An Athenian Diary

22

On the Road with the Paidia

The topic of my seminar at the School, which starts on December 2, has been announced as "Greek Agriculture." This is a topic that interests also Guy Sanders, the extraordinarily lanky Brit who is the current director of the American School excavations at Korinthos. Guy and I chatted a couple of weeks ago, and he described the aspects of Greek agriculture he was going to stress during the portion of the School trip to the Peloponnesus that he was leading. Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself agreeing to tag along. So here I am committed to noisy nights in provincial hotels, endless days in deserted fields under November rain, and hours on a tour bus with the paidia ("kids," the inevitable soubriquet by which everyone calls the first-year students). Six days on the road, in part repeating an experience I had twenty years ago, in part doing something wholly new. And, be it known, doing for the first time some serious duty as Whitehead Professor! Shall we get on the bus, without, I fear, either Ken or Neal. . . ?

    Saturday, November 15. Athens to Sparta by Bus.

The trip by taxi from the School to the Peloponnesian Bus Station cost me 3.40 euros. I had my backpack stuffed with books and papers to read, a suitcase equally stuffed with clothes. Today dawned gloomy and cold, so I packed for rain and freezing weather. But as the bus rolled through the Peloponnesian landscape, the sky began to clear, though it remained cold and clammy.

The busses in Greece have been notably modernized since I traveled here twenty years ago. When you buy your ticket they assign you a seat (like a plane) and the seats actually are numbered, and the passengers actually seek and take their assigned seats. My bus was big and capacious like a tourist bus, and unlike the olden days they did not let anyone who wanted on, till it was stuffed like a clam; no more passengers than seats, thank you! (Still, the Greeks have a long way to go to match the Turkish long-distance busses, on which the driver's assistant comes regularly around to splash your hands with lemon-water.)

When I got to Sparta I checked into my hotel, not the aptly-named Sparta Inn where Guy and the paidia were staying, but the Maniotis, a house of luxury by comparison. The views out my window encompassed a park with palm trees and a striking view of the Tagyetos mountains swathed in swirls of cloud.

    Sunday, November 16. Sparta and Environs. The Menelaion. The Sparta Survey. Vapheio, Amphyklai, and the Olive Oil Museum.

Sunday was the day of Sparta. Sparta sits in a lovely river valley (the Eurotas), fertile and endlessly farmed. The weather had cleared completely by morning, and got quite warm as the day progressed. We started, while there was still a bit of a chill, at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, the guardian goddess of Sparta. There's not much left; it occupies a slight depression near the bank of the Eurotas river, in an orchard of oranges. (Years ago I was in Sparta when the orange crop was so bountiful that farmers were literally giving them away by the side of the road.) But the place has a gruesome history, retold in the report by one of the students; according to our ancient sources, the sanctuary was the site of ritual whipping of children, both boys and girls, as part of a bloody coming-of-age ceremony. In Roman times the whipping festival became a kind of tourist attraction; a theater was installed around the altar to accommodate the curious spectators. Today the most substantial remain is part of the temple.

We visited next the Sparta museum. Every town in Greece, it seems, has its own little museum devoted to the local antiquities. In the olden days the archaeological authorities brought everything pretty, rare, or striking to Athens, leaving only sad collections of pots and fragments of statuary to the local facilities. More recently, policy has been to try to display objects near where they were found, and repatriations of some pretty substantial objects have been carried out -- notably, for example, the return to Santorini of the magnificent Minoan frescoes found at Akrotiri. The Sparta museum hasn't got anything quite that amazing, but it does display some nice dedications of scythes to the goddess and a huge head of Hera (?; the identification is disputed) whose forehead, eyes, and mouth have been scored with Christian crosses -- to keep the demon that inhabited it, as the ancient Christians believed, sealed inside (or so I would argue, after my reading of Iamblichos, Eunapios, and others).

