Along the cobbled road from the market down to the River Menios we went through an old part of the town where the houses are close, the most of them being over the workshops of sandalmakers, ironmongers, smiths, potters, and dyers. We stopped to admire the crocus yellow of a cauldron of boiling willow twigs. There were cats sitting in almost every window along this busy street, and dogs and children at every door. There was even a tame owl sitting on a girl’s shoulder, against which Lykas made a hex, spitting into his fingers and touching his forehead and genitals. Pyttalos remarked that an owl in town wouldn’t know the Lady if it were to see her, and bore no significance whatever.
— They are religious about them at Athens, Lykas said. He was proud of his information, and looked at me with a congenial frankness, his head slightly lowered.
— The owl is Athene’s sacred bird, I said.
— Owls, Pyttalos said, are the next thing to chickens.
— Who, I remarked as we reached the end of the street and had to wade through sheep being driven into town, are also sacred to Athene.
We came out onto a hill overlooking the river. Here we found the theater. It is quite old and charmingly small. The temple of Dionysos beside it was designed by Praxiteles. It, too, is small, but strong of line and brilliantly painted. Dionysos, the Eleans say, has never failed to attend their Thyia, the grounds for which are eight stadia from the town. Three empty jars are placed in the temple on the eve of the Elean Thyia, before any witnesses who care to watch, citizens or strangers. The doors are then sealed and guarded. Next morning, the seals are opened by the priests, and the jars are found to be filled with wine. The Andrioi have a similar visitation of the god. If one is to believe the Greeks about such things, one might as well believe the Aithiopians above Syene, who show a stone in a meadow which they call the table of the sun, where Helios dines. Religion is a grievous and wonderful thing.
Elis is as rich as Crete in vineyards. The god would certainly not be shy of showing himself to such diligent and worshipful votaries. The Thyia is a rite of deepest antiquity, the symbolism of which involves the winnowing basket, or likna, in which the infant Dionysos is said to have been cradled, the old reverence for bread and wine cherished by the Hellenes and indeed by the civilized world. The likna serves a third and purely religious function when it is filled by the priestesses with a toy of the god’s phallos carved of fig wood. The harvest fruit is placed with it, awned wheat, gourds, leaves, and other bounty. This is then designated the cradle of Semele, and a hymn proclaims that the god is the son of his mother.
At Olympia we had seen the chair of Demeter Khamyne, whose lady bishop watches the contests, and Pyttalos explained that this Demeter is the same as Semele, or Zemele, as he called her.
— Mama of Zanysso, he added.
— She is, then, I said, the earth, and Dionysos is the vine.
— No, Kyrie, no, Pyttalos said. The earth is Zemele; the vine is Zanysso. But not all. The gods are more than we can know of them.
— We do not speak, O Kers!
— Touch wood, Pyttalos said.
As we walked back to our inn, all the asses of Elis began to bray, for it was their fodder time. Pyttalos and Lykas laughed, knowing my foreigner’s opinion of this unnerving and peculiarly Aegean cacophony. If any other creature has the lungs of the Greek ass, I do not know it. I have heard the elephant trumpet, but its silver alarm has neither the volume nor the pitch of the Prienian ass, whose throat is of brass. And certainly none other of Zeus’s animals has its satyric impudence, for like as not he accompanies his heart-stopping caterwaul with full priapic display of his considerable member, which leaps from its shaggy foreskin, for no other reason, I suppose, than that his daimon fulfills its being in his bray and pizzle, and that these proclaim their glory together, no doubt to the everlasting delight of the gods.
