“It is right, citizens, that you consider this and remember the current times: you need good faith, not corruption. You need to hate wicked men, cleanse the city of these kinds of monsters, and show all people that the majority of the people have not been ruined by a few politicians and generals. We are not slaves to their opinions because we know that we can easily defend ourselves with justice and values shared with each other as long as the gods favor us if anyone attacks us unjustly. But we know equally that no city will be preserved through corruption, betrayal and the values of wicked men like these.
For this reason, citizens, do not heed any request nor pity. Do not acknowledge the truth of the guilt which you have seen made against the injustice of the acts. […] But all of you help your common country and the laws, since both of these are being tried now against this man’s wickedness. You are about to cast a vote for the whole country, both for the established religions and the ancient laws and the constitution which was prepared for you by your forebears.”
“Tarquinius, when he was sufficiently prepared to tyrannize over them even against their will, did away with the most powerful people in the senate, and then in the population at large; he killed many openly if he was able to come up with some suitable charge for them, but he also killed many in secret and banished some. He did this not just because some of them loved Tullius more than him, nor because they had breeding and wealth or wisdom, nor because they were endowed with manifest bravery and wisdom; he killed from envy and suspicion because they were dissimilar in character, but, no less than the rest, he also killed many of his friends who had helped put him in power, reckoning that on account of their boldness and eagerness for revolution, through which they had helped him, they could easily give the throne to someone else.
Thus he killed off the strongest part of the senate and the equestrian class, nor did he replaced any of the people who were killed. He knew that he was hated by the entire populace, and he wished to make them as weak as possible through lack of manpower. He undertook to completely dissolve the senate and every gathering of people, especially one of chosen people and of anyone who had a pretext to authority from antiquity, because he reckoned that these meetings were necessarily extremely hostile to the tyrant.”
Thus, as far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove. This ideal is very interestingly marked, as intended for a perfect one, in the fifth book of the Odyssey; when Mercury himself stops for a moment, though on a message, to look at a landscape “which even an immortal might be gladdened to behold.” This landscape consists of a cave covered with a running vine, all blooming into grapes, and surrounded by a grove of alder, poplar, and sweet-smelling cypress. Four fountains of white (foaming) water, springing _in succession_ (mark the orderliness), and close to one another, flow away in different directions, through a meadow full of violets and parsley (parsley, to mark its moisture, being elsewhere called “marsh-nourished,” and associated with the lotus); the air is perfumed not only by these violets and by the sweet cypress, but by Calypso’s fire of finely chopped cedar wood, which sends a smoke as of incense, through the island; Calypso herself is singing; and finally, upon the trees are resting, or roosting, owls, hawks, and “long-tongued sea-crows.” Whether these last are considered as a part of the ideal landscape, as marine singing-birds, I know not; but the approval of Mercury appears to be elicited chiefly by the fountains and violet meadow.
Now the notable things in this description are, first, the evident subservience of the whole landscape to human comfort, to the foot, the taste, or the smell; and, secondly, that throughout the passage there is not a single figurative word expressive of the things being in any wise other than plain grass, fruit or flower. I have used the term “spring” of the fountains, because, without doubt, Homer means that they sprang forth brightly, having their source at the foot of the rocks (as copious fountains nearly always have); but Homer does not say “spring,” he says simply flow, and uses only one word for “growing softly,” or “richly,” of the tall trees, the vine, and the violets. There is, however, some expression of sympathy with the sea-birds; he speaks of them in precisely the same terms, as in other places of naval nations, saying they “have care of the works of the sea.”
If we glance through the references to pleasant landscape which occur in other parts of the Odyssey, we shall always be struck by this quiet subjection of their every feature to human service, and by the excessive similarity in the scenes. Perhaps the spot intended, after this, to be most perfect, may be the garden of Alcinous, where the principal ideas are, still more definitely, order, symmetry, and fruitfulness; the beds being duly ranged between rows of vines, which, as well as the pear, apple, and fig-trees, bear fruit continually, some grapes being yet sour, while others are getting black; there are plenty of “_orderly_ square beds of herbs,” chiefly leeks, and two fountains, one running through the garden, and one under the pavement of the palace to a reservoir for the citizens. Ulysses, pausing to contemplate this scene, is described nearly in the same terms as Mercury pausing to contemplate the wilder meadow; and it is interesting to observe, that, in spite of all Homer’s love of symmetry, the god’s admiration is excited by the free fountains, wild violets, and wandering vine; but the mortal’s, by the vines in rows, the leeks in beds, and the fountains in pipes.