Hills around the city bear the remains of sanctuaries, and these were our next destination. The so-called Menelaion (a sanctuary where Menelaus was worshipped) should really be the Helenaion, for it was originally dedicated to the worship of Helen as a goddess, and most of the offerings there were given to her; her husband was added only much later, as an afterthought, when the goddess herself asked for him to be honored too. (Many observations about sexism may be here inserted.) Archaeologists have long speculated that behind Helen here lies an ancient mother- or earth-goddess, suppressed by the Indo-Europeans with their male sky-god and revived in the form of the beautiful cause of the Trojan War. (You can read all about some of these ideas in the books of Maria Gumbatas). Be that as it may, the view from the site is magnificent: 200 degrees or more all round, the valley laid out like a rich green map, Sparta still a small and well-contained town without the scatter and sprawl of Athens, and those extraordinary Tagyetos mountains rising up to the west, like the Tetons above Jackson Hole.

We also visited Vapheio, where some rich Mycenaean graves were found, though for me the greatest interest there was a little green frog living happily in the puddles collected in the bottom of the excavation.

I had dinner that night with Guy and Steve Tracy, the Director of the School, who'd come along on the trip to get to know the students better (and, one suspects, to escape some of the endless demands on time and energy that the Directorship entails). We sat almost alone in a quiet little restaurant, dining on hot roast pork and steamed potatoes, served up by an authentic Spartan -- who was "raised up," as she put it, in Canada.

    Monday, November 17. The Water Power Museum at Dimitsana. Stymphalos.

Today the bus took the road out of the Lakonian valley, up into the mountains of Arkadia. We stopped for food at Tripolis, the Arkadian capital, a vibrant and happening town that has a go-get-it feel absent from Athens, despite that city's greater population and (I suppose the Athenians would say) sophistication; Tripolis feels more like a small but happy American town, the kind of place where the guy in the record store will say, "Sorry, I don't have that but I can get it for you by tomorrow!"

Arkadia, of course, serves as the setting for more Romantic literature than anyone could possibly read, starting I suppose with Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. In the stereotype Arkadia is deeply and darkly wooded, packed with shepherds and nymphs, lush, warm, sexy. And in fact there are parts of Arkadia that bring those images strongly to mind -- and nowhere, at least where I have been, more than the valley of the Lousios river, our destination. The river has carved a gorge through the mountains which rise up, alternately covered with woods and projecting bare rock, steeply on each side. The river is fed by springs that rise way up in the mountains, and the long fall to the river far below provided the opportunity to harness that power. In the nineteenth century the area around Dimitsana -- itself a charming town of old-style buildings and narrow winding streets, strung out along a cliff high above the river -- became the center of gunpowder production, using new water-powered technology; now the old mills have been thoroughly restored and turned into a wonderful outdoor Water Power Museum. We wandered up and down through the gunpowder factory -- a mainstay of production for the Greek War of Independence, not unlike Simsbury for the American War -- the raki still (raki is the "explosive" liquor made from grape-skins and distilled to hyper-alcoholic content), the fullers' establishments, and various other enterprises exploiting the power of falling water, through lush growth of oaks and deciduous trees changing color (yellows of autumn splash the landscape of the Peloponnesus with colors not seen up in Attica), down to the deepest reaches of the museum woods, where an abandoned car marked the end of the trail. The Lousios valley has been

developed as a natural region, with -- extraordinarily for much of Greece -- hiking trails that take you the length of much of the river, past sights of natural beauty and monasteries set on the banks of the river.

Our other main site this day was Stymphalos. Surrounded by steep mountains and accessible only by narrow twisting roads that skirt great cliffs, Stymphalos is set in a broad plain with a lake at the center. Shallow enough in many parts to support great growths of reeds, the lake owes its existence to the collapse of the katabothros that had drained the plain's river beyond the mountains, to the sea. Stymphalos was the site in ancient myth of one of the labors of Herakles against the Stymphalian birds, inhabitants of the lake, feathered in bronze, which tried to kill anyone who approached them.

The site is being excavated by a Canadian team, who have uncovered the ancient town, laid out in a grid pattern, and who seem to think it was destroyed in 146 BCE by the Roman general Mummius. We saw signs neither of destruction nor of the birds, till, well ensconced in our bus, a great flock of starlings flew up off the road, darkening for a moment the sky to our right.

At almost every stop, when there are even a few minutes to spare, the boys in the group produce a soccer ball and start playing. Usually the girls (who are fewer and, I am told, all attached) stand around and watch. Primal primate display behavior, I suppose. At the Water Power Museum one fellow found another, quieter and more private, source of self-amusement, but just as deeply embedded in our shared primate past.

