CHAPTER 2

A IS FOR ATHENA

MY FIRST EXPOSURE to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed to classical: popcorn in red-and-white striped boxes, a stern lady usher who confiscated the candy we snuck in from outside, buzzers under the seats for a gimmicky thrill.

Every week, the Lyceum showed a double feature, usually a horror movie—The Mummy, Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—paired with something mildly pornographic (and highly educational). At one Saturday matinee, I laid eyes for the first time on the Cyclops. The movie was Ulysses (1955 AD), starring Kirk Douglas as the man of many turnings. In a way, it, too, was a horror movie, full of monsters and appari tions: a witch who turned men into pigs, sea serpents, Anthony Quinn in a short tight skirt.

Ulysses is the Latinate name for Odysseus and the one preferred by Hollywood and James Joyce. How Odysseus became Ulysses is, like many things that happened between Greece and Rome, impossible to say for sure. Scholars have suggested that the “D,” or delta, of Odysseus in Ionic Greek was originally an “L,” or lambda, in the Dorian and Aeolic dialects. Delta (Δ) and lambda (Λ) are similar in form—a wedge with or without a bar—but to my knowledge no one has suggested that Odysseus was the ancient equivalent of a typo for Ulysses. The name may have reached Rome independently as Ulixes through Sicily, the traditional home of the Cyclops.

In Catania, a city under Mount Etna built largely of polished black lava, souvenir shops sell ceramic figurines of the Cyclops. The Cyclopes (plural) were a race of giants, similar to the Titans, clumsy prototypes for human beings. Polyphemus worked on Mount Etna, forging lightning bolts for Zeus. A friend from Catania told me some Sicilians believe that the Cyclops was Mount Etna, which erupted like Polyphemus’ eye after Odysseus poked it with a pointed stick, spewing into the sea stones that formed the Faraglioni di Acitrezza, dramatic stacked rocks in the Gulf of Catania. At any rate, one can imagine the story of the Cyclops going out into the world ahead of the epic poem, the way the Cyclops episode in the movie at the Lyceum preceded my knowledge of Homer. There is nothing like an old-fashioned Cyclops to get your attention.

Athena must have appeared in the movie—what is the Odyssey without Athena? She is the protector of Ulysses; he would not survive without her. Surely the hero invokes her—I must have heard her name. But I don’t recall meeting Homer’s gray-eyed goddess at the Lyceum. No tomes of mythology by Bulfinch, the d’Aulaires, or Edith Hamilton sat on the bookshelves in our house—in fact, there were no bookshelves in our house. But we had comic books and library cards, and I subsisted happily on the Brothers Grimm and Little Lulu. I did not, like a prodigy, read the Iliad in translation at fourteen. I had a weakness for the genre of the girl detective, for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. I also liked Poe and Dickens and Mark Twain and tried to read Hawthorne (yawn) and Sir Walter Scott (snore) and Dostoyevsky (coma). Anything I learned about Greek mythology was either absorbed through popular culture or through writers in English. In junior year at Lourdes Academy, the all-girls Catholic high school I attended in Cleveland, we read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the lesson of which, according to Sister Diane Branski, was that though Joyce had lost his faith (and left Ireland), he could never get away from the Church (or Dublin). And neither would we.

Perhaps the spirit of Athena hovered over Lake Erie, but in those days—the fifties and sixties, when the twentieth century still felt like the future—my primary model, like that of most girls in the normal course of things, was my mother. She cooked, made the beds, swept the floor. She was a world-class talker—“Your mom sure has the gift of gab,” people would say—and she sang as she washed the dishes, songs like “Fascination” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” But to me washing the dishes was nothing to sing about. And while her example was powerful—as a nine-year-old, I fantasized about having a toy carpet sweeper—I was dubious about following in her footsteps. For one thing, she rarely went anywhere.

My mother and I were outnumbered by the males in the family, and I disliked being grouped with her. I felt housebound. I remember the taste of the front door, which I pressed my tongue against in my desperation to get outside—harsh cold glass in winter, bitter metallic screen in summer. I was always comparing my mother with other girls’ mothers, wishing to trade up. The nuns gave me models other than my mother, and I had an inkling that I might be popular in the convent. I liked the idea of changing my name—it would be a fresh start—but I worried about having to get up early, at the gong of a bell, and go to Mass every day. The convent was something to fall back on in case I didn’t get married. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get married. But the nun’s life seemed just as circumscribed as my mother’s.

