CHAPTER 5: Olympia.

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I planned to take the train from Patras to Olympia but will have to wait three hours, so I take the bus instead. This time we have assigned seats and guess who isn’t in the right one and causes all the commotion? After they get me straightened out everything goes smoothly although the intolerable heat inside the bus causes me to drip in sweat. The bus travels south among the small villages of the western coast, narrow streets, winding roads, olive orchards, orange orchards, mountains, horns, horns, horns.

At Pirgos, the capitol of Elis Nome, I change buses. The bus stations I’ve seen in Greece have been old, dingy, dirty, colorless. This is no exception. I grab a pack of peanuts and a soft drink and stand among crowds of cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking men with suffering, country faces sitting at tables sandwiched into the room. I spot a young couple, tall, thin, good-looking kids in their late twenties, speaking English with a Greek. Their blond hair stands out like a beacon in deep darkness. I can’t keep my eyes off them.

As we enter the rattley old local bus, I pick a seat beside them and strike up a conversation. Hans and Margo are from Holland, just south of Amsterdam. They speak excellent but heavily accented English. We spend the few minutes it takes to traverse the seventeen kilometers to Olympia with me telling them about my two-day visit to their hometown six years ago. I had a woman with me then, my last real relationship, and talking with this couple from Holland brings back that trip and increases my sense of loneliness on this one. What I wouldn’t give to have a woman sharing this journey with me.  

The Greek at the bus station had good words about the Pension Poseidon in Olympia, so when the bus drops us at the side of the street, we exit together and walk along main street looking for it.

Olympia is a one street town, a two-lane highway with cross streets, full of pensions and small gift shops. The Pension Poseidon is at the end of one of these small cross streets, two blocks from the highway. How these world-famous towns can be so small still amazes me. I could walk the entire length of Olympia in five minutes.

According to myth, Zeus wrestled his father, old Kronos, here at Olympia to become the god of both immortals and men. He instituted the Olympic games to honor the event. The gods then held the first games, during which Apollo beat Hermes in the foot race and Ares at boxing.[1]

The ancient Greeks were fond of festivals, and of all the ones held throughout the country, few attained Pan-Helenic scope, but the grandest of all was here at Olympia, the Olympic Festival which included sacrifices, feasting and the athletic contests from which we derive our modern Olympic Games. Ancient Olympia was both a religious and sports complex. Sacrifices were made to the “Twelve Gods,” who constituted a corporate body ruling earth. They were Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Athena, Hephaestus, Hestia.[2] Other gods and goddesses were loosely grouped to one of the twelve.[3]  

After a quick shower and change of clothes, I exit the pension hearing Hans and Margo in the shower together talking and laughing, the sounds of splashing water warbling their words. I walk past the door feeling jealous and thinking how long it’s been since I took a shower with a woman.

I take a quick walk across a bridge over the quiet Alphaios river, which flows like a mighty torrent in the spring, to the ruins of the ancient city. The countryside around Olympia is low wooded hills covered with deciduous trees and farms. The ruins are just closing and will reopen at seven-thirty tomorrow morning, but I didn’t plan to visit them this afternoon anyway. I came to see a hill close by.

The Hill of Kronos overlooks the archaeological site, and was occupied in prehistoric times, as early as 1900 BC.[4] Kronos was the son of Gaia  and Uranus, Earth and Heaven, from whom all the other gods descended. As at Delphi, Olympia was originally the site of Gaia’s sanctuary here on the southern slope of the hill. Both her daughter Rhea and her grand daughter Hera were also worshipped here, a hill dedicated to goddesses.

I climb the slope through thick dark pines, my feet crunching on cones in the soft earth. The trees are so thick, it’s as if darkness has fallen. I stop at a small clearing and gaze over the ruins of ancient Olympia in the plane below, the silence broken by the flutter and tweet of finches bedding down in the pines. I’ve climbed this hill to look over the site I’ll see tomorrow, and to pay tribute to Gaia where her sanctuary stood thousands of years ago. I’m increasingly becoming aware of the role goddesses played in the advancement of civilization and wondering about their replacement by male deities. Was this a trend all over ancient Greece?

