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At any rate, the olive branch with the little owl (the
skops
, whose pretty descendants still occupy the holes and fents of the Acropolis and utter their strange melancholy call at dusk and dawn) feature upon the coinage of ancient Athens. In modern Athens, too, the children of the Gymnasium sport a distinctive button which pictures Athena's owlet, which has come to stand for wisdom: not esoteric wisdom necessarily but horse sense of the worldly kind. And while we are on the topic of the olive I must not forget to add that the cultivated tree, which is harvested in November and December, is grafted on to wild stock—so perhaps we should look for its origins in the historical side of grafting as a technique; it argues a highly sophisticated knowledge of agriculture in the country which first adopted the practice. Was it India? If so how did it come into the orbit of the ancient Greeks? I am not competent to answer all these questions, though my mind occupies itself with these and other questions as I travel. Indeed I hold long conversations with the vanished ghost of Martine who was always hunting for answers, and was not slow to disagree with the propositions I enunciated. I could see that she would have a hole or two to pick in my olive theories; but in fact if one were to ask how the word Mediterranean should be defined I should be tempted
to answer: “As the country where the olive tree is distributed and where the basic agricultural predispositions such as the cuisine depend upon its fruit either in the form of oil for cooking, oil for lighting, or fruit to eat with bread. It has fulfilled all these functions from time immemorial and in the countries bordering the inland sea it still does.”

But I had strayed a little in my thoughts; I had not touched upon the central question raised by her remark. What happened before
this
—what was the island like?

Long before the owl-eyed Athene came into her own the island was settled by men whose history has been obscured by the fact that they left nothing behind for us to admire. Many strains, many invasions of tribes from different quarters must be envisaged, but the historically predominant inhabitants were the Sikels whose alphabet, if I am not mistaken, has not been deciphered as yet; nor are their inscriptions very numerous. It is a dead end where the prehistorian ekes out his scanty certainties with large conjectures; a few tombs, a few clearings and stone houses worthy of the jungle cannot go far to excite our minds or our aesthetic sense. It is really idle to dwell upon them. (I am talking in my sleep to Martine with one-half of my mind; with the other I am trying to rough in the outlines of the pocket history which she had once demanded for her children.) One should concentrate in such cases on what is striking, and leave out the rest. Good histories of the place in
yawn-making detail—there are a number; but in shortening sail I would build something more like a companion to landscape than a real history.

It is not the Sikels as such, then, who are interesting; what is interesting is trying to visualize the state of the island which they inherited—a pre-Mediterranean Sicily, if I could dare to call it that. In its Pleistocene period, for example, it must have been a desolate and forbidding place with nature far outstripping man in the luxuriant prolixity of its inventions. All that man could do was to cower superstitiously under it in fear—without the tools and intelligence to shape or combat it, or even to defend himself against the wild animals which abounded in these fastnesses of oak and beech, the boars, the leopards and the stags of great tine; not to mention the snakes and wolves and insects which harried these forlorn little settlements of volcanic limestone where the only household tool was obsidian—a volcanic glass—which offered a limited scope in cutting up meat or vegetables for food. One must presume that man at this time was a debased sort of creature from the cultural point of view—unhappy on land as on the sea because he was the master of neither. I picture a sort of Caliban of the woods, living on grubs and worms when he could not find animal carcasses to nourish him. In Africa and in Australia there are such cultures existing to this day. Perhaps the Sikels were not quite as primitive, but in the absence of any firm facts about them one is at liberty to imagine;
nothing they did seems to indicate that one day Syracuse would arise, white and glittering on its green and blue spur between the two perfect harbors—a home from home for Corinth, for Rhodes, for Athens.…

The imaginative jump is a big one; but it is not less of a jump to try and imagine what the landscape must have been like without most of the fruit and flowers that we see today and which characterize our notions of the Mediterranean scene. So much of what surrounds us today came to the island very late in its history, sometimes as late as the sixteenth century. The long straggly hedges of prickly pear came from the Americas, as did the agave and the tomato. The Arabs imported lemon, orange, mulberry, and sumac. Papyrus from Egypt still flourishes in some corners. The land is bounteous, and it varies in exposure and elevation to a considerable degree. But then, if one reflects, even the olive and the vine were originally not native to Athens, though where they came from we can only conjecture. But as for Sicily, everything “takes” and there is a suitable corner where soil and temperature combine to welcome almost everything. Deeds had seen tobacco as well as avocado doing well here.

