The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  So we stand silent at the top of the stairs. It is a solemn moment. Alexandros sticks a finger in the air and points to the left. We all turn our heads: the valley leading to the sea, and behind it Mount Ida with a white cap of snow on its peak. “That’s where the Cave of Zeus was. Halfway up the mountain.” And there it is, halfway up the mountain—a dark blue spot like the splinter of a mirror. Alexandros points in front of himself: “And there Zeus was born.” That is already not as clear. The place of birth is veiled by a chain of mountains. That’s why you have to believe.

  Ah, Alexandros, Alexandros, if you were always at my side I could move mountains. I would teach the petty and self-satisfied obedience to the gods. We might do extraordinary things—make a covenant across time, reconcile the dead with the living.

  Now Alexandros stands at the top of the stairs. We are all silent. I can see that Alexandros is a charioteer. The stone chariot of his Phaestos halted for a moment.

  AGAIN I SIT IN little Venizelou square in Heraklion looking at the Morosini fountain. I order my notes and impressions. I would like to answer the question of what Crete means to me, what moved me most here.

  There is no path to the world but the path of compassion.

  The remains of the empire, of great castles and capitals do not move one as much as the ruins of Minoan palaces. It seems that the hubris of great civilizations was foreign to the inhabitants of ancient Crete. They did not tempt fate. They strove to endure in their separateness and in their delusional sense of security. It is as if the unleashed elements were too great and cruel in proportion to what they destroyed. Their ruins are the ruins of a cradle, the ruins of a child’s room.

  Departure

  A DOZEN OR SO kilometers east of Heraklion is the airport—a big meadow without goats or sheep.

  The plane flies over the sea the whole way; from up high it looks hard as carbonized rock. We drag a gray shadow like an anchor behind us. The Cyclades. The islands below are like the tawny skins of wild animals flung on the waves.

  ATTEMPT AT A DESCRIPTION OF THE GREEK LANDSCAPE

  For Magda and Zbyszek Czajkowski

  I WENT TO GREECE to encounter the landscape. One can make a perfectly good study of Greek art in European museums. The humid night on board a ship sailing the classic route from Brindisi1 to Piraeus was filled with questions about the color of the sky, the sea, and the mountains.

  I thought it would be a continuation of the Italian landscape. But by morning, when the first islands began to appear on the horizon, then the steep coast of the Peloponnesus and finally the Bay of Corinth, I understood that it was given to me to know something I would not be able to compare with anything else.

  It is a landscape that by its very own nature defies description. It is impossible to find a place that would be even an approximation to a sum, a synthesis of the traveler’s visual experience, impossible to cut from that tangle of blue sky, mountain, water, air, and light a single view and say: that is Greece. Of course, you can say that is the way it always is with a varied landscape, but here we have to do not only with a wealth of variety. One of the most powerful experiences I kept having in Greece was the sensation of movement, as if my eyes were constantly being opened to the painful drama of the earth’s birth.

  Mountains ought to saturate the landscape with a majestic silence. But unlike the Alps, we have here a hectic piling up, a clash of land masses, sharp ravines, sudden passes, and between them valleys, rarely broad, most often narrow, serpentine. Force and violence have written their names on the precipitous slopes.

  The geologist says: the limestone and dolomite prevalent in Greece are evidence that for hundreds of millions of years the land was submerged by the sea called Tethys. This sea divided the northern land mass called Angara (Central Europe, Asia, North America) from the southern mass Gondwana (Africa, South Asia, and South America). The Mediterranean is what is left of ancient Tethys.

  From its depths the Greece of today rose up by force of volcanic explosions. The contours of the lands and seas were only formed in the last age of the earth’s history. It is one of the most seismically unstable regions of our globe. On the peninsula and on the Hellenic islands there have been over 300 earthquakes in recorded history.

  You see the sea from almost every elevation. It closes off the horizon with a flat line which should have a calming effect. But even when it is peaceful, when it is not assaulting the land, its deep color reminds us that it is an abyss covered with a mirror.

