Digging through Byzantium

Don't count me out yet - I may yet find my walking shoes again and set out to the Attic hinterland, my knapsack on my back, next weekend. But last weekend I decided to take it easy once more, and limited my traveling to walking the few blocks down the hill from Kolonaki to the Byzantine Museum. Who can blame me? As a member of one of the foreign schools, I again got in for free. And the museum itself was quite a treat, despite what I think of the era it commemorates, and of being asked to dig through its debris for the past month.

For a start, the Byzantine Museum is not the Byzantine Museum. It's the Byzantine and Christian Museum, and covers everything from the permanent division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western spheres in 395 AD, past the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, right down to today (or at least to 2004, when it was last refurbished, in time for the Olympics). As a result, it's surprisingly large - it took me a good two hours to get through it all, even though my stomach is now conditioned to rumble at 11:30, in time for the weekday lunch break.

The museum doesn't limit itself in the information it presents to Athens or mainland Greece. In fact, you can get a good idea of the total history of the Empire - which stretched, at its greatest extent, from Gilbraltar to the Eastern shores of the Black Sea - just by reading the introductory displays in each of the rooms. (I was happy to revisit the stunningly vivid green mosaics of Theodosius' church of San Vitale in Ravenna, present here in some excellent photographs.) At the same time, the artifacts are drawn mainly from Athens and its Attic environs.

Of course, Athenian history doesn't end with the suppression of the democracy by the Macedonians in 322. (Arguably, even the history of Athenian democracy doesn't end in 322, but that's another story). It continues, through Athens' flourishing as a university town in the Roman Empire, to her conversion into a Christian bishopric. Many of the great pagan temples were transformed into churches, chief among them the Parthenon (Greek for virgin), which was turned into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. The Byzantine emperor Basil II, after smashing a Bulgarian army in 1018, dedicated his victory to the Virgin there, just as an ancient general might have done.

Just East of another impressive ancient site, the ruined hulk of the Olympaion, are the traces of one of the most important early churches, the Illisos basilica, some of whose mosaics are on show in the museum. It was dedicated to Leonidas, a Christian martyr who was killed during the persecutions ordered by the Roman emperor Decius around 250 AD. The museum also houses extensive remains of chapels taken from the monasteries that grew up around nearby Mount Hymettus in the early middle ages. Plato and Aristotle's philosophical schools were shut down by imperial decree in 529; Athens and the world were moving on.

Edward Gibbon (author of the monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) made it de rigueur in the late 18th century to denounce the Byzantines as decadent and vicious, painting a picture of the upper and lower classes alike as perpetually mired in uneducated stupor until some palace intrigue or drama at the chariot-races stirred them into frenzied riots. The scholarly fashion lasted a surprisingly long time, but is now itself regularly denounced by historians, who see in the Byzantines a resilient culture spanning the ancient and modern periods and productive of much beauty.

I'm not entirely convinced. Certainly, every age has a story to tell, though for my money the highly urbanized and egalitarian city-states of the classical age have more of interest to say to us than the exploitative and rural empire that followed them centuries later. In the end, of course, scholarly specialties come down to personal preferences. If I had as long to live as the Eastern Roman Empire (395-1453), I might spend more time scraping through 11th and 12th century layers of dust. As it is, I've now been rotated to a deeper trench, and spent some of the morning dusting off one of the interior walls of the Painted Stoa. And that may just put enough of a spring in my step to get me walking again this coming weekend.

On the embassy

This week things finally heated up. Rupert Murdoch's empire - and David Cameron's reputation - both came under increasing pressure; Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy decided on a managed Greek default; and meanwhile, in the Agora, it just got hotter. After a mild summer, it finally got as hot as I dreaded when I signed up for this dig, pushing past the 40 degree mark in the sunlight. Luckily, this year a grand tradition was revived, in which all our excavators are invited to a party at the pool in the official residence of the American Ambassador to Greece. We lazed around in the cool lawn next to the well-tended garden and the tennis court; beyond the gates, a wave of debt-inspired distrust was spreading outward from Athens over all the capitals of Europe.

It's hard for me to see how the story of phone-tapping at The News of the World has been receiving pride of place in the British press in the past few days. One part of an enormous media conglomerate broke the law; a Leader of the Conservative Party once hired a former editor of that newspaper; it doesn't seem to follow from these facts that it is likely or even desirable that the multi-national be disbanded or that the Prime Minister be forced to resign. All the same, the persistence and aggressiveness of the recent attacks on Cameron have reminded me how hated he is by many of my English friends. Hated for many reasons - but only one is relevant here, and that is the most important.

Many people despise the current conservative government because among its first acts in power was to enact a sweeping program of austerity measures, cutting or freezing the budgets of virtually all administrative departments (though health was ring-fenced, and overseas aid was actually increased). Here in Athens, a lot of people hate the Socialist government of George Papandreou for identical reasons: austerity measures mean painful cuts to valuable government programs. Many of them come to Syntagma to demonstrate, hurling slogans across the road at Parliament. It might seem hard to disagree with them. And yet the austerity measures pushed through by Cameron and Papandreou, Berlusconi and Zapatero - politicians from both sides of the ideological divide - make sense. They may not be right, or even the best option, but they make sense.

I don't think we need Aristotle to tell us why such policies make sense, but I'm a classicist so I'll bring him in. 'Increasing income is one way to become wealthier', this Athens-based commentator tweeted through time, 'Another is to reduce expenditure'. This kind of economics - from the Greek oikonomia, household management - is understandable to anyone. If you're living beyond your means, you have two choices: get more money or spend less.

Of course, economics at the national level is in some ways more complicated. One complication is added by the notion that the government can stimulate the economy during economic downturns by injecting liquidity into the market. Such policies, championed by the British economist Keynes, have become very popular of late, and for good reasons: Roosevelt's use of the idea helped get America out of the Great Depression. But in the most recent round of global recessions we were reminded of an inconvenient truth: governments, like individuals, only have so much money, and they can only borrow so much more before others start to wonder whether they will ever pay it back.

The countries of the rich west, after the first dip in the current crisis, that sparked by sub-prime mortgages and fueled by the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, decided to spend large sums of money stimulating their economies. That was reasonable enough. But now someone needs to pay for the cost of the stimulus packages, as well as all the admirable government programs that various nations have been running. And we are back to our basic law of household management: you can have more money by getting more, or spending less.

The Conservatives in Britain and Italy, and the Socialists in Greece and Spain, have opted for the second option: spending less. Their policies make sense; but they are not necessarily the right option, or even the best option. The other option - to get more money - may be better. Getting more money would mean raising taxes, though in practice a lot of the money could be obtained by levying higher taxes on the super rich and collecting them effectively. The British government has retained a temporary 50% top tax bracket, but even Labour has been shy to suggest tax raises as a solution to the nation's financial woes. No wonder - what politician in any Western democracy isn't aware that raising taxes is electoral suicide?

As simple as the principles may be, the structure of global finance has become almost incomprehensibly complex. A runny nose is one part of the system quickly leads to ful-blown epidemic a continent away. If European leaders wanted to avoid default, they would have had to take measures years ago either to increase income, or reduce expenditure. Instead, the single currency created a single interest rate for Germany and Greece, meaning that Greeks were offered the temptation of easy loans that were suitable only to central European manufacturers. They took them - like the Irish, the Spanish, and others - and now they are trapped with interest rates to high for them to borrow their way out of a mess.

After a day at the ambassador's house we wandered back to

Kolonaki and stopped for gelato at a sweet shop. My friend lent me a Euro - we get paid tomorrow, and I was into my last lefta. I looked at the owl and olive-branch motif on the reverse of the coin, one of the symbols chosen by the Greeks for the common currency. It goes back to the sixth century BC, when the Athenians chose it as a national symbol to replace the coats of arms that powerful aristocrats had placed on previous coins. The olive is for peace, appropriate for the peace that the Union, so many European think, has secured for their generation. The owl, of course, is Athena, goddess of wisdom and foresight. I flipped the coin in my hand, wondering if I was witnessing the fading of a dream - a noble one, perhaps, but a dream nonetheless.

