All this, and the human attitude which flowered from it, was brought to Sicily in the long boats and planted here in the thoroughly Greek cities of Syracuse, Agrigento, and Gela. To be sure, thinking of Zeus as a watcher over the olive one feels that he belonged to an older religious culture of which the oak and the other mountain trees were perhaps fitter symbols. As for the olive, it was left as a simple phenomenon, accepted as a free gift from Athena after she won the contest with Poseidon for the patronage of Attica. To the old sea god belonged perhaps the saltwater well on the Acropolis, a mysterious feature recorded in Pausanias’s account of the Acropolis. This does not help us much … though we are told that Athena herself was born from the ear of Zeus (like Gargarmelle?). As Deeds once remarked: “The maddening thing about the ancient Greeks, and one would like to kick them for it, is the capacity for believing two mutually contradictory things at one and the same time.” It comes of being as curious as one is hospitable — all foreign Gods are made welcome, whatever their origins; hence the mix-up when one tries to establish something concrete about the homegrown deities.
At any rate, the olive branch with the little owl (the skops, whose pretty descendants still occupy the holes and fents of the Acropolis and utter their strange melancholy call at dusk and dawn) feature upon the coinage of ancient Athens. In modern Athens, too, the children of the Gymnasium sport a distinctive button which pictures Athena’s owlet, which has come to stand for wisdom: not esoteric wisdom necessarily but horse sense of the worldly kind. And while we are on the topic of the olive I must not forget to add that the cultivated tree, which is harvested in November and December, is grafted on to wild stock — so perhaps we should look for its origins in the historical side of grafting as a technique; it argues a highly sophisticated knowledge of agriculture in the country which first adopted the practice. Was it India? If so how did it come into the orbit of the ancient Greeks? I am not competent to answer all these questions, though my mind occupies itself with these and other questions as I travel. Indeed I hold long conversations with the vanished ghost of Martine who was always hunting for answers, and was not slow to disagree with the propositions I enunciated. I could see that she would have a hole or two to pick in my olive theories; but in fact if one were to ask how the word Mediterranean should be defined I should be tempted to answer: “As the country where the olive tree is distributed and where the basic agricultural predispositions such as the cuisine depend upon its fruit either in the form of oil for cooking, oil for lighting, or fruit to eat with bread. It has fulfilled all these functions from time immemorial and in the countries bordering the inland sea it still does.”
But I had strayed a little in my thoughts; I had not touched upon the central question raised by her remark. What happened before this—what was the island like?
Long before the owl-eyed Athene came into her own the island was settled by men whose history has been obscured by the fact that they left nothing behind for us to admire. Many strains, many invasions of tribes from different quarters must be envisaged, but the historically predominant inhabitants were the Sikels whose alphabet, if I am not mistaken, has not been deciphered as yet; nor are their inscriptions very numerous. It is a dead end where the prehistorian ekes out his scanty certainties with large conjectures; a few tombs, a few clearings and stone houses worthy of the jungle cannot go far to excite our minds or our aesthetic sense. It is really idle to dwell upon them. (I am talking in my sleep to Martine with one-half of my mind; with the other I am trying to rough in the outlines of the pocket history which she had once demanded for her children.) One should concentrate in such cases on what is striking, and leave out the rest. Good histories of the place in yawn-making detail — there are a number; but in shortening sail I would build something more like a companion to landscape than a real history.
It is not the Sikels as such, then, who are interesting; what is interesting is trying to visualize the state of the island which they inherited — a pre-Mediterranean Sicily, if I could dare to call it that. In its Pleistocene period, for example, it must have been a desolate and forbidding place with nature far outstripping man in the luxuriant prolixity of its inventions. All that man could do was to cower superstitiously under it in fear — without the tools and intelligence to shape or combat it, or even to defend himself against the wild animals which abounded in these fastnesses of oak and beech, the boars, the leopards and the stags of great tine; not to mention the snakes and wolves and insects which harried these forlorn little settlements of volcanic limestone where the only household tool was obsidian — a volcanic glass — which offered a limited scope in cutting up meat or vegetables for food. One must presume that man at this time was a debased sort of creature from the cultural point of view — unhappy on land as on the sea because he was the master of neither. I picture a sort of Caliban of the woods, living on grubs and worms when he could not find animal carcasses to nourish him. In Africa and in Australia there are such cultures existing to this day. Perhaps the Sikels were not quite as primitive, but in the absence of any firm facts about them one is at liberty to imagine; nothing they did seems to indicate that one day Syracuse would arise, white and glittering on its green and blue spur between the two perfect harbors — a home from home for Corinth, for Rhodes, for Athens.…
The imaginative jump is a big one; but it is not less of a jump to try and imagine what the landscape must have been like without most of the fruit and flowers that we see today and which characterize our notions of the Mediterranean scene. So much of what surrounds us today came to the island very late in its history, sometimes as late as the sixteenth century. The long straggly hedges of prickly pear came from the Americas, as did the agave and the tomato. The Arabs imported lemon, orange, mulberry, and sumac. Papyrus from Egypt still flourishes in some corners. The land is bounteous, and it varies in exposure and elevation to a considerable degree. But then, if one reflects, even the olive and the vine were originally not native to Athens, though where they came from we can only conjecture. But as for Sicily, everything “takes” and there is a suitable corner where soil and temperature combine to welcome almost everything. Deeds had seen tobacco as well as avocado doing well here.
Indeed a stable subtropical climate is ideal for all crops — if one wishes to enjoy the best of all worlds. Here, for example, one can see stands of banana, grapefruit, and sugarcane in the hot lowlands. Even carob trees must have come from somewhere like the Lebanon.…
But how hard it is to imagine this “granary of Rome” without lemons, oranges, or grapes, without the cactus and the sentinel aloe. While in the cool misty uplands the conifers and berries remind one of Austria or England. Even the sweet orange was brought here from China by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.
Is it any wonder that the Sikels, eking out a fearful life without all these glorious fruits in which to exult, left us nothing to admire? Not for them the final conquest of the land which brings wheat and barley, nor the control of the sea which brings the produce of other lands, other cultures to one’s door. They were locked up in their loneliness like the inhabitants of another planet and it is impossible to feel much sympathy with them, or gain any insight into their characters.
But if the arrival of the Greeks so much marked agriculture and city growth it was, so to speak, only the historical topsoil which was changed; underneath it all the island climate was that of Attica or perhaps the Argolid. The limestone valleys were quick with freshwater springs; the land was as beautiful as Greece and quite as rich. And in the first spring showers Sicily must have put forth as rich a crop of wild flowers as Attica itself for it still does to this day. The Greek garden described by Homer in the Odyssey—it could and perhaps did flourish also here in Sicily: