Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  For many years, I thought of Hamilton as old-fashioned, as if that could possibly be a flaw in a writer on antiquity. I also had her confused with Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Both women lived on Gramercy Park for a while, and both are beloved and revered for their contributions to culture. Margaret Hamilton had that famous thin face and sharp chin and dark eyebrows (and, in the movie, a green complexion), and in the thumbnail portrait that appears on the back of my crumbling paperback copy of The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton bears a slight resemblance to her (lacking the iconic conical hat).

  But Edith Hamilton was no witch (and, for that matter, neither was Margaret Hamilton). Edith Hamilton began to study Latin with her father when she was seven years old. Her paternal grandmother was an early proponent of education for women. Born in Germany in 1867, Edith grew up in Indiana, where she was homeschooled. She was sent to finishing school in Connecticut (Miss Porter’s) before going abroad and, with her sister, becoming one of the first women to study at the University of Munich. She taught school for a living and did not begin to write about the Greeks until after she had retired as headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School, in Baltimore, when she was fifty-five.

  Edith Hamilton had to be pushed into writing. She began with essays about the Greek tragedians for a theater magazine, and the writing was so lucid and engaging that she was encouraged to do more. Her collection The Greek Way was published in 1930 and was what is known in publishing circles as a sleeper: it sold steadily for years and years and is still in print today. From a lifetime of reading and teaching, Hamilton had digested the literature, in the original language, and could retell the stories in a spare and elegant style, without footnotes or any of the scholarly impedimenta that put off the general reader the same way that subtitles in foreign movies distract an American moviegoer. In Mythology, Hamilton’s collection of Greek and Roman myths, she refers in a brief headnote to the authority she has chosen to follow, and then simply, even kindly, tells the story and offers some interpretation. Her language is clear and her message is illuminating.

  One reason that Hamilton’s work was so popular is that she made an end run around academia. Classicists cannot help being snobs: once you have read something in Greek, a translation is a pale imitation, almost a sacrilege. They would not themselves value the work of Edith Hamilton or Stephen Fry or Rick Riordan—or even of Robert Graves, though his encyclopedic scheme has the earmarks of scholarship. Yet these writers with the common touch are introducing mythology to people who may fall in love with it and go on to read Hesiod in Greek and Ovid in Latin. Something made me register for Classics 355, and whatever it was—those cheesy Hollywood movies at the Lyceum or Classics Illustrated from the rack at the drugstore—the allure of mythology was strong enough to lead me, in college, to that lecture class, which in turn, eventually, led me to Greek and Greece and to Eleusis.

  TEN YEARS OUT OF COLLEGE, having at length lost my virginity, and undergone a revival of interest in mythology, I lit out along the Sacred Way for Eleusis, or Elefsina, as it’s called in modern Greek. I wanted to see the tombs along the route and I hoped to experience something of what it felt like to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Maybe by poking around on the sacred ground itself with my newly acquired modern Greek I could penetrate the mystery. At the least, I thought, I would see something of the countryside outside Athens.

  I had timed my stay in Athens, against Dorothy Gregory’s advice, to coincide with Greek Easter, which fell late that year, in May. I didn’t understand that everything in the capital would be closed—the Greeks go to their ancestral villages or close up shop for days at a time. Wandering around in the Plaka, beneath the Acropolis, I saw a man turning a lamb on a spit in his patch of a backyard, and I longed to fit in somehow and celebrate the season. Perhaps in Elefsina, which in ancient times was sacred to Demeter, I would find something that would connect me to the pagan rites of spring.

  From Athens to Elefsina is fourteen miles, and the Blue Guide, noting that “the first 3 or 4 miles are heavily industrialized and tedious to the pedestrian,” recommended taking a bus. As a child of Cleveland and a former resident of the Garden State, I was not to be put off by “heavily industrialized.” Fourteen miles sounded tedious, though. The Blue Guide mentioned that at Dafni (Δαφνή), six and three-quarters miles outside Athens, there was a monastery famous for its Byzantine mosaics. I decided to take the bus as far as Dafni and walk the Sacred Way from there.

