Delos to Athens Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise

If our friends, the schoolmasters, hadn't touched them, the Greeks,

like Shakespeare, would still seem as exciting as they really were.

A tiny people, starved by a stony landscape,

but dreaming new things in art, politics and science.

Like all Greek thinking, the Greek gods were clear and objective.

The Greeks kept in touch with them and listened to them

in the way we pick up a telephone or turn on a wireless.

And what they heard was to them no less real or unreal.

The centre of Greek worship,

in a sense the centre of the Greek world, was the island of Delos.

There Delos lies in the Aegean Sea,

untidy with the relics of gods and men.

So sacred it had become that those about to die or give birth

were taken off the island to keep it pure and undefiled.

According to Homer, this was the birthplace of Apollo

and Artemis and to the Temple of Apollo,

the whole wealth of the Greek world attributed.

That wealth has long been scattered

and the centre of the Greek world is desolation.

Sometimes across the desolation, a message comes through.

"I am of the same marble," says the archaic inscription,

both statue and pedestal.

The people of neighbouring Naxos offered Apollo their lions.

These guardians of the holy place have stayed on,

oblivious of the departure of their gods.

In front of the lions, there was a sacred lake.

Today, the lake is a tangled field

and two or three lonely columns merely remind us how decay's

effacing fingers have swept the lines where beauty lingers.

In Delos, too, you were not allowed to look at your own shadow,

lest death strike you within the year. Help!

A sacred mountain still caps the sacred island.

Halfway up, a cleft in the rocks was once a shrine of a rustic kind,

earlier than the formal temples.

When the Greek world declined, Delos,

in its central position, caught the practical eye of the Roman traders.

They arrived with all the machinery of commerce

and Delos the Sacred became Delos the Profane.

Even so, the Roman tradesmen's houses have a certain robust

charm and are well worth looking at.

This prosperous Roman town could even boast of three-storeyed houses.

And one of these, almost a unique survival,

still stands against the hillside below the sacred mountain.

Indeed, today,

when Greek piety on Delos is a mere scatter of marble fragments,

the Roman mercantile quarter is still upstanding and spectacular.

History sometimes a strange and wayward hussy.

The magic of Delos is rooted in a Homeric hymn.

Homer, whoever he or she was, and some dreary people think of him

as a committee, Homer is at our elbow everywhere in the Greek lands.

But how in fact did Homer speak? We don't know.

But Professor Stanford of Dublin, brave fellow, is prepared to guess.

I'd like to give you an example of what I think Homer sounded like

when he was recited in Athens in the 5th century BC.

I can't give you any guarantee whether that was the original

Homeric form, but still, now there are two things to keep in mind.

One is the rhythm, which is in four time - one, two, three, four,

one, two, three, four, and the other is a very peculiar thing.

It's pitch accent - a kind of melody which the poet

can control by marking certain actions on the line.

Now, listen, if it seems quite idiotic, well, blame me, but I think

it has a certain charm, rather like plainsong, or something of that kind.

Now, here are the first five lines of The Odyssey, more or less

I think, as, say, in 450 BC, you would have heard them in Athens.

HE RECITES

Well, Homer may have sounded something like that.

One wonders, too, how the great plays of Ancient Greece came over

to their Greek audiences.

At least we've seen shape of their theatres at Miletus and elsewhere.

Now, here at Epidaurus is the best of them all.

The Greeks were past masters at acoustic contrivance.

This famous theatre still holds 15,000 people and even a stage

whisper could be picked up by the furthest spectator

with the cheapest ticket.

Listen for yourself to these lines of Escalus.

ACTOR RECITES LINES

But all the stones we've been looking at are the mere symbols

and monuments of the people who created and used them.

They tell us nothing about the government of the Greeks,

nor how their society was organised.

Well, how was it organised?

Sir John Wolfenden summed up Plato's ideas

and you'd hardly guess that Plato's been dead this 2,000 years and more.

And it was really in order, I think, to try to disentangle what he was

saying about psychology that Plato moved on to trying to invent

an ideal state. And his description of that is really quite clear.

You've got three layers of people.

Those who are the governors, those who are the executive

and those who are the governed.

