Mycenae

THE GIANTS

The windows of the night train revealed a landscape almost lunar in its starkness. The train hugged a wall of rock made steel blue by midnight; the mountainside had the consistency of quicksilver. When we passed over the bridge at the great canal of Corinth, we seemed to be suspended in a hunk of purple midnight space. Everything dwarfed us. We were on our way to Mycenae.

The next morning, rainwater turned red as blood in the hollows of the stones in Corinth. Nikos and I stood in the ancient agora and gazed up at the mountain where holy whores once had their temple; a Byzantine castle now clings precariously to the summit. Everything’s so big in this country, I thought. What is it? Everything’s stretching and reaching and gasping for more and more space. The infamous light seems to yank things out of their contexts and present them naked and fullblown to the eye. Everything demands attention; there is nothing subtle about Greece.

Mountain water still trickled through one of the great underground tunnels at the fountain of Pirene, reminding us of the fluidity of time. I wanted to go down the steps which led to a sacred spring, but the gate at the bottom was closed. I wanted to climb Parnassus, snow-capped in the distance, but it was too far away. I wanted everything; I wanted to be enormous and overwhelming, yawning and expansive like the light.

We moved on to the town of Argos, ate, and got a ride into Naphlion where we intended to stay the night. As we drove along the lazy Argive plain — (I believe that’s what they say in travel books) — Nikos suddenly leaned out of the window, gave a cry of surprise, and told the driver to turn around.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I think we should stop,’ said Nikos. ‘We’ve just hit Tiryns. I forgot it was here.’

‘We’ve just hit what!’ I cried, marvelling at the colossal coolness of his statement, for Tiryns was the second gigantic stronghold of the ancient Greeks, sister city to Mycenae. ‘Where is it? Why can’t I see it?’

‘It’s back a bit from the road,’ he said.

The driver turned off onto a smaller road and the walls of the great fortress came into view It was late afternoon and the sky was turning greenish-grey, announcing rain.

‘My God,’ I said feebly as we got out of the car. ‘This place must have been built by giants.’

‘There are legends about that; Nikos said. ‘Some people still believe them.’

Dark clouds were scuttling across the changing sky, and the huge walls of Tiryns looked darker and more menacing than I ever would have imagined. The fortress seemed to be a somber, mighty statement of sheer brute strength, of sheer size in the face of our littleness. The enormous stones seemed to smirk at us as we walked along the ancient pathways. We were puny, ridiculous; we had not built this place. And yet it had a kind of bulky, awesome beauty like a sound idea blown out of all proportion, like a symphony which is too long.

I shivered. The sky was very dark now, and the first drops of rain struck the monstrous stones. We left at the first sound of thunder, and when we looked back, Tiryns was a great grey elephant asleep on the horizon. It rained all the way into Naphlion.

I think it was Saturday when we went to Mycenae. I can’t be sure, but I’m going by the feeling that certain days have certain colours, and this was a blonde day — dusty blonde, to be more precise. The air smelled of ancient, unknown flowers, and all the cicadas were singing like mad in the groves in the hollows of the hills. The rise in the land was so gradual that we didn’t realize how high we were until we reached the ruins of the ancient city and heard the high dry wind whistling around the circular walls.

‘Giants built this place,’ I whispered, as we approached the Lion’s Gate. Nikos just smiled, and ran his hand along one of the great blonde stones.

I looked up and there they were — the two splendid equivocal lions gracing the gate of the fabulous city, gazing at one another as they had gazed for more than three and a half thousand years. The double beast which, like the two-headed eagle of the Byzantines, I had always imagined to symbolize the dual nature of human existence — free will, and Fate. For a moment I could see the tragic Orestes standing where we stood, contemplating a horrendous matricide, struggling to rationalize his actions in terms of the dictates of his own mind rather than those of divine law. A few lines from a long poem, Orestes, by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos came to my mind.

And now,

in front of this gate I feel totally unready; — 

the two marble lions — see them? — they’ve grown tame,

they, who started out so dauntless when we were children,

half wild, their manes bristling for some foolhardy leap,

now finally settled down agreeably on the top corners of the gate

with dead hair, vacant eyes, — terrifying nobody, — wearing an expression

of punished dogs, bearing no resentment,

their tongues licking from time to time the warm soles of night.

We passed through the gate and entered the ruins of the city of Agamemnon, a city once stuffed with gold from the spoils of war, from the conquest of Troy, a city which now exists only in the mind and in the mute stones where snails and snakes and lizards go about their furtive business. Nothing is left except golden coins and ornaments in the museum in Athens, and the famous masks, all flattened out and funny in the daze of death, to tell us what really happened here. A great city rose and fell; it’s an old, old story.

