Report to Grego (25 page)

B
y means of their struggles the Greeks sanctified each region, subordinated each to an exalted meaning which formed its definitive essence. By means of beauty and disciplined passion they converted each region's physical nature into something metaphysical. Pushing aside grass, soil, and stones, they discovered the region's cool, cool soul deep beneath the ground. This soul they embodied sometimes in a graceful temple, sometimes in a myth, and sometimes in a happy indigenous god.

For hours on end I gazed at Olympia's sacred landscape—its nobility and meditative tranquillity, the cheerful, welcoming valley between domesticated foothills which screen it from the fierce north wind, the scorching south wind, and leave it exposed only on the western side toward the water, whence arrives the cool sea breeze, ascending the course of the Alpheus. No other site in Greece incites a feeling of peace and concord in you so gently, so compellingly. With unerring eyes the ancients designated it as the place where all the Greek stocks would meet together in brotherhood every four years, and in so designating it they filled it with meaning and increased its tranquillity and its power to instigate reconciliation.

Greece was torn by jealousies, hatreds, civil wars. Democracies, aristocracies, and tyrannies exterminated one another. The closed gorges, sequestered islands, secluded coast lines, and small independent city-states created a single multiheaded organism rent by mutual hatred; and passions boiled in every breast. Then suddenly, every four years, garlanded heralds, the spondophoroi, set out from this sacred valley in summertime and ran to the farthest boundaries of the Greek world. They proclaimed the hieromenia, the “sacred month” of the games, declared a general truce, and invited friends and enemies alike to come to Olympia in order to compete.
From the whole of the Peloponnesus and continental Greece, from Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, and Thrace, from the shores of the Black Sea, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Cyrene, from Magna Graecia and Sicily, athletes and pilgrims sped to the sacred panhellenic cradle of sport. Slaves were not allowed to set foot here, nor were criminals, foreigners, or women. Only free Greeks.

No other people had comprehended sport's hidden and manifest value so perfectly. When life has succeeded by dint of daily effort in conquering the enemies around it—natural forces, wild beasts, hunger, thirst, sickness—sometimes it is lucky enough to have abundant strength left over. This strength it seeks to squander in sport. Civilization begins at the moment sport begins. As long as life struggles for preservation—to protect itself from its enemies, maintain itself upon the surface of the earth—civilization cannot be born. It is born the moment that life satisfies its primary needs and begins to enjoy a little leisure.

How is this leisure to be used, how apportioned among the various social classes, how increased and refined to the utmost? According to how each race and epoch solves these problems, the worth and substance of its civilization can be judged.

I walked back and forth among the ruins of the Altis, joyfully viewing the shell-bearing stones employed to build the temples. These stones have been smashed by Christians and devastated by earthquakes. Rains and Alphean floods have washed away their stunning iridescence. The statues have been burned for lime; few remain to us, but these suffice to console our minds. I picked two or three sprigs of mint which had sprouted in the hollow where Phidias's gold and ivory statue is reputed to have stood, and the eternal scent filled my fingers.

Man wrestled in this mystic place, but the gods wrestled here before him. Zeus fought Chronos, his father, in order to take away his kingdom. Apollo, the god of light, defeated Hermes in running and Ares in boxing—mind conquered time, light conquered the dark forces of fraud and violence. Heroes were the next to contend here, after the gods. Pelops came from Asia, defeated the bloodthirsty barbarian Oenomaus and wedded his horse-taming daughter Hippodamia. The advanced Ionian civilization, so full of serenity and grace, defeated the unpolished natives of this region, brought the horse under subjection, and solidified man's might.
Another hero, Heracles, having cleaned the Augean stables, came here to offer up great sacrifices to Zeus, the new god. With the ashes remaining from the victims he burned, he raised an altar and proclaimed the first Olympic games. This divine altar was raised continually higher with the ashes from new sacrifices, and Olympia became ever-increasingly the great workshop where the various Greek stocks forged their bronze bodies.

They did not do this simply to make these bodies beautiful. The Greeks never served art for its own sake. Beauty always had a purpose: to be of service to life. The ancients wanted their bodies strong and beautiful so that these bodies might be receptacles for balanced, healthy minds. And beyond this—the supreme purpose—so that they might defend the
polis.

