Villa Ariadne

by Dilys Powell

  People, I fancy, were not far wrong when they believed that the Villa servants had saved money. All the same private savings have nothing to do with the hope of a pension, and I could not help admiring the dramatic conclusion. ‘After forty years,’ Manoli said in a fine burst of righteous exaggeration, ‘a man should not be thrown out to die like a dog.’

  Anyway I felt I should like to talk to the older servants, those who, unlike Manoli, were no longer working. I found Maria, that flittering household moth who decades earlier had cleaned sherds on the Evans excavations, at her village of Katalagari. Bunched together in skirts and scarves, hooded in black, she came at the rumour of an English visitor to hobble along the narrow street, where to my surprise she recognised me instantly. I was glad to get out of the airless little staircase of her house to a balcony which smelt sweet with flowers in pots; a boy was sent running to fetch loukoúmia; a bottle of tsikoudhiá was brought; and I sat drinking and holding Maria’s arthritic old hand while a crowd of friends and relations pressed in. Are you from London, from London are you? Where are you staying, where are you staying? How many days, how many days? Slowly and with piercing clarity for the benefit of a foreigner the women duplicated every question. A party of little boys stood watching from a rooftop across the street. One of my audience – it was a daughter, a handsome woman with no headscarf, the hair severely parted and drawn back – spoke bitterly about the lack of a pension from the School. And completely reduced by gentle old Maria’s welcome, I will do, I said, what I can. It won’t be every month or even every year, it won’t be much, but something I will do; I won’t forget. I left carrying a bunch of scarlet lilies cut from one of the balcony pots. Maria herself had complained of nothing, asked for nothing.

  Kosti, the former steward, was in a different mood. His village, Alagni, is about twenty miles from Herakleion; I was driven up in a hired car which half-filled the tiny square, the plateia, I sat in the café, ordered a drink and asked the man who served if he knew Kostis Khronakis. A messenger was despatched, a young man with bright lively manners and an incipient moustache appeared – Kosti’s son Minos. A few minutes later a well-remembered figure came stumping into the plateia, a battered coat thrown over the shoulders, a wisp of black worn round the head. The once-fair moustache was grey; the chin was stubbly; but the eyes peering out of the wrinkles still blazed a mad bright blue. He had no memory of me until I mentioned Humfry. But then he sat down and without pause ran through his repertoire of anecdotes, beginning with the one in which, according to some of my friends, the central figure is Hogarth (‘Hoggeris’ in Cretan). For me, though, it has always been Evans. Anyway Kosti himself, no matter who is being rescued, invariably plays the part of the rescuer. ‘I carried him out of the waves on my shoulders, on my shoulders I carried him.’ The story was once well known among his Cretan acquaintances. ‘Has he told you’, they would say, ‘about carrying Evans on his shoulders?’

  When I went into his house Kosti, surrounded by wife, son and a variety of relations and neighbours, got on to a more urgent subject. He had worked for the School and the Villa for forty-seven years: ‘Now they have thrown me out.’ Making a personal bid for my sympathy, he recalled a letter he had written to me after Humfry’s death; he had been to Mycenae, the letter said, and there had put flowers on the grave. Yes, I said. I remember; that was kind of you.

  ‘Shall I write to the School Committee in London about my pension? Forty-seven years I have worked. I have been very ill, I have had three operations, my legs have gone black, would you like to see them?’

  I made a hasty diversion. How did you get on, I asked, in the war? Did you ever see any of the British officers? Did you hear about General Kreipe?

  ‘Once Mr Dunbabin, you know, Tom, came to the house. His clothes were all in rags – I gave him some of mine. Yes, we had four Germans billeted here, they slept in this room. One was a bad lot, he killed two Greeks in the next village. Two of the others were good men, anyhow none of them ever gave us any trouble. Then one day they came in and told us: “They have stolen our general, it is the end of the war!” Not long after that they went off hanging their heads with the Greeks laughing at them… . Shall I write to your Prime Minister about my pension? I am strong, I can still work. Why’ (the blue eyes glittered with mischief) ‘I will come to the Stadium in Athens and wrestle to show you… .’

