27
A FLEET SETS SAIL

Because of his longing for something gone across the sea
a phantom seems to rule the rooms,
and the grace of statues shaped in beauty
comes to be an object of hate for the man.
In the absence of eyes
all Aphrodite is vacant, gone.

AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon¹ (c.458 BC)

IN TROY, AS THE HELEN OF THE EPIC CYCLE looked out west, across the sea, she would have seen two small dark shapes on the horizon.² Two boats – preliminary envoys from Greece.³ We hear from a variety of literary sources that when he learns of his wife’s absence, Menelaus’ first reaction is not to spill blood, not to effect a lightning strike, but instead to attempt to sort out the whole sorry business with diplomacy.⁴ The Greek army has already been raised and is waiting in Tenedos, but the hapless Spartan king sails with Odysseus to negotiate for Helen’s release.

Cut off from the rest of the army, Menelaus and Odysseus are exposed and outnumbered. As they take their request to the Trojans, Paris attempts to engineer an assassination, bribing another Trojan, Antimachos, to persuade the assembly to butcher the Greek heroes.⁵ But the libidinous prince could have saved his gold. The assassination attempt is bungled and the stalwart Greeks endeavour to persuade Priam and the assembled court to hand Helen back – adding, with more than a glimmer of a threat, that by doing so they will save themselves much adversity. The Trojans choose the path of greatest resistance and vote not to give up their prize. Greek audiences would have watched this moment played out in a drama by Sophocles, now lost, called Helenes Apaitesis, ‘The Request for Helen’. It is an eternally popular theme – the empty privilege of hindsight – an impotent vision of blood shed avoided, of the better, happier place the world could have been.

But there is more than just pathos in play here. This version of events reflects international relations in the Late Bronze Age, when pacts and treaties and diplomatic negotiation stitched populations together; war was an expensive and unpredictable business. Great store was set by negotiation. The King of the Hurrians negotiates with the King of Babylon, the King of the Hittites writes to rulers on the Greek mainland and, in one of the most celebrated treaties from the ancient world, the Hittites and the Egyptians enter into a peace treaty, the ‘Eternal Treaty’ (now popularly known as the Treaty of Kadesh) to try to prevent widespread, unsustainable, mass conflict. A copy of the clay tablet on which the treaty was inscribed in 1259 BC is posted outside the United Nations Security Council. It was an agreement sealed thirteen years later by a royal marriage – that of a Hittite princess to the King of Egypt, Rameses the Great:

[The treaty which] Ramses [Beloved] of Amon, Great King, King [of Egypt, Hero, concluded] on [a tablet of silver] with Hattusili [Great King], King of Hatti, his brother, in order to establish [great] peace and great [brotherhood] between them forever … I have now established good brotherhood and good peace between us forever, in order likewise to establish good peace and good brotherhood in [the relations] of Egypt with Hatti forever.⁶

The clay and bronze tablets that carried messages and information from one head of state to another were written by men and women who clearly had a common understanding although the icy respect and honey-tongued, thinly veiled threats of some of these diplomatic texts are only too familiar. The language of diplomacy seems to have changed very little down the millennia. Take, for example, the King of the Hittites, writing to Kadashman-Enlil II, the King of Babylon, some time between 1263 and 1255 BC:

When your father and I established diplomatic relations and when we became like loving brothers, we did not become brothers for one day only; did we not establish permanent brotherly relations based on equal understanding?

… after the death of your father, I dried my tears and dispatched a messenger to the Land of Babylon, and sent the following message to the high officials of Babylon; ‘If you do not keep the son of my brother as ruler, I shall become your enemy, I will go and invade Babylon; but (if you do, then) send me word if an enemy rises against you or if any difficulty threatens you, and I will come to your aid!’⁷

The tablets reveal something of central importance to the Late Bronze Age. In many ways, it was appropriate that this distant era should be nominated as heroic. Not simply because this was a time of storybook wealth, vigorous ambition and massive achievement before an age of retrenchment that we have labelled ‘the Dark Ages’, but also because those in charge of the palace-citadels of the Eastern Mediterranean were, in a sense, giants of men. Read the treaties written by the Hittites and the other great leaders of the day and the language used clearly demonstrates that these are agreements not between states, but between individuals: between singular men (and sometimes women) – heroes and heroines whose actions could indeed direct the course of entire civilisations.

