Avernus

(Transcribed from notebook)

The Acropolis was, as expected, pretty damned amazing. Amazing enough to drag me out of the cranky mood I was in from being woken up too early. Almost the whole place is covered in scaffolding at the moment, though I was expecting that, so it wasn't disappointing - again, I think they're trying to spruce it up in time for the Olympics. The site - I don't quite know what I was expecting. I really don't have any kind of visual imagination, so I wasn't picturing it at all beforehand. I feel like I went around in kind of a daze - everywhere I walked around it I was thinking 'this is where the Panathenaic procession happened, this is where the statue of Athen by Phidias stood. t was like it just fell out of my texts. I was very surprised about how much I knew about the site - just little details about who designed what and how the buildings were laid out.

The Acropolis Museum was pretty amazing too - all these beautiful kourai and statues of athletes and the bits from the Parthenon pediment frieze, which are *huge*, if you haven't seen any of them. On some reflection, I've decided that I don't feel in the least guilty over the fact that the Elgin marbles are in the British museum. *shrugs* I just don't see why Greece has any more *right* to a chunk of history than anyone else does - sure Classical society has had as much influence on England as on Greece today? Probably an ill-thought out and contentious opinion, but that's my immediate reaction.

We also went to the Theatre of Dionysus. In some way, that felt more incredible to me that the Parthenon and the rest. No, it doesn't have any of the splendour and grandeur of architecture that the sites higher up the Acropolis have. But there was just something strange in the site there. I sat there reciting as many choruses as I could remember (I know, I'm such a geek) and thinking that two and a half thousand years ago these words were being heard for the first time on these very seats. That theatre was the first to hear Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia... It's hard to imagine. It's not anything ridiculous like feeling ghostly presences, but there's an odd sense of the sheer weight of literary history bearing down on the place.

We then went and had a very good late lunch (stephado and divine baklava, mmm....), then went for a wander round the tourist trap shops. Nothing very fun to add, excpet I was *most* amused by a couple of 'Ancient Greek Sex' calenders I saw lurking in some shops, which universally featured covers of vase illustrations of young men having sex with one another. Or in one case, a young man being buggered by one bloke and performing fellatio on another. >.@ Where do they keep these vases that I've never seen them?

No, Emmy-chan, I didn't buy you one.