A clever face

Caius

Ceasar

Little-Boot

Did he really deserve such a ravishing portrait in marble? The question is silly, but I will repat it: did he? So much subtlety, so much psychological empathy expended on a figure that has become the byword of tyrannical excess and sheer psychopathic malignity through the ages. For even if only a tiny fragment of the accusations leveled by Suetonius and Dion Cassius are true, the rest being calumnies reflecting the animus harbored against him by the senatorial party, still there is enough of depravity there to make one gasp. This young man insolently tossing his brow, his frightfully penetrating glance, the malicious smile emitted by his pursed lips, all this is (knowing what one does know) the quintessence of beastliness hiding under a highly polished facade. As I was standing before him I felt that one could very easily allow him/herself to be charmed by this eager face. So, again, did he deserve this?

The easy answer is that he did not, but it is a trite one. For the stuff of history consists of the canonization of various personages who just made a mark on memory. This elevation is mostly due to happenstance or privilege, and only in rare cases to ability. But ability which rides the cusp of chance equals happenstance as well; there have been untold millions of supremely gifted individuals simply swollowed by external adversity without a trace. But even those who left a good legacy had as a rule to purchase this through the suffering of myriads whom they used as the instruments of whatever beneficial goal they were working towards. Are they immune to prosecution on account of the end result, even though the mostly unstated and unreported woe of their victims was as brutally real as it gets? Hegel and his motley followers say yes, but I personally beg to differ.

And, then, there is the other circumstance that the alleged benefaction to humanity of these "world-historical" types is usually judged to be such post facto on the instigation of those who uphold and perpetuate its norms and structures. It is pronounced good simply because it was in some sense successful. But this is a terribly dangerous principle. For in the absence of a god of history who guides the outcomes according to a plan guaranteeing the triumph of virtue (whatever that might be), those who did prevail did not do so by necessity, but by mere chance. In which case it is entirely conceivable that their adversaries might have just as easily prevailed given a different conjunction of contingent factors (including ability to judge characters and situations).

We commend, for instance, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath for bringing about the abolition of feudalism and the establishment of individual rights in Europe. But who is to assert, and on the basis of what secret gnosis, that the same outcome would not have been brought about anyway, without the abhorrent butchery that those "world-historical" events involved? Why do outcomes that the collective consciousness of humanity gradually inclines towards as it processes its historical experience have to be imposed on concrete life from above, namely through the actions of chosen individuals or groups supposedly incarnating a hypostatized universal will (a Weltgeist)? Why not entertain the contrary notion that it is only through the spontaneous confluence of countless particular actions on the ground that the very same outcomes can be securely established, in which case the dazzling theoretical and rhetorical pyrotechnics of those claiming to have read the mind of history's god (Hegel's phrase) is simply de trop? But we have been intellectually cowed by the audacity of those visions, a capitulation which fully serves our natural tendency to leave the strain of thinking to others in favor of sleepwalking through our lives or of mindlessly attaching ourselves to sundry "saviors".

A more interesting, and possibly equally true, answer is that the "bad fellows" do indeed deserve the adulation that art, literature and official history have heaped on them. Firstly, because if one digs deep enough one might discover some benefits that their murderous rampage did proffer to those that survived to enjoy them. After the black death those that were spared enjoyed a much more comfortable life, for vast tracts of lands now lay without master. After the annihilation of the Pontian Greeks ordered by Stalin (an event, by the way, which the staunch Stalinist frame of mind of today's Greece studiously ignores, although one might expect that it would inflame its ingrained nationalism), the populations left behind -or more accurately the segment thereof loyal to the Party- saw their standard of living rising appreciably, as they now appropriated the property of the masses that perished during the treks to central Asia. Stalinist propaganda reels of the time proudly exhibit the stately neoclassical dwellings of the Greeks, built before the revolution, as gifts of the communist regime to the grateful proletariat. And, which is more scary, this is how the surviving proletariat itself both willingly and through brain-washing came to remember them.

As for our friend Caius Little-Boot his sworn enemies inform us that before he had used up the immense treasure that Tiberius bequeathed to him (in the record time of less than a year of his accession to the imperial dignity), he also did accomplish projects that did favor the common weal (aqueducts, baths etc., not to mention public games), δημοκρατικώτατος γὰρ εἶναι τὰ πρῶτα δόξας (Δίων Κάσσιος). That first year was remembered as blissful by the people of Rome, both against the background of the afflictions of Pretorian rule in the city as Tiberius gradually rotted into bestiality in his Capri seclusion and also on account of the memory of the beloved Germanicus, the Boot's father.

And this brings us to the second, and more significant reason, why the malefactors "deserve" their immortality in art: they are weighty symbols. An aside here: Hitler and Stalin did not achieve such immortality for their tyranny also managed to destroy art itself (Eisenstein being a baffling exception). But Caius was full of artisitc pretensions himself to the extent of becoming enamored of dance masters and pining away at their feet on stage: ἐδούλευε δὲ καὶ τοῖς ὀρχησταῖς καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις τοῖς περὶ σκηνὴν ἔχουσιν. And he had the insight to recognize Greek genius and elevate Greek art. He even dabbled in writing poetry in Greek, apart from the fact that he spoke the language fluently. He, thus, had a mighty tool at his disposal which he was far-sighted enough to further. And it served him well. Mussolini can be said to be a true follower of his in this respect. For he also seized on genuine art and gave it free reign, to the extent that the artistic legacy from Fascist times (such as poetic and visual futurism as well as architecture as evinced by the EUR complex for instance) contains a genuine aesthetic kernel that defies the ideological declamation.