On the way back, I meet Hans and Margo window shopping and arguing over some gold jewelry she wanted. They look rejuvenated beyond what a simple shower could accomplish and invite me to join them for dinner. We decide on a large outdoor restaurant sparsely populated with patrons. Before our food is served, the wind comes up, forcing us to don our sweaters.

Being around these two reinforces how isolated I am from world events. It’s only been three weeks, yet I’ve dropped off into a strange internal world of mythology and personal history. They’ve just entered Greece and are full of information. I immediately question them about the turmoil in Russia that I heard about while in Athens. They tell me Yeltzen stormed the Russian White House and imprisoned his Communist and extreme nationalist foes. The crisis is over for the present. They have unsettling information about the US. A dozen US troops have been killed in Somalia and scores wounded. The humanitarian effort is in jeopardy and the public demanding withdrawal. Clinton is also considering invading Haiti because the military has refused to allow disposed president Aristide reentry into Haiti to restore the civilian democracy. The Justice Minister has been assassinated and violence is spreading.

The waiter interrupts to set our dinner on the table, and during the lull in the conversation, I reflect on how far from home I am. I feel a little guilty being in Greece with all the trouble at home. All this news of war is unsettling. The darkness around our outdoor restaurant in Olympia pulls in about me.

For dinner they both have mousaka, a baked lasagna-like dish with eggplant and a custard topping. I’ve ordered a skimpy dinner of fruit, bread and coffee. I look greedily at their meal while trying to understand why I should feel guilty about being in Greece. My father used to call me when he was having problems on the farm. Even though I had a wife and two kids and a good job in aerospace, he thought I should drop everything and run home to keep him from losing the farm, something he thought impending every summer.

While we eat they continue to bombard me with current events. The Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Mandela and De Klerk in South Africa and that for literature to Toni Morrison of the US. I feel as though I’ve dropped off into a Black Hole.

At midnight I lie in bed in the Pension Poseidon with music drifting into my room from the disco across the street, hoping it closes soon so I can sleep. The music stops suddenly, and a rooster crows. His horse voice rattles like the bus I came in on, lofts a little, cracks and stops. A rooster with a broken larynx.

20 Oct, Wednesday

I sit on the edge of a huge shaped stone in the middle of the temple of Zeus among the ruins of ancient Olympia. The site lies to the north of the Alphios river where it comes together with its tributary the Kaladeos. Both rivers have frequently overflowed their banks and changed direction through the centuries, destroying and covering the ruins with silt.

I came here early this morning, before eight o’clock, and had the site to myself. The sun had mounted the surrounding peaks, night’s darkness just lifting from among the trees.

The sky was the clearest of any morning I’ve been in Greece. Yesterday’s wind cleaned the cool air and left a dewy gloss on the grass. But already the sun is hot on my face and it’s glare blinding me. I wish I had a hat. To the south, the blue silhouette of a mountain range defines the horizon. To the west, a mountain rises up out of the plane, white homes dotting its ridge.

Olive trees, oak trees, evergreens populate the ruin-strewn landscape. The earth is parched and dusty. The stalk of dead wildflowers occupy the space between stones, their thin stalks supporting barren shells of seedless pods.

Behind me, ruins butt up against the foot of dome-shaped Kronos Hill. I feel dwarfed sitting among the monoliths. Before me, a huge circular stone stands on edge, flat as a table and one third of it buried in earth. For one hundred yards in any direction I see the same thing, huge clumps of stones in the disarray caused by earthquakes and plundering.

Tourists begin to infiltrate the site. A teacher lectures a group of two dozen French school children as they pass before me. Behind them, another group and yet another, all speaking French, all carrying backpacks and notebooks.

The religious center was known as Altis, the sacred grove of Zeus. Altis contained temples to many gods and goddesses, the most significant of whom where dedicated to Hera and Zeus.

