Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  We think of Greeks as having olive complexions and dark eyes, like Latinos, but some of the ancestors of the ancient Hellenes originally came from the north, and even today you often meet Greeks who have startling pale-blue eyes, as if lit from within by the Mediterranean. There are surely as many shades of blue as there are of gray/grey: cornflower, sapphire, royal, navy, aquamarine, cobalt, cerulean, indigo, Wedgwood, powder, metallic, cendre. There is Delft blue, the blue of chicory blooming wild along the interstate, the heavenly blue of the morning glory, hyacinth and hydrangea blue, robin’s-egg blue, the ravishing blue of the Tasmanian superb fairy wren. There is Alice blue, swimming-pool blue, and gas-jet blue, and the dusty blue of blueberries. And don’t forget forget-me-not blue. The blue of Windex, the primary blue of Marge Simpson’s hair. There is the memorable blue of my father’s eyes, the true blue of my younger brother’s eyes tearing up on a morning of acqua alta in Venice. My older brother has clear blue eyes with more gray in them. People sometimes insist that I have blue eyes, but it isn’t so. My eyes, like my mother’s, are gray with a yellow ring around the pupil that shades into green, depending on the light. When I’m angry or when I’ve been crying and my eyes are red-rimmed, they are indisputably green. I would gladly step up to the epithet of Athena, but the form for a driver’s license does not have a box to check for the eye color “glaucous.”

  Translators have tried all kinds of variants to give Athena’s eyes something that gets at her character. Caroline Alexander, the first woman to translate the entire Iliad into English, initially used “gray-eyed” as the epithet for Athena, following Lattimore, but, on looking further into it, she changed her translation to “gleaming-eyed.” Searching Liddell and Scott, Alexander told me, she found an instance in which glaukópis was used, by Homer, as a verb instead of an adjective to describe a lion’s eyes; eyes can shine, but they cannot gray (only hair does that). Besides, the big cats have green or amber eyes. Alexander thinks of Athena’s eyes, evocatively, as “the color of wet stones.”

  For an entry in The Homer Encyclopedia, the classical scholar Laura Slatkin suggests “silvery-eyed.” Robert Fagles goes with “bright-eyed goddess,” which suggests enthusiasm. Christopher Logue, the master of anachronisms, experiments with “the prussic glare,” which sounds alchemical, and “ash-eyed,” which has a matte quality, as well as “Ringsight-eyed,” which might refer to the eyes of the owl. Pausanias, a Greek who documented his extensive travels during the early Roman era (mid-second century AD; he is often called the Baedeker of ancient Greece), describes an image of Athena near the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens as having gray-green eyes, in the translation of Peter Levi; in one version of the myth, she is the daughter of Poseidon and therefore has eyes the color of the sea. Levi notes the connection to “owl-eyed”—the word glaukós is similar to glaux, the ancient Greek for “owl”—suggesting that Athena sees in the dark. Watchful Athena.

  The various editions of Liddell and Scott provide several definitions for γλαυκός, some of them to do with quality and others with color. In the Little Liddell, as the abridged version is called, the definitions begin with “gleaming, glancing, bright-gleaming” and go on to “pale green, bluish green, gray.” Liddell and Scott specifies that when eye color is meant the word means “light blue or gray,” adding that in Latin glaucus means “of the olive, of the willow, and also of the vine” (perhaps olive green is the color of the silvery leaves, not the appetizers stuffed with red pimientos). The epithet of Minerva, Athena’s Roman counterpart, is translated “with gleaming eyes.” But Lewis and Short, the Latin equivalent of Liddell and Scott, defines glaucus as “bright, sparkling, gleaming, grayish.” So gray-eyed Athena dates from the days when Greek was filtered through Latin.

  I asked my Greek teacher, Chrysanthe, what γλαυκός means in modern Greek. She did not hesitate for long before replying, “Pale blue.” If you pursue blue (galázios) in a modern Greek dictionary, it expands into sea green and azure, the particular blue of the sky. Webster’s defines azure as the “blue color of the clear sky.” It’s hard to get away from the sky when you are talking about blue. The Greek galaxías (galaxy) means the Milky Way, a reference as much to the tinge of blue in milk as to the swath of white in the midnight sky.

