In the Fall of 1939, Henry Miller left his home in Paris and went to visit his friend Lawrence Durrell in Greece. He met a bibliographer and brilliant storyteller named George Katsimbalis and he wrote a travelogue about this stay there that was published in 1941. Miller always considered it to be his finest book and I can’t disagree. Although he was famous for The Tropic of Cancer, The Tropic of Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion, that was mostly because they were banned for being obscene. I have never read an author in greater need of editing.
The book the Henry Miller wrote about his travels in Greece was called The Colossus of Maroussi (which is what he named Mr. Katsimbalis)and George Orwell thought it was a great piece of writing. Like all of Miller’s works, it exhibits an absolute lack of control over where it is going, but it has a fascinating section about a visit that he and Katsimbalis made to the ruins of Mycenae in the plain of Argos. Mycenae is the walled city that was called by Homer the home of Agamemnon, the Greek King of Kings, who led the(possibly mythical, but I doubt it) invasion of Troy, across the Aegean Sea in what is today Turkey. The story is the basis of both of Homer’s epics: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both Troy and Mycenae were “excavated” in the late 19thcentury by the wealthy amateur Heinrich Schliemann, which led to the discovery that there actually was a Mycenean Greek civilization and a real Troy and, possibly, an Agamemnon. The grave that Schliemann exhumed at Mycenae – in the famous grave circle –produced a golden death mask that is proudly displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. It is not, alas, the mask of Agamemnon, although Schliemann proclaimed that it was, electrifying the world and launching archaeology in a fairly major way (it always helps to find gold).Nonetheless, Mycenae has become, for the world, the centre piece of the heroic age of Greece, the age of Achilles, Helen, Paris, Odysseus, Menelaus, Priam, and Hector.
Miller’s knowledge of even this limited background of the ruin and its cultural heritage and meaning is highly questionable. He says in the section of the book about Mycenae: “My book knowledge is nil. I can look on this mass of rubble with the eyes of a savage.” But this may be partially a dramatic stance, because he is aware of a number of physical icons from the Mycenean era: “these ruins, the scattered relics in museums, a sword, an axle, a helmet, a death mask of beaten gold, a beehive tomb, an heraldic lion carved in stone, an exquisite drinking vase.” And yet, he has some fascinating things to say about his experience and I will quote a few passages at length from the book:
“It was still early morning when we slipped through the lion’s gate. No sign of a guardian about. Not a soul insight. The sun is steadily rising and everything is clearly exposed to view. And yet we proceed timidly, cautiously, fearing we know not what. Here and there are open pits looking ominously smooth and slimy. We walk between the huge slabs of stone that form the circular enclosure. . . . I am amazed at the diminutive proportions of the palace chambers, of the dwelling places up above. What colossal walls to protect a mere handful of people!”
“The gods stride forth over the sunlit swards, full-statured, fearless, the gaze frighteningly candid and open. A world of light is born. Man looks at man with new eyes. He is awed, smitten by his own gleaming image reflected everywhere.”
“I feel like a cockroach crawling about amidst dismantled splendors. It is hard to believe that somewhere back in the leaves and branches of the great genealogical tree of life my progenitors knew this spot, asked the same questions, fell back senseless into the void, were swallowed up and left no trace of thought save these ruins. … I stand at the summit of the walled citadel and in the early morning I feel the approach of the cold breath from the shaggy gray mountain towering above us.”
“We of the New World, with millions of acres lying waste and millions unfed, unwashed, unsheltered, we who dig in the earth, who work, eat, sleep, love, walk, ride, fight, buy, sell and murder there below ground, are we going the same way?”
Clearly Miller was deeply moved by the experience, the imagined life experience of the Mycenean people, their sudden, total extinction and the lesson for our struggling civilization. But there was one further experience to come. He and his new friend stumbled on an unusual survivor from 12th century BC – the stairway down to the walled city’s water cistern.
“We have just come up from the slippery staircase, Katsimbalis and I. We have not descended it, only peered down with lighted matches. The heavy roof is buckling with the weight of time.… Katsimbalis was for crawling down on all fours … ‘We don’t want to miss this,’ he pleads. But I refused to go back down into that slimy well of horrors. Not if there were a pot of gold to be filched would I make the descent. I want to see the sky, the big birds, the short grass, the waves of blinding light, the swamp mist over the plain.”
