The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  “Okay,” Markos said. “And is that what you came to find?”

  “No. I came to find Athena.”

  “Not here,” he told me. “Black-figure ware is next.”

  “There are no mythological figures in the late eight century?”

  “No…” he didn’t want to commit himself on that. “Sometimes. Maybe.” A thought came to him. “Women were drawn in outline,” he said. “Faces painted in with white glaze.”

  “Oh?” That wasn’t true of my sherd.

  “That’s the way it was done,” he said.

  I turned at that. “That’s what the book says. That’s because the book simplifies. Look at the variety here. Different workshops, different artists, different regions. Didn’t you say Corinth was a competitor? Change doesn’t happen in an instant. And no culture is homogeneous.”

  “So if Athena isn’t a white-faced lady, how are you going to find her?” He almost sounded like he was complaining.

  “Welcome to my world,” I said. “You want certainty, go study physics. History is all about comparing multiple sources in the clear understanding that every one of those sources lies.”

  “Okay,” he said. Adjusting. A very adaptable young man. I was liking him more and more. “Here are some warriors,” he said.

  The human figures, when they appeared in this period, were geometric. Only the horses seemed to be portrayed more naturalistically. Actually, I just had to stop and say I really liked those horses. Angular, full of attitude, pointed noses like that Picasso sketch of Don Quixote.

  But even then, within all the stylization that made them fit within the still measured and repetitive geometric shapes, there were suggestions of movement and musculature and drapery, that insight into the human form that would in time make Greek Art renowned through the ages.

  “Black-figure, then,” I said. I followed Macduff to the next room.

  Black-figure pottery was when it first started looking like what most people would think of as Greek. Okay, sure, like Xander had said, I’d never studied seriation. I didn’t even have whatever probably very useful classes Markos had at Vakalo. I felt a flush of envy at the thought.

  “I want your brain,” I murmured in his direction.

  “What, like a zombie?”

  I hadn’t meant for him to hear me. “No, I wish I knew what you knew about ceramic art.”

  “Okay then.” He thought about it. “My brain,” he mused.

  I reflected I was probably the first girl to say that to him. Sorry. Being catty again. Could I just say it had been a while? It was starting to seriously mess with my concentration.

  Right. Later. I still had work to do.

  For my inexpert eye, every culture had at one point drawn lines and squiggles on their pots. I didn’t care if it was Mycenae or Cycladic, Iron Age or Neolithic, from Cypress or Turkey or the American Southwest. Humans had common ways of putting something to look at on their little clay jars.

  But black-figure? This was a more elaborate process. The reddish-orange background, no doubt carefully manipulated in the kiln to get that life and variety of color. Then figures in shiny black glaze, figures created in silhouette. Details were carved into the glaze with a sharp tool to leave pale lines, like the color-hold effect of certain cartoons today. Spots of white and even red glaze sometimes added on top of that, especially on faces.

  It was easy to tell the women. They were often given a white overglaze. But they also had the long skirts.

  “So much, we think what we do today is the way things are,” I said to Markos. “Today if you see two people and one has bare legs, that one’s the girl.”

  He grinned. “Guys got to show off more in the ancient world.”

  We were drifting through the black-figure ware, into the red-figure — again, no hard line, more a blurring and combination until all colors mixed in the still-later Polychromatic.

  And there it was. Two figures locked in combat. One down, bleeding, trying to defend. The other towering over him. Long skirt, tall helmet pushed up to show her stern face, aegis held before her. The Gigantomachy. Athena defeating the giant Enceladus.

  Everything was different, but the core was the same. A hundred years too early, but the core idea was too clear to be a chance resemblance.

  “When did they start wearing their helmets on top of their heads?” I asked, while I worked it through in my head.

  “Where else would you wear one?”

  “You!” I poked him lightly in the arm. “I mean propped up so you can see their face.”

  “Always. For heroes and gods.”

  “Sure, okay. For the same reason all the movies put lights inside the space helmets these days. So you can see the faces of your stars.”