Cycladic encyclical

After the (mis)adventure on the Road of the Towers, I decided to have a quieter weekend, and get some reading done in Athens itself, as well as taking in a museum. As excavators in the Agora, we were all issued with free entry passes to museums and archaeological sites owned by the Greek state. Except, that is, for those of us (like me) who already had a free entry pass from being past members of the American School, who simply brought last year's pass with us (they're valid for three years). The stipulations 'owned by the Greek state' can be important, as I learned on Hydra, where I was denied free entry to the local private historical museum.

The staff at the Cycladic Museum were happy to let me in for free, even though it's also a private institution: set up in 1986 to house the collection of the businessman and art enthusiast N.P. Goulandris, it continues to receive funding from his foundation. The Museum of Cycladic Art is its official name, and also something of a misnomer. The first floor is indeed full of the simple yet haunting figurines that can be found in the small Cycladic rooms appended to the Greek collections of major institutions such as the British Museum. The second floor, though, holds a fairly representative selection of all the major periods of Greek art, with a bias towards Athens in the classical period (which I won't be complaining about). The top floor is devoted, surprisingly but pleasantly enough, to antiquities from all periods of the Cypriot past.

The museum is well laid out, has some splendid individual items, and also features video presentations on how red- and black-figure were manufactured that are so good that I was actually convinced I understood it until I tried to summarize the process to some archaeologists. But the focus of most visitors will be on the Cycladic figurines, which project a kind of unapologetic naïvety that used to be called 'primitive' and that proved inspirational to modernist sculptors such as Giacometti. The Cycladic Museum has a floorfull of them, and - if you believe an American archaeologist that I heard lecture last summer - three quarters of them are forgeries. The issue is that there's no record of where most of the figurines were found. Many were simply acquired from the antiquities market, which obviously had an incentive to produce them. Their graceful simplicity may not have helped, making them relatively easy to fake.

Whatever the truth of that archaeologist's claims - he also claimed that Schliemann forged parts of the artifacts he discovered at Mycenae - there are other issues that often come to mind when I visit Greek museums. (I visited rather a lot of them last summer, as a member of the American School.) In general I have to say that I'm usually extremely impressed: I've been to a great number of large, clean, air-conditioned museums where the antiquities are treated and displayed in an exemplary way. All the same, a large number of these expensive-looking museums I've been to were in out of the way places, and it sometimes seemed when we got there that we were the only guests that day - or maybe even that week.

The Greeks have clearly demonstrated beyond any doubt that they can take care of antiquities, and make them accessible to any tourist who wants to come see them. It may seem churlish in that context to raise some further questions, but a couple that spring to mind are, 'How did they pay for all this?', and 'How are they still paying for this, with all that's been going on here?' Certainly, if my own experience and what I've heard from others is anything to go by, the deepening financial crisis and the austerity measures it has necessitated have led to fewer staff at many national museums (meaning, for example, that I was unable to look at archaic Athenian coins at the Numismatic Museum, something I am complaining about).

In many cases, museums proudly display signs with a circle of stars against a blue background declaring that they were constructed with, and continue to enjoy financial support from, the EU. (I always notice EU flags in Greece, since they're so common here and comparatively so rare in the UK). At other times (as in the case of the Cycladic Museum or the similarly enjoyable Benaki Museum a stone's throw up the road), the museums are privately funded. A few high-profile projects (such as, if I'm not mistaken, the impressive new Acropolis Museum) are funded solely by the Greek State; though of course, receiving outside funds for some museums makes it easier for a country to bankroll others.

In the context of the debate about repatriating certain ancient Greek artifacts, it would seem only fair to point out two facts. The first - already stated, it bears repeating - is that Greeks have clearly possessed the expertise and reverence necessary to protect and display classical monuments for quite some time now. The second is that they have done so partly due to subsidies by the wealthier countries of the EU, chief among them Germany. This is not necessarily to say that classical artworks should not stay in Greece, or that they should not be returned from other EU nations. But it is to stress that Greeks will either need to make their museums fully independent of EU funding, or come to think of the great works of the classical past not as jealously guarded national possessions, but as the common heritage of all Europeans. What the Greeks certainly can't afford - and what may not be particularly popular among the younger generation in any case - is a narrow-minded cultural nationalism. Once again, the economic structure of Europe can be seen to be dictating its politics, and perhaps even its culture.

A typical day

This blog started out as a way of telling my friends and family about my experience working on an excavation in central Athens as the Greek economy collapsed around me. Friends from Greece and elsewhere were quick to send me links to articles about the crisis, and as a result I haven't talked that much over the past month about archaeology. But since this is what I'm engaged in for at least seven hours every day, and since the protests have died down (there are places to pitch a tent in Syntagma available now if anyone fancies a camping holiday), I thought I might provide a picture of a typical day in the Agora.

My day starts at 6am, when I wake up. It may start a bit earlier than that on some days, since my flat-mates (and nearly everyone else on the dig) get up considerably earlier than me, and sometimes they wake me up. They have breakfast at home, buy coffee at the McDonald's in Syntagma, and go down to the Stoa of Attalus to hang out until work starts. (The Stoa is one of many porticoed buildings which would have surrounded the ancient Agora. It was given as a gift to Athens by Attalus II, a King of Pergamon, in the 2nd century BC, destroyed by the Herulian barbarians in 267 AD, and reconstructed by the American School in the 1950s. It houses the Agora Museum but also acts as our base and store house for finds.)

After a breakfast of yoghurt and croissants, I head down to the site, usually by the quickest route, which leads me past the yellow-stone national Parliament, through Syntagma with its protest camp, down the shopping street Ermou, through Monastiraki with its tourist shops, and down Adrianou past the restaurants with their tables set out to look over the ancient Agora. The streets are usually empty when I walk down, except for a few street-cleaners wearing orange T-shirts with 'Demos Athenaion' written on them (in ancient Greek, 'the Athenian people', but now just 'City of Athens').

I go to the whatever trench I've been assigned for my two-week rotation. There is one enormous trench split into two parts and two regular sized trenches, making four in all. For the whole of the central month of the eight-week season I'm working in Beta Theta, the extra large trench, which is to the right of the modern road Adrianou, with an entrance between two restaurants built over parts of the ancient Agora (more on that later). Another trench, Beta Eta, is around the corner, behind one of the restaurants, below James Joyce' Irish pub, which is popular with some of our diggers. The remaining trench is Beta Gamma, and it's across Adrianou, between the modern road and the railway line that runs through the Agora. We aren't digging at all this season in the part of the Agora that's been converted into an archaeological park, and where most of the important monuments were found; we're focusing now on the area around the Painted Stoa, where there's still a lot of digging to do.

When I get to the trench I go to the area where the equipment is kept and pick up a pick, a trowel, a wicker brush, and a metal dustpan, as well as a zambele (a bucket for dirt), and take it to wherever I was digging the day before, to be ready to start work when the bell of the nearby church rings for 7 o'clock. The day invariably starts with sweeping. The Americans are very keen on this; on the first day they told us that its importance couldn't be exaggerated, since if you don't sweep loose dirt away you won't be able to see what you're digging. (I've heard that Italians don't think so highly of sweeping, suspecting that it mixes up different contexts; there's also been a lot of envious chatter about the Germans using vacuums on their sites.) We usually sweep with a wicker brush, but are sometimes handed paint brushes if an area needs to be especially clean for a photograph.

