Eternal Athens: A Modern City Which Still Lives Its Past

by C. P. RODOCANACHI

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THE STREETS OF ATHENS

ATHENS, with a population of one million souls, Athens, a capital in full process of modernization, a great center of trade, industry, and finance, still is and always will be shot through with rural charm. The Greek cannot live in a town in the Western sense of the word; nor can he live in the country. There are practically no isolated farmhouses in Greece. His habitat is the village, populous enough to provide company or, more specifically, verbal intercourse, and yet open to the sun, the wind, and the landscape. Though Athens has immensely outgrown the dimensions of a village, the surrounding countryside is everywhere present. Its busier thoroughfares have open views of fields. Owing to the varying ground levels the eye is nowhere absolutely bounded by walls. From all windows a patch of Attic plain may be enjoyed, a ridge of mountains, or an expanse of sea.

Athens is wrongly called a city. It is the largest of Greek villages. Side by side with many-storied buildings with elevators, central heating, electric kitchens, baths, and all the equipment of a selfrespecting capital, even in its most central quarters Athens has cattle sheds and poultry yards with their many smells. Processions of turkeys driven by peasants with long rods gabble down the main streets straight from the farm. In the thick of traffic, shepherds pass along with bucolic slowness and serenity, clad in clothes like those worn by their ancestors. The cry that from time immemorial has gathered the flocks together on the high grazing grounds of the Pindus or the winter pastures of the Boeotian plain, answers the futuristic cacophony of automobile horns. Among men and women dressed in the latest creations of Savile Row or the Rue de la Paix, you can often meet kilted mountaineers from Mount Parnassus, or baggy-breeched sailors from the Aegean Islands. A Cretan couple, in white boots and a black kerchief for headgear, are seen sitting at the same table with their son in plus fours, a student of Athens University.

In Athens the unprepossessing truths, the seamy side of a large city’s public services, are exposed to view. In other towns people do not see how slaughtered animals reach the butcher’s stall where they are exhibited so neatly retailed that the bloody reality of their last journey is forgotten. Here cartloads of whole lambs and calves, their heads or legs dragging along the streets leaving a trail of blood, are a daily sight. Drying linen is everywhere visible with all its intimacies. Athens is candid.

Just as the philosophy of Aristotle and presentday politics are peripatetic, so is the retail trade of Athens. Little handcarts, impelled by strong arms and a quick brain, offer the passers-by the most miscellaneous wares from pins to perfumes, pants to neckties, toothpastes to gramophone records. The bargaining between customer and vendor proceeds on the lines of the Socratic syllogism. Nothing is left to chance. Argument follows argument, retort, retort. It is not so much a case of rapacity versus thrift as a verbal duel between vendor and purchaser, each bent on beating the other in wit and astuteness. The argument is often carried on between a hawker looking up from the street and a housewife who pelts him, his wares, and his prices with her shrill vituperations from a thirdor fourth-story window. As the argument grows hotter other windows open up and many onlookers take part. It is often lifted from the humble plane of the particular to the high sphere of the general. It is not the tradesman’s fault that everything is so expensive; it is not even his fault that profiteering is rampant. The fault lies with the Government. The last elections, the financial system, the great international questions of free trade and protection, are all dragged in. The original difference over the quality and price of a comb or a bottle of Eau de Cologne often acquires the importance of questions with which the whole world and the mightiest brains have been battling for the last hundred years.

But king of the Athenian streets is, unquestionably, the donkey. It is through the ubiquitous donkey that Athens keeps in touch with the countryside. It is the donkey that brings proud Pentelicon, Hymettus of the many shades, bluff Fames, flowery Kiphissia, the olive and cypress groves, vineyards and pinewoods of the Attic plain, the kitchen gardens and orchards of Patissia, the beehives of old Byzantine monasteries, directly to Athens.

