Volume 43, Number 18 · November 14, 1996
Gifts of the Greeks
By Jasper Griffin
Dinner with Persephone
by Patricia Storace
Pantheon, 398 pp., $25.00
What is it that we all know, and yet we don't know at all? A good candidate for the answer to the riddle might be Greece and the Greeks. On the one hand there is Ancient Greece. Everyone has a repertoire of images which that idea calls up: stone columns, open-air theaters with actors in beards and masks, a vague air of uplift combined rather disconcertingly with nude statues, indecent vase paintings, and a general sense that these people wore no underclothes. On the other hand there is the Greece of today, the place we have visited, perhaps, on a package holiday or a conducted tour: suggestive of wine flavored with turpentine, priests with beards and their hair in a bun, Melina Mercouri, and a general sense of being herded with other foreigners round crowded sites, to meals with goats' cheese in the salad, followed by a cautious sun bath on the beach of an Aegean island. That leaves a considerable gap in the middle, through which modern Greece as a real place, with inhabitants who are neither extras from a play by Sophocles nor tour guides and bartenders, somehow tends to slip and evade us.
Review, 4093 words
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