The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  What Rhodes could muster was heartbreakingly small. About six thousand troops with a thousand aliens in the city represented the hard core; then they armed the slaves which gave them another sixteen thousand men. Crete and Egypt sent help, so that the final score was about twenty-five thousand men versus twice that number. However, the figures take no account of the machinery which Demetrius had brought.

  Today this machinery may seem faintly comic, but any study of the science of siegecraft of that time can only impress the reader with the complexity and efficiency of the weaponry they used. ‘Sophisticated’ is the mot juste and, when one thinks of the sheer presence of the giant Helepolis as it hovered up over the walls of Rhodes, one wonders why the Rhodians did not simply give in without firing an incendiary arrow. This famous assault-tower was nine storeys high, was propelled on oaken wheels, and reared up above the high towers of the city. It had catapults, grappling irons and drawbridges which could be lowered to release a stream of skirmishing infantry upon the bastions. It took an operational force of some 3000 men to propel the thing. The whole structure was given a thick outer skin of osier and hides, enough to stop arrows; the top floor was a nest of archers who could shoot down into the town. Diodorus says it was fifty metres high, and the careful Vitruvius calculated its weight as 125 tons. This dreadful contrivance gnawed away at the walls of Rhodes and succeeded in causing extensive damage, though not to the morale of the defenders. They held firm and drove back repeated assaults. After a year of inconclusive operations, Demetrius received a pigeon from his father ordering him to return to his home; he was, however, told to sign a treaty with Rhodes before leaving. As this was rather generous in its terms, the Rhodians were relieved and signed it.

  Demetrius, though something of a lout, had a generous side to his Macedonian nature; no doubt too he felt a bit of a fool for not having done better with all his toys. At any rate he left the famous assault-tower as well as all his siege equipment, ordering that it be sold and the proceeds donated towards a statue which would commemorate this great siege. The Rhodians accepted the terms, and thus the statue of the sun god Helios was born – the original Colossus of Rhodes. Work on the statue began in 302 BC by Chares of Lindos. It took twelve years of his life to complete, and when it was finished stood some thirty-five metres high, all in bronze. The precise site of this huge figure is still subject to argument; as is its pose also, for it was never described by reliable eyewitnesses. It served as a landmark for all vessels as they neared the island, and by superstition it became the protector and guardian angel of the city. For sixty-odd years it stood there until the earthquake of 227 BC toppled it over. Could it have straddled the harbour as some people said? It does not seem likely. At any rate when the statue fell it fell on land, and lay there for centuries, as famous in its ruin as it had been when erect.

  According to rumours and legends Helios was supposed to have been displeased with the statue, and his oracle forbade any attempt at restoration. No Rhodian therefore dared touch it once it fell and the huge thing lay there for nine hundred years until AD 635, when it was taken off by Saracen marauders and sold to the Jewish merchants of the Levant.

  So foundered the fame of Demetrius Polyorcetes leaving only a footnote in the history books. It is just, for he lacked the magnetism of the truly great man. In him you smell the personal ambition behind the deeds. The boy Alexander, on the other hand, gives the impression of being a sleepwalker of genius pursuing an ever-receding dream of human unity. Nor is there anybody very interesting in the bead-roll of the generals and kings who, like termites, chewed his fragile dream-empire to pieces within a decade.

  So the Colossus crashed down, and gave a chance to the superstitious to read into it omens of divine displeasure. When finally it was carried off, piece by piece, popular rumour said that it took nine hundred camels to do so. Does that seem excessive for 125 tons of scrap? I know nothing of the habits of camels; perhaps it was. Another rumour, which sounds like the work of an ironist, insists that Rhodes got back her Colossus later, during the siege of 1522 in the form of cannonballs fired by the investing Turks.

  The glory and intellectual fame of Rhodes can hardly be exaggerated; and it endured for many centuries, through flourishing schools of rhetoric and fine arts. It is pitiful what little remains today, of what is recorded by Pliny and praised by Pindar. Her fame held on into Roman times, and famous Romans like Caesar, Brutus, Antony, Cassius, Tiberius and Cicero all studied in Rhodes. Some contracted a great affection for the island with its wonderful winter climate, and Tiberius spent one of his exiles in the island, transporting his entire retinue of concubines, catamites and conjurers; for once, at least, the comparison with Capri seems reasonably apt. The mystic Apollonius was another who made several stays in the island; there was also a host of other poets and painters who are now just names, attached to empty plinths or broken chips of vases.