This incomparable voice is of composite majesty. In genus it is the whinny of the horse family, yet the lowing of cattle is folded in with the equine tune, and there is also to be detected in it the triumphant crow of the cock, the squealing of pigs, and the howling of dogs. And noises outside the cries of nature seem to figure in its awfulness, such as the stone saw, the whine of a gale in ships’ rigging, the terrible lash of siege engines hurling missiles. Neither Pyttalos nor Lykas nor any Greek is disturbed by this piercing of the ear, a cry equally frantic whether in anticipation of supper, copulation, breakfast, or hoarfrost. Indeed, I suppose it is one of the strange Greek harmonies, an analogue of the aesthetic wherein the Hellenic adoration of the body is combined with the strictest and perhaps the purest of morals, and a fierce love of freedom exists within laws which a Tartar would deem tyrannical, and a sense of color rivaling that of the Egyptians expresses itself in coarse whites, drab terra cottas, and a single blue which one sees everywhere. Pyttalos never ceased to be all mirthful wrinkles when I winced at the hgee! HGAH! of the Greek ass, spilling my wine if I were raising it to my lips, or scoring my papyrus if I were making a note when one of these beasts called its god, its wife, or its master.
At the inn, waiting for supper, I stole the liberty of looking into the landlord’s office. Whitewashed and splendidly provincial, it was hung with wineskins and strings of red onions, a sheepskin, baskets, fishing canes, straw hats, and, curious to note, a mask of some character in a play, a godly face with elegantly curled hair and beard. From the ceiling hung a cage of plaited grass in which the household’s pet cricket sat folded up, waiting for the night.
We had goat for supper, with a soup of barley and scallions. Pyttalos found an herb in his wallet and broke it into his soup.
— For old age, he said, with a wink at Lykas.
I have sweetened my life with many far places, but I think none was more quietly congenial than the town of Elis. These were the streets which I now watched with their dogcarts in which matrons under parasols rode with the aplomb of Tanagra figurines, with their moustached promoters carrying game cocks under their arms, with their troops of brown athletes walking on the balls of their feet beside their trainers, superbly indifferent to the gaze of the girls’ faces behind every curtain of beads, to the appraisal of the Spartan eye, and the higher appraisal of the Corinthian and Platonic stare, these were the streets that Pindaros had trod. Pythagoras had been here, and the philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras. Simonides, too. Even Diogenes, it is said. Hippias was born here.
We sat after dinner with our landlord Aristander and passed the evening with pleasantries. I asked if the tomb in the market which an old man had told me was that of Oxylos was not that of the ancient king of the Eleans.
— Who knows? he said. Is it not written somewhere?
— It is, I said, but one would expect a more prominent monument.
He expressed regret by opening and closing his hands, as if to apologize for the inexplicable remissness of the elders and archon of Elis.
— Probably too stingy to put up a proper stone, he said.
— Was he a god? Pyttalos asked.
— No, I said. Merely a king.
— As, Aristander said confidentially, were many of the gods that we now count among the immortals.
— So the philosophers say, I said, letting him know that I detected the source of his opinions.
— Graveyard talk, Pyttalos said. Because the gods have not come to their dreams or favored them with a showing—here he opened his ancient hands—they think there are no gods.
— I have heard the bull-roarer, Lykas ventured.
— My great aunt, Pyttalos went on, as if Lykas had not spoken, saw a centaur once. A philosopher came all the way from Epidauros to ask her about it. She was picking dandelions for a salad, a woman with no luck, born in a thunderstorm, and with a cast in her eye. Picking away, she was, and humming, most likely, as was her way, a hymn to the Lady, she was very religious, and looked up, and there in the broad daylight was the centaur. She bolted like the grandmother of all jack rabbits. She screamed all the way home. She went through briars and over
walls, and looked as if she’d fought a lynx when she turned up in the yard, scaring everybody out of remembering their own names. For a week she kept to her bed, living off broth.
— To us she said it was wild and awful, deinós. When the philosopher came she said it was noble and religious. She cried as she told him about it, as if she’d seen the Lady or Maia.
I looked at my hands, my dusty feet.
— Did the centaur speak? Lykas asked.
— She didn’t say, dear soul, Pyttalos sighed. She wouldn’t have remembered a word if it had. Or would have added so much to what it said that the philosopher would have been there a week taking it down.
— Did she really see a centaur, Pyttalos? I asked.
— Who knows, he said. My grandfather saw Zeus.
Aristander looked into the wine jug.
— He was an eagle, Pyttalos continued. He spoke.
— An eagle talked! Lykas said.
— An eagle who was Zeus, I said gently.
Landlord Aristander pulled at the lobe of his ear and sat straighter.
