CHAPTER 7

ACROPOLIS NOW

IT MUST BE said that I was not raised with the highest standard of beauty. Lake Erie was not beautiful. It was the first body of water I was ever sat down by, and I remember that the shore was covered with green slime. I loved the fireworks over Edgewater Beach one Fourth of July when I was small enough to ride on my father’s shoulders: tiny golden fish clustered into the shape of one giant fish, a school of fish shaped like a fish flashing in the night sky. I have never seen fireworks to match. I did not live in a beautiful place until I moved to Vermont and had a view of the Adirondacks and a lush green drive to work. New York always looks beautiful to me when I am leaving it. Maybe that’s the way of it: things are at their most beautiful when you think you’re seeing them for the last time.

So how did I ever develop a taste for Greece?

Nothing was quite what I expected. The light, the famous light, was not brighter than light anywhere else but softer, more delicate, like cream instead of milk, or real maple syrup tasted for the first time. There were no sharp edges but, rather, bands of color along the horizon, shades of distance, whitewashed walls, blue domes, the soft terra-cotta red of roof tiles. The landscape was the setting for the temples: the man-made enhanced the natural and nature set off the man-made. It was the perfect assemblage of elements.

Wherever I went, I heard parents calling to children, “Έλα! Έλα εδώ!” “Come! Come here!” Imagine being a child in Greece, growing up in that landscape, being plopped down on a beach in your ancestral land, learning the word for the sea: θάλασσα (thálassa), with the stress on the first syllable, like a wave that breaks and then retreats, hissing, and is overtaken by the next wave, and the next. Once, walking down a hillside to the sea, admiring a terraced garden among small pines, I watched as a man removed a block of wood in an ingenious network of irrigation channels, sending the water in a new direction. “Έξυπνος,” I said. Ex + hypnos—“out from sleep”—is the Greek for smart, intelligent, alert, woke. He smiled. He hadn’t invented the system. His ancestors had figured it out millennia ago.

Ed Stringham had spoken appreciatively of Vouliagmeni, a beach outside Athens, but when he traveled, it was for the cities, for the art and culture. “You must go to the Benaki,” Ed had said. With its rank upon rank of icons and its collections of sculpture, pottery, jewelry, silver—from the archaic to the modern—the Benaki is a world-class museum. Ed impressed on me the importance of the Byzantine in Greek history: the country had missed the Renaissance, he said—it was under the Ottoman Empire while its own ancient glories were being rediscovered in Italy, and it was largely the Orthodox Church that kept Greek culture alive. Although Ed had stressed that Greece looked east, to Asia, rather than west, to the rest of Europe, it was the Parthenon, the symbol of Western civilization, that he spoke about most rhapsodically. He had climbed the Acropolis one night with a poet to view the Parthenon under the full moon. The memory of it made him swoon: the glow of the marble, the shape of the columns against the sky, the poignancy of ruins that were both tragic and triumphant. Seeing the Parthenon had clearly been a highlight of Ed’s youth, his “bloom,” as the ancients called that epoch of young manhood when a boy is at his most godly. Although it was the landscape and language of Greece that first drew me, Ed’s praise made me long to see the Parthenon. Surely it was something that nobody could ever feel jaded about.

So in 1983, on my first day in Athens, right after breakfast, at which I had asked a street vendor for a donkey (yáidaros) instead of a yogurt (yiaoúrti)—not even close—I went straight to the Acropolis. I was sitting on a big rock by the stairs to the Parthenon when a man who looked Greek addressed me in German, inviting me to join him and his friends. The German threw me off—I didn’t come to Greece to speak German. I declined, and he said, in Greek, “You don’t want to?” He was Greek after all. Only later did I realize that he had addressed me in German because he thought I was German—that was the default nationality of fair-skinned women traveling in Greece. Americans were rarer, and even rarer was the fair-skinned American who didn’t get it when a Greek was trying to pick her up.