  My Greek language skills at the time were frail, but I was game. The words that most often left my lips were Δεν κατάλαβα (Den katálava)—“I don’t understand.” I would practice what ever question I needed to ask, but unless I got the answer I was hoping for, I didn’t understand. Trying to get information about ferries from Crete to Rhodes, I was bold enough to telephone the equivalent of the port authority in Piraeus, but the man I talked to seemed to expect me to come back from Crete to Piraeus to go to Rhodes. It sounded as if every time I wanted to go somewhere I would have to start all over again. It was frustrating. Ferries existed only if the Greek you were talking to owned the ship or would receive a commission for selling you a ticket. (This was pre-Internet, remember, and the various ferry companies were not organized online for easy browsing.) After getting no satisfaction on the phone, despite having overcome my xenophonophobia (fear of foreign phones), I sought out the information kiosk at the port in Piraeus in person and posed my questions to the man there. I got the same unintelligible (or unacceptable) answer. “Δεν κατάλαβα,” I said. The man’s eyebrows shot up and he said, “I know you!” It was the same man I had spoken to on the phone.

  On my Elefsinian expedition, all my Greek verbs somehow got jammed in the past tense, as if I were stuck in reverse. When I got on the bus, I asked the driver, “You took the Sacred Way to Elefsina?” Somewhat warily, he gave me the downward sideways nod of affirmation. What I saw from the bus window confirmed my suspicion that the Blue Guide exaggerated: suburbs of Athens, some large expanses of old tires, but nothing to compare to Cleveland or Elizabeth, New Jersey. We passed a basilica that I took for the monastery at Dafni—the Greeks on the bus crossed themselves repeatedly—and I got off. The bus driver gave me a quizzical look. “I walked,” I explained. He grinned.

  I walked, all right. I walked for more than an hour before I saw a sign for Dafni. The monastery was a leafy refuge behind a high stone wall. A handmade sign at the entrance said, “Closed Due to Damages from Earthquake.” There had been a major earthquake in the Gulf of Corinth—6.7 on the Richter scale—in 1981, and apparently putting the mosaics back together again was not a priority.

  Although I hadn’t originally set out to visit the monastery and knew nothing about Byzantine mosaics, now that I was here I was not so easily turned away. Often it happens that a milestone, a stage on the journey, a name on the map chosen just to help me find my way somewhere else, becomes a destination in itself. So it was with Dafni. Now that I was here, I wanted in. Someone was on the other side of the wall, watering the garden. I made a racket at the gate with my meager vocabulary—“Kaliméra! Good morning! Is there nobody?”—and started the dogs barking. A man came to the gate, and I launched into a fractured monologue—“I was walking along the Sacred Way, and thought I’d ask for a little water . . .” I must have sounded like the Scarecrow chatting to the Wizard of Oz about running into Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. At least I knew how to say neráki, a little water, the diminutive of neró. The man was not impressed, and sent me over to a parking lot where some people were camping. The monastery, I learned, had been devoid of monks for years and was now a park and picnic site. The campers gave me a little water and asked if I was Finnish. I must have looked very pale.

  “The new highway joins the ancient road in Dafni,” the Blue Guide says. The modern highway, built in the sixties, is the toll road from Athens to Corinth, fifty miles west, and it was not intended for pedestrians. It reminded me of
the FDR Drive, the busy highway along the East Side of Manhattan, which I accidentally rode my bicycle on once when I was new to New York, wobbling, terrified, along the narrow shoulder as traffic hurtled by, inches away from me. I would never make that mistake again. Now traffic whizzed past me on the Sacred Way, and every third vehicle—trucks, taxis, private cars—honked as it bore down on me from behind, shattering my nerves. Many drivers offered me a ride, but I declined. I watched for ancient tombs and instead saw miniature shrines in the shape of churches mounted on posts like rural mailboxes. Each held an icon, a wick in a shallow tin can, a pack of matches, and lamp oil, often in a recycled ouzo bottle. These were memorials to people who had been killed on the highway. It occurred to me, as another truck driver honked and shot past, that I might end up a casualty myself, and there would be nobody to raise a shrine for me.