  Whoever comes here with the palette of an Italian landscape painter will have to abandon all sweet colors. The earth is burnt by the sun, parched from drought, it has the color of bright ash, sometimes of gray violet or violent red. The landscape is not only before your eyes but beside you, behind you, you feel its intrusion, its siege, its intense presence. Tall trees are rare; occasionally a loftly oak—the Zeus of trees. Clumps of greenery cling to the slopes, small bushes stubbornly struggling to survive. On the roads, on gentler hills, the wild olive tree with its slender leaves mobile as fingers, silver-green underneath. Low against the earth, thyme and mint—the aromas of heat.

  Between light and shadow a sharp line cut by a diamond, without the whole scale of gray and half-shadow known from the countries of the North. The Greeks covered the stones of their temples with murals in order not to go blind. But before their sanctuaries rose up in the sun, Greece’s heart was already beating under the earth. One must begin one’s wanderings from caves, labyrinths, and crevices.

  This will be an attempt to describe the landscape and its apparently direct results.

  I

  THE VILLAGE IS CALLED Psychro. It is situated at the foot of one of the highest mountains on Crete—Dikte2. The guide, a tall dark peasant, awaits the few arrivals; he leads them by a sharp serpentine trail up the mountain, up to the place where the cave opens that according to legend is where Zeus was born.

  The sun-drenched mountain slope suddenly opens into a hole as black as coal. The guide lights candles. The downward gradient is steep. After only a few steps the darkness thickens; one is seized by the cold and the penetrating stony moisture. Black stalactites—the colonnade of a mad architect—narrow corridors and crannies strengthen an impression of the moist, biological mystery of birth.

  The cave is divided into two parts, of which the larger was the site of sacrifice. There are remains of something in which archaeologists can make out traces of an altar. Natural steps lead to the other part, laid out a few dozen meters deeper, at the bottom of which dark water has frozen. Here ex vota have been discovered which date to the Minoan and Mycenean ages.

  When you descend all the way down to the small subterranean lake, which reflects the candlelight as solidly as black marble, the darkness thickens, tightens around the body, more and more material, suffocating, until you want to scare off its menacing presence with a cry.

  Why was this place of all places chosen as the cradle of the god of the heavens? Shouldn’t he have been born on a mountaintop or in a wide valley filled with sunlight? Why was his origin stuffed into the depths of a cavern?

  Greek religion was a synthesis of earth and heaven. It absorbed what came before the Greeks—Cretan, Asiatic, Egyptian elements. It assimilated the old Mediterranean tradition of agricultural cults with their powerful mark of mysticism, their whole pleiade of earth goddesses and Great Mother—patroness of fertility and the harvest. Zeus—seemingly the most Greek of the Greek gods—was not free of these influences. Born in a cleft of earth, raised by the nymph or goat Amalthea, he was initially a secondary god. His later cult and enthronement on Olympus is connected with the new Greek religious current introduced by shepherds (not farmers). A feature of that cult was, if not the disappearance, then certainly the limitation of the mystical agrarian principle, and a domination of male gods, the transference of the seat of the world rulers from the depths of the earth to the heavenly spheres. The Cave of Zeus (Diktaíon antron) is the dark cradle of a new world religion.

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nbsp; To leave the cave is to be liberated from oppressive darkness. Before one’s eyes lies the great Lassithi plain—the joyous geometry of cultivated fields. The outstretched canvas wings of windmills like white sunflowers turn in the sun. An intense shimmering of white, yellow, green. The valley of life is surrounded on all sides by a chain of barren mountains.

  II

  ON MAPS EPIDAUROS IS placed—God knows why—on the sea coast. In fact it is a three-hour walk away from the coast. Before you enter the sanctuary of Asklepios you have to pass through a green forecourt, a garden of tall trees and luscious green grass implausible in this burnt country. There is probably not a corner of land in all of Greece better suited to be the site of a cult of the most kindly god of Greek Olympus, who, as the sculptors portray him, smiled and laid a healing hand on the bodies of the afflicted, the sick and those seeking aid.