“Acropolis” means “the upper fortified part or citadel of a Greek city,” “a place of refuge.” In ancient times, people protected themselves by gathering together on a height where they could see enemies approaching and roll rocks down on them. Whoever is up high has an advantage. “Refuge” as a definition has developed from the function of the place, but its literal meaning—from akro, edge, and polis, city—is the Upper City, the Heights. Although the English word acrophobia (akro + phobia) is a fear of heights, akro can also mean edge. An acrophobic may not mind being in a high place as long as he doesn’t have to look over the edge. Athens is a hilly city—not an easy place to ride a bicycle—but, compared with the mountains in the east and north, it slopes like a plain to the sea in the west and south. The Acropolis is a mountain peak that somehow got separated from its range and now stands flat-topped in the middle of the city that grew up around it, inspired by it, depending on it for refuge.

The city of Akron in northeastern Ohio, famous for rubber, tires, and the Goodyear blimp, takes its name from the Greek akro. I went there once in high school, and by Ohio standards it did feel rather elevated. Akron sits on a western plateau of the Alleghenies, 1,004 feet above sea level; the Acropolis in Athens is 490 feet above sea level, but it is not part of a plateau. It’s a high, sharp rock that juts up out of the chaotic city like a huge shard.

On that trip, my view of the Parthenon, the temple to Athena the Virgin that crowns the Acropolis, was compromised by scaffolding and rusty-looking machinery. It was like going to Venice when the Campanile is under renovation or the Alhambra when the fountain in the Court of the Lions is being replumbed. It was disappointing. All I could do was try to get a grip on the history of the Parthenon. A less grand version begun by the Athenians after the Battle of Marathon, in 490 BC, was destroyed by the Persians and then reconstructed, more grandly, under Pericles in 447 BC. Construction took nine years, and it stood until 1687, when it was blown up by the Venetians, who shot mortars at it when they learned (from the Greeks) that the Ottomans were using it as a weapons depot. By 1983, the Parthenon had been a ruin for three hundred years—ten generations. What was the likelihood that it would be restored during my lifetime?

I wandered around with my Blue Guide, but it was hard to match what I was supposed to be seeing with what was actually there. I didn’t know the archaeological terms—metopes, naos, propylaea. There was a pocket museum right there on the Acropolis, and I saw the damage the pollution had done to the sculptures, eating away the marble. Personally, I was not sensitive to the bad air—the Cloud, as the Athenians called the smog created by traffic emissions. Cleveland is a steel town, and New Jersey has a petrochemical refinery or two. To me the air of Athens smelled piney, like retsina. But the decay of the stone was tragic.

The next time I climbed the Acropolis was in 1985. I arrived in Athens via London, where I visited the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles. I bought postcards and books and learned to recognize Herakles by his lion skin and Hermes by his floppy hat and winged sandals. There was a lot of fighting going on in the friezes: battles of Centaurs, Lapiths, Amazons. Centaurs, of course, had the bodies of horses and the heads and torsos of men. Lapiths were mythological beings from Thessaly, who mostly fought with Centaurs. The Amazons were a mythical tribe of warrior women who scheduled conjugal visits with the opposite sex once a year, strictly for procreation. They excelled at archery, and legend has it that a girl’s right breast was cauterized so that she would grow up better equipped to shoot arrows. (The name Amazon is supposedly from a-mazos, without a breast.) In our time the word Amazon is more likely to be associated with the empire of Jeff Bezos and online shopping for books and for bows and arrows—and for bras and prostheses, for that matter. The behemoth company was named for the Amazon River, which was named for the Amazons.

