The Antiquity You Miss

I'd never have thought there could be an argument, even a foolish, fallacious, just-to-be-the-devil's-advocate argument, against plunging oneself wholly and unabashedly into classical Greek literature. But there is a danger, and even in lauding those incomparable poets and playwrights you spring the trap.

Homer's Hellas is no part of the Balkan peninsula, not even geographically. How can you apply a word normally seen in the firm black print of the modern cartographer to the orderly wildness of his ancient world? How can you possibly call Achilles or Perseus or Helen "Balkan"? And yet there is a Balkan peninsula, one whose stories you will never know if you have not ventured further north than Illyria (and that only in company with the exiled Alexander).

And so, even when the crags of Illyria are described, although you have a vague idea of jagged mountains dark against the night sky, it is still Artemis in her chariot in that sky, because it is still Homer's world. And the Oracle of Dione takes on something of the quality of the Pythian shrine at Delphi: the slightly amused, slightly mocking, ultimately benevolent nature of the god.

North of that? You do not know; you imagine a few nebulous uninhabited mountains and then you are happily feeling the cold breath of Boreas and watching the Viking longboats, regretting only that so few of their ancient writings are extant.

But if you are forced, just for a moment, to abandon the sophists and go south of Poland instead of north of Greece, it is different. The crags, free of the association with Arcadian meadows, are more threatening, the moon is the symbol of things darker and more dangerous than a virgin goddess, and Dione is suddenly Dione as she was when the world was under Kronos. War is the bloody struggle that accompanied the spread of the Ottoman Empire, more terrifying in its savagery than the epic heroism that was the fall of Troy.

Does this make you want to abandon Euripides and Sophocles? Not in the least. But it does give you an odd chill, because sometimes the inventiveness of human beings is far more terrible than the wrath of gods. It does make you wonder what might have been.