Once, for sixth-grade religion class, we were split into groups for a project on vocations. The nun handed out pamphlets describing what could be expected from each calling: you got married, you became a priest or a nun, or you remained single. I was put on the “single” panel. Remaining single did not feel like a choice—it was something you got stuck with, like the unmated card in a game of Old Maid. But the pamphlet pointed out that although you might not choose it, if you were to die tomorrow—tragically, at age twelve—you would perforce be single. The only divine model the Church offered a girl was the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I suppose Athena became a model to me without my even realizing it: a third way. Athena, like Mary, is a virgin—parthéna—but she does not carry the paradoxical burden of maternity. She was born, fully formed and armed for battle, a warrior, from the head of Zeus. Her mother, by most accounts, was Metis, one of the Titans, rivals of the Olympians, meaning that Athena came from old stock. Because Metis wasn’t around (I am sorry to report that Zeus swallowed her while she was pregnant), Athena had none of the conflicts a girl has with her mother. She gets along well with Zeus’s wife, Hera, that most irritable of goddesses. Zeus never pressures her to marry.

Other women and girls may favor a different goddess. Many opt for Artemis, the huntress; someone who longs for children might identify with Demeter; great beauties are chosen by Aphrodite. Hera is not popular; in her Roman guise as Juno she is statuesque and confident, but what a bitch. For me, it had to be Athena. Whereas the Virgin Mary is a model of humility and servitude, Athena is the template for a liberated woman.

Athena is unfettered: she has no masculine deity to accom modate, no children to appease, no family obligations to juggle with her career. She is beholden to no one—Zeus treats her with respect and indulgence. Like a favorite daughter, she knows how to handle him. He trusts her judgment and lets her have her way. Her virginity may be one of the reasons Athenians chose her to be the patron of their city: she would be dedicated. The founding myth of Athens is that Athena and Poseidon were rivals for top honors in the city. Athena planted an olive tree on the Acropolis, and Poseidon caused salt water to spring up on its slopes. The gods judged the olive the greater gift and awarded the city to Athena.

Not that Athena doesn’t have domestic virtues: she is a weaver and a patron of the crafts, a civilizing influence. She’s not a fertility goddess, like Demeter and Artemis, but more of a survivor. Olive trees are legendarily resilient. Chop one down or burn it up, and new shoots grow from the stump. And Athena didn’t just plant that olive tree—someone had to impart the knowledge of how to cultivate it and how to press from its hard, bitter green fruit the precious essence of what the earth has to offer. Olive oil is an ingredient in everything from salads to shampoo, and the Greeks even used it as fuel, burning it in lamps. Athena seems to me to be the great example of using your resources wisely.

Most of all, Athena has tremendous feminine strength. In the Iliad, when Zeus lets the gods take up arms along with the mortals on the battlefield, Athena lays out Ares flat—Ares, the god of war! Athena can be terrifying. She wears the head of Medusa on her breast, at the center of her shield, or aegis. The Gorgon’s head was a gift from Perseus, who slew the monster while looking at her reflection in his shield instead of directly at her face, which would have turned him to stone. In art history, Medusa leers comically from a round frame: snaky locks for hair, tusks, a pig’s snout for a nose. She sticks out her tongue at you. The message is “Don’t mess with me, you weakling.”

Athena is direct: she never tries to seduce anyone or wheedle to get her way. Her brand of wisdom is a form of common sense, which was something I lacked, a muscle that did not get much exercise in college or graduate school. I was a good worker, though—the only job I ever had that I was truly terrible at was waiting on tables—and by the time I got to The New Yorker there were different kinds of women to observe: a cheerful receptionist heading back to graduate school, proofreaders of all styles—zealous, jealous, quietly brilliant—and wickedly good writers, like Pauline Kael and Janet Malcolm. When I was promoted to the copydesk, my dream job, and it was just me and the words, I had a crisis of confidence. No one thanked you when you did something right, but when you screwed up they had ways of letting you know.

