Athens: Ancient City of Stories

As an avid student of Rome, for me Athens is inescapable. The poetry, the drama, the teachers, the art, and the philosophy shaped the culture, history, and self-perception of the Romans. Much like the art historians who base much of their knowledge of Greek art on the surviving Roman copies, my knowledge of Athens is largely filtered through the writings and perceptions of the Eternal City. However focused my classics education may have been on the Italian peninsula, I still stumbled across many mentions of Athens and Greece during the course of it, more than I initially remembered.

Like many other 20^th century Americans, I first encountered the classical world through Edith Hamilton. When I was eleven years old and reading everything in sight, my father decided that my summer should have a more erudite focus than the Trixie Belden novels I had read to a nub. He took away my childish books, promising to return them later, and filled a box with two dozen classic novels that included Mark Twain, George Eliot, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Charlotte Bronte, Kipling, Plato, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, and, finally, Edith Hamilton and a copy of Aesop’s Fables. A copy of Mythology, leftover from my father’s own childhood, was easily the most readable book in the bunch. I read that one first and enjoyed it thoroughly. The characters were delightfully decadent. I also read Aesop’s fables that summer and especially remembered the fox and the grapes. They reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and I decided that if cultures so far from each other developed similar tales, then illustrating bad habits with animals must be something human beings would naturally do.

When I was 13, I took a trip from my former hometown to my new home in a large city. After visiting friends in my old hometown, their mother placed me on a plane and my mother told me on the telephone that it was a non-stop flight. I was reading my dad’s copy of Plato’s The Republic, and when the plane stopped, I naturally got off. No one was in sight to pick me up, so I curled up against a wall and finished the book. Looking up, I finally heard the announcement on the loudspeaker calling for me. I had gotten off the plane in the wrong city, and when I didn’t show up at the airport in my new home, my mother knew exactly where I was: curled up somewhere finishing my book. While I know I didn’t comprehend much of what Plato was talking about, I was so absorbed that I spent almost two hours in the wrong city without realizing it.

Despite a year of Latin in high school, I didn’t encounter Athens again until I started Latin with as an undergrad. For my Classics minor I took Mythology and read retellings and summaries of much of the corpus of Greek literature. The theater department also put on a production of Medea, which I attended. Although I never took Greek History, I also acquired the book and read much of it during another lazy, college summer.

My principle encounter with Athens during the course of graduate studies was when I studied the Second Sophistic era. The Second Sophistic takes place long after the fifth century, and in claiming that class, I may be making the similar conflation as Edith Hamilton, where everything in Greek is filed with classical Athens. In 2008, I took Greek 101 and 102 at the local community college, which served mostly to reinforce that I have a great deal more work to do. I look forward to it.

Bibliography

Aesop. Fables.

Balme, M. G., and Gilbert Lawall. Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Euripides, and Ruby Blondell. Women on the Edge: Four Plays. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Hamilton, Edith, and Steele Savage. Mythology. Boston: Little, Brown and, 1942. Print.

Plato, and Benjamin Jowett. Plato: The Republic. Norwalk, CT: Easton, 1980. Print.

Plautus, Titus Maccius., and Amy Richlin. Introduction. Rome and the Mysterious Orient: Three Plays by Plautus. Berkeley: University of California, 2005. Print.

Pomeroy, Sarah B. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.