At Pylos: 14+ female slaves on account of the sacred gold1
Linear B record of ‘temple offerings’ perhaps to a priestess c. 1200 BC
THE ILIAD DEALS WITH A NUMBER OF TESTY RELATIONSHIPS: between Helen and Paris, Paris and Menelaus, Agamemnon and Achilles. But the most dysfunctional of all is that between Zeus and mankind. Zeus reigns but he is a flawed and fickle god, who treats humankind like a box of tin soldiers, and just as with a spoilt child, you can never quite be sure when he will tire of his game and start kicking his phalanxes all over the floor.
… but all night long the Master Strategist Zeus plotted fresh disaster for both opposing armies – his thunder striking terror – and blanching panic swept across the ranks.2
From the Iron Age onwards, audiences who listened to the rhapsodes – the singers of epic poetry – would have identified with the struggles of those blanching warriors. These men and women knew that their lives too were governed by the immortal egos on Mount Olympus. They also knew that the gods and goddesses themselves were subject to the whims, foibles and tantrums of the king-god Zeus. Zeus ‘the cloud-gatherer’ is central to the Iliad, because by the time the epic was written down in the 7th century BC, he had become the undisputed ruler of the Olympian pantheon and there-fore of the known Greek world. He was, to quote Hesiod, ‘the father of gods and men … the most excellent among the gods and supreme in power’.3
But it had not always been thus. A Bronze Age Helen would have lived in a world in which Zeus was a mere upstart – an ingénu yet to prove himself on the celestial scene. Zeus does get a mention on Linear B tablets, but there is no evidence whatsoever that he was supreme.4 To date, four, possibly five, figures of a ‘smiting god’ (a male anthropomorphic deity with his arm raised aggressively, almost certainly Zeus or Poseidon) dating from the 13th and 12th centuries BC have turned up in the Aegean,5 but so far these are isolated finds. When it comes to the number of totemic female images that have been uncovered, these smiting gods are mere dust on the foothills of mountains.
For the men and women of Helen’s pre-historic world, female spirits and their earthly representatives had a pedigree stretching back tens of thou-sands of years. Gathering up all the figurines and artefacts and fresco paintings created in the twenty thousand-odd years before the Trojan Wars would generate an assemblage of predominantly female forms. A mere 5 per cent would be of men.6
Come the Bronze Age, representations of women are still abundant – often shown as creatures who sit somewhere between the temporal and spiritual worlds. They are found in particularly notable form on pithoi – the clay jars used for the storage of precious grain, oil and wine. These vessels, vital for the continuation of a settled, farming community, were habitually made in the shape of giant wombs. On some pithoi women’s facial features, bodies and sex organs have been carved or painted. In the Heraklion Museum, one vase dating from c. 2000 BC has been lightly moulded into the shape of a girl – two spouts jutting out in the place of her nipples. Lactating women weren’t hidden away, they were glorified, magnified into ingenious terracotta creations that could spurt choice liquid from their breasts.
Just as these vessel-women were the source of life-giving nutrients, they could also nurture death. In some cases pithoi are found storing not food but bodies. Corpses have been bent into a foetal position, crammed back into these giant jars and then covered with honey. Honey would have embalmed the flesh with some success for around eight weeks7 – mirroring the amniotic fluid that had originally cosseted life.8 Still-births and miscarriages would have been very hard to explain: women appeared to bring forth the dead as well as the living. The womb was also a tomb. Whether she was real or imaginary, Helen was the perfect paradigm for this duality: she was the woman who made love and war, a force charged with both the positive and the negative.
Even in the dog-days of the Late Bronze Age, a time of religious, political and social flux, women are conspicuous by their presence. They march across the palace walls, they are carved onto seal-stones and conjured out of clay. Some link arms and process together, others ride in chariots. On one fresco in the cult complex at Mycenae a woman carries a giant sword, another a staff, a third two sheaves of wheat. A pair of men are there too but they are Lilliputian figures tumbling down, naked, helpless in front of the armed females. These painted ladies give the impression of a gender still holding its own (even if they were doing so by the skin of their teeth).
