The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  The Northern Aegean

  *

  Lesbos · Lemnos · Samothrace · Thasos

  Spacious and gentle is Lesbos – but how to escape from the net of ancient associations which make everything to do with the place memorable? But then, why try? Lesbos vibrates like a spiderweb with the names of high antiquity – the greatest of all being Sappho. Here, in the shadow cast by slate-grey Olympus, Sappho lived and worked, though, if Eressos is really her native hamlet, she worked with her back to the present Turkish mainland. In contrast, the modern capital of Lesbos, Mytilini, which is perched on its long irregular promontory in the eye of the wind, faces the mountains across the water. A glance at the map will show how queer its shape is – like a half-enunciated geometrical problem. Its lozenge form is abruptly carved into by two great landlocked bays, Kalloni and Iera, the former nearly ten miles long, a haven of clam water to delight the heart of a sailor. Each of these natural estuaries has a narrow entrance drilled like a sinus into the landscape. Entering them, you receive your first impression of Lesbos as a place offering tranquillity and beauty and a sort of repose which seems even to silence the cicadas at noon. Perhaps this impression is the result of finding such safe anchorages, where one can sleep on deck under the stars, conscious of rich glades close by, which are densely clothed in olives as hairy and untutored as those of Corfu. Lesbian fruit and olives find their way to the Athens market; so do the Lesbian ouzo and white wine.

  Mytilini is a breezy and pleasantly animated little township without any special, awesome antiquities, and just a sufficiently mixed style of architecture to divert the traveller. It is cool in summer because of its orientation; but the whole island has a singular charm which is hard to analyse since Lesbos is not as beautiful as Rhodes or Crete or Corfu. Is one being seduced by the literary association connected with its famous name? Even if I am accused of romancing I would say ‘No’, and insist that Lesbos belongs to a special category of place which holds a secret magic of its own. No matter how shattered by tourism or despoiled by promoters’ taste, these select places (even if they are mere holes in the ground) still echo with a sort of message that the visitor receives. ‘Once a star, always a star,’ says Noël Coward very rightly. There is a radiance and a throb in names like Taormina, Avignon, Delos, Tintagel, Mycenae, which will never be extinguished – or so one hopes. I would put Lesbos into this category even though it is outclassed in natural beauty by other and bigger islands to the south and east. It is hard to describe the scenery objectively when one knows that for Daphnis and Chloe, that delightful novel, this place was chosen as a stage for its young lovers to walk, bemused in the passionate self-discovery that first love brings and time will never repeat. The subject matter of the book is divine innocence and pure joy – for which Greece provides an appropriate backcloth; these vernal glades and combes with their fruit-blossom, oleanders and olives is the perfect setting for such a theme.

  If I turn away from Sappho for the present, it is to remind myself that in the long scroll of Lesbian history her name is only one of many illustrious names. Pittacus, tyrant of the island, was among the Seven Sages of Greece and enunciated the two brief maxims which were inscribed upon the porch of the Delphic temple. Theophrastus, who lived to be 107 years old, and spent thirty-five years as the head of the Athens Academy, was a pupil of Plato and Aristotle; his long reign shows him to have been justly popular in an epoch marked by political and intellectual upheavals. Among philosophers and moralists who lived on the island were Aristotle, who taught here for two years, and the sadly neglected and traduced Epicurus, whom we are just beginning to appreciate at his true worth once more. Epicurus’s philosophy exercised so widespread an influence that for a long time it was touch-and-go whether Christianity might not have to give way before it. But the poor in heart won out, don’t ask me why – it is one of the great mysteries of the world. The Lesbian intellectual was held in high esteem in the ancient world. There is an anecdote about Aristotle appointing a successor to a teacher in his school. The choice lay between Menedemus of Rhodes and Theophrastus of Lesbos. The great Athenian philosopher deliberated long, and finally asked for the wines of the two islands to be served to him; he sipped them as he reflected. Then, pronouncing them both excellent, he gave the palm to the Lesbian, saying that it had more body. So Theophrastus was chosen for the post.

