The antagonisms and eloquent examples of quarrels between cities should not obscure the fact that in spite of everything, and chiefly thanks to Delphi, Greece constituted a spiritual unity. They came from the farthest colonies to the sacred hillsides to gain the grace of atonement under the radiant power of the one who, as Pindar says, gave us the lute and inspiration15, he who floods our hearts with the love of peace and hatred of civil strife.
The cliffs surrounding Delphi are covered with scant greenery, they are blood red and dark blue, constantly threatening to break off. Against this dramatic background you may see in the evening the slow gliding shadow of an eagle.
Delphi—the stone crown of the Greek landscape.
VI
SPARTA OFFERS ALMOST NO aesthetic impression (really none at all). The town, once the seat of Greek power, is small, provincial, and badly built. The living wall of Spartan chests, much boasted of, has long gone under the earth. The remains of pitiful ruins, which date from later times anyway, are without a trace of grandeur or beauty. The museum is poor—just one sculpture worth notice, a Leonidas torso, looming from rough stone like an unfinished work by Michelangelo. Thucydides’s prediction has come true: nothing remained of proud Sparta.
It offers no impression but it prompts reflection. They did not manage to hold back time, although the whole construction of the Spartan state and its customs constituted an attempt to hold it back. Until the very end (that is, until the defeat inflicted on Sparta by Thebes in 371 B.C.) a social abyss separated Spartiates from helots, who were excluded from the law. The helots were victims of atrocious massacres perpetrated by Spartan youth not out of hatred, but—what is worse—as a form of training, a military exercise. In that most oligarchical of Greek states, power remained in the hands of a small group of citizens. Economic activity was forbidden to the free citizens. Waging war was the only enterprise worthy of the Spartiates. The arts were under the patronage of Tyrtheus—the author of hymns and odes, the two literary genres recognized by Saint-Just many centuries later.
However, Sparta had its admirers. They were intellectuals, of course—Plato, Xenophon—who, like the Spartans, prefer a state governed by an idea to one governed by the unreliable and suspect laws of life.
VII
OLYMPIA DID NOT MAKE a great impression on me at first. The terrain is flat and heavily wooded, as it so rarely is in Greece. The famous stadium is really just a sizeable meadow. The only elevation in the vicinity is the hill of Kronos, symmetrical as a cupola and covered with a beautiful bristle of trees. The light here is soft, green, filtered by leaves and reflected from grass. The complete antithesis of the Delphic landscape.
Olympia has been the object of archaeological probing from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Germans undertook systematic excavations. The work continues to this day. Perhaps it is the chilly scientific systemization that makes an aesthetic contemplation of Olympia difficult. Only in the museum do you feel what it really was, looking at the loveliest collection of Greek metopes and the two magnificent pediments from the temple of Zeus.
Archaeologists through the ages have been vexed by the problem that the principles of conservation and the principles of reconstruction cannot always be reconciled. In addition, for commercial reasons they have tried to open excavations to the public as early on as possible, which often hampers research. But it is surely not superstitious preciosity to say that ruins should have power to evoke. Of course I’m not talking about adding missing columns, sticking on metopes, or rebuilding vaults. The remains of Poseidon’s temple on the promontory of Sounion (thanks to the excellent location—like a lighthouse—on a line of cliffs descending down to the sea) have the ideal features of an unfinished reconstruction that spurs the imagination. One visits Olympia with a guidebook in hand, as if completing a piece of homework: the Heraion was here, the altar of Zeus here, his temple (mighty drums of columns, lying like tree trunks), and over there is Phidias’s workshop. The true grace of beauty does not descend until one is in the museum.
The Games—considered the oldest in Greece—took place every four years from the beginning of July or September, and were the basis for Greek chronology from the sixth century B.C. They lasted five days, and their organization and program have been quite well known for a long time. Today’s researchers try to discover the origin and decipher the secret meaning of these festivities.