Ulysses has, however, one touching reason for loving vines in rows. His father had given him fifty rows for himself, when he was a boy, with corn between them (just as it now grows in Italy). Proving his identity afterwards to his father, whom he finds at work in his garden, “with thick gloves on, to keep his hands from the thorns,” he reminds him of these fifty rows of vines, and of the “thirteen pear-trees and ten apple-trees” which he had given him; and Laertes faints upon his neck.
“Is the reason your letters have not come for so long because everything is going well? Or, is everything good but you are really busy? Or are you not that busy but just have barely any time for writing?
Please take this worry away from me, I can’t handle it! Do it even if you have to send a courier. I will pay the cost and top him too as long as he tells me what I want.
I am well, if to be well is to live in suspense and worry, expecting all day long and fearing that anything which can hurt a person as happened to my dearest friend.”
Plinius Iulio Serviano Suo S.
1Rectene omnia, quod iam pridem epistulae tuae cessant? an omnia recte, sed occupatus es tu? an tu non occupatus, sed occasio scribendi vel rara vel nulla? Exime hunc mihi scrupulum, cui par esse non possum, exime autem vel data opera tabellario misso. Ego viaticum, ego etiam praemium dabo, nuntiet modo quod opto. Ipse valeo, si valere est suspensum et anxium vivere, exspectantem in horas timentemque pro capite amicissimo, quidquid accidere homini potest. Vale.
“Reverent Hera, who often comes down
From the sky to gaze upon your fragrant Lakinian home.
Take the linen robe which Theophilos, the daughter of Kleokha
Wove for you with the help of her noble daughter Nossis.”
“These weapons the Brettian men hurled down from their unlucky shoulders
As they were overcome by the hands of the fast-battling Lokrians.
They are dedicated here singing the Lokrians glory in the temple of the gods.
They don’t long at all for the hands of the cowards they abandoned.”
“Pass by me, give an honest laugh, and speak over me
A loving word. I am Rhintho from Syracuse,
A minor nightingale of the Muses. But from my tragic
Nonsense poems, I made my own ivy crown.”
“There is nothing sweeter than love: all other blessings
Take second place. I even spit honey from my mouth.
This is what Nossis says. Whomever Kypris has not kissed,
Does not understand her flowers, what kinds of things roses are.”
“This frame has the picture of Thaumareta. The painter
Caught the form and the age of the soft-glancing woman well.
Your house dog, the little puppy, would paw at you if she saw this,
Believing that she was looking down at the lady of her home.”
The cult of Latin. After the thinness, the ‘transparency’, of mediaeval authors, the reading world was once again drunk on antiquity, Greece and Rome; the most educated wrote in Latin; each writer wanted to show that he knew more Latin than the other; there are bales of their Latin poems; the Italians took over the style and extended the vocabularly, the Spaniards and English imitated the Italians; Camoens tried it in Portugal. It was the gold rush for the largest vocabulary. I suspect that Marlowe started to parody himself in Hero and Leander. He had begun with serious intentions.
I recognize that this suspicion may be an error.
The next phase in France and England was to attempt to squeeze the katachrestical rhetoric into a strait-waist coat.
“I believe I have already noted that the more famous deeds and words of men and women are sometimes not their greatest ones. My opinion was confirmed yesterday during a conversation with Fannia. She is a granddaughter of that Arria who was a source of strength and an example for her husband in his death. She was telling me many things about her grandmother which were no less important even if they were less well-known. I think they will be as amazing for you to read as they were for me to hear them.
Her husband Caecina Paetus was sick, and their son was sick, and it seemed that both would died. The son did die and he was a boy of exceeding beauty matched by his humble character who was dear to his parents no less for these qualities than for the fact he was their son. Arria prepared everything for the funeral and then led the ceremony in such a way that her husband did not know. Indeed, whenever she went into his bedroom, she pretended that their son was still alive and was actually getting better.
