Before I resume my travelogue, I have to lament the fires in Greece. My 1969 European trip was the highest, happiest point in my life, and much of that was spent in Greece among the sites I'd taught in Humanities and World Literature. It is one thing to teach Greek tragedies, quite another to walk into Agamemnon's palace at Mycenae, crouch through Herakles' (Hercules') fortress at Tiryns, climb the steep winding path up sacred Delphi. I delighted in the various little documentaries during the Athens Olympics, especially the views of Olympia, where the great games began. A forest fire threatened the museum there. I remember the odd little hill above the curving river and the unprepossessing ruins, the small stadium. Better still I remember the museum, for it contains Praxiteles' Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, illustrating at once the sculptor's famous curve named after him, a stance you can duplicate by putting all your weight on one foot and throwing that hip out; also illustrating the phenomenal sensuality of cold marble by the most famous sculptor of his period. With the astonishing three-dimensional lilies at Epidaurus from the temple to Asclepius, the first physician-god of medicine, whose wand with entwined serpents, the caduceus, is still the symbol of medicine, I kept wondering how Italy could ever match the sculptural skills of the classical Greeks. Until I saw Michelangelo and Bernini, of course.
The Apollo there, from the west pediment of the temple of Zeus, is also my favorite version of that supreme god of the arts (4 Delos should always give me away), whose oracle at spectacular Delphi was the most famous in the world of that time. He is halfway between the stiff archaic kouros (nude young men) and the classical idealism we are most familiar with, and stands with his right arm pointing straight out from his shoulder, gazing serenely across the centuries.
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