Mirrors (14 page)

THE HERO

How would the Trojan War have been told by an unknown soldier? A Greek foot soldier, ignored by the gods and desired only by the vultures that circled the battlefields? A farmer-fighter, hymned by no one, sculpted by no one? A nobody, an everybody, obliged to kill and without the slightest interest in being killed to win Helen’s eyes?

Would that soldier have predicted what Euripides later confirmed? That Helen never was in Troy, only her shadow? That ten years of butchery occurred for the sake of an empty tunic?

And if that soldier survived, what would he recall?

Who knows.

Maybe the smell. The smell of pain, and only that.

Three thousand years after the fall of Troy, war correspondents Robert Fisk and Fran Sevilla tell us that wars stink. They have been in several, on the inside, and they know the hot, sweet, sticky stench of decay that gets into your pores and takes up residence in your body. The nausea never goes away.

FAMILY PORTRAIT IN GREECE

The sun moved backward across the heavens and set in the east. While that strangest of days withered away, Atreus was conquering the throne of Mycenae.

Atreus felt the crown teeter on his head. He watched his relatives out of the corner of his eye. Thirst for power shone in his nephews’ gaze. Just to be sure, he cut off their heads, chopped them to bits, cooked them up, and served them as a casserole at the banquet he offered his brother Thyestes, father of the deceased.

Atreus’s son Agamemnon inherited the throne. He fancied Clytemnestra, his uncle’s wife, and wanted her for his queen. Agamemnon had to kill his uncle. Years later he had to slit the throat of his prettiest daughter, Iphigenia. The goddess Artemis demanded as much if her host of satyrs, centaurs, and nymphs was to provide favorable winds to the ships heading off to fight the kingdom of Troy.

At the end of that war, under a full moon, Agamemnon returned triumphantly to his palace at Mycenae. Queen Clytemnestra welcomed him and drew him a hot bath. When he stepped out of the bath, she wrapped him in a cloak she herself had woven. That cloak became Agamemnon’s shroud. Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, buried a double-edged sword in his body, and she decapitated him with an ax.

With that same ax, some time later, Electra and Orestes avenged their father’s death. The children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra chopped up their mother and her lover, and gave inspiration to the poet Aeschylus and to Dr. Freud.

STRIKE OF CLOSED THIGHS

In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, the women of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Boeotia went on strike against the war.

It was the first strike of closed thighs in the history of the world. It occurred onstage, born of the imagination of Aristophanes, and of the rant he placed in the mouth of Lysistrata, an Athenian matron:

“I will not point my feet at the heavens, neither will I squat on all fours with my ass in the air!”

The strike went on without a truce, until the love-fast forced the warriors to acquiesce. Weary of fighting without solace and alarmed by the female insurgency, they had no choice but to bid the battlefield goodbye.

This was more or less how it was told by Aristophanes, a conservative playwright who defended traditions as if he believed in them, but in his heart held nothing sacred but the right to laugh.

And peace reigned on the stage.

Not in reality.

The Greeks had been fighting for twenty years when this play was first performed, and the butchery continued for another seven.

Women still had no right to strike, no right to an opinion, no right at all, except to submit to the duties assigned to their sex. Acting was not one of them. Women could attend plays in the worst seats, but not appear onstage. There were no actresses. In Aristophanes’s production, Lysistrata and the other protagonists were played by men wearing masks.

THE ART OF DRAWING YOU

In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.

On the wall, his shadow flickers.

The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.

It is still dark. The woman takes a coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.

Those lines will not leave.

They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave.

SOCRATES

Several cities fought on one side or the other. But this Greek war, the war that killed more Greeks than any other, was the war between Sparta and Athens: the oligarchy of the few, proud to be few, against the democracy of the few pretending to be all.

In the year 404 BC, to the trilling of flutes, Sparta took her cruel time demolishing the walls of Athens.

Of Athens, what remained? Five hundred ships at the bottom of the sea, eighty thousand dead from plague, innumerable warriors disemboweled, and a city humbled, filled with the mutilated and the insane.

Then Athenian justice condemned to death the most just of her men.

The great teacher of the Agora, who pursued truth by thinking out loud while strolling in the public square, who fought in three battles in the war just ended, was found guilty. “Corruptor of the young,” the judges declared, though perhaps they meant to say he was guilty of teasing and criticizing their sacred city, and never mindlessly adoring her.

OLYMPICS

The Greeks loved to kill each other, but they also played other sports. They competed at the sanctuary of Olympia, and when the Olympics were on, they forgot all about war for a while.

Everyone was naked: the runners, the athletes who threw the javelin and the discus, the ones who jumped, boxed, wrestled, galloped, or competed by singing. None of them wore brand-name sneakers or spandex tights or anything but their own skin, glistening with oils.

The champions received no medals. They won a laurel wreath, a few vessels of olive oil, the right to eat for free for the rest of their lives, and the respect and admiration of their neighbors.

The first Olympic winner, someone named Korebus, earned his living as a cook and continued to do so thereafter. At the inaugural Olympics, he ran farther than his rivals and faster than the fearsome north winds.

The Olympics were ceremonies of shared identity. By playing sports, those bodies were saying wordlessly: “We hate each other, we fight each other, but we are all Greeks.” And thus it was for a thousand years, until triumphant Christianity outlawed these pagan nudities that offended the Lord.

In the Greek Olympics, women, slaves, and foreigners never took part.

Not in Greek democracy either.

PARTHENON AND AFTER

Phidias, the most envied sculptor of all time, died of a broken heart after his insufferable talent landed him a jail sentence.

Many centuries later, Phidias was punished again, this time by usurpation.

His best works, the sculptures of the Parthenon, are no longer in Athens but in London. And they are called not the Phidias Marbles, but the Elgin Marbles.

Lord Elgin was not exactly an artist. As British ambassador a couple of centuries ago, he shipped these marvels home and sold them to his government. Since then, they sit in the British Museum.