The Hittite king, for example, frequently styles himself ‘Great King, Hero’.⁸ Given that single aristocrats could mobilise vast forces in the Late Bronze Age – 47,500 allied Hittite forces at the Battle of Kadesh,⁹ we are told by ancient accounts – it is little surprise that these all-powerful rulers became larger-than-life characters in the popular imagination and that their decisions and actions became legendary.

Still, even if this was an age of diplomacy, of negotiation between heroes, in the narrative of the Trojan War, diplomacy failed. Paris would not release his exotic new queen, and the Greeks were sent back to their ships empty-handed. Whether Helen had walked lightly into Priam’s great city, or had been dragged through the gates, bruised and traumatised by her rape, the Trojans were not going to give her up. Licking their wounds, the Greek leaders Menelaus, Odysseus and Agamemnon began to draw up their battle plan.

They recalled the vows of loyalty that they and all the other heroes of Greece had made to each other over the sacrificed corpse of a horse when contesting for Helen’s hand. They agreed that when an infiltrator, a foreigner, came and made a mockery of their honour and their self-sacrifice, came and took Helen while a guest of the Spartan palace, they had sustained a collective affront. Agamemnon, the most powerful king in Greece and the elder brother of the cuckolded Menelaus, had the perfect excuse to mobilise the army. Doubly, triply insulted, next time the Greek tribal-leaders were not going to take no for an answer.

As Helen lay in Paris’ bed, weeping or laughing at the news that Menelaus had been sent back from his diplomatic sortie empty-handed, his tail between his legs,¹⁰ the Greek fleet, following an earlier, abortive attempt to land on the Troad, was gathering at Aulis on the eastern coast of Greece near Thebes.¹¹ The Greeks were not to be cheated of their prize-woman. Supplies were loaded, and the drummers drummed as soldier after soldier marched up and down the beaches preparing for battle. The glory of Greece was there – the warrior-heroes who between them ruled over Crete and the Greek mainland. Women had been left in charge in palace-fortresses back in Greece and the clans had put aside their differences to form a unified war machine. Their blood was up. The shores of Troy promised revenge and plunder and women a-plenty. Later in the narrative of the conflict, Thersites provides an inventory of the spoils of war: bronze, gold and ‘Best of the lot, the beauties’.¹² Spurring one of his men on, Agamemnon offers ‘a tripod, or purebred team with their own car or a fine woman to mount and share your bed’.¹³

Everything was set and yet the wind was against the Greeks; the boats, lined up at Aulis, could not set sail. An enervating lingering dragged out, day after day. Only an extreme act would bring catharsis. Helen’s was an act of love that famously precipitated an act of war, but the killing starts long before the Greeks land on the Anatolian coast. Her affair set in train a whole catalogue of murders. The first victim was a young child – Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia.¹⁴

The reason the Greek ships had found themselves trapped at Aulis was because a Greek soldier – some whispered Agamemnon himself – had killed a deer in the sanctuary of the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. To make matters worse, the arrogant hunter then boasted that this was a feat that bettered any kill of the gods. The goddess was enraged. Artemis would only be appeased with a blood gift of the most perfect kind. And so Agamemnon sends wily-tongued Odysseus to tempt his young daughter Iphigeneia to her death. ‘Tell her that Achilles is waiting,’ says the desperate king, ‘tell her she shall be married to the greatest of all heroes.’¹⁵ Iphigeneia travels from Mycenae with her mother Clytemnestra. But when she arrives, she is not taken to put on her wedding clothes, but instead to an altar slab by her father. Here she is to be sacrificed; ostensibly to appease the goddess – but in reality for Greek honour, to ensure that men can fight for an emblem of beauty. It is a desperate moment. Iphigeneia cries out to her father, but is still lifted ‘like a goat, face downward, above the altar’. She is ‘gagged, the bit yanked roughly, stifling a cry that would have brought a curse down on the house’. She knows all her assailants, but she can do nothing but ‘with pitiful arrows from her eyes’ shoot the sacrificers, ‘vivid as in a picture, wanting to speak, to call each one by name.’ And all this, as the watchman acidly points out, is Helen’s fault. Iphigeneia is sacrificed to ‘safeguard, / A war of vengeance over a woman’.¹⁶

The hideous brutality of Iphigeneia’s death drives Agamemnon’s wife, Helen’s half-sister, Clytemnestra, to kill Agamemnon on his return from Troy. Horror at his father’s murder, in turn, spurs Orestes to kill his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes is persecuted, driven mad by the Furies for his unfilial hatred. Helen is the catalyst of one of the most famous tragic cycles in the world.