And let's be quite clear about this - there is no suggestion here of

democracy in anything like the sense in which we understand the word.

The Greek city state,

all the societies that we know in Greece, were based, as everybody

here knows, fundamentally and primarily, on slavery.

Here, you've got in Plato's ideal picture, three ranks,

three layers, three castes, because that's what they are.

The governors, who are to correspond in the individual to the rational

element in a man's total personality.

And you've got the executive element,

which in the individual corresponds to the will,

what gets things done. And then you've got, very oddly,

the governed, the whole mass of other people,

corresponding in the individual to undifferentiated and rather

unspecific desires, emotions, hopes, ambitions and suchlike.

Now, in a state, the state is well run if the governors govern,

and the executive people execute,

and the people who are governed are content to be governed

and do their job properly, as persons who are governed.

Similarly, in an individual, you've got a rational element,

which directs the whole operation of the personality,

you've got a will, which gets the job done,

and you've got this undifferentiated material of emotions

and desires and ambitions, out of which the rational element,

with the support of the operative element,

gets the total personality fused into one operative human being.

And the essence of it is that each of these three layers,

and each of these three elements in the individual personality,

does its own job and doesn't try to do anybody else's job.

In fact, they fit together into what I suppose is the key word

of most Greek thought and most Greek art, certainly,

and a good deal of Greek living, they all fit together in a harmony,

which literally means 'a fitting together' in Greek.

They all fit together in a harmony where each person,

each element in a person, is doing his or its own proper job

and not aspiring to do anybody else's.

Well, no social mobility, you're not allowed to move out of the lot

to which the Almighty, or Zeus, or whoever it was, called you.

It wasn't Victorian hymn writers who invented the rich man

in his castle and the poor man at his gate.

There they were, rigidly set in those ranks and the education

of each was the one appropriate to doing that particular job right.

Now, if you've got a breakdown of an individual personality, or if you've

got a breakdown in a society, that came

because one of these three ranks, or one of these three parts

of the individual, was not doing its job properly,

so that the harmony broke down.

A rigid caste system, if you like, with the education available

and appropriate for each.

You see, the Greeks had no idea, let's get this clear, of progress.

Certainly not of automatic progress.

If they had any views about it at all, it was the opposite.

That the ideal, the perfect time to have lived was way back

in the days of Kronos

and everything that had happened since was a decadence,

a move downwards.

So, what you've got in real life was a departure from this perfect

society of the three layers, wherever any one of those three layers

tried to do the job of another layer.

And you've got a cyclical motion.

Your ideal situation - which was really aristocracy

and not democracy at all, in our sense of the word -

your ideal situation went bad

if the best men didn't do their job properly.

Then you had a lead into one man - the rule of a monarch -

and then the rule of democracy, in the bad sense,

the rule of the mob,

and that went wrong and resulted in obvious chaos, and you got

back to the rule of the best and your three layers re-established.

That all may sound rather unreal

and a little bit of the study rather than of actual practical politics,

and poor old Plato himself got landed in the situation

which fortunately not many political theorists do get landed in.

He was, in fact, asked to apply his principles in real life

when he was asked to go

and deal with the constitutional crises in Syracuse

and came away from it, twice in fact, wiser, but I'm pretty sure,

a much sadder man because in real life it didn't work.

From Plato's Athens to the modern city is more than a jump in time.

But Greece is still the home of sailors and the challenge

and invitation of the sea is the reality behind ancient

and modern Athens alike.

In the beginning, it was the native harshness of their land that

drove the Greeks to the sea.

It was the sea which made Athens great

and enabled it to fight off the armed might of Persia.

Athens today is a swarming modern city.

For such is the power of its antique threads

that like the emperor's clothes, you see them when they aren't there.

Is it fanciful to suggest the manner of political argument hasn't

changed all that much?

And does it require any imagination to think that the interests

and passions of Greeks have remained much the same over 2,000 years?

A powerful link between ancient

and modern Greece is the Greek Orthodox Church.

We happen to arrive in Athens at the onset of the Greek Easter.

