T’was the morning after. The previous night out had been aggressively mediocre; a dozen of us went out for dinner, but the bill splitting was chaos and in the end I ate nothing and shared a bottle of wine with Tom, to make things simpler. I know that doesn’t really make any sense, but it seemed a practical idea at the time.
I went down for breakfast and sat alone, suffering a mild cumulative hangover. It was a familiar and not entirely welcome sensation; I drink a lot less these days, and some part of me still gets all puppy eyed and guilty when I booze for more than two days in a row – oh, but the internal battle always goes the same way. Part of me thinks I should be disciplined, always, forever working on bettering myself – and part of me thinks oh shut up you’re not a monk. So there you go.
I was unsure what to do with my day. I’d agreed to go to a nudist beach with Tom the night before, while inebriated – but come the daylight, I found myself feeling less enthused at the prospect of sitting naked on a windswept beach all day beside a man I’d spoken to for a total of about thirty minutes. I text him and told him I was too hungover for the beach (it felt more polite than saying ‘I don’t want to be naked with you all day’), then lay around the hostel for a while before romping out to find Alan in the early afternoon.
“Where are you?” I yelled into my phone, over the din of the crowded market I was currently lost in.
“I’m at the ancient Agora,” said Alan. “I can’t find the entrance.”
I smiled at this. I’m at the ancient Agora. It was nice to hear ridiculous sentences again, the sort of things you only hear when out on a little adventure, doing something weird. You accumulate them as you travel; I write them down sometimes. The mad preacher set his parrots on me again. That sort of thing.
I found Alan in a park, and together we made a big lap of the Agora fence until we found a way in. I was happy to be outside; being a productive sightseer nicely offsets the guilt of getting all boozy in the evening. We went inside, and as we stood before the temple Alan acted as my guide and interpreter – explaining exactly who Hephaestus was and what he did (his mum thought he was gross and threw him off Olympus).
“You never really hear about the extended family of Jesus, do you,” I said to Alan, who was raised Christian. “Like, who were Jesus’s grandparents?”
“I think it goes all the way back to Abraham,” said Alan.
I didn’t really know who Abraham was, so I moved swiftly past it.
“Imagine being just a normal guy and then like three generations later your family has the Messiah in it. And forever after you’re just this footnote. Like Joseph. What happened to him after Jesus was born? Did he just… go back to work? The poor guy had it rough.”
“Cucked by God,” said Alan, so quickly and flatly that I practically shrieked a laugh.
I was tremendously impressed by the Agora. Everywhere you go in Athens, you’re treated to new views of the Acropolis – and each time I saw it trumped the last. It just looks better and better. What a concept for a modern city – having a giant ancient sky temple sitting on a mountain smack in the middle of it. I think I’d like London a lot more if we had our own sky temple whacked in the centre, visible from every borough. We’ve got the Shard, I suppose – but it’s not quite the same, is it.
Now, I haven’t Googled this (I could, obviously, I’m typing on my laptop right now – but I don’t want to. It takes away the fun), but I’m guessing ‘agora’ means something like ‘open space’ in Greek – because A) it’s in the word ‘agoraphobic’ and B) that’s what the Ancient Agora of Athens seemed to be: a big open space. And what a space! Pretty pink flowers and squat trees laden with oranges, lazy feral cats slumped over great hunks of marble. We roamed the ruins, reading each plaque and imagining what once stood there: civic buildings, temples, meeting places. God it must have been pleasant. All that sun and quiet, all those togas.
I saw two girls crouched down, looking at something, and went over. They were stroking a tortoise.
“Is it your tortoise?” I asked.
They said it wasn’t; they had just found it. I stroked the tortoise too, and took photos of it – it seemed very happy, munching grass and shuffling along. It struck me as an excellent juxtaposition; tortoises are always very wise characters in stories, aren’t they, and it was therefore very fitting that this little fellow should be wandering around the place where democracy was invented.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether the tortoise was meant to be there, or whether it was a pet that had escaped – but there wasn’t anybody around to ask, so I left it alone. Five minutes later I found a sign that said ‘DON’T STROKE THE TORTOISES’, which obviously made me feel like a big knobhead tourist but also didn’t really answer the question as to why the hell they were there in the first place.