  Turning to the big American dictionary, Webster’s Second Unabridged, I found glauco- as a combining form meaning silvery, gray (like the leaves of the olive tree?). Glaucoma is traced to the Greek for light gray, blue gray (like cloudy eyes?). For the mineral glauconite, the Greek root is defined as bluish-green or gray; glaucous is “of green-blue hue” and “yellowish green.” Merriam-Webster’s unabridged online dictionary really has room to spread out. For color, under glaucous, it offers pale yellow, green, and light bluish gray or bluish white. Latin glaucus and Greek glaukós may be related to an Old English word meaning pure, clear. So the color associated with glaukópis has evolved, changing with the circumstances, the way eyes change color depending on what a person is wearing or her mood. Webster’s Unabridged Online goes on to offer separate, detailed definitions for shades of glaucous blue, glaucous gray, and glaucous green.

  Surely Homer meant for Athena’s eyes to be beautiful—a poet would not dwell on the description of a goddess’s eyes to say they were as two thumbholes poked in a blackberry pie. These eyes are intelligent. They show purpose, they are expressive, they are sometimes complicit, conspiratorial. Emily Wilson, in her translation of the Odyssey, ransacked the thesaurus for Athena: she gives her “twinkling eyes,” “glowing eyes,” “shining eyes,” “glinting eyes,” “sparkling eyes.” The goddess is “clear-eyed,” “owl-eyed,” “bright-eyed,” “sharp-sighted.” Her eyes are “aglow,” “steely.” At one point, Wilson even has her wink. Athena looks mortals in the eye. She levels with them through her gaze. Maybe, like the rosy fingers of dawn and the wine-dark sea, the gray-eyed goddess is so called not because of what her eyes look like but because of their effect on whomever she is looking at. Whatever color these eyes are—I would go with pale-green bluish-green gray—they are engaging.

  That all this speculation on shades of gray and blue and green and yellow and silver, with qualities as various as the moods of the sky and the sea, springs from a single ancient compound adjective, γλαυκώπις, describing a goddess who has our welfare at heart, seems to me proof of the vitality of words, their adaptability and strength and resilience. Good words never die. They keep on growing.

  CHAPTER 4

  DEMETER DEAREST

  WHEN I LEFT CLEVELAND for college in 1970, I was as a sealed bottle of milk: wholesome and protected from experience. When anyone asked where I was from, I’d say the Midwest. If they inquired further, I’d say Ohio. And if they still weren’t satisfied I’d admit I was from Cleveland. The West Side. Near the zoo. Cleveland was a joke—it was the place where the river caught on fire. The DJs there called it “the best location in the nation.” We called it “the mistake on the lake.”

  I had gone to an all-girls Catholic high school. By the time I was eighteen, I had traveled as far west as Detroit, as far south as Columbus, and as far east as Niagara Falls. The lake—Lake Erie—was north. I dreamed of going to boarding school in Switzerland and learning to speak French, German, and Italian. Radcliffe, Smith, and Wellesley were the stuff of fantasy. My father could afford to send me to a state university in Ohio. And he wanted to keep me in Ohio. I was determined to get out.

  My senior year in high school, a friend who was researching colleges told me, “You should go to Rutgers—it has a renowned department of dairy science.” I had a thing about cows. Placid, motherly creatures, cows evoked for me the pastoral life, and my affection for them extended to all aspects of the dairy industry—barns, silos, milk, cheese, cow paintings. Eventually, I drove a milk truck in Cleveland—the best job I’ve ever had. (Packaging mozzarella at a cheese factory in Vermont was the worst job I ever had. Copy editing at The New Yorker was the longest job I ever had.) As a teenager, I dreamed of having three
cows and a bull on a dairy farm somewhere green and pristine, preferably Vermont, and initially I pursued that dream as far as the Garden State.

  Rutgers, for all its Ivy League–sounding name, is a state university—The State University of New Jersey—and the tuition was only $200 more a semester than the tuition at an Ohio state university, an amount that I could earn at my after-school job. (I was a price marker in the clothing department of a discount store called Uncle Bill’s.) So I applied to Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers University.

