FOLLOWING HERMES
Travels in Greece
Emily Hiestand

First published in The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press,1998); revised 2024
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The story of the blissful, then tormented by trials, then happily-ever-after romance of Psyche and Eros first came to me in 1956, via Kathleen Elgin’s stylishly illustrated children’s book on mythology. The whole family tree of the Mediterranean gods was shown on the endpapers as a majestic, handy reference, and the drawings for the stories provided indelible information. I can see them even now: in the illustrations for Psyche’s story, sleeping Eros had blue–black curls, a chiseled chest, and wings; and as for Psyche, whether she was stealing through the palace at night, suffering trials, or flying with through the air with Eros, she always wore a long, gorgeous, off-one-shoulder dress that looked like an evening gown. At nine, I puzzled about several aspects of the story but discerned a fashion lesson (find a versatile outfit), and was excited to discover that psyche is a Greek word that means soul, mind, and spirit.

How simply it begins; from household shelves come tumbling myths, golden boughs, democracy, a domain of the Muse. For a traveler from the West, Greece is so saturated in myth, history, art, and ideals that we inevitably journey there in imaginative as well as physical geography.

I first set out from Boston for Greece in the summer of 1989 with another poet, my peripatetic friend Katherine. Our husbands, Peter and Tony, are to join us later. On an Olympic Flame jet, the other passengers are predominantly Greek–Americans returning to the homeland, and immediately after dinner, they rise from their seats to roam the aisles — patting arms, laughing, showing wallet–crumpled photographs, and speaking exuberant Greek. By the tones of voice, it seems that these passengers are not necessarily old friends greeting each other on holiday; rather, the fact of returning together has made an instant airborne community of citizens of the diaspora. Two hours ago, they were diffuse in the melting pot of America. Now they are the concentrate of a people.  

Zooming into the night across the Atlantic, we are already in the Greek world. When children shriek in joy or misery, their cries are unabashed wails, and in the Greek sky the villagers do not try to quiet their expressive young ones. Perhaps the social gestures of the roaming adults rests on this exuberance cultivated in the smallest child.

These days, journeys in Greece are often to sun and fun resort compounds that hope to minimize what one Greek resort owner calls “the problems outside the hotel,” by which, presumably, he means Greece. One eminent classicist whose lifework has been an investigation of pre–Socratic literature, will no longer actually go to Greece, where, he says, the old, sacred sites are overrun by tourists and sullied by misapprehension, where the ancient sounds are lost even to the Greek tongue. In the way of milkweed seeds and nomads, Hellenism is elsewhere. I admire this scholar. Still, I have packed Richard Geldard's Ancient Greece, in which he dares to say that “the gods have not vacated the holy places... If there has been any vacating, it is our own ‘vacation’ from the myths of sacredness within ourselves.”

Traveling with neither a Hellenist's pure vision, nor the wish to loll on a raft in a tourist compound, I have come to Greece to see what this land has to tell us about right habitation. The question has a special charge in Greece because it was here that Western culture began to propose not only answers but whole traditions of how to ask.    


Guide of all travelers

That the geographies of place and spirit are mingled is clear from the very first day of our four weeks in Greece. After a hot taxi ride from the airport into Athens, Hermes, the trickster guide of travelers, promptly manifests in our hotel lobby. The hotel has a handsome, sepia–toned frieze of archaic figures and fish that runs along the wall just below the ceiling, and just under the frieze there is a living row of tourists who are not jumping bulls acrobatically but are slumped on suitcases and duffel bags. The desk clerk, Rafael, who booked and twice confirmed our rooms by overseas telephone, is wearing a woody cologne and a humble–pie, fatalistic smile as he says to us: “I have no room for you.” I like the way he does it. It's not an apology, nor in the least cavalier. It is a fact that he delivers, with the dignity of a fact that has been visited upon us all equally by some fact–making force located elsewhere.

Somewhere, something has ordained that Rafael give away our reservation to the large group from Sunshine Tours. Rafael gets to the better news: he has arranged for another room in a hotel just down the street and he will carry our luggage there. Rafael is a thin man, perhaps mid-sixties, who resembles Fred Astaire. He doesn't look like he could carry our luggage single-handedly, so we share the lugging. The three of us make a slow procession through the old city at the base of the Acropolis. Tired, hot, disappointed, Katherine and I trudge with Rafael up to the substitute room on the top floor of the small Hotel Plaka, a structure made of gleaming wood and deep blue paint.

Opening the door, we enter what must be one of the best rooms–with–a–view in all of Athens. The large, airy room has tall casement windows that open wide and frame a majestic view of nothing less than the whole temple complex of the adjacent Acropolis. Katherine and I stand mute before the close, shimmering marvels, then turn to thank Rafael for this gift. He gives us a smile and glides away. I lie down for a 15-minute rest, which turns into a deep sleep into the next morning, awakening now and then to see the temples just out the window. In the afternoon sun they are bleached white; at dusk, the marble melds into the gray blue sky; by night, the limestone hill and sanctuaries are flooded in bursts of diamond–bright gold and red light from projectors. From eleven pm until three am there is a light rain of songs, music floating from the tavernas that are outlined in strings of lights and terraced into the slope of the Acropolis. With dawn, the temples are flushed rose, and the Greek flag is being raised.

Like so many other late 20th century cities, Athens is both toxic with pollution, and a monument to an idea that seized cities in the 1950s, stripping the old, settled, and eccentric, leaving behind grey concrete modular buildings. I am a fan of modernist architecture, but the Athens built during the thrall of urban renewal is a city whose poured-concrete architecture brings to mind the solacing words of Le Corbusier: “There is enough ivy in the world to cover all the bad buildings ever built.” Wonderfully, one delicious patch of older built Athens was left. This zone, called the Plaka, surrounds the Acropolis in a square mile full of the stucco and red tile structures, narrow winding streets, and overhanging trees and vines that once comprised all of Athens. Here are pale butter–colored dwellings, wrought–iron stairs spiraling up the sides of houses, purple–blue painted doors, and flowers spilling from old olive cans and from cracks in the stonework.

Outside this oasis, the renewed parts of the city are harder to admire, visually. But they call to mind the post–travel experience of returning to one's home city and seeing some familiar, loved streets as though for the first time. How common, even bleak, some of the local fences, variety stores, and parks can then appear. Perhaps the visual blights in an unknown city feel more intense than they do in a known city. Perhaps in the known city we are far beyond the hyper–alertness needed in a new place, so we focus on particulars that do appeal, a bolt of cloth, the scent of cumin or thyme, a grove of apple trees. And, too, many a lackluster road leads to someone dear whose image overlays the physical route.

The unknown city, as yet unrelieved by the cushions of affection, gives us a gift: it opens the senses wide to an undifferentiated, uninterpreted flood. Continually orienting, absorbed, surprised, and by end of day utterly spent, a traveler resembles a child. And gradually the peering and marveling at the “other’ (still hauling goods by mule! votive shrines in airports!) elides into the traveler's essential discovery: that the ways of one’s own culture are just as curious, as idiosyncratic, and as subject to the chance of history.

At the botana 

Our initial quest in Athens is to an appliance store. Athens is a jumbled city, whose merchandizing style has the feel of a bazaar: sandals, rugs, tables of books, pyramids of food, carts of steaming hot corn peddled in ninety–degree heat, and racks of clothes take up the slender sidewalks, on which few Athenians walk anyway, preferring the streets, where they weave among traffic, calling destinations into the windows of taxis with fares, hoping to piggyback, a custom that is energy efficient, but also adds to the disorienting bustle. A few blocks after exiting from the appliance store with a Black & Decker world–wattage hair-dryer in hand, Katherine and I see a tiny shop with this beguiling window display: a basket of tall, dried herbs, two candles in the shape of roses, a hefty stack of beeswax and votive candles, and paperbacks with illustrations of women and demons. We go right in.

The shop is a botana for herbs and herbal medicines. Cool, dim, eight feet wide, maybe fifteen feet deep, one of its walls is lined from top to bottom in dark mahogany drawers, the other is composed of open shelves stocked with candles, incense, and books. Three ancient women tend the botana. All three turn slightly to look at us as we enter then continue weighing and measuring amounts of dried and powdered plants into small brown paper bags. Along the back wall are five chairs on which are seated three silent customers. The preparations proceed at a deliberate pace; the women collect substances from drawers, crush them in a mortar, funnel them into bags, occasionally ask one of the customers a question. The latter, two men and one pale, thin woman, answer in a few soft words.

The shop’s thin, pliant beeswax candles are sold in banded bundles of one dozen. When I pick up two bundles, the shop women again turn slowly in concert to give me a look, uncannily like the three deadpan musicians of Sid Caesar's enigmatic Nairobi Trio. Of the dried plants that are stacked loose in large boxes on the floor, some are recognizable — branches of bay leaves (also called Daphne), long wands of oregano, bunches of thyme — and some are unfamiliar. I select some of these plants to buy, gently prying the stems and leaves from the heap, and take the herbs up to the shop counter to be wrapped. Store packaging in Greece typically follows one of two approaches: either the goods are dropped into a very thin plastic bag, or they are hand-wrapped, carefully, in a strong paper, often one printed with a floral pattern. If a store hand-wraps, even a purchase of five post cards is wrapped as though it were a gift, the paper’s ends folded into a triangle and secured with a small square of tape. When one of the botana shopkeepers finishes compounding her remedy, she takes the candles and herbs from my hands and begins to roll them in heavy pink–brown butcher's paper, making a big bundle flared like a bunch of lilies from a florist.

