Civilisation

Say “David Attenborough” and I think of Planet Earth and other natural history programmes on television and that has been a lifelong interest of his.

When he was eleven he discovered the zoology department at the University of Leicester (where his father taught) needed a large supply of newts. He provided them at three pence apiece, not admitting he caught them in a pond beside the department. He did his National Service in the Royal Navy and shortly afterwards joined the BBC although at the time he had only seen one TV programme. In the 1960s he was appointed controller of BBC 2 and commissioned a thirteen part series almost everybody has heard of but few remember seeing: Civilisation, presented by Kenneth, later Lord, Clark – Alan Clark’s father. The series started with the Dark Ages, the six centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

In Greece this week eleven of us are looking much further back, to the earliest tribes that came to Greece and eventually the establishment of city states. On Sunday we drove to Pylos to see the foundations of the Palace of Nestor built by the Myceans in the 13th century BC. It is described in the Odyssey and the Iliad as “Nestor’s kingdom of sandy Pylos”.

Nestor is rich – he sends a fleet of ninety ships to Troy – and has gained much experience in his old age. He freely dispenses advice to anyone seeking it but has a reputation for boasting and prolixity. Of course Nestor may not have actually existed. The palace most certainly exists and is remarkably similar to the palace (also Mycenaean) at Knossos where the Minotaur lived in a labyrinth. Last month I went to the Labyrinth exhibition at the Ashmolean so this is fresh in my mind.

After lunch we walked along Homer’s sandy beaches to climb up to Nestor’s cave. If you go to the village of Clogherhead in Co Louth there is an excellent short walk around a headland to the harbour used by fishing boats: Clogher Head. As children my uncle led my cousins and me on a rock climb and we always visited a cave with red lichen inside. It is called Red Man’s Cave and the story goes the red is the blood of Catholic priests murdered in the cave by Cromwellian soldiers in 1649.

This sounds highly probable as does the story of Nestor’s cave. It is where Hermes hid fifty cattle he had stolen from Apollo and, so Apollo wouldn’t twig, he drove them into the cave backwards making it seem as if they were leaving the cave. Shades of Robert the Bruce leaving a spider’s web undisturbed across the entrance to a cave in which he was hiding from English soldiers.

There are some 800 stone towers on the Mani in the Peloponnese, built as protection from invaders and just as often as protection and a vantage point from which to attack Maniot neighbours – the Maniots find feuding most agreeable. They are towers of strength.