Da Vinci's Bicycle, Guy Davenport [best motivational books to read TXT] 📗

we walked out to see his tomb. The Rock was once a town, but there is nothing there anymore. Pyrrhon’s sarcophagos, along with some others, lies in tall grass near a grove of pine trees.

How old the world!

Another statue in the market at Elis is of Apollo Doctor, the same Apollo you find at Athens. There is also a Sun of stone, with rays coming from his head; and a Moon, with horns.

At the end of a wide street off the market is a grove of terebinth and manna ash where a delicate and elegant sandstone sanctuary of the Graces stands in a lace of shadow. Their statues are wooden, their robes gilded, their heads, hands, and feet of white marble. One holds a rose, Aphrodita’s flower; another, a sprig of myrtle, sacred to the rites of Aphrodita and Adonis. The third holds a pair of dice.

Beside the Graces stands an Eros, also of wood.

Farther on, there is a temple of Silenos, interesting in that it is not to Dionysos and Silenos but to Silenos alone. His image is fat and rampant. A satyr is offering him a cup of wine. It is sad to know that satyrs are mortal. I have seen the tomb of one in the land of the Hebrews, though I could not read his name or age on the red stone. A learned man of their tribes showed it to me. When I told him that the forests of my native Lydia, and of the Greeks, were as full of satyrs as the streets of Damascus with camels, he smoothed his black beard and made no comment.

There is also a satyr buried at Pergamon.

In the marketplace there is also a kind of temple, a roof over pillars carved of oak, but with no walls. It is, the Eleans say, a tomb; whose, no one can remember. An old man told me that it was the tomb of Oxylos, but could say no more about it.

Near this forlorn structure is the House of the Sixteen, where select women weave the annual robe for Hera. Its yard is surrounded by a wall, and inside that by several large chestnut trees.

At the edge of the market there is a temple in ruins, with only its pillars still standing, roofless and bereft of statuary. Tall grass mixed with wild flowers grows around it, and the inside, naked of altar or images, was alive with crickets and lizards when I looked. It was in its day dedicated to the Roman emperors. I daresay it dates from the vanity of Nero Augustus, whose opulent hand touched Greece with its fever. Hadrian, who was emperor until my eighteenth year, was already beginning to shy away from the idea of divinity inhering in a living man; the second Antonine was too religious to encourage a cult of the emperor, and Marcus Aurelius has refused altogether to assume the title Divus.

Behind the arcade of the Korkyrean spoils there is a temple to Aphrodita of the Sky. Her image of ivory and gold is by Pheidias, and stands with one foot on a tortoise. Beside this temple is a walled grove for the Common Aphrodita. Her statue is in an underground room, a bronze Aphrodita riding on a bronze billy goat. The sculptor is Skopas, and his worldly Aphrodita on her randy buck is as well wrought in its manner as the etherial Aphrodita of Pheidias. I do not know the meaning of the tortoise.

The Eleans are the only people who have a temple to Hades. It is opened once a year, only the priest is allowed inside, and the reason is this. When Herakles was besieging the Pylos whose ruins we saw on the road from Olympia, Athena came to help him. In those days Hades had a temple at Pylos and came to the defense of the city. If Hades found his worship at Pylos acceptable, the Eleans felt that his rites ought to be established in Pylos’s mother city Elis.

There is also a temple for Fortuna at Elis. Her image is enormous, and stands outside the sanctuary proper. It is of gilded wood, but the face, hands, and feet are of marble.

To the left of this temple is a small shrine to Sosipolis. The painting inside is of a dream. It depicts Sosipolis as a boy in a blue robe on which stars are painted. He holds the horn of Amaltheia. I saw no image of him as the sacred serpent, or with Ilithyia.

There is a statue of Poseidon in the residential part of Elis. He is a beardless young man with crossed legs, leaning with both hands on a spear. He is dressed by the Eleans in a tunic of linen, over which there is a flaxen khlamys and a cloak of wool. This is Poseidon of Samikon in Triphylia, brought here as a trophy. The Eleans say that it is an image of Satrapas, one of the names of Korybas, and not Poseidon at all. Poseidon to the inland Greeks is the Earth Shaker; to the Greeks of the islands and ports he is a god of the sea. Pyttalos, indeed, said that Poseidon is the god of walls, and it was his opinion that this dressed statue was of an Olympic victor, and that a gaggle of religious widows and wives with nothing better to occupy their time had set it up here to add awe and flash—here he made a curious sign with his hand, probably obscene—to the neighborhood.

The houses hereabout had walled gardens and were set among trees. I saw a splendid wild red of late roses through a gate, with a fall of petals beneath the bush and their musk loose in the air. There was also an old herm from the time of Alexander, and a sundial. Through the inner gate I could see Persian chickens in a yard, and a cart horse gone white around the muzzle munching fodder from a rick.

On the acropolis