September 30, 1999, Peloponnese, Greece, overnight in Nafpias, Ki

g-Mi

OS Hostel

Greece is the source of much learning in the West. After living in Athens, I repeatedly looked around me and thought to myself how many high-level sermons and study narratives in the world had gained authority by virtue of this, and everything here was so unpretentious and unpretentious. The passers-by here do not ask us all to put on Platonic hemp, and the scholars here do not ask us to follow the example of Herodotus

Odotus's History, the police here do not ask us to avoid the streets where Aristotle taught, the press here does not engage in rancid sources, and the youth here do not look like they are born offspring.

Back in Greece, almost all scholars were dusty explorers. They walked, they discovered, they pondered, they corrected, and this constituted the vibrant Greek civilization. Herodotus began to roam long distances at the age of thirty, from Babylon in the east, to Sicily in the west, to Luxor in the south, to the Black Sea in the north, and then to participate in various cultural activities of the Athenian city-state for a long time, which gave rise to the later Histories.

I was even more interested in the philosopher Democritus

Itus), whose life coincided with our expedition, from Greece to Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and India, and the money for his roaming was his father's legacy. When he returned to Greece, his father's inheritance was almost exhausted, and his city-state was guilty of squandering his father's inheritance, and it is said that he defended himself in court with his newly completed scholarly work, The Great World, and finally persuaded the judge to be exempted from punishment.

Democritus's discussion of the relationship between his travels and his academic achievements in the courtroom must have been wonderful, but unfortunately we did not have the opportunity to read it, but we have recorded this passage from him:

Among my contemporaries, I have roamed the vast majority of the earth, and I have explored the farthest reaches; I saw the most lands and countries; I have heard the most speeches from learned men; No one has surpassed me in sketching the geometry and proving it, not even the so-called surveyors of Egypt.

The great philosopher's autobiography actually describes the group portrait of scholars in the flourishing period of each culture. I have often wondered how these scholars would sigh if they knew that thousands of years from now there would be some people who claimed to be "scholars" who would have avoided the vast adventures of their lives, and had been boggling their heads in the tiny lines of the words as tiny as the tip of a needle. This kind of association was also felt when I traveled to the ruins of Jixia School Palace in Shandong.

It is precisely because of this background that the focus of our expedition is not on libraries, research institutes, universities, and museums, but on the field of civilization sites, so we often have to leave the city to go to the wilderness.

The center of Greek civilization was Athens, but to get to know it in depth, we need to take a look at its backdropping. Well, as a matter of course, go to the Peloponnese first. The name of the peninsula will be known to anyone with even a modicum of world history, as the city-state of Athens fell into decline during the Peloponnesian War that broke out in the mid-to-late fifth century BC. The Peloponnese Peninsula was vast and ecologically backward, and the Spartans were even more belligerent and militant and politically conservative, which really brought down a developed, progressive, and prosperous Athens.

This is the tragedy from which all civilizations cannot escape. Civilization is called civilization because it is compared to the ecology around it, and therefore, it is destined to be a neighbor of barbarism and backwardness. If the two sides belong to different political forces, there will be wars from time to time; If the two sides belong to the same political scope, there will be internal friction every day. The struggle between the Spartans and the Athenians in the Peloponnese was basically an internal strife, and they could not be driven away or escaped, and they would not be suspended until they were leveled and both sides were defeated.

However, beyond the general knowledge of world history, the early cradle of Greek civilization was also in the Peloponnese, especially Mycenae (Myce

ae）。 Mycenae flourished a thousand years earlier than Greece, and it was a wild and martial civilization, but it also silently nourished Greece, although the Greek civilization that matured later was fundamentally different from the Mycenaean civilization.

People's impressions of Mycenae are probably derived from Homer's epic poems, right? The indescribable beauty Helen, snatched from Mycenae by the Trojans, actually caused a ten-year war. Once the Senate held a meeting, and the gray-haired senators felt that it was not worth fighting for a woman for ten years, but at this moment Helen appeared in front of them, and all the participants were amazed, and immediately changed their words, saying that they should fight for another ten years. In the end, it is known that the Mycenaeans won with a "Trojan horse". But no sooner had the victors triumphed than they were brutally murdered by the usurpers...... These episodes, which were thought to be legends, were partially confirmed by the excavations of a German archaeologist in the eighties of the nineteenth century.

This must be done, not to reread the epic, but to actually trace the origins of Greek civilization. You know, how did Mycenae get it at that time, they fought against the Trojans for a Helen, and they led a coalition of Greeks!