  My father relented, and in the fall of 1970 we headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We made it as far as Norristown and spent the night in King of Prussia—these names delighted me—and in the morning we headed up the New Jersey Turnpike to New Brunswick. After delivering me to the dorm, my father gripped me by the shoulders, gave me a quick kiss, and said, “I don’t like long goodbyes.” He kept his head tilted back to hold the tears in. I was sad, too, but this was a turning point: I’d made it happen and I had no regrets.

  On George Street was Dave’s Food Store—a straightforward-enough name for a grocery store—and a ramshackle house with something purple blooming on the porch. It was the color of lilacs, but lilacs bloom only in the spring. What an enchanted, alien place I had landed in! The purple flower turned out to be wisteria, which keeps on blooming if you prune it. I have since inhaled it on Capri and Corfu and eaten it on Martha’s Vineyard and planted a vine of my own in Rockaway, where it is eating my bungalow.

  But the punch line of my escape from Ohio is that many of the New Jersey natives at Douglass had friends who had gone in the opposite direction: “Ohio is full of good schools,” they said—Oberlin, Hiram, Case Western Reserve. “Why did you come here?”

  New Jersey had the ocean, for one thing. I had never seen the ocean. I didn’t know much else about the state—I thought its capital was Atlantic City. A new friend, appalled that I had never seen the ocean, borrowed a car and drove me to Asbury Park. I remember the thrill of being on the boardwalk and knowing instinctively that the ocean was to the east. In Cleveland, the water was always north. My orientation to the whole continent changed!

  My first English class at Douglass was Autobiography, and we started with Sylvia Plath: The Colossus and Ariel. Her suicide angered me. I felt that as a college freshman I was being introduced to something ugly, to despair. Here was a published poet, a woman who had gone to Smith and married a handsome British poet and had children—she had everything—who seemed never to have recovered from her father’s death, and somehow, reading her poetry, I felt as if I had to entertain her death wish. The other book that had a profound effect on me was Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. She wrote about her defiance, as a girl, toward the idea that there must be a God because someone—something—had to have existed in order to create the universe: wasn’t it just as easy to believe that the universe existed all along? (There is probably a name for this brand of heresy.) I was appalled at some of the things Mary McCarthy wrote. OK, so she didn’t believe in God—did she have to insult him? I would have hedged my bets. I expressed this in class, and when the professor said that he was an atheist himself I was horrified. I already liked this man, but I was Catholic—how could I like an atheist?

  On the way back to the dorm, I caught myself praying. It was a habit, a way of talking to myself without feeling insane. “God, please don’t make me stop believing in you.” Before the next class, I had a blinding insight. Infallibility, whereby the Pope cannot be wrong in matters of faith because he takes dictation directly from God: wasn’t that as absurd as the emperor of Japan saying he was descended from the sun? The whole edifice crumbled for me—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. (Was this what Dad was trying to prevent by keeping me in Ohio?) At any rate, I would discover that a person can describe herself as an atheist yet still maintain that, in the words of the Catechism, the Roman Catholic Church is the one true holy catholic and apostolic church.

  The seal was off the milk bottle.

  Soon I was registering for exotic-sounding courses like astronomy, existentialism, and mythology. I dropped astronomy (too much math) and was way over my head in existentialism, but mythology, Classics 355, was a revelation. It was a lecture class taught by Professor Froma Zeitlin, who assigned starry things like the Oresteia and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and readings in Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose anthropological approach to myth was the basis of structuralism, and Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion, and Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who had developed a theory of archetypes (I thought it was pronounced “Archie types”).

