FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 An epithet enthusiastically employed in the 19th century AD by writers such as H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang and Oscar Wilde.
2 An approach, I note, also embraced by Meagher (2002).
3 The Greeks were only thus called when populations from Italy encountered a tribe from the Balkan peninsula called the ‘Graikoí’. The Italian aliens gave these people a collective name ‘Graeci’. In the classical period the Greeks called themselves Hellenes.
4 See Latacz (2004), 133–4 for a useful summary.
INTRODUCTION
1 Labels noted during a site visit in 2002.
2 The stele can be read back to front, although in both readings it is Helen’s face that melts Menelaus. Because the warrior appears taller and shaggier on one side, a sensible interpretation is that this is Menelaus after ten years on the Trojan plain: see Pomeroy (2002), 116–17.
3 Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 2, Act II, Scene 4, lines 87–8.
4 See Fragment 1 of the Cypria: ‘Once upon a time the countless tribes [of mortals thronging about weighed down] the broad surface of the deep-bosomed earth. And Zeus, seeing this, took pity, and in his cunning mind he devised a plan to lighten the burden caused by mankind from the face of the all-nourishing earth, by fanning into flame the great strife that was the Trojan War, in order to alleviate the earth’s burden by means of the death of men. So it was that the heroes were killed in battle at Troy and the will of Zeus was accomplished.’ Trans. M. Davies (1989), 33.
5 Hesiod, Works and Days 159–65. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
6 Sappho, fragment 16 and Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
7 West (1975), 2.
8 Southern Italy and Sicily.
9 The story is told in Cicero, On Invention 2.1–3 and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.64–6. Cicero sets the story in Croton, Pliny in Agrigentum.
10 François-André Vincent, Zeuxis et les filles de Crotone. Paris, Louvre INV.8543. The date of the painting is disputed: 1789–91. There are two versions by Vincent painted around the same time.
11 For comprehensive catalogues of Helen in ancient iconography, see Ghali-Kahil (1955) and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Vol. IV, nos. 1 and 2 (henceforth LIMC).
12 Iliad 6.357–8. This translation is taken from Austin (1994), 1. All subsequent extracts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are taken from the translations by Robert Fagles, with his line references, unless otherwise stated. A Greek line reference from the Loeb Classical Library [LCL] editions of Homer will also be given. In this instance the LCL reference is [LCL 6.357–8].
13 A Semitic adaptation of the Phoenician script.
14 An epos (from which ‘epic’ derives) is a long narrative poem that tells the tales of heroes. The epos was originally composed for oral recital.
15 See Hesiod, Works and Days 159.
16 See, for example, Pausanias 3.22.9.
17 There were thought to be two generations of giants called Cyclopes. The first were loyal handymen to the gods on Mount Olympus, forging, for example, Zeus’ thunder-bolts. Odysseus meets the second in the form of Polyphemus during his long voyage home from Troy.
18 Descriptions of the relic indicate that the bone was probably the scapula of a mammoth. See Mayor (2000), in particular Chapter 3, and passim.
19 For example, see Iliad 5.336–43 [LCL 5.302–8].
20 Also those of Hesiod.
21 At the time of writing, the papyrology department at Oxford University, using infrared technology with the help of Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, have announced the potential to trace ‘lost’ texts on pieces of Egyptian papyrus.
22 See Davies (1989), 32. Ancient tradition credited Homer or a man called Stasinus with authorship of the Cypria. Some even said that Homer had given the epic to his son-in-law Stasinus in lieu of a dowry for his daughter.
23 Cleopatra is the other. There are of course parallels between the appeal of both women. See, for example, Lucan’s Civil War 10.59–62: ‘Cleopatra, the shame of Egypt, the fatal Fury of Latium, whose unchastity cost Rome dear. As the dangerous beauty of the Spartan queen overthrew Argos and Troy town, in like measure Cleopatra fanned the frenzy of Italy.’ Trans. J.D. Duff. Both Cleopatra and Helen are described as Erinyes – ‘Furies’ – Helen, for example, in Virgil, Aeneid 2.573.
24 Suetonius, Nero 38; Tacitus, Annals 15.39
25 See Foreville (1952), 198, 209.
26 Caxton STC [Short-Title Catalogue] 15375. ‘The Recuyell’ roughly translates as a ‘Collection of Trojan Histories’. It was begun by Caxton in March 1469, and actually printed for the first time in 1474 or 1475 at Bruges. It was a translation of a French work by Raoul Lefevre, the Recueil des histoires de Troie. A copy of Caxton’s work, now in the Huntingdon Library in San Marino, California, was owned by Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of King Edward IV. For more details, see Blake (1976) and Painter (1976).
27 Euripides, Helen 22. Trans. R. Lattimore.
28 An opinion formed from the extant evidence. Fuller, more eloquent papyri may have been written in Late Bronze Age Greece and subsequently (although perhaps temporarily) lost.
29 Thanks to Silvan Kosak for advice on this matter, and for pointing out that as the pieces are often so fragmentary, this is a task that will by definition, be laborious and lengthy.
30 On medieval nuns and Ovid’s Heroides, see M.W. Labarge (1986) Women in Medieval Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 220. For extant examples of homoerotic poetry from convents see J. Boswell (1980) Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 220–1.
31 See Maguire (forthcoming) Shakespeare’s Names. Thank you to Dr Maguire for a preview.
32 See Jean-Luis Backé’s essay in Brunel (1992), 522.
33 La Belle Hélène premiered on 17 December 1864, marking, so Saint-Saëns wrote, ‘the collapse of good taste’.
34 J.W. von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections. Trans. E. Stopp (1998), 113–4 (London: Penguin). Goethe’s personal correspondence indicates he spent many years struggling with the notion of Helen. In one letter of 1831 he writes that he carried Helen’s story around with him as an ‘inner fable’.
35 Thanks to Roman Roth for this example, from his forthcoming article on ‘Myth and Female Identity in North Etruscan Burials of the Hellenistic Period: A Closer Look at the Urn of velia cerinei from Castiglioncello’, in Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of Italian Archaeology (Supplement to Bulletin Antieke Beschavingen).
36 Odyssey 4.162 [LCL 4.145].
37 Euripides, Andromache 628.
38 Lycophron, Alexandra 850–1. Trans. G.W. Mair. This theme – Helen’s degeneracy proven by her lack of male offspring – is picked up by a number of Elizabethan writers.
39 Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece 1471–7.
40 Eidolon gives us our word ‘idol’.
41 As stated in the Foreword, Homer describes the Greek peoples as the Achaeans, the Danaans and the Argives.
42 For discussion of the possible dates for the end of Troy VI, see Mountjoy (1999).
CHAPTER ONE
A Dangerous Landscape
1 Homer, Iliad 13.20–4 [LCL 13.17–19].
2 The ancient Greeks described the island as ‘kalliste’ (the most beautiful). The island’s Greek name is Thira or Thera. It was renamed Santorini by conquering Venetians in the 13th century AD.
3 Dating of the eruption of Thera ranges from 1625 to 1550 BC depending on methodology. For a good summary of debates around the issue see Wiener (2003).
4 Forsyth (1997), 103. For another good overall summary of the data on the Theran eruption, see Manning (1999).
5 Forsyth (1997), 113ff.
6 See Minoura et al. (2000).
7 See Fitton (1995), 125ff.
8 Keftiu seems to be the name given to Bronze Age Cretans on the wall paintings of the tomb of Rekhmire in Egyptian Thebes.
9 For the impact of migration on disease in general see Arnott (2005a).
10 There are many ways of interpreting the interface between Minoans and Mycenaeans from the 16th to the 12th centuries BC. See Bibliography for a number of articles on the subject.
11 For ‘Great King’ epithets, see the Alakšandu treaty (CTH 76); the treaty between Hattusili III of Hatti and Rameses II of Egypt (CTH 91); the letter from Queen Naptera of Egypt to Queen Puduhepa of Hatti (CTH 167); the letter from Rameses II of Egypt to Queen Puduhepa of Hatti (CTH 158); the letter from Hattusili III of Hatti to Kadashman-Enlil II of Babylon (CTH 172); and the letter from Uhri-Teshshup (?) of Hatti to Adadnirari I of Assyria (CTH 171). All examples, with translations, in Beckman (1996).
12 See Latacz (2004), 145.
13 Some of these earthquakes, it is estimated, must have measured up to 6.2 on the Richter scale. For 13th-century BC ‘storms’ see Nur (1998), 140. For comet impact, see Masse (1998), 53.
14 See Sampson (1996), 114.
15 In one potter’s workshop at Gouves, close to the palatial complex of Knossos on Crete, a potter’s tools have all been flung in the same direction, and the floor covered in sedimentary material. See Vallianou (1996).
16 Papadopoulos (1996).
CHAPTER TWO
A Rape, a Birth
1 The Cypria, fragment 8, has Nemesis as Helen’s mother.
2 Euripides, Helen 212–18. Trans. R. Lattimore.
3 This mosaic can now be found in the Kuklia Museum in Paphos, from where it was stolen in 1980. It dates from the 2nd/3rd centuries AD. See LIMC, no. 42.
4 The stele in the Argos Museum is a Roman copy of a Greek original from the 6th or 5th century BC. This design was much copied; one version is on display in the British Museum: GR 2199.
5 Painted for Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara and then sent to the French court – the original is now lost.
6 When the painting was given to the National Gallery by the Duke of Northumber-land in 1838 the duke wrote a letter stating that it should not be displayed publicly. It is now on view: G1868.
7 Leonardo started a painting in 1505, but although many copies of it were made, the original is now lost.
8 c. 1598–1600.
9 Research trip 2003.
10 On the few Late Bronze Age frescoes that have survived, birds, particularly doves and swallows, flit across the painted surface alongside religious iconography.
11 On the ‘egg’ tradition of Helen’s birth, see, for example, Euripides, Helen 257–9 and Pausanias 3.16.1; also Gantz (1993), 320–1. The First Vatican Mythographer (VM I 204) introduces a notion that two eggs were hatched, one containing Castor and Pollux, one with Helen and Clytemnestra.
12 Who, despite their mixed paternity, all came to be born in egg-shells.
13 Ancient sources come up with all possible permutations of paternity in relation to Clytemnestra, Castor, Helen and Pollux. For a summary see Deacy and Pierce (1997), 85.
14 Apollodorus, The Library 3.117.
15 Thanks to Peter Warren for his help with LBA plant identification.
16 Lucian, Judgement of the Goddesses 14 (2nd century AD). Trans. A.M. Harmon.
17 Hera’s typical epithet is ‘white-armed’: see, for example, Homer, Iliad 24.66 [LCL 24.55]. In the Louvre papyrus of Alcman’s Partheneion (PMGF 1), Hagesichora’s face is described as ‘silver’: on the use of this term to denote whiteness, see Hutchinson (2001), 89, n. 55.
18 See B.M. Thomas (2002) ‘Constraints and Contradictions: Whiteness and Femininity in Ancient Greece’, in L. Llewellyn-Jones, ed., Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World (Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales), 5, on the dried remains of white-lead carbonate found in women’s graves. Xenophon and Aristophanes, writing in the 4th century BC, also mention the use of white lead, or psimythion, as make-up. See Aristo-phanes, Ecclesiazusae 878; Xenophon, Household Management 10.2.
19 German school, b. 1704, d. 1761.
20 J.G. Platzer, The Rape of Helen. The Wallace Collection: P634.
21 Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War 4.175–9. Translated by and reproduced with kind permission of Dr Neil Wright.
22 Pausanias lived and worked c.AD 120–180.
23 Pausanias 3.16.1. Trans. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod.
24 J. Boardman (2002) The Archaeology of Nostalgia (Thames & Hudson).
25 Ten rolls of parchment or papyrus – a volumen is a roll in Latin.
26 Peter Brown as quoted in Freeman (1999), 148.
27 West (1975), 13, suggests that Helen’s association with eggs may have a connection with our ‘egg-honouring’ at Easter time.
28 Aphrodite was said to have cursed the Tyndareid women with serial sexual encounters, ‘twice-married and thrice-married and abandoners of their husbands’, because King Tyndareus failed to honour the goddess with sacrifices. See Stesichorus 23 (PMG), and Gantz (1993), 321.
29 Ostrich eggs were in fact a feature of the Late Bronze Age; with their surprisingly durable shells, they were used as deluxe packaging for international trade. The most exquisite of goods would be tucked into the empty shells, and then the eggs sent off on long, dangerous voyages in flimsy boats to tempt other traders across the waters. They were also turned into rhytons, lavish vessels used in religious ritual. Thirteen ostrich-egg rhytons have been discovered in total (there is one on display in the Mycenae Museum, MM 1684). One particularly fine example from a shaft grave at Mycenae started off life in Nubia; it is richly decorated, with applied dolphins made of faience (an early form of glass): the dolphins’ eyes and the curve of their bodies, arcing as they swim, are picked out in green and brown glaze. Faience decorations are also firmly stuck around the neck of the rhyton. Other eggs are beautified with silver or gilded bronze. In the ‘Room of the Artists’ at Mycenae, a tiny gobbet of yellowish material has been analysed and shown to be a mixture of resin and sulphur, which, when heated, becomes a browny-black glue. Creating these fragile works of art – sticking on the delicate, precious little details – would have been a stinking business. All details from Sakellarakis (1990); also see Karo (1930–3), 238–9.
30 For further discussion see chapter 11.
31 The city’s consortium of businesswomen call themselves the ‘Daughters of Penelope’ (Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey being Odysseus’ loyal and loving wife). These high achievers choose not to be Daughters of Helen.
32 See Wright (2004), 123, 160 and passim.
CHAPTER THREE
The Lost Citadel
1 Homer, Odyssey 4.79–85 [LCL 4.71–5].
2 New tablets were excavated at Thebes between 1993 and 1995 by Italian and French teams and published by Vassilis L. Aravantinos, Louis Godart and Anna Sacconi.
3 One new Linear B tablet from the Theban royal archive makes the first, tantalising Bronze Age reference to a ‘son of Lakedaimon’: Gp 227.2. See Aravantinos, Godart and Sacconi (2000) for the first publication of the tablets: reviewed by Palaima (2003).
4 See Catling (1977).
5 See Wright (2004), 123, 160 and passim.
6 Thompson (1908/9), 116.
7 The likely date of the foundation of the Menelaion is 700 BC: see Cartledge (1992), 55.
8 Herodotus 6.61.
9 Pausanias 13.9.9; Pindar’s Nemean Ode 10.56 and Pythian Ode 11.62–3 report that the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, were buried at Therapne too; cf. Pomeroy (2002), 114.
10 The poet Alcman evokes the ‘holy sanctuary of well-fortified Therapnai’. See Calame (1997), 201, n. 346, and Alcman, fragment 14(b).
11 Tryphiodorus, The Taking of Troy 520.
12 See Catling (1977), 37–8.
13 Or kreagra.
14 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen 10.63.
15 Catling (1976), 14.
16 All inscriptions are being re-studied by Professor Tony Spawforth of Newcastle University at the time of writing.
17 See Thompson (1908/9), 124.
18 Thanks to Richard Catling for this suggestion.
19 It is possible that virgins descended, ready, thanks to the perceived support of the spirit of Helen, to engage with Spartan men. See Chapter 11.
20 See Odyssey 4, passim, and Chapter 32, p. 234.
21 Figures from French (2002), 62 and Wardle and Wardle (1997), 17. As French points out, Knossos dwarfs all of the above, however, covering an area of c. 120,000 square feet [11,150 square m].
22 At the time of writing the excavation report for Therapne was still forthcoming. My thanks to Richard Catling and Dr Hector Catling for their help with this material.
23 Catling (1977), 33 and personal correspondence.
24 ibid.
25 Odyssey 4.80–1 [LCL 4.73–4].
CHAPTER FOUR
The Mycenaeans
1 Odyssey 3.344 [LCL 3.305]; Iliad 7.207 [LCL 7.180] and 11.52 [LCL 11.46].
2 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 909–11.
3 Thanks to Nicola Wardle. See Inscriptiones Graecae iv.4.9.7.
4 In fact Schliemann wrote a telegram to the Greek press saying: ‘This corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon.’
5 The Bloomsbury group clump together, Sartre breaks convention by signing diagonally, Ginsberg leaves a short poem.
6 Current excavations at Thebes may show that this was in fact one of the most significant and powerful of the Mycenaean territories.
7 Mounts Agios Elias, Zara and Aëtovouno (‘Eagle Mount’).
8 There are other Mycenaean settlements across the Peloponnese at Argos, Sparta, Pylos, Tiryns, Asine, Kleonai, Midea, Pellana, Orchomenos and Ephyra (Corinth).
9 Tablet 714.1–2.
10 Military, religious and secular affairs alike were all controlled from the citadels. Food and supplies and luxury goods were brought into the palace-centres and then redistributed for subsistence or profit. Here records were kept, written in Linear B script onto soft clay tablets, recording people and possessions down to the last goat, the last jar of olives, the last cup of grain, the last fig. The native population and imported slaves would produce food for the palace and deliver it to the centralised storerooms. Those within the palatial economy would then be given their supplies in return. Villagers in the outlying settlements might be subjected to corvée labour – a hefty tax on human resources. The bean-counters, the scribes of Linear B – a literate elite that some argue were the rulers themselves – by insisting on extra deliveries of food or pressing farmers into military service could control whether or not a family had enough food to survive the winter.
11 See Odyssey 4, passim.
12 Those on display at Mycenae are replicas; the originals are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
13 Found at the cult centre in Mycenae: MM 2084.
14 From shaft graves, finds dating between 1600 and 1300 BC.
15 Mycenae lady fresco fragment from the House of the High Priest, in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (NMA 11670).
16 For a discussion of the historicity of Homer, see Latacz (2004), 216–49.
17 Hesiod, Works and Days 159.
18 Excavations by the German Archaeological Institute.
19 Iakovidis and French (2003), 22, n. 45.
20 Tablets Aa 701 and 515 from Pylos: see Chadwick (1988), 79. Chadwick also identifies groups of women from other parts of Asia Minor, including Milesians, Knidians, Chians and Lemnians (91).
21 We cannot tell for certain what kind of liberties, if any, the subject population enjoyed. Some from the bottom rung appear to have lived more like medieval bondsmen and women – free, with their own patches of land, but with fixed stringent duties owed to their overlords. In the Near East in the Late Bronze Age, women and children are recorded as serving a period of indentured service – working in bondage to pay back family debts, or to raise a dowry.
22 Lawiaiai at Pylos seem to be ‘captives’ or ‘women taken as booty’: Chadwick (1988), 83.
23 c. 1352 BC.
24 On this discovery, see A.B. Knapp (1992) ‘Bronze Age Mediterranean Island Cultures and the Near East, Part 1’, Biblical Archaeologist 55.2 (June 1992), 52–72, esp. 65–7.
25 A small temple was found at the site in 1955 when the airport was being built, three miles from Amman. Amongst other items, a quantity of Mycenaean pottery was discovered, and when the site was re-excavated in 1966, by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, more Mycenaean artefacts were found. One example, recovered in 1955, is now in the museum in Amman (Amman 6261). It is a krater, restored from sherds, featuring a charioteer, and dated to LHIIIA2. Details from Hankey (1967), 128 and 131ff.
26 Details on the Mycenaean trade-horizon taken from Dickinson (1994); French (2002); Harding (1984); Wardle (2001).
27 The Mycenaeans happily appropriated Minoan cultural innovations – writing and inlaid pottery. See Appendix One.
28 Across Mycenaean Greece there were striking affinities. Rigidly efficient bureaucracies ran to the same systems. Administrative records from Pylos, Thebes, Mycenae and Tiryns, for instance, follow an identical pattern – there are the same systems of weights and measures, the same sealings used on casks of olive oil and jars of wine, the same language spoken, the same gods worshipped. Kings, queens and officials, priestesses and priests are distinguished in the same way. Those in power walk through corridors, archives, antechambers and storerooms whose architecture is strikingly isomorphic. Frescoes describing religious ritual and state occasions strongly resemble one another. There are corresponding shrines and sanctuaries, aristocrats across Greece are buried in the same way with the same funerary rituals. Commonalities such as these would have allowed for cultural and political liaison, and, when the time called for it, for consolidated military action.
29 Buried in Grave Circle B at Mycenae.
30 All ‘war-wound’ references in this paragraph from Arnott (1999), 500–1.
31 Goodison (1989), 106–7.
32 The Mycenaean Warrior Goddess perhaps evolves into Athena, the protecting goddess of Athens. For further discussion see Rehak (1999).
33 Linear B tablets provide close detail of the rigid social categories in Mycenaean society. The wanax is the king, or overlord – on occasions wanax appears to be used as a divine title: French (2002), 127. A basileus was only a chief of craft-groups. A more important figure is the lawagetas. His title seems to mean ‘leader of the host’ although his exact function is unclear. The ‘mayor’ is the koreter, and the deputy mayor the prokoreter, followers are hequetai and then there is the telestas whose name could mean ‘one who brings to fulfilment’ in a religious context. Women are also given clear-cut designations, particularly in the religious sphere. There was a strict hierarchy, and it is worth remembering that the word comes from the ancient Greek hieros, ‘sacred’, and arche, ‘rule’. Religious business is accounted for within palace archives – there is no distinction between ‘church’ and ‘state’. Perhaps ruling in the citadel – particularly if you were a woman – was also thought to bring with it some kind of religious power. Thanks to Lisa Bendall for help with Linear B terminology in this paragraph.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Pre-historic Princess
1 The samples that produce these statistics are, by necessity, small. But for a good summary of latest figures see Arnott (2005a), 21–7.
2 Flowers were such an important harvest that one of the months in the Mycenaean calendar was called wordewios – ‘the Month of Roses’.
