The Scariest Man in Football

I saw this picture on Yahoo sports this evening and immediately suspected it of being doctored in some way. Well, it hasn't been. Raiders owner Al Davis:


No wonder Mr. Davis has had such a hard time making the Raiders a halfway-decent team: he's been dead for 12 years.

Letters from Greece I: Northern Greece

Dear Friends,

I have been traversing Greece for the greater part of the past two and one-half months visiting archaeological sites, museums, and cities big and small in pursuit the art, objects, and history of this country from the Neolithic to Modern periods with special stops at the Archaic and Classical (800-300 BC), Roman (150 BC-AD 400), Byzantine (up to AD 1453), and Revolutionary (AD 1820-30) periods. I thought particularly important to take our conversation from the tables of diaspora Greek diners to the hills of Hellas herself – and besides, if you don’t like the text, you can just look at the pictures.

I first departed Athens to pursue an arc across the north of Greece from west to east. Paradoxically, our course began heading south towards Corinth. This was to swing upwards along the northern edge of the Peloponnese to a bridge which spans the Corinthian gulf. The gulf gets wider by about 30 millimeters every year; we shall see how long nature continues to brook this yolk that man has designed for her.



Through the regions of Akarnania and Aitolia we made observations and heard lectures on site, getting to examine architecture, blocks, and inscriptions in person. We came to the cape of Actium, where in 31 BC Octavian defeated Mark Antony in a naval battle for power over the Mediterranean world. Octavian became Augustus and commemorated his victory he established the town of Nikopolis: “Victory City.”

Further north is Epirus, which is knotted with mountains and the clank of shepherd’s bells accompanied our hikes. There is a town there called Arta by the river Arachthos, and over the river is a bridge. It was probably built in the 13th century and is the only crossing point over this river, making it very important regionally. A folk ballad accompanies the bridge, about the frustrations its architect faced when his stones were swept away after every day of work; the river demanded human sacrifice to allow its waters to be crossed.

Forty-five master builders and sixty apprentices
Were laying the foundations for a bridge over the river of Arta
They would toil at it all day, and at night it would collapse again.
The master builders lament and the apprentices weep:
"Alas for our exertions, woe to our labours,
For us to toil all day while at night it collapses!"

A bird appeared and sat on the opposite side of the river.
It did not sing like a bird, nor like a swallow,
But it sang and spoke in a human voice:
"Unless you sacrifice a human, the bridge will never stand.
And don't you sacrifice an orphan, or a stranger, or a passer-by,
But only the chief mason's beautiful wife,
Who comes late in the afternoon and brings his supper."

The chief mason hears it and falls down like dead.
He quickly sends to his wife, with the bird as his messenger:
"Let her dress slowly, change slowly, and bring the supper late,
Let her come late to cross the bridge of Arta!"
But the bird ignored it and gave her a different message:
"Hurry, dress quickly, change quickly, and bring the supper early,
Go quickly to cross the bridge of Arta!"

So she went and appeared at the end of the white lane.
The chief mason saw her and his heart broke.
From far she greeted them, and when she came near she spoke:
"Greetings, builders, and greetings to you, apprentices.
But what's wrong with the chief mason that his looks are so dark?"
"He lost his wedding ring, it fell into the first chamber.
Who'll go down there now and up again to find the ring for him?"
"Master, don't worry, I'll go myself to get it,
I'll go down there and come up again and find the ring for you."

She had hardly descended, hardly went down into it,
When she called: "Pull me up, dear, pull the chain,
I've looked everywhere but can't find anything!"
One comes with the spade and one with the mortar,
And the chief mason himself goes and throws a big stone…

The layers of history overlaid on the landscape are made manifest in the surrounding structures. On one bank is a Turkish toll house now 200 years old. The bridge remained a vital crossing point into the twentieth century: next to the toll house is a German pill box – a reminder of the Nazi occupation.

Eastwards is the region of Macedonia. It is famous as the homeland of Alexander the Great. At the site of Vergina was found a magnificent burial – a man cremated and interred in a gold box, crowned with a gold wreath, inside a marble sarcophagus in a mausoleum that imitates the monumental temples of the day. Around him were the trappings of a warrior aristocrat: armor, shields, spears, and a set of greaves.