We had to wait to hear what Zeus said while Pyttalos enjoyed his power to hold our attention. I passed him the wine bowl. He sipped and smoothed his whiskers.
— Grandfather Hippagoras, that was his name, was physicking the ass, sticking a turpentine and onion bolus down it. Cyrus was the ass’s name, and there was considerable give and take in the business, as Pappa Hippagoras and Cyrus were both stubborn, and both famous for having their way. He had just got the bolus in and was on his knees holding the jaws of the ass closed with both arms, and it had just swallowed its medicine, with a kind of spasm in which, with a little more energy, it would have pulled its head off and jumped to Olympia, the eagle—Zeus—flew by and said, Fine do!
— Fine do! Lykas repeated.
Aristander seemed disappointed.
— He knows his animals, you see, Pyttalos explained.
We spent the evening talking of many things, the price of wool and wine, the games, the stars, the dilatoriness of the Roman bureaucracy, the wiles of tax collectors, until there were few people abroad in the streets, and Aristander was yawning politely behind his hand, Pyttalos openly, and Lykas had gone to sleep, his head on his shoulder.
Next day we said our farewells to Elis and set out on the road to Kyllene, the port of Elis on the Ionian. It has a good harbor, faces toward Sicily, and is a hundred and twenty stadia across the plain.
As we left the west gate, there ran by us a line of weary boys, jogging, naked, dull with dust. Their fatigue was evident in their ribs and eyes. They had run many a stadion, and breakfast was still before them. Had I been younger, I would have found great significance in their beauty, and shared their innocent knowledge of their own glory. But I took too much pleasure in the health of my middle years, thanks be to a generous fate and the kindly gods, to envy these striplings their brief splendor at the games, and found myself wishing for them the easy stamina to walk, when they are my age, across the world, and a soul to take it in.
The rich valley plains between Elis and Kyllene, now the color of stone in the late summer drought, bear the flax and hemp which the Eleans weave with every degree of fineness. Indeed, their linen is almost as fine as silk, which is not, as Pyttalos supposed, made from bark.
Silk, I explained, the manufacture of which is much misunderstood and practically a secret in the western world, is made by an insect from the land of the Seres; hence the Greek ser. This Serian insect, twice the size of our dung beetle, spins a web like the tree spider, which it also resembles in having eight feet. The Seres keep these insects in houses, safe from the weather, regulating the temperature for them according to the season. These creatures weave a fine thread, making a ball of it with their feet. For four years they are fed on millet, but in the fifth year, when their life span is almost over, they are fed with the tender leaves of the reed, their favorite food, which they eat until they burst, and more thread is found inside them. This is then woven into the finest of cloth.
When Pyttalos discovered that I had not been to the land of the Seres, he lost interest in my discourse.
Dust whitened us, got into our eyes and mouths, until we looked like millers. I reflected that men are what they eat, and that the Greek eats a lot of rock, and perhaps a lot of metal that is within rock, lime and iron. It is no wonder that the Greek picture of the world is wrought in rock and metal. He drinks rock in his mineral springs, breaths rock dust, and comes in time to look like rock, as Pyttalos does.
I shook dust in clouds from my tunic.
— We are approaching the sea, I said to Pyttalos, and one might reasonably expect to see a cloud or feel a breeze and, here I pointed to the bone-dry bed of a stream, perhaps rain. I was being city-bred and sardonic, and I detected the accusation in my idle remark that Pyttalos and his countrymen somehow loved, and even asked the gods, for an utter drought all summer long.
— Your swallow leaves in Metageitnion, he replied. After that we get new weather. The rain comes in Boedromion, and the wind. On the fourth day after the Scorpion rises, the Pleiades set at dawn. Then you get frost. The leaves are all down by then. My rheumatism goes into my fingers and knees. On the thirteenth, Lyra rises at dawn. Winter is here.
— And you sit by the fire eating roasted chickpeas, I said, and talk of the Medes and Persians.
He looked at me and sighed.
— I was quoting an old poem, I said.
