[ALBSA-Info] Financial Times

[Agron Alibali]

Financial Times (London) 
May 18, 2001, Friday London Edition 1 

Why we welcome Greeks bearing gifts: From theatre to weapons, Michael Kustow explores how deeply rooted our spirit is in ancient Hellenic culture 

 By TO THE IRONIES OF MYTH AND HISTORY IN THE MANDOLIN 


Greece - its plays, poems, statues, laws, landscape, politics and philosophy, its light, its tastes, its islands, its "wine-dark sea" - keeps murmuring its siren songs in our ears. From the lachrymose but picturesque melodrama of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, to the ironies of myth and history in the Trojan war theatre saga Tantalus, Greece is still stroking the senses and stirring the spirit. 

Artists go on reaching into the well of Greek stories and argument. In his final creative surge, Ted Hughes picked up Ovid and re-voiced riddling Greek myths, unpacked Aeschylus and Euripides. The poet Christopher Logue continues his 40-year "account" of Homer's Iliad, bringing it into the age of cinema and missiles named after Greek gods - Poseidon, Trident. Tony Harrison's most recent foray into classical Greece is the decidedly modern feature film Prometheus, in which the golden effigy of our age of industry and technology journeys through a Europe depleted by pollution, consumerism and racism. 

In the West End, Fiona Shaw creates a commanding, contemporary Medea. In Ireland, Katie Mitchell's Electra touches the nerve-ends of rage and revenge. The quarrel over the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens continues to expose the curatorial paternalism of the British Museum. 

Paul Cartledge's recent BBC series The Greeks re-examined the golden age of 5th-century BC Athens and the collapse of its empire. On Sunday Radio 3 turns over a day's programming to all things Greek. 

The culture and politics of 5th-century BC Athens underpin our cities and political assemblies, our sports and our science, our myths and our heroes. The concepts, the wars, the drama and arguments made in Greece half a millennium before Christianity, the exclusions, boundaries and demarcations that were set in classical Athens, have become a kind of DNA code of our culture. 

But we've come a long way since Shelley famously announced in 1821, "We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece." For a long time, Greek antiquity has ceased being simply the idol of Hellenophiles; it has also become what contemporary cultural analysts call a "site of struggle". Multiculturalists call it a cultural conspiracy. Feminists decry its dismissal of women. It's attacked as a model of ethnocentrism, a museum of Dead White European Males, a high-minded hall of fame founded on slavery. 

How has the ancient Greek legacy gone through such dizzying changes since antiquarians began digging up classical trophies for their collections half a millennium ago? The thing we call "classical Greece" has been as fiercely fought over as the battlefield of Marathon. Look at all the ways it's been used to reflect what we need to see of ourselves. 

In 19th-century Britain, Pericles and Plato supplied role-models for empire-builders. For today's radical Left, the Athenian system, albeit excluding women and slaves, is a template for radical democracy. An artistic inspiration to sculptors from Canova to Antony Caro, neo- classical art based on Greece was also an aesthetic imposition William Blake felt he had to combat. In France recently, ultra-rightwing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen's henchpeople justified their xenophobia by reference to classical Athens' treatment of foreigners, whom they called "barbarians". Conversely, ancient Greece has also been a benchmark for multiculturalism, as in Martin Bernal's controversial "Black Athena" which contends that ancient Greeks were black or coloured migrants from Egypt. 

What we call "classical Greece" is, in today's critical vocabulary, a "construction". The materials of which it was built were statues, vases, columns, tombs, and above all texts - Homer and Plato and Euripides, laws and decrees heaped with laundry lists in the jumble of history. Many of the most precious had been held in Byzantium, in whose Greek-speaking capital Constantinople a fabled treasury of classical Greek culture had been preserved. After it fell to the Turks in 1453, the trickle of objects became a flood. 

By the 18th century, with the age of Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists, there was an appetite to find a history and meaning in these breathtaking samples of disinterred Greek art. It was provided by one of the most brilliant and appealing Helleno-maniacs of his time, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Besotted with the art of classical Greece, this German schoolmaster found a job as a cardinal's librarian at the Vatican. Every day he scrutinised the white marble statues of ancient Greece - or at least their Roman copies. Moved by their ideal male beauty - he was a homosexual - Winckelmann wrote rhapsodically about the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of Greek art, and his books set a new touchstone for Europe's artists and intellectuals. But like many German Hellenophiles of the 18th and 19th centuries, Winckelmann never got to Greece. It was almost as if there was a terror of actually embracing the reality of his ideal. An English aristocrat toyed with the idea of taking him there as her tour antiquarian. "I have never wanted anything as passionately as this," Winckelmann wrote. "I wouldn't mind losing a finger, in fact I wouldn't mind losing my balls, for a chance of getting to Greece." The pilgrim who was prepared to castrate himself was murdered in Trieste by a young thief he had invited to his room, boasting of priceless Greek coins he had there. 

The Greek siren song echoes on. I hear it most clearly in the theatre, the least material and most mercurial of ancient Greek benefactions to us. Not only Tantalus, but a galaxy of productions has shaken our stages: Peter Hall and Tony Harrison's Oresteia, Peter Hall's Oedipus plays and Lysistrata, and Tony Harrison's Dionysiac Trackers, built on the fragments of a wildly disrespectful satyr play. 

Perhaps the reason why Greek theatre is such a significant resonator of the Greek spirit now is that in a time of tragic, apparently insoluble and violent conflicts, in the Middle East, the Balkans, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, it shows us how to face the worst. It confronts us with the ultimate mystery - how, with all our cleverness, we still go on hating and hurting, trapped in nets of crime and retaliation. 

"We've had 2,500 years of philosophy, psychology, science," says playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, "and not one of them has yielded some final understanding. Going back to the Greek plays you begin to sense this suspicion, in a kind of horror, that the human being is ultimately not just irrational, but unknowable." 

Faced with atrocity, suffering and pain, there's a human instinct to break down, howl, rage, and so to lose language. In a television age, we allow ourselves a brief moment of compassion or indignation before the newsreader moves on. In their theatre, the Greeks kept violence off the stage, out of sight. But they did not keep it out of mind, or out of heart. And through their theatre, with its impassive, eloquent masks, they preserved the power of language - "speech, thought light as wind" as Sophocles puts it. And this is the biggest difference between our image-saturated world and theirs, so like and unlike ours. Michael Kustow's 'Possessed By The Greeks' is on Radio 3 on Sunday at 4.00pm, part of Radio 3's Greek Day. 



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