When he was asking how the boy was doing, she would respond, “he slept well and is eating easily.” And then, when her tears which she had held back overcame her and burst out, she left the room and surrendered herself to sorrow. When she was done, she returned with dry eyes and a composed face as if she had left her loss outside.
It was truly a famous deed when she took a dagger, drove it into her chest, pulled it out again, and then, as she offered it to her husband, added that immortal and nearly divine word, “Paetus, it does not hurt.” But when she was doing these things and saying them, fame and eternity stood before her eyes. For this reason it was greater when she suppressed her tears, hid her grief, and still acted as a mother once she had lost herself without the promise of eternity or the prize of glory to come.”
Adnotasse videor facta dictaque virorum feminarumque alia clariora esse alia maiora. Confirmata est opinio mea hesterno Fanniae sermone. Neptis haec Arriae illius, quae marito et solacium mortis et exemplum fuit. Multa referebat aviae suae non minora hoc sed obscuriora; quae tibi existimo tam mirabilia legenti fore, quam mihi audienti fuerunt. Aegrotabat Caecina Paetus maritus eius, aegrotabat et filius, uterque mortifere, ut videbatur. Filius decessit; eximia pulchritudine pari verecundia, et parentibus non minus ob alia carus quam quod filius erat. Huic illa ita funus paravit, ita duxit exsequias, ut ignoraret maritus; quin immo quotiens cubiculum eius intraret, vivere filium atque etiam commodiorem esse simulabat, ac persaepe interroganti, quid ageret puer, respondebat: “Bene quievit, libenter cibum sumpsit.” Deinde, cum diu cohibitae lacrimae vincerent prorumperentque, egrediebatur; tunc se dolori dabat; satiata siccis oculis composito vultu redibat, tamquam orbitatem foris reliquisset. Praeclarum quidem illud eiusdem, ferrum stringere, perfodere pectus, extrahere pugionem, porrigere marito, addere vocem immortalem ac paene divinam: “Paete, non dolet.” Sed tamen ista facienti, ista dicenti, gloria et aeternitas ante oculos erant; quo maius est sine praemio acternitatis, sine praemio gloriae, abdere lacrimas operire luctum, amissoque filio matrem adhuc agere.
“Oh! citizens of Argos, do you hear what he says? You dare to compare yourself to Themistocles, who found our city half empty and left it full to overflowing, who one day gave us the Piraeus for dinner, and added fresh fish to all our usual meals. You, on the contrary, you, who compare yourself with Themistocles, have only sought to reduce our city in size, to shut it within its walls, to chant oracles to us. And Themistocles goes into exile, while you gorge yourself on the most excellent fare”
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.93.3-5
“Themistocles likewise persuaded them to build up the rest of Piraeus, for it was begun in the year that he himself was archon of Athens, because he conceived the place both beautiful, in that it had three natural havens, and, also that, since the Athenians were now seamen, it would very much advance the enlargement of their power. For he was indeed the first man that dared tell them that they ought to take upon them the command of the sea, and then immediately helped them in the obtaining it. By his counsel also it was that they built the wall of that breadth about Piraeus which can now be seen.”
The journey begins at Omonoia Square, one of the most recognizable landmarks of modern Athens, built in the 19th century after the birth of the modern Greek state, and also iconic to the turbulent history of the country: Included in the initial urban plan of Athens (1833), it’s been renamed many times, as many as it has been renovated, rebuilt, destroyed and remade. A witness to the city’s modernization, once the site of the neoclassical architecture that has characterized central Athens (the body politic’s desire to mimic a grandiose past), it was once regarded as an icon of multiculturalism, in the same way that it is now despised for the same reason.
The rather derelict area is now traditionally known as a gray area for foreign workers, low cost retail (and drugs) and most recently, a site of contestation of European identities with the refugee tents going up in the area, making inescapably visible the plight of human rights and the failure of international law to protect those who need it most. As the square watched the refugees of the Asia Minor arrive in Athens from the port of Piraeus to rebuild their lives in Greece, it has now watched refugees from imperialist wars in the Middle East flock into Europe, but with little hope to rebuild anything.
