La cueva de Platón
Fuente: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
I decided to take a cruise through mainland Greece and its islands.
I traveled through the Peloponnese, Chios, Ithaca, Argos, Athens, and alongside these marvelous places, I also strolled through its poetry and prose.
The journey lasted almost fourteen centuries: from 800 BC to 529 AD, well into the Roman period.
All this was made possible by a winter day, the first of the season, I must say, when it snowed from dawn till dusk.
My passion for cultivating leisure led me to a forgotten corner of my library, and there I found the five volumes of “Student Consultant: History of Literature.”
This began my odyssey, and I confess that I was shipwrecked.
Too many places, too many authors, some familiar to me like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Leucippus, Heraclitus (the one who said it’s impossible to bathe in the same river twice, for each time the water is new).
Others unknown, like Theocritus of Syracuse, Agatharchides of Cnidus, or Aristarchus of Samos.
But curiously, I found a common thread that I believe hasn’t changed much from 800 BC to the present day.
The evolution of the human spirit is a constant quest, a desperate need to find answers and truths in the face of what one passage in the book describes as “brutalized reality.”
In the end, it proved to be a productive way to spend a winter’s day, although I’ll probably forget almost everything I read.
But this journey brought back to mind some figures I did remember, like Pythagoras of Samos, Thales of Miletus, and Plato of Meatballs. (Platon in Spanish is a big dish)
Laughter, and please excuse the bad joke.
After all, the Greeks also invented the genre of “comedy” (inspired by the Dionysian festivals), and good humor will always be relevant.
