“Better than wine are the kisses of your lips,” the woman sang.
And in the version that has lasted to our days, she also sang:
“I am black, but I am beautiful,”
and she excused herself, attributing her color to her work in the sun, in the vineyards.
Other versions, however, insist the “but” was snuck in. She sang:
“I am black, and I am beautiful.”
ALEXANDER
Demosthenes mocked him:
“This boy wants altars. Well, that much we’ll give him.”
The boy was Alexander the Great. He claimed descent from Heracles and Achilles. He liked to call himself “the invincible god.” By then he had been wounded eight times and was still conquering the world.
He began by crowning himself king of Macedonia, after killing all his relatives. Anxious to become king of everything else, he lived the few years of his brief life continuously at war.
His black horse outpaced the wind. He was always first to attack, sword in hand, plume of white feathers on his head, as if each battle were a personal matter:
“I will not steal a victory,” he said.
How well he recalled the lesson of his teacher Aristotle:
“Humanity is divided into those born to rule and those born to obey.”
With an iron hand, he snuffed out rebellions and crucified or stoned the disobedient, but he was an unusual conqueror who respected those he conquered and was even willing to learn their customs. The king of kings invaded lands and seas from the Balkans to India by way of Persia and Egypt and everywhere in between, and wherever he went he sowed matrimony. His astute idea of marrying Greek soldiers to local women was unpleasant news for Athens, which heartily disapproved, but it consolidated Alexander’s prestige and power across his new map of the world.
Hephaestion always accompanied him in his warrings and wanderings. He was his right-hand man on the battlefield and his nighttime lover in victory. With thousands of invincible horsemen, long lances, flaming arrows, and Hephaestion by his side, Alexander founded seven cities, the seven Alexandrias, and it seemed as if he might go on forever.
When Hephaestion died, Alexander drank alone the wine they had shared. At dawn, thoroughly drunk, he ordered up a bonfire so immense it scorched the heavens, and he outlawed music throughout the empire.
Soon thereafter he too died, at the age of thirty-three, without having conquered all the kingdoms the world possessed.
HOMER
There was nothing, no one. Not even ghosts. Nothing but mute stones, and a sheep or two looking for grass amidst the ruins.
But the blind poet could see the great city that was no more. He saw it surrounded by walls, high on a hill overlooking the bay. And he heard the shrieks and thunder of the war that leveled it.
And he sang to it. It was the second founding of Troy, born anew by Homer’s words four and a half centuries after its destruction. And the Trojan War, consigned to oblivion, became the most famous war of all.
Historians say it was a trade war. The Trojans controlled the entrance to the Black Sea and were charging dear. The Greeks annihilated Troy to open up the route to the Orient via the Dardanelles. But all the wars ever fought, or nearly all, have been trade wars. Why did this war, so like the others, become worthy of remembering? The stones of Troy were turning to sand and nothing but sand as fated by nature, when Homer saw them and heard them speak.
Did he simply imagine what he sang?
Was it just fancy, that squadron of twelve hundred ships launched to rescue Helen, the queen born from a swan’s egg?
Did Homer make up the bit about Achilles dragging the vanquished Hector behind a chariot as he drove several times around the walls of the besieged city?
And the story of Aphrodite wrapping Paris in a mantle of magic mist when she saw he was losing, could that have been delirium or drunkenness?
And Apollo guiding the fatal arrow to Achilles’s heel?
Was it Odysseus, alias Ulysses, who built the immense wooden horse that fooled the Trojans?
What truth is there in the end of Agamemnon, the victor who returned from ten years of war to be murdered by his wife in the bath?
Those women and those men, and those goddesses and those gods who are so like us, jealous, vengeful, treasonous, did they exist?
Who knows if they existed?
All that’s certain is that they exist.
LITERARY ORIGIN OF THE DOG
Argos was the name of a hundred-eyed giant and of a Greek city four thousand years ago.
Also named Argos was the only one to recognize Odysseus when he returned to Ithaca in disguise.
Homer tells us that after plenty of war and plenty of sea Odysseus came back home dressed as a decrepit, bedraggled beggar.
No one realized it was he.
No one, except for a friend who could no longer bark or walk or even get up. Argos lay in the doorway of a shed, abandoned, tormented by ticks, awaiting death.
When he saw or perhaps smelled the beggar approach, he raised his head and wagged his tail.
HESIOD
Of Homer, nothing is known. Seven cities swear they were his birthplace. In each, perhaps, Homer recited one night in exchange for a roof and a meal.
Of Hesiod, it is said he was born in a village named Asera and that he lived in Homer’s time.
But he did not sing to the glory of warriors. His heroes were the peasants of Boeotia. He took up the lives and labors of men who wrested meager harvests from the hard earth, fulfilling the curse of merciless gods.