Yet this image of Omonoia Square with the tents (just a stone’s throw from the Greek parliament), has a tendency to fade quickly. In a kind of white flight that saw the wealthy abandon the city center as it became progressively impoverished—a situation that paradoxically gave it its multicultural character. But a recent change of government has put forward plans for the reclamation of the city center by investor capital. Will the square be cleaned from its intangible history of migrations?
It remains to be seen. But it is significant that here we begin the journey towards “Piraeus/Heterotopia”, a participatory theater project by Japanese artist Akira Takayama that took place in 2017 (as a part of the Fast Forward Festival, organized by the Onassis Cultural Center), and is now dormant but latent since I was able to “awaken” it, during a visit to Athens in May. The project consists basically of an unusual walking tour of the port area, armed with a smartphone app and a map, with several stops selected based on the hidden (or at least not apparent right now) history of the area, unlocking a speculative oral history: At every stop, visitors listen to a story (it’s necessary to reach the spot physically to unlock the sound audio in the app) written by commissioned writers from different countries.
Akira Takayama, Piraeus / Heterotopia, Fast Forward Festival 4, Onassis Cultural Center
The story being told ‘might’ have happened there, and it’s written based on detail research of the history and possible connotations associated with the specific spot. Here we introduce the idea of a para-fiction: It’s both true and fictional. Starting with Ancient Greece, all the way to the current refugee crisis and the Asia Minor catastrophe in between, “Heterotopia” highlights the important role of this area as a space of transition, overturning the current European idea of migration from a state of exception, to an essential aspect of human history.
This “strange land”, is for Takayama an ‘heterotopia’ following from Foucault’s use of the term, as a space of otherness that is larger than the sum of its parts. The urban and economic history of modern Athens has been nothing but strange combination of randomness and neglect, so that the port with its privileged location stands far beyond the metropolitan heart of Athens (centered around the Acropolis), and is not necessarily part of the self-image of Athens today, but it reappears in this project as an epicenter of mobility and demographic change. In what follows, I will stay loyal to the spirit of the project, leaving the oral stories alone, for they need to be experienced in person (the app is still functional and it is possible to do the walking tour).
I will focus on a few spots in the project, attempting to unmask the presence of the past – classical and otherwise, and make it present. At a time of infinite powerlessness before our current condition, with the global erosion of the liberal democratic project, these places of ‘otherness’, at the borders of European capitals (and particularly for Athens, an alleged monument to the Western tradition), remind us of the porousness of history, and therefore, of the tragic but nonetheless pluralistic experiences that have shaped the birth of modern polities.
The arrival in Piraeus is a continuation of the fragile multiculturalism of Omonoia (something that truly stands out in a country like Greece, built along the lines of 19th century ethno-states and largely self-identifying as white, by association with the classical past of Europe), with wares being sold in many languages and crowds of tourists rushing to catch the ferries to the Greek islands. As we know from ancient writers, particularly Thucydides, Piraeus was developed in the 5th century BCE under the statesman Themistocles, who in 493 BCE initiated the works of a fort in Piraeus, and in 483 BCE, the Athenian fleet left their order port in Phaleron, and relocated to Piraeus, a move that would be decisive in the battle of Salamis.
Phaleron, the old harbor, now the district of Palaio Faliro, is also the site of fascinating history: One of the most important archaeological findings of recent years was the mass grave in Faliro Delta, furnishing valuable information—and many new questions—about a rather obscure period of Greek history, the 7th century BCE. The find was the subject of another Japanese artist’s work, when Hikaru Fujii presented his video/performance work “The Primary Fact”, once again at the Onassis Cultural Center’s Fast Forward in 2018, that I wrote about.
Hikaru Fujii, “The Primary Fact”, Fast Forward Festival 5, Onassis Cultural Center
The archaeological site was revealed during the construction of a complex for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, now housing the national library and the national opera, highlighting the hybrid situation of Greece where these long-established shipping families such as Onassis and Niarchos act as a kind of para-state; not unlike the rule of the oligarchs, mentioned by Plato in the opening portion of his “Seventh Letter”. But returning to Piraeus, its story is long and complicated: Athens and Piraeus were connected through a pathway between the two walled cities (the Themistoclean Walls were completed in 471 BCE), but it declined after being destroyed by the Romans. What follows for Piraeus is a long dormant period during Byzantine and Ottoman rule, and later revival when Athens was designated the Greek capital under Bavarian Otto I.
