Idomeneus skewered Erymas straight through the mouth,
the merciless brazen spear point raking through,
up under the brain to split his glistening skull –
teeth shattered out, both eyes brimmed to the lids
with a gush of blood and both nostrils spurting,
mouth gaping, blowing convulsive sprays of blood,
and death’s dark cloud closed down around his corpse.
HOMER, Iliad1
TROY MAY HAVE SMELLED SWEET ONCE but it would soon be running with filth. Fighting for possession of Helen, the Greeks and the Trojans lock in a tortuous struggle, as first one, and then the other, gains the upper hand.
Paris and Menelaus challenge each other to a duel. Too many lives are being squandered. This is a matter of honour and so they will sort out the whole deranged business the hero’s way, man to man, close-quarter fighting. Dressed in their finest, glinting armour they march to the dust-bowl that was once arable and mark out the ground. The duel begins symbolically, with showy moves: each throws a spear; Menelaus runs at Paris with a silver-studded sword. But then it becomes messier, more personal; the Greek king and the Trojan prince hurl themselves at each other, grappling together on no man’s land. Menelaus is the stronger, and the more experienced warrior, it is clear he is going to win. He grabs Paris by the strap of his helmet and begins to drag him towards the points of Greek swords.
Aphrodite cannot bear to see her beautiful prince pulverised. She conceals herself within a cloud of mist and swoops down to scoop Paris off the battlefield – laying him out languidly on his ‘large carved bed’. Disguised as an old woman, the goddess seeks out Helen and orders her back to service her second husband. Helen is furious – both with Aphrodite ‘who supplied the lust that led to disaster’ and with the feeble failure of her cocksure amour. She tries to resist both the goddess and the goddess’ plaything, but Aphrodite, chilling, threatens to dash Helen’s beauty, her one security. Helen slinks back to Paris’ chamber where the beautiful boy is in infuriatingly ebullient mood. He has danced away from death and although Helen scorns him he begs her to lose herself in love: ‘He led the way to the bed. His wife went with him./ And now, while the two made love in the large carved bed,/ Menelaus stalked like a wild beast, up and down the lines –/ where could he catch a glimpse of magnificent Paris?’2
Deprived of his prey, the King of Sparta succumbs to redoubled hate. And as Paris and Helen worship Aphrodite under the ‘high-vaulted roof ’ of the prince’s ‘sumptuous halls’, outside in the dust the battle and the atrocities continue. At one point Menelaus suggests making a Trojan soldier a prisoner-of-war rather than executing him. His elder brother Agamemnon, saturated with blood-lust, roars at the disgraced King of Sparta:
No baby boy still in his mother’s belly, not even he escape – all Ilium blotted out, no tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!3
The Iliad is an orgy of killing. Homer’s poetry pairs heart-piercing verse with a delight in the minutiae of death and suffering. To read it can be distressing.4 In one extended narrative scene that would have filled a number of parchment or papyrus sheets, the Greek Diomedes drives his way through the Trojan ranks:
One he stabbed with a bronze lance above the nipple, the other his heavy sword hacked at the collarbone, right on the shoulder, cleaving the whole shoulder clear of neck and back.