After sweeping, a supervisor or an assistant supervisor will usually come over and have a look at my area. If the earth has changed significantly and it's a new level in the stratigraphy, they'll 'open a new basket', handing me a bucket with a tag on it making clear which cell in the grid plan of the site I'll be excavating. I'll then start doing a 'pass': working from one end of the area to the other in rows, chipping earth away with my pick and then sweeping the loose dirt into my pan. I'll then sift through the dirt in the pan with my fingers, putting any bits of pottery into bucket, and any bits of bone into a zip-lock bag. (Any glass or coins I'll take up to the supervisor immediately.) After I've finished my pass I'll sweep the whole area again, tidy up the edges of the area I've been digging (the scarp), and call for the supervisor. They'll then decide whether the earth has changed enough to 'close the basket', in which case I'll sweep it again, the supervisor will take photographs (digital and polaroid), and I'll be handed a new bucket with a new tag. If the earth hasn't really changed, I'll be asked to do another pass. And so on, ad heatstroke.

About twice a week I'll be sent away to an area beside the Stoa of Attalus where we do pottery washing. Groups of us will huddle around bowls of water with buckets full of pottery sherds (and pieces of tile and stone that diggers have mistaken for pottery sherds), cleaning the sherds with toothbrushes and placing them in an empty bucket. Others will then take the buckets of clean sherds and dump them out on trays, where they'll arrange them by type (fine versus coarse), colour (black versus red), and size. At the end of the day the supervisors will take a look at them, getting an impression of the chronological story they tell, counting and cataloguing them, and deciding what to throw away and what to keep.

At 9 o'clock a supervisor will hand around orange slices (like at half time in a school rugby match). At 11 we get a lunch break. A lot of diggers queue up for gyros; others eat what they've packed. (I usually have a hunk of bread an tzadziki.) At 11:30 we start work again. This year the temperature has been pretty mild, so it's normally not uncomfortably hot till now, but the afternoon session is often tough. At 1pm we get a water break, where we sit in the shade for 15 minutes and drink water and moan. Then there are only 45 minutes till the end of the day at 2, not a moment too soon for us, who then tromp over to the Stoa with sweat pouring down our brows to wash our hands, go to the bathroom, or just get our stuff before going home. On Fridays we get paid; when it's someone's birthday the director brings out a cake and several cases of pop.

The rest of the day most of us have off, though the supervisors stay behind to catalogue pottery and other finds for a few more hours. There are usually drinks in the James Joyce on Tuesday afternoons, and elsewhere on other weekdays, though the decrepit, boring grad students among us will tend to forego such merriment for the American School's renowned Blegen Library. I usually eat a Greek salad as soon as I go home, and may supplement that with entire boxes of chocolate cookies. Then I sit for a bit, read things for my dissertation or write this blog. I'll go to a cafe around 6 to read Demosthenes, whose speeches I'm working though this summer. After dinner around 7:30 I don't have much time before I collapse into bed at 10.

On Thursday nights the director invites us all to his house, where he gives us pizza and free beer. We eat and drink on his rooftop patio, with Mount Lycabyttus behind us, while he sits downstairs and reads or plays cards with his family. By Thursday night we are all exhausted, broke, and very grateful for the free food. Some people get a little tipsy before wandering back home; we wish we didn't have another day of digging to do before we get our pay packets and start the weekend. Our muscles are tight and cramped and our backs are aching; our stomachs are full of pizza and beer, and our minds with images of decrees on marble, the heads of statues, and silver coins, that might be buried under the dust right now, just waiting for us to release them.

A worm's eye view

After another day in the sun with the agoraddicts, it was a pleasure to be able to read John Lanchester's outstanding article on the Greek default in the London Review of Books (yes, the Greek default, which he is probably right to take as a fait accompli). Lanchester, a Brit, offers an extensive overview of the crisis, its causes, and its probable consequences. Although a novelist should probably know the word 'passivity' (which any classicist will prefer to his awkward 'done-unto-ness'), his piece is certainly one of the most illuminating contributions I've read so far, and for having brought it to my attention I should thank my friend Leo - a translation into Roman in more senses than one.

Lanchester offers us what he calls 'a worm's eye view' of the crisis. Granted, he says, the Greeks (as well as citizens of other countries that borrowed heavily, like you and I) profited from government borrowing, but it didn't feel that way at the time. In any case, though Greece now has too many cushy public-sector employees, can you really blame Giannis for taking up that promising position five years ago? He was just trying to earn a living, and the government job was the most attractive option available to him. He can't be blamed for the government's decision to create that position, nor was he to know that it was ultimately unsustainable given the state of the public finances and Greece's likely rate of growth. And if anybody did know that the number of new public-sector jobs was unsustainable, they were ignored, like Cassandra prophesying the fall of Troy.

Lanchester mixes up a number of insightful observations here, but because he tries to develop them all the picture that emerges is blurry. His first point is a perceptive comment on a tragic feature of human psychology: our setbacks hurt us more than our victories make us happy. The follow-up again appeals to an understanding of the human mind, premised on the assumption that people will do what is in their short-term interest (if I get offered a good job, I will take it). Lanchester then exploits the sense that, in our modern quasi-democratic constitutions, there is a gulf in power and communication between the rulers and the ruled: I didn't borrow money, the government did, and anyway, how was I to know it would all end it tears? Finally, we have one of the fundamental problems with democracy: policies are chosen on the basis of what please people, not with a view to what is best for them.

I sympathize when Lanchester gestures despairingly to the abyss dividing government and governed in our modern states, just as I did when George, the protestor I talked to in Syntagma Square, made a similar lament. At the same time, it seems clear to me that there is enough responsiveness even in our imperfect democratic mechanisms for the people to take proper responsibility for their own fate. Given time, memory, and good historians (this is crucial) a people should be able to learn from its mistakes. Those who remember the destructiveness of over-spending by past governments should be cautious about accepting the assurances of parties who promise ambitious projects in the future. Occasionally this works, for a while; Canadians, for example, consistently punished fiscal indiscipline in the wake of the deficit run up by Trudeau's governments in the 70s.

But more often it doesn't work, often because people like to vote for politicians urging them to let the good times roll. This is one problem with democracy even the ancient Athenians didn't have figured out (let alone the modern ones). The politician Demosthenes was constantly complaining that his fellow citizens only wanted to hear what was pleasant (that King Philip of Macedon was no threat), not what was true (that King Philip of Macedon was about to take over Greece). Plato was more scornful, comparing democratic politicians to make-up artists who could make a sickly customer a picture of health (philosopher-kings, he thought, would be more like expert nutritionists, patient builders of genuine well-being).

Cutting back is difficult, as a lot of people are remembering these days: it's painful to give up that holiday, those clothes, that daily takeaway coffee. But when you consider the alternative, it turns out that the perilous path of discipline is the only route we can choose if we value our autonomy as adult human beings. Of course it would be much easier to save if someone made our spending decisions for us, just as it was easier not to make mistakes when our parents were overseeing our every move. In the same way, it might well be easier for countries not to overspend if their spending decisions were taken away. Technocrats in Frankfurt, say, could impose the discipline that politicians in Lisbon and here in Athens seem unable to go through with themselves. If you find that an acceptable scenario, you may as well stop reading this blog; though it does place in stark terms the real stakes of arguing that our democracy is partly to blame for our sorry choices. If we complain too much about or freedom to choose, someone might well just take it away from us.

The two towers

It's impressive - and rare - when classicists can use their personal experience to back up a claim about the ancient world. Victor Davis Hanson made his reputation (in Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece) by casting doubt on ancient reports of armies destroying crops in a summer by drawing on his own failure to drag olive trees out of the ground with a tractor on his farm in California. (He later followed this up, in Hoplites, by having his students run around in replica Greek armour to test a theory about the mobility of heavy infantry in classical times.)

But few scholars of ancient warfare can match the experience of N.G.L. Hammond, the sometime headmaster and specialist on Macedon who also led the British mission in support of the Greek resistance to the fascists in World War II. Hammond argues in one article that ancient armies can't have depended upon pack animals alone for provisions on campaign; the reason being that he had tried to provision an army that way himself in Greece, and it hadn't worked.

