Free Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell

Poseidon for the patronage of Attica. To the old sea god belonged perhaps the saltwater well on the Acropolis, a mysterious feature recorded in Pausanias’s account of the Acropolis. This does not help us much … though we are told that Athena herself was born from the ear of Zeus (like Gargarmelle?). As Deeds once remarked: “The maddening thing about the ancient Greeks, and one would like to kick them for it, is the capacity for believing two mutually contradictory things at one and the same time.” It comesof being as curious as one is hospitable—all foreign Gods are made welcome, whatever their origins; hence the mix-up when one tries to establish something concrete about the homegrown deities.
    At any rate, the olive branch with the little owl (the skops , whose pretty descendants still occupy the holes and fents of the Acropolis and utter their strange melancholy call at dusk and dawn) feature upon the coinage of ancient Athens. In modern Athens, too, the children of the Gymnasium sport a distinctive button which pictures Athena’s owlet, which has come to stand for wisdom: not esoteric wisdom necessarily but horse sense of the worldly kind. And while we are on the topic of the olive I must not forget to add that the cultivated tree, which is harvested in November and December, is grafted on to wild stock—so perhaps we should look for its origins in the historical side of grafting as a technique; it argues a highly sophisticated knowledge of agriculture in the country which first adopted the practice. Was it India? If so how did it come into the orbit of the ancient Greeks? I am not competent to answer all these questions, though my mind occupies itself with these and other questions as I travel. Indeed I hold long conversations with the vanished ghost of Martine who was always hunting for answers, and was not slow to disagree with the propositions I enunciated. I could see that she would have a hole or two to pick in my olive theories; but in fact if one were to ask how the word Mediterranean should be defined I should be temptedto answer: “As the country where the olive tree is distributed and where the basic agricultural predispositions such as the cuisine depend upon its fruit either in the form of oil for cooking, oil for lighting, or fruit to eat with bread. It has fulfilled all these functions from time immemorial and in the countries bordering the inland sea it still does.”
    But I had strayed a little in my thoughts; I had not touched upon the central question raised by her remark. What happened before this —what was the island like?
    Long before the owl-eyed Athene came into her own the island was settled by men whose history has been obscured by the fact that they left nothing behind for us to admire. Many strains, many invasions of tribes from different quarters must be envisaged, but the historically predominant inhabitants were the Sikels whose alphabet, if I am not mistaken, has not been deciphered as yet; nor are their inscriptions very numerous. It is a dead end where the prehistorian ekes out his scanty certainties with large conjectures; a few tombs, a few clearings and stone houses worthy of the jungle cannot go far to excite our minds or our aesthetic sense. It is really idle to dwell upon them. (I am talking in my sleep to Martine with one-half of my mind; with the other I am trying to rough in the outlines of the pocket history which she had once demanded for her children.) One should concentrate in such cases on what is striking, and leave out the rest. Good histories of the place inyawn-making detail—there are a number; but in shortening sail I would build something more like a companion to landscape than a real history.
    It is not the Sikels as such, then, who are interesting; what is interesting is trying to visualize the state of the island which they inherited—a pre-Mediterranean Sicily, if I could dare to call it that. In its Pleistocene