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.

On the Parthenon metopes: concluding comment

One of the wounded metopes

Hebe and Hera (the "Annunciation" metope)

As I mentioned before the London metopes are for the most part intact and thriving. Tthose kept in the Acropolis Museum on the other hand are a sorry sight to behold -despite the expert efforts at restoration that ought to be admired. The main rerason for this goes a long way back to the early Christian period. At that time mobs of inflamed Christian zealots, egged on and protected by emperors (such as the murderous Theodosius I, the butcher of Thessalonica, but also the founder of the first church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople!), rampaged throughout the Hellenic world destroying the temples of the gods and wreaking particularly fierce violence upon free-standing sculpture on account of the nudity.

The Parthenon was also subjected to this brutality. Hords of destroyers equipped with sharp metal instruments mounted ladders to attack the metopes. They proceeded to hack away at the figures scraping off as much as they could and leaving just pitiful remnants on the marble slabs. Today you can witness this atrocity at close range as you stand underneath the metopes brought down from the building. It is just like being present at a murder scene. You can mentally reconstruct the lethal strokes of the barbarians as they smashed their victims: the marks of their aggression is plain on whatever has been salvaged.

Only one of those metopes on the north side was spared, and it has been also detached and brought into the museum. It depicts two female figures, one seated and one standing, facing each other. They are both headless nowadays. It represents Hera and her daughter Hebe in discourse about developments in the struggle between Greeks and Trojans and the possible outcome of that conflict. So what was it here that stayed the hand of the smashers? Well, the frenzied mobs of new converts to the "true faith", as they looked up to this metope, were seized by the delusion that they were looking at a representation of the Annunciation of the Virgin! How such a scene could have found a place on a buiding put up several centuries before they did not bother to ponder, for it is not in the nature of fired up ignoramuses to put to themselves rational questions like that. At any event we should be thankful for their self-willed blindness at least in this case. 

The Maidens of the Hill

Girl in Athens

Girl in London

Girl in Athens

Metope in BM

The last metope on the Parthenon (Acropolis Museum)

"Caryatids" is of course a misnomer. They were Korai, and more precisely Choephoroi, namely libation bearers to the tomb of Kekrops who was buried under the very porch that they had been carrying on their heads for so many centuries. Their outstretched hands bearing the phialae have long since been chopped off by jealous time, which has been particularly vicious with regard to the protruding parts of ancient statues such as limbs, noses, male genitals etc. It was this identity-obscuring mutilation that probably led to their association with the girls from Karyai in Laconia who visited the sanctuary once a year  to perform their ritual dance. I dare speculate that this must have been a rather sensational event, given the propensity of Lacaedemonian ladies to strut about scantily clad, as we are apprised in such a hilarious fashion in the Lysistrata.

Be that as it may, a major project is under way in the Acropolis Museum to clean up their torsos, ravaged as they were by twenty-odd centuries of exposure and especially by that suffocating smog that blighted the Attic sky in the eighties and the nineties. That shroud of pollution is now thankfully gone (one of the very few good tidings that one may relay from here), the maidens were replaced on the Erechtheion by replicas and were recently accorded the pride of place they deserve in the impressive new museum. The restoration project utilizing laser beams is  run by the Institute of Technology and Research in Crete, the only one of Greek insitutions of higher learning to rank among the top ones world-wide. The reason for this distinction (to digress a little, but not really as you will see) is that ITR was founded with a charter of its own which was modelled on those of Anglo-Saxon  institutions and therefore had nothing in common with the arrangements crippling the other local universities. This conjuction of classical culture and state of the art technology is a particularly happy one, if only as a sign of what might have been had modern Greece elected to embark upon the road of liberal republicanism conscious of its classical roots and inseminated with the modern scientific spirit. Alas, this destiny -as preached by the great Koraes- never came to fruition as reactionary nationalism eventually smothered all traces of free thinking and the values of individual autonomy in the country. Today we are living through the terminal consequences of that debacle.