Priestesses are landholders, they have their own servants (including male attendants), and one Linear B tablet seems to show them dealing in ‘sacred gold’.9 Priestly women have controlled access to supplies of stored food and are called the klawiphoroi, the ‘key-bearers’.10 Potnia is a term that can refer both to a goddess and the ‘mistress’ of the citadel.11 In chronologically parallel societies (the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Babylonians) the highest-born women have central religious roles – they are the chief representatives of the gods. There is every reason to believe that a Mycenaean queen – a Bronze Age Helen – would also have been a high priestess, a religious as well as a temporal potentate. Although Homer’s Helen is half-mortal, half-divine, it is as a woman, as a Spartan queen, that she speaks confidently to the gods and goddesses in the epic; she addresses her altera ego Aphrodite as an equal.
Homer’s tale of the Trojan Wars, of the final flourish of the Bronze Age, describes the end of an era. For Homer’s audience, this story about Helen had to do two things. It had to explain the influence of a woman to an audience who, living in a man’s world, knew that this power had been eclipsed. And – even subconsciously – it needed to describe a moment in historical time of displacement and flux: a time when it was still not entirely clear whether the boy (god) Zeus would be king, or what kind of earthly kingdom he would have power over. For Homer (and for almost all sub-sequent authors), Helen was a contradictory creature: a female Janus, with one face turned to the future and the other looking back, a Bronze Age Everywoman who represented a world in temporal and spiritual transit. A paradox. A troubling reminder of the way things once were.
Sexual politics, particularly pre-historic sexual politics, constitute a puzzle whose complexity rivals King Minos’ famous labyrinth. But by following the story of Helen’s Bronze Age peers, we can perhaps find some kind of path through the maze.
Let us imagine we are walking through the citadel of Mycenae some-time around the middle of the 13th century BC. We enter through the famous Lion Gate. It is our first point of reference – frequently cited as an appropriately male gateway for the macho rulers of Mycenae. But comparison with engravings on seal-stones of the period shows that this domineering portal is flanked by two worn, carved animals – not a pair of lions, but lionesses,12 for the animals at Mycenae have smooth necks whereas lions of this period are typically shown with luxuriant manes.
The shrines and sanctuaries of the Mycenaean palace-fortresses have none of the blustering grandeur of Egyptian or Classical Greek temples – none of the ‘look-at-me’ architecture that typically accommodates the deities of a male-dominated pantheon. The cult centre at Mycenae, dating from the mid-13th century BC, enjoys such conspicuous modesty that it was discovered only in 1968.
I made my initial visit to the cult centre while it was still being investigated – hoping to get a clearer sense of religious practice in Helen’s Late Bronze Age world.13 The inner sanctum, the holy of holies, at first seemed little more than a glorified garden shed. A creaky wooden door swung open to reveal beetles scuttling across the floor and festoons of cobwebs. Eroded earthen steps led to an empty platform. But the investigation was fruitful: this was a secret chamber where grotesque figures, nearly all women, had been stored. Each of the stolid, hook-nosed terracotta idols, now safe in the Museum at Mycenae, stands about 50 cm high and is punctured with small holes: on the torso; above an eyebrow; on a cheek; burrowed through an upper arm – niches on which amulets and sacred offerings could be hung.
Most of the idols have their arms raised, bent at the elbow and facing flat out in front of them. This gesture usually denotes a worshipper, so it is thought that these figures perhaps represent the female populations of the citadel – given their grotesque appearance, maybe even the spirits or demons (the word comes from the Greek daimon) within them. One particularly unsettling figure was found with her face turned into a corner. The grotesque, with her worrying evil eye, was left staring for over three thou-sand years at a wall which would once have been brightly painted and decorated; it is degenerate earth now.
