Chambers of the Sun Part 15a

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The Noble Savages

Alihan Guesthouse, Selcuk - September 22nd, Evening

"It is an isle under Ionian skies,
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise,
And - for the harbours are not safe and good -
This land would have remained a solitude
But for some pastoral people native there,
Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited; innocent and bold." (from Shelley's Epipsychidion)

It is terribly easy for a young Romantic to see the Ionians as noble pioneers, flawless in character and - for form follows character - flawless in appearance, a generation of oily Apollos calling forth poetry into the wilderness with every breath. It is terribly easily forgotten that Ionians would have stood - rather sheepishly, I imagine - against the three hundred at the Hot Gates, that their nautical knowledge would have put them in the fore of the Persian navy at Salamis, and that they were at best a mistrustful collection of squabbling states who met once a year at the Panionium to pretend that they had more in common than dialect and a taste for pederasty. It is all terribly easily forgotten, because youth wants to believe in perfection. From the exalted heights of their poetry, the immaculate sensibility of the human body and everything that is best in the human nature that we see in their sculpture, and the haunting perfection of the marbles void of the paint which would once have been plastered on, it would seem impossible that anything other than a race in the very element of excellence had lived by these blessed shores.

Hipponax's limping feet had already delivered a couple of swift kicks in the groin to Winckelmann's "blithe" Greeks, who "never suffered from venereal disease or the (delightfully named) 'English malady'" - by which he means depression - quite before the twentieth century, with its compulsive desire for real fact, had so exploded the ideal that we are amazed that such degenerates managed to write, let alone to capture and express the soul of man. Today, I am setting out to deliver the death blow to the poor old lyre-playing shepherd in his age of gold, but on quite different grounds. What I propose to explore is the sheer otherness of the early Greek mind.

We tend to think of the classical Greeks as being a bit like us, really, or perhaps a bit more like the Victorians. We like to picture Sophocles as a sweet old man, perhaps the vicar of a Cotswold village, and Thucydides as a pasty, rather bookish type on the threshold of middle age. At least I do. Their philosophy works on the same logical grounds as ours, only it is less sophisticated, and tragic poetry is really just a stiffer precursor of Shakespeare. The Greeks, we assume, must stand at the inspired beginning of a direct intellectual progression to the present day; perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we think of ourselves as Athenians in trousers. The notion of the Classical aesthetic - even if we have done everything in our power to discard it of late - formed over the course of the Renaissance and later eras has held such sway over our every artistic production that we cannot but believe that the Greeks had it too. Western philosophy, too, has been described as "an extended series of footnotes on Plato," on the assumption that Plato would recognise the dynamics of modern logic; the need to identify ourselves with the classics has informed our reading for five centuries or more, and hence - until the emergence of structural anthropology as a serious science - everything that didn't fit tended to be brushed under the carpet or Bowdlerised.

We cannot really hope to understand a culture until we take it purely as it is, and what Greek culture periodically is is very odd indeed. Today I have gone out in search of a couple of examples of the weirdness - the primitiveness, even - of their early literature. The first of these curiosities has brought me to the modern Turkish town of Manisa. Forty-five minutes' bus-ride east of Izmir, Manisa is an area of rapid domestic growth, and is some way off the tourist trail. It has almost tripled in size in the last ten years, and stands as a testament to the wonderful vigour and hope of the Turkish nation under the AK Parti. Until fifteen hundred years ago, however, this was the town of Magnesia ad Sipylum, named for the crag that dwarfs even the suburbs of the new city, visible for miles around. The magnetes lithos comes from here, so named because, according to Aristotle, Thales was the first to attribute a (vaguely) scientific reason for the phenomenon of magnetism, a mere hundred and fifty miles away in Miletus. This in itself makes a fascinating aetiological study for an insight into the curious blend of physics and poetry that constituted Presocratic philosophy, but is not the reason why I am here - and nor is the probability that the word "syphilis" is derived from Ovid's character Sipylus. It is Homer who has brought me here.

In the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad, at the climax of the plot when Priam takes the hands of the man who has killed so many of his sons and kisses them, and Achilles, riven with grief for his friend Patroclus, is moved to pity, when the greater community of humanity binds a falling king to the warrior who has defiled his best son's body, something very strange indeed happens. Drawn together by their sorrow, they embrace and weep together, and then, when the ransom has been performed, Achilles bids Priam eat, "for even the fair-haired Niobe took thought of food, though twelve children perished in her halls, six daughters and six sons in their prime. The sons Apollo slew with shafts from his silver bow, angered against Niobe, and the daughters the archer Artemis, since Niobe had compared herself to fair-cheeked Leto, saying that the goddess had borne but two, while she herself was mother to many...for nine days they lay in their blood, nor was there anybody to bury them...but on the tenth day the gods of heaven buried them, and Niobe took thought of food, for she was wearied with the shedding of tears. And now somewhere among the rocks, on the lonely mountains, on Sipylus...there, though a stone, she broods over her woes sent by the gods." (tr. Murray)

What on earth is going on? What possible points of comparison could there be between Niobe and Priam, aside from the loss of a child, and how could this analogy persuade Priam to eat? (Readers with little stomach for tedious Classical scholarship may wish to skip the argument and look ahead to the conclusion in about three paragraphs' time) The insertion of this myth would seem inappropriate in the extreme, the sort of thing that you might expect a sniggering Alexandrian librarian to put in to show off his erudition, rather than a teardrop pearl in the diadem of Greek literature. However, when one is in possession of all the facts, it is a piece of the most extraordinarily brilliant character psychology, and takes us back to the very roots of the Iliad. The greater story of the Wrath of Achilles revolves upon a phenomenon called ate, which has no direct English equivalent; translators usually say "blindness." Ate is a force wholly external to man, the eldest daughter of Zeus, and she compels men to grievous error. Agamemnon is afflicted by this force when he snatches Briseis from Achilles, and in return Achilles falls prey to ate when he fails to accept the prayers of the embassy sent to persuade him to relent from his wrath. Both men suffer devastating consequences, consequences which embroil the hosts of both sides in the war; the Achaeans are driven back to their camp, crushing Agamemnon's confidence and status, while Achilles loses his dearest friend Patroclus for his own blindness. The death and mutilation of Hector are a direct result of the ate that has ravaged both sides.