3 Murex trunculus seems to have been the species most commonly used in Lakonia. Many thanks to Deborah Ruscillo for her help with murex queries.
4 Homeric examples of ‘shining cloth’ references: see Iliad 3.170 [LCL 3.141] and 3.487 [LCL 3.419]; for Linear B reference, see Pylos tablet Fr 1225: Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 482. Clader (1976), 58–9. See also Shelmerdine (1998), 109.
5 Divinities are also often described as shining or radiant. There are two possibilities here: the first is that Helen is being remembered as ‘quasi-divine’ because she was illustrious in life; the second that she was a mortal character being used as a foil for an idea about divinity. Time and again when we read about Helen, we are told that she glows with a white, bright luminosity. ‘And Helen the radiance of women answered Priam’, says Homer: Iliad 3.207 [LCL 3.171]. She wears cloaks that shimmer. It has been suggested that her name derives from an Indo-European root, svaranā, meaning ‘the starry one’ or ‘the shining one’, which gives us the Greek word elene that can mean a torch or light. See Skutsch (1987), 188–93. Homer often talks about Helen as ‘Argive Helen’. The obvious interpretation is that she was a representative of the Greeks (also known as the Argives) or a woman whose influence resonated through the Argive plain, but there is also the possibility that the bard is playing on words. In the Greek languageargurosfirst appears as a word in Homer’s Iliad, where it means silver/silvery. For a further discussion of the ‘shining’ nature of Helen see Clader (1976), 56–64. Internal light was the mark of a goddess, but it was also the mark of one touched by divinity – of a mortal who has experienced or is experiencing an epiphany.
6 Odyssey 19.56–63 [LCL 19.53–8].
7 See tablet from Knossos, Sd 401 and Pylos tablet Ta 707. Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 366 and 342 respectively.
8 There is a fine example from the 14th century BC in the Heraklion Museum, Crete.
9 See Rehak (2005), 7.
10 Sakellarakis and Sapouna-Sakellaraki (1997), Vol. 2, 654 ff.
11 See also Chapter 14.
12 The Mycenaean palette was taken straight from the earth – pinks and rich yellows, greens, mauves and rusts ground down from natural clays and oxides. There was one notable exception: ‘Egyptian blue’. This valuable tool in the artist’s box acquired its evocative name because its production involved a chemical technique masterminded by Egyptians during the Old Kingdom (c. 2500–2100 BC). Blocks of this blue pigment were generated by heating frit, a glass-like element, with copper-bearing ore. Manufactured blues were probably a (rich) poor man’s lapis lazuli, a trick to make the palace appear to boast, throughout, the precious lapis stone from Afghanistan or Iraq.
13 See Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 131.
14 Hypoplastic lines in dental enamel, see Arnott (2005a).
15 Todd Whitelaw has estimated the population of the Mycenaean settlement at Pylos at around 3,000 individuals, based on house sizes and densities at more extensively investigated Mycenaean sites, in Voutsaki and Killen (2001). Thanks to Todd Whitelaw for his help in discussing population figures for Aegean Late Bronze Age society.
16 The architecture of Mycenaean settlements at the end of the 13th century BC, too, is designed to deal with military engagement. The citadels grew more fortified – increasingly circled by those monstrous walls of huge, unworked limestone blocks. Across the Isthmus of Corinth a Cyclopean wall has been traced running a full kilometer west of the Saronic Gulf. And at Mycenae, and neighbouring Tiryns, gloomy, secret cisterns, Mycenae’s over 18m deep, have been hacked out of the bedrock to provide water in the event of a siege.
17 See Latacz (2004), 120–40, for analysis of these nominations. The term ‘Mycenaean’ is another 19th-century invention.
CHAPTER SIX
The Rape of ‘Fair Hellen’
1 Hyginus, Fables 79.
2 Apollodorus, Epitome 1.23.
3 Diodorus of Sicily, 4.63.1–4.
4 Hellanikos FrGrH 4, 323a: F19 (168b). Hellanikos (c. 480–395 BC) was a noted mythographer and chronographer but only fragments of his work now survive. Later authors have certainly found this paedophiliac episode exciting. One Elizabethan writer – John Trussel in his First Rape of Fair Hellen (1595) – is insistent that Helen was only eight when she was raped. He describes the wheezing Theseus having to gasp for breath before he renews his advances. Another literary tradition claims that Theseus sodomised Helen to preserve her virginity: see Thornton (1997), 85 and n. 45.
5 Isocrates was an Athenian educationalist and a pamphleteer of a conservative persuasion, who lived from 436 to 338 BC.
6 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen 10.19. Trans. L. van Hook.
7 Site visit May 2001.
8 Trans. W. Barnstone (1962), quoted in Freeman (1999), 142.
9 The word ‘rape’ comes from the Latin rapiere, ‘to seize’. In antiquity it does not necessarily mean a sexual violation but does carry the implication of an abduction by force.
10 Rose (1926), 401.
11 And probably earlier: see Cartledge (2002), 310.
12 Thompson (1908/9), 124 and 127.
13 Flogging to the death was almost certainly a Roman elaboration.
14 Plutarch, Theseus 26.
15 Variant myths say that Helen was pregnant by Theseus at the time and gave birth to a daughter – Iphigeneia, whom she then left with her sister Clytemnestra. Pausanias 2.22.6 summarises the literary tradition claiming that Iphigeneia was the child of Theseus and Helen: for example, Stesichorus (PMGF 191). Iphigeneia grows up to take her own place in legend, as a victim of human sacrifice. (See Chapter 27.) The young girl’s fate was a tale at the heart of three of the most powerful of Greek tragedies: Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis; Euripides, Iphigeneia among the Taurians; and Aeschylus, Agamemnon.
16 Hellanikos FrGrH 4, 323a: F20 (134).
17 Plutarch, Theseus 32.3. Trans. B. Perrin. See also fragment 11 of the Cypria (scholiast on Homer, Iliad 3.242) that ‘the Dioscuri, failing to find Theseus [in Aphidna], sacked Athens’. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
18 Diodorus of Sicily gives one account of this story: 4.63.1–4. This is part of his multi-volume Library, a universal history of mythological times up to 60 BC, composed in Egypt and Rome 60–30 BC.
19 In 432 BC the Spartans had declared war on Athens. Their plan was to torch Athenian grainfields and force the Athenians to come out and meet them in fixed battle. For a city-state of professional soldiers the victory, the Spartans imagined, would be swift. But the Athenians were too canny to rise to the bait. Well connected to external food supplies via their port of Piraeus, the Athenians did not rush to meet the Spartans. Instead they waited to mount large-scale defensive military action on their own terms – Spartan success would not come easily. For the next twenty-seven years there would be victories and defeats as each power tested the strengths and weaknesses of the other. It was only when the Spartans took Persian gold and used their new-found wealth to become a sea- as well as a land-power that the pendulum started to swing in their direction. Athens’ allies – with the exception of Samos – smelt defeat and the vulnerability of their overlord, and defected to the Spartan cause one by one. For an ideal overview of Spartan history, see Cartledge (2002).
20 Herodotus 9.73 and Thucydides 7.19.1.
21 Rape cases seem to have been more concerned with affronts to the honour of the city or oikos rather than issues of consensuality. Legendary rapes were often cited as historical and political catalysts; cf. the rape of Lucretia and the rape of the Sabine women. See R. Omitowju (1997) ‘Regulating rape: Soap operas and self-interest in the Athenian courts’, in S. Deacy and K.F. Pierce, eds (1997) Rape in Antiquity (London: Duckworth) and R. Omitowoju (2002) Rape and the Politics of Consent in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
22 Helen’s rape by Paris was cited by military leaders in the classical period. For example, in his funeral oration of 322 BC, the orator Hyperides diagnoses the actions of the Greek general Leosthenes at the end of the first year of the Lamian War as a means of defending all Greek women from the affront of hubris. An affront suffered twice by Helen.
23 Deriving from Sparta’s hinterland, Lakonia.
24 Rare mixed-blood offspring were labelled mothakes.
25 Given that all adult male citizens, ‘Spartiates’, were allowed only one profession – that of the soldier – the Spartans were a force to be reckoned with. Little surprise then that they should sustain a push-me-pull-you tussle with the other most prominent city-state of the period, Athens. Sometimes these two were close allies, and sometimes the bitterest of enemies. Conflict was inevitable as each became entrenched in its own social and political ideals – finally, after a long, bitter, bloody, dissatisfying war, in 404 BC Sparta triumphed, decisively, over Athens and Spartan warriors tore down the walls of the Athenian polis. Athens’ flute-girls (prostitutes who lived outside the city walls) quickly changed sides and, dancing amid the flames, over the bodies of the Athenian dead, celebrated the end of an empire. See Xenophon, Hellenica 2.2.23. Sparta spent the next thirty-five years dominating much of the Greek world.
26 Thucydides 1.10.2.
27 Other than the acropolis, the theatre and the Menelaion almost all the digs in Sparta are now classified as ‘rescue archaeology’ – work can begin only when a building lot in the city is cleared for development or when someone’s extension falls down, revealing, as it collapses, an ancient past in its foundations.
28 Hoplites formed the bulk of the Spartan army. Every male Spartan citizen who had been through the agoge system had to serve as a hoplite.
29 Pausanias 3.15.3.
30 Cartledge (2001), 150 and 161; see also L.H. Jefferey (1961) The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece: A study of the origins of the Greek alphabet and its development from the eighth to the fifth centuriesBC (Oxford), 200, n. 24; M.N. Tod and A.J.B. Wace (1906) A Catalogue of the Sparta Museum (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 178, no. 447.
31 This ritual headdress is called a polos; it could perhaps have a connection with the polos worn in ritual circumstances by Mycenaean women.
32 For an astrological interpretation of this see Richer (1994).
33 Cults could have been established earlier but our first extant evidence is Hellenistic.
34 It is easy to understand why Helen and her brothers should be worshipped so full-bloodedly at Sparta – after all, Castor and Pollux were considered the protectors of the city, and Helen their emblem of perfect womanhood – but interesting that the popularity of the cult became widespread. Images of Helen and her brothers on coins from Asia Minor almost certainly bear witness to the cult spreading well beyond the Greek mainland. See Larson (1995), passim. And Chapter 36.
35 For fuller discussion see Spawforth (1992), passim.
36 Helen was also known as Argive Helen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sparte Kalligynaika
1 Peleus describes the problem of being married to Helen. Euripides, Andromache 595–600 (5th century BC). Trans. P. Vellacott.
2 Odyssey 4.341–2 [LCL 4.304–5].
3 A comprehensive overview of ancient sources shows Helen having a relationship with the following: Theseus, Menelaus, Paris, Enarsphoros the son of Hippocoon, Idas and Lynceus, Corythos, Deiphobus, Achilles and Theoclymenos. See Clader (1976), 71.
4 Excavated at Artemis Orthia and dating from the same century.
5 Carter (1988).
6 See Pomeroy (2002), 106, n. 2.
7 Later commentators even suggest the girls ate cakes in the shape of breasts. See Pomeroy (2002), 106, n. 3.
8 See Griffiths (1972), passim.
9 There is some, slightly questionable, evidence that Alcman started off life in Lydia.
10 Partheneion 3 (P.Oxy. 2387) is in the Papyrology Room at the Sackler Library in Oxford. Partheneion 1 is in the Louvre (P.Louvr. E3320). Many thanks to Nikolaos Gonis for his assistance.
11 Alcman, Partheneion 1 and 3. Trans. S.B. Pomeroy (2002), 6 and 7.
12 A reputation revived in the Roman period; see Plutarch, Lycurgus 18.4. Spartan girls were certainly well used to female company; given that all males from the age of seven to thirty lived on their own together in men-only army camps, the relationships between women must have been very strong.
13 See Larson (1995), 68, and 176, n. 53, citing C.M. Bowra, for a suggestion that Helen appears in Alcman as the dawn goddess Aotis.
14 This may also have been the case in the Late Bronze Age. Linear B tablets show the gods and goddesses of the Mycenaeans (not only their human representatives on earth) owning assets such as flocks of sheep and being listed as landholders. On the House of Potnia at Thebes, see Chadwick (1976), 93, 99; on landholding, see Chad-wick (1976), 77, 114. A new Pylos join has revealed a ‘Hearth of Dionysus’; see J.L. Melena (1996–7) ‘40 Joins and Quasi-Joins of Fragments in Linear B Tablets from Pylos’ and ‘13 Joins and Quasi-Joins of Fragments in the Linear B Tablets from Pylos’, in Minos 31–2: 159–70; on flocks of sheep, see Chadwick (1976), 93, 129.
15 Odyssey 13.469 [LCL 13.412].
16 The oracle at the religious site of Delphi in central Greece handed out judgments on current affairs, prophecies for the future and bon mots concerning state and personal histories. It was the Delphic Oracle that branded Spartan girls ‘kallistai’ in the 7th century BC. Parke and Wormell (1956), Vol. 1, 82.
17 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.566a–b.
18 Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 1.3. One very fragmentary vase found in Sparta shows men and women debauching together – there is no indication that these women are hetairai (prostitutes). It is currently held by the Sparta Museum. Pipili (1992) no. 196.
19 Plato, Laws 806A; cf. Republic 5.452A.
20 See Cavanagh and Laxton (1984), 34–6.
21 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.600f–601a.
22 Clearchus of Soli, fragment 73.
23 See Xenophon, Household Management 7.10. Trans. S.B. Pomeroy (2002), 9.
24 Pollux 4.102.
25 See Pomeroy (2002), 112ff, for an account of Spartan girls’ physical education, with sources.
26 See Bowra (1961), 53 on poloi; also Aristophanes, Lysistrata 1308–15.
27 Helen is herself compared to a ‘Thessalian horse adorning its chariot’ in Theocritus, Idylls 18.31.
28 Sarah Pomeroy has pointed out that while Spartan girls have their long hair cut in preparation for marriage, Pliny in his Natural History links the cropping of a mare’s mane with a reduction in libido. Pliny, Natural History 8.164.
29 The challenges of the sources available for Spartan studies, particularly the lives of women, are succinctly laid out by Pomeroy (2002), 139–70.
30 Augustus was said to have made this visit in 21 BC. See Cartledge and Spawforth (1989 reprinted 1991, 2002), 199, citing Cassius Dio 54.7.2.
31 Scholiast on Juvenal 4.53.
32 Ovid, Heroides 16.149–52.
33 Propertius lived from c. 50 BC to c. 2 BC.
34 Trans. A. Dalby; taken from Dalby (2000), 146.
35 Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 1.4 and see Pomeroy (2002), 25, for further discussion.
36 British Museum GR 1876.5–10.1.
37 For a further description of constructions on the Menelaion, see Tomlinson (1992).
38 Herodotus 6.61.
39 Pausanias 3.19.9.
40 Pausanias 3.7.7.
41 The fact that she was honoured with rituals that involved plants and flowers could suggest that her memory was being conflated with the primal vegetation goddess who gives her name (έλέυη) to reeds or shoots and woven baskets in ancient Greece. Some would go so far as to say that she was nothing other than a nature goddess herself. See Clader (1976), 56–68. See also Appendix 4.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tender-eyed Girls
1 The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (2000). Trans. J. O’Brien.
2 See Hallager and McGeorge (1992), especially 43.
3 On girls’ maturation rites, such as the arkteia, where young girls, who had not yet reached the age of menarche, served Artemis as ‘bears’ in her sanctuaries at Brauron and Mounichia, see C. Sourvinou-Inwood (1988) Studies in Girls’ Transitions: aspects of the arkteia and age representation in Attic iconography. Athens: Kardamitsa.
4 See, for instance, NMA 3180.
5 See Rehak (2005) for a good summary and for a discussion of the Thera frescoes. I am very grateful to John Younger for allowing me to see an advance copy of this work.
6 The similarity of dress, adornment and ritual between Theran and Mycenaean society allows for close comparison of the two.
7 After investigations in the 1930s and tentative digging in the 1960s led by Spyridon Marinatos.
8 Because a monkey and a griffin are close by, this goddess could be a Mistress of the Animals, a potnia theron. A deity with particular responsibility for nature.
9 See Rehak (2005).
10 The ‘Citadel House mould’ from Mycenae shows that moon-shaped jewellery was also made at Mycenae.
11 For a good summary of all frescoes excavated, see Marinatos (1984).
12 Morgan (1988), 31.
13 For further discussion see Goodison and Morris (1998), 125.
14 Pliny, Natural History 21.17.31–2.
15 Ellen Davis has identified six different hairstyles at Thera, marking six stages of sexual development. See Davis (1986).
16 Here, too, above a doorway there is a religious symbol which can signify fecundity, the ‘horns of consecration’ – bull’s horns which drip with blood. The image almost certainly represents both a sacrifice on an altar and a bleeding woman. Bulls had been symbols of fertility since the Palaeolithic era. A woman’s womb is an organ that would have become clearly visible during excarnation or any sword-attack: see D.O. Cameron (1981) Symbols of Birth and of Death in the Neolithic Era (London: Kenyon-Deane), 4–5. A womb bears a marked resemblance to a bull’s head – particularly to the head of the breed of bull common in pre-history, the auroch, a massive beast standing up to 2m at the shoulder with long, slim horns measuring about 30 cm and a footprint the size of a man’s head. The bleeding horns speak of female fecundity. The frescoes could well be a pictorial representation of activities which actually took place in the room – rites of passage such as initiation rites.
17 In the area of the ‘lustral basin’ situated below the saffron-gatherers’ fresco.
18 On the ground floor of Xeste 3, Room 3. North Wall.
19 By the archaic and classical period one finds the hair of the statues of particular goddesses decorated with yellow or golden paint. The 6th-century BC towering ‘Berlin Goddess’, for example, in the Pergamon Museum, has her thick curls tinted yellow, and Praxiteles’ famous sculpture of a naked Aphrodite was thought to have gilded locks. Both these goddesses were honoured for their pronounced eroticism. This could be the remnants of a pre-historic association of blondeness with ‘special (sexual) powers’.
20 It is estimated that 250,000 crocus flowers are needed to produce 1 pound (0.45 kg) of saffron: see the Cambridge World History of Food, Vol. 2, eds. K.F. Kiple and K.C. Ornelas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1846. There are ideograms representing saffron on the Np series of Linear B tablets from Knossos on Crete: see Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 51.
21 Men are portrayed in other contexts at Thera. For an excellent survey see S. Sherratt (ed) (2000) The Wall Paintings of Thera. Proceedings of the First International Symposium. Petros M. Nomikos Conference Centre, Thera, Hellas, 30 August – 4 September 1997. 2 Vols. Athens: Petros M. Nomikos and The Thera Foundation.
22 British Museum, E773.
23 See Chapter 14.
24 Visitors should check which representations of the frescoes are on display before visiting Thera.
CHAPTER NINE
A Trophy for Heroes
1 This episode in Helen’s story has its counterpart in other sagas dealing with contests for the hand of a heroine: women such as Atalanta – who forced suitors to compete with her in foot-races; Jocasta – whose son Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and won the right to sleep with his mother and control the kingdom of Thebes; and Hippodamia, whose father took part in the chariot-races with her suitors and always won. But Hippodamia loved Pelops and wanted to share with him the kingdom of Elis, so when he took up the challenge she had wax pegs inserted into her father’s chariot’s wheels – the wax melted as the race went on and the chariot overturned, killing her father. The treachery eventually resulted in a curse being put on the House of Atreus. See Pindar, Olympian Ode 1.25–96 and Apollodorus, Epitome 2.3–10. All these women were competed for. Like Helen, they too had substantial estates to share with men who proved themselves worthy.
2 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
3 Apollodorus, The Library 3.10.8.
4 Euripides, Trojan Women, 987.
5 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
6 Excavation report: C. Tsountas (1889) ‘Ereuna en te Lakonike kai ho taphos tou Vapheiou’, in Archaiologike Ephemeris 129–72.
7 In the classical period, a statue of Apollo 9m high would have towered above the site. Fragment 53 of Alcman’s poetry describes the spread at one festival – moon-shaped buns with sesame-seeds, sweets of honey and flax seeds for the children. Although there is no specific reference to the worship of Helen at the Hyakinthia, similarities with the Heleneia are very strong – see Xenophon, Agesilaus 8.7 and Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 4.138e–139b.
8 Hesychius 1999. Hesychius of Alexandria compiled his Greek lexicon in the fifth century AD: it survives in a single manuscript from the fifteenth century.
9 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 4.139ff; Xenophon, Agesilaus 8.7; Plutarch, Agesilaus 19.5–6.
10 Helen’s rape by Theseus was commemorated on a throne at Amyklai along with other episodes from the Trojan War cycle. Pausanias, 3.18.10–16.
11 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
12 See Hesiod, fragments 204.78ff. and 197.4ff. in the Merkelbach and West edition (1967).
13 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.102–5. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
14 At every turn in Mycenaean society one’s standing (or lack of it) was reinforced by the bureaucrats – Linear B tablets show, for example, that only certain men were allowed the finest quality wool for their cloaks.
15 Iliad 2.56 [LCL 2.47].
16 Iliad 2.539–43 [LCL 2.455–8].
17 Iliad 10.306–10 [LCL 10.262–5].
18 Site visit Wildwood, UK, 2002.
19 See Chapter 17 for further details.
20 The Horse Book of Kikkuli of the Mitanni was already widely employed in the 14th century in Anatolia. Tablets inscribed with training methods can be seen in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum; for example, Bo 10407 (KBo III 5, IBOT II 136).
