Traces of Antiquity

          As we all know, Greek civilisation goes back a very long way and here, in Athens, the physical remains of it are impressive. But a lesser appreciated connection with antiquity is ‘barrel wine’, everyday plonk sold by variety rather than brand. There are two shops near us that sell it (they also have shelves of bottled wines). One shop is rough and ready, run by a friendly chap whose English is as rudimentary as my Greek. It’s here that I learned to blend agiorhittiko with cabernet/merlot to make a quaffable two-litre bottle for 6 euros. The other shop is more upmarket and run by a smartly presented young man who appears to have learned his trade at some posh wine merchant in London. It was here that I paid 23 euros for a bottle of unremarkable xinomavro.

          Wine has always been a part of the culture. Around 220 BCE, a Greek engineer produced a robotic servant, a full-sized replica that could pour wine into a cup placed into its hand – and then add a measure of water (which was customary at that time). Reconstructed from original diagrams, a modern copy of this automaton is the headline exhibit at the Kotsanos Museum of Ancient Greek Technology – despite being perhaps the least useful of all the inventions displayed there. Alarm clocks, burglar alarms, auto-repeat arrow-shooters, the windlass, Archimedes screw, the pantograph, medical instruments still in use today, digital signalling systems and the Antikythera portable calculating machine – described by some as the antecedent of the laptop – all were triumphs of ancient Greek technology. Moreover, they were powered by hydraulics, pneumatics and muscles. With the exception of the odd steam-powered gadget, the energy they used was renewable. These inventions might have given birth to a green industrial revolution – except that there was no industrialisation. From what I gleaned, mass-production, marketing, corporations and export-drives were all non-existent. The inventors appear to have operated ‘lifestyle’ businesses, hiring out their services as and when they got a call. Industrialisation came about in the 18^th century.

          The reason for this delay is complex: there are so many factors to take into consideration that it might be beyond even the latest iteration of AI to make sense of them. However, it is evident that tyrants and dictators played their part, destroying libraries, committing genocide, wiping out competing cultures, rewriting histories to suit their own ends and generally suppressing intellectual and cultural freedoms. (Putin and Xi Xinping, by the way, are just two of the present-day rulers continuing in this mode.) Otherwise, it may have been possible to have had a green industrial revolution 2,500 years ago. As it stands, we’re still trying to get one going now – against the tide of a neo-capitalist economy controlled by extractive industries.

          The true depth of antiquity can be even harder to grasp when you’re afflicted, as I and my Other Half both are, with century confusion – by which I mean, for example, that we have to think twice about the year 1453 having occurred in the 15^th century. (It gets worse BCE, when counting down, not up). So, it was a good exercise for us to go round the chronologically ordered sculpture galleries at the National Archaeological Museum yesterday, testing each other as we went. However, by room 15 of 28, we agreed that there were only so many selfies in stone we could bear to gaze upon in one morning and, by common consent, retired for lunch at a cellar taverna renowned for its simplicity. The interior is undecorated, the furniture is rudimentary, the cook is also the maître de, the menu comprises four plain but tasty dishes, the wine is either red or white and payment is by cash only. In fact, if I had to imagine a restaurant from two and a half thousand years ago, this one would come close.