Dinner with Persephone (11 page)

“It is from New York.”

“I thought it must be Greek because of the finesse of the gold work. Because, I will tell you, since you are here to learn about our manners and traditions, the most important thing about us is that we are light—Hellenism,
ellenismos
, is light, like spiritual gold. We know that terrible antihellenic propaganda is spreading now both in the West and in the East, that the West wants us to be inferior, and the Muslims are surrounding us like a noose in the East, and want us again to be their slaves. The West has no culture or history without us, yet we know they now denigrate classical Greece, just as they have abandoned Christianity and now worship Science. But they
will realize too late they need our light to exist, as they always have. And we know that in the East, they are lusting to say that their cultures were superior to ancient Greece, that we imitated them. But let me show you something all Greek children learn in school.” He tears a piece of paper from a legal pad and draws on it an Egyptian-style column and a Doric column. “Look. You see how top-heavy the Egyptians’ columns were, how elaborate the capitals? Now look at the Greek column. What supports it has the mass and the power, not what is on top of it—their columns were the architectural expressions of monarchy, ours of democracy. They made mummies, we made statues. Their culture was preoccupied with death, their art an art of death, but ours is of life, our statues with their kinesis surge up from the world of the dead into life—theirs is the art of slavery, ours of freedom!” Mr. Angelchild has made it clear that only a hater of Greece, a tool of vicious international propaganda, would remember that classical Greece is considered the first true slave society in the West. I have read that one in three inhabitants of classical Athens was a slave; in fact, there is evidence from various sources, including vase paintings, that slaves staffed the workshops of the master carvers who produced the magnificent Greek sculptures. To say nothing of women, whose free labor and lack of legal status was more insidious, considered an organic rather than a political condition. Since no legislation was required to enforce their subjection, it was unalterable. They were not people, as male slaves were, but elements of men’s lives, like hands or feet. Slaves could be freed, women could not—the dispositions of men were taken to be the fates of women, rather in the way that in the 1970s, American federal judges rejected claims of hostile sexual harassment in a case called
Come v. Bausch … Lomb Inc.
, on the grounds that the supervisor’s handling of his female staff “satisfied a personal urge.”

In fact, to call classical Greece, an ethnically based androcracy, a “democracy” is just a little more meaningful than calling China a “people’s republic.” The word “democracy” in classical Greece has the air of a demagogue’s coinage, a persuasive flattery of the governed
by their governors. However, it is Kyrios Angellopaidi’s passionate stake in idealizing the legend of classical Greece that interests me—it is sacred to him, a holy precinct where any but worshipful approaches defile. It is sacred as even his own children are not, since he could not do the crucial work of bringing them up if they were; what a different matter it is to be idealized than it is to be loved.

“Theirs is the art of darkness, with their pyramids and tombs, ours is the art of the sculpture, the column, and later, the dome, when the light of classical Greek reasoning joined the radiant light of the Logos, the truth, the absolute, when the Parthenon was revealed in Agia Sofia of Constantinople. For the word of God came to the world in Greek. It was given to us to create Christian civilization as we had created classical civilization. It is no accident that all of Jesus’s teaching was recorded in Greek, but a divine mystery. He only says one Aramaic phrase in all the gospels, and that is an expression of anguish, of betrayal. The Jews say they were chosen by Jehovah, but it is we who were chosen by Christ. Christ is incarnated in Greek.

“Our whole history is a cycle of miracles. It cannot be understood with reason—and I don’t say this out of nationalism. Who can explain how the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae were possible, the perfection of the Parthenon, which we built before you had a language, the sublimity of Agia Sofia, so beautiful that it alone converted the savage Russians, the women of Zalongo, who danced off cliffs to their deaths so the Turks could not capture them, or 1940, when we almost with our bare hands defeated Mussolini’s soldiers with their beef and their overcoats and their imitation civilization? Greece will never die, no matter how much people who hate our light would like to snuff us out.”

Kyrios Angellopaidi has written some poems about Greece, and he reads me one while his wife is setting the
mezedes
on the table. They are full of golden suns, and crystalline architecture and motion in marble and perfect truth.

Lunch is ready. This is still, particularly in summer, the most substantial Greek meal, whose heaviness acts as a pre-siesta hypnotic, and I don’t linger long afterwards, since it is clear that the Angelchilds are longing for their nap. It seems to me that Greeks are not truly at peace with the enterprise of sleep unless they can fall asleep and wake up while it is still light. The whole nation seems to resist going to sleep in the dark, as if they are afraid they won’t wake up. Before I leave, Mr. Angelchild gives me a book by Fotis Kondoglou, a modern neo-Byzantine painter whose work I can see in various churches and buildings in downtown Athens. It will help me understand Byzantine art, he says, and he also gives me a little book which he says has a great deal to say about Hellenism. It is called
Greece, Light of the World, Go Forward!
and is written by a monk who seems to be associated with the monastery on Mount Pendeli, the mountain known in antiquity for its marble. On the cover of the book, under a garishly blazing sun, is a photograph of the famous Hellenistic bronze sculpture of a boy jockey riding a horse galloping full-tilt, a statue that was recovered from the sea off Cape Artemision in 1926. “That,” Mr. Angelchild says, “is the spirit of Greece, never in stasis, in eternal motion, racing forward.” I wonder if he realizes that the boy urging the horse forward has long since been identified by scholars as a portrait of a black African.