So what symbol did Caligula actually become? In his own eyes obviously that of divine rulership, almighty in its deeds that mock all human standards and inclinations. To me, the supreme token of his own sudden lunge into bestliness (allegedly after an unexpected recovery from a severe illness a short time into his reign) is not so much his incestuous relation to his sisters, and especially Drusilla, not even his sadistic rapaciousness with respect to other persons' goods (wives as well as money) -although all these things are nauseating enough. It is not, further, the famous floating bridge from Puteoli to Baeae. That was a jest, a cruel jest surely bankrupting further the public coffers and subjecting to his punishing whim a multitude of unfortunates as he strode about in the breastplate of Alexander, but still a jest, as were his two floating palaces in imitation one supposes of Cleopatra. No, his vilest urge was to ship from Greece all the statues of the gods he could lay his hands on, including the famous one of Zeus from Olympia, to cut off their heads and place his own on their shoulders instead. As I look at his head in Corinth I can very well imagine it being one of those which replaced the divine prototypes upon those mutilated bodies. This delusion of divinity (at least Alexander was faking it all) pinpoints the inner origin of the actual mutilations he inflicted far and wide upon the Roman populace, the sickest one being when he ordered a section of the crowd watching the games to be pushed into the arena to be mauled by the beasts as there were no more convicts to be used that day and there was still time for fun. All this in fulfilment of the prophesy of Tiberius that he was rearing a viper for the people of Rome. But Tiberius also added: "and a star in the firmament for all humanity". And how true he was, in his twisted way. For his adoptive son is indeed one of the darkest angels to grace the annals of human evil-doing.

Caius is the symbol of the depths of degradation that human nature can plumb, in the same way that the statues that he destroyed (he was also said to be planning the destruction of the works of Virgil and Ovid) are the benchmark of the heights of life-fostering creativeness which that same nature can also attain. His most appalling attribute, revealed early on, was according to Suetonius the delight he got from the pain of others: the more excruciating the pain the more orgasmic his transport. This propensity he ably carried forward well into his reign: ἦν δὲ οὐ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν ἀπολλυμένων οὕτω τι δεινόν, καίπερ δεινὸν ὄν, ἀλλ' ὅτι τοῖς φόνοις αὐτῶν ὑπερέχαιρε καὶ τῆς τοῦ αἵματος θέας ἀπλήστως εἶχεν (Δίων Κάσσιος). His special skill lay in construing the statements of his subjects, no matter how laudatory of himself, in such a way that would always support their despoilment and physical annihilation. He was the consummate ἀργυρολόγος, as Dion Cassius also calls him. If someone praised him as the greatest emperor of all time for all his youth, he interpreted that as meaning that he was too young for the office. Hence the speaker was pronounced guilty of sacrilege. So, whether one spoke or remained silent he was equally condemned.

He hated Tiberius, of course, for having  murdered his mother and brothers. He even smothered him on his deathbed as the old brute seemed to be tarrying in giving up the ghost. But when he acceeded to office, he interpreted the denunciations of the defunct emperor that the advent of the son of the beloved Germanicus unleashed as an attack upon that same imperial office, especially if they came from senators. In his attack upon the Senate he brazenly evoked they very admonitions of Tiberius, in order to justify his murderous onslaught: δεῖ καὶ ἐμὲ μηδὲν χρηστὸν παρ' ὑμῶν προσδέχεσθαι, Dion quotes him as declaring. And the biographer continues: τοιαῦτα ἄττα  εἰπὼν αὐτὸν δὴ τὸν Τιβέριον τῶ λόγῳ παρήγαγε, λέγοντά οἱ ὅτι καὶ καλῶς καὶ ἀληθῶς πάντα ταῦτα εἴρηκας, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο μήτε φιλήσῃς τινὰ αὐτῶν μήτε φείσῃ τινός. πάντες τε γὰρ μισοῦσί σε καὶ πάντες ἀποθανεῖν εὔχονται, καὶ φονεύσουσί γε, ἂν δυνηθῶσι. μήτ' οὖν ὅπως τι χαρίσῃ πράξας αὐτοῖς ἐννόει, μήτ' ἂν τι θρυλῶσι φρόντιζε, ἀλλὰ τό τε ἡδὺ καὶ τὸ ἀσφαλὲς τὸ σεαυτοῦ μόνον ὡς καὶ δικαιότατον προσκόπει. οὕτω μὲν γὰρ οὔτε τι πείσῃ κακὸν καὶ πάντων τῶν ἡδίστων ἀπολαύσεις, καὶ προσέτι τιμηθήσῃ ὑπ' αὐτῶν, ἂν τ' ἐθέλωσιν ἂν τὲ μή......οὐδεὶς γὰρ ἀνθρώπων ἑκὼν ἄρχεται, ἀλλ' ἐφόσον μὲν φοβεῖται, θεραπεύει τὸν ἰσχυρότερον, ὅταν δὲ δὴ θαρσήσῃ, τιμωρεῖται τὸν ἀσθενέστερον.

A chill runs down one's spine listening to this. All the more so because it is a true diagnosis. This is the very genius of death pontificating.This is the discourse of pure might, shorn of any moral adornment. This is the formula of historical action reduced to its elementary components. This is Thucydides looking on from his distance of four centuries or so to witness the verification of his insights (he was the model for Dion Cassius). Machiavelli must have learned a lot from this diatribe.

All subjects hate their rulers and wish them dead. So, the ruler should not show favor to any one of them (especially the most potent among them), and he should not spare any of them. Murder is the indispensable instrument of power. The only thing the ruler must strive to effect is what is pleasant and safe for himself. If he does this he will not suffer anything adverse to his interests and he will enjoy all good things in life. Moreover, if he achieves this he will be honored, willingly or not, by those who secretly wish to destroy him. No man willingly bends to power. They will serve it as long as they are afraid of it. But if they gain in strength, they will put down the weaker party.

