Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, (1485-86)

     

      Paddling in water somewhere off the coast of Cyprus, author Mary Norris decided to strip down to her birthday suit. She did have a reason--the restaurant adjacent to the beach had claimed that that bit of coast was once a favorite hangout of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and Norris had hoped swimming in the water might earn her a blessing from the goddess of love herself. But as she did the backstroke in her one-piece, she thought instead of Achilles, hero of the Iliad, whose mother had held him by his heel and dipped him into the River Styx as an infant. Thanks to the magic of the river’s water, he became invulnerable—all except for that spot on his heel where his mother’s hand had been, the spot where the arrow that killed him eventually lodged. Not wanting to suffer the same fate of a partial corporal blessing, Norris wriggled out of her suit and let the ocean wash over her body. Writing about the experience several years later in her memoir Greek to Me, she remembers that “I felt as if I had shed a woolen overcoat. The current pushed me gently back to shore and I washed up onto mounds of bleached seaweed, as cushiony as confetti. I felt reborn” (174). A fitting blessing from a goddess who rose from sea foam. 

       

      When she is not floating to shore nude like Botticelli’s Venus, Norris is recognizable as a longtime copy editor at the New Yorker and the acclaimed author of Between You and Me: Confessions of the Comma Queen (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). Her latest book, Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), is a beautifully woven account of her lifelong passion for Greek food, language, culture, mythology, and occasionally men. Both a memoir and an ode to the pull of Greek culture, Greek to Me shows readers a new side of Norris as she traipses to and from sunbaked temples, pours libations to ancient gods, and skinny-dips in the wine-dark sea. 

       

      I loved Norris’s book, largely because of my own love for all things Greek, first ignited by the obsession my grade-school friends and I had with Rick Riordan’s mythology-inspired Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series. Even for those who did not grow up thinking they were demigods from ages nine to eleven, Greek to Me is an ambrosial treat. Though perhaps most people do not take their interest in Greece and Greek mythology so far as to learn the language or perform in Antigone—both of which Norris did—she and I are not the only ones fascinated by Greece. Philhellenes, a Greek-derived word that means a lover of all things Greek, have grown in number since the 19th century, as everyone from Lord Byron to Henry Miller escaped to the rocky peninsula for inspiration and solitude; famously, Byron was so taken in that he joined—and died for—the movement for Greek independence. In more recent years, films like Mamma Mia! (2008), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), Shirley Valentine (1989), and Zorba the Greek (1964) all claim in one way or another that Greece is the place to unlock one’s full potential, enticing the viewer with intoxicating shots of sun-soaked islands, and advertising Greece as the place one goes to find themself (and your own Pierce Brosnan while you’re at it). But from where do these ideas come? What is it about this rocky country that draws me, Norris, Lord Byron and thousands of others back to Greece after all these years? While my own interest—and that of most other philhellenes my age—can be attributed to Riordan and his ability to hook young readers on snarky heroes and epic quests, there is also something undeniably captivating about Greek mythology and culture; after all, everyone from the Romans to America’s Founding Fathers shared our love for these tales. 

       

      Searching for an answer to this question reminded me of a conversation I had this fall with Brian Keeler, an art school friend of my uncle’s who shows his work in Ithaca, New York, and Wyalusing, Pennsylvania. Over Zoom, he showed me a work in progress in which he had used his fishing buddies as models for a reinterpretation of Spanish artist Diego Velazquez’s Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630). When I asked him why he, Velazquez, and so many other creatives are drawn to these scenes from Greek mythology, he answered poetically that trying to figure out why these stories resonate with us is “like a fish trying to discover water—it’s just there, all around us.” 

       

      Brian is right—the legacy of the ancient Greeks is woven throughout American culture, visible in our architecture, art, education system, language, and government. In the haze of my Percy Jackson phase, I remember starting to see these little pieces of Greece everywhere, in the logo of Goodyear Tires (Hermes’s winged sandal), in the Asclepius staff over my doctor’s office, and on my Nike-brand sneakers. Convinced we were demigods, my best friend and I learned the Greek alphabet, using it as a secret code to encrypt handwritten notes we passed. In high school, I started recognizing these letters when they appeared in math and physics to represent constants. In the astronomy class I took my freshman year of college, my knowledge of mythology made remembering the names of each planets’ moons easy—for example, Phobos and Deimos, two moons of Mars, are named after two sons of Ares, Mars’s Greek counterpart. Even the English language, made up of words like cosmos, chaos, and dynamite, traces some of its roots back to Ancient Greece. In book one of the Percy Jackson books, the wise centaur Chiron tells the protagonist Percy that Ancient Greek culture is at the heart of all Western civilization; for proof, just turn to the architecture of Western cities from Berlin to Madrid. Nowhere, Chiron claims, is this influence stronger than in America: “Look at your symbol, the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center, the Greek facades of your government buildings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians are not prominently displayed.” 