  I passed what looked like military installations, unphotogenic parcels of land with signs forbidding the taking of photographs (as if). Yellow-and-red triangles stamped with black exclamation points warned of danger ahead. A long, curving hill promised a view from the top: an oil refinery and rusty freighters in the Saronic Gulf, as it turned out. I passed factories that made equipment for telephone poles; stores selling huge assortments of colorful plastic merchandise, like sprinkling cans and laundry baskets; garden shops, where those mini churches were for sale; gas stations; more oil refineries. It was as if I were on the outskirts of some infernal industrial city like Gary, Indiana, except that here and there was a small olive grove. At one point, next to a stoneyard full of marble, there was a tiny working farm with chickens and Holsteins and bales of hay. Next to a convenience store for factory workers was a single ancient marble tomb with an olive tree spreading over it.

  The surface of the Sacred Way was gummy with oil. My sandals had not been broken in when I started on the road, but they were now. My feet were coated with grease and dust. When I got to Elefsina, instead of going straight to the ruins I stopped in a soupermarket—Greeklish for a minimart—and bought a two-liter bottle of water and carried it with me to the ruins in a plastic bag. The sanctuary was not far from the center of town. Inside the gate, I started to sit down, but the Greek in the ticket booth wouldn’t let me rest there. I was bad publicity. So I trudged up the hill behind the ruins and sat in the shade of some pine trees.

  I took a long drink from my bottle of water and then stuck my bare feet in the plastic bag and poured the rest of the water over them. Ah . . . The crinkly plastic held—it did not leak. I suppose I should have had a higher purpose there as I looked out over the sanctuary of Ancient Eleusis and the flat roofs of modern Elefsina to the industrial cranes bending stiffly on the waterfront and the ships with rust to their watermarks and the storied island of Salamis, home of Ajax the Great, but just then I gave thanks for plastic. The word “plastic,” after all, is from the Greek, and its original meaning was innocent enough: malleable, shape-shifting. A zacharoplasteíon (ΖΑΧΑΡΟΠΛΑΣΤΕΙΟΝ) is a pastry shop, or sugar shapery. The Greek for plastic wrap is διάφανη μεμβράνη—diaphanous membrane. Plastic is lightweight and versatile and practically indestructible (which, of course, is also its drawback). It keeps things from going bad. Plastic gets a bad rap. The very refineries I was looking at may have been the source of the plastic bag my feet were soaking in.

  MOST OF WHAT WE KNOW about the Eleusinian Mysteries has been deduced from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is among the earliest writings in Greek. The procession was held in the fall, at harvesttime. Initiates prepared for it in Athens (not the Athens in Ohio). One of the rites was that everyone drank a potion—a kykeón (the modern word means porridge or gruel)—of the sort that Demeter asked for when she came to Eleusis. Worn out by grief for her daughter and disguised as a mortal, she had stopped and sat down by a well. The daughters of the queen came along, and brought her home to their mother, Metanira, who took her on as a nanny to her newborn son. Metanira offered the goddess wine, but she declined and asked instead for barley water with mint, or pennyroyal (in the translation of Thelma Sargent, who was a New Yorker copy editor before my time). Edith Hamilton notes that Demeter requested the same cooling drink that farmers refreshed themselves with in the field. The authors of The Road to Eleusis, a book devoted to penetrating the Eleusinian Mysteries, believe that the active ingredient was “ergot of barley,” a fungus that grows on wild grains. They write, “This potion—an hallucinogen—under the right set and setting, disturbs man’s inner ear and trips astonishing ventriloquistic effects.” The editor/translator of the volume of the Loeb Library devoted to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, H. G. Evelyn-White, writes that the drinking of the potion, whatever it was, was an “act of communion” and “one of the most important pieces of ritual in the Eleusinian mysteries, as commemorating the sorrows of the goddess.”

  As Hamilton reminds us, in her spare and eloquent retelling of the myth, Demeter was one of the suffering gods. When her daughter went missing, she searched all over the earth. None of the gods would tell her what had happened, because it was with the consent of Zeus that Hades, his brother, had nabbed Persephone. Helios, the sun, had seen what happened, and when he told Demeter where her daughter was, and that it had all been arranged between the two brothers, she was so enraged that she left Olympus. No amount of persuasion could bring her back. The gods reminded her that Hades was actually a good catch. He is called Hades after the place where he reigns, the way someone in Shakespeare is called, say, Gloucester, but the god’s real name is Pluto—Πλούτων, from πλούτος, meaning wealth—and he is rich in departed spirits. Think of him as an undertaker: even an undertaker needs a wife. And not all May-December marriages turn out badly.