The story of Iphigeneia deals with fundamental issues – the conflicts of love and duty, of ambition and humility, of superstition and belief. And because of this the slaughter of a virgin-princess from Mycenae is still enacted on stages across the world. Recently I saw a small poster advertising a production of Goethe’s version of the tragedy in a little theatre above the Prince Albert pub in Notting Hill, West London. Interested to see how a regular theatre crowd would react to the tale of the sacrifice of a pre-pubescent, I bought a ticket on impulse and waited half an hour for the show to start. The theatre audience was sitting in the bar downstairs, talking about film-stars and shopping alongside the fashionable of Notting Hill. Conversations were shouted to compete with the TV and thudding piped music while the electric ceiling fans above whirled busily, necessary in this crowded smoky venue even on a chill November evening. Single men smoked, read the Evening Standard and talked on their mobile phones – a lot of day-to-day business to get through before moving upstairs to be pounded by a drama first staged 2,500 years ago.

And of course all those thoughts about passion and principle, free will and fate, hooked to the story of a woman butchered so that the Greeks could get on with the business of retrieving Helen from Troy. In Euripides’ version of the tale, Iphigeneia’s mother Clytemnestra begs her husband to reconsider his decision, which, even to an ancient Greek mind, seems nefarious.

Tell me: if someone asks why you are killing her, What will you say? Or must I speak your words for you?‘So that Menelaus may get back Helen.’ A splendid act, To pay a child’s life as the ransom for a slut! To buy what we most hate with what we most dearly love!¹⁷

Just before he kills her, Agamemnon tries to justify, to his own daughter, her imminent death. He articulates the close connection between eros and eris, blaming a form of the love goddess for rousing his men to a passion to leave Greece and fight. ‘Some kind of Aphrodite has frenzied the army, made them mad to set sail as soon as possible.’¹⁸ Small comfort to the young girl.¹⁹

Iphigeneia is stretched across the altar and the high priest brings his knife to her throat. In some versions of the story there is a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning and the girl is whisked off by Artemis herself to Tauris (present-day Crimea on the Black Sea). In others, the blade hits home. But the fate of the daughter of Agamemnon is now an irrelevance because suddenly, miraculously, the leaves around the sanctuary begin to stir. The wind is back and the soldiers and generals let out a great sigh – they are on their way to Troy: 1,186 ships, bearing between them 100,000 men, sail from the port of Aulis to reclaim Sparta’s wandering queen.²⁰

Today the coastline of Aulis is a sad place, dominated by a vast cement factory – the intrusion of industrialisation on the landscape is uncompromising. There are classical and indeed Mycenaean ruins here, and a sanctuary of Artemis, but all is covered in a fine layer of cement dust. The air is bitter. Occasionally little posies are left on marble slabs in memory of the young Iphigeneia. An innocent who has come to represent the inexorable brutality of war and of blind ambition.

Homer does not deal with the Iphigeneia story but his famous roll-call of Greek maritime might, ‘the Catalogue of Ships’, sheds an interesting light on the origins of the Iliad. We are told that twenty-nine naval contingents are launched from Aulis in Boiotia, in northern Greece. This catalogue is surprisingly similar to the lists of foodstuffs and taxes and personnel, the property distribution and the hierarchies, which are scratched into the clay of the Linear B tablets. It is bald, bland and repetitive, a blatant and meticulously detailed assertion of power. First listed are the regions and towns that have contributed to the war effort; then we learn the names of the commanders and finally the number of ships and crew members.

It is impossible that this comprehensive list was researched and formulated by one man, concocted as a giant memory test to flesh out an already long poem. Of all 178 names recorded by Homer not one is fabricated and almost every one of the places catalogued is given an appropriate geographical position.²¹ Indeed, prominent parts of Homer’s 8th-century BC Greece are conspicuous by their absence; the bard is not simply detailing the centres of power in his own Iron Age world. These omissions indicate the historicity of this element of the epic – the excluded towns and regions were indeed not part of ‘Greece’ in the Bronze Age. Described by some as an ‘order of march’ the list is a plausible compilation of the forces available to a Late Bronze Age general.