The copydesk was like a sieve for prose: the copy editor filtered out impurities without adding anything new. I swung back and forth between extremes, trying to do less rather than more while also trying not to draw attention to myself by missing anything egregious. I wanted to write, so I was envious when one of my contemporaries at the office succeeded in placing a story in The Talk of the Town. When I copy-edited a colleague’s work, I had to filter out my own impurities. One evening I ran into William Shawn in the elevator vestibule. “You look troubled,” he said. Probably I was worried about having to share an elevator with Mr. Shawn, but I told him I was not sure I would ever master my job on the copydesk. He gave me a steady look—we were almost the same height; he was five foot five, and his eyes were at the same level as mine—and assured me that I would learn by osmosis.

Athena turned out to be a good model for a copy editor. She wouldn’t worry about offending a writer or whether a writer liked her or not, and she wouldn’t let anyone get away with anything. I just had to trust that my motives were pure: I was there for the language. Once I’d absorbed the ethos of copy editing, and moved from the copydesk, where you couldn’t correct things even when you knew they were wrong, to the next level, among the copy editors I most admired—page O.K.’ers, in The New Yorker’s terminology—I stopped worrying so much. At a museum, I was attracted to a print of a Gorgon, leering comically with her tongue stuck out. I bought that print and pinned it up over my desk.

ATHENA APPEARS IN Book 2 of the Odyssey as Mentor, a friend to whom Odysseus entrusted the care of his son when he left Ithaca for Troy. The word mentor, meaning counselor or teacher, comes to us directly from Homer. It is thousands of years old. William Shawn was acting as a mentor when he spoke to me in the vestibule, counseling patience. Sometimes all it takes is a hint, like a drop of iodine in a glass of water, to tint your view of things and help you see the way forward. As a child, I had a pattern of making friends with girls who had older sisters—a big sister would have made all the difference to me. As I got older, my mentors got younger. They just had to be people who had more experience than I did. But, crucially, a mentor has to choose you. You can’t force someone to take you on.

There was a tradition of mentoring in the copy department at The New Yorker—one of the veterans took it upon herself to train the next generation—but sometimes it felt as if I were learning how to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was Eleanor Gould, a genius, someone it was impossible to emulate because you couldn’t possess her formidable intelligence. Charybdis was Lu Burke, a taskmaster, who hurled dictionaries at people’s heads. Away from the office, as I got deeper into Greek, I found a gentler mentor in a woman at Barnard who agreed to tutor me in modern Greek. Her name was Dorothy Gregory. She was the best teacher I’ve ever had.

Dorothy was petite, with dark hair and eyes, a sharp chin, and a sweet, archaic smile, as if she were amused at something from a vast distance. She was always well dressed: tweed skirt, wool sweater, belted coat. She was generous, often complimenting people. “You look like a model,” she’d say, though not to me. “You always come running,” she observed once when I arrived at her office breathless after rushing uptown from work.

Dorothy was from Corfu, which is in the Ionian Sea, west of mainland Greece. She had lived in Michigan and Indonesia and done graduate work at Columbia, specializing in Walt Whitman. This makes sense in retrospect: Whitman is our most rhapsodic poet, and Dorothy loved the work of the Nobel Prize–winning Greek poet Odysseus Elytis, who rhapsodized about all the islands in the Aegean and all the regions of Greece and their people. Rhapsodos, αψωδός, means a stitcher of songs, from άπτω, to sew, and δή, ode. It was the word for someone who recited epic poetry in ancient times. In modern Greek, άφτης (ráftis) means tailor—a word that stuck with me, so that once, in Thessaloniki, coming upon a writer friend who was sewing a button onto his shirt in the lobby of a hotel, I could say, with authority, “Ο ράφτης”—“The tailor.” Rhapsodic has a sense of wonder in English that comes from the poet’s engagement with the material.

Dorothy was endlessly patient with me, and indulgent of my desire to learn this immensely complex tongue and one day dance on a table in emulation of Zorba the Greek.

Sometimes Dorothy made me feel as if I were the mentor in this relationship. Once, crossing the street, I noted that we were jaywalking. “What did you say?” Dorothy said.

“Jaywalking. It’s when you cross against the light.” I’m not sure where it comes from, but I always associated it with jail.

“Jaywalking!” she repeated. “You taught me something!”

Greek was my therapy in those days, my relief from my native tongue and the life that went with it. I wrote stilted paragraphs on such topics as washing my clothes at the laundromat: I aired my dirty linen on paper. I could be unspeakably vulgar in my adopted tongue, as when I reported on a trip to the pharmacy with my friend Clancey in search of cough medicine, and the pharmacist asked whether I needed an expectorant or a suppressant: “ ‘Cough for the man,’ Clancey told me. I did.”

