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

there is a temple to Athene, quite fine. The statue is of ivory and gold, the work of Pheidias, if we may believe the Eleans. A cock stands on her helmet, the emblem of her warlike genius, or perhaps the symbol of Athene the Worker.

Along the cobbled road from the market down to the River Menios we went through an old part of the town where the houses are close, the most of them being over the workshops of sandalmakers, ironmongers, smiths, potters, and dyers. We stopped to admire the crocus yellow of a cauldron of boiling willow twigs. There were cats sitting in almost every window along this busy street, and dogs and children at every door. There was even a tame owl sitting on a girl’s shoulder, against which Lykas made a hex, spitting into his fingers and touching his forehead and genitals. Pyttalos remarked that an owl in town wouldn’t know the Lady if it were to see her, and bore no significance whatever.

— They are religious about them at Athens, Lykas said. He was proud of his information, and looked at me with a congenial frankness, his head slightly lowered.

— The owl is Athene’s sacred bird, I said.

— Owls, Pyttalos said, are the next thing to chickens.

— Who, I remarked as we reached the end of the street and had to wade through sheep being driven into town, are also sacred to Athene.

We came out onto a hill overlooking the river. Here we found the theater. It is quite old and charmingly small. The temple of Dionysos beside it was designed by Praxiteles. It, too, is small, but strong of line and brilliantly painted. Dionysos, the Eleans say, has never failed to attend their Thyia, the grounds for which are eight stadia from the town. Three empty jars are placed in the temple on the eve of the Elean Thyia, before any witnesses who care to watch, citizens or strangers. The doors are then sealed and guarded. Next morning, the seals are opened by the priests, and the jars are found to be filled with wine. The Andrioi have a similar visitation of the god. If one is to believe the Greeks about such things, one might as well believe the Aithiopians above Syene, who show a stone in a meadow which they call the table of the sun, where Helios dines. Religion is a grievous and wonderful thing.

Elis is as rich as Crete in vineyards. The god would certainly not be shy of showing himself to such diligent and worshipful votaries. The Thyia is a rite of deepest antiquity, the symbolism of which involves the winnowing basket, or likna, in which the infant Dionysos is said to have been cradled, the old reverence for bread and wine cherished by the Hellenes and indeed by the civilized world. The likna serves a third and purely religious function when it is filled by the priestesses with a toy of the god’s phallos carved of fig wood. The harvest fruit is placed with it, awned wheat, gourds, leaves, and other bounty. This is then designated the cradle of Semele, and a hymn proclaims that the god is the son of his mother.

At Olympia we had seen the chair of Demeter Khamyne, whose lady bishop watches the contests, and Pyttalos explained that this Demeter is the same as Semele, or Zemele, as he called her.

— Mama of Zanysso, he added.

— She is, then, I said, the earth, and Dionysos is the vine.

— No, Kyrie, no, Pyttalos said. The earth is Zemele; the vine is Zanysso. But not all. The gods are more than we can know of them.

— We do not speak, O Kers!

— Touch wood, Pyttalos said.

As we walked back to our inn, all the asses of Elis began to bray, for it was their fodder time. Pyttalos and Lykas laughed, knowing my foreigner’s opinion of this unnerving and peculiarly Aegean cacophony. If any other creature has the lungs of the Greek ass, I do not know it. I have heard the elephant trumpet, but its silver alarm has neither the volume nor the pitch of the Prienian ass, whose throat is of brass. And certainly none other of Zeus’s animals has its satyric impudence, for like as not he accompanies his heart-stopping caterwaul with full priapic display of his considerable member, which leaps from its shaggy foreskin, for no other reason, I suppose, than that his daimon fulfills its being in his bray and pizzle, and that these proclaim their glory together, no doubt to the everlasting delight of the gods.

This incomparable voice is of composite majesty. In genus it is the whinny of the horse family, yet the lowing of cattle is folded in with the equine tune, and there is also to be detected in it the triumphant crow of the cock, the squealing of pigs, and the howling of dogs. And noises outside the cries of nature seem to figure in its awfulness, such as the stone saw, the whine of a gale in ships’ rigging, the terrible lash of siege engines hurling missiles. Neither Pyttalos nor Lykas nor any Greek is disturbed by this piercing of the ear, a cry equally frantic whether in anticipation of supper, copulation, breakfast, or hoarfrost. Indeed, I suppose it is one of the strange Greek harmonies, an analogue of the aesthetic wherein the Hellenic adoration of the body is combined with the strictest and perhaps the purest of morals, and a fierce love of freedom exists within laws which a Tartar would deem tyrannical, and a sense of color rivaling that of the Egyptians expresses itself in coarse whites, drab terra cottas, and a single blue which one sees everywhere. Pyttalos never ceased to be all mirthful wrinkles when I winced at the hgee! HGAH! of the Greek ass, spilling my wine if I were raising it to my lips, or scoring my papyrus if I were making a note when one of these beasts called its