Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  This brings us to Athens Alive—not to be confused with Athens by itself: a fascinating assembly of texts, over 300 pages of them, by Greeks and foreigners. Each entry concerns a different aspect and period of the city and its inhabitants. It covers most of the last two millennia and ends in 1940. This is a book of the greatest interest; one which it would be folly to be without; if I have complaints they are minor ones, easily over-ridden, or, if justified, put right; and here they are. Kevin Andrews, the most assimilated and tribalized of writers on Greece—in Haggard or Conrad terms, many days’ march upstream in the hinterland of Romiosyne—is kind to his readers as a rule, pointing out hazards and helping them over styles. But his attitude here becomes mysteriously quelling, even touched with asperity, and the book’s alternative title—‘The Practical Tourist’s Companion to the Fall of Man’—compounds the reader’s disarray.

  ‘May the book succeed as propaganda,’ the foreword says:

  the collection is addressed to the general reader . . . but it is also aimed, with malice aforethought, in the direction of those earnest functionaries in the world’s more active government agencies and business corporations who occasionally read books, to supplement their knowledge of a place and its inhabitants, while pursuing their steely but always fatal purposes of geo-politics and geo-merchandise.

  The gnomic irony and obliquity of address make the reader more fidgety still. Plainly, the author suspects him of associating with secret agents, even of being one himself: a sinister transatlantic figure, perhaps, with a snap-brim Stetson and a manilla envelope full of laundered bribes; or an Iron Curtain operator with tundra-face, catfish smile and mortal umbrella. (Rather the former, it emerges later on, though the latter seemed just as likely a candidate for terminal bogey.) ‘In this connexion,’ he concludes, ‘the present volume, though spanning sixteen centuries, has a specific reference—for those with ears to hear—to the time and place of compilation. Athens 1967—1974.’ This exactly covers the Colonels’ rule. If the book had come out then, dark innuendos would have been the only safe tone for a writer living in Greece. But the regime ended six years ago, the tyrants are behind bars, protests against foreign interference fill headlines and are boldly sloshed over furlongs of wall, and, at the very moment of writing, pacifically escorted young men in tousled thousands are marching through the capital under a forest of banners, punching the air by numbers. Cheerleaders with electric megaphones beat time to scanned accusations of treachery launched at the very figure who was thought, when the Colonels fell, to have rescued the country from chaos. With freedom of speech in so healthy a state the author’s manner is strangely cloaked and circumspect, almost as though he missed clandestine times.

  The foreword promises a sequel embracing the period from the Second World War until the aftermath of the Dictatorship. This is excellent news. The scrupulous fairness of The Flight of Ikaros soared high above the prevalent bias and melodrama; Volume 2, when it appears, will have different virtues. As we see, recent years have filled the author with feelings which are hot and partisan, so the result is certain to be lively, stimulating, and avowedly de parti pris. But, for myself, the great point of this still unseen work is that it might act as a catharsis. Polemical writing, which many can do, may at last take a step to the rear and make way for the sort of book which none but Kevin can produce. I don’t know what his political allegiances are; possibly none; but I think Orwell’s touchstone of ‘common decency’ would not be far off the mark: First Will and Testament was full of a passionate intensity, and it was all the better for it; but in Athens Alive, I think it pulls the wrong way.

  All through post-classical history, Greece has been interfered with and exploited by foreigners and it is time this stopped. This, in simple terms, is the book’s dominating theme. The author points out that in times of stress, Greece has saved herself by her own efforts. He doesn’t point out that occasionally foreign help was neither selfish nor ignoble. But his main contention is true; it is depressing; it applies to other countries, though not for so long, it is a good theme for an essay. But it is too limiting a selective principle for this wonderful array of historical texts. The vigour of his manner could get the message through the reader’s skull in a couple of pages: the texts themselves would hammer it home. Choosing passages only to point up a story of injustice and hard luck would have excluded too much that was valuable, so it is very fortunate that he often strays.

  Meanwhile, what has become of our kind companion of Athens? The shared jokes, the outrageous outbursts, the bitter draughts so skilfully administered? The characters of most of the authors quoted have an interest apart from their works; they are well worth a few lines of introduction and perhaps an anecdote or two; and how well our former companion would have done it, weaving the whole thing into a continuous and captivating whole!

  Instead, in the grip of his new anti-reader drive, the author packs us off each time to the six stark pages of bibliographical data at the back of the book. (My mind flies to a similar work, brilliantly carried out, but dealing with the much shorter period of 1453 to 1821: Fair Greece, Sad Relic, by the late Terence Spencer.) Our old Athens mentor would have redressed the balance of the letterpress, for all the editorial comment is reduced to lower-case footnotes and these, by their very nature, are condemned to seem simultaneously cramped and inordinately long. Our absent friend would have loosened them up, expanded and promoted them and then have guided them into a single flow with the text, with both on equal terms. As it is the two are sometimes so unwieldily off balance that the page looks like capsizing. Their drift, however, is just as absorbing as, from this pen, we have a right to expect.

