£5.50 PDF ISSN 2397-9836 argo A Hellenic Review Issue 11, Spring/Summer 2020

THEBES: forgotten city Paul Cartledge

Classical mountaineering Matthew Shipton in the swinging sixties Don Short Did write the ? Thomas W. Hodgkinson The Hellenic Society Online Subscribe to ARGO

As this issue goes to press, we have had to postpone Professor Leslie Brubaker’s lecture (‘Dancing ARGO is a ful-colour magazine for everyone interested in Greek culture, both in the streets: urban life in medieval ’) scheduled for 7 May, and there is some ancient and modern, featuring articles about art, archaeology, theatre, travel, uncertainty over whether the AGM and Presidential Lecture will go ahead on 13 June. literature and much more.

However, while this outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19 continues, there are many ways to enjoy If you have enjoyed reading this issue, please visit the Hellenic Society website membership of the Society online. to subscribe to ARGO: https://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/publications/argo/.

If you are interested in joining the Hellenic Society and receiving ARGO plus Publications much more, you can read all about it below … Membership with a subscription to the Journal of Hellenic Studies gives you online access to all the back issues of that journal via Cambridge Core (Cambridge University Press). Members who subscribe to Archaeological Reports have online access to all back issues of that publication in the same way. Become a Hellenic Society member While it is not possible to despatch print copies, members with a subscription to ARGO will be sent a link by email to access the magazine online. We hope to print copies of these issues as soon as it is The Hellenic Society, founded in 1879, is the leading organzation for those interested in the language, possible to do so. literature, history, art and architecture of ancient, Byzantine and modern Greece. It offers an interesting and varied public events programme, supports activities in schools and universities, maintains a world-class library If you need help to access these resources, please email [email protected]. and publishes world-leading journals in the field.

JOIN ONLINE: https://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/membership/ Library All members are entitled to use the Library. While it is not Publications possible to visit in person, the Library offers a wide range of All members receive The Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS) and either electronic resources which can be accessed using the Archaeological Reports (AR) or ARGO. Members can also subscribe to all barcode on your reader’s card. The librarians are still able to three publications. All members have online access to current and past issue cards at this time to new members and to any current volumes of JHS. members who do not already have a card, and will email the Events barcode number. Members can contact the librarians at The Society organizes a programme of public lectures and conferences, visits [email protected]. to sites and museums, and lectures arranged with local branches of the Classical Association. You can watch past events on the Society’s YouTube Some of the key online resources are: channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/HellenicSociety1879. JSTOR Classics Journals The Hellenic & Roman Library Loeb Digital Library Members enjoy access to the Library, which is Gnomon maintained jointly with the Roman Society and Table of Contents for Classical Studies (TOCS-IN) the University of London’s Institute of Classical Studies. It is one of the world’s Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) Latin Literature foremost classics lending libraries and contains over 150,000 volumes, Greek Documentary Papyri/Inscriptions Database including almost 700 current periodical titles, and many digital resources. If you Beazley Archive (Databases for Pottery/Gems/Terracottas) are not able to visit the Library, you can still benefit from access to JSTOR and the Digital Loeb Classical Library. See the library’s website: https://library.ics.sas.ac.uk/. Events Finally, although it is not possible to hold live events at the moment, please do explore the Society’s Supporting Hellenic studies YouTube channel where you can find podcasts of all our recent lectures and conferences: The Society aims to help those engaged in Hellenic Studies at all levels by means of grants to schools, univer- https://www.youtube.com/user/HellenicSociety1879. sities and other institutions, undergraduates, graduate students and young researchers. More details can be found on the Society’s website: https://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/grants/. Enjoy Professor Patrick Finglass talking about ‘Passionate lacunae: towards a new edition of Sappho’ last autumn, joint events with the Roman Society (‘Animals in the Ancient World’, ‘Memorialisation’, https://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/ ‘The Culture of the Greek Cities of the East’) and major day conferences (‘Saving Ancient Treasures Contact: [email protected] for the World’, ‘Sculptural Display: Ancient and Modern’, ‘Greek and Roman Armour’). Registered Charity number: 245623 VAT registration number: 233 4890 60 © Matthew Shipton

seum ty Mu Get ul Pa J. he T ©

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ANCIENT MODERN REVIEWS 4 Thomas W. Hodgkinson 18 Matthew Shipton considers 33 J.W. Bonner on Theodor argues Odysseus is the 19th-century mountaineers’ Kallifatides, The Siege of author of fascination with the classical Troy 8 Paul Cartledge reclaims a 35 Alice Dunn on Alexandros place on the map for the 21 Paul Watkins explores the Papadiamandis, The forgotten city of Thebes relics of Britain’s Greek Boundless Garden: Selected 11 Emma Bentley, essay Empire on Kythera Short Stories 2 competition winner, on the 24 David Ricks revisits the 37 Henry Cullen on Andrea Hymn to Brousos of Alexander Pallis, Marcolongo, The Ingenious 13 Zosia Archibald introduces an unparalleled travel book Language: Nine Epic Macedonia and its 28 Don Short on reporting from Reasons to Love Greek archaeological history Greece in the heyday of 39 J.W. Bonner on Mary British journalism Norris, Greek To Me 30 Caroline Mackenzie meets LATE ANTIQUE author to The opinions expressed in these pages are those of 16 the authors, and do not necessarily represent those Violet Moller explains why discuss writing for children of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Cassiodorus was such a about the ancient world Editorial Committee: Professor Roderick Beaton, pivotal figure in the Professor Paul Cartledge, Dr Daisy Dunn preservation of Greek and (Editor), Dr Fiona Haarer, Dr Stephen Harrison, ARGO Issue 11, Spring/Summer 2020 Dr Lisa Hau, Mr George Lemos, Mr Peter Lennon, Latin texts Professor Judith Mossman, Dr Margaret Printed by Bell & Bain Limited Mountford and Dr Vasiliki Zali Typeset by Gina Coulthard Front cover image: ‘Thebes’ by Amanda Short, © Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies gouache and collage, 2020 (© Amanda Short; ARGO, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, www.amandashortdesign.com). Back cover Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU image: of the Valais (© Matthew Shipton) CONTRIBUTORS

ZOSIA HALINA ARCHIBALD graduated HENRY CULLEN has been a school classics texts through the Middle Ages and won from the universities of Bristol and teacher since 2010. He is co-author of the Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction in Oxford, and teaches classical archaeology Latin to GCSE (Bloomsbury 2016) and 2016. She co-presents the history podcast and ancient history at the University of is Director of Studies at the JACT Greek Travels Through Time. . She has co-directed two major Summer School. field projects, at Pistiros in Bulgaria DAVID RICKS is Professor of Modern (1999–2013) and at Olynthos in Greece ALICE DUNN is a writer and freelance Greek and Comparative Literature at (2015–2019). She is the author of two journalist for The Spectator and The King’s College London. Among his monographs and co-editor of a dozen London Magazine among others. She interests are Anglo-Greek literary books, including three volumes of essays was recently shortlisted in the 2019 connections, especially in the case of on Hellenistic economies. Her chapter on Surrey Life Magazine/Guildford Book Cavafy, and he has written on Alexander Macedonia will appear in the Festival Short Story Competition. Pallis’ . forthcoming Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World, edited by P. THOMAS W. HODGKINSON studied classics MATTHEW SHIPTON gained a PhD in Cartledge and P. Christesen. at Oxford. He is a Sunday Times theatre classics from King’s College London in critic, Daily Mail travel writer and the 2015 and published his first book in EMMA BENTLEY is a third-year classics author of the novel Memoirs of a Stalker 2018, The Politics of Youth in Greek student at King’s College London. She is (Silvertail Books 2016). Tragedy: Gangs of (Bloomsbury). also co-editor in chief of Kerberos, an Based in London, he is writing a second undergraduate classics research journal. CAROLINE MACKENZIE read classics at book, on mountaineering in classical Pembroke College, Cambridge. After antiquity. J.W. BONNER teaches the humanities at practising as a solicitor in London for a Asheville School in North Carolina. A decade, she returned to her love of DON SHORT began his journalism career long-time Asheville Poetry Review and classics and taught Greek and Latin as in local news before moving to Fleet Kirkus Reviews contributor, his essays head of department in a school in Street in 1958 as a general news reporter and reviews have also appeared in Sevenoaks. In 2018 she was awarded with The Daily Sketch. He joined The Artforum, Dictionary of Literary distinction in a Master of Arts in classical Daily Mirror two years later, where he Biography and The North Carolina art and archaeology at King’s College became Chief Showbusiness Corres- Literary Review, among other London. Caroline’s current work pondent before leaving in 1974 to form publications. His fiction has been includes private tuition in Latin and his own editorial bureau, Solo published in various literary magazines, Greek, study days and lectures for Syndication. He broke the story that the including The Greensboro Review and English Heritage and archaeological Beatles were to disband, is credited with The Quarterly. societies, and independent research and coining the phrase ‘Beatlemania’ and writing. In 2019 she published her first ghosted several bestselling books, PAUL CARTLEDGE is A.G. Leventis Senior book, Culture and Society at Lullingstone including that of Peter Sellers. His new Research Fellow of Clare College, Roman Villa (Archaeopress). Her website book, and Beyond, has just Cambridge, and A.G. Leventis Professor can be found at www.carolinetutor.co.uk. been published by Wymer. of Greek Culture emeritus in the Faculty of Classics. His Democracy: A Life (new VIOLET MOLLER is an historian with a PAUL WATKINS is a publisher and author of edition 2018) is published by Oxford special interest in the history of science works on various Mediterranean islands, University Press and his latest book, in the ancient and medieval worlds. She including Sicily, the and . Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient is the author of The Map of He is on the Council of the Anglo-Hellenic Greece, will be published in November Knowledge (Picador 2019) which traces League and was editor of The Anglo- by Picador. the journey of three crucial scientific Hellenic Review from 1990 to 2015. © Georgios Pazios/CC BY-SA/Wikimedia Commons LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 24

hen we founded ARGO in Home to and the praise-poet 2015 we were determined Pindar, among many others, it Wthat it should be an certainly wasn’t the pigsty the elegant, colourful, well-illustrated Athenians endeavoured to charac- journal, and that it should be in print. terize it as. This city, with its many At a time when so many publications idiosyncrasies, was surely one of the are online only, we continue to take most fascinating in the ancient world. great pride in ARGO as a physical Elsewhere in this issue you’ll find object to be picked up and savoured a knowingly provocative – but at leisure, rather than scrolled persuasive – argument for recog- through at speed on a screen. nizing Odysseus as the true author As you’ll have noticed, however, of the Odyssey (pages 4–7), an

© Ángel M. Felicísimo/CC BY-SA/Wikimedia Commons we are publishing this edition exploration of why classical so digitally. The spread of Coronavirus appealed to mountaineers in the 8 (Covid-19) has had an impact on all 19th century (pages 18–20) and a areas of our lives, and the publishing thought-provoking essay on the industry is having to adapt quickly. At Brousos of Alexander Pallis (pages the time of writing, editors are 24–27), an author you may not have making unprecedented moves to heard of, but will be eager to explore delay the release of spring and further soon. There is of course summer titles. Ordinarily, ARGO is much more besides. dispatched from Senate House in The books reviewed in this issue London, but with the closure of the have a distinctly international building some weeks ago and uncer- flavour, three-quarters of them tainty hanging over the status of the having originally been published in printers, which like all businesses are Europe – in Greek, Swedish and having to take things a day at a time, Italian. While Henry Cullen and J.W. we made the decision to produce this Bonner immerse themselves in two issue as a PDF rather than delay its very different paeans to Greek publication. Our hope is that we language, Alice Dunn discovers the might print it later in the year, or as short stories of Alexandros Papadia- soon as this is possible, so that you mandis, who was one of the fathers may yet receive a copy for your of modern . coffee tables and bookshelves. In difficult times, I hope that we The articles in this issue will may continue to seek diversion and certainly merit a second reading. In joy in reading books, both fiction and our cover story (pages 8–10), non-, poetry, essays, articles, and in exquisitely illustrated by our artist sharing memories and dreams of Amanda Short, Paul Cartledge throws travels in Greece. From all of us at a spotlight on ancient Thebes, a city ARGO, we hope that you stay safe ARGO is published by the Society for as rich in myth as it is in history. As and well. the Promotion of Hellenic Studies you read his article you will DAISY DUNN www.hellenicsociety.org.uk undoubtedly find yourself wondering EDITOR, ARGO @Hellenic_Soc why Thebes is not better known today. @DAISYFDUNN a r g o © The J. Paul Getty Museum (gift of Leon Levy; digital image courtesy the Getty’s © Open Content Program)

A herm portrait of Homer depicted blind and made in the 20th century. Odysseus: author of the Odyssey

Odysseus, argues Thomas W. Hodgkinson, was not only a hero but the poet behind the name ‘Homer’ too

ne hundred and eight men And Odysseus strung the bow It’s one of the great similes in any are competing for a woman. easily, literature. At this climactic moment of OIt’s an archery contest. One With as little effort as a poet strings the Odyssey, the hero cocks, as it by one, they fail: they aren’t strong his , were, the gun that he will use to enough even to string the great bow Looping the soft sheep’s gut at either massacre his enemies, and the poet of her husband, a man who is end. compares his action to the quintes- missing, presumed dead. In reality, Then, with his right hand, he tested sential act of peace, the preparation of course, Odysseus is secretly the string, of a musical instrument to amuse an among them, disguised as an old And it sang out with the note of a audience. On one level, it’s brilliantly beggar. He asks if he can have a go, swallow descriptive of Odysseus’ heroic and, reluctantly, they agree. (Odyssey 21.406–11). ease. While his enemies couldn’t