The Spartan armies that marched into Attica every year during the early phases of the Peloponnesian War, or into Boeotia to battle the Thebans in the early 4th century, must have used wagons to transport provisions, and to use wagons there must have been a good road. Hammond thought he knew where that road was: it ran between modern Vathikhoria and Agios Vasilios in the Megarid, near the splendid ruins of the fortress of Aigosthena (now Porto Germano). Since a series of ancient towers were constructed to control the road, Hammond christened it 'The Road of the Towers'.

Encouraged by my supervisor and the director of the excavation, I set out to walk the road and find the towers along with my flat-mate, who I'll call Adventure Mike here, since his name is actually Mike, he's adventurous, and everyone else on the dig calls him that. For all their encouragement, my professors had been rather vague on the specifics of the walk, and none of the bookstores in Athens seemed to have a detailed map of the area in stock, perhaps because it's off the edge of maps of Attica and of the Peloponnese. But I did take a picture of the plan of the ancient road in a book by Hans Ruprect Goette on my my new digital camera.

We took a bus out to the town of Vilia, which is nestled under Mount Cithaeron, which formed the natural northwestern boundary of Attica in ancient times (nearby, you can see the ruins of another fort, that of Eleutherai, probably built by the Athenians to defend their hinterland). At Vilia, I tried to tell the bus conductor that we wanted to be dropped off if possible at the place on my map of Attica that was marked 'Ancient Tower'. He seemed confused, and told me he didn't know where the ancient tower was, but took my map and went up front to consult with the bus-driver.

After a few minutes of deliberation with a few of the passengers and the bus-driver (who pulled of the tricky feat of simultaneously consulting a map and driving thirty people up a mountain road), the conductor returned and told us we'd already gone by that point, but that if we waited when we got to Porto Germano they would drop us off on the way back to Vilia. We nodded, waited, and were eventually dropped off exactly where the map - and a road sign - told us there was an ancient tower.

Except there was no ancient tower, at least not there. Mike said he was used to Greek signs announcing archaeological sites that were actually miles away on the nearest major road, so that people knew where to stop their cars. We went into a roadside restaurant and asked the man if there was an ancient road anywhere near. He asked me where I was from. I said that I was born in Calgary, which isn't false, and it turned out to be the right answer: he'd lived there himself for several years, and was happy to give us an extra bottle of water for free at the start of our trek.

The road up into the hills our Greco-Albertan friend had pointed to was soon criss-crossed by other roads, but we kept working our way upwards till the road narrowed into a goat track. There was a spectacular view out over a long green valley speckled with the orange roofs of houses that eventually opened out into the sparkling blue of the Corinthian Gulf. Near the top of the climb we came to a shrine with a picture of Mary in it and a cross on top. We felt good: we were doing the Road of the Towers.

Or were we? The trail became harder and harder to identify; after a while we realized that there was no trail. We had simply been following random openings in the brush for the last half-hour or so. But since by this time we had begun to descend again, we had no intention of climbing back to the shrine. Instead we stuffed our lunch of bread and anchovies into our mouths just before any of the swarm of flies could land on it, and kept working our way down into the valley.

At this point I mentioned despairingly to Mike that we hadn't even seen any towers yet. As soon as I said that he pointed out into the distance at something that looked like a shadow that was somehow wider than the tree which produced it. We looked at it through our cameras, using the zoom to reassure ourselves that we had, indeed, found one of the ancient towers. Soon afterwards we spotted another. They were too small to be used as lookouts, and since they were down in a valley they wouldn't have made sense as refuges or strongholds.

But they did control the road, and we knew if we made it to the towers, we would also have made it to the road. For the next half hour or so, we slalomed down shale, between trees and over or through an ever-present, shin-high layer of sharp holly bushes. By the time we reached the first, circular tower, we felt like intrepid archaeologists bursting upon some undiscovered site. But soon afterwards, we noticed a display board with information for tourists, and the broad, red road leading to it, and felt, to use a phrase I learned in the UK, like right wallies.

But at least we had found one of the towers and were on the road to another of them, which was square. After this we climbed out over a valley crowned with rocky crags, with plains where grain was being grown far below. The sun was beating down, and we were running out of water; we ate some biscuits and kept marching. After a while, there was a fork in the road. To our right, we could see it winding off towards the distant gulf like smoke curling up into the ether. We turned left, hoping that somehow the road would get us back to Calgary.

The road mocked us, indulging in enormous digressions and perambulations around fields and hills. At some point we walked past a donkey chained to a tree. We drank our water and ate through the rest of our food. We'd been walking for about 5 hours and the sun was unrelenting. We walked by a reservoir filled with days-old water seeded with dead bugs, but filled our water bottles with it anyway, just in case. Finally we spotted a modern road, so I poured the buggy water on my head.

But the modern road was long, and the Greeks driving by in their swimsuits with their beach equipment were in no hurry to pick us up. Instead they liked to wave at us, cheering or jeering as they sped by. We found two or three half-empty bottles of water that had apparently been thrown out of car-windows on the way by. I drank one of them in three gulps. Soon afterwards, I spotted what looked like a cafe or a house, and my heart rose as mirages of cold drinks formed in my mind's eye.

Then I saw a cross and my heart sank. A church, for Christ's sake. Inside there were bottles of oil and water. I opened the Bible on the lectern and read the first passage my gaze fell on: it said (really) Piete ex autou, drink of this; this is my blood. Well, our blood now. We swiped two bottles of water and left two Euros as an offering. I wondered whether the water was for ritual use and Mike said, 'They're supposed to be Christian'. Then we noticed that two young guys in a pickup had pulled over and gestured for us to climb in.

They were going to Porto Germano, so we went with them. When we arrived we had half an hour to down an astonishing number of bottled drinks before the last bus left for Athens. We took them down to the beach and watched the families watching the day go down in flames: the serious children focusing on their play, the vigilant adults keeping an eye out, the superior teenagers strutting their stuff. I walked to the edge of the pebbly beach, scooped up the latest wave from the distant Ionian and Adriatic seas, and poured it over my head.

Americans in the agora

Hanging over a chair a few feet away from me as I write is my flat-mate's T-shirt, commemorating 80 years of American excavations in the agora. On the back is the first sentence in the now extensive series of excavation notebooks, begun in 1931: 'After proper ceremony of sprinkling of holy water by priest of neighboring church, Agora Excavations began about 7:30 a.m.' Our supervisors still record all our finds in the same type of notebook (as well as on an iPad), and our workdays are still measured out by the bells of the same church.

One question I am sometimes asked by people outside of the field is, why are there Americans in the agora? There is a short answer and a long answer. Let's deal with the long answer first.

The long answer is that at some point in the 19th century, elite Europeans decided that their culture originated in classical Greece. Since being in touch with your Greek roots was a way of demonstrating that you were European, the great powers started founding study centers in Athens, which could act as bases for excavations elsewhere in Greece. The German Archaeological Institute was founded in 1874; the American School opened its doors in 1881; and the British established their centre in 1886. (Canadians had to wait till 1976 for their own modest institute.)

In the first half of the 20th century, there was a scramble for what promised to become the most significant archaeological sites in Greece. The Brits were first to Knossos; the French set up camp in Delphi and Delos. In Athens itself, the Germans scrutinized the ancient cemetery and potters' quarter, the Kerameikos, and the Americans got down to work in the area they suspected lay over the classical agora. (There is a Canadian dig at Mytilene).

Americans run the excavations in the agora, in other words, because they are part of a long tradition of European cultures looking for themselves in Greece. That's the long answer. The short answer is: money. The Americans, as usual, seem to have more of it than everybody else. In the early days, John D. Rockefeller paid the workers and the archaeologists; nowadays the excavations are supported by the family of David Packard, who sold computers, through the Packard Humanities Institute.