  “So why doesn’t Vader take his helmet off?”

  “Shush,” I said. “Because he looks like a potato under it,” I said. And then I had it. “The piece I’m trying to place. The standing figure is armored, in short tunic. Helmet down. It was made during that Orientalizing phase of yours. Everything is still very geometric but the figures are starting to break out of their trapezoids and take on full life.”

  “Tunic? Heroes are usually naked.”

  “Heroines aren’t,” I said. “That’s how our enharmonic professor, the great Edward E. Sharpe, fucked up. And his protege didn’t see it, either. Despite having studied seriation and all. They saw what they wanted to see. What they expected to see.”

  “They saw a hero.”

  “The depictions hadn’t settled yet. No aegis. That hadn’t gotten into the myths yet. Or into the art, which is the same thing as far as we are concerned. And Athena was still an Action Girl back then. The way Homer described her.”

  “Goddesses do not wear a man’s tunic.”

  “Artemis does,” I said simply. And for that pioneering artist that had made Giulio’s pot, so did Athena.

  “I know what the calyx is,” I said, mostly to myself. “I know when the calyx is. What I don’t know is why. I need context.”

  “Context?” Markos was attentive.

  “Let’s go meet us some Mycenaeans.”

  “I’ll catch up.”

  I went back down to the ground floor, trying so very hard not to get distracted from the wonderful statuary and the even more tantalizing signs. A full Egyptian chariot? Really? Back to the foyer and through the fancy iron-grill doors to the core of the museum.

  And gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.

  Or so Schliemann had said, in his telegraph to the King of Greece. I think. It could be a little hard to tell, sometimes, with Schliemann.

  It was a simple case, painted dark green, in a low-ceiling, dimly lit room. A half-dozen gold objects gleamed within. Nothing but that central position singled out that one death mask out as the most recognizable Mycenaean artifact in the world. A flattened face in hammered gold that had graced the cover of oh so many books and theatre programs.

  It had been a moment right up there with Howard Carter’s. After waiting a week for his sponsor, Carter had finally peered through a tiny hole into the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen."What do you see, what do you see?" Lord Carnarvon had asked excitedly.

  Heinrich had been digging within the walls of Mycenae, digging down into what would be called Grave Circle A when he found his own “Wonderful things.” As I looked around the gallery, I realized that most of this floor was stuff he had collected. From the shaft graves at Mycenae and, of course, from Troy. That’s where he’d taken a picture of his young wife, Sophie, wearing jewelry he said had belonged to Helen.

  I moved around to the other side of the cabinet. Bronze swords, looking heavily corroded. Gold jewelry, which despite the shiny incorruptibility of the metal still managed to look tremendously old. And then, bam.

  I knew these big-nosed Jules Feiffer-looking dudes striding around the curve of a large clay pot. The Warrior Vase. Also on more than a few book covers.

  That’s what I loved about museums. You’d read about thi
ngs, see pictures of them in your reference books, but then to actually encounter them. Particularly if you hadn’t expected to see them.

  “You told me, Ken!” A raised voice from the other side of the display. “Once seen, it can’t be unseen. The little goatee, the curved mustache. It’s practically Kaiser Wilhelm. So Schliemann forged it?”

  The next voice had that weary precision of a life-long academic. “Consensus is that it really did come out of Grave Circle A. But Schliemann might have re-touched it a little to fit his preconception of a Hero-King. And it was from about three hundred years too early.”

  The first voice returned, quieter and sounding a little abashed at its earlier outburst. “Like Troy, right? Archaeologists hate him because he stole the credit from Frank Calvert, right?”

  “No. Because he dug his way right through Troy. If there ever was a Trojan War, it was probably around Troy VII. Schliemann dynamited through that layer in his search for items he could show off. Same at Mycenae. Stamatakis complained about his methods but was unable to stop him.”

  Schliemann? I mean, I knew he’d played a little loose with history sometimes. But thievery and forgery? Say it ain’t so, Heinrich.

