Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  La Belle Hélène still welcomes visitors. Sitting under the neon light of the new extension the current owner regales guests with tales of his own ancestors, his grandfather and his Uncle Orestes, men who pulled Mycenaean gold out of the earth with their bare hands. And then, after the obligatory trip to Herr Schliemann’s old room, the patron will proudly list just some of the enthusiasts for Mycenaean culture who, over the years, have slept under his roof. Sartre was here, Virginia Woolf and the Frys, and Agatha Christie. Nazis stayed too, Goebbels, Himmler and Herman Goering – drawing lessons from the warrior-cultures of the past. The composers Debussy and Benjamin Britten, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg – they all came, and as they passed through they left their own paper-trail behind them, signing the fat visitors’ book before returning home.5

  Although ‘Mycenae rich in gold ’ is shattered walls and bare stone now, the massive site – which spans a full hectare – still signals its original impact. Of all the Late Bronze Age palace-fortresses excavated on the Greek main-land, Mycenae appears to have been the grandest, the most audacious.6 It is cradled by the Arachneion mountain range,7 and if you approach from the modern village of Mikines, the citadel is a diminutive, humble echo of the mountains’ great limestone splendour – a toy-town version of the rock masses, themselves giant fortresses. But then, walk through the famous Lion Gate and survey the Argolid plain from the citadel itself and the impression is entirely different. Now Mycenae laughs at the landscape below. Seemingly impregnable, crammed with the finest art and fiercest armaments in the known world, this was the home of history’s winners – here it becomes apparent why the Mycenaeans are a legendary civilisation.8

  A traveller in the 13th century BC would have passed through swathes of dramatic virgin countryside, much of it uninhabited, some unfarmed, and then, breaking the brow of a hill or turning the corner into a valley, there would have stood one of the Mycenaean warlords’ great citadels, typically elevated on a hill or rocky outcrop with the grand megaron – the great hall or royal throne room – at its heart. To reach the wanax (the Mycenaean king) and his queen, a physical ascent had to be made – privileged access granted only to a few. There would not be disappointment on arrival – the royal apartments were richly furnished. One Linear B tablet describes a throne from Pylos made predominantly of rock crystal, decorated with blue-glass paste, ‘mock’ emeralds and precious metal; on its back, the figures of men and palm trees picked out in gold.9

  Religious sanctuaries were also contained within the citadel – these palace-fortresses were the homes of gods as well as men, places where power, both real and perceived, resided.10 Little wonder that Homer should speak of Mycenae rich in gold, of the high-roofed chambers and dazzling halls of the Spartan palace, of men and women adorned as gods, little wonder that wandering heroes should marvel at the ‘polished walls’ of the clan leaders’ homes which were themselves ‘troves of treasure’.11 Around 800 BC Homer recalls the impact these places must have had on contemporaries – an impact that survived in the popular imagination for at least five hundred years, transmitted from one generation to the other by storytellers and by gossip in modest homes around low fires late at night.

  Schliemann, and others after him, discovered at Mycenae a mass of wealth to match Homer’s eulogies. In one of Schliemann’s excavation reports, details of the rich finds from a single tomb spread across nearly fifty pages. Here was a finely carved ivory lion, small enough to rest in the palm of a hand. The lion is crouched waiting to pounce – its muscles flex in readiness: the genius of the craftsmanship is immediately apparent. There are solid gold drinking cups,12 rock crystal carvings and sandstone grave-markers bearing rich abstracted pictures. The inlays on daggers, swords and jewellery beaten from gold, silver and niello (a compound of sulphur and silver) are as fine as spun sugar. A delicate head of a boy, carved out of ivory,13 gazes out at the world with a subtle, melancholic expression.

  Many of these treasures were preserved because they were buried along with the Mycenaean dead in tholos tombs (cavernous round structures) and in shaft graves (burial chambers cut into the bedrock). The contents of shaft graves show that Mycenaeans had a passion for gold.14 Gold leaf, seemingly fine enough to be used as a confectioner’s decoration, would be worked into jewellery or made into death masks for kings. In two apparently isolated instances from Mycenae, the gold has been pressed out paper-thin and then wrapped around the bodies of dead babies. Craftsmen created life-size gold flowers resembling the ianthos that grows profusely in Greece today; gold discs were punched with images of women, and then sewn onto clothes. Many of these treasures would be buried with their owners, but some would be kept by the living, used as gifts for the gods or passed down as totemic heirlooms from father to son, from mother to daughter. A princess such as Helen would have been cocooned in her Peloponnesian citadel by the bullion of her ancestors.

  Painted figures once strode out across the frescoed walls of the Mycenaean citadels – part of the grand decorative schemes which covered the richest rooms. All are fragments now but they are still dynamic. One woman holds out a necklace – an offering to a deity perhaps. Her tight, scooped-out bodice is dyed saffron yellow, and a translucent yellow gauze thinly veils her breasts. Her left hand, painted it seems with the finest sable brush, stretches out elegantly.15 These were the women who, so the bards sang, waited in the Peloponnesian palaces and prayed as the siege at Troy dragged out another long year. The women who, we are told, first cursed Helen’s name.

