CHAPTER 2: Thebes.

The bus winds through the deserted streets of Thebes, and drops us off at a corner in the shade of the bus station, a brown nondescript building in the center of town. I step off the bus into a lazy afternoon and grab my black travel pack from the stack of suitcases thrown on the ground.

A woman standing next to me screams, and as I try to move away from her, grabs me by the sleeve as if she expects me to help her. The man she’s with steps forward to confront the ticket agent, who shouts back at both of them, then looks me off. The bus driver jumps out and shouts at the man. The woman, who’s dressed in a loose plain smock and sandals, closes her eyes and screams again, her toothless mouth gaping. I jerk my sleeve from her and back away. I’m expecting an exchange of fists, but the driver gets back in the bus and pulls out with the ticket agent standing in the doorway, refusing to let them aboard. The woman’s third scream sends a shiver through me, then she turns on me and shouts what I interpret to be an obscenity. I move on down the street away from this ominous beginning to my stay in Thebes.

While I try to recover and assess my predicament, I survey the town. I'm half a mind to give up on Thebes and move on to Delphi, but I'm afraid to return to the bus station. Thebes is located on a long sloping plateau overlooking an agricultural valley. I see a tractor parked on main street. All the businesses are closed. No tourist shop in sight. The light traffic along Pindarou Street isn’t bothersome, and I get a feeling of being in a sleepy village. No sign of the distraught woman and her companion. The air is clean, quite a change from Athens. Thebes seems strangely familiar. It isn’t just the cotton fields on the way here. Something elusive, I'm not sure what.

When Oedipus arrived in Thebes, he'd came from the oracle at Delphi just ninety kilometers to the west. He had killed four men on the way. One of them unbeknownst to him was his father, the king of Thebes. Another got away and would cause him untold trouble years later. Oedipus cleansed himself in a spring at the edge of town and met the Sphinx, a monster with the body of a winged lion and the head and bosom of a woman. The Sphinx held the city under siege. She had positioned herself on a mountain to the west and when someone approached, she’d swoop down, ask a riddle and if they didn’t answer correctly, she would kill and eat them. Her question was: “What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening but speaks with one voice?” Oedipus answered, “Man. He crawls on all fours as a child, walks upright as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age.”

This single event, a bizarre happenstance much like a scene from a fairy tale, inserted at a key point in a story otherwise marked by its real-life qualities, asks us to look deeper into Oedipus. The Sphinx’s riddle was a restatement of an inscription above the door of the temple of Apollo at Delphi from where Oedipus had just come, “Know Thyself.” The meaning of the inscription is "to know you are a man and not a god, to understand the limitations of mortal life." To put yourself on par with an immortal was highly offensive to the Greek gods, and they punished this presumptuousness swiftly and dramatically. Oedipus’ answer showed he knew the lot of mankind, and by inference, his own limitations. But what followed also showed that having that much self-knowledge is not enough.

By answering the Sphinx’s question, Oedipus opened the gateway to his own ruin. He won the hand of the queen of Thebes, who was his biological mother. When Oedipus’ parents gave him as a child to the shepherd to be exposed on Mt. Kithaeron, Oedipus was essentially born again, the mystery-shrouded mountain becoming his second mother. From that time forth, he had a dual nature. The first was the way he presented himself to the world, as the prince of Corinth where he was raised, his persona and all his self-knowledge. His second nature was biological, hidden, more truly him. He was the biological child of the queen of Thebes, the woman who became his wife.

Oedipus is the Rosetta stone which allows us to go beyond the limits of traditional self-knowledge. Sophocles’ chorus of Theban elders says as much in his play Oedipus Tyrannus:  

You [Oedipus] are my great example, you, your life

your destiny, Oedipus, man of misery--I count no man blest.[2]

Sophocles’ actual words are even more specific. He uses the ancient Greek, paradeigm, paradeigm. Sophocles saw Oedipus as a lesson or warning for all men. Knowing this, two things we can say immediately. First, we all have a dual nature, and secondly, our destiny is predictable but unavoidable. Both, most troubling insights. The oracle at Delphi told Oedipus he would kill his father and marry his mother, a script he performed to perfection soon after. By trying to avoid his destiny and not returning to Corinth, he fulfill it.

Only days before my near-fatal confrontation with my father, I saw Sophocles’ play Oedipus Tyrannus while at college. It was my warning and the events that followed brought me ever closer to the Oedipus myth.

George, the hotel clerk, leads me down a dark hall to a room with two single beds. Since I’m the only one in the hotel, he puts me in a room next to the community toilette. “Just like having a private bathroom,” he says. 

For several years George made his living as a sculptor.  

I can’t see the main street from my room, but I can hear it. I lay my backpack on top of a little rack inside the door and unload some of my clothes. The siesta is over and motorbikes are coming out. My room overlooks a small courtyard with a sagging clothesline from which swing a woman’s bra and panties.  