  Professor Zeitlin was just starting her academic career and she already had a following. She was an inspired lecturer, who made mythology electrifying. In 1976, she moved to Princeton, where she taught for decades, gaining fame for the approach to classics that I had lucked into in the spring of my sophomore year. (“You studied with Froma Zeitlin?” a classicist asked me years later, awed.) She was particularly eloquent on the “Great Round,” the cycle of life and the seasons, and Gaia, the Earth Mother, as she deconstructed the myth of Demeter and Persephone and elaborated on the cult associated with them, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  Initiates into the cult walked in procession from Athens to Eleusis on a road known as the Sacred Way, along which were many tombs. Nobody knows precisely what the Mysteries were, but they had something to do with death. Eleusis was a center of worship of Demeter (De-me-ter), the patron goddess of agriculture. She was the Mother Nature of the Greek gods. Her daughter, Persephone—often called Kore, which means simply “girl”—was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Kore was out picking flowers and was attracted to an especially beautiful narcissus when Hades erupted from the earth in his horse-drawn chariot and carried her off. She was raped and abducted, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Professor Zeitlin made it sound inevitable: “Virgins are always ripe for sacrifice.” I was a virgin, and, like many coeds, I was eager to lose my virginity, but I had never thought of it that way.

  The loss of her daughter was tragic for Demeter, who had no heart for making things grow anymore. No one could comfort her. She made the mortals suffer, too. If Mother Nature does not produce grain, if nothing germinates and nothing blooms, nobody eats. Demeter’s grief caused a famine. Zeus and the other gods realized that if mortals were to go extinct, there would be no one to worship them—the gods are selfish—so he agreed to let the reluctant bride go back to her mother. But there was a trick: before she left, Hades made her eat a few seeds of a pomegranate. I don’t think I knew what a pomegranate was before this, but it is a fruit of many seeds—it is a red globe crammed with red seeds, obscenely packed with seeds, a fruit that is nothing but seeds. Because she had eaten of the pomegranate—“she took his seed into her mouth”—Kore would have to return to the Underworld.

  This was presented as the background for the Eleusinian Mysteries. People traveled on foot from Athens to Eleusis, past gravestones, thinking of a mother and daughter, of the inevitability of death and the promise of rebirth. Maddeningly, they were sworn to secrecy, and nobody revealed the content of the Mysteries. What happened when they got to Eleusis? Did they listen to a lecture, see a performance, close their eyes and follow a guided meditation? What did they learn? I wanted to be an initiate!

  Professor Zeitlin was eloquent on the meaning of the myth as an explanation of the seasons: crops grow and are harvested and die back; trees lose their leaves and are bare all winter, but in the spring they send out sticky little leaves and revive our hopes. There was a time when people didn’t know, couldn’t trust, that spring would come. Frankly, every year, as winter lingers into April and May, I wonder if spring will come. So though it was a bleak scenario—rape, death, winter—it was a comfort to know there would be an end to suffering.

  Professor Zeitlin’s lecture culminated in the anthropological concept of the Great Round. The cycle of life begins with the earth and returns to the earth, the way the
seasons revolve from life to death and back to life again. It doesn’t mean that you don’t suffer during the death part, or even the marriage part, but it does mean that as life gives way to death, death gives way to life again.

  I went soaring out of Hickman Hall that spring day and ran down the lawn to catch the campus bus across town to Rutgers for Existentialism, slipped on the wet grass, flew up in the air, and landed on my ass in the mud. A woman who had been sitting at the top of the hill witnessed the scene and pointed at me, screaming with laughter. I cut Existentialism—probably missed Sartre’s Nausea—and tromped back to the dorm, soggy but ecstatic.

  I had spilled the milk. I was open to the Mysteries, excited about what came next, ready for a refill.

  PROFESSOR ZEITLIN’S APPROACH to mythology was different from anything I might have absorbed growing up. From Ulysses at the Lyceum in the 1950s to the blockbuster Wonder Woman, featuring an Amazon princess, in 2017, the appeal of mythology is timeless. The classic collections, if one may call them “classic” when they are directed at nonclassi cists, include Bulfinch’s Mythology and the encyclopedic two-volume Greek Myths compiled by Robert Graves, which offers so many variations on the exploits of gods and heroes that you may be tempted to make up your own. The latest addition is a collection called Mythos by the British author and actor Stephen Fry, who attributes his love of mythology to a book called Tales from Ancient Greece, which he picked up as a boy. In the popular Percy Jackson series by the American writer Rick Riordan, a twelve-year-old boy is immersed in fantasy adventures inspired by Greek mythology. Among all these approaches, the work that is perhaps the most accessible is that of Edith Hamilton, whose books The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and Mythology were extremely popular in mid-twentieth-century America and made her the interpreter of the Greeks for generations.