Though American money is largely what has ensured that there are Americans in the agora year after year, the agora itself is very definitely part of Greece. Everything we dig up is legally the property of the Greek state (and ultimately the Greek people). There are of course a great number of Greek archaeologists, but there is a lot of digging to do, digging is expensive, and Greece doesn't have enough money to dig all its sites itself (especially nowadays). So allowing the foreign schools to excavate makes sense for both sides.

One thing that may make less sense to some is that we student volunteers actually get paid a small amount each week to sweep dust away from ancient stones. Most excavations don't pay their student diggers, since there is an army of aspiring archaeologists out there every year who want the experience and are willing to it for free. Sometimes students will even pay money to work on an excavation, especially when the dig has a training focus.

But you won't be surprised to hear that paying diggers makes a lot of sense to me. First, it prevents archaeology becoming yet another of those professions (like journalism) in which the only people that can get a job are those who are wealthy enough to be able to do unpaid internships. And second, well, I've just been digging through dirt in the Greek sun for seven hours. And as my flat-mate said to me on day two, 'Can you imagine how crazy you'd have to be to be working this hard without getting paid?'

Germany, Emperor of Debts?

An Athenian friend of mine - no oracle, this time, but an orator of some distinction - has taken polite issue with some of the opinions I've expressed on this blog, and has kindly forwarded to me three of four articles from the British and German press. I'll call my source Demosthenes, even though he's really more of a historian than an orator, and definitely more of an archaeologist than me. He's also, as it happens, a fellow acolyte of the Pelican.

One article, from Bloomberg, places the Greek crisis in the wider context of economic instability in the so-called PIGS nations (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain). Demosthenes no doubt wanted to remind me of the fact that Greece is not alone, and if I haven't made that sufficiently clear in my posts so far, I'm happy to do so now. Not only is the crisis not just about Greece (which rules out explanations for the crisis like 'Greeks are just lazy'); it's not even just about Mediterranean countries - the 'I' in the acronym stands for Ireland, not Italy. The particular form that the crisis has taken has varied from country to country (in Ireland a collapse in the baking sector, in Spain the bursting of a real-estate bubble), and the differences among the PIGS countries (in population, religion, and culture) make any single explanation for the crisis inadequate.

One of the things that Demosthenes seems to have taken issue with was my implicit endorsement of the German Foreign Ministry's statement that the Greeks had received their war reparations - and then some. But in an interview for Der Spiegel, Albrecht Ritschl, a German academic at the London School of Economics, turns this account of things on its head. According to Ritschl, Germany has never properly repaid the countries it plundered in World War II, Greece included. At the same time, Germany received vast sums of money from the USA in the form of the Marshall Plan. The post-war economic miracle came about not because Germans worked hard, but because they were being given money and because they didn't pay their real debts. In accordance with his theory, Ritschl proclaims Germany 'Schuldenkaiser', 'Emperor of Debts'.

In an equally iconoclastic piece in the German edition of the Financial Times, Thomas Fricke argues that Germany is not so much helping Greece by lending it money than it is helping itself. The loans that Germany is offering - even in the bailout packages - come with interest, some of it considerable. Because of this, Germany stands to profit by lending Greece money, and shouldn't pretend either that it has been injured by the smaller nation's profligacy or that its aid is reluctant or altruistic.

The contention of Ritschl, a financial historian, that Germany never paid full reparations to the countries it devastated in the 1940s may well be accurate. But he admits that Germany did make some payments of this sort; he simply considers them peanuts compared with the damage that Germany did to Greece. But accurately quantifying a violation of that nature is surely difficult. If what Ritschl is saying is partly that Germany has a historic responsibility to Greece, few would disagree. But it is a responsibility that Germans are arguably already conscious of, though they might go about fulfilling it with slightly less complaining.

It also seems unconvincing to me to argue that the economies of Germany and Greece grew at different rates in the post-war period almost entirely because Germany was receiving money from the US. Other European nations (including Greece) received funds under the Marshall Plan; but not all of them became one of the world's most competitive economies. On a more basic level, aid doesn't go very far towards explaining growth; if it did, Tanzania, which received more foreign aid than any other country in the 1970s, would not have seen its economy shrink during that period.

As for Fricke, I'm not sure that he understands the reason that people pay interest. People pay interest because there is value in gaining liquidity in the present, and there is a cost in the risk lenders take on in giving money to somebody else for a time. To say that Germany will profit from interest payments is to state the obvious, and to accuse Germany of foul-play for charging interest is to compare them with interest-free lenders that rarely exist in the marketplace. The point is not that Germany is lending Greece money, but that it is lending Greece money at a time when no rational lender with a concern for his own wallet would lend it. And with that, there comes a very real risk that the Germans - as well as the many others who have lent to Greece - will never get their money back.

The way back

The road there and the road back are one and the same, said the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus. I tested that out twice on Hydra: once on my long westward stroll yesterday evening, and again during a brisker eastward walk this morning, past the gates of whitewashed seaside mansions and monasteries, and down into another cove with a grey sand beach. In neither case was it true, in part because of the need I felt to stop on the way back to photograph the kittens that had taken up languishing poses in the shade in the time it took me to walk down the road and decide to turn back.

After Hydra, I got back on the ferry and was shown to a seat for my lunch, part of the deal for the one-day cruise (which I wouldn't recommend, by the way - it was actually a rip-off). Seated with me was a Greek man in his fifties and a Californian woman of about the same age who had come to Athens because her daughter was participating in the Special Olympics. She asked him why Hydra had so many canons, and then, when he said that they were placed there during the Greek War of Independence, she asked him what that had been about. She also asked him what all the protests were for, and he said that the people were angry because they hadn't seen any of the EU money that had come Greece's way; it had been snapped up by the politicians.

When I got on the bus at the Peiraeus I noticed the same Californian lady sitting

next to me. We were meant to be going back to the Hotel Grande Bretagne, but the bus stopped a few hundred meters away from Syntagma Square, near the south-east corner. Amalias had been blocked off; there was another protest. The American lady looked exasperated and somewhat fearful. But as I walked towards the square bracing myself for more tear gas, I noticed that things were different this time. The low-level protest was not violent; and the square was full of people giving speeches or leading discussion groups or handing out flyers. I couldn't understand much of what they were saying, but I couldn't help but feel glad, and maybe hopeful, about the way they seemed to be saying it this time round.

Hydration

After a week clouded with tear gas and punctuated by stun grenades, it was nice to be able to look forward to a three-day weekend away from the turbulent capital. Our long weekend coincided with two national holidays: the anniversary of the granting of dominion status to my own distinctly un-mediterranean native land, and more relevantly (since this is an American excavation), the 4th of July. On Friday night, the Canadians hosted a gathering, luring the Americans in with poutine before ordering them to undergo several rounds of trivia questions designed to draw further attention to our nation's underwhelming cultural accomplishments.

This morning I woke at 6, as usual, and headed down to Syntagma. I was absolutely astonished to be able to buy a frappé in a newly refurbished McDonald's, in view of the fact that the place had been firebombed only three days beforehand, suffering damage that I had assumed would take weeks to repair. By contrast, as I waited for my shuttle to arrive on the steps of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, I noticed that its fine marble stairs were still chipped at the edges and corners. Having suffered not even a sniffle from lingering tear gas, I climbed onto my bus to the Peiraeus.

I'd bought a ticket for a one-day cruise of the main islands of the Saronic gulf: Aegina, Poros, and Hydra. Although I didn't know it when I boarded the ferry, we were headed to the most distant of the three, Hydra, first. My plan was to disembark on both Hydra and Poros, spending a night in each, before getting back on the ferry to Athens via Aegina, which I visited last summer with students from the American School. (Most of the agoramericans ha set off for Mykonos and Delos for the long weekend; a few bolder spirits jetted off to Lesbos, Samos and even Rhodes.)