4 ANCIENT string the bow, he does so without about Troy, but he goes even further. been fatally wounded. That’s to say, effort. But at the same time, there’s He happens to sing of a quarrel he weeps like a character in the more going on here. The question is: between and Odysseus, story just told: a woman who has how much more? having no idea that Odysseus is in been widowed by Odysseus himself. No one knows who wrote the the audience, incognito. Hearing What Homer is presenting us Odyssey, and ‘wrote’ is in any case him, the hero weeps, covering his with here is a corridor of mirrors, a the wrong word for a work of oral face with his cloak so that no one will mise en abyme in which the faces of poetry, which was developed over see. poet and warrior alternate. Noticing the centuries through a form of the warrior weeping, the Phaeacian collective creativity: via recitation Whenever the godlike poet paused, king calls a halt, instead asking and elaboration by different poets in Odysseus wiped his tears and Odysseus to tell them who he is, a society that had lost the skill of uncovered his head becoming the storyteller instead of writing. There may have been an And made an offering to the gods Demodocus. Odysseus obliges, originator poet. There was most from his two-handled cup. after a final tribute to the poet, in probably a finalizer poet, who was to But when the poet began again, and which he remarks that life doesn’t the Odysseus poem as the the Phaeacian noblemen get better than listening to such Mesopotamian scholar Sîn-lēqi- Urged him to continue with his extraordinary poetry. unninni was to the older Gilgamesh entrancing story, Which brings us to the salient poem, expanding it and honing it into Again Odysseus covered his head moment when Odysseus literally something like the director’s cut with and wept becomes the author of his own story. which we’re familiar. (Odyssey 8.87–92). The 24 books of the Odyssey are not What we know is that this is a autobiography, or not straightfor- poem steeped in, and in some sense According to this literary GIF of wardly. ‘Tell me, Muse, about the about, poetry. It begins and ends in the paradoxical relationship between man’, the poem begins (ἄνδρα μοι Odysseus’ palace at , which is artist and audience, the emotion ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, Odyssey 1.1), presented as a place of and evoked by the artist simultaneously drawing an instant distinction dancing. The first thing of any signif- identifies you and strips you of your between the poet (me) and his icance said by a human character is identity. The blind singer picks up his subject (man). Yet the fact is, most of Odysseus’ son, , lyre and the silent listener covers his the Odyssey’s best-known episodes observing that the so-called suitors – face and eyes, whose vision is – , , Scylla, etc – are the Bullingdon louts who have already obscured by tears. When the narrated by Odysseus himself. invaded his house – are preoccupied first action is reversed, the second He isn’t telling his story in verse. with poetry. They are sitting around action is reversed. This intimate Yet he is, because he speaks in the listening to Phemius, the palace thread between creator and metre of the poem. He’s not accom- poet, who is singing of the return of consumer is like that between a panying his story with a lyre. Yet the from the . puppet and puppeteer. equally he is, because in books 9, 10 Immediately, we wonder why Odysseus comments that and 11, he’s being portrayed by Phemius picked this theme, which Demodocus sings as if he had been whoever is performing the poem. inevitably distresses Odysseus’ wife, at Troy – as if, that is, he were The Odyssey is not a book, or it . Worse, it seems he often Odysseus himself. It’s an instance of didn’t develop as one. It’s a verse does so, since she says it ‘always’ the typically Homeric device of drama, an improvisatory one-man saddens her to hear it. paired similes that are loosely the show. Phemius’ theme is also the inverse of each other. A warrior, It is Homer improvising theme of the Odyssey. The finalizer comparing a poet to a warrior, Odysseus, who is improvising his poet – let’s call him Homer – uses reverses the simile we began with, memoirs. And when the hero the device to materialize like a ghost when a poet compared a warrior to a pauses, as Demodocus did and within the action (while singing of the poet. Homer would have done, the return of the Greeks, Phemius is The link continues, with Phaeacian king observes that he Homer). In the process, he turns us, Odysseus as puppeteer. After telling has told his story as skilfully as a his audience, into the unsuitable Demodocus he admires him more poet, narrating ‘both the sufferings of suitors. There’s a joke there, as than any man, he asks him to sing of the Greeks in general, and his own there is in the remark that he the Wooden Horse and how in particular’. That latter phrase performs ‘reluctantly’. Odysseus used it to sack Troy. In (πάντων τ᾽ Ἀργείων σέο τ᾽ αὐτοῦ Phemius will return, but before he effect, he says: ‘let’s talk about me’. κήδεα λυγρά, Odyssey 11.369) does, we meet another poet, Demodocus sings and Odysseus serves as a thumbnail diptych of the Demodocus. At the court of the weeps. How does he weep? Like a and the Odyssey themselves. Phaeacians, where Odysseus lands woman cradling her husband, who As a storyteller, Odysseus displays up, the blind palace poet also sings has fought to defend his city and the talent of Homer.

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the story, when the returning hero One was the arrival on the beach. sets foot on his native Ithaca after 20 Another comes when, with the ‘So I’m a crank, years away, the word ‘Homer’ swineherd, he reaches the palace, but a crank with a degree (Ὅμηρος) is embedded in the and recognizes it not by sight but syllables. shrouds the from the sounds of Phemius of self-awareness. landscape in mist, so he can’t performing in the hall. Or again, when I know I won’t persuade recognize where he is, and in his he enters, the overbearing Antinous many of my theory, despair, he groans and strikes his asks why the swineherd has dragged or not in full.’ thigh (πεπλήγετο μηρὼ, Odyssey in a beggar off the street. The 13.198). swineherd replies indignantly: I won’t say any of these things – only that the Odyssey is a story of Who goes out of his way At this point, though, I need to concealment, studded with moments To invite a stranger into his house pause, too. I must wipe my tears and of self-revelation that link hero and Unless he happens to have a special uncover my head. I’ve written a poet. More tentatively, I will skill, novel and a screenplay, both based speculate that these amplified, Like a prophet, say, or a doctor or on the idea that the Odyssey’s origi- ambiguous moments bear traces of carpenter, nator poet was Odysseus himself. an earlier version of the Odyssey, Or a poet who enchants with his So I’m a crank, but a crank with a which may have identified Odysseus song? degree of self-awareness. I know I as the originator poet. (Odyssey 17.382–85) won’t persuade many of my theory,

or not in full. The J. Paul Getty Museum (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s © Open Content Program) So I won’t make reference to the ancient tradition that the Odyssey was composed, if not by Odysseus, then by one of his descendants: an intriguing idea that would explain the poem’s consistently propagandist tone, which seems designed to defend its protagonist against the charge of responsibility for any of the many misfortunes that befall him and his men. I won’t note that the first words of the poem are ‘man’ and ‘me’, and that, notwithstanding the misaligned cases, that proximity creates an association between poet and protagonist from the get-go. I won’t observe that the Gilgamesh poem, whose influence on the Odyssey has been documented, provides a precedent by naming Gilgamesh as its author. I won’t draw attention to the scene in book 9 of the Iliad when Odysseus reaches the tent of Achilles to find the murderous truant passing his time playing a lyre and singing of the deeds of great men – a fine paradigm, delivered casually, of a warrior-king with the skill and inclination to perform self-referential poetry. I know it’s tantamount to an admission of pure derangement to speak of messages concealed within the text. So I won’t mention that, at This bronze statuette of a lyre player with a companion is thought what is structurally the hinge-point of to have been made on in the seventh century BC.

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In an exchange that drips with grip on his instrument, and aimed it at More magic. What follows occurs irony, we’re conscious that his audience like a bow. within a strange supernatural time Odysseus, who alone knows what And so on, through the scene of pocket: while Athena holds back the the future holds, is a kind of prophet. slaughter. In a flourish that feels sun, Odysseus and Penelope go to The man who has come to cure the post-modernist three millennia too bed and make the most of an infinite house of its plague of suitors is also soon, the finale of the Odyssey is set night, after which, fittingly for the end like a doctor (the Greek phrase is in the kind of room in which the of a poem about storytelling, they ἰητῆρα κακῶν, which could as well poem would have been performed. swap stories. Like an oral poet, refer to an exorcist as a physician). So the effect would have been the Odysseus retells tales he has told He is a carpenter, too, who conceived same as if, at the cinema, you saw a before. A story whose multiple the Wooden Horse, whittled a stake film that ended with the massacre of authorship exists out of time, and to blind the Cyclops, made a raft to a cinema audience. which at its climactic moment escape and even rebuilt his I’m aware of some of the objec- compares its hero to a poetic story- bed and bedroom during an tions to my argument. Among them is teller, ends with him telling stories extensive palace refurbishment. the conviction that the Mycenaean while folded into a temporal nowhere If the first three elements of our Greeks didn’t quite have our modern that sees the normal laws of physics ascending tetracolon have formed concept of authorship, seeing poetry suspended. inadvertently fitting descriptions of less as an achievement than as a gift There’s no consensus about a Odysseus, what should we expect from god. Maybe. But the attribution, historical Odysseus. Even if there from the fourth? Is Odysseus, then, even if later, of the Odyssey to a poet were, we couldn’t link him to the a ‘poet who enchants with his song’? by the name of Homer seems like poem we have. Yet the Odyssey is a By now we have our answer ready. counter-evidence. And if we sift the work haunted by ghosts – not only He is, in a way that is more than bloodbath in the hall, there’s more. the literal ghosts of the Underworld, metaphorical. He is a poet, maybe Phemius begs Odysseus for mercy but also the ghosts of past and the poet. on the grounds that he is ‘self- future versions of the hero, and of This insinuation never radiates taught’. The Greek word is past and future versions of the text more seductively than at the most αὐτοδίδακτος, a Homeric hapax he lives in. Among these I detect a crucial moment of self-revelation. whose exact meaning in the context draft that may, even if only as a We’ve arrived back at the stringing is obscure. But what seems clear is literary conceit, have named him as of the bow. The suitors have tried that the poet is taking some credit for its author. and failed. The swineherd has the quality of his work, maybe Perhaps if we imagine Odysseus placed the bow in the hands of the staking a claim for its originality. as the originator poet, it makes beggar, with the same ceremony as, Ultimately, Odysseus spares him. sense to imagine Homer, the elsewhere, a lyre is placed in the Not only that, he then deploys him finalizer poet, suppressing the attri- hands of Phemius. With a now as a means of controlling the story bution. He was happy to sing familiar irony, the beggar tests if the about what has happened in the Odysseus’ praises, but not to give bow has contracted woodworm, and palace. He tells him to strike up him credit for his masterpiece. one of the suitors observes that he music. The survivors dance, handles it as confidently as a man celebrating the defeat of the suitors. who has a similar bow at home. As Odysseus intended, passers-by This scene isn’t only being recited. hearing the sound assume this is the ‘A story whose multiple It’s being performed. When the wedding feast for Penelope, who beggar tests the bow, the performer has agreed to remarry. In a sense, authorship exists out of may have made an equivalent they’re right. time, and which at its gesture with his lyre. While comparing After some resistance, Penelope climactic moment the stringing of the bow with the tearfully accepts that Odysseus is stringing of a lyre, he may have her husband. Two decades apart compares its hero to a mimicked that movement, looping end in emotional reunion. poetic storyteller, invisible sheep’s gut around a tuning ends with him telling key. When he describes the hero And dawn would have found them stories while folded into a plucking the string, which sings out still weeping with the note of a swallow, he would If grey-eyed Athena hadn’t had other temporal nowhere that surely have done likewise, selecting ideas. sees the normal laws of the tightest string, and making it sing. She held back the night at the physics suspended.’ I like to imagine that, when the hero world’s edges aims an arrow at his most arrogant And restrained the golden sun in the antagonist, the suitor Antinous, the sea. performer might have adjusted his (Odyssey 23.241–44)

7 a r g o © The J. Paul Getty Museum (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s © Open Content Program)

Soldiers fight to defend their walls – possibly those of Thebes – from attack on this Attic red-figure or drinking cup attributed to Apollodorus from ca 500 BC. Thebes: the forgotten city

Whether you prefer the city of History or the city of Myth, it’s high time Thebes reclaimed its place on the map, says Paul Cartledge

he Greek city of Thebes is number of reasons for this oblivion, better known today. (There was in absolutely central, not only not all of them bad, the reasons for fact yet another Greek Thebes, but Tgeographically, but also rescuing it from the condescension that one is eminently forgettable.) culturally. It is central both to the of posterity are more powerful. Second, unlike and ancient Greeks’ achievements, The first and most obvious reason Athens, Thebes only briefly drove especially political and high-cultural, for oblivion, or confusion, is the the political agenda. and to their continuing impact on existence of the Egyptian Thebes, Indeed, while Sparta and Athens European, Euro-American and by situated within modern Luxor. This hogged the limelight, Thebes extension global civilization, now great city was the capital of Egypt languished in the deep shadow of and for the foreseeable future. And during the New Kingdom, the era of their incandescence. yet, for many centuries, the city has Rameses the Great; and of the two Third, and probably most been very largely – and quite delib- namesakes, Egyptian Thebes, which decisive of all, in 480 BC, at a pivotal erately – forgotten. While there are a earned a mention in Homer, is far the moment in all ancient Greek and

8 ANCIENT thus European and Western history, was constructed, also in the ality, so that it was possible to create the then ruling regime of Thebes , as a home and capital such a force in such a city. Its made a fatal mistake – it chose the city for the now liberated ex-Helot creation in 378 BC was credited to wrong, that is the Persian, side in the Greeks whom the Spartans had kept one Gorgidas, and it is mentioned in Graeco-Persian Wars. This earned enslaved for centuries. Plato’s famous Symposium inhabitants of the city an undying Spanning that decade but origi- dialogue. reputation as traitors to Hellenism at nating a few years earlier was one of Its most important achievement a time when it really mattered to the most unusual social formations was its contribution to the Thebans’ stand up and be counted politically. known from all the ancient world: the decisive victory over the Spartans at was for that reason so-called ‘’. This was a Leuctra in 371 BC, but its most down on Thebes, and there was no crack infantry force of 300 famous exploit was also its last. At Theban Thucydides to redress the composed of 150 pairs of male the Battle of Chaeronea in in balance. Indirectly, too, this act of ‘lovers’. We are not well informed on 338 BC, where the Thebans and treachery brought on Thebes’ head how it was recruited or maintained. Athenians were crushed by King 145 years later the most awful retri- But Thebes was especially Philip of Macedon, assisted by his bution – its near-total physical renowned – or excoriated, according 18-year-old son Alexander, the Band destruction, on the orders of the then to taste – for its alleged ‘invention’ of perished to a man. They were buried master of the Greek world and ritualized pederasty and for its actual on the battlefield as they had fought, ultimate Greek culture-hero, practice of male-male homosexu- in a single body, and the site of their . What is to be put on the other Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, public domain (Wikimedia Commons) side of the ledger? As I see it, and as I have written it, there was not one ancient Greek city of Thebes but two: the city of History and the city of Myth. Thebes, the real historical – and indeed prehistorical – city, was a major place in its own right. In the Late Bronze or Mycenaean age of the 14th and 13th centuries BC it boasted an important palace located on what was always the ancient city’s most distinctive feature, the Acropolis, later known as the Cadmea (Kadmeia). In the sixth century BC, Thebes inaugurated a most fruitful form of political association, namely feder- alism, one that eventually influenced the world’s most powerful democratic state today, the United States of America. In the fourth century BC it produced a series of brilliant political leaders who were also genius generals. Between them – and the chief among them was , whom Walter Raleigh rated the greatest of all the ancient Greeks – they introduced stunning social, military and political reforms, reduced once omnipotent Sparta to a nullity and established Thebes, for a brief but important decade, as the major power of all mainland Greece. It was under this Theban hegemony of 371–362 BC that the original Megalopolis was built, in Pelopon- ‘Oedipus Solves the Riddle of the Sphinx’ nesian Arcadia, and that Messene by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1827.

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of their birth to Theban personages. in 335 BC they reputedly came One level down from those gods tumbling down on the orders of ‘This mythic Thebes of were the heroes – and anti-heroes – Alexander to a similar accompa- theatre has been labelled of ancient Greek myth. Thebes was niment. Pindar, the praise-poet of the “anti-Athens”, the notoriously the city of swell-foot victors at the great Olympic and Oedipus, the patricide who, misap- other panhellenic festival games, upside-down city onto plying a Delphic , married his was a Theban by adoption if not which the Athenians own widowed mother and then birth. A younger contemporary of his projected everything they fathered four children upon her – was Pronomus, the James Galway children who were simultaneously of his day, though the reeded weren’t, or didn’t have, or both his sons and daughters and his instrument he blew, called , didn’t want to have.’ half-brothers and half-sisters. was more like an oboe than a flute. Horrors. And then there were the Theban Oedipus and Thebes became the philosophers: Simmias and Cebes, communal grave is still marked fount and origin of a thousand followers like Plato of Socrates, today by the famous marble Lion of myths. Not just those of whose works have not been Chareonea. So much for the Thebes (who with turns up in preserved, and, not least, Crates the of History. ’ Bacchae) and of Oedipus famous Cynic, who opted for a life of Yet it is the Thebes of Myth that himself (think of Sophocles’ Oedipus poverty on the streets of Athens. really deserves our commemoration Tyrannus and Antigone, with their There are, in short, many reasons as well as admiration. We might brilliant plays on the disorienting role why ancient Greek Thebes not only plausibly start our quest from the of the Delphic oracle, and the hero’s should not but must not be forgotten. city’s unique connections with the tragic solving of the riddle of the

Orient. Thebes, although it was Sphinx), but also of the Seven © Ángel M. Felicísimo/CC BY-SA/Wikimedia Commons located in the centre of mainland Against Thebes (the title of a Greece, was reputedly founded by surviving tragedy by Aeschylus, the Cadmus, a Phoenician from Tyre, in prequel to Antigone) and the two what is today roughly modern Suppliant Women tragedies (again Lebanon. That intriguing myth by Euripides and by Aeschylus) and enables us to re-examine the whole so many more. In fact, this mythic issue of Eurocentrism – or alterna- Thebes of theatre has been labelled tively, Orientalism – in the study of the ‘anti-Athens’, the upside-down ancient Greek history, with Thebes city onto which the Athenians as a prime exhibit. projected everything they weren’t, or For example, the Greeks didn’t have, or didn’t want to have – themselves attributed their own tyranny, patricide, fratricide, incest, original creation of a fully phonetic treason, civil war. You name it. As alphabetic script – the ultimate Sigmund Freud, for one, memorably of our own – to the Phoeni- did: his ‘Oedipus-complex’ has its cians, in the sense that they called roots in the complex and complexity their alphabet ‘Phoenician’ or of ancient Greek Thebes. ‘Cadmean’ letters. The Phoenicians Finally, the snooty Athenians, not did use an alphabet but did not content with appropriating sophisti- employ signs for vowels. At the cated Theban myths, abused their same time, both in their foundational Theban near-neighbours collectively ‘national’ epic, the Iliad of Homer, as ‘Boeotian swine’. Boeotian they and in later literature, such as the certainly were: Thebes was the Histories of Herodotus, the Greeks principal city of the Boeotian ethnic portrayed the Phoenicians quite sub-group of Greeks who gave their negatively, as ‘barbarians’ name to the region of Boeotia. embodying cultural traits that were Theban history cannot be properly the diametric opposite of good, understood except within its Hellenic values. regional, Boeotian context. But So far as religion is concerned, swine in the philistine, low-cultural Thebes had specially intimate and sense they certainly all were not. deep connections with major ancient In myth, the original city walls Greek gods, above all Dionysus and with their famous Seven Gates had . Both owed at least a part been built to the sound of music, and Ptoion Kouros.

