CHAPTER 21: Aulis.

(Background Music: Iphigenia At Aulis by Euripides)
(Performed by ensemble De Organographia)

I walk the dark crowd-strewn streets of Halkitha trying to find a hotel and remembering that this is the city where Aristotle retired in 322 BC to morn the death of his pupil, Alexander the Great. I round a corner and run smack into a forest of Christmas trees and stacks of decorations. After no longer living with my children, Christmas lost its magic, but on this journey I’ve found it again. My stay on Patmos and visiting the home of the Virgin Mary at Ephesus has had a profound effect on me. I simply glow inside when I think of Christmas in California with family. I like Halkitha even though it has the motorbikes and horns of all Greek cities.

I finally find a room in an old hotel with an old man behind the desk and an even older, cadaverous man helping him. They creak about like gigantic praying mantises. But what is so strange about the room is the two sets of huge French double doors: one I entered by and just opposite them, the other set leading to a minuscule second-floor balcony through which noise from the street enters unabated. I feel as though my bed is in an entryway.

I unpack, still reeling from the images of injury and death I saw on the road today on top of which are now superimposed fleeting images of Santa Claus. After unpacking a few things and showering, I walk to the dock through the cool evening air to watch the dark fast-moving water between Euboea and Boiotia. In Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis, the Chorus of Women was from Chalkis. They’d come to see famous Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus, Achilles. I imagine their excitement the night before they made their trek south along the coast to Aulis, the anticipation of witnessing a great event.

After returning to my room, I undress and lie in bed thinking that tomorrow no great event will occur at Aulis, just the arrival of one more traveler who will pay homage and move on.

Finding Danielle was my first break in solving the mystery of my daughter’s disappearance, but my good fortune was dampened when I learned Danielle was even more mystified than I. And she was pissed. Vicki and Bear had run off without telling her.

After getting the two of us together, Troy left to play nursemaid to the rest of his misfits, and Danielle and I went outside to talk. I sat on a log and she sat on an old tricycle facing me. Sitting astride the tricycle, she seemed a precocious child. She told me she lived with the woman and took care of her house, swept the floors and washed the dishes for room and board. The man was the woman’s boyfriend. Danielle confessed she was more than a little behind in her duties. Then she told me about Bear.

As I listened to Danielle talk about Cynthia, I realized a big change had come over my daughter in the two years I had lived apart from her. She had assumed a rather motherly role toward the less fortunate of her classmates and other young girls like Danielle, high school dropouts. Cynthia had brought them home with her. Danielle had lived with Cynthia and her mother for a few months. Vicki, when she was being beaten by her father, also came to live with them. That was Cynthia’s connection with Troy who was running an unofficial home for wayward kids. That was the reason she had a following.

When Danielle told me how much she admired Bear, I got a glimmer of hope, that maybe my decision to leave Cynthia with her mother in Phoenix had not been such a bad idea after all. Her mother was a social worker. Apparently some of her spirit had rubbed off.

That evening before I left, Danielle took me into her bedroom and in her closet retrieved a sweater from among many other items Cynthia had given her. The sight of my daughter’s sweater was like seeing a glimmer of her. I held the sweater to me, searching for a warmth that would mean she was still alive.

Danielle told me she would help me find Bear. “Bear is the best friend I’ve ever had,” she said, obviously searching for words to say something difficult. “I’m glad you’re looking for her. I like Vicki, but she can be really hard. When we ran away together last year, we hitchhiked to Florida. This may scare you to hear it, but you should know. We caught rides with truckers. Some things that happened to me, I still can’t talk about. You should be concerned about her,” she said with a look beyond her years. “If they do what we did, she is in danger.”

After several months, the police caught up with Vicki and Danielle in Miami and sent them home. No one accompanied them, and Vicki exited the plane in Dallas. Danielle, tired of running, appreciated the free ride back to Phoenix.