       

      Though the legacy of the Ancient Greeks certainly is all around us, its presence alone does not entirely explain the allure of the country. According to David Roessel, author of Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2001), it was the British writer Laurence Durrell who popularized Greece as a life-changing destination. During his time in Corfu, Durrell claimed that “other countries may offer you discoveries of manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself.” Durrell was not alone: a lot of non-Greeks, myself included, associate Greece with returning to basics, with coming home to the person we really are. There is a sense among Westerners that we are all Greek; although this is untrue, there is a reason we identify so strongly with a culture most of us have nothing to do with. In a very small way, everyone in the Western European world and their American descendants is a little bit Greek, a phenomenon we owe to Rome. 

       

      As one of the largest empires of the classical world, Romans spread their customs and culture from England to Turkey, leaving a lasting impact on the areas they conquered. Much of this culture was adapted from the Greeks—the Romans improved upon the basic forms of Greek architecture, adding the arches that bear their name, and studied the Greek arts and sciences. From the Greeks, we get modern ideas of politics, but the Romans built the basis of modern Western law. When Rome fell in 476, Arab scholars preserved the learning of Ancient Greece and Rome in their libraries and improved it by incorporating their own scholarly tradition. Though geometry may have come from Euclid, our modern numerals are Arabic; it was Arab mathematicians that gave the world the concept of zero. As civilizations rose and fell in Western Europe, Greek mythology, learning, and culture continued to be adapted and incorporated by ruling powers, enjoying periods of popularity—the Renaissance, for example—and never disappearing entirely. By the time of the American revolution, Thomas Jefferson’s interest in Greek democracy and classical architecture—evident in his Monticello plantation and his University of Virginia—was nothing new. Despite the three thousand years that have passed, the spirit of Greece is still alive and well. But what was it about Ancient Greece that seduced the Romans in the first place?  

       

      Although I harbor some deeply ingrained image of dark-haired, sandal-clad chiton wearers frolicking through olive groves, Ancient Greece was not really a spot in which most of us would have wanted to spend time. Women, for instance, had almost no rights, and it was the labor of enslaved war captives that allowed men like Plato to sit around all day thinking. The land is stony and barren, and the Greeks have to literally squeeze everything to make it useful—olives, grapes, sheep (for milk), etc. As for the mythology, the uncensored stories are violent, rife with rape, murder, and vengeful gods who are usually the worst offenders. People are constantly getting transformed into trees or torn apart by wine-drunk madwomen. Even Aphrodite, lovely as she is, was born of the foam that frothed up where the Titan Kronos cast the severed genitals of his father Uranus into the sea. And yet, there is beauty too. The mythology assigns every tree a dryad, every stream a naiad: though the land is not lush, the sparkling sea is bountiful, and the otherwise drab landscape is dotted by graceful columns arranged in imposing architectural forms. Perhaps it is the Greek knack for creating beauty out of harshness that made the Romans fall in love when they conquered the land just before the turn of the first millennium. 

       

      In addition to this beauty, there is something about Greek culture, especially Greek mythology, that appeals to humans by encouraging being human. The gods themselves do not behave like the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim God, nor are they anything like the half-beast, half-human figures of Ancient Egypt or Ancient Persia. Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the rest of the Olympians behave much more like Guinevere and Arthur of Camelot than a Judeo-Christian Jehovah. In the forward of her famous collection of Greek myths, Edith Hamilton writes that the humanity of the Greek gods is the “miracle of Greek mythology—a humanized world, men freed from the paralyzing fear of the omnipotent unknown” (17). Moreover, there are the stories of heroes, either demigod or fully human, who complete fantastic quests with the help of special powers, the prototypes for Spiderman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Humans love a good superhero, and in Greek mythology, there is someone for everyone. Someone who fancies themselves clever and cunning will prefer Athena and her chosen hero Odysseus; those who value strength and power will love Heracles. There is a patron god for everything, too: sailors, weavers, farmers, warriors, trumpet players, thieves, you name it. With three thousand years of Greek influence on Western Civilization and a mythology that appeals to all types, it is no wonder that so many non-Greeks feel right at home in Greek culture. 

       

      Norris is an excellent tour guide through this world of philhellenism, and this book is a must-read for language nerds—Norris’s enthusiasm for language is infectious and accessible. One example was her long—but fascinating—chapter on the development of the Greek alphabet. I have related many times to disinterested family and friends (I am afraid I am not quite the storyteller Norris is) how the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet—aleph and bet—stuck as a name for the alphabet by evolving into the Greek alphabeto, the Roman alphabetum and, of course, our modern English word “alphabet.” Norris has fun with language, going out of her way to use Greek-derived words—“I’m not acrophobic” (199); “did not detract one iota” (195)—in her prose, but the effect is playful, not forced. Norris does not take herself too seriously, but the book is also deeply personal as she reveals painful personal evolutions and discusses her childhood darkened by the tragic infant death of a brother two years older than she. Norris touchingly shows readers how studying Greece, Greek, and mythology helped her to understand some of her own personal struggles. Adventures during her solo trips to Greece are in turns profound and funny, though readers might fear for her safety as she expertly dodges handsy sailors, farmers, mechanics, and restaurateurs—at times it seemed that every able-bodied man in the country was propositioning her. But even in spite of these leering men, Norris’s descriptions of her travels and her contagious zest for Greek culture have me packing my bags for my own Greek odyssey of self-discovery. Would any Westerner feel reborn, as Norris did, swimming in water where Aphrodite is said to have bathed? I guess I’ll have to find out for myself.