Bumping so immediately into the botana, I assume that there might be many herbal medicine shops in the city. Later, when I mention the botana to a native Athenian who teaches urban planning and architecture at the Polytechnic, she is quite interested. Could I tell her how to get there? She knows of no such shops. I'm surprised the shop is as rare as all that, but it is no surprise that herbalists have become scarce. Plant lore emerges from intimacy with the land and, like great basketball teams, relies on a large, predictable pool of youth who are capable of assuming, perhaps improving, the practice with each generation. Like traditional healers in all parts of the globe, the women of the botana are continuing a vestige of a paleolithic culture in which the Earth was understood as alive, and the principle divinity was a goddess. Her primary emblem was the tree, and in the Mediterranean world her name was Gaia. Perhaps the balmy air, light, and waters of Greek Christendom have been more tolerant of the pagan sensibility about the earth that elsewhere in the West.

As the twentieth century closes, we have no common, respected vocabulary to name and cultivate the experience of an innately valuable Earth. Such language has been avoided by contemporary 20th C. environmentalists as they have made the case for protecting the natural world in terms appealing to pragmatic legislatures. As a result,, much environmental talk values the planet primarily as a storehouse for human use and assumes that value is determined by human needs; we are urged to care about, say, rainforests because they supply sources of medicine and help regulate the Earth's climate. However, when the Earth's value is determined by utilitarian values — which are given to fluctuation and change — the planet and source of our well–being remains at risk.

Standing in the botana among the pungent plants, it’s possible to sense an older, more intimate connection with the natural world. The drawers of powders, tawny stems, roots, and drying flowerheads give off a subtle, spicy aroma, and a quiet meditative mood. It is our first day in Greece: my only Greek is “F. Harry Stow,” a phonetic device for eυχαριστώ, the Greek word for thank you. “F. Harry Stow,” I say to the women who solemnly press the flared package of herbs and candles into my hands. And then, Katherine and I are out of the sweet, dark shop into the bright light of downtown Athens.

Acropolis

Much attention is given, rightly, to the temples of the Acropolis — their scale, grace, and endurance — but compared to the massive rock on which they rest, the buildings are a delicate filagree. The temples are built on this outcropping because it is an astonishing geophysical event: a mass of coarse, semi–crystalline limestone and red schist that rises five hundred feet from the surrounding flat plain, forming a vertical wall of overhangs and clefts, the summit inaccessible save on its southwest slope. Chthonic is the word that my first classics professor used for the underground forces that produce such upheavals of the Earth. From the city below, the great rock may be seen at any time of the day or night, by chance: as one turns a street corner, looks up from the newspaper, sinks into a taverna chair. The hill and its temples are a constant, and remain dignified even when lit by the flashy evening light shows. The rock fairly radiates, shimmering above the Plaka, the bouzoukis of the cafés, the juntas, and shifting political coalitions.

For ancient Athenians, the rock was an ideal plateau from which to invite the sky gods into their city. At this time of year, ancient citizens would be approaching the culmination of months of activities that prepared a soul to meet the divinities, the annual summer pilgrimage called the Panathenaea. It was a spectacular procession during which the fierce summer sun might help intensify and shape consciousness for the passage through the Propylaea and the gateway structures which draw the eye steadily upwards.

Now as Katherine and I wend up the hillside along the dusty processional path, Athens begins to recede to a patchwork of bright reflections from hundreds of solar hot–water panels mounted on the flat roofs of the city. Along the whole route, there are handsome twisting olive trees, the sun is strong, the maquis aromatic with pines, rosemary, and roseberry spurge buzzing with bees. Up close, shrubs reveal large snails, the color of deer, clinging to the inner, shady limbs. Among the temples, not even a sparse pine gives shade against the sun. In truth, it was easier to study their grandeur in the slide lectures of art school, where the Parthenon was a wall–size rectangle of light glowing in the dark. Beside the actual, awesome edifice, I feel off balance. Perhaps that is one of its purposes.

It’s easier to take in the small Erechtheion, the sanctuary whose south porch is supported by the six famous stone women, the Caryatides. The image of endurance, these statues weathered two thousand four hundred years of time, invasions, and the uses of their temple as church, a harem, and a military powder magazine. When these statues succumbed, it was to the lightest medium. During the 1960s, Athenian air grew so corrosive that the eyes, noses, gowns, and thick braids of the Caryatides began to dissolve. Replicas were installed, and the original statues removed to a climate–controlled exhibit case in the Acropolis Museum. It is a familiar story by now in cities with great marble and limestone heritages, but I am brought up short by the instance of the Caryatides, with their strong arms, neck–bolstering braids, and calm eyes. To the south and east of the replica Caryatides and close by Athena's urbane temple stood the two–winged stoa that was the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia, the wilderness goddess. Greatly honored in the gorges and forests of Greece, especially in Arkadia on the Peloponnese, she was also judiciously invited into the heart of the human city.

Elusive

These days in mid–June are the longest of the year, and one afternoon in the remaining light, we drive first south to Poseidon's Temple on the bluff of Sounion, and then north again through the olive groves and vineyards of the Messogia Plain to Brauron on the eastern coast of Attiki. Near the sea, with the Erasinos River nearby, the road goes uphill, then downhill into a forested valley. At the entrance to the excavated site at Brauron, the gate is closed, as we are several hours too late. Far off the road, half–hidden by tangled vines and woods, stand three columns, insubstantial as a private, tumbled-down porch. We stand for a while in the failing light peering at the slender evidence. Inside, I know from reading that there is a fountain, and a crack in the wall of the sanctuary behind which lies the tomb of Iphigenia, the princess who was either (according to Aeschylus and Euripides respectively) slain by her father, or saved at the last minute by Artemis and brought to Brauron to live as Mistress of the Animals.

On journeys it has happened several times before that something I especially wish to see or visit withholds itself. Travel is like knowledge itself: much remains unknown, a situation not always remedied by checking museum hours. And, too, the direct gaze, for all its virtues, can obscure: some things can simply not be seen head-on in bright light. Here at Brauron, dusk is arriving, cooling and dimming the fields. We drive back toward Athens, stopping along the way at an empty taverna by the shore, where tables, their legs sunk in sand, are scattered through a grove of olives that grows nearly into the sea. In a strong, clammy wind, the leafy olives are a froth of silvered green. Hurricane lamps glow on the tables, and in the harbor, lights pulse on inside the cabins of boats. The boats shine through the trees and the lines between sky and water, trees and tables grow indistinct.

It occurs to me that having eluded our eyes, the shrine to Artemis at Brauron reveals something about the wilderness goddess. As the Princess Iphigenia says, “None of us ever sees Her in the dark or understands Her mysteries.” Historically, Artemis is an aspect of the Earth goddess, not Gaia herself, but the goddess of inviolate nature, wilderness in the old sense of being “unto itself.” Artemis is ‘otherness’ — that which cannot be fully possessed, known, or controlled. Of all the divinities, she is the most solitary and the most contradictory: she carries a quiver of arrows, her name means “she who slays,” yet she also tends the mother in childbirth and protects the tender young of the world. She is the twin of Apollo and while her younger brother rules in the sunlight of the city, she moves in moonlight.


Greening Athens

The problems of statue noses dissolving and human eyes burning in Athenian smog are among the issues that Droussoulla Vassiliou Elliot aims to remedy. Droussoulla and her husband, Sloane, are publisher and editor in chief respectively of The Athenian, the English language magazine of Greece. Sloane is slim and erudite, a dry wit, a watcher of Greece by profession and by marriage. Droussoulla is kindly, intellectual, able to effect city–wide campaigns from her desk using only natural grace, a telephone, and a vast network of allies and friends. Her family has lived in Athens for centuries, and I am not surprised when three people from the UN Global Cooperation Project show up in Droussoulla's office saying that it is their Greek headquarters. I have arrived in her office to talk about her idea to, as she puts it, “green Athens.”

Ten years ago Droussoula Elliot launched a children's nature club that has by now greened the first batch of what she hopes is a generation of ardent Greek naturalists. Recently she has been helping to organize a campaign to protect the Mediterranean sea turtle. But the scheme dearest to her heart is to cover the buildings of Athens in living flora. From her large office window, Droussoula can envision the ubiquitous balconies of cement high-rises, apartment houses, hotels, and offices draped in a lush hanging gardens, vegetation spilling from every sill and rail. This, she declares, rightly, would greatly purify the air. The plan is the response of a woman who looks out her window every day to see haze drifting across bleached buildings whose hot balconies bear only the rare plastic chair. And, in her hands, the transformation is not quixotic idea. Over lunch, Sloane Elliot tells me about another Greek tradition for protecting people and places.  

Twenty years ago, when the Elliots were traveling in New York with their new baby, the infant's temperature suddenly soared. A doctor treated the baby, but his temperature did not drop. Droussoulla called her sister in Athens. The sister asked only if the baby had been in crowds. Yes, they had stood in front of a theater where people had admired the baby and chucked its chin. Well, obviously, the sister said, the baby had been affected by the evil eye. (More later on what causes it) Over the transatlantic cable, Droussoulla's sister led her through the ceremony to remove the curse. Immediately after the ceremony, the baby stopped crying, and his temperature dropped to normal. In Droussoulla's family, knowledge of how to give and remove the evil eye has been passed from a grandmother to an uncle to a sister, who will pass it on to a son — always woman to man to woman to man. Sloane tells me these things in the tone of someone who only discovered ice cream as an adult and is just never going to get over the fact that ice cream exists.

We are lunching at a taverna situated only inches from street traffic, and as the waiter brings fragrant bean soups, a car ruffles the tablecloth. Undisturbed, Sloane advises me on how to recognize the evil eye: you must suspect it if things are going badly, if you are sick or unlucky for a long while. Still, you may just be sick, or having a normal streak of bad luck. How can one tell? It's quite simple, he says. Take a glass of water and pour a small amount of oil on the surface. If the oil gathers together in one floating island, as it would normally do, things are just going poorly, but if the oil stays scattered on the surface of the water, then you have been affected by the evil eye. A second way to know is to say a passage of Christian liturgy quickly: if you can say the liturgy fluently, you are just having a bad time of it; if you scramble the words, it's the evil eye. Curse removals can be performed by an Orthodox priest or a lay healer, and prevention is also possible: wear a blue bead painted with an eye and, when in situations that invite the evil eye, pretend to spit. “Pwppitt,” Sloane says, pretending to spit into traffic. If only the New Yorkers had taken this simple precaution when cooing over his new baby, they could have deflected the wicked spirits by pretending to disdain lovable babies. 

