Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

by A. E. Housman

CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.
ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road.
CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.
CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
CHORUS: To learn your name would not displease me much.
ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.
CHORUS: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.
ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--
CHORUS: What? for I know not yet what you will say.
ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
CHORUS: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.
CHORUS: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.
ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?
CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is much the safest plan.
ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.
CHORUS
Strophe
In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But after pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come:
LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingunuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.
Antistrophe
Why should I mention
The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for,
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud.
She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts
I do not hanker after:
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.
Epode
But now does my boding heart,
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many sphipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.
ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
CHORUS: I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.
ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
CHORUS: If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.


This is exactly what it sounds like when I try to translate Greek tragedies. Thanks to Chris for introducing me to this.

Thalatta! Thalatta!

Dear Fellow Ancient Greek scholars,
Yes, the title "Thalatta! Thalatta!" is somewhat misleading, since in fact when the event being alluded to occurred the soldiers were at the Black Sea, not the Mediterranean. However, since Chris and I could not think of any quotes in Greek related to the Mediterranean, this is what we shouted. Sorry, classicists and fans of Xenophon everywhere. So, we hiked to the end of the Agia Irini (Agia means "Saint," by the way- it's a word you run into a whole lot over here) and after we caught a bus ended up in Sougia, a small village on the Mediterranean sea. Most of the students went swimming. Chris and realized that we did not have bathing suits.
But this did not deter us! Into the sea we went, fully clothed. It was very wet. Jeans get very heavy when you are swimming in them. Whether or not it was cold is debatable- I thought that the water temperature was actually rather pleasant.
And that is, my friends, more or less the end of my trip to Crete. After this, we caught a bus back to Chania and from there a ferry to Peireias and from there a bus back to Pangrati. And then I walked home. It was very exciting.

This Gorge is Gorgeous!

Actually, I don't think there's too much to say about our trip down the Agia Irini gorge that we took on our last day. Crete, being a very mountainous place, has a lot of gorges that run from north to south, and they're all rather nice to hike down, I guess. The trip was about 5 miles long, which after the crazy delta force week felt like nothing, and it was pretty, though the light and the placement of trees made it hard to get good pictures.

Goodbye to the Delta Force

I would like to put in a good word for Nigel and Stefanie, the leaders of Delta Force CYA. I do believe, from the words of others and from my own observations, that the Delta Force ("bus D") was by far the best of the five buses on the trip, and that we had by far the best time. I mean, who else broke into an ancient cemetary? Who else were let loose on unsuspecting mountain villages? I know for fact that my people were the only ones who got dragged behind a small restaurant in the mountains and were forced to drink shots of warm, freshly made raki. (This is difficult. Very difficult.)
Unfortunately, it was after our night in Chania that the Delta force was officially disbanded, and we were mixed in again with the rest of the student body. Tear.

Chania- I Should Stop Wandering Around By Myself In Big Cities Without a Map

Finally we made it to Chania (that's pronounced Han-YA, by the way- would it be helpful for people if I made a pronuciation guide? I know I hate reading things when I can't pronounce the words, and that Greek pronunciation is not aways intuitive for some people. Especially since I'm never sure how to transliterate things.) Since I knew I was going to be wandering around the city by myself without a map, I took a picture of my hotel so I could remember that I was staying at the Nefeli, not the Samaria or the Arkadi or any of the other hotels in the city. As hotels go, it was ok- they didn't have enough triples, so I shared a room with only Emma instead of Emma and Christine.
The sea shore! This is Souda bay, which is a place of great historical significance, especially if you are reading about the German invasion of Crete in WWII. (Actually, this was rather fascinating- we talked about the mililtary tactics involved, and it was very interesting. Did you know that Crete was the first territory ever taken entirely by air?)
The bay, this time facing the other way. The water was very clear, and a very beautiful color.
To the lighthouse! Actually, later in the night we talked about going out to the lighthouse, but it was late and we were all a bit tired and not exactly in the proper condition to be taking long walks on an uneven sidewalk next to some deepish water.
The waterfront, which as you can see looks very little like Greece and looks more like Italy. (Hmm. I wonder why? Let me give you a hint- it's a two word phrase that begins with 'Venetian' and ends with 'occupation')

Crete: It's A Little Bit Like the American West, But With More Ruins

So, before we ever went to Crete, the administrators of CYA gathered us all together and explained to us in very simple terms, with pictures, that Crete is just not like the rest of Greece. It's partly because of the geographical distance, partly because of different histories, and partly cultural- but Crete is just different. Sort of like Texas.

