Then, things fell into place. Names were given to squares (Karysti, Koliatsos, Klafthmonos) and streets (Academy, Athens, Themistocles). Times of war and peace became rooted in collective memory—or collective amnesia, depending on how you look at it. If one person insists they’re looking at Syntagma Square, they’re mad. If thousands see it, the square is there.
When my parents told me we lived in Athens, I believed them. I’d have believed them if they pointed at a plane and called it a spoon. Without much thought, I passed this knowledge on to my daughter. I told her about the ancient Agora and the way slaves and women were excluded from Athenian democracy. I told her about the Persians, about Themistocles, about the Funeral Oration of Pericles. The Peloponnesian Wars, and, in the Hellenistic period, the Athenian turn against the Macedonians. And how did I know all of this?
I’d read it in their books.
I should have suspected the truth back when I was in school. Homer, we were told, is credited with composing The Iliad and The Odyssey. But what does “credited” mean? Who’s crediting whom with what? Shouldn’t Herman’s theory of expansion make us think (that is, make us skeptical of Homer’s sole authorship)? And what about Kirchhoff’s theory, which claimed that every epic is a patchwork text? Or the fact that Homeric Greek was never spoken at all? The problem with gripping stories is the way they overtake you. You refuse to challenge them.
Years later, when I began my investigations, I realized that the theory of composite texts and collective authors are two of the few keys we have with which to unlock the ancient world. Truly, everything I have to tell you came together through the expansion and collaging of ideas. Just as Penelope in The Odyssey weaves and unravels her fabric, so the great fabricators of Athenian history weave and unravel their myths of grandeur. Hermann and Kirchhoff came close to the truth but backed away before reaching its core; a shatterproof theory can break your teeth.
The scheme was brilliantly devised and the deck of cards was shuffled many times over the years. Their interweaving had been exemplary, with seams no one can see. When they encountered uncertainty, they concluded that “nothing can be proven with certainty.” This is how people react to the unknown.
By “they,” I mean a guild of rhetoricians, poets, and archaeologists. Among them, to mention a few, were an ancient philosopher who evangelized about bliss and a traveler who tore through the strawberries of Mount Helicon. And later, a German architect who built the palace of Athens; the lord who bore pieces of the Parthenon to the British Museum; a Greek poet who wrote of the Caryatids, “Youth senses your significance / and springs up already at your edges.”
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They worked in conditions of absolute secrecy. They conveyed plausible “information” from one generation to the other. But plausibility is the enemy of truth. Artists became beasts: they distorted the world because they could not bear its awful darkness. Why envision humanism in this completely inhumane way? Why imagine an ideal society and allow real people to face down dizzying giants?
Their dream was to create a city that was transcendent, beyond compare. A city that would invent cities and governments, language and liberty. The members of the guild—all of them men—would meet in secret chambers in the depths of the desert, chambers that had been built centuries before sand flooded the world. And there, with persistence and method, they worked out a plan of idealism and anarchic imagination. They made models of temples and houses with kitchens and men’s quarters. They broke shells for ostracisms. They thought up adventures on the shores of Asia Minor. They crafted clay and metal vessels, and the next generation inherited the duty to bury them deep in the earth. They invented the names of wise men and submissive women. They mapped out philosophical theories about time, happiness, and death. Step by step, they created a society that matched their insatiable vision of absolute power and control.
When I say step by step, I mean one invention emerged from the one that came before, just as one lie leads to the next. Since they gave the city of Athens a goddess of protection, shouldn’t they organize a festival in her honor? And so began the Panathenaea festival. They conjured neighboring cities, Boeotia and Megara; after all, no city is an island. They invented the ekklesia, the ancient popular assembly of male citizens; they invented the Oracle, and the sacrifices. The gods, the concubines, the slaves.
Such was their brazenness, their perverse ambition, their need for play, that instead of producing a coherent history, they generated lyric fragments and myths about tridents and olive trees. The truth is, these gentlemen were all entertaining themselves by playing a sort of Monopoly—if I give you Sounio, will you give me Eleusina? What’s more, I would truly hate them for how they’ve wronged us—for that horrific sense of inferiority with which they make us live—if I didn’t feel, once in a while, that they had also rescued us from the desert. From that murky landscape that forces us to walk with our heads down, asking, how is it possible we have fallen so low?
Listen to this. One evening, walking on Lykavittos with my husband, I turn to him and say, I can’t see anything, there’s nothing here. My husband agrees, nods his head as if in a trance. And it really does feel like walking in a deserted landscape, with just the Acropolis visible in the distance, like a brightly lit paper cutout. As though the world has suddenly cracked open and you see the paper onto which it has been written.
When they asked me to write a piece about Athens, I thought half jokingly and half seriously that perhaps the time has come to share what I know to be true. Worst case scenario, you’ll think I’m just writing a story. Further still, you’ll think I’ve lost it completely.
Perhaps, though, you’d like to judge for yourselves without resorting to what others have told you. Just open your eyes and take a look. Of this I can be sure: you’ll arrive at the same conclusion. If a person insists they see a desert before them, they’re mad. But if thousands can see it? The desert does exist.