  Plutarch has told us how famous the island already was in antiquity both for its musicians and for its poets; and the musical tradition was emphasized in mystical fashion by the fact that here the singing head of Orpheus was washed up and recovered after the Bacchantes had tossed it into the River Hebros. The famous ‘dolphin-charming’ Arion was a native of Methymna (now Melyves), and Terpander of Lesbos was the first to string the lyre with seven strings – an invention which for the ancient world was as decisive as the jump from clavichord to piano was for us. (Sappho went so far as to invent her own small version of this lyre, upon which she accompanied herself.) The opulence of Lesbos’s intellectual history is matched only by the opulence of its soil, and even today you can sense this. It would be a good place to work in, and quite a number of modern writers have been sufficiently impressed to spend a year or two in the island composing their books. Lesbos has known nothing but the best in poetry, music and philosophy – a very rich heritage for one small place!

  Its geographical strangeness also plays a part, for as you enter the narrow gullet of Iera or Kalloni the fissure closes behind you, sealed by the turning mountain. You lose sight of the narrow channel by which you have entered this anguish of silence and calm; a sense of unreality supervenes and you feel panicky.

  Sappho is beginning to emerge from the haze which the dark ages cast over her. For a long time she seemed almost a mythical figure, perhaps some escaped Olympian, footloose on earth. Now we know that she was a real person and are gradually finding out more about her. Even her work is slowly coming to light, though we still have only about one-twentieth of what she actually wrote. For a long time this venerated ghost of antiquity existed only by hearsay and the chance quotation of phrases from her poems which were embalmed in the work of critics and grammarians. From these crumbs it was hard to show convincing evidence of her genius, and the few biographical anecdotes were either vague or implausible. Between 1897 and 1906, however, by a stroke of luck, at a place in Egypt called Oxyrhynchus, a great find was made by the scholars of the Egypt Exploration Society.

  The sand is a wonderful preserver of objects and writings, and the find consisted of a hoard of mummy-wrappings fabricated from papyrus. These writings, presumably regarded as expendable by their owners, were used as wadding for coffins, or even as stuffing for ritually embalmed animals like small crocodiles. They ranged in period from the first century BC to the tenth AD. All this workshop rubbish had been thrown on to a garbage-tip, from which the scholars managed to rescue it. Among so many ancient texts, quite a number were Sappho’s poems. Our earliest papyrus is from the third century BC, some three hundred years after her death – though there is one small piece of pottery inscribed in a fourth-century hand. At the time of writing, however, not everything has been deciphered and released, so some new poems may yet emerge. Her great popularity in the lands where Greek was spoken ensured that her texts were jotted down by many different hands – which provides a fertile field for scholars of variant readings.

  If we are to trust reports she was small and swart, and was compared to the nightingale, which is a particularly ugly little bird. ‘Small and dark, with unshapely wings enfolding a tiny body’; this was the poetess whom Plato called the Tenth Muse. The little portrait of her – made long after her death – on the red-figured hydria by Polygnetus, which is in the National Museum of Athens, depicts a slender woman with a disproportionately big head and a long, reflective nose. She might be the sister of Virginia Woolf, so close is the resemblance.

  Her poems were accessible to everyone; they were not alembicated and difficult. Moreover they were sung or danced or
mimed before the general public. So great was their simple and vehement force that their author was treated almost as a goddess and statues to her were erected all over the civilized world. More than a thousand years of ancient testimony – 600 BC to AD 600 – insisted that she was the greatest poetess the world had ever known. Then a chill wave of doubt and sanctimoniousness set in and gradually her work was almost totally destroyed, while allegations as to her sexual proclivities began to be bandied about, largely under the influence of Ovid’s satyrical allusions.

