Building Zeta
Ashort walk from Amazonon Street is the Kerameikos Archaeological Museum. It’s on the site of the original Kerameikos, just inside the ancient city gates, and gets its name from the ceramic workshops and studios that used to fill this area. Not only was this a hub of industry, but at night, it was the site of one of the most famous brothels in the city. You can stand in the ruins of this ancient bordello. Some of the walls are still intact, as is the alley that runs between the city wall and the building. You can lean on them, just like flute girls and comedic playwrights might have done 2,500 years ago.
Not surprisingly, the brothels of ancient Athens had menus. I’m guessing the brothels of contemporary Athens probably have menus too. It’s always good to know what the various services on offer are and how much they cost. For example in Athens around 420 BCE you could get the kubda, which was the cheapest position and involved standing behind the enslaved prostitute, who was bent forward; for a few obols more you could spring for the lordo, which was the same as the kubda but with the enslaved woman leaning back against you, or you could go all out and try the keles, or “stallion.” Nowadays we call the stallion a cowgirl—or, if you prefer, a reverse cowgirl—and the brothel is referred to as “Building Z.” There are no rooms per se, just stones in the dusty ground, the outlines of what was once a place for sex and wine and song and human trafficking and slavery.
The archaeological museum is a large open area in the center of the sprawling modern metropolis, a short walk from the Acropolis and the ancient Agora. My guide to the Kerameikos was Nicolas Nicolaides, a historian, writer, and Ph.D. student as well as one of the cofounders of Big Olive, a company that offers cultural tours of Athens. He is something of an expert on the life of the city then and now, and, like most Athenians, he is an enthusiast for a good taverna. Almost all my favorite restaurants in Athens I discovered through him. He can be professorial when he’s spouting information, but he is quick to smile and is prone to fits of giggles that remind me of a cartoon character.*
Nicolas pointed across the Kerameikos to a large pile of rocks in what looked like a vast pile of rocks. “The city gate, over there, you can see the steps and you can see the road in the middle.” I looked, but I wasn’t sure I was seeing it. From our vantage point the entire area was just a jumble of partial walls and outlines of buildings embedded in the dirt with a scattering of stones and ancient grave markers. Some of the markers were ornate, in the shape of virile animals like bulls or lions, while others depicted scenes of the dead being visited by their friends and family. My favorite was a simple marble slab from the fifth century BCE with the message I AM THE BOUNDARY MARKER OF THE SACRED WAY chiseled into it. Who says they didn’t have street signs in antiquity?
The Kerameikos is the edge of classical Athens, just inside the city walls. It was where you entered and exited through a double-doored gate called the Dipylon. As Nicolas said, “You can imagine the products coming from either the countryside or the port of Piraeus. And the road would be lined with long buildings, lines of columns that would provide shade.” If I squinted, I could see the ghosts of the towers that protected the Dipylon. Of course the towers were now just piles of wind-eroded stones under a corrugated plastic roof.
Nicolas continued to point out faint traces of the old city. “You can see the line starts near the oleander.” And you could. It was the road that used to go out, past the city gates and the cemetery, past Epicurus’s garden, to Plato’s Academy. I don’t know how other tourists feel when they suddenly see the traces of the ancient world and get a whisper of what it must have been like so long ago, but for me I felt a strange sensation overtake me—I was moved, reader. Awestruck. Maybe I was dehydrated. It was a weird feeling, something that I think people call “spiritual.” It reminded me of hiking the Incan trail to Machu Picchu with an Andean man, a historian and guide, who said he never got tired walking in the mountains because he got energy from Pachamama every time he walked the trail. For him it was spiritual. For me it was the coca leaves that kept me going. They say the spirit moves the Catholics who walk the Camino de Santiago and the Muslims on the hajj. That I had that kind of feeling in an area famous for ancient wine bars and whorehouses perhaps says more about me than I’d like to admit.
The author in the alley (photograph by Diana Faust).
