Look, Pisistratus – joy of my heart, my friend – the sheen of bronze, the blaze of gold and amber, silver, ivory too, through all this echoing mansion! Surely Zeus’s court on Olympus must be just like this, the boundless glory of all this wealth inside! My eyes dazzle … I am struck with wonder.
Odysseus’ son Telemachus describes Helen’s and Menelaus’ palace to the son of King Nestor. Homer, Odyssey1
AMYSTERY SURROUNDS HELEN’S PALACE. The Sparta of the Age of Heroes features prominently in the canon of Greek myth – and yet no obvious palatial remains have been uncovered, no monumental Bronze Age structure that one can imagine being a spur to the Homeric tales of court intrigue and warrior honour – or the awestruck hyperbole of Telemachus’ report as he wonders at the opulence of Helen’s Spartan home. Recent archaeological discoveries in Greece2 suggest that modern-day Lakonia was indeed a distinct territory in the Late Bronze Age;3 the poets tell us it was a rich kingdom. So where is the royal seat of Lakedaimonia, the headquarters of the Mycenaean clan that held sway here three and half thousand years ago? Where is the home of a Spartan Queen, our Bronze Age Helen?
Archaeologists have looked for a Mycenaean palatial complex buried beneath present-day Sparta but have drawn a blank. Preliminary investigations suggest that the earliest remains of occupation and permanent settlement under the modern town date from the 10th or 9th century BC. There is a slim chance that Late Bronze Age walls, chambers and grand halls could be hidden there, but until such a footprint has been located we have to look elsewhere to try to identify where the Bronze Age Spartan clan would have been raised.
The prime candidate is just outside Sparta itself on a hill called Therapne. The road to Therapne lies to the south-east of the city. It follows the River Eurotas upstream for a mile or so and then branches – one metal sign for an archaeological site signals a turning right into a low ridge of hills. The situation is impressive, but the archaeology scant. The German archaeologist and adventurer Heinrich Schliemann, who famously ‘discovered’ the site of Troy, came here at the end of the 19th century and was disappointed – he declared this was no home for Homeric heroes. But local farmers had more faith. As they worked their fields primitive artefacts made of bronze and terracotta – votive offerings – were turned up by the plough. Some came forward with their finds; in 1909 archaeologists from the British School at Athens began to dig.4
The earth leading up to the summit of Therapne is a rich burnt red; even in spring the grass that covers the hill has already been bleached to a sandy gold. On the high ground, the warm winds start to move quickly. Here you can see a 50-mile span north to south of a domain rich in natural resources. Stretching out beneath the shadow of the hill is the flat, fertile Tayegetan plain, now a market garden for Athens and beyond – Spartan oranges end up as pulped juice around the world. The horta – wild greens – that gave the ancients a mineral-rich diet, and kept the modern Greeks going through German occupation, still grows on the hillside. Faunal remains attest to the presence, in the Late Bronze Age, of the quarry of hunts enthusiastically portrayed in Mycenaean art: venison, hares, duck, geese, wild boar and partridge.5 The Eurotas meanders through the valley all year round, crystal clear in the spring, rusty after the November rains when it tears its banks.
Up here on this river bluff there are two distinct areas of archaeological significance. The oldest is a truncated Late Bronze Age building surrounded by tantalising clues of human activity: painted pottery sherds, female figurines6 and beads made of semi-precious stones, spindle whorls, loom weights and pots for food preparation. The second archaeological feature, crowning a misshapen natural rock core, is a crumbling rectangle of archaic stone blocks – the remains of a religious structure – a structure that has just been shown to have late Bronze Age foundations. For the last two millennia, this particular remnant of the early days of Greece has been known as the Menelaion. 7 But before that, the building that stood here, dating from the late 8th century BC and rebuilt in the 5th century BC, was called, simply, TES HELENES HIERON – ‘HELEN’S SHRINE’.8
From at least the 7th century BC onwards, ‘Helen’s Shrine’ was believed to be the spot where Helen was buried alongside her husband Menelaus. Here great honours were paid her.9 The Spartans could have chosen to worship anyone at this prominent location: Athena, Heracles, Poseidon, or the king of the gods, Zeus himself. But for at least a thousand years this breath-taking, confident, awe-inspiring site was reserved for Helen and for Helen’s family10 and as late as AD 300 Helen was still described by a poet called Tryphiodorus, who wrote another epic version of her rape, as ‘the bride [nymphe] of Therapne’.11
Archaeological discoveries back up the connection made with Helen in the literary record. The hilltop was first excavated in a rather piecemeal way in 1909 and 1910 – and then left fallow for over sixty years. But when archaeologists started to work more systematically in 1974 they immediately turned up evidence of cultic activity; pits at the corner of ‘Helen’s Shrine’ to accommodate offerings of holy food; in front of her shrine a deep cistern providing water for the purification of celebrants and for the communal feasts that played a key part in cult worship.12 The words ‘For Helen’ have been incised into a 6th-century harpax, 13 a meat-hook dedicated as an offering. This vicious-looking eight-clawed instrument (now in the Sparta Museum), used for hanging meat, suggests that Helen was worshipped with animal sacrifices and feasting: ‘sacrifices worthy of gods not just heroes’, says Isocrates in the middle of the 4th century BC. 14 A fine bronze perfume jar, an aryballos, was also found here. Dating from the 7th century BC, it too is inscribed, roughly, with Helen’s name.15 Difficult to make out, the inscription reads: ‘Deini[s] dedicated these things [in gratitude] to Helen (wife) of Menelaos.’16
