In the year that the twentieth century died, I was visiting Whitehead professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. I had retired from the University of British Columbia where I a professor of classics for a quarter century and the American School was a pleasant change. The article which is partially reprinted here was written at the suggestion of the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Staige Blackford, who died tragically shortly after it was published in an automobile accident. The complete article can be found published on the VQR web site, (autumn issue, 1999.)
The summer after I passed my preliminary examinations for the doctorate at Yale, I sailed for Greece. I had written the examination for the Seymour Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and won it. The year was 1954, I was 23, the Korean War a state of suspended animation, the Vietnam War still lay in the future and I was making my first visit to Europe. Greece itself had emerged from civil war not quite four years earlier. Only one ship offered direct service between New York and Piraeus, the Greek Line’s Nea Hellas, an elderly vessel built for a defunct British shipping firm only a couple years after the Titanic sank, and she still possessed some Edwardian elegance in the first class and some equally Edwardian squalor in third. Less than a year later the Greek Line replaced her on the New York Piraeus route with a new ship named the Olympia and the Home Line provided competition with the Queen Frederika , and the Queen Anna Maria, named after the last queen of Greece who has somehow faded out of the headlines without attracting media attention. In 1954, however, Paul and Frederika still lived in the royal palace behind the National Garden, and the recovery from the long period of war began in 1940 was well underway.
A few weeks ago, on my last visit to Greece, I discovered a copy of Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi in an Athenian bookstore which advertised new and used books. I bought it quickly, thereby stripping myself of the drachmas I had intended to spend on a cappuccino, but the book is out-of-print and the store was about to close for a delayed siesta (it was 3 p.m.) Miller’s Greece was pre-WW2. He sailed from Marseilles to Piraeus only a few months before Mussolini sent in his troops in 1940. His fellow passengers were Arabs, Turks, Lebanese, English, French, and Americans. Mine were American students, a few Maltese and Turks, and a party of English tourists. But most of the passengers were Greeks. One made friends quickly and forgot them. But since this my first trip abroad, I kept a journal. Faithfully then fitfully and in the end, not at all. But I recorded some encounters There was a young Greek priest returning from studies in the United States, who told me sadly that the Fourth Crusade was one of the great criminal acts of history. There was a young Greek from Canada who was going home to find the bones of his brother, killed by the Communist E.L.A.S. ten years before. He also intended to find his brother’s killer. O got my first encounter with one of Greece’s great controversies when I retired to a deck chair with a textbook of modern Greek. An assemblage of Greeks, all eager to help, gathered round. But they soon quarreled. What Greek should I learn? The argument was good-natured but vigorous. I listened carefully, trying to understand. It seemed that each of my would-be tutors had strong opinions about correct grammar and vocabulary, but none of them agreed with anyone else. On one matter, however, there was complete consensus. My textbook was wrong.
I reflected on Henry Miller again a few days ago when I was enclosed by a traffic jam at Dafni on then road between Athens and the sacred site of Eleusis. My little Fiat Uno was surrounded was surrounded by a battalion of larger cars: Hondas, Mercedes, BMWs, Rovers, and Peugeots, with a Jeep Cherokee almost scraping my left fender. “One should never race along the Sacred Way in a motor-car” Miller had written, “it is sacrilege. One should walk, walk as the men of old walker, and allow one’s whole being to become flooded with light”. Miller belonged to an age that is lost. The Sacred Way between Athens and the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the industrial suburb of Eleusis is now a four-lane highway. The 11th-cewntury monastery church at Dafni is hemmed in by an immense river of traffic. The marvelous atmospheric light which Miller admired is still there, but the omnipresent nefos has stolen its clarity. The nefos is the cloud of pollution which now hangs over Athens: a mixture of smudge from oil-burning furnaces and exhaust from internal combustion engines, and in the summer of 1998, forest fires from Mts. Hymettos and Pendeli outside the city added wood smoke to the mix. The nefos sometimes recedes but never disappears, nor will it as long a Hellenic Petroleum provides the furnaces of Athens with low-grade fuel oil. But Hellenic Petroleum is not only a state monopoly, it is one of a small minority of state-owned enterprises in Greece that makes a profit and that shields it effectively from pressure to reform.