Though Zeus’ temple, where I now sit, came to be the religious center, Hera’s temple was here first, being built around 600 BC. In her temple, Hera sat on the throne and Zeus stood beside her as a suppliant in beard and helmet.[5] Clearly Zeus, as Hera’s husband, was a latecomer to Altis as Kronos had been to what we know now as the Hill of Kronos.

Hera, the grand daughter of Gaia, was by far the most gloriously beautiful of all the goddesses.[6] She was the goddess of monogamous marriage, who raged over her husbands infidelities. Hera was older than Zeus and chose him, her youngest brother, as her husband as soon as he was born.[7] They were married on Mt. Kitheron[8] where Oedipus would later be exposed by his parents. Zeus seduced Hera by transforming himself into a cuckoo, a bird who lays its eggs in other’s nests.[9] He performed a similar act here at Olympia by replacing Hera as the primary deity at the site. The two children of Hera and Zeus were Hephaestus, the physically deformed god of arts and crafts, and Ares, the gigantic god of war. The rest of Zeus’ children were illegitimate and the cause of Hera’s rage.

Other than the famous statues, the primary object inside Hera’s temple was a cedar chest. Pausanias describes it:  

There is a cedar-wood chest with figure on it in ivory and gold, and carvings in the cedar-wood itself. ... the figures on the chest have inscriptions in ancient lettering, ... the chest has the following decorative scheme. Oinomaos is chasing Pelops who has Hippodameia ... Those daring to box are Admetos and Mopsos [Manto’s son] ... Menelaos in a breast-plate with a sword is coming at Helen to murder her, obviously at the fall of Troy. ... There are the sons of Oedipus: Polyneikes has fallen on one knee and Eteokles is coming at him. Behind Eteokles stands a woman with ferocious teeth like a wild beast and curved nails on her fingers; the inscription calls her Doom, as Polyneikes is being carried off by destiny, and Eteocles is dying as he deserves.[10]  

These inscriptions depicting legends of places I’ve visited are only a small part of the cedar chest’s decorations. Cedar chests always remind me of my mother’s. It's a large object but contains no such inscriptions or designs. My mother keeps it in her bedroom and fills it with valuables as well as things she wants to hide, like Christmas presents. She keeps birth certificates, old family photographs, baby shoes and spoons, report cards, school pictures, and letters from her family. My father also keeps a few things there; his two pistols is what I remember most, occasionally a rifle. I always welcomed the sharp smell of cedar when the lid swung open.

Pausanias doesn’t mention what was inside Hera’s cedar chest.

Zeus’ temple replaced Hera’s in importance. The most significant work of art in his temple was a statue of a forty foot Zeus seated on his throne made of ivory and gold (long since stolen from the site) sculpted by the Athenian, Phidias.

The god is sitting on a throne; he is made of gold and ivory. There is a wreath on his head like twigs and leaves of olive; in his right hand he is holding a Victory of gold and ivory with a ribbon and a wreath on her head; in the god’s left hand is a staff in blossom with every kind of precious metal, and the bird perching on this staff is Zeus’s eagle. The god’s sandals are gold and so is his cloak, and the cloak is inlaid with animals and flowering lilies. The throne is finely worked with gold and gems, and with ebony and with ivory.[11]

The statue, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was confiscated and taken to Constantinople where it burned in a palace fire in the 5th century AD.  

I sit on the grassy slopes at the side of the stadium as did spectators at the first Olympic games held in 776 BC, 2769 years ago, watching the French school kids race the length of the track in street clothes, their street shoes clopping loudly against the hard dirt.

The teacher stands at the end of the stadium calling times from a stopwatch as the students cross the finish line. Even from twenty meters, I can smell their strong body odor.

Pelops, for whom the Peloponnese is named (Pelops Island), held the games in celebration of his defeat of Oenomaus, king of Pisa, a near by city. Pelops was in love with Hippodameia, Oenomaus’ beautiful daughter. But Oenomaus had been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by his daughter’s husband and would only give her to the man who could beat him in a chariot race from Olympia to the Isthmus of Corinth. Oenomaus would relinquish not only his daughter but the kingdom of Pisa as her dowry.