We came to a field where women were winnowing beside a white house, their blue shirts stippled with chaff. Whether they were working or dancing was a pretty question, for they dipped the grain with their long baskets to a busy music which a bearded fellow played on the bouzouki, a peasant lyre with four sets of double strings. He could have been forty or a hundred years old. Greeks go from youth to old age with no apparent transition. He could have been Orpheus himself, older than the blue mountains beyond the fields. As we came abreast of them, we could make out the song.
White was the moon
And the stars in the river.
O Anaktoria,
Do you dream of Lysander?
The dill was all yellow
And gone was the clover,
The mouse and the wheat-ear,
The last of the summer.
To our surprise, Lykas began to sing in his high sweet voice, not yet that of a man.
White was the robe
She spread for her lover,
White was the robe
And embroidered the cover.
But whiter by far
Was the snow he lies under,
And whiter the stars
Where the hill foxes wander.
And then Pyttalos joined his grizzled voice, for the ballad was endless, and we walked on singing, toward Kyllene.
First there was the wrinkling glare of the sky to show us that we were not far from the coast, then that faint bitterness in our nostrils, the smell of all ports, and then, as we came to the top of a hill, the sea itself.
Below us lay Kyllene with her ships and warehouses, sunny streets and taverns.
Here, in some days, I was to sail to Italy. After dining on octopus, which the Kyllenians serve raw in a sauce of olive oil and herbs, we set out as diligently as ever to record the port’s antiquities. There is a temple of Asklepios here, as well as a sanctuary to Aphrodita.
But the most imposing of their temples is to Hermes, protector of the city and its trade. The temple is old indeed, an archaic building with old-fashioned columns which would seem to owe their inspiration to the Phoenicians. Inside, upright on a round millstone, is a blackened shaft topped by what appeared at first to be a great acorn. Except for the dolmens of Sicily or perhaps the wild tall rocks of the Calabrian coast, I had never seen any stone so primeval in its import, nor so direct a symbol. It is, I should think, older than the idols of the Cyclades.
— But, I said, it is nothing more than a stone phallos.
— Yes, Pyttalos said, it is Hermes.
A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg
FOR A MAN who had seen a candle serenely burning inside a beaker filled with water, a fine spawn of bubbles streaming upward from its flame, who had been present in Zurich when Lenin with closed eyes and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat listened to the baritone Gusev singing on his knees Dargomyzhsky’s In Church We Were Not Wed, who had conversed one melancholy afternoon with Manet’s Olympia speaking from a cheap print I’d thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, and who, as I had, Robert Walser of Biel in the canton of Bern, seen Professor William James talk so long with his necktie in his soup that it functioned as a wick to soak his collar red and caused a woman at the next table to press her knuckles into her cheeks and scream, a voyage in a hot-air balloon at the mercy of the winds from the lignite-rich hills of Saxony Anhalt to the desolate sands of the Baltic could precipitate no new shiver from my paraphenomenal and kithless epistemology except the vastation of brooding on the sweep of inconcinnity displayed below me like a map and perhaps acrophobia.
The balloon had shot aloft at Bittersfeld while with handsome Corsican flourishes and frisky rat-a-tat on the drum a silver cornet band diminishing below us to a spatter of brass and gold played The Bear Went Over the Mountain.
Cassirer lashed the anchor to the wicker taffrail and cried auf Wiedersehen to the shrinking figures below, ladies in leghorn bonnets, an engineer in a blue smock, an alderman waving his top hat, a Lutheran minister holding his bible like a brick that he had just been tossed, and little boys in caps and knee socks who envied our gauntlets, goggles, plaid mufflers, and telescope with fanatic eyes.
The winds into which we rose were as cold as mountain springs. Tattered wisps of clouds like frozen smoke hung around us. Unless you looked, you could not tell whether you sailed past the clouds or the clouds past you, and even then the Effect of Mach confused the eye, for the earth seemed to flow beneath the still gondola until this illusion could be dispelled, as when you look at a line drawing of a cube and sometimes see its far side as its front, Mach, who leaned over bridges and waited for the flip-flop of reality whereby he knew he was on a swift bridge flying down an immobile river, and none of us knows whether our train or the one beside us is sliding out of the station.
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