Early in the morning the peddler wakes the cooks and scullions with his peculiar chant in praise of green vegetable marrows, wine-colored eggplants, and rubicund tomatoes. But the best witness to their quality is the donkey that carries them, for he is the sure, unlying witness that they are fresh from the fields. The presence under your window or at your front door of that misunderstood and much maligned quadruped, so unjustly overshadowed by the prancing horse of knights and battles, is itself a grateful change of air. When he stands there all the slowness and tranquillity of country life is with him, a consolation for the harassing speed and agitation of the town. Two huge baskets balance themselves on each side of his painfully bony quarters. They are filled to overflowing with all the tasty vegetables that the Attic earth can produce. All questions as to their quality are answered by some poetic simile. The vegetable marrows are as fresh and as firm as the breasts of a virgin; the eggplant is as delicious as the lips of a sweetheart; the tomatoes are honey without the bee sting. Every seller from the Attic plain is capable of lyric flights in praise of his goods and fine images that Theocritus would have deemed worthy of his Bucolics.

The vegetable-donkey is succeeded by the fruitdonkey. There is something nobler in his step and general deportment. His owner is of a higher peasant class. His packsaddle, bridle, and baskets are of better materials, so that he may be equal to the honor of carrying that glory of Greek earth, the grapes of Dionysus. After a brief altercation over the price the bunches are weighed. This operation does not pass without lively and acrimonious comment. No Greek housewife has ever believed in the Roman scales, based on the rules of leverage discovered by her distant ancestor Archimedes. No Greek peddler has ever believed in any other principle of mechanics as applied to the art of weighing. The great virtue of the Archimedean system is that, in able hands, it gives uncontrollable results. Absolute measure, which always inspired the lucubrations of the Greeks, was never popular in Greek trade. Indeed, the Greeks seem to have such reverence for it that they refuse to apply it to sordid utilitarian purposes. Be that as it may, weighing is always a fruitful source of contention and, consequently, of enjoyment. Between the grape peddler and the housewife strong language is exchanged — she, consigning his misdeeds and his family down to the tenth generation to the flames of hell, he, protesting his righteousness to all the saints in paradise. The difference is invariably settled by a small bunch added or snatched off at the last moment.

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BUT in tile hierarchy of Athenian donkeys the place of honor must go without doubt to the flowerdonkey: the bearer of the city’s moving flower beds whose fragrance and magic give a new life every day to the morose aristocratic quarters, and bring beauty and consolation to the most dismal slums. Those two long ears, symbols of laziness and simplicity, acquire a most unexpected dignity when they are seen proudly emerging from between two large baskets overflowing with royal lilies, irises, Kiphissia roses, clove-scented carnations, golden chrysanthemums, and whole loads of violets, the veritable Attic flower, “the crown of Athens” according to the poets. Under the flower-donkey’s sly eye, dull with knowledge and experience but quick to reach conclusions, the young man chooses the bunch to be offered to his sweetheart; a young woman hurriedly pins a few carnations to her dress; an old lady buys, without even haggling, a few lilies to take to the sacred icon of the Most Holy Virgin in a neighboring church.

The donkey, in his wisdom compounded of the flight of all illusions and hopes, looks on passively without stirring ear or hoof. He expects nothing better than the prick of the sharp stick that will push him along to some other street corner, where he will alleviate other pains, add to other joys, obtain other pardons. He follows placidly all the vagaries that bring men and women to his side. Flowers bought for one woman will some day go to another; the tolerance of the Holy Virgin will never equal the accumulation of sins it is intended to redeem. He knows, moreover, that the flowers he carries away from the fragrant gardens at dawn, pearled with the dew, will all be withered by the evening. He knows that tomorrow is never better than today. He knows full well the painful weight of his daily load and the even more painful lightness of his feed of oats. Ever since man and donkey met, service has been the privilege of the one and illtreatment the fate of the other. Yet the victim of this conjunction of tyranny and service has never revolted. Slavery has its own rules of wisdom, whatever they may be. But it is to be hoped that if there be a paradise it is full of Greek donkeys and that if there be a hell the generality of Greek donkey drivers are roasted forever in its flames. And if all the sticks that have been broken on the backs of donkeys are used as fuel, the flames will never be spent.

