More from Athens

Today i've remained in the Plaka section of Athens, visiting the Akropolis and the Agorá and walking through the many little winding streets in the neighborhood. I suppose i couldn't have done anything more touristy, but as there are not so many tourists this time of year, i didn't feel like such a schmuck. Besides, people here are such that they don't make you feel an outsider. Everybody smiles and is helpful. Maybe it's the season.

I liked the parthenon very much, and imagined Socrates sitting on its steps, talking to his students. He might have never done this, but then again, he might. The caryatids in the erechtheion were even more eye (and imagination) catching. Later i found out they are not the originals, but casts of them; nevertheless, i thought them fascinating. They are all slightly different in their dress and accoutrements, in the way their hair falls over their shoulders, and even in their pose. I also thought they looked quite suggestive, exposing one leg forward, barely covered by the rocky folds of thin clothes that, if real, would have been transparent. The classics must have been aware of the erotic element in these sculptures, and it must have been even stronger then, since in their society women were so covered and hidden. How would they have looked at sculptures in general? There are a few in the Acropolis museum and the stoa Attalou that are seriously hypnotic, even though many of them are mere fragments of lost wholes, or severely damaged by weather, pollution, martial conflicts or, that old favorite of mine, religious fanaticism. In spite of it all, treasure survives: an enigmatic face that seems to take in air through parted lips; a portrait of a serious, bearded man who obviously never heard a 'no' in his life; the weighty, robust and essentially masculine foreleg and shins of a wrestler; the exquisitely detailed toes of a rider by the heaving barrel chest of a horse – all else gone...

Later i walked to the theater of Dionysus, where the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus were put up for the first time... over 2500 years ago! The stone seats are still there, and i sat on one for a while, imagining the actors and their voices, and wondering whose eyes might have been looking from the position of mine when Antigone or Oedipus Rex were performed first. Who might have been by my side? Who in front and behind me?

I climbed to the Areos Pagos, where around 50 a.d. saint Paul spilled the sermon to the athenians as it appears in the new testament (it was after that, i suppose, that they started defacing the sculptures that represented the deities and the work of their ancestors).

Then, in the Agorá, i tried to visualize the people that walked through these ruins when they weren't such, or those who might do so in the future, when as much time passes as has now passed since the now scattered marble blocks were whole buildings. What did/will they think? What were/will be their daily affairs and concerns? It's sweet not to know, and makes me want never to die.

I was seriously pooped after all the walking up and down and around the hillsides, so i stopped at a cafe and ordered an epanakotyropita (the only greek word i know, apart from ‘thank you’: efharisto!), which is a delicious cheese and spinach confection that i devoured in two minutes. I ordered another, and this time i took five.