21 See Hood (1953).
22 See Konsolaki-Yannopoulou (1999) and (2000).
23 Iliad 2.26 [LCL 2.23].
24 Troy also earns this epithet [LCL 2.287].
25 Helen’s brothers were also famous for their equestrian prowess. A Homeric Hymn describes them as ‘riders on swift steeds’; the poet Alcman talks of them as ‘masters of swift colts, skilled horsemen’; and Alcaeus as ‘Castor and Polydeuces, who traverse the broad earth and oceans on swift-footed horses’.
26 And would our Bronze Age Helen have ridden out to meet them? There are images of women handling horses from the Late Bronze Age but they all appear in a religious context. There is one statuette from 13th-century BC Attica that represents a female figure riding side-saddle. From the Hélène Stathatos collection: see Collection Hélène Stathatos (1963) Vol. III: Objets Antiques et Byzantins (Strasbourg), 23–4 (no. 6) and Plate II, no. 6. Finely painted images from Mycenaean frescoes show women driving chariots. Their progress is stately, they wear elaborate hats – probably a religious procession. On the frescoes at Tiryns, females thunder across the walls in chariots, their boar’s-tusk helmets an indication that these are perhaps the prototype warrior goddesses.
27 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.1–6. Trans. H. G. Evelyn-White.
28 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68; Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 49–71; Apollodorus, The Library 3.10.8; Hyginus, Fables 78.
29 Horses buried in the Bronze Age with their owners presumably were killed at the time of the owner’s death (Marathon, Dendra). Pausanias 3.20.9 tells us there was a tomb called ‘The Horse’s Tomb’ on the Sparta-Arcadia road which held the body of the very horse sacrificed by Tyndareus.
CHAPTER TEN
The Kingmaker
1 Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 67–75. Trans. P. Vellacott.
2 It is clear from extant Hittite texts that athletic contests were mounted for the benefit of the gods at large social gatherings. Hoffner (2003) lists the events: boxing, wrestling, stone-throwing, foot-racing, archery and chariot-racing.
3 Diethnes Politistiki Enosi Pammachon – the International Cultural Pammachon Union. Many thanks to Kostas Dervenis for co-ordination of this event.
4 See Dervenis and Lykiardopoulos (2005).
5 See Arnott (1999), 500.
6 Herodotus, 6.126ff.
7 For a fuller account of these issues, see Finkelberg (1991).
8 Pausanias 2.18.6.
9 Odyssey 4.12–14 [LCL 4.10–12].
10 Interesting that Megapenthes is not described as a bastard even though his mother was a slave, hinting perhaps at an accepted system of surrogate births. See Finley (1954).
11 Settlements along the Turkish coast show evidence of strong trading links – Mycenaean pottery has been found at Clazomenae, Panaztepe, Colophon and Ephesus. This was not unfamiliar territory.
12 See Neville (1977), 5 and n. 13.
13 The Gortyn law code from Crete – inscribed in the 5th century BC but it may well describe legislation rooted in the Late Bronze Age – also details the rights a woman has over property.
14 Linear B information in this paragraph derived from personal correspondence with Dr Michael Lane, May 2004–April 2005. See also Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 232ff.
15 At a place called pakijana. The scribes seem to recognise an unresolved dispute between Erita and ‘allotment-holders’ who can claim certain benefits to the land. Erita has a special plot of land described as etonijo which appears to be dedicated to some ‘god’ and also has given a woman named uwamija a kera a ‘gift of honour’ in the form of the benefit of a parcel of land. In the eyes of the scribes, Erita the priestess has clear rights to the possession and disposal of her property in land, which include passing claims on to another woman.
16 In another series, many landholders are subjected to religious ‘taxes’ – perhaps one tenth of the product of their land as suggested by another series of tablets from Pylos (Es series). These tablets imply that ‘taxation’ is proportionate to the ‘benefit’ a person holds.
17 Hyginus, Fables 78 – see note by the translator M. Grant, 74, who mentions a similar story told by Aristotle as quoted in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists 576, where the daughter of a Gallic king, Petta, chooses her husband. See also Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 68–75.
18 The custom certainly fed through to some parts of western Europe and was still practised until recently in parts of rural Germany, where young girls were auctioned to become the ‘May-wife’. These girls started the spring as passive, obedient ‘spouses’ but come the early summer they got to choose their own ‘dancing partners’. If a girl wanted to stay with her mate, she announced the fact by pinning a bunch of flowers to his hat. See West (1975), 12.
19 Iphigeneia in Aulis 68–75. Trans. P. Vellacott.
20 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
21 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68, 98–100.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A ROYAL WEDDING
1 Also called Idyll 18. Trans. A. Verity.
2 Epithalamia were songs or poems traditionally performed on the eve of a wedding, literally ‘epi’ outside the ‘thalamos’, the bridal chamber.
3 The choral leader who wrote so expressively in the 7th century BC about rituals for young Spartan girls down on the banks of the Eurotas.
4 Theocritus may also have got some of his detail from another poem written about Helen in the 6th century BC by the Sicilian poet Stesichorus. Only the tiniest fragments of Stesichorus survive now, but it seems this poem covered Helen’s early life in some detail. See notes in Hunter (2002), 109.
5 Theocritus, Idyll 18.
6 Theocritus, Idyll 18. 43.6 Trans. S. B. Pomeroy (2002), 115.
7 Eighteen was late to marry by Greek standards, a peculiarity of the Spartan city-state, apparently endorsed from the Late Archaic period onwards.
8 Plutarch, Lycurgus 15.4.
9 See Hagnon of Tarsus in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.602d–e.
10 See discussion in David (1992), 1.
11 See Griffiths (1972), 27.
12 Theocritus, Idyll 18.8.
13 V 659 (from Mycenae) and Vn 851 (from Pylos) on pallets.
14 For detailed analysis of foodstuffs at various sites, see Tzedakis and Martlew (1999), passim.
15 A tradition also referred to by Homer: e.g. the wedding feast at Sparta for Hermione; a feast in honour of Poseidon at Pylos; and something marked by its absence in the unruly, improper behaviour of Penelope’s suitors. It is worth noting that a feast in honour of Poseidon at Pylos is recorded in the Linear B. tablets. See Sherratt (2004), 315.
16 There is an interesting comparison here with Iron Age British tribal gatherings.
17 Tablet Cn 1287.
18 Un 138. See also Un 418, 718, 853 and Cn 418.
19 Another tablet records the delivery of 197 sheep for a feast. Uc 161, from Knossos.
20 Some animals travelled ‘over water’ and across distances of 50 km to get to the table. Palaima (2004), 226.
21 Un 2 from Pylos, in Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 221.
22 Pylos Ta 716.
23 See Isaakidou et al. (2002). The flesh has been cut off the mandibles – this could, perhaps, correlate to the sacrifice of tongues described by Homer in Odyssey 3.373 (LCL 3.332).
24 Agia Triada sarcophagus: see Fitton (2002), 192 and Immerwahr (1990), 100–2.
25 Some figures in this and the following paragraph are derived from a lecture given by Lisa Bendall on 6 May 2004, ‘Mycenaean Feasting at Pylos’, at the McDonald Institute, Cambridge. Also conversations with John Killen and reference to Ventris and Chadwick (1973).
26 Uc 161, from Knossos.
27 Analysis of the pottery at cult sites shows that wine played a significant part in the more intimate sacral rituals of the Late Bronze Age as well as in the grand feasts – where huge amounts would have been drunk. In another room (Room 9) of the palace of Pylos, there are a further 600 kylikes. The traces of organic materials found in the cult centre at Mycenae bear witness to resinated wine, both locally made and imported from producers along the Palestinian coasts at Ugarit and Ras Shamra in large Canaanite jars. A clay mug held a mix of wine and mead. Elsewhere there is alcohol steeped in rue and sage. We think of rue as a token of remembrance but it can act too as a sedative; today pharmacists warn against its use because the risk:benefit ratio is too unstable. So while the gods might have felt very close to the inhabitants of the Late Bronze Age it seems that men and women were happy to use drugs, as well as alcohol, to bring them closer still.
28 Iliad 4.401 [LCL 4.346]. Honeyed wine is referred to on a sealing nodule recording a wine delivery at Pylos. I tried this Bronze Age drink with archaeologist Holley Martlew in October 2004. It is delicious and extremely efficacious.
29 The ‘Campstool Fresco’ from Knossos.
30 See Bendall (2004), on Room 60 at Pylos.
31 Sufficiently significant to be buried with the aristocrats – for example, at Vapheio two bronze jugs, a bronze ladle and a silver ladle, and a brazier.
32 For a fuller discussion of the topic of feasting and social display, see Bendall (2004).
33 For an excellent collection of references see Sherratt (2004), 316, n. 46.
34 Odyssey 9.3–11 [LCL 9.3–11].
35 Odyssey 17.270–1. Trans. E.V. Rieu. [LCL 17.270–1].
36 On the battlefield too, when the heroes describe the real pleasures of life, music and dancing are nearly always mentioned. In the midst of a seething, passionate torrent of abuse that a vengeful Menelaus is hurling at the Trojans, we get an idea – certainly of Iron Age pleasures, and most probably of Bronze Age ones.
One can achieve his fill of all good things, even sleep, even of making love … rapturous song and the beat and sway of dancing. A man will yearn for his fill of all these joys before his fill of war. But not these Trojans – No one can glut their lust for battle! Iliad 13.733–8 [LCL 13.636–9].
37 Although ethno-musicologists have a difficult time reconstructing the sounds of the very distant past because many musical instruments were made entirely of organic material, and have simply rotted away, a few examples do remain. There could be a wealth – particularly of percussion instruments – enjoyed by Bronze Age society, which we cannot imagine today because their remains have been swallowed by time. One survivor is a rattle (sometimes made of bronze, sometimes of terracotta) called a sistrum. The sistrum is prevalent in antiquity. A strange hybrid of a fork, a maraca and an abacus, the sistrum gives out a sound that is at once eerie and intrusive. Bronze finger cymbals, not unlike those used today by Hari Krishna devotees, were probably an oriental import to Greece. Found on Crete and in the Uluburun shipwreck. See Bass (1987) and (1996). Another import was a large whistle carved out of the tooth of a hippopotamus, and unworked tortoise shells destined for use as resonating boxes. In 1981, H. Roberts reconstructed a tortoiseshell lyre for the British Museum. See Younger (1998), 17 and H. Roberts (1981), ‘Reconstructing the Greek Tortoise-Shell Lyre’, in World Archaeology 12: 303–12. In the Mycenaean sanctuary of Phylakopi, on Melos, Late Bronze Age tortoise-shells were excavated with holes carefully drilled into the sides to allow for the attachment of lyre arms. See Renfrew (1985), 325–6. The tortoise-shell fragments were recovered from the east and west shrines, during the excavations between 1974 and 1977 by the British School of Archaeology at Athens. Renfrew notes that tortoises can still be found in the countryside around Phylakopi. A Homeric Hymn describes the creation of these musical instruments (also called the chelys-lyre) by Hermes.
38 See Younger (1998), 37 and Plate 24.3 (CMS II. 3.7).
39 Agios Nikolaos, Archaeological Museum 11246.
40 This is from Malia, and was found in a building at the far north-east corner of the palace. It dates from LM1 (16th–15th centuries BC). See C. Baurain and P. Darcque (1983), ‘Un triton en pierre à Mallia’, in Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 107:3–73. Thank you to Peter Warren for details.
41 Iliad 9.225 [LCL 9.189].
42 See Plutarch, for the Life of Alexander (15) and Aelian, Historical Miscellany 9.38.
43 The Judgement of Paris, Attic black-figure amphora, c. 575–550 BC. Paris, Louvre F13.
44 Paris, Louvre, Département des Peintures INV. 3696.
45 Women, it seems, would on occasion play. From Palaikastro in East Crete there is a crude terracotta group of a woman holding a lyre while three others hold hands and dance in a semi-circle in front of her.
46 There is a particularly fine example from Amyklai, just 8 cm tall.
47 Lang (1969).
48 Odyssey 17.287 [LCL 17.261].
49 Theocritus, Idylls 18.54–5. Trans. A. Verity.
50 See Pantelia (1995), 79 for further discussion. The author points out that Ptolemy’s marriage to (his sister) Arsinoe would also have ‘strengthened both his claim to the Egyptian throne and his position as a figure of cult in Egypt’. There are echoes here perhaps of Helen’s story.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HERMIONE
1 Ovid, The Art of Love 2.690f Trans. R. Humphries.
2 Although most literary sources say that Helen had only one child, a comprehensive account of ‘Helen’ references yields quite a list of children – from her liaison with Theseus, Iphigeneia; with Paris, Corythos, Boumonos, Idaios and Aganos as well as the seemingly fatherless Aithiolas and Nicostratus (for latter see Apollodorus, The Library2ii, 2i). Pleisthenes is mentioned in fragment 12 of the Cypria as another child of Helen and Menelaus.
3 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 204.94–5, in Merkelbach and West (1967).
4 Could he be talking about a system of surrogacy, where aristocrats use slaves to increase the number of their offspring? Odyssey 4.14–17 [LCL 4.12–14]. Hittite tablets of the time indicate that in Anatolia at least, surrogacy was acceptable; ‘if within two years the wife does not produce children, she will purchase a slave woman for her husband; but as soon as the slave produces a [male] child, the wife can sell the slave as she wishes’: Darga (1993), 34.
5 Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 127 and 310.
6 Material from 2002 site visit.
7 In the 7th century many terracotta figurines of the goddess were left as votive offerings in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in Sparta. See Farrell (1908).
8 Gg 705.
9 Odyssey 19.213–17 [LCL 19.186–9].
10 The Eileithyia Cave in Crete still has a folkloric reputation for causing miraculous pregnancies. Chemical analysis of the pure water found in the cave indicates that drunk in large quantities it could work as a laxative. See Rutkowski (1986), 65.
11 Pausanias 2.21.8.
12 Fragment 13 of the work of the poet Stesichorus claims that after Helen’s abduction by Theseus, the Spartan queen founded the shrine. Argos’ pride and joy is a massive Greco-Roman theatre. Originally built in the 3rd century BC, it can still hold an audience of 20,000. Today children mooch around the capacious remains on school trips but when a play is staged here the place hums again as it would have done in the classical period. Many of the women in that ancient press of tourists would also have visited Eileithyia’s shrine, to thank the goddess for the gift of a child or to beg her for more, and as they did so they would have remembered its young founder, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Today experts think they have detected the site of the altar of Eileithyia, hidden underneath one of the town’s Christian churches.
13 Angel (1977), 88–105. This method has had its critics, but combined with evidence from dental analysis, it seems to show that girls were sexually mature aged twelve/thirteen. There is no reason to believe a gap was left before they started to produce children. From the 5th century BC onwards it was thought that the gap between menarche and marriage for the gyne (a word meaning a mature female, although it can also translate as wife) should be as narrow as possible. It is likely that the ideal for most Late Bronze Age families was that girls should fall pregnant very young.
14 See evidence from Tomb 11 as published by Hallager and McGeorge (1992). See also opening of Chapter 8.
15 See Arnott (2005a).
16 The Mycenaean record is silent on beliefs and rituals concerning pregnancy and child-birth but Hittite tablets are inscribed with detailed descriptions of the Papanikri, the ‘Birth Ritual’. The ritual sounds, quite frankly, uncomfortable. Women had to give birth on a wooden stool in the presence of the priest. If for some reason one of the legs or the seat of the stool broke, the priest would be roused to a frenzy, frantic to cleanse the evil that had been made manifest by the breakage. The mother would have to make a libation to the gods. Sheep and birds would be sacrificed, a lamb would be bound with red yarn and dressed in red material with a hat on its head and rings and anklets on its feet and legs. On the following day, the newborn child seems to have been beaten with a stick by the men responsible for sacrifice. Procreation was not a private affair – it was the business of the whole community. See Darga (1993), 105: A135 (Istanbul Archaeological Museum Bo. 2001).
17 See Robertson (1990), esp. 24 and Riddle (1992) on contraception in the ancient world.
18 To date, Mycenaean objects have been found at twenty Egyptian sites. See Bryce (2005).
19 The oldest prescription for contraception appears to be in the Petrie papyrus, discovered at Kahun in 1889 and written during the reign of Amenenhat III of the Twelfth Dynasty. A wealth of information is contained in a group of documents now called the Papyrus Ebers which were written down in c. 1500 BC. Papyrus Ebers 716.
20 A papyrus fragment from around 1400 BC describes the wild murmurings and mutterings that would sometimes have served as medical attention – an incantation from the Land of the Keftiu (Crete) written at the time the Greek Mycenaeans were in control: ‘… Exorcism of the Asian sickness in the keftiu language … This spell is uttered over ferment, gas, fluid and urine.’
21 See Latacz (2004), 131–2, citing W. Helck (1979) Die Beziehungen Ägyptens und Vorderasiens zur ÄgÄis bis ins 7. Jarhrhundert v. Chr., 2nd edition (Darmstadt), 97; and P.W. Haider (1988), Griechenland-Nordafrika: Ihre Beziehungen zwischen 1600 und 600 v. Chr. (Darmstadt), 139, 14, n. 48.
22 Pliny, Natural History 24.38.59 – used in wickerwork and perfumery as well as for medical purposes; details from King (1998), 86f.
23 For fuller discussion of this subject, see King (1983).
24 Plutarch, Lycurgus and Numa 3, 4. Trans. B. Perrin.
25 The female poet who probably lived in the 7th/6th century BC. See 378, n.2 for questions about Sappho’s life.
26 P. Oxy 1231, fragment 14. Trans. D. A. Campbell.
27 She was even on the radar of Adhelm, an Anglo-Saxon theologian who wrote in a letter to one of his pupils Wihtfrith sometime between AD 673 and 706: ‘What, pray, I beseech you eagerly, is the benefit to the sanctity of the orthodox faith to expend energy by reading and studying the foul pollution of base Proserpina, which I shrink from mentioning in plain speech; or to revere, through celebration in study, Hermione, the wanton offspring of Menelaus and Helen, who, as the ancient texts report, was engaged for a while by right of dowry to Orestes, then, having changed her mind, married Neoptolemus.’ Letter III, ‘To Wihtfrith’, in Aldhelm: The Prose Works. Trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (1979). (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield).
28 Euripides, Helen 282–3.
29 Andromache in Euripides, Andromache 206.
30 Written around about 20 BC.
31 Ovid, Heroides 8.91. Trans. H. Isbell.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Welcome Burden
1 Tomb 8C; see Hallager and McGeorge (1992), 32.
2 Gates (1992) gives an extremely interesting and useful survey of objects found in children’s graves.
3 In Grave Xi, Grave Circle B.
4 See Mylonas (1966), 105.
5 At Prosymna – the name that the travel writer Pausanias gives to the area around the Temple of Hera, Argos, 3.17.1 – children’s bodies have been found with miniature terracotta animals – maybe creatures that could provide succour in the form of milk on the child’s journey through the afterlife. There are even a few models of horses and chariots (although some academics hotly debate this identification), which could have been left, again, to help comfort the children in their journey. Weapons are conspicuous by their absence; these children were clearly not styled little soldiers.
6 The wife of a Victorian archaeologist and sponge merchant, a woman named Mrs Brown, allegedly committed the heinous crime of losing valuable Mycenaean goods from a child’s grave. A gold doll, found at a Late Bronze Age site on Aegina, was smuggled out to Mrs Brown so that she could sail out of Greece with her illicit booty. But she died during the journey, her body was thrown overboard and the gold doll vanished from the record. Higgins (1979), 46–51; amplified by Gates (1992).
7 NMA 28092 (EUM–331).
8 Excavations of the cemetery began in 1969.
9 All references from Tzedakis and Martlew (1999), 211–79.
10 NMA 2899.
11 For a full description of the figurine, see Wace (1939); see also American Journal of Archaeology 45, no. 1: 91; and American Journal of Archaeology 43: 697 and Fig. 1.
12 In August 1989.
13 Iliad 3.207–13 [LCL 3.171–5].
14 Men are sometimes involved too, but the rituals are predominantly single-sex.
15 The Linear B tablets from Knossos, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae show that a number of women had particular skills and particular job-titles. There are raptriai (‘sewing women’) and lewotrokhowoi (‘bath-pourers’) among many other examples.
16 KN Ap 639.
17 MY V 659. Thank you to Lisa Bendall for help with this list.
18 Olsen (1998) has a very clear description of the three categories: 384ff.
19 No Linear B tablets yet discovered talk about midwives or wet-nurses – a gap which is almost certainly a chance of survival or recording practices rather than a comment on Mycenaean practice. It is therefore difficult to know whether aristocratic women such as Helen would have nursed their own infants. Myth stories seem to imply that the high-born handed over their children to be raised. Apollo, for instance, was farmed out to Themis rather than fed by his own mother Leto. And in the Iliad, as Hector rushes to meet his wife Andromache, we get what appears to be evidence both of paternal affection and of wet-nursing:
She [Andromache] joined him now, and following in her steps a servant holding the boy against her breast, in the first flush of life, only a baby, Hector’s son, the darling of his eyes And radiant as a star … (Iliad 6.471–5 [LCL 6.399–401])
20 Meeting with Dr Elizabeth French, September 2004. Once again, many thanks to Dr French for her help with this project.
21 See Chapter 14. Five ‘smiting god’ metal figurines have been found and a small number of non-phallic male figures from Phylakopi.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HELEN, HIGH PRIESTESS
1 Pylos tablet Ae 303. Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 166.
2 Iliad 7.551–4 (LCL 7.476–9].
3 Hesiod, Theogony 47–9. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
4 There is too a female Zeus, Diwia, in Linear B tablets, e.g. Tn 316. Lisa Bendall has pointed out that Zeus does get fairly lavish gifts when he is honoured, such as a gold bowl and a man (Hera gets a gold bowl and a woman) at Pylos.
