Greek legends - Exploring three cities of the ancient world where myths are set in stone
By Toni Salama August 3, 2008 MYCENAE, Greece
As near as anyone can calculate, Hercules became a god in 1226 B.C.
He wasn't supposed to. His original destiny was to simply become king of Mycenae. But a series of behind-the-scenes treacheries put his evil twin, Eurystheus, on the throne. Worse yet, this bad brother-king required Hercules to perform a series of seemingly impossible tasks.
Greek mythology has a way of righting injustices, though, and the very labors meant to destroy Hercules served to make him a hero instead: The name of Hercules became synonymous with strength and daring. Nobody ever heard of Eury-something-us.
As for Mycenae, it remains, equal parts myth and stone, on a hilltop in Greece's Peloponnesian Peninsula. It's one of three essential stops on a circuit of classical Greece archaeological sites beyond Athens.
Olympia gets more coverage, especially during an Olympic Games year. And Delphi inspires more curiosity because of its oracle. Both of those places attract bigger crowds. But at Mycenae, the course of Western civilization shifted to embrace the heroic.
Between the mysterious doings of the Minoan culture of Crete, which ruled the Aegean before, and the hyper-logical mind-set of the Athenians afterward, Mycenae held sway. To pass through its much-photographed Lion Gate is to enter an age of giants.
Mycenae
The ruins of Mycenae (pronounced my-see-nee) sit on a hill that today faces a wide, flat valley of citrus and olive groves: the plain of Argolis. Its back is protected by a low mountain range in the eastern reaches of the Peloponnesian Peninsula. Getting here from Athens means crossing the Corinth Canal, the digging of which technically turned the peninsula into an island.
There's an eerie quality about Mycenae. Guides who elsewhere bellow for the attention of their followers speak more softly here. Tourists tread lighter on the walkways and whisper among themselves rather than prattle out loud. The midafternoon sun doesn't burn as hot as on other hillsides, for a stiff wind carries its heat away.
For a long time, the experts were sure Mycenae was just so much storytelling on the part of Homer. To accept it as historic fact also would have required at least entertaining the possibility that it was populated with larger-than-life characters.
Perseus, the fellow who beheaded Medusa, either founded Mycenae or fortified whatever town was already here. He settled down with his wife, Andromeda, a union that four generations later - roughly about the time the Lion Gate was built - would, by the calculations of Isocrates, produce Hercules.
Hardly anyone believed the people and place actually existed until a German archaeologist unearthed Mycenae in the 1870s.
The walls of the fortification are constructed of stones so huge that, as legend would have it, only the Cyclopes, the mythical one-eyed giants, could have put them in place.
Any enemies not discouraged by the battlements would have had to approach the Lion Gate as visitors do today, through a dog leg in a wall at least four times the height of a man, constructed of massive masoned blocks. The gate itself is formed by two gargantuan stone posts topped by a curved lintel cut from a slab even more massive. Above the lintel, a single triangle of stone is carved in deep relief with two facing lions rearing on their hind legs.
A ramp inside the gate winds uphill through sparse ruins to where they think Mycenae's palace stood. Only the floor remains, and some foundations of interior walls that likely would have separated the throne room from sleeping quarters. It's a good spot to take the measure of the city, understand its strategic position and get an unobstructed view across the plain of Argolis to another range of mountains whose distant ridgeline forms the profile of what area residents identify as the sleeping Agamemnon, a king who followed Hercules by a generation.
Sadly, the legendary king's golden funerary mask, at least the one popularly attributed to him, was excavated here but became a spoil of modern museum wars. It's on display front and center in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, some 70 miles away.
Mycenae's not bad for a place that the Age of Reason said couldn't exist.
Olympia
The road between Mycenae and Olympia traverses rugged terrain where the late-afternoon sun blesses craggy mountain tops with golden light. En route, curious roadside shrines show the way to remote churches - or more often mark the spot of deadly traffic accidents.
The passing scenery outside the bus windows includes a few of the 6 million trees in the region that produce the famous kalamata olives, prized for smallish fruits best pressed into oil.
