Ancient Greece Odyssey: Part Five

Goats on the mountainside leaving Delphi

The drive from sacred Delphi to worldly Nauplion (pronounced "Nafplio") on the far side of the Isthmus of Corinth was long and sleepy. Haunting music in an ancient mode played over the bus' speakers as we dozed. It was a modern recording of a hymn to Apollo whose notes are inscribed on a stone from the Treasury of Athens.

The winding mountain road threaded olive groves and lonely towns, hugging steep, bleak hillsides cropped by sheep and brown goats. Hazy blue mountains slanted down to the sea. After a few hours we crossed an incredibly long suspension bridge spanning the Gulf of Corinth from northern to southern Greece (the Peloponnese). Halfway across, we gazed westward across the Ionian Sea towards Italy. One of the islands out there was rocky Ithaka, home of Odysseus.

On the Peloponnesian side of the Gulf, behind the blue peaks of the closest mountains, rose a long, snowy spine running parallel to the coast: Mt. Chelmos, called Aroania in ancient times. According to our guide Anna, the headwaters of the legendary Styx are hidden on its bleak slopes.

Turning east, we hugged the opposite side of the Gulf for many hours, stopping at lunch to marvel at the canal now cutting through the isthmus of Corinth. Eventually we passed the site of Corinth itself on a high knob of land overlooking the sea. In ancient times Aphrodite's priestesses serviced sailors there, but later it became a bastion of Ares, a military outpost for whichever forces occupied this part of the world.

In late afternoon we reached the medieval city of Nauplion, with fashionable shopping, a modern hotel (meaning c. 1950), and a postcard view of the bay with its little medieval fort in the harbor built by Venetians guarding their trade routes. The gusty sea breezes blowing into our hotel balcony are delicious.

The Lion Gate of Mycenae

Then the goddess the ox-eyed lady Hera answered:
"Of all cities there are three that are dearest to my own heart:
Argos and Sparta and Mykenai of the wide ways."

Iliad 4.50-52, Lattimore translation

In Ancient Greece Odyssey Part II, I showed you the treasures Heinrich Schliemann found there, which now reside in the Athens National Museum. Now let me show you where they came from. Excerpt from my travel diary:

Today we pay our respects to the stern bastion of Mycenae, a short drive inland from the bay of Nafplion. We head into the surrounding farm country fenced by low hills, punctuated with knobby outcroppings. Orange groves scent the air just outside the city outskirts. As always, the profusion of flowers on banks and meadows is breathtaking, spilling into groves of dusty gray-green olive trees and stands of tall, dark cypress. Soon we take a road leading up into the hills.

Our first stop is the so-called Treasury of Atreus, an empty beehive-shaped tomb that Schliemann, ever the romantic, named for King Agammemnon's legendary father. It's a huge hollow structure covered over with earth and thick grassy turf. The interior is 48' across, 40' tall, not counting a side chamber closed to the public (to my frustration). Massive stones -- the lintel over 1,000 tons -- are a testament to ancient engineering.

They had not come up with arches yet, but relieved the stress on the lintel with a clever trick: a hollow space called a relieving triangle above the door, camouflaged by a thin facade of elaborate stone relief. Archaeologists have found fragments of the facade with its carved decoration: empty bands alternating with stripes of running spirals like those on the stelae of Grave Circle A, plus palmettes. There were also stacked sets of elaborately-decorated half-columns of colored stone, doweled into the doorframe (you can see the holes). Their shaped matched the column on the royal coat of arms seen on the Lion Gate of the main citadel (above).

(Click for larger sized photo)

The colorful facade is long gone, and bees swim in and out through the triangular opening; there are plenty of flowers outside. The tomb is truly a beehive now. It resonates to their humming when the tourists file out, and I can feel the buzzing in my bones.

Before ascending Agammemnon's citadel, we stopped by the museum set discreetly in the slopes below the main site. Those who have not studied pre-Greek civilizations might be surprised by the simple artifacts from the age of Homer's heroes. That's partly due to looting and loss, but also, a close reading of Homer shows that the heroes of the Trojan war prized pots, livestock, pot-stands, cloaks and spears, and gave these as rich gifts. Those were simple times! We also read of King Odysseus leaving his men at the shore on Circe's island and heading into the woods to hunt down a stag to feed them (Od. 10.156). These ancient kings were more like Robin Hood than King Arthur.