If Athens “crowned with violets” always was and still is fragrant, it always was and ever will be — resonant. The privacy of the home is completely foreign to the Greek or, more accurately, the Greek home is not the private dwelling of each family, it is the whole city. Truly this city-instinct, still alive in the heart and mode of life of every Greek, links the present generation to those who founded the Greek miracle on the fusion of the private hearth and the altar in the city temple. The city is still, be it small or large, the only home of its citizenry. They feel more at home on the public square, in the streets, in the taverns, than in their own houses. This city-instinct as contrasted with the hearthinstinct is the reason why street life is more intense in Greece than in any other country. At certain hours of the day nobody seems to have stayed at home. It may be said more accurately that everybody has left his house for his home: the gardens, squares, and streets of the city. The house is for sleep at night and rest in the afternoon. Meetings with friends, evening meals, games of cards, backgammon, or chess, take place in the cafés, where whole families are seen seated as it they were at home. It is usual for a newcomer to Athens to ask a friend or relative: “At what café shall we meet?" Only very rarely is there an inquiry about the house where the friend or relative actually lives.

The old conception of the city has survived all vicissitudes. Today, as in the days of Pericles, a Greek is primarily an Athenian, a Boeotian, a Thessalian, a Peloponnesian, a Cretan, etc. Every province, every town, every large village always extols its virtues and proclaims them to be without peer in the whole of the Greek community; every fault and weakness is attributed to the rest of the country. Patriotism and the sense of political unity are not at the root of local particularism, they merely grow out of it and crown it. Provinces are not divisions of Greece; Greece is the sum of its provinces. But if Greece is not the expression of racial unity as between politically independent cities, it is nevertheless the political synthesis of distinct towns and villages. Greek patriotism is the apex of an emotional pyramid based on town and village solidarity.

But the survival of the old Greek civic spirit is yet more noticeable in the persistence of the close relation between the city and religion. The pride of a city, or of a particular quarter in large cities, is not its private or public buildings. It is its church. In the smallest villages, in the poorest quarters, you can generally find a church out of all proportion to its surroundings. To have a large and sumptuous church is the ambition of every community. Money that would not be spent on comfortable houses, money that could not be raised for local schools or administrative quarters—generally the shabbiest in the country — can easily be found for and spent on the erection or decoration of the local church. The ambition of citizens is such that whole generations will sacrifice their savings for the building of some wonderful church.

Solidarity in religion, violent individualism in private relations, a picturesque manner of life in which material comfort has little place but the soul is satisfied by the simple pleasures of nature — such is the hallmark of the Greek throughout history. If Greek intellectual and artistic achievements today, though far from negligible, may not be compared with what they were, this is the inevitable lot of a people overshadowed by the glory that was Greece. Nevertheless, if civic virtue and aristocratic simplicity still tread the paths of earth, it is in Greece, and particularly in Athens, that their footprints, however faint, are least unlike those left in the glorious days of old.

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THE AGORA

NOTHING links the Athens of today more closely with Hellenism of all time than its central square. Whether we speak of the Agora of the classical era, the Hippodrome of Byzantium, or present-day Constitution Square, open-air gatherings for the pleasure of debating every conceivable subject are the hallmark of Hellenism. It is always on a public square that the Greek has chosen or repudiated his governments, corrected the strategy of his generals, repealed the laws or the sentences of his courts. Most acts of this kind are merely academic. Only a few are actually carried into effect. For the Greeks have always met to talk. The spoken word is the only god whose faith they have never betrayed.

