Venice to Mycenae Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise

Greek civilisation spans more than 2,000 years,

longer than separates the Ancient Britons from television.

It stretches from Mycenae, where Homer's Agamemnon reigned

and was murdered over 3,000 years ago,

to the Parthenon of Athens in the 5th century BC,

the greatest building of its kind in the world.

In the evening of Greek civilisation it reaches

to the Santa Sophia of Istanbul the ancient Constantinople.

These are magnets that draw us to the Greek world again and again.

Today, you can reach Greece and its people in a few hours by air,

but Greece was always meant to be approached by the sea.

And by the sea we all went,

although that involved the Channel crossing

and the continuing rigours

of an overnight journey by train across Europe.

These are some of the rigours.

Venice. One's first destination is inevitably Venice.

After all Venice was, for 1,000 years,

the commercial capital of the Mediterranean.

And in more senses than one was an heir to Greece.

St Mark's, built about the time of our Battle of Hastings,

is a mature child of the Byzantine world which was, at heart, Greek.

And here on St Mark's

are those famous bronze horses of the 4th century BC.

From Greece they were taken to Rome and on to Constantinople

by the Emperor Constantine.

In 1204, they were taken to Venice by those ghastly Venetian crusaders.

In 1797, Napoleon took them to Paris.

And, finally, after Waterloo they went back to Venice.

These much travelled horses

are not merely superb examples of Greek art,

their involuntary wanderings reflect the Greek spirit of adventure.

Everywhere in Venice you find links with Greece,

not many in the pure Greek tradition

but links with Constantinople which began life as the Greek Byzantium

and was the meeting place of Europe and Asia, as indeed it is today.

Then another strand in our Greek theme.

Carved on fortress after fortress all over the Mediterranean

the lion of Saint Mark, proud symbol of Venice.

Partly Greek, partly Persian,

carried hither and thither by soldiers and merchant venturers

and today resting, finally one hopes,

on the column where it's been, war and peace, since 1250.

Even today there are more lions in Venice than in many parts of Africa.

My own memories of Venice go back to the First World War.

And I can't help marvelling at how much of man's glory

has so far survived his own destructiveness.

Venice in 1917,

the great soldier Colleoni had gone into hiding.

The most dramatic equestrian statue in the world.

There's a man for you!

Just look at the fellow.

The splendid brutality of the Middle Ages in every line of him.

In 1917, the Greek horses too were safely put away.

Only the lion of St Mark defied the bombs unshielded.

Today, 40 years later,

you might think that this place was still the centre of the world.

CHURCH BELL CHIMES

To us it's still the familiar picture of the painter Canaletto.

Still the great commercial city,

cashing in on its magnificent conventions and traditions,

behaving as if Venice were a most serene republic still.

The pigeons are an official part of the scene,

a charge upon the municipal rates, eked out by abundant charity.

Tourists feeding the pigeons, touts feeding on the tourists,

and all equally happy.

CHURCH BELL CHIMES

Let us not frown too much on this Venice of the tourists,

true it's wonderful reflections are twisted more often nowadays

by odourous and noisy launches than by the silent gondola.

We may agree nostalgically with the poet who observed,

"Delicious! Ah! What else is like the gondola?"

Yet, with or without the gondola, Venice still looks her part

as an agent bride of the Adriatic.

An illusion, if you like, but an illusion of fairyland.

And now the cruise was taking us into that Adriatic Sea

into which, in the days of her greatness,

Venice was remarried solemnly every year by her Chief Magistrate.

Our ship followed almost exactly

in the wake of the old Venetian crusaders.

There were nearly 300 of us onboard, scholars, students,

people from all walks of life,

drawn to Greece for all sorts of reasons.

I discussed the extraordinary pull that Greece

still seems to have on us with Sir John Wolfenden.

I suppose one of the chief attractions,

the first attraction, is the actual country itself,

mountains, rivers, streams.

But besides that, you know,

there are the things that the Greeks put there as well.

Your temples and statues and theatres,

all those things we're going to see in the next few days.

Well, now, we tourists...

we're going here I suppose with various purposes,

some of us are interested in temples

and some of us are interested in flowers,

but isn't there some force

that draws people to Greece beyond all that,

although they haven't really any Greek or Latin?

I think there is and I think if you really wanted,

and I think it's worth trying to say this though it's not easy,

I think is true to say, don't you, that what the Greeks did

in the questions they raised in their thinking,

the books they wrote, the poetry they wrote,

the experiments in living, political democracy,

-all those things all start there.

-Plato and all that.

Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, wherever you look

in the fields of art or history or political living,

it all starts in Greece.

You don't think we give the Greeks credit for rather too much?

Well, I don't know, I'm prepared to give them credit even today.

It's not very fashionable nowadays to be pro-Greek.

Even in the pro-Ancient Greek sense.

People don't think as much as they used to of the philosophy of Plato.