I stopped to take a photo of Alan beside a monument, and as I was putting my camera away, an elderly Chinese man asked if we could take his photograph. He told us he had spent the last 20 years in Paris, so I spoke to him in broken French while he carefully positioned himself beside a pair of large round boulders.
“Boobs,” he said, pointing to them and grinning.
I barked a laugh, and he bowed to the stone mounds with his hands pressed together. I took his photo, and he was very happy and grateful.
Laughing in confusion, Alan and I sauntered on across the Agora. More temples, more ruins, and an ancient sewer. We found a pair of statues: Socrates and a Chinese-looking man in a robe.
“It’s Confucius,” said Alan, whose parents are Asian. “It’s me and you!”
We took a photo with the statues, me posing beside Socrates, Alan beside Confucius. It felt oddly wholesome and sweet. We laughed a lot.
INTERLUDE: THE BEST PUN EVER MADE
We got a drink after in a sunlit, breezy cafe overlooking the Acropolis, then headed back to the hostel to watch the sunset from the rooftop – too pooped to hike up to Lycabettus Hill. As we skirted the neverending Agora fence, following it around to our hostel’s neighbourhood, we spoke about travelling long term.
“I travelled too long last time,” I told Alan. “Moving hostel to hostel for a year straight, you get a bit… eccentric. Everyone’s so open-minded, nobody in hostels ever tells you anything you want to do is a bad idea. You end up with your head filled with all sorts of stuff. I nearly signed myself up for a clinical trial when I got back from that trip. My family had to rally together to tell me I was nuts.”
“I can see how that would happen eventually,” said Alan, who’d been away two months and was due home in a few days. “I think I’m good man, I’ve had a lot of fun but it’ll be good for me to go home and see my fiance and get my career moving.”
“I agree,” I said. Then, pointing to an white cat sitting on a slab of marble on the other side of the fence, I added: “Cat-egorically.”
“Nice,” said Alan.
Then it struck me.
“Oh shit. Cat–Agora–cally.”
“Dude,” said Alan. “What the fuck.”
Two puns within a single word, relevant to both the conversation at hand and its location and a key feature of said location? Come on. Come on.
END OF INTERLUDE: THE BEST PUN EVER MADE
We sat and chatted on the hostel terrace, and over the course of a couple of hours, the various hostel faces we’d spoken to over the past couple of days drifted by and we merged into a large, jovial group once again.
We got roped into a bracelet-making session going on downstairs in the common area – I made a pretty orange and red one – and I chatted to the new people who joined our table: a smiley designer, Shikha, living in Milan, and a smartly-dressed Berliner named Tony. Oh, how easy it is to make friends in such places! And how infuriating to know that this could be anytime, anywhere, if it wasn’t for social convention. People on the tube are not friendly because they know they’re not supposed to be friendly in such a space. There are rules – unwritten, yet carved deeper than stone. A smile at a stranger on the Northern Line? Unthinkable! But we all have the latent capacity for easy friendship of course – as proved by the way we all relax the second we step off a flight somewhere balmy. It puts me in mind of the Christmas truce in the trenches – a quick football match, a spot of laughter, claps on the back – then back to hucking grenades at one another.
*****
On my final day in Athens, I set out with Alan, a German and a Norwegian to explore the large, forested park in which Socrates’ prison sits. We found the prison soon enough; a cave with bars on it. I tried to focus my remaining awe on the cave, but the plaque was coy about whether Socrates was actually ever imprisoned there; there’s also a high chance it was just a storage building.
“Socrates was an idiot,” said the German among us, only 19 years old. “They literally gave him the chance to avoid a death sentence, and he instead insulted the judge so they killed him.”
“Well yeah,” said the Norwegian. “But the judge asked him to admit he was wrong. He was already an old man, and probably would have died soon anyway. So his choice was to undo his life’s work and make himself look totally fake and hypocritical and maybe live like, two more years, or let himself be executed and be remembered forever.”
“I guess we’re still talking about his ideas, like, two thousand years later,” I said. “Doubt we would be if he’d gone back on it all.”