Danielle said she would talk to some of her friends, and I left her standing in the dark outside the dilapidated home. She seemed reluctant to see me leave, and I was reluctant to go. As I climbed the side of the ravine back to my car, I wondered if it was because she had found a father in me, and I had found my daughter in her. My drive to my son’s apartment was full of prayers for my daughter’s safety and horrible visions of what she could be experiencing in the hands of truck drivers. This was when I confronted myself about my faith that God would protect her and found it seriously lacking. The reality of the situation was what came to the forefront. I’ve never felt so alone in the world, so abandoned. It was as if God was dead.

In 429 BC a great plague devastated Athens. It occurred during the Peloponnesian War when all of Attica was brought within Athens' walls for safety. The crowding and resultant unsanitary conditions created a fertile breading ground for disease. According to Thucydides, the 5th century BC historian, the devastation brought with it unprecedented lawlessness and loss of respect for the gods:

No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. (II, 53)

Within this atmosphere Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus, the plague being the impetus of Oedipus' search for the murder of Laius and the driving force that would not let him back off once he realize the result would be his own ruin. Perhaps no parallel exists with this wide-spread tragedy and my own desperate search for my daughter, my fear for her life. But the hand of God did seem to me to be indiscriminate, and no appeal on my part convincing enough to ensure his interference on her behalf. It wasn't a total disbelief in God but a rather dramatic realization that I was on my own on this one. I'd always questioned the nature of reality, but in this instance I had no trouble differentiating it from that of the of the world of the divine. Everything I knew about God paled in comparison to the necessity for me to act to save my daughter.

The next day when I returned, Danielle was gone. I searched for her all morning, a growing sense of powerlessness coming over me. But that afternoon, just as I was about to give up, I found her on her bike coming home. She had been on a long training run for an upcoming race. “You need to meet more of Bear’s friends,” she told me.

She took me to the home of one of Cynthia’s classmates, Sue. Sue was not pleased to see us and mad at Danielle for bring me. She refused to talk to me at first, but after several minutes of Danielle’s coaxing, Sue reluctantly took me into her bedroom. She had several of my daughter’s teddy bears and shoe box after shoe box of letters from friends. Sue claimed Bear and Vicki had left her home with two guys from a rock band. She didn’t know the guys because they were from out of town. She cast suspicious glances at me as Danielle pulled bits of information from her. Danielle fed her several names and finally got a confirmation.

Danielle turned to me, “Two guys from LA,” she said. “I know them, but there’s no way to get a hold of them. They’re always on the road.” Sue said the guys were only dropping Bear and Vicki off somewhere in town but claimed she didn’t know where. “A truck stop?” asked Danielle. But Sue clammed up, and it was useless to question her further.

Some of what had happened the day Cynthia disappeared became apparent. Cynthia had stripped her bedroom of everything valuable to her, stuffed animals, private correspondence and musical equipment. Sue had picked her up at home soon after Cynthia’s mother left for work. When the two guys from the rock band came to pick up Cynthia and Vicki at Sue’s, they didn’t have room for all her stuff, and she had to leave much of it behind. But it also indicated Cynthia didn’t know what she was getting into.

I gathered up all of Cynthia’s stuff and took it with me. Danielle wanted to know what I was going to do with her letters. I said I was reluctant to read them because they were private. I have always had a great respect for my children’s right to privacy and would never even consider reading them without her approval. “Don’t be so pure,” said Danielle. “Read them. Bear’s life may depend on it.”

That evening I went back to my son’s apartment, sat at his kitchen table, opened a shoe box and forced myself to do something I considered unethical. But Danielle was right. If her private letters contained a clue to her whereabouts, I had to find it. Hour after hour I poured over the letters, skipping those containing only personal matters and reading with intense interest those to and from Vicki. Apparently Vicki had returned Cynthia’s letters to her, so I got both sides of their correspondence. One of the most startling discoveries was that both girls were great writers. The “Valley Girl” dialect was high-octane and super-literate.

