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Greek Dialogue
By J. R. BAMBROUGH (St. j.)ho's College, Cambridge)
QUOT homilies, tot Graetiae. Every man must find his own Greece. A description of the country, if you have been there, would be idle ; if you have not been there, it would be impossible. But the Greeks are a dilferent story ; they are not intangible like a sunset of Hymettus, nor inscrutable like the stones of Delphi. They live when the Parthenon is a fading photo- graph ; they move when the sheep-bells of Cithaeron are a distant echo ; they have their being when Mycenae is an after-image: and Socrates the taxi-driver of today, like Socrates the sage of long ago, is remembered for his ceaseless conversation. Like his namesake, he never stops talking and asking questions ; and for the same reason, that he is curious about everything under that same Hellenic sun.
No stranger can live an " unexamined life" in Greece. He must ask and answer a thousand questions a day. " Are you married ? Have you any children ? How big is your village ? Can you read Plato ? Have you been to Crete ? " When he has passed his test in classics, geography and autobiography, the foreigner becomes at once a " senos," a guest-friend of the examiner. If he can recite the first two lines of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Antigone, and knows the names of any ten ancient Greek authors and heroes ; if he will exchange Christian names and cigarettes with his new acquaintance, and knows that Greece is the most beautiful country in the world, then he is a fine fellow, and will have friends to the end of his train journey, his tour, his life.
Sometimes the questions are difficult. The bearded tourist must admit either that he is a Communist or that he has been crossed in love ; no other explanation is possible. The Londoner can exhaust his ten-word vocabulary and all his ingenuity, and still fail to make it clear that London is something more than just a big village. My own Waterloo came on the day of the Fete Nationale. " When is your Independence Day ? " asked my newest friend, and I was baffled. He must be trying to choose between two equally paradoxical alternatives. Either England has never been free, which is impossible ; or England has always been free, which is absurd.
The foreign stranger, if this kindly curiosity offends him, is thawed by Homeric hospitality. The Greeks at the next table in the taverna will order a bottle of wine, a bag of nuts or a bowl of fruit for their English neighbours, who, after a decent interval, respond with English cigarettes or a liqueur. The sightseer often ends his circuit of the ancient shrine in the house of the phylax. drinking home-distilled raki. eating home-made cheese and trying to understand or operate a hand-loom. There is a notice in some Athenian tramcars which reads, " Seats are reserved for soldiers, priests, foreigners and women," and the order of precedence is strictly observed, to the embarrassment of those trained to strap- hang on the Underground. In keeping with this was the reply of the Cretan peasant who confessed sadly, "Two children . . . and three daughters."
The glory that was Greece is the most general topic of conversa- tion, and the safest ; but even here the traveller must match with tact the Greek's deep sensitiveness. On the road from Athens to Eleusis there is an olive tree bravely labelled " Plato's Olive." I innocently asked a Greek friend how old it really was. He forgave me in the end, but my scepticism was a severe trial of his affection. Political discussion is to be avoided, and the careless talker soon learns how wide is the range of politics. He may say that the weather has been disappointing this week, but he must be prepared to acknowledge that this week is quite untypical, and that he intended no reflections on Greece. her glorious past or her present constitution. Their patriotism is for the Greeks the first law of life and nature ; their homeland is sacred to them in the full sense of that well-worn word, and the stranger must beware of blasphemy.
Journeys are the occasions for the most intimate conversations. When the sheep are lashed to the top of the bus, and the poultry have nestled under the scats, and the piglets and kids have found comfortable couches in the aisle, the exchange of views and nuts and gossip and fruit begins. The only hindrances are the noise of the ancient engine, long ago stripped of its bonnet, and the ceaseless yelling of the motor-horn, which echoes round all the lonely hills of Boeotia, csen if there is no more *rattle than a wayward goat.
Famous men are praised, and our fathers who on this soil wrought great deeds against the German or the Turk. Some seek out musical tunes, which after five hours and a hundred miles begin to find a welcome in cars unaccustomed to Balkan harmonics. Before and after every village the police inspect the papers of the Greek pas- sengers, and stay to discuss Demosthenes with the honoured strangers. Linguistic skill and learning are paraded. The sergeant " used to keep a ham and egg joint in Detroit." and he speaks fluent and idiomatic American. The driver, too, claims to be able to Teak English, and he proves it when we ask him if there will be any
more formalities. "Non!" he says with a proud smile. "Es ist finito." Homer and Aeschylus, we arc told by our learned neigh- bour, were " the best-greatest novelists of all time." The conductor, distracted by the complexities of his way-bill, juggles with the string of beads which a Greek carries to comfort the times when there is nobody to talk to, or cigarettes are scarce. While the gendarmes feel for firearms in our luggage, we repay a fragment of our debt by taking photographs of our fellow-passengers and writing down their names and addresses.
It is on board ship that life-long friendships are born. Passengers are all aboard, and have staked their claims to plots of deck, long before the animal, vegetable and mineral cargo is in the holds. Pedlars come to sell icons or oranges, and stay to say how they envy us our visit to Crete, thcir homeland, or to re-enact the battle of Marathon. As we steam out of the Piraeus, everybody, Greek and foreigner, crowds to the port side to look for the Acropolis in the setting sunlight. A glimpse of Athena's temple at Suniunt is promised, if it is not too dark. Then the awnings arc put up, and only the romantic classical student, trying hard to remember un- forgettable lines of Homer, leaves the feast of talk and food and wine to look at the full moon on the wine-dark sea. The young men, on a few square yards of deck, entertain us with a traditional dance, their hands joined with knotted handkerchiefs. Greek voices and Greek instruments battle for audience with the engines ; but the girls are too ill to care for serenades. After some short hours of fitful sleep we awake to a dazzling dawn, and the red rays tinge the snows of Ida to the south. At Candia everybody is so helpful that it is long before we can leave the harbour and walk sleepily through streets packed with variegated stalls and Cretan men in local costume. Everybody knows that we are for Cnossos, and they reminisce about " Lord Evans." Some ask us to find work for them in England. Others are ambitious to marry English ladies, and so, they hope, to become English lords, and live rich and idle.
Athens or Olympia, Crete or Delphi, life is one long Greek dialogue ; so we can appropriately end with a Platonic myth, a cautionary tale for the unwary ; not a " likely story," perhaps, but a true one. In the anion:twice from Athens to Olympia, when we had endeared ourselves to the whole carriage-load of passengers by reciting Homer, by offering cigarettes and by enthusing (ritually, and for the third time) over the Corinth Canal, the halcyon day was darkened by a cloud of suspicion. A surly man, the only unsmiling Greek we ever met, asked us if we could speak Italian. In folly and pride I confessed to a smattering. The Inquisitor then asked me, in Italian, " Is Italy a beautiful country ? " and in a tone which seemed to expect the answer " Yes." When I gave this answer, he ran off in wicked glee to broadcast my blasphemy. My newly-made friends gathered round with sad faces. Surely this inoffensive youth, this xenos who had quoted Homer, could never have said anything so monstrous ? They insisted on a repeat performance. Again the prosecutor opened his cross-examination: "Parla lei italiano?" When the crucial question came, "L'Italia bella?" I was saved by Socratic dialectic. "L'Italia." I mumbled, "'no non i fascisti." For the rest of the journey I lacked neither nuts, nor cigarettes, nor fruit—nor conversation.
The witch-hunter retired defeated to the bar ; but I had narrowly escaped ostracisn..
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