Chambers of the Sun Part 15b

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(continued, funnily enough, from 15a)

We don't just assume that the Greeks thought along lines similar to the modern mind, we assume even more implicitly that they expressed themselves in similar terms. Indeed, the limpid clarity of classical writing has been a model not just for our prose writers but for our poets. I myself have peddled the direct simplicity of Greek diction, unmistakable not only in tedious legal wranglers like Lysias but also in the sublime music of poets such as Sappho, Homer and, in later times, Theocritus. We tend to identify lucidity of language with lucidity of thought, and to believe that, minus a few inevitable cultural barriers, Greek is thoroughly intelligible.

Oh dear.

The trouble comes with dramatic poetry. The problem, I think, is that drama is a communal activity in a way that epic isn't quite so much, and "personal" poetry is barely at all. Epic, with its unnatural hotpot of dialects and identities, makes its appeal to the greater world, neatly robing in words all the vague feelings of a greater Greece that might have been entertained by Sicilians and Cyreneans alike. Personal poetry, on the other hand, by which I really mean the monody of the symposium, is by its very nature subversive and individual; but dramatic poetry is the very affirmation of the community.

The twentieth century has seen a great deal of excellent work done by anthropologists on the importance of ritual in Greek drama, and it helps to use the imagination a little. Take the Athenian festival of Dionysus, for example. It is midwinter, and the Celts up north are slaughtering their herds before their trousered gods, clustering around infernos of yew boughs. The winter does not come quite so harshly upon Attica, but it is a time of year when the individual is no longer self-sufficient, and has to turn to his family, to his deme, to his city for support. It is a time of scarcity and physical discomfort, when everything that is wild in man hears the edge on the wind in the hills. The Athenian response to this dangerous in-between time was to celebrate the meeting of beast and angel in the human body; wine flows copiously and the tables are laden, the passions are inflamed and the animal is in the ascendant.

Then - when his belly is full, his family safe, his body warm - you remind man that he is a social animal. The easiest way to do this is to repeat communal rituals, to rehearse the old myths, to establish the circle of firelight and the darkness outside it, us and them. In a developed society like that of early Athens, the answer was discovered on the stage. Citizens from every walk of life - and we know that the audiences were broad, judging by the enormous capacity of the amphitheatres and the level of address in social poets like Aristophanes - citizens from every layer of society gathered for art, for entertainment, but above all for pride in being Athenian.

Though Athenian tragedy may have evolved into one of the most sophisticated artforms ever known, against such a visceral background it was always subject to less noble pressures. We see the ancient winter rites in half-noticed, vestigial forms like a literary tail-bone: the repetition of myths, the odd structure of the choral strophes, and most obviously in the elusive Satyr plays. It is even more evident in Old Comedy; Aristophanes' language has shocked readers for centuries, often not so much by its notorious bluntness as by its parochial turns and in-jokes. It's not just his diction, either - the weird, shadowy half-figures and half-plots that keep recurring throughout his plays hint at a structure that would have been archaic even in his day.

I think that it makes matters clearer to trace dramatic poetry back to its beginnings. Aristotle famously said that drama originated in the dithyramb, but it is probably safer to say that it would have been one of the genres of choral melic poetry. Choral poetry would have embraced the dithyramb as well as many other varieties of verse designed to be performed before a public audience. Much of it would have been provincial by function, as we see in one of the most outstanding poets that Asia Minor ever produced - Alcman of Sardis.

This is not, I concede, one of the happiest pieces of joined-up thinking in this journal, because one of the few things that we can say with any certainty about Alcman is that he left Lydia and spent his most productive years in Sparta. (Any excuse, though.) Now, thanks in part to 300 and in part to Thucydides, we know that Sparta was a brutally spare society dedicated to producing a brilliant warrior class. Writing would of course have been for wimps and runts; this is borne out by Sparta's most famous poetical son, Tyrtaeus, whose elegy is devoted entirely to getting soldiers to tear out other soldiers' intestines. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that the Sparta of the seventh century BC was a haven for the arts. Among others, the semi-legendary Terpander of Lesbos taught there, and later said, "here the youths flourish with their spear-points and their clear-voiced Muse."

It was in such a world that Alcman wrote his partheneia, meaning literally "songs for virgins." Judging by the surviving texts, which are precious few, these would for the most part have been concerned with initiation and the adoption of the common identity. They were sung by choirs of adolescent girls hand-picked for their beauty and rigorously trained in dancing, singing and physical fitness. Bach's Wachet Auf strikes me as the best analogy, except that Alcman blends in elements of personal reference and local myth to the point of obscurity. The partheneia are written in an articulate, complex metre, and read like a mix of liturgy and banter. Factoring in the idiosyncrasy of the Doric dialect, I would frankly not have a clue were it not for Campbell's copious and helpful notes.

"The girl," sing Alcman's chorus, "who comes next in the beauty stakes after Agido is like a Kolaxaean horse running after an Ibenian. For the Peleades (interpretations include "the Doves" and "the Pleiades"), rising like the star Sirius through the ambrosial night, will attack (or possibly "contend") with us as we carry a robe (or possibly "plough") to the goddess of Dawn (or possibly Fertility)." You are forgiven for scratching your head. Alcman is going out of his way to write poetry that is intelligible and appreciable only to a seventh-century Spartan; "no writer," comments Campbell, "wrote less katholou (for the whole), or more for his own city." With such an antecedent spirit, it is little surprise that we find Athenian drama - an art rooted in the shibboleth - a little cryptic from time to time.