Wait a minute, you get scientists nowadays

getting up on their hind legs and saying we read Greek,

we're all for humanistic studies and so on.

Is that simply to show their broadmindedness

or is it really a genuine fact?

Well, I would've said again that science starts with the Greeks.

I mean, wherever you look, you start there.

And I would go so far as to say, myself,

if I were really pushed,

that Western civilisation as we talk about it,

including American civilisation,

the whole of Western Europe really when you get down to it,

what it doesn't get from the Bible, it gets from the Ancient Greeks.

-Well, that I will argue with you after dinner.

-All right.

Within 36 hours the ship reached the west coast of the Peloponnese.

We were, quite properly, bound for Olympia for it is at Olympia

that the newcomer most readily finds contact

with that sense of beauty and humanity

that are the basic contributions of Greece to the modern world.

This is what Olympia must have looked like in its heyday.

Here every fourth year, Greeks laid down their arms

and renewed the brotherhood of the civilised Greek world.

Olympia is still being excavated,

much of it still lies buried beneath the dust of ages.

Here by the River Alpheus, among the pine trees,

stood the great Temple of Zeus

and in the middle of the temple one of the seven wonders of the world,

the gold and ivory statue by Phidias.

Alas, it has gone the way of all gold

and so too has the great temple,

its columns thrown down by men or earthquakes.

Before the games, Zeus, father of the gods,

was honoured for a day and a half.

The games themselves lasted for another three and a half days.

The competing athletes were sworn in in front of the temple.

The artist was no less honoured than the athlete.

And the sculptor Phidias had his workshop in the midst of the site.

His work is lost, but we still have the famous Hermes of Praxiteles.

And the complete embodiment of what the Greeks thought beautiful,

the Apollo unruffled, cold and certain.

If any competitor cheated,

he was made to put up a statue at the entrance to the stadium.

The bases of some of the sculptured penalties

remind us that not everything was cricket, even at Olympia.

Of the stadium itself only the starting line is now visible.

Given time and a good digging

the place might soon look much as it was 2,500 years ago.

Back on the ship now bound for Corinth and its canal,

I discussed some of the features of the Olympic Games with

Francis Kinchin Smith of the University of London.

But during the whole of the games

peace was enforced upon the whole of the Greek world, wasn't it?

All war stopped. It was an amazing thing, that.

Over 1,000 years these games were held every four years

and war stopped all over the Greek world.

The games themselves, were they a straight show

or was there a certain amount of, shall we say, cheating?

Before they started they had to swear an oath

that they wouldn't cheat and the judges had to swear an oath

that they would give their decisions fairly and not give any reasons.

-A very good idea.

-A very good idea indeed.

There were one or two spectacular

and, shall I say, rather brutal elements in the games, weren't they?

There's the pankration for example,

I suppose one might describe it as all-in wrestling.

That's a very good modern description.

Yes. You remember the story

of the two pankratiasts in one of the old writers,

they'd fought themselves to a standstill, they lay in heaps

on the ground about three yards apart and they were level,

they were equal. Each had done as much harm as the other.

And finally one of them mustered enough strength to crawl over

to his opponent, to grasp his little toe and to break it.

-He won. He won by a short toe.

-That's a very good story.

But there were other stories of pankration

that were almost...much more brutal than that, you know.

There was the one...

They were allowed to do anything they liked - kick, twist -

except gouge a person's eyes out or bite,

and if they did the umpire had a long stick

and gave them a good whack on the back.

-There was an awful lot of that going on.

-Yes.

It's well to remember that Greece

means different things to different people,

to the Christian scholar it's pre-eminently the scene

of the propagation of the Christian faith.

It was this aspect of Greece

that Mr Pentreath, headmaster of Cheltenham, was lecturing about.

In many cities in Greece

and in Ionia on the west coast of Asia Minor,

we shall, in a sense, be in the footsteps of St Paul.

On this cruise for instance, we shall be where he was at Corinth,

in Athens and at Miletus,

because, of course, Greece was the stepping stone

by which the gospel came to Europe.

At Corinth we can stand where Paul once stood.

You remember, he was brought up

before Gallio the proconsul of the Roman province.

The opposition were frightened of him

and hailed him before the judgement seat.

Well, the archaeologists have given us the judgement seat,

a platform about eight feet high and 30 feet wide.

And there the proconsul would appear from time to time,

in state, sitting more or less on the edge of it

and anyone who had a grievance to make

could confront the Roman proconsul.

So you can imagine Paul

being brought by the Jews and standing before Gallio.

St Paul apart, I find little to get excited about at Corinth.

It's been shaken by earthquakes too often and has rather lost heart.

There is, however, a bit of a very fine temple,

one of the oldest in the Greek world, that of Apollo.

Even in ruin, it gives one a foretaste

of the extraordinary beauty and repose of Greek architecture.

We're now going through the Corinth Canal.

