The Greek Islands (9 page)

The interior organization of a small Greek village today – such a one as you might pass through on the road to Phaestos, say – has not changed substantially since ancient times, despite electric light and concrete. The village square may be the
delivery
point for goods like flour and rice, but the threshing floor is as active as ever and, when not in domestic use, serves as a sort of theatre for speech days and open-air festivals; it is, I suspect, the prototype of the first theatre. It is always beautifully sited for wind, because of the winnowing, and in consequence is fine for voices or music. I have seen it everywhere used for festival purposes, in villages of medium size. Nor would it take one very long to divine three other communal points which serve as electrodes, so to speak, for news, opinion, argument – the
factors
upon which the intellectual life of a village reposes. There is the bakery, first of all, which, as there are no private ovens, has a specially large built-in corner for personal bakings – where for a penny one can have a dish cooked. The ten minutes or so before midday, or the evening shortly before the baker opens up, is a prime gossip time for the women. Another community centre is the village spring, where water is drawn and clothes are washed. There is no need to repeat stories of haunted springs and the prevalance of Nereids in modern Greece – their origins reach back to Olympus and perhaps far beyond. And the men? They have the café where their intellectual life is spent drinking
arak
or
ouzo
and staring mindlessly into space.

One modern Cretan obsession which is striking in its
ubiquity
is the passion for high leather boots, upon which the modern peasant will spend quite large sums. Everywhere there are bootmakers crouched, in little shops, over their ‘trees’, their
handicraft proudly on show in the window. The boots!
Everywhere
they are worn, or are on order, or are being tried out with that famous Cretan strut, or being worn with an old-fashioned and dignified costume. They set off to perfection a pistol in the sash and dagger at the hip (now uncommon, except on dress occasions like important weddings).

Whether it is true or not that Crete is the most Greek of the islands, its history is certainly more continuous and more
revelatory
than in any other island. It is more revelatory chiefly because of the discovery of the Minoan civilization and the brave attempt to date history backwards almost into the
Neolithic
Age, around 4000–3000
BC
. Knossos and Phaestos are the most important places to show us these discoveries; but apart from their historical interest, both supply an aesthetic
experience
which cannot be matched elsewhere. I would stress here that a visit to Knossos must be followed by a browse through the Heracleion Museum where so many of the treasures from the site are housed and admirably displayed.

The two fixed stars in the firmament of Greek archaeology are Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans, who trod hard on his heels. The German had all the luck and the optimism of the great romantic – indeed his life is a romance; he spent it realizing a childish dream. Nobody before him had thought of the
Iliad
as more than a poetic fantasy. He used it as a guide book, literally dug up the reality behind the document, and set all our thinking about ancient history by the ears. He was both lucky and determined; everywhere he planted his spade,
treasure
hoards sprang out of the ground. What is piquant is that he even had his eye for a while on those enticing green
tumuli
on the knoll at Knossos, and even tried to get permission to open up the site; but administrative problems with the authorities proved too vexing and he turned aside to make discoveries more important, though slightly less spectacular, at Mycenae –
the famous shaft-graves which were useful historical echoes when it came to placing and dating the finds from Knossos.

Sir Arthur Evans was less flamboyant but no less a dreamer. He had been in the island already, hunting for seals with
pictographic
markings, and in some curious way he was able to predict that when Knossos was cleared and assessed, they would find specimens of Minoan writing. Was it premonition? Or had the disposition of the seals he found given him a clue? He was more plodding than imaginative – though he wrote an excellent travel book about Yugoslavia when a young man. Looking backwards it seems that everything lay at hand, ready for him – a whole civilization which pushed back the old frontiers of prehistory. Cautiously he waited until he could buy the whole site and deal with it carefully, at leisure.

So the great adventure began. Evans’s findings were carefully checked against the typology of objects already unearthed in Egypt and Asia Minor. Egypt was especially helpful, for the desert is an admirable conserver of everything, even papyrus, and the history of this ancient land is more smoothly
continuous
, less tempestuous than that of the Greek isles where
invasions
, wars and shattering earthquakes have erupted so often. Egypt was the touchstone; with its help Evans began his, at first, vague and hesitant back-dating of Minoan history. Even today, when the time-chart (still open to correction according to
findings
) pushes the history of the place back to 3000
BC
, one can feel how momentous the discovery was – and also how difficult and unsure the intellectual act of trying to sort and assign all these fragments. What would be the impressions of a Minoan archaeologist, picking over a heap of mud in a London
devastated
by an atomic attack – a heap which yields him objects as disparate as a teddy bear, a Father Christmas, a Rembrandt, (was England full of monkeys, and at what epoch?), an Iron Cross, an income tax return … and so on? How would he sort
them out historically and assign a purpose to them? Were the English believers in a bear totem? And was Father Christmas a sort of Zeus? The margin of possible error is disquieting, and should put us a little on our guard against the ‘certain certainties’ that T. S. Eliot refers to.

However chilling the time-chart is to those who hate dates, the thing is well worth a glance. For, in fact, it records the slow emergence of cultural man – with so many failures and
collapses
, not all of his own manufacture – from a cave-lurker of Neolithic times to a warrior, a priest or an architect, capable of abstract thought and the use of a tool which did duty as an extension of his arm. Completely different animals, one might say. Here is the chart in all its grimness.