Coming into the city, people would have seen the Acropolis on the hill, the fortified walls, and then passed through the gates and entered a bustling commercial area. Nicolas swept his hand across the map: “They were the brothels of the city of Athens, so we are on the edge of the city. It’s interesting because even today, if you visit a European city, usually the brothels are around the train station or the port. It’s where you enter the city. So here it was exactly the same.”1
It’s funny to think that areas like the Kerameikos become liminal spaces. Travelers enter a city and the threshold they cross is lined with brothels and taverns. Sex for hire and booze on tap—that’s how weary travelers know they’re back in civilization.
But now it’s just rubble. We know Building Z was a brothel during the time Ariphrades was alive. So it’s likely that I was standing in the exact location where Ariphrades excited the flute girls. Ground zero for comedic and cunnilingual notoriety.
Nicolas adjusted his baseball cap. “The deeper you get during an excavation, the further back you go in time, so if you try to read an archaeological site you see that sometimes buildings are built one on top of the other. That’s what people did. If the buildings were destroyed by war or earthquake or anything, they would come back and build on top of the old buildings and the buildings of their ancestors. And what’s interesting is they almost always used the same architectural materials, which is why the bottom layer is usually missing. The concept of preservation is something that comes with modernity. People would use anything, even statues and columns, as building materials.”
And they did, dumping beautiful sculptures into the ground to build fortifications against the Persians or the Spartans or the Romans or whoever was attacking that week. It was a practical solution to a pressing problem. You simply use the materials on hand so you don’t have to go all the way up to the mountain in order to extract marble. That’s what happened to the Library of Hadrian, an exquisite temple of learning sacrificed to fortify the city walls. You can still see the ruins just off Monastiraki Square.
(Photograph by C. Messier, Creative Commons)
The other reason libraries and temples and public buildings are destroyed is power. Throughout its history the Christian church has used pagan or Mayan or whatever kind of temples it found and built on top of them, converting one kind of sacred space into its kind of sacred space. Churches might be places of worship, but they are also symbols of power. They became the dominant narrative, absorbing the old, appropriating pagan feast days and turning a harvest festival into Christmas, and recasting Greek and Roman deities as apostles. If they couldn’t subsume it, they simply destroyed what they didn’t like. Imagine if that constant ebb and flow of conquest and destruction hadn’t happened? What if the dominant powers had allowed the past to continue to flourish alongside it?
But the Christians were insecure and destroyed what came before. I’m singling out Christianity because it is the dominant force in Greece, but this kind of behavior is practiced by almost all the major monotheistic religions. Perhaps it’s simply what happens when your foundational beliefs are based on fiction.
I’m not an archaeologist. You don’t see me down in a pit brushing dust off some crockery or spelunking for ancient treasures wearing a weather-beaten fedora. So why was I moved by this pile of rubble in the Kerameikos? So much about the ancient Athenian civilization is lost that most of what we have are gaps. As historian James N. Davidson writes, “While scholarly attention has been distracted elsewhere, some extraordinary gaps have been allowed to open up in our knowledge of ancient culture and society. The lack of work on Greek heterosexuality and (until recently
and outside France) ancient food are particularly striking.”2
Scholars do their best to try to figure out what life might have been like back then, but as we’ve seen, contemporary biases skew their conclusions. It’s a lot of very highly educated guesses, filling the gaps with conjecture, sometimes wishful thinking, romanticized ideas, and political agendas. One of my favorites is the scholar who studied Athenian pottery and decided that the depictions of anal sex between two men weren’t actually anal sex but something called “interfemoral intercourse.” As Holt N. Parker writes, “So, just as a good girl in the 1950s might allow some ‘heavy petting’ without losing her reputation but would not ‘go all the way,’ so a good eromenos could allow interfemoral intercourse, but not penetration.”3 In other words they were rubbing their dicks between each other’s thighs, because to actually penetrate another man would diminish his standing in Athenian society. But really, I’m not sure I buy it. It sounds like something that might happen at a church sleepaway camp and not what a penetration-obsessed society would do. Why wouldn’t they just stick it in? They stuck it in everywhere else.
