Mount - Harry Mount’s odyssey : ancient Greece in the footsteps of Odysseus

Harry Mounts Odyssey

Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus

To S, the face that launched a single ship

The sea, autumn mildness, islands bathed in light, fine rain
spreading a diaphanous veil over the immortal nakedness of Greece.

Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune
to sail the Aegean Sea. To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season,
murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt
to transport the heart of man into paradise.

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS, ZORBA THE GREEK

Now the sea is the Argonauts sea, and in the dawn

Odysseus calls the commands, as he steers past those foamy islands.

Wait, wait, dont bring the coffee yet, nor the pain grill.

The dawn is not off the sea, and Odysseuss ships

Have not yet passed the island, I must watch them still.

D. H. LAWRENCE, THE ARGONAUTS

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

A Potted History of Ancient Greece

20001600 BC Minoan Crete.

16001150 BC Mycenean Greece.

1200 BC Rough date of the Trojan War, lasting ten years. Odysseus criss-crossed the Mediterranean for another decade.

1150800 BC The Dark Ages.

776 BC The first Olympic Games.

c. 750 BC The Greek alphabet was invented.

c. 750725 BC Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey.

508 BC Cleisthenes created democracy.

490 BC The Battle of Marathon. The Athenian underdogs beat the Persians.

480 BC The Battle of Thermopylae. The Persians beat the Greeks, despite a heroic last stand by Leonidas and his 300 Spartans.

480 BC The Battle of Salamis. The Greeks beat the Persians.

461429 BC Pericles in charge of Athens.

460445 BC The First Peloponnesian War, fought by Sparta against Athens. Resulted in the Thirty Years Peace.

458 BC Aeschyluss Oresteia.

447 BC The Parthenon was begun.

442 BC Sophocless Antigone.

431404 BC The second Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta. Athens lost.

429 BC Pericles died.

399 BC Socrates executed.

357 BC Birth of Alexander the Great.

323 BC Alexander died at Babylon.

146 BC Rome destroyed Corinth and took over Macedon.

27 BC The last vestiges of ancient Greece yielded to Rome, as southern Greece became the Roman province of Achaea.

Introduction:
from Heathrow to Troy

Odysseus began his journey home to Ithaca on the windswept plain beneath the burning ramparts of Troy, by the banks of the meandering River Scamander.

Edward Gibbon embarked on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the ruins of the Roman Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter.

I started my odyssey in the Pret a Manger at Terminal 5 in Heathrow Airport.

I was waiting for a BA flight to Istanbul the nearest major international airport to Troy.

Odysseus never had to ask the girl behind the counter at Pret a Manger for a receipt for 5.26. Keeping an efficient record of tax-deductible expenses wasnt a priority for distinguished Trojan War veterans.

He was too broad-minded to bother paying the VAT-free takeaway price for a Pret smoked salmon sandwich, an apple juice and an apple and yet sit in the customer seating area all the same. Still another small victory over the taxman. Never to be sniffed at.

Odysseus didnt have any Factor 50 Boots sunblock in his spongebag, either. Looking at my face in the mirror a few days earlier, Id noticed a faint corrugation to my upper lip the ghost of a wrinkle. After eating my sandwich, I rushed to the skincare department of the Boots at Terminal 5.

Over the last 15 years, age had made pretty good inroads into the ephebic good looks of my youth ephebes were Greek citizens, aged 18 to 20, usually hard at work on garrison duty.

I bet Odysseuss olive skin was less wrinkled than mine, even after a decade baking in the salty, Mediterranean sunshine under the sloping, towering walls of Troy.

He wouldnt have needed my sunhat. Later in my journey, even the weakening October sun in Mycenae was enough to turn my bald pate an angry shade of red, after Id lost my hat a much-loved stingy brim Id got near the Fulton Fish Market in New York seven years earlier. Im wearing it in the photograph on the cover of this book, taken in Priene, on the western coast of Turkey.

The hat is casting its usual, limited shade on my face; thus the Zorros mask look. I had worn it on every sunny day of my journey so often that the bottom half of my face was tanned a freckly cappuccino colour; the top half, from the bottom of my eyes up, remained a pasty off-white.

Id parted from my hair a decade before. I certainly had less of the stuff than Odysseus. Homer refers to Odysseuss abundant head of hair when hes shipwrecked, naked, on the shores of Corfu, on the final leg of the journey to Ithaca. There he is discovered, shielding his crotch with a leafy branch, by the gorgeous Princess Nausicaa, while she tosses a beach ball at her singing handmaidens. The Greeks were the first to develop modern beach activities surviving Minoan paintings on Crete show women in bikinis as early as 2000 BC.

To make the shipwrecked Odysseus look more attractive to Nausicaa, Athene, Odysseuss guardian goddess, transformed his scurfy, salty hair into curls that looked like huakinthino hyacinths. These days, I cant scrape a single lock of hair together, let alone a full hyacinths worth.

At 42, the bell was tolling for my youth and how I minded the whirring-by of the years.

Odysseus was enviously indifferent to the passage of time as he whiled away the hours with Nausicaa; or a whole year with the foxy witch, Circe, on the island of Aeaea, now a peninsula off the Italian coast near Anzio, about 50 miles south of Rome.

Yes, 20 years was a painfully long time for him to be away from his adored wife, Penelope. But he did spend seven of those years nestling in a secret love cave with the seductive sea-nymph Calypso, on the island of Ogygia thought to be Gozo, Maltas neighbour.