We need our giants, I thought bleakly as I stood over the royal graveyard. Mighty kings with glittering plans and abysmally cunning minds were buried here, in this snaillike, circular Necropolis. They are gone, poof, vanished. History is merely history; it is only glorified through myth.

I joined Nikos, who had gone on ahead of me and was standing at the far side of the ruins, looking over the sheer drop down the mountainside. Beyond, a sister mountain glowing with gold and mauve seemed so close we might have reached out and touched it. The mighty sky was also a tangible thing — a dome of glass. Dizziness made us draw back and continue our wanderings among the stones.

We came across the entrance to an enormous underground cistern which must have been one of the reservoirs of water for the city in times of siege. We descended, daring each other at every step, for the ancient slippery stairs were worn down by centuries of feet making their way deeper and deeper into the bowels of the mountain. It was pitch black and dreadfully chill. It was terrifying. Somehow it seemed to me to be a place of death, although I could not think why. It was a place of water, and water is life ... and yet somewhere at the very bottom of that reservoir a single drop of water was going tinkle tinkle, and sending up black, distorted rings of sound which were almost visible. I remembered Rider Haggard’s She, and the nightmare of immortality. The worn-down stairs, the sad passageways in the caves of Kôr. I brooded over the evils of Time.

Later we took pictures of one another standing in the cone-shaped archway at the far end of the city. It was constructed with the same unbelievably huge blocks of stone as the Lion’s Gate. We wondered if it might have been a sort of back door to the city, an emergency exit in times of siege. Whatever it was, it made us look like pygmies. Mycenae really cuts you down to size.

Finally we went to the place alternately known as the Treasury of Atreus or the grave of Agamemnon, a curious, beehive-shaped structure cut into a hillside. Once inside, a strange trick of acoustics distorted human voices, so that they seemed to be coming from within the very walls. People stood around in small groups, speaking in hushed whispers, giggling nervously now and again as the walls giggled back. We didn’t stay long.

As we drove away from Mycenae the afternoon light was turning from gold to copper, and the city looked serene and mysterious, as though it held some brilliant secret — perhaps at the bottom of that dark cistern -- which would never be brought to light.

Nikos was laughing silently as we turned a bend in the

road and the city was lost from view.

‘What’s funny?’ I asked.

‘Giants,’ he replied. ‘Giants are funny.’

‘They are not. They’re serious. And anyway, I like them; I said.

It was dusk when we returned to Naphlion.

The next day we went to Epidaurus to see the ancient theatre which once seated fifteen thousand people who chattered and munched cheese and olives, scolded their children, laughed at the plays of Aristophanes, wept at the tragedies of Euripides and generally, no doubt, had a fabulous time. It is situated in a marvellous grove of pines and red leafy vines which give off burning, pungent aromas. We walked through the ruins of the temple of Aesculapius and the surrounding ruins which were all part of a great medical centre of the ancient world. People came here for cures for every conceivable disease of the body or the mind. I shuddered when we came to a structure known as the tholos of Polycleites — a sort of circular labyrinth whose function is still not entirely clear. Some say it was used for secret religious initiations; others say it may have been a prison (or even a bank!). But the most probable theory is that it was used for curing certain types of insanity, the idea being that the patient underwent some sort of experience in the labyrinth so fearful that it snapped him back to reality. It is always associated with snakes, and one wonders if the idea was to cure mental disease by employing the very symbol of all that is loathsome and fearful in the human unconscious, to lead the patient through, as it were, the labyrinth of his own mind. The symbol of medicine is still a serpent coiled around a staff. In any case, we did not like the tholos, and we moved on.

The air was wild with the smell of mustard and pines. We sat in the top row of the ancient theatre and listened while a man far down below us dropped a single drachma onto the dot that indicated centre stage. Like a pebble dropped into a still pool, the coin made tinkling rings of pure sound which rose to greet us through the hot blonde air.

‘Nikos,’ I said. ‘I just had a thought. What if they weren’t giants? I mean the builders of Mycenae. What if they were just like us, you know, hopelessly mortal and all that, clipping their fingernails, worrying about their grey hairs, troubled by their nightmares…’

Nikos laughed. ‘You build big when you’re scared,’ he said. ‘And they built big!’

I thought about that for a while, and gradually it all made sense. ‘So; I whispered sadly, ‘They weren’t giants after all, were they? They were just plain scared.’

‘Scared silly, I would say,’ he said.

God, the price we pay for our illusions. Someone dropped another coin onto centre stage and the air turned silver.