Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes

by Lawrence Durrell

  Pliny’s account is the most circumstantial. Writing three hundred years after the earthquake which overthrew the statue, he was still in time to see the ruins as they lay upon the ground. For those who enjoy scholastic ambiguity and polemic however there is an inscription attributed to a certain Simonides which claims the work as executed by Laches of Lindos. The portly Sextus Empiricus has offered us an intellectual compromise on this burning question by producing a not unlikely story that Chares, the designer of the statue, having offered his estimates for the work, was told to double its size; this he did, but as he had already spent the money given him he took his own life, and left Laches to carry on the work. The statue, then, took twelve years to build, and enjoyed a life of fifty-six years before the earthquake of 227 overturned it.

  The site of the Colossus has never been determined with any accuracy, nor has the pose been described for us by reliable eyewitnesses. Argument over possible sites and poses is likely to go on until the next earthquake, in which presumably the whole island of Rhodes will sink into the sea and leave behind it legends as tenuous as those which make up the myth of Atlantis. At any rate the story that it stood straddling the harbor with its huge legs is a medieval confection. And here it must be confessed that the greater part of the Colossus’s fame dates from the Middle Ages. “In ancient times it attracted little notice; it did not rank among the masterpieces of Greek sculpture, and in size it was rivaled by earlier and surpassed by later statues.” It was, it is true, placed in the catalog of the Seven Wonders—and to this, no doubt, it owed its great celebrity during the Middle Ages.

  For fifty-six years the Colossus stood as a tribute to the magnitude of the siege, and then came one of those sudden earthquakes to which much of the Aegean area is still subject. The town was shaken to its foundations. The temples, the arches, the statues—in the space of a day they had been swallowed up. And in the forest of falling statuary the Colossus was only one of a number of casualties sustained on that memorable day in 227 BCE. An inscription recently unearthed by Sand positively forbids the Rhodians to add another statue to the temple of Aesculapius. The earthquake must have more than regulated such questions of votive overcrowding; the echo of tumbling statues and falling public buildings reached every corner of the civilized world. For nine centuries the figure of the Sun God was to lie prostrate in the town it had adorned. It was not until the seventh century that the shattered remains of the piece were knocked down to a Jew from Syria and transported in camel loads to the Middle East for boiling down. Presumably the statue was formed once more into the implements for a fresh war. This is the kind of inverted poetry by which we live. At any rate the amount of the successful bid has not been recorded; the Jew probably got it cheap; the story goes that it took him 900 camels to load and carry it off. “The twenty tons of metal,” says Torr coldly, “would not, however, load more than 90 camels.”

  It says something for the veneration and love with which Rhodes was regarded in the ancient world that though the city was razed to the ground the island’s allies at once began to send presents of money and food. Ptolemy, that perspicacious hunter of fine books, was deeply moved by the disaster, while the Kings of many other neighboring states bestirred themselves to help the Rhodians. Treasure flowed in—the greater part of which, no doubt, was intended to help with the restitution of the Sun God. The Rhodians themselves were anxious to set up the great statue once more, but a curious fact prevented them from doing so. The Oracle of Delphi pronounced against the idea. Worse evils might follow, it said, if the ds were to be set up again. The Rhodians, recalling that hubris always carries its ugly reward, desisted.

  A good deal of ink has been shed in an attempt to elucidate the problem. Why should the oracle of Delphi, the center of Apollo worship, transmit so unfavorable an omen to stricken Rhodes? Insinuating tongues have suggested that the Rhodians found better uses for the donations of neighboring states, and even that they came to some underground arrangement with the priests of the oracle in order to provoke such an announcement and be free from the irksome necessity of rebuilding the Colossus. It is also hinted… but here again the evidence becomes, in Torr’s phrase, “flimsy,” and in Gideon’s “rather thin on top.” I must leave the reader to worry his own way through the alleys and loopholes of the argument. As for ourselves, we have spent days arguing about it; afternoons diving in the harbor for fragments of it (in pursuit of some mad theory of Gideon’s that it was situated upon the easterly mole, and that some of its shattered fragments must surely have fallen into the water); and now the historical impact of its name is mixed with memories of this pure sunlight, these dancing summer days passed in idle friendship and humor by the maned Aegean. Who could ask for better?