10 ANCIENT © Trustees of the British Museum

Vulcan, Venus and Cupid on a 16th-century intaglio. No ordinary craftsman winner of the student essay competition

In 2019, the Hellenic Society launched a new essay competition which gives undergraduate students the chance to showcase their work. We received scores of high-quality entries from students from all over the world, and are delighted to present the winning essay here. Emma Bentley impressed the judges with her originality and the way that she uses the Hymn to Hephaestus to open up several important issues. Congratulations, also, to our two runners up: Marziale (King’s College London) and Victoria Downey (Durham). The competition will be back this summer for its 2020 edition – keep an eye on our website for details.

Sing, clear-voiced Muse, of This is one of 33 , peace throughout the year, protected Hephaestus, famed for his skill, each dedicated to a god and by the homes they constructed. Life Who, with gleaming eyed Athena, attributed to Homer in antiquity. before craftsmanship was violent; taught splendid crafts Modern scholars argue that they had the reference to ‘wild beasts’ To mankind upon the earth. multiple authors and that most date conjures up images of a hostile Hymn to Hephaestus 1–3 (transla- to the Archaic period (seventh to sixth natural world in which mankind was tions are the author’s own unless century BC), yet the Hymn to no different from animals. The fact stated otherwise) Hephaestus was likely composed in that these technical skills are taught the second half of the fifth century BC to mankind suggests a learning So begins the Homeric Hymn to in Athens. It features concepts process, rather than an innate ability Hephaestus, a hymn to the Greek typically associated with far grander to master arts from birth (or from god of fire and metallurgy that philosophies and tragedies from this mankind’s genesis). Craftsmanship presents craftmanship as essential to period, and is significant because it has divine origins, but progress is the development of mankind. It elevates the role of Hephaestus as driven by education and skill. praises Hephaestus (alongside the well as that of the ordinary craftsman. Unsurprisingly, the god that the goddess Athena) for teaching Praise of Hephaestus illuminates hymn calls ‘famous for his art’ is mankind the skills that enabled his technical skill. He is klutotechnēs, known throughout Greek culture for humans to progress from living in ‘famous for his art’, and this technē his technical skills. Hephaestus caves ‘like beasts’ to enjoying a (craft or skill) is what sparked human constructed the peaceful life ‘in their own homes’. progress. Now mankind lives in (Iliad 18.368–617), built palaces for

11 a r g o the gods and fashioned Pandora out in relation to the other Olympians, careful not to read a short hymn as a of raw materials ( 570– who were a physically able ‘leisure philosophical work, yet it does 87). He was physically disabled; this class’. His physical disability practical arts to virtue to a is central to his mythology, signifi- frequently rendered him the ‘butt of limited extent: the composer cantly his expulsion from Olympos cheap jokes’, in the words of requests that Hephaestus grant as a child. Accounts differ, but one Garland, which modern audiences them , excellence or virtue has eject him due to his would hopefully condemn. (Hymn to Hephaestus 8). Arete, disability and another (Iliad 1.590– Yet one cannot minimize the role when taken to mean moral virtue, is 94) claims that his disability was a of technē in the progress of not normally associated with result of throwing him from mankind, something that also occurs Hephaestus, yet it does connote Olympos. Thus, Hephaestus is within the Bound. The fulfilling one’s purpose or potential in positioned as an outsider in the ambiguous dating and authorship of any field. Therefore, the hymn may divine sphere. The scholar Robert both works makes it impossible to simply be appealing for excellence in Garland claims that Hephaestus’ know if Prometheus Bound influ- craftsmanship. There is no real role as smith to the gods ‘conforms enced the hymn in any way, yet explanation of how mankind to the social conditions of the day’: concepts certainly overlap. Here obtained the political skills that were many persons with physical disabil- Prometheus, rather than Hephaestus, necessary for survival in the ities in the ancient world took up gives crafts (alongside fire) to Protagoras (perhaps they already occupations such as metalworking. mankind, technē helps liberate possessed such virtues); however, It was this technical skill that gave humans from a beast-like existence this is irrelevant. It is possible that rise to Hephaestus’ brief popularity in (Prometheus Bound 436–505). Both the Hymn to Hephaestus was Athens during the building project works suggest that artisanal skills composed for an Attic festival initiated by the statesman Pericles in enable or develop the qualities honouring Hephaestus, and this 447 BC. Craftsmen were in demand, within mankind that render them purpose requires no thorough philo- so it is no surprise that Hephaestus’ recognisably human, and now able sophical or anthropological inquiry. status flourished. This is demon- to exert influence over the natural The Hymn to Hephaestus is not a strated by the architecture of the world. Technē has a divine origin, grand work of tragedy or philosophy, period. The travel writer Pausanias but it is the skills of the humble but within it there are traces of describes both an altar to worker that are paramount. complex concepts and mythologies. Hephaestus in the Erechtheion on Further evidence to attribute the Of course, eight lines of verse do the Acropolis (Pausanias 1.26.5) and hymn to fifth-century Athens can be little to capture the difficult reality of the temple to Hephaestus (built found in Martin West’s statement being a craftsman, and it is likely that between 449 and 414 BC), with a that the ‘concept of human progress these arts were praised because of statue of Athena beside it (Pausanias from a primitive state’ that is present economic and architectural needs. 1.14.6). Athena and Hephaestus in this hymn ‘was an invention of the Whether this celebration of craft was were associated with each other mid fifth century, associated with the genuine or not, however, one can within Athens, just as they are in the sophist Protagoras’. Little of hope that the elevation of hymn. The people of the island of Protagoras’ philosophy survives, but Hephaestus’ intelligence and ability (to where Hephaestus fell Plato characterized him in his within the hymn, alongside the from Olympos; Iliad 1.590) performed Protagoras. In this dialogue he significance attributed to often rites to Hephaestus and named their claims that Prometheus stole fire marginalized professions, demon- capital Hephaesteia in his honour, and technical skills from Hephaestus strates the importance of both and imperial Athenian interest in the and Athena to give to mankind, and, Hephaestus and ordinary labour to island may also explain societal on account of this, humans were divine and human narratives. interest in the god, as Edith Hall able to build shelter and defend Further reading discusses. The central role of crafts- themselves (Protagoras 320d–22b). Cashford, J. and Richardson, N. (2003) manship and the pairing of Athena Plato sets this discussion in Athens The Homeric Hymns. London and Hephaestus in the hymn support in 433 BC or earlier, and, whilst we Dolmage, J. (2006) ‘“Breathe upon us an claims of a fifth-century Attic origin. can never know what is Platonic and Even Flame”: Hephaestus, history, However, craftsmen, even during what Protagorean, it seems likely and the body of rhetoric’, Rhetoric Review 25.2, 119–40 the Periclean building project, were that the concept of progress within Garland, R. (1995) The Eye of the not a universally privileged class, the Hymn to Hephaestus has a Beholder: Deformity and Disability in and the celebration of their Protagorean influence. the Graeco-Roman World. Ithaca NY profession is arguably a reflection of However, for Plato’s Protagoras, Hall, E. (2018) ‘Hephaestus the hobbling the demand for labour above all. technē is not enough to ensure humorist: the club-footed god in the history of early Greek comedy’, Illinois Scholars such as Garland and Hall human survival, and Zeus has to Classical Studies 43.2, 366–87 note that their ambiguous social intervene with the gift of political skill West, M.L. (2003) Homeric Hymns. position reflected that of Hephaestus (Protagoras 322a–d). One should be Cambridge

12 ANCIENT © The J. Paul Getty Museum (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s © Open Content Program)

Alexander the Great, Greece, ca 320 BC. Macedonia through modern eyes

Zosia Halina Archibald introduces Macedonia and its extraordinary archaeological history

hen we think of classical were fused in a new, multicultural, society, the most desirable political Greece, we think immedi- territorial empire. order and statecraft. In the 18th Wately of Athens or Sparta. There is much to commend in century, the Macedonian kings, We don’t think about the north. The this historical sketch. At the same Philip II and Alexander the Great, north only comes into the political time, this broad-brush image distorts offered models of leadership. From game later, when the story moves, the past. Before the foundation of the 19th century onwards, the in the middle of the fourth century modern universities, in the 19th and aspirations of nation states towards BC, to the equivocal contest for 20th centuries, ideas about ancient democracy increasingly favoured dominance of the Aegean region societies developed in the context of Athens as a model. In the Greek War and the rise of Macedon. Historians discussions about contemporary of Independence, Athens became have tried to explain what happened societies. The philosophical works of the geographical, ideological and in terms of the military and diplo- Plato and formed a natural political focus of national Greek matic brilliance of King Philip II and framework for these conversations, aspirations. The classical past, of his more famous son, Alexander alongside Plutarch’s biographies. visibly represented in the surviving the Great. The Macedonian kings Models of the Greek states and of monuments of central and southern swept the whole of Greece into a the Roman were frequently Greece, was intimately linked with new world order, in which classical adopted in the heated debates of the the emergent nation state, in the Greek political and cultural values 17th and 18th centuries about good eyes of politicians and public alike.

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First clues to ancient northern Roman or Byzantine administration. landed in Salonika in 1915, during secrets Most of Greece north of the First World War, recording of The north of the Balkans is a moun- Thermopylae belonged to the archaeological remains became a tainous region, dominated by the Ottoman province of Rumeli until key auxiliary activity of the British Pindos range, which forms a giant 1867. By the time that significant Salonika Force and the Service spine down the Greek peninsula, territorial changes took place, at the Archéologique of the Armée de separating the western districts of Congress of Berlin (1878), the so- l’Orient, its French equivalent. The , Aitolia and Ambrakia from called ‘Great Powers’ of Europe had Governor-General of Macedonia, Macedonia and . Mount become closely involved in the affairs Giorgios Oikonomos, became the Olympos was always, it seems, a of the Ottoman provinces of southern first Ephor of Antiquities in natural point of orientation, visible, in Europe. Greece took control of Macedonia, and made it his task to clear weather, from hundreds of Thessaly and part of Epirus, while ensure that military (and non- kilometres away. Wreathed in clouds Macedonia remained part of the military) activities in the region and snow, it became the seat of the . Macedonia at this conformed to the state’s laws about gods from the time of Homer time included lands that extended the preservation of antiquities and onwards. Beyond Olympos were well to the north of what is now North that the recording of monuments numerous peoples with whom the Macedonia, and Thrace extended would proceed systematically. southerly Greeks had regular into large parts of what is now In the years that followed, a wide maritime connections: Macedonians, Bulgaria. The final chapters of this range of sites and monuments, of Thracians, Paionians and others. story of territorial rearrangements different historical periods, was When Professor Manolis occurred in the latter years of the investigated by detachments of Andronikos, and fellow archaeolo- 19th century, and particularly in the allied troops. Ernest Gardner, who gists from the University of Thessa- first two decades of the 20th century was Professor of Classical Archae- loniki, discovered royal tombs at (the era of the ‘Balkan Wars’), when ology at the University of London, Vergina, in Macedonia, in the late the geographical apportionments happened to be seconded to the 1970s they were at first unsure began to resemble the border lines Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and whether this gift horse was one that that we see today. became a key figure in the organi- they wanted to accept. After all, they zation of a strategy and as curator of had all been schooled in a Greek World War I and the discovery of the British Salonika Force Museum. liberty based on Athenian Early Iron Age Macedonia Gardner had been Director of the democracy. What would it mean to An important moment in the story of British School at Athens, and some recover the tomb, and the body itself, archaeological discoveries in of his former students, including of Philip II, the man who, according Macedonia took place during the Captain Stanley Casson, were to the Athenian orator Demosthenes, First World War. Until the early among the archaeologists who had crushed Greek freedom? 1900s, Macedonia did not play a part conducted fieldwork, while Andronikos proved to be not just in the national Greek narrative of the Lieutenant Marcus Tod, a university a very successful archaeologist, but classical past. Significant steps lecturer in Greek epigraphy, was a also a charismatic storyteller. He began to be made by Greek and pioneer in the recording of inscribed created a new story about the non-Greek scholars, notably Christos texts in the region. For the first time, Macedonian kings and their royal Tsountas, Alan Wace and Maurice plans and drawings began to be cemetery at Vergina, which charmed Thompson, who had started to inves- made of a wide series of sites and his fellow Greeks. These were kings, tigate the surviving above-ground monuments across Macedonia, but but they were Greek kings, who monuments and remains, which particularly those in the region north commissioned splendid art works, included the prominent ‘toumbas’ or and east of Thessaloniki and in the as well as being magnificent hosts ‘tells’, the artificial mounds created direction of the Chalkidic peninsula. and great military commanders. by long-lived human settlements These discoveries continue to over centuries in prehistory. represent the founding datasets of Greece between the ‘Great The French scholar and explorer archaeology in the region. Powers’ Léon Heuzey had identified the The nascent Greek kingdom did not ancient site of Vergina and published The Early Iron Age in the include large parts of what had been a detailed map and account in 1876. Thermaic Gulf the community of Greek-speaking Nevertheless, it was not until 1912, Among the sites excavated by states in the pre-Roman era as well when Macedonia was incorporated archaeologists such as Wace, as under Byzantine rule. The into the Greek state, that this interest Thompson and Casson, or Léon Rey provinces of the Ottoman Empire developed. The first Archaeological of the French service, were were organized along territorial Service was founded to record and settlement mounds and cemeteries divisions that were quite different investigate sites in Macedonia. with remains of the Early Iron Age from the divisions of pre-Roman, When French and British troops (ca 1000–700 BC). Some of these