  Incautiously I described conditions at the Villa; there was no work. The place was shut up. I had forgotten the myth about the de Jongs.

  ‘It is all the fault of Mrs de Jong, all her fault. When she and her husband left they took things from the Villa, they left it bare. It is all her fault.’

  Nonsense, I said, what things?

  ‘Furniture, all sorts of things. Forty-seven years I worked, I know how to cook, how to do everything, now they have thrown me out …’

  Well, I said, stop telling these silly stories about Mr and Mrs de Jong and when I get back to England I will see what can be done. As I was driven away Kosti with his family and a small crowd of fascinated observers stood waving in the plateia. That, I thought, is that until another year.

  Next morning I walked from the Herakleion hotel up to the Museum. At the entrance desk an official stopped me. Kosti Khronakis, he said, is looking for you; he is still somewhere about. There was a search. Upstairs among the strange formidable faces of the frescoes (so different from the faces of the replicas in the Palace), downstairs among the double axes and the jewellery and the decorated pots – not a trace of Kosti. But when I went back to the Astir Hotel there in the street, a coat thrown over his shoulders, was a figure waving frantically with a stick; he had come down by bus from his village.

  ‘Since I went to the grave at Mycenae and strewed flowers,’ he began as we sat on the hotel terrace; the waiter bringing drinks grinned delightedly. ‘After forty-seven years I have been thrown out. Will you take a letter to the Committee for me when you go back to England?’

  All right, I said. But I am going to Athens tomorrow, so get the letter written, leave it at the hotel and I will take it. He demurred. Today (for such a letter has to be professionally composed in high-class Greek) was too soon. Never mind, I said, I will give you my address in London; write to me there. And now we must leave, for I am going to Mallia.

  ‘To Mallia? I will come with you!’

  At last with repeated promises I detached myself. Once more I looked back from the car to see the stubborn old figure standing in the sun, waving. ‘Shall I’, he had said again as we parted, ‘send a letter to your Prime Minister too?’ He thought for a moment. ‘And shall I put in a little one for the Queen?’

  It was indeed true that there was no place for Kosti at the Villa any more. Long after the hand-over conditions at the property were anomalous. In 1958 when, making my first nostalgic return, I had crept down the stairs and peered into a bathroom with dripping tap and a bedroom where creepers were beginning to thrust fingers through the window-hinges, the British School was apparently still authorised to use the house as overflow accommodation for students working on excavations, and the Director came up from the Taverna to join them for meals. A year later I found the Taverna unoccupied, but Piet and Effie were living in the Villa – living a picnic life in one room with camp-beds, a stove, a table, a couple of broken-down chairs, a threadbare carpet and a cupboard which they said was a relic of the Evans furniture.

  Piet had been making exquisite drawings, 1,400 of them, for a German publication of the Cretan seals in the Herakleion Museum. He had been allowed to take trays of the impressions up to the Villa to work from, and he was now waiting for Professor Platon, who was at Rethymnon, to come back to Herakleion and approve the work. The Museum’s professional mender occupied a nextdoor room and sometimes slept there. Manoli and Ourania still had the servants’ quarters. For the rest the house was a shell, and at the sound of footsteps in the garden tiger-striped, long-eared cats shrank into the thirsty tangle of mullein and wild poppy. As late as 1960, five yea
rs after the Greek Archaeological Service had taken over the estate, there was still no change. The little Taverna seemed to me when I was staying there that year to have assumed the modest comfort, the self-sufficiency, the calm cloistral air which had once belonged to the Villa itself. But the big squat stone house still slept.

  In 1962 I was again briefly in Herakleion. On the bus to Knossos I asked for Evans’s house. The conductor made no difficulty; that at least was the same. Stealthily, for I wanted to look by myself before I was overwhelmed with the commonplaces of news, I made my way past the Taverna courtyard and up through a garden still matted with dry weeds. The Villa was silent. The silence, though, was of a new kind. The house was closed. But the dark green shutters were fastened back, and through basement windows I could see bedrooms freshly equipped – mattresses tidily rolled on the beds, lamps on the bed-tables, basins with running water.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ourania, when the uproar of the dog brought her out, ‘they have had archaeologists here, Greek, English, I don’t know who else. They have turned the dining-room into a drawing-room.’