As the hours passed, though much of what they had to say to each other was in code, a story unfolded. My daughter had been in continuous contact with Vicki, who wrote to her under several assumed names, during the year after she ran away. After Vicki separated from Danielle when she exited the plane in Dallas, she spent several weeks there, then drifted to Los Angeles. In a letter mailed during early December, Cynthia suggested the two of them meet in San Diego when she came to visit me.

 A chill went up my spine as I remembered the Christmas Cynthia came to visit, the strange knock at the door late in the evening, her leaving with an unknown kid and returning during the wee hours of the morning, our heated argument. I realized, that night she had met Vicki, and they must have planned Cynthia’s disappearance four months later.  I was lucky she came home at all.

At the time, Vicki was living in San Bernardino with her boyfriend and his family and desperate for money. I read the few remaining letters with increasing urgency, begging Cynthia to tell where they planned to go when she joined Vicki. But the answer I was looking for wasn’t in the letters. I was left with several addresses where Vicki had stayed during the past year and that of her last boyfriend in the town of Highland close to San Bernardino.

The next day I had lunch with Danielle, and told her how little I learned from the letters. We ate at the Good Earth because she, like Cynthia, was vegetarian. She knew Vicki’s last boyfriend and had a telephone number in Highland. We called but got no answer. She said she would try to get in touch with them during the next few days. I told her I was leaving for San Diego as soon as we finished lunch. The next day I would drive to Highland.

I dream of a vertical poem supposedly written by John Lennon and wake myself laughing:  

ENCYCLOPAEDIA
D
O
N'
T
W
A
N
T
GOAT

The visual image of my dream is of a goat eating an encyclopaedia, sort of an irreverent approach to learning. I can’t contain my laughter. John must be sending news of Pan, the goat god.

As sleep gradually overcomes me again, I think of the temple of sacrifice I’ll visit tomorrow and the time I first witnessed a sacrificial ritual on the farm. The “high priest” conducting the ceremony was my father. He was unusually agreeable that morning and kept me beside him so the better to observe the proceedings.

My parents had talked it over and decided I was old enough to watch the slaughter of the young bull. When he was a calf, I had fed him from a bucket with a rubber teat that he sucked and butted like it was his mother’s udder. I fed him a mixture of her fresh foamy milk and tan licorice-smelling powder. And now that he was near grown and had stubby horns out each side of his board-flat head, the adults swung aside the old wood gate and drove him out of the pasture into the large dirt yard in front of our home. My mother stood to the right outside the kitchen door, still in her apron. My uncle closed the wood gate, shutting off the young bull’s retreat, and my older brother stood to the left, should he break for the corrals. My father, standing directly in front, completed the silent box and stopped the young bull with his head held high, nostrils flaring and snorting.

Without animosity, my father raised the pistol and fired a shot between the young bull’s horns, shot him in the forehead with a silver pistol. The dust flew when the bullet popped, and he shook his head as if to ward off a pesky fly, as if the sting had nothing to do with us at all.

I stood with my elbows out a little from my sides, marking the calmness of the day, the angle of the sun and the methodical arrangement of the killing by the adults. I edged closer to my father as he raised the pistol one more time and shot him right between the eyes. The young bull turned his head to correct the terrible thought raging inside and a front leg betrayed him so that he stumbled momentarily. The other followed and he kneeled, paused in that pose for a moment then went limp all over.

