The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  Professor Kaya Caprioglio argues, as I think powerfully, from this evidence that Zeus’s partner on this occasion can only be Amphitryon’s wife Alcmena and that the scene represents the act of procreation of the greatest of Grecian heroes, Hercules. ‘Zeus,’ as Robert Graves puts it, ‘honoured her so highly that, instead of roughly violating her, he disguised himself as Amphitryon and wooed her with affectionate words and caresses.’ Zeus did not, as Professor Caprioglio points out, appear to any other of his many loves in human form, and the mask in the Salamis representation is intended, in the professor’s view, to show that the form adopted by Zeus on this occasion is not only human but specifically so, the face revealed being that of Alcmena’s cuckolded soldier-husband. I myself find this argument fully convincing.

  It is true that, as Kaya admits, no obvious connection exists between Amphitryon, the King of Troezen, and Salamis, but ‘no obvious connection’ here means only ‘no known connection’; the much-publicised Cypriot Aphrodite cult has tended to obscure the complex network of religious inter-relationships linking Cyprus to mainland Greece and to Asia Minor two thousand years ago. Salamis was after all allegedly founded by Teucer, a refugee from burning Troy; the names of Troy and of Troezen might easily have been confused by later generations and the liaison of Zeus with Alcmena celebrated in Salamis – as many other such mythical events elsewhere – in consequence of a simple linguistic error …

  Not really a guidebook at all, Kate had decided; more a collection of historical curiosities and archaeological oddities. A rather old-fashioned sort of book altogether and not one she imagined she’d find of any great interest, should she ever get around to reading the rest of it. The other photostatted pages made reference to Zeus all right, as to numerous other Classical dignitaries, but she couldn’t find any other reference to masks; so all this crap about a porn mosaic had to be what Dobie wanted. She couldn’t think why. But the train should get her back to Cardiff in time to get to the nearest fax office, though with not too many minutes to spare. She looked at her wrist-watch.

  The train was swaying dangerously to and fro now, thundering down the track like an outraged buffalo scenting the purple sage of Bristol Parkway. Kate raised her head again to stare out of the window at passing chimney-stacks and factory walls smeared over with spraygunned graffiti. Surely, as William Bryce would have said, this couldn’t be what Dobie wanted? Surely all that mythological guff could have no relevance to anything going on in the modern world? What could Dobie have gone and got himself into now?

  Perhaps he’d already managed to cut himself off from the modern world, anyway; the world of Deirdre Walters, the world of brick walls and of aerosol cans and of the natural affinity existing between them. Perhaps in Cyprus you could get away from all that. It certainly seemed that Seymour had. Briefly, Kate tried to visualise a different world, a labyrinth of tall stone pillars and stone steps and of linked and writhing shapes, human and unhuman – a world very far removed from Dobie’s comfortable certainties of x taken to the power of n and of πr2. He’d better be careful, Kate thought; it mightn’t be a good world in which to miss one’s step, much less to lose one’s way entirely. As to all appearances Seymour had done …

  ‘Of course it’s rubbish,’ Kaya barked jovially. ‘Written for a popular audience, as you’d expect. But accurate enough. The facts, as far as I know, are as he states them. After all he got them from me and Derya, all of them. Kind of him to give me a mention, though, I dare say.’

  The professor seemed to be in a rather more amiable mood this morning, placated perhaps by Dobie’s expression of interest in the gleaming architectural relics that towered to either side of them as they walked along. It hadn’t been a very long walk from the university: not much more than fifteen minutes, in fact, at a leisurely pace along the beach and through the pine trees, and Dobie wasn’t even sweating. His interest wasn’t altogether feigned; at close range, Salamis was extremely impressive. Partly, Dobie decided, because of the remarkable way in which it had become assimilated by the terrain, the thirty-foot-high marble and granite columns thrusting upwards through the dark clumps of umbrella pine and ilex to juxtapose startlingly their antique and time-scoured artificiality upon the surging waves of natural growth, like the bones of a ship on the seabed encrusted with shells and wound about with waving seaweed.