I
  leaf through the monk’s book while keeping an eye on the clock, since I am going to walk over to the Marble Stadium, the 1896 Olympic site, to see the reception for the Greek gold-medal winners, a ceremony to which all Athens has been invited. My eye is caught by an admonition. “Three things the modern Greek must get clear: First: There was illumination not only in ancient Greece, but afterwards, also in Byzantium, in 1921 and 1940, and in contemporary times, with Greece’s Nobel Prizes, her shipping, and the Greek colonies all over the world. Second: New archaeological researches and other historical evidence are bringing to light that Greece was advanced for a long period of time before all other civilized peoples through her immediate pre-Hellenic Aegean ancestors. Third: The current geographical borders of Greece do not represent the country. The great powers have pinned us down. The recovery of the lost fatherlands is and will be the perpetual goal of Greece.” I flip to the last page—there is a faint photograph of a map with the caption “And our Cyprus, like our northern Epirus and our Asia Minor, is Greece.” It is the old claim of the Great Idea, the dream of a Greece as it had momentarily been under Alexander, the idea that so many
Greeks died for in the twenties, appearing again in a book published in the nineties. It was never an idea, though, but a dream, beyond the reach of thought. No matter where I travel here, I am traveling in dreams.

At the stadium, on this hot late-summer night, the Greek policemen on duty for the event wear short-sleeved pale blue shirts. Two large video screens are placed in the center of the stadium, flanking a dais draped in the Greek colors, Aegean blue and white. The dais is crowded with ten or so chairs for the athletes and dignitaries who have yet to arrive. The screens are playing again and again the triumph of Pyrros Dimas, the weight lifter, raising his barbell to its full extension and shouting “
Yia tin Ellada!
For Greece!” Every time the video reaches this point, the crowd bursts into applause. Braziers where vendors are selling grilled corn are set up at the entrances to the stadium, and vendors clamber up and down the aisles selling small Greek flags and
pasatempo
, the time passer, which are pumpkin seeds in small bags. “
Pasatempo, paidia
,” the vendors shout out, habitually addressing groups of Greeks as “children,” as is the custom here. “
Oriste, paidia, pasatempo.
” Across the stadium, a huge banner draped over the railing reads “Northern Epirus is Greece.” The national anthem is struck up to fill the time, and a tiny girl on her father’s shoulder waves her flag in time to it. At intervals during the wait for the limousines, the anthem, the “Ode to Liberty,” is sung at least four times, the gentle nineteenth-century melancholy of its melody conflicting with the violence of its lyrics, in which the figure of Liberty is recognized by the terrible edge of its sword, and is drawn from the sacred bones of the Greeks. The words are the words of the national poet, Solomos, a contemporary of Byron’s. Byron of course is the model of the heroic foreign philhellene, a district of Athens is given the Greek version of his name, Vyronas, and there is a monumental romantic nineteenth-century statue of him downtown, dying in the arms of Mother Greece. Oddly, I can call to mind a bust of Solomos in Athens, but no full-length statue. The image of Byron overshadows Solomos, the stories of Byron’s adventures and
last days in Greece are familiar as Solomos is not. And yet, Solomos made an epitaph for Byron in what for me is one of the exemplary scenes of nineteenth-century romanticism. When he heard in 1824 of Byron’s death at Missolonghi, he is supposed to have leapt onto a table in a taverna and improvised a new stanza for the poem I have just heard sung as the national anthem: “Liberty, for a moment, leave the battle, drop your sword,/Come to this place now and mourn/on the dead body of Lord Byron.” There always seems to be an imbalance of memory here, whether the angle of vision is from inside or outside—Greece distorts memory, like a flawed telescope.

Children wearing sashes in the Greek colors chase each other through the tiers of seats, as the athletes arrive and are conducted to the dais, where a gold-robed priest blesses them, and politicians make speeches about their achievements. A video of the actress Irene Papas dressed in white classical robes standing in front of the Acropolis plays, and more parallels are drawn between these athletes and the great Olympians of Greek antiquity. They kneel on the steps of the dais and are crowned with green wreaths, which have, I think, been made larger to be visible to the crowd, and have a saladlike overtone. Groups of dancers draw the athletes into dances from the Pontus and Epirus. In the morning when I pass by the stadium, the grounds will be littered with the green husks of corn.