The area around Thebes was inhabited by hunting and gathering tribes during the Paleolithic age. Nearby, archaeologists have found stone tools dating to 12,000 BC, but permanent settlements in Boeotia Nome started in the Neolithic Age (7000 - 2800 BC) with the introduction of agriculture and cattle breeding.[3] One of the earliest references to Thebes is in the Homeric hymn To Apollo where the poet calls it a “forest covered abode,”[4] but this epithet certainly doesn’t apply today. To the north lies the Ionian plain where I saw cotton farms on the way in. Further to the west lies the Kopaic Basin where, during the late Bronze age, a swamp was drained and turned into a productive agricultural valley.

According to legend, Thebes was founded around 1400 BC by Kadmos, who was from Tyre in Phoenicia. Tyre is only sixty-five kilometers from Nazareth were Jesus spent his childhood 1,400 years later. Kadmos left Tyre in search of his sister, Europa, who had been kidnapped by Zeus. Kadmos couldn’t find her, so he went to Delphi to see if Apollo would help him. Apollo told him to forget his sister, and instead follow a sacred cow to where she first laid down, and there found a city. Kadmos followed these instructions and founded Thebes. He named the center of the city the Kadmia. Around the Kadmia, he built walls with seven gates.

The site was inhabited by a serpent who killed many of Kadmos’ men. Kadmos slew the “dragon,” an offspring of Ares, the god of war, and upon the advice of Athena, buried its teeth (Athena called them “snaky corn”): 

... There lay the dragon stretched on the ground, dead, and over the corpse furious Ares shouted in heavy anger. ... Now he [Kadmos] fathered the fruit of death inside a helmet of bronze, the grim harvest of the creature’s jaws. Then he drew upon the land the humped plow of Pallas from her holy place in those parts, and plowed a battle-breeding furrow in the bright earth, and sowed long lines of the poison-casting teeth.[5]

Shortly, giants sprouted from the earth, fully armored and primed for battle They were called “Sparti,” sown-men:  

One shot up with head high, shaking the top of a mailcoated breast; one with jutting head stretched a horrid shoulder over the opening earth; another bent forward above ground as far as the midnipple, one again rose on the ground half-finished and lifted a soil-grown shield; another shook a nodding plume before him and showed not yet his chest; while still creeping up slowly from his mother’s flanks he showed fight against fearless Cadmos, clad in the armour he was born in. O what a great miracle![6]

Kadmos threw rocks at them, and true to their Ares nature, they started fighting amongst themselves, all but five dying in the ensuing battle.

One of Kadmos’ daughters married Echion, the leader of the Sparti. Kadmos was Oedipus’ great great grandfather on his father’s side, and his great grandfather on his mother’s side. Thus Oedipus was a descendent of the serpent and Ares himself.

George was right about the size of Thebes. It’s much bigger than I originally thought. The center of Thebes is isolated on a pear-shaped plateau, a kilometer long, half a kilometer wide and sloping downward to the north, the top of the pear. From there, the hill drops rapidly to the residential district. The city sprawls to the north onto the plains and the agricultural valley. Deep ravines bound the center of town on the west and east, the steep banks covered with brown grass.

The mountains on the far side of it are purple silhouettes in the distance. One of them, a small bald peak glows light tan in the sun, a  pyramid-shaped mountain. I pull out my own map to see if I can identify it. It’s name is Phicium, obviously from Sfinx or Sphinx. I’ve just located the “Mountain of the Sphinx.”  

The sound of cars is everywhere now, mostly teenagers honking and waving at friends. Standing here at the edge of the hill staring across the farm field at Sphinx mountain with the sound of young voices behind me, I realize what is so familiar about this place and the reason I’ve fallen in love with Thebes. Thebes is a ‘50s town, like my hometown during my youth. It’s outdoorsy and motor vehicles rule the male social life. Even the farm fields to the north remind me of where I lived as a kid.

My father could never talk to me in words. He used a form of symbolic communication encrypted in action. It's taken decades to decode his actions during our crucial times together. I’m much like a Greek seer trying to divine from the rustle of tree leaves, or perhaps Oedipus answering the Sphinx riddle.

When my mother stopped him short of killing himself, my father walked from the bedroom out of the house and into the backyard where he started rotating the tractor’s large rear tires. These tires are formidable objects weighing several hundred pounds and filled with water instead of air. We always used at least three people handling them. But my father was doing it by himself. My mother saw him in this dangerous act and asked me to help him.

Since he couldn’t talk to me reasonably, and had been stopped in the act of loading the rifle, he had chosen a symbolic act, one which could have killed both of us. While my father and I dueled with the tires, I remember the sun beating down on us, straining under the weight as we gripped the large lips of black tread protruding from the tire’s surface. I was dressed for town, just showered and freshly shaved. My father was sweating profusely, crying painful tears as I had never seen him do. “No son of mine has ever left home mad,” he said. He was in such utter agony. I didn’t and still don’t understand why.

