Works and Days
“So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two…. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due.”
On this date in 1944, “A bitter civil war broke out in Athens….”
“Cambridge was colder and darker and offered even fewer distractions than before the war. By June, 1943, Minakis had done the maths tripos with honors…. He read Cavafy and Seferis and T.S. Eliot:
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate…
Minakis was happy for his colleagues when the war ended but felt little on his own account or that of the country he had left; the Greek government was a British prop that could not feed its people, the Communists and the Monarchists were at one another’s throats like savage dogs, and civil war was inevitable.
Better to return to grim Cambridge….”