  The Rhodians evolved a code of laws which was, in its time, world-famous and was later adopted by the Antonines; parts of it were later absorbed into the Venetian sea code. In addition, the island played a very powerful part in commerce; spices, resins, ivory, silver, wine, oil, fish, amber, from every point of the compass, came to her and were sold in her marts. Yet, though the Rhodian fleet was considered the best in the Mediterranean, it seems not to have numbered more than fifty ships of the line.

  However, history is cruel. There was no deep economic or military reason for the decline and fall of Rhodes. Rome was jealous of the island’s riches and out of spite declared Delos a free port – which dealt a fatal blow to the Rhodian commerce. Then, in 42 BC, came an unexpected physical assault by Cassius, who stripped and destroyed the town and butchered most of its inhabitants. Kaput the glory and power; and there was no way to recover them. Of her thousands of statues, buildings and harbours, nothing remained – or hardly anything. The invaders left no stone upright upon another. The pathetic relics are there in the museum – among them my favourite stone jujube-woman (the marine Venus), a statue as much the work of the sea as of a sculptor. Mostly such things were fished up from the harbour or discovered by accident during recent excavations. The story-book town in the story-book island has vanished.

  But what you do not know you do not miss; the present beauty of Rhodes, together with its buoyant blue sea and crystalline air is more than enough to delight the visitor. Although Swedish tourism seems to have turned it into a Swedish town if one judges by street signs, menus etc., this does not really matter. The afternoon prowl round the four kilometres of bastion is an unfailing delight, ending as it does with a coffee or a mastika under the spreading tree which shades a little café (Barba Jani’s it was when first I went there). Then it is pleasant to saunter out through the great barbican and on to the waterfront, where the little harbour of Mandraccio has a handsome line of outdoor cafés at which you can read a paper, send off incoherent postcards, and do the hundred and one things that tourists feel called upon to do.

  The modern architecture of the administrative buildings and the cinema is suitably chocolate-box, but the little Turkish-style market place is a success because of its layout and because the Italian tenderness for trees makes certain that shade is not lacking. The sunset, as seen from the top of Monte Smith, is worth the short walk, and will probably put you in a mood to round the crest of the hill and push on until you reach the ancient stadium in the midst of green glades starred with flowers. The spring flower riot in Rhodes is easily as splendid as that of Corfu; and after spring rain there is one hill on the right just before you reach Lindos which turns blood red, covered as it is in sheets of anemones. The town has little architectural merit but its wide streets and general impression of space lavishly treated are pleasant, and also enable it to be kept clean; after the insanitary uncleanliness of so many provincial Middle Eastern towns this is particularly striking.

  I had the luck during my stay on the island some time ago to be a Foreign Office Information man on loan to the Army, and the Army tre
ated me well. I had an office jeep – or rather a captured German Volkswagen which looked a total wreck but remained valiant, indestructible and faithful right to the end. With this whizzing old thing, I was able to get to know Rhodes over two and a half years as few people did soon after the last war. They were the happiest two years of my life. My duties were not killing, and continually interesting. Since the war was over and Enosis was heralded as the right and true end of Rhodes, the Greeks were all amiability. The Army relaxed, dreaming of Wimbledon and Winchester. Strange to say, a lot of people there didn’t think the climate of Rhodes was a patch on that of England – which proves the truth of the old proverb attributed to Euripides, ‘Home is where the heart is,’ a proverb that no Greek would disapprove of.

  Fate was even more lavish with its gifts to me, for I was accredited not only to Rhodes but to the whole Dodecanese group – the fourteen islands. It was assumed that these fourteen islands were crying out for the rich and copious information which I had to offer. My saddle-bags were crammed with syndicated intellectual fodder, and since the Greek is so greedy for news, I had a marvellous client to serve. Moreover, when I presented my case to the Navy, I was allowed to declare myself an official passenger and travel, when I wished, by naval craft of all sizes. What an experience this form of travel offered! It was infinitely more speedy than the lagging inter-island caiques which, like a slow train, put in everywhere. I continued to take caiques when in search of local colour, or when hunting for a friend, because it gave me an invaluable sensation of leisure; I wandered about, calling in at the various islands for a drink, so to speak, and wandered away again having transacted my business.