The evil eye is respected by all classes of citizens in Greece and it is caused by envy. Societies based on cooperative ventures like fishing and farming especially value the equitable distribution of goods, but nature is ever inequitable, and we humans, as children of nature, are often inequitable, and these facts can produce social unhappiness. It is this unhappiness, born of natural injustice, and the limited powers and desires of human beings to remedy it, that is attended to by the evil eye. It seems a brilliant bit of psychology to help level things in the community. Belief in the evil eye both allows and discourages envy. It locates the sources of envy: first, in the successes of the fortunate, and secondly in the longings of the less fortunate. It instructs the successful to bear the burden, the potential curse, of their success, and suggests that they guard against the evil eye by tact and discretion, and by plowing their good fortune back into the community so that others are not so tempted into envy but more often grateful.

At the same time, those vulnerable to envy are given a powerful ritual to constrain the destructive emotion, to anticipate it, to protect others from it, even to purge themselves of it. The belief acknowledges the variations in awareness that people bring to social life: some maliciously convey the evil eye; others unwittingly infect their circle; still others learn to purge themselves of envy and dispel curses. By all these means, the ritual modulates the imperfect scales of fate. Behaving like nature itself, the evil eye is neither entirely beyond, nor entirely within, human influence.    

The host/guest tradition

“I defy you to find poverty anywhere in Greece as wrenching as what you see on Washington Street in downtown Boston, any hour of the day.” Kostas Gavroglu makes the claim in his quiet professor's voice, at the Taverna Psarras, where Katherine and I are about to be treated to justly famous Greek hospitality. Kostas and his wife Anne have been alerted to our arrival by a mutual friend, a philosopher of science with whom Kostas and I have both studied in America. The generosity the Gavroglus shower on us is an extension of their great regard for him. We learn that Greeks go to a taverna for dinner not before eight–thirty in the evening. Nine is better; ten o'clock prime time. Out of deference to our recent arrival from Boston where restaurants often close at ten o'clock, the Gavroglus come to our hotel at eight and lead us on a winding walk up the hill, through courtyards, shops, and tavernas seamed together by stairs, arbors, and strings of lights, until we reach the taverna of the Psarras, which means fishermen.

Outside the fishing villages, where, as we later learn, the price of seafood scarcely shows up on the bill, fish is quite expensive in Greece. But Psarras is a rare city taverna that serves fresh, affordable fish. In other ways, too, Psarras betrays village roots, its pace slow as a sleepy town. It is the one taverna in the foothills of the Acropolis that makes no special appeal to the tourists flowing up the hills, leaving to other eateries the practice of lining the cobbled streets with soi–disant suave men calling out price, quality, and invitations in whatever tongue they suspect a visitor might speak. At the Psarra, a semi-awake fellow notes one's arrival from his chair by the door, nods, and sometime later comes by with the standard taverna issue: paper tablecloth, a basket holding the bread and silverware wrapped in napkins.

A vast tree grows in the center of this cafe: the roots have erupted between stones, causing the sloped dining plateau to be forever uneven. Limbs and leaves shade thirty tables, the kitchen structure, and a nearby leather shop. Logging and stock–grazing severely deforested Greece as early as 300 A.D., and since these practices have continued and there is today but slight interest in reforestation, trees and springs are welcome events on the landscape. (Within hours of driving down the eastern prong of the Peloponnese, it’s clear why shade and water, and their sources, are revered and have been since the time of the bucolic and pastoral poets.) It is an excellent sign when a taverna, or anything else, is located under a tree.

Under the large Psarras tree there is a medley of chairs and tables. Most city tavernas have molded aluminum or plastic chairs, but the Psarra uses wooden tables and wooden chairs, and, like the country tavernas, paints them many shades of blue: teal, navy, dark, light, or sea. The color blue appears to be the national hobby! Another day, in a bright midday June sun, a woman of perhaps eighty–six slowly re-paints ten of the taverna’s wooden chairs; she uses a two–inch brush and a half–pint can of blue enamel, no drop cloth, merely careful strokes, and a tolerance she shares with her culture for the fetching splatters of color that land on floors and stucco walls. Boats and chairs, windows, walls, and the hook–necked gourds hung to decorate the undersides of arbors are some of the things painted annually in Greece; the painting places are easily found, marked by layers of polychrome speckles.
  
For dinner for four at Psarras, Kostas orders the following: fried squid; gopas, a large bony fish from the sardine family that is easily filleted, leaving a limber Fritz–the–Cat cartoon skeleton; greens similar to the collards of Alabama; thick ovals of fried potatoes; Greek salads; plates of steamed zucchini; bread; wine; and a plate of cut lemons. Twelve plates are crowded onto the table and, while small individual plates are handed to each diner, it is clear that to use them as more than a staging or boning platform is gratuitous, even rude. Over a long, courtly, warm evening Kostas and Anne demonstrate that the famous host/guest tradition celebrated in the Odyssey has endured. And they show us how to eat in a taverna; they initiate us into the foods, the manners, and, without speaking of it directly, point us toward the significance of the village taverna.   

In a fishing village

Three weeks later, by the time Peter and Tony have arrived and we have all converged on the remote fishing village, Skala Sykamineas, on the northern coast of Lesvos, we have learned just enough to enter into the traditions that are cultivated throughout Greece in the village taverna. There must be many flavors and versions, depending on location. In this particular version Skala Sykamineas is not only by the sea but has rich soil for vegetables and melons; it is remote enough that cruise ships don't swarm, but close enough so that a few will come each week in season, providing needed income. It has has an enormous boulder just offshore that provides the anchor for a harbor wall, and a broad enclosure. The wide rock promenade snugs the fleet of fishing boats and provide a place for infant prams, teenage courtship, and the climb of the elders to a minute chapel perched on the rock. It has a family–run taverna that serves as the public living room of the village, open from dawn until after midnight. The village has inhabitants who are ingenious, who may leave for the cities or other lands, but who often come home after Athens, after life on the cruise ships, to tend the village olive groves, the village school, the village chapel — Panayia Gorgona it is called, the Chapel of the Mermaid.

A thriving tavera is a clock of the very rich hours of each day. Throughout the long Mediterranean day, foods stream into the living room in baskets, sacks, plastic containers, and shopping bags. A back door exists in the taverna building and is used for taking out garbage, but suppliers to the communion make their deliveries by crossing the shaded front apron of the taverna among the table and chairs and diners, entering the wide front doors. A typical early morning delivery here begins when a Dutch couple place an order for yogurt with honey; minutes later a woman brings four containers of fresh–made yogurt from her neighboring house. A wiry farmer lugs in a lumpish burlap bag of onions; the taverna owner strolls up from the shore with a round basket brimful of glinting sardines. By ten o'clock, the first of a daylong procession of six–year–old boys scampers in with a limp octopus or an eel held by the gills. The baker sends his assistant down the small hill with a shopping bag of hot, fresh rolls. Not only suppliers, but diners are expected to come into the kitchen; we order by admiring and pointing to the array of hot dishes and chilled fishes. Next to the food cases, the one telephone of the village sits on a shelf next to the tomato harvest. The walls are encrusted with snapshots, all curling, of the owner's family linking arms with tourists, cousins, and returnees from Athens and Kos.  

Sitting is a constant and important activity in and around the taverna. Early morning sitting is done by fishermen returned from lamp–fishing at night; after unloading the catch, they sit at the edge of the docks near the taverna on large baskets, each of which holds a taxi–cab-yellow nylon or pale yellow rope net. The nets are laced with corks and hooks and after each use the men rearrange them, smoothing all the hooks in one direction. Even earlier morning sitting is done by clusters of women at the worktables in the taverna: peeling skins from braised tomatoes, chopping them, along with garlic, herbs, and onions into shiny mounds that will be added to rice for a stuffed squash blossom treat served at this time of year.

And even earlier morning sitting is done by dozens of cats, motionless before the bows of unloading fishing boats until a silver fish comes flying from the deck to land on the dock, compelling the cats into a flurry of fur and claws. Greeks cats are thin, foxlike creatures, with ears large in proportion to delicate heads and jaws. The cats population is very large and fends for itself; the cats are not pets but hard–working members of the town. No sitting still is done by children in or near the taverna; they play under and between the tables and chairs, chase cats, jump stone walls, squash plants, and prance by with aquatic things in their hands.

Mid–afternoon sitting is done by older men, who emerge in their places at the old men's tables soundlessly. Wonderfully, the word for “occupied” in Greek, as in “I am occupied just now,” includes the meaning “I am sitting.” The old men have reached this purest meaning, for although they can be drawn into political talk and sliding checkers across a checkerboard, most often the sitting of the old men appears to be entirely unsullied by any motion or worldly distraction. Late night sitting is done by the oldest women in the village, who sit on the floors of their porches and courtyards, in groups of six or more, with their black–stockinged legs are straight out. They crochet curtains and napkins on the shelves of their stomachs, while eating bowls of popcorn, talking and laughing into the wee hours, as late as two o'clock in the morning. Just before the old women emerge for night sitting, and periodically during their tenure, the smell of hot oil and corn rises, and the street smells like a disembodied Bijoux movie theater.  

Some sitting is episodic: an old peddler appears in town, and lays out his goods on a stone wall: tin plates, Swiss army knives, keychains, cigarette lighters, and pictures of the Madonna. He then sits by the wall for one week, drinking coffee in a chair under a nearby awning. Some sitting is hard–won: in an ongoing effort, waiters vigorously shoo gypsies away from the taverna without much success, and then, once or twice during the hottest swath of the day, relent, allowing three gypsy women peddling bundles of one-dollar tablecloths to settle on a shady bench and slowly drink glasses of water. Tourist sitting is more desultory, done at all times of the day. A German woman sits for hours reading Kierkegaard, alone. At noon, a cruise ship drops anchor beyond the harbor and by launch brings four hundred traveling souls to the taverna. To one side of the taverna there is a huge, unshaded side terrace created for just this purpose. Normally this terrace is empty and ignored; during the hour–long swarm, its chairs are briefly occupied to bursting.