  Who were these two guys? I snuck a peek around. One was rounder and had that look of a retired businessman and experienced tourist; money and time for Caribbean cruises and dinners in Paris. The other was lean and had glasses and dark curly hair that reminded me of Egon from Ghostbusters. He was in the kind of lived-in business suit that went with a university professor or researcher. Or a career archaeologist.

  Harold Ramis — I mean Ken — noticed me spying. He frowned slightly, and stepped through an alcove into one of the adjoining rooms. Neolithic and Cycladic, I thought.

  Damn. I wanted to hear more of this. I moved a little quicker to the end of the Mycenaean items, passing way too many cases of gold and much more tantalizing items. Wait, were those Linear B? The clay tablets, discolored from the fires that had saved them for posterity, beckoned to me.

  I cut through the far doorway of the Neolithic section anyway. I would be back. This was way too much museum for one day, anyway. I was distracted again by arrowheads and spear points, tiny meticulously shaped splinters of death knapped from hard stone. Pottery was ahead, some of it large enough to block me from view as I closed in on my mystery pair.

  “I’m sorry. I guess this is your day for disillusionment,” my target was saying as I crouched.

  “This is like what you were saying when you visited us last year,” the other man said. “The Snake Goddess figurines, right?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Ken told his friend. “It is impossible to tell at this point how many of the Cycladic figurines in major collections are…”

  “Hiding from the zombie attack?” Markos spoke from behind me. Too loudly, and he’d made no effort to hide. A docent, a young woman in drab clothing, looked up from her cell phone to hiss at us. She jabbed her hand, gesturing for us to stop messing with the exhibits.

  Of course Ken and his friend looked up at all this. Gods rot it. Next time I hid behind a pithos I was going to pick one large enough for a Greek Philosopher to sleep in.

  Why hadn’t I just gone up and introduced myself? Now they looked like they wanted nothing to do with me, and the way the docent was looking at us, she’d raise the alarm if Markos and I did anything but exit gracefully.

  We exited gracefully.

  I stopped in front of the Silver Siege Rhyton. Which was right by a bull rhyton I was sure I’d seen in more than one book, but anyhow. “The Mycenaeans,” I addressed Markos. “What do you think of them?”

  A shrug. “They are the ancestors of the Greek people.”

  “Go on.”

  “The warriors of Homer.”

  “So, the Trojan War. The Odyssey. But then what happens? Isn’t that the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Then the Greek Dark Ages?”

  Markos seemed a little puzzled. “This was the Heroic Age. The stories of their heroes and their accomplishments were sung about until Homer came to write them down for the world to treasure.”

  “I’ve heard it said The Iliad is the bible of the Greeks.”

  “The Bible is the Bible of the Greeks,” Markos told me firmly. “I was named for Mark the Evangelist. My name day is the twenty-fifth of April.”

  Of course. Saint Mark. San Marco. From piazza to pleasant companion. And I took his point. It was too easy to see modern Greeks through the filter of the Classical world. They’d spent longer being Orthodox than they’d spent with Zeus and Athena.

  “I did not mean to insult,” I said humbly. “I am sorry.”

  Another of those piercing gazes. That “what do they think of us?” look I had noticed on other faces. “Yours is the First of September,” he said then. “Penelope.”

  “Oh, you’ve been looking me up!” I said. “I thought you were on a smoke break.”

  Markos tried to look wise and mysterious. He couldn’t keep it up. “No, I guessed,” he admitted.

  But back to the so-called Greek Dark Age. His attitude was interesting. It was the same thing I was seeing in the signage. The Bronze Age Collapse wasn’t being portrayed here as a total change in culture. It was just one bubble, one transition in a long chronology. And from the celebration of the Minoan and Cycladic and prehistoric cultural achievements in this museum, they were also considered part of their history. Perhaps not Greek, themselves. But acknowledged as part of their past.

  “You happen to remember the date of the Trojan War?”

  “1194. Traditionally.”

  “And four hundred years later, Homer is writing about it?”

  “Homer lived around 800 BC. The first written collection was by Peisistratos around 500 BC. So it is said,” he added.