14 ANCIENT were located in the immediate project), as well as in the suburbs. immediate rural hinterland. The city vicinity of the city of Thessaloniki, An updated railway line towards had a nucleus, on the South Hill, notably the ‘Toumba’ on its north- Athens, motorways to Athens and dating from the Early Iron Age, which eastern periphery and another at across Macedonia, particularly the expanded across the slopes and Karabournaki, in the direction of the new Egnatia Odos, linking central onto the North Hill in the late fifth modern airport and closer to the sea. Europe to , and the century, as a result of an initiative by These settlements did not become Transadriatic Pipeline Project have the Macedonian king, Perdikkas II, in comprehensible until they had been all resulted in major archaeological 432 BC. Ceramic finds on the South investigated by large teams of discoveries that are transforming the Hill suggest that the population specialists, using modern scientific image of the north. New ancient city shared many features with the methods, from the 1970s onwards, centres (such as Edessa and occupants of the ‘Toumbas’ in the ‘Toumba’ under the direction of ), wealthy country houses area of Thessaloniki. As research Stelios Andreou, on behalf of the and farmsteads (along the Egnatia continues, we are likely to find out a University of Thessaloniki, and Odos) and traces of quays along the great deal more about the inhabi- Karabournaki by Professor Michalis coastline of the Thermaic Gulf tants of the ‘north’ and their societies. Tiverios. They were unlike the sites (Transadriatic Pipeline) are among of central and southern Greece, with the most notable additions to Further reading their stone public monuments. Macedonia’s burgeoning range of Nevett, L.C. et al. (2017) ‘Towards a The cemeteries, on the other antiquities. Discoveries of inscribed multi-scalar, multidisciplinary hand, such as those at Chauchitsa texts and graffiti on clay show that a approach to the classical Greek and Karabournaki, yielded rich, even number of different dialects of Greek city: The Olynthos Project’, spectacular burials, the men co-existed in the region (North Annual of the British School at furnished with iron weapons, bronze Greek and Ionian Greek). Athens 112, 1–52 ornaments and sometimes helmets, A six-year field project at ancient Martin González, E. and Paschidis, and occasionally gold-foil attach- Olynthos, which is a collaboration P. (2017) ‘The 21st-century ments, the women with rich bronze between the Greek Archaeological epigraphic harvest from jewellery and decorative attach- Service (represented by Bettina Macedonia’, Archaeological ments for clothing. Sometimes they Tsigarida) and the British School at Reports 63, 181–200 too wore gold-foil ornaments and Athens (Zosia Archibald, University Shapland, A., Stefani, E. (eds) necklaces. Like the enigmatic settle- of Liverpool; Lisa Nevett, University (2017) Archaeology behind the ments, the men, women and of Michigan), has revealed new data Battle Lines: The Macedonian children of Macedonia and its neigh- about a complete ancient city and its Campaign (1915–19). London bouring regions looked very different from their southern counterparts. The J. Paul Getty Museum (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s © Open Content Program)

‘North’ and ‘south’ in the archae- ology of the Greek mainland Andronikos’ discoveries at Vergina changed the ways in which the ‘north’ was perceived by educated Greeks of the south, as well as by popular audiences, in Greece and interna- tionally. From the late 1970s onwards, investments and resources began to be directed northwards, not just to Vergina and the preservation of its royal tombs, but also to many significant cities and rural districts, including and Kozani. The - Macedonian sanctuary at Dion became the focus of major long-term investment, as did sites along the coast, such as Amphipolis and Abdera. The rapid expansion of the city of Thessaloniki brought with it the need for rescue excavations in the city The birth of Alexander by the so-called Master of the Jardin de vertueuse centre (most recently the Metro consolation and assistant (Flemish), ca 1470–1475.

15 a r g o Cassiodorus: unsung saviour of antiquity

Violet Moller explains why Cassiodorus was such a pivotal figure in the preservation of Greek and Latin texts – and of classical education more broadly

lavius Magnus Aurelius collaboration with Pope Agapetus I. complex actually contained two Cassiodorus Senator was one Sadly, conditions in the eternal city monasteries. One was a retreat for Fof the last great Romans; he during the mid-sixth century were those seeking a life of silence and was born, with a silver spoon firmly not really conducive to study, and contemplation and the other was a in his mouth, into a wealthy in things only got worse when the traditional monastery where monks late fifth-century Calabria. A distin- Byzantines deposed the Gothic king lived, worked and prayed together. guished lineage – his father, grand- as part of their reconquest of in At Vivarium’s heart was the father (who was part of an embassy 536. Twenty desperate years of war library Cassiodorus founded and to Attila the Hun) and great-grand- followed; Justinian’s attempt to personally stocked with books. It father all served in high office – protect Roman culture and reunify was divided into two main sections – ensured a smooth route to power for the old empire destroyed far more Greek and Latin – which were stored young Cassiodorus. than it saved. Within a few decades, in separate cupboards. This library, He was appointed consiliarius all the lands he reconquered had as Cassiodorus explained, was when he was just 20 years old, rising slipped away; the empire in the west based on the idea ‘of what had been to the position of magister officiorum was lost for good. done formerly in Alexandria and of (chief minister) to Theodoric, the Cassiodorus retired from the what was being done now in the Ostrogothic king of Italy, in 523. world of politics in 538, fleeing the Syrian town of Nisibis’. He must Theodoric was keen to preserve and in Italy in favour of have brought back many of the assimilate as much imperial Roman Constantinople. He spent the rest of Greek texts with him from culture as he could and the period of conflict there, but Constantinople, and at least some of Cassiodorus, as a member of the strangely never served the emperor these were non-religious – many of Roman elite, was on hand to help in any official capacity. It is likely he them were translated into Latin so with this. He took over the role of spent much of his time studying, that the monks could read them. chief minister from the disgraced, perfecting his Greek and travelling They included what later became and soon to be brutally executed, around Asia Minor. One of the places known as the ‘liberal arts’: rhetoric, scholar Boethius. These two men he visited was Nisibis, which was a logic, grammar, arithmetic, dominated classical learning in sixth- great centre of scholarship, one of astronomy, geometry and music – century Italy. Thanks to their efforts, the few during this period. When he subjects that were becoming the tenets of the Roman education returned from Constantinople, he increasingly side-lined in favour of system were preserved and passed settled on his family estates near Christian texts as religion took over on in western Europe. Squillace and founded a large every aspect of education. By the Boethius, as author of works monastic complex called Vivarium. end of the century, the only real such as The Consolation of For Cassiodorus, this was the culmi- option (aside from a private tutor at Philosophy, has retained a nation of a long-held dream, home) if you wanted to learn to read reputation through the intervening something he had been planning and study was to enter a monastery. centuries. Cassiodorus was not so since the failed attempt to found a A library is dependent on a good fortunate. His contribution has been school in Rome. supply of texts to fill its shelves and largely forgotten, which is a shame, Situated on the far southern Cassiodorus took care of this by because he played an important and coast of Calabria, close to the shore building a large scriptorium at remarkable role in the history of of the , Vivarium was well Vivarium. Not only this, he insisted knowledge. placed, accessible via the roads that that book copying was carried out by His initial plan was to found a led north to Rome and south to specially trained monks working to a theological school in Rome, Sicily, and the east–west maritime high standard. In doing so, he supported by a library of Greek and routes between Spain, Africa, helped to re-establish a degree of Latin texts that he established in Greece and Constantinople. The professionalization and quality in

16 LATE ANTIQUE book production not seen for many Creative Commons CC-BY License scholars used the Institutiones as a years. In monasteries, copying texts bibliographical guide throughout the was not valued; it was usually done Middle Ages and, as such, it was by either the very young, or the very one of the most influential texts of old and infirm – anyone who was not the period. Book 2, the secular capable of doing other more section, describes the central tenets important, strenuous tasks. of these subjects: rhetoric, grammar Cassiodorus put writing and book and logic (the Trivium), followed by production at the centre of monastic geometry, astronomy, arithmetic and life. This focus was gradually music. These went on to form the adopted by other foundations in the framework of medieval education. following centuries. Just a couple of decades earlier While the fate of Cassiodorus’ in the sixth century, the other great library is a mystery, scholars believe monastic manual of that period had that a bible (known as the Codex been written by St Benedict of Grandior) made in the scriptorium Nursia. Benedict’s Rule was was purchased in Rome in 679 by extremely influential, providing the Ceolfrith, Abbot of Monkwearmouth- guiding principles of the huge Jarrow in northeastern . network of Benedictine monasteries Ceolfrith had made the long journey that were founded over the following to Rome (astonishingly, a journey he Cassiodorus shown in the Gesta centuries, many of which endure to made no fewer than five times) in Theodorici, 1176–1177, Netherlands this day. As a guide to monastic life, order to buy books and ornaments to (Leiden University Libraries; Leiden it is mainly concerned with the practi- furnish his new monasteries. Back in MS Vul. 46, fol. 2r). calities of how to organize a the scriptorium of Wearmouth monastery and live a pious life. Jarrow, the Codex Grandior, which for future generations, describing the Reading is prescribed as a regular no longer survives, was copied and subjects and listing the texts needed part of the monk’s routine, but there this new version, the Codex to study them. The Institutiones is is no detail about education or Amiatinus, was taken to Italy by divided into two books: divine and secular texts. Later in the Middle Ceolfrith on his last journey south. secular. As such, it is an explicit Ages, after the monastery had been He had planned to give it to the Pope attempt to combine the Christian and refounded for the second time in as a present, but unfortunately died the profane into one harmonious 949, the scriptorium became famous before he reached Rome; the Codex curriculum, in order to give young for the quality of its manuscripts and ended up in the library of a men everything they needed to go talents of its scholars, but there is no monastery in Tuscany. A gigantic on to lead productive, fulfilled lives, evidence this was the case in tome weighing 34kg, it is the oldest inside or outside the Church. Benedict’s time. In this early period, surviving complete copy of the Latin Cassiodorus was a devoted it was Cassiodorus who kept the (Vulgate) version of the Bible. The Christian, but one who realized the flame of intellectual enquiry burning exquisite quality of the script and the need for a broad, balanced at Vivarium. beauty of the hand-painted illustra- education. He must have been Cassiodorus’ desire to unite the tions provide us with a fabulous horrified at what he saw going on two halves of the old Roman Empire witness to the achievements of around him in sixth-century Italy – within the walls of his library was a Cassiodorus and the scribal tradi- schools closing and the whole defining feature of his life and tions he founded. In 2018, the Codex apparatus of the classical education achievement. But he was pushing Amiatinus was brought back to system collapsing. Prominent against an unstoppable tide; by the England for the first time in 1,300 churchmen were also becoming end of the sixth century an almost years to play a starring role in an aware of this situation and beginning total cultural and intellectual schism exhibition of Anglo-Saxon to realize that simply being able to had taken place, one that was not manuscripts at the British Library in read the Bible was not enough – redressed until the Renaissance. London. priests and monks needed to be However, thanks to his efforts, some Ceolfrith was able to buy the properly educated. Greek knowledge was preserved Codex Grandior in 679 because the Officially, steps were taken to and passed on in the West, and Vivarium monastery was no longer ensure that young men were taught classical education survived, albeit active and its library was being sold in monasteries, but Cassiodorus had in a much-reduced form. For this, off. The fact that we know so much a much more profound influence on and the tradition of monastic book about the books it contained is down the survival of the classical production he founded, Cassiodorus to the Institutiones that Cassiodorus education than any decree passed deserves to be remembered and wrote to act as a teaching curriculum by the Papacy. Librarians and celebrated.

17 a r g o © Matthew Shipton

View from the Eiger. Mythical peaks

Matthew Shipton considers 19th-century mountaineers’ fascination with the classical myths

n we went. Hark once more, contains one of a great number of tions, ‘I saw a great white throne’, in to the thunder, now echoes from classical antiquity we reference to Mont Blanc, before Opreceded by vivid lighting find in mountaineering literature of continuing ‘After crossing the Tour, I gleams which flash into my eyes the period. enjoyed a day of idleness’. And he from the polished surface of my axe. This was the of enlisted Virgil to colour a description Gleam follows gleam, and peal Alpinism, when news of climbing of deceitful mountain passes, before succeeds peal with terrific grandeur; glory and tragedy was celebrated or recounting a happy chance and the loaded clouds send down castigated in equal measure in the encounter with fellow ‘scholars’ from from all their fringes dusky letters pages of The Times (Charles Cambridge. streamers of rain … Grandly the Dickens being one famous corre- But perhaps the most famous cloud-besom swept the mountains, spondent on mountaineering – he work of mountaineering literature of their colossal outlines looming at disapproved). The Reverend Girdle- the time is Leslie Stephen’s account intervals like overpowered stone, an occasional climbing of his travels in the Alps, The struggling against their doom. companion of Tyndall, prefaced his Playgrounds of Europe. Playgrounds own work, The High Alps without elevated Alpinism in the popular This mise en scene, vividly presented Guides, with a truncated quote from Victorian imagination. Stephen, father by John Tyndall in his famous book Horace’s Ars Poetica: qui studet of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Mountaineering in 1861, dramatizes optatam cursu contingere metam had a much closer knowledge of the the 19th-century scientist and multa tulit fecitque. With winning classical world than many of his mountaineer amongst the glaciers incongruity, Girdlestone liberally contemporary mountaineers. He was and peaks of the Valais, a small figure dusted his writing with a spindrift of well-schooled in Greek and Latin, and in an epic landscape. The work made classical references, quoting wrote influentially on Pope’s transla- Tyndall’s name as a mountaineer and ominously from the Book of Revela- tions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

18 MODERN

Stephen valued equally learned Bursting through these dark European mountaineering know- perspectives on both mountains and mountains like the flame ledge and, as it was to the ancient the classical world, comparing an Of lightning through the tempest Greeks, considered an inhospitable ‘educated’ view of the Alps with the and remote region. If there remained ‘cultured’ gaze of the British upper Tyndall’s description of the storm in Victorian cartography a location classes towards Greek statuary in on the glacier suggests an still marked ‘here be dragons’, the British Museum (in a passage engagement with a famous Greek Georgia could lay claim to that that, sadly yet typically of Stephen, myth, that of the Titan Prometheus territory, not least as dragons contrasts this desired ability with that and the . In 1820, Percy featured prominently in the local absent in the Cockney, a cipher for Shelley published his version of the variant of the Prometheus myth, that the working class more generally). myth of the Titan’s punishment by of Amirani, an epic hero from the He describes the pinnacles and slabs Zeus under the title Prometheus remote Georgian past. of Alpine ridges as akin to pyramids Unbound, itself undoubtedly a by- Grove animated The Frosty or Roman amphitheatres; pictures product of his earlier composition of Caucasus, no doubt with the aim of his team of climbers, in the eyes of Mont Blanc. demonstrating his elevated status, the residents of Courmayeur at the by adding historical digressions on Italian base of Mont Blanc, as like The crawling glaciers pierce me with the places through which he passed ‘uncouth visitors from the ice-world the spears en route to the Caucasus. Arriving at as their classical ancestors might Of their moon-freezing crystals, the Poti, on the Georgian Black Sea have stared at a newly-caught Briton’ bright chains coast, Grove introduces the river and the famous Alpinist Francis Fox Eat with their burning cold into my Rion (Phasis to the ancient Greeks): Tuckett as Odysseus; and suggests bones. ‘I need hardly tell the reader that the the mountain landscapes could be Rion is the stream down which came read like Greek drama, as either Given that several Titans were and the ’. While unintelligible black marks on a white specifically associated with Grove’s objective was Elbrus, background to the untutored or as mountains in the mind’s eye of a ancient myth was never far from some of the noblest poetry in the reader of Shelley, it would be a view. Setting out on this quest, world to those with experience. simple imaginative step towards an Grove writes: Grove, a climbing Alpine framing of the Titanomachy or contemporary of Tyndall, Girdle- Prometheus’ punishment. One can With the mountain of Prometheus stone and Stephen, summed up his visualize Tyndall on the and his vulture, we should have, own hierarchy of value thus: mountainside – thunder, the Zeta of alas, nothing to do, for, though a Zeus’ lightning bolts crashing down, very similar myth exists about Going up a big mountain is an act of the monstrous bulk of the Titanic Elbruz, the scene of Jove’s smallest importance to the world and mountains, glimpsed just briefly vengeance was, according to local does not, like knowledge of Greek or through the gloom of the storm. tradition, on Kasbek. high birth, entitle a man to think Viewed through the optic of Shelley’s himself very much better than his Prometheus, this mountain Grove cast his net widely in fellows. landscape becomes filled with search of ancient texts with which to elemental beings animated as burnish his accounts, including the By contrast with Stephen and though characters from Greek Bible, just as Girdlestone had done, Grove, Tyndall had no formal mythology. comparing a rime-clad pinnacle to education in classics, but there was While the Alps may have inspired Lot’s wife draped in a snowy gala another force adding a mythological Shelley’s Prometheus, it was, of dress. And from the top of Elbrus he patina to his writing. Tyndall had course, the Caucasian mountainside perceived the mountains arrayed written poetry throughout his life, to which the Titan was chained in beneath him and his party as had read some ancient texts in myth. In The Frosty Caucasus, nameless Titans, before spotting translation and idolized Tennyson Grove gives his account of travels in Kazbek, some 120 miles away, and, and his many classics-infused this mountainous region and improbably, Ararat, which he placed works. There are resonances of describes scaling Mount Elbrus, the in Iran. Shelley’s Mont Blanc: Lines Written highest peak in Europe. Grove had The sum of Grove’s use of in the Vale of Chamouni of 1816 in achieved several fine first ascents in classical antiquity in his mytholo- Tyndall’s mountain tableaux: Europe, sometimes with Stephen gization of mountaineering is on full and the famous guide Melchior display in a passage on Kazbek, Where Power in likeness of the Arve Anderegg, before he turned his which is worth quoting at length, comes down attention to the East. At this time, in where he repeats the observations From the ice-gulfs that gird his the latter half of the 19th century, the from 1811 of a (sadly) unnamed secret throne, Caucasus was at the boundary of traveller:

19 a r g o

It is not difficult, therefore, to see those Tyndall describes in the Valais. assisted and endangered by why Kazbek has become thus In the language of the time, these metalwork, the gleam of lightning in famous, why the mass of crags on opponents would have to be his ice axe an elemental strike the face of the mountain, so defeated through their climbing – the forewarned. Both climber and Titan conspicuous from the post-station, is Titanomachy is transformed here existed in a topographically liminal made the scene of Prometheus’ into the battle between the modern, space, both represented civilizing torment, … it was assuredly in these Olympian Victorian climbers and the influences within elemental realms – abodes that compounded ancient, elemental Titans. the forces of and ever her love-potions and her poisons; The widespread use of classical present – and the experience of both here it was that Prometheus sources in mountaineering accounts was defined by struggle. Equally, both received the reward of his bold of the period can be explained in occupied a mythic space between life impiety; this is the very birthplace of several ways. Sometimes authors and death, and mortality, magic; and it is from these lofty wished simply to display their and their stories are by turn self- peaks that the immense roc used to erudition. At other times, they wished serving, compelling and inspirational. take its , intercepting the rays of to locate their works within a The influence of Shelley’s the sun. particular social or cultural context, Prometheus, and his other works on to illustrate otherwise pedestrian mountain landscapes, cast a long That mountain, some 600m lower accounts or to appeal to wider shadow over the period. To the than Elbrus’ mighty 5,642m, was first audiences. But more fundamentally, Alpinist of the late 19th century, the ascended in 1868 by several English these works show the climber’s Caucasus represented mountain- mountaineers, including Douglas identification with a landscape eering at the geographical and Freshfield, a former editor of the populated by figures and shaped by physical limits of possibility, the Alpine Journal and renowned author events from ancient myth, allowing range occupying a not dissimilar and mountaineer. Freshfield had the creation of a heroic narrative. place to that it held in the ancient also a keen interest in the classical Of all the figures from the ancient Greek imagination. The Caucasus and remains a major source today world, it was Prometheus with whom would provide the ultimate arena in for the ongoing discussion of these Alpinists could best identify. which to seek immortality through Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, Tyndall on the glacier was both mythologization. having published, in 1914, Hannibal © Matthew Shipton Once More. It comes as no surprise, then, that Freshfield would approach Kazbek (and write about it in Travels in the Central Caucasus …) mindful of the local mythic tradition around the figure of Amirani. Between the two mythologies, that of Prometheus and Amirani, there appears a common thread; punishment by the gods for disobedience was banishment to a place beyond civilization, i.e. the mountainside. On a similar view from Caucasian mountain tops, Freshfield remarks: before us rose ridge behind ridge, until behind and above them, all towered the peaks of the central chain of the Caucasus … showing us plainly enough that we were in the presence of an array of giants, armed in like panoply of cliff and ice to those we had so often encoun- tered in the Alps.

Freshfield’s use of the term ‘panoply’ seems quite purposeful, painting a scene of Titans as mountains equipped for battle, like The descent to the Aosta valley in the Alps.

20 MODERN © Howard King

An English church on Kythera

Paul Watkins explores the relics of Britain’s Greek Empire on Kythera

‘I have been asked where the Ionians were? And what England could have to do with the people of Persia?’ Lord Kirkwall, former official of the Lord High Commissioner during the British rule of the , 1815–1864

ne of the unsung joys of construction of a small domed Sadly the church’s landmark travel is the moment when church in the Byzantine style, dome had recently collapsed and I Oyou open the shutters of a dedicated to the Orthodox St Martin realized that the building I was darkened hotel room to the (Ayios Minas) and later on, in the contemplating was now no more wakening view. A late arrival in 16th century, transferred to the than a ruinous memorial to a short- Chora, capital of the Greek island of Catholic faith as part of a Franciscan lived but intriguing period in the Kythera, provided me with such a monastery. island’s history. pleasure. With the need for a good Later still, in the early 19th night’s sleep paramount, the century, Ayios Minas became the ‘King Tom’ and his ‘Viceroys’ shutters had remained closed until ‘English Church’, converting to the British occupation of the seven morning. Protestant faith during the British Ionian islands was the result of the Framed by the open window was occupation of the Ionian islands withering of French power in the the revelation of a shallow, verdant (1815–1864). In its brief life as an Mediterranean during the valley, with only one man-made Anglican place of worship for the . Napoleon had feature. At first I could not clearly handful of British soldiers and seized them from the Venetians in identify the tumbled mass of stone, administrators and their families, the 1797 prior to his campaign in Egypt, glowing warmly in the early morning church played an important if minor but his subsequent defeat at the light, as a building. All I knew was role in maintaining the idiosyncracy Battle of the Nile in 1798 brought that at some time in the island’s early of a British Greek Empire, formed of their surrender to the forces of Venetian period (13th century) the Kythera and the other Ionian islands Russia and – two of the site had been chosen for the dominated by . powers allied against the French. A

21 a r g o © Howard King The shipwreck On 12 September 1802 a British ship, the Mentor, was sailing from Athens to Malta with a precious cargo: 17 crates of marble sculp- tures newly removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin. The route of the voyage, via the southern coastline of the Peloponnese, was diverted by strong northwesterlies to the southern of Kythera, where it took on water. In desperation, the crew made for the island’s nearest port, Avlemonas, on the east coast. Unfortunately the heavily weighted ship struck the shore just outside the harbour and quickly sank. Happily all on board were saved. Among them was Lord Elgin’s private secretary, William Hamilton, who had been involved in a similar mission – the removal of the Rosetta Stone from Egypt – the previous year. (This was the same Hamilton who later became Britain’s Derelict interior of the ‘English Church’. Envoy to Naples and protector and husband of Nelson’s Emma.) His companion on the voyage, another period of independence created a and offered little opposition to great philhellene, was Colonel ‘Septinsular Republic’ but this only Maitland’s rule. But a colonial William Martin Leake, renowned for lasted until 1807, when the French adventure that might have seemed his geographical surveys of Greece briefly returned, then to be finally little more than a move on the geopo- and, like Hamilton, a dedicated evicted by the British after a long litical chessboard had a positive collector of antiquities. It was essential that the marbles blockade (1809–1814). The British outcome for the inhabitants of Corfu, – along with Lord Elgin’s reputation imposed on the islands Paxos, Levkas, , – were recovered. Sponge divers lasted until 1864 when they were Zakinthos, Ithaca and Kythera, from Symi and were united with Greece. bringing about a degree of order, local recruited to explore the wreck and The first overlord of Britain’s justice and material advancement for retrieve its priceless cargo, which was subsequently shipped to Greek possessions, commanding the islands unknown in their history. England in two Royal Navy his insular domain from a splendid In this respect, Maitland’s vessels.* Sold to the British palace on Corfu, was Lord High ‘viceroys’ had a major role to play. Museum by Lord Elgin, the marbles Commissioner Sir Thomas Maitland. These men, colonial officials and remain there as a major attraction Something of a maverick in the great army officers, were made Residents for visitors despite the efforts of Greece to repatriate them. tradition of British colonial (governors) of the smaller islands, Under the supervision of the governors, ‘King Tom’ was the where their exploitation of the people Greek Archaeological Committee, guardian and executor of a consti- and resources was to some extent excavations of the shipwreck have tution which ensured control of the balanced by their contribution to the continued into the 21st century. Islands’ Assembly, and which could general good. Kythera’s best-known Some of the other antiquities stowed on the Mentor along with the enact legislation without the Resident, Captain John McPhail, is marbles have been recovered, and authority of a British parliament. He remembered for his public works, much has been learnt about ship was effectively an independent the product of his training as an design and equipment of the period. sovereign with complete power over architect and engineer. The island’s *Although the British were not in his subjects. His view of their road network, still in use today, was control of the Ionians at the time of political rights was best summed up largely his creation (and that of the the shipwreck, it has been suggested by his confident assertion that islanders’ corvée labour) as were the by the historian G.N. Leontsinis, ‘colonial assemblies are injurious to splendid bridges, many still capable author of a doctoral thesis on the the people and disadvantageous to of carrying modern traffic. McPhail’s social history of Kythera, that the islanders were strongly pro-British good government’. most interesting architectural legacy, (following the expulsion of the Though forming part of the Ionian however, is the half-dozen or so French and the setting up of the Assembly, the noble families who had school buildings whose English short-lived Septinsular Republic), governed the islands in the 400-year Gothic design stands out so strik- and thus happy to permit the export Venetian period were subverted by ingly against the Kytheran of their Greek heritage. the offer of large salaries and titles, landscape (see panel on page 23).

22 MODERN

These schools, serving a population swollen by refugees from the Greek The British architectural legacy on Kythera War of Independence, were built for the purpose of educating a Greek civil service to provide future recruits for the British administration.

The ‘English Church’ I followed the track to Ayios Minas along the valley floor to a small cemetery behind the church, where a path between the marble Orthodox British School, Milapidia, exterior and interior (© Paul Watkins). tombs led to a square stone vault shaded by a pine tree. A carved Schoolhouses inscription showed that this was an One of John McPhail’s most inspired projects was the building of schools ossuary containing the bones of the throughout Kythera to educate local children as potential administrators. British residents who had been disin- The schools were based on the Lancastrian system, which owes its name terred from an earlier graveyard and to the pioneering work of Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838), in establishing from the interior of the church, trans- schools in which more advanced students assumed the role of teachers, ferred here in 1935. Inside the thus alleviating the burdens – and cost – of adult staff. The method was church a plaque from 1971 recorded highly influential in the earlier part of the 19th century, which included the period of school construction on Kythera (1820s). McPhail’s venture had this event in Greek and English. the enthusiastic support of Frederick North, Fifth Earl of Guilford, who Apart from a second plaque established the on Corfu, the first university of modern (1623) commemorating a Venetian Greece. burial within the church, the interior British schoolhouses, mainly built in the years around 1825, can be was bare, with crumbling plaster found at Potamos, Milopotamos (Kato Chora), Milapidia, Fratsia, Osios revealing the ragged stonework and Theodoros and Aroniadika. They are notable for their derivative architec- an east end open to the sky. The tural styles, inspired by the contemporary fads of British academe (such sanctuary was buried by the rubble as the neo-Gothic). As in the case of Chora’s ‘English Church’, however, of the recently collapsed dome. Here these buildings have lacked any substantial restoration and are in a sad was a sad glimpse of a misplaced state of disrepair. and near-forgotten imperialism. The church, like so many similar relics on Bridges and other structures Their modern function has ensured that McPhail’s bridges are better the island, is unlikely to be restored. preserved than the schools. Most notable are those at Katouni, Kapsali, A memory of Kythera’s British Potamos, Mitata and Karavas. Other British works include the lighthouse community survives, however, in the at Moudari (1854) at the northern end of the island, the market building at Archaeological Museum of Chora. Chora (1834) and the Lazaretto (quarantine station) at Kapsali, an 1817 Here the headstones from their reconstruction of the original Venetian building. Also at Kapsali is a tall, former graves have been stored and stone-built reservoir (1825), once supplied by an aqueduct, used for archived. Sadly, the engraved watering the ships which came into the harbour. epitaphs give little information on the burials, with no reference to the birthplace or place of death (i.e. Kythera) of the men, women and children who found themselves so far from their homeland. This speaks volumes about the attitude of the British expatriates towards their adopted home, which they saw as foreign and remote. The most celebrated antiquity in Bridges at Kapsali (left) and Katouni (© Paul Watkins). the museum is undoubtedy the impressive Archaic ‘Lion of Kythera’ Acknowledgements (sixth century BC) which stands The author would like to thank Howard King, Ann Morton, Lita Tzort- proudly near the entrance. This zopoulou-Gregory, Eleni Harou and Marieta Fyrou for their helpful infor- cannot be mistaken for any other mation, and Jim and Annie Tzannes for their generous hospitality and symbolic lion, either Venetian or assistance on Kythera. British.

23 a r g o © Georgios Pazios/CC BY-SA/Wikimedia Commons

It’s not hard to see why Monastery, in western mainland Greece, is a popular tourist attraction. The ultimate travel writer

David Ricks revisits the Brousos of Alexander Pallis, an unparalleled travel book that takes him back a century into the heart of Greece

he remote and historic partisan in Greek politics; well read not Brexit, seemingly averted, a monastery of Prousos is listed in English literature and in sympathy centennial glance at this rough, Tby TripAdvisor as the #1 with modern thought, he was also tough little volume of a hundred or attraction in , in committed, intellectually and philan- so pages may be timely. in western mainland Greece, and thropically, to the ‘hirsute’ idiom of The Oxford Dictionary of National rightly so. More surprisingly, perhaps extreme demotic Greek; he was a Biography entry by Richard Witt – and this will be known by few liberal anti-monarchist with a identifies Pallis with a knowing pilgrims or tourists – the place domineering streak. A man whose zeugma as ‘cotton merchant and supplied the title of one of modern whole career places him at the inter- translator’. Dr Witt’s vivid short Greece’s liveliest pieces of travel section of two cultures, Pallis (1851– biography – I hope the full-length one writing, Alexander Pallis’ Brousos. 1935) can be seen as both proudly he has been preparing will one day This late work, first published serially Greek and an exemplar of a charac- appear – makes an excellent starting in the journal Noumas between teristically Western disappointment point for encountering Pallis, but for February and November 1921, and with the actuality of Greece. Firing those unfamiliar with his presence in in book form in 1923, gave a salvoes on all sides, Brousos – Greek and British life, I give some distinctive form to its author’s ostensibly an innocent travelogue – essential information here. idiosyncratic stance and is still vivid still rewards attention, not least for Born of Epirot (and Albanian- a century on. the questions it poses about Greek speaking) antecedents in Piraeus in Pallis was a long-term resident of identity and especially Greek 1851 (he often used the jesting pen Britain and its empire, yet a fierce Diaspora identity. With Grexit, but name Lekas the Arvanitis), Pallis