At nine–thirty or ten o'clock on weekend nights, beautifully dressed clusters of former natives arrive in the taverna from their homes in the city. After the second World War, the horrendous civil war in Greece continued, with much bloodshed. The prevailing regime found ways to round up villagers and persuade them into Athens. The city was swollen within a few years to four times its former population, and many villages shriveled. The migration into Athens continues, and many city dwellers drive back to their home villages on Friday and Saturday nights. They come in couples, in groups of six or eight, and cluster around one long table, visiting with parents, friends, a fisherman brother who stayed, ordering the catch of the day and, in mid–June, kolokithia lololuthia, the small, folded squash blossom pockets of rice, rosemary, onions, and cheese. These fresh, seasonal delicacies are a candidate for the best of all the culinary treats we discovered in Greece.

After dinner, the fisherman brother, who lamp–fishes during much of the night, leaves the others at the table and motors his boat out of the harbor to work. In a while we see his lamps set out in a string, like Christmas tree lights bobbing on the surface of the sea. The others linger: one young man has brought his guitar, and one of the women stirs her friends into singing Greek folk songs. After the singing starts in earnest, the taverna owner's son Nikos, who manages the table service and speaks English with the customers, lowers the taped Theodorakis music that comes from a speaker wired in the tree, and the returnees have the floor to harmonize for the night.

In June, at the harbor taverna of Skala Sykamineas, the evening air is reliably balmy and breezy. Each night, we gather during the early evening when light bathes boats, cats, trees, faces, and stones in an intense coral light. We sit at a blue table on blue chairs and report on our various field trips. Peter, who spends many of his days in a mask and flippers underwater draws a detailed picture of a fish with blue wings and eight legs that he saw flying along the harbor floor. We believe him. After the sun slides behind Turkey, lights strung through the myrtle trees come on. We order food in the manner of Kostas: marrow in lemon juice, greens, and fish. Now and then our forks, approaching the same potato oval, clink in midair, and after some time in this ordinary, extraordinary village, my idea of home is expanding. The landscapes, places, ways, and people that matter to us occur in places all over the planet.

Translations
The small cement terrace of the pensione where we are staying is lined with gardenias growing from olive oil cans and crisscrossed by a clothesline hung with black slips, lingerie, and pale blue paper lanterns that recently held candles for the feast of “Ag-yee-a Mar-tha,” Saint Martha's Day. It is after dark and already, just outside the terrace walls, a line of senior ladies has begun singing songs that come through the walls of Afrodite's Rooms–to–Let. Afrodite's daughters, twelve–year-old Nikki and eleven–year-old Tule, sit with us at a picnic table on the terrace where their mother has put two reading lanterns and a plate of honey–dripped sweets. The girls bring lined composition books in which they have written stories, for us, in the rudimentary English they have learned in school. To practice, the girls want to read their stories aloud. Nikki has enough English to make infant sentences, Tula less, and we have only a few Greek words. In the traditional manner, we all make up for these lapses with smiles and pantomime.  

In Nikki's story, called “My Friend,” she goes to the beach with Evgania, a girl just her age who lives in the one grand house in Skala Sikiminias for four months each year and goes away to school in Paris for the other eight months. The story is about what they do during a summer day and how much they miss each other during the winter. When Nikki gets to the part about the beach, she pauses and asks me the English word for something the girls are making at the water's edge. She describes the activity, but I cannot make out what she is talking about, so Nikki begins to draw a picture of a circle of stones in the off–shore shallows. Nikki's stones are ovals, carefully shaded on one side. Next she draws something inside the stones. It looks like a net that the rocks hold down in the water, keeping it fixed in the sweeping tides. And then she draws some fruits in the net. Ahhh, finally I understand: she is describing a circle of stones in the water to hold fruits and keep them cool in the sea, something for which there is one word in Greek. Now Nikki turns to me excited to hear the equivalent English word. 

Another night during the English lesson (and lessons in Greek life for me) I ask Nikki if her mother makes any medicines from plants. Yes, of course she does! Nikki is so charming and eager to practice her English that she will talk about any subject, but I see from her perplexed look that she considers the subject of how to make cough syrup from olive trees too obvious a body of fact to support any interest. It is as though I have asked her to tell me about the fascinating custom of hanging clothes on clothes hangers. I’ll later learn from the clerk in the village craft shop that many of the women in the village are skillful herbal healers. Until the 20th century such botanical healing was considered a scientific pursuit, and by chance, the most prominent botanical scientist of the ancient world came from a small village just thirty miles to the east of Sikiminias. There, in Skala Eressou, Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle as director of the peripatetic school of philosophy, kept his garden and wrote the Historia Plantarum, a treatise in ten books, in which he distinguishes the habitats of plants.

Poems in situ
Lesvos was also famously the home of the poet Sappho (Sap–fo in the Greek pronunciation). Less well known is a contemporary master who also traces his heritage to this coastline. A few miles to the west of Skala Sykamineas, on an unmarked country road, stands the Alepoudhelis family house. Both the mother and father of the poet Odysseas Elytes (nee Alepoudhelis) were from old families of Lesvos, and it was boyhood summers on Aegean islands that saturated Elytes’s language in light. He writes poetry that comes, he says, from an alphabet of the Aegean: the garden of the sea, olive trees, above all, the light. Often described as surreal, in situ the poems seem to give an accurate portrait of the island’s visual qualities. About these matters, Elytes has said that he and his generation “have attempted to find the true face of Greece. This was necessary because until then the true face of Greece was presented as Europeans saw Greece...[W]e had to destroy the tradition of rationalism which lay heavily on the Western world.... Many facets of surrealism I cannot accept ... but after all, it was the only school of poetry ... which aimed at spiritual health....  [I]t had cleared the ground in front of us, enabling us to link ourselves physiologically with our soil.”

On the summer solstice
Near dusk one night on Lesvos I am heading back to Afrodite's Rooms–To–Let through a small woods. Rounding a bend in the path, I come upon a group of women and children lighting three large brush bonfires on a scruff of beach at the outer edge of the village. As the women touch matches to the three piles of brush, the sun is just setting, and for half an hour — until the bonfires somewhat burn down — four orange–red shapes flare against the evening sky. As the sun slips into the sea and the flames diminish, the women and their children turn into silhouettes against the sky and sea. One thin boy, about nine, suddenly bolts from the cluster and leaps over all the fires, one after another, whooping. His small, wiry body, at apogee over the low flames, looks like a twisting shape the fire has thrown up.

Now a girl runs forward and jumps over the fires, and then all the children do, sometimes several times, like kids shooting down slides then running around to do it again. The mothers stand talking along the seawall. When the fires burn still lower, the children gather stones from the beach and begin hurling them into the embers. It is June 21st, Saint John's Eve on the Christian calendar, a quasi–advent that foreshadows Christmas. On the pagan calendar, it is the Summer Solstice, and these hours mark the time that shorter, colder days begin. In pagan culture, this was the night of bonfires, lit all over Europe to signal, or perhaps ritually renew, the sun's waning energy. 

One of the mothers along the wall recognizes me from the English lessons; she waves and I join her near the fires, which are still giving off waves of heat. She explains that the girls and boys are jumping over the fires so that they will eventually have children themselves, and she encourages me to jump too. The boys and girls are excited that an adult might join them. The fires are mostly crackling-hot stones by now, with only low flames and rogue licks leaping up; still, I have a moment of thrilled fear as I sail over the fire. Afterwards, a boy named Alekos gives me two stones and tells me to throw them in the fire. When I do, he shrieks the Greek child's joyful shriek. The matronly women (who are probably ten years younger than I am) giggle and look very pleased. I stay with them for a while longer, until the stones grow cold and the women, who leapt over fires themselves not so long ago, round up their happy, spent children and head home.

Paradise
While I have been sinking happily into the rituals and rhythms of a village, Peter and Katherine have been talking more and more about traveling on to Turkey, which is visible from the harbor of Skala Sykamineas as a ribbon of land shimmering just nine miles away, across the Gulf of Eddremit. On even a large, detailed map, the gulf between Lesvos and Turkey is so slight that a thin, red line demarcating the border almost entirely fills the channel. Turkey is tantalizingly close, and to my companions the ribbon on the horizon is beckons as the gateway to another world, to the true East.

Passage to Turkey is booked in Mytilini, in the office of Spyros, a handsome man who wears a yellow silk shirt in a dim office that faces the harbor. From this office suite, with floors covered in rugs three layers deep, Spyros rents motorcycles, cars, and houses, can exchange currencies, and sell tickets for boats to Turkey. He says to my friends, “I know you are wanting, since before three days, to take the boat to Tourkeees.” How does he know? Spyros is an influential man on the Mytilini waterfront, with a deskful of telephones. While we wait, any number of men slip in through the open front door and are waved by Spyros into another room behind a cloth hanging. In addition to vehicles and exchange rates, he knows people; it was Spyros who, after talking with us for ten minutes some weeks back, told us to take our books and sketchpads into little, off–the–path Skala Sikiminias. Now it is only because of a boat-scheduling dilemma, one even Spyros cannot adjust, that Peter and Katherine remain on the very rim of the Western world.  