We didn’t talk about the situation beyond his few simple words. I said nothing at all. I felt as if I no longer recognized this man, as Oedipus hadn’t recognized his father, this man who raised me, clothed and fed me from birth. I was concerned for my own safety around those huge teetering tires but unconcerned for him, though I then knew he was suicidal. I had to watch myself, control my own actions because I had a compulsion to steer him toward catastrophe. There in the heat of the afternoon sun, a profusion of sweat dripped from both of us, sweat which could just as easily have come from the life-and-death tension between us, a part of me was killing my father, passing an unconscious signal, Do it, I don’t care, just do it. Like Oedipus, I was standing at the crossroads of my life, and though the blood didn’t flow from my father’s body and his life didn’t cease, I just as assuredly killed everything of him I could.

In the coming days, no one said anything about what had happened. I let it go myself and didn't try to leave home. It wasn't so much that I thought I had won the argument, but that I'd stood my ground. I was a young man coming into my own, and I had passed my first big test. My father's tears had been more of a nuisance than a concern. I thought they were just another ploy in his long train of attempts to control my life.

Not long afterward, I quit college and got married. I had always known the girl I married would have to be acceptable to my mother. We'd always been close. My wife would have to have my mother’s values. It didn’t take long to find her. I found a girl from my own home town whose family was originally from the south, as was mine. Her religious views were the same as my mother's. I remember the first time I kissed that young woman. It was as if I'd struck a tuning fork, the mesmerizing buzz in my head set in perfect pitch by that kiss. After the trouble with my father, I married a woman who was the imagine of my mother, accomplishing symbolically what Oedipus experienced literally. He lived on in ignorant bliss until learning the truth about himself. My time was also coming.

---

During early evening, I step outside the hotel to experience Thebes' nightlife. George sits with a group of men out in front of the hotel. After talking with him a bit, I stroll the streets around the courthouse plateia which is thickly populated with milling people. Large groups sit in chairs outside the tavernas, the warm evening air carrying clouds of cigarette smoke toward bright stars overhead. The two main streets are a block apart and one-way, one going south, the other north, and are bumper-to-bumper with creeping cars. Kids are everywhere, adults everywhere. A festive mood predominates.

Thebes has put on a new face and no longer looks like my small California farm-town of the '50s. Tonight it has an unmistakable European flavor, hordes of people clog the sidewalks making the street the only possible place to walk. The tables out front of the restaurants are packed, and the women have come out. Groups of young men and women sit together, the ratta-tat-tat of Greek flowing freely. The air is full of horns and sirens.

The commotion centers at a Communist rally, half a block from the hotel. The Communists blare a continuous stream of taped patriotic music with a religious quality, the irresistible marching spirit of humanity. I could be converted this evening. The national election is this Sunday, day after tomorrow.

A man gets knocked down by a slow moving car then argues heatedly with the driver. Dirtied his pants, but he isn’t injured. The military has overrun Thebes. All the young soldiers are from a training base close by. They populate the tavernas and roam the streets in gangs.

---

Back in the hotel as I lie between the cool sheets, the Communists silence the loudspeaker, and soft night noises loft though my open balcony doors. The voices from the plateia also fade leaving only the occasional sound of a car or motorbike. I hear a lone siren. The glow of lights above the rooftops slowly dims.

 

8 Oct, Friday

During the night, I have to use two heavy blankets to keep warm, and wake to pigeon voices, their soft coos and warbles coming through my partially open patio doors. I have a splitting headache but rise early to see the sun come up and get an early start at the museum. For breakfast I have a bunch of grapes in my room, then step out into the coolness of early morning. 

I grab a greasy goat-cheese pita from the German who runs a little kiosk out front of the museum. The museum is a flat-topped building inside a fenced courtyard at the northern end of the pear-shaped hill. A huge stone 13th century AD Frankish Tower looms over the entire complex. I pay just inside the wrought-iron gate and enter the building alone. The museum is vacant except for me and the attendants, all women. When I speak to one of them in English, she confers with the women next to her and answers in a way that tells me she didn’t understand. I try a little Greek but that confuses her even more. A woman follows me from room to room, my footsteps echoing among the stone statues and display cases. I hear women whispering about me.

Another interesting display is the Oriental cylinder-seals made of lapis lazuli, forty-two of which were found in the “Treasure Room” of the old Kadmia.[8]  

Also on display are several ivory plaques blackened by fire. Archaeologists believe ancient Thebes was destroyed by fire around 1225 BC. 

A religious ritual at Thebes is depicted in a huge fresco that covered an entire wall in the palace, forty-two feet in length, a life-size procession of women bearing votive offerings of lilies, papyrus and wildflowers. They wear long flounced skirts, short-sleeved jackets with open bosoms, their large breasts protruding erotically.  

But I’m most affected by the jewelry. Perhaps it’s the young women walking about the museum who have triggered my reaction. Through the jewelry I sense the presence of Oedipus’ daughters, Antigone and Ismene. The jewelry consists of many necklaces, bracelets, earrings. They are made of gold, agate and lapis lazuli. Did the jewelry belong to Antigone and Ismene? A curious thought occurs to me. Women leave behind jewelry and art, men leave behind the weapons of war.

