I am happy to be with you again, and am grateful to David for filling in so we could keep all of you “posted” on this amazing voyage.  After an entire day of sleeping, I think I’m back.

As any student of Western Civilization knows, recorded thought in our sphere began with the Greeks, specifically Plato, Aristotle and Socrates.  By some kind of rare miracle, the place where they walked and talked still exists.  Despite hoards of Turks, Venetians, Macedonians, and Nazis, the Parthenon, temple to the Goddess Athena, still stands.  The worst thing that ever happened to this marvel of ancient architecture is that the Turks used it as a munitions dump and when the Venetians invaded, they actually blew it up!  Modern buildings would surely never survive such treatment.  But the Parthenon still stands, metaphorically bloodied, but unbowed.

In Florence, I wrote of the “rebirth” of modern civilization, but in Greece we see the actual birth.  These architects built solely from their own imagination–they had nothing to guide them and only thought to inspire them.  With geniuses like Pythagoras discovering geometry and philosophers like Plato discussing the “ideal” they were able to combine thought and math and create a temple like no other ever discovered.  It stands, as everyone knows, on the Acropolis, high above the modern (and unfortunately quite ugly) city of Athens.  The juxtaposition is a interesting contrast regarding the values of modern day Greeks.

I have a thing about columns.  They absolutely fascinate me.  I was thrilled to discover the point where I could look at the column on the corner of the temple that I faced and see that the columns behind it were not visible.  They were lined up in such a way that they appeared to be one column.  That is a mathematical trick, for if they were truly lined up, the other columns would be visible.

It was hard to wrap my mind around the idea that this was where modern thought began to unfold and where democracy was conceived.  Last time I visited, there were soldiers with machine guns on the acropolis and we didn’t get to climb it.  This time, the economy was teetering and anarchists were rioting.  It was much too hard for me to reconcile these things in my mind.  Are the modern Greeks really the descendants of the ancients?

We then traveled to Corinth, but at a stop on the way I had to perform my new trick of falling down.  I made it as dramatic as possible, and of course fell on the same knee I always fall on.  Modern Greeks spend very little money keeping the Roman sidewalks up to date!  I stepped in a hole, turned my ankle, and sprawled on the sidewalk.  Fortunately, nothing was broken, and my goal of climbing the Acropolis had already been achieved.

When we arrived at the ruins of Corinth we went to the excavation of a famous marketplace with accompanying baths.  A little the worse for wear, I paused under an olive tree and watched as the group went on ahead.  Finally I was able to follow, and ended up staring at a plaque I could not understand.  David came up behind me and told me that that marked the very place that Paul had stood when accused by the Jews of heresy.  Their rulers, the Romans (of whom  Paul was one), could find no fault with him as he spoke there in that spot in his own defense.  They released him, and he went on to create a large branch of Christendom in Corinth.  (Thus his letter to the Corinthians).  It was the Sabbath, and David and I both had the feeling that we were standing on holy ground.  This feeling had eluded me on the Acropolis in the temple to a pagan Goddess, but here in this ruined marketplace where David and I stood alone, we felt it.  Paul’s writings on grace have helped me many a time, and I was humbled to be standing where he had once stood.

This was called the Bema and was originally a few feet taller.  Paul stood in front of this structure, speaking up to the Roman official, who was standing on top of the Bema.