Whatever Miller sensed was down that (indeed) “slippery staircase,” (and it is still there) filled him with horror and nothing would make him go down there. A number of writers have suggested that Miller had tuned into the spirit of the age of the ancient Greeks and their agony over the brevity of life and the violence of warrior death. Perhaps so. But perhaps so, in ways that would never have occurred to Miller because of the timing of his visit.
Mycenae had its moment of fame during the archeological frenzies that accompanied its various excavations in the late 19century. By the time that Miller got there, it was deserted, except for a solitary guard who showed up late for work some days. Miller and Katsimbalis spent an entire morning there without seeing another soul.
When we visited in 2018, Mycenae was crawling. The area that was paved as a parking lot for the tour buses was larger than the site we had come to visit and it was full of tour buses. And this was in May – off season, as it is laughingly called. This was the same wherever we went (except for the Museums). Delphi was jammed and had lost much of its lustre; the Parthenon was mobbed and largely inaccessible to preserve it from the tourists. There was a sense of unreality about the fact that the Korai (columns in the shapes of women that make up the Maiden Porch of the Erectheum) were copies and the originals had been removed because the acid rain of Athens had been melting them down. It was thrilling to be there again but there was lingering sense of diminishment and loss, and the knowledge that it was only going to get worse.
Et ego in Arcadia
I had first been to Greece in the Spring of 1974. On my own in Ancient Greece. Doing it on the cheap, which was not hard then. A drachma was worth about 3 cents Canadian. I had finished McGill and was doing a Masters at Bishop’s and a small family legacy came my way and paid for most of the trip. I really hadn’t a clue what I was doing – I had yet to read my first Greek Tragedy (something that I was going to end up teaching for 25 years). I was more than a little like Henry Miller, in that sense.
I was there in the last year of the Colonels and the feel of military rule was everywhere, but my knowledge of politics, especially Greek politics was negligible. I remember going to a cinema in Athens to see, of all things, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, in English with Greek subtitles. It was terrifically funny but no one else seemed to get the humour, the audience was silent throughout. Then came the ending with Charlie’s plea for truth and democracy and the audience suddenly came to their feet applauding and openly weeping. Then I began to understand what was going on all around me. Once, in a restaurant whose street front wall was all glass, I realized, in the middle of a meal, that everyone else in the restaurant was in uniform. A few minutes later a car backfired on the street outside and I found myself the only one not crouching on the floor, under the tables. The Colonels did not last much longer.
I had friends who lived in Athens and I followed their suggestions as to where to visit. As a result, I went to quite a few places that tourists did not visit – then or now. I saw Rhodes and got to see the Vale of the Butterflies. I was taken to the island of Aegina and to the shrine of Aigios Nectarios and listened to his heart beat in the stone sarcophagus. I got to visit Hydra where my idol at the time, Leonard Cohen, had lived and written and I got lost on the island and ended up in a tiny local taverna where I first tasted the local retsina in a tin mug. I went to the Plaka, I wandered the Acropolis, walking wherever I wanted, in and out of the Parthenon and the Erecthium and there was a maximum of 5 or 6 other tourists there on that whole morning. The only taste that I had of what was to come was a visit to Syntagma square.
I sat and had an ouzo which came with (of course) olives and peppers and a slice of bread that carried the dirty thumbprint of the waiter who had cut it – in those days you bought bread by the slice. At the next table there was an American student, loudly trying to sell his spear fishing gear in order to help pay for his ticket home. A faint, warm wind was beginning to blow from the west. I took a bus to Nafplion (the old capital of Greece when it was newly liberated from the Turks) and had dinner by the water. I was told that I should go down to the pier where the fishermen were landing their catch for the day and pick a fish for my dinner and it would be brought back for me to the Taverna and cooked and served. And it was so.
On my way back to Athens by bus I had a layover for a couple of hours at Argos. I needed a piss and got a gestural signal that the “bathroom” was in the back – and so it was. It consisted, in fact, in a pair of shoe outlines over a hole that opened into the sewer below. The shoe indentations faced both ways. No stalls, no walls, just a hole. After that experience I decided to treat myself to an adventure. I found a taxi driver who spoke a sort of English and said that his cousin owned a restaurant in Montreal (everyone who I spoke with in Greece had a cousin who had a restaurant in Montreal). He agreed that for a certain amount of money he would drive me up to the ancient Mycenean citadel of Argos and wait an hour while I looked around and then bring me back to the bus station. We did that and I had Argos for myself for an hour. It had never been excavated so it meant little to me, historically, but I had my own Ancient Greek ruin for an hour. The taxi driver became my tour guide and told me that he had been in the Greek resistance during WW2. He said that they would hit a target in the industrial town of Argos and then the Nazis would chase them up here; that there were tunnels that led towards the seacoast and that they would re-emerge in Nafplion for dinner. Of course I believed him.