At any event, already two of the five maiden remaining in Athens have been cleaned -three if you count the pitiful remains of one of them that was smashed by a Turkish shell during the siege of the Acropolis at the time of the Greek Revolution. And the results are astonishing. The grime of ages has been burned off and the honey-whiteness of the Pentelic stone has surged forth to display its breath-taking vivaciousness. You can sense the alert humanity pulsating through its hidden veins. The faces have sadly been half eaten away, but there is still enough of expression left on them to captivate an eager theoros across the chasm of the centuries.

These spruced up girls, each in her uniqueness, do indeed look so intimately in touch with their lonely sister in Rm. 15 of the British Museum. As I was staring at the latter during my visit this past February I could not help being affected by the sad abandonment oozing from her features, despite her being lovingly cared for. I was struck by the fact that her face is also half clawed off, which shows that even as she was being abducted Time had already been hard at work visiting its wrath. But even so, her almost erased eyes did seem to be beaming southwards messages of a mellow grief. Standing in front of her one cannot help conjuring in imagination the raptures of a family reunion. I have always thought that the only valid argument for the return of the Acropolis sculptures is the restoration of the aesthetic integrity of the Athenian monuments.No other consideration carries the slightest weight. And the sense of loss from that severance is today all the more poignant as one stands before that estranged girl in London, or before her companions in Athens as their shimmering whiteness is once again blooming in plain view.

Another significant event has also taken place. The last metope of the Parthenon remaining in place (the first from the western end on the south side) has been removed from the temple and brought into the Acropolis Museum. It depicts a centaur defeating a Lapith who in turn jabs the monster's thigh as he is being strangled. This piece of sculpture had never left its original place and the muck of twenty five centuries lay thick upon it. Now it has been chiseled away and the original marble has been exposed. Alas, it is seriously corroded, although even in this damaged state the explosive tension that Phidias instilled in the stone still leaps at you in waves. Once again, one cannot avoid the comparison with the condition of the metopes kept in the British Museum: those are immaculate, bar the inevitable fractures. The flesh of the creatures burns with the desire to be stroked. It is clear that their stay in London has benefited them greatly. Arguments, thus, based on the state of preservation of the sculptures would seem to favor those justifying Elgin's effrontery. I am saying this because a few year's ago, at the height of the nationalist frenzy for the return of the sculptures in connection with that foul show of the "Olympics", there was an outburst of indignation concerning some alleged faux pas of the BM restorers in scrubbing the frieze with some noxious substance or other. There may have been a grain of truth to this. But, whatever damage it may have caused, still the BM pieces are in visibly better condition compared to the ones in Athens -although if these are also laser-cleaned they may shine incomparably as well. But all this pales into insignificance compared to the botched repair work inflicted upon the Parthenon and the temple of Nike by Greek restorers back in the thirties (replacing for instance the lead joints with iron ones!). This veritable hatchet job resulted in the marble being fragmented from within. At the same time the loose pieces on the ground were haphardly stuck together thus deforming the architectural structure of the buildings. But this of course does not figure in the inane propaganda of nationalist demagogues, for whom anyway the issue of the sculptures is just a pretext for bashing the foreign "conspiracy" against the chosen race.

It is apposite to stress here that before the last two decades of the last century the issue of the Elgin loot did not figure at all in public discourse or in educational instruction. It was invented as a great "national issue" with the coming to power of the "socialist" party in 1981 as part of its "anti-imperialist" agenda. That was the same party whose educational policies ruthlessly suppressed classical learning, deformed the Greek language by cutting it down to the requirements of street agitation and in general gutted the school system by putting it under the control of party hacks. For the rest Melina shed crocodile tears before the horse heads of the Parthenon pediment in the British Museum. This crass hypocrisy, based upon utter ignorance of all things classical, has been the hallmark of official state policy.

All in all, even in this toxic environment some good things are happening for those with eyes to see. 