5 See Renfrew (1985), 302–10.
6 See Meagher (2002), 72.
7 Centuries later we hear that Agesilaus (360/59 BC), a king of Sparta who died in North Africa, was embalmed in honey to be brought back home for burial. And Alexander the Great’s body was said to have been carried from Babylon to Greece in a honey-and-wax cocoon. See Diodorus of Sicily 18.26.3. Studies in the University of Illinois showed neat honey to be a better preservative of turkey-meat than the traditional preservatives butylated hydroxytoluene and tocopherol.
8 Meagher (2002), 56.
9 Ae 303.
10 The Priestess of the Winds at Knossos on Crete was honoured with a gift of 30 l of olive oil.
11 Others with hieratic power are the enigmatic ki–ri-te-wi-ja. John Killen has pointed out that more data are needed to draw certain conclusions about the role of women in a religious context.
12 See for comparison CMS II.6 no. 74 (Plate 276) and CMS 1 no. 46 (Plate 505) in Krzyszkowska (2005). My thanks to Olga Krzyszkowska for her help.
13 Site visit October 2004.
14 Mycenae Archaeological Museum, MM 294.
15 NMA 4575.
16 There are clues as to the kinds of rites that would have been carried out here in the cult centre in honour of that little goddess. A small clay bath-tub was once filled with water for purification, three hearths around the altar (itself only 60 cm high) are ready to receive sacrificial offerings. Vessels were found here to carry wine and titbits to sustain the goddess. Gifts have been left to appease the spirits in the room: cooking pots, a stone bowl from Crete and the graceful ivory carvings that demonstrate the artistic genius of the Mycenaeans – a lion, the fine head of a young man.
17 Mycenae, Acropolis Treasure: NMA 942.
18 In another close association of women with nature, at Thebes, women process across a painted wall carrying lilies, papyrus and rock-roses. Warren (1988), 26.
19 For a recent survey of seal-stones, see Krzyszkowska (2005).
20 Thomas (1938–9), 65–87.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LA BELLE HÉLÈNE
1 Iliad 3.168–71 [LCL 3.139–42].
2 Odyssey 7.103–7. Trans. E.V. Rieu, revised D.C.H. Rieu [LCL 7.104–7].
3 Iliad 18.697 [LCL 18.596].
4 Pylos tablet Fr 1225.
5 See Shelmerdine (1985), passim.
6 Helen’s ‘gold curls’ are referred to in Euripides, Helen 1224. Earlier, Sappho, in fragment 23, describes her as xanthe – ‘golden’, which may refer to her golden hair.
7 PY AN 656 and AN 218 may feature reference to braid-weavers.
8 Advice to visitors: double-check opening times of site of Pylos.
9 The most likely areas for production at the archaeological sites of Pylos are Courts 42 and 47.
10 Terebinth resin is the base of turpentine and is still harvested on an industrial scale on the island of Chios.
11 Thanks to Cynthia Shelmerdine for her help with this material and for pointing out that a lump of LBA terebinth resin she was given to handle had maintained its distinctive aroma.
12 Dayagi-Mendels (1998), 36.
13 For further details see Manniche (1999). The Papyrus Ebers (written c. 1500 BC, see 370, n.19) contained details of medical and cosmetic preparations. Recipes included those to fight wrinkles.
14 NMA 4575.
15 Thanks to Diana Wardle for allowing us to conduct a practical experiment based on the LBA findings.
16 Over a thousand years after these frescoes were painted, in Euripides’ play The Trojan Women, Paris’ mother accuses Helen of ‘impudent flaunting’ (Trojan Women 1028. Trans. J. Morwood), of making an extra special effort to attract Menelaus. But Euripides is giving Hecuba a classical rather than a Bronze Age voice. It is only around the 5th century BC that we have written evidence that make-up had come to be thought of as a means of deception – enhanced beauty enticing men into sexual activity – and as such had become the mark of a prostitute. The Bronze Age Helen would have worn heavy, garish make-up that emphasised her physicality and her gender, but that would not have branded her a whore.
17 There are other styles of dress too. In a painting from Mycenae, a naturalistic female figurine is wrapped in a single robe. On an earlier ring made of electrum a woman wears either ankle bracelets or voluminous ‘Ali-Baba’ trousers under her skirt. On the frescoes, some women are shrouded in cloaks. The use of paint on frescoes at Mycenae and a tomb from Crete indicates that some women wore skirts made of wrapped animal hide.
18 See Rehak (2005) on ivory examples; for an example of a gold signet ring, see NMA 3180.
19 Euripides, Trojan Women 1042.
20 Hughes-Brock (1998), 260.
21 Propertius 3.14.17–20. Trans. A. Dalby (2000), 146.
22 Heroides 16, Paris’ letter to Helen. Trans. H. Isbell.
23 Pliny, Natural History 33.23.81.
24 British Museum B376.
25 Trans. P. Forbes (1967) 363, from ‘Le Sein d’Hélène’, an essay of 1937; and congratulations to Vintage Direct for having such an intriguing website.
26 Iliad 3.273 [LCL 3.228].
27 Thanks to Peter Millett.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE GOLDEN APPLE
1 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen 54. Trans. L. van Hook.
2 The curved mirror-image was slightly distorted, the face reduced, the world behind clearly visible.
3 It was also quite common for classical artists and authors to pair Helen with a mirror. The imagery is potent; she is both an eidolon (a ghost, a reflection) and a woman whose image is deceptive. See Hawley (1998), 46–7 for a good further discussion. On Helen’s appearance on mirrors, see ‘Elina’ in LIMC.
4 Fitzwilliam Museum GR.19.1904.
5 For example, LIMC nos. 83 and 86.
6 Euripides, Trojan Women 1107–8. Trans. J. Morwood.
7 Euripides, Orestes 1112. Trans. P. Vellacott.
8 For example, Iliad 3.146 [LCL 3.121].
9 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.45 and passim.
10 Sappho, fragment 23; Euripides, Helen 1225. Down the centuries, heroes have been golden ever since. The Romans, masters of artifice that they were, even wore blond wigs – fashionable and a statement of their heroic credentials.
11 Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy 14.39–70. Trans. A.S. Way.
12 Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.138–252.
13 Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Fourteenth.
14 The Egyptians were obsessed with ‘beauty’: see Manniche (1999) on evidence for their expertise in cosmetics and other beauty-aids. There is also a love-poem, from the Papyrus Chester Beatty 1, dated c. 1450–1500 BC, which lingers over the components of a woman’s beauty: see trans. by M. Lichtheim (1976) Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 2, 182–5. Thank you to Nicole Doueck for her help.
15 There is a hybrid word in Ancient Greek, ‘kalokagathia’ which translates directly as ‘beautiful goodness’ or ‘the joint nobility of appearance and conduct’ – kalos means beautiful and agathos, good. It was thought by many that the two were inextricably linked. Men (the Greeks fought shy of applying the notion of kalokagathia to women) were good because they were beautiful – a perfect face was simply the patina of a perfect spirit. In the fairytale world of Snow White and Cinderella, too, absolute beauty indicates absolute virtue. Kharis, Helen’s beauty, also demonstrates sexual maturity and sexual potency. Herodotus tells us of an Olympic victor called Philippus of Croton who was revered by the people of (non-Greek) Egesta as a hero purely because of his physical perfection. The town erected a hero’s shrine on his tomb and his heroic cult continued for generations (Herodotus 5.47). In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades – the lubricious renegade who for a time sided with Athens’ arch-enemies, the Spartans – holds up Socrates (who was famously ugly) as a noted exception to the kalokagathia rule. And although the philosopher shifted his ideas during his life, in his earlier works, Plato seems to see beauty as an outward sign of virtue. Other thinkers doggedly kept alive the ‘beauty equals goodness’ theme. In AD 260, Plotinus, a man with a Latin name who seems to have been born in Egypt and who wrote in Greek, concluded in his best-known work, On Beauty, that to agathon was the ultimate form of to kalon. But Helen, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, worried him. In another treatise, On Intelligible Beauty, he asks: ‘From what source, then, did the beauty of Helen whom men fought for shine out, or that of all women like Aphrodite in beauty?’ Plotinus, On Beauty (Ennead 1.6) and On Intelligible Beauty (Ennead 5.8). Trans. A.H. Armstrong.
16 In Neoplatonic thought, from the 5th century AD, Helen’s beauty was interpreted as representing the beauty of the cosmos – a beauty that draws souls into a warring world. See Proclus, Commentary on the Republic.
17 Both Herodotus and Aristotle noted with interest that in a number of ancient cultures beauty or fineness of form justified political authority. Aristotle, Politics 1290b5. Trans. S. Everson: ‘a government in which offices were given according to stature, as is said to be the case in Ethiopia, or according to beauty, would be an oligarchy; for the number of tall or good-looking men is small’. In Bion’s Ethiopian History, we are told that the Ethiopians choose the most handsome men to be kings. Cf. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.566c. See also Herodotus: ‘These Ethiopians … are said to be the tallest and fairest of all men … they deem worthy to be their king that townsman whom they judge to be the tallest and to have strength proportioned to his stature.’ Herodotus 3.20. Trans. A.D. Godley.
18 Gorgias was considered one of the finest speakers of his day and was said to have won plaudits in Olympia at the Olympic Games, where his audience would have been closer to 20,000 as well as in his homeland of Sicily. See Plato, Gorgias 458c for an indication of Gorgias’ popularity in the ancient world.
19 I remember shivering outside the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall in London, with a queue of other hopefuls, waiting to get returned tickets for the sell-out discussion, ‘What is Beauty?’ in 2004. We were a mixed bunch, artists and academics, tourists and lawyers, young men who looked as if they worked in advertising, young mothers who looked tired. In an age when beautiful things and beautiful people can be swiftly and easily manufactured, we still seem to want to believe that beauty itself has an abstract quality. The programme leaflet promised a lively exploration of the subject. Why does beauty have power? Can the essence of beauty ever be defined? What, indeed, is beauty? The question appears eternally fascinating.
20 Athenaeus, writing in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, reports such contests in his Deipnosophists at 13.565ff and 13.609ff, the latter a male beauty contest recorded by Theophrastus.
21 Agones: see p. 73.
22 Hawley (1998), 53, n. 7 lists a number of ancient sources on beauty contests held at Tenedos and Lesbos.
23 See Spivey (1996), 37, illustration no. 16: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, no. F4221.
24 When describing the education of Athenian girls, Aristophanes articulates beauty as a defining quality of the complete young woman. See Calame (1997), 197, on Aristo-phanes, Lysistrata 641–7.
25 Scholiast on Theocritus’ Idylls 18.22–5, 39–40.
26 This is of course a tradition that continues; in Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, a poem from the 13th century AD, Helen is also cited as the measure of all beauty.
27 Reference from M.E. Waithe (1992), History of Women Philosophers, Vol, 1: Ancient Women Philosophers 600 BC–500 AD: 198, citing Mozans, a pseudonym for J.A. Zahm (1913), Woman in Science, 197–9 (New York: Appleton).
28 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.554c.
29 See Hawley (1998), 38; cf. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.565.
30 See, for example, Cypria, fragment 1; Iliad 24.28–30 [LCL 24.29–30]; and Ovid, Hero-ides 16.51–88. See Gantz (1993), 567–71 for fuller literary and artistic sources.
31 Like Paris, Helen will be ‘unmanned’ by lust. Paris’ mother Hecuba spits out at Helen in Euripides’ play Trojan Women: ‘My son was handsome beyond all other men. You looked at him and sense went Cyprian at the sight.’ Euripides, Trojan Women 991–2. Trans. M. Gumpert (2002), 79.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BEARING GIFTS
1 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 5.18: ‘Beauty he declared to be a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.’ Trans. R.D. Hicks.
2 A sculpture known as ‘The Ephebe of Antikythera’ – perhaps the work of Kleon of Sicyon or Euphranor.
3 Paris’ preparations for combat take up several lines, compared to a terse two lines for Menelaus’ own military toilette: ‘magnificent Paris, fair-haired Helen’s consort. First he wrapped his legs with well-made greaves,/ fastened behind the heels with silver ankle-clasps,/ next he strapped a breastplate round his chest, his brother Lycaon’s that fitted him so well./ Then over his shoulder Paris slung his sword,/ the fine bronze blade with its silver-studded hilt,/ and then the shield-strap and his sturdy, massive shield and over his powerful head he set a well-forged helmet,/the horsehair crest atop it tossing, bristling terror …’. Iliad 3.385–94 [LCL 3.239–37].
4 Those who knew of, or shared, the views of authors such as Herodotus, see Chapter 23.
5 See Hyginus, Fables 91; also Pindar, Paean 8a. The story was also the basis of the prologue to Sophocles’ lost play, Alexandros.
6 Iliad 3.16–18 [LCL 3.15–17].
7 Dares, The Fall of Troy: a History, 12. Trans. R.M. Frazer, Jr.
8 O Polemos tis Troados: a Byzantine Iliad (c. 14th century AD). Trans. Myrto Hatzaki. Thanks to Dr Hatzaki for use of the translation.
9 Through a character called Nereus.
10 Odes 1.19–24, in T. Creech (1684) The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace: Done into English. London.
11 Hittite gods are shown with their hair twisted into a ponytail and topped with a large conical cap.
12 See Hoffner (2003) and Macqueen (1975), 101.
13 We know from faunal remains that wolves, bears, leopards and panthers were hunted down by Bronze Age aristocrats in the forests of north-west Anatolia.
14 Latacz (2004), 28.
15 Cypria, fragment 1.
16 Iliad 3.44–5 [LCL 3.39].
17 Whose descendants Romulus and Remus would then go on to found Rome.
18 Cypria, fragment 10.
19 Knossos tablet Ld 573.
20 See, for example, Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, on ‘Helen, wife of Menelaus’. Boccaccio continues to describe the story as love at first sight: ‘There he fell in love with Helen as soon as he saw her resplendent in celestial beauty, wanton in royal elegance, and desirous of being admired.’ See G.A. Guarino (1964), whose translation this is.
21 Cypria, fragment 1.
22 For a useful window onto the history of the relationship between the Hittites and Wilusa see the Alakšandu Treaty (CTH 76: there are numerous tablet fragments).
23 Genesis 23:3 and II Kings 7:6. See also Bryce (1998), 389–91.
24 For an overview of Hittite climate and geography, see Hoffner (2003).
25 Some from other centres of Hittite power: Tabigga in the Tokat province, Shapinuwa in the Corum province and Sarissa in the Sivas province.
26 M. Riemschneider (1954) Die Welt der Hethiter (Stuttgart: Kilpper), 93f.
27 Writing arrived, in the shape of cuneiform, in Anatolia in the early 2nd millennium BC.
28 See Bryce (2003).
29 EA 7:71–2 and EA 7:64–70: see Moran (1992). In this paragraph and the previous I have relied heavily on Bryce (2003). Once again, I owe him many thanks for being so helpful with this project.
30 Cypria fragment 1. Apollodorus in Epitome 3.3 reports that Menelaus entertained Paris for nine days, before leaving for his grandfather’s funeral on the tenth day.
31 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 67.7. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
32 Herodotus 2.113–19.
33 Dio Chrysostom, the Eleventh or Trojan Discourse. Trans. J.W. Cohoon.
34 The whole story is told in Herodotus 2.112ff.
35 For example, EA 4:47–50 after Moran (1992).
36 In the reign of Tudhaliya (IV).
37 See Bryce (1998), 345 (RS 17.159 [PRU IV 126] 1–10).
38 See Bryce (1998), 344–7.
39 Trans. A.M. Miller (1996), 45.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ALEXANDER HELENAM RAPUIT
1 Duffy (2002). Reproduced by kind permission of the author.
2 Paris is also called Alexander by Homer and known by both names thereafter. Why did Homer do this? One possibility is that he is conflating historical reality with local Anatolian myth – and therefore gives his Trojan prince the names of heroes from both.
3 Cypria, fragment 1.
4 Apollodorus, Epitome 3. Trans. J.G. Frazer.
5 Ovid, Heroides 16 and 17. Trans. H. Isbell. In Dryden’s ‘Introductory Argument’ to his translation of Helen’s letter to Paris he opines: ‘The whole Letter showing the extream artifice of Woman-kind’. Dryden, Poetical Works, 514 (Oxford Standard Authors), cited in R. Trickett, ‘The Heroides and English Augustans’, in Martindale (1988), 193.
6 Apollodorus, Epitome 3.3. Trans. J.G. Frazer.
7 Site visits 1985–2005.
8 Paris, Louvre OA 1839.
9 The artist is thought to be Gubbio: Paris, Louvre OA 1849.
10 Limoges, dated to the 16th century. Paris, Louvre OA 2044.
11 Paris, Louvre OA 7339.
12 See Iliad 24.33 [LCL 24.28] on the ‘ate’ of Paris, and Odyssey 4.293 [LCL 4.261], where Helen refers to her own ‘abandonment’. See also Lindsay (1974), 28.
13 Herodotus 2.120.
14 Croally (1994), 95.
15 Iliad 14.209–25 [LCL 14.170–83].
16 Iliad 3.62 [LCL 3.53].
17 Iliad 6.415 [LCL 6.350].
18 A term sometimes used to describe the consort of a goddess.
19 I was drawn to this idea by the work of Bella Vivante.
20 Alexander Helenam Rapuit is Isidore of Seville’s entry explaining Helen’s importance to his universal theory (compiled 7th century AD).
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Female of the Species Is More Deadly Than the Male
1 This fragment was found in Egypt in 1906, and published in 1914 by Grenfell and Hunt. The translation used here is by Josephine Balmer, from (1984) Sappho: Poems and Fragments (London: Brilliance Books), reissued (1992) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe). Reproduced with permission. It appears in Margaret Reynolds (2003) The Sappho History (Palgrave: Macmillan), 6–7.
2 The ‘Sappho debate’ looks set to run and run. Some argue that she was a construct, invented to create a genre of ‘female’ poetry. For a taste of the arguments that she might be fictitious, see Prins (1999), 8.
3 Aelian, fragment 190. Trans. N.G. Wilson.
4 Plato, Phaedrus 235bc. Trans. M. Williamson (1995), 12.
5 Palatine Anthology 9.506; testimonia 60 in Sappho, trans. D.A. Campbell in Greek Lyric.
6 The papyri in question are the property of the Egypt Exploration Society and housed in the Sackler Library in Oxford, stored in paper folders or between glass sheets. They continue to be studied and more are published each year, but it will be several generations before the work of processing them is complete. Fragment 16 (known by its reference number of P.Oxy.1233) is kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
7 Williamson (1995), 55.
8 See Pomeroy (2002), 46–8 on polyandry and ancient sources for its practice by Spartans.
9 Plutarch, Lycurgus 15.6–7.
10 Colluthus’ work was written in the reign of the Emperor Anastasius I (ad 491–518).
11 Colluthus, Rape of Helen 314; 254; 393–4. Trans. A.W. Mair.
12 See Bate (1986), 19, for a more extensive list.
13 Illustration to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Cambridge, Trinity Hall MS 12, folio 69 r: see Baswell and Taylor (1988), 297. On the following page of the same manuscript, Agamemnon carries his daughter Iphigeneia’s head on a plate.
14 See Peter Green’s excellent ‘Heroic Hype, New Style: Hollywood Pitted Against Homer’, in Arion 12.1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 171–87.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Helen the Whore
1 Clement of Alexandria, Paidogogos – The Instructor 3.2: ‘Against Embellishing the Body’. Trans. W. Wilson. Earlier, in a section entitled ‘Against Excessive Fondness for Jewels and Gold Ornaments’ (2.13), the author refers to women who richly adorn themselves without being truly beautiful, as ‘Helens’. Clement was a Greek theologian, one of the founding fathers of Christian literature. He died c.AD 215.
2 The full title is Ylias Daretis Phrygii; for ease of reference, it will be referred to here as Trojan War.
3 Trojan War 4.189. Joseph based his account on Dares’ The Fall of Troy. In chapter 12, Dares also describes her cruribus optimis. Thanks to Neil Wright for his help with this and other passages.
4 Clement of Alexandria in the Paidogogos dealt in some detail with Helen’s affair and disgrace: ‘For the mind is carried away by pleasure; and the unsullied principle of reason, when not instructed by the Word, slides down into licentiousness, and gets a fall as the due reward of its transgression. An example of this are the angels, who renounced the beauty of God for a beauty which fades, and so fell from heaven to earth.’ Chapter 2. Trans. W. Wilson.
5 And Joseph goes further, slicing Helen open to investigate her heart, lungs, spleen and ‘lustful’ liver: ‘But the itch in her sensitive liver goads her on more lasciviously than it should, destroying the merits of her deserved fame and perverting the praise due to her inborn love. This liver is a monster that cannot be overcome by any voracious vulture, rolling stone, whirling wheel or receding water; when her lust, well slaked and cooling, seems dead and buried, then the old fires breathe afresh in its fertile tissues. So a single part totally sinks Helen, and rouses the very world to disaster as kingdoms clash in war.’ Trojan War 4.193 ff. Trans. Neil Wright.
6 Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War 3.330–8. Trans A.K. Bate. The translation does depend on one’s interpretation of incumbens, which supports either the notion of Helen being ‘on top’ or of her pressing into Paris’ body.
7 De Lille was born at Lille c.AD 1120.
8 Alan de Lille, The Plaint of Nature 135 and 71. Trans. J.J. Sheridan. See also 217.
9 Payer (1984), 22.
10 Brundage (1993), 87.
11 See Baswell and Taylor (1988), 306.
12 From Thomas Proctor’s A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), in Rollins (1926), 81.
13 Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus 161.