His poetry counseled chopping wood when Sirius first appears,
picking grapes when Sirius moves south,
threshing when Orion rises,
harvesting when the Pleiades appear,
plowing when the Pleiades disappear,
working in the nude,
and never trusting the sea, thieves, women, restless tongues, or evil
days.
THE SUICIDE OF TROY
According to Homer, it was the goddess Athena who whispered the idea in Odysseus’s ear. And the city of Troy, for ten years impervious to the Greek siege, was defeated by a horse made of wood.
Why did Priam, the Trojan king, let it in? As soon as that strange, enormous figure showed up outside the walls, smoke from the kitchens turned red and statues wept, laurels withered and the sky emptied of stars. Princess Cassandra threw a lit torch at the horse and the priest Laocoön stuck a lance in its flank. The king’s advisers counseled opening it to see what it might contain, and in all Troy there was no one who did not suspect the beast was some sort of trick.
Priam chose his downfall. He wanted to believe the goddess Athena had sent him an offering as a sign of peace. Not to offend her, he ordered the gates thrown open, and the horse was received with chants of praise and gratitude.
From its innards emerged the soldiers who razed Troy to its final stone. And the vanquished became their slaves, and the women of the vanquished became their women.
THE HERO
How would the Trojan War have been told by an unknown soldier? A Greek foot soldier, ignored by the gods and desired only by the vultures that circled the battlefields? A farmer-fighter, hymned by no one, sculpted by no one? A nobody, an everybody, obliged to kill and without the slightest interest in being killed to win Helen’s eyes?
Would that soldier have predicted what Euripides later confirmed? That Helen never was in Troy, only her shadow? That ten years of butchery occurred for the sake of an empty tunic?
And if that soldier survived, what would he recall?
Who knows.
Maybe the smell. The smell of pain, and only that.
Three thousand years after the fall of Troy, war correspondents Robert Fisk and Fran Sevilla tell us that wars stink. They have been in several, on the inside, and they know the hot, sweet, sticky stench of decay that gets into your pores and takes up residence in your body. The nausea never goes away.
&n
bsp; FAMILY PORTRAIT IN GREECE
The sun moved backward across the heavens and set in the east. While that strangest of days withered away, Atreus was conquering the throne of Mycenae.
Atreus felt the crown teeter on his head. He watched his relatives out of the corner of his eye. Thirst for power shone in his nephews’ gaze. Just to be sure, he cut off their heads, chopped them to bits, cooked them up, and served them as a casserole at the banquet he offered his brother Thyestes, father of the deceased.
Atreus’s son Agamemnon inherited the throne. He fancied Clytemnestra, his uncle’s wife, and wanted her for his queen. Agamemnon had to kill his uncle. Years later he had to slit the throat of his prettiest daughter, Iphigenia. The goddess Artemis demanded as much if her host of satyrs, centaurs, and nymphs was to provide favorable winds to the ships heading off to fight the kingdom of Troy.
At the end of that war, under a full moon, Agamemnon returned triumphantly to his palace at Mycenae. Queen Clytemnestra welcomed him and drew him a hot bath. When he stepped out of the bath, she wrapped him in a cloak she herself had woven. That cloak became Agamemnon’s shroud. Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, buried a double-edged sword in his body, and she decapitated him with an ax.
With that same ax, some time later, Electra and Orestes avenged their father’s death. The children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra chopped up their mother and her lover, and gave inspiration to the poet Aeschylus and to Dr. Freud.
STRIKE OF CLOSED THIGHS
In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, the women of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Boeotia went on strike against the war.
It was the first strike of closed thighs in the history of the world. It occurred onstage, born of the imagination of Aristophanes, and of the rant he placed in the mouth of Lysistrata, an Athenian matron:
“I will not point my feet at the heavens, neither will I squat on all fours with my ass in the air!”
The strike went on without a truce, until the love-fast forced the warriors to acquiesce. Weary of fighting without solace and alarmed by the female insurgency, they had no choice but to bid the battlefield goodbye.
This was more or less how it was told by Aristophanes, a conservative playwright who defended traditions as if he believed in them, but in his heart held nothing sacred but the right to laugh.
And peace reigned on the stage.
Not in reality.
The Greeks had been fighting for twenty years when this play was first performed, and the butchery continued for another seven.
Women still had no right to strike, no right to an opinion, no right at all, except to submit to the duties assigned to their sex. Acting was not one of them. Women could attend plays in the worst seats, but not appear onstage. There were no actresses. In Aristophanes’s production, Lysistrata and the other protagonists were played by men wearing masks.
THE ART OF DRAWING YOU
In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes a coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave.
SOCRATES
Several cities fought on one side or the other. But this Greek war, the war that killed more Greeks than any other, was the war between Sparta and Athens: the oligarchy of the few, proud to be few, against the democracy of the few pretending to be all.