On the other hand, many rich grave goods were hauled off by the early excavator of Mycenae, Heinrich Schliemann, and are on display at the Athens National Museum which I explored in Ancient Greece Odyssey Part III.

The Mycenae Museum displays artifacts found in more recent excavations of the citadel and its surroundings: pottery, stone weights once used to anchor the warp-threads of a hanging loom, stylize clay figures of farmers ploughing behind oxen, female figurines (goddesses, worshippers or dolls?) and unusual terracotta snakes. Both snakes and figurines were found in a small cluster of religious buildings within the citadel of Mycenae.

What did these serpents mean? We can only speculate. The Minoan snake-goddesses on Crete, a few centuries earlier, may be connected somehow, but the Mycenaeans weren't the same people; they were mainlanders who conquered the Minoan islanders and adopted some of their art styles and religious practices. The Mycenaeans were the ancestors of classical Greeks, and a few inscriptions naming Mycenaean goddesses have been matched to later Greek goddesses. Athena may be one of them. Beyond that, we can't say much, except to admire these curious offerings.

Likewise, this fragmentary fresco is both familiar and intriguing. Many details are borrowings from the older Minoan civilization's art style, while others are uniquely Mycenaean. The most curious item is the long bronze (?) sword, point-downwards, which one of the two large female figures seems to be holding. The lady facing her is holding a staff -- or spear? The small male figures between them suggest the women are goddesses. Could one goddess be Athena? Is the other goddess a prototype of Demeter, called "the lady of the golden sword" in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter? But Demeter's name hasn't been found in Mycenaean inscriptions, and Athena's isn't certain. They could be other early goddesses who did not survive (or were much changed) in the classical period.

Chris' lecture the night we arrived in Nauplion was about Greek tragedy. We weren't going to be visiting a theater the next day, but rather, a site that had served as the legendary backdrop for some of Greece's most famous dramas: Mycenae.

I won't share with you her commentary about Aeschylus Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles' and Euripides' Electra -- several plays about Agamemmnon's murderously dysfunctional family. There isn't time, and anyway, I shouldn't be giving all Dr. Downing's words away. But let paraphrase some of what she said that evening.



Greek tragedy was based on a long mythic tradition. It was a new method -- a new medium, like the internet -- for telling familiar stories. Chris points out that since the playwrights could count on their audience knowing the story, they could play with the dramatic irony of the characters not knowing.

The stories chosen for Greek drama were usually tangents to epic tradition, dramatizing conflicts within famous families.

The tradition of tragedy arose from a religious ceremony in which a goatskin-wearing chorus performed in honor of (and to entertain?) the god Dionysos. Trag-oidia means, roughly, "goat-song." Originally, there was one chorus leader; once a second leader was the action shifted to dialog between the two. Later, the playwright Sophokles introduced a third actor. The chorus, ostensibly bystanders to the events of the drama, served as commentators and surrogate audience, anticipating and voicing the thoughts of spectators. Much of the play was sung in an operatic style.

Chris reminds us that the window during which Greek tragedy flourished was surprisingly brief: seventy years from Aeschylus' Persians to Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides' Bacchae.

Theater of Dionysos in Athens where Aeschylos, Sophocles, Euripides, and all
the great classical tragedians staged (and usually performed in) their plays.

It was a time of radical turmoil. The old family-centric way of life was giving way to civic duty: the polis (community) now came first. The Persians had been driven off once and for all (dramatized by Aeschylus' Persians performed just eight years after the event in 472 BCE). Athens, basking in its new status as a superpower, embarked on a period of empire-building; Sparta and her allies objected. The Peloponnesian war pitted Greek poleis against each other until Sparta's victory in 404 BCE. In the meantime, Greek philosophy and historical writing were developing, and educated Greeks were coming to understand the difference between storytelling and rational debate.

Greek tragedies reflect these momentous changes. They began as part the religious rituals of a six-day festival of Dionysos, and always remained so. But they also began to challenge everyday assumptions, raise political issues, focus on personal responsibility and self-knowledge, and question the nature of humanity's relationship with the gods.

In the fifth century, each tragedy was performed once, live, for a religious festival and dramatic contest. By the fourth century they were in reruns or read as literature, lifted from their religious and social context.

Scholar Paul Veyne famously asked if the Greeks believed in their gods. We don't know, says Chris, but they seem to have believed in Agammemnon and other heroes.

Up next: Notes on Mycenae, Greek Tragedy, and King Agamemnon!