Dorothy laughed. The Greek word káno, like the French faire and the Italian fare, means both “I do” and “I make,” and does not do double duty as a reinforcing verb, the way it does in English. The past tense, έκανα, is what Greek children holler from the toilet (“I made!”) when they have had a bowel movement.

So much of language study is learning not to say things.

But most of the time it was exhilarating, and my notebooks filled with new vocabulary. Dorothy taught me a little modern Greek history, including the legend of Bouboulina, a woman who commanded a fleet during the War of Independence, in 1821. She explained the rituals of Orthodox Easter, when families roast a lamb on a spit over coals in the yard. I was taken by the custom of tapping together red-dyed hard-boiled eggs—whoever’s egg doesn’t crack is the winner. I asked Dorothy why the Greeks dye their eggs only the color red, and her first response was to wonder why we in the West dye our eggs all those dull pastels when a vibrant red is the obvious choice. “Red is the color of blood and the color of joy,” she said.

It was while I was first studying with Dorothy that I read the Iliad, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation. Before that, I had preferred the Odyssey and found war stories punishing. I noticed that every time the Achaeans, as Homer calls the Greeks, need to propitiate the gods and sacrifice hecatombs of oxen, supposedly so that the gods can savor the odor of grilled meats (the gods have no need for food, subsisting on ambrosia), it is an excuse for a feast. They share out the meat, family style, as in a Greek restaurant, or turn chunks on a spit—the original souvlaki, or “little skewer,” diminutive of soúvla, as prepared on street corners in Astoria. They pour libations to the gods before taking a drink themselves. I started making a practice of pouring libations, splashing beer into a potted plant or, to my dinner companions’ horror, spilling expensive wine over the rail of the porch at an elegant outdoor restaurant. The Greeks offered libations to the gods to thank them or to ask for their blessing. Maybe it was just an excuse to drink, but pouring the first sip onto the earth or into the sea, giving the gods the first taste, became a habit, a way of saying grace, the ritual prayer before a meal (Bless us O Lord and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord Amen). If you accidentally knock over a glass, good: it’s a spontaneous libation. Sometimes, a libation is more of a gesture than a generous pour, as when you are on an airplane and with moistened fingertip flick a drop toward the carpeting, hoping not to stain the pants leg of the gentleman next to you. I invoke the good will of whatever god is most appropriate to my current project: Zeus for air travel, Hermes for a road trip, Apollo for a doctor’s visit or for self-discipline, Hephaestus for engine trouble and for all plumbing emergencies, and always, always Athena for guidance.

One day in Dorothy’s office, catching my breath as we settled into a lesson on the future perfect, I felt strangely excited. I looked at Dorothy, bent over the desk, sketching a paradigm in my notebook (she often took notes for me), and found myself wondering . . . I developed crushes on male teachers all the time, but here I was feeling an erotic attraction to a woman. The room was warm and I was breathing heavily. Steam was coming off me. I decided it was the language that thrilled me—Greek is sexy.

THAT SPRING, I made my first trip to Greece. It was an ambitious itinerary. Originally, I thought I’d go from island to island, in emulation of Odysseus, but the Iliad, set on the shores of what is now Turkey, had made me aware of Asia Minor and the Greek presence there throughout history, and I wanted to search for Homer in the theater of the Aegean. Ed Stringham had taught me that Greece looks east, toward Asia, not west toward the rest of Europe. On the night ferry from Piraeus to Crete, I got up early and went out on deck to catch Homer’s famed rhododáctylos, the rosy fingers of dawn. I was hoping for a glorious display in the east to welcome me to the Mediterranean. The only other passengers on deck were a few men leaning against the rail, smoking cigarettes, and a black-clad crone huddled in the stairwell, holding her kerchief over her face, seasick. (The Greeks are famously prone to seasickness—they could even be said to have invented it. The word “nausea” comes from the ancient Greek naus, for “ship.”) The sky was overcast, but I stayed on deck, shivering, eyes on the horizon, waiting for a sign from the gods. One of the men offered me a cigarette as we neared the harbor of Heraklion. At last, a pink smudge appeared among the clouds and then got rubbed out. That was it: I had to settle for the rosy knuckle of dawn.

