By maunding and imposture Helen came,
Eater of the white fig, the sugar-bread;
Some beauty, yes, but not more than her tribe
Lathe-made for stock embraces on a bed.
LAWRENCE DURRELL, ‘Troy’ (1966)
LIFE FOR OUR BRONZE AGE HELEN would have been sensuous and short. The average age of death for Mycenaean females was twenty-eight. Women were mothers at twelve, grandmothers at twenty-four, dead before they were thirty.1 The majority of the population was carried off in its prime by disease. Homer talks about the ‘scurf of age’, but in real terms pre-historic Greece was a land populated by the very young – and it had a cultural energy to match.
Archaeological finds attest to trade in gold, silver, amber, carnelian, andesite, obsidian, red jasper, lapis lazuli and ivory from both elephants and hippopotamuses. In pithoi, giant storage jars, there are traces of olive oil, frankincense, myrrh and wine; coriander and sesame were used to flavour food, rose-petals, sage and anise to sweeten perfumes.2 The clothes of the richest Mycenaeans, made of wool and linen and even fine wild-silk, were coloured with saffron and a purple dye extracted from a species of sea-snail.3
The Mycenaeans’ was a magpie culture. Great sea journeys would be undertaken to bring the finest raw materials and manufactured goods back to the Greek mainland. The more successful a clan-leader was, the more his palace would have glittered – storerooms and tombs would have been stacked with relucent treasure. Cult images were dressed in cloth that had been impregnated with olive oil to give the material a distinctive sheen; privileged mortals too would have worn clothes treated in this way.4 Those of the highest rank are – for the first time – literally, illustrious. Perhaps this is what the bards meant when they recalled that Helen was ‘radiant’, ‘fair’, ‘shimmering’, ‘golden’.5
And so we can imagine the young Helen, starting her day, being decked in the treasures and baubles that marked her out as a princess. Sitting perhaps, with her feet resting on one of the fine footstools inlaid using the ‘aiamenos’ technique, with ivory men, horses, lions or octopuses – a decorative effect recorded both in Homer6 and in the Linear B tablets.7 Her jewels would have been taken out of an ivory trinket box.8 Some extant examples are decorated with human heads, animals and shields, others are in the shape of ducks – a bird that symbolised female sexuality.9
The necklaces worn by a young noblewoman, a number of which have survived and can be found in the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, are still startling to look at: handsome, colourful things made of agate, steatite, red carnelian and amethysts. Some have matching bangles. Beads range from the size of gobstoppers to split lentils. Gold jewellery also survives: diadems, belts, a chain of showy rosettes separated by delicate triangular cut-outs. Large, gold hoop earrings, portrayed on frescoes and rescued from Late Bronze Age graves, would have dangled and swung in the ears of the highest-born women.
Those of high rank flashed gold and silver signet rings – or, if they were really exalted, rings decorated with iron, since iron at this stage was a rare and precious metal. A female skeleton discovered in 1965 in Tholos Tomb A at Archanes had, lying on her chest, a giant signet ring, depicting a scene from a tree-cult.10 The position of the ring on the woman’s breast-bone suggests that it (and other rings like it) may have been worn as a pendant. These impressive, mysterious jewels were etched with images of religious festivals, bull-leapers, hunters, battles and voluptuous female figures. Red jaspers the size and texture of boiled sweets look disarmingly simple, until you run your finger across the surface and feel the shapes of bees, bulls and leopards, priests and high-priestesses – carved out to mark distinctive seal-stones. These intaglios were important status symbols for both male and female potentates. In one area at Mycenae, tentatively labelled by archaeologists a ‘cult complex’, an enigmatic fresco was excavated in 1968. Women dominate. Of the three shown, certainly two, possibly all three, have seal-stones strapped to their wrists.11 In graves of the 14th and 13th centuries BC, male and female skeletons have been found with the seal-stones still close to their wrist-bones.
The rooms where a girl like Helen spent most of her time would have been emblazoned with colour. The walls, covered with lime plaster, were decorated with vivid patterns in blue, yellow ochre and deep salmon pink – still visible on the fresco-fragments that have survived. Pattern and form were created using both the buon fresco and fresco secco techniques – the paint being applied in different sections when the plaster was wet and again when it was dry. Even some of the floors were technicolor – decorated with paint or vivid cut stones; at Pylos there are geometric patterns, and an octopus glides close to the central hearth of the palace. Columns as high as three men, also coated in a rich pink wash, would have supported the roof and provided a colonnade through which a young princess could wander – perhaps on her way to the megaron, one of the most richly appointed areas of the building.12
We know from Linear B tablets that flax-products – oil and fibre, used to make clothes, sail-cloth, thread, strings and nets13 – were an important export for the Peloponnese, particularly from the region around Pylos. The flax crop would have lit up the land with a brilliant blue when each plant bloomed from dawn until its petals fell at noon. Many of the grandest women wore moulded glass-paste beads, some the colour of speedwells, some indigo, some deep turquoise. As they passed through their territories, carried in litters by slaves, their jewellery would have been a guileless, bijou echo of the landscape around.