Having discovered at a very early stage that speech is both the instrument and the mistress of thought, the Greek has always endeavored to sharpen this instrument, and he faithful to that mistress of his soul. Adequately to fill his lungs, the air which the Greek breathes must be resonant. Silence is stifling to him. The use of words is not, he thinks, merely utilitarian. The purpose of speech is more the child of words than their father. Words are treated as though they possessed an existence of their own. Occasionally they may be called in to serve some immediate practical purpose. But, generally, the purpose derives from the display of words and is rarely the primary occasion of speech. Even in the hottest argument persuasion is not the main object. For a Greek, argument is less the crossing of rapiers than the erection of parallel columns. Each party builds his own column. Argument is piled on argument as block on block. The two opposing columns rise side by side, each completely independent and oblivious of the other. The whole point is to build higher and faster than your opponent; to overawe him with your audacity and to astound the onlookers. He who has finished his column first and crowned it with a flowery capital is considered the winner. He must be an artist in quality and speed. This explains why the Greek has always been such a quick thinker and glib talker.

Greek columnar architecture is probably the outcome of the Greek mode of argumentation. In other architectures, the outlines, if extended, generally lead to a common center, where they should meet. Like the Greek argument, Greek lines run strictly parallel. Greek speech does not aim at contact; agreement is not its object. It aims at superiority. When Greeks exchange news it is less for the sake of information than for the possibilities of argument over the news exchanged. Their powers of dialectic are, therefore, unequaled. Mount Olympus was a paradise of argument. The Iliad and The Odyssey are still the best textbooks on which to train orators. Plato chose the argumentative dialogue as the best means of building and expounding his philosophy. The unsurpassed beauty of Thucydides’ history rests largely on the speeches which he attributes to his heroes. Rhetoric in poetry, philosophy, history, even in dreams of the hereafter, is most certainly peculiar to this race, which thinks and acts to this day in terms of eloquence, The most illiterate peasant is, in his own way, a master of speech. He can only be guided by a speaker subtler than himself. To deduce contrary conclusions from the same premises or, by some tricky move, to alter the premises in the course of argument in such a way that agreement can be avoided and new verbal beauty brought to flower, has always been and still is the national sport of the Greeks.

Throughout all the changes of religion, social and political constitution and rulers, the real mistress of the Greeks has been sophism — sometimes, but not always, in the pejorative sense of the word. It is sophism that made Greece both so great and so small; great when it was used to a purpose, small when it was abused. Etymologically the word means “wisdomism.” The consequence is that education in Greece was never a question of learning facts. It was always a question of receiving, displaying, and professing “wisdom.” For the Greek mind, meditative and silent thought is inconceivable. Thought and its expression are considered inseparable and equivalent. In great minds this equivalence was extraordinarily fruitful, as is proved by their great achievements. But when words no longer subserve thought but are granted a value of their own equal to that of thought itself, the mediocre mind is sorely tempted to use them, to the detriment of constructive thinking. And since every Greek is naturally skillful with his tongue he believes himself wise and that his primary function is to display his wisdom. This compels him to explain, to comment, to argue until his opponent is beaten at points, though rarely knocked out and never persuaded.

This controversial attitude is sublimely illustrated in Plato’s dialogues. Dozens of characters pass across the dialectical stage of this greatest of all thinkers. They belong to all stations of life, from professional intellectuals to businessmen. Their dialectical skill equals that of Socrates, the past master of argument. If he generally wins the day it is only because of his “daemon” and not because of his superiority in dialectic. Scenes from Plato’s dialogues, or the lifelong oratorical duel between Aeschines and Demosthenes, the political antagonism between Pericles and Cimon, are repeated every day on Constitution Square in Athens. In summer, dialectical exercises are peripatetic; in winter they take a sedentary form inside Zacharatos Café. In both cases it is desirable that there should be several protagonists. The eristic art is greatly enhanced by a background of listeners and hecklers.

