The ancient sanctuary of Epidaurus is now, quite understandably, primarily renowned for its extraordinary fourth century BC theatre which has, by accident or design, perfect acoustics. There is much else to see at the site, which is still being excavated, and which was for about eight centuries a renowned therapeutic centre. Its rise and persistent renown have been the subject of much study. Personally, I find its decline and rediscovery somehow just as fascinating. How could it be that a whole metropolis gradually and almost entirely disappeared under soil and trees? Why were the dressed stones of the theatre not plundered and re-used? Imagine the thrill of the 1829 French Scientific Expedition that gradually realised it had uncovered an intact fourth century BC theatre! Sitting under an ancient oak amid the ruins, I got the same sense I had had walking among the jumbled ruins of ancient Athens. There are just so many dressed stones and pieces of marble, and each of them represents goodness knows how much human labour; scattered about are the results of millions, perhaps billions, of man hours of labour. At the end of No Country For Old Men Sheriff Ed Tom Bell recalls ‘a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house’ which he ‘got to thinking about’: ‘I don’t know how long it had been there. … You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock… Just chiselled out of the rock. And I got to thinking about the man that done that.’ Shelley said it all in Ozymandias: ‘boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

A 7th century BC tyrant, Periander, is reputed to have first had the idea. The neck of land connecting the Peloponnese to mainland Greece is indeed absurdly narrow – just six kilometres, with the sea clearly visible in both directions. But the project was beyond Periander’s means and so he invented an alternative, with boats being dragged laboriously across a paved slipway on rollers rather than braving the long sail around the peninsula, including the stormy cape Matapan (antiquity’s equivalent of the Cape of Good Hope or the Cape Horn). Julius Caesar and Caligula were among those who revisited the idea and under Nero’s command a massive slave workforce even managed to dig out about a tenth of the length of the canal before he died and the project was abandoned. Then, in the nineteenth century, following Greek independence, the project was once again got underway. Inspired by the Suez Canal, and despite financial and geological problems, the canal was in 1893 at last completed, connecting the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf and, technically, turning the Peloponnese peninsula into an island. The canal was never really a success. It was too narrow (just 23 metres), it could only be used one way at a time, its high walls channelled strong winds, the different tides created strong currents, its steep walls and the friability of the rock led to repeated rock falls and closures, ships rapidly got too big, the First World War led to a heavy decline in local traffic and the canal was badly damaged in the Second World War. Now, a few pleasure vessels aside, the Canal’s primary function is probably as a tourist attraction (you can bungee jump off the underside of the road bridge). And yet… All traces of Nero’s aborted, though considerable, efforts were blotted out by the nineteenth century works (which followed exactly the same course and even used some of the shafts drilled by the Romans). What a stupendous achievement it would have been! Nero’s Corinth Canal – the eighth wonder of the ancient world!

This evening we drove north out of Athens for about an hour, until we hit the sea, and there we met Georges Dassis, the President of the Employee’s Group at the European Economic and Social Committee. We were received like kings and, after melon and water melon and sweet pancakes at the Dassis family home, we preceded to a taverna on the sea shore, literally one metre from the waves, where we ate grilled sardines, squid and octopus, washed down with a local wine. I have already written elsewhere about Georges’s hidden skills as a bouzouki player, and to this must now be added the knowledge that Georges is a diver, a harpoon fisherman, no less, who likes nothing better than to bring back a sea bass or two. As our meal came to an end, the girls from the taverna came out to hang octopus tentacles to the street lamp to dry in the seawind. We could have stayed in that spot, with Georges and his family (that’s a grand daughter in the picture), forever. We headed back to Athens still bathing in the warm glow of traditional Greek hospitality.

This morning I got up early and jogged around the Acropolis. My route took me first up and down the hills of Filopappos and Pnyx, before heading through the ancient agora and the Plaka district, then past the Lysicrates monument before heading back to my starting point near the theatre of Dionysos. This was, quite literally, a jog through antiquity. It was on Pnyx Hill, for example, that democracy first started, during the 4th and 5th century BC, when citizens’ assemblies (Ekklesia) met there to discuss and vote upon all important matters of state. Themistokles, Perikles and Demosthenes all spoke from the speaker’s platform (the bema) that is still visible today. The ruins-scattered Filopappos hill, alongside it, is where Francesco Morosini’s dastardly cannon were located in 1687. There are splendid views from the monument at the top (raised in honour of a Roman consul, AD 114-16) and there I saw an old lady, dressed all in black, thread her way through the scrub pines to the summit. I imagined her doing this every day. If she had done so, she would have seen the sea of green between Athens and the Mediterranean – visible in the near distance – gradually become a sea of buildings, for modern Athens now pours all the way to the sea.

The last time I visited the Acropolis it was, thanks to our Greek hosts, an unforgettable night time visit, with the illuminated Parthenon and the Nike temple standing out against the surrounding darknesses of where, our guide explained, ancient Athens had once bustled. This time we did it under a blazing afternoon sun and the scale of the challenge facing the restorers was much clearer. In 1687, during the Venetian siege of the Acropolis, General Francesco Morosini bombarded the Parthenon with cannon fire. The Turks were using the temple as an arsenal at the time and the ensuing explosion demolished much of it. The city later put some of the temple back together, but they did so wrongly, and now with modern techniques the restorers are gradually taking the temple apart and putting it back together again. It being night time, I had not realised on my previous visit just how much of a massive jigsaw puzzle the top of the Acropolis is. I hope my picture provides a small illustration of the scale of the task confronting the restorers…

