Just Don't Call Me "Late to Supper"

 

View down to Finikounda

Folks in the village call me by a variety of names: Tzon (John), Tzonathan (Jonathan), Yianni (my Greek name), Yano, or sometimes only by my last name, with an epithet attached for good measure. The latter, I’ve found, is usually shouted.

Our spitaki in the distance--'lil red roof

 

Most Greek men also acquire a paratsoukli (nickname), for example, Mitsos for Dimitri, or Taki for Panayioti, and so on. I have yet to be anointed with my own paratsoukli—but I fear it’s coming.

 

Whatever they call, I just hope they don’t call me late for dinner.

 

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Antiquity’s Agricultural Triad

The Hellenic world reached its apex on the shoulders of the all-important triad of antiquity: grain, olives, and grapes. The advance of Western civilization owes its might to the triad.

 

The olive tree, in particular, is the measure of wealth and status in Messenia. A farmer knows exactly the numbers of trees under his or her purview, anywhere from a few dozen (like us) to many thousands (most of my neighbors). Gathering the olives in the autumn is a heroic effort, with all hands on deck. The harvest consumes the region, the village cafeneions empty out, and the olive presses--every large town and even many small villages, like ours--run twenty-four hours a day for several months.

 

It is argued among agro-historians that either western Crete or southern Messenia was the birthplace of the cultivated olive. Regardless of which region stakes the claim, the explosive growth of population and power throughout the region, beginning around 2000 bce, is a direct result of the triad—but olives/olive oil, especially, became the currency of prestige.

 

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A day doesn’t go by without meeting an old face (or a new face for that matter) in the village--local Messenians and foreigners alike. My poet friend Niko refers to the village down the mountain as “the United Nations of Finikounda.”

 

After being here, on an off, for fifteen years—having first arrived in this place with a backpack and tent in 2007; then returning with a young family for six months in 2009; and then again in 2013 to begin renovating an old wreck of an agricultural building and clearing and planting the land around it—the cast of characters has only grown exponentially. During these fifteen years I have cultivated friendships and strong bonds with so many.

 

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Messenia, the name of this most southwest prefecture of the Peloponnese, has a storied history that dates back to the Middle Bronze Age (2000 bce to 1600 bce), a period also referred to as the Mycenaean Age. One can look even further back into prehistory, to the Neolithic period, where the massive ocean cave in neighboring Laconia, Spilio Dirou, was inhabited by early humans.

Cyclopean walls of ancient Messene

Invading foreigner

 

The colossal Bronze Age palaces, the stuff of the great poet Homer, author of the Iliad and Odyssey—Europe’s first works of epic literature—fell to the invading Dorians, who wrought destruction on an epic scale. The Dorians were the mysterious people of the North and are the ancient ancestors of the Spartans. Or, rather, the Spartans were the heirs to Dorian invaders. In parts of the eastern Peloponnese a Doric dialect is still spoken in remote villages, some of whose village names are clearly not Greek. Or not the Greek that we know from the Classical period.

 

There is no clear explanation for the destruction of the palace culture, the burning of the massive citadels with their Cyclopean walls. But evidence of that epic age of heroes can be found in nearby “sandy Pylos” (Homer’s description), most notably at Nestor’s Palace. Nestor, the wise king, figures prominently in the early books of the Iliad.

 

Following the fall of the Bronze Age kingdoms—in particular the citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns—a so-called Dark Age followed beginning in the 900s and lasted for several hundred years. Archaeologists point to the return of more rudimentary pottery and an absence of writing and literature as being indicative of this time of regression.

 

As heirs to the Dorians, the Spartans became ascendant in 735 bce, which is the date of the First Messenian War.

 

Sparta is located in the (modern) prefecture of Laconia, the peninsula that is east of Messenia, in the shadow of Mount Taygetos (elevation 8500 feet), whose highest peaks are covered in snow even in summer, while we swelter at sea level.

 

Gradually but methodically the Spartans overran Messenia, enslaving its people for about four hundred years.

 

Every olive tree has a story--and 1000 years of life or more

Lunch is cheap

Sparta existed by conquest, not through “culture”—properly understood as art, architecture, philosophy, and the like. Subjugation was the Spartan modus operandi and with it the Spartans prevailed in the world of ancient Greece.

 

The captive people of Messenia were known as Helots (“captives”) and those nearer to Sparta itself—though not citizens of the warrior-state, mostly free residents of the region—were called Perioeci (“outdwellers”). Together, both groups unwillingly fed and supplied the Spartan war machine, but the Helots suffered tremendously.

 

A young Spartan male earned his colors with annual forays into Messenia, periodic raids designed to murder and terrorize the people into constant, unremitting submission, making them totally subservient to their overlords.