  ‘A lot of it is in the sea,’ Kaya said. ‘Or under it. You can still see the shape of the harbour walls in the bay if you look down through the water. And some of the port buildings. Of course they’ve been pillaged as well, by divers and such.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s lucky so much of it is underground, then,’ Dobie said, ‘where it’s relatively safe.’

  ‘Yes. But only relatively. People come and dig, you know; heaven knows what they find and what they take away. The whole site ought to be properly guarded, of course. But the area’s so enormous. Something like twenty square miles if you include the burial areas, as of course you must. There’s no immediate answer to the problem that I can see.’

  Dobie looked around him. It was more like one of those weird Indian temples lost in the depths of the jungle than anything he’d seen in Europe, but in far more advanced a state of ruin and far, far bigger. There was a whole town here, under the clinging roots of the bushes and the sheltering trees. ‘So if anyone wanted to look for this mosaic that’s disappeared …?’

  ‘The Zeus mosaic?’ Kaya vibrated his rather thick lips contemptuously; the Turkish equivalent of a snort, no doubt. ‘Needle in a haystack, as the saying has it. Oh, there are quite a number of things we know about but have lost track of – the Athena statue, the Eurotas frieze – maybe they’ll all turn up again but if they do it’ll be through pure chance, as like as not. What you see here is the tip of the iceberg. Not even that.’

  Dobie was still surveying it. In a clearing of the woods, a great bare square with the tall columns marching down all four sides; behind the square, a huge brown jumble of stone walls and of fallen rocks. ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘In the spring, the whole of this square is carpeted with flowers. It’s a beautiful sight. Though originally it would have been paved over with mosaic patterns. You can still see vestiges of the stonework here and there.’

  ‘And this is the gymnasium, I think you said.’

  ‘That’s right. And over there, the baths. Not much left of the buildings, they’ve mostly collapsed, but we’ve been able to work out the water supply lines and the heating system quite accurately. In their heyday they’d have been more than a match for the famous baths of Caracalla, believe me. Splendid engineering. Well, they made as much of a cult of bathing as we do nowadays and almost certainly a ritual as well. No bikinis, of course. He-he-he.’

  They walked on to take a shufti at one of the bathing pools. It didn’t seem to be very large. Or very deep. ‘No bikinis, you said?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘He-he-he,’ Dobie said. His visualisation of a couple of dozen unclothed Deryas splashing about in the shallows was certainly intellectually stimulating. The water couldn’t have reached much above their knees. There’s more to this archaeology business, Dobie thought, than I’d suspected.

  ‘Of course, they wouldn’t have admitted tourists. Or the hoi polloi. All this area would have been reserved,’ Kaya said, waving one hand around with a proprietorial gesture, ‘for the local earwigs, no, bigwigs, that’s it. The town aristocracy, so to speak. I always tell my students to think of the gymnasium as another kind of temple, rather than to give the word its modern connotations. Because they worshipped physical perfection. That’s what the gods exemplified to them – Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and the rest – although the idea sounds paradoxical to the modern mind. But what we now call spiritual values didn’t really come into it. Or only indirectly.’

  Dobie dredged up a vague memory from his schooldays. ‘What about mens sana in corpore sano?’

  ‘Ah, but mens sana to them was quite a materialistic concept. Rationality, we’d cal
l it nowadays. Which of course implies a rejection of metaphysics and religious belief and all that sort of thing. Seymour was quite amused by that paradox, as I remember.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Kaya sat down on the chipped stone wall that surrounded the pool. Dobie followed suit. The dry stone felt pleasantly warm against his cotton-trousered buttocks – quite sybaritic, in fact. Yes, it was sensible to allow the old corpore a little room for expansion, once in a while.