Oenomaus had the fastest team of horses in the land and, even though he handicapped himself by sacrificing a goat after his competitor had already left for Corinth with Hippodameia at his side, Oenomaus always caught the suitor, decapitated him and mounted the head above the entrance to his palace. But Pelops, realizing Oenomaus’ charioteer Myrtilus was also in love with Hippodameia, promised him half the kingdom and a night in bed with her if he would help him win the race. Myrtilus, who was a son of ruthless and conniving Hermes, couldn’t refuse a night in bed with Hyppodameia, so he failed to put the locking pins in one of the wheels of Oenomaus’ chariot. During the race, the wheel came off and Oenomaus was dragged to death by his own horses.

But Myrtilus had met his match in Pelops. Pelops had no intention of living up to the bargain and drowned Myrtilus in the sea. As he fell into the pounding surf, Myrtilus pronounced a curse against the descendants of Pelops. Pelops was the father of Atreus and the grandfather of Mycenae’s Agamemnon, general of the Greek forces in the Trojan War. Myrtilus’ curse was to haunt the house of Atreus for the next three generations, filling the halls of Mycenae with blood. Pelops was the first to build a temple of Hermes, Myrtilus’ divine father, to ward off the curse imposed.[12]

I’ll pickup the bloody trail of this legend in Mycenae where Agamemnon ruled and where I’ll be in a few days.

But all this mythology belies the fact that the men’s sporting events were not the first games in Olympia. Just as the religious site originally belonged to Hera, the first games at Olympia were also dedicated to her. Hippodameia started them to give thanks to Hera for her marriage to Pelops. Hera’s games started with the weaving of a robe for the goddess by sixteen women who also organized and conducted the games. The events consisted of races for virgin girls, who ran with their tunics above their knees, their hair flowing free and right shoulder and breast exposed.[13] They raced here at the stadium, but the most important event was the race to the top of the Hill of Kronos.[14] The winners received a crown of olive branches and shared in an ox sacrificed to Hera.  

Another legend concerning those who conducted Hera’s games tells us even more about the politics of Olympia at the time. Pausanias tells the story of an ancient dictator who performed dreadful acts against neighboring townships.

But since his people did not participate in the acts, after the dictator died the people of both townships wished to make peace. To do this they:

... chose a woman of the most venerable age and the most distinguished position and reputation from each of the inhabited cities of Eleia at that time to settle their quarrels for them. ... afterwards they were put in charge of holding Hera’s games and weaving Hera’s robe.[15]

The women defined the course of peacemaking between warring factions of men. Hera’s games where in honor of marriage, coming together. Zeus’ games were born of strife, of one god’s victory over another. After Zeus defeated Kronos, he exiled him and the rest of the Titans of his generation to Tartarus in Hades, the Underworld.  

Hermes ruled over the men’s games here at Olympia and duly ordered contests[16] throughout Greece. At the entrance to the race track were two alters, one for “Opportunity” and the other for “Hermes of the Games.”[17]

Hermes himself first visited Olympia when he rustled Apollo’s cattle. He sacrificed two of them here and divided the meat into two portions for the Twelve Gods.[18]

Hermes was also the giver of oaths.[19] During the opening ceremonies of the games, athletes and officials took a solemn oath of honesty and sportsmanship.[20] No cheating occurred until the ninety-eighth Olympiad when six boxers were fined for accepting bribes.[21] Even in antiquity, the games were not about money or big prizes. The winners won only an olive wreath, but the games were of such great importance that time was measure relative to the four-year interval between them, the first official Olympiad being held in 776 BC. In times of war, all hostilities were suspended in a Sacred Truce. No one in armor was allowed to enter the city.  

The male Athletes trained for ten months before competing and came to Olympia for the final two months. The games were held consistently for over one thousand years. The festival occurred during the full moon following the summer solstice, another legacy of Hera who was a moon goddess, and the full moon signifying her fulfillment.

As many as 200,000 spectators attended. Only one of them was a woman, the priestess of Demeter of the Ground,[22] an homage paid because the ground for the stadium had been taken from her.[23] Although women were barred from watching the games under the penalty of death, virgin girls were not.[24] The stadium did not have seats, the view areas made of huge mounds of dirt, which now are rather small due to erosion through the thousands of years.