The Olympic Games are certainly an echo of the pitiless struggle for power between father and son (Kronos and Zeus, Zeus and Heracles—the patrons of the games) or father-in-law and son-in-law (Oinomaos and Pelops)—the ancient theme of innumerable fables throughout the world. A candidate for kingship had to show his superiority and physical prowess—and the best, most final way to do this was to kill the opponent. At the source of disinterested athletic contests lay murder and seizure of the throne.
After the death of Patrocles, Achilles—the Iliad tells us—had games held. This was not merely a way of honoring a fallen hero. The festivity had a magical significance. It was about an injection of vital energy that the competitors transferred to the dead man.
The only material reward for the victor was a wreath of olive leaves—not from any old wayside olive tree, but from the kallistefanos16 tree that Heracles brought from the land of the Hyperboreans. This indicates a link between the games and a cult of vegetation. Running in particular, bare feet rhythmically pounding the earth, was said to awaken the earth’s slumbering powers of generation. In origin this was a ceremony in honor of Heracles—not the Dorian Heracles, the one known from legend, but his much older embodiment, the chthonic Heracles, daimon of nature.
The primordial origin of the games lay in a battle for life and death. But one should not imagine that in the Classical era, the element of risk disappeared entirely. Competition was not just a display of strength and beauty but also a game for the highest stakes. The four-horse chariot races were especially dangerous; at the time of the Pythian Games in 462 B.C. only one made it to the finishing line in one piece. The blinding sun, the sharp turns, and the length of the course were the cause of many fatal accidents, which—as in the corrida—were a part of the spectacle.
Along with Delphi, Olympia was a symbol of the fraternity of all Hellenes. For the duration of the competition, ambassadors called theoroi18 declared peace, and quarreling cities with differing political systems, dialects, and customs breathed deeply of the air of a fatherland recovered and held in common.
The Games were an agon, that is to say a contest or rather a battle, which was one of the essential elements of Greek civilization. A battle was said to produce not just a good or a brave man, but the best man—the hero. Olympia was, then, a school of energy and a display of personal models.
It was also a school for sculptors. The contestants lent their bodies to gods and demigods. The finest Greek artists: Phidias, Myron, Polycletes (creator of a new canon) worked for Olympia.
The Greeks had no team sports. Victory was individual, the preservation of the names of winners of the Games testify to this. In the beginning, in the eighth century B.C., they were without exception Peloponnesians, later the names of contestants from Athens, Smyrna, Thebes, Krotona, Syracuse, and Samos appear. The winner of a laurel wreath stood a good chance after his death to become a dweller on the Isles of the Blessed, cooled by an ocean breeze, where, under enormous trees festooned with flower garlands, the chosen stroll under the gentle gaze of Radamanthus and his spouse Rhea17, reigning on the loftiest of thrones.
VIII
FOR A COMPLETE PICTURE of Greece you need an image of the islands. On the plane flying from Heraklion to Athens you see them rising from the sea. They have ragged coasts and a tawny color, like a lion skin flung on the waves. Seen from the deck of a ship they have a human face: whitewashed houses, with flat roofs, crooked little streets, smoke, a bustle of black figures around a fishing net only just retrieved from the sea.
I chose Delos. The ship sails twelve hours from Piraeus to the
island of Mykonos. It casts anchor in the open sea. A motorboat brings passengers into the small fishing port. Although I traveled at night the houses, stuck to together like a honeycomb, were emitting white steam.
Mykonos is fashionable, but due to the difficulties of communication it has fortunately not attained the status of Capri. In the morning it’s best to go to the port and let your gaze wander from house to house, inwardly composing a Baroque sonnet made up of comparisons to chalk, foam, marble, Alpine snow. A true orgy of white—if the word “orgy” can be applied to that most hushed of colors.
For centuries Mykonos lived off the bounty of the sea. This is the kind of sentence found in tourist pamphlets, from which one can glean veritable pearls of applied poetry. More precisely, the inhabitants were fishermen and pirates. The town is famous for the fact that for every two houses there is a votive chapel, founded by representatives of both professions, which tells us that here the sea can indeed be perilous, and coveting one’s neighbor’s goods—an irrepressible urge.