There were a lot of animals in the sculptures—a wide-eyed ox being led to sacrifice, horses whinnying—and young girls in the Panathenaic procession carrying pomegranates and gifts for the goddess. The most beautiful sculptures from the Acropolis, to me, were the Caryatids: strong, graceful female figures supporting the porch roof of the small temple called the Erechtheion. (I am always embarrassed to pronounce the word, but I’m told it’s carr-y-a-tids.) Lord Elgin’s men took one of them to London, sawing her off the porch and stacking rubble in her place. Lord Byron, a contemporary, deplored his countryman’s rape of the Acropolis. The British say that Lord Elgin’s action, which took place while he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1799–1803), saved the precious marbles from certain destruction—they would have been neglected under the Ottomans and eroded by pollution in modern times—and make the point that in the British Museum you get to see the figures from the friezes and the pediments up close. The original sculptures were very high on the temple, and even the ancients couldn’t have been able to see them very well. But the six Caryatids were rhythmic in their poses, and breaking them up was a sacrilege.

In Athens I climbed the Acropolis again and tried to reassemble it all mentally, but the Parthenon was in fragments and the fragments were scattered all over Europe. Its fragmentation was part of its history now. Even if I lived to be a hundred and fifty and could still scramble up to the heights of the city or command a sedan chair, it was unlikely that I would ever see the Parthenon free of scaffolding, with Doric columns intact and monumental marble gods on the pediments. I would never be able to enter the temple that once housed a colossal statue of Athena and feel the proportions of the place and crane my neck to look at the friezes. The Parthenon of the present was a forlorn reminder of the Parthenon of the past.

AND THEN, INCREDIBLY, just a few years later, it happened. The great bronze doors, richly worked, stood open, and I entered the Parthenon. The temple had a coffered ceiling, and all the sculptures on the metopes, pediments, and friezes had been restored in fine detail. The space was vast, dominated by the huge chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos by Phidias, rising more than forty feet tall. And I wasn’t dreaming! But I wasn’t in Athens, either. I was in Nashville, Tennessee.

At first, I didn’t know what to make of the Nashville Parthenon. I thought it was a joke. But, if so, why wasn’t everyone there shrieking with laughter? I tried to share the joke with the guard at the temple door, but he seemed to honestly believe that this replica Parthenon was better than the original, because it had all its parts and wasn’t crumbling, like the one in Athens. “Look,” he said, swinging one of the doors closed. “The doors work.” I was incredulous. Had no one noticed that the Parthenon in Athens is on top of a hill and this one was on flat land, surrounded by grass? Where were the rocks? Where was the sense of something built on a sacred height, the shape of the temple cut out against an azure sky? Instead of spotting it in the distance on your way into the city, you roll past it and do a double take. It reminded me of the time I saw the White House through the car window: instead of an awe-inspiring landmark of democracy, it was a long, low dwelling with a wide front lawn.

At a wonderful bookstore aptly called Parnassus I met a woman named F. Lynne Bachleda. “You have to see our Parthenon in context,” she said. Nashville calls itself the Athens of the South, and it is full of colleges and universities—a locus of learning, like Athens, Greece. The Greek key motif is worked into the public library (architect, Robert A. M. Stern). (A library is, in fact, sometimes called an athenaeum, after Athena.) The city first constructed a plaster replica of the Parthenon in 1897, for the hundredth anniversary of the state’s entry into the Union (1796). It was one of several structures, including a pyramid and a Ferris wheel, that, Lynne said, were “meant to bring foreign cultures, and fun, to Nashville, showing the marvels of the age.” The exhibition was like the 1851 Great Exhibition in Victorian London, or the New York World’s Fair of 1964. “Our Parthenon has value,” Lynne said. “It speaks well of Nashville that we wanted it here.” She went on, eloquently, “It is the only place on earth where you can experience the architectural volumes and visual balance of the original, albeit with a very different ‘vibe.’ ”

As a kid in the fifties, Lynne loved going to Centennial Park. There was a lake with ducks and a sunken garden and a fighter plane and a steam locomotive. Lynne’s father was a Latin teacher who had also studied Greek, so the family had a classical bent—their dog was a boxer named Psyche. Schoolchildren put coins in a collection box inside the temple to raise money for a statue of Athena. By 1982, thirty years later, they had enough cash to go ahead with the project. A local sculptor named Alan LeQuire won the commission, and a friend of Lynne’s, Annie Freeman, posed for the statue. “She had a beautiful strength to her physique, a real grounded strength to her,” Lynne said. Annie, an artist and songwriter, was in awe of LeQuire. Sculpting the Athena, she said, was “like trying to replicate the Statue of Liberty from a souvenir.”

