The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  When dusk falls, it’s best to sit by the road leading to Agamemnon’s grave (a stone beehive of cut rock) and cast another eye on the Cyclopian walls and the piled-up ruins of Mycenae. Night descends from the mountains, but the nest of the Atreides still glows with the reddish color of ancient gold and ancient blood.

  IV

  SO THE GREEK LANDSCAPE spoke to me in the voice of myth and tragedy, filled with pathos. That was the dominant impression. The importunate presence of the naked earth, of strongly sculptured rocky masses, is strengthened by a scanty cloak of vegetation. Great big trees—poplar, yew, oak—grow in the valleys, but everywhere the forest draws back before an offensive of small prickly bushes which can weather everything.

  We know from historical reports that the now bald mountainsides of Crete were once covered with forests of cedar and cypress. The environs of Olympia were rich in poplars, but they fell victim to a rule saying they were the only tree that could be used in sacrifices. The Greek landscape of today is therefore wilder and more devoid of greenery than it was in ancient times.

  But even so, it is not without its small corners of retreat—groves in which one can imagine Socrates conversing with Phaedrus. Even in the middle of Athens, a city filled with hollering and feverish pedestrian traffic, you can turn off the busy Leophoros Dioniziou Areopagitou, which runs along the foot of the Acropolis, and plunge into the crooked paths of the Hill of Muses. It’s good to come here in the evening and wander amid the myrtle, laurel, and cypress. The trees are not very big, no taller than an average man, and in the dusk they are so anthropomorphic that you feel like greeting them, stopping and chatting with them.

  In no other country have I ever experienced this strange sense of fraternizing with nature, the natural ease with which nature transforms itself into human shapes. That is why it seems to me that the metamorphoses of trees into dryads were not so much due to the Greeks’ extravagant imagination as to quick observation and accurate reading of signals sent by the surrounding world.

  Not far from Athens, in the direction of the promontory of Sounion, there is one of the oldest Attic sanctuaries—Brauron. A road leads through fields and dissolves into sand, which is probably why this locality is rarely visited by tourists, who with each year lose more of the character of pilgrims.

  At the feet of the Brauron Acropolis there is a portico in the shape of the letter . The Doric columns of light gold sandstone are not very high in proportion to the low hills of the surrounding area; with the smell of harvest and the cicadas, they create an odd atmosphere: a sanctuary in a wasteland.

  Next to the portico, which is the dominating construction and encloses an architectural whole, fragments were dug up of two small temples—to Artemis and Iphigenia—and a priestess’s abode. Herodotus relates that every four years a bizarre ceremony took place here. Young girls, dressed in saffron-colored robes, were sacrificed to the goddess. They went by the curious name of she-bears. The ancients explain the ceremony by the fact that at the dawn of time a bear devoted to Artemis was killed at Brauron, in reply to which the vengeful goddess sent a pestilence onto the area. The sacrifice of girls was intended to placate the goddess of the woods.

  This interpretation does not go very deep. The excavations of recent times, which have thrown up the remains of a prehistoric settlement, permit us to conjecture that the ceremony at Brauron was a distant echo of the totemic rites of some pre-Greek clan whose guardian animal was the bear.

  A bear in Greece? Any remaining representatives of the species live in the high mountains of the north—modern Greece seems extraordinarily poor in fauna.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century during engineering works in the town of Pikermia near Athens they stumbled upon…an animal cemetery! The discovery became a sensation for naturalists all over Europe.

  On the basis of this find, scientists came to the conclusion that in the time immediately preceding recorded history, Greece was a region of unusually bounteous and varied fauna. Animals of temperate climes lived here—goats, deer, bears—alongside animals of hot climes like antelopes, elephants, hyenas, rhinoceroses, monkeys, as well as species characteristic of cold climates like the musk ox. Nor was there a lack of powerful predators like the striped tiger and lion—so often represented in sculpture; they were not, as one might think, purely an import of the imagination.

  The huge cemetery in Pikermia had resulted from some gigantic forest fire from which herds of animals fled only to perish, tumbling down the steep inclines of the gorges.