We didn't believe them. How wrong we were.
Ok, this is a Roman bath at Aptera, and this is mainly how Crete is not like Montana, in my opinion. Also the olive trees. And the speaking Greek. And the totally different cultures.
But is the culture really so different? People in the west like guns. People on Crete like guns. People in the west like shooting holes in road signs. People on Crete like shooting holes in road signs. People who live on remote mountains in the US are strange. People who live in the remote mountains of Crete are strange.
If you didn't know that this was a trip to Crete, could I convince you that this was Colorado?
Probably not if you saw this picture. It's from a heroon (hero shrine) at Aptera, and it's really cool because as you can see you can still read the inscription. Nifty!

Essentially, Crete is like Texas, but different.

"Bizarre Power Struggles" In Rethymno

The quote comes from my marvelous guidebook, "Let's Go Greece On a Budget," which is a wonderful book that I would recommend to anyone who is going to Greece and likes a guidebook which is budget oriented, informative, and generally snarktastic. They describe Rethymnon as a place known for its "bizarre power struggles" by which I think that they are referring to the warfare that is going on between the drug growers/dealers and the police that is more or less constantly happening there.

Oh, Crete. It is a fabulous place.

Rethymno the city is on the northern coast of Crete, and it is a picturesue little place, with a large touristy waterfront and some back streets that are winding and pleasant. This is the view to the west from outside Fortezza, the Venetian fortress which more or less dominates the city skyline.
My friend Emma and I went for a walk during our free evening, and is usual here, though I'm not sure why, ran into our professors at a random street corner nearish the waterfront. They were trying to take pictures of the ridiculous number of small birds perched on some lines, so I tried to take the picture- without much success.

Otherwise, it was a fun city to walk around in. Emma and I got quite lost, and it was alarming when we realized that we did not know where we were, what street our hotel was on, or even what our hotel was called. Thankfully between the two of us we could remember enough of the landmarks to find our way around. We had a nice dinner at a little taverna on a side street, where we spoke to the proprietor in Greek as a courtesy, only to later find out that it was actually necessary, since she didn't speak any English at all. I think this may have been the only place we ate at where we were not given free raki, but since I was tired at the time and a bit dehydrated, I was just as glad.

This is inside Fortezza, the Venetian fortress, and that building you are looking at is actually a mosque. All of Cretan architecture is a weird amalgamation of Greek, Venetian, and Turkish styles- a testimony to the many takeovers and occupations.
Red Sox Pride!

The sad/funny part is that everyone who has seen this picture yet assumes that I was crouching behind this wall, looking sneaky like a sneaky thing. Or a fox. In fact, I was actually on tip-toe- this place had some major fortifications. And I'm short.
Another picture from Fortezza- the water actually did look that blue. It was a beautiful day.

Kittens at Arkadi!

The moastery of Arkadi is probably one of the most famous sites in modern Cretan history, though since I am pretty sure very few people know much about modern Cretan history, I'm not sure how much this means. It is a very interesting place, and the history of Crete, like the history of Greece, is very interesting.

So, for those of you not in the know: in the late 1800s (1866, to be precise) the Cretans were involved in yet another struggle against their occupiers, who at this point in time were the Turks. A group of about a thousand monks and villagers (including women and children) were holed up in this monastery, fighting against a much larger Turkish force. When the Turks broke through the outer door, the defenders hid themselves in the powder magazine and, when the Turks gathered round to see what was going on, blew the whole thing up. The defenders are very famous on Crete and very well loved- their names are all over the place as street names and you see statues of them in major cities, like Rethymno. It's called the Holocaust of 1866, and the event forms part of the basis for Nikos Kazantzakis' book Freedom or Death.