14 Helen’s beauty by definition was thought to make her unchaste. As Thomas Heywood would write in his Troia Britannica of 1609: ‘Beauty and Chastity at variance are, / Tis hard to finde one Woman chast and faire …’
15 Ovid, Art of Love 359–72. Trans. J.H. Mozley.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Pain of Aphrodite
1 Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis 544–51. Trans. R.E. Meagher (2002), 28. Euripides describes the white heat of engagement with Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
2 Cypria, fragment 4. Trans. M. Davies (1989).
3 Colluthus, The Rape of Helen 155–8. Trans. A.W. Mair.
4 Iliad 3.461–71 [LCL 3.400–7].
5 See the quotation that opens this chapter.
6 See B. Geoffroy-Schneiter (2003) Greek Beauty (New York: Assouline), 5.
7 Hesiod, Theogony 190–206.
8 Pausanias 7.23.1–3.
9 Ovid, Heroides 16.123–5. Trans. G. Showerman.
10 Ovid, Heroides 16. (excerpts) Trans. G. Showerman.
11 Propertius, Elegies 2.15.13–14. Trans. G.P. Goold.
12 For a full list of ancient sources that deal with this aspect of eros see Carson (1986), 148.
13 Eros was also thought to love beauty: ‘For it is a universal truth that no one has escaped or will escape Eros as long as there be beauty and eyes to see it.’ Longus, Pastorals of Daphnis and Chloe (2nd–3rd century AD).
14 Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.12.
15 Hesiod, Theogony 121.911.
16 Vernant (1991), 101, translating a fragment of Alcman.
17 Aphrodite is often found in the natural landscape. In Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon 741, Helen is a ‘heart-eating flower of love’.
18 Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus: see Chapter 43.
19 Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 4. Trans. D.M. MacDowell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Sea’s Foaming Lanes
1 Iliad 3.54–7 [LCL 3.46–9].
2 Colluthus, Rape of Helen 328ff. Trans. A.W. Mair.
3 Iliad 3.516–28 [LCL 3.441–50].
4 Helen is shown on coins from Gythion as a tree between the Dioscuri: Lindsay (1974), 221, and n. 16, citing Chapouthier (1935), 149.
5 See Roscher (1884), 1950–1, on Helen.
6 Apollodorus, Epitome 3.3–4.
7 The nearby chamber tombs at Mavrovouni were used by the Germans as bunkers during the Second World War.
8 Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques INV. 20268.
9 Animal-skins would have played an integral part in currency since humans started to trade with each other, so it is little surprise that one precursor of metal coinage, talents, are ox-hide shaped blocks of bronze, some the size of small dogs.
10 Latacz (2004), 45.
11 A full list of destinations can be found in Odyssey 4.80ff.
12 A late scholiast was said to have given her star the name Ourania – see Lindsay (1974), 211, and the scholiast on Statius, Thebaid 7.92, for the notion of Helen as a star.
13 See, for example, R.A. Goldthwaite (1993) Wealth and the Demand for Art 1300–1600 (Baltimore).
14 Dares, The Fall of Troy 10.
15 Cf. Helen on Etruscan tombs; see p. 11 (Introduction).
16 National Gallery, L667.
17 Site visit in 2003.
18 British Museum, ANE E29793 and E29785. For more information on the Amarna tablets, see Moran (1992).
19 Discovery close to the Mediterranean Turkish coast opposite the Greek island of Megisti.
20 An alternative dating system for the Aegean Bronze Age is summarised in Warren and Hankey (1989).
21 Cline (1994), xviii. Michael Wedde has pointed out to me that the fastest route to Egypt – hooking on to the north wind – might depart from Crete, head due south with a landfall at Libya and then on east to the Nile Delta. The return route could travel up the Syro-Palestinian coast utilising light winds blowing off the coast in the early evening light to travel northwards under sail. My thanks for his help with this passage.
22 Herodotus 2.117, citing Cypria fragment. Lloyd (1988) in his commentary on this passage, notes that other testimonia on the Cypria contradict Herodotus’ report, claiming instead that Paris stopped off at Cyprus and Phoenicia on the way to Troy; cf. Apollodorus, Epitome 3, 1ff.
23 Iliad 6.341–6 [LCL 6.289–92].
24 On Linear B, see, for example, Ae 303: Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 166. See also Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 409–10 on the subject of foreign women captives and slaves. On Hittite sources, see Bryce (2002), 51–5, referencing, for example, KUB XIII 4, on appropriate punishments for slaves in the Hittite world.
25 Once again, only fragments of Stesichorus exist. His ideas and poetry resurface in the works of Plato and Euripides among others.
26 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen 64; Plato, Phaedrus 243a; Pausanias 3.19.11.
27 See West (1975); 7 and n. 10.
28 Herodotus, 2.112.
29 See Visser (1938) for further discussion of Helen’s cult in Egypt.
30 A fragment of Hekataios also has Helen in Egypt: FrGrH1, F308, 309.
31 Herodotus 2.113–20. Trans. A. de Sélincourt.
32 Minoan-style frescoes have recently been identified in Egypt.
33 Minoan hegemony had allowed for close trade relations between Eastern Mediterranean countries but it is in the 13th century BC that we find strong, regular trade links across a comprehensive sweep of the Eastern Mediterranean.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
East Is East and West Is West
1 Catullus 68.87ff. Trans. F.W. Cornish.
2 In the Roman period, a lump of stone was shaped to represent the omphalos and displayed at Delphi. It is still in the Delphi Museum.
3 Helen was present at Delphi on a frieze decorating the Siphnian treasury (carved perhaps in the 6th century BC). In Greek folklore Menelaus and Odysseus visited Delphi to ask if they should travel to Troy. The oracle advised that they first had to offer to Athena Pronaia a necklace which Aphrodite had once given to Helen. There does seem to have been Late Bronze Age cultic activity at Delphi – 175 Mycenaean terracotta female figurines were found there at the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia.
4 Pausanias 10.12.2. Trans. W.H.S. Jones.
5 Thank you to Phiroze Vasunia for assistance on this point.
6 Hall (1996) in her introduction to her edition of Aeschylus’ play The Persians, outlines how the performance of this play has been deployed for political ends on many other occasions.
7 P.Oxy.3965.
8 See Erskine (2001), 61–92, on the conflation of Persians and Trojans in fifth-century Athenian thought.
9 Herodotus 1.5 and 1.4. Trans. A.D. Godley.
10 Herodotus 6.32 and 6.31.
11 In the geographical area of Caria.
12 See McQueen (2000), vii.
13 Herodotus clearly had a showman’s instinct. The historian is supposed to have given public recitations of his work – a good performance would merit a donation. He was one of the intellectual buskers of the ancient world. The story goes that Thucydides went to one of his recitals at Olympia and was moved to tears. But if there was a schoolboy crush, it did not last long, and the younger historian later denounced the elder (by implication) as a pedlar of tall tales.
14 The 5th-century BC Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places claims of the balmy conditions of Asia Minor that: ‘Courage, endurance, industry and high spirit could not arise in such conditions either among the natives or among immigrants’(12).
15 Euripides, Trojan Women 993–7. Trans. M. Hadas and J.H. McLean.
16 Euripides, Helen 926ff. Trans R. Lattimore.
17 See Hall (1996), 10, and for a slightly alternative view, Erskine (2001), 70–2 and 79–92 on Trojans and Persians in fifth-century iconography.
18 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen 67–9. Trans. L. van Hook.
19 Seneca, Troade 892–8. Trans. A.J. Boyle.
20 Describing the Carians (the historian Herodotus’ geographical and perhaps genetic ancestors), Hellenistic and Byzantine commentators chose to see as ‘typical’ of the Iliad passages where Greek ‘brain’ wins over Trojan ‘brawn’ and so they proudly promoted Homer as a chauvinist in its original sense of the word, a fanatical supporter of (in this case, Greek) national interests.
21 The story of Troy was continually used for political ends, Byzantine writers promoted it as a demonstration of Greek supremacy and in 1580–1581 the romance poet Torquato Tasso published his Gerusalemme liberata (‘Jerusalem Delivered’), which described Christian crusaders storming Jerusalem. The Scottish classical scholar Thomas Blackwell, in his work An Inquiry Into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), describes the Greek invasion of Troy as ‘a prodigious Rendezvous of the bravest Inhabitants, and Sons of the noblest Families of a free Country, wide and warlike; and engaged in a violent struggle of Passions and Arms, with another of more effeminate Manners’(301): quoted in Williams (1993), 93ff.
22 KUB XIV 3 (CTH 181): see Bryce (1998): 321–4.
23 For full discussion of the designation Ahhiyawa, see Latacz (2004), 121–8.
24 Strabo, Geography 4.169.
25 Tablet KUB 26.91 (Bo 1485).
26 This text, discovered in 1924, has – so some claim – yielded new information; although the author was probably the Greek-speaking king of Ahhiyawa, it can be interpreted as being written in Hittite cuneiform. A king on the Greek mainland may have been sufficiently embroiled in Anatolian affairs to have to communicate in the same language. Material unpublished at time of writing.
27 The conflation of Helen’s story with a natural disaster, the knock-on effect of dust-clouds from an asteroid, is one explanation offered for its drama. Some academics prefer more prosaic reasoning – there are well-researched arguments that the Trojan War was a conflict over fishing rights. But dendrochronological evidence from tree-rings buttresses the natural disaster theory. It is possible that a scandal involving Mycenaean and Trojan royalty was an inflammatory act in a period of increasing instability. Since recorded time, seismic climate changes and ecological disasters have been accompanied by human wars. Changes in food quantity and supply, the annihilation or creation of new paths of communication, and the destruction of settlements are all outcomes that frequently project human groups into states of conflict. There is little reason to think that this period in pre-history was any different. The ancients chose to pin the blame for the war, not onto storms and dust-clouds sent from the heavens, but on Helen. For discussion of cosmic activity in the period, see M. Baillie (2000) Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets. London: Batsford.
28 Aristotle, History of Animals 551a (24).
29 Iliad 9.412.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Fair Troad
1 The poet Rupert Brooke writes one of his last letters home, to Violet Asquith, during the Great War of 1914–18. Keynes (1968), 662.
2 Site visit in 1988.
3 Margaret Adelaide Wilson, ‘Gervais (Killed at the Dardanelles)’, in Reilly (1981) 129.
4 Latacz (2004), 41.
5 Bryce (2005) points out that the three kingdoms of prime importance in western Anatolia were Mira, the Seha River Land and then Wilusa – what we now call Troy.
6 Textual evidence bears witness to curious imports such as a cult-image of a god sent from Ahhiyawa to one of the kings of the Hittites. KUB v. 6 (CTH 570) ii.57–64.
7 Bryce (2002), 5.
8 Greek words and names appear to have been absorbed into the Hittite language, and so were many from Luwian, the language possibly spoken in the Troad. Note, for instance, that the Luwian compound priiamuua means ‘exceptionally courageous’ – are we looking at the root of King Priam’s name? A name thought suitable for great kings? See F. Starke (1997) ‘Troia im Kontext des historisch-politischen und sprachlichen Umfeldes Kleinasiens im 2. Jahrtausend’, in Studia Troica 7: 447–87, esp. 456–8.
9 In Iliad 6.138–282 [LCL 6.119–238] a story is told of the Trojan Glaucus and the Greek Diomedes who meet on the battlefield. Glaucus reveals that his ancestors originally came from Corinth on the Greek mainland, but were then exiled to Anatolia. The reason for this humiliating expulsion from the homeland was the overblown sexual appetite and then rage of a lustful queen called Antea. Antea – originally from the region of Lycia – was infatuated with a beautiful prince of Corinth called Bellerophon, but her advances had been rejected: ‘mad for Bellerophon, the lovely Antea lusted to couple with him, all in secret … she could never seduce the man’s strong will, his seasoned, firm resolve.’ Iliad6.188–90 [LCL 6.160–2]. Antea, addled with frustration, swore that Bellerophon had in fact tried to seduce her and her furious husband engineered Bellerophon’s exile – packing into his luggage secret messages that demanded his execution. Homer’s reference here to folded writing tablets – which have since been found preserved in the anaerobic conditions of the Uluburun shipwreck – is another indication that a number of the stories he tells come not from the illiterate ‘Dark Ages’ but from the Late Bronze Age. The Uluburun examples were made of wood, one still preserving scraps of wax and its ivory hinges. Exiled to Lycia in south-west Anatolia, Bellerophon in fact proves himself a true hero, killing, among other things, the monster the Chimaera and siring a new dynasty on Anatolian soil. Iliad 6.181–252 [LCL 6.154–211]. On ‘dynasty’, see Iliad 6.244–52 [LCL 6.206–11]. One of Bellerophon’s descendants was the Lycian hero fighting for Glaucus. When the two warriors, Lycian and Greek, find their common roots they decide not to fight but to honour each other instead. They seal their newfound relationship in that way so beloved of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Greeks with an exchange of gifts: xenia in action. The two men are not brothers in arms, but find themselves to be brothers in blood. ‘Both fighters sprang from their chariots, clasped each other’s hands and traded pacts of friendship.’ Iliad 6.278–9 [LCL 6.232–3]. The little story of Glaucus and Diomedes is a useful one. It buttresses a stereotype of women as dangerous and untrustworthy. But it also commemorates the fact that the ‘Heroic Age’ was a time and a place of racial exchange – when peoples and individuals moved in both directions across the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, a time when natural harbours such as Be¸sik Bay would have regularly hosted Mycenaean Greeks.
10 Some argue that Homer’s epic derives partly from eastern sources as a result of this kind of interchange. Wandering minstrels in the Troad would have recited cycles, surprisingly similar to those that then turn up 500-odd years later in Homer. Homer’s story itself could owe much to Hittite sources – or at least to Babylonian and Hurrian sources via the Hittite world. One literary work, The Gilgamesh Epic (originally Sumerian), has passages which, if you substituted Homeric for Gilgameshi names, would read like an echo of the other. There are female temptresses – pretty similar to Circe and the Sirens – and Ishtar, whom some equate with Aphrodite and even Helen herself. The Kumarbi Epic Cycle could be understood as having strong parallels with Hesiod.
11 102 were excavated, 35 contained skeletal remains representing 95 individuals. Thanks to Dr Hans Jansen for his help with this matter.
12 A decade after Mehmet the Conqueror sacked Constantinople in AD 1453, the sultan visited Troy. The trip was a piece of well-staged PR. Here the Ottoman ruler declared that by defeating the Greeks he had avenged his Trojan ancestors. See Rose (1998), 411.
13 Herodotus 7.43.
14 Cicero, Pro Archia 24. Trans. N.H. Watts.
15 In 48 BC, Julius Caesar toured the vicinity while in pursuit of his arch-rival Pompey, declaring that: ‘Pergamum [Troy] will rise Roman’. His visit was vividly immortalised by the Roman author Lucan: ‘He walks around a memorable name – burnt-out Troy … now barren woods and trunks with rotting timber have submerged Assaracus’ houses, and, with roots now weary, occupy the temples of the gods, and all of Pergamum is veiled by thickets: even the ruins suffered oblivion.’ Lucan, Civil War 9.964–99. Trans. S.M. Braund.
16 The distance between the city gate and the fortress gate is only about 80 metres.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Topless Towers of Ilium
1 H.D., Helen in Egypt 2.6, in H. Gregory (1961), 242. Reproduced by kind permission of New Directions Publishing, New York. Note that this is Helen in Egypt, not Helen in Troy.
2 See Latacz (2004), 216, n. 4, citing M. Korfmann (1997), ‘TROIA’ – Ausgrabungen 1996, Studia Troica, 7; 1–71.
3 The Archaic Greeks called it Ilion; it then became known as Ilium Novum.
4 See Fitton (1995), 48. This graffito was recorded in the late 17th century.
5 Clarke’s notion was published in London by William Gell in 1804 in a volume called The Troad or The Topography of Troy.
6 Fitton (1995), 59.
7 Schliemann’s archaeological methods might have verged on the vandalistic, but he was in fact the last in a long line of improvident visitors to the site. Others had already, albeit inadvertently, done their best to destroy the Bronze Age remains buried in Hisarlik. Because Troy was such a strategic and (thanks to Homer and the epic cycle) culturally and emotionally significant site, it had been regularly levelled and then re-occupied down the centuries. Greek, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine settlers all cannibalised building materials and spliced through the surviving archaeology while they constructed their own lives.
8 Fitton (1995), 68.
9 Although Schliemann’s conclusions (and excavation technique) were in part flawed, current excavations at the site support his basic assumption that the site of Troy on Hisarlik is both Homer’s Ilios and the Late Bronze Age settlement of Wilusa – a wealthy town and a trading-post at the centre of a number of disputes in the 13th century BC. Developments in current excavations can be tracked on the Project Troia website or in the periodical Studia Troica.
10 Schliemann (1870) ‘Les fouilles de Troie’ in the Levant Herald, 3 June 1870; and see Allen (1999), 131.
11 For debate on the exact conditions of the discovery see Easton (1981) and Traill (1984).
12 For an account of the rediscovery of this hoard in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, see M. Siebler (1994) ‘Eine andere Odyssee: Vom Flak-Bunker zum Puschkin Museum’, in Troia-Geschichte-Grabungen-Kontroversen. Mainz: Antike Welt. See also Easton (1994).
13 Moorehead (1994), 229.
14 Moorehead (1994), 92–5. Schliemann’s diaries and letters are held by the Gennadius Library, Athens.
15 Moorehead (1994), 35.
16 H. Schmidt (1902) Heinrich Schliemann’s Sammlung Trojanischer Altertuemer (Berlin), 232–3.
17 Hoards in Troy such as these do attest the continuous and exceptional wealth of the town – surely garnered through international trade.
18 Work started on the building in 1878.
19 Iliou Melathron itself is a menagerie of styles from across antiquity. Schliemann dug deep into his pockets to realise his domestic dreams and the project cost 439,650 drachmas. On the walls are copies of Pompeiian frescoes painted by a Slovenian artist, Yuri Subic. The mosaic floor incorporates motifs from Troy and Mycenae and the house is protected by solid gates and railings along which a series of stern sphinxes process. It is all a far cry from the mossy half-timbered cottage where Schliemann’s life began. Now the Iliou Melathron is Greece’s leading numismatic museum; how appropriate that the man who worshipped Mammon should inadvertently build the god one of his finest shrines.
20 Digs took place in 1932–8 under the supervision of Carl W. Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, and then were resumed in 1981 at Beşik Tepe by an international team under the supervision of Manfred Korfmann. The work continues to this day, and finds are stored in the Canakkale Museum. Details in A Guide to Troia (1999) by the Director and Staff of the Excavations (Istanbul: Ege Press).
21 Wilusa refers to the kingdom of Troy and would, almost certainly, also have been the name given to the city.
22 Detailed arguments around the issue of the identification of Wilusa as Troy, and of Hisarlik Hill with historical elements within Homer’s epic can be found passim in Latacz (2004); for the designation Wilusa, see particularly 82–3.
23 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 13.186.
24 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional no. 17805: Guido MS, fol. 46; (date c. 1350).
25 Chronique Universelle, dite la Bouquechardière (Universal Chronicle) of Jehan de Courcy. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M214, fol. 84.
26 Scherer (1963), 37, Fig. 37.
27 There is a wonderfully poised painting of Helen by the artist Guido Reni. The huge Reni canvas, painted in the 17th century, hangs in one of the long corridors of the Louvre. The Reni painting has its own, complicated symbolism (much of the composition seems to have been planned with European politics in mind) but it is a good example of an appreciation of Helen’s narrative without the need for a rape at its heart. See Colantuono (1997).
28 Despite the fact that Homer, among others, tells us that chief among Helen’s attendants was the matron Aethra (the aged mother of Theseus, herself abducted by Castor and Pollux when they rescued Helen as a girl from Aphidna).
29 A subject brilliantly discussed by Ruth Bernard Yeazell (2000) Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
30 ‘… which Philaenis and Elephantine later imitated, who carried out further similar licentious acts’. Trans. H. Parker (1992), 92. Philaenis and Elephantine were two of nine writers whose names we have as authors of sex manuals. Philaenis is thought to have lived c. 370 BC, and Elephantine c. 1st century BC: see Parker (1992), 94.
31 S.v. Astyanassa, 4. 261 in Suidae Lexicon, ed. A. Adler, Vol. 1, 393.
32 See Parker (1992) for further discussion of ancient sex manuals.
33 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 403–8.
34 LIMC, no. 191.
35 Manuscript details all from Baswell and Taylor (1988) with backup from Buchthal (1971).
36 Iliad 6.576 [LCL 6.483–5].
37 II Kings 7:6.
38 H.P. and M. Uerpmann (2001) Leben in Troia – Pflanzen und Tierwelt, in: Archiaölogis-ches Landesmuseum Baden-Württemberg et al (eds), Troia – Traum und Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Theiss), 315, especially Fig. 325.
39 CTH 284.
40 For further information, see S. Penner (1998) Schliemanns SchachtgrÄberund und der europÄische Nordosten Studien zur Herkunft der frühmykenischen Streitwagenausstattung [Saarbrücker BeitrÄge zur Altertumskunde 60] (Bonn).
41 For example, the stone grave stele from Shaft Grave V, Grave Circle A, Mycenae, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, NMA 1428.
42 See, for example, Tiryns frescoes; deep bowl krater at Nauplion 14336; vase painting on amphoroid krater, London, BM C357.
43 Thanks to Mike Loades for researching, leading and coordinating the operation and to Robert Hurford, chariot builder and Jonathan Warterer, horse-trainer.