  The sanctuary is expansive; on thick grass in the shade of trees the remains of altars, porticoes, and temples are strewn. The most interesting and enigmatic structure is the thólos3—placed near the temple of Asklepios. It was a richly ornamented rotunda in multicolored limestone and marble, held up by two circles of columns (26 Doric columns on the outside and 14 Corinthian columns forming the inner circle). The true enigma is the deep labyrinth under the thólos, its convoluted subterranean part.

  A cross-section of this labyrinth reminds one of a molehill. It is known that amphibians and subterranean animals were for the Greeks an embodiment of chtonic powers. Before Asklepios took on his gentle human face, he was a mole. The labyrinth under the thólos in sunny Epidauros is the dark root of this myth.

  The ritual to which the sick awaiting the god’s help were subjected was straightforward. After making a sacrifice they were led to the temple, where they were supposed to spend the night on the still bloody hides of the sacrificial animals. The most important part of the treatment was incubation—a waiting for sleep, during which the god entered into direct contact with the patient. Beforehand fasting and abstinence were recommended, to ensure maximally favorable conditions of incubation.

  The number of sick who visited Epidauros at any given time could reach eight hundred. Not until the third century B.C. was the portico—serving as a kind of forecourt to the temple—enlarged. The nearest village was an hour’s travel away. Pilgrims then slept sub Iove4. Only in the second century B.C. was an inn built for them.

  The writings of ancient authors do not say much about Epidauros. The classics were not very interested in personal matters, and they do not seem to have paid much attention to the little ailments of little people. We are left with the immedate sources—ex vota—thanksgiving inscriptions, but the most recent scholars maintain a great reserve toward them.

  For it is hard to believe—even with all the respect due to miracles—in the five-year pregnancy of Cleo, ending in a happy issue, after which the daughter thus brought into the world bathed herself in the spring and, to top it all off, went for a stroll with her gladdened mother. It is easier to believe in the cure of a mute girl, who gave a cry of fright at the sight of a snake and began to talk. (Epidauros and its surroundings are plentiful in big gentle yellow snakes—helpers of Asklepios—that slither around everywhere and nest in the incubatorium). The tales told by the grateful inscriptions are not without humor and charm. One slave smashed his master’s favorite bowl. Terrified, he made his way to Epidauros with the shards of the valuable dish in a bag. And that time the good Asklepios healed a bowl.

  Probably the accidents and illnesses of Asklepios’s patients were varied and not always delusional. It happened that people fell gravely ill, as a silent gallery of human body parts sculptured in stone and offered to the god testifies.

  It seems right to assume that the smiling Asklepios’s therapy was based on a sensible combination of dietetics and hygiene that had nothing to do with magic. The god recommended people to protect their heads from the sun, drink milk with honey as a laxative, go for walks, keep the body clean. “Klinatas of Thebes,” says one of the inscriptions, “had a vast number of fleas on his whole body; he went to the hieron5, where he had the following vision: he dreamt that the god undressed him, took a brush and cleaned his body of fleas. The next day Klinatas left the incubatorium cured.”

  It is generally thought that Greek medicine was born in a temple. But there is much evidence to suggest that both disciplines—miracle-working and medical science—developed independently, in conditions of what one might call peaceful coexistence. After all, Hippocrates, the precursor of psychotherapy, who warned people of charlatans, recommended sacrifices and prayers, especially against melancholia and nightmares. The Asklepion6 in Epidauros had an array of branches in many Greek cities and we know that in the Athenian branch, priest and doctor worked side by side. No, Aristophanes can’t be right to laugh at Greek physicians. Comedy and its indispensable exaggeration is not the best source of information on the problems of the age. Asklepios was not the god of charlatans, that much is certain.

  From Greece the cult of Asklepios migrated to Rome, where it was subject to vulgarization and contamination by the magical practices of Egypt and Asia. It received its first pure form—though this seems paradoxical—in Christian times. The graves of martyrs began to serve the function of incubators. The names changed, but the method employed by the saints—Tekla of Seleucis, John of Egypt, and Cosmo and Damian—remained fundamentally the same.