In 1993, the discovery of a single Linear B tablet in Thebes²² threw an entirely new light on the Catalogue question. The tablet was uncovered by accident, when a water pipe was being laid in Pelopidas Street in central Thebes. The waterworks were suspended and an archaeological investigation begun. The dig has been productive and, to date, over 250 tablets have surfaced. These tablets show that Thebes was in fact the centre of a massive territory, a territory larger than Pylos or Sparta or Mycenae itself.²³ If the Theban district was a vitally powerful region in the Late Bronze Age, it suddenly makes sense that a consolidated movement of Greeks should set sail from Thebes’ port – the port of Aulis.

The new Theban tablets list a town, Eleon, which had always given archaeologists and historians some trouble – it is mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships, part of the naval contingent from Boiotia. Yet Eleon seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. As a northern Greek settlement it is not mentioned in any other source from antiquity. And so, scholars argued, this town must have been simply a figment of Homer’s imagination.

The Thebes tablets dating from the 13th century BC tell a different story. Eleon appears on tablet TH Ft 140. ²⁴ Homer’s lines, in this case (as in many others), are transmitting information direct from the Bronze Age past.

And by comparing Homer’s verse with the hard evidence of the Late Bronze Age, another snag in the Trojan story can be unravelled. It has often been asked why Homer uses two names for Troy. Why does he call the town both Troia and Ilios? Why do we have a book called the ‘Iliad’ that tells the story of the ‘Trojan’ war? The answer has now revealed itself thanks to a collaboration between linguists and historians of the Hittite world.

Homer was probably an Ionian Greek; he could have lived in Smyrna or in Chios. By the time his words were written down in the 7th century BC, in the Ionian region the ‘w’ that often preceded the letter ‘i’ would have been lost (the Aeolian dialects kept their ‘w’ for longer; Sappho, for example, would have used it). The Hittite texts tell us that in the Troad there were two territories in the region of Troy – one was called Wilusa, the other Taruwisa.²⁵ If these names are remembered down the centuries, and then sung by a bard who drops his ’W’s, Wilusa becomes (W)Ilusa, then (W)Ilios and eventually Ilios, and Taru(w)isa, becomes Taruisa and eventually Troia. Hence we get the story of Ilios, the Iliad, and the wars of Troia, Troy.

The rhythm of the Iliad too can guide us towards the certain knowledge that a number of Homer’s lines were composed in the Mycenaean period. The entire poem is written in hexameter. Many of the verses read perfectly, and yet the meter of some lines is simply unsatisfying, there are jolts and jars where normally the poetry flows. But write those lines using elements of Linear B, Bronze Age rather than Classical Greek – in the language that the Mycenaeans would have used – and the lines scan perfectly.²⁶

Despite the historical roots of the Catalogue of Ships the quest to reclaim a wayward queen could never have launched a thousand ships. If the Mycenaean elite had left for Troy in such a number, with each fifty-oared boat carrying thirty warriors, each of those warriors with at least one high-born valet, the Mycenaean economy would simply have disintegrated. In the 13th century BC, the sighting of just seven ships off the coast of the Levant spread panic through the region.²⁷ And in legend, Heracles was said to have sacked an older city of Troy with a mere six ships. We have to wait close on a thousand years before a fleet remotely approaching the size of Homer’s Catalogue is ever recorded and even then (when the Persians sail to Greece in the hope of a takeover) the number reaches only five hundred or so.²⁸

Back in the Cyclades where those stunning Bronze Age frescoes were preserved by the violent eruption of the Thera volcano, one diminutive example shows a nautical procession setting sail. Here the boats are finely decked out, fluttering with garlands of flowers, the skins of sacrificed animals, flags, and coloured cloths – they are clearly ready for some kind of grand state occasion. In the background men and women scurry around a vast citadel; soldiers are in evidence, and it is difficult to tell whether the boats are being welcomed or repulsed. There were no dedicated war-fleets in the Late Bronze Age. Those boats in the paintings would have been multi-purpose vessels that delivered sometimes goods, sometimes traders and diplomats, sometimes soldiers to far-flung shores. Camphor and incense could be burnt in the prows – there would have been lights to deal with the endless blackness of the ocean.²⁹

It would have been boats like these that carried the contingents of Mycenaean Greeks to Beşik Bay. And, if there is any truth in the stories, it would have been boats such as these that brought Ajax, Achilles, Odysseus and the glory of Greece hurtling eastwards across the surf, the greatest warriors of the known world, leaving their homes and families, leaving their citadels unprotected, their crops rotting in the fields, to honour a promise made on a plain close to Sparta ten years earlier.³⁰ And keenest of all, the cuckhold King of Sparta, Menelaus, with the sails on his boat bellying, crossing the high seas, to bring back his queen.