  Athens Alive is a paperback printed in the city it describes; the contents are of much more than passing interest; it will be reprinted; and I foresee hardback editions in England and America with the editorial apparatus unmuffled and updated—no great labour; it is less than a tenth of the whole—and adorned with illustrations. Could its scope not be widened? Yes, but what about the book’s message, the author might ask: the full dessertspoon every half-hour? Well, I think the bottle should be given a good shake and the dose drastically reduced. Or perhaps he might simply let it stand in the cupboard. After all, he’s the patient.

  The author defendably starts his sequence with the Roman conquest rather than the battle of Chaeronea, and his first entry is a passage from Ovid about the city’s desolation followed, after a three centuries leap to early Byzantine times, by a Syrian Greek’s riveting account of the near-kidnapping of unwary new students by rival teachers of rhetoric. (Between these two might be glimpsed the lines of Juvenal describing the needy little Athenian émigré, by turns grammarian, narrator, painter, tightrope-walker, etc., ‘ready to fly to heaven if you tell him’; all the more aptly as he is identified with Daedalus—the author’s parent, mythologically speaking.) By now the city is sinking to a little provincial town of the Eastern Empire, vainly clinging to faded shreds of greatness. But there is enjoyable bickering still among the sophists, students’ high spirits and riots now and then; in spite of the official change of religion, the mysteries in Eleusis are winked at and the Neoplatonic threat to orthodoxy riddles the shrunken population with exciting discord. Sneered at by the saintly, Julian the Apostate invokes the briefly reinstated Athena; and, a few decades later, appearing all-armed on the walls, she saves her city from the Goths.

  For the first time (in my case) we read the Theodosian edicts against sacrificing; then Justinian snuffs out the philosophy schools, breaking the city’s last links with Plato and Aristotle. This had an unexpected result: the philosophers fled to Persia where they were welcomed by Chosroes and showered with honours; but they sickened for home just like Themistocles among the satraps at Susa a thousand years earlier. The Great King relinquished them with sorrow and he even managed to extort toleration for their heterodoxy when they got back. These recondite and enthralling details come as much from the small print of the author’s notes as from the te
xts themselves. They are full of interesting and rare illuminations like this, also of penetrating and original thoughts. One, which would have pleased Dodds, is that a strange kind of manic madness rushes to the help of the Greeks when things are at their worst. Alaric’s vision of Athene Promachos had been positively her last appearance. When, half a millennium later, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer flung himself down in the Parthenon before its reigning patroness, the halo of a newer Virgin had replaced the shining helmet and the great semicircle of horsehair. How scarce are the annals now! And how sad it is, in 1182, when Archbishop Michael Akominatos—a Phrygian Greek from Constantinople—finds that the speech of his flock is barbarized almost beyond understanding!

  All at once, the villainous Fourth Crusade fills the landscape with marauding knights and long passages of medieval Burgundian put everything into enthralled slow motion: ‘En celle manière come vous aves oÿ, si fu faict l’acort et le pays dou seignor de la Roche au Prince Guillerme. Et puis que la pais fut faicte et complie li jone bachellier mennerent grant feste de joustes, de rompre lances a la quintaine, et de caroles’—it is as though the castle were being captured and the lances splintered at the bottom of a treacle-well. The Low Latin pages of Maroni’s 1395 chronicle may not be hard—‘Civitas Acthenarum ut hostendis per antiqua hedeficia alias fuit magna civitas in ea fuerunt, prout vidimus multas columpnas’ etc—but it might make the hypothetical CIA reader scratch his head a bit, and here he would not get much help from the footnote, for it is medicine time; the author is lashing himself into a rage about General Metaxas, the Truman doctrine and NATO, so hasten on to the 1436 narrative of Cyriac of Ancona . . .

  Speaking of the plight of Athens in the Dark Ages, the author thinks that the latter-day Greeks may have been unjust in blaming all the desolation on the Turks, though they certainly helped. Rather unexpectedly the first account of the city, two centuries after its capture in 1453, is by a Moslem, and the style of Evliya Chelebi has a strong touch of the Arabian Nights about it. The picture that he and his Giaour successors conjure up—pillars, cupolas, cypress-trees, ruins full of owls, storkharbouring minarets; janissaries with pipes as long as their muskets yawning among the tumbled capitals, idle or oppressive disdars; the downtrodden and clever Greeks, pliant notables, cylinder-hatted priests, turbaned hodjas, and the vertigo-proof dervishes of the Tower of the Winds gyrating and ululating in their dark octagon. These things set the pattern until the end of the Turkish incumbency.

  Here is an unforgettable glimpse, out of Dodwell, of the Greek secretary of an oppressive voivode:

  Galloping through the narrow streets of Athens and endangering the lives and limbs of the passengers, he was easily distinguished at a distance mounted on a white horse with its tail and mane dyed of an orange colour, and he was attended by other horsemen who played on the violin as he rode.

