A Companion In Greece

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30562, 3 October 1964, Page 4

A Companion In Greece

The Smile of Apollo. By Patrick Anderson. Chatto and Windus. 245 pp. Index. “The present book,” writes Mr Anderson of this literary companion to Greek travel, “has been born out of my sense of what I should like to have had with me during that wonderful first visit of six or seven weeks.” Part anthology, part guide-book and travel book, it describes the chief historical sites of Greece and other places of interest, with emphasis on Athens, Delphi, Olympia, Mycenae and the Aegean Islands, Associated legends and literature are quoted extensively, together with the impressions of travellers through the ages; Chateaubriand, for example, looking down upon Athens illumininated by the early morning sun: “her flat roofs mingled with minarets, her cypresses, ruins, isolated columns, the

domes of mosques crowned by stork’s nests”; Benjamin Robert Haydon, ecstatically copying the friezes on the Parthenon; Lawrence Durrell listening on a hot, black right in the Acropolis to the crowing of the Attic cocks. In addition there is a smattering of history and /modern folk-lore, and, for good measure, a chapter on Greek Art. All this material has been carefully and tastefully arranged, making a book very suitable for leisurely browsing, though it is a little bulky to fit comfortably in the traveller’s knapsack. The glimpses of contemporary Greece which Mr Anderson gives us are always vivid, whether he is evoking an uneasy sense of divine presences lurking behind a silent landscape, or describing a boisterous all-night voyage in the Aegean with a boatful of Greeks, where “overcrowding can reach proportions of such uncomfortable, indeed acrobatic intimacy, that the only thing to do is to. relax, laugh, join in the shouting and singing, and forget that one of your feet is planted between two sleeping children and that the other has become the support for the grey hairs of a grandmother of the greatest beauty and refinement, whose attendant hens occasionally peck your ankle.”

A more detailed index than the short list of place names included here would have been helpful for easy reference in an otherwise comprehensive guide to Greek travel.