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.