Being in two eras at once is great. Rocking in the belly of a boat as it nudges across the Mediterranean, island- hopping in the oar strokes of ancient Greek heroes, fast-tracks me to that heady, diachronic state. For centuries, women and men crisscrossed oceans in search of pleasure, treasure, inspiration and adventure. So, each summer, I load friends and family onto boats and ferry them across wine-dark seas to follow the trail of high-achieving ancients, both real and imagined.
Sometimes these odysseys haven’t been entirely idyllic. Climbing up to the acropolis of the prophet Elias, on Chios, with a self-confessed “Homer nut” to seek out an Iron Age throne room at midday resulted in heatstroke for one 12-year-old charge. Being zigzagged up the sheer sides of Santorini by mule, as the ancients once did, on the volcanic island that blew sky high in 1,615BC (and which I’m convinced spawned the legend of Atlantis), resulted in the skin being slowly sandpapered off the leg of my student daughter as the pair slalomed round a sharp corner. Emulating the long-suffering mother in My Family and Other Animals (down to the drinking and knitting) and rescuing a stray puppy from a beach on Corfu brought touching satisfaction, but also a hideous eye infection, to the early life experience of my youngest.
Yet travelling with rackety purpose invigorates body and mind. Starting from Santorini, a centre of maritime travel since the Bronze Age — cases dragging, straw hats on, popping roasted sunflower seeds bought from a harbour boy and piling onto boats piloted with millimetre precision by the ship-loving Greeks — is fundamentally thrilling. In the wall paintings of Akrotiri, the Greek Pompeii, you can see the beautiful boats the ancients first sailed on from the island — garlanded with flowers, camphor smoking on the decks, animal skins for decoration. The passengers are dressed like cavemen, but it was they who pioneered sailing technology to explore beyond their horizons.
Wily Odysseus, cuckolded Menelaus, towering Ajax, rich-tressed Helen — every excavating season, more evidence for the real lives of this sophisticated Age of Heroes comes to light. On Thasos, my kids have picked up fragments of prehistoric wine cups rich enough for the table of King Nestor; on Evia, they watched as 3,000-year-old conical, solid-gold bras were excavated; and on Andros, they saw the sea whipped to a froth like Homer’s “great gulf... battered by winds of every direction”.
The Greeks recognised that the mind craves disturbance. As well as to trade the raw materials of civilisation — cedars from Lebanon, ostrich eggs from North Africa, amber from the Baltic, sesame seeds from Asia and rock crystal for thrones from the Greek mainland — the ancients also set out to exchange ideas. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all eagerly zipped round what the Egyptians called the Great Green to expand their minds.
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Drifting across dolphin-rich waters, whether it be short haul from Athens to car-free Hydra or chugging for hours on a ferry to investigate Minoan palaces on Crete (10 new ones have been identified in the past decade alone), offers the chance not just to watch rubbish Greek shopping channels on the ever-present on-board televisions, but also to sip a raki or three, the gift of Bacchus, and “give your mind wings”.
Warriors travelled these seas to fight, so travel companions can be regaled with tales of derring-do and dastardly deeds. Skyros — famous then and now for its goats, wine and warm welcomes — was where Achilles was said to have hidden, dressed as a woman. Milos, a geo-seismic, geological bonanza, witnessed the Melian dialogue during the Peloponnesian wars. Locals told the Athenians they wouldn’t bow down before them, that “might was not right”. It was an argument that didn’t go so well — all the men were slaughtered, all the women and children enslaved. Their butchered bones still turn up on occasion. Now, in happier Melian times, you can go swimming in bone-white volcanic rock coves, roast lamb in the oven-hot sand and clamber over rocks the size of sofas, where the ancients shaped volcanic glass (obsidian) into arrowheads and blades so razor-sharp, one 21st-century archaeologist insists on using obsidian under the surgeon’s knife.
Many islands invite the tourist-mariner to travel back to a time before urbanisation warped worlds. On “beauty-filled” Lesbos, there really are shivering oak trees and silvery moons, just as the poetess Sappho described them. On Sifnos — which still celebrates 60 festivals a year, and where the air is so clean that 18th-century travellers dubbed it the Switzerland of Greece — old men bike around the island every Saturday night, delivering ceramic pots of chickpea stew from communal ovens (ingredients: rainwater, chickpeas, thyme, onions).
Despotiko, an uninhabited island just west of Antiparos — the ferry service is provided by a captain whose dog is called Poseidon — boasts little but maquis and a collapsed temple to Apollo. Our idyllic meander around the newly excavated ruins there was somewhat frissoned-up by the local goatherd — a furious dog — defending his livestock. With hackles rising prouder than a choirboy’s ruff, Apollo’s guard-hound advanced on us as if consumption was the only option. We lobbed the stones at our feet in his direction — until we realised they were, in fact, archaic pottery shards — and our nemesis eventually retreated.
To my two girls, tales of Cerberus suddenly made all kinds of sense. As, back on Antiparos, did tales of the underworld. In the island’s centre, non-claustrophobic visitors can descend into a stalactite-rich cave that has been a tourist attraction since antiquity. Archilochus the poet, who wrote intensely emotional verse (and who was so choleric, he drove his fiancée and her father to suicide), allegedly carved his name in the depths here, as did, for sure, the phil-Hellene Lord Byron. Antiparos fosters time-travelling to the power of x.
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We finished our last maritime odyssey in Ios — once a rowdy party island, but now owned in large part by the former Wall Street trader Angelos Michalopoulos, who keeps donkeys, imports threatened olive trees and has devoted his resources to preserving Ios’s raw beauty. There are pathways winding through juniper bushes and a prehistoric settlement, Skarkos, whose inhabitants once managed that constant flow of civilisation-catalysing, intercontinental sailors. It was said that it was here, on an aromatic hillside, that Homer came to die.
We watched the sun set behind nodding orchids as the hebe, the island’s youth, swayed to Nessun Dorma at the classy Pathos Bar (appropriate enough — even Bronze Age heroes drank killer cocktails of retsina, mead and wine). And we could see what this water-garlanded isle, and others like it, from the Cyclades to the Dodecanese, offers the living, as it did the long dead: time-thwartingly epic panoramas from which to consider history and what it is to be human.
Bettany Hughes’s latest book, Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, is out now in paperback (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Her next film, Bacchus Uncovered, will be screened in the spring