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It seems like any other day, the sun rising like a yellow smear over the concrete of Athens, reflecting acid orange off the rooftop water heaters. I lie under the rough blanket and listen to the sounds outside my door—I am next to the kitchen and can hear my roommate, Paki, opening the refrigerator, scooping yogurt into a ceramic dish and sliding it across the table.

It starts slowly, insipidly. A crawling sensation of terror, making me break out in a sweat—I feel as if I’m being pulled into the floor. The sensation of dread increases, my pulse racing, wondering what will happen to me. Will I evaporate in this room? Will I run screaming into the streets? The balcony—I am five floors up. What if I fell off? I hear the call of the vegetable vendor far below, his three-wheeled cart making its way up the street behind the apartment, a megaphone on the roof. “Fresh vegetables, come buy, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes…” the voice intones in a raw, blunt stab. Car horns honk, a woman calls out from a balcony, “Boree…” she says to a woman across the street. “… could be…”

This psychological descent began, a few weeks before, with an actual journey underground. A few friends and I had dined at a favorite downtown taverna, famous for its enclosed patio and densely trellised arbor, offering an oasis from the chaos of the surrounding city. There, beneath the filth of the streets, the sounds of traffic and the cats climbing blood red bougainvillea, splattered like a mob hit against the brick-walled courtyard, I had an experience that changed my life.

After downing a couple of tiny copper pitchers of retsina—the resin tinged wine specific to Greece—I stepped out in search of the ladies room. The waiter told me it was “down there,” and pointed to a hole in the floor. For some reason I hesitated, glancing around at the packed tables of the lunch-time rush hour before peering down the winding stairwell leading into a crepuscular doom.

At the bottom I was faced with a long corridor. Breathing in a mixture of damp earth and cooking oil, I crept down the hallway, my hands touching the moist stone walls for guidance. When I got close to the end, I heard a voice in the darkness.

“Do you want to see something interesting?”

My heart jumped; I stopped, too terrified to answer.

“It is very interesting. Do you like to see?”

Do I like to see? “What?” I finally said, in a pathetic lamb’s bleat.

“Come here. I show you.”

I walked slowly towards the voice, aware of an ambient light flickering softly like a nighttime ritual about to happen. Suddenly I felt like Persephone in the Underworld, wondering where her mother went. There was Hades, my waiter, standing next to a large underground clearing, pointing to something. I leaned in closer for a look.

“See—there.” Pause. “What you call it in English? A grave?”

I was stunned. Standing right before me, a few feet away, was an upright piece of marble. White, lonely and sacred, it was about five feet tall and projecting directly out of the earth.

“But…how did it get here? I mean, why is it here?” I fumbled over my words, too entranced to be frightened anymore by the fact that I was in a foreign country in a dark basement, alone with a strange man who was now holding my hand.

“Here—I show you,” he responded innocently, pulling me closer to the object. We stopped at a respectful distance, but I could see the engravings on the face of the stone, clear as day.

“It was not placed here…it has always been here. You see,” Hades said, animated, his white teeth flashing in the veiled light, and his voice lowering, at once excited and at the same time tinged with an edge of awe, “we are standing in a graveyard.”

All at once, as if Zeus himself hit me with a lightning bolt, I got it. We were thirty feet below the modern Athenian street level, and I was standing in the middle of a Roman cemetery. This was the stuff they couldn’t teach you with slides in the darkness of a university lecture auditorium. The ancient still lived here—thinly paved over by the present—and reached