There was something I did not understand on that trip, and on several subsequent trips (and readings of Homer), and figured out only at home, in New York. I woke up one day and rolled over to look out the window, as usual, to see if the early morning light was turning the tops of the buildings pink—a phenomenon I enjoy so much that I have never hung a curtain at my bedroom window—and sat up sharp. Rhododáctylos (from rhodos, rose, and dactylos, finger) refers not to a display of slender pink fingers stretched out along the eastern horizon but to what those fingers touch: the tall things first, water towers and skyscrapers. Think of Midas or, in our day, Goldfinger: he did not himself have fingers of gold, but anything he touched turned to gold. As Adam Nicolson puts it in Why Homer Matters, “Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is ‘rosy-fingered’—not rayed with her outspread fingers, but touching the tips of trees and rocks with her fingers.”

I didn’t stay in any one place too long on that first trip. It was (and sometimes still is) my style of travel to go to great lengths to get someplace and then decide that just getting there was enough: let’s leave. I grew up in Cleveland with a father who believed, based on his experiences in the army in the Second World War, that one place was much like another and there was no point in going anywhere new, because it wouldn’t be any different. In other words, you take yourself with you wherever you go.

So I shot around the Aegean like a pinball: from Crete to Rhodes, Cyprus, Samos, Chios, Lesbos. In a couple of weeks of travel, I got hit on by waiters, flirted with by a deckhand and a petty officer, and courted by a college English professor. On the ferry from Piraeus I had accepted a cigarette from a man named Mimi, a diminutive of Dmitri, who farmed tomatoes on the southern coast of Crete. He offered to show me Knossos, the excavated remains of the Palace of Minos, the legendary King of the Minoans, a civilization that flourished well before the Trojan War, arising possibly as early as 3000 BC. Beginning in 1900 AD, Sir Arthur Evans excavated the site, and also, somewhat controversially, painted the place, adding decoration and restoring frescoes in the style of 1920s Art Deco. Mimi hustled me through the Minoan site by a labyrinthine route that led to the most secluded corner of the ruins. Was this the cave of the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, half man, half bull, hidden away by the design of Daedalus? I scarcely had time to wonder before Mimi proceeded to dry-hump me. I liked Mimi, but I thought our relationship needed time to develop. Maybe I’d visit his tomato farm, or we’d at least have lunch together—maybe see a movie?—before we had sex. I tried to tell him that this was happening way too fast for me. The Greek for “fast” is grígora, and when Greeks want to emphasize something they say it twice, so I said, “Grígora, grígora,” meaning (I thought) “Too fast.” It turns out that what I was saying was “Faster, faster.”

Mimi did not teach me much about the Minoan civilization, but he did give me a glimpse into the prevailing view that a single woman traveling alone in the Mediterranean must be in want of a man. Except for a nice old guy with cataracts, the men all asked why I was traveling alone and refused to believe that I was alone by design. Where was my husband? Dining alone in restaurants, I was a tourist attraction unto myself. Eating is social, and the style of the Greeks is to share a lot of different dishes. If I wanted olives and tzatziki and calamari and what they called a χωριάτικη σαλάτα (choriátiki, or village, salad)—which didn’t seem unreasonable—I was served enough to feed a family of four. The waiters, almost always men, flirted and asked personal questions and offered private tours of the Acropolis by motorbike. I could not sit down on a bench in public without being invited to a ménage à trois. I was not used to attracting so much sexual attention. While it flattered me, it also confused me. It would have been simpler to invent a husband—call him Menelaus—and explain that my old man was back at the hotel, or even let the Greek men come to the ego-salving conclusion that if I wasn’t interested in them specifically, I must not like men in general.

I loved men, but I had a militant streak about making my way alone, and I was not to be derailed by a horny tomato farmer. The ultimate goal of my travels was Constantinople, or Konstantinoúpolis, as I insisted on calling it (Istanbul is a corruption of the Greek for stin póli, “to the city, in the city,” understood to be the city of Constantine), and I wanted to reach it by way of Troy, the archaeological site near Çanakkale, in Turkey. I was on the trail of Homer. Because the Iliad and the Odyssey were written in the Ionic dialect of Greek, they are associated with the region around the island of Lesbos and the city of Smyrna on the mainland—Izmir in modern-day Turkey. Leaving Crete for the eastern Aegean, I made my way up the Dodecanese from Rhodes to Chios on boats that sailed under the blue and white stripes of the Greek flag, and then crossed over to the opposite coast on a boat that flew the flag of the Turks: red with a crescent moon and a star.