  The sea has no timetable, and one may be locked into ports for days at a time when the weather turns sour. Nothing to do but play cards and drink and watch the barometer. This is why seamen have such unwrinkled faces; they co-operate with the inevitable, they let Jeeves cope. When young, I travelled much in these waters and have vivid memories of being locked into harbour for as much as ten days, with very little to eat or drink; at such times Ithaca, Patmos, Mykonos, Leros, Calymnos, seem to raise themselves from the ocean floor with the spray exploding all over them, and smile, their fingers to their lips. The winters in Greece are really more marvellous than the summers … but you need to be young and fit to enjoy the necessary struggle against cold and wind.

  It is partly poverty that keeps the Greeks so happy, so spare and in tune with things. There are no psychoanalysts in Athens; they would not be able to make a living. The Greeks act things out with total abandon. No sooner is something felt than it’s done; there is no room or time for gloomy self-questionings and lucubrations. When you know that you might die of starvation this winter, when you feel your ribs stick out, what point is there in indulging your Oedipus complex? If he is mentally troubled, the Greek sets himself a long pilgrimage to some distant monastery and consults a local sage. He makes a real thing of his religious problems – and fundamentally (apart from lesions) there is no problem of mental health which is not in the last analysis a religious problem.

  I linger a little before leaving the town of Rhodes where I spent such happy post-war years, locked into the secret garden of Murad Reis. I was indeed living in a Turkish cemetery of such beauty and silence that I often longed to die and be sealed into one of those beautiful forms; to lie there dreaming forever of Eyoub and the great ladies who drowse away time in the vehement silences of the Turkish heat, with just the sound of the leaves falling. In Rhodes it was the leaves of the eucalyptus, like little propellers, spinning down. My table in the garden rotted with heat and spilt wine; sometimes I made notes on it or drew something. Everything ran with sweat, wine and heat. Then visiting friends wrote messages on the table when I was absent, and finally started to write poems. The yard was completely surrounded with flowering hibiscus – the most beautiful, tenacious and feminine plant there is. What a joy, like a drink of cold water, to see it bursting from the throat of a riverbed, or from a nest of burning stones, in full summer. In my dreams women have always been mixed up with flowering hibiscus! Obscure thirsts are nourished by such images.

  There is a persistent factor in Rhodes’s history which seems to repeat itself over and over again. This is the Rhodian’s taste for all things outsize. Think of the three thousand statues, for example, or the gigantic proportions of the statue of Helios. When they had a siege it was the biggest ever, and Demetrius produced his Helepolis for it. When they possessed a philosopher, he was greater than Solon. It is interesting that this preoccupation with size emerged again during the period of the Crusades. Not content with having the biggest-ever sieges against the biggest-ever armies, they decided one day to go the whole hog and build a Titanic of a boat – the biggest man-of-war ever seen afloat. It was called The Grand Carrack and descriptions of it suggest that it really was all that they planned it should be.

  It had eight decks and so much space for stores that it could keep in the sea for more than six months at a time without touching land to re-provision, even for water. It had huge tanks of fresh water aboard. Nor did the crew get along with mere ship’s biscuits as was the custom of the day. They ate the whitest of white bread, for the ship’s bakeries turned out two thousand loaves at a throw, using freshly ground corn milled in hundreds of hand-mills. This great sea animal was sheathed below water with several layers of metal, riveted with bronze screws which do not rust like iron ones. ‘With such consummate art was it built that it could never sink, no human power could submerge it.’ (One recognizes the authentic note of hubris – the Greek sin of overplaying one’s hand, the sure road to catastrophe.) The armoury was equipped for five hundred men. Cannon of every sort and kind figured in the armament, while fifty of the pieces were of extraordinary dimensions. But what crowned all, according to the chronicler, was that this enormous boat was incomparably swift and manoeuvrable; it required little effort to reef or veer her sails and she was speedy in her revolutions. A crew of three hundred managed her, while she had two large galleys of fifteen benches each, one lying in tow and the other aboard. ‘Though she had often been in action and perforated by many cannon balls, not one went directly through her, or even passed her lead work.’