  Born in 615 BC, Sappho was married to a rich businessman from Andros, who, however, is not mentioned in any of the fragments of her verse which we have today. That she was wealthy and from an aristocratic background there seems little doubt. She presumably played her part in the political life of Lesbos, for twice she was banished. She seems to have travelled a good deal in Greece, and to have made a great impression on the celebrated men she met; Alcaeus, her contemporary, called her ‘pure and holy Sappho’, which has prompted the great scholar C. M. Bowra to speculate on whether she was the prime mover in a Thiases or semi-religious college of women centred upon the cult of Aphrodite and the Muses. Priestess, director, and living muse, she marshalled her group of girls and organized the celebrations which marked the seasons. Looking back from today, it is hard to realize how much this old religion formed part and parcel of the Greek corpus of belief.

  I suspect that Greek religion, looked at through the smoked glasses of Pauline Christianity, shows a somewhat distorted version of itself. But in a world where the gods meddled so actively in the life of men, and where men could actually celebrate a ritual marriage with a goddess, the effective life of the ordinary people must have been vastly different from our own. You never knew, when there was a knock on the door, whether it was Aphrodite herself in human form outside. Often it was; though you did not usually realize this until after she had gone. Man’s soul moved easily between earth and sky, and it is not really possible for us to appreciate the sort of religious considerations which dictated the ancient Greek’s order of priorities. Today, it is only the poets who have not lost the faculty of sensing the Aphrodite under the disguise of an old shepherdess or a wrinkled crone. It is likely that the Greeks had developed different faculties of awareness from our own – an immediacy of recognition of things cosmic, or even of states like death. Conversely, they would have found it impossible to read St John of the Cross without amazement and perhaps disgust; and a crucifix would have taken some understanding, even though they were cheerfully accustomed to animal-sacrifice in the name of one of their gods. One has to keep all this in mind when trying to feel one’s way into the hearts and minds of ancient peoples. As for Sappho, how much was she goddess and how much poet? We shall never perhaps know. But that she was very much a woman, and a passionate one to boot, there seems little doubt from the poems we have of hers.

  One senses, too, what it was in her attitude which struck such a chord in the heart of the whole civilization which bore her. The poetry was at once fine and energetic as a vision of her feelings; people found it unusual, in an epoch of classical invocation to abstract personifications, to come upon verse which was in touch with the universal as well as commonplace emotions like vexation, passion, pathos, desire. A whole personality was actualized in her work; hers was not simply a superlative but frigid technique. An original and unexpectedly touching person emerges from the supple verses, from the music. That is why old Strabo calls her ‘a miracle of a young woman’, and that is why the older Solon admired her. I think too that it is fair to sense behind this praise an acceptance of her moral excellence as a muse and earth representative of Aphrodite. There is, at any rate, no suggestion of lubricity or impropriety in private conduct in these early references – whatever the state of morals in Lesbos at that time. The suggestions of lesbian predispositions and illicit loves come later from Ovid; but even he goes back on them, and says that she lost her taste for girls by falling in love with a man. What does it all matter?

  There is no reason to doubt the popular story of her death, though serious scholars have always treated it as intrinsically improbable. Why? She followed a lover, Phaon, through the islands and, when he refused her love and left her, jumped from the White Cliff in Lefkas to her death. She would have been about fifty, for in a fragment she mentions her wrinkles and the fact that she is past the age of child-bearing. The visitor to Lesbos will find such tales as this one of her death, and the problems they raise of truth or legend, tease his mind, whether he is travelling across the jade water of Iera at sunset with the slither of flying fish at his prow, or whether tucked against a tavern wall at Castro in Mytilini – a wall which shelters him from the wind, as he watches the shadow-play of vine-leaves upon the courtyard walls of the pink, blue and white houses of the town. There have been some digs at Eressos, her home town, but nothing really spectacular has been uncovered which might serve as a link with the forgotten epoch when Lesbos was one of the most civilized islands of the Greek archipelago.

