Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (12 page)

Each of us has his preference in this burning matter. Nimiec, who is an unqualified cynic in all things concerning the Greek language and character, chooses the latter as being most likely because least logical. N. thinks that the gulf is the simplest and most prosaic derivation. I prefer the figurative and visual derivation from a tail, because the island does taper away into a handle at the southern end—as anyone can see by glancing at the map. Zarian clings to the simple and fishy derivation, declaring that the island has at all times been famous for its abundance of fish. “You will notice how carefully the wells are blessed by the priests against the summer drought; have you ever seen them blessing the sea?”

Theodore prefers to remain beyond the range of all this inexact and unfruitful scholarship. He merely shakes his head and sips his yellow wine.

10.4.37

According to Diodorus, the Sicilian, Kerkura, the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys was carried into the island by Neptune. Here she bore the loved Phaex who ruled over it calling it Korkura.

Bochart derives the two names Scheria and Kerkyra from the Phoenecian words “scara” meaning “commerce” and “carcara” meaning “abundance.”

The island’s fertility made it the favorite abode of green Ceres; it was here she concealed the scythe with which the first Titians were taught the art of husbandry. Hence the antique name Drepani, a reaping hook.

It was also called Macria after the fair Macris who took refuge here from the wrath of Juno.

10.5.37

As late as the third century BCE a cave was shown to the superstitious where the marriage of Jason and Medea was said to have taken place; as well as an altar to Apollo.

In the Naupactican Verses quoted by Pausanias they were said to have returned here, and it is recorded that their son Mermeras was killed while hunting on the opposite coast.

Short-sighted Procopius in the sixth century
CE
was shown the petrified bark of Ulysses but his incredulity transformed it into a fabric of stones dedicated to Jupiter Cassius by a wandering merchant.

10.6.37

Diodorus says that the island was originally colonized from some very remote part of the world; and indeed during the Trojan wars Corcyra was looked upon as a mysterious, semi-mythical island—a beautiful boundary-stone at the very edges of the known world. Enter Calypso’s cave on the island north of Corcyra, and you will hear nothing but the faint bumping of the tides against the headland and the thin, shrill appeals of the gulls.

There are no Cyclopean remains in Corcyra; consequently you are free from the oppressive blood guilt of Tiryns—its blocks of hewn stone drenched with blood: of Mycaenae with its burial grounds choked with bodies, and the obsessive numbering drone of bees in the dark tomb of Agamemnon. You are still in a Latin world.

10.7.37

Temples were once numerous; Thucidides mentions temples to the Dioscori, Juno, and Alcinous; Jupiter Cassius was worshipped with sacrifices at Kassopi on the northern gulf.

10.9.37

The Greek permits himself one cerebral disturbance which from time immemorial has been capable of overturning the whole structure of the state: politics. Not the barren politics of abstractions and
principles, but the warm cruel politics of the heart: hero-worship, the advancement of parties and personalities. In this alone we catch a glimpse of his bitter dualism of heart—an interior anarchy, which will not let him rest. I have been dipping into Jervis and wondering at the sameness of the general pattern; both in ancient and modern times it is the same impetus which carries affairs forward: arguments, obsessions, pride, panic, self-advancement.

“Mnesippus, bent on reducing the town by starvation.…”

“Being in need of money to pay his men Iphicrates attempted to ransome his numerous prisoners …”

“Ctesicles attempted to restore order and unity.”

Yet the anecdotal material in the history of this one small island is all the richer for the variety of its detail.

10.14.37

Periander, tyrant of Corinth, gave it as a present to his brutish son Lycophron who became its ruler. For a long time past bitter quarrels had been breaking out between them; at last a reconciliation took place, and so great was Periander’s relief that he wrote suggesting that they should exchange thrones. When the Corcyreans became aware of the intentions of the feared and detested father of Lycophron, they rose up in a panic and slew the son—which was, of course, the worst thing they could have done. In revenge for this Periander seized three hundred Corcyrean nobles who
happened to be living in his domains and sent them as slaves to the dreadful Alyattes II. Fortunately, however, the ship bearing these unfortunates was blown into Samos by a northwester, and the indignant Samiots risked the wrath of Periander by rescuing them.

