Dinner with Persephone Read Online Free Page A

together, more a spiral than a chessboard, in a cultural struggle that could never be fully resolved or completely clarified, because each side was so markedby the characteristics of the other it had taken on. Each side at times confronted the other in opposition, but at others adopted the more insidious method of incorporating its rival, like two actors competing for the same role. It was even a common dream in the second century for Romans and Greeks to have dreams of each other’s alphabets. The interpreter who recorded these dreams remarks, “If a Roman learns the Greek alphabet or a Greek learns the Roman alphabet, the former will take to Greek pursuits, the latter to Roman. Many Romans, moreover, have married Greek wives, and many Greeks, Roman wives, after having this dream.” Elite Roman children had Greek nurses, and Greek literature and decorative arts had something like the prestige and elegance of French for nineteenth-century Russians or Persian for the Ottoman Turks. I remember having dinner with a teacher who worked at one of the most prestigious Greek prep schools, who told me her high school class had flatly refused to read Virgil’s
Aeneid.
Greek high school students have a reputation for being ungovernable; I heard teachers’ stories of classes who, en masse, refused exams, and of idle weeks passing while students went on strike, attending school but doing no schoolwork, in the service of various causes. These particular students held it as dogma that the
Aeneid
was a cheap imitation of Homer, with a popular Platonism, present in both the ancient Greek preoccupation with sculpture and the modern Greek preoccupation with icons, that insisted there was one ideal original, and the rest of the genre increasingly false and bloodless. “It’s as if they accused Chopin of being a cheap imitation of Beethoven, without of course having heard him,” the teacher said frustratedly to me. They were unable to see Virgil’s poem as a radical reinterpretation of the epic and the epic hero. It was an ironic thing to hear, since the borders of influence were so permeable—the Byzantine Empire, which evolved into an empire dominated by Greeks, was founded by a Latin-speaking Roman, now one of the important saints of the Greek church, and the language of this empire, later to become Greek, was originally Latin, and remained Latin for an ample numberof centuries. Besides, the Greeks had called themselves, well into the twentieth century, Romans, and their word for quintessential Greekness had been Romiosyni, Romanness. This historical vertigo had been brought home to me by the title of a modern short story, which described a quintessential Greek Orthodox Easter. The title of the story was “Romaic Easter.” Through the strange spiral of this history, the Greeks evolved into their conquerors.
    The Byzantine emperors, though, in the eastern empire, were the emperors of the crossroads—not only did the Byzantines have to claim to Rome that they were the real Romans, but they had to declare to their rivals in the Middle East—the Persians, the Jews, the Arabs, and the Turks—that they were the Roman Empire. Partaking of both the cultures of the West and the East, but fully integrated with neither, Byzantium was a transvestite empire, partly both but also neither, the Empire of the Crossroads, whose preoccupation with dual natures of all kinds, from its man-gods to Diyenis Akritas, its own epic hero, the biracial knight of the border, is its most ineradicable legacy to modern Greece. Diyenis (of two races) Akritas, the medieval Greek hero, son of an Arab chieftain and an aristocratic Greek lady, was to have been the subject of the second part of Kazantzakis’s
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.
    A boy calls for customers to riffle through his stock of used CDs—the one in his right hand has a picture of one of the finest current pop singers, and I go closer to read the title:
Our National Loneliness.
    Walking away from