  Homosexuality in ancient Greece is an interesting subject. It is not reasonable to suppose that the Greeks were any more or less homosexual than their neighbours – the Persians, for example; but the Greeks were singular in that they institutionalized and solemnized the proclivity. It seems clear that homosexuality gradually grew up, and that during the Doric period – up to, say, Homer – the predilection, if it existed, was not yet subject to civic sanction. Aristotle explained the phenomenon by saying that Dorians found it a way of expressly limiting population; they were the first to encourage the love of boys and to try to segregate women from society. There is nothing intrinsically irrational about this. Population has always been the curse of developing civilizations. The Romans exposed girl-children in an effort to regulate it. In some South Sea islands, the amount of food available was calculated per head and surplus population was exposed to ensure the safety of the community. In our time, a high infant mortality has done something like the same job – but not, alas, in Egypt, India and elsewhere. At any rate, the boy-love of the Greeks, once adopted, took firm root and found even the holiest sanctions of religion.

  Pederasty pervaded Greek culture as a necessary feature of superior citizenship; it was a form of chivalry, it sanctified virtue. Judaism, and after it Christianity, fought the habit from the outset, but had little success to begin with. Finally, in 342, it resorted to criminal punishment. Monosexualism developed with monotheism. The Bible makes no special reference to homosexuality. But for the Jews the sexual cravings had to be subordinated in the interests of the tribe, and social motives therefore dictated their attitude also – which was very different from the open and poetic Greek ideal. The Greek code of behaviour was sufficiently original to deserve a mention here; and it is not out of context in this chapter if one remarks, apropos Sappho, that no such code obtained for lesbian practices, unless somehow they were also partly institutionalized in the temples devoted to female deities such as Aphrodite. It is vexatious to know so little about the profounder feelings and attitudes of the old Greeks; the joky, sexy, bawdy incidents graven on the vases, scenes in which gods and goddesses took part, may have had some quite special cathartic significance. I mean, if one interpreted literally the blood and skulls of Tibetan temple-decoration, one would think the worshippers were bloodthirsty cannibals, rather than Buddhists. So Greek satire and smut might have made laughter figure among the cathartic canons of Aristotle, along with the pity and terror which bloodshed and horror represented on the stage was supposed to induce in the spectator.

  Although some traces of the boy cult were to be found among the Ionians, the actual custom, like knighthood, only became fashionable with the Dorians. It became, for example, a privilege only permitted to the free citizen, the knight. Slaves were expressly forbidden to practise homosexuality under pain of death. There were also strict rules which admitted no deviation. In Sparta, Crete, Thebes, the training for Arete (virtue) among the dominant classes was based on peder
asty. The Spartan lover was held accountable for his ‘companion’, who became attached to him at the age of twelve; he, and not his boy, was punished severely for any shameful act on the latter’s part. Sparta of course was the model fascist state – it is curious how these repressive systems and their perverted concepts arise. The Nazis invented nothing, it seems. (‘The battlefield at Chaeronea was covered with the bodies of lovers lying in pairs …’)

  Stranger still, from an anthropological point of view, the choice of a boy-lover in Crete assumed the form of a bridal theft, like becoming betrothed to a girl. The lover advised the family of his intention to come and abduct the boy. If the family did not like the proposed ‘match’ they did their best to thwart it; but the higher the social position of the lover, the greater the honour for the boy and his family. After being initiated, the chosen one was sent home bearing ritual gifts. In Thera and in Crete, such unions even enjoyed official religious sanction, the actual coupling of the knight and his boy taking place formally under the protection of some god or hero. At Thebes, the seventh-century inscriptions make the matter abundantly clear. Upon the holy promontory, about seventy metres from the temple of Apollo Kerneies, outside the city, we find chiselled in large script, upon a site consecrated to Zeus, the following: ‘On this holy spot, sacred to Zeus, Krion has consummated his union with the son of Bathycles and, proclaiming it proudly to the world, dedicates to it this imperishable memorial. And many Thebans with him and after him have united themselves with their boys on this same holy spot.’