10.15.37

“… Of the affairs of this period,” writes Jervis, “little more than confused accounts remain. It appears from a fragment of Diodorus the Sicilian that not long subsequent to the battle of Ipsus, Cassander beseiged Corcyra by sea and by land, but he was obliged to raise the seige by Agathocles of Sicily himself who burnt the whole of the Macedonian Fleet and afterwards gave the island as a dowry to his daughter Lanassa, on her marriage with Pyrrhus, King of Epirus.

Owing, however, to frequent intercourse with the East polygamy had become prevalent with Greek Princes; Pyrrhus was already married to two wives, one a Poeonian and the other an Illyrian Princess; and the attention he paid to them aroused the jealousy of the Syracusan lady. In order to revenge herself Lanassa retired to Corcyra.

It is a landscape that does not nourish jealousies; certainly Lanassa’s broken heart was soon mended; for she sent a proposal of marriage to the great Demetrius Poliorcetes himself. This Prince was so handsome that,
it was said, no sculptor could be found whose art could do justice to him. His reaction to this proposal was at once thoughtful and deeply considered as befitted a prince and a political man. As he had recently concluded a non-aggression pact with the terrible Agathocles her father, he thought it would fit in very well, if he sealed the pact by marrying the heart-broken Lanassa. A story for moralists.

In Roman times, Agrippina touched here on her melancholy journey from Asia to Italy with the funeral urn of the noble Germanicus. Those few ashes hid all that was left of a world of ambition and pride and uprightness of character. She made only a short stay here
“to calm the agitation of a mind pierced to the quick.”

10.17.37

Confused and out of key with their own lives Anthony and Octavia landed here from an impe rial galley, he was on his way to Syria, while she had decided to return slowly to Rome—and to a world of favors as empty as his embraces.…

“A landscape for resolutions and partings,” says Zarian in an essay on famous visitors to Corcyra. “A landscape which precipitates the inward crisis of lives as yet not fully worked out.” This is from a passage which describes the meeting of Cicero and Cato in the shadow of the fortress in 48
BCE.
The former was on his way to Italy to throw himself on Caesar’s mercy, the latter “not having yet despaired of the
Commonwealth” was to set sail in company with Cneius Pompeius, for Africa.

10.19.37

Winter quarters for Consuls during the wars between Macedonia and Rome. The wind whitening the reedy stretches of Paleopolis and shrieking through the olive groves of Perama. On the northern escarpment the seas pounding at Peristeri (Island of Turtle-Doves), and running white and yellow with the undertow of silt from the Butrinto estuary. Civil servants yawning away a winter over wood fires making inventories of fodder and shipping. “In the last campaign between Pompey and Julius Caesar, the former increased his navy by the shipping of the isle; and had it occupied by the main body of the Fleet under M. Bibulus.”

Here Titus, Vespasian’s son, watched with some impatience games given in his honor.

10.20.37

Geneseric, the ally of Attila, says Zarian, was a man who always trusted “that the winds would bear him to a land the inhabitants of which had provoked the divine vengance.” He frequently visited this indented coastline in person with his pennoned fleet; and after the Vandals came the Goths under the terrible crooked Totila, to pillage and burn.

Having secured Rome, Totila had equipped 300 galleys manned by Goths and sent them down to conquer
and ravage Greece. Justinian could only muster 50 sail and 5,000 men to oppose them. It was the Ice Age settling down on the Roman Empire; and for all the valor of Belisarius and Narses it could not be averted or withstood.

10.21.37

Somewhere in the lovely Valley Di Ropa you will come upon a small chapel-covered mound remarkable for the two superb umbrella pines growing thereon. Above you to the left rises the single crag of Peleka above this expanse of green. To the right, almost hidden by the dense woodland, you will see a long curving drive lined with trees which aims slowly round upon a house with peeling green shutters. The cypresses lining the road are perhaps the most ancient in the island; their plumes are almost black, and near the ground are powdered by the fine golden summer dust. Mournful and unkept to the outward view, the house lies hidden from the main road.

