The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung;
Where grew the arts of war and peace;
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Greece, born of the union of myth and history and in turn the father of western civilization, populated by the descendants of Helenus, forefather of the Hellenes who crushed the Persian invaders early in the 5th century BC, reigned over the western world. Later in the century under Pericles, Athens established herself as a democratic state that led the rest of Greece into a Golden Age. This was the era when the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates, the sculptor Phidias, the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes, and the comic dramatist Aristophanes, who in their respective ways, along with many others, contributed to their city a center of art unlike no other in the world at this stage in time.
On the highest hill in the city lies the Acropolis, named after its legendary founder, Cecrops. The Athenians erected the most magnificent temple in Attica to honor their patroness whom they believed to have sprung full grown and already clad in armor from the brow of Zeus – Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom. And on the brow of the Acropolis, the Athenians raised the temple of their patroness, the Parthenon.
On this sunny afternoon in June, this architectural splendor reduced me to tears. Despite the damage inflicted on the structure through many centuries by vandals, specially by Turkish hordes who invaded Greece and used the temple as a target to test the power of their cannons, enough remains of the masterpiece of the architects Ictinus and Callicrates to give the viewer today a vision of the classical perfection of this awesome edifice. If the temple had not been looted and the statue of Athena left untouched, it would have rivaled the statue of Zeus in Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the World according to the traveler and historian, Herodotus.
For hours, my voracious eyes feasted upon the glory that was the Parthenon: The pediment now shorn of the marble figures that adorned it (Known as the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures now repose in the British Museum in London where I had seen them prior to my visit to Greece), the reliefs carved by Phidias, the massive Doric columns, the cornices, the deserted altar and the treasury behind it.
Of the structures on the Acropolis, none is more imposing, next to the Parthenon, than the Erechtheum. Its portico is known for its caryatids – sculptured columns of female forms of Amazonian proportions supporting the pediment. I made my way down the hill under the constellations named after mythical figures – Andromeda, the archer Perseus, the winged horse Pegasus — with the resolve that I would visit these hallowed halls again before leaving this myth-shrouded land.
Following my own atlas, guided by myth and history, I traced part of the journey of the cow-maiden Io, beloved of Zeus and victim of the jealousy of Hera; swam in the sea named after her, the Ionian; visited the cities of Oedipus, Corinth and Thebes; climbed Mt. Parnassus, home of the Muses and Apollo, site of the famed oracle, and drank deep of the waters of the Paerian Springs; stopped at Saunion where Byron etched his name at the base of a pillar in the temple of the sun god shortly before he perished from a rheumatic fever in Missolonghi, where he trained a local force to drive away the Turks from Greek soil; and ended up in Piraeus, the harbor of Athens from which Theseus sailed to Crete to rid the world of a man-devouring monster, the Minotaur; and King Aegeus, thinking that his son had perished in the mission leaped into the sea which came to be named after him, the Aegean.
I still had far to go in my personal odyssey, to follow the steps of the wanderer Io, the heifer, whose final destination would be Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, Zeus would restore her to her true form with a touch of his celestial finger and with the same touch impregnate her. From her seed, generations later would issue the mightiest mythical hero of all, Heracles.
For far too long in my student days, history was Greek to me until I discovered the book that opened my mind to the grandeur of historical literature. I was so entranced by Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War that I finished reading it in one long sitting. The war between the democratic and freedom-loving Athenians and the despotic, militaristic Spartans is one of the most decisive in the history of Greece. The Pyrrhic victory of the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta over the Delian states led by Athens I found more heartbreaking than the novel, The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault.
In his tragedy The Trojan Women, Euripedes depicts the degradation and anguish of the captive women of the Royal House of Troy in the hands of their captors. My most memorable experience of drama has to be that at the Theater on the Square in New York when the venerable thespian, Mildred Dunnoch, essayed the role of Queen Hecuba. Everyone in the house was in tears in the final scene. As the women’s chorus hymns its lament and farewell to their homeland, she mounts the gangplank with regal dignity, but before she steps into the deck of Agamemnon’s ship, which will take her to slavery in Argos, she turns around to take one last glance at her burning city.
If Euripedes appealed to the tragic muse to voice out his condemnation of war, Aristophanes applied his gift for comedy, employing an entire arsenal of arms – satire, irony, verbal abuse, topicality, foul language, bombast, physical obscenity and sex (Cast classical restraint to the four winds!) to condemn warfare.
In Lysistrata, which is being staged by Dramatis Personae at the Pius XII Theater, Pius XII Catholic Center, the targets of Aristophanes’ weapons are the Athenians and the Spartans who are engaged in a disastrous war, inflicting horrendous damage on both camps.
An Athenian woman, Lysistrata, summons all the women of the warring cities to a meeting at the Acropolis and proposes a plan to end the hostilities. They must deny their husbands the pleasures of the marriage bed if they keep going back to the battlefield. The comedy has many funny complications, but ultimately the women succeed in their sex-strike to convince the menfolk that it’s far better to make love, not war.
Producer-director Lito Casaje states in his Director’s Notes: "Lysistrata may have been written some months before its first performance in 411 BC but its classic standard is highly formidable as evidenced by its well proven timeless and universal insights on pacifism, feminism, sexism, women’s rights, anti-violence, sexual politics and the perennial battle of the sexes between the man from Mars and the women from Venus."
Casaje, in staging this outrageous comic masterpiece, has a sword of Damocles hanging over his head – purists, self-appointed censors and moralists and the entire religious community. The director has taken his own personal liberties with the play and critics may cavil. Nonetheless, one certain attraction of the production is Michelle Deles who plays the title role. I can well imagine her as Aphrodite, undraped, rising from the sea-foam in Cyprus.
On my last day in Athens, I went up to the Acropolis again as I had promised myself I would. I stayed there until sundown contemplating the classical perfection of the Parthenon when the ancient gods of Greece gifted me with a vision that would remain in my memory to the end of my days: As if by the touch of an alchemist, the translucent marble metamorphosed into burnished gold!
In his apostrophe to a Grecian urn, the poet John Keats enthused:
"Beauty is Truth, — Truth Beauty" — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.