... the crowd which assembled at Olympia was drawn by various motives. Some came simply to enjoy the spectacle, some to compete in the games, and others to buy and sell. Baths and tents were set up, not only traders and cooks, but also since the panegyris [national festal assembly] lasted several days, as temporary lodgings for the assembled multitude.[25]

During the large-scale sacrifice, hundreds of animals were slaughtered, roasted and distributed to the people. The ancient Olympics were a five day event. The opening ceremonies occurred on the first day followed by chariot and horse racing on the second. The morning of the third day included a procession to the temple of Zeus and the sacrifice of a herd of oxen. This was the day of the full moon. Only the fat and bones were burned before the altar, the meat being saved for a huge feast on the fifth day. The boy’s wrestling, boxing and footraces were held the afternoon of the third day. On the fourth day, the sprints and distance races were held in the morning followed by men’s wrestling, boxing and pancration. Pancration was one-on-one combat with no holds or atrocities barred. Mutilation was the result. Closing ceremonies were held on the fifth day followed by the feast of the herd of oxen at which singing, eating and drinking by light of a thousand campfires continued until dawn.[26]

I walk back through the stone arch at the entrance to the stadium and sit cross-legged on the ground among a dense population of sandstones and columns at Hera’s temple. Nothing is left of her statue or the throne on which she sat, although a limestone head believed to be hers has been found. It seems even statue’s heads roam the Greek countryside. My shadow lies before me eclipsing a rock shaped by human hands twenty-five hundred years ago, a shadow cast by a sun born four billion years ago.

I return from my visit to the ruins of the ancient city, walk through the museum and come back to my room for a nap. Afterward I walk groggily around town and meet my two friends from Holland. They buy me a beer at a deserted restaurant at the edge of town not far from the train station, an Amstel, a Dutch beer. Hans tells me rather sheepishly he calls Margo “the barbarian,” almost as if he’s ashamed of her. She was raised on a farm. He talks about her father’s herd of cows and Margo being the milkmaid. She doesn’t seem particularly fond of him divulging her background. I tell her of my own upbringing, of the years my father had a dairy, my day of slopping through dung-filled corrals and milking cows. 

Hans was raised in the city and is obviously proud of it. Margo has an earthiness about her I really appreciate. She reflects purity in her smooth fleshiness, her peaches-and-cream complexion and blue eyes.

I ask their opinion of the Berlin Wall coming down, the reunification of German. A nervous glance passes between them, and at first I think they won’t answer. But gradually they express pleasure that the barrier between the east and west has been eliminated but concern about the reunification. The neo-Nazi moment in Germany is very strong and Germans are still culturally arrogant. When Germans come to Holland, they insist the Dutch speak German.

I say that while I was in Holland, I noticed a strong resemblance between Dutch and German. My comment offends them, and they assure me the two languages are very different.  

They also tell me the war has resumed in Bosnia, just to the north of Greece. The Serbs have broken the shaky truce and are once again shelling of Sarajevo. More refugees are fleeing into Greece.

I have dinner alone at a little fast food place on main street, a gyro and a piece of the sweet cake pastry heavy with honey. My visit to the ruins of ancient Olympia have brought back my two years at Bakersfield College. I too was an athlete, not Olympic caliber, but I did make the college track and cross-country teams. My older brother was a world-class athlete, and I had followed in his footsteps all my life, which had been a little fast and far apart for me. Through him, I met Fred. During my second year, my brother had gone on to a university on an athletic scholarship, and I was left to discover what to do with myself without his guiding light. I gravitated away from athletics toward writing poetry, developed an interest in literature, physics and philosophy. For the first time in my life, I was choosing my own path. I even found the courage to stand up to my father, but it all went up in smoke with the single click of a deer rifle.