  In Euripides’s Iphigenia of Tauris we find a reference to Brauron. The text goes: “And you, Iphigenia, will be the keyholder10 of the temple on the holy hills of Brauron, where you will be buried after your death. They will offer you splendid fabrics, left by women who died in childbirth.”

  In Euripides’s time, Iphigenia was no more than a mortal heroine. But earlier she was counted among the heavenly beings as the goddess of fertility. She gave up her place to Artemis, much as Helen, first a goddess, was degraded to the role of Menelaus’s wife—the cause of the unfortunate Trojan War. What was the meaning of these dethronings? Probably there was a new need to codify legends in the times immediately preceding the birth of tragedy, and an array of local gods had to yield to general Greek gods.

  Brauron has the indolent atmosphere of old, abandoned country estates. A spring wells up from the side of the acropolis and the quick stream disappears under the portico’s foundations. Although the layers of many legends and beliefs from the dawn of time lie piled upon the Brauron sanctuary, it seems that this temple was originally built in honor of water—in a country where a spring is a divine revelation.

  V

  SET SWINGING PAST THE bounds of the imagination and far past the bounds of any description—the landcape of Delphi. Many lovely things have been said about it: “A place that possesses mystery, grandeur and a tremor of the divine” “amid a colossal layering of rock, temples reign supreme in a sublime tragic wasteland” “a vast decoration of earth tortured by the wrath of the god of thunderbolts.” These small and common phrases are like a ring held up to the horizon; no one can contain the splendor of this place in words.

  Man climbed to the mountain wilds to wrest a secret from the gods. He clung to the last slope of Parnassus—invisible from here—which was so savage that to this day Dionysus wanders about there, unafraid. The rocks called the Phaedriades fall almost perpendicularly from a height of 300 meters. From a narrow crevice the Castalian Spring bursts forth. A path has been trodden right over the gorgelike ravine of Pleistos, leading westward into the mountains, and southward in the direction of the Bay of Itea. Far away, very far down, you can see the sea, shining like a snakeskin.

  It is difficult to trace the origins of the fame and significance of Delphi, the spiritual capital of Greece. Some scholars hold that the institution of tyranny played a part in it. At moments of crisis, the oracle’s authority buttressed a tottering throne. It is characteristic that these were not only Hellenic rulers but also barbarian kings from Phrygia and Anatolia—Gyges, Croesus, Midas. The latter endowed Delphi with a golden throne around the year 740. Was this a sign of piety? Maria Delcourt rightly notes that an Asian prince treated a god as a mighty ruler, whom he had to bribe.

  By the age of Homer, Delphi was famous and wealthy. A myth teaches us that originally the place was called Pytho and was governed by Gaia, the goddess of the earth. Apollo then felt a desire to have a temple here. Before that could happen he had to kill the female dragon of Pytho—the embodiment of chthonic powers. A Homeric hymn from the end of the seventh century B.C. describes the wrestling-match of these two elemental powers of Greek religion.

  Not far from the beautifully coursing spring, the god, son of Zeus, killed the dragon with his mighty bow and arrow—a huge beast, which had inflicted many injuries on people and their thin-legged sheep. Whoever met it was lost, up to the day that Apollo—the Archer God—shot it with his mighty arrow. Racked by terrible pain the beas
t uncoiled on the earth, emitting a great groan…and gave up the ghost, exhaling its last breath from a bloody throat. Then Phoebus Apollo spake proudly: “Now you will decay11 in the earth, which nurtures humankind.”

  The Homeric hymn goes on to say that the victor set out to find priests to be guardians of his new temple and new religion. He swam to Crete in the shape of a dolphin. Since then the place has been called Delphi.

  The second part of the myth is unclear and some read it as proof of a Minoan influence on the site of this new cult. Nowadays it is thought that the Apollonian religious revolution took place in the eighth century B.C. or just before that, in a time when Crete had been a part of the Greeks’ domain for several centuries. In close proximity to Apollo’s sanctuary in a place called Marmaria, the earth divinities retained their sovereignty; this is shown by sphinxes and other symbols alien to Phoebus. Most probably Pytho was the site of an oracle before Apollo arrived.