Three hundred or so terracotta figurines, a number of them women, riding horses, have been excavated at Therapne. These could be images of Helen herself 17 or, perhaps more likely, of her worshippers. Fibulae – sturdy bronze and iron dress pins – have also been found on the hill; dedicated perhaps by girls who communed with the spirit of Helen and then left their girlhood and their girlish clothes behind them, descending the hill as a rite of passage when dressed as mature women.18 A steady flow would have tramped up that hill between c. 700 and 200 BC clutching their gifts for Helen, thinking fervently of her as they came.19
So if this was the location of Helen’s shrine, could the Late Bronze Age building, a hundred yards off, be Helen’s palace? For years excavators and romantics have debated whether the compact Late Bronze Age remains – described by the most generous as a ‘mansion’ – might have held the royal household, might have been where Helen grew up, the palace to which she was brought by Menelaus after her dangerous liaison with a prince of Troy, where – in a scene that was vividly imagined by Homer – she entertained Odysseus’ son Telemachus and heard stories told of how the Western world had risen in arms to bring her home from a foreign city.20 However, there is a problem. Other palatial complexes, built and ruined at about the same time are significantly larger. ‘Nestor’s Palace’ at Pylos, a hundred kilometres west, appears to be five times the size of the Spartan offering. The other grand citadels in the Peloponnese dwarf the Therapne remains. In the Argolid plain the palace complex of Mycenae covers an area ofc. 110,000 square feet (10,220 square m) with a surrounding community spread over c. 32 hectares; the Tiryns and Pylos complexes are c. 55,000 square feet (5,110 square m).21 Helen, always billed as a wealthy woman, would surely have inhabited something approaching this scale.
Here then is a bewildering state of affairs; at Therapne evidence of a vigorous cult of Helen – and a fortifiable hill standing above a fertile plain just as the Mycenaeans liked it (almost without exception they favour elevated defensive positions). Here is a Late Bronze Age building of the 13th century BC, the most likely date of a Trojan War, scattered with Mycenaean pottery. We have a Linear B reference to a district called Lakedaimon; and yet visible signs of a palace are absent. There is no hint of the grand citadel-complexes found at the other seedbeds of Mycenaean culture. No showy home for a rich Spartan queen.
The latest research does, however, shed some light.22 The eastern slopes of the hill of Therapne are very exposed – the summit is particularly prone to erosion and the clay sub-soil easily subsides. The remains of that little ‘mansion’ have now been identified simply as substantial basement storage areas. Late Bronze Age sealings for clay stoppers have been found here; this is where food and wine supplies would have been stored. These modest remains do not look like a palace, because they were not one. Any Mycenaean palace would have towered high above, away and to the left as you stand facing the setting sun. There are faint traces of this building on the highest point of the hill and a rough staircase leading from the ‘basements’ to where the upper rooms would once have been. The basements are a fraction of a larger complex and have survived only because of their more protected position on the hillside.
But the area of ground where that palace would have stood has been eaten by the elements. The hill of Therapne is itself now much smaller than it would have been three thousand years ago – as a result of natural erosion vast quantities of earth have, over time, slowly but surely slipped down the hillside. And as the ground disappeared so too the Spartan palace walls would have cracked and tumbled. Mycenaean treasures, broken and exposed, would have been eagerly picked off by human scavengers. We cannot find the palatial complex of the Late Bronze Age king and queen of Sparta, because in its entirety it is no longer there to find. Even if Helen has not escaped from history, her home has almost certainly escaped the archaeological record.
But one enigmatic woman from the Late Bronze Age has been left up on Therapne hill. While excavating close to the basements, archaeologists found three skeletons.23 The first was a human female – aged about thirty; the two others were children. The woman has her legs drawn up to her chin, suggesting she has been trussed up with her hands behind her back.24 She was unworthy of even a shallow grave, her body left on a rubbish tip. Hers was no natural death. She was, almost certainly, either the victim of an attack or has been left as a human offering – a sacrifice. At the time that she died the basements had been scorched by a fire of such intensity that large areas of the palace above must have been weakened or destroyed. Here, towards the end of the 13th century BC, the community living at Therapne witnessed a dreadful calamity. The destruction of the palatial buildings at Sparta is symptomatic of the closure of the ‘Age of Heroes’, when across the Greek mainland once powerful Mycenaean centres crumble and fall. Archaeological evidence describes the features of this demise but not its cause. At Sparta we have only one adult witness left – and she is long silent.
It seems as though the Spartan palace, immortalised by Homer as blazing with gold, amber, bronze, silver and ivory,25 will never be teased back out of the earth. So, to envisage more fruitfully how a Late Bronze Age princess such as Helen would have spent her early years, we have to look elsewhere: we have to travel 120 kilometres north-east of Sparta to the plain of Argos and the place that gave Mycenaean civilisation its name – the grand citadel of Mycenae.