  And now I remembered that in the previous autumn an archaeological conference had been held in Crete. Delegates had stayed at the Villa Ariadne, and the house had been put to the purpose for which Evans intended it. Once more it had served as a quiet meeting-place, a retreat for researchers and scholars.

  Or perhaps not so quiet, for in the preceding decade the underground skirmishing which is the daily life of archaeology had burst out into the open.

  iv

  The battle had begun in the early 1950s with a revolutionary philological study. Or perhaps one should look back to the start of the century and that fabulous first season at Knossos when Evans had unearthed hundreds of clay tablets, some of them with hieroglyphs but most bearing linear inscriptions of two kinds, to be known as Linear A and Linear B. The second of these scripts was the more sophisticated and the later in date. There was also much more of it; and though scholars threw themselves enthusiastically into the task of trying to decipher anything that turned up the chances with Linear B seemed the more promising.

  Evans immediately recognised that the tablets represented inventories, lists of people, animals, goods. But in what language? Etruscan? Hittite? He believed it to be an unknown tongue, in fact Minoan, so that even if it could be deciphered it might still be incomprehensible. Since he had begun his explorations with the idea of finding an early system of writing the hope of reading the script was dear. A few of the tablets were illustrated in his 1900 report in the British School Annual. In 1909 his Scripta Minoa I included the hieroglyphs, the Linear A and another handful of the Linear B inscriptions from Knossos. In 1935 came Volume IV of The Palace of Minos with more Linear B. But exhausted by the creation of the enormous book the ageing giant never managed to publish the great mass of the tablets. Six years later he was dead. The riddle was still unsolved; and his old friend Myres was left to grapple with editing the collected material.

  For half a century after Evans’s first triumphs Linear B remained, in spite of numerous scholarly theories, an enigma. In 1939, however, there was another of the discoveries which translate myth into history. It was the discovery described by John Pendlebury in that letter to his father: ‘Blegen has got a Palace apparently of the Homeric period… .’

  The American archaeologist the late Carl Blegen had been digging on the west coast of the Peloponnese at Pylos, reputed domain of Nestor, wisest of the Greeks who sailed against Troy. And like Schliemann proving the truth of Troy, like Evans verifying the golden tales of Minos, Blegen brought archaeology to the defence of legend. There, a few miles from Pylos, were the remains of a Palace which the evidence marked as Nestor’s. He found not only the Palace of Nestor. He found, as John Pendlebury reported, large numbers of inscribed clay tablets (there were in fact hundreds of pieces): and though at the time John thought they differed from the Palace of Minos finds the seven photographs which were immediately published showed clearly, according to later and more fully informed experts, ‘that the Pylos tablets were identical in script, layout and language with the Linear B documents which Evans had found at Knossos’.

  But the war delayed fuller publication, and more than a decade went by before the Pylos material could be made generally accessible. Then suddenly a rush of evidence. In 1952 Blegen, once again excavating, found more tablets. That same season Evans’s old adversary Wace brought to light at Mycenae a number of Linear B pieces. And Myres now published in Scripta Minoa II the Knossos material. Or a great part of it; authorities maintain that various factors – the difficulty of dealing with Evans’s notes, interruption by the war – combined to make the book incomplete. Not that there was blame for Myres, who at an advanced age had been faced with so difficult a problem. Two years later he was dead. He was eighty-four; and another towering figure from the romantic era of archaeology had vanished.

  That summer the British School was digging in the island of Chios. The Sunday Times, benevolently encouraging an experiment in underwater archaeological exploration, had presented the School with skin-diving equipment; an indolent, un-athletic, ignorant bystander, I swam about, ignominiously failed in an attempt to skin-dive, rambled over the hills and by the kindness of the Director, Sinclair Hood, shared the life of the expedition. The party included a reserved young man with dark hair and serious refined features, Michael Ventris. He was the team’s draughtsman-surveyor; his wife Betty worked with him; and the industrious pair would be seen setting off with their notebooks in the long shadows of early morning or the stunning heat of afternoon towards the foundations of an archaic temple high in a hollow of the hills.