  Finally, with mankind on the brink of extinction, Zeus agreed to give Demeter’s daughter back. That’s where the pomegranate came into play: having eaten the food of the Underworld, the girl would have to go back there every year. Like her mother, she, too, suffers, because although she returns with the flowers of spring, she is never innocent again.

  Kore has the sweetness of a girl. She does not have much personality—her epithet in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is slim-ankled—but she was popular: the hymn provides a catalogue of the friends who were out there picking flowers with her the day Hades swooped in. Her freshness is inspiring, enviable. I thought of Kore/Persephone when I read Anne of Green Gables while visiting Prince Edward Island, where most of the Anne books by Lucy Maud Montgomery are set. Sometimes when I am on a grassy trail through a meadow bordered by roses, with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod waving in the breeze, I can still feel some of the freshness of a young girl’s response to spring. But a girl has to grow up, right?

  Perhaps the initiates, too, freshened up before entering the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis. I climbed down from the piney hill and started up the home stretch of the Sacred Way. In ancient times, I would have been in a crowd of excited Greeks of all classes. The only other people here now, however, were a party of French tourists. I envied them because they had someone telling them about the rocks, interpreting for them. I was an archaeological illiterate. But here is what I saw, armed with the Blue Guide: The well by which Demeter sat down when she came to Eleusis was still here. Broad, shallow marble steps rose to a propylaeum, or forecourt, and turned in toward the hill. Poppies and broom and sea lavender bloomed among the ruins. On my right was the Cave of Hades, a natural grotto in the hillside. This may have been where Persephone, as she might be called once she is Queen of the Underworld, emerged, blinking, in the spring. It’s not explicit in the myth, but she must have been pregnant, because she was raped by a god, and gods can’t not be potent. (The place of her rape has been associated with a field in Sicily.) Here were temples to Aphrodite and Poseidon. Past several lobbies where perhaps souvenirs were sold, or people gathered as in any lobby before an event, at the very end of the Sacred Way, was the holiest place: the Hall of the Initiates, a square space, roofless now, the floor paved with slabs of stone, befo
re bleacher-like stands cut into the rocky hillside.

  This is where it happened, whatever it was. Arriving at the inner sanctum, the initiates would not have seen as many gas stations or as much rust as I did. They would have passed a field of grain at harvesttime. Pausanias, touring Eleusis in the first century AD, wrote, “Here they show you Triptolemos’s threshing-floor and altar.” Triptolemos, a prince of Eleusis, was the first, Pausanias says, to “sow cultivated grain.” This was written almost two thousand years ago, but as little as two hundred years ago, in 1801, the site was still a center of worship of Demeter. That year, an enterprising and unscrupulous traveler from England, one E. D. Clarke, made off with a two-ton kistophoros—a feminine statue resembling a caryatid holding a basket on her head—against the protests of the villagers. Peter Levi, in his notes to Pausanias, writes that “an ox ran up, butted the statue repeatedly, and fled bellowing.” Clarke’s treasure sank in a shipwreck off Beachy Head, in East Sussex, England. The statue from the sanctuary of Demeter was eventually salvaged and installed in Cambridge.

  In the years since my pilgrimage to Elefsina, I have learned that back in the sixties and seventies, when Greece was governed by a right-wing junta whose members were known as the Colonels, there was a flowering of petroleum refineries and other polluting industries in the Gulf of Salamis, at the foot of the city sacred to agriculture. Elefsina has long had a reputation among Greeks as the city that was ruined by industrial development. It is as if the whole region had been raped, despoiled, sacrificed. Talk about having to accept death in the midst of life. A plastic bag is handy, but can it really have been worth it to trade off the sanctuary of the goddess of agriculture for plastic? I had the feeling, standing in the Hall of the Initiates, under the hillside that protected the site, that Demeter had left the building.