The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner Page A

majordomo deities. The muses determined not only when you wrote but also what you wrote. Homer was the world’s first writer and also, it turns out, the world’s first writer with writer’s block. He begins The Odyssey by thanking the muses. Like all authors, Homer craved legitimacy. Today, that is provided by the likes ofthe New York Times Book Review and Goodreads. In Homer’s time, it was the muses. The original validators.
    We may have outgrown many unfortunate Greek practices, such as slavery, but when it comes to the creative process, we are still very much Greek. We still beckon our muse. We may not believe they are actual beings, but these forces remain just as mysterious, and fickle, as the nymphs who romped on the Hill of the Muses. It’s impossible to understand Greek creativity, friends tell me, without understanding these deities. They speak a garbled tongue, though. Best to bring an interpreter.
    Mine is Robert Pitt. Robert is an epigraphist. He reads the writing on the walls. On the pottery and statues, too. He comes highly recommended, not only for his command of this ancient language but for his ability to breathe life into it and, in true Greek fashion, simplify it so that even a cretin such as me can understand.
    Robert is a trim, lanky man who looks considerably older than his thirtysome years. But nothing about him is the least bit geriatric, mind you. He’s just one of those people who was born middle-aged. Like the ancients, Robert believes in the power of place. That’s why he lives in Athens, not Oxford or Boston. To truly know the Greeks, he tells me, “you need to know their topography, their mountains, sounds, and smells.”
    As we hike the winding path that leads to the summit of the Hill of the Muses, Robert tells me how as a young boy growing up in England he fell in love with the ancient Greeks. “I remember reading The Iliad and just being blown away by it, by the artistry and the story, and the immediacy of it.” A three-thousand-year-old tale with immediacy to it? I realize that for the Roberts and Bradys and Alicias of the world, the past is not such a foreign land. For them, I suspect, it is the present that is alien.
    It’s still early but already the Mediterranean sun has grown fierce. I suggest we rest for a while. We find two rocks in the shape of benches and sit. “Socrates might have sat here,” says Robert matter-of-factly. That’s what I love about Athens. The past is always brushing up against you, with such tantalizing what-ifs as “Socrates might have sat here.”
    I ask Robert about the role that language played in the Greek miracle.
    Words mattered to the ancient Greeks, he says, in ways we can hardly imagine. For them, “talk was the breath of life.” They had a word for those who didn’t speak Greek: barbaros. It is where we get the English barbarian .
    “It was an extraordinarily poetic language, yet at the same time an incredibly precise and subtle one,” he says. Not content with simply the active and passive voices, the Greeks invented an intermediate voice, something no other language had.
    Always keen to synthesize, the Athenians combined their love of language with their love of drinking. The result was a game where participants tried to outverse one another. Robert has seen this practice preserved on pottery. “We have lots of vases from the symposia where people are scratching out verses and shouting, ‘Oh, I thought of a good one.’ ”
    The love of language was instilled at an early age. Children were weaned on a steady diet of Homer—and expected to memorize all twenty-seven thousand lines. It’s difficult to overemphasize the influence of Homer on Greeks of this time. Think Shakespeare, Freud, Mark Twain, and John Grisham combined and you get an inkling of how large Homer loomed in the Greek imagination.
    More than just the imagination, actually. In a fascinating study, psychologist David McClelland found a direct link between Greek