Henry Miller came to Greece on the eve of World War II. The country was still coping as best it could with the resettlement of a million Greek refugees driven from Turkey in the 1920s. The debacle of 1922 in Asia Minor is forgotten now in most of the world which has later incidents of ethnic cleansing to occupy its attention, but not kin Greece or Turkey. The political stability of Greece was a victim of the first World War when the Allies, Britain and France, maneuvered the pro-German King Constantine I off the throne and replaced him with his second-eldest son, Alexander with, as his prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, one of the most brilliant statesmen of modern Greece. It was another example of Great Power interference in Greek affairs, but the times were desperate. The war was not going well for the Allies. The Gallipoli campaign, which was intended to yield them Constantinople, had turned into a mismanaged bloodbath. Bulgaria, Greece’s old enemy, had joined the Central Powers and attacked Serbia. Greek assistance was crucial: in fact, the nine Greek army divisions which Venizelos provided the Allied offensive in Macedonia in September of 1918 would hasten the German collapse on the Western Front the following November. The Allies had reason to be grateful to Venizelos and to Greece when peace came, and the prize that Venizelos wanted was Smyrna, which Turkey was renamed Izmir, now that it has been swept clean of Greeks. On 15 May 1919, a Greek task force landed at Smyrna and took kit, killing or wounding some 350 Turks in the process, thus setting a spark to revived Turkish nationalism under Mustafa Kemal or Atatürk, to give him the surname that he took after he ordered Turks, as part of his reforms, to take family names. Next year the Treaty of Sevres gave Greece the right to administer the Smyrna region for five years, after witch Greece could annex it if the inhabitants wished. The League of Nations reserved the right t demand a referendum. Then King Alexander was bitten by a pet monkey and died of blood poisoning; the next election brought the anti-Venizelists to power and a rigged plebiscite returned King Constantine to Athens. Not to be outdone by their political opponents the royalists launched their own offensive in Turkey. It went well at first; the Greek army almost reached Kemal’s stronghold of Ankara. But its supply lines were overstretched and its general was slightly lunatic, and although mental stability is not a sine qua non for a successful general, it is a desirable virtue. In late August, 1922, Kemal launched a counteroffensive and it was devastating. The Greek army fled, and Greeks and Armenians were driven from Smyrna; only the Jewish and Turkish quarters of the city were spared. Greece received a flood of refugees, among them some who would achieve distinction, such as the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos who found the royal Macedonian tombs at Vergina 1977, and the Nobel prize-winning poet, George Seferis whose papers are now in the Gennadius Library which is part of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Henry Miller described his visit to the Armenian refugee quarter of Athens just before war broke out. “I had heard that it was sordid and picturesque, but nothing about it had quite prepared me for the sight which greeted my eyes “ The refugees had been waiting for 20 years for new homes which the government has promised, and when Miller visited the quarter, the new homes were ready. They were “models in every sense of the word,” he wrote. “The contrast between these and the hovels in which the refugees have somehow managed to survive for a generation is fantastic, to say the least. From the rubbish heap a whole community provided shelter for itself and for its animals, its pets, its rodents, its lice, its bedbugs, its microbes.” The refugees were at last being integrated into the fabric of Athens. Then came Mussolini’s invasion. In the early morning of 28 October, 1940, the Italian ambassador presented the Greek prime minister or, perhaps to be more accurate, dictator- Iohannis Metaxas with an ultimatum. Metaxas said “No”. Thereupon Mussolini launched his attack which bogged down with embarrassing alacrity and had to be rescued next year by the German army. October 28th is still celebrated in Greece as “Ohi Day” or “No”Day, for Ohi is Greek for “No”. However, the day is now a celebration of the spirit which brought Greece through a couple millennia of vicissitudes since it became a province of the Roman Empire in 146 BCE. Anti-Italian overtones have been eliminated. Greece and Italy are now members of the European Union, and relations are friendly, if occasionally wary.