Spyros is a little despondent not to have been able to help Peter and Katherine make the trip to Turkey. Some days later, when Tony and Peter must fly to Athens overnight and Katherine and I are hanging around Mytilini city, waiting for them to return and staying in a harbor hotel, Spyros invites the two of us to see the home he is building in the countryside. We accept and follow Spyros on his motorcycle in our car along twisting, dusty roads. An hour later, we enter a somnolent village where Spyros is building a large house on several acres of bearing trees. We tour the orchards first, groves of olives, mulberries, jujubes, and citrons, and take the armfuls of lemons that Spyros presses on us, saying that otherwise the fruit will only fall to the ground. Near the center of the orchard is a stand of carobs, a bushy evergreen whose bean–shaped fruits are ripening into chocolate–brown pods. Inside the pods will form the seed that medieval goldsmiths used to establish the carat measure, and that can be ground and used as a flavoring in lieu of chocolate. Around the carobs is a ring of cultivated almonds, whose nutmeats are sweetening inside pale green oval drupes. The velvety cases hold the hard, flat kernels that protect the edible nut. Come into Greece from Asia, the almond also thrives in barren country as a wild variety with a small and bitter nut. While he is showing us around, Spyros refers to his land and the enclave as a paradise.  

Paradise is a word first used in Greek by Xenophon, and it comes from the Old Persian word for an enclosed pleasure ground, a place wonderful not only because of what it contains, but because of what it excludes. In calling his retreat a paradise, Spyros continues a tradition — at once Greek, Christian, and Oriental — in which the garden is considered a graceful mingling of human and more–than–human nature, a place of balance and spiritual repose. Even in prelapsarian Eden, gardening was the one labor required of Adam and Eve, who were instructed to “dress and keep” paradise, and early modern English gardening books such as Paradise Regained and Paradisus in Sole perpetuated the idea that cultivating the Earth is a way to peace.

Walking among the shining leaves, as late sun spills through chinks in the green thickets, the entrepreneurial Spyros has become a countryman speaking of how the trees will be mature when his son is, how he hopes the son will come here to stay summers with his grandmother. The child, he explains, lives in France with his mother and visits but rarely. The mother never visits; she is still angry about the other women. We reach the two story house he is building; the first floor, which is still open to the weather with bags of cement stacked in towers, will one day be the apartment for his mother. The second level, already beautifully finished, has marble floors, and large, sliding-glass doors covered by heavy curtains that make the rooms as cool as a cellar. But as he talks about the fine building materials, the trees, and breezes, Spyros seems to grow sad, and finally wonders out loud what his son cannot come to visit this summer. He also wonders why he cannot find enough time to be here, and why only marriage pleases a woman. Why cannot this paradise be inhabited?   

Spyros has asked two middle–aged, bookish women here to show us his idea of paradise and to talk about the ideal home, what it may be, how elusive it is. The questions are large and poignant. This might be the landscape of which Elytes writes: “And yet if you move from what is to what may be, you pass over a bridge which takes you from Hell to Paradise. And the strangest thing: a Paradise made of precisely the same material of which Hell is made. It is only the perception of order of the materials that differs... [a] perception...sufficient to determine the immeasurable difference.” 

A geophysical theory
Returned to Athens, fresh from the fishing village on Lesvos, we meet Elisabet Sahtouris, an evolution biologist and author, in the cool, marbled, and glass splendor of an hotel near the Euginedes Planetarium. Here there are deep, soft leather lounge chairs, waterfalls spilling from every nook, a shimmering rooftop pool; there are banks of telephones and whirring fax machines, the smooth operations of international business, a corridor of ease. And here, in a conference room with tables covered in rose-pink cloths, many creative minds from the world's great planetaria are convening to plan a response to the disappearing night sky. Save for the most remote regions, the electric grid of civilization has finally illuminated the whole planet. Elisabet, an American currently living in Greece, has been asked to speak to the planetaria directors on a recent geophysical theory about the Earth.

In the hotel enclave, we are a scant mile or so from the outdoor rooms at the base of the Acropolis where questions about the nature of nature were first launched in earnest in the West. You wouldn't know it from the scorching air outside these cool rooms, but Earth's atmosphere has the property of homeostasis, a word that means “wisdom of the body” and refers to an organisms' ability to keep its temperature constant regardless of surrounding fluctuations. Elisabet presents the view that planet Earth itself is best understood as a living organism able to regulate the temperature and the composition of its surface. This is the Gaia theory developed by geophysiologist James Lovelock and microbial biologist Lynn Margulis, a theory that is, as Lovelock sanguinely admits, “at the outer bounds of scientific credibility.” The idea is “that the atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, and the crust of the Earth are regulated at a state comfortable for life because of the behavior of living organisms.”

Gaia theory builds on the theory of natural selection, introducing the idea that organisms not only adapt to their environments, but profoundly change them. In this theory, life and its environments are so “tightly coupled” as to be a single evolving system. Critics have seen Gaia as a teleological theory that imputes purpose to the planet and an absurd sentience to the biota. To reply, Lovelock created a modeling program that shows how global temperature is regulated “over a wide range of solar luminosity, by an imaginary planetary biota without invoking foresight or planning.” Pressed about spiritual implications of the theory, Lovelock sidesteps the division between science and religion: “Individuals,” he says, “interact with Gaia in the cycling of the elements and in the control of the climate, just like a cell does in the body. You also interact... through a sense of wonder.” Elisabet’s talk is lively, fact-filled, and well-received by many if not all the scientists; in the Q&A, one astronomer at our table puts down his pink napkin and mildly asks Elisabet: “Why do you find it less interesting to consider the Earth as dead matter?”

Katherine and I travel with Elisabet aboard a hydrofoil called Flying Dolphin to Angistri, a small island about forty minutes from the Athenian port at Pireas. The islands we pass on the way are characteristic Greek island moonscapes, the barren mounds produced by over-grazing and over-logging that people have come to find starkly beautiful in the harsh sun. Angistri Island has retained its lush pine forests and Elisabet lives here, with her husband Arghiri, in a two–room, white–washed house near the forest, high in the steep hills of Metochi above the port town. Inside the house is a room with a couch, two chairs, a bottled–gas stove, and a sink; in a second room there is a rocker, a bed, a writing desk and a window with a long view down to the sea. On one side of the deep casement, Elisabet has mounted a small antler from whose prongs hang thirty dried seahorses. The seahorses are all different sizes, some with long, elegant tails, some shriveled, some tiny, some black, some a sepia or taffy color. The wind is good on the hill and it makes the single lace curtain wave, and the seahorses swish their tails.

On our first visit up the hill, we bring a fish, a cake, and a ripe melon. Arghiri takes the melon and begins cutting it into slices. The melon is the color of cantaloupe, and veined on the outside like cantaloupe, but bigger and sweeter. The Greek way to cut a melon is to divide it into about eight slices, then separate the meat from the rind in one curved cut, and then, leaving the long scimitar of melon in the rind boat, to cut the fruit into chunks. Arghiri cuts each slice away from the melon body very slowly, gracefully, and lightly strokes the seeds off the melon, letting what of the seeds and strings will fall of their own weight slip onto the plate.

Then, he takes a bite, and says something very firmly, while laughing in a jolly way. Elisabet translates: “Arghiri says the melon should be fried.” By our usual standards, it is a perfectly ripe melon, but we are in a land where degrees of ripeness can be scrutinized like particles in an electron microscope. Still smiling, Arghiri produces another melon, one so ripe that it seems to melt into a cool froth.  

Later, Elisabet leads us to a secluded sea–grotto, following trails that wind along high bluffs; far below in the azure sea, two swimmers move slowly across the cove, nets of light flickering over their pale backs. The white sand floor is clearly visible, the sea like a glass of water tinted slightly blue. Strewn along the path are dry, fragrant pine needles. At the grotto, Elisabet discusses her travel schedule and the conference politics that take her away this island. As she talks, the sea laps the rocks and washes into tidal pools full of mustard–green plants whose arms pulse over colonies of shining periwinkles.

Along the road                                          
The drive from Athens to the healing center of Epidauros is hot, through mile after patchwork mile of olive, lemon and artichoke crops. Walking into one artichoke field, I am dwarfed by the giant, sculptural stalks, and wander among their shade like a field mouse through grasses. Most of the green globes have already been picked and delivered to market, and the few remaining swell from stems like candles on an ornate candelabra. It is the soft, inner core and the bracts of this perennial that are eaten in their immature stage. At just about the same stage, the flower heads and buds which are tucked in the head of the globes may be collected for medicinal use. Since the time of Theophrastus, herbalists have known that the flower heads and leaves, boiled for twenty minutes into a decoction, may be sipped to reduce fever and stiff joints, and that a crushed poultice of the leaves is soothing to tonsillitis. These lingering, unpicked artichokes, now too old for either food or medicine, are splaying into huge, tufty, purple blooms.  
 

The house of Atreus
Early the next morning we drive to the citadel of Mycenae where reality refuses to stay in the tidy compartments contrived for it. The palace crowns an acropolis high in hills that overlook a valley of the Argolid Plain, a long fertile avenue to the gulf. The approach is by a good wide road cut sensibly cut into the foothills. There is an ample parking lot and an enamel sign warning against starting forest fires with cigarettes. Past the chain–link and the water fountains, one climbs to the entrance with its gate of keystone lions: the gate where Clytemnestra welcomed Agamemnon home. What is left of the palace structure is low rubble, clinging to the shape of the hills. Behind us, the horned peaks of the mountains Marta and Zara are rising two thousand six hundred feet on either side of the citadel.  

At Mycenae, by 1500 BC the northern sky gods ruled, Zeus was supreme. His priests were the wa-na-ka, whose rule extended throughout the Aegean, a wise dominion it seems, founded on knowledge of natural cycles: the palace that worshipped Zeus is sited in the shadow of mountains that, according to Vincent Scully, form the upraised arms of the Earth Mother, a shape echoed in Mycenaean terra–cotta sculptures. We approach the Lion Gates. Wildflowers pry out of the dry stone walls and rock fissures, small plants who favor bare places, and meadow–blanketing varieties that spill away and down the hillside. Past the lions, inside the palace walls, the grave circles — deep, straight–sided wells of stone and grass — are baking in the sun. Standing on the rim, looking into the graves, time arrives in its complexity: is July 1989, the shaft tombs are from the Middle Helladic period, nearby Clytemnestra stabs her child–murdering husband to death. Here, we walk on stone, on theatre, on myth, on history, the present, past, and future. As I put on some sun–block, the Queen has come outside the Lion gate to justify her revenge to the stunned Chorus.