Over a hundred lines on, the butchery continues …
With that he hurled and Athena drove the shaft and it split the archer’s nose between the eyes – it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze cut his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.5
The bone evidence from the Late Bronze Age bears out Homer’s assertion that there were many ways to die in armed combat. Forensic studies reveal the dreadful injuries sustained by both Bronze Age Anatolians and Greeks. Within the city of Troy itself a girl aged between sixteen and seventeen has been hastily buried, her feet burned by fire.6 At the balmy site of Asine on the Greek mainland – a place mentioned in Homer’s Catalogue of Ships,7 where a picture-perfect sea abuts the Mycenaean remains and prickly oak grows among the stones – was the body of a man who had been subject to therapeutic trepanations. The scalp has been cut back in flaps, to remove cranial bone fragments that had been driven into the brain during armed conflict. There is skeletal re-growth, suggesting that the warrior survived both the initial head injury and the subsequent operation.8
Near the Athenian agora, a middle-aged, Late Bronze Age man has had an incision carved into his right shoulder-blade – almost certainly gouged by a spear or a rear arrow attack. Warriors have sustained severe trauma as the result of ‘parry thrusts’ to their right forearms. And to counter the injuries made by the weapons they had invented – the rapiers, the slashing swords, the daggers – the Bronze Age populations developed an impressive array of medical equipment. At the Palamidi-Pronoia cemetery near the seaside town of Nafplion a hoard of what seem to be surgical instruments was found during excavations in 1971 – a long saw, forceps, a curved razor, a scoop, two long probes and three chisels.9
A gruesome and primitive array – and yet much Bronze Age surgery seems to have worked. The body of a woman from Grave Circle B in Mycenae (clearly an aristocrat) has a perfectly healed, fractured humerus – someone has given her excellent medical attention. On Linear B tablets we find the words pharmakon (as remarked in the Foreword, origin of our ‘pharmacy’), and on tablet Eq 146 from Pylos is iater, which means ‘doctor’. E-ri-ka (possibly hibiscus) and Althea officianalis (marshmallow) crop up on Linear B tablets; today marshmallow root is one of the key ingredients of detoxifying teas as it mollifies gastro-intestinal problems. The terebinth resin (kirtanos in the Linear B tablets, the sap from the ‘turpentine tree’) – used in the perfume industry – also had medicinal qualities. Its efficacy as an antiseptic was clearly exploited: a staggering quantity of it, a whole ton’s weight, carefully packed into a hundred jars, was found in the Uluburun shipwreck. When the resin was taken out of its pots and rolled between the fingers of the excavators, the tangy, terebinth smell came stealing out.
Little surprise that antiseptic was needed in such quantities in the period. If a warrior was not killed in hand-to-hand combat (or subsequently by the surgeon’s knife) there was still the risk of Apollo’s ‘black bolts of plague’ which, Homer tells us, sought out many soldiers on the plains of Troy.10 For nine days, in the Iliad, following the outbreak of plague ‘the corpse-fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight’.11 Once again, the skeletal evidence attests to relentless epidemics in the region. And even for those who managed to avoid fighting or disease, each day’s pillaging could bring a premature death. There are descriptions in Homer of the rank and file dividing up loot – no cash economy here, so anyone in the path of the invading army would have been mercilessly plundered.
While bearing in mind their real and extraordinary achievements, and their sometime sophistication, when we try to imagine the life of a pre-historic princess and her peers we should never forget to what degree superstition, prejudice and ignorance would have been a part of their lives. One particular ritual act bears relevance to Helen’s story. At the beginning of the 13th century BC, the Hittite king’s wife, Gassulawiya, was mortally ill. In desperation she sent a substitute, a human representative, to the temple of the great goddess Lelwani. This was a woman chosen specifically for her beauty. The sick queen begs: ‘this woman shall be my substitute. I am presenting her to you in fine attire. Compared to me she is excellent, she is pure, she is brilliant, she is white, she is decked out with everything. Now, O God, My Lord, look well on her. Let this woman stand before the god, My Lord.’12
Perhaps this ‘brilliant’, ‘white’ woman was to be sacrificed. The text is so damaged we shall never know. But it is certain that her beauty made her worthy of sacrifice, of becoming sacred. A dying queen – one of the most powerful women in the Near East – believed that of all the things on the known earth, of all the things the massive wealth of the Hittite empire could buy, a beautiful woman would be most pleasing to the goddess. A beautiful woman was her single hope. If there had been a preternaturally beautiful woman born in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC we should not be surprised to find her totemic. We should not be surprised to hear that men went to war over “a Helen”. But just as Menelaus and Paris found that Helen’s beauty did not bring the perfect world it promised, so for Gassulawiya the sorcery of beauty proved sour. The queen died.