The passage was unproblematic enough, besides the traditional Greek music that was laid on free of charge (and apparently without anyone requesting it) for most of the journey. As we pushed through green, garbage-infested waters past Aegina's rocky hills, we were serenaded with a miscellany of Greek folk tunes, including 'Lady in Red' and 'Don't Cry for me Argentina' and climaxing with an extraordinary medley of hits, including 'I Will Survive' and 'You're Just to Good to be True (Can't Take my Eyes off of You)'. The lady sitting next to me looked over and rolled her eyes, but the singer could not be stopped. He crooned all the way to Hydra; that is his day-job, and he intends to go on doing it.

Hydra town is a collection of tourist shops and restaurants clustered around a bay full of bobbing fishing boats and jostling yachts. Unlike similar places, like Chania on Crete, it's not particularly distinguished by its architecture. I wandered around for a while looking for what I would consider a cheap hotel (a single room for 50 Euros or less), before realizing that there weren't any on this island. I did get a glimpse of a few stray kittens, though, most of whom ghosted away from me as I clumped down the narrow whitewashed stairs that serve as alleyways here.

There are no cars on Hydra, and that suits me just fine. I went for a walk along the coast

westwards, peering down at swimmers on pebbly beaches below me. After an hour or so I descended to a lonely strip of grey sand and swam a few strokes out into the salt water, which curled around me and got in my eyes. I thought about not stopping over in Poros tomorrow night after all. After all this writing about debt, perhaps I should put the cost of another night in a hotel into repaying my own; I'd spent too much money traveling last summer. I also thought about my mind, the way it continually

protests about the past and negotiates the future, while all around, the sun is raining silver on a rich blue sea.

The spirit of anti-capitalism

It never for a moment looked like today was going to be tranquil. Even by 6:30, when I set out for the ancient agora from Alopekis Street, there were big blue police vans blocking the streets leading to Syntagma. I was able to cut the north-west corner of the square, though, by the McDonald's. There was broken glass everywhere on the ground, and huge cracks like spider webs adorned the windows of any shops facing onto the square. When I turned onto Ermou there was a Greek security guard sitting in a doorway, and he looked up when he saw me and said 'Ellada, eh, Greece!' with mock enthusiasm.

At the excavation I tidied up my scarp (the edge of a trench) and swept for hours to prepare the area for a photograph, to be taken by my supervisor. In the next space over was the Greek friend who had took me to Syntagma yesterday. I asked her how the protests went and she said 'alright'. I asked her if she thought the austerity measures would pass through parliament and she said she thought they would, but hoped they wouldn't. She also said that she'd worked through the text of the bill with a friend, an accountant, who said that any company with Greece's finances would be going 'straight to hell'.

When I tried to walk through Syntagma the same way I did yesterday, from the south-west to the north-east corner and then home, I immediately realized that things were different this time around. There were many times more people; whereas the virtually empty road separating the center of the square from Ermou served as a boundary line yesterday, today I couldn't even make it onto that street because of the crowds of people. Most had white faces and some had home-made or low-end gas-masks. I passed a tall bald German man with a large camera talking in a reporter's tones into his mobile, and then a young Greek man shouting passionately at a group of other Greek youths, presumably exhorting them to some great deed.

When I reached the north-west corner, I looked up past the city's poshest hotels to where a lot of the action seemed to be happening. I could see an amazing number of stones being flung from the mass of protestors towards the police, some from several meters back in the crowd. After a while, the police shot tear-gas canisters at the crowd, and it pulled back, creating a no-man's land about ten meters wide. A few brave protestors went up into that space, kicking the tear-gas canisters back towards the police and hurling rocks at them from only a few meters away. When the tear-gas had died down, these men turned to the crowd and raised their arms, at which point the crowd erupted into cheers and applause. When, soon afterwards, the police let off another round of tear-gas, the crowd booed and hissed.

As the first ranks of protestors turned to flee from the tear-gas, everyone in the area a hundred or so meters back where I was standing also turned, and began walking westwards along the alley that Basilea Sofia narrows into at that end of Syntagma. Some people were slightly panicky; others stopped and turned around frequently to get a view of what was happening or to record it on with their phones; a few people seemed to be encouraging others to stand their ground. At that point a column of a dozen or so riot police marched through the crowd, apparently on their way to the front. The crowd sent up an awful booing and hissing, and a few people threw things at them from a few feet away.

After a while there was more tear-gas, and more shepherding of us back away from the square. This was the only point at which I had any sense of being in danger, not because of the explosions of the stun-grenades and tear-gas canisters the police were firing or because of the peppery tickle of tear-gas in my nose and mouth, but because of the mass of people moving unpredictably. I eventually made my way up to Panepisitimiou again, where I turned and saw two large fires burning in the middle of the street.

I thought about staying to watch what was going on for a little longer, but then turned up towards Kolonaki, an area apparently perpetually insulated from serious disturbances. I'd seen enough of the riots to ask myself yet again what exactly the protestors were doing it for. If the police had suddenly vanished, would they actually have burst into Parliament and strangled Papandreou where he stood? At the head of the demonstrators, nearest to Parliament, I'd seen a large banner reading 'amesi dimokratia' (direct democracy), but the slogan seemed tarnished.

The Protestant ethic

It looked like today was going to be pretty tranquil. I'd heard that the government would be voting again on the austerity measures demanded by the EU and the IMF, I'd read that the unions had called a general strike, and I knew that the indignants had called for a huge protest on Syntagma. But when I walked down to Syntagma this morning, there were no police men waving me away, and no massed ranks of police vans, only a modest blockade of Irodou Attikou, where the Presidential Residence is. And after I'd made one pass of my hourglass-shaped trench, and well before the sun had gotten to me, I was sent to wash pottery by the Stoa of Attalus.

Washing pottery is a pretty pleasant task, especially when compared to digging. Equally monotonous, it has the advantage of allowing you to sit down and talk with other diggers around a tub of water, like campers around a fire. Today I worked through two or three buckets of coarse sherds with the two Greek students who work on our excavation, which allowed me to pick up some useful new phrases in modern Greek ('I am tired and hungry'). It also allowed me to hear about the University of Athens, Greek-led archaeology in Greece, and what two students thought about the government.

They didn't think much of it. One of them had heard - and the other believed - that the police had been deliberately allowing central Athens to fill up with immigrants, which was driving housing costs down, allowing those linked to the political elite to snap up valuable properties for artificially low prices. People didn't want to live downtown with immigrants because the most desperate among them could be driven to crime - as in a recent case of a man who was shot for his camera while preparing to drive his wife, who had just gone into labour, to hospital.

At the end of the day I walked with one of the agorathenians through Monastiraki Square, where she called a friend on her mobile asking if they were protesting in Syntagma. We then walked up into Syntagma from the south-west side, with the scene around us becoming gradually more chaotic as we went on. When we entered the square itself I could hear what sounded like shots being fired again, and over in the north-west corner of the square there was a flame several feet high licking the gassy air. There seemed to be some sort of skirmishing going on in that area, but most of the action appeared to be concentrated at the eastern edge of the square, where it faces onto the National Parliament.

As we crossed over into the main part of the square a young man wearing a mask approached us holding a spray-bottle. He sprayed my friend in the face, and then, after giving me time to remove my sunglasses, did the same to me. When I looked at my friend again, her face was covered with what looked like white stage makeup; she told me it was Maalox, a kind of stomach medicine that the protesters put on their faces to mitigate the effects of tear gas. There were people all around us with similarly whitewashed faces, walking to and from talking, and occasionally setting fire to cans of garbage.

When we got up to Amalias, the street which divides the square from Parliament, my Greek colleague went to join her friends at the protest while I turned towards the north-east exit of the square. My conversation with George had confirmed that I disagreed with the vast majority of the protestors' beliefs, and I already knew that I did not sympathize with their methods. I passed an immigrant selling bottled water, looked up at the rows of policemen, six or seven deep, outside of Parliament, and went onto Panepistimiou.

