SHARING a pomegranate with Persephone could have been dangerous; however,
Patricia Storace, a fond but critical New York Hellenist and poet, ate the mystical fruit cautiously and spent a whole year in Greece overground.
The resultant coercively intelligent book is the travel diary of an acute observer who, while recording her immediate impressions of places and people, has attempted to analyse in depth the Greek national psyche which evolved under the influences of Olympian gods and EU bureaucrats.
Being able to speak their language, she contrived to know all sorts of Greeks well enough to discern certain common characteristics. She found that they are proud, xenophobic, and anxious to strengthen their sense of national identity by demonstrating "proof of the all-important continuity between ancient and modern Greece".
Storace enthusiastically shares her enjoyment of Greek sunshine on Greek seaside villages, Greek churches and Greek neoclassical domestic architecture, Greek festivals, Greek conviviality and Greek food and drink. But when Greek conversation expresses nationalistic and sexual boastfulness she condemns it with the severity of an intellectual feminist New Yorker.
Consider, for example, her account of a lunch at the home of a Greek journalist, where the wife is a faceless cook and waitress. This chapter is ironically entitled "The True Light". In the very first sentence, Storace calls attention to the ludicrous irony of the host's name, Kyrios Angellopaida, which "translates to Mr Angelchild".
Over a glass of Macedonian rose, the clumsy fellow pays a compliment but puts his chauvinistic foot in it:
"That is a pretty necklace you have - it is
"It is from New York."
"I thought it must be Greek because of the finesse of the gold work. Because, I will tell you; since you are here to learn about our manners and traditions, the most important thing about us is that we are light - Hellenism ellenismos, is light, like spiritual gold.
We know that terrible antihellenic propaganda is spreading now both in the West and in the East, that the West wants us to be inferior, and the Muslims are surrounding us like a noose in the East, and want us again to be their slaves. The West has no culture or history without us, yet we know they now denigrate classical Greece, just as they have abandoned Christianity and now worship Science."
As in other dialogues, Storace gives Mr Angelchild ample opportunity to make a fool of himself. He compares Egyptian mummies and Greek statues. "Theirs is the art of slavery," he declares, "ours of freedom!"
"Mr Angelchild," she comments, "has made it clear that only a hater of Greece, a tool of vicious international propaganda, would remember that classical Greece is considered the first true slave society in the West."
She develops this theme at some length, pointing out that "one in three inhabitants of classical Athens was a slave", and women slaves were treated as the lowest of the low, for "They were not people, as male slaves were, but elements of men's lives, like hands or feet."
At the end of the twentieth century, contemporary Greeks idealise a false notion of their past, in Storace's judgment. "In fact," she writes, "to call classical Greece, an ethnically based androcracy [a society ruled by males], a `democracy' is just a little more meaningful then calling China a `people's republic'."
The jacket portrait shows that the author is a good-looking, fair-skinned blonde with a friendly smile; the sort of woman, evidently, whose appearance incites some Greek men to come on with grossly ill-calculated overtures. She cites several incidents.
Patricia Storace is an industrious researcher who writes with admirable elegance, but, man, she sure is a nag.