DeLillo, Herodotus, and the stones of Athens

 Don DeLillo’s The Names begins with what feels like a long camera take, trailing a character from behind as he walks around the streets of the Plaka, the central market district of Athens. The longer the shot continues, however, the more you realize that the man who’s leading you is not the central character. There’s someone, something else. You keep glimpsing it between the blocks, above the antennas and awnings and electrical wires. It’s apparitional, a massive presence that seems to hover in the middle distance, glimmering and impassive beneath the bright Mediterranean sunshine. At long last the character stops in an open plaza, pauses, then looks up. The camera follows. The Acropolis rises like a brilliant white column shooting skyward, its pillars and pediments strident yet effortless. The high city.

I gasped when I first glimpsed the Acropolis. I was stepping onto the balcony of an apartment I’d rented for six weeks in Kolonaki, a wealthy neighborhood in central Athens. My host, Klaus, was showing me around the place. I was panting and slathered in sweat from climbing up the five flights of stairs with my luggage. Oh my god, I said. Klaus stopped his description of which switches operated which lights. Oh yeah, he said. The evening sun bathed the Parian marble in rosewater. It’s nice, isn’t it? He said.

This was my first visit to the city. I came to use the library of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. My writing had been sailing, propelled by gusty inspiration during a residence at the Center for Hellenic Studies that fall, where I found enormous energy and imagination from the fellowship’s abundant unstructured time. After leaving the Center, however, I moved to East Africa to join my wife who was working there. The unstructured time continued but I soon began to require more resources – books, mostly, that I couldn’t simply excerpt with a “scan and deliver” from the Harvard Library. As it turned out, Athens was about the same distance as New York from Los Angeles and flights via Istanbul were a relative bargain. I left late one night and arrived in Athens by mid-morning.

Klaus handed me the key and wished me a pleasant stay. He was still astride his scooter when I exited the building. I had to get out. I wandered the city in a state of surging excitement. These were the stones of Athens. The places that had only existed in my imagination, the haunts of Socrates and Pericles and Solon. I tried to follow a walking route in my guide book but I felt myself drawn off course, as if caught in an unknown planet’s gravitational field. The Acropolis rose higher as I approached. The high city. The holy city. The first olive tree. The place where the Athenians were born of the soil.

In the mornings, I brewed strong espresso with a hot plate and sat on the balcony with the Acropolis before me. The sun draped color across the ruins. A siren pierced the morning stillness. Kolonaki bordered another quite different neighborhood, Exarcheia, where anarchists had taken over abandoned buildings to house and provide services for the tens of thousands of migrants arriving into the city. Policemen in bullet-proof vests and face-shields sat in idling vans or leaned against light posts along the street that divided the two neighborhoods. Past their cordon, the walls of apartment buildings screamed with graffiti and slogans. Figures loomed from half-rubbled buildings.

The American School resided in Kolonaki as well. I was given an entry card and a carrel in a high-ceiled reading room. A librarian led me through the stacks, which were small but full of the very tomes I needed – commentaries on Herodotus, monographs examining topics like the Greek discovery of freedom or Herodotus’s depiction of the Spartans. The ambiance of generations of scholars refreshed me after so many lonely hours in my quiet yet empty East African apartment. Young and old hunched over open books.

I appeared at the library with daily regularity, yet I often tarried in my apartment, on the balcony. I slid the dining room table partly into the living room, allowing for a view even while seated. I could look up from my laptop screen and see the pillars of the Parthenon. While I imagined myself in conversation with Herodotus, wondering what he’d make of the anarchists’ message of radical equality – was it an update of Herodotean isêgoria, the equal voice he viewed as central to Athens’ flourishing? – I gazed upon the Acropolis with humbled amazement. Here I was, within sight of where Herodotus conversed with Sophocles, traded stories with Ionian merchants, or recited excerpts from his burgeoning manuscript. Here too were the layers of history through which the Histories had somehow survived, the generations of preservation now materialized in places like the American School or the Archaeological Museum where places known to me only by their mention in Herodotus – Samos, Lesbos, Sikyon – took material form in pottery adorned with leaping dolphins or scuttling crabs.

I finished the manuscript of Herodotus in the Anthropocene while living in Athens. I’d had to move before I quite reached the end, and my new apartment lacked the elevating view. But I later realized that beneath the busy street outside its windows, ran the traces of the Ilisos River. Socrates and Phaedrus cross that river in the beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue that inquires into the meaning of writing. Socrates and Phaedrus recline in the shade of plane trees to escape the heat of the day and read aloud a speech of Lysias that Phaedrus has brought with him. Then they discuss the divine madness of creation. I knew this madness. The madness of Greek, the madness of antiquity, of turning away from the present to consider it through the distant vantage point of the past. This was my madness, the spark that took me to the heat of Athens that summer. When I struck the final period and pushed back my chair to stand, I felt like I had come full circle. Now I walked in the footsteps of Socrates and Phaedrus, my steps hastened by the swell of accomplishment. Herodotus in the Anthropocene would see the light. 

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