The most disheartening piece of this wisdom is the one claiming that the whole society will acquiesce in egregious tyranny, provided the tyrant is resolved to be unflinchingly brutal as long as it takes and he lets all know it. Of course, a conspiracy may lay him low, as it did Caius. But the tyrannicides usually do not aim to do away with tyranny, but only with the tyrant so they can take his place. Cassius Charaea, the killer of Caligula, was an exception in that harking back to his namesake who had asassinated Julius Ceasar, intended to restore the republic by giving power back to the Senate. But the dominant political actors, even though they were opposed to the fallen monster, did not concur. Poor lisping Claudius was cowering in the closet and when the Praetorians found him he thought that he was headed straight for the executioner's block. But they acclaimed him emperor instead and they disembowelled Chaeraea. Empire was the only game in town and the various factions were just vying about who would execute it most consequently. They fully shared the dead boy's horrific doctrine, except that they objected to his manner of dividing the spoils. Society, from its elites down to its last downtrodden member, had been completely gleichgeschaltet. The imperial regime was strengthnened by the murder of the wayward emperor, for that weapon had been employed which is most congenial to its tyrannical nature. Claudius would eventually be felled in the same manner. So the tyranny went on and on, and in the minds of subsequent generations it even acquired the glow of glory and beneficence, manufactured chiefly by orators, poets and historians.

So we are stuck with Caius after all. Can we see through his smirk? Can we decipher the symbolism that his, alas, attractive countenance exudes, brushing aside the mesmerizing aesthetics?

Corinth in the spring sun

A weary sailor dreaming of the priestesses of Aphrodite

A chubby Hellenistic flutist and friends

The fortress of Aphrodite: Acrocorinth

From Corinth or from Syracuse?

A Corinthian capital from Corinth

A goat contemplating the vanity of existence

Apollo and Daphne

That old bloody-mindedness again

Apollo on guard 

The ruins of Corinth are opulent and exquisitely wrought, as was to be expected. But they are not "Greek". They are Roman, or more precisely Greco-Roman, with the exception of that stalwart of quintessential Hellenism, the archaic temple of Apollo. Looking at that long suffering giant, the oldest free standing edifice in Greece, I was instantly reminded of its brother, the temple of Apollo in Syracuse. They are uncannily similar, as they ought to be. The columns of both temples are monolithic. The temple in Ortygia is not in such a prominent spot as that in Corinth, but otherwise the family resemblance is striking. It could not be otherwise: Syracuse was the most illustrious colony of Dorian Corinth.

For the rest what we are looking at here today is Colonia laus Julia Corinthensis, namely the city founded by Julius Ceasar in 44 B.C some time after his victory over Pompey at Pharsala in Thessaly. The Hellenic city had ceased to exist in 146 B.C. when Mummius Achaicus razed it to the ground slaughtering its population, in another feat of glory as understood in those beloved classical times. The new city had a mixed population, consisting of Roman legionaries and their families, Greeks, Jews and others. The Jewish population in particular increased dramatically after the crushing of the Judean revolt by Vespasian and Titus. Vespasian dispatched to Corinth 6000 Jewish slaves, the pitiful remnants of another glorious massacre, in order to participate in the great project of cutting a sea passage across the Isthmus. This had already been dreamed up by Periandros who had to settle with the δίολκος instead, and revived by no other than Caligula. Nero was still enamored of this idea.

These facts are well known and in a sense trite. Nevertheless, they go against the grain of the historical understanding prevalent in modern Greek society and education. If you bring up the Roman dimension, you will most likely get disapproving frowns: how dare you claim that such an unrivalled culture as the Greek was ever mixed together with the crudity of the West which, as we all know, was eating acorns when "we" were building Parthenons? This is the level of imbecilic stupor that learning in general has descended to here, especially during the past generation. The chief assumption behind this moronic notion is, of course, that there has always existed a racially and culturally "pure" nation, which went through various phases of foreign occupation without ever forfeiting its identity. Thus we are taught in school that first there was the Ρωμαιοκρατία, then the Φραγκοκρατία and finally the Τουρκοκρατία. Of course, no mention is made of a Μακεδονοκρατία, although the descent of the Macedonians and their military destruction of political freedom in southern Greece was very much perceived by the southern Poleis as a violent imposition of a foreign regime.

The Romans, then, supposedly came and strangled the freedom of Greece, although there was no politically unified Greece in 146 B.C. In fact it was the Roman conquest that amalgamated the disparate fragments of Hellas, which had been warring among themselves as always, into a unitary province of Achaia, with Corinth as its capital. It pays to be reminded that Rome itself was most probably founded by Hellenic traders sailing from Greek Sicily up the Tiber (the Aenean tale being an Augustan concoction). Besides the Roman elites already at the time of the late Republic had been decisively Hellenized. The upper crust was Greek speaking or at least bilingual. When Ceasar was assassinated his last words were spoken in Greek, and Suetonius presents Caligula for instance speaking in Greek and citing the Greek poets in the original. In another period the official language of the Christian church with Rome as its center was Greek as late as the 4th c. A.D., a whole line of early Popes being Greek-speaking (some of them being celebrated as "saints" by the Orthodox church even to this day). Roman culture had developed under the guidance of Hellenic and Hellenistic prototypes.

Rome's takeover of the Greek mainland was a political event of great significance. But it was no "enslavement" as today's nationalists would portray it, with the fuming patriots huddles in dank underground cells, singing Greek anthems sotto voce and plotting the overthrow of the foreign yoke as the boots of the legionaries pounded the pavement above and the barbarian Latin tongue drowned out the noble sounds of Greek in the marketplaces.The Greek people were not a pariah community under Roman jurusdiction. That is why they never dreamt of revolting (as the Jews repeatedly did). Their language, religion and philosophy had triumphed all along the line and the leading lights of Greek thought (Polybius, Plutarch, Herodes Atticus) were fully integrated into a civilization they considered their own without the least detriment to their robust and proud Hellenism. To them civis romanus sum was in no way an insult, as our "national" baboons would have it. But then they would also condemn Polybius and Plutarch and a host of other late Greeks as traitors and bootlickers of the oppressors of the fatherland. Their atrophic mind is capable of just so much.

