In this garden flourish tall trees like pears, pomegranates and apples thick with fruit, also sweet figs and bounteous olives. Moreover, a rich vineyard has been planted hard by, beyond the last row of trees; there are garden plots also blooming all year round with flowers.…
These new and picturesque additions to the domestic scene spelt leisure and plenty, and with them came the first thrust of the vase paintings and the first verses of the poets who peopled the streams with nymphs, the oak groves with dryads, the caves with Pans and centaurs, and the forests with satyrs and silens. In the culture which followed each plant and flower had its story, its link with the mythopoeic inner nature of man — which he can only realize when he has a chance to dream. Yes, Martine, that was it! A chance to dream! So Daphne turned to laurel, so Persephone broke her fast in nibbling pomegranate seeds — and poetry itself became domesticated.
But the fruits of all this were not necessarily the sophisticated blooms of enclosure, they were simply the fruits and flowers of the earth. It is significant perhaps that there were no treatises written upon gardening until the late Hellenistic era. Temple groves and gardens followed — I am thinking that Plato (who was nearly murdered in Sicily by the tyrant of the day) rejoiced when his academy in the valley of Kephissos was transformed into a “well-watered grove with trim avenues and shady walks”; nearby too was the academy of his rival Epicurus, laid out, they say, at the cost of seven thousand drachmae. (One drachma was a day’s wages.) Here he lived and taught in his three-wheeled chair, and when he died he willed the garden and the little house to his fellow philosophers. It has vanished. Everything has vanished. Fussy old Cicero was the last to set eyes on the place when, some two hundred years later, he passed it by accident while walking in Athens with friends. But the effect of shade and water and time upon philosophy — there is a whole treatise in it. Outside the city to the northeast in a large green park lay the Lyceum where Socrates taught and where Aristotle and his followers paced the walks in deep discussion, becoming nicknamed The Peripatetics. They were specialists in the qualities of shade as well as water — just like the modern Athenians and the Sicilians are. Indeed one can test the contentions of modern folklore by comparing the shade of a pine with a plane, the shade of a fig tree with that of a cypress. Try them, and see which brings the deepest siesta sleep and which troubles you with dreams and visions.…
The Hephaisteion Garden had its echo in Sicily where history recorded a sacred grove to the god on Etna. It was guarded by savage dogs which were, however, trained to welcome decent folk and only attack visitors who were either temple polluted or living under a curse for some act of sacrilege. Hephaistos (as brother?) shared the responsibility for the Acropolis with Athena and his shrine was hard by her own.
But this was public forestry, so to speak, and meant to echo public (or religious) statuary, like the grove of laurel and olive which surrounded the Altar of Pity where malefactors and runaway slaves often sought refuge; or the white poplar where thieves and other swindlers of a philosophic persuasion held their informal get-togethers. But what of the wild flowers?
In early spring, and again in the autumn, with the first rains which herald the winter, Sicily like the whole of Greece is carpeted in wild flowers — some six thousand varieties have been listed of which some few flourish only in the Arcadian valley of the Styx. They are still familiar to us, the flowers which filled Greek gardens of old — crocus, violet, hyacinth; but northerners will be fondest of the more fragile anemone and cyclamen. Sometimes one has seen the little white cusps of the cyclamen pushing up through young snow like the ears of some fabulous but delicate creature from a storybook. Then there is Star of Bethlehem, as we call it, tulip, prodigal narcissus, humble daisy, lofty lily.… But for Martine there was nothing like the rose; she loved its variety and hardiness, for she had seen it bravely flowering out of dry and bony ground, almost calcareous rock face. And she had promised herself a rose garden wherever she went. Its history is as beautiful as its flower for it goes right back into the Age of Bronze as far as fresco paintings in Crete are concerned.
It appears in the Iliad as the flower of Aphrodite who cured the wounds of Hector with oil of roses. Thus having become sacred it descended from Aphrodite to Eros and Isis, ultimately to emerge once more as the rosa mystica of the Virgin.
It was perhaps the only flower to be intensely cultivated and marketed. For the Romans the rose became a rage and a fad and fresh blooms were rushed to Italy in winter by fast ships fresh from nurseries in Egypt. Rhodes took its name from the roses and showed the flower on its coins; its abundance was so famous that a legend grew up that sailors approaching the coast would smell the flowers before they sighted the land. Athens — no don’t tell me, I know — was always for Pindar “the violet crowned city,” though he may have meant the violet-magnesium light which plays about Hymettus at sundown, and not the flower at all.… But here my memory recalled a warning she uttered in a later letter — the one about Agrigento where I had not yet been. “The yardstick is Athens if you like, but we always forget that almost all we know about Athens as a town comes from a very late witness, Pausanias, writing in the second century. I imagine him as portly and meticulous, a Roman Gibbon, working up his travel notes in his depressing office in Asia Minor. Thank God for him — but of course he was the first tourist and perhaps the greatest.”
Yes, the caution is worth heeding, and luckily I was able to turn to the admirably phrased introduction of Jane Harrison on the subject — for she had chosen him as the only real guide to Athens. The Emperor Hadrian (who by the way was much beloved by the Sicilians because of all he did for the island) made a valiant attempt to makeover Athens anew, to restore its former glories by the addition of new temples and restored monuments. His passion was an antiquarian one which reminds us very much of the contemporary British or German attitudes. But work as he might, the soul of the city had fled, and all he ever achieved was the snobbish embalming of a once magnificent corpse.
He supplied anew all the outside apparatus of a vigorous city life but he could not stay the progress of the death that is from within. Accordingly this prosperous period of Hadrian’s reign has the irony of a magnificence purely external. Pausanias, of course, did not feel the pathos of the situation; perhaps no contemporary thinker could have stood sufficiently aloof to see how hollow was this Neo-Attic revival. Greece endured to the full the last ignominy of greatness; she became the fashion of the vulgar.
I fear these last fine phrases could be aimed a little bit in our direction — in the direction of the little red bus with Mario at the wheel, and the twenty or so captives of tourism tiptoeing around monuments they do not comprehend with a grave piety they do not feel. Pausanias himself complains petulantly against the tourism of his day, for the Romans could not help but feel that Greece had the edge on them, that in some undefined way they remained forever provincial, out of the main swim of culture despite all their own real greatness and their own mighty and original culture. Somehow there was a tug towards Greece, and the young Romans must have made a sort of Grand Tour of the now ruined and blasted land, still eager to be accredited to the mysteries (which had lost all their numen, all their spiritual sap) or to win a prize for a chariot race at Olympia, or a derivative play in a Greek theater. They were marked by the thumbprint of an unnatural vulgarity, which they never succeeded in surmounting.