CHAPTER 23: Colonus.

6 Dec, Monday

I wake before sunrise and lean against the headboard with my clothes on, the covers pulled to my chest. I have two blankets on my bed plus my running jacket and sweater spread over them. The heat is on, but I’m still cold.

I rise early to look at a map of Athens, planning my search for Colonus. In addition to the modern map, I have a copy of an ancient map of Athens which I got from the University of Colorado library before I came to Greece. The ancient city was encircled by a continuous oval-shaped wall, one kilometer by one-and-a-half kilometers, the Akropolis a little off center, to the southwest. It shows the district of Colonus as being just inside the north wall, south of the Acharnian Gate, three quarters of a kilometer north of the Akropolis. From my modern-day map, this is SofokleouV OdoV, Sophocles Street.

I walk Adrianou Street to the Monastirakiou district then take Aiolou Street north of the Akropolis to Hermes Street, the shopping district. I laugh to myself realizing they’ve named the street through the shopping district for the prince of thieves. I know a few streets back in the States that could be aptly named for Hermes. Except for the Greek heritage evident in the appearance of the people, I could be in downtown Denver. The buildings are tall and well built, modern, the store windows displaying women’s and men’s clothes, dresses skirts, shoes, suits, all now with a Christmas touch, a twist of mistletoe, a twig of holly, a miniature Santa.

I hear a shout coming through the cool morning air and look around to see who’s causing the commotion. I spot an old man sitting up against a building at the edge of the sidewalk, an old blind man with his legs folded underneath him, his alms bowl on the cement between his knees, arms outstretched. He shouts, “Kalimera! Kalimera!” Good morning! Good morning! He spews words I can’t understand. He’s expression is aggressive, chiding, overwrought, his manner demanding, calling the people to him. His entire face shrinks in around his naked eyepits, as though the vacuum left by the absent eyeballs forcefully sucks his wrinkled face into the void, something like Oedipus must have looked after gouging out his eyes with Jocasta’s broach. To accentuate the effect, he doesn’t wear a patch. His muss of gray hair covers his forehead, and he wears loose khaki pants and shirt. The clink of coins in his cup punctuates the many voices of the crowd. I give him a wide berth, as if afraid he’ll strike me.

But I run into another beggar, a badly-burned middle-aged woman, blond, flashing gray eyes. She sits, legs stretched out in front, leaning against a cement column with the hem of her soft feminine skirt pulled to her crotch so I can see her brown and white scars, which go so deep they’ve eaten into her flesh and disfigured her legs. She pulls the front of her blouse open, exposing more and more of her burned, disfigured breasts, pulls the large masses of flesh from within the twin-pouched bra, fondles them to ensure I see that her nipples are burned off. Her nose is artificially pugged, eyebrows gone, ears only stubs. She displays the wares of her trade, the display case that is her body. She calls out desperately for money in a shrill, shrieking voice. I feel ashamed for thinking lofty thoughts yesterday about the “fire of life” which this woman has so literally experienced. My revelations now seem trivial.

No, this isn’t Denver. I walk away from all this, not knowing whether to cry out of pity or laugh at the burlesque nature of the sight. Finally it’s two dirty children that bring my feelings to a conclusion, and I cry a little, get a few sobs out to break loose the choking knot inside. The children, perhaps four years old, sit on the sidewalk with their little tin cups, their faces artificially smudged. Even they have the unmistakable mark of the actor, chewing their fingers and trying desperately to cry but not quite making it.

I walk north looking for the street called SofokleouV, Sophocles, overcome with disillusionment at the brutality of life, turn west down a street which has been cordoned off and covered with a corrugated tin roof. Underneath the dark enclosure, meat marketers shout their specials while standing among red slabs of hanging beef, huge chunks of flesh on table tops, kidneys, livers, joints. And then pork, complete hog heads with pointed ears and lolling tongues, fish, large fish, small fish, octopus, squid. The death and mutilation reminds me of the dead man I saw at the side of the road near Markopoulo. Hordes of people bump into me, men in bulky blazers, women in heavy coats, crowding, shoving; and the meat cleaver coming down, Whack! Whack! Whack! as it cleaves thick chunks of flesh under rows of sparkling lights.

Sophocles Street is a mass of modern buildings. I can find nothing to identify with Colonus, so I walk to the National Archaeological Museum to see if someone there can tell me where to find it.

Inside at a reception desk, I talk to a young woman. She’s all smiles while telling me Colonus is located northwest of the train station. I pull out my map of the city. “There,” she says. “It’s still called Colonus.” “Is that where Oedipus died?” I ask. “No one knows for sure,” she replies.

Where do these gorgeous women come from? This young lady wasn’t here when I visited the museum two months ago.

I’m too tired and hungry to walk to Colonus now, and soon I find myself sitting in a Wendy’s restaurant in downtown Athens eating a Big Classic with cheese, a small order of fries and a cup of American coffee with two creams and three sugars, really soaking up the “Greek” culture. I sit on the mezzanine filled with a horde of roughhousing Greek teenagers. I’ve come to this American restaurant to start my reentry into our culture, smooth over the shock I anticipate.

When Oedipus, in old age, came here at the end of his blind wanderings, his oldest daughter Antigone was with him. Some twenty years had lapsed since he learned he had killed his father and married his mother. His other daughter, Ismene, came to Colonus on horseback with news of an oracle and of the impending war between his two sons who were fighting over the throne of Thebes. Ismene also had trouble finding Colonus. “The sufferings I bore in seeking where you were living, father, I will pass by; I would not renew the pain in the recital.”[1] She had serious business. Her brothers were at war with each other and seeking an alliance with Oedipus because of an oracle from Delphi stating whatever land was home to his grave would fall under divine protection. The welfare of Thebes depended on Oedipus’ grave being on Theban soil.

Eteocles, who was then the king of Thebes, had sent his uncle Creon, dead Jocasta’s brother, to coerce Oedipus back to Thebes. But Oedipus, with the news of the oracle brought by Ismene, saw through his charade. When Oedipus wouldn’t go back with him, Creon abducted both Ismene and Antigone. But Oedipus had befriended Theseus, king of Athens, and he sent an army to retrieved the girls.

Polyneices was the next to come after Oedipus, and his words upon seeing his father for the first time in years resurrect the sight of the old blind man I saw this morning on the streets of Athens, an echo of old blind Oedipus in his final days when he sat begging in this same town over 3200 years ago. Polyneices was taken aback by the old man’s appearance, much as I was by the blind man this morning, and agonizes about it to his sisters:  

Ah me, what shall I do? Shall I weep first for my own sorrows, sisters, or for my aged father’s, as I see them yonder? I have found him in a strange land, an exile here with you two, clad in raiment of which the foul squalor has dwelt with that aged form so long, a very blight upon his flesh--while above the sightless eyes the unkempt hair flutters in the breeze; and matching with these things, it seems, the food that he carries, hapless one, against hunger’s pinch.[2]  

Oedipus was forever Oedipus, still the same old moaner and groaner, protesting his fate and proclaiming his innocence as he had ever since he found out he had killed his father and married his mother. But here, he revealed a new hatred, that for his sons.

Instead of becoming the mediator between these two hot-brained young men, realizing the destructiveness of their behavior and trying to turn them in a new direction, Oedipus expressed his animosity. Polyneices had cast Oedipus out while he was king, and Eteocles didn’t call Oedipus back when he assumed the throne. Oedipus was not in a forgiving mood, and instead put a curse on both of them.

By the time I finish lunch it’s mid afternoon and too late to walk to Colonus. I decide to wait until tomorrow and make a fresh start early in the morning. I slip past the hordes of pseudoamerican teenagers, out of the Wendy’s, and down the street to Hotel Phaedras.

I stand out front of the hotel in the cool evening, looking down on the Byzantine church in the recessed courtyard where two months ago a monk posed while I took his picture. A wedding crowd has gathered before the Church of St. Catherine. A video camera man, floodlights, and a sudden rush of well-dressed people signal the arrival of the bride’s car, her father driving, her mother in the passenger seat. The wide-eyed bride, dressed in white and sitting in the backseat between two dark-suited men, hides in a mountain of flowing fabric. The crowd quickly disappears inside the church.

I stand outside the door wishing I could see inside when suddenly a smiling woman appears beside me, grabs my arm and pulls me just inside the door. The church is small and elaborately decorated. The crowd, now seated and shrouded in darkness, is packed into the small room. Up front, the bride and groom appear in bright light. The priest, dressed in his finest sacred raiment, approaches them. The smiling lady who has made me privy to the this private scene, gently pushes me back outside and pulls the door to behind her.

An hour later the crowd reappears and mills about the courtyard. The newlyweds have escaped through the back exit. I have a good solid feeling for them, their family and friends, getting married within the walls of a six hundred year old Byzantine church, all under the watchful glow of the Acropolis.

On my next trip to Long Island, I made a pass through Manhattan. I didn’t go there to see a Broadway play or the bright lights. My rental car was a big problem, and when I finally found a parking garage, the cost was ten dollars an hour. Strawberry’s, where my daughter had found a job after a week on the run, was on Park Avenue. I saw my runaway daughter standing among the racks of women’s clothes helping a woman with a dress. She turned toward me and smiled, looking so bright-faced and healthy. I finally got to hug her. After all my worry and concern for her, it was her turn to worry about me. She told me not to walk the streets alone. “This isn’t San Diego, Dad. This is the Big Apple, and you have to watch your step.” Very motherly, I thought.

That evening after she got off work, we had dinner downtown at the English Pub. We had shepherd’s pie and sipped shandies afterward. The little girl I once knew was gone, and in her place was this young woman, Bear, congenial but guarded with her father, definitely defiant at times, worldly. She had been on her way to London, she said, but fell in love with New York City. She was offended that I thought she had hitchhiked. She had hocked everything, electric guitar, amplifier, keyboard, and bought two plane tickets for herself and Vicki. Vicki got a job as a waitress the day they arrived; it took Cynthia a week to get the job at Strawberry’s. She had to take a lie detector test to get her job. She lied her way through it.

She turned hostile when I asked about college. She said she had learned from my decision to leave her in Phoenix with her mother and go to San Diego to work on the Space Shuttle project, and also from her mother leaving me, that sometimes you had to shake yourself up, take that big chance. But that night she was dressing in black and admitted to dabbling in witchcraft, not a devil worshiper but definitely on the fringe of something scary. She wouldn’t discuss it. Like Persephone, she had retained a touch of the Underworld. My concern for her returned but now accompanied by disappointment.

She showed me the City. I met her friend, Vicki. The two of them were living in an attic in Flushing. Before I caught my flight back to San Diego, I dropped her off there. As I walked away from her, I felt her death returning. I turned to look back at her, but she had already turned away, receding into a world I’ve never come to understand.

Even tonight lying here in bed in Athens, a part of me still believes she’s dead.

7 Dec, Tuesday

I wake well before dawn with a comfortable sleepiness, knowing tomorrow will be a day of traveling. I’m going home. Today I’ll walk to Colonus where Oedipus met death. According to Sophocles, Colonus had a religious significance. It contained an entrance to the Underworld and was home to the Furies. But as the young lady at the Museum told me yesterday, no one knows the exact spot where Oedipus died.

I pull out my city map to plot my walk north. I notice Greek words at the green circular spot on the map that the young lady at the museum yesterday identified as Colonus, LofoV Ippeiou, Kolwnou. With the aid of my dictionary I translate these words as “Hill of the Horses, Colonus.” I turn to Sophocles’ play and read old blind Oedipus’ inquiry of a citizen of Colonus when he first came there. Oedipus asked him where they were:  

As much as I can tell you, I will tell.  
This country, all of it, is blessed ground;
The god Poseidon loves it; in it the firecarrier
Prometheus has his influence; in particular
That spot you rest on has been called this earth’s
Doorsill of Brass, and buttress of great Athens.
All men of this land claim descent from him
Who is sculptured here; Colonus, master horseman,
And bear his name in common with their own.
That is this country, stranger: honored less
In histories than in the hearts of the people.[3]  

Since the man Colonus was a master horseman and the park I’m visiting this morning is “Hill of the Horses,” the site just might be what I’m looking for. Poseidon was said to have fathered the first horse there. He fell asleep on a rock (Mother Earth) and his semen fell on it which then gave birth to the first horse.[4]

I hear the garbage truck outside, see its flashing yellow light on the drapes. The loud voices of men float into my room, a trail of fading voices.

I walk through dingy streets, cutting a crooked path through the city. I pass car repair shops, tire shops, construction sites. Rubble fills the space between dilapidated buildings, everything coated with a layer of exhaust, dust, grime. Athens has been populated as far back as Neolithic times and is constantly fighting decay. I come to a set of railroad tracks and balk. No obvious crossing, and I’m the only pedestrian among the hordes of cars. I scurry across anyway.

On the other side of the tracks, I pick up Ioanninon Street and go north. My pulse quickens as I approach Colonus. The streets are wider, less dingy, less crowded, cleaner. To get here, I’ve walked only through industrial areas, but Colonus is residential, tree laden. If this is the land of the Furies, they’ve mellowed through the millennia.

Up ahead, the dark fettered shape of treetops sticks above roofs. I see a park and approach an intersection with a kiosk. A cloud of bird chatter drifts toward me.

I walk past the kiosk into the park along a stone walkway, the sun’s rays blocked by a covering of green leaves. The park is on a large hill covered with  trees. Underneath the foliage, tree trunks glistens like chocolate. 

At the edge of the walkway, curbs enclose tilled earth. Recently-planted seedlings stand awkwardly, and vines twine around tree trunks.

The path becomes steeper, and as I come to the top of the hill, the trees open to bright sunlight and a children’s sand-covered playground, a red teeter-totter, a swing, the gangly wood structure of a climbing maze.

I walk along a stone-covered courtyard, past the playground to an overlook of the city, red-domed Byzantine churches pocking the ocean of tan buildings.

Within the confines of a prickly wrought-iron fence are monuments which shine brilliant white in the morning sun surrounded by shadows, much as the statue of the horseman, Colonus, must have in antiquity. They mark the tombs of two archaeologists,[5] Carl Otfried Muller (1797-1840), a German scholar who looked upon the classical past “as a world of human experience to be brought into an organic relationship with the present,”[6] and Francois Lenormant (1837-1883), who was a French professor of archaeology interested in Mediterranean civilizations. His father was also a distinguished archaeologist.[7] But this isn’t what I’m looking for.

If Sophocles lived and died here, surely the Greeks commemorate the spot with something. I walk to another iron railing where the hill drops away.

 Suddenly I’m overlooking a small theatre with a large semicircular stage and a flat conclave. Finally I’m satisfied. Surely this theatre is a tribute to Sophocles. I sit on a short stone wall overlooking the theatre, overlooking Colonus and open my book of Sophocles plays and read Oedipus at Colonus. I’ve come here to be initiated into the mysteries of Oedipus.

But before I get past the first few lines, someone addresses me in Greek, and I look up to see a withered old man standing above me, his bright eyes investigating my foreignness. I understand little of his Greek, something about “OidipouV” (Oedipus). He points to his own eyes and repeats “edo” (here) several times. I show him my book, open to Oedipus at Colonus. He’s delighted, asks me where I’m from in halting English, and when I tell him, “United States,” he expresses great pleasure and says something about him being in Canada long ago and how he used to speak English but has lost the ability. I tell him Colonus is very beautiful, “Wraia poli,” I say, and he excitedly waves his arms indicating the land hereabouts, expressing his pleasure to me in words I have no hope of understanding, but their essence comes through loud and clear. After a while, he moves on, speaks to another Greek gentleman nearby about the “AmericanoV” (Amerikanos) to whom he has just spoken.

Again I open my book of Sophocles’ plays to Oedipus at Colonus which Sophocles wrote at the age of ninety during the last year of his life. The play was first performed five years after his death and was staged by his grandson.[8] While Sophocles was writing the play, his sons rebelled against him and tried to prove him an imbecile to relieve him of business matters. In his defense Sophocles read the following ode[9] from the play in progress describing and praising Colonus. A citizen of Colonus addresses Oedipus:  

Stranger, in this land of goodly steeds thou hast come to earth’s fairest home, even to our white Colonus; where the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note in the convert of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy and the god’s inviolate bowers, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun, unvexed by wind of any storm; where the reveler Dionysus ever walks the ground, companion of the nymphs that nursed him.

And, fed of heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms morn by morn with fair clusters, crown of the Great Goddesses [Demeter and Persephone] from of yore; and the crocus blooms with golden beam. Nor fail the sleepless founts whence the waters of Cephisus wander, but each day with stainless tide he moveth over the plains of the land’s swelling bosom, for the giving of quick increase; nor hath the Muses quire abhorred this place, nor Aphrodite of the golden rein.

And a thing there is such as I know not by fame on Asian ground, or as ever born in the great Dorian isle of Pelops--a growth unconquered, self-renewing, a terror to the spears of the foemen, a growth which mightily flourishes in this land--the gray-leafed olive, nurturer of children. Youth shall not mar it by the ravage of his hand, nor any who dwells with old age; for the sleepless eye of the Morian Zeus beholds it, and the gray-eyed Athena.

And another praise have I to tell for this the city our mother, the gift of a great god, a glory of the land most high; the might of horses, the might of young horses, the might of the sea.

For thou, son of Cronus, our lord Poseidon, hast throned her in this pride, since in these roads first thou didst show forth the curb that cures the rage of steeds. And the shapely oar, apt to men’s hands, hath a wondrous speed on the brine, following the hundred-footed Nereids.[10] 

Needless to say, Sophocles was acquitted of being an imbecile.

Many of the features of Colonus described by Sophocles 2400 years ago still apply today. Colonus is a pleasant oasis in a sea of noise and fumes. I hear children’s voices echo from the school yard close by even as I hear the bell to bring them back indoors, but it’s all quickly overlaid by the sound of a jack hammer. The hill is covered with olives, pines, deciduous trees and bushes, their deep bight color a testament to the rich earth.

But Colonus was also a land to be feared. When Oedipus and Antigone first found a place to rest, one of the citizens of Colonus, to Oedipus a stranger, came to them worried about where they sat:  

STRANGER: ... quit this seat, for you are on ground which it is not lawful to  tread.

OEDIPUS:    And what is this ground? Sacred to what deity?

STRANGER: Ground inviolable, on which none may dwell; for the dread  goddesses hold it, the daughters of Earth and Darkness.

OEDIPUS:    Who may they be, whose awful names I am to hear and invoke?

STRANGER: The all-seeing Eumenides the fold here would call them; but  other names place in other places.[11]  

The other name for the Eumenides was the Furies, those vengeful deities who drove Orestes insane.

My shadow keeps forming and dissolving as clouds intermittently block the sun’s rays. The stone where I sit is cold. The air is cool, but here comes the sun again. I feel its heat on my back.

I now turn to the description of Oedipus’ death, or disappearance as it may be more aptly described. Theseus was the only one permitted to see Oedipus’ death, and he told Theseus he was to pass this knowledge along to only one person. Oedipus gave Theseus specific instructions:  

But for mysteries which speech may not profane, you shall mark them for yourself, when you come to that place alone; since neither to any of this people can I utter them, nor to my own children, dear though they are. No, do you guard them alone; and when you are coming to the end of life, disclose them to your heir alone, and so thenceforth.[12]  

In this way, Oedipus created his own mysteries at Colonus as Demeter had her Mysteries at Eleusis. The mysteries of Oedipus would provide protection for Athens. As Ismene told Oedipus shortly after she joined him, the land containing his grave would be protected, “By force of your wrath, when they take their stand at your tomb.”[13] That which had destroyed him in this life, his wrath when he killed his father, would be his asset in the afterlife as protector of Athens. Having treated his sons as he did, it’s fitting he would descend to the land of the vengeful Furies.

Though Oedipus was blind to this world, he was no longer blind to the next. The old blind man led his daughters and Theseus to where he was to die, “the sheer Threshold bound by brazen steps to earth’s deep roots.”[14] He spoke as he led them: “This way, here, this way, for this way doth guiding Hermes lead me, and the goddess [Persephone] of the dead!”[15] Antigone and Ismene fetched water from a spring for a drink offering, and in doing so, they came to this very hill where I now sit, which was sacred to Demeter, another definite connection with the Mysteries: “And they went to the hill which was in view, Demeter’s hill who guards the tender plants...”[16]

Irritated by Oedipus’ prolonged farewell to his daughter’s, Zeus called him to the task at hand, “Oedipus, Oedipus, why delay we to go? You tarry too long.”[17] Finally, Oedipus said good-bye to his daughters and led Theseus to the site. A messenger tells what he saw:  

... when we had gone apart after no long time we looked back. Oedipus we saw nowhere any more, but the king [Theseus] alone, holding his hand before his face to screen his eyes, as if some dread sight had been seen, and such as not might endure to behold. And then after a short space we saw him salute the earth and the home of the gods above, both at once, in one prayer.

But by what doom Oedipus perished no man can tell save Theseus alone. No fiery thunderbolt of the god removed him in that hour, nor any rising of storm from the sea; but either a messenger from the gods, or the world of the dead....[18]  

Just as at Eleusis, the epiphany at Colonus was kept secret, the mystery of Oedipus’ disappearance.

In my trip through Greece, I’ve encountered both the ancient Greek gods and Christianity, and in particular the words of St. John on Patmos, the Apocalypse. Since Oedipus was such a vengeful man and at death went into the land of the Furies, I wonder if there might be a connection between the words of John and Oedipus’ death here on the Hill of Horses. What happened to Oedipus? Could it be that he jumped astride that pale horse and road it into darkness. Was Oedipus the Death John saw?

Sophocles died shortly after completing Oedipus at Colonus, in 406 BC. His funeral train was said to have been guarded by Dionysus, god of theatre himself. Sophocles was a member of an Asklepios cult. When Asklepios, the god of healing, came to Athens in 420 BC to purify the city after the great plague, he came in his usual form, a snake. Sophocles took the snake into his home for safe keeping while the Asklepion at the foot of the Akropolis, which I visited two days ago, was being built. After death, Sophocles was worshipped locally as the god Dexion, the Receiver, in recognition of his caretaking of the snake.[19]

In the years to come, citizens of Colonus erected a shrine which Pausanias saw when he came through in the 2nd century AD. He also told of the destruction of the site by the Macedonian general Antigonos during 3rd century BC:  

They [citizens of Colonus] show the place called Kolonus of the Horses, where they say Oedipus entered Attica. ... they show you an altar of Poseidon of Horses and Athene of Horses and a hero-shrine of ... Theseus and Oedipus and Adrastos. Among the damage Antigonos did to the country side in his invasion was to fire the grove of Poseidon and the shrine.[20]  

On my way back from Colonus, I walk southeast to the train station, then south to a slim walkway over the tracks, where I look down upon an old black locomotive, a life-size version of one I got under the Christmas tree as a kid.

I continue on through the flea market again, turn a corner and suddenly I’m face to face with Santa. He sits astride a sleigh pulled by two stuffed reindeer. His costume is the most authentic I’ve seen, and the children crawling in and out of his lap are having a great time. So is the old American watching them.

A change has come over me in the last few days. I’m no longer a traveler but a man displaced in another country and needing one last look at this glorious city. At sundown, I walk up the side of the mountain to the foot of the Acropolis, walk alongside whitewashed homes, small streets and ascend the Areopagos, Ares Hill, to overlook Athens. Beautiful buildings fill the valleys and hillsides below. Athens is a city of building stacked on top of building, a sprawling metropolis with an organic homogeneity, an ocean of tan buildings and dark-island peaks. I've never seen anything like it, and must admit I've fallen love. I know she has her problems, but my God what a city.

I’ve come here to think about Orestes’ acquittal of murdering his mother. In Aeschylus’ play, The Euminides, Apollo defends Orestes. Apollo defense is that Orestes did not kill his mother, that true motherhood does not exist:  

The mother to the child that men call hers  
Is no true life-begetter, but a nurse
Of live seed. ‘Tis the sower of the seed
Alone begetteth. Woman comes at need,
A stranger, to hold safe in trust and love...[21]  

At Delphi the most sacred site in the Greek world, Apollo seized the sanctuary from Gaia, Mother Earth, by force. Here on the Areopagos, his attack on her was complete. He stripped her of motherhood. Thus the disenfranchisement of women in ancient Greece was complete.

The problem with Apollo’s agricultural analogy is that it ignores the genetic contribution of the woman during conception. This perception is a cornerstone of western thought, the tenet of a matriarchal society, subtle remnants of which exist today. The metaphor of a man sewing his “seed” is particularly telling in light of the Greek view of the earth as the Earth goddess, Gaia. Perhaps before the Neolithic age and the coming of agriculture, the female was seen as the source of all life, everything coming from the body of the female. But as agriculture, planting and sewing, became a way of life, man related his own semen to seed. To sew seed, man first splits the earth, penetrates it just as he penetrates a woman’s body during sex. Thus the idea of Apollo’s flawed metaphor came to be.

Apollo’s defense of Orestes, based on this agricultural analogy, was the death of the great Earth goddess. To the ancient Greeks, women were only the incubators for men’s babies. They divested the female of motherhood. Thus women give up their surname when they get married, and we trace family genealogy along the line of fathers. The Earth goddess, whose temples I saw replaced all over Greece, was finally dealt the death blow here on the Areopagos.

Apollo uses the birth of Athena as proof. He says Athena was born of father alone:  

There have been fathers where no mother is.

Whereof a perfect witness standeth nigh,

Athena Pallas, child of the Most High,

A thought-begotten unconceived bloom,

No nursling of the darkness of the womb,

But such a flower of life as Goddess ne’er

Hath borne in heaven nor ever more shall bear.[22]  

To avoid divine wrath, I'll attribute this remark to the author, Aeschylus, instead of Apollo. Athena had a mother, Metis, the most wise of all gods and goddesses. Zeus conned her into becoming small and swallowed her. Metis was pregnant with Athena at the time. Her birth occurred when Hephaestus split Zeus’ head, but it was not a true birth, only a liberation.

Even Athena participated in the charade. Orestes fate was to be decided by the council of judges on the Areopagos, this hill where I now sit and where murderers were tried. After both Apollo and the Furies presented their cases for and against Orestes, the judges cast their lots. But the vote was a tie, and Athena, who presided over the trial, cast the deciding vote. Since she was born of father alone and always took the side of men, she cast her vote for acquittal and freed Orestes.

Thus, Orestes was acquitted on false grounds. Klytemnestra was his mother. All mothers are true mothers. The father is a partner in conception, not the source of life. Our entire civilization, civilizations all over the world, are based on a lie. This disenfranchised not only women but also discredited the feminine element of men and reinforced the masculine element in women. Modern woman is cast in the mold of Athena.

A stiff breeze has cleared the air, and as the dying rays of sinking sun kiss the sides of buildings, I descend from the hill named for the god of war.

On January 28, 1986, nine months after my daughter’s disappearance and resurrection, I made another of my many trips to Kennedy Space Center for flight-team training, so I could man one of the spacecraft ground consoles during the Shuttle flight. We had a short layover in Dallas to change flights and as I exited the plane, I heard a comment from someone on the concourse. “... there was a fireball, and it fell into the ocean ...” I had been too busy with preparations for our own Shuttle launch to pay much attention to Challenger that morning.  But upon hearing these words of a stranger, I knew immediately what had happened and also knew our project would be canceled. The payload we were building was too dangerous to survive the scrutiny that would certainly follow a Shuttle disaster.

I continued on my flight to Orlando and drove to Cocoa Beach listening to the continuing news coverage on the rental-car radio. I cried all the way. The disaster had consequences beyond the professional impact, personal consequences. I had consciously moved to San Diego for a job on the most challenging project confronting the aerospace industry to try to prevent a Shuttle disaster. But one had occurred anyway. I had sacrificed my daughter for nothing.

I again had the feeling I had been shown something, taught a difficult lesson, and that someone somewhere was having a good belly laugh at my expense. Man received his inventiveness, cleverness from Prometheus who was a Titan, that race of gods who came before Zeus and Apollo. A Titan’s way of dealing with the world was not one of enlightenment but one of inventiveness, a more primitive form of intelligence. Prometheus gave this inventiveness to men.

Zeus didn’t think much of it. He realized Prometheus’ inventions would leave a trail of new misery for men.[23] After he discovered Prometheus had given men fire, Zeus roared with laughter[24] realizing the evil it would bring. I had sacrificed my daughter to work on a Space Shuttle contract, and I heard an echo of Zeus’ laugh after Challenger exploded. But the laughter of Zeus is not malicious. Our tragic flaw comes from the desire to be like the gods. Zeus seems to be also pulling for us. Our attempts to be heroic, reaching beyond our limitations, trying to deny our fate, results in disaster and causes his spontaneous laughter.

And on this journey through Greece, I’ve come to view the events surrounding not only my daughter’s disappearance but also those of the confrontation with my father, in a different light, one not shrouded by guilt and blame. It seems our lives at times parallel the old myths. Whether we observe them or not, the processes of cult are ever active. We experience the “trial by fire" and unconsciously are initiated into the Mysteries.

Modern psychology has placed the human experience very close to myth:

... we are, in soul, mythical beings. We emerge into life as creatures in a drama, scripted by the great storytellers of our culture.[25]

We had better watch this phenomenon closely because when our lives parallel myths, we are drawn toward disaster.[26] But even if we don’t reenact the myths literally we still experience them internally, feel as though the tragedies literally occurred. I still can’t get beyond the feeling my daughter is dead. This is the cult process.

I’ve worked on hardware now sitting on the surface of Mars; stood at the bottom of a missile silo looking up at a the long missile cylinder with a multi-megaton warhead sitting on top that could destroy our world, the unleashing of Prometheus’ gift of fire on an unimaginable scale; stood on the launch pad at KSC, climbed aboard the Space Shuttle to peered inside the cargo bay. Because of Prometheus, the human race has become godlike. But Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, shines like a beacon across the millennia between us and the ancient Greeks. Her novel is the perfect metaphor for 20th century man’s arrogance. The scientific mind has indeed created a monster in our own image, reached the pentacle of arrogance. Our godlike posturing would have been punished swiftly and severely in antiquity.

While walking back to my hotel, my journey drawing to a close, I wonder where I shall go now? What path shall my life take? I feel I’ve led my life like Sophocles’ guard in Antigone when he comes to the king bearing bad news:  

My liege, I will not say that I come breathless from speed or that I have plied a nimble foot; for often did my thoughts make me pause and wheel round in my path to return. My mind was holding large discourse with me: “Fool, why are you going on to your certain doom?” “Wretch, tarrying again? ... So debating I went on my way with lagging steps, and thus a short road was made long. At last, however, it carried the day that I should come here to you; and though my tale is nothing yet I will tell it. I come with a good grip on one hope--that I can suffer nothing but what is my fate.[27]  

He’s so modern, full of indecision, doubt, so afraid. It’s as if Sophocles looked into the eyes of this character and saw 2500 years into the future, into the heart of modern man.

What path shall I choose to end my lengthy unemployment? I no longer feel I’m in control of my life. Perhaps the feeling of control I had in the past was an illusion. Now I feel that my fate is in the hands of another. As Jesus told his disciple Peter:  

Verily, verily, I say unto thee,  
When thou was young, thou girdedst
thyself, and walkedst wither thou
wouldest: but when thou shalt be old,
thou shalt stretch forth thy hands,
and another shall gird thee, and carry
thee whither thou wouldest not.  

This evening I feel purposeless. I eat dinner at a local restaurant, a big piece of roast beef in brown sauce, boiled potatoes with rice and a tiny bottle of Greek wine, retsina, which tastes a little like paint thinner. Later I have an ice cream served by the gorgeous brunette at the crepe shop I so frequently visited when I first came to Athens, my first love so to speak. But I feel lost. I’ve spent my evenings the past ten weeks planning the next day’s activities, where to go, what to see. This evening I’ve nothing to plan. And once again, I’m alone.

I wonder about the loneliness of Oedipus’ youngest daughter, Ismene, the only member of her family to survive. Her mother committed suicide when she was a child. Just after her father/brother died his strange death at Colonus, her two brothers killed each other and not long afterward Antigone died in a last-ditch defense of the rites of the Earth goddess. That would make Thebes a lonely and desolate city for Ismene. The Greek poets don’t address her fate. She was gentle and timid, a sensible, down-to-earth young woman who seemed bewildered by the heroics of her family. She poses the question of her own fate to herself after her father’s death:  

Ah me unhappy! Friendless and helpless,

where am I now to live my hapless life?[28]  

I think of Ismene in the days following that turbulent time as a self-imposed exile in some obscure township where no one knew she was a member of that infamous family. I see her married with children, possibly a great storyteller, singing her poetry to her grandchildren and great grandchildren, telling of Oedipus and Antigone, keeping the legend alive. I see her old and withered, sitting with her feet to the fire, wrapped in a gray blanket staring into the glowing coals. Perhaps Ismene told her tales to Teiresias’ daughter, Manto, and they eventually became some of Homer’s best lines. Ismene alone escaped to tell it all.

If Ismene and Antigone represent two of the three feminine presence’s of Oedipus’ quaternion, where is the third? Am I missing a part of the Rosetta stone? Perhaps the answer to this question lies in Demeter’s Mysteries. According to Plato’s view of the Mysteries, we spend our lives nurturing a pearl which is the human soul reborn into the afterlife. It is a ghostly presence but always a part of us. My guess is that this pearl represents the remaining, undetectable feminine aspect of Oedipus’ personality, his soul.

8 Dec, Wednesday

All is quiet in my room and outside Hotel Phaedra, on the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, my last morning in Greece. I lie between the covers on top of which I’ve spread my running jacket, my army-green long-sleeved shirt, black pants and black sweater to hold in the heat. I try to contain my excitement at going home.

I rise feeling energetic, younger than my years, and walk to Syntagma to catch a bus only to learn a strike started this morning. Finally, a man standing next to me waiting for a shuttle bus speaks to me in English. He’s an American from Parker, Colorado, an engineer on business here in Athens. He suggests I walk with him to the Hilton where he’s staying. He’ll get us a taxi to the airport. We can split the fare.