A ‘goddess’ figure, also recovered in situ in the cult centre, is only 29 cm tall.14 Perfect round dots which circle the divine doll’s neck and hang down her chest represent a bead necklace, and her cheeks are decorated with the same spotted lozenges that appear on the faces of women on the frescoes and the ‘Sphinx’ head from Mycenae.15 Unlike the disingenuous, pierced, terracotta women, the face of this female figure is kindly and open. She is holding her breasts up high, an attribute typical of representations of a goddess.16
Finely moulded rings and carved seal-stones hint at the ecstatic rites that the women of the palaces performed to keep such deities on side. Central to Bronze Age religious practice, both on Crete and on the main-land, is the idea of epiphany, literally the ‘showing’ of a divine spirit. And in Mycenaean Greece, the divine spirits frequently chose to ‘show’ them-selves to high-class women. Long before Homer writes about Aphrodite on the battlefield, or we hear of Athena’s spinning contest with the cocky, competent peasant-girl Arachne, men and women thought that gods and goddesses walked among them and that, given the right propitiatory rituals, at any moment, a spirit might appear.
As Mycenaean women dance or shake trees or collapse over altars, divinities materialise in the heavens, in the form of doves and shooting stars. They peep from behind figure-of-eight shields. One signet ring originally found at Mycenae and now on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, only an inch and a half across (34 mm) has a whole world on its moulded surface – a world where only women are present.17 One sits down as others dance attendance on her; all are bare-breasted. The largest seated figure is offered lilies and poppies by two adorants; she shakes a plump bunch of poppies which she holds in her left hand. There is a fourth small female figure (a child perhaps?) reaching up to a tree. Just visible, drifting out of the sky concealed by a figure-of-eight shield, is a goddess. The ring is edged with lions’ or lionesses’ heads; the moon and the sun are in the sky.
The scene is enigmatic. But the proliferation of trees and vegetation suggests that a fertility rite is in progress.18 And the poppies make one thing clear – these women are employing narcotics to approach their gods. Many other Mycenaean rings and seal-stones bear similar scenes.19 One golden ring found at Thisbe, near the Gulf of Corinth, shows a female figure offering poppy capsules to a divinity, and a seal-stone from the same site is inscribed with the picture of a woman who seems to be rising up out of the earth, helped by a young man.20 On another golden ring from Isopata near Knossos a number of women are dancing through lilies, while a figure hovers above them: the ecstatic hallucination of a transported priestess perhaps – or a vision of a godhead conceived by a worshipper who had enjoyed the mind-altering gift of the goddess?
On occasion invisible spirits inhabit a human body, broadcasting their power through a mortal. The women (and occasionally men) who are the honoured subjects of an epiphanic visitation sit on high pedestals or soar above the heads of the crowd. A divine spirit radiates through them. These were women and men with feet of clay, but they were blessed, touched by the force of the gods. Perhaps this belief in epiphany could help further to explain Helen’s divine credentials. A high priestess who, during prominent religious ceremonies was thought to be possessed – who enjoyed unusually clear channels of communication with the spirit world. A human with a divine tinge.
In the past, the pre-eminence of women in the religious sphere in the Late Bronze Age has been discussed in patronising, faintly pitying tones, as if while men got on with the business of fighting, women simply tended the shrines. But if worship is at the heart of all temporal affairs, it is, by definition, less marginal. And given that women in the Late Bronze Age appear to have had particular responsibility for the successful production and storage of vital agricultural produce, they immediately become fundamental rather than incidental. Women were not occupied with arranging church flowers, as it were, while their officer husbands manipulated international affairs; they were protecting and marshalling the staff of life.
The women that we find represented at Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, Knossos and Thebes appear significant, prominent, gorgeous. A striking Spartan queen, in charge of her lands and responsible for the spiritual health of her people, could well have been the prototype for Helen – rich, influential, hallowed. But down the centuries this vaunted position could not be maintained. Helen was a woman who could not be allowed simply to be wonderful. As Homer’s reluctant home-breaker, as Hesiod’s promiscuous princess – the girl with neat ankles and the sparkling eyes, as Euripides’ ‘bitch-whore’, as Ovid’s flirtatious, artful queen, Helen is best remembered for being a flawed human. As she travels through time her brilliance becomes luciferous; the storybook Helen is a fallen angel, forever damned for committing that familiar crime of falling in love with the wrong person.