It was out of this Roman imperium that the later Byzantine entity, the eastern portion of the Empire, emerged.  Here we observe a remarkable somersault in the nationalist fairy tale. The "Byzantines" were Romans, they called themselves Romans, and they claimed for themselves the entire heritage of the former world empire through Constantine's translatio imperii. Magically, though, in nationalist hands the Byzantines spring out of the box once again Greeks, the descendants of that pure race that the Roman conquest had enslaved. In every schoolchild's mind today, and for the wider society too, it is a firm truth that Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian were Greeks, i.e. the same in all respects as today's Greeks, as Greek as Kolokotronis and Athanasios Diakos -and Andreas Papandreou, God forbid!

Christianity itself has also been reinterpreted from this angle as a Greek project, chiefly on account of the Hellenistic Koine being the language of the gospels (there is even a nationalist fringe propagating the notion that Jesus himself was Greek). Capitalizing on the rivalry between the eastern and the western church from the 9th c. onwards, the nationalists also eject the "Franks" from the precincts of the "true faith". Correct Christianity now becomes the exclusive property of the only god-anointed race: it is Greek Orthodoxy (mind you this implicitly also excludes the Slavs and Arabs of the Orthodox persuasion, just about everyone in fact who is not of the only allowable ethnic lineage). In this manner the accursed races of Jews and Latins are cleansed away and the annals of world civilization now sparkle with only one jewel of a race to adorn them.

It is entirely superfluous for any sane person (but sanity is in short supply here) to remark that although Paul, for instance, wrote in Greek, he was no Greek at all in the ethnic, cultural, racial or any other sense as the nationalist monstrosity would have it. Although he is indeed someone that, in a broad sense, any truly educated and fair-minded Greek of today in possession of his/her language and a critical historical sense would be rightly proud of. But these Greeks are a tiny minority in the "Greece" of today, which is instead a den of ranting nationalist apemen, under black or red flags regardless. And, thus, as a result of the above violation of just about every canon of right thinking and plain decency, the correlative historical tale of the Φραγκοκρατία emerges. Here again, we have the western beast  springing out of its forests and caves in order to annihilate the only fortress of ethnic purity and religious sanctity in the universe, Greek Constantinople. It would be self-demeaning to comment on this piece of abomination.

A visit to Corinth under the spring sun is refreshing and rejuvenating. The temple of Apollo still stands guard over the slope of the Corinthian Acropolis, the Acrocorinth, towering above and sheltering within its walls the remnants of the renowned temple of Aphrodite with its one thousand-strong crew of dazzlingly beautiful female servants of the Goddess. In the distance the Corinthian gulf sparkles, with the ornate Lechaion road pointing the way to the once bustling port of the same name. That Corinth was filthy rich just stares you in the face, and you don't necessarily need Horace to remind you that penurious nobodies are better advised to stay away. This is the Hellas of the world, an ecumenical city ably moulding with clearly Hellenic tools a universal humanism in which other cultures could also feel at ease. Roman Corinth is in fact a restoration of the universal cultural and political significance of its archaic and classical predecessor. In the marvelous museum you come face to face with the artifacts of this exciting epic: the remnants from the time of Kypselos and Periandros, the delightful pastoral mosaics and the haunting facade of the Phrygian captives which are the flowers of Hellenic art in its Roman reincarnation.

It is here also that you can stare straight into the eyes of Caligula. But more of this anon.

On the uselessness of Christianity

All the above of course applies to the primitive form of Christianity (for lack of a better word), the one emerging from the Gospels, or to be exact from the sayings of Jesus as recorded in these Gospels. Everything else is an accretion (even Jesus' words may have been twisted, come to think of it). And especially the Pauline version which is a rude imposition, lacking completely in the simplicity and the humility we find in the original message. Paul is pure conceit and self-importance masquarading under a fake confession of abjectness in the presence of his redeemer. His ostentatious emotionality is wielded as a weapon of terror. It is an irritating inflation of his own ego, in the exact same manner as his follower Augustine. It is just the rhetoric of power, or more precisely the power that dreams of its eventual elevation to world domination. With Paul the charisma has been already routinized into utter boredom. He is a rule-smith and behind the filigree of his injunctions there already gapes a disheartening void. His command that existing authority must be obeyed unquestioningly by "all souls" (πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω) lays the groundwork for the transformation of Christianity itself into a system of authority. It did that by latching on to the existant political structures. This announces the sorry and sordid future. Paul turned Christianity (for lack of a better word) into a church and a theology, that is into a set of cognitive and moral fetters. And by becoming that it ceased to be a living and redeeming faith.

But the the original "good news" was not a dogma, but a kerygma. It was the slave's mode of being, his coming to terms with his unfreedom sub specie libertatis and his attempt to share it with others. His subjection to external authority was not by way of validating it, but an act of inner defiance that sapped its foundations. This slave was a silent rebel, and not a salivating would-be king waiting for the moment when he would bestride the summit of worldly power. This is the valuable and abiding existential core of the Christian world-view, the one salvaged by Kierkegaard in modern times. But it was this that fell by the way as Christianity became an imperial religion and thus embarked upon its own stretch of vile deeds, the first in the series being its brutish assault (on the instigation of newly Christianized kings) upon the standing legacy of the classical spirit, smashing its temples, statuary etc. The acts of Christian rulers in subsequent centuries were just as unyieldingly rational, and as a result criminal, as any of those of Hellenic antiquity. They worshipped the logic of power, just as absolutely as any of the monsters portrayed by Thucydides or Suetonius. That -maybe- they experienced a more complicated inner torment does not mitigate their iniquity. It rather magnifies the signal hypocrisy of their conduct. Against this backdrop, the medieval "mirrors" of the Christian prince can only be read either as a parody or as an indictment.