24 MODERN was one of many intellectually gifted Ouranis and Stratis Myrivilis. Pallis’ pointing out that the trigger for the members of the to stance as a Greek of the commercial journey, which begins only on page be drawn away from university diaspora is different, neither seeking 11, is the election of 1 November studies to commercial life overseas. novelty nor – at least on the face of 1920 which saw Venizelos’ defeat. In a career that extended from it – engaged in a search for the The opening pages dwell bitterly on Manchester to Bombay with Ralli authentically völkisch. Like the the fate of those great men to whom Brothers and culminated in a palatial protagonist of the folk song known ‘the free kingdom’, as Pallis Liverpool mansion, now sadly as The Exile’s Return, most famous mordantly refers to it in general demolished, Pallis amassed consid- from the version published in 1914 (compare the sardonic Irish use of erable wealth and experience of the by N.G. Politis – in a volume funded ‘the Free State’), has been world. Concurrently, he devoted by Pallis himself – the returning ungrateful: Venizelos, and before that attention and acumen to language traveller, like Odysseus before him, King Otto, and before that reform, as manifested particularly in peruses the landscape and his wife Capodistria. None of them born in his translations of (and commen- for marks (semadia) of authenticity. mainland Greece, all rejected by her, taries on parts of) the Iliad and the Is he really home? And, if he is, will they stand in opposition to the Gospels (the Foyle Special Collec- his wife recognize him as her own? antitype of Theodore Kolokotronis: tions at King’s College London Yet Brousos makes an odd sort of Pallis was not the first Greek or the houses copies of these important nostos. From its title, one would last to lay the country’s ills at the door works with his own annotations). His expect it to revolve around a of the Peloponnesians. And he translation of the epic into an often pilgrimage to the remote but famous positions his book provocatively by compelling Greek folk-song idiom monastery in Evrytania: the tale of a quoting the realist philhellene and was a tour de force; in 1901 his prodigal son, perhaps, seeking his historian George Finlay on its very Gospel translation provoked riots in roots in Greek life and the Orthodox first page. But if there is a key Athens with a death toll of eight. faith in lands where St Paul precursor to Brousos, it may lie in a In addition to cultivating the preached. Yet Pallis was not the work of exactly a century earlier Greek dēmotikē as a literary artist, Diaspora Greek in whom nostalgia never mentioned in the text: William Pallis dug deep in his pocket to provokes religious piety, and his Cobbett’s Rural Rides, serialized in support the distribution of demotic Anglophilia came with a leaning to 1821–1826, published in book form in texts among children of the what used to be called modern 1830 and a classic ever since. Armed unredeemed Greeks of the Balkans. churchmanship. with a strong constitution and strong (I remember with pleasure and The narrative of the journey opinions, Cobbett returned from exile gratitude perusing the relevant begins on 18 November 1920 (while in the United States in 1817–1819, correspondence lent to me by Pallis’ Greece is at war in Asia Minor), still full of animus against the grandson Dr Alexis Vlasto.) But it is starting at the Peloponnese railway governing regime, and traversed the important to point out that Pallis was station in Athens, arriving finally at English south and midlands with an very much a man of the British Prousos, leaving there on 26 eye to injustice and abuse, wrapped establishment, taking citizenship November and returning to Athens up in a disarming diary form. after the disastrous Graeco-Turkish by Christmas. It is, though not The twists and turns of Brousos war of 1897, sending his sons to entirely lacking in descriptions, a can only be taken in fully by reading Eton, where he endowed bursaries winding course, with none of the the work itself – and, sadly, a work of for boys lacking means, and firing off topographical precision of a Colonel such a marked linguistic idiom, with pamphlets and more extended Leake or of other English travel so many in-jokes, is unlikely ever to works in English. His Greek is a writers on whom Pallis draws find a translator. But let me pluck out highly coloured version of demotic copiously. Instead, it is a pretext for what I see as those elements which with drastically reformed spelling. a Diaspora Greek with a large most clearly mark a view of Greece So when, late in life, Pallis emotional stake in Greece as a as seen from the Diaspora, then and published a travel book, Brousos, going concern to let off steam about perhaps now, a century on. A Greek one would expect it to have interest politics and life in general, rolling into who has made good will often as a document of its time – and in his causeries memories from a contribute to the old country through particular as a contrast with two dozen or so visits to Greek-speaking philanthropy, and Pallis’ material more familiar types of travel writing. lands over the years. But what gives contribution cannot be gainsaid, in The first, ably surveyed by Edmund the work the classic status which has his patronage of authors, Kostis Keeley, David Roessel, David Wills led to its republication in a series of Palamas among them, who made and others, is Anglo-American modern Greek classics? central contributions to modern writing about Greece; the second – Much of the praise for the book in Greece’s sense of itself. But what less common than one would expect its time came from those who shared Pallis intended to contribute through – is travelogues by Greek writers its linguistic predilections and Brousos was more specific: a vein of such as Nikos Kazantzakis, Kostas Venizelist allegiances. It is worth Greek self-criticism.

25 a r g o

If it is true that ‘violence is as write of Pallis’ ‘fine perception of the well as temperament, on foreign and American as apple pie’, then it is also Romaic soul’, or for another to speak especially English travel writing true that self-laceration is as Greek of his ‘overview of Romiosini’. ‘And more than on Greek. But had Pallis as tyropita: how else can we explain what should they know of England, ‘gone native’ in England? the more than 30 editions of Nikos who only England know?’ Rudyard To say so would be unfair to an Dimou’s The Unhappiness of Being Kipling’s question from 1891 has an author so distinguished in the sphere Greek since 1975? And it is analogy in Pallis, who in effect asks, of practical life and who had Greece important to note that Pallis’ wide- ‘And what should they know of very much to heart. Yet predominant ranging strictures against Greek Romiosini, who only the romeïko [a in the book is a strong vein of satire. mores come fuelled by knowledge of disparaging Greek word for the Among the author’s targets are the wider world but animated by a Greek state] know?’ Yet Pallis, many which are familiar from the sense of solidarity or complicity with undeterred, pressed ahead with the tropes of travel writing by foreign other Greeks: an early reviewer book version – encouraged by a visitors to Greece: litter, neglect of spoke of ‘self-criticism’ here. And the favourable reception – rather than ancient sites, economy with the truth nature of that self-criticism has discarding it as a period piece now when it comes to directions, uneven particular contours shaped by history perhaps rendered out of date by culinary standards, cruelty to as well as individual sensibility. events. And the revisions he made to animals and, of course, defective The role of history is at its most the text, though of interest as plumbing. Yet many of Pallis’ criti- evident when we note the small but tending to sharpen the political cisms of Greek life concern matters significant changes which the text polarization, are fewer than might which we would now consider of the saw between serial publication in have been expected. highest importance – the degra- 1921 and book form in 1923: in Where, then, does Pallis bring dation of the physical environment, between, ‘one third of Hellenism had the perspective of a Diaspora Greek, and of Greece’s tree cover in been uprooted’, as Pallis tersely and of a distinctly Anglophile and Liberal particular, among them. But Brousos bitterly notes, and the nature of the stripe, to his encounter with Greece? can be read as a sly sort of para- Greek Diaspora, with the loss of Asia This raconteur frequently divagates pilgrimage. As Witt puts it: Minor, was forever changed. That well beyond any conventional makes his comments about the travelogue so as to reflect the His last visit was a leisurely secular small-mindedness of the Greek state journey of a whole life, a life spent pilgrimage into the foothills, the more poignant. But it also for more than half a century outside written up in Brousos (1921), in changes the nature of the identity of Greece. In addition, Greek travel which wit, learning, and unsparing the people he describes. It was not writing being something of a rarity, criticism of Greek foibles clothe a out of place for one early reviewer to the author draws, by necessity as robustly didactic philosophy of life. © ΠΕΤΡΟΣ ΖΙΩΓΑΣ/CC BY-SA/Wikimedia Commons

Pallis’ final journey was to the foothills of the Agrafa mountains, shown here at night.

26 MODERN

A passage exactly half way through having mocked so many others, our the textual journey brings this out narrator is ready to conclude with a ‘That the Church saved the strongly. little self-mockery. nation is an old wives’ tale; On arrival at what he calls Agrini The book’s final scene witnesses the historical truth is the (present-day ), Pallis notes a flirtatious stichomythic encounter that it was known as Vrachori at the between the elderly (and married) converse ... The Church time of the Revolution; and one of the narrator and a widow of advanced was no mother but a blood- things that alienates and disorien- years, Vavoúlo, in a clear parody of sucking stepmother.’ tates this returning exile in contem- the question and answer form of the porary Greece is the pervasive ballad of the exile’s return. Vavoúlo renaming of places to give them a eventually vows to send the narrator Let me briefly endorse but also classical ring. The entire page of text some sausages for Christmas, in a refine this assessment, coming back in question was inserted after the double-entendre that brings the at the end to the motif of the exile’s 1922 Disaster: having criticized the house down. But the sausages return and its playful literary handling. clergy for rapacity and inhumanity never arrive, prompting the final cri The fact that Brousos begins towards the sick during the de coeur, ‘How can I ever trust with hot news – an election, and in Revolution, Pallis concludes with a woman again?’ Pallis guys himself wartime – should not conceal from biting assessment: ‘That the Church as a failed Odysseus here. And it is us the fact that the whole text is saved the nation is an old wives’ tale; as if Vavoúlo personifies the 100- saturated in the Bible and contains the historical truth is the converse ... year-old independent Greece which many references to the Greek The Church was no mother but a this Diaspora Greek cannot stay Church (here George Borrow’s The bloodsucking stepmother.’ away from but which leaves him Bible in Spain is an acknowledged But to end there would to be to perpetually exasperated. model). Pallis comes out swinging leave the story half-told. After this against the Crown on page 1, burst of indignation, the narration, Further reading quoting the Epistle of James 3:8 in with all its divagations, takes the Richard Witt’s short life of Pallis in the original in a somewhat narrator on a journey which, though the Oxford Dictionary of National truncated form: ‘And [their] tongue never reverent, is increasingly Biography is excellent. Of Pallis’ own is a fire, an unrighteous world, set consoling: descriptions of scenery writings, his two volumes of Homeric on fire by hell, full of deadly poison.’ proliferate as we approach the commentary contain much good He then moves to the Shepherd of spectacular setting of Prousos. For sense and entertainment value – one Hermas and in turn to St Paul’s First all Pallis’ disapprobation of super- of his emendations was commended Epistle to Timothy 13, where the stition and his incapability of by the editor (and banker) Walter strictures made by the Apostle to conquering what he sees as his Leaf – likewise his digressive and the Gentiles against gossipy women ancestrally authentic anti-cleri- entertaining notes on New Testament are attributed by Pallis to his calism, he finds the abbot of Prousos books. The Twenty-Second Book of experience of Athens. At many admirable – the more so because the Iliad (London 1909) and A Few places in the narrative, scripture the abbot is out of favour with the Notes on the Gospels according to St springs to this traveller’s mind. A obscurantist and populist clergy of Mark and St Matthew (Oxford 1932) free-marketeer, Pallis has a dig Athens. But he does not leave are currently available online as against the Workers’ Federation, Prousos on this note. Instead, the print-on-demand editions. For Pallis citing Deuteronomy 32:15: ‘But narration culminates with a double and the language question, see Jacob ate and had his fill and waxed allusion to the two aspects of Greek Peter Mackridge’s invaluable fat … and he forsook God who culture he loves best. Language and National Identity in made him.’ He does not hesitate to The first is Homer: Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford 1976). enlist the English missionary John Hartley in praising Capodistria’s Before I say farewell once and for all actions against piracy or to enlist to those parts of Brousos, let me say ‘It is as if Vavoúlo the High Anglican layman Athelstan a word about the monastery dog ... personifies the 100-year- Riley in mild humour at the expense When I saw him old but still splendid, of Athos, while describing Oliver a faithful guard in his place, I thought old independent Greece Cromwell as perhaps the greatest of straight away of Odysseus’ . which this Diaspora Greek England’s worthies. The religion cannot stay away from but behind all this is essentially founded And Pallis then quotes in a neat on wisdom literature, embracing hexameter translation made for the which leaves him Proverbs, Exodus and indeed the occasion the entire affecting scene perpetually exasperated.’ Talmud, and is at some consid- from Odyssey 17. This might seem a erable distance from popular piety. fitting place for his nostos to end, but

27 a r g o © Don Short

Don Short took on a number of exciting assignments in Athens. In Greece with Anthony Quinn and Co

Veteran Fleet Street journalist Don Short met many stars while reporting from Greece in the heyday of British journalism. He recounts his meetings with Anthony Quinn, Sammy Cahn and Zorba the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, among others

s the showbusiness writer at when I was there in July that year. Gaynor Jones from Wales. The the Daily Mirror in the 1960s Mikis Theodorakis’ name was taboo. locals called her the Pixie Goddess. Aand 1970s, I was regularly in Theodorakis, famous for writing Her innocent sound captured the Greece covering events for my chamber music, ballets and the film hearts of a land which, although column, from music festivals to news scores of blockbusters such as Zorba tightly ruled by a military junta, could emerging from film sets. My stories the Greek, had become chairman of still know romance as the strings of and experiences have stayed with the Patriotic Front and been arrested. the bouzouki plucked out the me ever since. I learned that he had been freed by nation’s ancient history. Even The Olympiad of Song festival the Greek colonels a few months passers-by around the giant Athens started in 1968 and was originally earlier and gone first to Paris and arena where the contest took place conceived as a light-hearted festival. then to London, where he gave his stopped in their tracks to listen to the It ran for six years and was hugely first concert since his release. But in talented singer during rehearsals. popular. Stars performed to crowds Greece, I discovered, the new regime With Everything was the name of her of 50,000 people, but ultimately the had branded him a Communist. His song, and with everything she sang event was cancelled owing to music was banned across radio, it. Appearing in front of tens of funding withdrawals. bistros and discos. As I noted in my thousands was a daunting Thirty-seven nations competed in column at the time, Zorba the Greek experience even for the festivals’ the Olympiad of Song in Athens in was now officially Zorba the Commie. guest stars like Adamo from Italy and 1970. But there was a notable The UK’s hopes for the festival our own Sandie Shaw. But Gaynor absence from the list of composers that year were pinned on 16-year-old handled it with aplomb.

28 MODERN

She came from the Swansea While I was back in Athens the Years later, I found myself in Valley and remembered singing following year, I heard the sad news Corfu on the film set of Anthony songs as a toddler in amateur village that Louis Armstrong had died. I met Quinn’s latest movie The Greek shows put on by her father. She was the American lyricist Sammy Cahn Tycoon. Controversy surrounded the offered a place at a well-known who had written many of Satchmo’s film as, remarkably, it resembled the stage school and later found herself hits. He reminisced about his life story of Aristotle Onassis. I flew in the West End production of The friend’s one big failing – his refusal out to see what was happening. Sound of Music. Then came to learn the words of his songs. Quinn was not worried about the television programmes with Sir Lucille, Armstrong’s wife, used to difficulties that had heated up with Ralph Richardson, Derek Nimmo plaster them up everywhere. If he potential lawsuits. He was quite and Charlie Drake. But, when I met went into the bathroom to have a comfortable in the title role because her, she had just veered closer to shave, they would be pasted upon he would be able to say: ‘Onassis her ambition of becoming a singer. the mirror. When he climbed into asked me to play his double.’ Things were not easy, as top bed at night, they would be lying on Quinn explained: ‘Six months composers dispensed their best the pillow. And he still couldn’t learn before Mr Onassis died, he called material to established artists, and them. me and suggested I should play him Gaynor found it difficult to find a Said Sammy fondly: ‘He would in a film. He said to me: “Somebody song. Her father, an accomplished blur his words, and always end up is going to do it some day, Tony, why pianist, came to the rescue. He with baby’. Sammy, 58, four times not you? I’d be very happy about it – penned her first patter, Peaches and Hollywood Academy award winner, because I know you will be kind to Pears. It wasn’t a hit, but hopes were had notched up hundreds of the me.” Another reason Mr Onassis high for the next one. world’s best-loved songs and was asked me to play him was because She told me her only regret about sitting on the song festival jury. My he thought I looked like him. “Tony,” showbusiness was that there were lunch with Sammy and his wife was he said, “We’re so much alike and not many people her own age. ‘Why, filled with thoughts of Satchmo. we have one thing in common. there’s only me and Jack Wild’, she Sammy said: ‘A year ago I tried to We’re both Zorbas.”’ said jokingly. Those words rang in organise a tribute night to him. But Quinn nodded wistfully. ‘Yes, my ears when I later learned that Satchmo just felt too unwell to face Onassis was a Zorba. He never lost she had married Wild, who had it. As he said himself, when you’re touch with his people even though played the Artful Dodger in the hit dead, everything’s wrong.’ My senti- he possessed such wealth. So on production of Oliver. ments too. this issue my conscience is clear.’ There were certainly strong © Don Short parallels between the film and Onassis: Quinn’s character Theo Tomasis owns a private island and a yacht and marries the widow of an assassinated American president. He even has a beloved son who is killed ... just like Onassis. But the producers Allen Klein and Nico Mastorakis protested and insisted, ‘This really isn’t the Onassis story.’ Meanwhile, wise man Quinn raised no objections to wearing a wig to thicken his thinning hair, or to wearing the heavy-rimmed spectacles that accentuated his likeness to the late Mr O. The director, Lee Thompson, added: ‘Quinn is just magnificent. He was tailor cut for the role.’ So it proved. No writs were served.