The best description we have of the monumental statue of Athena was written by Pausanias, in the mid-second century AD. “The statue is made of ivory and gold,” he wrote (in Peter Levi’s translation). “She has a sphinx on the middle of her helmet, and griffins worked on either side of it. . . . [T]he statue of Athene stands upright in an ankle-length tunic with the head of Medusa carved in ivory on her breast. She has a Victory about eight feet high, and a spear in her hand and a shield at her feet, and a snake beside the shield; this snake might be Erichthonios”—the man-serpent, sprung from the seed of Hephaestus, who is the mythological ancestor of the Athenians.

LeQuire took eight years to complete the statue. He started by researching construction materials and then did historical research, contacting eminent classical archaeologists, like Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, of Bryn Mawr College, who had written several books on Greek sculpture of the archaic and Hellenistic periods. Rather than regarding the Nashville Athena as a folly, Ridgway chose to see it as a great opportunity to understand how Phidias built the original statue, around 450 BC. LeQuire went to Athens, of course, and measured the base of the place where the Phidias Athena had stood. He also studied a small Roman replica of the Phidias known as the Varvakeion Athena, from the third century AD, in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. He drove around the Peloponnese, visiting sites associated with Athena, hoping she would appear to him. In a way, he was trying to apprentice himself to Phidias across the ages. He particularly admired the naturalistic poses and drapery of the Caryatids, on the Acropolis. A fifth-century BC head of a woman in Pentelic marble, which he saw in Brescia, Italy, and which might have been by Phidias, gave him the idea for Athena’s head.

To make sure that the replica Parthenon could bear the weight of the monumental statue, builders cast four gigantic concrete pylons that went down to Nashville’s limestone bedrock. Athena is four stories tall. She is built on a steel armature, clad in panels of gypsum cement reinforced with chopped fiberglass. “The work went on behind a curtain,” Lynne recalled, so that when the statue was done, in 1990, it was “more of a magical reveal.” The head is oversized, because otherwise, from below, Athena would look like a pinhead. She is so big that the Nike she is holding—the winged goddess of victory, at six feet tall—is to her the size of a basketball trophy. When you stand at her feet, that is what you see: monumental toes. Annie Freeman is modest about having posed for the biggest indoor statue in the world, and quick to give credit to other models. LeQuire is said to have used the feet of another woman to get the toes right. “Those are not my breasts, I can tell you,” Annie said. She likes to think that something of her stance and energy went into the statue, along with her nose (“I don’t have a pixie nose”), and was gratified when the sculptor told her that he chose her for her “strength of character.” Athena’s lips are modeled on Elvis Presley’s.

Lynne has been to Athens and seen the original Parthenon. “That was frankly disappointing,” she said. “You can only get so close. As someone who was raised with being able to walk into it—there’s an undeniable advantage to being able to appreciate the proportions of the building.” The erudite guide who took her around the Acropolis was not impressed when Lynne told her about the replica of the Parthenon back home. In fact, Lynne said, “She looked at me like I was a turd in a punch bowl.” Lynne’s favorite view of the Parthenon is from across Lake Watauga, in Centennial Park, when the doors of the temple are open and you can see inside to the gigantic statue. “There’s this huge woman, perceiving, assessing, inspiring,” she said. “To see her from a distance in statuesque majesty . . . Here is a woman with far-reaching power and the tools of war.”

In recent years, the statue has been gilded. “I miss the naked simplicity of the form,” Lynne said. “The gilding looks kind of cheesy, to my modern eyes, but I am all for historical accuracy.” The sculptor liked it white, too, but he recognizes that the whiteness of the Parthenon has nothing to do with the Greek aesthetic. “They used as many different materials as they could get their hands on,” LeQuire said.