I ask a young woman if she knows where the seven gates of ancient Thebes were located. She speaks English in a high-pitched, singsong voice with a shocking nasal quality. She says she’ll show me, takes me outside, through the museum gate. I rather naively anticipate a guided tour around the exterior of the ancient city, even hope for a little romance. But once we hit the sunlight, she suddenly seems rushed, anxious to get rid of me. “One kilometer. Gates everywhere. Ask anyone.” She scurries back indoors.

Right. How do I say “gate” in Greek? I strike out on my own using the map in a guidebook I bought in the museum. I find one gate here at the edge of the hill. It’s the Borrhaiai or Northern Gate. The hill area of the central city has been shaded in on the map and labeled, KADMIA. The stone-walled Kadmia lies between Dirce and Strophia torrents, and is isolated from the rest of town by virtue of the lay of the land just as it was 3300 years ago. The major roads, through which traffic enters and exits Thebes, are at the same locations as the roads of antiquity. This hill, which I’ve been talking about ever since I got here, is where Kadmos’ cow laid down. The ancient city is under my feet.  

As I walk toward the center of town, I see a grown man on a motorbike doing a two block wheelie, the blare of his exhaust shattering the quiet murmur of the wind and chatter of birds. I stop at the corner of Pindarou and Oidipodos Streets to stare through a chain-link fence at the excavated ruins of the House of Kadmos. I spot a hole in the fence and crawl through, hoping no one will catch me.

Deciduous trees grow at the far edge of the site, and volunteer shrubs pock the ancient Mycenaean remains. It’s small, fenced-in, intimate. Archaeologists found a palace workshop for manufacturing jewelry, working gold and carving ivory, at this site. Some of the jewelry was unfinished, as if work had been stopped suddenly.

We have no description of this palace, but Homer describes another from the same period that could serve just as well. He sees it through the eyes of Odysseus:

Through all the rooms, as far as he could see,
tall chairs were placed around the walls and strewn 
with fine embroidered stuff made by the women.
Here were enthroned the leaders ...
drinking and dining, with abundant fare.
Here too were boys of gold on pedestals
holding aloft bright torches of pitch pine
to light the great rooms and the nighttime feasting.
And fifty maids-in-waiting of the household
sat by the round mill grinding yellow corn,
or wove upon their looms, or twirled their distaffs,
flickering like the leaves of a poplar tree,
while drops of oil glistened on linen weft.[9]

I have lunch across the street from the ruins of the House of Kadmos at a little fast-food restaurant at the corner of Pindarou and Oidipodos Streets, a burger place popular with the younger set. It’s new, modern, very American. I listen to disco music while eating my dish of fried chicken chunks and French fries. This is a nice place to people watch. The hustle-bustle of young Greeks is everywhere. I look out the huge windows on the north and east sides of the restaurant at the traffic. All the vehicles along the grid-locked streets have their horn going at once, cars, buses, tractors. The cars are fairly new, Audi, Peugeot, Hyundai, Ford, Mercedes, Mitsubishi, a Nissan Taxi. I watch a man get a traffic ticket. He argues heatedly with a policeman who writes a while, argues a while. The man shouts continuously. They’re both red in the face. Young men sit at the tables outside. No young women sit with them. I see women walking together, women with kids.

---

I walk back up Epameinondou Street, but just before I get to the hotel, I turn west down Oidipodos Street. It descends sharply into the ravine I saw yesterday, but which today I realize is Dirce torrent. This torrent was famous in antiquity. Pindar (522-438 BC), a native of Thebes, mentioned it frequently in his odes. At the foot of the hill, I turn left along the side of the road and immediately find what I’m looking for. 

I sit in the grass on the side of the hill west of Dirce torrent, looking back at the Kadmia, Oidipodos Street a black stripe through white buildings. 

Every morning before sunup, George used to run a couple of miles up this dirt road with all his clothes off, even when it snowed, he said. I’d be concerned about snakes, myself. I hear Greece has a lot of adders.

I see several holes burrowed into the ground, small round openings to large cavernous interiors, seven, eight feet deep, and very dark. This is Lower Thebes, which was mentioned by Homer in his narrative of the Trojan War.

Some fifteen years after Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, a plague ravaged Thebes, and Oedipus learned from the oracle at Delphi that it was caused by a pollution within the city. The murderer of Laios was still among them. Oedipus turned to one of the greatest figures in all Greek myth, the blind Theban seer, Teiresias, to learn the murderer’s identity. Though Teiresias was blind, he could see into the human soul and reveal the future. Oedipus, though he could see, was internally blind. But aged Teiresias at first refused to reveal the murderer’s identity, touting Oedipus with metaphors of his, Oedipus’, blindness. Under treats of physical violence, Teiresias finally told Oedipus point blank that he was the murderer. Oedipus went into a rage, accusing Teiresias of plotting to overthrow him. Not until two shepherds, one from Thebes who took baby Oedipus from Jocasta and the other who gave him to the king of Corinth, were brought forward was the irrefutable truth revealed. Oedipus had indeed killed his father, Laios, and married his mother. Jocasta then committed suicide, and Oedipus blinded himself and left Thebes to wander as a blind beggar.

