Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  Before setting out for Elis we had eaten honeycomb and goat cheese under the great oak by the sanctuary of Artemis of the Mating Dance, where the bones of Pelops lie in a bronze box. Mount Sipylos is said to be the home of that licentious and sacred dance, and Pyttalos laughed, licking honey from his fingers.

  — Some dance, he said. These Eliskoi have a house for the Lady every hilltop and ash grove. I’ve seen the dance at the Thargely and by the Dog there wasn’t a bird on its nest.

  Lykas chewed his barley cake and grinned.

  We had been on the road for two days when we came to the ruins of Pylos. Aside from werewolves, which Pyttalos assured us appeared there at the right time of the moon, Pylos had nothing to offer but her overgrown ruins, and we pushed on to Herakleia, an Elean village on the river Kytheros. There is a spring outside Herakleia inhabited by the nymphs Kalliphaeia, Synallasis, Pegaia, and Iasis, or Shine, Leap, Gush, and Heal. Together they are called the Ionides, named for Ion the son of Gargettos, who came here from Athens. The spring is particularly efficacious in curing arthritis and rheumatism. Pyttalos remarked that it took a poultice of asafetida and horseradish to get at the root of his aches, and that he left sitting in a cold spring to the young and the not overly bright. And added that it was scarcely decent anyway.

  We had an onion and some hot wine with sage in it at Herakleia, and looked at the sanctuary of the nymphs, scaring a heron as we approached. I admired the butterflies and lizards, Pyttalos found a trefoil which he picked, and we moved on toward Letrini.

  There is little left of Letrini. A few houses still stand, and a temple of Artemis Alpheiaia. Alpheios, the legend goes, loved Artemis, and decided to carry her off. The goddess had come to Letrini for her night festival, to dance under the full moon with her virgins. She knew Alpheios’ intent, and she and her companions smeared their faces with river mud, so that Alpheios could not tell which of the dancers was Artemis. I think rather that the temple is to Artemis Elaphiaia, Artemis of the Deer Folk, whose cult is observed at Elis. And yet the Eleans say that Elaphios was Artemis’s childhood nurse.

  The muddy face of Artemis was probably a misunderstanding of some rite now lost, some drama perhaps with masks, or some disguise of the goddess far more serious than a device to avert the lust of a river, and who knows what allegory, what sacred poem, lies behind that?

  Elis as we approached it on its mountain plain was all honey, white, and green along the Peneus, which flashed crystal in its crooked course. The squares and oblongs of houses and temples were scattered without order among trees. The Greeks, who have such an eye for symmetry, like to dispose their buildings at odd angles, to show that geometry may please but not tyrannize. I saw instantly that I was coming to an extraordinary country town. All the grandeur of the Olympic games was at Olympia itself, which in its monumentality and profusion of statuary seemed more Egyptian than Hellenic. Elis, where the athletes trained and qualified for the games, and where the judges resided for most of each year, was elegant and relaxed. The sun had bleached and mellowed it. Athletes, trainers, and officials from all over the civilized world gave it a cosmopolitan touch, and yet as soon as we were in its streets, among poultry, dogs, farmers, old women with baskets of squash, and scholarly men with books under their arms, I saw that its identity was inviolate, peculiar to itself, rich of tone.

  Our innkeeper cocked his ear, as if he were going to hear Scythian. We had come from Olympia, yes? His rho was more liquid than Pyttalos’s and his use of the dative smacked of Athens. A chicken and a dog watched us unpack the mule, in hope of something dropped.

  Asses brayed throughout the night, as in every part of Greece, the bronze trumpet of the Fury Megaira. Crickets chirred, the nightingale trilled, two owls called to each other from distant trees. In the false dawn all the cocks of Elis crowed.

  We rose late, the privilege of travelers, dipped fresh bread in hot wine, fought the bees from our honey, and sampled a plate of figs which the innkeeper’s wife, a provincial Hera, brought us as a token of esteem. I was, she had heard, writing the picture of Elis for the Romaioi. I looked at Pyttalos without catching his eye. Would I mention the inn, its moderate prices, its desire to accommodate the better sort of traveler? I do. It is the Xenodokheion Hermes on the Hodos Marathonos. The straw is clean, the wine salubrious, the bread excellent.