  “And that’s when written Greek is back. As I understand it, the Mycenaeans were writing in Linear B, and all they were writing was shopping lists.”

  Markos made a grumpy sound of “That’s not right, but I’m going to hold off comment while I see where you are going with this.”

  “And what dialect was Homer writing in?”

  “Homeric Dialect,” Markos said, unhelpfully. “It is much like Attic,” he ventured.

  I didn’t know if that was true or if this was more Athenian pride. Didn’t matter. “But Hercules, doesn’t he predate the Trojan War? So how long is it until the Sons of Hercules come back to reclaim Greece?”

  “Eighty years,” Markos said promptly. “The Heracleidae, who were Dorian kings, conquered the Peloponnesus after the three generations had passed.”

  “So that’s way before Homer or Herodotus. And five hundred years before anyone was writing down Greek dialects. And also a long, long time…when did you say black-figure ware started appearing?”

  “In Attica? I guess 500, 600,” Markos said. “This is fun. Our teachers rarely work us this hard.”

  So basically E. E. Sharpe, and Vash, were full of shit. But I knew that anyhow. The question was still why. Where did this come from? Who benefitted?

  “I still lack context,” I said, frustrated. “Fine. Let’s move forward a few years. The rise of Athens, Sparta, the struggle against Persia, the Delian League, all that. Then conquest by Alexander, a Macedonian.”

  “Macedonian Greek.”

  “Hm?”

  “Alexander the Great spoke Greek, wrote in Greek, identified himself as Greek. He was Greek.”

  I’d touched a nerve? “Come on,” I took his arm. “We’re in the wrong gallery now. Let’s set the Wayback Machine for the time of Alexander.”

  We walked into the sculpture galleries. The many, many magnificent sculpture galleries. “Alexander bit off a big chunk of the known world,” I said. “He didn’t get into Germany much, though.”

  “He conquered the Thracians, but he stopped at the Danube,” Markos volunteered.

  “Pretty much where Caesar stopped.” I showed off my new-won knowledge. “Can I hire you and keep you by me always?”

 
“Are there benefits?”

  I took him by both arms. “This count?”

  We broke when another docent started hissing at us. If we weren’t careful, we were going to have the entire museum staff on our case.

  I sighed. Broke eye contact. “I still don’t get this Dorian thing,” I complained. “I’m going to blame it on Heinrich.”

  “Who?”

  “Schliemann.”

  “You know his house is about twenty minutes from here. We could get something to eat in Plaka.”

  “Do you not have classes in the afternoon?”

  Markos waved that off. “Cancelled with the storm warning. Xenophon reaches Athens this weekend.”

  “Xenophon? There’s a tropical storm Xenophon? Who names these things anyhow?”

  There was another hiss. Time to move before the docents formed a phalanx on us.

  “Right.” I ran it through in my head again. “Alexander, Hellenizing, Romans fight Carthage which is basically what the Phoenicians turned into, have a bunch of civil wars and split up, the Ptolemies crash and burn in Egypt, Constantine makes a new capitol, and the last of the Romans are Greek-speakers in what is now Istanbul. And that’s not helping me at all.”

  “Why did you stop there?”

  “Eh?”

  Markos took my chin in his hand. More lingering eye contact. “Why stop with Rome? Our history didn’t stop there. We have done so much more, have so much more to be proud of, long after Hadrian was dust.”

  “I was trying…I was trying to stay focused.”

  “But you keep saying context. Well, this is context. The Greece that overthrew the Turks after long years of subjugation. The Greece that fought again against the Nazis.”

  “Okay. Point made. So now what?”

  Markos brightened. “I know a place. Traditional food. They play traditional music. Not ancient, not Roman, but our tradition.”

  I’d had enough of stone and clay for the day, too. “Lay on, Macduff.”

  I was overloaded. I’d stopped even trying to learn the names of the foods that arrived. I just ate. And enjoyed. The music was bright and rhythmic although the harmonies confused me. No. No more analysis. Just listen and enjoy.