The finds from the Mycenaean citadels and graves illustrate the centrality of visual signals in pre-history. Before writing was employed as a tool of propaganda, appearance and experience are all-important. Images have to speak louder than words. The ruling classes of the Mycenaeans had access to precious raw materials from across the Eastern Mediterranean – of a calibre and variety never before imagined. And so in marked contrast to the rest of the population, the high-born made sure they gleamed, perpetually, with an artificial lustre. A girl like Helen, sparkling and glinting as she would have done, would have had it reinforced day in and day out, from a very early age, how important, valuable and desirable she was.
This was an infant society and yet we find on the Greek mainland for the first time a systematic, ubiquitous and extreme division between rich and poor, between town and countryside. Bone evidence speaks of the effects of social segregation – the aristocrats, well-nourished during life and buried within or next to the citadels are on average a full 5 cm taller than the Mycenaean workers, who, in contrast, both in shanty towns and in villages, show the effects of regular starvation.14 The citadels were exalted and exclusive. Fairytale palaces when the resident clan-leaders served your needs or protected your family; sinister castles when they turned their might and their systems against you.15
Today, the massive building blocks of the grand Mycenaean citadels have been softened. At Mycenae, each year, a million or so tourists trail around the citadel and the stones and footways are gently burnished by centuries of wear and tear. At different points in the year where one stone meets another there are splashes of bright pink and yellow, the flower-heads of tiny wild cyclamen and autumn crocuses clinging to the crevices.
The sun-baked ruins with their airy, open spaces might present a pretty picture today. But imagine walking through each room closed in with many thousands of tons of solid stone, with exterior walls up to 7.5m thick. Large areas of the palace complexes would have been dark and musty – the smell of burnt vegetable and mutton fat from natural oil lamps lingering in the corridors. And from the workshops in the citadel the acid tang of metal being forged – because towards the end of the Mycenaean age a mass of armaments was produced.16
For the bulk of the Bronze Age population, life was strained and precarious. Most Mycenaeans did not have Cyclopean walls to protect them. Tomorrow could bring a new earthquake or a new leader, and then those wild flowers would be dancing not in the breeze, but in the back-draught of enemy fires. Rival clans might choose to extend their boundaries to notch up new territories with a body count to match. There was, too, always the chance that devastation could come from across the oceans. Think of the heart-stopping anxiety of looking out to sea, spotting a small speck on the horizon, not knowing whether it was a trader or a messenger, or the advance guard of a hostile force; malcontents making their way slowly and steadily towards you, with the explicit purpose of burning your crops, razing your property to the ground, maiming your husband, enslaving your children or raping your wife.
In the Iliad, Homer weaves his story around a network of allies – men variously described as the Achaeans, the Danaans or Argives.17 Their clan-leaders – Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus, Achilles and the rest – had a sense of collective identity, but on the battlefield, back at camp and in bed, they were torn apart by personal rivalries and dog-fights – within the Greek confederacy there is a great deal of posturing. These tribal micro-conflicts – in many ways the meat and drink of the Iliad – bear out a likely scenario in the Late Bronze Age in which each territory was run by a warlord, his wife and their loyal coterie of aristocratic elite. Tribes in competition with those across the valley.
On one vase, ranks of elite foot-soldiers march doggedly across the surface. This ‘Warrior Vase’ is a solid, roomy thing – 40 cm high, made late, around 1150 BC and now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. At first glance one can be deceived into thinking that all the figures are male. The automaton warriors are striding into battle, but behind them is a lone figure, waving. It is a woman. Is she a mother saying goodbye? Is she a Mycenaean Greek waving for help? Is she an alien (a Trojan even) about to be attacked? Is she a queen sending her soldiers off to die? We do not know the story of the vase, but we can read its message. At the tail-end of Mycenaean civilisation – in precarious, blood-thirsty times – this is what men are brought up to do: to stand together and fight while women stand and watch.