The monastery is I think of Venetian design, but a common thought is that it looks like a mission from the American southwest. The comparison with the Alamo is, of course, a very common one, especially since Crete is often being compared with Texas. (More on that later.) It's very pretty, and since there aren't very many people there, quite peaceful.
This is a bullet that is loged in a dead tree. It is very famous, and I am about 90% certain that it is a Turkish bullet from the Holocaust, but since there weren't any signs there, I'm not certain.
The dead tree from a distance- it's a very neat looking tree.

But, of course, the best part of this trip was not the history or the site, but the baby animals who were there- in this case, kittens. In a box.
Awwww...

Isn't the cuteness almost too much?

The Mines of Moria

There are very few pictures from the morning of our second day on Crete- we went to an ancient site at Eleutherna, and couldn't take pictures because it hadn't been published yet. This was really too bad- there was a lot of cool stuff there, and there were some things that were extremely well preserved. (Included the skeletons of three children killed in the earthquake that ended Roman occupation of the site. They were huddled together to try to protect themselves from falling rocks. It was interesting to see them there, but sort of heart-wrenching too- sometimes it's a bit too easy to forget that the people I study were real people.) This is a view up to Mount Ida, the mountain where baby Zeus was hidden to keep his father from eating him. We were worried about rain the whole day, but it actually never was a problem- the sky cleared up a few minutes after this was taken.
This is the remains of a Hellenistic guard tower- you can distinguish easily between what was built then and what was built in the middle ages. This was a part of Eleutherna, but far above the site of the town- we were still allowed to have cameras.
Christine at the guard tower! There was a beautiful view, but also quite a steep drop on either side of the hill- I'm afraid of heights, and I had a hard time walking around up at the top. As usual, we were the only people at the site- we had to be led there by some of the archaeologists who were involved with the dig.
And it's a good thing we had the archaeologists! We were chilling, and I was trying not to fall off a cliff, when one of them came over and asked if we wanted to see an ancient cistern. We said yes, assuming it was a little thing- it wasn't. There were two huge underground cisterns, and the neat thing was that they let us go into them and wander around! It was quite dark. This is the view from the smaller of the two, outside to the open air. (Nigel referred to them as the "Mines of Moria", which made us all laugh.)
They definitely weren't promising from the outside, though! We asked how old they were, and it seems that the holes were first dug as quarries- there were probably some natural caves that were enlarged. This was during the archaic period. By the hellenistic period they were being used as cisterns- from inside, you could see the remains of the plaster they were using to seal out moisture.

Eleutherna was really cool too- there is a grave site there, and the finds there are proof that human sacrifice was once practiced as part of funeral rites. (A human skeleton was found that was either beheaded or strangled- we couldn't tell which, the archaeologist's English wasn't so great.) The town had a very nice Roman bath and an ancient temple and a herm and a Christian basilica from the Byzantine period with some mosiacs that we unfortunately couldn't see. Also the skeletons that I mentioned earlier.

Like most of our trips, it also involved a ridiculous amount of hiking- Vasilis, our bus driver, refused to drive down the road that led to the site. I think he was worried about the switchbacks involved.

Delta Force CYA, Operation: Cretan Lightning

Or, the part where Caroline and Bus D/Delta Force CYA illegally broke into an archaeological site!

No, really. We went to Phourni, a Minoan/Mycenaean site, and could only get into the site by climbing around on a large hill and hoisting ourselves over a rather large fence. According to our professors, Nigel and Stephanie, up until this year the site was only surrounded by a pesky little barbed wire fence- easy to climb over- but for some reason they had beefed up security and built a six foot tall wrought iron fence around the entire site. For some reason.

My guess is that the increased security might have had something to do with the large number of students breaking in multiple times a year. Just saying.

Anyways, this site was way cooler than Knossos because we were the only people there, possibly because of the fence. And the whole breaking and entering thing. It was really cool! These are some Mycenaean shaft graves, and as you can see they're in pretty good condition- you can see the remains of grave markers on two of them. All objects found in the site have been removed, of course.