My father slit the hide between the bull’s leg bone and tendon with a pocket knife, inserted a small white cotton rope and my uncle hoisted him by the back ankles to the rafters of the old shed so he hung head down with large dull eyes. Then my father made a small slit at each jugular so the bull’s fresh blood poured in two small streams off his chin and puddled in the soft powdery dirt, much as Odysseus had done in the Underworld to lure the soul of Teiresias, a tribute to the Earth goddess to whom all beings return. I didn’t realize it then, but the bull is especially sacred to Gaia.[1]

I was twelve at the time and remember not wanting to turn thirteen, a little younger than Iphigenia when she was sacrificed at the site I’ll visit tomorrow. After the bull my father killed was bled, the carcass went to the butcher where it was dismembered and we all consumed him, T-bones, rib-eyes, sirloin. The fact that I associated myself so closely with the young bull made it seem a little like I died too that day. Something about me was lost, and I was never the same, but since visiting all the temples on this journey, I now see my parents actions in a different light. In ancient Greece, sacrificial animals were frequently used in initiation ceremonies as a surrogate for the initiate, who underwent a rite of passage. On ancient Crete, Dionysus was the bull god, and during rituals Cretans tore bulls apart with their teeth.[2] Dionysus was the twice born god, and he was torn apart by the Titans prior to being resurrected as the god of madness. In my case, the sacrifice could be viewed as a ritual where I died as a child and was reborn a young adult. The ancient Greek cults seem to tell us the transition cannot occur without experiencing trauma.

3 Dec, Friday

Early in the morning, I walk down the street from the hotel and rather apprehensively enter a barbershop. I’ve needed a haircut for some time but have been putting it off hoping to make it back to Colorado. Last night, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window and decided it’s time to get the locks chopped. This is not a place for women. I sit with three other men waiting my turn. It’s much like the barbershops in the States, or perhaps as they used to be, swivel chair, toilet paper around the neck, cologne, powder. Afterward I smell as though I’ve just got out of bed with a woman. I feel so domesticated to Greece.

After walking around a plataea, I talk a walk out on the waterfront to get a look at Xalkitha, a rather impressive array of expensive hotels spread along the water's edge. I see the bridge connecting Euboea and Attica in the distance.

I notice in my guidebook that Halkitha has an archaeological museum and wonder if someone there can tell me how to get to Aulis. 

I finally locate the museum across from the police station on Venizelou Street. I enter through an iron gate beside a hut where a gorgeous blond with long flowing hair and a persistent smile sells tickets. I wonder if she’s really Greek with all that fair skin and natural-blond hair. I ask if she speaks English, and she tells me sheepishly that she speaks only a little.

I’m not sure of the pronunciation of Aulis in Greek. It’s spelled AuliV and the ‘au’ is pronounced equivalent to the English ‘av’ in modern Greek and ‘au’ in ancient Greek. 

So I try both on her, adding Aulis is where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter. Her eyes light up. “Iphigenia!” she exclaims. Through bits of English and Greek, I learn of a train station on the mainland just across the wood bridge where I should catch the train to the first stop, “Steno,” Steno. I should get off there, cross the tracks and follow a dirt road past a cement factory. I’ll find a sign marking the location. “Not much there,” she says.

At noon, I cross the bridge to the Attica side and sit in the train station, a large brick building at the beginning of the line. The tracks start and stop here. I wait for my train to Steno which will arrive at 12:15, so the rumor goes.

The large waiting room echoes with voices and footsteps on the slate-tile floor.

Agamemnon was not the strong willed, decisive man you’d expect to be in charge of a large army. He was ambitious but clearly in over his head. He had a problem with Artemis because he killed a deer sacred to her and boasted he was a better shot than the goddess. Because of this sacrilege, she calmed the wind at Aulis so the Greeks couldn’t sail. Through the high priest Chalcis, Artemis demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his most beautiful daughter, Iphigenia, upon her altar or they would never sail to Troy.