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CONSTITUTION Square is swarming with groups of twos and threes walking up and down. Argument and rhetorical gesticulation are everywhere. Some groups may be seen to split up now and then, because a coup de gráce in the form of an argument ad hominem has been delivered. But again and again groups of the most skilled debaters become centers round winch the itinerant cells conglomerate. When the discussion becomes so general that few can hope to get a hearing, a rapid process of dissociation soon restores more favorable conditions. The members of too large a group are seen leaving it and adhering to some other smaller cell. There they seize hold of the first argument that strikes their ear, oppose it, and so constitute part of a new group. This process is so general all over the famous Square that at certain hours of the day it is like a great honeycomb where hundreds of bees are busy gathering the honey of Attic speech. Everybody lives, moves, and has his being in a hubbub of “words, words, words,” and since the possible combinations of words are infinite the work is never finished. After nearly three thousand years this game is still played. Inside the café the process is similar: arguments fly from table to table, chairs are carried to and fro, associations and dissociations are constantly taking place according to the trend of the argument. Many pencils are at work. Military moves are sketched on maps of a startling subjectivity; designs of houses, pseudo-Euclidian. geometries, uncontrollable algebraic formulae and compulations that have made mathematics, long before Einstein, the most relative of sciences, litter the café. Marble table tops are scrawled all over with accounts, bank balances, and state budgets, the latter always showing a deficit when the computer is in the opposition, and large surpluses when Ins party is in power.

The streets that converge on to the Square seem merely intended to feed it with subjects for controversy. With grandiloquent slowness people stroll along less with a view to transacting business than to collecting information. Their shopping consists mainly of anecdotes, scandals, gossip.

Agoracrite, the political-minded shopkeeper in Aristophanes, still carries on his dual trade of tripes and loquacity. If the Square is the heart, the streets are the veins of the Greek body politic. They are also the wings of the stage on which the political comedy of the moment is enacted.

Laughable though this garrulity may appear, it has not been without value. Under the long Turkish domination speech was held suspect by the conqueror. Subjects of conversation were few; all politics were banned. The Greeks suffered more from these restrictions on speech than from all the other nuisances imposed upon them. Youth fled to the mountains, where at least they could voice their ideas and sing their patriotic songs. For many generations the youth of Greece became Klephts and Armatoles. Then one day they swept down from the mountains and ousted the invader. Would it be too fanciful to say that the repression of Greek speech ultimately drove the Turk back into Asia?

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THE public square may be considered the keystone of Greek thought, for the Greek was never a solitary thinker. The Kant of Koenigsberg, the Spinoza of Amsterdam, those hermits of the intellect, have no counterpart in Greece. All Greek thinkers were public men, in all senses; they were both public-spirited and popular. To name only one: Socrates was a man in the street, a man of the Athenian market place, as well as a good soldier popular with his comrades-in-arms.

Today he would be a regular client of the Zacharatos Café and a frequenter of Constitution Square. He would be seen in Shoe Lane in constant intercourse with cobblers and the contemporary Agoracrites of the food market. His days and nights were so full of talk, his nature was so opposed to the solitude of study, that there is not a single line from his hand. That greatest master of “winged words” seems to have been incapable of thought except in the presence of opponents. To sharpen his mind he needed the grindstone of objection and opposition. His greatest ideas seem to have shot forth like the sparks from friction.

In this respect Socrates is the heart and soul of Greece. His metaphysics spring from bantering witticisms. His psychology and ethics are children of the crowd. The sap of life as lived by the common herd is in them. He is so much of the crowd that he often shows himself shy, when he has to express higher meanings. Then he hides himself, or is hidden by Plato, behind some magical subterfuge — Diotima, for instance — or behind that “daemon “ of his. He is a man of the people, poorly clad, heard unkempt, with a sensitive but in no way intellectual face. Judging by his looks he might have been a tripeseller.