If these look a bit small for graves to you, you're probably right- you couldn't lie a corpse down in one of them. The Mycenaeans buried their dead curled up in little clay coffins, and after ten years or so would remove the bones from the shaft and reinter them elsewhere. This way they could reuse the site!

Which, by the way, was very pretty. It was like much of Crete- sort of scrubby and dry but with beautiful views.
This is a tholos tomb, and it was so cool! This is a pretty small one, and it's pretty simple- the ones at Mycenae, which are very famous, are much bigger and I think more elaborate, though I haven't been there (yet). This one was really cool because we could actually go into the tomb (both the main chamber and the smaller side one) and see it for ourselves.

If you have never seen a tholos tomb, this might look a little strange. Tholoi are pretty cool- they're biggish tombs, partly underground, that are shaped like beehives. In this one you can see the dromos, which is the roas running up to the tomb, as well as the tomb itself.
Inside! It was big enough to fit multiple people, and I could stand in both chambers. Josh, who is a foot taller than I am, could not stand in the small side chamber but could stand in the main one.

And another part of the site! This is a very old part of the site- we broke in uphill, where the graves were newer, and worked our way down/back in time- and to try to explain all the walls would take pages and I would still be confused. There are several tholoi here, in bad condition, and rock walls built over a period of hundreds of years.

Puppies at Knossos!

Note: I have a ridiculous number of things to say about Crete, and I don't want my stories to be boring because I'm rushing through them. I'm posting pictures for now- explanations and stories will be coming soon! So, our first stop on our trip was Knossos, a palace built by the Minoans, and basically the best part of this part of the trip was the puppies. They were very cute. And probably the most spoiled puppies ever, since every one of the thousands of tourists had to stop and pet the puppies.
Ok, to be fair, it is a cool place. This is a segment of a room that was probably a shrine of some sort, and it's all original- the rocks, the mud between the rocks, etc. In the more remote places, you can sort of hang out and appreciate how amazing this must have been when it was still in use, 3,000+ years ago.
Much of the site has been heavily restored, which is both cool and not cool. I think it's really good for people who don't have a background in archaeology, because it means they can see what it might have looked like a bit better. But it is an interpretation, and I for one would prefer to see the site and think for myself rather than see a bunch of columns they've painted red. Look! Isn't this way cooler than some painted column? It's an ancient hole for a door hinge! I would rather just chill around the site and see things like this and imagine Knossos for myself.

Also, it was just really, really crowded. And hot. On the whole, I would say that Knossos was underwhelming- still cool, but by far the least cool of the archaeological sites I went to.

Especially since this site didn't involve any breaking and entering.

Iraklion: A City Which Might Also Be Called Heraklion

Iraklion, the first stop on our magnificent journey through the island of Crete, is one of the larger cities in Greece and is, from my brief aquaitance with it, a very ugly place. It does have some interesting things in it: this is the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis, the Cretan writer who I mentioned in my last post. It says "I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free," or some approximation of that in Modern Greek.
This may actually be one of the ugliest fountains I have ever seen in my life, but the amount of ugly is so great that it's actually hysterical. I think the Venetians made this fountain at some point during their long occupation of the island out of bits of ancient things that they could find.

The famous fountain of four lions, also made by the Venetians. Wandering through the big cities of northern Crete, you often feel like you are not actually in Greece- due to lengthy occupations by both the Venetians and the Turks, many cities have a very interesting mix of architectural styles.

The little column that you can see at the right side of the picture is the remains of a minaret from when this church was a mosque. Many churches on the island were made into mosques and then back into churches. This was more prominent in the other cities we later visited.
And just in case you forget that this was a Venetian territory- the winged lion is everywhere.

Fun With Ferries: The Trip Begins!

Actually, this is what happened when I accidentally left my camera with my friends when I went to bed on the first night on the ferry. Please note that these photos were not taken by me. They are NOT MY FAULT. I'm sorry if the creepy photo of Chris is giving you nightmares.
In some order, which I can't determine due to the fact that blogger is doing weird things: Chris taking a myspace photo, Christine and Catharine playing cards at a funny angle, Gina finding this whole thing quite funny, Catharine with cards, and Christine looking like a blow-fish.