I have decided to take an accelerated conversation class for a few weeks, before I go to the islands of Thasos and Naxos to write a magazine story—a few days ago I received an obscene phone call and decided that my halting response was less than effective. The telephone had rung, and a man had said that he was calling from the local police station, and that he was making a routine check to obtain certain pieces of information about new residents in the neighborhood. So I started out in the spirit of polite cooperation, and by the time the shade of his questions changed, and I figured out that this was not the standard practice of neighborhood police, I was flailing. It must have been as strange for him in a way, like trying to make an obscene telephone call to an extraterrestrial, whose
delayed responses and careful searching for correct vocabulary and grammar across the intergalactic borders of language must not have been what he had in mind.

The makeup of the class is amusing. A French girl engaged to a Greek boy, a half-Greek Swede, a half-Greek German, a Spanish classicist, a wealthy Mexican who spends part of every year here on romantic homosexual pilgrimages. This is a phenomenon so familiar that it is frequently satirized on Greek comedy shows—I saw one the other night in which an actor Kostas knows played an Englishman with dyed golden hair who flirts with a Greek policeman—“Which way to Mykonos, darling?” he asks, and failing with Greek men, tries his luck with Greek women as a last resort.

The door opens and everyone falls silent for the teacher, but Elvis Presley walks in, with sideburns, tight jeans, boots, and a white T-shirt. His eyes are red-rimmed as if he’d had a long
tavernaki
evening the night before, and when he introduces himself his Greek is a fantastic hybrid, its great polysyllabic mouthfuls lapping up and down in the slow currents of a Georgia accent. “
Con su permiso
,” the Mexican mutters appreciatively under his breath.

Elvis tells us he is from Savannah, but has no time for details because our teacher arrives with copies of the newspaper article we are to discuss. Her mouth is set sardonically as she slides photocopies of an advertisement for Coca-Cola down the table. The picture shows the Parthenon propped on Coke bottles instead of columns, an ad which has run in Italian newspapers and been reproduced here, to cries of indignation. She has invited an advertising businessman she knows to participate in the discussion, and it is clear that this morning’s instruction will not only be in language, but in politics.

“What do you think of this?” she asks the group, and outlines for us the reaction of the Greek government. The minister of culture will be asked by the Central Archaeological Council to raise the issue with the EEC. The mayor of Athens has commented that the ad is unacceptable and must be withdrawn. Melina Mercouri has
remarked that Coca-Cola bought the Olympics, so now it is trying to buy the Parthenon as well. There are demands that the Coca-Cola Company publicly apologize. “Do you think,” the teacher asks, “that such an ad shows the proper respect for our ancient heritage?” The advertising man answers coolly that the ad is part of a series that has shown the landmark buildings of other nations, including the Empire State Building, with Coke bottles forming some element of their architecture. No one else objected, he says. “Besides, is that image any worse than these?” He passes around an assortment of ads—the Aphrodite of Milos is posed next to a washing machine, and groans, “I’m jealous.” A computer is juxtaposed against the columns of the Acropolis to show how durable it is. Another one, he says, provoked a similar scandal: it is an ad for shoes, showing a model stepping freely away from the marble women upholding the Porch of the Maidens—presumably they can’t come to life or leave their work of supporting the temple because they aren’t wearing the brand of sandals she is. But it is hard to work out why one ad is offensive and another is not. Why was this ad withdrawn on the initiative of the Union of Advertising Companies in Greece but some of these others ignored? “We must not vulgarize the symbols of antiquity,” the teacher says. “It is for us to set an example for the younger Western cultures which are based on ours.” The advertising man tells us that the company that made the sandal ad defended it on the grounds that it served to remind the Greek people of the missing caryatid, stolen away from the Parthenon, that it was an image that evoked appropriately patriotic feelings. The teacher calls on different students and asks them to explain their opinions of such advertisements. I am glad not to be called on, and glad to see from the wall clock how close we are to the end of the class. The teacher reads a section of the Greek code of advertising from a Xerox she is holding. “An advertisement must not trade on subjects of national importance, sacred objects, the national, cultural and spiritual heritage, national failings, religious doctrines …” The notion of
filotimo
, the hunger for honor and prestige, reaches even
into advertising, whose very practice, some might say, is evidence of national failings. And there are those who would say that
filotimo
itself, which acts as a kind of unofficial national and personal censorship of critical thought, is a national failing. I notice the teacher is wearing a small gold charm of the Parthenon on a bracelet. She looks challengingly in the direction of the advertising man, who stares back with a look of affected dissipation and pulls his trump card out of his brief case, a bottle of ouzo in the shape of a classical temple. “Which you can buy duty-free at the Athens airport,” he says mockingly. “Many would say we have nothing else to sell with. I say, let’s all have an
ouzaki
before lunch.”