“I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.’

I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills.

“Come on,” said Stephen. “It’s beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas.”

We crammed into Burns’s small car, and went back to our hotel.

― Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories

2 pictures (above and below):  Alan Davis

Athens, the eye of Greece, the mother of arts and eloquence.

                                                                                     John Milton, Paradise Regained, 1671

 Distinguishing Marks 

Every land has its distinguishing mark.
Particular to Thessaly are horsemanship and horses;
what marks a Spartan
is war’s season; Media has

its tables with their dishes;
hair marks the Celts, the Assyrians have beards.
But the marks that distinguish
Athens are Mankind and the Word.”
― Constantinos P. Cavafis, The Complete Poems

 

picture: Alan Davis

“The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.”
― Camille Paglia

I love the generous light and the deep shadows it spawns below the covered alleyways and heavy leaves of the trees. I love how green and unkempt it is, how gracious the olive trees are, how sincere and complex and perfumed is the food. I love how ugly and warm are the Greeks, how beautiful and charismatic they are. I love that the city is so vibrant and so relaxed, with great young galleries and eateries like gardens. I love the ruins and how they shape the city, how they create timeless oasis of tranquility. And more than everything, I love that it’s a living museum not afraid to show its scars.

http://thevoyageur.net/2018/01/29/the-mood-athens-in-october-greece/