Artemis, here on the east coast of Attica was the nature goddess, the mother of all things wild. As a virgin goddess, she was:  

... the divine spirit of sublime nature, the lofty shimmering mistress, the pure one, who compels delight and yet cannot love, the dancer and huntress who fondles cubs in her bosom and races the deer, who brings death when she draws her golden bow, reserved and unapproachable like wild nature, and yet, like nature, wholly enchantment and fresh excitement and lightning beauty. This is Artemis.[3]

The train comes, a slow-moving chain of passenger cars. A horde of people exit and another horde gets on.  I sit opposite an old woman with gray hair and glasses who looks up at me and smiles as the train starts moving. We travel in silence with the sea to our left and the rocky mountains growing to our right, as if to squeeze the train off the hillside into the water. The train snakes along the crooked track. “Aqhna;” the woman asks, wanting to know if I’m going to Athens. “Steno,” I reply. She gets wide-eyed, “Steno;” she asks obviously upset. I think maybe I’ve said something wrong, possibly offended her. To my alarm she calls the conductor, says many things to him very rapidly. He leaves quickly for the front of the train, and immediately it starts to slow. The woman has saved me. The train had no intention of stopping in Steno. If she hadn’t told the conductor, we’d already be past it.

I get off the train alone, out in what seems like the middle of nowhere. It’s cold and overcast and the ground damp. I stand next to an old rust-red brick building watching the train disappear around the bend. I wonder how I’ll ever get back on the train if it doesn’t ordinarily stop here? The brick train station is locked, and looks as though it’s been locked a long time. Away from the tracks to the west, the weedy ground rises and two old shacks with chickens and dogs lie between the station and a blacktop road further up the hill. I hope I'm not stranded.

As the woman at the museum told me, a dirt road runs along the other side of the tracks, beside a tall cyclone fence around a cement factory. I cross the tracks and walk south along the dirt road, as instructed, with the cyclone fence to my left.

Beyond the cement factory, the road is lined with trees and tall dead grass. A small, badly-polluted harbor appears. Walking along this sandy road I remember the words of Euripides’ Chorus of Women from Chalkis in his play of Iphigenia:  

To the sandy beach of sea-coast Aulis I came after a voyage through the tides of Euripus, leaving Chalcis on its narrow firth, my city which feedeth the waters of far-famed Arethusa near the sea, that I might behold the army of the Achaeans and the ships rowed by those god-like heroes; for our husbands tell us that fair-haired Menelaus and high-born Agamemnon are leading them to Troy on a thousand ships in quest of the lady Helen ...  

 

Through the grove of Artemis, rich with sacrifice, I sped my course, the red blush mantling on my cheeks from maiden modesty, in my eagerness to see the soldiers’ camp, the tents of the mail-clad Danai, and their gathered steeds.  

...

I beheld the offspring of Laertes [Odysseus], who came from his island hills, and with him Nireus, handsomest of all Achaeans; Achilles next, that nimble runner, swift on his feet as the wind, whom Thetis bore and Chiron trained; him I saw upon the beach, racing in full armour along the shingle, and straining every nerve to beat a team of four horses ...[4]  

No throngs of an army here today, no blushing maidens visiting the site. Aulis is still, damp, a heavy silence imposed by thick clouds. All I see is a couple of homes, no village. Just a rabid dog who stands at the edge of his yard threatening to eat me. I wonder if this is really the right location. The woman at the museum mentioned a plaque of some sort, or a sign on a building at the cement company, but I can find nothing. Pausanias described the site as he saw it in the 2nd Century AD:  

Where the Euripose cuts off Euboia from Boiotia ... is AULIS .... There is a SHRINE OF ARTEMIS here, and white stone statues, one carrying torches, the other shooting. .... They still keep in the temple what is left of the trunk of a plane tree mentioned by Homer in the Iliad. The story is that the Greeks at Aulis could not get a breath of favorable breeze, but then suddenly a stern wind got up, and everyone sacrificed what he had to Artemis, male and female victims alike: ever since it has been traditional that any victim is acceptable at Aulis. They point out the spring where the plane tree grew, and on a mound near by the bronze floor of Agamemnon’s tent... Not many people live in Aulis, and those who do are potters ...[5]

Seems even less of a village than when Pausanias was here. Any confidence of I had of finding the actual site where Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia has evaporated. I’m in a deserted industrial area with no sign of a historical monument. I walk on up the road past a house on the left, a little wood shack sitting among trees. Two dogs growl and pull at their chains, and at a small white lifeless house with a wood fence, a small dog with a squeaky voice follows me up the road barking at my heals. I keep shooing him away, fearful he'll nip me. Further on is a field of dead grass enclosing by another cyclone fence, and that’s it. Beyond is the asphalt road south.