The closer I got to Turkey, the smaller the boat. The big ferries had full bars, with whiskey, beer, and wine, but that last boat, between Chios and Turkey, served only ouzo by the shot. I was sitting at the rail, nursing an ouzo in a small glass, stretching it with ice and water, and staring into the sea, when I suddenly understood the meaning of the Homeric epithet “wine-dark sea.” The sea is blue, right? At least on a sunny day. Not purple like wine. Under clouds the sea is gray or greenish-gray. The Mediterranean may be turquoise along the edges, in the shallows, but out in the middle it is navy blue. There is a theory, perhaps inspired by the words “wine-dark,” that the ancient Greeks didn’t see the color blue, but I don’t buy it. The Greeks lived in a world of blue. They had the open sea and the vault of the sky—maybe their eyes were so saturated with blue that they saw through it: it was transparent, like air. Blue was their enveloping medium, like water for fish. They had lapis, the most gorgeous of blue stones, and flax, which has a delicate powdery-blue flower. What came to me as I sipped my ouzo and gazed at the Aegean was that Homer wasn’t saying that the sea was the color of wine. He was saying that the sea had the depths found in a cup of wine: that it was mysterious, hypnotic, dangerous. “Wine-dark” was a quality, not a color. It drew you in, you could lose yourself in it.

Çanakkale, the town closest to the site of ancient Troy, was a bit of a letdown. I had learned only three words of Turkish: water, bus, and thank you, and for thank you the Turks used merci. The default language for tourists was German. In an emergency, German would come back to me: Es ist besser wenn ich nicht in dein Zimmer gehe. It is better if I do not go to your room. In Çanakkale, I was taken under the wing of a man who had a small boy, and who answered all my questions with “Is possible.” Anything was possible! It wasn’t necessarily a good idea, but it was possible. He put me and all my luggage on a minibus to the ruins of Troy. The Turks had not mastered the tourist economy. There was no guard or guide or museum or brochure or ticket booth or Coke machine. There was a dusty lot with an incomprehensible plaque showing a series of strata in solid or dotted lines, dating the different settlements. The Turks had built a monumental wooden horse that served as a viewing platform, and which I mounted via wooden stairs. Troy was farther inland than I expected. Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur archaeologist from Germany, thought he had figured out from clues in Homer where the ancient city stood, and went there and dug. He dug right past Priam’s Troy. That was in the 1870s, before the modern science and ethics of archaeology were in place, and Schliemann was careless by modern standards, and looted Troy.

It surprised me to learn that not everyone believes there really was a Trojan War. Of course there was a Trojan War! It was already ancient history when Homer and friends sang about it, having taken place hundreds of years earlier, around 1200 BC. To me, the proof that the Trojan War really happened is in the realistic touches in the Iliad. For instance, there are two characters named Ajax. Why would Homer give two characters the same name unless there really were two men named Ajax? Fitzgerald calls them “Aías, tall and short.” Another realistic touch is that one character goes by two names: Paris/Alexandros. He is mostly called Alexandros by the Greeks and the gods, and Paris by his family.

Traveling alone, without benefit of a local guide or a strong grasp of the language, had its frustrations, but they were in inverse proportion to the satisfaction I felt when I succeeded—when the ship came in and the anchor chain rattled down the hull and I trotted up the gangplank. The other tourists—couples and families and backpackers—would gather at the stern, waving goodbye to the place they’d just visited, while I was up at the prow, eager to move on to my next destination. The thrust of this journey was definitely forward.