  Although so many books have been written on the Delphic oracle and all the scholars emphasize its great importance, both its functioning and its political role still remain in the realm of guesses and hypotheses. Emil Bourguet writes: “Regardless whether it was the last pagans12 or the first Christians who for very different reasons wanted all traces to disappear of what might be called the mechanism and the material aspect of the oracle—the result is the same: the last Pythia took its secrets with her to her grave.”

  As the bride of a god, the Pythia initially had to be a virgin. Later she was chosen from among married women who had lived a blameless life. The oracle was consulted once a year, then once every three months, but in the period of Delphi’s greatest authority, extraordinary consultations were also known to take place. The number of prophetesses also grew, but never exceeded three.

  The usual representation of a priestess of Apollo: a woman with her hair loose and lips open sits on a tripod seat, intoxicated by fumes emanating from the earth. This hysterical vision has little in common with reality. No cleft in the rock has been found at Delphi from which those overpowering vapors were supposed to have risen. The whole legend can be ascribed to later Christian interpreters, Origen and John Chrysostom, who wished to give an enemy institution the diabolical smell of sulphur.

  The consultation of the oracle took place in the part of the temple called adyton (inaccessible place). The persons who were there to consult, cleansed themselves in the Castalian spring, made the requisite payment and stood by while a sacrifice was made. If the sacrifice turned out to be propitious, they went into the adyton. The Pythia, unseen behind a curtain, gave answers to the questions put to her.

  The proverbial opacity of the prophecies demanded the aid of exegetes. Thus the sybyl’s responses were always interpreted. Delphi was a complicated institution, whose honorary president—if one can call it that—was Apollo, but alongside the Pythia’s helpers, called holy priests, ambassadors of particular states were also active, mediating between the gods’ seat and their native town.

  Unfortunately, we know neither the functions, nor the hierarchy of particular dignitaries, nor even the names of these intermediaries. Inquisitive researchers have wrested from this immemorial conspiracy the name of an Athenian seer and exegete from the fifth century B.C. His name was Lampon and he held office in Delphi, but we don’t know if he was accredited or acted on his own authority. However, we know of him that he played an important role in declaring himself on the side of Pericles against Thucydides. A ram with one horn appeared in the vicinity of Delphi. Lampon declared—and gave suitable publicity to his declaration—that soon the Athenian state would cease oscillating between two political systems and that Thucydides, head of the aristocratic party, would have to cede to Pericles.

  No general conclusion can be drawn from this single fact, even that Delphi always supported democratic forces. Aristotle says that the ambassadors of Greek states in Delphi were the mainstays of tyranny. As a result of the fragmentary sources and to the despair of lovers of certain knowledge (even in the sphere of godly affairs) we are condemned to hypotheses and every thesis can be countered with powerful arguments.

  The weight of the questions examined by the oracle varied: they ranged from personal matters to questions of war and peace. Pindar cites the following story, which may be just a joke. One Battos, a citizen of the island Thera13, suffering from a speech defect (stuttering) consulted the divinity as to what to do to rid himself of this troublesome ailment. The Pythia answered that he was to emigrate to Africa and found a colony there. The obedient Battos set off for Africa, met a lion in the desert and sudden terror made him speak fluently. Whether or not this story is true, it is certain that Delphi supported the expansion of Greek colonization and did not hesitate even to use stutterers to that end.

  The most famous case—thanks to Herodotus—was that of the oracle in the dramatic days preceding the second Persian war. Panic seized all Greek cities. The Pythia’s answer to the Athenians’ question as to what to do did not lend them courage in the least.

  “Unfortunates, why do you not act?14 Leave your households and the high hills of your circular city. Not a head nor a body will survive; everything will be reduced to a pitiful state, consumed by fire and the violence of Ares on the Syrian chariot. He will destroy many other castles, not only yours; he will leave many gods’ temples to the fury of the fire, the sight will send down fear and trembling, for black blood will flow from their roofs as the promise of inevitable ruin. But come out of the holy sites and answer misfortune with courage.”