As I turn back, I spot it, a sign on a tall pole. In the grass field I just past, a small archeological dig lies beneath a large evergreen tree. Then I see more ruins on the other side of the tree. The closer I get, the more stones and walls become visible. I sound out the Greek letters on the sign, NAOS AULIDEIAS ARTEMIDOS (TEMPLE AULIDEIAS ARTEMIDOS). The temple of Artemis is inside the fence! I never imagined that the woman at the museum was telling me they had excavated the temple, the very spot where Iphigenia was sacrificed.

But it's fenced. I'll not be able to get a close look. And then I see a hole in the fence, one large enough for me to crawl through.

The archeological dig is much larger than I thought, perhaps covering three or four acres. It's as if the site was hidden and materializing before my eyes. My gloomy walk has turned into a glorious event.

I’m standing on the spot where Agamemnon, the seer Chalcis and Iphigenia stood. Ruins of the stone altar are still here. The small, unimpressive bay I passed on the way is the Bay of Aulis, where one-thousand ships awaited favorable winds to sail to Troy. Achilles raced the team of horses along the dirt road I just walked. Today the ruins are quiet and moody, dark and brooding. Homer, through the words of Odysseus, also described the site in the Iliad:

          One day, just when the ships

had staged at Aulis, loaded, every one,

with woe for Priam and the men of Troy,

we gathered round a fountain by the altars,

performing sacrifices to the gods

under a dappled sycamore. The water

welled up shining there... [6]  

I sit on the cold stone altar, light mist falling. A tall evergreen grows at the edge of the temple today, leans inward, just as Odysseus saw the dappled sycamore and Pausanias saw the plane tree, shading it from cloud-filtered sunlight.

Two stone statues stood before the altar when Pausanias was here, one carrying torches, the other a bow and arrow.[7] I hear the whish of passing cars on the nearby road, but the overriding sound is the rumble of the nearby cement factory belching fumes skyward.

When Agamemnon was told he would have to sacrifice Iphigenia, at first he refused, sending word to disband the army. But his brother Menelaus protested, and he and the wiley Odysseus’ convinced Agamemnon to commit the crime.

Agamemnon then sent a message to Klytemnestra, telling her to bring Iphigenia under the pretext of marrying her off to Achilles, a lie not even Achilles himself knew about. But during the night, Agamemnon had second thoughts and wrote a countermanding letter to Klytemnestra. Menelaus stopped the messenger before he got out of camp and accused Agamemnon of thinking “crooked thoughts, one thing now, another formerly, and something different presently.”[8] Agamemnon stood his ground, insisting he would not sacrifice his daughter and was about to send the messenger on to Mycenae when Klytemnestra and Iphigenia arrived. The word got out about the marriage, and gradually the entire plot was revealed, but the Greek army wouldn’t let Agamemnon back out of the sacrifice. 

Iphigenia, who was initially excited about her marriage to Achilles, was devastated when she learned of her father’s plot. Klytemnestra was enraged. Once events were set in motion, the sacrifice couldn’t be stopped.

 

Agamemnon had lost control and couldn’t face his daughter:    

  ... when king Agamemnon saw the maiden on her way to the grove to be sacrificed, he gave one groan, and, turning away his face, let the tears burst from his eyes, as he held his robe before them.[9]  

According to Euripides, after Iphigenia’s initial resistance, she relented and went willingly to her own sacrifice:

 

O my father, here am I to do thy bidding; freely I offer this body of mine for my country and all Hellas, that ye may lead me to the alter of the goddess and sacrifice me, since this is Heaven’s ordinance. Good luck be yours for any help that I afford! and may ye obtain the victor’s gift and come again to the land of your fathers. So then let none of the Argives lay hands on me, for I will bravely yield my neck without a word.[10]  

Klytemnestra refused to witness the murder, and afterward a messenger came to tell her of the miraculous event.

