Our morning began earlier than usual today, with a seven o’clock boarding of our bus bound for the port of Piraeus. We’ve undertaken a day cruise of three nearby islands: Poros, Hydra, and Aegina. What the day ahead holds we don’t yet know, but at the very least we’ll have abundant opportunity for people watching.
For instance, the surreality all around me is well beyond my ability to capture in words. I’m sitting on the upper deck of the cruise ship at a four-topper, located under an awning that gains us a bit of shelter from an already sweltering Aegean sun. For nearby company I’ve got not only Michele and Zachary, but also Scott Moore and Anne-Marie and Jeff Schulz. The undulating blue sea, azure skies, and sun-lit island mountains give us lovely sights, especially to the starboard side.
Yet natural beauty notwithstanding, many of our fellow passengers, oblivious to the scenery, have lost themselves in bacchanalian dancing of hilariously poor quality. To what music do they dance? The kind that is produced by an over-amplified cruise ship band comprised of an electronic keyboard, a tenor sax, an accordion, and a tambourine, and that caters to an internationally motley assortment of passengers. Gathering in front of the bar, the old, the decrepit, and those that should by time’s long passage know better are juking, jiving, and making merry.
To move things from the ridiculous to something well short of the sublime, in the midst of it all Zachary is reading a children’s adaptation of Greek myths, I’m reading Plato’s Gorgias, Anne-Marie is reading Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Scott is reading Odysseus Elytis’ Το Άξιον Εστί, and, to top it all off, an African tourist at an adjacent table is reading Leo Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illich. (“‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'”)
Imagine, then, those books, topics, and readers surrounded by the glory of the heavens that have no words yet pour forth speech of God, the sounds of a raucous band, and the gyrations of the senior citizens, and you come up with a impossibly incongruous scene.
More plausibly and indeed more pleasantly, yesterday, on Saturday, we divided our day between Corinth and Mycenae, with a short stop en route to look out over the canal between the Aegean and Ionian Seas.
Corinth brought us a treat in the form of an insider’s tour of the archaeological site by a scholar long associated with architectural studies in Greece. Robin Rhodes, one of Benjamin Moore’s architecture professors at Notre Dame, graciously hosted our group for two hours of thrilling conversation that took place in intolerably hot sunshine.
What we learned under his tutelage is that the Temple of Apollo at the heart of the ancient city, much discussed in all of the literature about the city, is not in fact a temple of Apollo at all. It is, as he argued persuasively, a temple with two cella built for the worship of Zeus and Hera. The architectural evidence for two separate chambers is as plain as can be, even for complete amateurs, given a little bit of guidance in seeing what’s there. Combined with ambiguous and easily misinterpreted lines from Pausanias’ ancient travel journals, it’s not hard to see how errors in the identification of the temple have arisen. The facts are interesting enough, but more fascinating still was the experience of being led so capably by Professor Rhodes through a problem-solving dialogue that eventuated in the general conviction that the temple could not possibly have been for Apollo. Our students experienced a tremendous exhibition of scholarly acumen combined with teacherly qualities of the first rank.
The balance of our afternoon was taken up by time in another of the most significant cities of the Peloponnese. I know that visions of ancient Mycenae, the great mountain citadel of Agamemnon (at least as the stories have it), will now always animate my reading and teaching of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. This rocky fortress–with its so-called cyclopean walls (the stones are so large the race of cyclopes must have set them in place, they say), high tower vantages, arresting lions’ gate, and overall sense of impregnability–makes an impressive sight.
Was it here, from the watchtower, that a sentry once saw a signal fire ablaze on the neighboring mountain, telling of the Greeks’ conquest over the Trojans? Did Agamemnon return home to this place as an honored hero and king, deign to tread decadently upon lavishly spread clothes that no mere mortal should spoil, and walk thereafter into a murderous trap planned in guile by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus? Were Electra and Orestes reunited somewhere in the vicinity as they paid restrained respect to the memory of a dead king and father? Whatever actually occurred here, I have little doubt that Aeschylus’ play cycle gains dramatic purchase on its readers and interpreters to the extent that its setting is understood akin to the real city of Mycenae.
Coming back to the present, at the end of a full day of cruising the Greek islands, let me add a brief comment about the conclusion to our day. We heard Joshua Bell play a violin concerto in the reconstructed Odeon of Herod Atticus, followed by a performance of Mahler’s 6th Symphony. Under the softly lit, crumbling ruins of the Parthenon high above on the acropolis, the bleakness of the final movement, with its ostensibly fatalistic and nihilistic trajectory, fit the setting about as well as could be imagined.
As the symphony labored on ponderously toward its conclusion, Athena’s glorious temple may as well have received the concussive hammer blows of fate each time the percussionist let his gigantic mallet fall. Here, in this place and time, forgetting about Mahler’s personal torments, the third and last blow recalled to my mind the Venetians’ recklessly launched cannonball, the one that brought the Parthenon to ruination so many years ago.
Yet I at any rate do not feel despair, but instead a reminder of God-loved, not godforsaken, fragility of this mortal life and the things we make. “As for man, his days are like grass, for he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting . . . .”
