Books About Greece: Mediterranean Winter by Robert Kaplan

This year, I've been re-reading a lot of books in order to teach them. I've gone back through classics like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and To Kill a Mockingbird. 

When it comes to reading for pleasure though, I've been trying to keep my choices as site-specific as possible. Luckily, there's no shortage of great writing about Greece. After I spent a weekend on the island of Hydra, reading Homer's Odyssey (in English... sorry, I know that makes me a cheater), I was struck by how accurate the descriptions still seemed. I woke up to "rosy-fingered dawn" and hiked along the rocky mountains.

Mediterranean Winter struck even closer to home. I couldn't put this book down. Robert Kaplan blends travel writing and history seamlessly as he describes his journeys through Italy, Tunisia, Sicily and Greece. He came to the Mediterranean as a young man right out of college with dreams of being a reporter but unable to find a job at a newspaper. He travels around the region, learning the languages, culture and history. Sound familiar at all? 

Kaplan talks about how visiting during the winter months (as opposed to the tourist-packed summer) makes him feel like an honorary resident."Seeing a city out of season is like finding a woman at home in her bathrobe without makeup: there is a feeling of both intimacy and let-down in which you may learn something vital."

Kaplan lived in Athens for seven years, and his observations are both affectionate and unforgiving. "Athens' fascinating lay not in the Parthenon and other ruins, but in the fact that it was the first of many Third World cities I would encounter over the years... I had seen planned, historically rooted cities...Athens simply sprawled, white hot, with little shade or planning." He also offers historical tidbits to go along with his personal observations. In this case, I learned that Athens had only three hundred houses in 1834 and then suddenly exploded to several million residents. 

The history which Kaplan writes about so vividly has some very interesting parallels today. The Greek financial crisis? Consider the events of 416 B.C. when the people of Athens were called upon to help their allies from Segesta defend themselves against a coalition led by the Syracusans. The Athenians sent representatives to the besieged city in order to gauge the Segestans' resources and decide whether to join the battle. Kaplan writes:

The Segestans were quite poor. In order to deceive the Athenian envoys about their wealth and power, the Segestans borrowed gold and silver drinking cups from their wealthier Elymian cousins in Erice, and flaunted them in the houses where the Athenians had been invited to stay. It is possible that work on the temple was begun or accelerated at this time to impress the Athenians, who went home with exaggerated notions of their ally's resources. And so in, 415 B.C., the Athenians voted to send sixty ships to help Segesta.

Of course, the war ended disastrously for the Athenians. Reading the newspaper today, it seems to me that one way to look at the financial crisis is that the tables have turned. Modern Athens used the same old trick on the E.U., and only now are the true resources being seen.