I find the Nashville Athena terrifying, with her helmet and aegis and spear. Her face, since the gilding, is made up with lipstick and eyeliner. This is no mild Mother Mary. But the Nashvillians made a convert of me. Sculpture is one of the so-called plastic arts: it is all about shape. True, there is no substitute for Pentelic marble, for the original stones. That is why the argument between the Greeks and the British over the Elgin Marbles is so bitter. The City College of New York has a set of Parthenon friezes—plaster casts from molds of the originals in the British Museum—on display at the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. As shapes, sculptures can be appreciated, at some level, even if they’re made of marshmallows. Recently I was delighted to see a mesh screen printed with the image of the Parthenon draping the side of a parking garage in Chicago’s Greektown.

I was a snob about the Nashville Parthenon not being up high, but that means a person who uses a wheelchair or someone pushing a baby stroller can go inside. It’s within driving distance of Cincinnati. And it’s not tacky—it’s not an ersatz Las Vegas attraction or any kind of commercial enterprise, like the seedy hotel with an Eiffel Tower on top that you can see from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This Parthenon is not fake but sincere. I would lay a tribute at the feet of the Nashville Athena.

IN THE SPRING OF 2013, I was invited on a press trip to Athens organized by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports to generate advance publicity for an exhibition of Byzantine masterpieces from Greek collections, which would be mounted at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Contemporary Greece was in a financial depression that threatened its membership in the Eurozone. The New York Times ran front-page articles about children being sent to school hungry and people scavenging for food in dumpsters. The national airline, Olympic, was no longer operating between New York and Athens. I had to fly an Austrian airline to Vienna and then to Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece—kind of like Chicago—and finally on to Athens. I missed being with Greeks on their own airline: the passengers always gave the pilot a round of applause when the wheels hit the tarmac.

Two young diplomats from Greece’s foreign press office were shepherding us on the tour. Both were named Andreas; one was posted to Istanbul, the other to Lisbon, and they were known to their colleagues as the Turk and the Portagee. I asked Andreas the Portagee where he had learned Portuguese, and he said that he had studied at the Ionian University, in Corfu. I told him that my favorite teacher had taught in the translation program there—Dorothy Gregory. “You knew Dorothy Gregory?” he said, astonished. “I studied with her on Corfu!” We stared at each other, openmouthed. Dorothy—Dora, as she was called in Greece—had died in Corfu in March of 2000, just before I was scheduled to visit. It was wonderful to resurrect her between us. “It is so touching that you knew Mrs. Gregory,” Andreas said.

When we checked in at our four-star hotel, I dotted the “i” in my name with such zeal that the pen popped apart in the lobby. I had been a little worried about traveling with a press crew until I saw my room. Because we were guests of the state, we had fabulous accommodations—my room had a balcony and a view of the Acropolis. I had binoculars with me, and whenever I was free I trained them on the rock, watching the way the shadows shifted. I might never have left the hotel. It was in the center of town, a district of Athens that I was unfamiliar with. I usually gravitated toward the Plaka, the slab of the city beneath the Acropolis, and stayed in small two-star hotels on its south side. This place was an art gallery unto itself, and a drink in the rooftop bar, where the view wrapped around to Mount Lycabettus—Athens’ other dramatic hill, calling across to the Acropolis—was a decadent experience, all flashing lights, like being at Studio 54 at the height of the disco craze. As I sipped my ouzo, I found myself thinking, I could get used to this. But it was an odd time to be treated like a rich person. On the streets there were angry demonstrations by the Greeks, protesting the austerity regime that the government had imposed to keep the country afloat in the Eurozone. People were facing the fact that they had been getting robbed by corrupt politicians for generations.