The legend of Pelops is intermixed with that of Laios and Oedipus. Laios’ father died when he was a child, and because of the danger to him by those who assumed the throne of Thebes in his place, he was sent to Pelops to be raised. When he became a young man here in Olympia, Laios became found of Pelops illegitimate son, Chrysippus, while teaching him to drive a chariot. I image them to be practicing for some ancient form of the Olympic games. Laios kidnapped Chrysippus and returned to Thebes to assume the throne. Chrysippus was humiliated at being homosexually raped and committed suicide. Laios had betrayed the trust of his guardian and benefactor.

Fred’s rape of my brother was also a betrayal of my trust when I brought him home to meet my family. I had taken his side against my father. I had also saved Fred’s life even though he had raped my brother. I saw Fred once more before he was deported. This final incident has always seemed contrived to me, part of the grand contrivance of life.

I was in Berkeley going to summer school, renting a room in the Acacia fraternity during the waning days of summer. I walked out the front door one afternoon going to my car, and there coming toward me was Fred walking up the steps with his head down. I had thought if I ever saw him again I would beat him beyond recognition. Instead, I spoke to him and walked on. He was sullen and didn’t reply. I’ve never told anyone of that chance meeting. I had my opportunity to get him and I didn’t take it. At the time, I thought it was cowardice. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t.

Fred was coming to see my other English friend, the athlete with whom I still roomed. Fred told him he wasn’t homosexual, that nothing had happened between him and my brother, that we were mean people who just wanted to see him deported. He was, in fact, on his way out of the country. My roommate had trouble believing Fred was homosexual. He had known Fred for several years in England though they had not been friends until they came to the States. But I knew firsthand of Fred’s sexual orientation. We had slept in the same bed together.

Ever since that last encounter with Fred, I’ve wished when my father turned to me and said, “Let’s kill him,” I had made that move down the hall. I can see us now, flinging the bedroom door open and Fred standing there in his white undershirt and striped boxer shorts, startled by our sudden move toward him. I would hit him first and my father would join in. I’d pound his head until he spit blood and teeth, shove him up against the wall and my father and I’d beat the life out of every living ounce of flesh in his body, beat and stomp and cuss until the light faded from his eyes. Everyday since I said no, I wish I’d said yes. Like Odysseus and his son, Telemachus, my father and I would go on a blood-driven rampage.

What stopped me was a mystery, because it was more like I couldn’t kill him than believing it wasn’t the right thing to do. But a few years ago, I told a wise old man about my guilt for stopping my father from killing Fred, my cowardice. He looked at me straight and said, “So what you’re confessing to is not killing a man, to acting civilized in an extraordinarily difficult time. You’re not confessing to committing murder, you’re confessing to not committing murder.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I can hardly live with myself.”

I’ve tried to take his supportive words to heart and appreciate the maturity of my actions, but still lapse into thoughts of cowardice and wishing I had bowed to my father’s will. I feel a lot of guilt over what happened, after all I was the one who brought Fred into our home, didn’t listen to my father when he protested. I didn’t back off even when he loaded the deer rifle. Fred remaining alive is a problem for my younger brother. He didn’t commit suicide, but a marriage of sorts still exists between them. Fred’s death threats will remain active for as long as they both shall live.

I lie in bed listening to a cricket’s cheerful chirp and thinking of the fifth and final day of the ancient Olympics, thinking of the evening feast with the smell of roast beast filling the night air, smoke from a thousand fires rising to the stars circling overhead and voices of the multitude raised in praise of Zeus.

21 Oct, Thursday

Roosters wake me shortly before sunrise, and I pack for my day of travel to Sparta. The roosters in Olympia have the worst voices I’ve ever heard on a chicken. It’s not just that rusty-bucket sucker outside my window. All their cock-a-doodle-doo’s have something wrong. Some never get going well, can’t hit that high pitch at the beginning and though they hold their notes, they have no heart. Others are truncated, stop in mid sentence as though they don’t believe what they’re saying. The one with the broken voice has contaminated them all. The rooster is the sun’s sacred bird[27] and the symbol of resurrection. The message may come garbled here, but they still get it across.