Tuesday, November 18. Nauplio Revidivia. Pyramid, Argos Museum, Mycenae.

Tuesday brought us out of Arkadia and back to Nauplio, the chief town of the Argolid these days, which Edie, the girls, and I had visited ourselves not all that long ago. The museum, it turned out, was closed -- under renovation, like so much else in Greece, for the Olympics -- so we headed instead for sites in the countryside. My favorite was a strange monument which I don't remember ever seeing before -- a kind of pyramid sitting up on a hill, its top collapsed but its form absolutely obvious, overlooking much of the lower Argolid valley, to the sea. Lots of theories have been issued about its origin, date, and function -- most recently that it was used to lock up agricultural slaves -- but it seems pretty clear to me that it had military purposes (and was probably built around the end of the fourth century BCE).

We had a look too at Lerna, a famous prehistoric site with a big house preserving mud brick, which is pretty cool if you've never see it. We checked out also the Argos Museum, with the finds from the region, set in a lovely park with palms. Those palms all over the place in Greece remind me always that we're in a Levantine country, the western extension of the Middle East.

Last in the day was a trip to Mycenae, a site which I'd visited with the family not so long ago. To Alison's great disgust -- because when we visited we didn't have a flashlight and so we couldn't go down -- we went down into the cistern, dark and cavernous, with stairs turning 90 degrees, to end in a dead end at the bottom, a dozen meters below the surface. (Let me know any impressions the photograph on the left may bring to mind....)

    Wednesday, November 19. Berbati, Mycenae again, Tiryns Dam.

Our first stop today was at the Tiryns dam -- a remarkable structure, the understanding of which we owe to some remarkable archaeological detective work. Tiryns -- a major Mycenaean site on the Argos plain -- sits on a little rise of rock. In antiquity a river flowed nearby. Sometime around 1300 or so, the river changed course slightly and began depositing alluvium on the plain near Tiryns. To deal with the problem, Mycenaean engineers constructed a huge dam, at least 15 meters high and 40 or more long, of stone and earth, to block the course of the river and divert it into a canal they dug which redirected the waters into another river bed that flowed on the far side of the hill by Tiryns -- thus solving the flooding problem. We know all this thanks to archaeologists led by Paul Zangger, who drilled cores in the plain and reconstructed the hydrological history.

Berbati is a nice upland plain, beyond a mountain that conceals Mycenae. The plain has been the subject of an extensive archaeological survey and we know quite a bit about its settlement history. But the highlight of Berbati, for me, was our plan to hike from their, across a low pass, to Mycenae, following the bed of a Mycenaean road. As we passed through olive groves where the harvest was going on along a stream with flowing water and disused millraces, a stunning view of the plain and the mountains beyond opened up for us.

The walk took us over the pass and by a Mycenaean bridge; above, we could see stretches of retaining walls for another road above. The engineering abilities of the Mycenaeans are impressive; with their roads and dams and great fortification walls, they rival the Romans who came so much later. And the extent of control of the countryside these roads imply is something that struck me forcefully only on this trip -- just like what I had been reading this summer, in Roman papyri from Egypt, that showed how thoroughly the Romans really controlled the population in their empire -- for the purpose, of course, of collecting taxes.

The walk brought us by a scrawny little wild pear tree and then out by Mycenae, from the back -- a view that must be rare for tourists today, but must have been a common enough sight 3300 years ago, when the road we walked carried traffic. Of course, the sights would not have been complete without a dead fox -- which betrayed itself by its smell only when we'd passed it.

But the mountains rose up splendidly, high in the blue Greek sky, and one quickly forgot the odors and irrigation pipes.

    Thursday, November 20. Tiryns, Argive Heraion, Dendra, Merbaka.

Tiryns is another massive Mycenaean fortification in the Argive plain. Brooding on a small hill, its Cyclopean walls used to overlook a prison; there's a school next to it now -- I'm not sure which is more appropriate. Tiryns is also the place that built the dam we visited a couple days before; you realize, when you see the plain spread out at the feet of its walls, how vulnerable it would be to floods -- unlike Mycenae, on its hill. As usual we had another report at Tiryns -- and an invasion of school kids, whose reverence for the Bronze Age past was perhaps not quite what one might hope. (Overheard conversation between two kids: "You know, this is where the Minotaur was." "No, really?" "Yeah, really." Thanks to Georgina, the eavesdropper who reported this to me.)