From the port you go to Delos on a rickety motorboat. I have felt the wrath of Poseidon; to tell the truth, it wasn’t full-blown wrath but simply griping and a bad mood. It was enough, however, to persuade me the Aegean is not a puddle.
The owners of the motorboat gave tourists a fair warning by hanging near the rubbish bin an ancient sign covered with illegible writing, from which a philologist, someone accustomed to reading hermetic texts, might conclude that this time the journey is made at the traveler’s own risk.
The travelers—a group of British students—maintained a fine indifference before the adversities of fate. They unfolded the great sheets of newspapers, which in this case were not for reading but imitated the toga Stoics used to cover their faces to hide their suffering; the Germans made eager noises in the beginning, but soon fell into a heavy melancholy; the blond, black-clad Swedish girl kept her eyes closed throughout and big, beautiful tears rolled down her face. The only crew member beside the steersman, a sailor—if the word can refer to an elderly fellow—tried to scoop out the water carried by the crashing waves with a little ladle. The experience of this difficult journey seemed to me essential for the understanding of certain episodes in the Odyssey.
Finally, Delos. A wasteland without cultivated fields, a rock raised up by the waves more for gulls than for people, exposed to every wind, suffused with the rhythm of the sea. It is barely 16 square kilometers. From the highest peak of Mount Kynthos, you can see the wreath of the Cyclades: Tinos, Andros, Syros, Kythnos, Serifos, Antiparos, Paros, Ios, Naxos, Amorgos, Mykonos, Ikaros. I exaggerate slightly: you don’t see all these islands, but the names are so lovely that it is hard to resist naming them all. Delos lies in the middle of the Cyclades and that explains the exceptional significance of this island sanctuary, which already in the Mycenean age was a famous seat of the gods of earth, protectors of fertility and midwives. Herodotus tells of pilgrimages made here from remote Scythia.
Delos entered Greek mythology as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. In the beautiful Homeric Hymn, their mother Latona does not address Poseidon, who gave this stony shelter to fury-driven Hera, but the island itself. She speaks like an exiled princess to an impoverished village woman, promising her a future reward—hecatombs on the altar, wagonloads of fat meat. “Delos, if you will19 be the seat of my son Apollo…the hands of others will nourish you.”
For nine days and nine nights Latona knelt, clinging to the trunk of a sacred palm tree (a primitive birthing method) before she brought Artemis and Apollo into the world. Then the island was turned from common Ortygia (the island of pebbles) into radiant Delos. As in the case of Delphi, the change of name marked the appearance of a new cult. Although in the course of centuries more and more new and different gods were introduced here, it was not at the expense of their predecessors, for the beautiful principle held that you should not kick your old parents out of their homes. This was without a doubt to the credit of the Ionians who, without losing any of their individuality, managed to assimilate foreign elements for their own uses. And one must not forget that the whole Apollonian triad—Latona, Artemis, and Apollo (appearing at Troy with his Asiatic bow to oppose the Greeks)—came from the East.
Many mementos survive of the epoch of archaic excellence (Delos, along with Olympia and Delphi, was among the most famed of Greek sanctuaries). A vast torso of Apollo, a group of lovely korai and last but not least, the renowned Terrace of Lions. Resting on their hind legs, the beasts growl at the north. They have the elongated bodies of dogs. The artists from Naxos who made the sculptures around 600 B.C. must have known lions only from hearsay.
In the sixth century B.C. Athens became one of Greece’s greatest powers. It envied Delos its political and moral importance. Old myths were mobilized to prove immemorial Attic-Delian affiliations. The Athenian tyrant Pisistratus carried out a cleansing of the island, removing from it all tombs. From that time on it was not permitted either to give birth or to die on Delos. Mothers giving birth and people on their deathbeds were transported to the near island Rhenea. In the fifth century B.C. Delos and Athens were the capitals of an anti-Persian league, but the transferral of the Delian treasury to Athens marked the inevitable demise of Apollo’s cradle.
