By ten o’clock we could see land all the way ahead of us. The island of Hydra lay on the left. This was as it should be. Throughout the morning we sailed on, coming ever nearer to the coast ahead.
Now occurred the first event to signal our passage to a new world and a new era. We came up on a boat such as I had never seen before. It was of about the same size as our own but undecked. Although it had a single large crude sail the main contribution to its speed came from oarsmen, about ten to each side of the boat. We started the engines as a precaution, for we had no wish to fall foul of a pirate ship. Then we went in to hailing distance. There was an interchange between the men in the boat and Morgan, of which I didn’t understand a word. We accelerated away from them. When we were about a quarter of a mile ahead I asked, ‘What did they say?’
‘Only that they’re on their way to Athens too. I said we were strangers which must have seemed pretty obvious. I said we’d go in ahead of them.’
‘I suppose it wasn’t the right occasion to find out what’s going on?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that, you know. We’ll have to be extremely careful in our inquiries. Remember the Greeks date their years from 776 B.C., the year in which they started the Olympic Games. The best thing will be to ask them for an explanation of how they count the years.’
Then Morgan and Anna fell into an impassioned discussion about what the men in the boat had been saying. Classical scholars of the twentieth century were going to have their troubles, it seemed. Suddenly Alex gripped my arm and pointed ahead. We were getting quite close in now to what I took to be the port of Piraeus.
‘Look, aren’t those the Long Walls?’
We were all gazing at the seven or eight miles of unbroken wall, a wall that swept from near the sea away to the northeast. Athens we knew must lie at the northern end.
‘The wall is complete,’ whispered Anna. ‘It must mean we’re somewhere around the time of Pericles.’
Now came the worst of our problems, to tie up the boat without using the engines. The harbour lay ahead. We could see more open boats, charmingly and somewhat impracticably designed. We took the simple line of taking down sail, throwing out an anchor, and waiting for the people on shore to come to us. This worked out exactly as one might have expected. Soon there was an excited throng at the water edge obviously wondering at the strange lines of the new vessel which had appeared from the sea. Within a few moments half a dozen boats were rowed out to us. Morgan somehow managed to convey the idea that we wanted a tow to a safe spot. A dozen or more men took our rope. With much argument and laughter they hauled us about two hundred and fifty yards to a sheltered spot where there was a draught of about ten feet. Once again we put down anchor. Morgan and Alex rowed ashore in our dinghy. They made fast with a rope. Within a few minutes we were all safely landed. I realized now that our story of being strangers from the north, the land of giants in Greek lore, would seem entirely true. I was a full head taller than any of these people.
Chapter Eleven: Vivace
It would be easy to become deeply involved in the very many detailed differences between modern society and the times in which we were now immersed, but an encyclopaedic description of the situation would only obscure the wood by the trees. It was the differences of principle which really counted.
Take the height of the people. I found it hard not to think of them all as children, simply because they were ten inches to a foot shorter than I was, a difference of only some fifteen per cent when you think about it. My reaction came because I was conditioned to think of significantly smaller people as children. Yet these people were just as clever, just as much driven by strong emotion, by the desire for power, love, intellectual achievement, as we ourselves were.
Everything about us was hand-made, every movement—at any rate on the land—was provided by muscle, either animal or human. While most things were meaner, evidence of better taste was to be seen in almost every article. Nothing in our modern society could exceed, or perhaps even equal, the finest women’s dresses I was to see here. Yet these dresses demanded enormous effort, a far greater fraction of the productivity of the community, than was the case in modern society. This meant that fine clothing could only be worn by privileged persons and then only on special occasions. The everyday dress of the average citizen was rough and crude by our modern machine standards. It would have been impossible for it to be otherwise in a society of such limited resources.
The same was true of the buildings. On the whole people lived in houses little better than hovels. Only the wealthiest members of the community approached what we would call average middle-class comfort. Yet public buildings, the Parthenon, were of a magnificence our modern society could not equal at all. Indeed the situation was exactly reversed in the world of 1966. Private homes could be spacious and tasteful. Public buildings, public offices, hospitals, the whole gamut of state enterprises, were nearly always painfully sordid.
It took a little time both to notice and to get used to these differences. Immediately after our landing we were concerned to ensure the safety of our boat and to see our few important possessions adequately locked away below deck. No doubt hundreds of pairs of inquisitive hands would work themselves over every exposed inch of the yacht. Yet it seemed doubtful they would actually break in through the closed hatchways. At any rate we decided to take the risk. There was no car or bus to carry us the eight miles to Athens. We simply walked along the great fortified wall of the city.
We were met three miles out by civic dignitaries. I could tell nothing of what was said, for in the beginning I had only the crudest knowledge of the language, picked up from Morgan and Anna on the few days of our voyage from Britain. Morgan took on the task of explaining our position. He spoke clearly and slowly. His inflexion provided the populace at large with a considerable source of amusement. Yet his commanding height, combined with a Welsh flair for erudition, had a disarming effect on his audience. Clearly we were well received.
All I could tell was that we were escorted under favourable circumstances into the city. We arrived at length at an open area where about a thousand people had quickly gathered at the news of our arrival. The place of our congregation was a discussion arena, of the name Agora, I learnt later. There seemed to be nothing for it but that Morgan should give an account of the manner of our journey from the north, through the Pillars of Hercules, the western Mediterranean, and thence to Athens. I was surprised at the length of his speech. Only later did I realize that time was a commodity not in short supply in this community. It would have been taken as an insult, when so many were gathered together, to have spoken tersely. Morgan knew this from his classical studies. Later he told me he addressed the throng something along the following lines:
‘At this time of the year the days in the north are short, the Sun lies low in the sky. Our fields and our houses are battered by the strong wind which blows everlastingly from the west. Rain clouds fill the sky with an ever-present threat of violent storms. So you may understand the thoughts of my countrymen turn often to the lands of the south, for it is a belief among our people that southern lands are warmer, winds lighter, that in every way the natural elements are less destructive of human comfort. It was to discover whether this was so that we commenced our journey.’
I give only this short example of Morgan’s discursive style. It would be painful to attempt even a partial repetition of his speech, of the manner and construction of our vessel, of the nature of our rivers and harbours, of the terrors of the open sea. He described our farewell to our native land giving them a Greek version of John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II. Then the sights we had seen on our journey, the birds and fishes, the Rock of Gibraltar. The words flowed on and on until I wondered if he was intent on talking the whole day away. Not a sound came from the audience. Although, as I say, there was upward of a thousand of them, everyone seemed able to hear. The excellent acoustic properties of Greek theatres, always such a marvel to the modern world, came from the fact that the spoken word, discussion and argument, had absolute top priority. In days before the microphone and loud speaker, acoustics simply had to be good. Soon I was to realize that to be able to speak clearly, with persuasion and reason, was equivalent to power in this city.