Kostis Palamas

 

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will commence in August. The following is a brief biography of the man who wrote the words to the Olympic Hymn.

 

Kostis Palamas

The Poet who wrote the Olympic Hymn

Kostis Palamas (1859 — 1943) was one of the greatest Greek poets of the modern era, the man who along with his great contemporaries – Ioannis Polemis, Georgios Drosinis, and Nikos Kampanis – ushered in the modern revivalist movement in Greek poetry during the final decades of the 19th century. Palamas also has the distinction as the author of the words to the modern Olympic Hymn.

Kostis Palamas was born in the Achaean city of Patras to a wealthy family belonging to Mesolonghi in the province of Aetolia-Acarnania. After Palamas lost both his parents by the age of seven, he was brought up by an uncle Dimitrios Palamas in Mesolonghi, where he began to study law, continuing his law studies at the University of Athens from 1876.

Palamas soon gave up the study of law and started working as a journalist in the 1880s, devoting himself increasingly to literature and poetry. During the same period he married Maria Valvi, his childhood sweetheart, and became the father of three children. Tragedy soon struck his family when the youngest child died at the age of five, an event that would deeply affect him for the rest of his life.

Palamas was appointed as the Secretary of the University of Athens in 1897, a position he was to hold until 1926, a position that was to give him lifelong financial security, allowing him to devote wholeheartedly to poetry and literature.

After experimenting with poetry in the archaic “Katharevousa” version of the Greek Language (“Love Epics”), Palamas began to write poetry in the Modern Greek of the common people. His first collection of poetry, titled “The Songs of My Fatherland,” was published in 1886. His work “Hymn to Athena” (1889) was the winner in a prestigious poetry contest.

The major works of the prolific Palamas include “The Eye of My Soul” (1892), “The Tomb” (1898), “The Salutations of the Sun-born (1900), “The Static Life” (1904), and “Twelve Sayings of the Gypsy” (1907). Palamas also has a work of prose to his credit, “The Death of the Young Man.”

Palamas was given the prestigious post of President of the Athens Academy at the age of 70. He spent his final years loved by his family and friends, away from the public glare, but adored and venerated by lovers of literature as well as the general public.

Kostis Palamas died in 1943 during the German occupation of Greece. His funeral in Athens became a rallying point for the Greek resistance, with vast numbers of mourners (said to be over 100,000) singing his songs, and even singing the banned Greek national anthem, as an expression of protest against the Nazis.

Regarded as the national poet of Greece, Palamas exemplified the Greek spirit and culture in full measure. He bestrode the Greek literary scene like a colossus for over 30 years. His literary struggles, along with his compatriots of the “revivalist” movement, against the proponents of “purist” language in literature then prevailing, profoundly influenced and vivified the intellectual scene of his country. The great French writer and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland even regarded Palmas as the greatest poet of Europe of his time. Kostis Palamas never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though he was nominated several times.

The lyric Palamas wrote for the Olympic Hymn was set to music by the Greek composer Spyros Samaras. It was commissioned for the first modern Olympic Games,  the Summer Olympics of 1896. The Hymn was not used again until the 1960 Summer Olympics, during which period each host city was allowed commission its own original Olympic Hymn. The  original version by Samaras and Palamas was declared the official Olympic Anthem in 1958, and since 1964 it has been performed at each edition of the Summer Olympics.

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Mysteries

The Island of Santorini and the Myth of Atlantis

The island of Santorini is one of the places prominent in the speculations of professional and amateur historians and writers who have tried to unravel the myth of Atlantis, which was originally portrayed in the Dialogues of the Greek philosopher Plato. Despite the skepticism of serious scientists and archaeologists, proponents of the Santorini-as-Atlantis theory have pointed to the similarities between Plato’s description of Atlantis, and the archeological, seismological, and vulcanological (study of volcanoes) evidence found on the island of Santorini, to support their arguments.

Plato, for example, mentions a location in Atlantis which had a profusion of water that was accumulated from surrounding hills. Excavations at Knossos and Akroteri, in the island of Santorini, have unearthed places that match Plato’s description. Similarly, the palace at Knossos has an uncanny resemblance to Plato’s description of the palace of Atlantis as an Acropolis-like, multi-level structure situated atop a terraced and leveled hill. According to Plato, the outer walls of the palace supposedly “shined like silver.” The followers of the Santorini-as-Atlantis hypothesis find support for their arguments in the silver-like shining properties of gypsum (a kind of crystalline stone) that was used to build the palace’s huge foundation blocks. Moreover, the various kinds of rocks found in Santorini match the “white, black, and red” rocks that existed in Atlantis as per the description of Plato. The depiction of Santorini in the numerous frescoes discovered in the island can also be interpreted to resemble the layout of Plato’s island city of Atlantis, with its concentric areas of land and water and the deep canal connecting them to the sea.

The final and apparently decisive argument of the proponents of the Santorini-as Atlantis theory is the abrupt demise of the Minoan civilization of Santorini (and nearby Crete) that parallels the sudden destruction of Atlantis as described by Plato. According to many scholars, the island was destroyed around 1,500 BC when the Stroggili volcano erupted and collapsed unleashing multiple tsunamis that devastated the Mediterranean and destroyed Crete also. In his Timaeus, Plato describes the utter destruction of Atlantis in “one day and night” when “there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods,” when their “…warriors were swallowed up by the earth,” and “Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished…”

Santorini as the fabled Atlantis: Fact or fiction?