The island’s later Renaissance came in the Hellenistic and the Roman ages. Not losing the character of a sanctuary, Delos also became the commercial metropolis of the Aegean. After the destruction of Corinth and Carthage by the Romans in 146 B.C., the island, centrally located between Asia, Europe, and Africa, underwent a period of prosperity.
New people—new gods. Delos was always like a hospitable inn. On the gently rising slopes of the Kynthos there is a terrace of foreign deities. Three temples of Serpis, a temple of Isis, alongside the ancient gods of the Apollonian triad and Zeus and Hera. And the new legend that Callimachus elaborates: the little Delian stream of Inopos was said to be filled with the waters of the Nile. The waters of the sacred Egyptian river on a pilgrimage to Apollo—an eloquent example of the fraternizing of religions in the declining years of the ancient world.
Delos is often compared to Pompeii. The similarity is more one of atmosphere than of appearance and details. A visit to Delos’s theater district is not in the least a stroll through a cemetery. The stone-paved streets have retained the traces of carts and footsteps. On the floor of the house of Cleopatra, Dionysus or “The Dolphin,” mosaics suddenly shine out. This dead city is alive. You can recognize traces of the quotidian, such as the imprint of hands on the walls of the temple and storage houses, palaces, and lupanaries.
I am aware that what I have written does not correspond to its title. Too often I have slid from the theme of landscape into the sphere of legend and history. I can’t even explain to myself the connection that exists between the Greek landscape and its art and beliefs. But a powerful intuition tells me that the temples, sculpture, and myths of Greece grow organically from the earth, sea, and mountains.
The lure of description and the failures of mere descriptiveness. I haven’t even managed to articulate the shape and color of an olive tree. Isn’t there at least one I know in precise detail, right by the wall enclosing the palace of Minos in Knossos? I have counted each of its leaves with my eyes and I carry its exact contour within me. But you would have to be Dürer to make an object from this experience.
Describe one hillside: at the foot of the hill, the silvery ragged green of bushes. Three white houses. A vineyard reminiscent of a low elongated arbor. From the top, the blue sky dapples the greenery, but between the rows of grapevines there is a cold sapphire chill. A small square of the very vivid bronze the hornbeam’s leaves turn in autumn. And finally, further up, flaking rock and scanty grass.
I wanted to describe it.
ANIMULA
To Zdzisław Najder
I do not see Freud anywhere rising above his own psychology, and I do not know in what way he intends to liberate the sick from the suffering which plagues him as a doctor.
CARL GUSTAV JUNG
I CANNOT REMEMBER EXACTLY by what accident I stumbled upon the text. In all likelihood it was at the time when I was writing an essay on the Acropolis and, as work was not going smoothly, I had sought refuge in reading, as I usually do in such circumstances. I was reading little scraps here and there, bits of commentary, articles scattered in scholarly archaeological journals, and making notes, doubting all the while that they would ever be of any use whatsoever. It was quite obvious I was deluding myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t being idle, that I wasn’t falling into spiritual prostration, so I busied myself with barren, tedious make-work in the hope that from that barrenness and tedium a pure ray of inspiration would suddenly burst. Meanwhile, the drawers of every subject catalogue in every library I visited yawned with a hundred titles in various languages seeming to say: “Why do you toil? Everything has already been written, there’s nothing left to contribute in this field. The only role that may fall to you is the role of a compiler.”
And it was at that time of restlessness and distraction that a letter by Sigmund Freud to Romain Rolland1 fell into my hands, a letter written on the occasion of Rolland’s 70th birthday and, as is clear from its character, intended for a commemorative album being published by friends in honor of the great writer.
If one leaves aside the epistolary conventions of the opening and ending, one can treat this fragment of Freud’s as an essay, the more interesting in that it shows the creator of psychoanalysis applying the method to himself, or more precisely, to a certain episode in his own life. The episode is removed from the writer by a period of thirty-odd years, and seems of the most banal kind; yet it appears in his field of consciousness—as he confesses—persistently and without any obvious reason or cause.
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