The stones are seen but unheard

The stones of cities talk. They tell stories – of great men who trod their pavements; their prophets, saints and villains; the blood that flowed into their drains; civilisations born, dead or forever alive; the trees of great cultures growing to luxuriant splendour only then to shed their leaves one by one.

The stones of Athens talk louder than just about anywhere in Europe. And they aren’t the only ones who do the talking.

This I discovered the other day when asking the concierge at our hotel what, apart from the Acropolis, he’d recommend we see. This led to a quarter-hour’s discussion of the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, something one seldom expects to have with hotel staff.

The young man strongly advised us to steer clear of Aristotle’s Lyceum in favour of the groves of Plato’s Academy – even though the proverbial groves are all that remains of it. This because Aristotle was the much inferior philosopher to begin with, even before he was eternally compromised by his subsequent, if unwitting, incorporation into Christianity by Aquinas and other scholastic subversives.

Christianity, he explained, took the great Hellenic civilisation, squeezed it dry, drank up the juices and then discarded it like used-up lemon halves. Yes, but… I objected meekly and with an ingratiating smile. Can’t one say that by incorporating first Plato and then Aristotle into its own philosophy, Christianity gave them a new life? Take Neo-Platonism, for example…

My interlocutor refused to take Neo-Platonism even as an example. The less said about that profanation, that sacrilege, that vulgarisation, the better. His own smile was pleasant but far from ingratiating.

I must say that in all my travels I’ve never before encountered a Platonist concierge, nor one who could direct me towards the ruins of one particular philosophical school in preference to another. One more readily expects directions to a restaurant that gives the concierge a kick-back (“Just tell them Mario sent you”), a shopping district or, if one is so inclined, a brothel.

Thus inspired by the realisation that Athens is different, we did what every tourist does first: climb Acropolis Hill, all the way up to the Parthenon, followed by a descent to the Agora and then another, shorter, climb to Pnyx Hill.

Few stones in the world talk as eloquently, but they do need an interpreter or perhaps a language teacher, for not many people these days understand stone. Looking at the throng of tourists attacking the Hill, most of them young and showing few signs of a cultured family background, one could see that the language of those stones was, well, Greek to them.

True enough, each highlight along the way is accompanied by a board with a short write-up about the place. But the information provided is exclusively archaeological, structural and architectural. Talking to cultural innocents, the boards leave their virginity intact.

Who cares when and how the Theatre of Dionysus was dug up? Who cares whether the columns of the Parthenon are Doric, Ionic or Corinthian? Oh some people do, as they should. But, given the little space available, wouldn’t it be better to tell them that the theatre is where Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes premiered their plays? Or, at the risk of incurring the concierge’s wrath, that St Paul spoke on the Hill?

It’s nice to know the exact dimensions of the dais on Pnyx Hill, but wouldn’t it be more useful to tell the visiting children (chronological or cultural) that Pericles and Demosthenes delivered their orations from there?

In the Agora every little stone is accompanied by recondite information about technical matters, with nary a word about what happened there. Chaps, this was every Athenian’s real home, with his house merely, and not invariably, his bedroom.

This is where they all rushed every morning to discuss, and determine, the future of the city. This is where Socrates, old and looking half-mad, would accost strangers with silly and irrelevant questions – you know, the kind that lay the foundation of Western thought.

Unfortunately, the contemporaneous powers-that-be realised that the questions weren’t silly and irrelevant, that they indeed were laying the foundation of the kind of thought that was at odds with Athenian democracy.

Democracy, Athenian, modern or any other, has no place for sages mouthing nasty things about it. So the democrats locked Socrates up in prison – and there it is, a caged hole cut into the rock of Pnyx Hill. It’s mercifully identified as Socrates’s dungeon, though no information is provided of why he was put there – or subsequently killed.

I would have been tempted to include the words ‘first great victim of democratic tyranny’, or, as a minimum, to say that Socrates’s friends offered to spring him on the eve of his enforced suicide, but he refused as a matter of honour, and not to give his prosecutors the satisfaction of such an implicit admission of guilt. Wouldn’t it have made a more interesting story than structural information?

Perhaps it wouldn’t. As the concierge told me mournfully, even Greek children are nowadays only told that their heritage is great, without explaining what makes it so. Socrates was charged with perverting the minds of the young; his accusers’ typological descendants succeed in keeping those minds perpetually empty.

So the stones keep silent. The Acropolis and its environs are merely tourist attractions, a sort of vaguely historical Disneyland, minus the rides. An opportunity missed, yet another generation lost.

(Tomorrow I’ll tell you of my impressions of the city itself, which I love.)