To what degree was the revival of Piraeus part of the European antiquarianism regarding Greece? It would be difficult to answer. The current station building goes back to 1920s, a period of intense conflict in Greece with their loss in the war against the new Turkish republic, along the way forfeiting claim to the historical Greek Smyrna, and receiving thousands of Greek refugees from the Asia Minor, reluctantly welcomed into a country still very poor and largely undeveloped. It was from Piraeus that Greek migrants left to pursue the American dream, and it was also from there that the Nazis occupied Greece.
Different generations of migrants have settled in the area temporarily before moving on (during the research for Heterotopia, Takayama and his team also spoke with refugees from Syria in the refugee camp of the Piraeus port), but postclassical history seems to capture little of the imagination in Greek historiography, where the only path to connect a grandiose classical past with the birth of the modern republic, is the silencing of everything else. In this way, Greeks both reconnect with the European tradition and lay claim to their ‘whiteness’ (opposed to the people of the former multicultural Near East), and replace complexity with a traditional nation state.
“You are asking me to read some of your poems when I am on vacation to see if they should be published. You add pleading and provide an example, when you ask if I can find any spare moments of time to spend on this. You say that Cicero nurtured poetic talent with amazing kindness.
But I do not need to be begged or encouraged. I worship poetry itself almost religiously and I love you most deeply. I would do what you want as carefully as I would happily. Nevertheless, I think I can already respond to you that the work is fine and should not be suppressed, as much as this is possible to evaluate from the parts you have already recited to me, unless it was your power of recitation which moved me (since you read sweetly and skillfully). But I am still confident that I was not misled enough by my ears that the clarity of my judgment was at all dulled. Perhaps my wits have weakened and restrained a little, but they can’t be plucked and removed completely. That’s already my statement on the work as a whole, but I will test its parts by reading them.”
C. Plinius Silio Proculo Suo S.
Petis ut libellos tuos in secessu legam examinem, an editione sint digni; adhibes preces, adlegas exem¬plum: rogas enim, ut aliquid subscivi temporis studiis meis subtraham, impertiam tuis, adicis M. Tullium mira benignitate poetarum ingenia fovisse. Sed ego nec rogandus sum nec hortandus; nam et poeticen ipsam religiosissime veneror et te valdissime diligo. Faciam ergo quod desideras tam diligenter quam libenter. Videor autem iam nunc posse rescribere esse opus pulchrum nec supprimendum, quantum aestimare licuit ex iis quae me praesente recitasti, si modo mihi non imposuit recitatio tua; legis enim suavissime et peritissime. Confido tamen me non sic auribus duci, ut omnes aculei iudicii mei illarum delenimentis refringantur: hebetentur fortasse et paulum retundantur, evelli quidem extorquerique non possunt. Igitur non temere iam nunc de universitate pronuntio, de partibus experiar legendo. Vale.
“Who is more fertile in the art of speech than Plato? The philosophers say that, if Jupiter could speak Greek, he would speak just like Plato. Who is more vigorous than Aristotle, sweeter than Theophrastus? Demosthenes is said to have read Plato over and over with ardent zeal, to have heard him too. That is clear enough from the selection and the magnificence of his words. He even says this about himself in some letter or other – but his style seems too combative when applied to philosophy, as theirs seems a bit too mild when applied to the court.”
Quis enim uberior in dicendo Platone? Iovem sic [ut] aiunt philosophi, si Graece loquatur, loqui. quis Aristotele nervosior, Theophrasto dulcior? lectitavisse Platonem studiose, audivisse etiam Demosthenes dicitur—idque apparet ex genere et granditate verborum; dicit etiam in quadam epistula hoc ipse de sese —, sed et huius oratio in philosophiam translata pugnacior, ut ita dicam, videtur et illorum in iudicia pacatior.
#/media/File:Tuscum_des_Plinius_Schninkel_AA2.jpg){kind=link}
#/media/File:Plinio_Il_Giovane.jpg){kind=link}