by Mary Norris
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 mainla
nd—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.
CHAPTER 3
DEAD OR ALIVE
ANYONE WHO DOUBTS the value of studying a dead language should tune in to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is broadcast live on ESPN, like an Olympic event, with color commentary by lexicographers and up-close-and-personal interviews with the contestants. I thought I knew some Greek, but these elite athletes of orthography routinely spell Greek-derived words that I didn’t even know existed, much less what they meant or how to spell them. The 2018 competition tapped a reservoir of Greek-derived words: ephyra, pareidolia, ooporphyrin, lochetic, ecchymosis, ochronosis, gnomonics (the art of making sundials), propylaeum (which means something like “foregate,” as in the ceremonial entrance to the Acropolis of Athens). Pareidolia turns out to mean the all-too-human tendency to discern an image in some unexpected place, as “the face of the Virgin Mary on a toasted cheese sandwich,” in the citation from Webster’s Unabridged. Ooporphyrin I figured had something to do with an egg (ω’όν in ancient Greek) and purple (porphyry, the deep-red stone): a reference to some fabulous creature that lays purple eggs? Close. It is the characteristic pigment of brown eggshells.