In the year 404 BC, to the trilling of flutes, Sparta took her cruel time demolishing the walls of Athens.
Of Athens, what remained? Five hundred ships at the bottom of the sea, eighty thousand dead from plague, innumerable warriors disemboweled, and a city humbled, filled with the mutilated and the insane.
Then Athenian justice condemned to death the most just of her men.
The great teacher of the Agora, who pursued truth by thinking out loud while strolling in the public square, who fought in three battles in the war just ended, was found guilty. “Corruptor of the young,” the judges declared, though perhaps they meant to say he was guilty of teasing and criticizing their sacred city, and never mindlessly adoring her.
OLYMPICS
The Greeks loved to kill each other, but they also played other sports. They competed at the sanctuary of Olympia, and when the Olympics were on, they forgot all about war for a while.
Everyone was naked: the runners, the athletes who threw the javelin and the discus, the ones who jumped, boxed, wrestled, galloped, or competed by singing. None of them wore brand-name sneakers or spandex tights or anything but their own skin, glistening with oils.
The champions received no medals. They won a laurel wreath, a few vessels of olive oil, the right to eat for free for the rest of their lives, and the respect and admiration of their neighbors.
The first Olympic winner, someone named Korebus, earned his living as a cook and continued to do so thereafter. At the inaugural Olympics, he ran farther than his rivals and faster than the fearsome north winds.
The Olympics were ceremonies of shared identity. By playing sports, those bodies were saying wordlessly: “We hate each other, we fight each other, but we are all Greeks.” And thus it was for a thousand years, until triumphant Christianity outlawed these pagan nudities that offended the Lord.
In the Greek Olympics, women, slaves, and foreigners never took part.
Not in Greek democracy either.
PARTHENON AND AFTER
Phidias, the most envied sculptor of all time, died of a broken heart after his insufferable talent landed him a jail sentence.
Many centuries later, Phidias was punished again, this time by usurpation.
His best works, the sculptures of the Parthenon, are no longer in Athens but in London. And they are called not the Phidias Marbles, but the Elgin Marbles.
Lord Elgin was not exactly an artist. As British ambassador a couple of centuries ago, he shipped these marvels home and sold them to his government. Since then, they sit in the British Museum.
When Lord Elgin filched what he filched, the Parthenon had already been devastated by weather and war. Erected to the eternal glory of the goddess Athena, it endured the invasion of the Virgin Mary and her priests, who eliminated several figures, rubbed out many faces, and mutilated every penis. Many years later came the Venetian invasion and the temple, used as a powder house, got blown to pieces.
The Parthenon was left in ruins. While the sculptures that Lord Elgin took were broken and remain so, they speak to us about what they once were:
that tunic is just a piece of marble, but in its folds sways the body of a woman or a goddess,
that knee walks on in the absent leg,
that torso, decapitated, bears an invisible head,
that bristling mane conveys the missing horse in full whinny, and
those galloping legs how it thunders on.
In the little there is, lies all that was.
HIPPOCRATES
They call him the father of medicine.
New doctors take their oath in his name.
Two thousand four hundred years ago, he cured and he wrote.
These are a few of the aphorisms born, he said, of his experience:
Experience can fool you, life is short, the art of treatment long, the moment fleeting, and judgment difficult.
Medicine, the most noble of all arts, falls far behind others thanks to the ignorance of those who practice it.
There is a circulation common to all, a respiration common to all. Everything is related to everything else.
The nature of the parts of the body cannot be understood without grasping the nature of the organism as a whole.
Symptoms are the body’s natural defens
es. We call them diseases, but in reality they are the treatment for the disease.
Eunuchs do not go bald.
Bald men do not suffer from varicose veins.
May meals be your food, and food your medicine.
What cures one will kill another.
If a woman has conceived a boy, she has good color. If she has conceived a girl, then her color is poor.
ASPASIA
In the time of Pericles, Aspasia was the most famous woman in all Athens.
This could be said otherwise: in the time of Aspasia, Pericles was the most famous man in all Athens.
Her enemies never forgave her for being a woman and a foreigner. To add insult to injury they saddled her with an unmentionable past and said that the school of rhetoric she ran was a breeding ground for girls of easy virtue.
They accused her of scorning the gods, an offense that might have cost her life. Before a tribunal of fifteen hundred men, Pericles took up the defense. Aspasia was absolved, although in his three-hour speech Pericles forgot to say that rather than scorning the gods, she believed the gods scorn us and spoil our ephemeral human joys.
By then, Pericles had already tossed his wife out of his bed and his house, and was living with Aspasia. He sired a son with her, and to defend the child’s rights he broke a law he himself had decreed.
Socrates interrupted his classes to listen to Aspasia, and Anaxagoras cited her opinions.
Plutarch wondered: “What artful power did that woman possess that allowed her to inspire philosophers and dominate the most eminent political figures?”