The highlight of the whole trip was a visit for a couple of days to Crete. I flew from Athens and the flight was a terrifying battle between drunken passengers and a lone stewardess over seatbelts and lit cigarettes. When I landed (just at dawn) I made my way to the ancient city of Knossos outside Heraklion. Knossos (the current version) is older than Mycenae and was abandoned sometime between 1380 and 1100 bce. At one time it had had as many as 100,000 inhabitants. The city was destroyed either by fire or earthquake, or both and was uncovered and partially restored by Arthur Evans, who estimated that the site had been occupied since at least 8000 bce making it much older than the Myceneans, but that in its last years it was occupied by those Myceneans and was destroyed around the same time that Mycenae fell.
Evans spent a fortune and a lifetime on Knossos and not only excavated it but also “creatively” restored parts of it, primarily a few porticos, many mosaics and the palace complex containing the king’s and queen’s megarons and the throne room. Using recovered fragments, the entire surviving throne and the measurement of pillar bases (and a lot of concrete) Evan’s recreations are amazing feats. In addition to giving us an ancient world to look upon they succeeded in preserving the excavations from torrential rains and several (smallish) earthquakes. Evans has been mocked for a few errors but he has given the world an astonishing visual sample of an extremely sophisticated civilization that most people have probably never even heard of.
When I visited the site and the attached museum, there was only one other tourist, that I saw. There were absolutely no restrictions as to where we could walk. Everywhere was open to see, and touch. I even had the experience of sitting on the throne of King Minos and visiting the Queen’s megaron and seeing the evidence or a running water system with a flush toilet.
I have not been back and I’m not sure that I would want to go. Now everything is roped off, inaccessible, mobbed with crowds that comprehend very little, take excessive selfies and seem to feel that it is much more important to take pictures than it is to LOOK. They are there because they have the funds to be able to be there and it is a thing to do.
You don’t know what you got…
What has happened? Why did the garden city world of unwalled Crete and the Mycenean world with its Cyclopean walls both vanish and leave us only ruins to uncover, excavate, rebuild and wonder about. There is an answer and for a complete version of it I will refer you to a book called “1177 B.C.: The Year that Civilization Collapsed” by Eric Cline. The short version is that at the height of the Bronze Age society – in Egypt, Mycenean Greece, Crete, The Hittite Empire and elsewhere; probably the first example of “globalization,” a series of catastrophes struck. There were plagues, natural disasters (earthquakes, fires, droughts, floods), attempted coups and finally, from somewhere in the west, came the Sea People. Everything that came before them had weakened the structure and it all collapsed under their assault. Everyone seems to have been swept away, with the exception of Egypt, which hung on by its fingernails. Then the Sea people were gone as well without leaving any record behind.
We know almost nothing about them except their destructive capabilities. We don’t know where they came from or where they went. The Egyptians had a number of names for them, but they are just unrecognized names, they do not enlighten. The wind blew them in and they blew the Bronze age away.
What has happened in the last half of the 20century and the first quarter of this century is vaguely similar. A wind of wealth beyond need has swept peoples from all of the wealthy parts of the world onto the ruins and memorials of that same bronze age and they are being ground down under the weight. All around the Mediterranean world (and probably elsewhere) the monuments of past ages are being ground down by touching, stealing, vandalism (a man recently chopped off one of the toes of the statue of David, in the museum, under the gaze of tourists and guards – a statue that had stood for over 400 years unharmed in a civic square) and most of all the sheer bulk and weight of vast numbers. The last time I was in the Papal Museum I was literally carried through four large rooms in a row by a surging crowd. And the authorities seem to wallow in it, it is tourist money that seems to sustain them. The Greeks are poor and this is their greatest source of income. They are even seriously considering paving the top of the Acropolis to accommodate them.
The new Sea People are here, and we are them.