Missives into space

They say no information is lost in the turbulence of the universe, not even when things are gobbled up by a black hole. Hawking thought otherwise at some point, but this was a signal mistake of his early on. He has since recanted. We must be thankful. So nothing is wasted. Radio signals keep traveling on forever, sounds and voices also, hopefuly to be picked up by whatever receivers might be there on the other side when we are long gone. We are all stored as some kind of unique code in this colossal data bank. Existence is self-enclosed in its mathematical eternity. Quite a strange, nay incomprehensible, thought, but also quite comforting. It seems that immortality after all is on offer by pure objective science itself; one need not have recourse to delusion or runaway fantasy to secure it. God, or at least God as various perverted minds have posited him through the centuries, is indeed an "unecessary hypothesis" as Hawking also, correctly this time, asserted (except that this is not logically equivalent to the proposition that "there is no God"). This was a notion that occurred to alert minds very long ago. The finitude of absolute Being was the ingenious insight of Parmenides, the eternal conservation of material existence Epicurus' stupendous contribution to rationality (Epicurus' thought was after all a logically rigorous extension of Eleatic doctrine).

Why is all this relevant? Because when one lives in a society where communication has broken down, one needs some inner theoretical conviction upon which to ground the usefulness of writing and talking. I must confess that I have been going through such a crisis for the past few months, hence my inability to wield the pen -or to be more precise to hit the keyboard- after the thoughts I registered at the end of last year. There was a dismal closure there, a conclusion very much of the nature of a black hole that swallowed all of my expressive faculty -language itself kind of withered within me. I still stand by that conclusion: namely that what we have gone through in this place over the past three years is akin to the death of a star, the forces of entropy having finally suffused the modern Greek national project which for the past two hundred years has been desperately trying to discover or concoct some essence for itself. Well, it is now manisfest that it has failed. Of course, the debris is still burning away, but this weird flame is fast tumbling into terminal darkness.

The most egregious symbol of this is the current Greek parliament, which is the worst in history, a pathetic aggregation of corrupt old hands that actively caused the present implosion together with a bevy of new-fangled extremists of the left and right spouting ideological balderdash and enchanted by violence. The funny thing is that this putrescent set up is still able to express itself (it's not really expression, but a form of grunting and screeching) in the time-honored language of nationalism. The chief motif in this discourse is the hoary myth of malicious "foreigners" conspiring to wipe from the earth the "chosen race". It's the kind of declamation that surged mightily forth from the recent wreckage in Cyprus. The Cypriot situation is another sorry sight that one must dignify even with a passing comment. Still it is another eye-opening symptom of the cultural and ethical decomposition affecting today's Greek-speaking world (I wish we were dealing with Greekness and I wish we were dealing with sensible speech). The Cypriot ruin is entirely of the Cypriots' own making. They joined the EU under the solemn commitment that they would accept the UN plan for the unification of the island -a commitment they promptly and provocatively broke. For them the EU was nothing more than a stick to beat Turkey with. Their joining Europe was a pretense. The Ponzi-scheme of an economy that they erected, sucking in all the dirty money of the formerly communist Russian mafia, was also a deliberate enterprise. Then they affected surprise when the whole thing came tumbling down over their heads. And their first instinct was to fight tooth and nail to protect the Russian oligarchs by massacring their own small savers and nationalizing the working people's pension funds, a scheme that Merkel was right to castigate as the most shameless attempt to expropriate the little man's future ever attempted. Still, they excoriated as "usurers" the Europeans that advanced a 10 billion, 30-year loan at 2.5% and lauded the Russians as "brothers" from whom they had received 2.5 billion for five years at 4.5%, with nothing more forthcoming. In fact it was the Russian governement itself that had to remind them that they were EU members, and that their prime obligation was to strike a deal with the Europeans. And now AKEL, the pseudo-communist party that ruled Cyprus for five years to 2013 and presided over the economic and other disasters (such as the lethal explosion of the confiscated Iranian munitions meant for Syria which crippled the island's electricity grid), is loudly propagandizing for the country's exit from the Euro! How sick can you get.... But you see I broke my promise not to comment on this sordid, little affair.

The upshot is that in this whirl of nonsense and depravity there is no point in arguing, or talking even. The media and the universities are abuzz with anti-European, Stalinist and racist clap-trap. With the result that about 75% of the people believe that the proper way for Greece would be to follow the Cypriot example of rushing headlong into isolation and destitution to save its "national honor". Yet something inside will not let go. Thought is silent and that is as it ought to be. On the other hand, one ought not to be doing any favors to the baying cadavers of perdition. In the immense empty spaces of the cosmos a dissenting cadence ought still to be registered. But with no illusions, of course, as to its effect.