The last time I came to Athens, in September 2008, the new Acropolis Museum had not yet opened its doors, but its raked angles were already visible, gracefully tucked into the slopes under the Acropolis. Now the museum is gloriously open. Its luminous, airy interior hovers on stilts over still ongoing excavations, whilst its rectangular top floor is skewed so as to be in perfect alignment with the parthenon. Inside the top atrium, the parthenon’s two freizes (some the originals, others casts of the Elgin marbles)  are perfectly displayed so that the visitor can get a full sense of the stories they recount. No matter from which angle one views the museum, it never seems out of place with its environment and is always stylish. It is, in short, a brilliant success for its Swiss architect, Bernard Tschumi, and his Greek associate, Michael Photiades. But the good news doesn’t stop there. The museum is democratically priced (at 5 euros, with all sorts of reductions) and sports an excellent, democratically-priced restaurant with an external terrace looking up to the Acropolis and the parthenon. And the rest of the exhibition is done is such a way that the visitor feels he or she is amidst a light gathering of statues, the museum’s design ensuring that visitors flow in a way that avoids any sense of crowdedness. In short, a highlight of the summer and an absolute ‘must’ for any visitor to Athens. What possible reason can there be for not giving back the marbles now? The museum is even designed to resist an earthquake up to ten on the Richter scale!

I am on a Cormac McCarthy binge at the moment. Following hard on the heels of All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men was my ferry book yesterday and today and just fitted the trip. I’d seen the film, which is faithful to the book, but only by (inevitably), peeling the story down to its dark, stark core; the hunting down of an opportunistic thief by a sociopathic hitman. In the book there is far more about the thoughts of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his motives in trying to protect the opportunistic thief, Llewelyn Moss, and his young wife, Carla Jean. This novel is not on a par with Pretty Horses or Blood Meridian, but it’s a cracking good read nonetheless. I have become fascinated by the way McCarthy pulls off his literary tricks. One, I realise, is by leaving no sort of hiatus whatsoever between a scene and the next (in other words, he can be even more parsimonious with scene changing than the tautest film director). The reader gets used to doubling back briefly to ascertain that a scene change has occurred and is then dragged forward by the collar into the next scene. It’s a very effective way of keeping the story galloping forward. The sociopath, Anton Chigurh, is a chilling invention and yet he is all too recognisably human, and it is this awful realisation that spurs Ed Tom Bell to retire, rather than to continue to try to track him down. This brave new world is one in which he does not want to live.

This afternoon we crossed the Rubicon. ‘There’s nothing there,’ said N° 2 sprog and, of course, he was right. If it were not for the helpful sign we would not have known what we had just done. And yet this weedy trickle (if it is the right weedy trickle – archeologists and historians are divided about that) has given its name to an enduring expression in the English language. ‘To cross the Rubicon’ means ‘to pass the point of no return’, usually in pursuit of a risky enterprise. In 49 BC the Rubicon, wherever it was, marked the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Roman Italy. A hesitant Julius Caesar led the Thirteenth Gemina Legion over the Rubicon, deliberately breaking Roman imperium law and making conflict inevitable. According to Suetonius, Caesar declared ‘lea iacta est’ (“the die has been cast”) – another phrase that has endured in the English language. Because he won in the ensuing conflict, Caesar was never punished for his dire infraction but, as we know, history caught up with him in the end. The river, meanwhile, much reduced by industrial usage, has trickled on into a sort of parallel posterity.

This evening we watched the 1956 musical film, High Society. The music and lyrics, whether by Cole Porter or Louis Armstrong, and the singing (Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra much to the fore) were all as wonderful as I had remembered them. The film was also memorable for Grace Kelly’s last performance before she became a real-life princess (and she also made a respectable debut in the film as a singer). But what struck me most about the film this time was its pathetically flimsy plot and the obscenity of the life it portrayed. Set among the industrialists’ and financiers’ villas on Rhode Island, the story is about love and marriage among the rich and their offspring. There is not even a hint of social satire. They go through life drinking cocktails (there is much of that in John Cheever’s stories from that period also), smoking cigarettes, quaffing champagne and getting changed for dinner. In short, the whole thing is simply a vehicle for the stars and their voices, as ephemeral as the gas in their champagne bubbles. I was about to write that you couldn’t get away with that nowadays, and then I thought of Mamma Mia!  That’s probably unfair. The latter has quite a lot of plot (however improbable) and not all of its stars can sing!

Thanks to the generous offer of my fellow scribbler, Cleve Moffet, who recently invited me to dip into his extraordinary collection of Belgian memorabilia, I have just finished reading a gem of a little period piece: Six Weeks at the War, by Millicent Duchess of Sutherland (The Times, London, 1914). Chapter Two of my emerging magnum opus takes place in Namur in 1914, during its siege and fall. I had done quite a bit of research before writing, of course, but the Millicent Duchess of Sutherland was actually there, as a Red Cross volunteer, and her book is an an eye witness account of that extraordinary, though now forgotten, period early in the war when Belgium’s great fortified cities – Liège, Namur, Antwerp – were bombarded and cracked open like nuts by the massive German siege guns. It was as I had described it – the blown-up bridges, the shells thundering into the city like express trains, the fires, the destruction, the panic, the exodus – but I couldn’t help but become interested in the author herself. Previously a well-known London society hostess, she seemed to have come into her own through her Red Cross work, standing up to ‘the invader’, working behind enemy lines, nursing hideously injured men of all nationalities, demonstrating great courage and fortitude, and always standing by her ‘ambulance’ of nurses and surgeons. The most arresting memory I take from the book, though, is a photograph of two German soldiers guarding Namur’s utterly shattered market place. One of the two soldiers looks to be fifteen at the most, and the other could have been only slightly older. Behind them is a local boy of about five. He is dressed in a skirted smock and … smoking a pipe.