  ‘He said Molière and Dryden had got nearer to the truth of the matter than he’d supposed. To be honest, I’m not familiar with their works, but apparently they adopted a rather derisory approach to Classical myth and religion. Well, naturally the Greek gods and heroes must seem absurd if you attribute to them spiritual values that they didn’t possess. They represented elemental and physical power. The women, beauty and fecundity. That was all. And that was considered to be enough.’

  ‘Not by William Bryce.’

  ‘Who? Oh, yes. Well, exactly. The representation of violent physical energy in the sexual act has never had much appeal to the Western mentality, has it? You prefer to have it symbolized in the form of the hydrogen bomb.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Dobie said, ‘the underlying mathematical equations, as they were first formulated …’ But he hadn’t come here to talk about that. ‘I suppose the trouble is that nobody’s perfect. Spiritually. Or physically either.’

  ‘No. But in Salamis they aimed at perfection.’

  ‘No harm in trying.’

  ‘That, again, depends on how you look at it. There’s some evidence they practised a rather radical system of practical eugenics. The children of the ruling classes who showed at birth any signs of imperfection … They got rid of them. Put them to death.’

  ‘Sacrificed them?’

  ‘Well, again, not in the modern sense. Though certainly there’d have been some form of ritual, in which I believe the Zeus mosaic would have played its part. I think the children were killed before it, or possibly on it. Seymour didn’t mention that in his book but then he always found the idea rather unpalatable. That’s not to say that he found my conclusion unacceptable, however.’

  ‘It is unpalatable,’ Dobie said.

  ‘To us, yes. Of course it is. Because we think quite differently upon these matters. These people related imperfection in new-born children not to hereditary defects, as we might do, but to some fault of execution in the moment of conception. Strabo is very clear and quite enlightening on that point. Well, the Zeus mosaic from all accounts shows Zeus in the act of conceiving Hercules, who became the peak of male physical perfection on the human level. In other words and putting it very crudely, he’s showing how it’s done. So the father of the child shouldn’t make the same mistake again.’

  ‘Are you saying it was the father of the child who …?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Since his was the responsibility.’

  ‘Well,’ Dobie said. ‘All I can say is …’

  But he decided not to. Unpalatable was no longer the word that he would have chosen. Old William Bryce’s interpretation might be unduly moralistic but it seemed to him infinitely preferable to Kaya’s.

  ‘Autres temps, autres moeurs. One shouldn’t judge too harshly. And as a scientist one shouldn’t judge at all.’

  ‘You discussed all this with Seymour, did you? At length?’

  ‘With Seymour and Derya, yes, quite often. Seymour’s views always interested me because he wasn’t a scientist, and Derya, well, Derya was good enough to help me with some rather complex calculations. But I believe I mentioned that before.’

  Kaya had risen to his feet. The tutorial appeared to have been concluded. Dobie also rose and fell more or less into step beside him as they strolled across the open space towards the amphitheatre. To their left the sea extended like a stretch of blue watered silk towards the horizon.

  ‘It’s an odd coincidence, but a few years ago Derya played a part in one of those works you mentioned earlier. A leading role, in fact. I don’t know if her acting—’

  ‘Oh, I know all about her acting,’ Kaya said. ‘She gave all that nonsense up when she got here. Not much opportunity for it anyway. But Seymour was always telling me how good she was and in fact there’s a photograph … But of course you must have seen it, you’re living in that house so you must have done. Alcmena. Yes, an element of coincidence, I suppose, but Seymour really made too much of it, I always felt. After all, the Zeus mosaic is only one element in a really complex mythological mix-up. Cyprus has always been a hotchpotch of cultural confusions, then as now.’

  ‘I was thinking rather that acting … It does demand a certain amount of, how did you put it? Raw physical energy. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Well, she had plenty of that. And she didn’t employ it only on the stage either.’

  ‘So there’s been a certain amount of gossip.’

  ‘Yes. And I think I made my opinion of all that quite clear the other day. Of course I’m not denying she was a … a highly sexed young lady. I don’t think anyone here would dispute that.’

  ‘But some might be better qualified to comment on the matter than others.’

