Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

from a cult of olden time which eventually begat the gymnasium, the baths, the tracks, I do not know. The name of the road was explained this way: once the infantry of Oxylos was curious to know what went on in Elis, and by this road their spies came to listen at the wall, so silently that no one heard them.

I wonder if in times now forgotten the city cult was that of Artemis Philomeirax and the silence not that of Aitolian spies but of initiates whose procession came along this road to the rites.

The stone road was dusty, quiet, and slowly covering with leaves. Here a thistle had come up between stones, its leaves curled and ornate, there, a stray flax flower. The plane trees were old and tall, and we relished their shade and peacefulness. Pyttalos had been here many years before, and remarked that it was all the very same.

Three boys came onto the road from the smaller gymnasium, the Moltho, going to the baths. Their chests rose and fell, and they breathed through their mouths. They were wrestlers, for ovals of dust spotted their oiled bodies. One had thrown a khiton over his shoulders, one wore a triangle of white linen knotted at each hip, the other was naked except for a blue ribbon around his forehead. Their hair seemed to have been cut with the bread knife. They looked at Lykas, in the manner of boys and dogs, thinking perhaps that he was someone new at the schools. He blushed.

The temple was very old. Its northern side was black with lichen, and the sun and rain had bleached its eastern wall to the whiteness of ancient bone. The statue of Artemis was carved of olive wood in the archaic style. Her face was covered with beaten gold so impure as to be red. She wore a stole of bright but countrified needlework, mere geometry to indicate blue stars, a white moon, a yellow sun with its rays, and a row of partridges. The cult statues were equally primitive and equally blunt, a girl with a rather overstated notch to emphasize her place in nature, and a boy with broad shoulders and copious testicles. The interior was dim—we looked through the latticework of the door—and smelled of clean old stone and still, dry air. The figures were serene in their half-light, except for the golden mask of Artemis, which had the strict kindness of the Spartan women written on it in, so to speak, the Elean dialect. Before the altar there were terra-cotta figures, no larger than toys horses, deer, birds, bears, lions

These sweet temples which I have seen everywhere in Greece, her islands and colonies, with their thin, fluted columns browned by age and sunlight, with their trees, knot-kneed or mossy or slender still in their fortieth year, gather all their circumjacence, their rocks, nettles, narrow windows, god images, turning shadows, birds’ nests, wasp hives, urns, priests, and acolytes, into a venerable family, for how can a tree’s shadow, flowered, full-leaved, or laden with snow, move on a temple’s wall from the old age of Herakles to the graying of Hadrian’s beard, without becoming its sister or brother as those kinships stand among wood and stone? It was Herakleitos who said that some things are too slow to see, such as the growth of grass, and some too fast, like the arrow’s flight. All things, I have often thought, are dancing to their own music. A Lydian song is soon over, but the music to which the zodiac is turning requires twelve times three thousand years to close its harmony, if we may follow the calculations of Pythagoras, and the rhythms of time for a child are so much slower than for a man that we have lived for centuries before our beards arrive. It is the young who are so very old. Yet there is a mortality even in children which we cannot discern in old temples, which, in surviving generation after generation, have taken on that grace by which their sacredness shall probably survive Greece and Rome. Earthquake and impiety cannot destroy them all

There are two roads from the gymnasiums to the agora One goes by the cenotaph of Akhilleus to the quarters of the Hellenodikai. It is along this road before sunrise that you can see the trainers and runners coming down to the tracks. The other road goes by residences and gardens.

The place and market at Elis are not laid out in the Ionian manner, but have kept the old style roofed columns, with passageways between, as congenial as the eastern markets, or the shaded and comfortable back-streets of Athens and Corinth. We were amused to learn that they call their market the Hippodrome, for they tame horses here as well as buy and sell, talk and play checkers. The portico facing south has Doric columns, stately and plain. Here the Hellenodikai can usually be found passing the time of day. We were shown altars that can be moved about in the market, permanent ones being inconvenient in so busy a place. The Hellenodikai have rooms off the marketplace, and live here for ten months of their term. They take instructions in the games from the judges, and decide which athletes are to be pitted against each other in all the contests.

Across the street from the portico of the Hellenodikai is the Korkyrean Portico, built with money from the raids on Korkyra in the time of the wars with that island. This series of roofed columns has a wall down the middle, with statues set against it, one of which is of the philosopher Pyrrhon, who would admit nothing. That a room might be empty, he could never subscribe to, for the predication was too fraught with ambiguities to be considered. Empty of light, it was full of dark. Empty of chairs and tables, it was full of air. Pyrrhon is buried outside Elis, at a place named the Rock, and