Wednesday 30th September

It wasn't supposed to rain today; but it did.  I'd gone out without a mac, having faith in the weather forecast (since it has been pretty accurate up till now). 

Argos in the rain was a little dispiriting at times.  I wasn't able even to find the remains of the shrine of Apollo Deiradiotes, and the Archaeological Museum is apparently closed.  The ancient Agora was open, but is a pretty neglected site.  At least the slopes of the Larisa Hill provided me with a bit more of a decent history fix (along with another downpour).

I'd been really looking forward to Argos.  I knew there wasn't very much to see; but other places I've visited on this trip the visible remains haven't been much more than foundations and a litter of broken column drums, and I've still got plenty out of seeing them.  Pausanias has a lot to say about Argos, which was a thriving prosperous city in his day, and I was really looking forward with interest to relating what I've read to what's on the ground now.  His history and description runs to 18 sides in the Penguin edition.  What's more, it's all fascinating; I'd love to be able to quote it wholesale and give my own personal commentary on it. 

The really unusual thing that strikes me, reading Pausanias' section on Argos, is how prominent the women are, compared to their role in the history of other places.  There are women who get named elsewhere, as wives and mothers in the main; generally they aren't recorded as having done anything in their own right.  Then suddenly in Argos we have all these women who jump off the page as having motive and agency and even discernible character.  It's very odd, and I can't help wondering if it reflects a society in which the status of women had been better than average; a society in which even if by Pausanias' day everything was much the same as anywhere else, the local stories and myths carried echoes of that earlier state of affairs. 

To start with, there's a long story about how the Argive people came to have only a constitutional monarchy, and then got rid of even that, long before many other places.  In his footnotes Professor Levi comments that it's also mentioned in Plato, and seems to reflect an element of social contract in the early institutions of Argos.  I find the line "But from time immemorial the Argives have equal rights and the rule of law..." really interesting.  Argos is one of the places where Pausanias often sounds as though he's quoting things he was told by a local guide; he even says at one point "I'm writing what the Argives say about themselves".  And I would like so much to think that this phrase about equal rights and the rule of law is another echo of a more egalitarian half-remembered past.

Of course, I'm building all this on sand.  I don't have the original Greek text (& couldn't begin to translate it these days if I did).  I don't know what words Professor Levi translated to give that phrase, or what other connotations they might have.  I'm really just looking for something to support my hunch about the peculiar prominence of women in the account of Argos.

To begin with, one of the big Argive legends is the story of Danaos and Aigyptos, who were twin brothers who fought with one another.  Aigyptos wanted his sons to marry Danaos' daughters (50 of each, in theory!) and Danaos didn't like the idea; so he fled to Argos and won the kingship from the previous incumbent, Gelanor.  However, Aigyptos followed him, with all fifty sons in tow, and so to prevent a war, Danaos gave in and consented.  However, he ordered his daughters all to murder their new husbands on their wedding night and cut off their heads.  Forty-nine of them obeyed him; the fiftieth, Hypermnestra, didn't.  Hypermnestra spared her newly-wed husband Lynkeus and helped him to escape from the city; he signalled to her with a beacon from a place called Lyrkeia, up in the hills, to confirm he'd got away.  The Argives held a festival of beacons each year to commemorate ths.

Danaos accused his disobedient daughter of treason.  He put her on trial, but the court found her not guilty and she was able to recall her husband, while Danaos and his other daughters were subsequently punished by the gods with various torments in the afterlife.  Hypermnestra and Lynkeus went on to found a new dynasty, and she dedicated a statue of Aphrodite the Victorious and built a sanctuary of Artemis of Persuasion in Argos as thank-offerings; Pausanias records seeing both of these.  He also records seeing Hypermnestra's tomb and says Lynkeus is buried with her - NB not the other way around.

Next we get the story of a nameless young woman at the time of the Peloponnesian War, who was kidnapped from her wedding procession and raped by the Argive general Bryas.  She pretended to helpless passivity and waited until he had fallen asleep, then blinded him and fled back to her own people.  Bryas' soldiers demanded her blood to avenge their commander, the young woman claimed the status of a religious supplicant, and the people of Argos refused to give her up.  Things came to a fight; which the people won, massacring their own troops to protect the rights of this one woman.  Professor Levi says mildly that this tale "implies an actual revolution"...

And then there's Telesilla.  I get cross with Professor Levi at this point, because he dismisses the next story on absolutely no grounds whatsoever except that he doesn't believe it.  Telesilla was an Argive poetess, and the story Pausanias tells is that there was a time when the Argive army had been defeated by Sparta, and most of their soldiers killed.  The Spartans were advancing on the city, so Telesilla armed the women with whatever weapons they could find and formed them up in battle order.  They marched out to face the Spartans - the Spartans, mark you, not just anybody! - fought boldly, and turned back the first charge.  Whereupon the Spartans realised they were in a catch-22 situation; the deepest shame would attach to them whether they won or lost, because to defeat an army of soft women from the plains would make them an object of ridicule at home and abroad, while to be beaten by them would mean complete disgrace.  So they withdrew and yielded the field of battle.  The people of Argos commemorated Telesilla's bravery and leadership with a carved relief in the Temple of Aphrodite, showing her discarding her books and putting on a helmet. 