  In the Garden of

  the Villa Cleobolus

  IT IS DIFFICULT to convey the extraordinary silence of this garden, for it is true that the main road runs along the length of it, and that the noises of motors can be heard; but so dense is the packing of oleanders and small pines and so heavy the shadow in which the house is set that sound itself becomes blurred and mingles with the hushing of the sea along the beaches to the eastward. Here in the evenings we gather for drinks and gossip, sitting in cane chairs around the little painted table, hearing through the dusk the shallow strains of some forgotten fugue wafted to us from the old horn gramophone which is the Mufti’s special pride. Here Gideon and Hoyle play out those interminable games of chess, which always end in a wrangle (and the discovery that Gideon has been cheating). Here, sitting on the ground, the grave, detached Huber is whittling at the hull of a ship or the bowl of a pipe.

  Presently the servant comes swaying down the dark path with a rosy branch of candles shielded in the coarse red coral of her hand, to sweep up the ashtray and discarded books and set our supper places. The little dog shakes itself, yawns and stands up to sniff the premonitory odors of the kitchen. And Mills, dripping wet from the sea, comes panting down the path to change for dinner—from a wet bathing costume into a dry one.

  Gideon has unearthed a peasant legend which purports to explain why the juice of the oleander is so bitter. The Virgin, says the tale, was walking towards Golgotha distracted by her grief when the hem of her dress was caught by an oleander; impatiently she cursed the tree saying: “May you harbor forever the bitterness I feel today.” Immediately the sap of the plant turned acid. Today the peasant uses it as a styptic for cuts—when he cannot find a cobweb.*

  Gideons preoccupation with his livestock is assuming the proportions of a mania. “Every time a cow coughs on the island,” says Mills bitterly, “I receive a signal from this bloody old agricultural fool and have to motor forty miles to see what has happened. It won’t do, Gideon. I shall complain to the Brigadier.”

  Gideon sighs and gazes round him for sympathy. “Unamiable fellow,” he says mildly. “I am being inspected next week by the GOC Cows. As it is, half my damned cattle can’t stand up. You don’t want me to lose my job, do you?”

  “Yes,” says Mills, “I do.”

  “Come,” says Gideon reproachfully. “Take the larger view, old boy. Don’t let your horizons be limited by a petty outlook. Expand. Be generous. Be large.…”

  “And as for that milk.…”

  “My dear fellow, an administrative oversight.…”

  “Wasted in pig swill.”

  “Be just.”

  A large consignment of powdered milk, long and anxiously awaited by the maternity hospital which Mills runs, disappeared last week from the quay. An officer, whose signature on the bill of lading was quite undecipherable, had carried off the consignment in a truck. Careful enquiry proved it to have been Gideon; but by the time Mills caught up with him he was forty miles to the south of Rhodes, where the precious consignment had been mixed into the swill of a dozen “host pigs” imported from Cyprus.

  “Like Cellini,” Gideon explains, “I threw everything into the furnace. The battle against undernourishment must go on. My job must be kept at all co
sts.”

  The forthcoming inspection of his department has certainly been preying on his mind. His cherished “host pigs” were suffering from seasickness. What was one to do?

  “I should pour your whisky ration into them,” says Mills bitterly, hovering between genuine fury and laughter.

