As a child, on windy nights I'd fantasise that my bedroom could disengage from our home. Like a caterpillar giddy for transformation, it would emerge as a sublime sailing ship, float with the vagabond clouds, then drift down to worlds of long ago.
I would step off the ship onto the bronze earth. Greeting me were Greek gods and goddesses — Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, and the others — smiling gently from ivory faces. My life would be adorned by their radiance, their jealousies would captivate me, and my parents would be proud I'd found such famous companions.
After a social studies unit in fourth grade on Greek mythology, anything even remotely connected to ancient Greece was irresistible. It was more thrilling, by far, than a party or a snow day off school in my Indiana hometown.
I discovered books by poets and scholars exalting the romantic melancholy of ancient ruins. If such notables shared my passion, then I knew my infatuation must be legitimate. One lacklustre day, as I looked through routine snail mail, I found a beautiful catalogue with a cover photo of an ancient Greek temple soaring above the sea. It was from a newly launched cruise line, Voyages to Antiquity. Instantly, those three words transported me to my childhood reveries.
All the ancient civilisations I'd longed to visit were in that catalogue, encompassed in 25 journeys — aboard a sleek white vessel, the Aegean Odyssey.
It looked like a reincarnation of the ship in my childhood dreams. But this one sailed farther: through the entire Mediterranean world and into the Aegean, Ionian, Adriatic, and Black seas — to Byzantine Turkey, Renaissance Italy, Pharaonic Egypt, Classical Greece, even exotic ports of Asia. Unable to resist, I chose an odyssey through the Greek Islands and Turkey, from Athens to Istanbul.
The cruise line hosted a pre-sailing tour of the Acropolis. Our guide told how it had been sacred terrain even during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods, before Classical-era Greeks created the Parthenon there — Athena's temple, dedicated to wisdom. Later, the guide said, the edifice became a church and mosque.
Stopping at Epidaurus
The first night, on the ship's al fresco dining terrace, the captain regaled me with tales of steering the ship through celebrity waters - the same wine-dark seas that Homer's Odysseus had sailed. Leaning over, as if to impart a secret, he said: "At our next stop, Epidaurus — the best preserved of all ancient Greek theatres — the tragedies of Euripedes and Sophocles are still performed. Shakespeare's masterpieces, too."
Later, in my cabin, I thought of the parallel quest, from Sophocles to the Elizabethan bard, to unfold the mysteries of the human psyche. The mystical ingredients of the voyage were the near-obsession of a fellow passenger, a charming Londoner. At Mycenae, Troy, and Delos, he'd find secluded spots to create watercolours of the sites.
Wandering through these vast, ancient sites a few days later, it was as though Aphrodite, goddess of love, had returned to me from my childhood fantasy and whispered: "Don't mind the others if they accuse you of being a hopeless romantic. Look at me, I've devoted 2,500 years to being just that."
Back home, re-immersed in the workaday world, a friend from the ship called to commiserate about our shared malaise. "I feel bereft of ruins and all those sublime islands," she lamented, "and can't wait to return." Near retirement, she was determined to experience, solo, all 25 odysseys.
"But what about your husband?" I asked. "Isn't he a homebody with a low tolerance for your absences?"
In a heartbeat, she fired back: "If Odysseus could be apart from Penelope for 20 years, then Max can handle it."
— Christian Science Monitor