Iphigenia’s life had been spared at the last second when Artemis substituted a hind, a red deer; much as God sent an angel to stay the hand of Abraham raised to sacrifice Isaac and substituted a calf:[11]

 

... the priest [Calchas, the seer], seizing his knife, offered up a prayer and was closely scanning the maiden’s throat to see where he should strike. ... when lo! a sudden miracle! Each one of us distinctly heard the sound of a blow, but none saw the spot where the maiden vanished. Loudly the priest cried out, and all the host took up the cry at the sight of a marvel all unlooked for, due to some god’s agency, and passing all belief, although ‘twas seen; for there upon the ground lay a hind of size immense and passing fair to see, gasping out her life, with whose blood the altar of the goddess was thoroughly bedewed.[12]  

But the words of the messenger fell on deaf ears. Klytemnestra didn’t believe for a second that Artemis had whisked Iphigenia away and substituted a deer in her place.

She scoffed at him and spoke instead of Iphigenia:   

O daughter, of what God stolen art thou?

How shall I bid farewell to thee?--how

Know this for aught but a sweet lie, spoken

To heal the heart that for thee is broken?[13]  

Klytemnestra harbored a hatred for her husband from that day forth and killed Agamemnon with an ax when he return from Troy.

Following her disappearance, Iphigenia reappeared as a priestess of Artemis living in Taurus east of Troy, a peninsula in the Black Sea now known as the Crimea. Artemis had whisked her away at the last second and placed her among the Tauri. There she “was taught the inhospitable law of their horrible kettles, in cutting up men for meat.”[14]

After Klytemnestra killed Agamemnon, their only son, Orestes, returned from being raised in exile to murder his mother in revenge. As penance for having killed his mother, Orestes went to Taurus under the instructions of Apollo to retrieve “an image of the goddess [Artemis], which fell from heaven.”[15] While stealing the heavenly statue, Orestes found his sister, Iphigenia, and both of them tried to escape but were caught by the Tauri. Athena interceded on their behalf and told Iphigenia of her fate:  

... Iphigenia, thou must keep her [Artemis’] temple-keys at Brauron’s hallowed path of steps; there shalt thou die and there shall they bury thee, honouring thee with offerings of robes, e’en all the finely-woven vestments left in their homes by such as die in childbirth.[16]  

The ruins of the Brauron temple of Artemis are a few kilometers down the Attic coast from here, just east of Markopoulo, where a collapsed cave has been identified as the tomb of Iphigenia.[17] Maidens from Athens practiced bear rituals at the site. A girl, when she was to go from maidenhood to a young woman, would make an offering of her own hair at the tomb of Iphigenia. It was a symbol of the death of herself as a maiden and her rebirth as a young woman, just as Iphigenia had been sacrificed and resurrected. The maidens were required to performed a “bear” ritual prior to getting married. During this ritual, they symbolically became bears,[18] an animal sacred to Artemis. In this myth, a bear is substituted for the sacrifice of the maiden. Girls between the ages of five and fifteen attended the temple for training. They wore a short saffron, honey-yellow chiton and danced the “bear” barefoot with their hair down about their shoulders.[19]

The connection between the bear ritual and my daughter, Bear, is so obvious that I look at my Greek dictionary to see if her name, Cynthia, might also have a Greek equivalent. The transliteration of Cynthia is Kunqia. The closest word is KunqoV, Kynthos, the name of the hill on Delos where Artemis was born. On impulse, I check my handbook of Greek mythology for “Cynthia.” Sure enough Cynthia has an entry. The name comes from Kynthos and is an epithet for Artemis, the goddess to whom Iphigenia was sacrificed. Another rather startling coincidence.