While I pack, my thoughts take another verbal detour through the land of Oedipus. When I was in Thebes, I made the observation that Oedipus had the intelligence, as demonstrated by answering the Sphinx’s riddle of life, to solve the riddle of his own. Oedipus had not only the intelligence but also more than enough information. He had been told in Corinth that he was adopted and the rumor had spread throughout the land. Subsequently the oracle at Delphi told him he was to kill his father and marry his mother. Just before he met the Sphinx, he had killed four men. After he answered the riddle of the Sphinx, he was made king and given the hand of an older woman in marriage. You might argue that Oedipus didn’t take the rumors about his parentage or the oracle seriously, but his actions don’t support this. He went to Delphi because of his concern over the rumors and he wouldn’t return to Corinth because of the oracle’s answer. These two sets of information were active in his mind at the same time and he couldn’t, I will say, wouldn’t resolve the paradox. His answering the riddle of the Sphinx proves to me he knew the answer to the riddle of his own life but refused to act on it. Or more correctly, he did act on it. He just took the road less traveled.

I imagine Oedipus standing before the bridal chamber, the smell of sweet Jocasta wafting up from the silk sheets, goose bumps running up the back of his neck as he contemplated the oracle’s declaration and realized that the next foot was about to fall. At this point, I feel less of a sense of frustration at being jacked around by the oracle and more his sense of fascination with life, a fascination with the paradox of Fate governing our lives and at the same time having freewill. When he looked across the bed at Jocasta as she threw back the covers for him to slip in beside her, I think he at least suspected he was courting Fate, but he smiled and slipped off his sandals, dropped his robe to the floor and slipped into bed beside the queen of Thebes.

In the same way each grain of sand contains the history of the universe, Fred’s every move contained the revelation of his sexual orientation, never mind my other English friend not knowing and not believing he was homosexual. In my own way, I had an encounter with the Sphinx. Only a matter of weeks before my confrontation with my father, in one of my college classes I had read Sophocles’ three Theban plays. We had seen performances of all three, had long discussions and wrote papers about them in class. I remember sitting in an outdoor theatre on a spring afternoon shading my eyes from the bright sunlight as we discussed the merits of the case for and against Oedipus’ innocence. I remember arguing he must be guilty because he had all the information in front of him, that life would be meaningless if in the hands of the Fates we are only a machine grinding to the music of some god’s angry tune.

When I stood with my father in the living room the first time, the two of us shouting hot volcanic words at each other, at some level I must have known what my father was concerned about. Even his aborted assault on his own life was not enough for me to back off and tell Fred he wasn’t welcome in our home. I wonder if the confrontation wasn’t what I wanted, after all. What may be crucial is that we were arguing in the presence of my mother. When my father went to the closet and shoved shells into the chamber of that deer rifle, did he do so in self-defense?

I have the uneasy feeling my ignorance was only a surface ignorance and, at a deeper level, an elaborately disguised assault on my father. An attempt to attain my father’s stature in my mother’s eyes. And my father. Why did he let me sleep with Fred if he knew he was homosexual? Did he think I was homosexual also? Or was he letting me find out for myself? I’m convinced the entire incident had nothing to do with Fred. Those surrealistic summer days were purely between my father and me.

And as for Fred. That night, when I came back from turning off the pump with my cousin’s young wife, kicked off my shoes, dropped my pants and slipped between the sheets Fred had been warming for a couple of hours, was I really so naive as to not know he was homosexual? What the hell was I thinking anyway? The answer is I was thinking about my cousin’s young wife. She was a couple of years younger than me and quite attractive. Our little excursion to the far side of the field at midnight was loaded with eroticism. Looking back on it through the perspective of thirty-two years, I find it somewhat amusing: the naive twenty-year-old, heavy adulterous thoughts of a young woman floating like lollypops in his head, crawling into bed with a gay man.

After Fred’s deportation, I assumed it was all over. I’d made a bad mistake for which my younger brother paid a terrible price, sort of a sacrifice of the innocent, and I had reaped a terrible harvest of guilt. But this was history, and life would go on as planned. Little did I realize that for me this was only the fall of the first few dominoes.