  The ancient cities can be visited comfortably in a day; leaving the town by car at nine, you can lunch, lounge and swim at Lindos, call in on Cameirus at about four, and after a visit to the site of ancient Ialysos return to the town by dusk. This is thanks to an excellent motor-road which the Italians provided and which is still the most important tourist factor today. In sunny weather it is worth taking an early morning stroll round the market before setting off and filling your saddle-bags with fruit, melon, peaches and tomatoes – a sort of spare lunch in case Lindos should let you down; or worse still, lest some horror to suit the palate of some barbarous nation be forced upon you. Moreover, with a picnic you can crawl down to the sea and eat on the beach between bathes, than which there is no sweeter moral exercise or richer psychic balm. But first the assault on the citadel should be made otherwise you will not be worthy of your food, eaten beside this water which from the top of the cliff looks like a peacock’s tail spread out below – so brilliant and so various are its hues in sun and shadow. Your mind will say, ‘Go on then, jump!’ and for a long moment you will hover between the worlds of the dead and the living, hanging like a fly to the edge of the citadel. It is an extraordinary place, the temple of Lindos; so light and aerial, so pure and in tune with the sky above. One longs to know what statues stood up here. It is far more impressive than Sunion or Erix in Sicily. Here one regrets the intrusion of Byzantines and knights – everything sweaty-Christian should be scraped off, so that the pagan soul of the place can float free, as a reminder of the time when the aspirations of the human mind acknowledged the powers and terrors of nature. The site echoes with its past like a chord of music which the mind only can hear.

  The little town below, with its intricate cobbled streets and blazing whitewashed walls, lies very sti
ll. There seem to be few taverns, few open spaces under a plane tree where one can put a table and a chair. The main taverna, however, is beautifully situated just outside the citadel entrance under a tree, and others have sprung up in recent years. You can rent rooms in the town of Lindos, which drowses its life away, hardly troubled by the coming and going of the big buses with their sightseers. Strangely enough, the fishing is poor and one sees few fishermen. I made friends with one of the rare people with a small boat, a sort of absurd moralist called Janaki, and was pleased to see that the gift of philosophic reasoning was far from dead – indeed had been transmitted directly from the chief sage of the region, Cleobolus, who was, so to speak, the ancient Greek ancestor of Janaki. There is a marvellous water-labyrinth off the tiny beach below and while we explored it, Janaki, rowing while standing up, and dragging me softly along behind the boat in the cool water, would give way to profound moralizings upon nature. He took everything in dead earnest. Once we were arguing about the respective rights and roles of men and women in society and Janaki said, ‘The nature of the man is to bring a hammer down hard on a stone, that is his role.’ I said, ‘What about women?’ For a moment the question perplexed him and then his face cleared with relief. ‘Her role is to hold his trousers up,’ he said. ‘If ever she should let go our whole civilization would fall apart.’

  It was in deference to Lindos’s top sage that I called my little studio in Rhodes the Villa Cleobolus. Nothing of the old boy’s teaching remains, but we know that, like Pythagoras and Buddha, he believed in admitting women to the work, and allowed his own daughter and wife to become his students. Janaki had not heard of him – his education had stopped with the catechism. Yet I would regard Janaki as an educated peasant, for he knew his saints, his trees, and his sea. We spent afternoons in the little bay where St Paul touched down once (another epistle, another thrashing), and Janaki regaled me with his Lindean culture, which as a matter of fact, contained some interesting elements – such as the sunken cities. There were, he said, three cities which had been submerged far out to sea, off the point of the citadel, and sometimes in still weather one could look down into them and see everything very clearly. Being so used to this kind of Atlantean folklore I paid little attention, thinking that he had heard an account of the three Rhodian cities of antiquity, of which Lindos was the most famous, and that he had jumbled it all up in his head as peasants do. But I repeated this tale to a flower-hunting soldier who used to botanize in the island and he told me that one day, walking on the great bronze cliffs above Lindos in summer weather, he had seen the sea curdle and become still far out and had perceived, as if from an aircraft, dim forms which looked like Janaki’s city, far out to sea. The idea stayed with me and I once tried to work it into a play.