ON THAT TRIP, I traced a spiral like a hurricane over the Aegean, through Constantinopole—how cosmopolitan I felt, writing in my travel journal “Crossed the Dardanelles”—and overland to Thessaloniki, where I met up with some friends from New York, and we circled down to Delphi and the Peloponnese and back up to Athens. Even when something went wrong, it went right. Missing the ferry to Skiathos, in the Sporades (islands whose name implies that they were scattered in the sea), we spent a day driving around Mount Pelion and a night in Volos, the port of embarkation for Jason and his Argonauts in their search for the Golden Fleece (another big hit at the Lyceum). We bought cherries and sweet, tiny apricots from a woman who sold the fruit from her own trees, and who cut gardenias from her garden for us as parting gifts. Delphi, site of the oracle to Apollo, was full of liars and fake Greek spontaneity—boys who danced joylessly for tips at a tourist restaurant—but down the hill from Mount Parnassus, on the other side of the road, the guard at the sanctuary of Athena gave me a genuinely friendly greeting. His demesne, known as the Tholos, a round vaulted temple from the fourth century BC, was perfectly placed in the landscape: three reconstructed columns in gray and white banded marble, surmounted by a segment of the roof. He taught me to say “stous Delphoús” (“to Delphi”)—the name of the city is plural, perhaps for its mythical inhabitants the dolphin people, and takes this form in the accusative—and gave me two chips of stone, the size of fingernails, that he picked up off the ground, one smooth and dark gray, the other ridged and pinkish like a shell: talismans.

On the way from Delphi down through the Peloponnese to the tourist destinations of Ancient Mycenae—the beehive tombs and cyclopean walls and the ancient, storied theater of Epidaurus—we got off the highway and onto the back roads. We had been catapulting over a landscape that we should have been rolling in, like bumblebees in hydrangea blossoms. The Peloponnese is Herakles country, full of places that evoke his name: Tiryns, where he was born; Nemea, where he slew the lion whose impenetrable skin he wore as a cape. Ours was the only car on the narrow road, with vineyards spread out on both sides. As we approached a crossroads, hoping for a sign—in both senses, cosmic and mundane: reassurance from the gods that we had made the right decision by getting off the highway, and an indication from the department of transportation that a right turn would take us to Nauplio—an oversized placard came into focus, pointing the way to . . . Ancient Cleones? Every time we reached an intersection, we were directed to Ancient Cleones. We were approaching Arcadia, the pastoral landscape of legend, and Hermes, the wayfarer, was messing with us.

The magic dissipated a bit in Nauplio, where we looked for a place to stay. A woman who ran a guest house—a devotee of Hera, I am guessing—refused to give me a room with a view, because it was a double and I was a single. I shouldn’t have taken it personally. People need to make a living, and this was a matter of economics: you can put a single person in a double room, but you can’t put a couple in a single room. By depriving me of the room with a view, and taking her chances that a nice juicy couple would come along (which they did), the landlady squeezed more money out of the tourist economy. I went off disgruntled into the streets of Nauplio while my friends headed for the sea, but I couldn’t stay disgruntled for long. Here were purple-flowering trees such as I had never seen—jacarandas? The trumpet-shaped blossoms covered the trees and carpeted the path, as if it had been prepared for a procession. Later, looking at the wine list at dinner, we ordered a bottle of Nemean red—at the time, we pronounced it Nee-me-an, but I have since learned to say Ne-may-an—realizing that it was made from the grapes of the very vineyards we had driven through, with their bouquet of Herakles. That kept happening in Greece: the real world of crabby landladies and deceptive road signs would crack open and mythology would spill out. You have to pay the rent in the real world, but it’s crazy not to embrace those moments when it intersects with eternity.

Instead of satisfying my wanderlust, that trip whetted my appetite for all things Greek. I came home determined to go back. Meanwhile, I would learn ancient Greek and tackle the classics. I was bent on reading Homer in the original. I wished there were some way I could be Greek, or at least pass for Greek, just by saturating myself in Greekness—the land, the sea, the language, the literature. Odysseus was a hero to me, and, like him, I wanted to have Athena on my side. She was, after all, the patron goddess of education. Maybe I could be Greek in spirit.

Of all the Olympians, Athena is the goddess whose attributes are hardest to define. If Odysseus is a man of many turnings, Athena is a master of disguise. She appears in many forms in Homer, from mentor—the old family friend, a precocious little girl, a tall, handsome woman outside the swineherd’s gate—to swallow. She wears the aegis of her father—a goatskin trimmed with serpents—accessorized with the head of Medusa. Although she is associated with war, she encourages diplomacy over warfare, intelligence over force, strategy over blunt attack, eternal vigilance over anarchy. She can terrify you and she can fill you with hope. She is both aggressor and protector. Athena expects a lot of us and brings out the best in us. She is certainly a friend to Odysseus, and maybe to all of us who are trying to get somewhere.