44 See Bryce (2005), chapter 4: ‘The Aegean Neighbours’.
45 Sometimes four; a driver, an archer and two mobile infantry.
46 Iliad 8.76–7 [LCL 8.64–5].
47 Iliad 24.944 [LCL 24.804].
48 There were severe malaria epidemics across the Eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Golden Houses of the East
1 Iliad 2.912–14 [LCL 2.803–4].
2 The picture that emerges from the tablets of the Hittite civilisation is of a powerful entity, made up of a number of states or kingdoms – most of them with a ruling king and queen. Some were controlled directly from Hattusa, some had their own local rulers, others were ‘buffer zones’ – dividing, for example, the Hittite world and the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni (which covered much of northern Mesopotamia, northern Syria and parts of Eastern Anatolia).
3 I have relied heavily here on Bryce (2002) – an essential starting point for an under-standing of the Hittite world.
4 Discussed at length by A. Ünal (1994) ‘The Textual Illustration of the “Jester Scene” on the Sculptures of Alaca Höyük’, in Anatolian Studies 44: 207–18.
5 See A. Goetze (1957) Kulturgeschichte Kleinasiens (Munich: Beck), 94.
6 We also hear some royal women referred to as the SAL LUGAL.GAL (the Great Queen, legal queen).
7 CTH 76.
8 See Latacz (2004), 118.
9 At the very least it should not escape notice that Homer is using names for his characters which are perfectly appropriate to their time and place. On Linear B tablets, 58 names have been found which also appear in Homer, including an Achilles, whose name is inscribed on a tablet from Pylos in a rations list for workers at a festival (Fn 79), and a Hector, who is a ‘slave of the god’ in the Pylos land tenure tablets (for example, Eb 913 and En 74).
10 The ‘Milawata Letter’: CTH 182 (KUB 19.55 and KUB 48.90). The ‘Milawata Letter’ points to intrigue at the Trojan court, detailing a king of Troy (Walmu) who had been deposed and was then to be restored thanks to the agency of the Hittites.
11 Edict of Telipinu: CTH 19.
12 Apology of Hattusili III.9.3.3 (CTH 81).
13 Aphrodite does not appear on Linear B tablets – an absence that some scholars apply to the suggestion that Helen is a proto-Aphrodite figure.
14 Hurrian Hymn to Ishtar, KUB XXIV (CTH 717) i.38–40, adapted by G. Beckman (2000) in ‘Goddess Worship – Ancient and Modern’, in A Wise and Discerning Mind: Essays in Honor of Burke O. Long, ed. S.M. Olyan and R.C. Culley (Providence), 11, from a translation by H. Güterbock (1983) ‘A Hurro-Hittite Hymn to Ishtar’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 103: 156.
15 Stamps still survive: e.g. Stamp Seal of Hittite Queen Puduhepa, in the Corum Museum 1.973.90.
16 RS 17.133.
17 There are no recorded dates for this event – which possibly fell in Urhi-Teshub’s reign c. 1272–1267 BC during the civil war with Hattusili.
18 The daughter of Puduhepa, in the autumn of 1246, was finally dispatched on a journey organised and monitored by her mother to Egypt to marry Rameses II. But here the story peters out: like so many women who formed part of the human traffic between aristocratic courts, Puduhepa’s tardy daughter seems to become just another member of the harem at Fayum. See Bryce (2002), 125.
19 See Bryce (2002), chapter 2: ‘The People and the Law’.
20 Clause 28a, ‘The Laws’.
21 Clause 197, ‘The Laws’.
22 ‘If he brings them to the palace gate [the royal court] and says: “My wife shall not die,” he can spare his wife’s life, but must also spare the lover. Then he may veil her [his wife]. But if he says, “Both of them shall die”, and they “roll the wheel”, the king may have them both killed or he may spare them.’ (Clause 198, ‘The Laws’).
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Fleet Sets Sail
1 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 414–19. Trans. A. Carson.
2 See Cypria, fragment 1.
3 In Dictys’ version of the story, Menelaus sends a diplomatic mission from Crete as soon as he hears the news of Helen’s infidelity in Sparta.
4 Iliad 3.247–69 [LCL 3.205–24] and Apollodorus, Epitome 3.28–9. According to the Cypria, the Greeks send an embassy after an initial attempt at landing and a skirmish on the Trojan shore. According to Herodotus 2.118, envoys were sent after the Greek army landed at Troy, but were met with the intelligence that Helen and the treasure were actually in Egypt, not Troy.
5 Iliad 11.143–65 [LCL 11.122–42].
6 Trans. Beckman (1996), 91–2.
7 Extracted from KBo I 10 + KUB III 72 (CTH 172). Trans. A.L. Oppenheim (1967), Letters from Mesopotamia (Chicago and London), 139–40. Quotation taken from Bryce (1998), 293.
8 See paragraph 1 of the Alakšandu tablet.
9 See Beal (1995), 547.
10 See Gantz (1993), 576–82.
11 In some versions of the story, the fleet has already set sail, and the diplomatic embassy is sent once the Greeks have landed on Trojan soil. This might be the suggestion in the Iliad: see Iliad 3.247–69 [LCL 3.205–24].
12 Iliad 2.265 [LCL 2.227].
13 Iliad 8.331–2 [LCL 8.291–2].
14 Generally presumed to be Clytemnestra’s daughter, although in variant myths she is Helen’s child. In the imagination of some it was Helen’s overpowering allure that brought Iphigeneia her life and that dragged her towards an early death. See also Gantz (1993), 582–8, for a summary of ancient sources for this story.
15 It is in Euripides’ Iphigeneia among the Taurians and Iphigeneia at Aulis that we first find mention of the Achilles ploy. See Gantz (1993) for Euripidean variations.
16 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 259–78 [LCL 225–43]. Trans. A. Shapiro and P. Burian (2003).
17 Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis 1166–70. Trans. P. Vellacott. Production seen at The Gate. J.W. von Goethe, Under the Curse; a new version by Dan Farrelly.
18 Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis 1264–5. Trans. R.E. Meagher.
19 Although in Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Iphigeneia embraces her death as an honour.
20 Iliad 2.573ff [LCL 2.484ff].
21 See E. Visser (1997) Homers Katalog der Schiffe (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner), 746.
22 Summary of discovery in Latacz (2004), 240ff.
23 Godart and Sacconi (2001), 542.
24 Latacz (2004), Fig. 24.
25 See Latacz (2004), 92–100, for fuller discussion.
26 Latacz (2004), 154ff. and 260ff.
27 Letter from the King of Ugarit to the King of Alashia (part of Cyprus): RS 20.238, lines 27–31, from the archive of Ugarit. Published in Ugaritica 5 as no. 24.
28 Thanks to Michael Wedde for his detailed help with this passage and for the intelligence that around 1200 BC Ugarit had a fleet of 150 ships.
29 For a fine, fuller picture, see Morgan (1988), chapters 9–10 and Colour Plate C.
30 Although, as I have pointed out, Troy is in fact very close to Sparta by sea, in the epic imagination this had become a vast distance, as Achilles says (Iliad 1.184–5 [LCL 1.156–7]), when observing he has no personal quarrel with the Trojans and that this is a pre-emptive strike. ‘Look at the endless miles that lie between us … shadowy mountain ranges, seas that surge and thunder.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Helen – Destroyer of Cities
1 Iliad 2.420–3 [LCL 2.354–6].
2 (to loathe, shrink from) and (causing a chilling fear) are also used in association with Helen; see Clader (1976) for further discussion.
3 Iliad 2, passim.
4 Iliad 1.1–2 [LCL 1.1–2].
5 Iliad 1.33–6 [LCL 1.29–31].
6 Iliad 13.830 Trans. J.–P. Vernant (1991), 100.
7 Iliad 13. 959–60 [LCL 13.829–31].
8 For an excellent summary of the aggressive/sexual incarnations of the eastern goddess Ishtar (Aphrodite’s equivalent) see Bryce (2002), 147.
9 And just as desire and death, sex and violence, were, in the minds of the Greeks, two sides to the same coin, two different ways of expressing the same primordial urge, so one could lead to the other. As Plato neatly summed up, ‘there is no cause of battles and wars and civil strifes other than the lusts of the body’. Plato, Phaedrus 66c.
10 Iliad 2.183–90 [LCL 2.157–62].
11 Iliad 3.196ff. [LCL 3.162ff.].
12 Iliad 3.179ff. [LCL 3.149ff.].
13 Iliad 3.185–90 [LCL 3.145–8].
14 See R. Naumann (1971) Architektur Kleinasiens von ihren AnfÄngen bis zum Ende der hethitischen Zeit (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth), 252. Homer describes Troy as boasting ‘eudmetos purgos’ (a well-built tower).
15 Marlowe, Dr Faustus (B-Text) V.i.95.
16 See Korfmann et al. (2004) ‘Was There a Trojan War?’ For detraction of Korfmann’s claims, see D. Hertel and F. Kolb (2003) ‘Troy in Clearer Perspective’, in Anatolian Studies 53: 71–88 and F. Kolb (2004) ‘Troy VI: a Trading Centre and a Commercial City?’, in American Journal of Archaeology 108: 577–614.
17 Korfmann (1993), 27ff.
18 Iliad 16.816ff. [LCL 16.698ff.].
19 See Latacz (2004), 40 and n. 47, and Korfmann (1998).
20 Site visit in 1995.
21 Manchester Museum 1977.1048. In many versions of this popular vase design, the men are so absorbed that Athena has to appear to remind them that a battle has started to rage around them.
22 The campaigning season was typically April to September.
23 Alakšandu Treaty, 20.
24 1997–8.
25 Latacz (2004), 83.
26 Iliad 22.183 [LCL 22.153].
27 For a useful overview, see Korfmann et al. (2004).
28 For alternative dates for Troy VI, see Mountjoy (1999).
29 The use of an earth ‘cushion’ above the bedrock when rebuilding Troy VII after Troy VI may suggest that the Trojans, having experienced severe earthquake damage, attempted to accommodate further seismic activity within their architecture. For further discussion see Mountjoy (1999), 254–6, and Rapp and Gifford (1982), chapter 2.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Death’s Dark Cloud
1 Iliad 16.407–13 [LCL 16.344–50].
2 Iliad 3.516–28 [LCL 3.441–50].
3 Iliad 6.68–70 [LCL 3.58–60].
4 As is shown in Chapter 42, in the medieval period Homer’s wild, muddy blood-bath becomes a tale of morality, prudence and statecraft.
5 Iliad 5.161–4 [LCL 5.145–7] and 5.321–5 [LCL 5.290–3].
6 See Korfmann (1996), 34.
7 Iliad 2.650 [LCL 2.560].
8 A skeleton found in Grave Gamma at Mycenae, indicates that another warrior also survived a cranial investigation.
9 All information from Arnott (1999). Many thanks to Robert Arnott for his help with this project.
10 See Mayor (2003), 41–62 for a discussion of biological warfare in the Heroic Age.
11 Iliad 1.60 [LCL 1.52].
12 Bryce (2005). Text from KBo IV 6 (CTH 380), obv. 10’–15’. Trans. O. Gurney.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A Beautiful Death – Kalos Thanatos
1 Sorley (1922), 82. In the same work are found the lines: ‘The tales, after the port went round! The wondrous wiles of old Odysseus, old Agamemnon and his misuse of his command, and that young chit Paris – who didn’t care a bit for Helen – only to annoy her he did it really …’
2 Ideas discussed elegantly and comprehensively in Vernant (1991).
3 The Spartans were taught to welcome death on the battlefield.
4 In a world in which the life of the community was lived, almost exclusively, in a series of public spaces, public recognition was a raison d’être. As Vernant elucidates: ‘the same words – agathos, esthlos, aretē and timē– can denote high birth, wealth, success, martial courage, and fame. There is no clear distinction among the concepts.’ Vernant (1991), 56.
5 For neolithic examples from Britain see R. Mercer and F. Healy, eds (forthcoming), Hambledon Hill, Dorset, England: Excavation and Survey of a Neolithic Monument Complex and its Surrounding Landscape. English Heritage Archaeological Reports.
6 Sorley (1922), 85.
7 Pelly (2002), 10.
8 Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘Untitled’, in B. Gardner, ed. (1986) Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–18 (London: Methuen), 59–60. Shaw-Stewart was killed in action in 1917. See also Chapter 37 n22.
9 Iliad 18.623–6 [LCL 18.535–8].
10 J.-K. Huysmans wrote of the painting, ‘She stands out against a sinister horizon, drenched in blood, and clad in a dress encrusted with gems like a shrine. Her eyes are wide-open in a catatonic stare. At her feet lie a pile of corpses. She is like an evil goddess who poisons all that approach her.’
11 First site visit February 1995.
12 On all Moreau’s canvases the Spartan queen is strong and sinewy. Preserved in swinging racks along the walls of his old home there are scores of pencil, pen-and-ink and conté sketches of life-models. One woman, long-legged and fit, is the prototype for Helen. Along with the Helens she modelled for, this woman is not like most of the other female figures in the room – limp, naked and available – she is hard-cored.
13 In one painting on the third floor, Helen’s smooth empty oval face is echoed by the pale globe of the moon above her. Inv. No. 58.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Fall of Troy
1 Euripides, Helen 256ff. Trans. D. Kovacs.
2 Iliad 6.407 [LCL 6.344].
3 See Iliad 3.218 [LCL 3.180]; 6.408 [LCL 6.344]; 6.421 [LCL 6.356]; and Odyssey 4.162.
4 Iliad 6.415–16 [LCL 6.351–2].
5 Here is another hero who has died for her, and yet, in his dying, achieves kleos. See Clader (1976) for further discussion.
6 Iliad 24.909–13 [LCL 24.773–5].
7 When Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar and steals into the city to assess the Trojan fortifications, Helen has the wits to recognise him but does not hand him over to her new allies. Instead she bathes the lord of Ithaca and anoints him with oil, swearing that she has had a change of heart and longs to go home. Years later this story is being told back in the Spartan palace, but is trumped by Helen’s attempted betrayal of the Greeks in the Trojan horse.
8 Particularly in Virgil’s version of the story in Aeneid 6.
9 Virgil, Aeneid 6.515–19.
10 This story is told in Odyssey 4.310–24 [LCL 4.277–89].
11 Lesches, via Apollodorus, apparently suggested it was 3,000, but the figure is disputed by scholars: see Gantz (1993), 649 and n. 86.
12 Little Iliad, Fragment 20.
13 BM 1899.2–19.1.
14 From KUB XIII 4, see Bryce (2002), 52.
15 431 –404 BC.
16 Thucydides, 3.67.
17 Thucydides, 5.116.
18 Paraphrase from Tyrone Guthrie’s New York production. Thanks to Michael Wood for his help.
19 Thebes reference TH Gp 164: Godart and Sacconi (2001), 541.
20 Bryce (2002), 105.
21 Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.607–8, pictures Achilles’ disgust at being felled by an arrow – wielded by Paris’ ‘feminine hand’.
22 Paris’ character is reformed, though, by the European dynasties of the medieval and Renaissance periods who traced their ancestry back to the Trojans. Thus we find Proctor in his Gallery of Gallant Inventions remarking how ‘If Hellen had not bin so light; Sir Paris had not died in fight’; see Rollins, ed. (1926).
23 Both Hittite and Judaic texts refer to the practice of a widow marrying her husband’s brother; it is known in the Old Testament as levirate marriage.
24 Hyginus, Fables 240 has Helen killing Deiphobus herself.
25 Virgil, Aeneid 6.494–512. Trans. D. West.
26 Stesichorus, 201 PMG. See Gantz (1993), 651.
27 Little Iliad, fragment 19, EGF.
28 Euripides, Orestes 1286. Trans. M.L. West.
29 The double entendre was certainly not lost on the ancients; come the Roman period, a woman’s genitals are given the name of a sword-sheath, ‘vagina’.
30 Mykonos Museum 2240 (c. 675 BC). LIMC no. 225; see E.C. Keuls (1985) The Reign of the Phallus: sexual politics in ancient Athens (Berkeley and London: University of California Press), 397–9.
31 For a fuller discussion of all examples, see Hedreen (1996).
32 Translation after Clement (1958), 49.
33 Euripides, Andromache 629–30. Trans J.F. Nims in Grene and Lattimore (1958).
34 British Museum, GR 1865.7–12.4.
35 See Pipili (1992), 179–84, esp. 183–4, on 6th-century bronze shield-bands from the Peloponnese seeming to show the recovery of Helen by Menelaus, or else perhaps her abduction by Paris.
36 See French (2002), 16.
37 The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (New York: John Lane, 1915).
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Home to Sparta
1 Gladstone (1858), Vol. 2, 488.
2 Odyssey 4.631–41 [LCL 4.561–9].
3 So far, from the Mycenaean tombs analysed, this seems to be a population with terrible teeth from the early twenties onwards. A forty-year-old weaver (admittedly in dental terms a hazardous occupation), buried at the Armenoi cemetery on Crete some time between 1340 and 1190 BC, has lost twenty-three out of his thirty-two teeth.
4 Euripides, Trojan Women 1046–50. Trans. K. McLeish.
5 Euripides, Trojan Women. Trans. K. McLeish.
6 Agamemnon’s murder is referred to from the 7th century BC onwards. The first certain attestation to its taking place in a bath is to be found in Aeschylus, Oresteia. It is Aeschylus who puts the knife in Clytemnestra’s hand.
7 Odyssey 4.234 [LCL 4.210].
8 Odyssey 4.141 [LCL 4.127].
9 Odyssey 4.90–5 [LCL 4.81–5].
10 See also Euripides, Helen, passim.
11 Herodotus 2.119.3.
12 In 360 BC, Agesilaus, a famous Spartan king, died in Libya at a place called ‘the Harbour of Menelaus’. Menelaus’ harbour is mentioned in Strabo, Geography 17.3.22.
13 Aristodemus, FrGrH 22 F (1a).
14 See Hughes (1989) for a good general study. One Linear B tablet (Pylos tablet Tn 316) has been tentatively interpreted as listing the victims of a human sacrifice along with the gold that was also being offered to the gods. On the Greek mainland, tombs have been excavated that contain skeletons in atypical positions or configurations. At the modest site of Kazarma, where a tholos tomb was excavated in the 1960s; two kneeling skeletons were reported as being found just inside the entrance. These were clearly poor men; they had no grave goods with them, simply a necklace made out of olive and apricot stones. Could they have been slaves or favoured servants who had been killed on the pile of stones at the entrance of the tomb? Slaughtered so they could travel with their lord or lady to the afterlife? Drive for twenty minutes or so from Mycenae, and you will find the confident, hilltop site of Prosymna. Here, in Tomb VII, there is another curious figure from the Late Bronze Age, a skeleton stretched over a pile of stones with a large limestone slab pinning down the bones. In the lower city of Mycenae, in Tomb 15, six individuals who appear to have died or been killed at the same time have been laid one over the other. All data in this note from Hughes (1989).
15 Site visit in 2001.
16 See Sakellarakis and Sapouna-Sakellaraki (1997) for an introduction to the finds around Archanes.
17 We have such exceptional evidence for this dreadful scene only because at the very moment the ritual was being carried out, Crete was rocked by an earthquake. The walls of the sanctuary toppled, crushing those still left alive inside. Perhaps the Minoans believed Poseidon, the earth-shaker, had already sent warning tremors through the land. Perhaps the sacrificial victim, a man in his prime, was being offered up as a desperate attempt to appease the fickle, awful gods? Poseidon appears on the Linear B tablets: see Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 126, for examples attested at Knossos and Pylos, e.g. Un 718.
18 Odyssey 4.146–7 [LCL 4.130–2].
19 Barber (1994).
20 Paris was buried alongside his first wife Oenone according to Strabo, Geography 13.1.33, written some time under the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. Estimated dating of the Geography ranges from c. 7bc to c.AD 18.
21 An eagle flies by with a goose clutched in its talons as foretelling Odysseus’ triumphal reclaim of his wife Penelope and his palace in Ithaca.
22 Euripides, Orestes 62–6. Trans. D. Kovacs.
23 See Odyssey 4 for a description of Helen and Menelaus’ Spartan palace.
24 See Bergen (1981) for a discussion of Helen’s use of drugs defining the duality of her character.
25 Odyssey 4.220–6 [LCL 4.220–6]. Trans. E.V. Rieu.
26 Thanks to Professor Bradley C. Lenz for information that, given Helen’s and the Mycenaeans’ Egyptian connections, this drug could also have been mandragora, which, when mixed with wine, produces a trance-like state.
27 Hughes-Brock (1998), 251. There were also beads in the shape of figure-of-eight shields.
28 A seal-stone from Ipsopata is inscribed with the image of a woman who seems to be rising up out of the earth, helped by a young man – an epiphany brought on by narcotic use? Thomas (1938–9).
29 Opium is referred to in a Theban papyrus of 1552 BC.
30 See Arnott (2005b).
31 Even Papaver rhoeas L., the red poppy, which would have grown more commonly on the mainland (and Crete), acts as a mild sedative.
32 Odyssey 4.341–342.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Death of a Queen
1 Euripides, Orestes 1130–1310. Trans. P. Vellacott. The Mycenae story was relocated to Argos by Athenian playwrights following Athens’ alliance with Argos in the 5th century BC.
2 Euripides, Orestes 1639–43. Trans. P. Vellacott.
3 Euripides, Orestes 1683–90. Trans. P. Vellacott. The chorus has a three-line closing statement, but other than that, these are the last words of the play. Vellacott suggests in his introduction that perhaps Euripides, in ‘his last personal address to his fellow-citizens’ (1972: 68), before he leaves Athens for Macedon at the end of his career, is keen to set straight the ambiguity with which he has always imbued his representations of Helen, by depicting her here as a wholly sympathetic character – ultimately deified at the will of her father, Zeus.