Our other great site of the day was the sanctuary dedicated to Hera and controlled, in Classical and later times, by the town of Argos. There's a lot of debate now in the scholarship about when Argos came to control the sanctuary; before, some think, it was under Mycenae. Be that as it may, the view from the terraces, backed up against a mountain, are wonderful -- the Argive plain lies before you like a living map, the sea glimmering in the distance. The colors are wonderful here, the distances you can see amazing -- and sound carries too; from the terrace that bears the temple I could hear (though not quite understand) the conversation of folks harvesting olives a good kilometer away.

Dendra is a Mycenaean cemetery with one amazing feature -- the burial of two horses! They are not interred with a person (though a person was buried close by) but separately, by themselves. No one seems to know whether they were killed (sacrificed?) or died natural deaths (not likely I'll wager) nor much more, in part because although the excavation occurred decades ago, the excavator never got around to publishing the work -- and then she died. (This is all too common in Greek archaeology -- not the dying [okay, yes] but the failure to publish. Some folks really like to dig stuff up but don't seem to get very excited about sitting in the library and writing up the results. As a consequence, there are an awful lots of big holes in Greece about which one can say almost nothing.)

Our last visit of the day brought us to Midea, another akropolis with another stunning view of the plain. End of the day, some of us were tired; we looked around, climbed the steep slope to the top of the mountain, and took advantage of the solitude and quiet to contemplate the world as the sun set. By then the fire department had arrived to quench the tires someone had set fire down in the river valley, and the oily black smoke that obscured the view to the north had almost dispersed.

The village of Merbaka -- the origins of whose name is disputed -- today a small bump in the road, hosts a perfectly preserved, still used Byzantine Church of the Dormition of the Virgin (commonly known as Hagia Triada) of late thirteenth century date. Guy suggests that this church stood on a road in use since antiquity to traverse the Argolid plain going from Korinthos to the sea. The church itself is hotly discussed because it is one of the earliest in Greece to start to show elements of Gothic, that is to say Frankish, style. Some scholars have argued that these elements predate the same elements in western European churches, meaning that the Gothic style was invented in Greece! This view partakes more of patriotism than probability; the real issue is whether the church is late enough that these elements were in fact earlier expressions of home style by the Franks who had taken over this part of Greece, or whether they represent some kind of local borrowings.

What are these elements? One telling one is the door. A traditional Byzantine church door consists of two complete orthostats on either side. The Gothic door is made up of several stones stacked and trimmed; you can see this style on lots of pseudo-Gothic churches in the US, like St. John's in New York City, or the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Other elements include the engaged colonnettes in the windows and the column capitals with crockets. But then how to date it? Guy came up with a clever idea -- look at some ceramic bowls built into the walls as decoration. Date them, and you date the church! Turns out the bowls are late thirteenth century -- after the Franks had got to Greece!

So who's responsible for all this? Between 1278 and 1284, the Frankish cleric William of Moerbeke was bishop of Korinthos. William had classical interests -- he was one of the first to translate Aristotle into Latin. (This will be very good news for all my Greekless readers!) Now it happens that this church has some strikingly classical elements -- it stands on a base that's strikingly reminiscent of the crepidium of a Greek temple, and built into its structure are not one but two ancient stones, one an inscription in Latin honoring a famous Roman governor of Greece in 69 BCE, Quintus Metellus, the other a funerary monument, inscribed also, and depicting three figures (taken now as the "three saints" who give the church its popular name of Hagia Triada).

It seems not unlikely that William purposely inserted these classical elements into the church -- that indeed he was the guy responsible for the design and erection of this "Byzantino-Gothic" structure. One cannot help but wonder too whether Metellus wasn't an intentional echo -- Roman rule over Greece, as William's Franks were claiming authority in what had been a Byzantine world. . . . (I am very grateful to Tim Hudson's wonderful report on this site.)

Western patronage continues. The inscription below the medallion reads "At the expense of those in America, 1912."

 Friday, November 21. Kazarma, Epidauros, and Back to Athens.