For the Greeks, gymnastics was a required preparation for each citizen's life as a member of society. The perfect citizen was the man who by frequenting the gymnasium and palaestra was able to develop a body both strong and harmonious, in other words beautiful, and have this body ready to defend the Race. Look at a statue from the classic age and you know at once whether the man portrayed was free or a slave. His body discloses it. A serene bearing, passion that is perfectly disciplined, a beautiful athletic form: these characterize the free man. The slave is always portrayed with abrupt unbridled gestures and a body either fat or sickly. Dionysus, the god of intoxication, stands calmly by while around him the besotted sileni and satyrs, his slaves and inferiors, behave indecently and perform their obscene dances.

Harmony of mind and body—that was the Greeks' supreme ideal. Hypertrophy of one to the detriment of the other they considered barbaric. When Greece began to decline, the athlete's body began at the same time to hypertrophy and to kill his mind. Euripides was among the first to protest; he proclaimed what risks the spirit was running at the hands of athleticism. Later, Galen added his denunciation: “They eat, drink, sleep, evacuate their bellies, and roll in dust and mud—behold what life the athletes lead.” Heracles, the great martyr, who in the glorious years passed from exploit to exploit balancing mind and body to perfection, gradually degenerated into the huge-bodied, low-browed “winebibber and ox-eater.” And the artists, who in the great eras had created the ideal type of the youthful form, now took to representing
the athletic bodies they saw around them with raw realism, heavy and barbaric.

In Greece, as everywhere, once realism begins to reign, civilization declines. Thus we arrive at the realistic, magniloquent, and faithless Helleuistic era, which was devoid of suprapersonal ideals. From chaos to the Parthenon, then from the Parthenon back to chaos—the great merciless rhythm. Emotions and passions run wild. The free individual loses his powers of discipline; the bridle which maintained instinct in strict balance flies from his hands. Passion, emotionality, realism . . . A mystical, melancholy yearning suffuses the faces. The fearful mythological visions become merely decorative. Aphrodite undrapes herself like an ordinary woman, Zeus acquires roguishness and elegance, and Heracles regresses to a brute. After the Peloponnesian war Greece begins to disintegrate. Belief in the fatherland is lost; individual self-sufficiency triumphs. On the stage the protagonist is no longer God or the idealized youth, he is the wealthy citizen with his lascivious pleasures and passions—a materialist, skeptic, and libertine. Talent had already replaced genius; now good taste replaces talent. Art becomes filled with children, coquettish women, realistic scenes, and men either brutal or intellectual.

I climbed the hillock leading to the museum, hurrying to see Praxiteles' Hermes, the feats of Heracles, and the two marvelous pediments which have survived—hurrying, as though afraid that before I arrived, the soil might have swallowed these remains as well. Why? Perhaps because man's lofty toil transgresses the inhuman laws of eternity. (Thus our life and our endeavors acquire a tragic, heroic intensity. We have but a single moment at our disposal. Let us transform that moment into eternity. No other form of immortality exists.)

My heart relaxed when I encountered the museum's great hall. Apollo, Heracles, Nike, the centaurs, and the Lapithae were all glowing peacefully in the morning light, all still alive. I rejoiced. This world of ours follows extrahuman laws. We sense, in these fatal times in which it is our lot to live, that at any moment a bomb might fall and reduce man's most precious memorials to ashes. When we greet a work of art now, our pleasure is tightly interwoven with the danger of everlasting separation which overhangs that work.

Looking at the two great pediments here, you realize how accurately a certain Far Eastern sage formulated the purpose of art when he said, “Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.” These creative forces rage visibly beneath the transparent surface here, especially in the western pediment. The banquet has just terminated; the intoxicated centaurs have charged in order to seize the women of the Lapithae. One of them sprints forward and embraces a woman, at the same time squeezing her breast with his huge hand. She seems to have swooned from the pain, and also from a mysterious, indescribable delight. Elsewhere the combatants bite and stab one another. The beast has been let loose in a savage outburst of violent passion; age-old scenes somewhere between man and ape-man are revived before our eyes. A mystic tranquillity, however, extends over all this astonishing primitive passion, because standing with perfect composure in the midst of the frenzied people, invisible to all the combatants, is Apollo, his right arm, and only his right arm, stretched out horizontally.