It's impressive to look at and has a curious history.

Its first sod was dug by that many-sided Roman Emperor Nero,

who in the year 67, laid down his fiddle and took up a spade,

a golden one, as befitted the royal occasion.

But he didn't get very far with it.

The canal wasn't completed until the 19th century when the French

and the Greeks finished the job between them.

The ship was making for the east coast of the Peloponnese

for sights made famous by the Homeric legends

long before modern exploration showed

that they're not merely great poetry but also stupendous fact.

The most famous sight of all is Mycenae

and I was talking about Mycenae

to Lord William Taylor, an archaeologist,

and Professor Stanford, Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin.

Now, what about the romance of Mycenae?

Well, for me, Mycenae, I think,

is essentially Homer's Mycenae, rich in gold,

with its great king Agamemnon the Commander-in-Chief

of the forces against the Trojans.

He's a tremendous figure, angry, princely and noble,

the kind of man who's prepared to sacrifice his daughter

to make sure that the army succeeds.

You remember Iphegenia at Aulis. And he's a fascinating figure.

All the more fascinating, I think, because he's so human.

He fights with Achilles, he fights with his troops,

he's going to have his way.

He is the great king of Golden Mycenae.

That's how I see it.

And I rather think when they'd won the Trojan War

after ten dreary years,

he came back to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra.

-He had a hard deal.

-He had a hard deal.

-Yes.

But he was buried nobly, if I'm right.

I think he was buried in what's called the Treasury of Atreus.

-Would you agree?

-I'm afraid I can't agree with that.

In the first place, there is the difficulty of a date.

According to us archaeologists,

we would place the building of the Treasury of Atreus

in the end of the 14th century.

And as the Trojan War

is generally held to take place at the beginning of the 12th century,

there is a considerable gap there.

That's a bit difficult,

but couldn't they have used the old tomb to put Agamemnon into.

They used those tombs more than once, didn't they?

Yes, they were family vaults and were used for two or three generations.

So Agamemnon was really the key

to the excavation of Mycenae, wasn't he?

It was what led the German explorer Schliemann

to excavate at Mycenae,

because before that everybody said it was a myth.

They said the whole Trojan war was a myth.

And Schliemann was the first man

to explode that academic theory.

You remember, he dug those graves near the citadel.

-Or in the citadel rather.

-Yes.

Well, he started inside the citadel and among these graves

there were certain corpses who had over their faces

a gold mask with beautifully modelled features in some cases.

That was the origin of his wire to the Kaiser, wasn't it?

Yes, the first one of those that he discovered,

which is the finest of the masks, led him to send a famous cable

to the Kaiser saying, "I have gazed on the features of Agamemnon."

The matter-of-fact archaeologist won't have that, will he?

Well, that's quite true,

because in effect the face that he gazed on, on the gold mask,

was 300 years earlier than Agamemnon.

Well, there you have it, Stanford.

You can't have it either way, can you?

The German archaeologist was wrong

and Lord William, he's not quite sure that you're right.

Oh, the archaeologist was wrong as an archaeologist,

-but he was not wrong as a literary man, as a lover of Homer.

-No.

I think the difference, essentially, is this,

I see Mycenae in the background of Agamemnon,

the archaeologist sees Agamemnon in the background of Mycenae.

So Mycenae still arouses, shall I say, scholarly passions.

And rightly so, for here we have

the complex beginnings of the Greek tradition.

Here lived over 3,000 years ago the great kings of history and romance.

They traded and raided and brought in treasure and artistry from

the islands and built unknowingly the foundations of Europe.

Some of their mighty tombs

were copied as far away as Ireland and Scotland.

One of their swords is carved upon Stonehenge.

On the rocky slopes merchants had their houses

and peasants tended precarious fields as they do today.

Up on the hill the royal citadel towers over the landscape.

The very stones are of heroic dimensions.

The images carved on them stark and noble.

It was here that the famous German explorer Schliemann

made some of his greatest discoveries.

He'd always believed in the literal truth of the legends

and here in that great circle of upright stones,

he uncovered the tombs of the ancient kings.

Here is one of their tombstones.

And here in 1876, Schliemann found the bodies of the dead.

One with the famous gold mask upon it,

which he thought was Agamemnon's.

With them lay the armoury of heroes,

their swords, the jewellery of their women.

On the highest point of the citadel the persistent climber can still see

the remains of the royal palace with its stone walls and concrete floors.

Below is the rock-cut system for water in case of siege

with its long staircase leading up out of the darkness.

3,000 years ago the countryside must have been much as we see it today.

Greek voices echoed from these walls

for we know now that the builders of Mycenae spoke a Greek tongue

and read a strange kind of Greek script.

"Golden Mycenae" Homer called it.

Today it's a site and a scene and a memory on a heroic pattern.

And as such it dominated our thoughts

long after we'd sailed away towards the Greek islands.

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