It would be quite outrageously tenuous to try and pretend that my journey to Sardis is likely to throw any light on these observations, since all the indications are that Alcman left as a young man. Still, Sardis is well worth the trip. The city grew fabulously wealthy thanks to the wool trade and, more romantically, to the streams on Mount Tmolus, which are flecked with gold-dust. It is also good country for mythology, and each of the kings of the Gygean dynasty has his own anecdote. You may know all about Croesus, but did you know that Gyges himself reached the throne through a bizarre combination of sexual deviance and wounded pride? He was previously a loyal retainer to the king, who happened to be infatuated with his wife to the point of maintaining that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. "You believe me, right?" he would say to Gyges.

"Yes, m'lud."

"No, Gyges, I'm serious here. You have to see her to believe her. If only there were some way that you could see her naked…"

"With all due respect, m'lud, I can take your word for it."

"No, no, Gyges, here's an idea! She will undress in her chamber shortly before coming to bed. If you could wait in the shadows behind the door, you could catch a glimpse and then escape unseen. Nobody need ever know except you and me. What do you say, old man?"

Protesting every inch of the way, Gyges was manhandled into crouching behind the entrance to his own mistress' chamber before the hour of her undressing. The king himself placed his loyal servant in a hiding-place, muttered a few more choice words about his wife's backside, and went to bed. Meanwhile, the queen came in, and was disrobed by her attendants. Concealed in the corner, Gyges saw all, until the maidservants departed and the queen stood for a moment, admiring her naked reflection. Unbidden, a little gasp escaped Gyges' lips - the queen looked up instantly in his direction, but seemed not to see him, and left the chamber. Sweating profusely, the poor servant left as soon as he could and spent a sleepless night wondering if he'd gotten away with it.

The next day, the queen arranged a private audience with Gyges. Herodotus records her speech: "take thy choice, Gyges, of two courses which are open to thee. Slay (King) Candaules, and thereby become my lord, and obtain the Lydian throne, or die this moment in his room. So thou wilt not again, obeying all behests of thy master, behold what is not lawful for thee. It must needs be, that either he perish by whose counsel this thing was done, or thou, who sawest me naked, and so didst break our usages." (tr. Rawlinson)

In fairness to the lackey, he had to think quite hard about it, but there was no heroism in his soul. The queen, machinating away like Lady Macbeth, put a dagger in his hand and led him to the very same spot from which he had watched her. He lay in wait until Candaules came in, and plunged the dagger into his chest. In the absence of anybody better for the job, Gyges took the crown, and lived out another undistinguished thirty eight years, probably terrified into submission by his new wife.

There is also a charming story told about Alyattes, Gyges' rather more competent grandson, that when he died the people volunteered a tomb for their much-loved king. Herodotus records that it was built by "tradesmen, handicraftsmen and courtesans" - with no typing error. The tale runs that each workforce raised a column in proportion to the effort that they had invested in the tomb, and that the courtesans' column was by far the tallest, because in Lydia every girl would practise prostitution until she married. They're weird like that in foreign parts.

Alyattes fathered Croesus, who, on the basis of a message from the Delphic oracle that he would "destroy a great empire," picked a fight with Persia. Little did he realise that the empire the oracle meant was, of course, his own. Cyrus was not impressed and annihilated the Lydians, taking Croesus as a kind of pet. Lydia would thenceforth be a Persian satrapy until the days of Alexander.

Most of the surviving town is Hellenistic at the very earliest, with an elaborate Roman synagogue as testament to the thriving multicultural ethos of the Asian administration (or possibly they just needed the money) and a vast, ugly, heavily reconstructed hall of the Imperial Cult. The site is well-presented and gives an excellent idea of personal space in a Roman town; there is a fully-excavated drain running underneath the synagogue and a series of labelled shops that did not close until the Byzantine era. In the synagogue itself, the elaborate geometrical mosaics are the best-preserved that I have ever seen outside of a museum. Further up the hill, above the modern village of Sart, there are the remains of a Lydian settlement, which are currently closed. I thought briefly about shinning over the short perimeter fence, but a virago across the road had one beady eye on me as she beat her washing out on her balcony.

The real diadem of Sardis is the temple of Artemis, founded on the ruins of an earlier site dedicated to Cybele. One of the largest temples in the ancient world, it was once a rival to the Artemision at Ephesus, and is in a considerably better condition today. I wandered starstruck through a shrubbery of Ionic capitals as tall as I am, punctuated by the occasional column of the most astonishing magnitude. The shrine gains an electric aura from its location, on a shoulder between the dramatic crag of Mount Tmolus and the old acropolis and wreathed with woodland. It is generally almost deserted.

And that just about wraps up Turkey. I'm working on a final entry to drag everything together, but it looks as though it'll be fairly dry and academic in parts so feel free to give it a miss. Many thanks indeed to everybody who has taken the time to read any of this blog; it's been good to have a lifeline to home.

Güle güle to all!

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