Home to the Valley of the Muses, Greece’s Mount Helicon has been hailed by Ovid and Hesiod as the font of inspiration and poetry. But today, the plains between Helicon’s foothills and the cool blue waters of the Gulf of Corinth are yielding a more prosaic kind of material: aluminum. Instead of verse, raw red bauxite — a mixture of aluminum oxides — flows freshly mined from the hills to a large smelter operated by Aluminium of Greece (AoG) in the town of Agios Nikolaos.