  In Epidauros one finds the finest theater of the ancient world. Its place right next to the temple of Asklepios appears to be evidence of the healing role of Greek drama.

  No one managed better than the Greeks to make architecture part of the landscape, its complement and crown. If the temple can be compared to a grove of trees, the theater is reminiscent of a rocky hollow. The architect did not grove into nature with blunt geometry and cold scales. The theater in Epidauros, its back leaning against the side of a mountain, is a work worthy of the Parthenon.

  To avoid monotony of rhythm, subtle optical corrections were used here, much as on the Acropolis. The half circle of the audience is divided into two parts by a passageway called the diazoma. The upper part of the audience seats lean at a different angle, steeper than the lower part. In turn, the lower part of the koilon7 does not form a concentric circle in relation to the orchestra8, as if the intention were to soften the meeting of two similar geometrical figures.

  The guides rip paper and whisper in the half circle of the stage to demonstrate the perfect acoustics of the construction. When it quiets down, you have to plunge into the hot stone and abandon yourself to the eternal festival of mountains, trees, and clouds. A few dozen kilometers away you can see the Argolian plain, rumpled with hills becoming gentler with the presentiment of the nearby sea.

  III

  “HERE IS MYCENAE9 RICH in gold and the blood-stained palace of the Pelopides.”

  The remains of the gold are now in the museum in Athens. The palace is more like a gloomy fortress. Only blood and stones are left. When the avenue suddenly makes a turn, the Greek capital of crime rises up before one’s eyes. Even if we carry but a modest load of mythological memory, Mycenae makes the irresistible impression of a place haunted by tragedy.

  The acropolis has the shape of a clumsily drawn triangle with a foundation about two hundred meters high and sides three hundred meters long, erected on a hump of earth, surrounded by Cyclopian walls. On both sides steep gorges separate the fortress from the bare neighboring slopes.

  The whole gives the impression of a stern immensity, although Mycenae’s strength does not lie in gigantic dimensions. The violent sculpture of the terrain makes everything look bigger than it really is. The landscape is wild, closed in on itself. The sky, ripped by the tops of mountains, hangs over Mycenae like a solidified cloud of misfortune.

  The Cyclopian walls are a masterpiece of construction; they have withstood history’s intruding hordes for three and a half thousand years. Their name is apt, because they seem more a work of nature than of man. T
hey look like cliffs carried by the forehead of a glacier into this narrow, cleft valley, closed off on two sides by mountains.

  The anonymous builders of the Mycenaean walls were certainly architects of genius. They had a knowledge of the nature of stone for which one cannot find many comparisons. The blocks only seem uncut, their sides are uneven. The crevices are filled with smaller stones which ensure that the construction has elasticity, a natural musculature, which explains the mystery of its longevity.

  Genius loci describes exactly what we know about the rulers of Mycenae.

  Bands of Achaians, the first Indo-European invaders of Hellas, began to reach Greece from 2000 B.C. They quickly conquered the Peloponnesian peninsula. Their wolfish appetites drove them farther south—to Crete, which dazzled the barbarians. A hybrid civilization emerged, linking elements as alien as fire and water—the Nordic and the Mediterranean. Virtually all of the art mineur of Mycenae is copied from Aegean art. Refined goldsmiths’ work with masterly lines, rhytons with dove motifs (in a place which make you think of vultures), rustling necklaces of goldleaf—it all evokes the sweetness of Mycenaean feudal life. For that reason you have to enter deep into the ring of thick walls, smashed houses, the cramped and probably dark palace, the grim circular burial place inside the fortress, to grasp the abyss that lies between this citadel dragged down from the North and the sunny palaces of the Cretans.

  The Achaians undertook looting expeditions on a truly Norman scale, taking in Asia Minor (not just Troy, for even Hittite texts preserve their name), Crete, Italy. They returned with livestock, gold, and slaves. They slammed the Gate of Lions, whose bas-relief could frighten off anyone who came seeking justice. It has been rightly observed that the map of Greek heroic myths (the causes of war underwent a poetic sublimation in mythology) is in exact accordance with the Mycenaean centers.