Letter from Athens

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash

Snow was falling when I arrived in Athens, which will be my home for the next two years. The hills around the city stayed white for a whole week, making the trees loaded with oranges which line every street seem even more magical. The move has been complicated and much delayed, necessitating a break from the LitSalon. It’s by very happy coincidence that my first new study will be on the island of Agistri, to read the Odyssey and The Oresteia, with lots of familiar faces (and some new) joining me in my new home.    

In the meantime, I am enjoying Athens’ incomparable museums before the onslaught of summer visitors.  Museums, like literature, have always captivated me – just as words help us to make sense of the past, objects can do something similar, bringing us a closer connection to history.  

For a lover of the Homeric legends, the National Archeological Museum is the highlight of an Athens visit. The first two rooms house the contents of the graves from the palace at Mycenae, including the famous gold ‘Mask of Agamemnon’. Here are the hauls of treasure that Odysseus kept acquiring and losing, which Homer described so meticulously even though, a hundred lines later, they would end up at the bottom of the sea. They are gleaming inside their glass cases, seemingly ready to be loaded on to a ship.  

There are gold drinking vessels, tripods and bowls for mixing wine, all of them splendidly decorated. Objects made to be desirable as well as useful. Real hands lifted these cups, or wound the strands of gold beads around their necks and admired themselves in mirrors shaped like lotus flowers. Everything is rich with detail, even the smallest objects contain secret worlds. The blade of a knife is inlaid with a picture of a striped cat stalking water birds, a large gold signet ring shows a masted ship with full crew and two couples hailing it from the shore. Although so much of the Odyssey is fantastical, a myth, the people that Homer sang about never seem more real, or more like us, than when looking at the treasures they collected in life, and brought with them on their journeys to the afterlife.  

When the weather turned sunny and warmer a few weeks after we arrived, we spent Saturday on Aegina, an island familiar from last year’s study – the whole group made a day trip to see the temple there. The tables and chairs where we had a long, lingering lunch were all packed away for the winter, but the museum was open. Everywhere in Greece has museums, and even the tiniest are full of treasures. One of my favourite objects is here, a terracotta jug from the 6th century BC showing Odysseus and his companions escaping form the cave of Polyphemus.  I like it even more because, compared to some of the other objects on display, it’s not particularly well made: the painting is pretty crude, cartoonish. It is probably best described as fan merchandise – somebody bought it because they thought the Odyssey was really, really cool.  I feel the same way!

This time in Athens has given the Odyssey and Oresteia such a fresh new context, and has already increased my anticipation of sharing the joy of reading them when the study starts.

See you in the pages!