The longer we live, the more the losses accumulate, growing beside us like worm-casts. Loss forms a long list: work and opportunities, possessions and authority, health and life. Love itself, and loved people.
I've just been reading about a certain Frankish prince. Kalamata-born William II de Villehardouin, who died in 1278, had earlier been the most powerful man in the Peloponnese. He was a troubadour and poet fluent in Greek and French, and had a retinue of 80 knights, while his court at Andravida, now a modest market town, was considered by all of contemporary western Europe to epitomise the ideals and practice of chivalry.
William also built the castle atop the hill at ever-enchanting Mystras, near Sparta. In an interval of spare time he accompanied Louis IX of France on the Seventh Crusade.
But William was also, it would seem, one of the most determined and obsessive of people: he desperately coveted Monemvasia (pictured), the towering rock of granite that has been called the Gibraltar of Greece. I have nothing! I have nothing if I don't have Monemvasia! he is supposed to have declared.
It took him three years of siege to subdue the settlement, and he succeeded only after the inhabitants had been reduced to eating rats, but he learned eventually that the glories of our blood and state seldom last. Defeated in battle in 1259, he hid under a haystack, but was captured, taken far from home, and then forced to cede both Monemvasia and Mystras to the Byzantines, whose fortunes had suddenly improved.
Recently my Australian farmer uncle, Barry, died. He would have been 90 this month. Not long after that, my Greek neighbour, Aristomenis, was killed in a car accident: he was 19, and had been driving back from an exam.
In this day and age of celebrity, so much of reputation depends on achievement. In the eyes of the world Barry did not match his clergyman brother, who climbed to the top of the Presbyterian tree, so to speak, and was an Oxford Blue in rowing as well; nor did Barry's life resemble that of his only sister, a high-achieving and much-respected nurse. Fate decreed that he should stay home and run the dairy farm. Which he did, conscientiously and well, while coping with drought and disease and the unremitting grind of milking cows morning and night way back then. He never