The Hilton is a little nicer than the hotels where I’ve stayed, echoing foyer, glass doors, plush red carpet, mirrored walls, a vaulted chamber large enough for a blimp, a swimming pool. I wait in the lobby for him to get his suitcase, trying to reenter a world for which I no longer feel suited. We talk in the taxi on the way to the airport, and I end up at the wrong terminal. I split the taxi fare to the East Terminal with an American couple on vacation from Saudi Arabia where they both work.

I retrieve my luggage from storage, relieved to be reunited with the first volume of my journal and my forty rolls of film. I change clothes behind a row of storage shelves and repack my backpack.

In the early afternoon, I sit at the departures terminal, awaiting my flight to London. The modern waiting room seems sterile after all the ruins I’ve visited. I check my security pouch and find I still have $200 in travelers checks of the $2500 I brought with me on this journey.

Perhaps I’ll never find what was going on inside me when my father loaded the deer rifle, but my journey has been far from a failure. Zeus would have looked down on me and smiled for coming 7000 miles to look for something I brought with me. “Before Zeus, the laughing onlooker, the eternal human race plays its eternal human comedy.”[29]

I’ve learned that as a result of the death of the Earth goddess, our entire masculine society is defined by Oedipus and his family. His mother died, having taken her own life, an event similar to Athena putting the finishing touches on Gaia. In his mother’s absence, old blind Oedipus wandered the countryside, wallowing in self-pity, raging and cursing his sons while his daughters flit about in his service. The modern woman is either like is daughters, or like Athena, the goddess born of a father only, and though she has the wisdom to guide all civilization, devotes herself to the service of only the masculine, even the masculine part of herself.

My daughter’s life was a mystery to me, and it is no coincidence that through trying to understand our problems, I’ve discovered Demeter and Persephone and have been introduced (dare I say initiated?) into the Mysteries.

We now have little understanding of the true feminine spirit. To uncover it, we must search for the Earth goddess, for Hera, Artemis and Aphrodite, search for the elements of them within us all. Within them we’ll find the ruins of our complete selves and begin the restoration. Perhaps that's the true purpose of developing a personal mythology. Here in Greece, I’ve begun this process, and perhaps that’s where I’ll eventually find the feelings I suppressed when my father turned to the deer rifle to solve the problems between us. It's as if the feminine part of my nature died in that one instant, and remains hidden behind the mask of Dionysus. I didn’t accomplish the task I came here to perform, but perhaps I’ve awakened enough of my suppressed self to make the recovery possible.

I've found more than my own mythology. A personal mythology gives us a tool to think about and consider our lives. The fact that it is an ancient art demonstrates that it's a natural characteristic of the mind. But it's only a tool. Life for me was like a bad suit: it never quite fit. I'd never found that center from which every life projects. I had to pick up my life and shake it until I fell out. My daughter learned that early in life. Though thirty-two years late, I finally woken up. It took a trip to Greece. Through this personal mythology, I've finally centered myself.

When I look back on it, I realize that my own motivation for having a family and, in particular, a career was a sense of myth. When I pulled alerts in ICBM silos, stood at the bottom of the silo looking up at that long sleek shinny shaft that could end civilization as we know it, I was reveling in the male myth of our civilization. The ancient Greeks destroyed theirs several times. The first occurred around 2000 BC and the second 1000 BC following the Trojan War. Classical Greece destroyed itself during the Peloponnesian War. We almost destroyed ourselves during World Wars I and II. The pull toward war has always been irresistible for men, the unleashing of anarchy an irresistible part of the male psyche.

But the cure for all this violence may have manifested itself between wars, in 1922, with Women's Suffrage and during World War II when women took over the workforce to build ships, submarines and planes to support their men who were off killing each other. Women, through the influence of Athena, are the bringers of civilization, and men, through worshiping Ares, the great destroyers. Oedipus was not just a descendent of Kadmos from Tyre. He was also a descendent of the Sparti, the sown-men, a descendent of the dragon and thus Ares himself. All men have the irresistible pull toward anarchy, the thrill of destroying a civilization. But women have now entered the scene in force for the first time in the history of the world. This is the single most important fact that determined the outcome of the Cold War, that enabled it to reach a conclusion peacefully. The nature of civilization is changing through the feminine influence.

We take the shuttle to an airplane parked on a cement pad next to the runway, and as I enter I’m greeted by a beautiful British Airways hostess with the most delicious English accent I’ve ever heard. Christmas carols coming over the intercom fill the interior of the warm plane, “It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas.” Much laughter and good-spirited joking. I enjoy the crowding, the closeness of people. Now they’re playing, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” I can’t quit smiling.

We taxi. A great sunset is occurring in Athens. The bright rays peak from under a cloud and glisten off the Aegean, a swipe of blazing light across the sea toward us. We wait while a plane lands, its two propellers blurred circles. We move into position for our ground run, taking off to the north.

The acceleration pushes me back in my seat. What a glorious feeling to be going home. The lightness as the plane leaves the ground. Higher now, out over the water, ferryboats, fishing boats, the sun rising above the horizon to vanish behind a cloud, the Aegean rippled like corrugated metal, a glassy washboard. Two flattop tankers directly below, one sparkling white, the other a deep rust. We bank to the right. Helios has set fire to Athens.