written for protection against injury, and such unwritten, as bring undeniable shame to the transgressors.

--Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War(Thomas Hobbes trans.)

It just now occurred to me that a suitable translation of "Keramikos" would be "Potter's Field."  But cf. link.

Greece: Thinking the Unthinkable

Best recent summary of what's up in Greece: link, where we learn that a departure from the Euro might lead to an 80 percent drop in value of a new drachma against its departed comrade. Meanwhile I hear that you can buy a Mercedes for taxi service in Athens at a discounted price of €30,000. I assume that this means that the devalued price would be 150,000 drachmae? Unless, perhaps, the sellers of Mercedes taxis decided they had to shave a little off the top to keep the business (for you only, 147,000 drachmae, my best price!)?  This seems to me we should all be stocking up on Greek taxis--but no, wait, if  what I say is true, then somebody has already done it.

We also learn that the pre-crisis street price of an Athens taxi license was €150,000. (you could pass them down in the family, like a priesthood of Dionysios). A reforming Greece was supposed to do away with the Greek license raj, but with numbers like this I wouldn't hold my breath: few things can bring a nation to its knees quicker than an army of enraged taxi drivers. My puzzle is: would a post-departure taxi license find its price pegged to the Euro and so leap to 750,000 drachmae? Or is does it subsist in an internal market where a lower price might be indicated?

Meanwhile I hear that tourist business in the Greek Islands is growing again this summer—but that traffic on the mainland, including Athens, is falling flat. The Germans in particular are said to be giving the place a wide berth.  Given what I read, it is hard to blame them.

Faded Glory

May the sailor who brought me [to Athens] die miserably.  Athens contains nothing magnificent except its place names.  When a sacrificial victim is burnt only the skin remains as an indication of what animal that once was; just so, now that philosophy has deserted Athens, all that remains is to wander and wonder at the Academy and the Lyceum; ... Athens was indeed once a city, the home of the wise; now it is inhabited by bee-keepers.

--Synesius, Letters 135 [395 AD]

Richard Stoneman trans, in 

Richard Stoneman, A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece  (1984).

Greek Elections Update

Substitute "Prussian" for "Turkish" here and you might draw a crowd in Athens tonight:

Spirit of Freedom! when on Phyle’s brow
Thou sat’st with Thrasybulus and his train,
Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now
Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain?
Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain,
But every carle can lord it o’er thy land;
Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain,
Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand,
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned.

Here's a more familiar stanza of the same:

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
Art, glory, freedom, fail, but nature still is fair.

Both from George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." II.

Off Again

Of again, this time to Greece; fished a few spare drachmae out of the corner of the sock drawer, just in case.  We were in Crete a couple of years back but we are startled to realize we haven't set foot on the mainland for about 12 years.  We will travel, inter alia to the north, including Thessaloniki, where I've never set foot at all.

But I must finish, and shall chatter less
On Greece, for reasons which yourself may guess.
Only remember what you promised me
About the flask from dark-welled Castaly,—
A draught, which but to think of, as I sit,
Makes the room round me almost turn with wit.
Gods! What may not come true, what dream divine,
If thus we are to drink the Delphic wine!

--Leigh Hunt to Lord Byron (1816)

 To all faithful Underbelly readers, we'll tap a flask of dark-welled Castaly.