The excavator immediately proposed that this was the grave of Alexander’s father, Philip II, whose consolidation of power in Macedonia paved the way for his son to extend Macedonian power all the way to India and Afghanistan. Now the matter has become enmeshed in nationalistic fervor in Greece: the modern Greeks are often locked in debates with their northern neighbors FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and the location of Philip’s grave within the boundaries of modern Greece extends Greekness to the ancient Macedonians and thus FYROM cannot use the name Macedonia because it belongs to Greece. The Greeks see the problem as, “Were the ancient Macedonians Greek?” They answer yes, whereon it must follow that the modern area of Macedonia belongs to modern Greece. It is a sordid game of cultural property and twisted logic applied to 2,400 years of history.

The more appropriate question is, “What was the dialogue and debate about Macedonian identity like in antiquity and what forces shaped it?” One hundred years before Alexander, the historian Herodotus says, “I know for a fact that the Macedonians are Greek,” as if he must vehemently protest arguments to the contrary. In the 300s the Athenians opposed Macedonian aggression as the intrusion into Greece of outsiders. Understanding the forces that shaped the debate in the past gives us more insight into the past than using arguments from antiquity to win modern political disputes.

Back on the road, we went to Thessaloniki, the second most important city of modern Greece. The city has successive layers of habitation, from Macedonian to Roman to Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman. It has been part of modern Greece for less than 100 years: it was transferred from Ottoman to Greek control in 1912. In Aristotle Square there was a rally for the Communist Party ahead of the elections in which I inadvertently found myself while trying to get dinner. My companions and I drank and ate and walked the sea wall, appreciating being in a big city for a change.

Opposite the mainland in the northern Aegean Sea is the island of Thasos. We crossed in a ferry. It was colonized by Greeks from the island Paros. Amongst the colonizers, in the 7th century BC, was a certain Archilochos whose poems survive to us. He wrote of the island as being

An ass’s backbone crowned with wild wood.

Twenty-six centuries later, the description is not far off. A massive mountain rises in the middle, and the low coastline hosts several villages. We drove through the interior to the southern side, where there was an important marble quarry extending out into the sea. Archilochos writes humorously of bloody encounters with native locals.

Some one of the Saians is rejoicing in my shield
- Beside the shrub I unwillingly left the blameless thing -
Yet I saved my own hide, what care have I for that shield?
Let it go. I will buy another one that’s just as good.

The last days of the excursion were spent touring battle sites. First, the strategic city of Amphipolis. The import of the region and its metal and timber resources was dramatically increased by when the cold war between the Athens and Sparta erupted into open violence. The third party cities that were allied to either side became the focus points for the conflict – as would be Korea, Viet Nam, and Afghanistan in our own day.

422 BC: In order to capture the city from Athens, the Spartan general Brasidas undertook a 26-day forced march across Greece – the fastest movement of an army yet known in Greece, especially for the Spartans who were known for being deliberate, delaying, and slow to action. With eloquence more characteristic of an Athenian than the laconic Spartans, Brasidas convinced a faction of Amphipolitans to open the city to him. The Athenian general Kleon – “the most violent man in Athens” – arrived to take the field. Occupying a hill north of the city walls, he attempted to descend and flank the city to the east of the walls. Brasidas rushed out to meet the flanking motion and the Spartans routed the Athenians. Fleeing the onslaught, Kleon was cut down with his back to the enemy. The Athenian admiral Thucydides was supposed to bring reinforcements from nearby Thasos, but a storm prevented him from getting there in time. In Athens, he faced trial and exile, upon which he turned to writing the account of the war now left to us.

Rushing out into the front of the line, Brasidas was killed in action. The Amphipolitans thereafter commemorated Brasidas as their founding hero. There was found a silver burial box topped with a gold crown and containing the cremated remains of a man in a tomb within the city walls – an unusual practice indicating the importance of the burial. Associated pottery dates the box to the latter half of the 5th century BC. This I think, or perhaps hope, holds the remains of the Spartan hero of the Peloponnesian War.