What all this proved was that the first centre of high
civilization
in the Aegean area, with great cities and sumptuous
palaces
, highly developed art, extended trade, writing, and the use of seal stones, was here in Crete. From the end of the third millennium
BC
, a distinctive civilization came into being which gradually spread its influence over the whole complex of island and mainland states. During the late Bronze Age (
c
. 1600–
c
. 1100) this civilization contributed a kind of cultural
uniformity
to the Mediterranean scene, which was characterized by the
interlinking of cities and the exchange of goods and artworks. The gradual sway exercised by the kingdom of Minos made his capital Knossos one of the great cities of the world, and Crete the most powerful island, enjoying a pre-eminent central position in the Aegean with links to the north and to the south.

Yet history cannot be side-stepped – what goes up must come down. Gradually the
thalassocratia
of Minos degenerated, lost its absolute sway, and finally surrendered its supremacy to the more powerful mainland states. About 1400
BC
, the centre of political power shifted to Mycenae. Evans dates it from the destruction of what he has called ‘The Last Palace’; subsequent palaces were never to equal this one in size and splendour, and after it was destroyed all new buildings were small and meaner. This is partly because Knossos had also been the administrative centre of a highly complex and developed system of military government on the Spartan pattern. The great inscription found at Gortyna makes no bones about the slave culture it defines and delimits; citizens are divided into full citizens, serfs, and slaves. In 1400
BC
all
the palaces in Crete were destroyed simultaneously which makes it reasonable to surmise that enemy action rather than an earthquake was the cause. This is not Evans’s view, however; we will discuss that later. Whatever the cause, the land was over-run, and Mycenae took over the political and commercial contacts with Egypt and the Middle East that had once been the prerogative of the Cretans.

Of course, it is not possible to simplify, since so many unknown factors pop up at every turn of the road. It is perhaps wiser simply to tread the quiet precincts of Knossos and catch a glimpse of Mount Juktas centred between the so-called ‘Horns of Consecration’. The question of Evans’s restoration will inevitably arise; I personally find it insipid and in poor taste. But then Evans was trying to illustrate the relative position of things, and this purpose is fulfilled. The treasures in the little
museum, however, are a better guide to the spiritual temper of these faraway Minoan people, who sometimes make one think of China and sometimes of Polynesia. Bright, fresh and pristine are the little faces from the frescoes or from vase
decorations
. Candour and a smiling self-possession seem to be the characteristics of these people, but of course they guard their secrets very well. The snake goddess with her snake cult is an example;
was
it a cult? Snakes that are not venomous (which is true of those on Crete) are easy to play with. The Provençal
couleuvres
– grass-snakes sometimes two metres long – provide the same sort of fun without developing into a cult. At every harvest time the newspaper has pictures of people
snake-teasing
; but they let them go without harming them. And the snakes in the
garrigues
of the Midi are positively cheeky. The situation may well have been similar in ancient Crete, with no question of snake-playing being a religious rite.

If the Minotaur, the labyrinth, and the double axe are
symbols
, they are harder to interpret. Is it fair to suppose that the Minotaur symbolizes some great event – perhaps the arrival of men from far away – who brought with them a terrifying and puissant animal which had never been seen before: a bull? (Imagine the terror of seeing one’s first bull!) And then a
bull-culture
, bull-obsession displaced whatever had been the native pastoral cults? It is not too far-fetched if one remembers the superstitious horror combined with delight that our
grandfathers
felt on sight of the first devil-car, and recognizes to what a degree the invention of the petrol-engine has changed and is gradually strangling our whole culture. This is an obsession if ever there was one; and soon the tourist organizations of all Mediterranean countries will be forced to print and issue a map of all the marvellous beaches ruined by oil slicks.

To return to the labyrinth; is it relevant that the famous double axe was called
labrys
, and that the name of the labyrinth
was derived from it? Earlier folklorists, such as J. C. Lawson, were perfectly content to see the double axe as a sort of nuclear sceptre wielded by Zeus who, as top god, had the right to inflict top punishments. It represented the lightning which is such a feature of the Greek winter, a winter which specializes in
extraordinary
electrical storms of almost tropical intensity; trees are stripped with a single ripping noise like torn calico, balls of electricity roll about along the ground. Both in Corfu and Rhodes, and once in Kalymnos, I left the house open during a storm, and these violent balls of haze rolled softly through it and out into the garden again. The peasants fear these storms very much, not only because one could get struck by a lightning flash, but also because sometimes they turn to hailstorms, with huge chunks of ice capable of wounding a mule and knocking you senseless. Zeus, in modern belief, has given place to the word for god, but is a sort of personified god they think of, for when it suddenly thunders, a peasant will say, ‘God thunders, god lightning-flashes.’ Indeed he is not very far from Zeus, the modern peasant’s god. Well, in earlier days the double axe seemed to explain itself along these lines. More sophisticated, and perhaps more penetrating, is the observation of a recent archaeologist (Jacquetta Hawkes): ‘Its shape, the double
triangle
, was widely used as a sign for women, and the shaft sunk through the central perforation affords an effective piece of sexual imagery.’