4 Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.232. Trans. F.J. Miller.
5 Pausanias 3.19.9 on the story of Helen’s hanging by a vengeful Polyxo.
6 For three hundred years or so before the Trojan Wars, the elite on the Greek mainland had been burying their dead with ever more ostentation. Many tholos tombs are first of all intricately furnished and then abandoned, while chamber tombs boast rich offerings. It was becoming de rigueur to give your kin or your rulers a fabulous send-off, to make that transition between this world and the afterlife as showy as possible. By the end of the 14th century it seems that belts were tightened a little; goods were kept for the living rather than the dead. Thanks to Sofia Voutsaki for her help with this section.
7 Both so-called; we do not know the names of the kings and queens who were in fact buried here.
8 For example, the Turkish governor Veli Pasha sacked the Tomb of Clytemnestra, an action which made him an extremely wealthy man overnight. Wace (1964) points out that the tomb had probably been plundered before Veli got to it, but that Veli Pasha almost certainly destroyed the dome.
9 And although a wealth of skeletal material has been discovered, this has often been sexed incorrectly, or not sexed at all. It can be very difficult to tell which artefacts belong to whom.
10 See Persson (1931), 16, on the discovery of a carnelian seal-stone found by the left wrist of a queen.
11 Tholos D, Archanes, Crete, dated to LHIIIA2 (c. 1350 BC). See account by Sakellerakis and Sapouna-Sakellaraki (1997). For gold diadem reference: 186. There are tholoi at Phourni (see Appendix One).
12 As previous note.
13 Cavanagh and Mee (1998), 109.
14 Terracotta larnakes that show these scenes are held by the Thebes Museum: see also Cavanagh and Mee (1995), 45–61; and Immerwahr (1995), 109–21.
15 Children could be here for a number of reasons. Were these sons or daughters? Was the child apotropaic? Could the youngster somehow be gathering life-experience from the corpse before it was interred or burned? Were children symbols of continuity and renewal?
16 The tomb of Clytemnestra was excavated by Sophia Schliemann.
17 Wace (1921–3).
18 Tholos D at Archanes.
19 Sakellarakis and Sapouna-Sakellaraki (1997), 186.
20 Visit in May 2004.
21 Thanks to Dr Freisenbruch. Excavation report from Persson (1931), 13–14.
22 See Demakopoulou (1990), 122. Tomb dates LHIIB-LHIIIA1.
23 These were kylikes.
24 See the lyre-player on one long side of the Agia Triada Sarcophagus (also known as Ayia Triadha and Hagia Triada). Illustrations available in Immerwahr (1990), Plates 50–3.
25 In one tomb at Asine, a couple, both around forty years old, were curled around each other. The woman’s skull lies partially over the man’s: see Hughes (1989), 43. Could this be a ritual murder or suicide? A loyal wife (or even a loyal husband) following her or his partner to death?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE AGE OF HEROES ENDS
1 Barkan (2000), 106, translating Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women.
2 See Forsdyke (1956) 62ff.: Herodotus estimated the date at c. 1250: omitting Douris’ ‘extravagant assumption’ of 1334 BC, the average of ancient calculations of the date for the Trojan War was 1203 BC.
3 Thanks to Dr Spyros B. Pavlides for assistance with instrumental seismological data for the Aegean; see also Ambraseys (1996) on the seismicity of Greece between the 5th century BC and 18th century AD.
4 See Nur (1998), 144, on the effect of construction methods on fatalities in an earthquake: compare the earthquake in Armenia in 1993, with a magnitude of 6.8, which killed 10,000 people, with the Californian earthquake in 1989, measuring M.7.0, which resulted in the deaths of 50 people.
5 See Papadopoulos (1996).
6 Thanks to Tim Kirby.
7 Thanks to Ken Wardle, Diana Wardle and Elizabeth French.
8 The figurines of ‘Smiting’ gods and ‘Storm-gods’ have distinct eastern characteristics – and either individually or as an iconographic influence could have been imported from, for example, Syria. See Houston-Smith (1962); also D. Collon (1972), ‘The Smiting God: A Study of a Bronze in the Pomerance Collection in New York’, in Levant 4: 111–34; J.V. Canby (1969), ‘Some Hittite Figurines in the Aegean’, in Hesperia 38: 141–9.
9 Iliad 2.661 [LCL 2.570].
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
‘Fragrant Treasuries’
1 H.D., Helen in Egypt, 1.8 (Palinode), in Gregory (1961), 16: Achilles to Helen.
2 Pausanias 2.32.7–8.
3 Notes taken during a first site visit in 1988.
4 Pausanias 2.35.
5 Iliad 2.650 [LCL 2.650].
6 Pausanias 2.35.5–8 and 2.34.2.
7 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen, 10.63.
8 Notes made on 10 November 2003 at a lecture organised by the Greek Archaeological Committee (UK) and given by the excavator, Professor Alexander Mazarakis-Ainian, in the Great Hall, King’s College London.
9 See Archaeological Reports 2002–3: 75–6 for current published evidence. A forthcoming publication will appear as ‘Inside the Adyton of a Greek Temple: Excavations on Kythnos (Cyclades)’, in Architecture and Archaeology in the Cyclades: Colloquium in honour of J.J. Coulton, Oxford University, Lincoln College. Thanks to Professor Mazarakis-Ainian for information on this point.
10 Pindar, Olympian Ode 7.32. Thanks to Simon Hornblower.
11 The Spartan–Arcadian incursions continued into the 4th century BC. See Wide (1893) and Cartledge (1987), 328–9 for Aegesilaus’ campaign in Egypt in the 360s.
12 The Egyptian Helen counted the influential (Greek) Ptolemaic dynasty among her admirers.
13 Herodotus 2.212.
14 F.T. Griffiths (1979), 88, says that the cult of Helen, particularly the chaste Helen, was popular in Egypt, and cites Herodotus 2.112 as one reference, with his identification of the shrine of ‘Foreign Aphrodite’ as Helen’s; but there is also Plutarch, Moralia 857b, who said that Helen and Menelaus were much revered among the Egyptians. In thePannychis (fragment 227 Pf.) Callimachus (a Hellenistic poet who was the royal librarian in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC) celebrates her as a goddess together with her brothers the Dioscuri (Diegesis 10.7). See also Hunter (1996); Visser (1938), 19–20 and Wide (1893), 345.
15 The gold dish was bought by the museum in 1908. It has no clear provenance.
16 The inscription was made on 9 January in AD 58 (the fifth year of the reign of Nero) by a certain Ploutas. Perdrizet (1936), 5–10 and Plate 1.
17 Chapouthier (1935).
18 Rosivach (1994), 28.
19 Lycophron, Alexandra 852–5.
20 ‘A Plea for Christians’: W.R. Schoedel, ed. and trans. (1972) Athenagoras: Legatio and De Resurrectione (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
21 October 2004.
22 This letter, when prefixed by the asper C (which denotes rough breathing) becomes in ancient Greek ‘He’.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Daughter of the Ocean
1 Euripides, Orestes 1629–43, 1673–4. Trans. P. Vellacott.
2 Anthropomorphic idols in fertility cults were regularly taken out of shrines and sanctuaries by temple-officials to be washed and refreshed in streams and springs; the water was believed to renew their purity and virginity.
3 Hesiod, Fragment 24 in Merkelbach and West (1967). Nemesis too – another maternal candidate – started her mythological life as a sea-nymph.
4 Pausanias 2.2.3.
5 Pausanias 2.2.3.
6 The Romans destroyed the town in 146 BC, only to build it up again in 44 BC.
7 See Williams (1986), 21, for the suggestion that sex did not take place in the temple sanctuary itself.
8 Pindar, fragment 107, 11.18ff.
9 Strabo, Geography 8.6.20.
10 See Williams (1986), 18.
11 The Christians were only too aware of the hold Aphrodite had over men’s imaginations and actively engaged in a struggle to wrest the faithful’s focus away from carnal to spiritual love. Contrary to popular opinion, the Christians did not deny Eros’ power; they recognised it, as Sophocles, Euripides and other dramatists did, as ‘a killer’. In hisLetter to the Corinthians, Paul, who had lived for two years in Corinth with the Temple of Aphrodite towering above him, was not talking about hell-fire when he declared: ‘It is better to marry than to burn with vain desire’ (I Corinthians 7.9). He was using Greek symbolism and imagery.
12 For an interesting discussion of the root of Helen’s name as attested on two early 6th-century kraters see Skutsch (1987), 190; also R. Arena (1967), Le inscrizione Corinzie su vasi. Accad. Dei Lincei, series 8 xiii 2 (Rome): nos. 15 and 29.
13 Some modern Greeks still offer up imprecations to? (and occasionally on Lesbos this is the name given to a rainbow), although there may be a conflation here with St Helena, Constantine’s mother. See Skutsch (1987), 92.
14 Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnika 265.5. A grammarian living in Constantinople at this time, Stephanus of Byzantium was probably a contemporary of the Roman emperor Justinian.
15 Called Messeis: Pausanias 3.19.9.
16 Pausanias 2.32.7.
17 Although Helen was honoured at a number of locations by both republican and imperial Romans, for them she was a vexed figure of womanhood. Unlike Lucretia who honourably committed suicide following her rape by Sextus Tarquinius, Helen post-Troy lived on, unrepentant and unpunished. She was certainly not the model of a good Roman girl. As with other female characters in the Roman canon – Medea and Cleopatra – Helen challenged the Roman concept of virtus.
18 Trajan was emperor of Rome from AD 98 to 117. For an illustration of the altar, see LIMC no. 19.
19 Pliny, Natural History 19.92. Trans. H. Rackham. Cf. Dalby (2003), 131.
20 Pliny, Natural History 21.59.4.
21 Strabo, Geography 9.1.22.
22 The Greek Civil War lasted from 1946–9.
23 Also known as St Erasmus’ Fire.
24 We know very little about Sosibius, other than that he was from Sparta, probably writing in the 3rd century BC.
25 Statius, Thebaid 792–3. Trans. O. Skutsch (1987), 192. See also Silvae 3.2.8–12; and Sosibius FrGrH 595.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Helen in Athens
1 Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War 6. 953–8. Translated by Neil Wright and reproduced with his kind permission.
2 When the Dorians claimed Heraclid descent during their take-over of Sparta, it was important to emphasise their connection to local heroes and heroines – one of the reasons that Helen’s cult was promoted. They needed to prove they were autochthonous. In this sense Helen had already enjoyed political influence.
3 Cartledge (1997), 6.
4 Euripides lived c. 485–406 BC.
5 The arguments are simple but clever: ‘Well, you gave birth to Paris,’ says Helen at one point. For a good general study of Euripides’ Trojan Women, see Croally (1994).
6 Cartledge (1997), 17.
7 See Goldhill (1997), 57–8. An estimate of around 14,000 spectators in the theatre audience is given.
8 For a powerful account of the Great Dionysia, see S. Goldhill (1990), ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, in J.J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, eds, Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Social Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
9 See Isager and Skydsgaard (1992), 44–66 on agricultural implements.
10 See Taylor (1999), 21–2, on the excitement of the festival atmosphere. The Theoric fund was established (probably at the time of Pericles) so that even the poorest citizens on the deme roll could claim the price of a ticket (c. 2 obols). Women did not qualify. See Goldhill (1997), 67.
11 A few still survive in the Athenian Agora Museum although there is fierce debate as to whether all these examples are tickets or gaming counters.
12 See Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 272 who describes how in the ‘Rural Dionysia’ dried fruit and nuts and confectionery could also be used as missiles if the acting became boring or bad. See also Demosthenes, On the Crown 262.
13 Visiting the site today, one realises that the acropolis would also have created its own stagey backdrop. Vast rocks of marble shot through with red veins loom above the visitor. The other-worldly stone mass was living proof, as far as many Greeks were concerned, that the gods too were capable of an earthy coup de théâtre.
14 Boardman (1985), 234: metopes 24 and 25.
15 Also likely in the Colosseum at Rome. On women at the theatre, see Cartledge (1997), 8 and Goldhill (1997), 62ff.
16 On women in Greek drama, see Foley (1981).
17 See Taylor (1999), 18, on masks and actors’ properties.
18 Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas 29. 4–6.
19 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.537d.
20 Roman tragedians such as Seneca and Ennius attempted their own versions of The Trojan Women. It was one of ten Euripidean tragedies chosen for study in schools of the ancient world in the first and second centuries AD. Despite the later popularity of Sophocles, when Erasmus translated Euripides’ Hecuba into Latin in 1524, it became one of the most popular ancient plays of the Renaissance, and study of Euripides was revived. Under her tutor Roger Ascham, the future Elizabeth I translated Euripides as part of her education in ancient Greek. In the 20th century, The Trojan Women was performed more often than any other Euripides play, including at the foundation of the League of Nations in 1919 and 1920. All details from introduction to J. Morwood’s translation (2000), except Elizabeth I’s Greek, for which see Rice (1951), 47.
21 See Goldhill (1986), 20.
22 See Goldhill (1986), 19–20. The untitled poem, that Patrick Shaw-Stewart is believed to have written from Gallipoli in the First World War, echoes Aeschylus’ play on Helen’s name: ‘O hell of ships and cities, / Hell of men like me, / Fatal second Helen, / why must I follow thee?’
23 The finest examples of Helen’s abduction and her return can be found in L.B. Ghali-Kahil’s splendid Les Enlèvements et le retour d’Hélène dans les textes et les documents figurés (1955).
24 Euripides, Electra 1018–34 (1997) Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen. Trans. J. Morwood. Intro. Edith Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
25 Thucydides 2.46. Trans. Rex Warner.
26 Xenophon, Household Management 7.30.
27 For a good study of Euripides’ Helen, see Foley (2001).
28 Euripides’ Cyclops 179ff. Trans. W. Arrowsmith. The view has been put forward that the phrase ‘peri meson ton aukhena’ would have been suggestive to a Greek audience, as the word for neck or middle is a double entendre for penis and the word for neck-lace can mean a prisoner’s neck-shackle or dog-collar.
29 See Coles (1996), 123. Helen also made an appearance on the comic stage in the Nemesis (431 BC) and the Dionysalexandros of Kratinos (430 BC).
30 Fragments 70–6 in R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds (1983) Poetae Comici Graeci, Vol. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Alexis lived c. 372–270 BC.
31 There is a Greek vase from Apulia in the museum at Bari, which shows Helen’s birth and is probably the visual representation of a satyr play, mocking the harlot of Troy. Helen’s step-father Tyndareus seems to be smashing open Leda’s egg with an axe. The figures are leering caricatures. Bari, Museo Archaeologico 3899.
32 Aristophanes, Lysistrata 1302–16. Trans. A.H. Sommerstein.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Helen Lost and Helen Found
1 Trans. W.H. Parker (1988), 175 (No. 68).
2 For a description of the manuscript, see Bianchi Bandinelli (1955), 37–9.
3 Perhaps, too, the Lion of St Mark, now on the column of the Piazzetta: see Brown (1996), 17. The original horses can now be seen in the Museo Marciano.
4 Nicetas Choniates, Historia 10.652. Trans. H.J. Magoulias.
5 ibid.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Helen, Homer and the Chances of Survival
1 Trans. P.H. Young (2003), 59.
2 British Museum GR 1906. 10–20.2.
3 Petrie (1889), 24.
4 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Gr.class. a. 1 (P)/1–10.
5 Thanks to Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield for locating these examples. The plump ‘Germanic’ Helen can be found on a battered fragment of a manuscript copy of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Troiana, made in southern Germany c. 1440: MS. Germ. D.1, fol. 5r. Other examples from the Bodleian, featuring Helen, include a 1461 manuscript ofHistoire de Troye, a French translation by Jacques Milet of Orléans: MS. Douce 336, fol. 167r; and a first volume of the Miroir du Monde, a universal history from the Creation to the birth of Christ, in French, dating probably from before 1463: MS. Douce 336, fol.32. The latter features a single miniature of Helen’s abduction by ship.
6 All data in these two paragraphs gathered from P.H. Young’s exhaustive work The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey (2003).
7 The Homeric epics do not appear to have been written down until the 7th century BC. For the next fifteen hundred years, it would have been only the super-rich who had prized written copies of the poems, but more importantly Homer’s words (and there-fore the character of Helen) were also in the popular consciousness, kept alive for one generation after another by professional travelling bards. This was a tradition that continued right up until the 19th century; Schliemann claimed that when he was a child a drunk miller wandered into the little grocer’s shop where the proto-archaeologist sold herrings and swept the floor, and started to recite the epics in return for a couple of glasses of whisky. See Schliemann (1880); see also Traill (1995), 17–18.
8 Pliny in his Natural History, 13.68–89 describes its production and lists the other uses of this wonder plant: ‘The roots of the papyrus plant are used by local people for timber, not only to serve as firewood but also for making various utensils and containers. Indeed they plait papyrus to make boats and they weave sails and matting from the bark and also cloth, blankets and ropes. They chew it when raw and when boiled, but only swallow the juice.’ Trans. J.F. Healy.
9 Plutarch, Life of Alexander 8.2 and Strabo, Geography 13.594.
10 See Casson (2001), chapter 3, on the history of the library of Alexandria.
11 As I write, archaeologists are excavating at Alexandria, trying to get a clearer picture of exactly how the library and the museum worked together.
12 Iliad 3.492–7 [LCL 3.423–6].
13 Harley MS 2472f. 19b.
14 Virgil, Aeneid 6.494–512. Trans. D. West.
15 See Reynolds and Wilson (1991) for a comprehensive and authoritative study of the transmission of ancient texts.
16 The manuscript was known as ‘L’ and its copy as ‘P’: see edition and commentary by Dale (1967), xxix–xxxi for a brief account of the history of the text. We have no evidence for how the manuscript came into Demetrius Triclinius’ possession, but it seems it must descend at least from a master edition made for the library of Alexandria in about 200 BC.
CHAPTER FORTY
Veyn Fables
1 John Lydgate, Troye Book (1412–20), Prologue, 265–6.
2 Herodotus, 2.113–20.
3 Thucydides, 1.9–11. Trans. Rex Warner.
4 ‘[Homer] made lies / Feyning his poetries / And was to the Greeks favourable.’ Chaucer, House of Fame 3.386–8. See Myrick (1993), 8–9, n. 5, for further examples.
5 Take John Lydgate, for instance. Lydgate, a monk, was commissioned by Henry V while he was still Prince of Wales, to write The Troye Book. It was in the grand surroundings of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, the broken skeleton of which still remains, that this new epic was penned. Lydgate’s version is thought to be more ‘cutting-edge’, more ‘true’. Along with other medieval authors and chroniclers, instead of using Homer as a source, Lydgate chooses men whom he considers to be eyewitnesses to the real Trojan War; men such as Dictys and Dares.
6 See Myrick (1993), 9 and n. 7.
7 Dating Dictys and Dares is a vexed issue: for a summary of the arguments, see Frazer (1966), Myrick (1993) and Merkle (1994). Frazer (1966), 7, points out that it was only at the turn of the 20th century that proof for a Greek original of the surviving Latin translation of Dictys was found – on a fragment of Greek papyrus, the back of income tax returns for the year AD 206.
8 Iliad 2.747 [LCL 2.652].
9 Merkle (1994) makes the interesting point that whereas the tale starts in a rather idyllic way, with the terrible news of Helen’s rape begins a slow gradual descent of the great Greeks into moral degeneracy. Merkle suggest that Dictys might in fact be writing to reveal the disastrous effects of war on human character.
10 Dictys, 1.7. Trans. R.M. Frazer Jr.
11 Dares, 10 Trans. R.M. Frazer, Jr,
12 Dares, 12. Trans. R.M. Frazer Jr. Joseph of Exeter’s Trojan War, Chaucer’s retelling of the tale and the Irish story of Troy, Togail Troi, appear to be based on Dares.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Helen of Troy and the Bad Samaritan
1 The Collected Poems of Dorothy Parker (1936), 94. (New York: The Modern Library). Heartfelt thanks to Rev. Peter Watkins for quotation.
2 All the descriptions are from Crowfoot et al. (1957).
3 Virgil, Aeneid 6.515–28.
4 See Vincent (1936), 221 and n. 1, citing J.W. Crowfoot.
5 A sobriquet derived from Edwards’ article ‘Simon Magus, the Bad Samaritan’ (1997). Thanks to Mark Edwards for his help with this chapter.
6 Samaria had once been the capital of Israel, but after its invasion by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC, it was resettled by Babylonians, Aramaeans and a scattering of Israelites. The region was fertile, the town on a good defensive position overlooking the north/south route through Palestine.
7 Philip carried on towards Gaza (converting an Ethiopian eunuch on the way) and Simon was left in Samaria as a new acolyte of a fledgeling religion.
8 It is disputed whether a single author called Hippolytus was responsible for author-ship of the Hippolytan corpus. See, for example, J.A. Cerrato (2002) Hippolytus between East and West: The Commentaries and the Provenance of the Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and A. Brent (1995) Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop (Leiden: Brill).
9 Helene was a common spelling of the name at this time.
10 Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 6.19. Trans. F. Legge.
11 See Hoffman (1995), 16, n. 30.
12 Justin Martyr, in his First Apology (c. AD 160) records the cult of Simon and Helen in Rome, and even refers to a statue being erected in Simon’s honour, although it is generally thought he mistook the statue’s identity.
13 Some argue that this female Wisdom, referred to as the Idea of the Godhead or the Mother of All, makes an appearance in the Book of Proverbs of the Old Testament; for example, Proverbs 9.1 and 8.19.
14 See the following note for the principal sources for Simon Magus and his consort Helene.
15 Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 6.19; also Justin Martyr, Apology 1.26.3.