This triumphant, official Christianity is, compared to Hellenic culture, an enormity and eyesore. Its advent drastically impoverished humanity. It drained it of all cognitive grandeur and moral earnestness. For it could now allegedly count on guaranteed salvation, provided one recited some incoherent mumbo-jumbo, made some funny motions and bribed the absent Father. The believer, you see, had now money in the heavenly bank with guaranteed interest accruing for all eternity. It all became so easy. And predestination made it even easier: for self-righteousness is the commonest of human propensities. Everyone can convince oneself of one's own self-evident goodness. And this is "proof" that one's precious self definitely counts among the "saints". This led to an ethos of passivity loaded with a bogus self-importance. This vulgarly political Christianity killed politics. For it abjured praxis in the world, and placed all creative endeavor in the whim of an alien being. Nothing depends on our initiatives, so we might just lie back and wait for our justification to descend from above. For we are, of course, certain that we have it in our pocket. This is such a convenient laziness.

As for the Christian aesthetic, I have always thought that both its Byzantine repetitive formalism and its Gothic extravagance are shallow and boring. The suffering here is cheap and artificial. It is made to order to induce self-loathing and terror. Its exaggeration just makes one laugh, or retch. This is not art, but just mechanical technique meant to regiment and to cow. It does not even want to know itself as art, so why insult it with a tag that it resents. Art is the refinement of pleasure. And pleasure here is forbidden. In the medieval epics, such as the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied or El Cid, what is of artistic worth comes through the depiction of brutality and violent emotion, the raw physicality of existence. To the extent that they are genuine works of art they are, for all the pious pretense, anti-Christian. The same goes for the philosophy of the time. To the extent that it exhibits true thinking it works against the grain of the theology. Whatever is of value there is a fresh pantheistic naturalism, its bold heretical gestures. The doctrine of "double truth" is an indictment of official theology, the death knell of Christian smugness. Living thought pines for the return of Hellenism, the return of man.

The theologically based narcisssism promoted by Christianity is far more dangerous than the egomania of an Achilles. For it leads to a murderous free-for-all, in which all clashing parties claim to have the one true God on their side. The Greek gods, on the contrary, were divided among themselves. They were a mirror of fragmented humanity on the highest aesthetic plane. The Greeks, in any case, never fought for Apollo or Athena. They fought for the interests and the ideals (which was the same thing) of their Polis. The "holy wars" of cross-bearing hulks and paupers (and all other such wars derived therefrom) are on the contrary the exemplar of ugliness, of deformity. A figure like Richard Coeur-de-Lion is indeed interesting as a politician and war-lord and the atrocious massacre he perpetrated at Acre just as tragically despicable as the slaughter at Plataea or Melos. But in all this his "Christianity" is beside the point. The unchanging human nature that Thucydides depicts cut through the pointless theological babble of those times or any other, and brings to the fore the the savage beauty of the raw deed, exposing by and bye the superfluousness of the Christian pap. Compared to the sublime pathos of Greek tragedy the myriad of heavy tomes of abstruse Christian theology are not worth a fart. When this finally dawned on Christian "thinkers" they tried to bring Greek reason back in through the back door. But without abandoning their πρώτη πλάνη, namely the claim of epistemological priority for their bizarre "revelation". But this won't do. And Enlightenment criticism readily showed the emptiness of this pretense.

But there was another original sin affecting, this time, all Christianity (for lack of a better word), including its innocent, primitive form. The Christians rightly diagnosed the Hellenic world as immoral. But they misidentified its essential fault. With remarkable single-mindedness they located it in its sexual licentiousness and "perversity" (meaning male love, τὰ παιδικά). They heap a torrent of violent invective upon the religion of antiquity as stemming from and promoting erotic misconduct. The Alexandrian apologists, for instance, have no eye for any other aspect of Greek art or culture, apart from the lewed writhing of its naked bodies. And what a prurient eye it is. Their pornographic imagination gets terribly swollen by this spectacle to which they attribute the collapse of the ancient world. But behind this primness (exemplified by the self-castration of an Origenes, for instance) is in fact hidden an obsession with the biological functions, an intense undercurrent of animal hedonism. This may be sublimated, in the monasteries in paricular, as the love of the Virgin (what an image of supressed but imperative sexuality!), but it also breaks through to the surface with a surfeit of illicit erotic acrobatics. This, in its various forms, including the criminal one, has been an essential ingredient of the Christian experience throughout the centuries. Homoerotic "perversion" is in fact a substantial element of this sustained delinquency. The Christians themselves are the most trenchant accusers of their own doctrines.

It is, hence, exceedingly shameless for them to indict the Greeks with respect to their sexual propensities, and another proof of their intolerable hypocrisy. In truth, the emancipated libido was one of the most valuable, and tragic certainly, features of Hellenic life. In its extreme manifestations it led to grotesque suffering and injustice. When Caligula was murdered he was repeatedly stabbed in the genitals -and he certainly deserved it. But in the pre-Christian world the erotic was out in the open, acnowledged, contemplated, depicted in literature, theorized about, moulded into philosophy, the object of its creative agony. And poetry was at hand to process the matter of obstreperous desire into vivifying images of both suffering and delight. The human image was not at that time mutilated. The Greeks grappled with it in the totality of its powers and inclinations, without shying away from their excesses. This is infinitely more sane and natural, compared to the real perversity that Christian thanatophilia introduced into our culture, with monasticism as its most egregious manifestation. "Saint" Gregory of Nazianus' ode to chastity is, for all its impeccable Greek, a monument of inhuman ferocity. Only an enemy of the human race would pen such a perverted diatribe.

