OLYMPIC OBSERVANCES

 

“The fact is,” my friend Dimos exclaimed, “the West is not only degenerate but ignorant. Άκου εκεί, placing transexuals at centre stage in the Olympics. There were no transexuals in Ancient Greece.” Ruddy faced, he slapped his palm on the table indignantly, causing the patrons of Degani’s in Northcote to all turn towards him simultaneously, and then look away.

 

“I don’t agree,” I ventured.

“What don’t you agree with?” he asked. “That the West is ignorant and degenerate, or that there were transexuals in ancient Greece?”

“The Greeks definitely believed there were,” I responded.  “Take Kaineus, for instance. Born as the female Kaineides, she begged Poseidon to turn her into an invulnerable warrior in order to escape sexual abuse. As a man she fought alongside the Lapiths in the war against the Centaurs. Unable to hurt him, the Centaurs got rid of Kaineus by burying him under a stack of uprooted logs and stones, which is the traditional way Greeks employ to bury inconvenient truths. According to Ovid, his soul eventually emerged and escaped into a bird. Did you know by the way, that in ancient Greek, the word psyche, for soul, was the same as the word for butterfly?”

 

“But that is myth, not reality,” Dimos hastened to point out. “So it doesn’t count.”

 

“That depends on which you think is more powerful,” I considered. “Some transexuals were worshipped as deities. Aphroditus who originated from Amathus in Cyprus, was worshiped in Athens in a transvestite rite. The god himself was portrayed with feminine curves and clothing like Aphrodite's but also a phallus. According to Macrobius, who mentions the god/dess at his/her sacrifices men and women exchanged clothing. In describing the rituals involved in the festivals, he noted  that the image the god was accompanied by a large train of followers in which girls mingled with men because the festivals allowed “women to act the part of men, and men put on woman's clothing and play the woman.”

 

“I don’t believe it,” Dimos snorted.

 

“And don’t get me started on Tiresias, prophet of Apollo in Thebes, who is said to have been transformed into a woman for seven years by Hera after striking a couple of copulating snakes with a stick. As a woman, he became a priestess and even had children,” I ventured. “If you are looking for “traditional values” a la the American religious right, perhaps having recourse to the ancient Greeks is slightly misguided.”

 

“All of this is out of context,” Dimos shrugged, incensed. “It is all a Western plot to dominate us by diminishing our achievements and compromising our self-esteem as a people.”

 

“As for the occasional bout of orientalism, I can’t but agree that this process of denigration on one hand and appropriation on the other hand exists. And it has been going on ever since the Romans and is still with us today” I agreed. “In 1999, Auberon Waugh, son of the great writer Evelyn Waugh wrote of his concern that London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone would return the Parthenon Marbles: “to some short-legged, hairy-bottomed foreigners, who have nothing to do with the ancient Athenians but who happen to occupy the space, being descended from Turkish invaders over the centuries.” Charming no?”

 

“Yeah, when we were building the Parthenon, they were all swinging from tree branches,” Dimos scowled. “It took them until 1832 with the passage of the Reform Act to institute democracy. Meanwhile, Pericles was giving it ago, two thousand, two hundred years earlier. A bunch of Johnny Come Latelies , if you ask me.”

 

“Theirs is a point echoed down the ages,” I responded. “In his 1897 book on the Greco-Turkish War, “What happened in Thessaly,” George Warrington Stevens wrote:
“the Greek is what he was - a dishonest, intelligent, chicken hearted talker, whom nothing will apparently deprive of Britain's sympathy as long as he quotes Byron and lives in the land of Alcibiades.” So as you can see, possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

 

“Is that the conclusion you drew?” Dimos shouted. “What about the fact that they are denying our legitimacy? That we are the true descendants of the ancient Greeks? They have been trying to do this since Fallmerayer. Nothing we do has validity for them, because they are jealous of our inheritance.’