16 Tyre might be significant, as here and elsewhere in Phoenicia there was a conspicuous cult of the ‘mother-goddess’ Astarte/Selene. See Haar (2003), 264.
17 The Trojan Horse was used as an allegory for the ignorance of non-believers: ‘as the Phrygians, in drawing it, unwittingly invited their own destruction, so the Gentiles – the persons outside the sphere of my knowledge – draw destruction on themselves through ignorance.’ Epiphanius, Panarion 21.3.3. Trans. F. Williams. And Helen’s Trojan story does in fact lend itself rather well to being hijacked by this particular branch of heresy. For the Gnostics, Helen’s suffering epitomises the ‘tragic epic of womanhood … in which a female deity emerges as creative, good, but subject to loss, pain, humiliation and limits.’ Mortley (1981), 55.
18 Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 6.19. Trans. F. Legge.
19 The devotees of Simon and Helene had to remember to accord the cult-leaders the respect they deserved, calling their images Lord and Lady rather than Simon and Helene, otherwise ‘he is cast out as being ignorant of their mysteries’. See Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies 6.20. Trans. F. Legge. Up until the 3rd century AD Simon’s statue continued to be cast in the image of Zeus, and Helen, having left Aphrodite behind once and for all, embraced her mental acuity again, in the form of Athena. See Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.23.4.
20 For the notion of ‘Sophia’ in Gnostic thought see S. Petrement (1990) A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism (San Francisco: Harper) or E. Pagels (1978) The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House).
21 Epiphanius claimed that around a thousand years before, Homer too had recognised Helen not just as a wayward Greek, but as a manifestation of the one, true God. ‘For this is Ennoia, she whom Homer calls Helen. And this is why Homer has to describe her as standing on a tower, signalling the Greeks her plot against the Phrygians with the lamp. But with its brightness, as I said, he indicated the display of the light from on high.’ Describing his prostitute companion, Simon Magus was supposed to have supported this argument himself: ‘This woman was, then, she who by her unseen powers has made replicas of herself in Greek and Trojan times and immemorially, before the world and after. She is the one who is with me now, and for her sake I am come down.’ Epiphanius, Panarion 21.3.1. Trans. F. Williams.
22 Clementine Homilies 2.25. Trans. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (1870). This work tells us that both Helene and Simon were disciples of John the Baptist.
23 Her story was used as a convenient model by the Gnostic movement. As one authority on the Gnostics has put it. ‘… the story of Helen and Simon symbolises the story of the soul fallen into this world of darkness and ignorance, a whore, but ready to be converted and to receive her heavenly spouse, her liberator and Saviour. The charms of the eternal female and the magic arts of the male counterpart combine so cleverly as to produce a model and a legend destined to last for centuries.’ Filoramo (1990), 149–50. Simon liberates Helene from sex-slavery in Tyre, just as Paris liberates Helen from slaving in the bed of an uninspiring husband. In this very carnal love affair was found an allegory of the journey of the soul. This is the Helen who – in a new heretical, but Christianised environment – suffers torment, but ends up redeemed, celestial.
24 Epiphanius, Panarion 21.3.5.
25 ‘How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.’ Matthew 18:12–13.)
26 See Crowfoot et al. (1957), 8.
27 Mark Edwards has pointed out to me that Simon Magus is sometimes considered to be a representative of an old Samarian tradition in which some ‘Gnostic’ assumptions (such as the contrast between the god who creates and the highest god) were already ensconced before the advent of Christian Gnosticism.
28 See Quispel (1975), 300. Also see Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (1988), vol. 14: 343.
29 In the original Greek sense of the word, when a kategoros was an accuser in the assembly.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
‘Perpulchra’: More Than Beautiful
1 Lord Dunsany, ‘An Interview’ in Mirage Water (1938), 61 (London: Putnam).
2 Virgil’s Aeneid is a tribute to this resourceful hero.
3 I.N. Hume (1956) Treasure in the Thames, 49–51 and Plate V. London: Frederick Muller.
4 This is the English royal lineage as described by Geoffrey of Monmouth; many different versions were produced by other authors and other nationalities.
5 For a fuller discussion of these themes, see Waswo (1995). For an excellent overview of the uses and abuses of the Troy story in medieval England, see Benson (1980).
6 Robert III, 1390–1406.
7 Nicholson (1974), 220.
8 STC 5579.
9 Simon (1961).
10 Jean Bonnard (1884) Les Traductions de la Bible en vers français au moyen âge.
11 Gervase of Canterbury, writing after 1160.
12 O’Callaghan (2003), 311–13.
13 Giraldus Cambrensis, De Principis Instructione Liber 8.300.
14 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie 4769–71. Trans. T.F. O’Callaghan (2003), 307.
15 The degree of this cultural florescence is debated. It is sometimes known as the Carolingian Renaissance.
16 Matthew of Vendôme, The Art of Versification 56.23–57.8. Trans. A.E. Galyon (1980).
17 Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War 3.329ff. Trans. A. K. Wright.
18 Trojan War 4.180–92. Trans. N. Bate.
19 The subtleties of these arguments are discussed at length in O’Callaghan (2003).
20 Thanks to Alison Weir for sourcing this quote.
21 See A. Weir (1999) Eleanor of Aquitaine (London: Jonathan Cape).
22 Codex 4660, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Hecuba, Paris and perhaps Helen are also mentioned in the songs.
23 Ezra Pound conflates the two women – Helen and Eleanor – in Canto II. See also C.F. Terrell (1993) A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press), 5–6.
24 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie 4741–8. Trans. T.F. O’Callaghan (2003), 306.
25 See Highet (1949), 580, 46.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Dancing with the Devil
1 The first recorded performance of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was on 30 September 1594 at the Rose Theatre on Bankside, London. See Bevington and Rasmussen (1993), 48. There were possibly earlier productions at the Theatre in Shoreditch.
2 Henslowe was an entrepreneur if ever there was one, trading in goat-skins and coinage as well as in theatrical talent.
3 Hall (1998), 114.
4 In the 1594–5 ‘season’ the Admiral’s Men (who first staged Marlowe’s Dr Faustus) put on thirty-eight plays, twenty-one of which were new.
5 Figures from Hall (1998), 114–59.
6 For a good summary, see Emerson (2002).
7 Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was not published until after his death. There are two early versions of the play, the A text (1604) and the B text (1616), which differ significantly from each other. Helen’s entrance between cupids occurs only in the B text, Act V, scene i.
8 The interpretation of this scene is much debated. Although the consensus is that Helen is indeed a succubus, and that as a result of sex with her, Faustus is eternally damned, there are alternative readings. See, for example, Ormerod and Wortam (1985), Allen (1968) and Greg (1946).
9 The boom in tanners and starchers is particularly to be found in the 17th century. For the context of Bankside and the Rose see Bowsher (1998), passim.
10 Bowsher (forthcoming).
11 Site visit, July 2003.
12 Shakespeare had King Lear bemoaning the propensity for tittle-tattle (known as ‘jangling’ since the medieval period), ‘As if we were God’s spies’ with our talk of ‘who’s in, who’s out’.
13 Thanks to Jonathan Bate for his help with this point. See Bate (1997), 113–15, on Shakespeare’s adaptation of the line in Richard II (4.1.271–9).
14 See Bowsher (1998), 67.
15 See Sir John Melton, Astrologaster; or the Figure-Caster.
16 Quispel (1975), 301: Faustus, Chapter 55, English version: The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr John Faustus (London: 1592). Trans. P.F. Gent. (New York, Da Capo Press; Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969) It was Gent’s translation that Marlowe used as his basis for Dr Faustus.
17 See Hattaway (1982), 181.
18 Riggs (2004), 234.
19 For famous cases of this neurosis see Chambers (1923), Vol. 3, 423. Thanks to Julian Bowsher for his help with this passage.
20 Particularly in Euripidean and Aeschylean tragedy.
21 Elizabeth I herself was described as a ‘beauteous second queen of Troy’: see James (1997), 18.
22 Thomas Nashe, ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’ (1590–6).
23 When Shakespeare writes of Helen, he typically couples her with death: ‘For every false drop in her bawdy veins / A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple / Of her contaminated carrion weight / A Troyan hath been slain’ (Troilus and Cressida, 4.1.70–73) and ‘Show me the strumpet that began this stir, / That with my nails her beauty I may tear! / The heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur / This load of wrath that burning Troy doth bear; / Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here, / And here in Troy, for trespass of thine eye, / The sire, the son, the dame and daughter die’(Rape of Lucrece 1.471–7).
24 Shades of the line can also be found in Seneca, Troades 26–7: ‘Plunderers seize the Dardan spoils; A thousand ships cannot contain the booty.’ Trans. A.J. Boyle; see also Tertullian, De anima 34. And a popular school textbook of the time was one written by Baptista Spagnuoli, also known as Baptista Mantuanus. It comprised 10 Latin Eclogues. Interestingly enough, in the Fourth Eclogue, line 154 reads: ‘Tyndaris Aegeas onerauit nauibus vndas’, ‘Tyndarian Helen burdened the Aegean sea with ships’. Did Marlowe also know this launching Helen? See Baldwin (1944).
25 Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead 18. Trans. F.G. and H.W. Fowler.
26 Helen does have some Elizabethan apologists. John Ogle in his Lamentation of Troy, for instance, written in 1594, blames the gods for the war, and goes so far as to sanctify her.
27 Possibly written around 1595.
28 See Bevington and Rasmussen (1993), in the introduction to their edition of Doctor Faustus: 53–6.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Helen’s Nemesis
1 Ovid, Heroides 16.141–4. Trans. G. Showerman.
2 Iliad 5.492–3 [LCL5. 428–9].
3 Heimarmene Painter, Berlin, Staatliche Antikensammlungen 30036.
4 Lucian, The Judgement of the Goddesses 15. Trans. A.M. Harmon.
5 See Plato, Symposium (200e): ‘Eros is forever the desire of something, and that some-thing is that which is lacking’. See Caldwell (1987) for further discussion of these ideas. Caldwell makes the point (p. 89) that ‘Tartaros must come before Eros’.
6 Unlike Aphrodite, Helen is rarely portrayed naked. While the goddess is wantonly available, Helen, typically cloaked, appears to be saving herself for someone. She is opaque. Men’s eyes search for her but fear what they might find. When Paris sees her, the world changes; the Cypria (fragment 1) tells us that Achilles would fight only once he had looked upon Helen; one glimpse of Helen turns Menelaus’ hate back to love. The ancients found in Helen the perfect tool to explore the notion that the origins of desire are in the seen. Alcman describes ‘the liquid beam of the human eye as the source of erotic desire’. M.S. Cyrino (1995) In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry(Lanham, MD), 83, citing Alcman fragment 3.61, as quoted in Worman (1997), 167, n. 53.
7 Cypria fragment 8 [Athenaeus 8.334b].
8 But, interestingly, the Nazis preferred Penelope as a loyal (blond) hausfrau: see, for example, H. Bengl (1941) ‘Die Antike und die Erziehung zum politischen Deutschen’, in Die Alten Sprachen 6: 5. Thanks to Katie Fleming for her help on this point.
9 There is a suggestion that the worship of Helen Dendritis at Rhodes stems from the hanging of images of the female on trees as part of a ritual act. Helen is often shown with fillets dangling from her arms, as if she could be strung from a tree. See West (1975), 13.
10 Goethe, Faust, Vol. 2. Trans. D. Luke.
11 Doniger (1999), 42.
12 One can only hope that the highest-paid Helen of the early 21st century, the German supermodel of Wolfgang Peterson’s Hollywood epic Troy, does not represent our Zeitgeist. Helen is there shown as a simpering shell of a creature, a woman with no personality or power, a blandly beautiful face, malleable, decorative, a flummery – the antithesis of what any real, living Helen could have or would have been. Her essence in one sense was better captured by the pulp-fiction and Cinemascope productions of the 1950s and 1960s: see John Erskine’s novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy, originally published in 1925 but reprinted in 1952 with a controversial cover of a buxom Helen by Earle Bergey. ‘Her Lust Caused the Trojan War’, this Popular Library edition screamed, also boasting on its cover that it is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED.
13 H.D. (1957) Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press).
APPENDIX ONE
The Minotaur’s Island
1 Odyssey 19.194–6 [LCL 19.172–3].
2 Site visit 2003.
3 We still cannot tell whether the move from Minoan to Mycenaean was a glide or a bloody wrench, whether there was absorption of natives, a mutual integration or an annihilation. What is clear is that the transition was irreversible. In places such as Egypt, Syria and Cyprus, by 1450–1400 BC, Mycenaean pottery simply replaces that of the Minoans.
4 Thanks to Tim Kirby for this imaginative observation.
5 See finds from Pellana, reported in Spyropoulos (1998).
6 Iliad 3.277–8 [LCL 3.232–3].
7 Iliad 2.747 [LCL 2.652].
8 Details from ‘The Education of Michael Ventris’, a paper given by Thomas G. Palaima at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, March 2004.
9 ‘The Decipherment of Linear B and the Ventris-Chadwick Correspondence’: exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2003. The Mycenaean Epigraphy Group and the Chadwick Fund, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. Exhibition catalogue by Lisa Bendall: 39.
10 Tablets featuring names of oxen come from Knossos, and include, in the order of names given above, Ch 896 (Kelainos); Ch 896 (Aiwolos); Ch 897 (Stomargos), Ch 899, 1029 (Podargos). See J. Killen (1992–3) ‘The oxen’s names on the Knossos Ch tablets’, in Minos 27–8: 101–7.
11 A good, general discussion of this topic can be found in K.A. and D. Wardle (1997).
APPENDIX TWO
La Parisienne
1 (Enneads 5.8). Trans. A.H. Armstrong.
2 Thanks to Lesley Fitton for her help with this passage.
3 Site visit 1989.
4 Interestingly, Minoan seal-stones have never lost their totemic power. Many turned up at the beginning of the 20th century in peasant houses, where they were called galopetres (milkstones) and were still being used by mothers, the cold little spheres tucked in next to the nursing mothers’ breasts to ensure good milk supply. Fitton (1995), 123. Even through the ‘disappearance’ of the Minoan civilisation, the fault-lines of Ottoman rule and the German invasion over a period of three and a half thousand years, locals must have passed on from generation to generation the notion that when fertility and nourishment were important, these cold little lumps of art had real potency.
5 The Ring of Minos – a fabulous thing, itself the size of a Kalamata olive – has a surface dense with images of some kind of tree ritual. The ring has travelled from one owner to another and only recently came to rest in the hands of the Greek authorities. The officials must be weak with relief to have this vagrant treasure back under lock and key.
6 See Immerwahr (1990), 174–5, for further details.
7 See Fitton (2002), 58–9.
8 See Fitton (2002), 70–2, and 134 on storerooms at Knossos.
9 See Darga (1993), 103: A131 (Istanbul Archaeological Museum, Bo. 2004).
APPENDIX THREE
Women of Stone and Clay and Bronze
1 Homeric Hymns (1980), 1. Trans. C. Boer. Reproduced by kind permission of Spring Publications, Texas.
2 Some argue that the figures may be asexual or hermaphrodite.
3 From around 2500 BC a few copper, lead and bronze figurines are produced. From 6000 BC onwards, terracotta is the material most commonly used for figurine-production. Thanks to Professor Colin Renfrew for his help with this passage.
4 See Broodbank (2002), 63–4. The tattooing seems to be representative – copper and bone needles with the remnants of pigments have been found.
5 Goulandris Museum Inv. 828 c. 7000–3000 BC.
6 See Cambridge Archaeological Journal 6:2 (1996), 281–307 passim.
7 From the evidence we have currently, it seems that the Upper Paleolithic Period (c. 35,000–9000 BC) is the era when humans first make images and symbols designed to last.
APPENDIX FOUR
Elemental Helen – She-Gods and She-Devils
1 Iliad 1.633 [LCL 1.528].
2 Note the Homeric Hymn to the Earth (Ge) at the beginning of Appendix Three.
3 West (1975), n. 5, quoting Gow on 10.8.
4 Pollux 10.191.
5 Theocritus, Idyll 18. See Chapter 11.
6 Helen was trapped on the island to escape the attentions of King Thonis of Egypt. It was Thonis’ wife Polydamna who sent Helen there ‘lest this alien should prove more beautiful than she’ – see Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals 9.21. Trans. A.F. Scholfield.
7 Plutarch, Life of Solon 4.
8 Philostratus, Heroicus 20.32ff., says there was in fact a temple of Helen and Achilles.
9 Pausanias 3.19.11–13.
10 Lucian, True Story 2.25–7. Trans. A.M. Harmon.
11 Pausanias 2.18.6 says that these boys were Menelaus’ sons by a slave woman. Hesiod, Catalogues of Women, 70, says they were Helen and Menelaus’ sons.
12 Copenhagen National Museum 7125, discovered in excavations at the beginning of the 20th century: see note 13.
13 B. 11: see C. Blinkenberg (1941) Lindos II: Fouilles de l’Acropole 1902–14. Inscriptions, Vol. I, 148–99, esp. 166 (Berlin: de Gruyter; Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad).
14 Hesiod, Theogony 591–602. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
15 See West (1975) and Skutsch (1987).
16 See West (1975).
17 Hesiod, Works and Days 527ff. and Herodotus 2.24–6.
18 See Clader (1976) and Meagher (2002) passim. Discussed, for example, in Austin (1994) p. 86.
APPENDIX FIVE
Royal Purple – The Colour of Congealed Blood
1 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 959–60. Trans. A. Shapiro and P. Burian.
2 Dictys 6.4 reports Helen and Menelaus’ stop-over in Crete: ‘When the Cretans heard of Helen’s arrival, many men and women from all over the island came together, desiring to see her for whose sake almost all of the world had gone to war.’ Trans. R.M. Frazer.
3 ‘The last real hippie’, still wandered through the town when I last visited in 2003, roll-up in hand, tea cosy on his head.
4 The excavation reports at Kommos can be found in the series of publications by the excavators J.W and M.C. Shaw, eds (1995–2000) Kommos: an excavation on the south coast of Crete by the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
5 Some of these international journeymen left clues behind them. In the Late Bronze Age while a Syro-Palestinian boat was waiting in the bay, the anchor sheered off its rope (probably made of hemp or flax) and then lay, undetected, for the next three thousand years on the sea-bed. It is a simple thing, shaped like a Swiss cheese with just three holes bored through the block. But it speaks of a port filled with the babble of international voices. Of a place of exchange and communication, of visitors, of the victims of hostile ocean winds, of burgeoning international trade.
6 Linear B tablets seem to refer to po-pu-re-ja – female purple dyers. See D. Ruscillo (forthcoming) To Dye For: Murex dye production in the Aegean and its social and economic impact in the Greek Bronze Age. Thanks to Deborah Ruscillo for her help in this matter, and for allowing me to see a pre-publication copy of her work. There would too have been local production of purple in the Peloponnese.
7 Thanks to Lisa Bendall on this point.
8 Murex brandaris is the most common species in the region. Thanks once again to Deborah Ruscillo.
9 See Latacz (2004), 43 and n. 52, citing P. Jablonka.
10 Iliad 3.151–4 [LCL 3.125–8].
EPILOGUE – MYTH, HISTORY AND HISTORIA
1 Euripides, Helen 588.
2 The authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey is a question that will exercise scholars far into the future – but the current consensus is that Homer was one man, who lived in the 8th–7th centuries BC on the islands of the eastern Aegean (e.g. Chios) or the coast of Asia Minor.
3 In Greek mythology – passed on from the mouth of one male bard to another – there were four periods of human creation. The first beings were the children of the earth goddess Ge or Gaia, the female spirit who breathed life into both the immortals and humans. These firstborn lived in a golden age of peace and prosperity, and were known as the golden race of mankind. Next came the silver race – a society of extreme matriarchy ignorant of the Olympian pantheon – who lived in abject misery. This troublesome group were replaced by the bronze race, phase one, who believed in the gods but were war-like and piteous, and, phase two, the heroes who believed in the gods, who were noble in soul who fought the Trojan War and then (as long as they fulfilled the necessary requirements) went on to dwell for ever in the Elysian fields. Archaic and Classical Greece was inhabited by the iron race, unjust, cruel, and troubled. Helen is a link with both bronze and silver. Each phase was violently, abruptly terminated. Current scientific research – which looks at the attenuated growth of many trees through the Bronze Age – suggests that this was a period of excessive cosmic movement. Some scientists posit that a globally catastrophic comet hit the earth around 2807 BC – a comet whose impact has been estimated at between 105 and 106 megatons. The creation tales of rock-men and giant abysses, of floods and divine destruction were perhaps monstrous versions of the terrible climate changes of around 2350 BC when a number of Bronze Age civilisations disappeared. They could have been a hazy memory of the impact of a major dust event on Aegean communities of 1800 BC – the fallout of more volcanic activity. For comet impact, see Masse (1998), 53; on climate change and dust event, see Verschur (1998), 51. Homer appears to commemorate both seismic and cosmic activity – in this case the arrival of a meteorite – on the battlefields of Troy. ‘A crash of thunder! Zeus let loose a terrific bolt / and blazing white at the hoofs of Diomedes’ team / it split the earth, a blinding smoking flash – / molten sulphur exploding into the air / stallions shying, cringing against the car – and the shining reins flew free of Nestor’s grip.’ Iliad 8.152–7 [LCL 8.133–7].
4 Latacz (2004), 151.
5 One group of aboriginal Australians has detailed distinct story-memories of a distant, real place that was flooded eight thousand years ago. Divers exploring the sea-bed of the Persian Gulf found features 1,000 feet (305 m) below the waves, which precisely and minutely matched the aboriginals’ descriptions. See C. Tudge (1988) Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: how agriculture really began (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).