In the search for the murderer, Oedipus had experienced the classic quest for self. Though he could see externally, he was blind within and did not know his own true identity. When Oedipus could see within, see his internal pollution, he blinded himself to prevent seeing the external results, his family and kingdom all built upon the murder of his father.

Oedipus and Jocasta had four kids. The two girls, Antigone and Ismene were still very young. The two boys, Polyneices and Eteocles were the oldest and fought over the throne after Oedipus vacated it. Initially they agreed to share the throne, each being king on alternate years, but once Eteocles became king, he refused to step down. Polyneices then went into exile in Argos and formed an alliance to wage war on Thebes and regain the throne. Years later, he made his assault in the famous battle of Seven Against Thebes. Seven armies from Argos, one for each Theban gate, filled the Aonion plane to the north with the blaze of bronze, and they attacked the city. After the initial assault failed, Polyneices and Eteocles agreed to do battle one-on-one to prevent further bloodshed.

Sophocles emphasizes the physical intimacy of Oedipus’ children, presenting them as a near unity. He goes so far as to newly coin words especially for the descriptive task.[11] It’s as if Sophocles is saying that by having children with his own mother, Oedipus doubled back on his own life to begat himself, four different aspects of the Oedipus personality. The inseparable unity of his sons is then symbolic of Oedipus’ own dual nature. Their hatred for each other is Oedipus’ hatred of himself.

Polyneices’ and Eteocles’ battle ended in the only way possible, the only way two halves of a whole can die. They killed each other simultaneously with a “twofold blow.”[12] Their struggle to achieve the status of their father, to gain his throne, led to war and is symbolic of all struggle between men. This is another of the lessons we learn from Oedipus, the great Rosetta Stone. In the first battle we kill our father and in the second, the search for self, we destroy our lives and wander aimlessly, and in the final struggle, we kill ourselves.

The thought sends a chill through me as I realize, I’ve lost my family and my job and now wander about the Greek countryside as did old blind Oedipus.

Creon, Antigone’s uncle, had assumed the throne following the death of her two brothers. He ordered Eteocles’ body cremated with full ceremony, but forbid funeral rites for Polyneices because he had tried to destroy Thebes. Creon was motivated by the welfare of the state, “the ship that bears us safe.”[14] But Antigone felt allegiance to an even higher authority, that of the great Earth Goddess, Gaia, who demanded all dead be returned to her.

To fully understand any man, it’s necessary to understand his feminine side. With Oedipus, it’s necessary to understand his daughters. The two sisters also form a subdivision of the central unity of the Oedipus personality. Antigone was high-minded, defiant, passionate in her convictions. Though she had inherited her father’s stubbornness and dogged determination, her quest was not of the ego. “‘Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving,”[15] she told Creon. Antigone paid for her piety with her life. Creon imprisoned her in a cave for the rest of her days, and she committed suicide.

Antigone’s younger sister, Ismene, was more practical and recognized her limitations within the patriarchal society, the frailty of her sex, and was passive, even obedient to Creon’s edict. Though Antigone and Ismene clashed over defying Creon, it was not a clash of the ego, and their differences never resulted in violence. Antigone’s self-righteous determination was counterbalanced by Ismene’s uncertainty and self-doubt. Weak, submissive Ismene was the only one to survive. She didn’t have the heroic temper.

I know I’ll have to come to terms with this feminine stuff on this journey. And perhaps it can help to explain the change in me resulting from my confrontation with my father. We were big hunters on the farm, and though I never felt comfortable with it, I killed a lot. When I was twenty-one, my father bought a deer rifle for me, and we went into the Sierra Nevada that fall to get a buck. I remember sitting on a huge boulder overlooking a meadow on a mountainside, hearing the frantic animal cascading down through the brush toward me, snorting like a freight train. I leveled my new rifle at where he would enter the clearing and waited. What I didn’t count on was my emotional response when the big antlered buck moved into my sights. My heart raced and my breathing was worse than his. I shot, but if I’d hit him it would have been pure accident. I didn’t know it until that moment, but I could no longer kill. It was no longer within my nature.

The sun has gone behind the mountain and casts a long shadow past me halfway up the hill to the edge of the glowing Kadmia. I’ve been sitting here worrying about snakes long enough. Time to trudge back up Oidipodos Street.

---

When I get back to the hotel, I see George sitting behind the desk. He tells me about his days as a sculptor. Ten years ago, he made two copper plates with relief’s of Kadmos and Oedipus. The plates are on display on a wall in the pizzeria downstairs. “Can I see them?” I ask. George is pleased. I’m prepared for some mediocre craft work, but they’re actually quite well done. 

The plate of Kadmos shows him with Harmonia, his divine wife, standing beside spray from the Fountain of Dirce. The serpent, which formerly inhabited the site, is in the background lurching toward them. George depicts Oedipus engaged with the Sphinx. He wears a large flat-brimmed hat.