  Gideon adjusts his monocle with an air and says:

  “What an uncommonly good idea. I never thought of that. I shall do it.”*

  Three afternoons a week we invite the monk Demetrius to teach us modern Greek. He is a delightful character with an immense beard and a beguiling repertoire of stories—not all of them in the best taste. After a few desultory attempts to find a set book on which to work Gideon has selected Pope Joan,** that delightful albeit rather salacious novel which we translate together, amid shrieks of laughter from Demetrius. Hoyle, whose Greek is too perfect to need the same attention as ours, enjoys taking part in the conclave, but is occupied on a translation of Daphnis and Chloe with which I help him, in a vain attempt to learn some earlier Greek than demotic. These books at least canalize our enthusiasm which has been, up to now, dispersed over a wide area. Among sporadic translations Gideon has given me his rendering of the one poem attributed to Cleobolus of Lindos, an epitaph on Gordius, King of Phrygia. It is not bad:

  I am a bronze girl sculptured

  And set up here on Midas’s* monument.

  Believe me, so ever long as water

  Flows in the plains and the sunrise

  Delights men as the brilliant moonlight does:

  So ever long as rivers rush

  Between steep flanks, so ever long

  As oceans surge on beaches I

  Shall be seen reclining on this

  Old unhappy tomb to tell the passerby

  “Midas lies here interred.”

  Huber places the ancient school of the orators on the little plateau near Rodini. It has the precarious look of having been created in something which any puff of smoke might dissolve. A landscape as perishable as a smoke ring. Here, then, came Cicero to study peroration, adjuration and bombination. Apollonios Molon’s rhetoric had seduced him when the great orator had been representing Rhodes in Rome as Envoy. After Cicero came Caesar. Sand has unearthed some notes on Rhodian oratory from the Museum. I am indebted to him for these scraps of history which make our walks more pleasurable and our arguments, if anything, less pointless.

  Legend states that when Pompey visited the island he patiently heard all the resident sophists and presented each with a talent as a mark of his esteem. (Torr declares the talent to be worth £240.) Brutus and Cassius both studied rhetoric in Rhodes. Indeed the mark made by the Rhodian orators appears in every way to justify the praise of them by Tacitus. They are still, of course, great orators. Only last Sunday, at the unveiling of a plaque to commemorate some notable feat of allied arms, a certain Mr. Gongorides, clad in morning coat and sponge-bag trousers, in pince-nez and a cravat, held the floor for something under three hours, until two boy scouts fainted from the heat and the Greek garrison colonel’s wife burst into floods of irrepressible tears and had to be dosed with sal volatile. Written in the classical language of the day (kathare-vousa) which is a little more intelligible than Sanscrit to the average peasant, it was an unqualified success. No wit broke the unruffled flow of those serpentine sentences. As Greek speeches go it was remarkable for the restraint of its delivery. Apart from sawing the air sideways as if he were lancing a boil Mr. Gongorides employed few gestures. His pitch was uneven, for even the strongest voice cannot maintain the rapid staccato yowling note with which he began, without feeling the strain. By the time Mr. Gongorides ended our throats were all sore in sympathy with him. In the Officers’ Club there was much growling and swearing at the length of it—but then oratory is hardly likely to find admirers in the Army where the average officer’s vocabulary is restricted to monosyllables. The waste of time was considered deplorable, and the naval lieutenant whose permanent hangover has given his face the expression of a man trying to lift a sideboard, declared that he would run Mr. Gongorides to earth and dash his brains out with a bottle.

  It is not clear what Theodorus of Gadara would have had to say to this speech; as Tiberius’s teacher of rhetoric he would be, perhaps, the best qualified to judge it on its merits. But though Rhodes was the home of rhetoric its cause abroad was often pleaded by foreign speakers. When Artemisia occupied Rhodes it was Demosthenes himself who delivered a speech advocating Rhodian independence. Cato saved Rhodes by his speech in the Senate after the war with Perseus, and a few years later the alliance between Rhodes and Rome was the result of Tiberius Gracchus’s golden eloquence. Indeed when Claudius restored to the Rhodians their much-prized independence it was in response to a speech delivered by a fattish adolescent of fifteen, who was as much admired for his learning as he was later to be execrated for his crimes—Nero.