It was only when I got onto Panepistimiou that I started being bothered by the tear gas. It looked like there was a small band of policemen firing canisters in the alleyway where the Cartier and Bulgari shops are, along with the cafe where I'd been charged 6 Euros for a double cappuccino a fortnight previously. When I stopped to wait for the light to change so that I could cross Akadimias, I noticed two policemen standing near me in full riot gear, looking like futuristic re-imaginings of medieval knights. There was a young couple rushing to get their baby away from the encroaching clouds of tear gas.

Then I was in Kolonaki. Three ladies took a break from their al fresco lunch to giggle at me, and an older man stopped me, pointing at my face. I tried to tell him in Greek that someone else had done my make-up, and he laughed but gestured to me to wipe it off, saying 'astynomia' (police). When I got home one of my American flatmates had been searched by them on the way home, while the other had some pictures of the rioting, including one of a masked man approaching McDonald's with two chunks of marble in his hands. My US colleagues were not impressed. 'We come here to study the founders of modern civilization,' one complained, 'and instead what we get are these damn hooligans!'

Real democracy

Today on the way back from the dig I stopped under the sign saying 'real democracy' and looked again at some of the leaflets and posters they had displayed on their table. Last time I'd hardly lingered long enough to confirm that they weren't making reference to Frank Bryan's solid study of the New England town meeting, but this time I stayed for enough time for one of the people behind the table to ask me if I had any questions.

When he realized that I had several, he gestured for me to join him in an area with a few chairs between the stream of shoppers passing through the square and the protestors' makeshift camp. The man - I'll call him George here, because that was his name (and because it hardly blows his cover in Athens) - was middle-aged and filthy, with awful teeth. He spoke English well, which was a relief (my modern Greek is not up to political disputation). He offered me a biscuit, which I accepted, and a cigarette, which I declined.

George wanted to get one thing clear: the Greeks don't owe anybody anything. He seemed to have three main ways of getting back to this conclusion, and made use of them as soon as the conversation looked like it might go anywhere else. First, the Greeks don't owe the Germans anything because the Germans violated the country during World War II and never paid reparations. Second, the Greeks don't owe anybody anything because the terms of the loans they took out were unfair. Third, the Greek people don't owe anybody anything because the loans were made by politicians, not by the people themselves.

Greece's deputy PM Theodoros Pangalos accused Germany last year of failing to pay Greece back for gold looted during the war. The German foreign ministry quickly issued a rebuttal, pointing out that Germany had paid around 115 million DM to Greece in formal war reparations in 1960, and estimated that over 30 billion DM had flowed from Berlin to Athens in EU transfers since then. In any case, even if Greece did not owe Germany any money for whatever reason, it would still owe plenty of money to other creditors at the national and sub-national levels in France, the UK and the US.

George made his second point with a particular vivid analogy. 'Say you have a wife and two kids', he said, 'and I lend you money. Would you not try to stop me if several years later, when you couldn't pay up, I came to your house, killed your kids and fucked your wife?' Like many of the analogies bandied about by the opponents of the austerity measures, this struck me as somewhat over the top: nobody, as far as we know, has at this point been directly raped or murdered by employees of the foreign banks holding Greek debt.

Even if we change the terms of the example, though, it doesn't follow from my making a bad deal that I should be released entirely from fulfilling the terms of the deal, unless I've been forced to accept the deal under threat of violence, or if the terms are so egregiously disadvantageous that I would never have chosen them had I been in my right mind. But neither case seems to apply to Greece, which took out its loans entirely willingly after entry into the Eurozone at very good rates of interest compared to those that are common in international money-markets nowadays.

I had more sympathy with George's third complaint: that the Greek people were being made to suffer the consequences of decisions they had little to do with themselves, while the politicians who made them were shielded from the fallout. I could have pointed out that the Greek people also profited, for a time, from the loans their government obtained for them; but I preferred to seize the opportunity to agree with George, adding that if he had grown up in his city in classical times he would have been able to discuss and vote on his city's policies directly, one at a time, without having to cede control of the state for four or five years to a set of politicians.

This led to the question I really wanted to ask: given that the system we have now is defective, what were he and his co-indignants planning on putting in its place? 'The system of Pericles' he said (by which I took him to be referring to the classical Athenian system as a whole, and not to be excluding innovations, like pay for attending the assembly, that were introduced after the famous statesman's death in 429 BC). I told him I thought that was a wonderful idea, provided women were enfranchised and there were no slaves.

But I also pushed him on what exactly a revived Athenian system would look like nowadays, when nations are so much larger and technological complexity has increased so much. On this subject he had little to say, but said that he and his comrades would get to that; the first step was to combat the present system. This worried me: as another Greek put it a long time ago, links in a chain of thought that come later temporally may yet be prior analytically; or as my American flatmate expressed it this afternoon, destroying a regime without having a good idea of what to put in its place is pretty damn stupid. In fact, he implied that it reminded him of Donald Rumsfeld before the most recent war in Iraq, a comparison that the protestors would probably not be too happy about.

I'm not saying that the dream of reviving genuine popular participation, inspired by models from ancient Greece and elsewhere, is dead; only that it would require the most meticulous institutional design to be sustainable, and that arriving at it might be less painful working with our current quasi-democratic state-forms rather than against them. Meanwhile, the protestors I met will be preparing to confront the rows of police again tomorrow and the day after, as their rulers vote on another package of austerity measures designed to reassure those foreign banks. I will be monotonously brushing layers of dirt off stones, pieces of a bigger picture that might tell us how the ancients did something we now can't.

A Marathon day

Today a few other agorapparatchiks and I walked to Victoria Station - yes, Athens has one too - and got on a regional bus to Marathon. This is where about 10 000 Athenian faced up to around 30 000 Persian invaders in the year 490 BC, sending them scurrying back to their ships. Those 'barbarians' who were still alive then used those ships to sail around the tip of Attica (which juts out into the Aegean) with the aim of making a second, more direct attempt on Athens itself. According to the historian Herodotus, the Athenian soldiers, exhausted from battle, nonetheless rushed all the way back to Athens just in time to dissuade the Persians from trying to land again.

Before looking at a modern map of Attica, it had seemed to me to be a good idea to try to make this historic walk, as the classicist and soldier N.G.L. Hammond did in the 1950s. Unfortunately the spread of modern Athens has by now turned most of that walk into a dreary procession through concrete suburbs, so I thought we might walk from Marathon to Rhamnous instead. But when we got up to Marathon we realized that we had better get a taxi to the site; Greek archaeological sites and museums close at 3pm, and it was already past noon.

Rhamnous was one of over 100 'demes', or villages, which were constituent parts of the classical Athenian state. Being enrolled in a deme was what granted you Athenian citizenship; this in turn entitled you to having your name entered for service in the Council, and also gave you the right to attend and vote in the popular Assembly, Athens' sovereign decision-making body. The site of Rhamnous is stunning - a cluster of ancient houses set against the sparkling Aegean, with the island of Euboea stretching out under the sun in the distance.

Whether any of the demes' ancient inhabitants actually walked all the way to Athens to participate in the Assembly's debates and decisions has been doubted by some historians, and now I know why. All I did in the end was walk back from Rhamnous to Marathon, and that took me around three hours of hiking in the unforgiving Mediterranean sun. Walking from Rhamnous (admittedly one of the more distant demes) to Athens would have taken about a day, and it seems unlikely that your average farmer have given up two days' work for the return journey, even after citizens who attended the Assembly started being given a small stipend by the state in the 390s BC.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the battle of Marathon in the Athenian imaginary and in subsequent Western culture. Ancient sources tell us that in the epitaph of Aeschylus, usually considered among the greatest playwrights in history, there was no mention of any of his tragedies; the way he chose to be remembered instead was as a citizen who fought at Marathon. John Stuart Mill in the 19th century rather bizarrely claimed that Marathon was a more important event in British history than the battle of Hastings. Though I've seen the battlefield before, I skipped it today; it was already 6pm, and I was tired from my trek through the countryside. Unworthy, perhaps, of the ancestors I have chosen for myself, I bought a cold drink and waited for the air-conditioned bus to come.