Aristophanes wrote jokes about buttfucking, but I can’t find one about interfemoral intercourse. I don’t mean to harsh a classicist’s buzz. Academics can’t help but inject their personal agenda into a reading of the ancients; they have to fill in the gaps with something. It’s normal to try to connect with this ancient culture, to attempt to see it in terms we understand, namely, our terms. It’s human nature. I’m totally supportive of this kind of speculation. As a writer, it’s the gaps that interest me. The parts that were destroyed or suppressed or lost. If our imagination is our superpower—the thing that we believe separates us from other animals—then we can visualize and conceive of almost anything, from the pearly gates of Heaven and the fiery pits of Hell, to fantasy worlds with elves and sorcerers, to life on a space station, to what our boss looks like naked. We might not always get it right—in fact we often envision things that are impossible, entirely upside down—but our imagination fills in the gaps. When thinking about ancient Athens, the gaps are more like chasms and neglected areas of study. Just like underappreciated insects, orphan groups are everywhere.
Much of what we think we know about Athens comes from playwrights, poets, and shards of pottery, and it really begs the question: Just how reliable is it? Nowadays we hardly read anymore, let alone recite poetry or go to the theater. As talented as they are, would we want future humans to try to comprehend our civilization through the work of Louise Glück, Tennessee Williams, and some crockery from Ikea? Of course it’ll be worse than that: two thousand years from now scholars will be studying fragments of Iron Man 3 and Avengers: Infinity War and the various iterations of Spiderman and episodes of The Apprentice, wondering why we were so dumb and violent and what kind of pagan religion worshipped insect people. We will wish they had our poets and playwrights.
So what if your story is simply that you wrote some jokes, you made people laugh, you were engaged with your society and culture at the time, and you took as much pleasure in the world as you could? And after that, if your work disappears … well, does it matter? Not every writer gets a legacy that lasts thousands of years. Comedy is an in-the-moment kind of thing, it doesn’t always travel well, and it often comes with an expiration date. The pleasures of writing humor come from taking chances, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and mocking your own eccentricities, and that openness to all the foibles and pitfalls of your own humanity buys you some credit to poke holes in the hubris of the arrogant, the know-it-alls, the pious, and the dimwitted bosses who think they run the world. I can imagine Ariphrades was amused by the life he found himself living, the names he’d been called, the infamy he’d achieved. You learn to take your pleasures and your notoriety with some equanimity.
This must be what archaeologists feel when they start excavating a site or a classics professor might feel when she unrolls a newly discovered scroll. Are they excited by what they will find or what they imagine they might find? Is it like the jolt of brain chemicals we get when we gamble? Interestingly, it’s not when we win but when the dice are rolling, when the flop is being laid down, when the slots are spinning, that the brain gets excited; it’s the possibilities, the potential, the unknown about to be revealed, that turns us on. That’s the thrill of excavation, the jazz of discovery.
There’s not a lot of excavation in our modern lives; people don’t dig very deep. The basic needs of living, the constant distractions of media and the internet, our desires and delusions—these are all glittering on the surface, and we rarely stop and take a moment and look at what’s underneath. We don’t think critically about information we’ve been given. We seem reluctant to peel back the layers or think about the gaps. But that’s where our story is: buried underneath the debris and detritus of whatever system we are subscribing to, whether it’s capitalism or Judaism, commercialism or Christianity, Buddhism or socialism, these systems are constructs to distract us from excavating our lives. They fill in the gaps with prefab dogma so we don’t have to think about the unknowable or confront the mystery of life.
Being in Athens, thinking about the past, seeing the contrails of the ancient world, makes me want to think about things in a different way. What if we embraced the gaps? What if we left some mysteries mysterious? Because what does it say about our civilization that if something doesn’t fit our current narrative, we destroy it? That can’t be healthy. It creates cognitive dissonance. Isn’t rewriting the past to fit what we want to believe the definition of borderline personality disorder? Why don’t we put down our smartphones and turn off our televisions and really start looking at ourselves and our connection to the world? Can we trade superficial amusements for deeper pleasures? Can we live with gaps in what is and isn’t knowable? Is civilization a kind of mental illness?
This is a book of questions. I’m sorry I don’t have more answers.