Ah, the last day! And a day of big excitement. First stop was the Mycenaean bridge at Kazarma. Edie and the girls and I had seen this before; it's classic Mycenaean, with a pointed opening like the relieving triangle of the tholos tombs or the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and conveniently located close to thee road -- indeed, the modern road crosses the same stream at almost precisely the same place.

Next was Epidauros -- that great site, with its sanctuary to Asklepios, god of healing. It was the report on the activities of the sanctuary -- petitioners slept in special rooms in the sanctuary, where the god came and healed them, or told them how to get healed, in dreams; we know a lot about this procedure because of series of inscriptions recording in some detail the god's cures -- that provoked the first big fight I saw. One of the students vigorously attacked the notion that we should care about the superstitions of the ignorant ancient Greeks who sought miracle cures at Epidauros -- we study the Greeks for the monuments of rationality they left us, that's their value. I was surprised to hear such a view -- deeply positivistic -- expressed with such fierceness, in this day. The student who gave the report argued back, but neither made any headway with the other. For me, there's a continuum between the "rationality" of the Greeks and places like Epidauros; you can't understand one without the other. And I'm afraid I'm one of those types who studies the past for itself, hoping as best I can to understand it on its own terms; under that approach, the "irrational" (to use, just for now, those terms) is just as interesting as the "rational." And both are expressions of the society I want to know more about -- hence my class on Magic and Medicine in Ancient Greece.

    Some Final Thoughts on Travel by Bus, Travel by Foot, and Travel with Strangers

Bus is a great way to travel. You roll through the countryside at speeds not so great as to render the scenery a blur; you can read, or listen to music, or look out the window, as the mood strikes. I really like travel by bus. But the romance -- if such there ever was -- isn't what it used to be. I found myself recalling that scene in It Happened One Night, when Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable are taking the bus up from Florida, and the passengers spontaneously strike up a round of "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze." Okay, so Frank Capra was making one of his mild socialist points about the innate goodness of the common man -- but still, in an age of Sony Walkmen and laptop computers, nothing like that's going to happen. If you want to get to know your fellow travelers, you'd better have some additional structure to make that happen (like an American School trip), or be prepared to take social risks. (And I must confess, I'm mostly as opposed as anybody to causal conversation on public transportation -- I like to sink into my reveries, or read my book, or listen to my music, or all three; though I did have some nice conversations with my temporary seatmate, till my place was usurped by the arrival of her husband.)

But travel by foot is even better. I just love moving through the countryside at the pace of three miles an hour. Nothing passes that isn't noticed, or at least noticeable. You hear the olive harvesters, notice the fires they set; you spy the old mill race, and can stop to contemplate it. It's the pace people were made to go at. I can walk all day. Okay, those young students went blasting on ahead of me on the Berbati walk, but they looked pretty fagged by the end, and at least one said to me she was mighty glad when it was over. Last March I spent a week walking in the Arizona desert, mile after mile, carrying a pack. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I think a lot, when I am walking, about our deep ancestors, before even the mitochrondial Eve, walking across the plains of East Africa, under a Miocene sun, rocking on that most marvelous of our adaptations, the pelvis (Elvis was right, again).

And the dread November rains never materialized -- the day after I arrived the skies cleared, the temperature rose, and as you can see from the pictures, a succession of brilliant cloudless days, like an endless summer, greeted us. But in the Argolid, where it has rained only twice since the "rainy season" began, the farmers are worried that their fruit will not ripen and their grain fields won't get the moisture they need to nourish the crops.

One of my goals of taking this trip was to get to know the students. Till now they have mostly been to me ciphers -- when here, preoccupied with preparing their reports while enjoying late nights on the Loring Hall porch; gone ten days at a time, blessed quiet; and I anyway trudging daily to the Athens Centre hoping to better my Greek. But pretty soon now I have to teach my seminar, and I realized that I couldn't do a very good job of that without learning something first about the students. I found I liked them -- even the ones who didn't like each other -- not just for their commitment to the Greek past, but as folks, with senses of humor, good days and bad, tired morning eyes, sleepy faces on the bus. I didn't get to have dinner with any (maybe better that way) but I did with Steve (the Director) and Guy, and got to know both of them better too. Strangers at the start, yes; but with a common connection, and shared interest that just needed to be stimulated. I'll try to do more with them, as the winter wears on.

November 30, 2003

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