  Lykas had put on a fresh tunic, Pyttalos had appeared with his staff, and we set off to see Elis.

  The old gymnasium was the principal object of my visit, and we went there first. It is here that the athletes train before they go to Olympia. There is much about it that reminds me of all schools. Like my Lydian grammar school, it has a sweet quietness and intimacy which I missed at the Academy. It has the spiritual clarity of beginnings.

  Tall plane trees line the tracks inside the wall that rings the Xystos, where Herakles himself once pulled up thistles. These are the training tracks. The races for the competitions are run on the Sacred Course, which is also within the walls.

  Inside the gymnasium is the Plethrion, or wrestling floor, a hundred feet square. Here the Hellanodikai match the wrestlers by age, weight, and ability. A group of boys stood gravely around a trainer near a door at the far end of the gymnasium. Along a wall stand altars with statues. First there is Herakles Parastatos of Ida, before which the boys take the military oath of comradeship. Then there is a statue of Eros and beside it the god Anteros, or Love Returned, the principle by which boys in love with each other do not act like boy and girl, but sustain decency and chastity in their friendship. Beyond Anteros are statues of the Barley Mother and her daughter whom we may not name.

  There is no statue here of Akhilleus, or altar. An oracle forbade it, but there is a cenotaph outside where on the equal day and night at the end of summer the Elean women cover their heads with their shawls, bare their breasts, and wail for the son of Peleus and Thetis.

  A smaller gymnasium near the larger one is called the Cube, for its shape. It has a wrestling floor and a boxing ring. We saw the soft gloves hanging on pegs, and the strapped pouches with which the boxers were girded. Opposite the door stood a Zeus bought, as was inscribed on its pedestal, with fines paid by Sosandros of Smyrna and Polyktor of Elis.

  There is a third gymnasium, for beginners, called the Moltho, or soft floor. Here we found a head and shoulders of Herakles in bronze, and a relief built into the wall showing Eros as an athlete holding a palm branch which Anteros, also an athlete, is trying to take from him, illustrating the balance and tension of comradely love, as they both wish to be the giver. The bow and the string cannot pull the same way.

  On each side of the door to this third gymnasium there is a statue of the boxer Sarapion, who was born in the Alexandria which faces Pharos in Egypt. He brought wagons of wheat to Elis in the time of the famine, and one of the statues honors him for that. The other honors him for winning the crown of wild olive at the two-hundred-and-seventeenth Olympiad. The third gymnasium is also used for the recitation of poetry and oratory. The room set aside for this is called the Lalikhmion, after the man who had it built. Round shields painted with the signs of tribes hang around the walls.

  The way from the gymnasium to the baths, cobblestoned and strewn with leaves, is called the Silent Road, and here we came to the sanctuary of Artemis Friend of Adolescents, Philomeirax, whether from her being the neighbor of the gymnasium or from a cult of olden time which eventually begat the gymnasium, the baths, the tracks, I do not know. The name of the road was explained this way: once the infantry of Oxylos was curious to know what went on in Elis, and by this road their spies came to listen at the wall, so silently that no one heard them.

  I wonder if in times now forgotten the city cult was that of Artemis Philomeirax and the silence not that of Aitolian spies but of initiates whose procession came along this road to the rites.

  The stone road was dusty, quiet, and slowly covering with leaves. Here a thistle had come up between stones, its leaves curled and ornate, there, a stray flax flower.
The plane trees were old and tall, and we relished their shade and peacefulness. Pyttalos had been here many years before, and remarked that it was all the very same.

  Three boys came onto the road from the smaller gymnasium, the Moltho, going to the baths. Their chests rose and fell, and they breathed through their mouths. They were wrestlers, for ovals of dust spotted their oiled bodies. One had thrown a khiton over his shoulders, one wore a triangle of white linen knotted at each hip, the other was naked except for a blue ribbon around his forehead. Their hair seemed to have been cut with the bread knife. They looked at Lykas, in the manner of boys and dogs, thinking perhaps that he was someone new at the schools. He blushed.