Indeed a stable subtropical climate is ideal for all crops—if one wishes to enjoy the best of all worlds. Here, for example, one can see stands of banana, grapefruit, and sugarcane in the hot lowlands. Even carob trees must have come from somewhere like the Lebanon.…

But how hard it is to imagine this “granary of Rome” without lemons, oranges, or grapes, without the cactus and the sentinel aloe. While in the cool misty uplands the conifers and berries remind one of Austria or England. Even the sweet orange was brought here from China by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.

Is it any wonder that the Sikels, eking out a fearful life without all these glorious fruits in which to exult, left us nothing to admire? Not for them the final conquest of the land which brings wheat and barley, nor the control of the sea which brings the produce of other lands, other cultures to one's door. They were locked up in their loneliness like the inhabitants of another planet and it is impossible to feel much sympathy with them, or gain any insight into their characters.

But if the arrival of the Greeks so much marked agriculture and city growth it was, so to speak, only the historical topsoil which was changed; underneath it all the island climate was that of Attica or perhaps the Argolid. The limestone valleys were quick with freshwater springs; the land was as beautiful as Greece and quite as rich. And in the first spring showers Sicily must have put forth as rich a crop of wild flowers as Attica itself for it still does to this day. The Greek garden described by Homer in the
Odyssey
—it could and perhaps did flourish also here in Sicily:

In this garden flourish tall trees like pears, pomegranates and apples thick with fruit, also sweet figs and bounteous olives. Moreover, a
rich vineyard has been planted hard by, beyond the last row of trees; there are garden plots also blooming all year round with flowers.…

These new and picturesque additions to the domestic scene spelt leisure and plenty, and with them came the first thrust of the vase paintings and the first verses of the poets who peopled the streams with nymphs, the oak groves with dryads, the caves with Pans and centaurs, and the forests with satyrs and silens. In the culture which followed each plant and flower had its story, its link with the mythopoeic inner nature of man—which he can only realize when he has a chance to dream. Yes, Martine, that was it! A chance to dream! So Daphne turned to laurel, so Persephone broke her fast in nibbling pomegranate seeds—and poetry itself became domesticated.

But the fruits of all this were not necessarily the sophisticated blooms of enclosure, they were simply the fruits and flowers of the earth. It is significant perhaps that there were no treatises written upon gardening until the late Hellenistic era. Temple groves and gardens followed—I am thinking that Plato (who was nearly murdered in Sicily by the tyrant of the day) rejoiced when his academy in the valley of Kephissos was transformed into a “well-watered grove with trim avenues and shady walks”; nearby too was the academy of his rival Epicurus, laid out, they say, at the cost of seven thousand drachmae. (One drachma was a day's wages.) Here he lived and taught in his three-wheeled
chair, and when he died he willed the garden and the little house to his fellow philosophers. It has vanished. Everything has vanished. Fussy old Cicero was the last to set eyes on the place when, some two hundred years later, he passed it by accident while walking in Athens with friends. But the effect of shade and water and time upon philosophy—there is a whole treatise in it. Outside the city to the northeast in a large green park lay the Lyceum where Socrates taught and where Aristotle and his followers paced the walks in deep discussion, becoming nicknamed The Peripatetics. They were specialists in the qualities of shade as well as water—just like the modern Athenians and the Sicilians are. Indeed one can test the contentions of modern folklore by comparing the shade of a pine with a plane, the shade of a fig tree with that of a cypress. Try them, and see which brings the deepest siesta sleep and which troubles you with dreams and visions.…

The Hephaisteion Garden had its echo in Sicily where history recorded a sacred grove to the god on Etna. It was guarded by savage dogs which were, however, trained to welcome decent folk and only attack visitors who were either temple polluted or living under a curse for some act of sacrilege. Hephaistos (as brother?) shared the responsibility for the Acropolis with Athena and his shrine was hard by her own.