Artemis was the essence of feminine freedom, the goddess who “disappears into the distance. The Argives regularly celebrated her departure and her return.”[20] As caretaker of all young creatures, she was especially the nurse of children[21] and benefactress of orphaned daughters.[22] She was forever in the presence of Oceanus’ deep-bosomed daughters.

A light mist falls, a sign the time to leave the temple of Artemis has come. On my walk back, I stop to view the Bay of Aulis. Now that I know the Greeks mustered their ships here, I take a better look.

The bay is small and deeply recessed into the coast of Boiotia, its mouth almost closed. The water is murky white, chalky from the cement factory which hovers over it. The water stands calm, the stillness that was Iphigenia’s bane. It’s deathly still now, badly polluted.

Standing here before this murky bay, I’m suddenly anxious to get back to Athens. The legend of Iphigenia is so closely related to the myth of Persephone that I must go to Eleusis where she reappeared.

This is the story of another father, Zeus, giving up his daughter for the sake of others and the mother resisting all the way as did Klytemnestra.

I walk the sandy road and re-cross the tracks to the deserted train station. A light rain falls. I wonder if the train will stop for me? After a short wait, I see its tall shape emerging from around the bend on its way to Athens. I feel small, insignificant. I imagine myself trying to stop a train in the States. But as I raise my hand, it slows. In Greece, I have the power to stop a train.   [ Visit the Temple of Artemis at Aulis on the Web ]

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After saying good-bye to Danielle at the Good Earth, I returned to San Diego, another lonely trek across the badlands of the Mojave desert, arriving home late that night. The next morning as I packed to leave for Highland, Danielle called. She had talked to her friends in Highland, and they said they knew nothing of Vicki or Cynthia. “They wouldn’t lie to me,” she said. “Bear is not there.”

When I hung up the phone, a wave of quiet desperation engulfed me. My every lead had evaporated. I went back to work the next morning and tried to concentrate on getting our spacecraft ready to fly on the Space Shuttle. I had my own war to fight getting hardware delivered and shipped to Kennedy Space Center.

I realized that Cynthia was dead.

 

[1]Farnell, Lewis Richard, The cults of the Greek States, Vol. III, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907, page 11.

[2]Guthrie, W. K. C., The Greeks and Their Gods, Boston: Beacon Press, 1950, page 45/6.

[3]Otto, Walter F., The Homeric Gods, tr. by Moses Hadas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964 (1954), page 81/2.

[4]Euripides, The Plays of Euripides, Vol. 2, tr. by Edward P. Coleridge, Franklin Center: The Franklin Library, 1984 (1952), page 333.

[5]Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Vol. 1, tr. and intro. by Peter Levi, New York: The Penguin Group, 1971, page 347/8.

[6]Homer, The Iliad, tr. by Robert Fitzgerald, Franklin Center: The Franklin Library, 1979 (1952), page 40.

[7]Pausanias, page 347.

[8]Euripides, page 336.

[9]Ibid, page 372.

[10]Ibid, page 372.

[11]The connection between the two myths is rather famous. See Lubeck, Maria Holmberg, Iphigeneia, Agamemnon’s Daughter, Stockholm: Almqvst & Wiksell International, 1993, page 7.

[12]Euripides, page 372.

[13]Euripides, Euripides, Vol. I, tr. by Arthur S. Way, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1912, page 149.

[14]Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Vol. I, tr. by W. H. D. Rouse, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940, page 437.

[15]Euripides, The Plays of Euripides, Vol. 2, page 289.

[16]Ibid, page 325.

[17]Dowden, Ken, Death and the Maiden, New York:  Routledge, Inc., 1989, page 25.

[18]Ibid, page 26.

[19]Hughes, Dennis D., Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, New York: Routledge, 1991, page 181.

[20]Otto, page 82.

[21]Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, tr. by C. H. Oldfather, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. III, page 295.

[22]Otto, page 88.

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