The glorious promontory still stands. The comings and goings of the foolish tribes of men (and women) have surely affected it, but they have not brought it down. For those who have eyes to see it is still sending out its signals. At this time of year it is in wild blossom, clad in the anonymity of its multifarious shrubbery as it cascades seawards. In the recesses of these bushes the grouse are nesting. Whole platoons of them walking up and down among the ruins, showing contempt for the camera-wielding hordes, climbing on top of broken columns, looking out to sea towards Salamis. They are the guardian spirits of this place. Being here one rises above the landscape and it modern scars. It puts you in the mood of forgetting; you do not want to know what you are going back to. The sea path is straight from here all the way south to the lair of the Minotaur. One feels like the aged king in his fatal watch, soon to die due to a mere inadvertence. He died but his name lives in these waters.
I wrote recently of the oracle of Apollo at Abae. The Thessalians destroyed it as they led the Persian host towards Delphi after Thermopylae. There was long-standing enmity between them and the Phocians defending their sanctuary. Herodotus relates that they offered rather generous terms of surrender to the defenders, including the promise to forget about the bad blood of old. The Phocians replied that they were not willing to "betray Greece". But the old fox from Halicarnassus is too shrewd to fall for the pious mendacity of the political orator. I am of the opinion, he comments, that had the Thessalians been on the side of the Greeks the Phocians would readily declare for the Persians, for their chief goal was to oppose Thessaly under all circumstances. Recently I wrote an article for the Athens Review of Books arguing that ancient Greek society does not in any way fit the nationalist stereotype of a homogeneous nation striving for a common historical destiny against its sundry racial foes. I could have used the above example as well to illustrate the point. The thought is a banal commonplace of course for someone who has the slightest awareness of the history and culture of the times. But it has caused offense here....
After the Thessalians had laid waste to the sanctuary and the towns of the Phocians, they marched on to Delphi that was their main target. That place was known to be stuffed with gold up to the gills, and Xerxes wanted to lay his hands on it. But Delphi was saved. Herodotus offers a tall tale to account for this outcome. The inhabitants of Delphi, hearing of the Persian advance, wanted to bury the treasures in secret places, but the God forbade them saying that he "can take care of his own". As a result the Delphians left and only a few priests remained in place. As the Persian contingent, led by Thessalians, appeared at the sanctuary of Athena Pronaea a number of miraculous appearances scared the pants off the invaders. To top it all there was severe thunder on the peaks above the temple of Apollo and huge boulders tumbled down the mountainside scattering the barbarian formations, which turned tail and sped away.
Now, is this the same Herodotus who made the hard-headed comment about the Phocians above? Can he possibly believe that it was divine intervention that saved the navel of the earth from the threatened sacking? Who can tell? The point is that in a cultural environment "saturated with myth" (as Paul Cartledge puts it), myth moreover that is taken as reality and probably has some roots in it, it is a major enigma how genuine historical writing could have arisen. But, maybe, Herodotus is justly considered the "father" of history precisely because he straddles the divide between the mythic and the political age; precisely because he succeeds in reaching beyond the mythical foundation of his consciousness in order to grasp the political foundation of human action and/or the political significance of mythic belief. In any case, wrapped in a hoary garment, factuality does rear its head in the Herodotean account. Herodotus is not lying, and the discoveries at Abae bear out his accounts. Maybe what we learn from Herodotus is how to reach the core of truth in myth.
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