This is the retreat of the Count D., and it is here that Zarian brought me one day to make the acquaintance of this celebrated recluse into whom the philosophic scepticism of a classical education had bit ten so deeply. The old Count, a man of about sixty, was stocky and heavily built; he possessed a pair of remarkable eyes set in a head which was a little too big for his body. But the small hands and feet gave a distinctly Byronic cast to one’s first impressions. When
we first met it was some five or six years since he had first retired from the social life of the town to the calm of his country estate. In an island where loquacity and an overburdening sense of hospitality are the norm it was natural that he should rank as a recluse and an eccentric. Zarian had made his acquaintance in the course of some negotiations about the rent of a town house he was intending to lease from him, and something in the temper of his mind (Zarian was incapable of conducting business except in terms of Neapolitan opera) must have appealed to the Count, for they became immediate and fast friends. And now we spend the first week-end of every month staying in the old house as guests.

10.27.37

Count D. is interesting. Unlike the majority of recluses he is a hospitable man. Comfortably off, fond of his cellar and his immense library, he is content to spend summer and winter beyond the limited range of town amusements and gossip. He shoots, assists at olive pickings, and christens children; while the wine yield of his property is a constant and delightful concern. The house and gardens were built by an Italian architect, so that though the walks are unkept and the trees unpruned the whole place retains some of the formal humanist charm of the Italian country house.

Here we spend our time in endless conversations.
And here Zarian makes the effort of rising at dawn in order to verify the appositeness of the adjective “rosy-fingered,” which the Count maintains to be the most exact as well as the most moving adjective in all literature. Despite several dawns Zarian has not yet agreed with his friend upon this subject.

The Count is a philosopher—“a philosopher,” he will tell you deprecatingly in his faultless English or lapidary French, “a philosopher who only sits and listens.” He speaks always with the most casual frankness about his own life and interests, his rather fine dark eyes fixed calmly upon his audience. He is filled with what Zarian (who is a born hero-worshipper and who finds a philosopher under every stone) calls “a speculative calm.” It is rather the calm of one in whom the romantic is dead; and in whom the harder cutting-edge of experience has reached the inner man. Despite the sweetness and repose he is a prey to metaphysical incertitudes such as the artist only encounters; this you may guess from the fine sets of much-thumbed European philosophers which line his bedroom. “Philosophy,” he said once, “is a doubt which lives in one like hookworm, causing pallor and lack of appetite. Suddenly one day you awake and realize with complete certainty that ninety-five per cent of the activities of the human race—to which you supposed you belonged—have no relevance whatsoever for you. What is to become of you?”

On another occasion he said:

I am popularly supposed to have retired here because of the death of my wife. It is convenient but not true. Two years before she died I woke up one morning, dressed very swiftly, and stood at the window of my room looking down on the harbor. I was visited by an extraordinary idea. I have had, I thought to myself, all the women I could want, and all the amusement I can possibly bear. Something has changed. I could not analyze the change—was it in me, or in the disposition of the world around me? It was a kind of detachment—an idea not born within the
conceptual
apparatus but lodged in the nervous system itself. I had become different as a person. Anyone else would have gone away and written a book about it; but I did not want to bring this personal discovery within the range of the conceptual apparatus, and thereby spoil it by consciousness. I retired, it is true, but you will see from my life as it lies around me, that what I am after is not the
interpretation
of the Principle of
x,
as I call it; but I wish to interpret the ordinary world of prescribed loyalties and little acts like shooting or lying or sleeping through the Principle. It is the oblique method of dealing with the platonic fire, after all, that betrays experience. Therefore if you come to me, like Zarian, and ask me why I am not writing down these
discoveries, I can only reply that that is not what I mean by philosophy. I am enduring, and that is enough.

It is for these remarkable flights that Zarian admires him so; and not the less for his gravity and the charm of his address. “If only he would write a book,” says Zarian, the thirsty literary man, “it would be a work of genius.” Then he adds rather more slowly: “and if he can live without the thought of suicide.…”