At breakfast on Thursday, we finally met Bill and Suzanne Murray and the rest of the tour participants. I had been hoping to maintain relative anonymity, but it turns out that Bill knew my name and work--a student of his had quoted my Sexuality book in a paper on Plutarch. There is at least one other academic among the participants, a British medievalist retired from U of Denver, and I like his commitment to learning more about related and corollary fields of interest. First excursion, in the morning, was to the new Acropolis Museum. Some familiar items from the archaic temple of Athena have been moved there, but for the most part what strikes you is the plaster casts where the Elgin Marbles should be. It is very postclassical and very sterile.
Unfortunately, the climb up to the Acropolis was a little too much for a number of people, including Ron. When I was in my twenties, I remember, the ascent did not seem all that steep. The visitors at the time were far fewer and the accessibility to all the monuments greater. Yet I still recall reacting to the behavior of the crowds then: "Not so loud; this is a holy place." The mob yesterday reminded me of my last experience visiting the Vatican Museums, being shepherded in a long roped-off queue past someone's idea of what tourists should be seeing. I swore off the Vatican Museums then as I swore off Pompeii before that, and I'm swearing off the Athenian Acropolis now. Nothing will make me go back. As it is, Ron gave out before reaching the Propylon Gate, and I had no regrets abandoning the climb and walking him back to the bus boarding area. On the way up, though, I got a couple of excellent photographs of Herodes Atticus' Odeon, which I may be able to include in the second version of Sexuality, in the context of the Second Sophistic subsection.
The Cycladic Museum visit in the afternoon convinced me that I will never again go on an organized tour to any part of Greece, even if I don't know the locales. As everyone knows, Greek law provides that explanations of sites have to be given by Greek-trained guides: tour leaders, no matter their scholarly credentials, just stand to one side. At the Acropolis Museum in the morning, I heard the guide speak in all seriousness about pre-Greek matriarchy. OK, I'm tolerant of feminist extremism. However, I expected an honest and trained tour guide taking a group around the Cycladic Museum to bring up the issue of fakes, if only to warn interested collectors. Not one mention of the "f---" word. Worse, she raised the topic of Greek homosexuality in the context of showing viewers a red-figure vase depicting two Greek youths energetically dancing with two other figures wearing the sakkos--the iconographic symbol of a courtesan. If tour guides are abandoning scholarly rigor in order to indulge in sensationalism, any attempts we might make to educate the public are doomed.
In the evening, we had one serendipitous experience. As we were walking in what we hoped was the general direction of the Plaka, a gentleman asked me if he could help out with directions. When I said that we were going to have dinner, he immediately suggested a good fish restaurant in the area and offered to walk us there. Well, OK, at first you figure the con is on. But it turned out that he sold shoes at a neighborhood store, his wife was from New Jersey, and he apparently wanted to do a couple of Americans a favor. He took us to a restaurant called Ithaki, introduced us to the manager, and asked him to give us some really fresh fish. Ron ordered salmon, I ordered grouper (which I had just seen, pink and healthy, on ice in the fish case). That and a great Greek salad with tangy Feta cheese, plus an interesting bottle of Greek chardonnay, made for a really outstanding dinner. An after-dinner drink at the hotel rooftop bar topped off a memorable visit to a local neighborhood restaurant--which we learned of from a chance meeting.
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