At any rate, none of that really matters. What’s important is that someone wrote the stories down. Writing crystallizes language. It catches it, holding it like an insect in a fossilized drop of amber.
And now here I was, almost three thousand years later, taking in something Homer himself had never actually seen. I wondered how a blind man could have been so precise with his descriptions. Scratching my own poor stories onto paper, I’m still humbled and inspired by his eloquence.
For the next four weeks I followed Homer’s sweet trail of words back into Greece. I plunged into his wine-dark seas. I slept on the deck of a half-dozen rusting and anonymous ferries, chugging southward from island to island across the placid Aegean Sea, and whenever I could I read a line in The Odyssey and came upon the very real place being described.
On Crete I hiked up to the ancient ruins of Knossos. Odysseus brushed past here on his way to the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Knossos is a Minoan palace a thousand years older than classical Greek civilization. It has been largely reconstructed by a French archaeological team, and walking around its ruins, I could feel how impressive it must have once been.
Here one of the very earliest writing systems was unearthed. The Linear B script was discovered on a number of broken clay tablets, but it wasn’t until 1953 that it was finally deciphered. The script is a form of archaic Greek dialect and is based mostly on syllabic signs, a fair number of logograms (where a single symbol represents a whole word), and a base ten number system, the forerunner of our own mathematics. Most of the tablets are simply lists, a kind of accounting of tools, animals, and materials, but they provided the basis for the written language to come. The letters would soon relax and blossom into the call of Sirens and Cyclops, and over time would record the tale of Odysseus, shining among the deathless gods, sailing to his one true love on the distant shores of Ithaca.
The south coast of Crete faces Africa. A dusty bus ride gets you there — eventually. Over the backbone of the island I bounced along, heading for a little seaside village named Matala.
In the 1960s, Matala was on the hippie trail. Jimi Hendrix came through here. Cat Stevens stopped by on his way to India. Joni Mitchell lived in one of the caves in the cliffs. Nowadays police sweep through the caves in the evening and eject anybody trying to recapture their youth. The caves are ancient Minoan tombs and stare down over a bright beach, flooded during the day with travellers. I met no one here except for a bedraggled, eccentric old woman. She was from Germany originally, she said, but had lived in Greece for years. The woman cackled, hacked, and told me about the bonfires that used to roar on the beach decades ago. She spoke about the young men with their guitars, about their long hair and their dreams, and the crashing surf that comes in from Africa.
So one dark night, under the starry dome, I went down to sit on the beach. Far off in front of me were the coasts of Egypt and Tunisia. This was the end of the known world for ancient Greek wayfarers. Beyond this was only the strange, the curious mention of elephants, and spices.
I sat on the cool sand and thought about the Rosetta stone, which was used to first decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They hadn’t been read for a couple of thousand years, but when the Rosetta stone was unearthed by a troop of Napoleon’s soldiers in the dunes along the Nile River, it was immediately recognized as the needed missing linguistic link.
The Rosetta stone is just a big flat rock with inscriptions describing the coronation of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The uppermost lines are unreadable hieroglyphics. The middle lines are demotic (a cursive form of glyphs and a forerunner to Arabic), and the bottom lines are Greek. There were plenty of scholars who could translate the ancient Greek, and since the hieroglyphics carried exactly the same message, well … for the first time in two thousand years the Egyptian pictographs unfolded and all the long stretch of history was revealed.
The above, though, isn’t what I intended to write about. I meant to fashion the old German woman into a modern-day Oracle. I meant to dig up some more on Jimi Hendrix. I meant to go drinking in the Mermaid Tavern, but somehow my thoughts on that beach diverted me and I found myself wading through a deeper history.
Napoleon lost the stone to the British, and they carried it off to London to the confines of the British Museum. I touched it once, this magical Rosetta stone, a gesture very much like blasphemy to a museum curator. Strange, actually, because moments later an urgent siren wailed, and a legion of uniformed guards swept into the large room out of nowhere.
They didn’t head directly for me, though surely the colour of my face had blanched into a pale and guilty white. No, they herded everyone into a group and pushed us out an unmarked door. One minute I was brushing my hand against the Rosseta stone and the next I was standing in a parking lot. What really happened is that someone had phoned in a bomb scare. Obviously, the guards were used to such eventualities and were highly trained. Rightly so, because in a place like the British Museum, a repository of the world’s greatest treasures, the damage an explosion would cause would be a blow against all of humanity.
In any event, through Greek we know the ancients. Those who could write Greek began to record everything. Much of the Bible has come to us through Greek. So have our first solid glimpses of science, medicine, and philosophy. From Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom, we have the first intimations of what we would become.
From Crete I sailed to the Cycladic Islands. Dolphins danced in the ship’s wake, and in a few hours’ time we were under the cliffs of Santorini, the first of the islands. Everyone aboard moved outside to stand at the railings and gawk. Santorini is spectacular. The cliffs rise five hundred metres straight out of the water, and at their very top, miraculously clinging to the rocks, is the whitewashed town of Thera.
The ferry pulled into a little port at the base of the cliffs. We poured onto a bus that then laboured up a switchbacking road. Up and up we went in the swaying bus, stopping sometimes to reverse when a truck rumbled down the other way, loaded with tomatoes or watermelons.
At the rim of the cliff the terraces of the town overlook the frothing ocean far below. The houses are painted in traditional Greek colours — white with blue windowsills and doorstops. From here I could see that the cliffs swept around in a crescent moon shape, forming the one remaining wall of a vast volcanic cauldron. Down below there were smaller islands of black lava, some still steaming with the fury of the Earth’s core.
On the other end of Santorini, in the opposite crook of the crescent, is Oia, another tiny village. The tourists come here to watch the sunset. Busload upon busload arrives as the sun starts to dip. They line the cliffs and watch the sun boil red and dip at last into the sea. On the day I was there perhaps a thousand people actually broke into applause at the sunset. That was something I had never experienced before. They were clapping as if they had just seen a theatrical performance, and an old man beside me turned my way and smiled wryly. He was from somewhere in England.
“By George,” he said, “that’s the second most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.”
He appeared to be well into his seventies, so I imagined he had watched plenty of sunsets. I wondered, in fact, if he had seen Chantal’s fine sunset in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Of course, I couldn’t help but ask, “So where is the most beautiful sunset in the world?”
“Oh … I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet. You see, I just like to leave room for improvement.”
The language Homer spoke was only one of a multitude of Greek dialects used in the ninth century B.C. The Greek that’s spoken today comes down to us from only a single one of these many dialects, something we owe largely to Alexander the Great. He was a pupil, we’re often reminded,