Like Odysseus. In Homer’s tales, Odysseus’s best days are behind him, and the young warriors won’t let him forget it. “You know, stranger, I’ve seen a lot of sportsmen and you don’t look like one to me at all,” a strapping fighter named Euryalus taunts Odysseus during an afternoon of athletic contests in Phaeacia. “You look more like the captain of a merchant ship, plying the seas with a crew of hired hands and keeping a sharp eye on his cargo, greedy for profit. No, you’re no athlete.”
Odysseus gets to his feet, and school is in session. “Now I’m slowed down by my aches and pains and the suffering I’ve had in war and at sea,” he concedes, but that’s all he’ll concede. Swirling back his cloak, Odysseus reaches for a discus and grabs not the lightest, for more control, but the heaviest, for maximum momentum. He uncoils from his windup and lets fly, hissing the discus on a flight path so low and perfectly angled it nearly takes the Phaeacians’ heads off. It lands so far ahead of the field it doesn’t even need to be measured.
“And if anyone has the urge to try me, step right up,” Odysseus snarls. “I don’t care if it’s boxing, wrestling, or even running. Come one, come all.”
His young man’s body is gone, but he’s an expert at using what’s left. Earlier in the Iliad, Odysseus races two younger men. He’s the underdog once again, but his tactics are terrific as he slipstreams right behind the leader. “His feet stepped in Ajax’s footprints before the dust settled into them, and his warm breath from inches behind streamed down onto Ajax’s head.” Just before the finish, Odysseus surges so suddenly that Ajax is startled and falls. Ajax leaps to his feet, flinging horse dung off his face and complaining that the goddess Athena tripped him. But the runner who came in last saw it all and tells it straight.
“Odysseus is of an earlier generation,” Antilochus explains. “He is a tough old bird, as they say; it is hard for any of us to beat him, except for Achilles.”
John Pendlebury was running into the same tough old birds all over Crete.
The more he wandered the island after he took over as curator of Knossos, the more of these ageless, bounding, Odyssean mountain men he ran into. He couldn’t swear any were as strong as Eumastas; on the other hand, he kept coming across cheese huts high in the hills stacked from head-scratchingly huge stones. The great messenger Pheidippides was said to be Cretan; so were many of the other all-day runners, including Alexander the Great’s special courier, Philonides. And Pheidippides was certainly no youngster; he held the rank of “master hemerodromos,” so his heroic effort during the Battle of Marathon would have come during the twilight of his career.
So why should it be any different for Pendlebury? Now that he was living in an open-air performance lab, he had another way to test his theory that myths were based on real men and women: he could experiment on himself. Like Lawrence, Pendlebury loved role playing, so total immersion came naturally. He also shared Lawrence’s trick for getting inside someone else’s skin: first, get inside their clothes.
“Have just got a Cretan costume—perfectly gorgeous, a great show,” Pendlebury was soon writing his father. For a Cambridge academic, it was quite the makeover, even outdoing Pendlebury’s previous phase of wearing a white cape to high-jump competitions. Cretan shepherds dress more like buccaneers than farmhands, so Pendlebury kitted himself out almost Halloweenishly, in an embroidered black waistcoat, black breeches with a knee-length crotch, knee-high boots, a black headkerchief, a wide sash wrapped around his waist, and a black cloak with red-silk lining.
Every morning before breakfast, he did a fifteen-minute skipping drill that mimicked the light, skittering shepherd’s stride. “I find it quickens the muscles which walking is apt to increase but slow down,” he commented. To uncramp his body after long hours hunched over potsherds, he had masks and foils shipped to Crete and began fencing so he could stretch into full-length lunges and sharpen his balance, enlisting his plucky wife as a sparring partner. He even began high-jumping again, and gradually found he could sail higher than ever. As a university athlete, he’d barely cleared six feet, but that now looked easy. “Very fit and all the spring in the world,” he wrote to his father. “I think I shall have a good chance at the Greek record, it is only 6 ft or just under.”
Every afternoon, he stopped work and pushed into the hills for a ten-or twelve-mile hike. His range and curiosity were impressive—until they became astonishing. During one season alone, Pendlebury hiked more than a thousand miles across the island. One afternoon, he scrambled all the way over Mount Ida and still made it back to Knossos before sundown: “26 miles over filthy country in 6 hrs 25 m,” he jotted, always exact about his journeys. Cretan highlanders who at first didn’t know what to make of this eager, one-eyed stranger got used to having him ramble into their villages at night—famished, exhausted, and half-lost, yet ready to lift a wineglass and learn some new songs.
“He was making friends everywhere,” recalled Dilys Powell, who met the Pendleburys and became their occasional expedition companion when her husband took over as head of the British School in Athens. “By now he had travelled on foot from one end of the island to the other. It was only natural that its people should feel affection and respect for this tireless young Englishman, his fair skin burned dark, his hair the color of stubble, who turned up everywhere, slept anywhere, drank with them, talked with them, spoke their own kind of language.”
Pendlebury felt the same way about the Cretans, and he was ready to prove it. By the time Hitler had driven English forces out of Europe and was threatening London, Pendlebury had spent ten years on Crete and decided to make his stand where he was. He was pushing forty, but a decade of learning from tough old birds had left him lean and fit as a teenager. “Record time to the summit,” he noted with satisfaction after speed-climbing Mount Ida. “And a resultant waist measurement, pulled in a bit, of 22½ inches.”
But the War Office wasn’t in the market for middle-aged, half-blind academics, regardless of trouser size. Pendlebury was convinced his Mediterranean expertise could be invaluable to naval intelligence, but they brushed him off. He tried the military attaché in Athens, then army intelligence, before finally volunteering for the job of last resort: stretcher bearer. Before he was to start duty, however, word spread along the Cambridge-Oxford old boys’ network that certain, um … characters were needed for a new “special services” operation. No fighting know-how required.
“Seems tough and generally desirable” was the shrugging appraisal after Pendlebury finally got his interview, and he was soon heading back to Crete. His cover story: he was vice-consul, a midlevel, do-little diplomat. But to get a whiff of what he was really up to, Pendlebury’s friends learned to check his bedside table. “On his more nefarious expeditions,” Dilys Powell was told by one Pendlebury confidant, “he used to take out his glass eye and wear a black eye-patch. He would leave the eye on the table by his bed—if you found it there you knew he was away on some excursion or other.”
Pendlebury regularly slipped away from the Villa Ariadne and climbed into the mountains to scout hideouts and organize rebel bands. As a student of ancient warfare, he knew Crete was critical, and his own eye for the island’s defenses told him two things: the attack would have to come by air, and the real battle would be high in the hills. The Germans had crushed every ground force they’d faced, but they had yet to run into anything as elusive and unrelenting as a Cretan bandit. If Pendlebury could get ten thousand rifles into the hands of the highlanders, he was sure the Germans would have a fight on their hands.