The uses of Christianity

Viciousness as high art : notice the smile on his face (from Delphi)

More of the same 

Hegel says that Christianity was the religion of the slaves. Nietsche concurs, but loads this description with all kinds of negative evaluations. But why? Slaves need their religion, too. Actually it is a form of their liberation, a mental prehension of their turn at playing masters. This primitive Christianity was, thus, -I am reluctant to say- kind of salutary. It boosted the energy of the docile masses. Belief is not innocent; it brings about action. And some of the action that this new-fangled, childish belief brought about was in fact beneficial at the time.

We tend to idolize and idealize the classical era. But this is actually to miss its point and in fact devalue it. Hellenic antiquity was a raw and rough place and time to be. It was full of docile masses, except that they do not raise their heads above the parapet of out adored classical literature. One can catch a glimpse of them, if one wishes to. But we do not ordinarily wish to. Also its heroes are not exactly the avatars of pure humanity that we mythologize them into. To say that Achilles, for instance, was a butcher, the very paradigm of narcissitic fury wreaking destruction all around is not a sacriledge. It is a factual description, a plain truth that one can glean easily from the pages of Homer himself.

We ordinarily refer to some "dialogue" that took place in 416 B.C. between Athenians and Melians. Of course it was no such thing. It was pure savagery, the brutal assertion of might that laid waste an entire human community. One only needs to peel the thin wrapping of rhetoric to perceive the awfulness of it all. Ditto with respect to the Lacedemonian's treatment of the Plataeans in 427 B.C. We have the consummate speeches as concocted by Thucydides. And in the end what? Once again the brutal execution of two hundred Platean captives that gave themselves up as ἱκέται hoping for just and humane treatment. The more one delves into our cherished classicism the more one comes face to face with the very dregs of humanity's motivation and conduct. If we look at the sublime art of that age with a sober eye, i.e. clearing away the brush of mere aesthetics (or rather kallistics), then what are we staring at? Mostly, again, the foulest excesses of brutality; murder most foul (on all sides). Of unspeakable Rome one had better not speak. That Hellenic art was able to transmute these despicable deeds, the treatchery, the assassination, the rape, the disembowelments, the decapitations, the hacking of the enemy's limbs and the rest of it, into exquisite and eternal forms is no absolution of any kind. The reality behind the stupendous facade remains tainted. Simply because it was reality all too human, and for no other reason. The greatness, in fact, of Hellenic antiquity was that it was able to fashion a glorious culture out of such filthy matter.

The foolishness of primitive Christianity was an antidote of sorts to the mayhem engulfing the tormented and fragmented Hellenic world (that it was truly foolishness, μωρία, we have the word of Paul himself). It signified the Aventine secession of the slavish myriads from the works and the wealth of their raging, effete and brilliant masters. This exclusion was real fact inflicted upon the greatest segment of society by those masters themselves. But through the new faith that external fact became internalized as a willed rejection of that famed legacy by those that were never its beneficiaries.

The will of the slave begins to revolt the very moment the slave perceives himself as a slave. At that point he realizes that his slavery is his strength, for it is his unfree labor that props up the master's throne (Hegel). Christianity enabled him to cash in on this awareness, to metabolize his unfreedom as a higher, more potent freedom. The slave, through Chtistianity, began thus to revel in his slavery, which was now theorized into the human condition as such. "We are all slaves", the word went around. Including the cruel masters who are slaves of their passions and also slaves of an omnipotent God whom they do not acknowledge, but who will in good time smite them to smithereens. Slavery is the very definition of being human. We are slaves to physical necessity, slaves to death. Through that prism everything indeed, including the greatest wonders of Hellenic achievement, is just vanity, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων τὰ πάντα ματαιότης.

We must not blind ourselves to the fact that there is a serious degree of factuality in this assertion. The Christians have harsh physical reality on their side. Modern science is the most persuasive proponent of their worldview: when the sun eventually implodes, we will see then what happens to the brilliance of ages past. To me, that the Parthenon will in the very long run be annihilated in the general breakdown of the present physical set up is a thought that occasions fright. It is enough, almost, to turn one into a Christian.

So it is true to say, and fair to concede, that the hour of Christianity had duly come. It came at the historically appointed time. And it was its great enemy, Hellenism, in its convulsions and its revulsions and its monstrosites, that brought it forth. The Christianization of the Hellenized Oecumene is one of the most baffling historical outcomes. How was it that the elites, eventually, of that supremely sophisticated and sceptical age decided to turn belly up and commence their after-life now as fools? What prompted them to don the madcap? How was it that Greek rhetoric began now to spew forth the garbage of the Christian dogma? How come philosophy degaded itself into puerile mumbling about miracles and saints? The Greeks had their theologies and their mysteries of course. But their gods were the summits of the visible and the sensible. Their mysteries were but the nether regions of physical matter.

Historically this transformation is not fully explicable. But philosophically it is clear as the sun. In Platonic terms, it was the revolt of the ἐπιθυμητικὸν and the θυμοειδὲς against the λογιστικόν. Reason, having reached the peak of its self-unfolding, now doubled on itself. Yes, it imploded under the weight of its stupendous achievement. The supreme flower of its development was scepticism, the doubting of its very own being. The sweep of this doubt was so powerful, that it laid low the cognitive and moral certainties of former times. And rulers, such as Alexander, freed now from the weight of these constraints began to identify themselves as gods. Their wordly action was still supremely rational: to rule the Egyptians one had to become Egyptian himself in mind and in habit. But this signified the emancipation of Egyptian (Oriental, generally) sensibility from any Hellenic pretenses. When everything is doubtful the only certain thing is faith. This, and the cruelty of the deeds of the masters.