  The temple was very old. Its northern side was black with lichen, and the sun and rain had bleached its eastern wall to the whiteness of ancient bone. The statue of Artemis was carved of olive wood in the archaic style. Her face was covered with beaten gold so impure as to be red. She wore a stole of bright but countrified needlework, mere geometry to indicate blue stars, a white moon, a yellow sun with its rays, and a row of partridges. The cult statues were equally primitive and equally blunt, a girl with a rather overstated notch to emphasize her place in nature, and a boy with broad shoulders and copious testicles. The interior was dim—we looked through the latticework of the door—and smelled of clean old stone and still, dry air. The figures were serene in their half-light, except for the golden mask of Artemis, which had the strict kindness of the Spartan women written on it in, so to speak, the Elean dialect. Before the altar there were terra-cotta figures, no larger than toys horses, deer, birds, bears, lions

  These sweet temples which I have seen everywhere in Greece, her islands and colonies, with their thin, fluted columns browned by age and sunlight, with their trees, knot-kneed or mossy or slender still in their fortieth year, gather all their circumjacence, their rocks, nettles, narrow windows, god images, turning shadows, birds’ nests, wasp hives, urns, priests, and acolytes, into a venerable family, for how can a tree’s shadow, flowered, full-leaved, or laden with snow, move on a temple’s wall from the old age of Herakles to the graying of Hadrian’s beard, without becoming its sister or brother as those kinships stand among wood and stone? It was Herakleitos who said that some things are too slow to see, such as the growth of grass, and some too fast, like the arrow’s flight. All things, I have often thought, are dancing to their own music. A Lydian song is soon over, but the music to which the zodiac is turning requires twelve times three thousand years to close its harmony, if we may follow the calculations of Pythagoras, and the rhythms of time for a child are so much slower than for a man that we have lived for centuries before our beards arrive. It is the young who are so very old. Yet there is a mortality even in children which we cannot discern in old temples, which, in surviving generation after generation, have taken on that grace by which their sacredness shall probably survive Greece and Rome. Earthquake and impiety cannot destroy them all

  There are two roads from the gymnasiums to the agora One goes by the cenotaph of Akhilleus to the quarters of the Hellenodikai. It is along this road before sunrise that you can see the trainers and runners coming down to the tracks. The other road goes by residences and gardens.

  The place and market at Elis are not laid out in the Ionian manner, but have kept the old style roofed columns, with passageways between, as congenial as the eastern markets, or the shaded and comfortable back-streets of Athens and Corinth. We were amused to learn that they call their market the Hippodrome, for they tame horses here as well as buy and sell, talk and play checkers. The portico facing south has Doric columns, stately and plain. Here the Hellenodikai can usually be found passing the time of day. We were shown altars that can be moved about in the market, permanent ones being inconvenient in so busy a place. The Hellenodikai have rooms off the marketplace, and live here for ten months of their term. They take instructions in the games from the judges, and decide which athletes are to be pitted against each other in all the contests.

  Across the street from the portico of the Hellenodikai is the Korkyrean Portico, built with money from the raids on Korkyra in the time of the wars with that island. This series of roofed columns has a wall down the middle, with statues set against it, one of which is of the philosopher Pyrrhon, who would admit nothing. That a room might be empty, he could never subscribe to, for the predication was too fraught with ambiguities to be considered. Empty of light, it was full of dark. Empty of chairs and tables, it was full of air. Pyrrhon is buried outside Elis, at a place named the Rock, and we walked out to see his tomb. The Rock was once a town, but there is nothing there anymore. Pyrrhon’s sarcophagos, along with some others, lies in tall grass near a grove of pine trees.

  How old the world!

  Another statue in the market at Elis is of Apollo Doctor, the same Apollo you find at Athens. There is also a Sun of stone, with rays coming from his head; and a Moon, with horns.

  At the end of a wide street off the market is a grove of terebinth and manna ash where a delicate and elegant sandstone sanctuary of the Graces stands in a lace of shadow. Their statues are wooden, their robes gilded, their heads, hands, and feet of white marble. One holds a rose, Aphrodita’s flower; another, a sprig of myrtle, sacred to the rites of Aphrodita and Adonis. The third holds a pair of dice.

  Beside the Graces stands an Eros, also of wood.