I’m still sweating profusely from the long walk in the sun, and while taking pictures, sweat streams into my eyes and drips on the floor. By the time I get back to my room, my shirt is soaked through.

---

I eat dinner at a dark little restaurant George recommends just down the street from the hotel. The waiter doesn’t speak English and motions for me to talk to the cook, but he doesn’t speak English either, so I seize the opportunity to polish up on my pointing and grunting. Sometimes I’m too hungry to take a chance on my Greek. I set alone at a table with chairs for six. I have a plate of chopped pork, a salata and a sliced half-loaf of hard bread. Eight soldiers, at a table on the far side of the room, have finished their dinner and smoke cigarettes. Their tan uniforms are wrinkled and soiled from a hard day’s work.

 

9 Oct, Saturday

I wake to the restless sounds of pigeons on the adjoining rooftop and a cloud of chatter from sparrows in the trees on Epameinondou Street. Dressing slowly, I breakfast on peaches and grapes. When I first got to Thebes, I bought a kilo each. They sit on the small shelf in the night stand, slowly rotting. I’ve been thinking about leaving Thebes today but have decided to stay here to watch election returns with George tomorrow evening. I feel comfortable in Thebes, and to be quite honest about it, I’m again apprehensive of moving on. My insecurity is in full bloom.

I stand before the hotel staring blankly at the slow-rising sun as it comes over the two story buildings and between the limbs of trees. The only evidence of activity is shopkeepers stacking boxes of fruit and vegetables.

I stop to rest at the top of Magalo Kastelli, the hill where legend tells us Polyneices and Eteocles are buried.[16] Thebes is not as clean as I first thought. They dump their trash in vacant lots, on hills, in archeological digs. The torrents are filled with construction debris, chunks of cement  and trash. At the edge of every empty lot is a dog toilette. 

Among the inscribed stones, I see human excrement and discarded male underwear.

My life may have certain parallels with Oedipus, but Oedipus’ life was in many ways a parallel of an ancient god’s. The lives of the gods were frequently archetypes of mortal existence. Thus artisans worked in the tradition of Hephaestus. If Oedipus’ second mother was Mt. Kithaeron, his second father was the god who roamed tree-laden, mystery-shrouded Mt. Kithaeron: Dionysus.[17] Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, was more than just the patron of theatre, and here in Thebes, as the god of wine, he exhibited his more bizarre nature.

Dionysus was known as the god of frenzy. He traveled in the company of maenads and satyrs, who dressed in flowing garments and held orgiastic rituals where they ripped apart wild animals and ate their raw flesh. Their favorite haunt was Mt. Kithaeron.

Years before Oedipus was born, Laios had been told by Apollo that he was not to have a child by Jocasta or the child would grow up to kill him. But one night, Laios yielded to a wine-induced, Bacchic passion and made love to Jocasta anyway.

What is so striking about these two episodes, is the role wine played in each of them. Wine was a metaphor for Dionysus. These two episodes in Oedipus’ life, his conception and first inkling of his true nature, resulted from the actions of men under the influence of wine.

While Dionysus was a child, the Titans, an ancient race of gods, killed him. With their faces whitened with chalk like spirits of the dead, they surprised Dionysus as he played. They first dismembered his body, then boiled and roasted his limbs over an open fire and ate them. Zeus was attracted by the smell of roasting and chased them back to Tartarus, where he had previously banished them by hurling lightening bolts.[18] He salvaged the heart of Dionysus and swallowed it himself. At the time, Zeus was enamored with unconquerably-beautiful Semele, the youngest daughter of Kadmos and Harmonia. After eating Dionysus’ heart he re-inseminated Dionysus’ spirit into Semele.

But Dionysus’ birth travails were not over. During her seventh month of pregnancy, Semele, mislead by jealous Hera, asked Zeus to come to her, a mortal, as he came to Hera, his immortal wife. Zeus was horrified because he knew what would happen, but he had already agreed to do anything she wished when he lay with her to begat Dionysus. Zeus had always come to Hera as a lightening bolt, and when he came to Semele as such, he fried her. Zeus rescued the unborn child from her smoking carcass, and sewed the premature infant into his own thigh. Thus Dionysus was twice-born and had a dual nature.  Oedipus’ dual nature can be viewed as a mortal reflection of the god’s.

Dionysus’ second birth was here at Thebes, and Thebes became the primary site of his cult. But he wasn’t raised here. He was sent away, as was Oedipus, and nursed by Semele’s sister, Ino, in Orchomenos, northwest of Thebes on the far side of Kopais Basin. When he got older, Zeus changed Dionysus into a kid and had Hermes take him to Nysa, a mythical mountain, where three Nyssian nymphs raised the goat-child in a cave. He was tutored by an aged effeminate male figure named Silenos.[19] These nymphs became the maenads who followed him and practiced his frenzied rites.