  Lifting all the storks from their nests, a Venetian bomb wrecks the Parthenon in the middle of this lapse of time; towards the end, Lord Elgin makes off with everything but the columns. The shovel-hats of Jesuits and Capuchins, the wideawakes of architectural draughtsmen and the tricorns of dilettanti join the queer and varied headgear of the village; and soon, far away in the libraries of the West, handsomely got-up volumes begin to appear. (Nine pages of lively reminiscence and instructive but marvellously implausible conversation are quoted from Guillet de la Guilletière, who never set foot in Greece: a reference to ‘his supposed visit’ is not quite enough warning against this diverting old fraud.) A mass of documents mounts up as 1821 approaches, with Lord Byron, quite rightly, well in the lead; just as Makryannis, when the country finally bursts into flames, is unchallenged among the warlike chroniclers. Nobody catches the flavour so well or describes it more simply. At the grimmest moment of the siege of the Acropolis, in command of a desperate handful of defenders, suddenly, over supper, he makes it up with a brother-in-arms with whom he had long fallen out; and he sings an old mountain-song they both remember: ‘“Brother Makryannis,” Gouras said, “May this song bode well for us.” “I was in the mood,” I said, “for we had not sung for so long.” For formerly, in our camps, we were always singing and making merry . . .’ But towards moonset, bullets began to fly . . . ‘Gouras fired at the Turks, they shot back at the flash and hit him in the temple and he never spoke a word . . .’ The survivor led the breakout through the Turkish trenches. He was slashed by yataghans and hit by bullets again and again. With his head laid open and several bones smashed by trampling, he was flung senseless across a saddle . . . who would have thought that Greece would have been free only three years later? Or that the old Klepht would learn to read and write just to set it all down for us?

  This great landmark is only halfway through the book. The task of selection must have been enormously complicated by the nineteenth-century rush of material and the chaotic sequel to the War of Independence: the tension between the old and the new forces—Mani towers, mountain caves, the Phanar, the guaranteeing powers, the despotic Bavarian triumvirate that governed Greece under a Wittelsbach King, the struggle for a constitution, brigandage in league with authority, coups, changes of dynasty, spongebag trousers ousting the kilt—all this is minutely documented. There are famous names—Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Finlay, Aubrey de Vere, Flaubert, Gautier, Gobineau and—once again anathema in Athens except to a few perceptive eyes—Edmond About.

  But these are outnumbered by names less known, or not known at all, and some of the texts have been unearthed and published here for the first time. The extraordinary rustic narrative (1905) of Eva Palmer is one of these. This eccentric New York millionairess friend of Isadora Duncan became the foundress of the revived Delphic Festivals and the wife of the flamboyant laureate Sikilianos. (In a revised version, there would be a swarm of outside suggestions, a plea, even, for the flippant and the transitory as well as the learned; E. F. Benson, perhaps, for smart life in Edwardian times, Compton Mackenzie for the Venizelist-Royalist intrigues of the Great War, Robert Byron on the late 1920s, Cyril Connolly for a thé dansant of businessmen at the Grande Bretagne Hotel during the 1935 revolt. At the other end of the scale, I would sigh for an excerpt or two from Renan’s Prière sur I’Acropole: but, such are the revolutions of taste, he may be as much a bane to Kevin Andrews as Fallmerayer was to the Athenians of a few generations ago.) He is right to stretch his terms of reference to include Hemingway’s reports; he filed them as a young war correspondent in Smyrna and eastern Thrace: they describe, unforgettably, the Asia Minor campaign and the catastrophe that followed, and no part of Greek history more damagingly bears out the author’s theme or has had a longer influence on Athens today.

  No review can adequately explore this Aladdin’s cave. One can only hope, by darting about inside it, to give some idea of its richness and variety. A dark, brooding, rather perplexing mood weighs on the book as it nears its end, just as the author wished; pens may be decked with myrtle as well as the blades of tyrannicides but I can’t help longing for this particular quill to be laid out with scores of others for the great symmetrical pinions to be stuck together again, feather to feather; and at last, for the author to take wing, high above the snow-covered mountain chains and the archipelagos, as of old.

  I wonder whether he was assaulted on finishing by the same escapist urge that lays hold of the reader? The dash for the bookcase, the wish to be lifted by magic to an earlier city, before the fumes of today had driven the Caryatids from their plinth, after twenty-three hundred years? Before the book has started, even; before all the trouble began?

  From of old the children of Erechtheus are

  Splendid, the sons of blessed gods. They dwell

  In Athens’ holy and unconquered land,

  Where famous wisdom feeds them, and they pass gaily

  Always through that most brilliant air, where once, they say

  That golden Harmony gave birth to nine

  Pure muses of Pieria.*

  * Euripides, Medea, translated by Rex Warner.

  Drag
ons and Windmills

  Review of Robert Byron: Letters Home, ed. Lucy Butler (John Murray, 1991), The Spectator, 20 April 1991

  It was only in his twenties that Robert Byron thought much about the identity of his surname with the poet’s. The precise link, several centuries back, was blurred by lack of records, but both sets of Byrons sprang from Lancashire; the affinity had always been taken for granted; they were similar in background and heraldically identical and the degree of probability is very high. It means nothing, of course, that both stars were marked by originality, precocity, extreme intelligence, combativeness, courage, humour and a strong literary gift; but, had the centuries been switched, his ghostly lordship would surely have rejoiced in the thought of a link with his namesake.