The search for Mycenae in the inhospitable Peloponnese could not be done without the help of a local guide, and one of who, when asked, was also named Helen. But our Helen was old, stout, and spoke sleepily humming English, and was smoking a cigarette. The driver who partnered with her was a strong man with sparse hair and a deep face, resembling Socrates. Helen and Socrates led us across the knife-cut Corinth Canal into the hilly peninsula, where the trees were all over the place, sparsely populated, and occasionally a small village, with a few modest stone huts hanging signs for rent, but no business seemed to have been.

The road was too long, the sun was already in the west, the car finally stopped, and when I looked up, I saw an ancient theater built by the mountains. Of course I was interested in the ancient theater, but we had seen several of them along the way, and Helen said that there was one more beautiful one ahead. This alerted us to asking, "What about Mycenae, where is Mycenae?" ”

Helen shook her head and said, "Mycenae is over, and it's not nice there at all." "She actually took it upon herself to change our course. Later, I learned that she had received many tour groups from the East, and when she arrived in Mycenae, she did not want to climb the mountain, but only looked at the foot of the mountain, and felt that it was not interesting, so she quietly canceled it.

Of course we didn't agree, so she told Socrates to turn the car around and drive back.

The ruins of Mycenae are a 3,300-year-old royal city that occupies an entire hill of small rocks. From a distance, you can only see the decaying city wall on the hillside, and the average tourist thinks that it has been unobstructed, so they don't want to climb it anymore, but in fact, its first charm lies in the road, and the road is also the best verification of this royal city as a war base. The road is very secret, and when I got closer, I found that I was deeply amazed at the breadth of its hiding. I took the lead along the mountain, walking and walking, and suddenly turned a corner, and saw a mountain gate piled up by huge stones, and looked up, it was very majestic. On the top of the gate is a relief of two lionesses, which we have seen in many albums before. Suddenly appreciating the momentum of the ages, and encountering the world's masterpieces in the seclusion, I can't stop stepping to regulate my breathing.

There are deep concave mortars between the horizontal and vertical of the stone frame of the mountain gate, and there are rut marks on the underground stone for chariots to enter and exit. Turning upwards into the mountain gate, there are two royal cemeteries, which have been excavated by archaeological excavations, and now leave many empty outlines on top of each other. In other words, the first view of this royal city is the tomb, which is too different from the Chinese civilization, but accurately reflects the honor structure of a militaristic dynasty. The Mycenaean dynasty was also fond of murder at court, in addition to foreign military use, and it is surprising that archaeologists found corpses in tombs, such as two babies and three women wrapped in gold leaf, prove that many of the cruel stories in Homer's epic poems are not fiction. A tomb is linked to a series of stories, and the singing of a blind poet soothes the souls of countless dead. This is Homer's Mycenae.

Climbing up from the cemetery, the road is becoming more and more secret, and there are intricate stone stairs around and around, as if entering a three-dimensional Pantuo array, which shows that there were countless defensive ingenuity buried here in those years, just waiting for the enemy soldiers who entered the city to pay a heavy price. Finally to the top of the hill, which was the royal palace, now only a flat pedestal remained. At present, the mountains and rivers are vast, and the rulers of the year are here to plan their offensive strategies.

As a result of the war, the Mycenaean royal city left behind a large number of bronze masks and weapons, as well as a variety of funerary vessels. In addition to being collected by the museum, part of the excavated hillside is also on display, which is the Mycenaean civilization in the archaeological sense. This civilization was refined by war, organized by war, and after a war, it was exchanged and integrated on a large scale through a large number of captured craftsmen.

However, the cost of promoting craft civilization with war is too great after all, and the gains outweigh the losses. If the meaning of civilization is expanded, from craftsmanship to human history, then this mountain is hardly likable. There were too many battles, too many killings, and in the end even the royal city was reduced to a fortress. It is a dry and tasteless tragedy that the once-mighty Mycenae seems so cramped and monotonous compared to other civilizations.

In what ways the Mycenaean civilization nurtured the Greek civilization is an academic question that is still being discussed. I think that in addition to the agglomeration of ecological methods and technological levels brought about by the United War, the history of Homeric poetry should not be forgotten. Homer plucked the ancient chant from the bloody hill of Mycenae, and then, together with other chant, laid the spiritual and literary groundwork for Greek civilization. Do not think that these chants are worthless in front of the hard bronze stones, in fact, Greek civilization can only be possible by softening the Mycenaean aesthetically and spiritually.

Most of the ancient castles in the world belong to war, but one percent of them can go into history, one thousandth can become a landscape, and one in 10,000 can inspire poetry. In contrast, poetry is the noblest and the most rare, so the best attribution of Mycenae should be Homer, and then through Homer, to Greek civilization.