We went to the Benaki Museum, which I had visited on earlier trips on Ed’s recommendation, and which was sending some of its most precious holdings to the United States as part of the Byzantine exhibit. A curator showed us a mosaic icon of the Virgin, dating to the ninth or tenth century, from Stoudios Monastery in Constantinople. Icons, of course, are a staple of the Greek Orthodox Church, and there are very strict guidelines for icon painters. St. Luke is said to have painted the historical Mary, the Theotokos (God’s birth-giver), from life. This piece was unique, a survivor. For one thing, it was stone, not painted wood, and it hadn’t shattered. The Virgin’s face is beautiful and expressive, with a small mouth, long nose, asymmetrical eyes, and smooth brow; her veil is outlined in dark gray, and the shape of her head is echoed in rings of gold and green-blue: a halo of polychromatic stones. The alphabet book that I bought that day at the Benaki uses the image to illustrate the letter psi (Ψ) for ψηφιδωτό (psephidotó), which it defines as “painting with small colored stones or pebbles.” I was surprised to find that there was another Greek word, a technical one, for “mosaic.” Greek also uses mosaicó (μωσαϊκό), a word I always associated with Moses, as if he had been responsible for putting something precious together from a lot of small parts. But “mosaic” is also related to the Muses and refers to something that has been given an artistic treatment and is worthy of a museum.

We saw beautiful things at the Benaki—classical statues with Christian interpretations, like a stone shepherd carrying a lamb across his shoulders. In the Orthodox view, the Greeks did not miss the Renaissance, as Ed had said, but made the Renaissance possible by bridging the classical and the Christian during the many centuries of the Byzantine Empire. Across the avenue from the Benaki, the Byzantine and Christian Museum, a low sand-colored building, like a mission church in California, is devoted to this theme. It was lending the exhibition a thirteenth-century mosaic icon of the Madonna and Child called the Virgin Episkepsis (the Sheltering Virgin or the Virgin of Tenderness); the literal meaning of the epithet is “looking over,” as in “watching out for.” The Virgin’s features are the same as in the mosaic icon at the Benaki: small mouth, long nose, sad eyes. The face, contoured by the colored stones, has a delicate suggestion of rose in the cheeks. Her veil is framed in deep blue and striped with gold. It occurred to me that the halo might be an artifact of the mosaic process: the repeated outline creates an aura around the head. The icon has visible seams running lengthwise, along which it has lost some of its tiles, and appears to have been assembled in thirds. It arrived in mainland Greece from Tirilye in 1922, the year the Turks ejected the Greeks from Asia Minor, slaughtering people who had lived there for generations, burning Smyrna, and putting an end to the Great Idea, the notion that Greece would one day take back Constantinople and Asia Minor. Greeks call it the Catastrophe. Even disfigured, the Virgin of Tenderness was a supreme example of mosaic art.

Ever since I saw the mosaics at Paphos, on Cyprus, and was denied entry to the monastery at Dafni, I have gone out of my way to view mosaics wherever I can. There are Roman mosaics in Fishbourne, in the south of England. Rome itself has several jewel-like Byzantine churches, including Santa Maria in Cosmedin (home of the Bocca della Verità, supposedly the head of Uranus, whose open mouth is said to close on the hand of anyone not telling the truth—an early lie detector). Venice showcases the exquisite work of mosaic artists imported from Constantinople by the doges. I particularly love the floors (pavimenti) of St. Mark’s Basilica and of churches on Torcello and Murano, with their swirling patterns of concentric circles made of triangular chips of gray and white and golden stone, or simple colored squares—deep blue, burgundy, green—locked together and polished smooth. Their cool beauty makes me want to prostrate myself, if only to get closer to the stone.

I had been to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum, all near Napoli, which started out as a Greek colony; spent a week in Ravenna, an outpost of Byzantium (and Dante’s place of exile); and driven into Palermo (hair-raising), where on entering the Palatine Chapel I murmured to my companion, “I’m in Paradise,” to which he responded that this was exactly the effect the creators were striving for: a church should feel like Paradise. But I had yet to see the Holy Grail of Byzantine mosaics: the monastery at Dafni.