  Apart from the last sentence, in which there sounds a note of pagan tragedy (as we would call it now), the vision of total annihilation would terrify even the bravest. On the advice of Themistocles the oracle was consulted for a second prophecy, which was enigmatic: a wooden rampart would save Athens. A fleet was built and its victory at Salamis indeed saved Greece.

  Various interests and political forces rubbed up against each other in Delphi, but the claim would appear exaggerated that the spiritual capital of Hellas was traditionally conformist and in times of crisis would speak Persian, Spartan, or finally Macedonian, allying itself always with those who were or seemed the strongest. No doubt the oracle was abused, but it is now difficult to determine what was fact and what was the fantasy of interpreters, or of people who tried to justify themselves by invoking the god’s voice. For example, Argos and the Cretan towns that gave up on participating in the defense of Greece covered themselves with the prophecy advising against a war with the Persians, but plain knowledge of human nature leads one to assume that the decisive motive to give up was common fear rather than the blind faith of simpletons.

  The religious and moral role of the spiritual center of Hellas causes interpreters a great many problems. In general it can be said that the capital of Greek religion showed great common sense, supporting foreign cults among other things, and applying the rational principle of tolerance. But exceptions to this principle also occurred. After Troy had been won, Ajax of Locri dishonored the priestess of Athena, Cassandra, and this act was to be expiated by sending the Trojans two Locrian maidens annually for a thousand years; the girls were surrounded with universal hatred and led miserable lives, locked in Athena’s temple, not leaving the place and not speaking to anyone to the end of their days. In the fourth century B.C. the Locrians decided to stop this barbarian custom. But Delphi ordered the continuation of the sacrifice, which was a kind of collective punishment, extended for generations.

  It is more than probable that the humanization of Greek religion was brought about more by tragic poetry than by the priests. It was Aeschylus and Sophocles who fought with power, dignity, and courage against the custom of blood revenge, which weighed so heavily on Greek life. Their feel for the essence of religion—dispenser of forgiveness—was far greater than that of the official representatives of the cult.

  Delphi is like a great stone staircase hewn out of a cliff. The sacred road winds with sharp bends around an extraordinary crowding of votive chap
els, porticoes, treasure houses, and temples. The Doric temple of Apollo holds sway over this piling up of buildings. Higher up, on the highest elevation—the stadium and theater.

  Like the Gothic cathedrals, Delphi was a collective labor. When in the sixth century B.C. the temple of Apollo was wasted by fire, an international subscription was organized. The Delphic priests wandered from city to city, collecting donations. They did not leave out Egypt. The Pharaoh Amasis gave a thousand talents toward the cause. And when in turn that temple was destroyed by an earthquake, offerings toward a new construction began to flow in from all parts of Greece, the poorest of the poor also contributing their proverbial obol.

  Because of the temple’s remoteness and its precarious placement, the costs of building, and especially of transportation, were unusually high, and only attachment to a holy site can explain the fact that the Greeks did not seek out a more convenient location. The price of a block of stone in a mine came to 60 drachmas, but on the building site it was eight times more. At that time an architect earned two drachmas a day.

  Under the temple of Apollo there are ex vota and treasure houses—small sacred buildings also serving as storehouses for the most valuable sacrifices of the faithful, which it was safer not to leave in the open air—just in case. Here one can trace—on a miniature scale—the development of Greek architecture from the most ancient (probably the end of the seventh century B.C.) Corinthian treasure house—a simple extended chamber without divisions or architectural ornamentation—right up to the treasury of Cyrene, which is a stone lecture on the chief mathematical problems of the fourth century B.C. Hellenic geometry pays tribute to the god of measure and harmony.

  The ex vota on the other hand are testimony to the bloody rivalry between Greek cities. They were built not so much to honor the gods but to commemorate a city’s own military glory and remind its enemies of their defeat. The inhabitants of Argos dedicate their ex vota to the celebration of their victory over Sparta at Oinoe. When the Spartans defeated the Athenians at Aigospotamoi, ex vota were built and filled with statues of Spartan generals and admirals, and this right next to the ex vota of Athens. If we add that the material used to build these little temples of pride was derived from loot taken from conquered cities, we have the full measure of the humiliation of the conquered.