“Would you do it? Die instead of going back on what you said?” Alan asked me.
“I’d love to say yes, but… realistically probably not.”
“But you’d be remembered by the world!”
“I’d rather remember myself,” I said, “by means of not being dead.”
Alan laughed.
“And anyway, five years ago I thought I’d want to keep going to nightclubs forever. Now I hate them. How can I die for a viewpoint I don’t even know if I’ll have in five years?”
We shrugged it off and set off up a steep slope to the highest point in the park. It was hot, and we panted as purple butterflies bobbed and weaved around us.
“I’ve gotta go to the gym dude, I swear to god,” said Alan.
“Same. Do you know the quote about exercise by Socrates?” I asked.
“No.”
“It’s something like: what a shame it is for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable,” I said.
“Damn, these ancient Greeks were really the first performative males, huh?” said Alan, not missing a beat. “Looksmaxxing, philosophy.”
I thought this was fantastically funny of course, and immediately wrote it down.
At the top of the hill we found some cliffs, and a passing Greek woman heard us pondering the history of the Acropolis – you get a great view of it from up there – and stopped to tell us what she knew of its history. You can see everything from up there – every rooftop and aerial and swimming pool, all the way to the glittering sea. The city of a thousand vistas, Athens. The city of sudden panoramas.
Wandering the park, we passed two young guys clearly on the back end of a narcotic bender; tops off, tied around their heads like turbans, standing atop a boulder in the park blasting music, dancing slowly in the afternoon sun. We sauntered on, getting briefly lost in a pretty forest, when we stumbled upon a strange sight: a viewpoint consisting of a flat area, smaller than a tennis court, hewn out of the rock – presided over by seven carved stone seats, scooped out of the hillside itself in one long line. A lone hiker, a woman around our age, was sitting quietly in the furthest one.
There was a plaque, but it didn’t give much away: The Seven Thrones, it called them. Nobody knows their purpose or their origin. They may have been used in civic matters, or ceremonies, or rites. We know they’re thousands of years old – but who once sat in them, and why, is lost forever to history.
“I kind of want to… sit in it,” I said, drawn away from the path like Pippin towards the Palantir.
I crossed the hewn rock plaza and sat in a seat several down from the girl, so as not to spook her. The seat, which was rounded and smooth like marble – presumably from thousands of years of use – was immensely comfortable, supporting my back perfectly and holding my shoulders cupped.
“Wow,” I mumbled. “Alan, you guys, come try this.”
Shortly after, my three companions joined. A moment later, a middle-aged couple arrived, saw us, and came to take the remaining two seats. And there we sat, looking out over the hills and the forest: seven strangers in seven thrones, perfectly aligned.
And then, something magical: for the next few minutes, none of us spoke a word. We didn’t plan it, we didn’t request it – it just happened. No one fidgeted. Nobody laughed. No one looked around to check on the others. We just sat, all seven of us, in complete quiet, listening to the ancient wind, our bodies supported by the earth and the hillside, breathing the air and watching orange and pink flowers nodding in the meadow beyond. No horns here – no traffic. Just the great stillness – just the wind, and the soft echo of time.
Eventually some more tourists walked past and broke the spell; I had to stifle a laugh thinking of how we must have looked to a passerby, this silent row of tourists seemingly half-engulfed in the mountainside.
*****
We left shortly after, made our way back to the city. They were going on ahead to catch the sunset at Lycabettus Hill. My flight was in a few hours, however, and I wanted to give myself plenty of time – so I bid farewell to the boys.
“Ah man,” said Alan. “It’s been an absolute pleasure.”
“Save travels dude,” I beamed. “Good luck with your wedding. And let me know if you ever come to London.”
And we hugged, and said goodbye.
*****
Two hours later, I was on the airport train – two hours later still, I was in the air, looking down on the little orange-lit Parthenon from 10,000 feet and climbing. I sighed at the sight, tired and sad and happy. An ancient city at night, twinkling far below, shrinking in the distance: it’s the kind of sight that gets you all revved up. It’s the kind of sight that gets you thinking: what else is there?