You see truth in the future at last. Yet I wish to seal my oath with the Spirit in the house: I will endure all things as they stand now, hard though it be. Hereafter let him go forth to make bleed with death and guilt the houses of others. I will take some small measure of our riches, and be content that I swept from these halls the murder, the sin, and the fury.

The thick old walls of her house stand on the Argolid plain as rocky testimony to these events, and the delicate, scrubby wildflowers sooth the painful walls. You recall the story: For seducing his brother Atreus's wife, Thyestes is exiled from the Argolid lands. Later, Atreus invites his brother to a banquet of reconciliation where he serves up the children of Thyestes in a stew. Thyestes curses the house of Atreus and leaves again, his one surviving child in tow. The two sons of Atreus are Menelaos and Agamemnon. Agamemnon marries Clytemnestra and has three children: Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. Menelaos marries the incomparable Helen, and when she is seduced by Paris, the brothers mount a campaign to repossess her from Troy. The Argolid warships are ready to sail but becalmed in the harbor and the assembled warriors grow unbearably restless. Desperate for wind, Agamemnon agrees to the terms of Artemis: she will send wind for war if Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter. The King agrees, slaughters Iphigenia, sails to Troy, and returns ten years later, victorious, and with his mistress. During the absence of the King, Clytemnestra has mourned her daughter, taken as a lover the surviving son of Thyestes, and burned with rage. Alerted to the return of her husband by a series of signal fires, the Queen welcomes Agamemnon home, draws him a soothing bath, and when he is at ease, stabs him to death. Orestes feels compelled to avenge his father's death, and with the blessing of Apollo, murders his mother.)

Thus closes the second of the three plays that make up the grievous Oresteia of Aeschylus, a story over whose territory we presently walk in the rubble of Mycenae. Here, as time advances in its undifferentiated swirl, we pick our way over the palace ruins to the Cistern. This is a deep reservoir dug down into the hill to the level of an underground spring, creating a secret cache that supplied the palace with water during long sieges. The water filled an almost vertical cave that goes down ninety stone steps carved into a worn, narrow–walled passage. The entrance itself is through a corbel vaulted arch, the kind that forms a pointed top without a keystone. In the fierce sunlight, the opening is a pitch–black shape. Chiseled and installed on a limestone retaining wall of a nearby palace storeroom is a small marble sign that reads: The Cistern. Henry Miller, who was not known to shy away from experience, once visited Mycenae just before World War II and went down a few slippery steps of the cistern with his friend Katsimbalis. Later, he wrote: “We have not descended it, only peered down with lighted matches. The heavy roof is buckling with the weight of time. To breathe too heavily is enough to pull the world down over our ears.... I refuse to go back down into that slimy well of horrors. Not if there were a pot of gold to filch would I make the descent.”

Before I set out to Greece, a philosophy professor had pressed a two–inch flashlight into my hand. It works by squeezing the case, which activates a chemical battery and a minute, bright beam. “Good for alleys and theatres,” the philosopher said. Digging the gift out of a pocket now, I step just inside the cool edge of the cistern. Everyone, except the congenitally claustrophobic, can probably descend some few steps down into the cistern. Daylight dwindles gradually, then on the sixteenth rung, the stairs turn left and the passageway goes utterly dark. Pressed into action, the philosopher's light illuminates a very small spot on the wall, and as one, our party of three mature adults has strong stirrings in mid–chest and at the throat, and we wordlessly flee back up the stairs towards daylight.

At the top again, just inside the shady overhang of the cave entrance, we take stock. The three of us have three separate fears: of closed–in, tight spaces; that at the bottom, there is only emptiness; of fanged snakes. Peter has returned to America, and we can only wonder what his optimistic soul would find ominous. Tony, Katherine and I find that any two of us can counsel the third, presenting clear, obvious reasons why that friend's fear can be waved away with the kind hand of reason. The cistern passage has plenty of air; there will be a bottom, likely a slimy pool of water; and lastly, my friends want to believe that no fanged things dwell on the walls, lying in wait. But apparently they have forgotten that the cave belongs to the House of Atreus.

“How about a soda from the snack shop?” suggests Tony kindly. As Katherine and I agree that we must try again but that we need a stronger light, a lone tourist approaches unsheathing a brilliant spelunkers light. Hermes has many disguises, but we have no trouble recognizing him this time. Mutely, we follow him into the cistern, down and around the bend into complete darkness, past the twentieth step, down further into a passage where the stairs narrow. At bottom, the guide stops and shines his light, and we stare at a dry rock slab, dusted with crinkled leaves. Halfway back up the cistern stairwell, as pitch–black becomes less black, the mercurial guide speeds his steps and disappears. We will soon get to test our courage again, on the narrow, winding mountain roads of the eastern prong of the Peloponnese.

Under plane trees
Traveling south along the eastern edge Arkadia from Mycenae through the Parnon Oros which shelter brown bears, wolves and wild boars, we teeter on thin veins of asphalt, roadbeds skimming gorges in hairpins turns and winding, sickening curves. No guardrails or roadside boulders offer protection against the sudden spin into the chasm. Instead, every few miles there is an elaborate roadside shrine, and gradually we surmise that roadside shrines are the Greek guardrail program. What these installations lack in continuous physical protection, they make up for with other powers. The shrines are a box bolted onto a post or a rock, but in particulars, each is an original; some are stucco boxes painted white, some are wood, others nearly all glass edged in tin like a Greek lantern; there are elegant cages, diminutive model churches, and rough lemon crates. Always the side facing the road has a glass door or an opening into which a traveler can place votive candles, flowers, garlics, and personal icons. The candles are lit, the flame wavering over a small, damp pool of wax, and at the base of each shrine is often a small cairn topped with drying flowers.  

As the altitude increases so does the water supply. The sub–alpine meadows are much greener than the plains below; the air is cool and refreshing. This is the region of Greece traditionally associated with Artemis. It is also prime beehive country, where hillsides are dotted in cities of hives, hundreds of hives carefully spaced over the land. They are painted not white, but blue, of course, for Greek bees! At the timberline, the flora shrinks into the dainty, miniature plants of alpine meadows. This is the altitude for wormwood, the Artemisia plant whose dried flowers and stems we bought in the Athens botana as “mountain tea,” and which, in distillate form, becomes absinthe. It has long been a symbol of all that is bitter and troubling: once a “furious star named Wormwood... fell from heaven across the darkened sky of the Book of Revelation and made bitter one third of the waters of the earth.” “Wormwood, wormwood,” mutters Hamlet listening to the Queen's protests.

Overhead, two falcons ride the windrafts on canyons of air. At noon, we arrive at Kosmos, a tiny village at the crest of the Parnon range. The plaza of Kosmos is defined by seven Oriental Plane trees planted in an arc, and it is worth driving the harrowing chasms merely to drink a lemonade under these magnificent trees. All of the village shops and parking spaces, a town hall, three cafes and a large orthodox church fit themselves under the shady boughs of these seven plane trees. The crowns spread twenty meters or more in the air; the great trunks are dappled and multi–colored where old bark has flaked off, revealing white wood that has turned green and brown. Judging from their diameter, the trees are easily two hundred years old. At this time of the year hundreds of round, green catkins dangle from the branches. Since the time of Ecclesiastes, the Greeks have loved and planted plane trees, and have considered them wise. It could be because of the great age they attain, or the way their skin slowly peels revealing the inner life, or maybe just because they invite humans to sit under them and contemplate a cat snoozing on the sill across the street. Just beyond the shade of the last tree, the big wooden doors of the village church open onto a quiet back street, and there, sprawled in the sun to dry, are a hundred glinting brass things: brass music stands and candleholders, collection trays, cups, chalices, communion trays, snuffers, brass bells and horns. The street around the polished objects is soaked dark with wash water. En masse, the panoply of liturgical brass is a blinding concentrate of shine.

Land of Artemis

By evening we are halfway down the prong in Arkadia, on the coast, and as the sun slips away, we make our way on foot down a sandy hillside to a speck on the map called Porto Sambatiki. Here a dashing man named Yorgas Lysikatos came home again after twenty years working on cruise ships, and built a small taverna and guest house that look as much like a ship as possible: there are polished mahogany rails and doors, ropes swagging the perimeters of decks and rooms. An actual vessel, a dinghy, rests on the sand in front of the taverna, and before dinner, Tony and I row the blue boat out into the harbor, rowing in the Greek way, facing ahead, pushing rather than pulling the thin oars.

We are in the land of Artemis tonight, and I am thinking about her unsettling role in the old play of Aeschylus. Several hundred miles north of this seaside taverna, the denouement of the Oresteia unfolds: Orestes has killed his mother, and now the Furies appear to the boy, hounding him, eager to tear him limb from limb. Only in Apollo's new temple at Delphi can a matricidal child find some sanctuary, and as the Furies recognize neither Apollo's logic nor his purification rites, they relentlessly torment Orestes, at last pinioning him on the rock of Athens. All the aggrieved appeal to Athena, who then appoints a court of citizens to judge the case. When the jury is deadlocked, Athena casts the tie–breaking vote on the side of Orestes, affirming the new patriarchal code, saying:

I am always for the male with all my heart, and strongly on my father's side.  So, in a case where the wife has killed a husband, lord of the house, her death shall not mean most to me.

Athena knows that Furies must be propitiated, however, and promises them “a place of your own, deep hidden under ground that is yours by right.” Not easily removed from their original, central place, the Furies, reply:

Earth, ah, Earth what is this agony that crawls under my ribs? Night, hear me, o Night, mother. They have wiped me out and the hard hands of the gods and their treacheries have taken my old rights away.

