In Athens: Theater of Dionysos, Asklepion, Areopagos, Cave of the Furies

On May 4th, the “Theater & the Arts of Healing” students, plus Jaxon who wanted to join us, walked with Nancy and me through pauses in Athens’ mad traffic to the Theater of Dionysos and other sites at the base of the Acropolis. The proximity of theaters and healing centers in several ancient places—including Corinth, Epidauros, and Amphiareion, as well as here—first suggested to me the major theme of this course, and today’s walk helped us to explore that theme on the ground. Founded in 420-19 B.C.E. in response to the plague that ravaged Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Asklepion was built above and immediately adjacent to the Theater of Dionysos on the south-facing slope of the Acropolis. Under gradual reconstruction, its ruins are not open to visitors, but the students viewed them from above on a plenary excursion a month ago. Today marked a special opportunity for our class to speculate on ways in which the cult of Asklepios, treating patients by a process of dream therapy, connected to the dream-work of the Great Dionysia: the dramas staged annually for the social health of the body politic.

One such drama was Aescylus’ Eumenides, which we had just read and which framed our other focus. For the play concludes with a solemn procession as the women of Athens escort the Furies—now renamed the “Kindly Ones,” to their cave beneath the Areopagos, the “rock hill of Ares” where Athena convened the trial of Orestes, who is hounded by the Furies for having slain his mother Clytemnestra in the prequel, Choephori, for her having, in its prequel Agamemnon, slain her husband / his father in the bath just home from Troy, an act of matriarchal vengeance for Agamenon’s having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia so that the fleet could sail to Troy (the Oresteia delivers a long back-story!)—as the women of Athens, I say, and the members of the audience join a torch-lit procession along the lower slopes of the Acropolis to the Furies’ new home. There, having threatened Athens with blight and plague for blocking their vengeance on Orestes (his turn on vendetta’s wheel), instead they will bless the land and its people forever: so, at least, Athena prophesies. One wonders about that these days, with the implosion of credit, the EU’s begrudging bailout, and national strikes over the forthcoming austerity measures in Greece.

We had already followed Orestes into Athens from Delphi, site of a recent group excursion (see below). Orestes takes initial sanctuary from the Furies in Delphi, and Apollo refers him to Athena and a court of law in Athens. Today, as best we could—impeded by the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built c. 160 C.E.—a “Roman amphitheatre, a trellis-work of heavy brown stone arches one upon another,” Robert Byron described it (Europe in the Looking Glass, 1926)—which structure compelled us to climb high up the slope and down again, we followed the footsteps of the play’s concluding procession. This was a rare opportunity to ground a great piece of literature and theater in the terrain for which it was composed.

The orchestra space and the stage fragments of the Theater of Dionysos are roped off, so we could not perform there. Instead we sat on the weathered marble bleachers and read the play’s finale aloud, joining our voices in the chorus, sounding in a modern tongue the words Aeschylus composed for this place long ago. (Our thanks the late Robert Fagles, a great translator.) Then we climbed up above the theater, paused in the shade at the Asklepion to discuss it, and made our across to the Areopagos. We climbed it, discussed the Athenian court that presided here and the mythic defeat of the Amazons here, and enjoyed the view of the Propolyaia, the ancient Agora, the Hill of the Muses, and the horizon of modern Athens.

Then we descended towards the cave where ancient Athenians imagined the Furies to have returned to the earth to empower their city. Alas, no such deep cavity is intact today. A fig tree sprouts from within a wide gap in the rock. Further along the slope, silt and a cement wall occlude much of the base. Among the many ruins that Athens frames for one’s consumption—ancient building projects excavated, reassembled—the Cave of the Furies rests neglected. The slope of the hill is set off by a shabby metal fence in the weeds. Above that perimeter, however, curving into the outcrop of the north face are deep declivities, dark hollows in the rock. This must be the place.

Link to Aegina Photo Album

Aegina, 30 April

On Wednesday, our “Theater & the Arts of Healing” class enjoyed the company of Melanie Harmon, Director of Communications at AHA International in Portland, visiting to experience the Athens program first hand for future recruitment. A Master of Arts in theater who ran a theater company in Colorado before her career turn towards AHA, Melanie was a welcome participant in our reading and discussion of Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Yesterday she joined the full group of students, with Michael Wedde and Nina Lorum from the Athens Centre, on our day-trip to the island of Aegina—the maritime rival of Athens in Aeschylus’ day, now a ninety minute ferry ride from Piraeus. Michael’s predecessor, the late Ann Blasingham, lived on Aegina and, when Nancy and I were here for the Fall 2001 session, used to commute to the Athens Centre to teach “Monuments of Greece.” Now buried on the island, she was in our thoughts.