The roosters are quiet again, my room lit by the morning sun. I zip my backpack, hoist it and make the short trek to the bus stop on main street where I meet Hans and Margo at the tourist information office. They look fresh in their bright shorts and T-shirts and are eager to get going. We’ll take the bus to Tripoli together and then split up, them to Nafplion in Argos and me south to Sparta. A burglar alarm has been going off at one of the local businesses for the last hour, and it’s driving everyone crazy. The loud screech is like a hacksaw in my head. Here’s the bus to Tripoli.

One last story of Olympia as I leave it. It’s about a famous statue of a mare which induced “horse-madness” in stallions. The story is told by Pausanias:

... what happens to this mare is in fact obviously the work of some skillful magician. It is not nearly the biggest or the most beautiful of the Altis horses, and its tail has been docked which makes it look even worse; yet stallions go wild for it, not only in spring but every day in the year. They break their halters and escape from their grooms and come galloping into Altis and leap up on it much more madly than they would on the finest living mare that was used to being mounted. Their hooves slip on it, but they go on and on whinnying all the more and leaping up on it more and more strongly until you manage to drag them away with whips and main force: until you do so nothing can release them from that bronze.[28]

This ancient story says a great deal about the male’s infatuation with the feminine image, and how little he understands of her true nature.

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As we leave Elis Nome and enter Arkadia, the mountains become huge, the ravines deep, the cliffs precipitous, the turns sharp. The lush countryside in the heart of the Peloponesse is something I’ve not read about.

The depth of the canyons, I can only compare to the Grand Canyon. And of course, they don’t stand up to the Canyon, but I like the comparison anyway because they are so spectacular. Herds of goats and sheep roam the thick undergrowth. The precipitous mountainsides are covered with huge oak trees, fir, pine, orange trees, fig trees, huge maples, cypress, cedar. The bus encounters lots of road construction and creeps through narrow passages overlooking cliffs, passing perilously close to the crumbling dirt edge. We crane our necks at the windows to watch the edge of the mountain disappear beneath us.

When we get off at the station in Tripoli, the capitol of Arkadia, I wait for a few minutes with Hans and Margo, reluctant to leave them. They’re having trouble finding a bus. All the schedule postings say nothing about Nafplion. The station is a dark, hangar-like building and drab as I’ve seen. The exhaust from the buses is simply asphyxiating. Buses drive in, idle in stasis and drive out belching exhaust. Horn blasts reverberate off the walls which look as if they’ve been painted with motor oil. 

I go to the window and get my ticket to Sparta. My bus is about to leave. I say good-bye to Hans and Margo, hoist my pack and walk to the bus. As we drive out, I look anxiously for them, but they are gone.

I watch the countryside grow darker as we dip deeper into the Arkadian mountains. This is Pan country, the shepherd god’s abode. Pan was born with the feet and head of a goat. His appearance frightened his mother so badly, she fled from him. But the gods all loved this bearded, goat-footed god and named him, Pan, which in ancient Greek meant “all.” Our word for “panic” comes from the feeling Pan induces, his mother being their first to experience it. Pan was born here in Arkadia, and I must pass through his old stomping ground to get to Sparta. He’s a dark, terror-awakening god who reminds me of an old hobo uncle.

The gods came to earth in human form. Gaia had no single form, but being a great multiple goddess, had many forms depicting her different aspects. These forms included the goddesses Hera, Athena, Artemis, Demeter and Aphrodite, among many many lesser goddess. When we view her in whole, we see the world’s entire feminine spirit. Hera, as one aspect of Gaia, was the spirit of womanhood, marriage and the lives of women in ancient Greece, a spirit that resided in all women. Athena was the warrior goddess, who thrilled at the battle cry and the clash of arms, the protectress of cities. Artemis was the virgin goddess, mistress of childbirth and of all things wild. Demeter was goddess of cultivation, the spirit of all things springing directly from the earth. Aphrodite was the goddess of erotic love. Gaia was the way women of ancient Greece experienced the world. In Sparta, we'll get another look at Artemis, and this time we'll see an aspect of her that might be a little surprising.