  I had been sent to Chios as an observer. I observed, I asked questions. Who was Michael Ventris? He had won a certain fame, somebody said. Philologists were still arguing; too early for general acceptance; but it really seemed that Ventris had deciphered Linear B. In the interval, nearly twenty years, since my last visit to Crete I had forgotten the existence of Linear B. Nevertheless, recognising that interpretation of the script was likely to cause an outbreak of scholarly sniping, I looked across the table with a new curiosity at the grave, concentrated young face – which at that moment was probably grumbling about the vegetable stew which sometimes provided our main dish. Meat was scarce in Chios.

  Michael Ventris had been a schoolboy when he began to think about Linear B. In 1936 he was in the audience at Burlington House when during the exhibition celebrating the British School’s fiftieth anniversary Evans lectured on the Minoan discoveries. That was the start. Ventris says that four years later he ‘tested the theory of an Etruscan relationship on the Knossos tablets in an adolescent article’. Trained as an architect, he did not lose interest in the problem of Linear B. But there was always a major obstacle – the impossibility of getting a proper look at the script.

  At last by 1952 the cryptologists got their chance. Not only was Scripta Minoa II at their disposal, not only Blegen’s 1939 material, which was published in 1951; Wace generously let two decipherers have an early look at photographs of the tablets newly found at Mycenae. One of the two was John Chadwick, a Cambridge philologist and classical scholar. The other was Michael Ventris. And in 1953, mainly as the result of ‘an idea suggested’ by Ventris, an article jointly written appeared in The Journal of Hellenic Studies. The idea was that Linear B represented not Etruscan or Hittite, not, as Evans had believed, Minoan, but an early form of Greek. Some archaeologists had already suggested this. Ventris and Chadwick set to work to prove it by transliteration.

  Not to be expected that everybody would be immediately convinced. But the next year or two brought more material and more evidence, and in 1956 Ventris and Chadwick were able to publish Documents in Mycenaean Greek, a solid book with interpretations of three hundred tablets from Knossos, Pylos and Mycenae. The authors admitted that their translation was sometimes tentative. But they felt confident that in principle they were right – and by then most scholars felt so too. Linear
A remained mysterious. Earlier, more primitive, it possibly represented a really unknown language, perhaps the Minoan tongue which Evans thought was expressed also in Linear B. In detail, indeed, the whole subject, A and B alike, is impenetrable except to the serious student, and I risk referring to it only in so far as it concerns the Knossos story.

  But one need not be a student to see what it meant if the Knossos Linear B tablets really were written in a form of Greek. Artistic and archaeological evidence had shown that in its great creative period Knossos was closely linked with Mycenae. Evans maintained that Mycenae was a colony, ‘a Minoan plantation’; and in The Archaeology of Crete John Pendlebury, describing Crete as ‘a world power’, wrote of ‘the extension of her empire to the North, over the Mainland and islands’ and of ‘the Minoanization of the Mainland’. But if Linear B was Greek then at the time the script was being written on those famous clay tablets the language of the educated, the ruling class in Knossos would have been Greek. And then the situation is reversed: Mycenae, Greek Mycenae would, as some archaeologists had for years been arguing, have been the dominant power; a Mycenaean, a Greek Mycenaean could have held the throne of Minos. Evans believed that Knossos was wrecked by an earthquake. Pendlebury suggested that the disaster came with invasion from the mainland, ‘a deliberate sacking’ by rebellious dominions of the Cretan empire. The deciphering by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick of the Linear B script strengthened a third theory: that on the spring day, evoked by Pendlebury in a dramatic phrase, ‘when a strong South wind was blowing which carried the flames of the burning beams almost horizontally northwards’, it might have been the Minoans themselves, the subject people, who rebelled against their Greek overlords and set fire to the Palace.