After recovering from a Hera-induced madness, Dionysus returned to Thebes and stood by the Fountain of Dirce, where I was yesterday ruminating over the fate of Oedipus and his sons and daughters. In Euripides play, The Bacchanals, Dionysus himself describes his return to Thebes:

I to this land of Thebes have come, Zeus’ Son  
Dionysus, born erstwhile of Cadmus’ child
Semele, brought by levin-brand to travail.
My shape from God to mortal semblance changed,
I stand by Dirce’s spring, Ismenus’ flood.
I see my thunder-blasted mother’s tomb
Here nigh the halls: the ruins of her home
Smoulder with Zeus’s flame that liveth yet ...[20]

The connection between Oedipus and Dionysus is made even closer by the fate of Pentheus, brother of Oedipus’ great grand father. Pentheus, king of Thebes, didn’t accept Dionysus as a god. Enraged by Pentheus’ indifference, Dionysus drove the women of Thebes mad, and enlisted them in his orgiastic ritual on Mt. Kithaeron. During their bloodthirsty frenzy with the maenads, they caught and dismembered Pentheus. His own mother returned to Thebes with his blood-dripping head on her thyrsus. Though Oedipus’ fate was severe, it wasn’t as dramatic as that of his ancient uncle.

Dionysus also got married. Though Oedipus’ dual life has strange parallels to Dionysus, Dionysus didn’t find it necessary to kill his father. He had other methods of replacing Zeus in his mother’s bed. He and his wife took on primordial form. He metamorphosed into a snake; she became his daughter. He visited her in a cave, and “she bore him to himself as his own son.”[21] Thus simultaneously he mated with his daughter and his mother. Oedipus’ life was markedly like this, doubling back on his own life to mate with his mother and begat four children, each of them, at least in my mind, aspects of his own personality.

The world of Dionysus was forever the world of women, forever the feminine side of man. Coming to terms with him is not a pleasant thought since he was the god of madness. Madness has had its impact on my family. I’ve had a brush with it myself, though I'd prefer to ignore that on this journey

---

I continue my exploration of modern Thebes. Thebes has many new residential areas and many which are old and rundown.

Many of the businesses are permanently closed. Many construction projects are abandoned, renovations left half finished.

After a full day on the streets in the hot sun, I reenter the coolness of my room. The flutter and coo of pigeons just off my patio, their deep-throated language, soothes me.

 

10 Oct, Sunday

I lie in bed recovering from a dream. I usually have visual, movie-like dreams, but this morning I dreamed of a voice lofting up from deep darkness speaking of murder. The voice reminds me of Teiresias, the blind seer of ancient Thebes, “whose soul grasps all things, the lore that may be told and the unspeakable, the secrets of heaven and the low things of earth...”[22] Teiresias thought it best not to reveal this hidden self-knowledge. He tried to get Oedipus to give up the search for Laios’ murderer.

Alas, how dreadful to have wisdom where it profits not the wise! ... Let me go home; most easily will you bear your own burden to the end and I mine if you will consent. ... for you are all without knowledge.[23]

After Oedipus coerced Teiresias to reveal the murderer’s identity, the truth ruined him. That’s what Oedipus tells us about self-knowledge. It’s useless if not outright dangerous to know your true self. Apollo had already told Oedipus his fate before he killed his father and married his mother. Oedipus could do nothing to avoid it, his every action playing into divine hands.

In my dream the voice was recanting my past and predicting my future. I can only remember the end of a sentence, “... after all, you have killed before.” At that point I shut off the dream and woke. I’ve had many dreams like this in my life, dreams where I’m wracked with guilt over having killed someone. The knowledge that I’m a murderer comes from a deep-rooted literal guilt. During this morning’s dream, I believed the voice. But after waking, like Oedipus hearing the words of Teiresias, I’m not so sure.

---

On my way out of the hotel, I tell George that in a couple of days I plan to visit the Cleft Way, the place in Phocis Nome on the road from Thebes to Delphi, where Oedipus killed Laios. George doesn’t buy it. “Everyone knows where Oedipus killed Laios,” he says. “It’s the first thing school kids learn about the legend.” George drags out a map and shows me where the murder took place in the northeast part of the city . “He killed Laios at Oedipus’ Spring, right here in Thebes.”

The Thebans brought Hektor's bones here because of an oracle saying the bones would provide “innocent wealth.” I’ll encounter the myth of Hektor again on his home soil where he was killed by Achilles, provided of course I do make it to Turkey.

According to Sophocles, and with all due respect to George, Oedipus killed Laios in the deserted countryside where the three roads to Delphi, Thebes and Daulis converge, a place called the Cleft Way, or as it has been more recently named, Megas Hill.[25] When I get to Delphi, I’ll rent a car and drive there. I’ll wait until then because the Cleft Way is much closer to Delphi than Thebes.

After visiting the spring, I come back to the hotel and talk to George some more. George recently married a young woman from Albania, a general’s daughter. George and his young wife have a two-month-old daughter themselves. George is forty-eight and lived his life as a single man, until recently. George is thin, a little taller than me and has gray hair which he combs over his balding head. George still longs for the single life but knows he’s married a good woman. In Albania, family life is all important. She has a job and works very hard to buy things for their home, but she’s young and afraid to go anywhere, even with him. He loves to play with his new baby girl in the evenings. “I can’t understand what came over me,” he tells me. “After forty-seven years, I got married.” He looks startled, like he’s just realized what he’s done. “You fell in love, George,” I say. He flashes a puzzled smile.