Spending his days in the gardens of the Ilissos, in the streets, and round the Agora; strolling in and out of little shops and taverns where he was offered a cup of wine, resined in those days as now; followed by street urchins who were amused by his Silenus-like appearance and his humorous sallies; interviewed by men of every class and profession, from the innkeeper to the high magistrate and the intellectuals who were intrigued by his paradoxes, little guessing that they hid the truth of tomorrow; known to be henpecked at home by a proverbially shrewish wife, Socrates gained for himself the popularity of picturesque eccentricity, of a beggarly kindness and sociability spiced with flashes of wit and long disquisitions of an incomprehensible nature, where gods, men, and the city appeared in a new light. Echoes of his utterances in the streets, squares, public gardens, and shops gradually opened to Socrates the doors of the aristocratic houses. The hospitality extended to him by innkeepers led to the hospitality of the great, where he was pressed to eat and drink all night reclining on soft cushions between smart young men and brilliant wits. By some kind of intellectual and social dandyism a place of honor was given, at table and in conversation, to this shabby Silenus. The aristocracy of Athens were charmed and titillated by the presence at their table of a man so foreign to their manner of life. What they enjoyed most was his tantalizing sophistry, where his real meaning always escaped their interpretation and thus led to new arguments.

Socrates was lionized by the aristocracy of Athens because he was not one of them. Their sophisticated minds enjoyed his broad popular sarcasms, and the most sophisticated of them all, Alcibiades, enjoyed it more than anybody else. In Socrates the street conquered the intelligentsia and the aristocracy. With this conquest the fate of old Greece was sealed. And it is not without reason that Socrates was made to pay, with his life, for this invasion by practical, popular common sense of the august realms of the aristocratic beau monde of which the Greeks were so proud — and rightly, in the light of its astounding achievements.

Modern Athens affords us a clue to what happened then. It is not so long since characters similar to Alcibiades and Socrates could still be seen in the streets of this perplexing city. Some forty years ago there lived a belated edition of Alcibiades. An aristocrat by birth, an intellectual, and a famous duelist, full of wine and ideas, a friend to many and the generous benefactor of a host of picturesque destitutes with something personal and original to say, Prince George Mourouzis was both the idol and scandal of Athens. Rich, handsome, a brilliant cavalry officer, a lover of all women in search of love, a snob with the snobs, most simple with the common folk, he collected round him all the dandies and all the bohemians of his time. In his wake there followed many shining cavalry swords and many yet more shiny old frock coats. Socrates would have been his most cherished devotee and friend. Lacking a Socrates he attached himself to a certain Vdelopoulos, who preached and, in his own way, commented on the Gospels, to children and grownups at every corner of the main streets, amid the laughter and abusive quips of his audience. He was often seen in the cafés imbibing glass after glass of brandy with another of his boon companions — Suvlis, the philosopherbarber of Athens, who shaved the smartest men and dressed the hair of the smartest women, delivering at the same time with oratorical gestures and voice his views on world politics and the regeneration of mankind.

Athens is never without certain itinerant and oracular personalities scattering paradoxes by the mouthful, often covering some deep truth, often merely mad. With long beards and hair, clad in shiny rags that were in their time smart suits, they move from table to table, from tavern to tavern, from group to group, everybody’s friends and guests. All laugh at them, but all listen to them. For derision to be turned into admiration, and their paradoxes into the truth of tomorrow, would it be enough for them to be put to death with a cup of hemlock? Do they lack genius, or merely a Plato? Would they go down in history if only they could find their Aristophanes? These queries must remain unanswered, for nobody knows where Socrates ends and where Plato begins or whether Aristophanes satirized Socrates or only his lionizers. What is certain is that Socrates the individual thinker and Socrates the symbolic voice chosen by Plato the better to enunciate a philosophical system which still stiffens our theology and our scientific methodology, was a man of the Athenian market place. This alone confers a strong title to nobility on those streets, squares, taverns, and cafés. Let nobody laugh at the preposterous arguments that rage there. Some of the great truths on which the world shall live for many centuries may once more emerge from this fog of verbiage.