  Farther on, there is a temple of Silenos, interesting in that it is not to Dionysos and Silenos but to Silenos alone. His image is fat and rampant. A satyr is offering him a cup of wine. It is sad to know that satyrs are mortal. I have seen the tomb of one in the land of the Hebrews, though I could not read his name or age on the red stone. A learned man of their tribes showed it to me. When I told him that the forests of my native Lydia, and of the Greeks, were as full of satyrs as the streets of Damascus with camels, he smoothed his black beard and made no comment.

  There is also a satyr buried at Pergamon.

  In the marketplace there is also a kind of temple, a roof over pillars carved of oak, but with no walls. It is, the Eleans say, a tomb; whose, no one can remember. An old man told me that it was the tomb of Oxylos, but could say no more about it.

  Near this forlorn structure is the House of the Sixteen, where select women weave the annual robe for Hera. Its yard is surrounded by a wall, and inside that by several large chestnut trees.

  At the edge of the market there is a temple in ruins, with only its pillars still standing, roofless and bereft of statuary. Tall grass mixed with wild flowers grows around it, and the inside, naked of altar or images, was alive with crickets and lizards when I looked. It was in its day dedicated to the Roman emperors. I daresay it dates from the vanity of Nero Augustus, whose opulent hand touched Greece with its fever. Hadrian, who was emperor until my eighteenth year, was already beginning to shy away from the idea of divinity inhering in a living man; the second Antonine was too religious to encourage a cult of the emperor, and Marcus Aurelius has refused altogether to assume the title Divus.

  Behind the arcade of the Korkyrean spoils there is a temple to Aphrodita of the Sky. Her image of ivory and gold is by Pheidias, and stands with one foot on a tortoise. Beside this temple is a walled grove for the Common Aphrodita. Her statue is in an underground room, a bronze Aphrodita riding on a bronze billy goat. The sculptor is Skopas, and his worldly Aphrodita on her randy buck is as well wrought in its manner as the etherial Aphrodita of Pheidias. I do not know the meaning of the tortoise.

  The Eleans are the only people who have a temple to Hades. It is opened once a year, only the priest is allowed inside, and the reason is this. When Herakles was besieging the Pylos whose ruins we saw on the road from Olympia, Athena came to help him. In those days Hades had a temple at Pylos and came to the defense of the city. If Hades found his worship at Pylos acceptable, the Eleans felt that his rites ought to be established in Pylos’s mother city Elis.

  There is also a temple for Fortuna at Elis. Her image is enormous, and stands outside
the sanctuary proper. It is of gilded wood, but the face, hands, and feet are of marble.

  To the left of this temple is a small shrine to Sosipolis. The painting inside is of a dream. It depicts Sosipolis as a boy in a blue robe on which stars are painted. He holds the horn of Amaltheia. I saw no image of him as the sacred serpent, or with Ilithyia.

  There is a statue of Poseidon in the residential part of Elis. He is a beardless young man with crossed legs, leaning with both hands on a spear. He is dressed by the Eleans in a tunic of linen, over which there is a flaxen khlamys and a cloak of wool. This is Poseidon of Samikon in Triphylia, brought here as a trophy. The Eleans say that it is an image of Satrapas, one of the names of Korybas, and not Poseidon at all. Poseidon to the inland Greeks is the Earth Shaker; to the Greeks of the islands and ports he is a god of the sea. Pyttalos, indeed, said that Poseidon is the god of walls, and it was his opinion that this dressed statue was of an Olympic victor, and that a gaggle of religious widows and wives with nothing better to occupy their time had set it up here to add awe and flash—here he made a curious sign with his hand, probably obscene—to the neighborhood.

  The houses hereabout had walled gardens and were set among trees. I saw a splendid wild red of late roses through a gate, with a fall of petals beneath the bush and their musk loose in the air. There was also an old herm from the time of Alexander, and a sundial. Through the inner gate I could see Persian chickens in a yard, and a cart horse gone white around the muzzle munching fodder from a rick.

  On the acropolis there is a temple to Athene, quite fine. The statue is of ivory and gold, the work of Pheidias, if we may believe the Eleans. A cock stands on her helmet, the emblem of her warlike genius, or perhaps the symbol of Athene the Worker.