But this was public forestry, so to speak, and meant to echo public (or religious) statuary, like the grove of laurel and olive which surrounded the Altar of Pity
where malefactors and runaway slaves often sought refuge; or the white poplar where thieves and other swindlers of a philosophic persuasion held their informal get-togethers. But what of the wild flowers?

In early spring, and again in the autumn, with the first rains which herald the winter, Sicily like the whole of Greece is carpeted in wild flowers—some six thousand varieties have been listed of which some few flourish only in the Arcadian valley of the Styx. They are still familiar to us, the flowers which filled Greek gardens of old—crocus, violet, hyacinth; but northerners will be fondest of the more fragile anemone and cyclamen. Sometimes one has seen the little white cusps of the cyclamen pushing up through young snow like the ears of some fabulous but delicate creature from a storybook. Then there is Star of Bethlehem, as we call it, tulip, prodigal narcissus, humble daisy, lofty lily.… But for Martine there was nothing like the rose; she loved its variety and hardiness, for she had seen it bravely flowering out of dry and bony ground, almost calcareous rock face. And she had promised herself a rose garden wherever she went. Its history is as beautiful as its flower for it goes right back into the Age of Bronze as far as fresco paintings in Crete are concerned.

It appears in the
Iliad
as the flower of Aphrodite who cured the wounds of Hector with oil of roses. Thus having become sacred it descended from Aphrodite to Eros and Isis, ultimately to emerge once more as the
rosa mystica
of the Virgin.

It was perhaps the only flower to be intensely cultivated and marketed. For the Romans the rose became a rage and a fad and fresh blooms were rushed to Italy in winter by fast ships fresh from nurseries in Egypt. Rhodes took its name from the roses and showed the flower on its coins; its abundance was so famous that a legend grew up that sailors approaching the coast would smell the flowers before they sighted the land. Athens—no don't tell me, I know—was always for Pindar “the violet crowned city,” though he may have meant the violet-magnesium light which plays about Hymettus at sundown, and not the flower at all.… But here my memory recalled a warning she uttered in a later letter—the one about Agrigento where I had not yet been. “The yardstick is Athens if you like, but we always forget that almost
all
we know about Athens as a town comes from a very late witness, Pausanias, writing in the second century. I imagine him as portly and meticulous, a Roman Gibbon, working up his travel notes in his depressing office in Asia Minor. Thank God for him—but of course he was the first tourist and perhaps the greatest.”

Yes, the caution is worth heeding, and luckily I was able to turn to the admirably phrased introduction of Jane Harrison on the subject—for she had chosen him as the only real guide to Athens. The Emperor Hadrian (who by the way was much beloved by the Sicilians because of all he did for the island) made a valiant attempt to makeover Athens anew, to restore
its former glories by the addition of new temples and restored monuments. His passion was an antiquarian one which reminds us very much of the contemporary British or German attitudes. But work as he might, the soul of the city had fled, and all he ever achieved was the snobbish embalming of a once magnificent corpse.

He supplied anew all the outside apparatus of a vigorous city life but he could not stay the progress of the death that is from within. Accordingly this prosperous period of Hadrian's reign has the irony of a magnificence purely external. Pausanias, of course, did not feel the pathos of the situation; perhaps no contemporary thinker could have stood sufficiently aloof to see how hollow was this Neo-Attic revival. Greece endured to the full the last ignominy of greatness;
she became the fashion of the vulgar
.

I fear these last fine phrases could be aimed a little bit in our direction—in the direction of the little red bus with Mario at the wheel, and the twenty or so captives of tourism tiptoeing around monuments they do not comprehend with a grave piety they do not feel. Pausanias himself complains petulantly against the tourism of his day, for the Romans could not help but feel that Greece had the edge on them, that in some undefined way they remained forever provincial, out of the main swim of culture despite all their own real greatness and their own mighty and original culture.
Somehow there was a tug towards Greece, and the young Romans must have made a sort of Grand Tour of the now ruined and blasted land, still eager to be accredited to the mysteries (which had lost all their
numen
, all their spiritual sap) or to win a prize for a chariot race at Olympia, or a derivative play in a Greek theater. They were marked by the thumbprint of an unnatural vulgarity, which they never succeeded in surmounting.