Though the sculptor who created this great scene, a few years before the Parthenon, had already surpassed the virgin awkwardness of the archaic artist, he still had not reached the artistic perfection of the classic moment. He was still in the midst of the assault, he had not touched the summit, and he was burning with a passionate, impatient desire to attain victory. He had smashed one equilibrium but had not reached the next; full of panting impetuosity, he was racing toward the final destination. If this pediment moves us so profoundly, it is because it still has not attained man's highest summit, the summit of perfection. One is still able to discern the suffering, struggling hero.

There is still another pleasure here. On this pediment you distinguish all the ranks of the hierarchy: god, free men, women, slaves, beasts. God stands in the middle, erect and calm, lord of his strength. Though he sees the horror around him, he is not disturbed. He controls his wrath and passion without on the other hand remaining indifferent, for he calmly extends his arm and grants the victory to the party he likes. The free men—the Lapithae—also maintain the human stamp on their faces, maintain it as immobile as they can. They do not howl, do not fall prey to panic. They are men, however, not gods, and a slight pulsation on
their lips in addition to a wrinkle on the brow discloses that they are suffering. The women are suffering even more, but their pain merges unspeakably with a dark desire. In spite of themselves they seem glad to be seized by terrifyingly masculine brutes, glad to be shedding blood for their sakes. The slaves, on the other hand, are lounging about with presumptuous familiarity as they watch the others. They lack strict restraint. In the period when this pediment was created, these reclining forms at the edges could not represent gods. The gods would never have wallowed in such a way, never have forgotten their sacerdotal dignity. Finally we have the centaurs, the debauched drunken beasts. Howling and biting, they pounce upon the women and boys. The mind is absent and thus there is no force to impose order upon their strength or nobility upon their passion.

It is an extraordinary moment, this moment in which all the graduated ranks of life preserve their features intact. In this enmarbled moment all the elements coexist: the divine imperturbability, the free man's discipline, the beast's outburst, the realistic representation of the slave. A few generations afterwards the latter two, the lowest elements, were to rule. Realistic passion would spread out and disfigure both the free man and the gods. The rein would be left slack, and art would bolt and decline. From the dynamic tragicality of this Olympic pediment and the divine calm of the Parthenon we would arrive at the unbridled verbalism of Pergamum.

On this pediment we have the pleasure of seeing all the seeds of acme, pro-acme and post-acme coexisting in one conjoint flash. Perfection is a momentary equilibrium above chaos, a most difficult and dangerous balance. Throw a little weight to one side or the other, and it falls.

This pediment grants us still another pleasure. We look at it, and many questions arise. It came into being immediately after the Greek forces defeated the Persians and a happy wave of relief, pride, and strength poured over the entire land. Greece felt its might. The world around it and within it was renewed, gods and men were illuminated with a new light. Now everything else had to be renewed as well: temples, statues, paintings, poems. An everlasting memorial to the Greek victories over the barbarians had to be erected. What sculptural form was this memorial to take?

The great artist looks beneath the flux of everyday reality and sees eternal, unchanging symbols. Behind the spasmodic, frequently inconsistent activities of living men, he plainly distinguishes the great currents which sweep away the human soul. He takes ephemeral events and relocates them in an undying atmosphere. The great artist considers realistic representation a disfigurement and caricature of the eternal.

This is why not only the sculptors but all the great artists of classical Greece, wishing to insure the perpetuation of every contemporary memorial to victory, relocated history in the elevated and symbolic atmosphere of myth. Instead of representing contemporary Greeks warring against the Persians, they gave us the Lapithae and centaurs. Behind the Lapithae and centaurs we discern the two great, eternal adversaries: mind and beast, civilization and barbarism. Thus a historic event, occurring at a specific time, escaped time and bound itself to the entire race and that race's ancient visions. Last of all, it escaped the race and became an undying, panhuman memorial. By means of this symbolic ennoblement the Greek victories were thus elevated into those of all mankind.