The Beatles and Beyond by Don Short is published by The original press cutting of the author’s article on Anthony Quinn. Wymer Publishing

29 a r g o © Roman Mysteries Ltd

Caroline Lawrence in front of the east end of the Parthenon. The time traveller

Caroline Mackenzie meets author Caroline Lawrence to discuss the challenges of writing for children about the ancient world – and of ‘finding’ Socrates

Could you begin by telling me a and when we all went to see A Funny Switzerland on my gap year, and little about your background? Thing Happened on the Way to the read it along with the Iliad in trans- I was born in London to American Forum at a drive-in cinema, and lation. As soon as I got back, I rushed parents. A year after I was born, my when my parents sent me to Europe to sign up for ancient Greek at U.C. parents returned to California. My on a summer study tour and I spent Berkeley and fell totally in love with mother was an artist and my father a magical afternoon in Ostia Antica. classics. After Berkeley, I managed taught French and drama at middle But my coup de foudre occurred to win a scholarship to Newnham school. The seeds of my love for when I read Mary Renault’s book College, Cambridge, where I studied classics were gently sown as I pored The Last of the Wine, a historical classical art and archaeology. I found over mythological paintings and novel set in the time of Plato, Cambridge too academic and took a in my mother’s art books, Socrates and Xenophon. I was in few years off to get married and have

30 MODERN a son. I remained in England, and © Roman Mysteries Ltd Definitely! I have introduced it by later took an MA in Hebrew and transliterating the Greek words. A Jewish studies at University College recurring phrase is oo den oy dah, London. I then taught Latin, French which means ‘I know nothing’. I also and art at my son’s primary school, introduce the words daimonion (‘little first as a parent just helping out, later divine thing’) and aretay (‘virtue’ or as a paid teacher. ‘excellence’).

When did your writing career start How was your recent research trip and how you did you get into to Athens? What was the most writing in your particular genre? surprising/unexpected part of the I loved teaching but it was experience? exhausting and I fancied the idea of Serenaded by bouzouki and guitar in a One of the things that surprised me being a screenwriter. So I started taverna near the Agora. about Athens was music. It was writing a spec script about a Jewish everywhere! Outside the Acropolis slave-girl in Pompeii. I was telling my Are children more discerning Museum I listened to a couple of sister about this while visiting her in readers than adults? students playing buzzy ancient flutes California and she suggested that I I wouldn’t say children are more called diauloi. I heard five men write a book for kids instead of a discerning, but I believe they are playing bouzouki outside Monastiraki movie for adults. Immediately I had more demanding. The moment they metro and later an electric base the idea of a girl detective a bit like get bored they are liable to toss the player. An old man played santouri Nancy Drew from the popular book aside. But that’s also why I near my hotel. And at a taverna near mystery stories which I had read as prefer children’s fiction: the plots are the Agora, I was serenaded over a little girl. But my girl detective usually much faster moving and lunch by a delightful bouzouki and would live in first-century Rome. almost always more uplifting. guitar duo. Upstairs at the new Back in London, I wrote a first draft Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek during the last two weeks of the How does writing about (and Technology in the posh Kolonaki part summer holidays. The Thieves of researching) of Athens, I found a reconstruction of Ostia was published in 2001 and compare to and every musical instrument you can became the first of a 17-book series what are the different challenges? think of, including a few that were for called The Roman Mysteries. Somehow ancient Greece has sale. I even heard the alarm clock always felt more remote to me than that Plato supposedly invented, a What fascinates you about the ancient Rome, and not just because water-operated warbling bird whistle. ancient world? it happened longer ago. One reason My main motivating factor is to solve is that women had very little place in You have been diligently the mystery of what life really would ancient Greece ... or perhaps I researching Socrates through have been like back then. I am fasci- should say ancient Athens, which Plato. Were the archaeological nated by the tension of how like us gave us most of the literature. sources as important as the they were and how unlike us they Another reason is that Greek liter- literary sources? were. Even now, whenever I think ature seems to me to deal more with For my last book, based on the I’m beginning to understand the abstract concepts: Plato’s forms, the Mithraeum and the remains of a girl past, I read or see something that myths about the gods and the almost from third-century Roman London, I makes me realize how little I really operatic extremes of Athenian had lots of archaeology to inform the know. tragedy all seem like ideas rather story. This one was much harder. I than history. I used to think that Latin tried reading Plato’s Apology in Why do you think the ancient literature was more firmly grounded ancient Greek but got distracted by world strikes such a chord with in the concrete sensory world. the grammar. My breakthrough both children and adults today? However, now that I’m delving more came when I started listening to The ancient world is like a country deeply into Plato and Plato’s dialogues in audio version. you’re not allowed to visit; you only I’m finding some nice concrete Suddenly the ‘archaeological’ bits, hear tales about it. So, in the material in Greek literature. the concrete elements if you will, absence of a time machine, you started jumping out at me. seek out the most convincing Your Roman Mysteries books accounts and depictions in literature, cleverly introduce Latin words Can you give me any examples? film, re-enactment and even throughout the text which give the Many of Plato’s dialogues are set in computer games. I believe everyone stories great didactic value. Can specific parts of Athens. At the likes being transported to another we look forward to some ancient beginning of the dialogue called world. Greek in your new book? Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus

31 a r g o walk outside the city walls by the as well as pink and white oleander. I I wrote it in order to try to understand Ilissos river and stop on a grassy watched a line of diligent ants, saw why Socrates – an odd, barefoot, spot underneath a spreading plane butterflies flutter by and stalked one -looking Athenian who never tree. In the Protagoras (314c), a of the famous agora tortoises. Myrtle, wrote a word – ended up as one of eunuch doorkeeper refuses pine, oak and laurel trees were filled the most influential figures in Socrates and his friend entry, with the twitter of birds. Chattering Western culture. As Plato has a mistaking them for sophists. And the magpies were highly visible but wood character say in the Symposium dialogue called Euthyphro finds pigeons cooed unseen. I experi- (221c): ‘Many are the marvels which Socrates on a step of the Royal enced the relief of moving from I might narrate in praise of Socrates; Stoa. While in Athens I met a tour blazing sun into a pool of shade and most of his ways might perhaps be guide and scholar named George of giving aching feet a rest. When I paralleled in another man, but his Kokkos who pointed out the exact found the site of the prison where absolute unlikeness to any human point where Socrates stood. Socrates probably spent the last being that is or ever has been is But my favourite literary artefact month of his life, I sat by the Great perfectly astonishing’ (translation by is one I have never seen in any Drain in the shade of an almond tree Benjamin Jowett). museum. In the Symposium (215b), and meditated on his life and death. I think I’ve finally ‘got’ Socrates, Alcibiades likens Socrates to certain or at least found a version of him that Silenus figures that apparently sat in Where would you time travel to makes sense... Whether I can statue-makers’ shops. These carved personally? convince ten-year-old kids of his figures were shown holding pipes or I’d like to go back to Alexandria in fascination and achievement is flutes in their hands. They were the time of Cleopatra, to Jerusalem another matter! made in two halves and when you in the time of Jesus and to opened them up, they were found to Pergamum in the time of the Caroline Lawrence’s new book, contain images of a god, or physician Galen. The Time Travel Diaries: Dionysus, I’m presuming. A wooden Adventure in Athens, Silenus based on this description will Last but not least, what (else) can is published by Piccadilly Press on feature prominently in my book. you tell us about your much-antic- 28 May, and her website is ipated new book? www.carolinelawrence.com One of the great qualities of your

writing is the use of sensory © Roman Mysteries Ltd experiences. Which Athenian/ Greek smells, sights and sounds inspired you the most? Modern Athens is too far removed from ancient Athens, but I had a moment in the Parthenon car park when I saw modern Greek taxi drivers standing around in groups and imagined them wearing ancient garb – mantles, sandals, walking sticks... I was helped in this imagi- native exercise when a tanned, oiled and nearly-naked jogger wove through groups of tourists. He looked like an Olympic athlete, and he knew it! My afternoon wandering around the ancient Agora was probably my best few hours. Back in the 1930s this ancient marketplace was cleared of houses and then excavated by the American School at Athens. They reconstructed a stoa which now houses the small collection of the Agora Museum. They also planted the ruins with period flora which have grown lush in the past 70 years. I Caroline Lawrence before the ruins of the prison spotted red poppies, mauve mallow where Socrates probably spent his last month.

32 REVIEWS © Other Press

Homer retold

J.W. Bonner questions the place of Homer in a curious Second World War novel Theodor Kallifatides, The Siege of Troy (translated by Marlaine Delargy). New York: Other Press 2019. Pp. 203. £12.99. ISBN 9781590519714

omer’s great epic, the Iliad, cowardly descend to the Under- Debates among scholars and set after nine years of world. Democratic Death never readers about contemporary Hfighting between the Trojans plays favourites. English translations of Homer’s and the , compresses into In scale, the poem focuses on the poem fill pages of papers and an expanse of just a few weeks angry dispute between , magazines: there are Lattimore lessons on anger, love, friendship, leader of the Achaean forces, and fans, Fitzgerald devotees and hubris, fear and bravery. It abounds Achilles, the Achaeans’ greatest supporters of Fagles (I am rather in portraits of human nature made warrior. Their spat, and the sense of keen on Logue’s efforts). Theodor all the more explosive or potent honour each feels due to him and to Kallifatides, in his novel, The Siege because of the intensity of war. It is him alone, plagues the Achaean of Troy, tries his hand, but with a described as a war poem, but it army. All subsequent major events in somewhat tepid sleight. He returns might better be called a death poem: the poem follow with deadly logic the poem to its oral tradition by young and old, courageous and from all too human nature. having a school teacher tell its story

33 a r g o to her class of Greek village War is Hell – that’s truth. War is The attempt by Kallifatides to sneak students in 1945. This frame allows an accelerant of human mortality. into the novel the story of this epic Kallifatides the opportunity to draw The Greeks knew it, and Achilles conflict is interesting. It’s as if the readers into engaging with the knew he would encounter death at novel is a , a ruse by Homeric text through a rather some point in his life, whether in a which to bring the tale into the hands cursory handling of Greek village life short burst of glory at Troy or a long of the reader and unleash it on them under Nazi occupation. and forgotten stretch of years in his by surprise. The problem is that the The school teacher, named Miss homeland. The death of Patroclus at frame is flimsy, the Second-World- or Witch (since the town dogs fall the hands of settles the War tale little more than a young- silent in her presence) by the decision. adult, coming-of-age novel, though students, beguiles them with her Kallifatides, who was born in the attention paid to women is inter- rendering of the Trojan and Achaean Greece just before the onset of the esting. conflict. The novel’s 15-year-old Second World War and who has The pathos of so much death narrator finds himself in love with lived in Sweden since 1964, suffuses Homer’s poem in its final Miss. And the novel hints at compli- attempts to unsettle the glamour of lines. And that pathos infuses the cations in the loyalties of Miss: a war, arguing in an Afterword that final pages of Kallifatides’ novel. love for the German pilots stationed Homer was attempting to do the Achilles grants Priam time to pay in the village and a role in the same (I tend, from my contemporary homage to Hector: days to gather partisan movement to rid the country vantage point, to agree with Kalli- wood for a great pyre and a day to of its German occupiers. This thread fatides; at least, I don’t see how feast in honour of Hector. But on the deepens the developing love story readers can read the poem today 12th day, the forces return to battle – between the narrator and a and not feel the brutal to fighting that will end with the death classmate and the fate of the grotesqueness of death in so many of Achilles, the total destruction of narrator’s father, who has been of the poem’s lines). Troy and the murder of Agamemnon imprisoned by the Germans. There is much to be gained from when he returns to his wife. War is It is the teacher’s narrative of reading Homer’s poem in this way. Hell. So, oftentimes, is Life. Homer’s poem to her students that

provides most of the novel’s © The J. Paul Getty Museum (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) material. In addition to the brutal array of deaths she vividly revives (all prose variants of Homer’s descriptions) – warriors disembow- elled, brains spilled, limbs severed – there are emotional pauses. There is Priam kissing the hands of Achilles to urge the return of Hector’s defiled body with the words, ‘I have just done what no mortal man has done before: I kissed your hands, the same hands that slew my son’ and Priam telling Achilles that the Trojans need 11 days to pay their respects to Hector and adding, ‘On the twelfth – if necessary – we can resume the battle’. Homer’s poem ends with the Trojans celebrating Hector’s life. The reader finishes the poem knowing that the battle will rage on with as much fury and destruction as the poem’s opening rage between Agamemnon and Achilles. The narrator looks back on these events from a distance of 50 years. That expanse of time perhaps adds to the novel’s nostalgic glow, one that suffuses even the most tragic A fragmentary mosaic floor showing two heralds leading Briseis away from Achilles events at its swift conclusion. who grasps his lyre. Thought to have originated at Antioch in AD 100–300.

34 REVIEWS © Arne Nordmann/CC BY-SA/Wikimedia Commons

The author set many of his stories on Skiathos, where he was born. Master of the Greek short story

Nineteenth-century writer Alexandros Papadiamandis is one of the forefathers of . As a new collection of his short stories is released, Alice Dunn wonders how typical his stories are of their time Alexandros Papadiamandis (edited by Lambros Kamperidis), The Boundless Garden: Selected Short Stories II. Evia: Denise Harvey Publishers 2019. Pp. 390. £35. ISBN 9789607120410

he short story is a young art’ This is clearly a contentious wish also to mark this centenary with declared Elizabeth Bowen topic, and the way we approach the the publication of the second volume ‘Tin 1937. question of when short stories of his Selected Short Stories in This is a popular opinion, based started tells us a lot about how we English translation ... Unfortunately, in part on the ‘explosion’ of short think culture happens and origi- this was also the time that Greece stories, as Dean Baldwin called it, nates. Is there something in society was entering a deep financial crisis published in magazines in the late drawing these creations forth? Or is and there were insufficient funds to 19th century. In his book, Art and it the artist who throws the idea at underwrite this substantial project.’ Commerce in the British Short Story society and society has to wake up Despite the difficult economic 1880–1950, Baldwin states: ‘I have to it? This concern has been central climate in Greece, work on the counted at least twenty-three to the process of assembling this project continued, and the collection magazines founded during the collection of short stories by was finally produced. 1890s that published short fiction Alexandros Papadiamandis. The stories were written mainly in either significantly or exclusively.’ The acknowledgments for the the years 1894 and 1902, a time that There was a ravenous appetite for book, released last year, tell their is often thought of as Papadia- the form. Short stories, however, own story of the difficulties encoun- mandis’ most creative. This was, have always existed. As Mary tered in the journey to its publication: nonetheless, an uncertain age for Rohrberger explains, ‘Short ‘The year 2011 was the centenary Greece, ‘A period of post-Enlight- narrative fiction is as old as the anniversary of Alexandros Papadia- enment turmoil that followed closely history of literature.’ mandis’ death’, they read. ‘It was our on the heels of Greece’s War of

