When I left Stephanou I walked out and along the road proposing to think about “the man of culture,” Demetrios, and wound up thinking about Byron, the aristocrat, plunging himself and his fortune into the Greek struggle for independence. The problem that had plagued him most was which of the Greek revolutionaries was the most trustworthy, which could be counted on to put the cause ahead of personal ambition, indeed, in one case, of vanity. That Byron should have had to cope with another man’s vanity added a certain piquancy. I left the road and hiked across the open country, through grazing land and past the rubble of long-abandoned habitations. I let my mind wander with as little aim. The issues might be clearer when it found its own way back to them. I came on a cemetery and a soldiers’ monument at the bottom of which lay a withered wreath. Beyond was a church much of which seemed to have sunk into the ground. There was thereabouts, I knew, a sixth-century church, and I supposed I had happened on it.