Maybe it's just that I'm a woman, and I know women will fight if they have to.  I don't find anything hard to believe in that story; I feel Professor Levi's suggestion that it can only have arisen because Telesilla "may well have written some soldierly-sounding poetry" is much more far-fetched.  But that's just my opinion. 

Anyway, whatever the truth of the tale, that shrine of Aphrodite is one of the places I saw today.

It's on the southern slope of the Larisa Hill, next door to the Roman Odeion, the enormous set of public baths converted from a sanctuary of Asklepios, and the theatre.  Where the agora site was dank and low-lying, the hill is well-drained and open.  The hill was a relief, after the agora.

Oh, the agora of Argos!  This is the first really neglected place I've been to.  I know I've been praising the fact there are wildflowers growing between the stones everywhere, and remarking on how we'd clear them all off in Britain, to present our archaeology scraped completely clean.  But wild-flowers are one thing and rampant long grass, shrubs and weeds are another.  The interpretation signage just stops, halfway around; so that suddenly you find you have no indication at all as to what things are.  And for the first time in my trip, I found the English translations were really poor - mostly they have been excellent but some of these read like the work of Google-translate...

Yet there's a lot to see there, and that makes it all the more sad.  There was a running track.  There were public fountains.  There were public bath houses and a magnificently-engineered drainage system.  There was a large council house for the city assembly.  There were buildings with fine marble columns and decorations, mosaic floors, staircases, hypocausts...  The theatre probably seated something like 20,000 in its heyday.  There was every sign that this was a big, thriving place.

Until today I've found the ruins I'm seeing haunting and evocative, but today for the first time I found them sad.  I have to remind myself that the grey skies and rain must have played a large part in my mood.  My feet and trouser legs got very wet from walking through long wet grass and undergrowth, which isn't much fun either.

And yet, and yet; access is free, when the whole place could have been locked up and left to rot.  There is a site guardian (a cheerful friendly chap sitting in a little hut listening to the radio and teasing me about the rain).  There are toilets, which are clean and in good nick, with paper and bins and doors that close.  I've been in many a public loo in the UK that was filthy, with no paper and no bolt on the door; and in many a place where the loos are closed entirely, for reasons of cost.  So if the municipality of Argos has had to prioritise, I'd have to say they've prioritised the right things.

The Larisa Hill site is the other side of the road from the agora site; this is where the bigger stuff is, and it's also where, briefly, the weather became dry.  I was able to walk about the huge rock-cut space of the theatre (a less handsome one than Epidavros, thanks to the grim dark grey of the local stone) and the Roman baths and Odeion, and stand in the shrine of Aphrodite, imagining Telesilla and her battalion of women standing-to and defending the city.

Then I went and bought a delicious tyropita, a ring-shaped cheese pie in wholemeal pastry, and caught the bus back to Nafplio.

I knew I needed to walk off that pastry, so I set off out through the eastern suburbs of Nafplio in the afternoon, to walk up to Kanathos, the sacred spring a couple of miles outside the town which the goddess Hera is supposed to have visited once a year to bathe in. 

It's now a monastery, Agia Moni tis Panagias Zoodochos Piyis; Our Lady of the Life-giving Spring.  I could see it in the distance quite soon, which is always nice when you're out for a walk.  The road got more and more rural, and eventually turned into a track; then the track petered out completely, and I had to turn back, but I found another route and went on.  It was incredibly quiet, just a few birds and no other people about.  Because of the cool damp weather there weren't even many insects around, bar a few beetles on the roadway (who did not want to be photographed!). 

The road climbed, the views were good, then better, and at last I was coming into the forecourt of the monastery.  And it was closed for restoration.

It looks as though both church and cloister were in serious need of repair, and there's scaffolding over parts of both.  There was a tiny side chapel that was open, so I lit a candle and made an offering, and said a quiet prayer. 

Then I wandering about, taking a few photos, since I'd walked this far.  I went down a slope and through a gate, and found the spring.

Here is said to have bathed here to renew her virginity, incidentally.  From a human perspective that seems perverse, to say the least.  But for a goddess, the powerful successor of the Great Mother Goddess, it makes a certain sense that she would be perpetually renewed as Maiden as well as Mother and Queen.  At any rate, it was a quiet spot with an atmosphere of intense stillness, into which the voice of the falling water played like a kind of endless music into silence.  There were goldfish in the lower draw-basin, and a view out over the valley below. 

A strange, magical place, utterly secluded and secret.

It rained on me again on the way back to Nafplio.