… wave after wave of purple, precious as silver …
AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon 959–601
One of Helen’s landfalls on her journey home from Troy was Matala.2 For any boat travelling across the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC, Matala would have been a convenient, and possibly profitable, staging post. Tucked into its own westerly facing bay on Crete’s south coast, perfectly placed to enjoy exquisite sunsets every night, Matala today is the home of a slightly alternative, international crowd – a new age community lived in the caves here until they were outlawed in the 1970s.3
Two and a half miles along the coast from Matala is the archaeological site of Kommos. I have retraced the boat journey that would have been made here from Troy. On arrival, first sailing and then rowing, the galley would have passed the extraordinary rock formation of this particular segment of the coastline – past bays that welcome like cupped hands, where layers of sandstone are reminiscent, from the water, of whipped meringue. Excavations only began at Kommos in 1976, but quickly it became clear that this was a sizeable Bronze Age port – perhaps servicing the palatial complex of Phaistos which lies 6 km inland.4 The connection made between Helen and this stretch of the Cretan coast is fitting. Late Bronze Age traders and diplomats, aristocrats and the itinerant labourers of the sea would indeed have stopped off here.
And before they reached Kommos itself, its smell would have come out to meet them, because this was a centre of production for the colour purple – one of the most luxurious commodities of the ancient world. The manufacture of this colour of status is a messy business. It involves the harvest, dismemberment and then boiling – sometimes in urine – of a carnivorous sea-snail called the murex.
In Kommos many of these pre-historic sea-snails have been found with tiny, perfect holes bored into the shells – evidence that during factory farming they have turned cannibal, attacking their own kind to get food. Production here was on a substantial scale, providing dye for an international market.5 A newcomer to Kommos would have been greeted by men and women with livid arms, dyed up to the shoulders with the murex’s gift to humanity. Pliny described dye from the murex as being the colour of congealed blood.
While investigating the mechanics of Bronze Age trading systems, I have gone diving close to Kommos for these sea-snails. The trick is to lever oneself off the rocks 10 feet (3 m) or so below the surface and not to become a pin-cushion for sea-urchins in the process. Today sea-snails are fairly scarce, but local fishermen recount that forty years ago, when they were boys, the murex carpeted the sea-shore. With such a rich natural resource, Kommos would have been on the mental map of both traders and their clients – the great royal houses of the Eastern Mediterranean.6 In the Late Bronze Age, in Hittite, Egyptian and Mycenaean societies, purple was the colour of royalty. Linear B tablets may provide one of our first records of the concept of Royal Purple, on a tablet which describes what seem to be textiles as porphyreos, ‘of the colour purple’, and wanakteros, ‘royal, kingly’.7 A concept which has not faded over three and half thousand years.
Even if our Bronze Age Helen never actually visited Kommos, she would, doubtless, have known of the place. Aristocratic women in both Mycenaean and Anatolian cultures would have been expected to weave, and the finest would have woven purple cloth. Homer relates that at Troy, Helen spent the bulk of her time in her apartments weaving a giant piece of cloth. Considering it would have taken 12,000 murex to produce enough dye to colour the hem of a single garment, Helen’s ten-year oeuvre – her vast porphyry tapestry ‘the colour of death’ – would have kept the delivery boys from these centres of purple production very busy. So Helen sits and weaves. Murex shells used to create purple dye8 have been found in some numbers around Troy, 10 kilos in one workshop.10 Hittite tablets show that the city was famous for its textile production. There is no question that aristocratic women in this world would have sat and produced cloth. The intricate and delicate pieces they made might end up as gifts for visiting diplomats, might be worn in grand public ceremonies or might perhaps be offered to the gods, used to dress cult statues ceremonially. Hand-woven, pieces like this could take years to produce. Only the nobility devoted so many hours to so rarefied an activity. Homer envisages her:
weaving a growing web, a dark red folding robe, working into the weft the endless bloody struggles stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s hands.10
Some see these lines as a metaphor for poetry – in which case Helen herself is the poet, pulling together the threads of men’s lives, creating her own story, building an epic to be passed on to future generations. In a sense she (not Homer) is the bard, a woman fabricating the world around her.
It is significant that Helen’s great tapestry is purple, a colour associated in the ancient world with power and death. Around her men are supporting unspeakable agonies and Helen sits and weaves the tales of their woe. Perhaps Homer is also trying to associate Helen with the great commodities of pre-literate society, a rich visual image and a story that lasts in popular memory. Pictures are articulate in the absence of literature. The most beautiful woman in the world is the child of, and breeds, both.