Finally, Thermopylae, which has now become very familiar to us through the graphic novel and movie 300. Three hundred Spartans under Leonidas crossed towards northeast Greece. Along the way they picked up about 4,000 allies before stopping at Thermopylae – “the Hot Gates.” Mountains pressed up against the sea, leaving a narrow pass. Leonidas held against the endless number of Persians flooding the pass. Failing at hand-to-hand combat, the Persian archers blackened the sky with their arrows. “Then we will fight in the shade,” said the Spartans.

Leonidas was eventually betrayed by a local Greek who guided the Persians to a pass that would allow them to flank the Greeks. Leonidas realized that his position was compromised: he released most of the non-Spartans from their duty, though 700 Thespians remained voluntarily (the movie should be called 1,000, not 300). Without hope of survival the Greeks sallied forward of their defensive position and into the Persian camp, killing two of Xerxes’ brothers. Leonidas fell; the Greeks were slaughtered to a man. The poet Simonides’ epigram was placed upon the battlefield to commemorate the fallen.

O Stranger! Tell the Spartans that here
We lie, to their orders obedient.

The Battle of Thermopylae has been cast by historians, writers, and film directors as the violent meeting point of East and West, of effeminate Eastern tyranny and hardy Western freedom – and in this narrative it is freedom which triumphed. But it is worth thinking about whether this East-West dichotomy is not so much a geographical divide as a mental partition which we have imposed upon the landscape. After all, Europe and Asia are one contiguous land mass. Disdain for the East has dogged “Western Civilization” up until the present day: is Turkey European enough for the EU? Can Middle Easterners sustain that most exalted form of government, the Western republic? The root of this division lay in Thermopylae and in the ways that we continually appropriate and reconstruct the past as an expression of more contemporary issues.

We descended from Thermopylae to Athens, and I was happy to have a sedentary home, at least for the next couple of days. The next day, October 4th, was the national elections. Greece has a rather Biblical system whereby the voter must vote in the town in which he was born. PASOK – the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party – won against the “conservative” Nea Demokratia (New Democracy), as was predicted. More than anything, what seems to change most is not policy but who has government jobs. The state is by far the greatest employer here and government jobs are redistributed after every shuffling of parliament members. A cushy bureaucrat’s office hangs on whether you pledge your allegiance to PASOK or Nea Demokratia.

More to come as I get settled back in Athens after much travel and study.

Marc Chagall's Etchings for "Dead Souls"

Searching for information on Gogol's "Dead Souls" (1842) led me to information on Marc Chagall, a Russian-born 20th century artist. A brief skimming of his Wikipedia page leads me to believe he's a big name in the art world but, knowing little about art and art-related things, I had never heard of him. Here are a couple of his etchings from "Dead Souls." Here are more of them, if you're interested.

"La soirée chez le gouveneu"

"On the way to Sobakevich's"

Depressing the Crap Out of You

Stumbled across one of my favorite poems (full disclosure: I may have two favorite poems, or two poems that I know for that matter), Edward Field's "Icarus." If I could ever come up with something half as brilliant as this twist on a timeless story, well, I wouldn't be a "professional" crossword puzzle "editor." Which is kind of what this poem is about. . .

Icarus

Edward Field

Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.

“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked,
uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,

Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.

Halloween Wisdom (from Bobby Hill)

"I will never use toilet paper in anger again."--Bobby Hill in "Hilloween" (Just caught the classic episode on Cartoon Network while getting some homework done and chuckled at this line).


This has been your dose of Halloween Wisdom (from Bobby Hill).

An Open Letter to ABC Family

Dear ABC Family,

Please put an end to your gross misuse of the Greek character sigma in the stylized title of your (what I assume to be) unwatchable teen-drama show "Greek." As any person with even a modest knowledge of the Greek alphabet can tell you, sigma represent an "s" sound that, if properly transliterated, would cause your obnoxious-looking television show to be called "Grssk."


While I doubt this change would improve the quality of your lineup, it will at least make its advertisement slightly less grating.

Thank you,

Sean

PS-This letter is also applicable to the authors of "Greek Week" fliers at any university.

Wednesday Wisdom (from Kurt Russell)

Today's quote: "I may be a goddamm alcoholic, but that doesn't mean I can't tell the truth."--Kurt Russell as Det. Sgt. Eldon Perry, Jr. in Dark Blue (2002)


This has been your dose of Wednesday Wisdom (from Kurt Russell).