  
But as the play occurs in fifth century Athens at a time when Olympian divinities and city–state laws have long triumphed over the old goddess culture, Apollo and Athena prevail. Gradually, the Furies soften and forego bringing a blight on the land. They accept the name Euminides, The Gentle Ones, and allow themselves to be buried under the law court on the Areopagos hill. Until the recent theory that the subjugation of women and the degradation of the Earth are related phenomena, generations of scholars have found this an ending that resolves tensions between the culture in which the most sacred thing is the Earth itself — figured as immanent, life–giving — and the culture in which the dominant forces are male gods who sanction legal and warrior codes. By the tensions in his play, the poet Aeschylus shows an older lifeworld undergoing a subordination to the values of the patriarchal city–state. Lately, some readers (reading as the rainforests burn) have begun to notice that the play's ending is a fragile resolution. Classicist scholar Donald S. Carne-Ross finds the play so laced with oppositional values as to fundamentally resist reconciliation: on one hand, tribal bonds, immanent deities, the cyclical renewal of life within a numinous landscape; on the other, hierarchical power, linear time, allegiance to law and transcendent gods. Adding to that view is the peculiar role of Artemis: why should the protective, life–loving goddess demand the death of an innocent girl?

When Atreus slaughters all but one of his nieces and nephews it is clear that, the children are no longer seen as beloved young life, rather as markers in a political struggle. These values are anathema to Artemis. Although her wilderness is in tension with patriarchal society, Artemis does not represent a rejection of the masculine, nor an upholding of the feminine, but a choice for being. Her primordial duty is to protect the wild, generative world, and the potential for renewal. Artemis is angry because, for generations, the house of Atreus has responded to relatively insignificant wrongs with acts that are transgressions against life. When Artemis gives Agamemnon the choice of his daughter's life or wind for war, she hardly extracts a sacrifice that pleases her. Rather she sends her arrows straight and deep, revealing starkly that his mission and values entail the routine sacrifice of youth and humanity.

Other observers have viewed the Oresteia optimistically, as a work that envisions a new morality, achieved in tragic but warranted tension between primitive powers and the new codes of justice. The Oresteia is concerned with ending the cycle of sorrows caused by the custom of revenge, but this concern is woven with some others: What happens to the human moral order when the constellation of human mother and Earth is no longer an inviolable, numinous being? For the sake of humans and the Earth alike, we may want to shed the idea that nature is female, but the old questions of Aeschylus remain. Carne–Ross finds that the basic assumption that Aeschylus makes about the relationship of the human to the natural worlds is that “disorder in one realm” can spill “over into the other.”

What Aeschylus knew is that by dishonoring green, protective wilderness, including tender, protective aspects of human nature, we invite the anger of Artemis. His play is not a historical exercise. By the fifth century BC, the Greek conception of nature has evolved from chthonic force to an “infinite abundance” that is the context for civilization. However, the old Earth divinities, and the old culture values they embody, are more than a memory. They remain powerful for many citizens for hundreds of years, even into Hellenistic Alexandria, where Philo writes:  

The Earth... as we all know, is a mother, for which reason the earliest men thought fit to call her “Demeter,” combining the name of “mother” with that of “Earth” for, as Plato (Menexenus  238A) says, Earth does not imitate woman, but woman Earth. Poets quite rightly are in the habit of calling earth “All–mother” and “Fruit–bearer” and “Pandora” or “Give–all,” inasmuch as she is the originating cause of existence and continuance in existence to all animals and plants alike.

 
At nearly the same time that Aeschylus wrote his play, Sophocles wrote a passage of the Antigone known to us as “The Ode to Man,” also work of a mind lamenting the human will to overreach:

“Many things are deinos. Nothing/stranger than humankind. This being/ overpasses the grey sea, blown/by southerlies under the arching swell/that chasms to the depths all round;/wears at the eldest of the gods, / Earth...  / year in, year out, as the plough wheels to and fro....”

The word “deinos” means at once, terrible, wonderful, strange and uncanny. To appreciate the prescience of these poets, consider that the word oekologie was first coined in 1868, and that for decades early ecologists noticed only interactions among non–human life. When, in 1864, Charles Perkins March wrote a book called Man and Nature that detailed human degradation of environments, his book was politely ignored as pessimistic. Only after World War II did the perceptive begin to recognize the degrading human impact on the planet.

Aeschylus and Sophocles are not forecasting the future misadventures of humankind, rather they are witnessing the troubled relations that our species has had, from early on, with the rest of nature. As their plays predate all that we recognize as environmental pollution, the startling thing they tell us is that our problems of habitation are an accelerating, but not new, condition. In the last two decades, a new branch of philosophy has emerged: this is how K.S. Schrader–Frechette opens her book of environmental ethics:

If environmental degradation were purely, or even primarily, a problem demanding scientific or technological solutions, then its resolution would probably have been accomplished by now. As it is, however, our crises of pollution and resource depletion reflect profound difficulties with some of the most basic principles in our accepted systems of values. They challenge us to assess the adequacy of those principles and, if need be, to discover a new framework for describing what it means to behave ethically or to be a “moral” person.

The shaping powers of techne and reason have emerged in our species, on the Earth, and it is completely natural that we use them in creating our habitation. Once upon a time in the heyday of determinism and logical positivism, the French physicist Laplace thought that with sufficient data and computing power we would predict every event. Both Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, “the first crack in the crystalline structure of determinism,” and Chaos Theory tell us that a fundamental wildness saturates the universe. 

Wonderfully, the evolving planet is more complex than our minds can ever encompass and a choice for wilderness is not only placing vast geographical acreage beyond human influence — indeed, doing that is to exert human influence.


Problems outside the hotel  

“The secluded hotel on the delightful island of Lemnos comprises 125 charming stone-built cottages, each with its own walled garden. A superb buffet is served at the open air beach restaurant. The hotel is situated on its own fine golden sand beach and offers excellent windsurfing, pedaloes, sailing boats, canoes, sun shades and easy chairs. Myrina, the island capital, is a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the hotel and has a colorful port where one can watch fishermen mending their nets. 

— from an advertisement for the Atiki Myrini

I came upon this description and a photograph of a family reading in their walled garden — vines spilling over the stones, a lamp glowing — while staying on Angistri Island in a barely-completed, motel-like structure reached by means of a bridge spanning a gully full of construction trash: conduit tailings, fiberglass insulation sheets, and paint cans. All the other inns on the island were full, and we considered ourselves lucky to have found the last room at this just off the ground inn.

The rooms were not dull rectangles but hybrids of parallelogram and rhomboid, a geometry which made furniture-arranging challenging. The handsome large Greek beds, chairs, and chest only touched the walls akimbo here and there as if to steady themselves with fingertips. Curtains and shades were not yet up and considerable sun streamed in throughout the day, making the interior notably hot. Also, I have a little fever, perhaps from the dense city air. To rest, I took a walk to a lovely old inn and taverna up the hill where I can sit quietly in shady interior courtyard and look out on Angistri port and the pines growing at the edge of a clear blue sea. It is two o'clock in the afternoon, and there are no customers because everyone is napping in the heat. The owner of this coolest interior in town, Dmitri, generously allows me to sit on a bench near a window which occasionally admits a shimmer of air. His courtyard is planted with flowering vines and bushes and the taverna has curving stucco benches that appear to grow out of the floor and wind through space in graceful arcs.  

“He had a German architect do it.” says Joe. The beams are old, as are the tall shutters in the thick white walls, and there are old ceiling fans rotating slowly. Joe lives in Pittsburgh now and returns to his family's island home for two months each summer, frequently visiting at his friend's inn. He is a mechanic, wearing Hush Puppies and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. He has lived in America for six years, and he tells his two brothers to forget about America, but they are still saving for the plane ticket. Joe makes much more money than they do; he has a car, a television, an apartment near the plant; he gets a week's paid vacation, and he can drive to Florida. Joe tells his brothers that he has gotten a nervous stomach in America, that everything is “fastfastfast.” He says it as one word. But, he says, “You cannot tell them.” The brothers like the sound of work and money. “It is more relaxed here,” Joe says. “The food is good. I take out my boat. At night we hear the sound of our voices. This year, I don't make so much money because I am here, but in America it is fastfastfast.” 

Out the window, things are not quite the way Joe remembers. Down the hillside, the concrete floor slabs are poured for the new motels: electrical cables pop like bug's antennae from each floor, the surrounding earth is hard-packed, a dull red color. What is the fatal thing that happens in the shift from the traditional economic way of building buildings to the new economic building practices? The modest houses in Metochi village uphill from the port have a bedrock integrity: the windows are not precisely, merely beautifully located, making striking graphic designs of each wall. The proportions of windows to rooms are unfailingly pleasing. Casement depths are just right to invite one to lean and look out the windows. Breezes are caught; coolness is captured. White, terra-cotta, brown and blue cooperate. Materials, forms and colors have come to understand each other; tile yields to wood, wood to stucco, stucco to white, white to cracks and splatters: old hands at the marriage of function and beauty.  

I suppose the answer must be complex, involving industrial production methods, new economics, bureaucracies of building codes. The result is easier to depict, and it is more than because someone has decided that a cheaply-built hotel is a way to make money. In the series of calculations that go into this decision, somewhere along the line, perhaps at the outset, the host/guest tradition is ended in favor of the entrepreneur/consumer tradition, a different ritual, one not without its own points of honor, but a practice that fundamentally changes the way value is measured: now each member of the encounter, and the encounter itself, is allotted worth on a predominantly economic scale. The new buildings in Angistri port town violate not only aesthetic but moral principles and demonstrate again how these are irreducibly twined. The rampant building on Angistri island is increasingly typical of Greek villages and islands where tourists can be easily harvested. The next step is inevitable: huge increases in raw sewage which is still dumped directly into the waters off the village resulting in water too foul for fish or human swimming. The clear, brilliant sea–blues of travel posters notwithstanding, in all of Greece, only seven beaches have recently been found clean and safe by the Greek National Tourism Organization: three on Rhodes, two on Crete, one on Chios and one in central Greece. 