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Greek Tragedy

Euripides’ Helen: A Pseudo-Tragedy

Euripides’ Helen occupies a singular position among the plays of the “dark tragedian” of Greek drama. Often considered as a “light” play of the celebrated dramatist, the play gives us a totally divergent take on the traditional story of the abduction of Helen by Paris (or, the elopement of Helen with Paris).

According to the conventional version, Helen, daughter of Zeus, by either Leda or Nemesis, chooses Menelaus as her husband from among all the suitors that had come for her hand. She falls in love and flees with Paris to Troy during one of Menelaus’ absences. After the death of Paris in the Trojan War, she marries his brother, Deiphobus, whom she promptly betrays to Menelaus, the victor in the Trojan War, and lives happily ever after in Sparta with her first husband till their deaths.

Euripides based his recasting of the story of Helen on the observations of the historian Herodotus, who had earlier argued that the real Helen was actually whisked away to Egypt and hidden there, while Paris apparently took a phantom look-alike to Troy. While Helen safely pined away in Egypt, the phantom-Helen was hated and reviled by the Greeks and Trojans alike for betraying her husband and for being the cause of the bloody Trojan War.

The adultery of Helen and her betrayal of the Greeks, which unleashed the awesome carnage of the Trojan War, rankled heavily on the Greek consciousness for centuries. It was left to Herodotus and Euripides to rescue the reputation of Helen and, consequently, to defend the nobility of the Greek character. Hence the creation of “a breathing phantom [Helen look-alike] shaped from nothingness.”

The creation and portrayal of the phantom-Helen by Euripides was a deviation from the general world-view and dramatic style of the iconoclastic tragedian who had a penchant to often mock the gods, as well as to delineate his characters realistically. This “too-modern-for-his-time” feature in the works of Euripides has often been compared to that of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

By no stretch of imagination can the play Helen be called a tragedy. It has been characterized by various commentators as “romantic drama” or “tragi-comedy.” I would like to regard this play as a “pseudo-tragedy.” The “tragedy” in this play may refer to the sufferings undergone by the protagonists in particular, as well as the general “tragedy” of the Greeks who had been precipitated into the Trojan War by the supposed infidelity and betrayal of the phantom-Helen. The soliloquies of (the real) Helen and Menelaus in the play amply depict the misery endured by the protagonists. Helen has been wretchedly languishing in Egypt for years. At the beginning of the play, when she is informed by the Greek exile Teukros that Menelaus has perished, Helen becomes vulnerable to the threat of a forced marriage to Theoclymenes, the present king of Egypt. Meanwhile, Menelaus endures further suffering after the destruction of Troy, having to wander the Aegean for over 10 years with his phantom-wife (unbeknownst to him), and finally being shipwrecked off the coast of Egypt and facing capture and execution by the Egyptians.

It is in this context that the fairly simple and “light” plot of the play unfolds. In his celebrated tragedies – like Medea, Hippolytus, and Electra – Euripides uses incisive realism to depict the unruly passions and actions of his characters, and the ineluctable consequences attendant upon them. He uses the technique of divine intervention – the deus ex machina – only as a climactic device for the resolution of the drama. In Helen, on the contrary, the tables are turned. The protagonists find themselves in their predicament not because of the result of their own actions, but as a consequence of the machinations of the gods. And the resolution out of their predicament is not through the device of deus ex machina, but through their own amusingly clever trick practiced on the gullible Theoclymenes with the connivance of the king’s sister, the virgin prophetess Theonoe.

One of the unarguably hilarious moments in the play occurs when Menelaus and the genuine Helen recognize each other. Menelaus’ primary concern at that moment is the chastity of his wife during her long, forced exile in Egypt. This is a little surprising and rather ungracious attitude on the part of Menelaus who had no qualms about taking back the adulterous phantom-Helen who had cheerfully shared the bed of both Paris and his brother Deiphobus.

Euripides’ attempt in this play to assert the honor of the Greeks leads him on to make some uncharitable remarks about the Egyptians who are glibly dismissed as “barbarians.” That is a little surprising, as the Classical Greek civilization owes much to the more ancient Egyptian civilization, a debt acknowledged by many famous Greek thinkers and writers of antiquity. Menelaus’ blatant braggadocio is rather amusing when he vows to fight to death the Egyptian king and defend the honor of his newly-found wife, when the odds are really stacked against them. However, the realism and modesty of Helen finally persuades her husband to resort to the clever subterfuge suggested by Helen.

Euripides takes this occasion to express some genuine anti-war sentiments, something that should strike a sympathetic cord with contemporary readers. He makes the Chorus utter the following modern-sounding words:

“Oh why, oh why do heroes try to prove their excellence in war?

As if a spear could guard a man from the onslaught of life’s pain.

Strife will be with us forever if blood is the criterion…”

In the final analysis, the play Helen should be taken as a light-hearted play which Euripides wrote for mainly patriotic reasons, that stands apart from his great, dark tragedies, and that allowed the skill of the dramatist to effectively tell an oft-told tale in an iconoclastic way. The Euripides-as-pure-tragedian school will find this entertaining play disappointing and distracting. But nothing can detract from the excellence and appeal of this charming little comedy-in-disguise.