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Independence, when the traditional Papadiamandis’ words work hard the early 20th century. Anton old ways were disappearing under for effect and his character observa- Chekhov and Edgar Allan Poe, with the pressure of the indiscriminate tions are so convincing that we find whom Papadiamandis has been adoption of western mores and ourselves recognizing people from compared, wrote several stories ideas’, as the blurb on the inside our own lives in his fiction. about spirits. Poe’s famous story, cover asserts. The writer was born in 1851 on ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Papadiamandis may have looked the island of Skiathos, where many Valdemar’, is about a mesmerist who to the brevity of the short story for of his short stories are set. ‘The puts a man in a hypnotic state just punchiness and power in such a Matchmaker’, for example, features before he dies. In Papadiamandis’ climate. Its brief form allows the a description of its glorious light: story, ‘Sin’s Spectre’, we are asked reader an intense experience – a ‘The winter sun entered freely and lit the question of what happens to the series of epiphanies – when the up all of the widow’s tile-covered soul after death. ‘Is it true that the whole world becomes clear in an ground floor.’ There’s a strong sense departing soul is filled with loathing, instant. of place in ‘Dream on the Wave’, too: when it sees its maggot-ridden, Consider, for example, Papadia- ‘This sheer rocky coast of mine – mortal frame?’ Perhaps Papadia- mandis’ description of snow in ‘Love Platana, Grand Shore, The Vineyard mandis was influenced by the beliefs in the Snow’: ‘Snowflakes, white – was exposed to the North-east of Alcmaeon, who thought the soul flies, wisps of cotton driven to whirl- wind and sloped towards the was of life. winds in the air, falling to the earth; Northern wind.’ Papadiamandis’ stories are seeing the mountain turn white in the Papadiamandis had a busy and notable for their inclusion of mythical darkness.’ Or, in ‘The Yearly interrupted education, attending sentiment – a nod to the Hellenic but ’, how ‘the echoing sea several schools before going on to also Christian past. There is a story heard the horrible jest of the old study philosophy at the University of about witches: ‘They were women. seaman and transmitted it from Athens. He never obtained his Three naked women, completely wave to wave, not to the shore degree owing to economic diffi- naked. Like Eve their ancestress, in across the way where the calm blue culties. He began work, however, on the days before fig leaves were used waves lap playfully, but to the centre his first novel, The Migrant, which and the coats of skins were sewn of the sea, to the measureless deep, was published in serialized form in a together.’ Later, in the same story, the terrible abyss.’ Papadiamandis’ newspaper. After being briefly the narrator questions what he has short stories encapsulate moments conscripted into the army, he worked seen, ‘What were they meditating in time beautifully. as a translator and had his first short on, what were they invoking from Papadiamandis was not only a story published in 1887. He had a pale , their mother, who writer of short stories and novels, but quiet life, mainly in Athens, working sailed high in the skies, these three also an avid translator. He put many on his writing. unveiled, unvested priestesses?’ His works into Greek, including Bram His father was a priest, and ideas work also moves into animism and Stoker’s Dracula and Rudyard of spiritualism litter his short stories, naturalism – a world perhaps Kipling’s The Strange Ride of as they do those of many writers of inspired by Émile Zola, whose work Morrowbie Jukes. Kipling was well he also translated into Greek. known for practising the art of Reproduced by kind permission of Agni Pikioni Having moved between myths, omission. When Ernest Hemingway spirits and naturalism, we are turned his hand to writing short somehow unprepared for the stories, he looked to Kipling’s short moment when we find a story on fiction and became preoccupied with materialistic concerns. In ‘Gagatos condensing his prose as much as and the Horse’ we are given a possible. Papadiamandis’ own use snapshot of a ‘big shot’ who is busy of omission is apparent not only in ‘lending sometimes at 18%, his skilful economy with language, sometimes at 16% or 15% plus but also in his plotting. In his story compound interest. Shipping loans, ‘Neighbourhood Entertainment’ he usually at 36%, again plus compound uses dialogue almost exclusively to interest.’ The torrent of contrasts in tell the story of a young man’s this book of stories is truly exciting. suicide, handled as though it is By the end of the collection, we merely gossip among friends: are convinced that a degree of disenchantment must accompany ‘It’s over? Is it really?’ enlightened truth. It is the job of ‘He’s just died.’ brilliant writers like Papadiamandis ‘Did they give him communion?’ Drawing by Dimitris Pikionis, ca 1918, to reinject some enchantment into ‘Will they bury him with priests?’ ink on paper. our lives through reading.

36 REVIEWS © Trustees of the British Museum

Pillars of language: a column capital from the Parthenon. What makes Greek unique?

Henry Cullen gives his verdict on a book on that has taken Europe by storm Andrea Marcolongo (translated by Will Schutt), The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek. London: Europa 2019. Pp. 176. £12.99. ISBN 9781787701830

ne of the more revealing (b) the full use of participles in None of the above, though they questions you can ask a various tenses and voices, which may well identify a thoughtful Oclassicist (whether they are enables long sentences to get away linguist, is particularly sexy. It’s hard a nervous sixth-former enduring a with the bare minimum in terms of to claim that any one of them proves mock university interview, an main verbs and obviates the need for that speakers of Greek thought applicant for a teaching post or so many temporal clauses, relatives, about the world in a manner wholly simply a colleague musing over a absolute phrases and so on; set apart from speakers of less- glass of retsina) runs something like (c) the surprisingly small ‘core’ blessed tongues. And none of them this: what’s distinctive about how vocabulary on which Greek relies – it features in Andrea Marcolongo’s Greek operates as a language? If makes a small set of words do a lot The Ingenious Language, which your chosen victim also knows Latin, of work, meaning that ostensibly attempts to pitch Greek as a a comparison between the two can simple words like λογος need to language that has a unique way of serve as a productive sub-question. have umpteen meanings and conceptualizing the world around it. The best answers I’ve heard nuances. Number-crunchers at The book, first published in generally focus on: Dickinson College in Pennsylvania Marcolongo’s native Italian in 2016 (a) the astonishingly versatile have calculated that fewer than 500 to much acclaim, has now been definite article, the uses of which separate Greek words account for translated for an English-speaking include the bog-standard ‘the’, a some 65–70% of all words in the audience. The blurb on the inside vestigial pronoun form, ό δε (‘but Greek corpus. This means that just a flap promises us ‘a joyous love he’), the quasi-relative ό τρεχων (‘the small pool gets you a very long way; song’, and in this regard it does not man who is running’) and a gerund for the equivalent coverage in Latin disappoint, for the book’s primary (το είναι; ‘[the act of] being’); you need to learn nearer 1,000. asset is its sheer missionary zeal.

37 a r g o

Marcolongo claims that she ‘thinks in You will sense a δε coming to it by using three indicative verbs Greek’. She frequently recalls her balance the unspoken μεν, and (they flee; they fled; they have fled). liceo classico training, which comes indeed the book is not without The problem here is that, in the across as a rather grim slog where problems. Most frustrating, perhaps, indicative, Greek verbs do in fact the sunlit uplands of reading poetry is something that almost inevitably operate by tense rather than aspect. are never reached, even after years dogs ‘joyous love songs’, in that Marcolongo might rather have used of prose. Its lessons, though, have many passages are overblown and imperatives or infinitives to make her clearly stuck with her into adulthood; their claims rather over-egged. point. She is correct to observe the Greek bug bit hard and has not Marcolongo was, in a previous life, a aspect as a quirk of Greek, but her yet released its grip. speechwriter for the Italian Prime claims are too sweeping. A second Marcolongo’s exploration of some Minister Matteo Renzi, and sections problem is that this English trans- of the ‘nine epic reasons to love of the book do indeed feel rhetorical lation seems not to have been Greek’ (the book’s subtitle) is heartfelt to a fault. The following typifies what checked by an English-speaking and often touching. She focuses on I mean: classicist, who would have spotted linguistic features that she believes some obvious slips; twice, for set Greek aside: aspect (i.e. Greek The Greek optative is, for this example, it is claimed that the verb verbs are, she claims, overwhelmingly reason, the perfect measure of the ‘to translate’ is derived from the Latin concerned with frequency of action distance between the effort required verb traducto/traducer [sic]. This rather than tense); the dual, which to take stock of what we desire and claim works for the Italian tradurre, expresses how two items are spiri- the strength needed to express it – but not for the English equivalent, tually bound into a pair; the optative, to ourselves most of all; in the whose Latin root is transfero. Such which reveals nuanced attitudes of conviction that, no matter the slips, and several others like it, the speaker or writer about likelihood situation, elegance is what gives us cannot help but undermine the and desire; and so on. The final a slight but sure advantage, reader’s confidence. chapters are more general, offering especially when it comes to An overarching issue is that it is reflections on the process of trans- language. It’s just us – and our not entirely clear whom this book is lation itself and a whistle-stop history desires. for; I wasn’t sure, even after finishing of the Greek language. Inset text- it. Practising classicists will be boxes scattered liberally throughout It’s one thing for explanations to frustrated by the flaws I’ve identified the volume offer a rich assortment of be poetic; it’s another, though, for above; those without Greek will, entertaining tangents on topics as them to be undermined by errors, meanwhile, be unable to follow a fair diverse as Greek colours and Isidore and there are some unfortunate bit of the finer detail, despite the of Seville; they are probably my ones in this edition. Most obvious is blurb’s assurances to the contrary. In favourite sections. that, after claiming that aspect (the her introduction, Marcolongo singles There are plenty of gems at first ‘epic reason’) was completely out lapsed Hellenists who may have which both Hellenists and experi- dominant in the psyche of Greek studied the language at school, but enced teachers will nod approvingly. verbs, Marcolongo seeks to illustrate have memories of it that make them I particularly liked this: shudder or even recoil. But it’s worth

© Emanuele Ragnisco/Europa reflecting that in the English and US I know that all teachers recommend educational systems there are reading the entire passage before vanishingly few students who are beginning to translate, and that no forced to stick with Greek without student ever does. having chosen to; Hellenists who get as far as encountering the concepts And this: of aspect, the dual or the optative will have generally been won over The survival of the optative in Greek, already. the one Indo-European language to Marcolongo has certainly created safeguard it tenaciously, is proof of a thought-provoking volume whose Greek’s unmistakable, extraordi- enthusiasm will win it many narily durable verb system. Verbs, admirers. But I sense that a gap in not nouns, dominate ancient Greek. the market remains for a book which can cover some of this one’s Marcolongo’s discussions of omissions (including the less-than- features such as breathings and sexy features I mentioned at the cases are lively, accessible and outset) and convey rather more clearly the product of half a lifetime’s clearly, if rather more soberly, just careful rumination. what makes Greek unique.

38 REVIEWS © The J. Paul Getty Museum (digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

The beauty of the Greek alphabet: gold ring with Greek inscription to Hera, ca. 575 BC. What humans most need to know

J.W. Bonner is enchanted by one writer’s journey to learn – and love – the Greek language Mary Norris, Greek To Me. New York: W.W. Norton 2019. Pp. 227. £14.99. ISBN 9781324001270

ary Norris, in her debut book with an invocation of the Muse: ‘Sing This invocation is rendered in the Between You & Me, made in me, O Muse, of all things Greek voice of a wise-acre, a New York Mproofreading and editing that excite the imagination and wise-cracking voice by way, as we seem as sexy and glamorous as delight the senses’ – a fair summary learn in reading, of a youth in Ohio. fashion and world travel. For her of what Norris hopes – and manages Norris might be channelling her inner second book, Greek To Me, she – to convey in her writing. She Woody Allen. embarks on several real journeys and closes her opening paragraph with a This opening invocation also a torrid affair with all things Greek sassy twist: demonstrates Norris’ frequently (including a sailor or two). The result riveting writerly moves. She is a work in which etymological exami- things that have survived three succinctly balances her clause: nations appear almost as delightful as thousand years and more, since the ‘things that were old then and are a playful lover’s pillow talk. time before the time of Homer, things new now’ by closing with alliteration. Norris brings a wry wit and tone that were old then and are new now There is, as well, the lovely to this book from the very beginning. – you know, the eternal. If that’s not repetition of time: ‘since the time She opens it, in proper epic fashion, too much to ask, Muse. Please? before the time of Homer’ – a

39 a r g o cadence or rhythm that pleases. Greek To Me is an extended tion of the Nashville Athena, ‘four Greek To Me abounds in these tribute to Norris’ belief in the Greek stories tall’ – both the process of small pleasures. ability to transform the ordinary into construction and the human models Norris describes in some depth the extraordinary. to counterfeit the goddess. her childhood and school experi- Norris loves language. Hers is a In writing about Edith Hamilton, ences, including her inability to love that she manages, as well, to author of the classics Mythology and study Latin in fifth grade as a result trace to the Greek: alphabet arrives The Greek Way, Norris demon- of her father’s refusal to allow her to from the Greek, and ‘Anyone who strates her associative technique attend a Saturday class offering. In loves language loves the alphabet.’ and connective process: she moves high school and for a year in Norris describes reverently and from mentioning Edith Hamilton to college, she studies French, but rapturously her childhood class- writing about Margaret Hamilton, then switches to German. Watching rooms: the ‘frieze’ of letters in ‘who played the Wicked Witch of the Sean Connery play Agamemnon in elementary classrooms, ‘each West in The Wizard of Oz.’ Both, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits sparks capital [letter] paired with its notes Norris, ‘lived on Gramercy her interest in Greece, and the offspring. I used to think of them as Park for a while.’ Norris doesn’t stop resources available at The New mothers and babies.’ Indeed, words here. She then describes Margaret Yorker (colleague recommenda- for Norris have ‘a spark of the Hamilton’s features: ‘famous thin tions and paid opportunities to divine’. (Greek To Me concludes face and sharp chin and dark study Greek), where she finds work with an appendix of the Greek eyebrows (and, in the movie, a as a writer and copy-editor, lead her alphabet. A map tracing Norris’ green complexion).’ Norris then to study the language and prepare various trips and journeys to Troy returns to her story about Edith the stage for her travel adventures: and elsewhere would have aided the Hamilton and makes a case for the Lesbos, Sparta, , Athens, reader further.) popularizers of Greek and Roman Cyprus. We read here of her Norris manages to examine culture: skinny-dipping experiences; she various mythological figures and may not emerge as from events, from Athena to the Trojan these writers with the common touch sea foam, but Norris does grow in War. She ponders the various sites are introducing mythology to people self-confidence and self-aware- and ruins: the and who may fall in love with it and go on ness. Travels, as Emerson , the Acropolis. to read in Greek and Ovid in suggests, lead her back into her She describes her studies of Greek Latin. own self, and Norris seems the and her performances in staged stronger for them. productions of Greek tragedies: a Hamilton provides the epigraph Norris educates as much as she chorus role in Electra and the role of to the book: elates. Her intimacy with the Hecuba in The Trojan Women. Her language, culture and place steadily curiosity about the Parthenon takes though the outside of human life deepen her passion into wisdom. her from Athens to Nashville, changes much, the inside changes One of the first Greek words she Tennessee, and a lengthy descrip- little, and the lesson-book we cannot learns (ilios; ‘sun’) prompts her to graduate from is human experience.

consider the Greek in association © Norton with English: And while studying her lines to play her chorus role in the the Greek ilios had come into production of Electra, Norris English as . What in English is perceives ‘that ancient Greek is like the sun god is, in Greek, the the Bible …: records of the past that everyday word for the sun. Greek preserve the things that humans seemed to exalt the everyday. most need to know.’ Norris ends by tracing her way to This exaltation of the daily Patrick Leigh Fermor’s adopted extends, for Norris, into home in Kardamyli, where she encounters swarms of magical the way the Greeks have squeezed yellow butterflies and tours Fermor’s so much out of everything they have: house. It’s here that she takes a oil from the olive, wine from the swim in the nude, after which a grape ... mosaics from pebbles, metamorphosis seems to occur: her temples from stone. It is not a rich ‘intimates’, placed in her hat while land, but they have made it rich in she walks back to her hotel from the ways that transcend a country’s not-so-private cove, produce a gross national product. beautiful yellow butterfly.

40 The Hellenic Society Online Subscribe to ARGO

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THEBES: forgotten city Paul Cartledge

Classical mountaineering Matthew Shipton Greece in the swinging sixties Don Short Did Odysseus write the Odyssey? Thomas W. Hodgkinson