  In the great catalog of powers which in ancient times held the sovereignty of the seas Rhodes stands sometimes fourth and sometimes fifth. For some twenty-three years, about 900 BCE, the Rhodian fleet maintained a reputation for boldness and skill which could rival any other nation afloat. But the Rhodians were great colonizers as well as traders, and their ships covered the distance between Rhodes and Spain; as colonizers they perhaps gave their name to Rhodos, a town at the northeastern corner of Spain, while legends suggest that the river Rhone took its name from another Rhodian colony founded near its mouth. In Sicily the great city of Gela was founded by them, as was the city of Apollonia in the Black Sea.

  The great dockyards were maintained long after the Thalassocratia had passed from the Rhodians. And the spirit remained unimpaired until today, as anyone may judge whose daring is equal to a trip with the Kalymniot sponge divers to Benghazi or further west. When Heraclides set fire to the dockyards in 204 BCE, thirteen sheds were burnt up and each had a three-banker in it under construction. Rhodian shipwrights built not only for themselves but for foreigners too. Herod of Judea is said to have ordered himself a Rhodian triere, while after the earthquake which overthrew the Apollo great quantities of ship timber were among the presents sent to Rhodes by foreign kings. Torr adds that among the other presents were numbered items which suggest that other states wished to restore the shipbuilding trade in Rhodes; namely iron, lead, pitch, tar, resin, hemp, hair and sailcloth. He adds that once the Rhodian women had to cut off their hair and give it for making ropes; and that these ropes were for many years afterwards shown as curiosities to visitors. There is a story of a Rhodian captain muttering while expecting to lose his ship in a storm. “Well, Poseidon, you must own I’m sending her down in good trim.” And they were fine swimmers When they went out to burn the seige engines of Demetrius they simply swam home if their own vessels took fire.

  From these fragments of reference and legend the picture of the Rhodian seafarer becomes clear; you will see him today, if you have eyes, sitting in the crooked taverns of the old town rolling dice and hissing through his curling moustaches: or slapping down lucky court cards and grumbling, while his free hand gropes absently for the bottle of mastic. And when the sponge fleet puts out you will see him, a small jaunty figure, sitting loosely over his tiller, as perfectly in tune with the bucking sea as an expert rider with his horse, steering for the coasts of Africa. He hardly ever turns to look back at the dazzling white villages on the rocks of Symi or Kalymnos, or lift his hand as he passes the last cape which will hide the little dots of scarlet, white, blue, yellow and grey, which stand upon the quay and chatter like starlings.

  At six these early summer mornings I rise and cross the garden barefoot to wake E by throwing a pebble at her shuttered window; and together we bathe in the cold sea before breakfast. The Mufti has taken to calling on me every morning at this hour. He has discovered that E can make real Turkish coffee. In a Rhodian Turk such behavior is positively forward. He can have no further doubts about my suitability as a tenant. We arrive back in our bathing costumes at seven to find him sitting on a chair un
der the willow tree, resting one elbow on the little painted table. While Maria sets the table for breakfast he hums a little tune to himself, waiting for his coffee. The sunlight splashes through the rafters of the huge baobab tree which shades the house, picking up the colored pottery, and lighting his sad preoccupied old face with a warm rosy tint reflected from the red tablecloth. Often Hoyle drops in from the hotel across the way, and all four of us settle down to breakfast in that sunny coolness. Days that begin like this cannot help carrying their perfection forward—as sums of money in a ledger are moved forward under different headings—to lighten the office work, to persuade even the dour Manoli to sport a flower behind his ear. Idle conversations, leading nowhere except perhaps to the confirmation of a happiness as idle as this shadowy garden, with its heavy odors of flowers, coffee, and tobacco smoke, mingled with early sunlight.

  The peasant girl from Cos makes an admirable servant but she shares the superstitions of her people. It is unlucky, for example, to be the bringer of bad luck or bad news. Telegrams almost always contain bad news. Therefore rather than give me the telegram which arrived this morning she tore it up and put it down the lavatory. “I was afraid it was bad news,” she says. When I scold her she throws her apron over her head and roars like a bull. What is one to do?