George is a socialist and not particularly fond of the States. He doesn’t like Greece's New Democratic party, which has been in office the last three years. He wants Papandreou back, the seventy-something old man with the young flight-attendant wife. He says Papandreou doesn’t take any shit off America and the New Democrats give America everything it wants. Robert Kaplan in his book Balkan Ghosts, provides a quote from a Greek politician containing an unique insight into the personality of Andreas Papandreou:

“Andreas is like Oedipus.... As a boy he was very close to his mother. His revolt against his father continued well into manhood. Revolt against the father often means a general revolt against authority. In my opinion, Andreas was emotionally attracted to radical liberation struggles because of the anarchy they unleashed.”[26]

The observation is an interesting one. Like Papandreou, I’ve always been close to my mother. I was the only breast baby in our family of four boys. As a child, I slept with my mother and father until one night, which I can still remember, my father told me I was too old to sleep with them anymore and carried me from their bed, my mother’s bed, to the room where my older brother slept. I had always slept cuddled against my mother’s warm body. I held her silky hair between my fingers and rubbed it until I went to sleep. The ultimate silkiness of my mother’s hair, that purity of slickness, lulled me to sleep. I was hooked to and had depended on my mother’s body for my life’s nourishment and my internal peace. When my father carried me into the other bedroom and broke that bond, I graduated from my mother’s bed to my own baby bed, and he gave me my diploma.

My father may not have pined my ankles and sent me to Mt. Kithaeron to be exposed, but I sure felt abandoned. To replace my mother’s hair, he gave me the silk edge of a baby blanket to rub, but true silk was not even in the same league with the softness of my mother’s hair. Like Papandreou, I’m still close to my mother, but after my confrontation with my father and the anarchy it released, I’ve made an uneasy peace with authority, at least on the surface. Sometimes I detect a undercurrent of anger using me surreptitiously.

---

This evening the results of the Greek national election have been rolling in. The street out front of the hotel is filled with people. The plateia is a mob scene. TV sets out front of the tavernas have hordes of people gathered before them extending out into the streets. I walk along the sidewalk snacking on greasy gyros and sticking my nose in front of every TV I see. I’m particularly interested in how the Communists are doing. Cars cram all the parking spaces and move slowly through the crowd. Children chase each other. People eat, drink coffee, ouzo, talk, shout, argue, set off firecrackers.

I watch the cooks in the tavernas make gyros. First they grab a precooked pita, paste it with grease and throw it on the grill. Then they slice three wedges of tomato, cutting them directly on the pita with a long butcher’s knife. Then comes the precut onions, a few French fries and pork chunks which they cut with a long thin knife from the vertical turning spit. They add a little mustard, a splash of tsatsiki and a sprinkle of exotic spices. They fold the pita in half, closing it at the bottom to form a cone about the contents and wrap it in paper. That and a 330 ml Sprite is 350 drackmes. I have this at two different tavernas. I also have an ice cream cone from the disco restaurant for 100 dr. So for 800 dr ($3.50), I have dinner. Nothing fancy and with all the fat, a nutritionist’s nightmare, but I can’t complain about the taste.

I come back into the hotel and watch returns with George and a couple of his Greek buddies. George is all smiles. Seventy-four year old Papandreou has been returned to office after a three year absence. He makes a quick TV appearance with his thirty-something wife.

The Communists got four percent of the vote.

---

I lie in bed listening to fast traffic and sirens. Sirens mean nothing in Thebes, only an indication someone wants to make a lot of noise and a horn isn’t enough. I’m still apprehensive of being on the road, but I’ve got to suck it up and move on.

 

11 Oct, Monday

I’m up long before dawn packing for my bus trip to Delphi. This morning I had a dream about my daughter and son. It must have been triggered by my conversation with George this past evening about his baby daughter. God, I would give my life to see my daughter again. In my dream, I talked to my daughter and told her how much I miss her and my son, sat with my head in my hands crying. I woke from the dream and cried real tears here in Thebes, missing my son and daughter terribly.

The reason I’m so intent on finding the feelings I never felt the day my father grabbed the deer rifle is that I have a sense something inside me is suffering terribly. Although this morning it was about my kids, frequently I wake crying only for the dream to vanish without a trace, leaving no reason for my tears.

I think of Oedipus and how he never longed to see his sons. Antigone stayed with him in his blind wandering about the countryside and Ismene brought him news of Thebes from time to time, but Oedipus hated his sons. He put a death curse on both of them because he felt they had mistreated him. Oedipus complained Polyneices had once given him a bad cut of meat.

When Eteocles wouldn’t honor his agreement with his brother to share the throne, Polyneices went into exile in Argos, married and had a son, Thersander. Thersander avenged the death of his father by returning with an army from Argos called the Epigoni, the After-born. They sacked Thebes and