The “Phaedra” (a name packed with mythic associations) carried us to Aegina town escorted by a wheeling convoy of gulls. We disembarked mid-morning on a clear, sunny day. The winds were vigorous, the waters ink-blue at depth and turquoise near shore, and a regatta of ten or twelve identical twin-sailed boats, white canvas bright against the sea, pulled past the promontory towards which we made our way outside town: the ruins of Kolona. The settlement here dates from the Bronze Age, with traces of Minoan influence (an “X” mason’s mark on a large stone in an outer wall; pottery shards, etc.). The most striking feature of Kolona (from the Italian, colonna) gave the place its current name: the sole surviving column from the 5th century B.C.E. Temple of Apollo. Hewn from a single stone, not erected by the stacking of barrels, it still stands, greatly weathered, narrowed to a sharp asymmetric tip. Multiple layers of habitation, the effects of various invasions, and successive construction projects are evident here, cogently explained by Michael. One of the great pleasures of the site is its immediacy. Unlike the more trafficked ruins of the Acropolis or Delphi, roped off and prowled by guards with hair-trigger whistles, Kolona—Nina having paid our entry fees—stood quiet and available to us. One could lean against Apollo’s column or touch a surviving patch of water-tight plaster in the Byzantine cistern. The place was open to us as the Acropolis had been to Mark Twain or Lord Byron in the nineteenth century, whose accounts we read and discussed in the “Greek Journeys” class. Thus Kolona adds another welcome layer of time-travel to its ruins.

The crown jewel of Aegina is the Temple of Athena-Aphaia, located several miles up a winding road we climbed by bus. This mountaintop is the ideal place to explain Aegina’s rivalry with Athens, directly visible across the Saronic gulf: amidst the great white reticulated expanse of concrete, one can make out Lycabettus Hill and the Acropolis. If Pericles dubbed Aegina “the eyesore of Piraeus,” as Michael noted, the Aeginians had an equal and opposite answer. The metopes of the Temple of Athena-Aphaia have long since vanished, but the sanctuary itself, while much smaller than the Parthenon, is more complete, with a large number of original columns and entablatures still standing.

On the way back to Aegina town, we stopped at the workshop of Mr. Nektarios, the island’s primary surviving potter, a man in his late fifties who smokes cigarettes and scorns apprentices. An ancient tradition is withering but, at present, in sure hands. He welcomed us into his cramped space lined with unfired jugs, pitchers, and pots of many sorts. Then he proceeded to turn a few on his wheel, commenting in an amiable gruff voice while Nina translated. Huddled in a semi-circle, we watched him work the clay: after kneading it, he placed a moist lump on the plate and, the wheel turning, palmed the pile into a column, then thrust thumbs in from above to hollow out the interior. Swiftly, an attractive shape emerged, wobbling into sudden symmetry, touched up with a blunt straight-edge. With one hand inside, he thinned the walls into shape and, with a small blade of wood, inscribed a tight, then widening spiral down along the form. The objects took shape quickly and without false moves. After four throws, he took us outside, down through dried grasses, thistles, and scattered red poppies to his kilns: a traditional wood-fired oven and, inside a shed nearby, a modern green metal kiln still cooling from last night’s firing. One jarring element on the grounds here: from a pole on the roof of a nearby home dangled the body of a crow, a striking species with gray body and black head & wings that Nancy and I have admired since first seeing them on Crete. It was a stark advisory to all such birds to stay clear.

We stepped over to Mr. Nektarios’ crowded little display room bright with glazed items and his fenced yard jumbled with others largely unglazed, and several students made purchases. Then we all enjoyed a few hours of free time back in Aegina town. We embarked for Athens on the 6:00 ferry, the “Agios Nektarios,” a vessel owned by the island. The “Nektarios” coincidence is but briefly surprising: the name is widely shared. One of the island’s major luminaries was Saint Nektarios (1846-1920), who founded a monastery on Aegina in 1904 and, like Ann, rests there.