On the western coast of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, Ancient Olympia spreads over a clearing in what today is a heavily wooded area - even after Greece's most ravenous forest fires on record took the lives of more than 65 people last summer and threatened to consume the stones scattered here like so many fallen dominoes.
Guides say Ancient Olympia was never a city or a fort. They describe it, in its early days, as a sanctuary that went unoccupied most of the time. When athletes, administrators and spectators came every four years for the games, the place operated outside politics as usual.
By most accounts, these flat few acres wedged between the Alpheios and the Kladeos Rivers at the base of Mt. Kronos grew to national importance after a truce among the regional kings in 776 B.C. What there is to see is newer than that, and all of it broken: remains of the stadium and its entry arch, a column or two standing at the Temple of Hera, the shells of arcades here and treasuries there, ranks of upright columns that mark gymnasiums and dormitories.
What's left of a Roman-era hotel, of sorts, shows the outlines of a lazy-riverlike pool in its courtyard. All that's left of the Temple of Zeus is a foundation; the pillars it once supported cover the surrounding ground like ribs separated from a spine. The statue of Zeus it once sheltered, one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is here only in spirit; its substance is long gone.
The site is remarkable for its size, but it's hard to feel the magic. In one spot, an assembly of tourists squats on broken pillars to listen to the guide's spiel. A few feet away, another gang plops its collective bottoms on an ancient ledge to hear its leader. Tour groups converge on Olympia in such numbers that participants sometimes get separated from the group in the crowds at the museum and even return to the wrong bus.
Midday finds the parking area gridlocked by as many as 13 motor coaches and an equal number of minivans - not to mention dozens of private cars - with more trying to get in. In the place that once revered athletic prowess, the toughest contest these days is at the bathrooms.
Lines are so long that women queue up three deep in the men's restroom stalls, ignoring the fellows at the urinals.
The regret of not having enjoyed Olympia more fully is balanced by the odd relief of being out of the crowds, back on the right bus and pulling away toward Delphi.
Delphi
From Olympia to Delphi, the landscape is an odd combination of American Midwest farmland to the east and intermittent views of the Ionian Sea to the west. Progressing northward, the mountains rise higher and take on the contour of ocean waves, a succession of long, rounded ridgelines.
Outside of Patra, the drive crosses the 9,500-foot-long Rio-Antirio Bridge, a photogenic specimen of cable-stayed engineering that tethers the Peloponnesian Peninsula to the Greek mainland.
On the other side, the road follows the coastline of the Corinthian Sea into the Bay of Itea, and the town by the same name, before tackling the steep hairpin turns into the foothills below Mt. Parnassus.
The town of Delphi nestles in a narrow pass where small hotels on one-lane streets jostle one another to give guests a room that looks back down to the sea - and a valley populated with another 3 million or so more of Greece's olive trees.
Groups that spend the night in Delphi have the advantage of visiting the ruins early, before the day-trippers from Athens arrive. The star of Delphi's museum is the "Charioteer," a bronze with features so realistic that even after 2,500 years the 5-foot-11 figure still gazes at the world through eyes of inset onyx (some say glass) framed by copper lashes. He originally would have stood in the temple of Apollo with a brace of horses - maybe four, maybe six - no longer here.
The museum also houses the "Navel of the Earth," an R2-D2-sized stone carved in a decorative raised-diamond pattern. When it stood in its original location, just up the hill, it marked the center of the world, determined when Zeus sent forth two eagles, one from either side of the Earth, and they met at Delphi.
The mountains here are craggy, saw-toothed and gray. What's left of the temple of Apollo are a half-dozen or so pillars indistinguishable in color and texture from the rocky cliff face behind. This became a pilgrimage site after Apollo killed the Python here and the most famed oracle of the ancient world forecast the future in riddles. To reach it is to first straggle up the Sacred Way, past the Roman forum and pause at Delphi's only intact building, the small, restored Treasury of the Athenians, whose proportions are such that it seems almost to float.
Just down the road from the main archaeological site is the less-visited Temple of Athena Pronaia. A dirt path and a downhill hike lead to the Tholos, a circle of broken pillars.
It's lonely here, and quiet, a place to reflect on the deep valley below and the jagged mountains above and, yes, even the long drive ahead.
Toni Salama wrote this article for the Chicago Tribune.
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