From mythical paradise to the world of Midas

THE HOLIDAY ended as we arrived at Antalya airport, from which we were to fly back to London. The first thing that dragged me back to the humdrum from the paradise I had reluctantly left behind was the advertisements. There they were, unchanged after a fortnight: the gleaming cars, vapidly perfect faces, brimming bottles of Scotch, eerily shiny as if wrapped in cling-film and perpetually beckoning to the have-it-all school of life.

Only this time, instead of feeling that tiny tweak of covetousness, envy, or God-I-could-do-with-a-drink that is my usual Pavlovian response, I looked at the peach-skinned young model advertising an expensive duty-free scent and thought, how absurd]

My partner and I were on our way home after two glorious weeks sailing round the ancient Lycian coast of southern Turkey. Throughout that time, apart from the occasional C*c*-C*l* sign undulating in red and white behind the bar of a waterside cafe or the competing green logo of some brand of German beer, our eyes had been remarkably untainted by commercial images.

Instead, we had gazed at seas whose transparent blue spanned the palette from lightest to deepest turquoise, depending on the time of day, and at a coast that has changed only marginally since Herodotus wrote about it almost 2,500 years ago. Rocks, mountains, pines, olives, goats, bays, pebbles and shards of ancient amphorae had filled our sight; those, and the incomparable ancient ruins in places such as Arykanda, Phaselis and Olympus. We felt (I am being literal here) that we breathed air from the very dawn of our civilisation.

To return from this to the banal, artificial images designed to tempt money from the pockets of jaded 20th-century dwellers such as ourselves was to see how degrading these images really are. Take the perfume posters, all alike, that beckon travellers to the duty-free area. Their flawless young women are a tribute to anorexia and the cosmetician's art, but do grown-up women really want to look like that, devoid of experience, intelligence, originality or wit?

What about the cars pictured in the magazines we bought at the newsagents' kiosk, as the reality of returning after two weeks in a time capsule crowded in on us? Everyone knows that cars and their drivers (plus the obligatory laughing young female passenger, sister to the girl in the perfume ad) almost never sweep in splendid isolation down some idyllic mountain road. In reality they are more likely to be stuck, cursing, in a traffic jam, forced to hear their neighbours' blaring radio or watch him picking his nose at a traffic light. In such a situation aerodynamic spoilers and an acceleration of 0-60 in 5.7 secs is neither here nor there, nor will the young female find much to laugh at.

Such images are not only corrupting - as they promise a world that does not exist in return for inordinate sums of money that most people do not have - they are also an insult to our intelligence and receptiveness. Anaesthetised by artifice, we are less likely to notice the beauty of faces that are old or wind- roughened or frowning (against the sun, into the distance, or at a stranger).

What is more, these advertisements force the gullible into a universal template. Be they German, Japanese, Swedish, Hungarian, African or Australian, they contrive to squeeze themselves into an approximation of this apparent desirability, using the very cosmetics being promoted. Hence their success. Hence the ubiquitousness of the images.

Don't tell me that the archaic smile on the face of a kouros, those early Greek statues of young men standing in eerie equilibrium, or the inscrutable calm of the profiles from Egyptian tomb paintings, are just as unnatural. The difference lies in what they advocate. The kouroi represent balance, harmony, moderation and obedience to the gods; the Egyptians reflect stability, the suppression of the self, and faith in a life beyond this one.

The images from antiquity were crucial to a populace that was 99 per cent illiterate (though possessing a rich store of oral history) and to its priests and rulers. Their statues, those impassive figures guarding temples and tombs, epitomise the serenity achieved by those who subdue their own turbulent desires in favour of the greater good. The ancient Lycians won acclaim by contributing to great communal works such as temples and theatres. The inscriptions honouring them can still be read today, though their faces and chariots and favourite wines are long forgotten.

And these modern images that suddenly rushed back into my field of vision: what did they evoke? Money, money, money; it's a rich man's world.