The pursuit of devious policies with its Western allies, state meddling to hinder EEC imports, infringements of Community regulations which frequently bring it before the European Court and the airing of its corruption scandals in government agencies abroad have all contributed to this.
Should the good name of Greece be in need of a boost, there is no better name to turn to than Constantine Tsatsos. He personified the best qualities of his country not just because he was the first president of the Hellenic Republic and went about shaking hands with momentous people and laying innumerable wreaths at the foot of the Tombs of Unknown Soldiers. Being president was just one of the things he was, but he represented Greece in that capacity to perfection because he was so Greek himself.
Many readers may have unwittingly made their first acquaintance with him in The Colossus of Maroussi as the man who philosophized while bathing in a tin tub on Spetses. There he appears under the pseudonym Kyrios Ypsilon because when the book was being written in 1939, Tsatsos was still a political exile during the dictatorship of Metaxas, and the author did not want to get him into trouble.
“He was Greek as Greek can be,” wrote Henry Miller. “What I liked about him was his keen, buoyant nature, his directness, his passion for flowers and metaphysics… While we chatted he brought out a tin tub and filled it with warm water for his bath. On a shelf near his bed he had a collection of books which were in five or six languages… Ί would like to read Walt Whitman.’ He was sitting in the tub soaping and scrubbing himself vigorously. ‘To keep up the morale,’ he said… One has to have regular habits,’ he added, ‘or else you go to pieces. I do a lot of walking, so I can sleep at night. The nights are long, you. know, when you are not free.'”
These were his everyday concerns: freedom, justice, beauty, love, law – things that have concerned Greeks, in and out of the bathtub, for several thousand years.
Tsatsos was a philosopher as well as a chief of state, rare enough in the past and rarer now. It’s difficult to imagine Mrs Thatcher writing lyric verses, or Mr Reagan composing Platonic dialogues or even Mr Sartzetakis presenting an original approach to the philosophy of art. But a president who is also a noted philosopher and poet, whose wife is a well-known poet herself, whose brother won the Nobel Prize for Literature must be unique.
Tsatsos published poetry as early as 1923. He also wrote, among other things, books on ancient philosophy, on Demosthenes and on Cicero; on aesthetics, education and the philosophy of justice; many works on law and a critique of the poet Palamas which is still considered a classic; two volumes on Kant, one on democracy in America; a meditation in dialogue form, two plays, a life of Venizelos whose private secretary he was as a young man, and an essay on love. (Of Tsatsos, George Katsimbalis had already said to Miller years before, “the women are crazy about him.
He has an interesting theory about love…”) In a preface to his collected poems in 1973, excerpted elsewhere in this issue, Tsatsos stated that he felt out of step with his times both as philosopher and a poet. In fact he denied being a philospher at all, saying that if one did not create a philosophy of one’s own, one was only a follower.
It is presumptuous to disagree with him, but it seems he was wonderfully representative of a remarkable generation. Within a decade at the turn of the century, there was born in Greece an astonishing number of poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, statesmen, scientists, archaeologists and thinkers – the so-called Generation of the ’30s, since so many achieved fame at that time. As a group, they were the first in modern Greece to absorb fully foreign influences and make their work unmistakably Greek. At the same time they reinterpreted their long and glorious past and gave it concrete, contemporary meaning. The confusions of the Venizelist-Royalist schism in their youth, furthermore, made them intensely aware of public affairs which transformed them all into patriots, so whatever they wrote or thought or painted or composed, carried, beyond their great talents, an unmistakable ethnic weight. Tsatsos was among the last of these, so it was truly said of him at the time of his death last month, “not just a chapter of Greek history has closed, but a whole volume.”
The new volume may have opened unpromisingly, but it has one great advantage in projecting the good name of Greece in the future: it has the previous volume to consult, full of lives that are examples to go on living by.
