Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece functions in the novel as an imagined past that Sofia Papastergiadis repeatedly brings into contact with present-day family life. Classical references help her consider Greek ancestry, women’s social position, and the stories families tell about themselves; they also expose the distance between an idealized cultural inheritance and the demands of caring for her mother in the present.

A Past Carried Into the Present

Sofia’s screen saver, an image of a star-filled purple sky, connects cosmic and family histories. Her mother once taught her to write the Milky Way’s name in Greek and told her that Aristotle had gazed at the milky circle in Chalcidice, east of modern Thessaloniki, where Sofia’s father was born. The screen’s stars are only two years old and made in China, while the oldest star is about thirteen billion years old. When the screen breaks, Sofia describes the universe as shattered: an ordinary damaged object becomes an image for the instability of her own life, in which distant antiquity, family memory, and the immediate present coexist.

That layering is not the same as entering a historical scene. Ancient Greece is reconstructed through what Sofia has heard, studied, and imagined, and its associations are filtered through her questions about her own Greek heritage. Her father’s birthplace gives the classical references a family connection, but it does not make that inheritance uncomplicated. The past is available to her as language and image, even as her relationship with her father remains marked by distance and unequal responsibility.

Care and the Pressure of the Present

The novel repeatedly sets classical and cosmic spans of time against the practical, recurring time of care. Sofia’s mother calls for water, and Sofia tries different kinds—bottled water from the refrigerator, bottled water kept outside it, or boiled water left to cool—without being sure which will be considered right. The search makes caregiving a cycle of attention and adjustment rather than a task completed once. A broken screen may wait a month for repair, but Sofia does not know whether she will still be in the same place then; the answer depends on her mother’s condition.

That dependence shapes how Sofia moves through the world. At the Gómez Clinic, she walks arm in arm with her mother, matching her pace and describing her own legs as her mother’s legs. Yet her mother had walked to a local shop alone that morning, a fact Sofia does not want to dwell on. The contrast makes both dependency and capacity changeable, rather than fixed attributes. Later, Sofia finds herself limping even when her mother is not beside her, as though her body has retained the rhythm of their shared walking. In this account, memory is bodily as well as historical: the past persists in a present-day gait.

Care also has an economic and familial history. Sofia recalls that her father, Christos Papastergiadis, converted to religion, inherited wealth from a shipping business in Athens, and formed a new family with a much younger wife. Sofia says he has not shared that wealth with her and her mother; she describes herself as her mother’s burden and creditor, repaying care with the labor of her legs. When she later stays with her father’s family in Athens, she sleeps on a camp bed in the spare room and understands herself as the person caring for his first wife. These circumstances give the family’s connection to Greece a material dimension: ancestry and inherited wealth do not distribute security or care evenly.

The Vase and Gendered History

Ancient Greece becomes especially immediate when Sofia breaks an imitation Greek vase in her mother’s kitchen. Its frieze depicts female slaves carrying water jars, an image that joins classical decoration to the recurring work of supplying water in Sofia’s own household. As the vase shatters, Sofia sees her mother standing among the fragments. She reflects that, in the ancient world she is imagining, her mother would have been neither citizen nor foreigner, but a woman denied rights and treated as a vessel for reproduction. This is Sofia’s interpretation of the image and the historical order it evokes, not a change in her mother’s actual legal status.

The broken vase also calls up her mother’s earlier domestic labor: making cheese for Christos, preparing food, and later finding paid work after he left. The remembered sequence complicates the antique image of women’s work. Sofia’s mother is not only a figure inside a classical pattern of gendered labor; she is also a person who adapted, worked, and supported her family beyond that pattern. Sofia’s act of breaking the vessel can therefore be read as a rejection of the neat image it presents, though the shards do not undo the practical caregiving that continues after the scene.

Ritual, Myth, and the Athens Present

Sofia’s reflections on the meat market and the Parthenon extend her interest in how ritual gives meaning to violence, gender, and family life. At the market, she sees slaughtered sheep and considers how hunting rituals might have made killing more bearable to people who lived closely with animals. Her account is an anthropological interpretation prompted by what she sees, not a detached history of ancient practice. The scene places food, death, and the work of sustaining life in the same frame.

Looking toward the Parthenon, Sofia imagines worshippers in the fifth century BC and wonders how young women’s marriages and expected domestic and mourning roles shaped their lives. She pictures women expressing grief while men stand farther back. Her questions bring ancient gender conventions into conversation with her own unease about being assigned the role of the daughter who cares for others. She wants a form of anger and self-expression not confined to the expected work of women. The classical past supplies a vocabulary for that frustration, but it does not resolve it.

In contemporary Athens, the family apartment offers a sharp counter-image to the monumental past. Its walls are covered with Donald Duck posters, while graffiti appears outside; the household is also concerned about a shortage of medicine during the crisis. Sofia’s father, his wife Alexandra, and their baby inhabit a daily family life that is neither a classical tableau nor a myth. Sofia’s presence there is partial: she belongs to the family, yet sleeps apart and remains conscious of the care she has left behind in Spain.

Narrative Significance

Ancient Greece gives Sofia a way to compare different scales of time, from stars and classical temples to the repeated hours of illness, work, and family obligation. The comparisons do not produce a stable origin story. Greek language and history connect her to her father, but that connection coexists with estrangement; classical art can make women’s exclusion visible, but Sofia’s mother’s life exceeds the image on the vase. The past matters chiefly as a contested lens through which Sofia interprets inheritance and gender, while the present continually tests those interpretations through acts of care, movement, and survival.