Niobe, for her part, is a passive victim - the extent of fault in ate is not an issue which I have sufficient time or knowledge to discuss here - of this ruin; her father Tantalus had served his son Pelops up to the gods at a banquet, and the stain of his vile action afflicted the whole of his house. The mills of revenge ground slowly and inexorably for the Greeks, and his son Broteas was driven mad by Artemis, Pelops betrayed Myrtilus and brought a further curse upon the family, and Niobe herself was moved to her fatal boast. The curse on the house of Tantalus worked ceaselessly down the centuries, and reached its most current generation in the figures of Agamemnon and Menelaus; thus, from one point of view, the Trojan war was but a single element of the gods' spectacular punishment of Tantalus' impiety.

The point is that Achilles and Priam are both drawn together as victims of a greater hatred, and in reminding the king of this earlier tragedy, Achilles not only alludes to the common suffering that lies over their heads, he also shows a deep sympathy for Priam's feelings. The king is paralysed with a grief that will lay waste to what little remains of his life; like Niobe, he will find that sorrow becomes the sole medium of his spirit. Achilles understands that there can be no redemption, no happiness - for he himself is crushed by the same fate - and so his message is simple. Eat. Life is going to have to be endured alongside grief. Bear it.

These irresistible forces, far greater than any man or god, are felt throughout Greek literature; the overwhelming feeling that I take away from reading Aeschylus' tragedies is the inevitable march of things to how they should be, and Socrates' final admission that he is under the influence of a destiny far beyond any human action makes for one of the most outstanding expositions of thought and character in our history. In a book which it took me an almost physical wrench to leave behind, Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational unfolds the history of primitive passivity in the face of what we would today call the psychology. This spirit is almost the direct inverse of the clarion cry of the Renaissance - "what a thing is man!" - which picked up only the Greeks' wonderment at mortal achievement, and none of its flimsiness. We are inclined to see the march of classical Greece as being primarily a gradual mastery of the world to man, but even in the monuments of the Athenian enlightenment, Plato and Euripides, we see the very opposite.

Going to see Niobe was something of a pilgrimage, therefore, to the savage side of the classics. If the mythological figure who lingered longest in the Renaissance mind was that of Prometheus, chained in the teeth of the hellish elements on his Caucasian mountainside and spitting defiance ten thousand years on, then Niobe is his mirrored antithesis, an immortal reminder to look first to the skies and then to the human heart. Surprisingly, there is some controversy as to where she actually is. She is identified on the basis of the locally-born Pausanias' account as either a rock-carving or a natural formation, both on the shoulders of Sipylus. I decided to choose for myself, and arrived prepared for a day's slog in trackless woods. What I hadn't anticipated was the march of Eski Turkiye's tourist industry; I had only just reached the princess in time.

The nineteenth-century geographers warned me of a four-mile walk east of the town; however, the town has expanded to such an extent that I stumbled upon her before I'd even reached the edge of the suburbs. Worse, the site was swarming with builders. One of them, who spoke passable French, stopped for a chat. Apparently they are building an amphitheatre, and he pointed to a cheerful sign advertising the "Niobe cafe." They found it hilarious that a tourist had turned up already - "etes-vous journaliste, monsieur?" - and queued up to pose for photographs. I swallowed my disappointment and sized up the rock; Pausanias is quite right in his description - from close up, she looks like an odd rock with a tree growing in a hollow, but from a little distance at certain angles and with a fair following light, she looks remarkably like a woman hunched over in eternal grief.

Still, I was so disheartened that I couldn't bring myself to go and look for the carving, which many authorities now identify with the goddess Cybele and claim is possibly a Hittite piece. I had a look at Manisa instead, where Sinan built his last ever mosque commission. The Ulu Cami is indeed the work of a consummate master in that glorious period where brilliance becomes a habit; the showiness has dissipated, and all of the architect's work is done for him by proportion and subtle colouring. Light is diffused around arches whose form mimics the gentle curve of the dome's border more than is usual, and the geometric assonance of the facade is beautiful. A kind lady allows me the run of the entire building, and for the first time I find myself looking down on the mihrab from the gallery.

Next to the mosque is Manisa's museum of ethnography, comprised largely of finds from Sardis and Philadelphia. They have what is not so much a collection as a field of gravity which draws any object of significant age into its orbit with all the discrimination of a magpie; I was shown around by a gentleman who insisted on shepherding me through the rooms in the most bizarre order: geometric-period pots, late Ottoman regalia, Hellenistic statuary, Seljuk gravestones all blurred together into a glorious mess. It is all rather symptomatic of the Turkish attitude to archaeology: "what are you complaining about? It's historical." They had a finely composed small marble of Marsyas and a couple of very well preserved sarcophagi, and to be honest I quite enjoyed having to supply my own criticism and (without doubt horribly erroneous) conjectures as to the period and quality.

It's quite a cheerful little city, really, and ought to make a well-turned-out addition to Turkey's tourist route. I just feel a bit sorry for Niobe.

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