Faced with this and other devastating interactions between tourists and Greek life and ecosystems, one traveler wrote The Athenian:

Dear editors,

My husband and I ...would very much like to re–visit Greece but, in view of the damage which tourism is doing to the natural heritage, we are loathe to support the tourist trade and thereby hasten the destruction. I cannot think that my husband and I are alone in being... satisfied with simple facilities in private homes, instead of large tourist hotels.... I feel confident that eco–holidays may well be the answer — the local people would still enjoy extra income from tourists and tourists themselves would enjoy ... the proper Greece, with its cultural and natural heritage intact.

Sincerely, Delia Burt, Old Storridge, Alfrick, Worcestershire

Two new concepts in tourism are being floated by the travel industry these days. One is what Mrs. Burt refers to, and is generally called eco–tourism. Offered by various enlightened agencies and the travel wings of conservation groups, eco–tourism stresses benign observation. Another approach is being called quality tourism. Business writer Nigel Lowry follows the tourist industry and the EOT and noted recently that “Not only Greece, but all those countries which  on the strength of their sunny climates, have been favored travel destinations for many years are facing the same challenge. Many feel they have reached, or are approaching the saturation point in terms of numbers of foreign holidaymakers, and are now seeking ways to attract better quality tourists with a higher level of purchasing power.” Mr. Lowry notes two areas that may affect quality tourism; he calls them marketing and reality. Marketing is first and foremost, but Mr. Lowry adds that “changes in reality must not lag too far behind.”

About reality, the opinion of the tourist industry is that pollution and unsafe traffic conditions cannot easily be changed. Thus, the industry recommends that more self–contained luxury hotel compounds be built to attract tourists. A model compound is The Cretan Village, a resort owned by Mr. Angelopoulos. In addition to the luxury fortresses, more conference centers, yachting marinas and luxury spas should be developed to make Greece a “more varied holiday destination,” an increasingly important plan so the industry is not dependent on what it calls “the sundrenched scenery, which in any case is gradually being spoiled.” Having written off the natural world and the insoluble problems outside the hotel, the industry aims for small compounds that will insure its financial longevity during the next decades of planetary devastation. Multiply this kind of logic several billion times and you have the plight of the planet itself.

A golden road

How appealing is the impulse to retreat into small personal solutions is clear to me the day I lie feverish on a terrace above the lively Angistri port. Nearby there’s a color poster of the walled village of Atiki Marini – with a small garden, old stones draped with bougainvillea — and nothing seems more appealing than that serenity, the scent of flowers, and lap of water.

Another day, that wish is granted, sort of: Far from little Angistri, near the tip of the eastern finger of the Peloponnese, is the off–shore island of Monemvassia, a castle and fortress city that has been exquisitely restored by a consortium of bankers and architects. It is a town in which the basil plants that rise to giant heights in clay amphora are perfectly formed globes, the tips of the leaf–whorls plucked each morning to thwart the plants' impulse to go to seed. The stone streets are among the only streets in Greece entirely free of crushed cans, plastic straws and paper trash. At every window hangs an elegant, crocheted curtain, the lacy pattern opening, near the hem, into a cat or a moon. The wood frames on all the windows are sanded and refitted; the signs are regulated by codes; handmade, wooden. Even the one trouble in paradise is elegantly presented: in the castle where we have rooms, a calligraphed sign hangs on a polished brass fixture: There is problem in Castle. Please use water carefully. No motor vehicles come inside the walls.

This walled garden hotel is well beyond our means, so we stay only one night. But what a night. The moon is full. The castle's casement windows have deep ledges look out over red tile roofs to a slate–blue sea that reflects the moon into a golden road running from the horizon to the beach, a road for a night too luminous to spend in sleep. By eleven pm the only sound is a mouse nibbling on the roof. Through the wide windows, the moonlight is glazing the polished floor planks, the intricate layers of rugs, and causing all the bits of mica sewn into the Turkish pillows to wink. 

•

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Notes and Links

Kostas Gavroglu, philosopher, former Minister of Education, Athens
Elisabet Sahouris, evolution biologist, author
Recipe for Greek Stuffed Squash Blossoms
Old Taverna of Psarras

Bibliography

Aeschylus, Oresteia,  trans. Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, 1953. 

Carne-Ross, Donald S.  “The Beastly House of Atreus” (Kenyon Review , Spring 1981)

Elliot, Sloane, Our Town, monthly essays on life in Greece, in The Athenian
”The editorial of the magazine, titled “Our Town” written by Sloane Elliott, analyzed and commented, often with humor, on the political and social developments of the country and became a trademark for English-speaking readers living in Greece. ‘Our Town’ is a month-by-month Greek chronicle of life in Greece for 19 years.” — from The Athenian

Elytes, Odysseas, Open Book , translated by Theofanis G. Stavrou

Elytes, Odysseus  Analogies of Light , ed. Ivar Ivask, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman,  1975, 1981.

Evernden, Neil The Natural Alien , University of Toronto Press, 1985

Geldard, Richard G.  Ancient Greece, A Guide To the Sacred Places , Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1989

Glacken, Clarence J.  Traces on A Rhodian Shore , University of California Press, 1967 

Lovelock, James  The Ages of Gaia, A Biography of Our Living Earth ,  Commonwealth Fund Book Program, ed. Lewis Thomas, M.D.; W.W. Norton & Company, New York

Milne, Lorus and Margery  The Arena of Life: Dynamics of Ecology ,  Doubleday, Natural History Press, Garden City. New York, 1971 

Schrader–Frechette,  K.S.  Environmental Ethics,  ix, the Boxwood Press, Pacific Grove, CA 1981   

Thomas, Keith   Man And The Natural World, A History of the Modern Sensibility , Pantheon Books, New York, 1983. 

For a discussion of this matter, see Neil Evernden's book, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. University of Toronto Press, Toronto,1985. 

As Keith Thomas, (Man And The Natural World, A History of the Modern Sensibility, Pantheon Books, New York, 1983. p. 19-21) says, such radical anthropocentrism dates to early modern Europe, when theologians provided an emerging exploitative production system moral foundations for the domination of nature by human beings.  Interpretations of scripture inspired the typical belief that “All things (are created) “principally for the benefit and pleasure of man.”  Horseflies were created to sharpen the wits of men, birds to entertain, lobsters for food and contemplation, the dog to be affectionate, the louse to inspire clean habits, weeds to provide a struggle to put fire in one's spirit. Upon learning from travelers of the respectful nature philosophies of Buddhists and Hindus, seventeenth and eighteenth century religious Europeans were shocked and contemptuous. Of the Eastern nature reverence, scientist Robert Boyle said it was “a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures.” Still, their philosophies have not prevented Asian cultures from creating industrial pollution, deforestation and species extinction. The world's most anthropocentric religion has contributed to present day environmental troubles, but degradation of the Earth predates and extends well beyond the borders of Christendom.   

Richard G. Geldard, Ancient Greece, A Guide To the Sacred Places , Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1989, p. 187.  For a good discussion of the Panathenaea pilgrammage, see Richard Geldard's section on the Acropolis. 

Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris  476-77, trans. Witter Bynner, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 3, Euripides,  ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 391

R.S. Surtees, in 1854 in Handley Cross.  All quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary , 1935 edition. 

Carole Rubenstein, Institute of Current World Affairs Newsletter , JHM–19; February, 1989.

The Arena of Life: Dynamics of Ecology ,  Lorus and Margery Milne,  Doubleday, Natural History Press, Garden City. New York, 1971 

Odysseas Elytes, Selections for the “Open Book,” translated by Theofanis G. Stavrou in consultation with the poet, printed in Odysseus Elytis, Analogies of Light , ed. Ivar Ivask, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman,  1975, 1981, pps. 27 - 33.

Odysseas Elytes speaking on his Poetry in an interview with Ivar Ivask, in Athens, March, 1975.  Printed in Odysseus Elytis, Analogies of Light , ed. Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1975, 1981, p. 7-15. 

Keith Thomas,  Man And The Natural World, A History of the Modern Sensibility , Pantheon Books, New York, 1983.  pps. 236. 

James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, A Biography of Our Living Earth ,  Commonwealth Fund Book Program, ed. Lewis Thomas, M.D.; W.W. Norton & Company, New York, p.3 and p. 19  Subsequent Lovelock quotations in this section are from p. 39, and pps. 205 - 8 respectively.

Agamemnon ,  lines 1567 - 1576  All the quotations from Oresteia  of Aeschylus, are from the translation by Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, 1953.  

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi , New York:  New Directions, 1941.  quoted in Richard G. Geldard, Ancient Greece, A Guide To The Sacred Places of Ancient Greece , Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1989, p. 166. 

Henry Beston, Herbs and The Earth , An Evocative Excursion into the Lore & Legend of Our Common Herbs , David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. 1990, p. 93. 

from “The Eumenides,” Oresteia  of Aeschylus, trans. Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, 1953. 

Christine Downing, The Goddess, Mythological Images of the Feminine  (Crossroad, New York, 1981). 

Donald S. Carne-Ross, to whom my own thoughts about the Oresteia  are indebted, has persuasively argued in his beautiful essay “The Beastly House of Atreus” (Kenyon Review , Spring 1981)  that the two worlds may be fundamentally impossible to reconcile.  

A more complete discussion of the role of Artemis in the Oresteia can be found in an essay that appears in my doctoral dissertation, “Along the Border: oetry and ecology.”

Agamemnon , line 950

Philo, On the Creation, 133;  quoted in Traces on A Rhodian Shore , p. 14, Clarence J. Glacken, University of California Press, 1967,  

translation, Donald S. Carne–Ross, unpublished. 

For a discussion of the history of early modern ecology see the introduction in Lorus and Margery Milne, The Arena of Life, The Dynamics of Ecology , Doubleday/Natural History Press, New York, 1971. 

K.S. Schrader-Frechette, Environmental Ethics,  ix, the Boxwood Press, Pacific Grove, CA 1981   

Lovelock, p. 219

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