Dafni had been on the itinerary of our press tour and then disappeared, a disturbing turn of events, confirmed by the minister of culture himself: “There is some problem with Dafni,” he said. The restoration was ongoing. But one of our diplomat shepherds, Andreas the Turk, had always loved Dafni and was moved that an American even knew about it, so he called an archaeologist friend. On a side trip to visit the last strongholds of Byzantium in the Peloponnese, our bus pulled off the Sacred Way fourteen miles outside Athens and stopped at the park in Dafni. I couldn’t believe it.

Children suspended their play to watch as the foreign journalists were met at the door and welcomed inside the church. The scaffolding inside made it look like a trapeze school. Finally I understood that it wasn’t just for safety reasons that the church had been closed—by now multiple earthquakes had shattered the mosaics, which had collapsed onto the floor in jumbles of tesserae. The restorers’ work was of a magnitude I could barely comprehend: they were putting the Almighty together again. The mosaics, in various states of restoration, glowed from the walls and the vaulted ceiling. There was a Nativity scene with sheep and shepherds; a Baptism of Christ, with wavy lines to indicate water over his lower body, immersed in the River Jordan; a Last Supper, the Apostles crowded together around the Redeemer; and a Transfiguration. We were invited to ascend the scaffold ing into the dome. Short strings dangled from some of the tiles—a scientific test for humidity or stability—which did not detract one iota from the magnificent impression.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had been here before the earthquakes and seen it whole, wrote in his book Mani about “the stupendous mosaic of Christ Pantocrator at Daphni in Attica”: “whose great eyes, dark and exorbitant and cast almost furtively over one shoulder, at total variance with His right hand’s serene gesture of blessing and admonition, spell not pain but fear, anguish and guilt, as though He were in flight from an appalling doom. The only fit setting for such an expression is the Garden of Gethsemane; but this is a Christ-God in His glory, the All Powerful One. It is tremendous, tragic, mysterious and shattering.” I was standing within inches of the Christ Pantocrator, beneath his right hand.

If my travels had a moment to compare to Ed Stringham’s experience of the Parthenon, this was it. My gratitude has made me easier to get along with ever since. Back in Athens, I was more than content to join my fellow-travelers for a sunset tour of the Acropolis—the kind of thing that really galls you when you are among hoi polloi (Greek for “the many”) and see privileged individuals admitted after hours. We were an eccentric bunch: an ambitious freelancer, keen to solidify her relationships with the Ministry of Culture; a gentlemanly Southern wine writer; an art snob from the Upper East Side; a fresh young Mormon woman who worked in radio and lugged her equipment up the Acropolis, unsheathing a microphone the size of a giant zucchini. She refused wine at meals but drank in Greece with bottomless delight, reminding me of my younger self. As she hovered near our guide, a young man in khaki shorts and work shirt, with her giant padded microphone, we draped ourselves over the smooth rocks and listened. The guide talked about the restoration efforts, which entailed undoing the misguided restoration efforts of earlier generations. A young reporter from the West Coast took notes in a whimsical notebook with a purple pen—I imagined her dotting her “i”s with daisies and marveled at how easy and feminine she made it look to be a writer.

When we had wandered around for a while and it was time to leave, the West Coast writer discovered that she had lost her pen. “It’s my favorite pen!” she cried, and it was clear that the Acropolis would not be closing for the night until she had found it. We fanned out over the rocks, some of us more optimistic and willing than others, to make our fellow writer happy. I concentrated on the spot where I had watched her dotting her “i”s, her dark hair framing her lovely face, her short skirt belling around her. She was married with a young daughter and hadn’t been lucky so far on this trip, missing her connection in Vienna, oversleeping in the morning, passing out early in the evening. She would later confirm what I had suspected: she was pregnant. As a pencil lover, I understood the attachment to a writing tool—I was traveling with a quiver of Blackwings. Looking down, I spotted the pen hiding in a crevice of the rock, and said casually, “I found it,” instantly regretting that I had not nabbed this opportunity to shout in Greek, “Εύρηκα!” I found it! Eureka!