One other byproduct of the Smyrna debacle and the flood of refugees that followed was that the American School of Classical Studies was given the right to excavate the marketplace of classical Athens: the “Agora” written with an upper case “A to distinguish it from many other agoras, for the label can be applied to any emporium from a grocery store to a flea market. Refugee resettlement put pressure on any land available for development in the city, and the Agora, the location of which was known, was a prime site. Greece lacked the money to save it. Sixty-five per cent pf her taxation revenue went to service the national debt. In 1924, a bill to expropriate the land failed to pass the Greek parliament. Thereupon the government turned to the American School and offered it the right to excavate if it found the money to buy out the buildings the site. John D. Rockefeller Jr. provided the funds, and in 1931 the digging started. By 1940, when war interrupted the work, 365 “undesirable buildings” (the description comes from the History of the American School of Classical Studies by a former director, Louis Lord) had been removed.
When I reached Greece in 1954, the American School was building a new museum in the Agora to house the artifacts discovered there. This was no ordinary museum. The Agora site was crowded with ruins of ancient structures and there was no room for a new building; so the School decided to rebuild an old one. The Stoa of Attalus was a great colonnaded portico with shops along the back wall which has been donated by King Attalus II of Pergamon in the mid-second century BCE. Pergamon was a wealthy realm in Asia Minor which followed policy of never opposing the Romans and reaping the rewards of a faithful satellite as a result, but its last king, reading the future accurately, willed his kingdom to Rome which made it a province and exploited it cruelly. But the donation of the Stoa belonged to Pergamon’s opulent period. It was preserved well enough that its plan could be recovered securely for both the first and second floor, and thus accurate restoration was possible. In 1954, stone masons were working on its great column drums using skills not much different from the ancient masons, though their chisels were made from modern steel. Forty years on, the startling whiteness of its new marble was becoming muted and even a little soiled in odd corners. The nefos was leaving its signature. But in 1954 the new pillars were rising and the stone masons were chiseling new column drums out of rough-hewn cylinders of marble from Mt. Pendeli which had supplied the marble for the Parthenon and the other great monuments of classical Athens.
The archaeological exploration of the Agora which had been interrupted by the war was underway again. The last season before the war had been in the year of the Italian invasion, 1940. The professor of archaeology at the American School, Eugene Vanderpool, one of the greatest American archaeologists to work in Greece, had opted to remain in Athens during the German occupation when Greece starved. Vanderpool had come in 1927 crossing the Albanian border into Greece on foot with a group of students, and he had no wish to leave. He bicycled regularly to the Agora until the Germans caught up with him and dispatched him to a concentration camp as an enemy alien. However, he contrived to take with him his copies of Herodotus and Thucydides, and with the help of these two old friends, he survived.
He never talked about his experiences during the occupation, though there was a lively oral tradition which transmitted Vanderpool legends. Th nearest he came to discussing contemporary politics was when he interpreted the painted graffiti on the whitewashed walls in the countryside. “Long live my party” in red paint was probably executed by a crypto-Communist. “Long live the king” appeared with suspicious frequency. We suspected some industrious monarchists at work. The Greek monarchy was a casualty of the Colonels’ coup in 1967 (there were, in fact, two army colonels and one brigadier behind it) though one should not discount the intense unpopularity of King Constantine II’s German mother Frederika, who must count as one of them most unwise queens of history. The glum, nationalist dictatorship of the Colonels was not Constantine’s responsibility; in fact he tried to unseat the Junta with a bungled coup of his own but as a young Greek student told me, even though the political impasse may not have been his fault, he did nothing to make the situation better. It was an open secret, admitted afterwards by the United States, that the Junta had American support. When constitutional government was restored in 1974, a referendum was held on the King’s return which the center and left parties vigorously opposed, and 70 percent of the votes were for a republic. Yet, last year, when I was in Athens as a Whitehead Professor, I saw a small furtive “Long live the King” graffito on a newly-painted wall on Queen Sophia boulevard, 24 years after the referendum which dispatched Constantine into exile in the United Kingdom where he became a successful businessman. Graffiti generally have a more contemporary import. One, a short distance from the French School of Archaeology, rad “Fascist bums go hang.” Another, painted on an immaculate white wall in front of the British Embassy read “NO to the Internet. “It is the Beast of the Apocalyse”. Microsoft, meet the Book of Revelation!
The remainder of this article can be read on the Virginia Quarterly Review, 75/4, Autumn, 1999.