The oracle

I met up with an Athenian friend (to be referred to, pseudonymously, as Phoebus by this agora-nonymous blogger) tonight for a cold cappuccino among the elegant denizens of Kolonaki. He heard out my views on the financial crisis but had a few complications to add to my clean picture. There were two main ones, and I think they say a lot about the mistrust that exists between many Greeks and their governing institutions and officials. He had a lot of other things to say besides, but they were complex, difficult to interpret, and overwhelmingly in hexameter verse.

First of all he suggested that a few members of the Greek political elite - together with a few members of the international financial elite - had been arranging loans without the full consent of parliament and without following the proper procedures. Because of this, many Greeks (especially those who found employment with the state in the boom years and are now out of work) feel that it would be unfair to force the Greek nation to pay back loans on terms improperly contracted by a few.

Secondly - and at points his voice quietened somewhat - he alleged that members of the police were manufacturing outbursts of violence so that they could seem justifying in clearing large numbers of protestors from the square using truncheons and tear gas. He implied that plain-clothed agents, or sometimes simply right-wing conspirators, were being planted among the protestors, so that they could throw enough stones at the cops for violent counter-measures to appear proportionate.

The oracle had many other things to say besides, along the lines of the analyses that have appeared in the British and American press, about the failure of Greece to develop her own industries with the money it borrowed. But most interesting to me was the distinctive character of the first Greek voice I've had the opportunity to consult at any length during my first fortnight here. Whatever the international press may say about the need for Greece to pull together to solve the problems now pressing upon them, it's clear that there are trenches of mistrust between the people and their overseers that go much deeper than superficial political squabbling.

Greece, economic powerhouse?

A friend - to be known on this blog as to scranton (singular, neuter substantive) - has forwarded to me an article about the debt crisis by a Greek writer living in London. The piece is a good example of what many young Greeks, including many of those who are joining the protests in Syntagma, seem to be thinking about what is happening in their country. I thought I might discuss it here, partly because it has a certain rhetorical force and is a good read in itself, but also because it may allow us an insight into what is driving the resistance of many Greeks to their government's attempts to clear their debt.

The real substance of the article lies in an attempt to distinguish between reality and what the author thinks are simply 'media myths'. The core myths, according to the author, are those that support the notions that Greece is an uncompetitive economy that should not have been admitted into the Euro, and that austerity measures are now necessary if the nation is not to default on its loans, a situation that would lead to economic disaster for Greece as well as its neighbours. The author's obvious partiality to his native country, we might think, may turn out to be balanced by his insider's knowledge of his country's situation.

It is always useful to be made to question timeworn assumptions, especially if they take the form of prejudices, such as 'the Greeks are just lazy', that are flattering to ourselves by implicit comparison. And indeed, the author of the article presents data drawn from respected international institutions (such as the OECD) suggesting that Greeks work more hours per year than Germans or Brits, and that they produce more per hour than the Germans, Brits, or Americans. But though one of these claims may well be true, it seems difficult to combine both of them without coming to the conclusion that Greece has a higher annual GDP per capita than Germany, Britain or the USA; and if the author of the article believes that, he will have to argue against the figures of the IMF, the World Bank and the CIA. (I have to suspect, then, that there is something awry at UPenn's Center for International Comparisons, the source for his data on productivity per hour.)

The author devotes one paragraph to arguing against the view that Greece has a weak economy, citing the World Bank's classification of his country as 'high income', and boasting that Greece came 24th in the World Bank's 2009 list of wealthiest countries by GDP per capita. Nobody would deny that, in global terms, and compared to third-world countries, Greece is a high income economy. But the real point - and the real cause of the current crisis - is that Greece is a low income economy compared to other nations within the Eurozone. That Greece is much wealthier than Tanzania (145th on the World Bank's list) isn't relevant to the debt crisis; that it is significantly poorer than the Netherlands (9th on the list), with which it shares a currency, is sharply relevant.

In trying to show that Greece is a longstanding member of the club of wealthy, democratic nations, the author overreaches himself. The claim that 'Greece became the first associate member of the EEC outside the bloc of six founding members (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries) in 1962, much before the UK' is unimportant and misleading: associate membership, granted to countries who need time to prepare for full membership, is hardly a mark of economic maturity. What is important is to recall that Greece was allowed to become the tenth full member of the EEC only in 1981, 8 years after Britain had joined and only 7 years after the reestablishing of democratic governance after the regime of the colonels.

A final 'myth' the author wishes to explode is the idea that the bailouts are designed 'to help the Greek people', whereas in fact they are calculated 'to stabilize and buy time for the Eurozone'. But only the grossest dogmatism would lead anyone to think that the bailouts must be designed either for the benefit of the people, or of the Eurozone (and its financial markets), but under no circumstances of both. And part of the reason for the resilience of the current global crisis is that the finances of different nations, banks, and individuals are now all inextricably interconnected, so that a Greek default might harm the Spanish just as much as it harms the Greeks.

To be clear, what would likely happen if Greece were to default would be as follows. Greece would be kicked out of the Eurozone by its other members. The ancient drachma would be revived, only to depreciate rapidly. This might help Greece's competitiveness somewhat, making tourism in the country even more attractive and boosting its few exports. But it would be very difficult for Greece, after having defaulted, to borrow money from anyone, and it would be forced to go through with its cuts on social programs in any case. Meanwhile, the money lost by creditors in France and Germany would weaken these large economies, casting ripples of instability through Europe and out beyond into the wider world.

Sharing sherds

As any of you reading this will almost certainly know already, this blog started life as a series of emails home to family and friends. After writing two or three separate emails a day to my parents, my girlfriend, and others telling them about what I'd seen that day in the excavations or protests, I decided I could send them updates more efficiently by just writing a blog. Which was true - but as soon as I started writing the blog as a blog rather than as emails, I started to have to think much more about what I was writing.

I'm not just talking about the sense I now have that there might be other readers out there somewhere, and of having to tailor things to a slightly wider audience. I'm also bringing up a point about archaeology as a contemporary practice that I've already come across one or two times on this, my first dig. The problem, put simply, is that archaeology carries on (like many professions) in its approach to intellectual property as if social media didn't exist. But, as you may have realized, they do exist.

More fully, the problem is that traditionally, the person who finds an object has the right to publish it. (Except, of course, that it's really the director or the supervisor of the workman or student who finds the object who exercises that right.) This traditional situation was problematic enough in itself, since archaeologists who were not quick to prepare things for publication could sit on finds for years or decades, thus depriving a whole generation of scholars of useful material for research (and career-advancement).

There were also leaks. Technically, the local ephorate (see the post below) should know about a find before it goes public. But I was told recently about an episode a few decades ago involving the ephorate, the then director of the excavation, and the Painted Stoa (a portico in the ancient city which displayed paintings of Athenian military victories). After uncovering the Painted Stoa, the then director told a journalist from a popular magazine about it before the ephorate had gotten around to asking about the new find. When the building appeared in the next month's issue of the magazine, the ephorate complained to the director, who suggested to the officials that they might have found out earlier had they asked earlier. The reaction of the ephorate to this was to suspend the excavations for a few seasons while relations normalized.

But such leaks happened only as quickly as printing presses could print. Nowadays, all that is required is for a student digger to post a picture of a new find onto Facebook or Twitter, and an unpublished inscription can be available to all that person's friends, or the entire Internet, instantaneously. It's not surprising, then, that we were given guidelines at the beginning of the dig, the central regulation being: no photographs of finds on social media. The same, of course, applies to blogs. So while my family and friends can eagerly await reports of sherds and stones when I arrive home, there won't be any report of them here; just the impressions and musings of a tiro in archaeology at the epicenter of the European sovereign debt crisis.