* Specifically Dick Dastardly’s sidekick, Muttley, from Hanna-Barbera’s 1968 animated show Wacky Races.
Parabasis
In ancient Greek comedies the parabasis is a rant. A time-out. A space for the author to say a few words. Which is supposed to be different from the agon, where the characters do all the talking. Usually the parabasis divides the agon, giving the audience a little intermission from the main story. And, as I showed in previous chapters, the parabasis is where the author calls out people he or she doesn’t like and holds them up for ridicule. I can only surmise that the comedy routines of Don Rickles and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog were inspired by this classic theatrical form. Who knew?
In the parabasis for Wasps Aristophanes berates the audience for failing to give Clouds the acclaim he felt it was due. He has the chorus tell the audience:
Last year you betrayed him beyond measure when he sowed
some brand new ideas which failed to take root because you
didn’t understand them properly—although he swears by
Dionysus over countless libations that no one has ever heard
comic poetry better than that …
But in the future, my good people,
Cherish and nurture more
Those poets who seek
To say something new.
Keep hold of their ideas
And keep them in your clothes-boxes
With the citrons.
And if you do this, after a year
Your cloaks
Will smell of cleverness.1
I love Aristophanes for that. It’s just so audacious. Love me or you’re stupid. I suppose there’s something liberating about having an ego that supercharged. Whether it comes from a place of insecurity and rage or he’s playing himself as a character who just does not give a fuck, either way it’s remarkable. I can’t imagine having the balls or the hubris to stand up and say something like that, and, to be perfectly honest, I want a clever-smelling jacket. So like my parodos at the beginning of this book, my parabasis will be a little different
. I’m not going to call out local Angelenos and mock them—although Mayor Garcetti is certainly due a public ribbing for his faintheartedness in the face of multiple crises and sycophantic groveling to the powerful for a cushy job in Washington. But I’m not going to stoop to that. Let’s keep it classy.
There’s been a glut of books talking about the ancient world; some of them are self-help, some of them are philosophical inquiries using ancient texts to reframe the present. Recent titles like How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well, by Catherine Wilson; Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, by Edith Hall; The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient, by William Irvine; How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, by Donald Robertson; and The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, by Ryan Holiday.
I think the original philosophers would be delighted to see their ideas back in circulation. So let me throw my hat in the ring. How about a little Ariphrades-inspired pleasure to improve your life? Or improve the life of someone you love? At the very least we can start dismantling the patriarchy, give women equal rights, and stand back while they take their fair share of, well, everything. They’ve earned it.
Of course pulling from the past to explain the present can have a dark side. Some ancient philosophers have been co-opted by the “alt-right” who—overlooking the sodomy and interfemoral intercourse—look back on ancient Greece as the good old days, when white dudes were the bosses of the world, enslaved human beings did the hard work, and women cooked, cleaned, and received regular deposits of semen without complaint. I suppose in their minds a few pull quotes from Socrates and a picture of the Parthenon spiff up their sulky resentment at being involuntarily celibate, lend gravitas to their misogynistic whining. But it’s all so unearned. Like open carry permits and dressing up in camouflage, it’s macho posturing from dudes who never learned to share, guys who think they deserve to be the boss because, well, that’s what they think and their daddy promised them. As classicist Donna Zuckerberg writes in her excellent book on the topic of alt-right co-opting of the ancients, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, “They idealize a model for gendered behavior that erases much of the social progress that has been achieved in the last two thousand years—and they are using ancient literature to justify it.”2 And if you point out that they’re just cherry-picking the bits that bolster their racism and misogyny, they go on all-out social media rampages, as Zuckerberg discovered when she published an article critical of the Far Right’s misreading of Stoic philosophy. As she writes in her book, “It shows that these men enjoy learning about the ancient world because they believe that they and the ancients share similar beliefs, and they think that anybody who is not as misogynistic and xenophobic as the Greeks and Romans must not truly appreciate and wish to preserve ancient literature and culture.” Which in their minds is reason enough for posting death threats and rape fantasies. Since this is my parabasis, my stepping forward, let me be clear: Those guys can go fuck themselves.
Rude Talk in Athens Page 13