  Kaya emitted another high-pitched and definitely malicious little giggle. ‘Some might, yes. He-he-he-he. But not, as I think, any of us. Any of our colleagues, that’s to say, though I’m sure they’d find the suggestion extremely flattering. However, I’ve no reason at all to suppose that Derya’s interest in antiquities was ever extended in our direction. She’d have found us a great deal too old for her, I fear. Youth calls to youth all the world over.’

  ‘So who would have exercised a more insidious appeal?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Kaya said. ‘There’s a Turkish army base in the village, you know; some of the younger officers … though I wouldn’t have described their appeal as insidious, exactly. Or hers, either. No, Derya was always very direct in her methods. And her approach. Probably the result of her mathematical training and her appreciation of the geometrical qualities of the straight line. But you’d know more about that than I do.’

  Kaya was pleased, Dobie thought, to be facetious, but for the first time that morning he was now perspiring lightly. The expression in his eyes was difficult to read behind those thick lenses; very inscrutable these orientals. ‘How exactly was she helping you, Kaya?’ Very inscrutable and not that old. Nor was Hillyer and nor was Ozzie and nor was Cem Arkin and nor, for that matter, was Dobie himself. An over-ingenuous disclaimer altogether.

  ‘Now that you’ve seen the site I can explain a little more clearly. My students have been locating the positions of buried buildings through the use of Ponsonby meters, which work on the same principle as those little machines with which surveyors and estate agents now measure the walls of modern houses. All quite simple, but Salamis, like most ancient cities, is a kind of palimpsest – one town being built on top of another and so on through various layers. So the outline of the original civitas would normally be impossible to determine. However,’ Kaya said, raising his broad bespectacled face towards the sky like Winnie the Pooh in search of a passing cloud, ‘my contention has been that the foundations of the earliest city would have been laid out per scamna et stryges, in accordance with the geomantic principles accepted at the time. So I asked Derya to run our readings through the computer to see if any recurrent mathematical pattern might thereby be revealed. In which case, I would assume that the foundations and buildings corresponding to the pattern would appertain to the original city and all others to be later additions and accretions. A simple idea, really, but then many simple ideas turn out to be successful.’

  ‘So she did discover such a pattern?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And a most intriguing one. Since from it I shall be able to deduce the exact nature of those very early geomantic principles that have never been other than very vaguely understood.’

  ‘To a layman,’ Dobie said slowly, ‘that sounds rather like a major discovery.’

  ‘Si
nce the same methods can be applied to all the major urban archaeological sites throughout Turkey and the whole of the Middle East, yes – I rather think it is. And of course I shall make a full acknowledgment of Derya’s contribution, as is only proper.’

  ‘That might have been of no little help to her in her own career.’

  ‘I suppose it might. Yes. It’s all very sad.’

  ‘Did she at any time try to show you … how it’s done?’

  ‘That is not a question,’ Kaya said severely, ‘that one gentleman asks of another.’

  ‘I know. I’m asking it all the same.’

  Kaya looked up towards the sky again. It was an aching blue and cloudless as ever. ‘I have my pride,’ he said. ‘I have my pride.’ Rather an odd answer, Dobie thought. If answer it was.

  Away to the north and beyond the green clumps of umbrella pines the university buildings raised a distant bastion of glass and concrete. The university was here; Salamis, gone. Derya, too, was now disappeared; such physical perfection as had been hers was now vanished underground, like the Zeus mosaic itself, like William Bryce, Giacomo Marinetti and all those who at one time in the past had gazed upon it. What, Dobie asked himself, did it all matter? Why was he asking so many meaningless questions? It wasn’t his habit to question the past. That might be Kaya’s area of academic endeavour; it wasn’t his. Time to him was a pure abstraction, expressed when necessary by the convenient symbol t; some, no doubt, might think of it as an ever-rolling stream, carrying all its sons away and all its daughters, too, but that wasn’t how he was accustomed to look at it.