 

I considered this for a moment. “The ancient verb used for 'duly recognising' νομίζειν, has the same etymological root as νόμος, law,” I mused. ‘When you recognise something as being valid, (regardless as to whether it actually is or not) you are in effect legitimising it. So isn’t the fact that the West pays lip service to continuity by allowing (and I stress the term allowing because it is they who call the shots) the Greek team to march into the Olympic Opening Ceremony tantamount to recognition of that continuity you so crave?”

 

“But these aren’t the real Games. They are an ersatz and corrupted copy of the original ones. That is the problem. They are not Greeks so they cannot feel the ancient ideals that informed the Games as deeply as we do. First of all, the Games were part of our ancient Hellenic religion…”

 

“Whereas sport happens not to be the national religion of Australia,” I guffawed. “Look, the philosopher Anaxagoras was ostracised by the enlightened Athenians for affirming that the sun was not the god Helios but “an incandescent stone large than the Peloponnese.” He is still banned from the Pallaconian Club in Brunswick. That does not make the sun, any less real. Secondly, since when did Greeks ever really take religion seriously?  A Byzantine canonist, Theodore Balsamon, complained that: “certain clerics, on certain festivals disguise themselves with various masks. With sword in hand and wearing military costumes they enter the middle aisle of the church and then they come out dressed as four-legged animals.”

 

“But that is Byzantium, the most obscure, ignorant and dark period of our history,” Dimos protested. “Surely you can’t equate one with the other. There is no comparison.”

 

“Well, if we are talking about continuity,” I pressed my point, “between the ancients you so idolise and the moderns I absolutely adore, there lies securely wedged, a millenium of Byzantium, who also enshrined the transgendered in their rituals. If you have a look for example at depictions of the Cappadocian Saint Onuphrius, he is always painted nude, with a full beard and prominently displayed breasts. This relates to a legend that states he was once a woman who prayed to be given the features of a man so as to escape the attention of men.

God heard the prayer and granted her a beard. “But what is Plato but Moses speaking in Attic Greek?” as Numenius of Apamea enthused in the second century AD.”

 

“But I never saw any saints competing in the Olympics. And anyway, the Olympics should return to Greece, their birthplace. Having them outside of Greece is a supreme act of appropriation,” Dimos opined.

 

 

 

“Actually, for me, the most supreme appropriators were the Elizabethan playwrights,” I confided. “Part of Byzantine novelist Eustathios Makrembolites’ novel: The Story of Hysmine and Hysminias, specifically the scene of the storm at sea and the heroine offered as a sacrifice was adapted in Book 8 of the Confessio Amantis of John Gower and, by way of that, forms a portion of the plot of William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. And don’t get me started on the relationship between Hamlet and Orestes, none of whom, you’ll observe, ever went near the Olympics.”

 

“All I’m saying,” Dimos sighed, “is that certain ideals are immortal. You don’t need to give your modern twist on things. Just respect those values and leave them as they are.”

 

“You remind me of my daughter, who refused to participate in her school Mini-Olympics because they didn’t sing the Olympic Hymn, at the commencement of proceedings.”

 

“How wonderful,” Dimos gushed. “You must be very proud of her.”

 

“She was certainly proud of her principled stance,” I informed him. “Until that is, I informed her that the Olympic Hymn was not sung at the ancient Games, as Kostis Palamas had not been invented yet.”

 

“Seriously,” Dimos spat. “But I think we both agree that the West has lost its way. I can only pray that the goddess Dikaiosyne returns to set things right and to open everyone’s eyes.”

 

“But the ancient Greeks worshipped error. Only they could take the concept of being misled and turn her into a goddess. Πλάνη, was the goddess of Error, and she is generally as present during the competition between Apollo and Marsyas, looking on in horror as Marsyas loses and is about to be flayed alive.”

As Dimos gasped in microtones of horror and incredulity, I concluded: “Dicaearchus, of Aetolia was a pirate in the service of Macedonian King Philip V. He had a tradition in which wherever he landed he would build two temples, one to Ἀσέβεια, (impiety), and another to Παρανομία (lawlessness). It’s always better to hedge one’s bets both ways.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 17 August 2024