Lawrence Durrell - Sicilian Carousel - Adventures on an Italian Island

Comparing site for site — Neolithic and Greek in Sicily — one stumbles upon the fact that before the Greeks came men were terrified of rapacious nature, its excesses and its unpredictability. No evolution was possible — man stayed crouched in fear under the threat of extinction. Then something happens. Hope is born. But how? And for what reason? Nobody can tell us, but with the Greeks men began to see Nature not as hostile and dangerous, but as a wife and even Muse — for her cultivation made leisure (with all its arts) possible. What we mean when we use the word Mediterranean starts there, starts at that first vital point when Athens enthrones the olive as its reigning queen and Greek husbandry draws its first breath.…

Scholars will rush in at this point with their warnings against too simplified a picture — and indeed my choice of turning point in the consciousness of man is rather arbitrary; it is more probable than certain. But there certainly was such a point and the election of the olive in Attica will do as well as any other. Of course there were Gods and beliefs of all sorts circulating at the same time — local as well as imported ones; this is what makes the case of the scholar unenviably full of contradictions and suppositions. Yet there is a case to be made for the election of the olive for it was mysteriously bound up with the fate of the whole Greek people. The sacred olive tree in the Academy was an offshoot of the original tree in the Acropolis; and throughout Attica all olive trees reported to be of the same provenance were called mortal or seeded trees. They were state property and their religious sanctity helped to conserve a great national source of wealth. They were under the immediate care of the Areopagus and were inspected once a month. To uproot such a tree made the offender liable to banishment and the total confiscation of his worldly goods. They were under the special protection of Zeus Morios, whose shrine was near that of Athens. One of his attributes was the launching of thunderbolts upon the heads of such offenders.

But even the provenance of the olive is something of an open question. Where did it come from — Egypt? We cannot be sure. Yet of the qualities which made it valuable enough to become the Muse and Goddess of the Athenian we can speak with the authority of someone who has spent more than one winter in Greece, even modern Greece. The hardiness of the tree is proverbial; it seems to live without water, though it responds readily to moisture and to fertilizer when available. But it will stand heat to an astonishing degree and keep the beauty of its grey-silver leaf. The root of the tree is a huge grenade — its proportions astonish those who see dead trees being extracted like huge molars. Quite small specimens have roots the size of pianos. Then the trimmings make excellent kindling and the wood burns so swiftly and so ardently that bakers like to start up their ovens with it. It has other virtues also; it can be worked and has a beautiful grain when carved and oiled. Of the fruit it is useless to speak unless it be to extol its properties, and the Greek poets have not faulted on the job. It’s a thrifty tree and a hardy one. It has a delicate moment during the brief flowering period when a sudden turn of wind or snow can prejudice the blossom and thus the fruit. But it is a tree which grows on you when you live with it, and when the north wind turns it inside out — from grey green to silver — one can imagine with accuracy the exact shade of Athena’s smiling eyes.

All this, and the human attitude which flowered from it, was brought to Sicily in the long boats and planted here in the thoroughly Greek cities of Syracuse, Agrigento, and Gela. To be sure, thinking of Zeus as a watcher over the olive one feels that he belonged to an older religious culture of which the oak and the other mountain trees were perhaps fitter symbols. As for the olive, it was left as a simple phenomenon, accepted as a free gift from Athena after she won the contest with Poseidon for the patronage of Attica. To the old sea god belonged perhaps the saltwater well on the Acropolis, a mysterious feature recorded in Pausanias’s account of the Acropolis. This does not help us much … though we are told that Athena herself was born from the ear of Zeus (like Gargarmelle?). As Deeds once remarked: “The maddening thing about the ancient Greeks, and one would like to kick them for it, is the capacity for believing two mutually contradictory things at one and the same time.” It comes of being as curious as one is hospitable — all foreign Gods are made welcome, whatever their origins; hence the mix-up when one tries to establish something concrete about the homegrown deities.

At any rate, the olive branch with the little owl (the skops , whose pretty descendants still occupy the holes and fents of the Acropolis and utter their strange melancholy call at dusk and dawn) feature upon the coinage of ancient Athens. In modern Athens, too, the children of the Gymnasium sport a distinctive button which pictures Athena’s owlet, which has come to stand for wisdom: not esoteric wisdom necessarily but horse sense of the worldly kind. And while we are on the topic of the olive I must not forget to add that the cultivated tree, which is harvested in November and December, is grafted on to wild stock — so perhaps we should look for its origins in the historical side of grafting as a technique; it argues a highly sophisticated knowledge of agriculture in the country which first adopted the practice. Was it India? If so how did it come into the orbit of the ancient Greeks? I am not competent to answer all these questions, though my mind occupies itself with these and other questions as I travel. Indeed I hold long conversations with the vanished ghost of Martine who was always hunting for answers, and was not slow to disagree with the propositions I enunciated. I could see that she would have a hole or two to pick in my olive theories; but in fact if one were to ask how the word Mediterranean should be defined I should be tempted to answer: “As the country where the olive tree is distributed and where the basic agricultural predispositions such as the cuisine depend upon its fruit either in the form of oil for cooking, oil for lighting, or fruit to eat with bread. It has fulfilled all these functions from time immemorial and in the countries bordering the inland sea it still does.”

But I had strayed a little in my thoughts; I had not touched upon the central question raised by her remark. What happened before this —what was the island like?

Long before the owl-eyed Athene came into her own the island was settled by men whose history has been obscured by the fact that they left nothing behind for us to admire. Many strains, many invasions of tribes from different quarters must be envisaged, but the historically predominant inhabitants were the Sikels whose alphabet, if I am not mistaken, has not been deciphered as yet; nor are their inscriptions very numerous. It is a dead end where the prehistorian ekes out his scanty certainties with large conjectures; a few tombs, a few clearings and stone houses worthy of the jungle cannot go far to excite our minds or our aesthetic sense. It is really idle to dwell upon them. (I am talking in my sleep to Martine with one-half of my mind; with the other I am trying to rough in the outlines of the pocket history which she had once demanded for her children.) One should concentrate in such cases on what is striking, and leave out the rest. Good histories of the place in yawn-making detail — there are a number; but in shortening sail I would build something more like a companion to landscape than a real history.

It is not the Sikels as such, then, who are interesting; what is interesting is trying to visualize the state of the island which they inherited — a pre-Mediterranean Sicily, if I could dare to call it that. In its Pleistocene period, for example, it must have been a desolate and forbidding place with nature far outstripping man in the luxuriant prolixity of its inventions. All that man could do was to cower superstitiously under it in fear — without the tools and intelligence to shape or combat it, or even to defend himself against the wild animals which abounded in these fastnesses of oak and beech, the boars, the leopards and the stags of great tine; not to mention the snakes and wolves and insects which harried these forlorn little settlements of volcanic limestone where the only household tool was obsidian — a volcanic glass — which offered a limited scope in cutting up meat or vegetables for food. One must presume that man at this time was a debased sort of creature from the cultural point of view — unhappy on land as on the sea because he was the master of neither. I picture a sort of Caliban of the woods, living on grubs and worms when he could not find animal carcasses to nourish him. In Africa and in Australia there are such cultures existing to this day. Perhaps the Sikels were not quite as primitive, but in the absence of any firm facts about them one is at liberty to imagine; nothing they did seems to indicate that one day Syracuse would arise, white and glittering on its green and blue spur between the two perfect harbors — a home from home for Corinth, for Rhodes, for Athens.…