Nearby Koroni

 

Heroic Evzones

A poor but hardly inappropriate analogy would be the US government’s treatment of Native Americans during the early Republic—but 2500 hundred years earlier, the Helots were the long suffering people of this region.

 

In fact, the Spartans became the military model par excellence for later aggressors in history: the Nazis, the US Marines (caveat: as the son of a coloner, USMC, I am referring more to honor and discipline than to wonton brutality), and in our time, Putin’s storm troopers in Ukraine. The template of merciless warriors was firmly established in the eighth century bce—and has been finely honed ever since.

The olive harvest begins

Capturing the olives

Tree planted in 2014 bears fruit

Sunsets--none of them too shabby

Athens and Sparta

There are countless works describing the fifth century’s Peloponnesian War, a thirty-year conflagration that weakened both city-states forever. In the end, Sparta was victorious—but it was a victory of the pyhrric variety, decimating the two most powerful poleis of the ancient world. Contemporary writers, most notably the Athenian general Thucydides, give readers the best firsthand accounts.

 

But the modern scholarship never ceases, recent studies progressing hand-in-hand with archaeological discoveries and new insights into this most terrible of conflicts.

 

The modern, armchair reader can’t help but see parallels with the United States, a superpower reduced to a shell of its former self through overreach, grandiosity, and hubris. “Hubris” is a Greek word that is fitting.

 

The Spartans, of course, referred to the Peloponnesian War as the “Athenian War,” in much the way that America’s Vietnam War is referred to by the Vietnamese as the American War. Perspective, as usual, is everything.

 

The Peloponnesian War was a seemingly unending war of epic proportions (so many things in Greek history are “epic”) and it sowed the seeds of the long decline for both warring parties: Athens reached its apex just as the war began, and Sparta’s once massive land-based army, despite being the ultimate victor, never regained its fearsome glory.

 

The Cambridge scholar Paul Cartledge is one of the leading authorities on Sparta. His book The Spartans (2001) is a work of great erudition, shedding insight on the sociocultural differences between Sparta and Athens, poleis that were at one time allied in the defense of Greece from the invading Persian Empire, the world’s greatest and more feared military force at the time. The Battle of Marathon (490 bce) and then the decisive Battle of Plateia in 479 bce when Cyrus’s forces were obliterated and sent packing, are legendary. These two great battles liberated the West and gave birth to the Classical Age.

 

But how different indeed were these two city-states!

 

Athens prided itself on bold individualism, democracy, the flourishing of the arts and sciences, architecture, and, perhaps above all, philosophy.

 

Sparta, the ultimate warrior-state, was built on personal sacrifice, duty, loyalty, and militarism.

 

Athens was the premier sea power of its time; Sparta built a rigid, land-based army that was feared and respected, often reviled, throughout the ancient world.

 Women and Girls--Athens vs. Sparta

Among Cartledge’s most fascinating observations is the different role of women in the two city-states.

 

Athenian women were neither seen nor heard; they were denied an education, had no role in public life—except the heteraia, Athens’ high-end prostitutes, who wielded some influence in civic life—and were raised to be wives, mothers, and then were largely home-bound.

 

Spartan women, whose men were often away for years at war, received the same education as men (but separately), could own property, and were engaged in the civic life of the polis.

 

Athens girls were sheltered under the watchful eyes of the menfolk, prohibited from owning property, leaving the home, or entering civil life in any meaningful way. Mere mention of the name of married woman was taboo. Married off by their fathers at an early age, theirs was a servile existence, in a deeply conservative society.

 

Spartan girls, particularly post-pubescent girls were independent, enjoying such liberties that were considered embarrassing and wholly inappropriate to the Athenian public. They were educated, promiscuous, knowledgeable in the martial arts, avid readers and writers. They were not shy—in fact, they were derided as “thigh-flashers” by the Athenians.

 

Adolescent girls, who were said to be the most beautiful females in the ancient world--Helen of Troy, it should recalled, was first Helen of Sparta, the world's most beautiful woman. Adolescent girls appeared naked in public, were oiled from head to toe, and attracted suitors by way of public demonstrations of their javelin-throwing prowess. With husbands away at war, promiscuity and same-sex relations were tolerated, all facts that the Athenians found both shocking and bizarre. They were also super-athletes, wrestling (naked) among themselves and even with the boys.

 

The subject of women goes further. Spartans believed that Athens waged war “like women” because they used “spindles” (bows and arrows) as an alternative to the usual hoplite (“manly”) hand-to-hand combat.

 

Meanwhile, a Spartan girl—naked, oiled, and toting a javelin—must have provided an incredible counterpoint to Athenian prudishness.

 

Spartan women, according to Cartledge’s account, occasionally competed with men in the Olympic Games, and were known to have “won gold” (i.e., the laurel wreath) as charioteers, in the most “manly” of events.