Here, the whole rich panoply of ritual opens vistas of the east,

of Byzantium, where all Greek influence,

including its Christianity, was transmuted,

where the rival Church to Rome was set up in Constantinople.

To the east, the Greeks had carried their power and their glory.

But from the east, the Greeks had taken their price.

THEY SING

Saturday is the last day of the Lenten fast

and all Athens makes for the cathedral square and waits, together

with its king, for the sacred words "Christos anesti", Christ is risen.

RELIGIOUS CHANTING

The next day at the royal palace, as in the last

backstreet of Athens, the Easter lamb is roasted on the spit.

Hard-boiled eggs in crimson shells are knocked against one another

by the king and his guards, as if to symbolise the opening of the tomb.

And so we'd come to Athens very properly, by way of the sea

and looked upon the modern city

and witnessed its greatest religious festival.

It was time to look down on the sprawling uneasy

hive from the vantage of its central citadel.

Down there was the marketplace where Socrates had tried to convince

the Athenians by his dialectic, and St Paul convert them.

There stands the most complete temple in the Classical world.

There, too, is the Portico, rebuilt through American benefaction.

More like a railway station, I'm afraid,

than a respectable antiquity.

But here is a good place from which to look upon

the Acropolis for the first time.

This is a spot to which one ought to come every ten years

of one's life to maintain one's sense of values.

It doesn't take much here to conjure up the material greatness

of Athens, for the essential quality of the stones has remained.

When the Athenians had won their great sea battle of Salamis

against the Persian invader,

they carved these wonderful structures

out of the marble which they hacked from the hills nearby.

The Parthenon, the greatest war memorial in the world.

The building, which with Santa Sophia of Istanbul,

is the triumphant achievement of Greek architecture.

There it stands, greater than anything that's been written

or said about it, a structure that satisfies the mind and the senses.

It's magnificent to look at.

Every line of it is petrified intelligence.

The basis of its construction,

as of so much of the Greek achievement, is mathematics.

Every line of it is calculated.

There's hardly a dead straight line in the building.

The curves and proportions of which it is built are meticulously

thought out, but they're also inspired and vitalised by genius.

For example, the outermost columns are set closer together

to give the eye a feeling of strength

and tranquillity at the crucial corners of the building.

The steps and platform are subtly curved to the same end.

In this great masculine building, the Parthenon,

with its sturdy, direct columns four square upon the rock,

you have pre-eminently the masculine principle in architecture.

And within a stone's throw, there is the feminine

principle in Greek architecture, the Erectheion, with its Caryatids.

Stalwart ladies they are, these Caryatids.

Feminine, but not effeminate.

What Longfellow might have called a noble type of good heroic womanhood.

And the Caryatids,

heroic in sustaining their massive architectural task, are matched

by the feminine quality of the ionic columns which are their partners.

Sharp contrast in their delicacy and elegance to the stern

and muscular Doric pillars of the Parthenon.

On the southern edge of the Acropolis is the famous

Theatre of Dionysus.

Here, the great Greek plays saw the light of day for the first time.

Though much has been added and much has vanished since the days

of Sophocles, the solemnity of the place has not faded away.

These stones are eloquent of the beginnings of modern drama.

The high priest of Dionysus and the magistrates had the best seats,

which bore their styles and titles, to prevent mistakes of protocol.

The front of the stage was carved in Roman times

with the story of the patron god of drama, Dionysus.

And upheld by his rollicking attendant Silenus,

acting the part of Atlas.

However often one returns to Greece, one is confronted afresh

with the versatility of the Greek mind

which could create tragedies that have not lost their truth,

comedies with which we can still laugh,

and sculptures that have not lost their beauty.

Pericles, the master statesman, who adorned the city.

Ideals of manhood, worthy of the gods.

The robust maturity of wise action and reflection.

The gracious dignity and poise of womanhood.

And around it all, that modern city, splashed across the hallowed

landscape without completely indulging it.

A Hellenic cruise is a voyage back into a way of life

and a habit of thought that are ancestral to our own.

The Greek achievement rose and fell.

And rose again.

And was transmuted, finally, into the European tradition.

In a world of change and mortality,

nothing greater has lasted longer than this.

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