SOMEHOW WHEN A CITY IS ANCIENT you don’t expect it to change that much, but Greater Athens is a dynamic megalopolis. In recent years it hosted the Summer Olympics and built a new airport, got gleaming new Metro lines up and running, and opened the new Acropolis Museum. This is on the south side of the Acropolis, set back from a promenade planted with rosemary and thyme. A broad entrance ramp gives visitors a chance to look down at the archaeological site through green-tinged glass. Inside, findings from the Acropolis are arranged behind glass on both sides of a long corridor. The museum is built on several stories, with the sculptures installed at the level on which they would be found if they were still attached to the temple. A visitor can enjoy the details of metopes and friezes, in natural light, while looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Acropolis itself. The Caryatids have been moved inside to protect them from the pollution, so you can see them up close, admire their thick hair in its intricate braids, and peek out from behind them as if you were with them on the porch of the Erechtheion. (The ones on the Acropolis are reproductions.) The Greeks have left poignant blanks for the marble gods and doomed oxen and whinnying horses that reside in London.

The last time I was in Athens, in the spring of 2017, with no fancy press credentials, I went again to the Acropolis. I tried to get there early, before it got too crowded, but by the time I arrived at the ticket booth it was 10:15. The day was already hot, and the Acropolis was thronged. I joined the crowd of people jostling up the stone stairs, worn smooth to gleaming by the feet of supplicants since the time of Pericles. Four Japanese women wearing hats suitable for a garden party linked arms and pushed through the crowd, giggling. A man directed me to move so that he could photograph his wife: no photobombing allowed. Signs that said “Do Not Touch the Marble” made even the most reverent visitor want to reach out and stroke the cool pink stone. As at Dafni, the restoration was ongoing—there were more work crews on scaffolding than I had ever seen on the Parthenon before. Inside the temple, square white umbrellas cast patches of shade for the workers. There was the sound of drills. Column drums and slabs and disks, organized by size and shape, were lined up and labeled: a library of fragments. There was a railroad up there, and cranes and pulleys and tractors and carts full of stones. Minus the modern technology, it must have looked something like this during the original construction. I thought of a passage from Plutarch that Ed had once left on my desk: a retired mule, after years of labor on the Acropolis, showed up every day to cheer on the younger mules.

The crowd and the scaffolding on the Acropolis didn’t bother me this time; the modern trappings did not feel like a barrier between Athena and me. I sought out the olive tree that grows on the Acropolis, descended from the tree said to have been planted by the goddess. Detaching myself from the crowd, I stood in a wedge of shade and looked through a window to a kind of pantry for the workers: a clean white room with a bare table, a bench, a stove, a refrigerator, a sink with gooseneck faucets, a hook to hang a jacket on—nothing extra. It was as if I were looking at Athena’s kitchen.

I’m not acrophobic, and I enjoyed looking over the edge and out at the megalopolis (megalo + polis = big city), the buildings nudging up the mountains and flowing down to the sea. The apartment buildings were all roughly the same size and style: six to eight stories, utilitarian, if not brutalist, with white or pastel facades gridded with balconies divided by panels and rigged with awnings and shades; compact solar-powered hot-water heaters lay on the roofs like blue hippos; and the whole mess bristled with TV antennas. It looked as if the great city had been rendered in impasto, caked with layers of white that had built up over the years like plaque, the whole land a sculpture.

On the way down from the Acropolis that morning, a young woman suffered a laughing fit so infectious that it set off the group she was with and started the whole crowd laughing. My knees went weak as I shuffled down the stairs with the crowd, and if I reached out and touched the marble it was out of necessity, to keep my balance. It suddenly struck me as wonderful that throngs of people come from all over the world every day to climb the Acropolis of Athens and visit the temple of Athena Parthenos, and that Athenians, using the best scientific methods, are at work in their city constantly, industriously, sorting the ruins and shoring them up. Is this not a form of worship?