Believing in the Gods

The smirk of the one who knows

Is it possible in our day and age to believe in the Gods of the Hellenic pantheon? Nothing is more effortless. This is a simple act of sound sense and in total accord with our cognitive faculties. I do not mean by this to subscribe to the whole set of devotional practices and underlying popular superstition (which in any case mars every other faith that we know of). This historical and experiential crust must be scraped off. We must yet retain the mythology that informs it, certainly not as a body of factually true occurrences. For it is neither true in that sense not internally consistent by far. But it does not need to be either the one or the other. The mythological core is essential for its unsurpassed aesthetic power and as a set of symbols cryptically containing the gist of psychological and social existence. It is a set of pregnant riddles. Even the inconsistency of the versions and accounts is of prime significance, for inner dissonance and self-strife is the very stuff of being a human self in an impenetrable cosmos.

After we have thus cleansed the edifice of the expendable superveniences, what is left is a core of linguistic descriptions (and artistic renditions thereof) fully corresponding to the perceptible outlines of our natural experience. W. Burkert has already shown that in trenchant detail, but it does no harm to recall this penetrating insight. There is no inherent antithesis between religious faith and the course of the physical world, in fact the former trails the necessities of the latter. Zeus is the power of the sky: where is the dificulty believing in that? "Zeus" is a name, a sign containing as its meaning the imperious dominion, for good or ill, of a given set of natural exigencies. It stands for the turning of the seasons, the consuming power of time, the helplessness of humanity (even of fully matured scientific humanity like ours) in the face of cosmic constants that it cannot counteract or countermand and which will eventually annihilate it. Poseidon is the power of the sea: where is the difficulty believing in that? From the battles of Odysseus with the wrath of the watery main, to the Mary Rose and the Gustav Vasa and other countless ship wrecks, to the disappearing Pacific islands under global warming and the recent tidal wave that devastated Japan there is no more everpresent fact if one cares to reflect on it. Aphrodite stands for the devastating blows of desire: where is the difficulty believing in that? We have all been knocked helpless and unconscious by its pitilessness at one time or another.

It was good old Euripides that laid all that bare for us a long time ago. He was accused of cheapening the mystery: that was wicked jab as far as I am concerned. The mystery becomes all the more intense and threatening once you locate it inside the soul. Once transcendence is suppressed then you are left face to face with your self as the inscrutable demon par excellence. You can no longer blame external forces. That was the convenience of traditional religion. But there is nothing convenient in true faith. For it does not prove anything; instead it forces you to come to blows with what cannot be proven and thus assimilate it into the very nucleous of your inner being. Euripides is terrible, ludicrously terrible indeed at times. But isn't this what being-in-the world is all about? The terror springs from inside, it is the realization of our nullity which has to be made good by a countervailing greatness that we must conjure for ourselves with the meager tools that nature, our nature, provides. One must be able to laugh with that presumption. One must be able to deride one's own pretensions, for it is in this self-willed put-down that one might find the strength to fly over the chasm of our insignificance, nay our non-existence. One has to be a great optimist, a great narcissist even, to attempt something  as vain and doomed as that. But this is the leap of faith. It does not settle anything, but without it nothing is settled either. So in a sense you are forced to undertake it, if only you begin to contemplate. For contemplation is the wheel that mows you down, once you allow it -as you must- to commence its turning.

No, Euripides did not kill faith in the gods. He clothed it in a new kind of beauty, a beauty that is present and at hand, a beauty that is made -if at all- out of our own deeds and failures, i.e. of our mere words, our flatus vocis. Euripides shows that this doomed accident called man is indeed omnipotent, that he is the god. The spark of divinity he can manufacture for himself by striking with the hardest edge of his being upon the absoluteness of the world. This is the proverbial irresistible force colliding with an immovable object. Out of this (logically and empirically, but not aesthetically) impossible encounter anything might flow. Euripides believes as an atheist, and this is the most sublime and menacing form of faith -provided that it is transmuted into a world of incandescent forms. And he did this (something that, for instance, Adorno -another believing atheist- singularly failed to achieve).

But divinity is not only benign -as the Greeks very well knew. God succours, nurtures, but he also smites and pulversizes. The gods are envious and oppressive. They are vengeful and certainly far from fair. It was only the fancy of some odd idelaists, such as Hesiod and Solon, who wanted to see in god the guarantor of a cosmic order of justice. Plato follows suit, but he is wide of the mark in his churlish tirades against the "immorality" of the mythological accounts. Take away this immorality and you denude them of their truth. Then you have a hypothetical, artificial religion that is at odds with the physicality of life. But even Plato in his sane moments fully acknowledged that the concept of god is entirely coterminous with that of the natural universe. Certainly physical pleasure is at the heart of his pursuit of virtue as well.

Rain fructifies the fields, but it also floods and drowns indiscriminately. The first rain that inseminated mother earth was the blood from the genitals of Uranus cut off by the admantine sicle of his son. There is terror and beauty wrapped in one in this anbhorrent image. To be in the throes of faith means to gasp for breath in the coils of contradiction. And the divine deeds of man are equally double-faced, as Sophocles was eager to declare. Knowledge heals, but it also kills. Self-knowledge in particular -and this with regard to the very self engendering it in the first place. We must not beautify god. Apollo is also ἀπολλύων, the destroyer. He is both male and female. He is the killer of the snake, as well as the snake itself. He is the slayer of the Danaans (ἑκηβόλος), the bringer of death. Neither must we idealize the civilization that brought forth and worshipped such a god. The Greek era is awash with the atrocious deeds of the deities as well men striving to deify themselves. Ἄτη herself is a goddess and we know all too well the evil fruits of her exertions. But it is in the midst of such dark toil that humanity rises to the greatness that it demands from itself and knows that it is capable of. And it is upon this greatness (ephemeral, indeed) that we are still feeding.

