[Helen’s beauty] exhausted the divine genius of Homer … [and] tired out many great and famous painters and carvers.
Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women (ad 1364–70)1
THOSE BRONZE AGE CORPSES were left alone, but not undisturbed. Just as, in the minds of the ancients, Helen’s actions caused the Age of Heroes to implode, so the Mycenaean civilisation really did disintegrate at the end of the Bronze Age. Glittering palaces would fall, trade would evaporate, heroes would melt into the shadows – and all in the span of a lifetime.
The dating of ‘the Trojan War’ is a vexed and thorny issue. The traditional systems of the ancient world set it anywhere from 1334 to 1135 BC. 2 The most popular date, however, was c. 1184 BC; archaeology tells that around this time, the cultures of Crete and the Greek mainland and Anatolia did indeed evaporate and current research suggests that there were a series of devastations at Troy: battles and court intrigue in the first half of the 13th century BC, fire in 1200 BC, fire and perhaps earthquakes around 1180BC, cauterisation of the city as an economic entity for the next 100 years, total abandonment by 950 BC. Popular memory had one thing right: Helen’s death heralded the death of a whole way of life.
Around the end of the Bronze Age, much of what is now Greece and Turkey experienced intense seismic activity: ‘storms’ of earthquakes. The storms would impact an area of up to 2,000 sq km over a period of around fifty years. So, for instance, in an intensely active period in recent recorded history, say between AD 1900 and 2000, in the eastern Peloponnese an earthquake with a magnitude of over 6.5 on the Richter Scale occurred every thirty or forty years.3 With sophisticated architecture damage is minimal – with the building techniques of the Late Bronze Age4 devastation would have been extreme and it looks as though many of the Bronze Age centres were hit not once, but repeatedly.5 Crude oil lamps have been found by their thousands in Late Bronze Age sites. As buildings collapsed, as sanctuaries juddered and palaces fell down, these lamps would have been sent flying – starting devastating fires. Those not killed by the quakes and flames would have watched as frescoes and painted floors, golden cups and stores of handspun cloth, the trappings of Bronze Age civilisation and the marks of the heroic age, were consumed in front of them. Excavations of Late Bronze Age magazines at Thebes have uncovered carbonised fruit. At the tranquil site of Midea six miles inland from Argos, there are the charred remains of chick-peas, lentils, bitter vetch, grass peas, fava and broad beans; hoarded for men but consumed by fire.
In the expansive storerooms of the Mycenaean palatial complexes one of the most precious and prolific commodities was olive oil kept in giant stoppered pithoi each holding around 40 gallons (182 l) of highly flammable liquid. Inexplicably, at the point that Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, the necks of a number of these pithoi have been sawn off – as if the jars were being used as incendiary devices. In one palace on Crete, at Agia Triada, in the intense heat of the inferno, the Bronze Age equivalent of a fire in an oil refinery,6 the stone floor of the oil storeroom has not only buckled and serrated; it has vitrified – turned to glass.
Helen’s world was not wiped out by these calamities, but the impact would certainly have been enough to destabilise Mycenaean society. The chaos would have galvanised local opportunists: men and women empowered to question the authority of leaders (both religious and secular) who had clearly inspired the gods to great ire. The meticulous administrative systems of the Mycenaeans would have been interrupted. Deities were demoted: the strange female figures in the cult centre at Mycenae are laid to rest, the frescoes of beautiful women on the walls are carefully white-washed. A fine film of soil is sprinkled over the cult items and dedications and large stone slabs are laid along the side of the room to cover the significant, potent objects whose home this had once been.7
The spirits of the earth and sky had expressed their displeasure. Were the goddesses and fine female figures on the wall in disgrace? Were they being tactfully demoted? Did these earthquakes and the subsequent fires, which may well have contributed to the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation, herald a new era? An era in which that arriviste god Zeus – who almost certainly originated in the east – became dominant?8 An era which would see the end of female supremacy in the religious sphere, an era which would be remembered and distorted by bards through the ‘Dark Ages’ of Greece? An era celebrated with longing and fear by epic poets like Homer as an Age of Heroes? An era whose warriors had risked all for a woman and cursed her as they did so?
That end, that petering out of a once powerful people, is palpable in the flat lands north of Mycenae. A lone, battered, blue road-sign points to the archaeological site of Archaiai Kleonai. The settlement lies beyond the main road, across a railway track, past row upon row of drying tobacco leaves and low-level vines. Homer describes Kleonai in the Iliad as ‘sturdy, strong Kleonai’.9 Now the settlement is virtually non-existent. In fact, all that is left is a much denuded, much later, Hellenistic Temple of Heracles – there is no sign of Bronze Age glory. Travellers who passed through the area at the beginning of the 20th century reported that a few Mycenaean remains were still standing. But this is prime farmland – when I last visited the site, the rhythmic swish of itinerant labourers’ skirts as they passed to collect the grape harvest was a reminder that agriculture is now the priority here. Those Bronze Age stones and artefacts, which must have been just an irksome impediment to the business of farming, are long gone, chopped up by the plough or cannibalised by locals. Palatial masonry has become the foundations for barns and cow-sheds; sacrifice stones have turned into hearths.
If we estimate that the events described by Homer relate in large part to the late 13th century BC, then a hundred years or so after Helen’s mortal storyline ends, this would have been the fate of many of the great citadels. Some continued in reduced form – at Elateia in Phokis and Lefkandi on Euboia. There would still have been populations on the Mycenaean settlements at Athens, Amyklai and Mycenae itself. But most are abandoned by the ruling elite. From around 1150 BC, instead, squatters live in the ruins of the rooms of kings, pigs root in the sanctuaries of the old gods. As the great Mycenaean civilisation drags to its end, the Greek Dark Ages begin.
Across the Dardanelles, the almighty Hittite civilisation is also crumbling. Hattusa has lost its pole political position, cuneiform writing stops and the site at Boğgazköy with its gold-mine of archives is abandoned. By 1175 BC the Hittites have ceased to exist. Troy was destroyed by fire, perhaps the fire of the invading forces of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus and Achilles, but more likely the fire of native malcontents. Vandals burning down a city that had already been seriously weakened by natural disasters, chronic incursions and in-fighting.
One phrase archaeologists and historians use today to describe the end of these proto-empires is ‘systems collapse’. If the Mycenaeans, the Hittites and the Egyptians were indeed intimately linked, if they consistently traded with one another, married each other’s women and stole each other’s men, then the fall of one would bring the fall of another. Once the nations of heroes, they were now giant skittles tumbling around an empty sea.
The Bronze Age was ending, and with the new Iron Age would come a time of insecurity and inactivity. Gone are the fine twists of Mycenaean painting, the microscopic perfections of delicate, ambitious metalwork. Grand palaces are no longer built, the art of writing is eclipsed, this is a time of retrenchment rather than expansion.
But in those quiet, long, isolated evenings that men and women spent together, clearly what lasted, with absolute vitality, was storytelling. Throughout the ‘Dark Ages’ the bard and his lyre maintain a presence in art – these men did not disappear, they did not stop transmitting their tales. Oral culture is a transparent space in the eyes of the historian or the archaeologist, but within its time it can be the most effective method of transmitting images, information and ideas about the world and the past. And one of the brightest stars in this imaginary firmament was Helen. The rich and headstrong queen of Sparta would not be forgotten, she would not die. Now liberated from the prison of her beautiful body, she was no longer to be worshipped only by a Greek hero or a Trojan prince. This immortal, legendary luminary could now be adored by everyone, man and woman, labourer and lord.