Light can only grow from darkness. This is the wisdom of Greek religion. And it is the only one that man qua man is capable and worthy of. For it does not demand the superssession of human reality, and it does not posit a fantastic land of unalloyed goodness, as the cult of a later God-Man purported. This latter myth (for which the man who others stamped as the Christ was not responsible for) is a debilitating one. It revels in the nothingness of humanity, without seizing the entrails of this nullity to rise above it. It abides breathless and impotent in the feeling of non-being. Hellenic faith on the contrary is not reductionistic. It equates human consciousness with nature, but it does not level it to the latter's base automatism. The rythm of the world becomes the very pulse that the ignited self perceives within. And this awareness of oneness with external nature becomes an active strength to deflect whatever necessity has in store for us. We know ab initio how this rebellion is fated to end. Achilles knows that if he stays in the Troad he is going to die. But he stays, he dies and he becomes Achilles. If he had lived he would have become a nonentity, scratched from the tablets of our faith and knowledge. Destiny is there to be acknowledged certainly, but one does not prostrate himself before it. Our being fuses with nature, but only to become second nature (φύσις δευτέρα) within it. The task is to rise as high as one feels like or dares to rise. It's not as if there is no deep melancholy here. The Greeks know how to rue and mourn. It's best not to be born, mutters Sophocles, second best to die young. But since we were not granted non-existence, we must prosper with the (poisoned) boon that came our way. They know full well as I said above, how ephemeral all this is. But they do not feel free to be daunted by this knowledge, for thus they would abjure their freedom. The freedom to make the most of the mystery that we come face to face with looking in the mirror.

Lions in the rain

Lions in the spring rain

What is this desd man smiling about?

A myceneaean flower

Strictly speaking it is not lions, but lionesses. But no matter; exactness cannot overturn venerable usage. It is early summer and it has been raining on and off. I was counting on sunshine, but the sky above the citadel was heavy with clouds, the occasional drizzle bringing out the deep smells of the soil covered with wild flowers. The lionesses were smudged by the water sent down by the gods, but they stood their guard unperturbed, as they have done for the past three and a half millenia at least.

On Prophet Elijah hill flanking the ruins the world motor championship was holding one of its events. Ominous-looking race cars thundered down the dirt path winding around the hill sending clouds of dust into the sky. As I was coming in I thought that the brush was on fire. It was an odd encounter, the stillness of the glorious sepulchers trying to assert itself against the brashness of modernity. In the end the dead always prevail.

Pausanias says that Agamemnon and those slain with him during that fatal homecoming symposium (this is the tradition that he recounts) were buried inside the walls of the city. So were Cassandra (although Laconian Amyclae disputes this), as well as Electra and her children from Pylades. I must confess that it sounds like a pedestrian let-down to hear that Electra, after the sound and fury of those tragic events still dinning in our heads, married her brother's reticent companion and ended her days as a mere housewife. Still, Pausanias' matter-of-factness has its uses: he was after all Schliemann's guide in his quixotic enterprise. Clytemnestra and Aigisthos, on the contrary, were buried outside the walls we are told, for it was not "proper" to put them side by side with their victims. Two tholos tombs outside the fortifications have been conventionally named for them.

It all depends on what walls we are talking about. The ones still standing, the cyclopean foundations together with the gate plus the later additions, are certainly enclosing the royal fortress and palace. But is this the whole of the city? It does not seem ample enough to accomodate the entire population of tillers of the surrounding fields, artisans, soldiers etc. The northern quarter is a warren of very narrow passages and tiny cells: quite a cramped place One thinks there must have been a far wider enclosure. If this is true, then the stupendous tholos tomb designated as the "treasury of Atreus" (in full knowledge that it is no such thing) a few hundred meters from the citadel may have been situated inside the walls in this wider sense. Its magnificence attests to its being the resting place of an illustrious royal personage -why not that of Agamemnon?

That it is not the treasury of Atreus and his sons is clear from Pausanias' statement that they stored their gold in "underground vaults" (ὑπόγαια οἰκοδομήματα) near the palace. Just like the Lion Gate this tomb has been continuously visible since ancient times: it was never covered by soil and other debris. During his sojourn in this part of Greece Elgin took with him fragments of the decorative columns of its entrance (thank God he could not carry the whole structure too). So it has always just stood above ground, an empty shell of course after having been robbed of its funerary treasures, but a welcome place of refuge from the inclement elements for shepherds and travellers across the ages. In fact the most moving thing about it is, in one sense, its blackened roof, a record of fires lit by countless common people to protect themselves and their animals in the very halls of the great king.

The graves that Schliemann and Stamatakis unearthed are, of course, not those of the Atreids. They are about three centuries older, and probably belong to rulers of the dynasty of Perseus. We do not know their names, in fact there are no names of any kind on this precious hill. But who cares? We have their faces. We have the stern, grave, utterly imposing face of the bearded king, who is the epitome of sacred rulership. His eyes are closed but he is still staring at us across time. And then we have that other one, shaven and slightly pudgy, brimming with an understated joie de vivre. And then there is another one with a marked resemblance to a suffering Christ. And finally we have the king with the moustache sheletering a rather mischievous smile in his eternal sleep. It's up to us to give them names, to fill their empty places with vital bodies and their august attire, to remember their passions and defeats, to mould their poetic abscence into living symbols. And thankfully we have tragic song to lead us in this arbitrary, but so essential, journey.

And we must also name the two royal children covered in gold leaf. We have to create in mind the deeds of the great leaders that they did not live to be.