  The riches of the citadels excavated by Schliemann and his successors make it clear that although Homer was composing in the 8th century BC this was indeed the world commemorated in his poetry.16 A land of opulent palace-complexes inhabited by a warrior elite. A feasting, booty-grabbing, gold-loving society that enjoyed a clannish co-operation. An ambitious culture with a finely developed technological sense.

  Of course there are moments of brilliance in the years that separated Homer from the Late Bronze Age, a period from 1100 to 800 BC that has come to be called the ‘Greek Dark Ages’ – but there is nothing to touch the marvels of Mycenae and the expansive civilisation it represents. Little surprise that Homer and Hesiod should think of Helen’s era as an ‘Age of Heroes’,17 a time that had to be remembered, a time populated by men and women with an extraordinary capacity to achieve.

  The Mycenaean citadels were glorious – but kept so only by a population of unsung heroes. These shadowy masses are the labourers of the Bronze Age, men and women all but forgotten by the poets and the history books, who in the Greek landscape have left unusually vivid clues.

  The observant traveller in the Peloponnese will notice the odd, roughly thatched shack made of mud-brick: each the colour of burnt sienna, these kalyvia are shelters for herdsmen and itinerant labourers. They function remarkably well; mud-brick is warm in the winter, cool in the summer. A stone’s throw from the Mycenaean palatial site at Tiryns, half-hidden in an avenue of pomegranate trees, are the dilapidated walls of one of these mud-cottages – abandoned now. Before long, the rest of this modest house will collapse and the rains will wash the mud back into the earth.

  Up on the citadel of Tiryns itself there is a proud note from the German team who have been excavating the site since 1967. 18 Just outside the settlement walls the archaeologists have found evidence of cheap, rough homes nudging up against one another – the shacks of Mycenaean workers – each one made of mud-brick, with proportions that match those of the 21st century. It is ironic to think that, whereas the most powerful from the Late Bronze Age would walk through their smashed, burnt, empty palaces today and weep, the slaves, bondsmen and child labourers might find a more familiar landscape, their humble mud-brick homes, apparently, still standing.

  A civilisation as aspirational as the Mycenaeans’ needed to mobilise a mass of muscle – a human resource to do its dirty work. And into these mud-huts would have squashed the men and women who executed the elite’s back-breaking jobs: grinding corn, beating flax to prod
uce linen, sweating away lives, lifting those giant Cyclopean blocks into place to build the glittering citadels. Just east of Tiryns, thousands of tonnes of earth were moved in the Late Bronze Age, damming and diverting the natural flow of a water-course – the handiwork still visible today. A handful of channels and dykes that were built in the Bronze Age still work perfectly, irrigating farmlands in the Peloponnese. Until recently, women in the Argolid used the weirs around Mycenae to wash their laundry.19 Such construction would have involved a workforce of many hundreds. It is little surprise to find that the Linear B tablets have, etched into their soft surfaces, a category of men and women called do-e-ro and do-e-ra, male and female servants or slaves.20

  Slaves were almost certainly bought and sold – at Pylos, for instance, is a group of women described as Aswiai, ‘Asians’,21 who could well have been bartered or even kidnapped in exchange for wine or gold. Some of Homer’s greatest lines speak of the fate of women during military conflict: rape and enslavement following the slaughter of their husbands, brothers and sons.22 There are certainly more women listed in a subservient context on the Linear B tablets than there are men. It is easy to imagine the scenario: a domineering power like the Mycenaeans, expanding their territories and happily putting female captives to good use once they have executed their menfolk and acquired new lands. A time described by Homer, where territorial expansion (and the Trojan War is a prime example) is undertaken for glory and for material gain – the greatest commodity of all, humans.

  In their prime the Mycenaeans were certainly not contained by the Peloponnese. Their influence can also be traced in North Africa, Cyprus, Palestine (Israel) and Phoenicia (the Lebanon) – as far north as Croatia, as far west as Italy. Mycenaean rapiers have been found in the Danube Valley, broken bowls in rubbish dumps on the east bank of the Nile at Tel el Amarna, 587 km south of Cairo. On the plinth of a statue from the funerary temple of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenophis III23 we hear of a powerful city that lay to the north, a city called Mukana.24 Mycenaean pots have been excavated in eastern Spain, tiny Mycenaean beads have been found in graves in Syracuse on Sicily; and still the artefacts come out of the earth – construction workers building Amman Airport in Jordan25 unexpectedly uncovered a collection of finely made Mycenaean vases.26

  Miletus on the east coast of Turkey was a Mycenaean settlement, as was the area of Chalkidiki in the north of the Greek mainland. The importance of the Mycenaean control of coastal territories and contacts across the water is reflected in their calendar. The first month of the Greek year in the Late Bronze Age was called Plowistos – the month of sailing. There would have been talk around Mycenaean traders’ fires of the wild and wonderful lands that lay beyond the reach of even the most adventurous sailor, but there was more than enough to occupy these bully-boy buccaneers in the Eastern Mediterranean. Once they had taken over Minoan Crete,27 it has been argued, they turned their eyes east, to the coast of Anatolia and the rich city of Troy. Another culture to loot. Another people to enslave. Another city to fell. This is too early in time for there to have been a sense of nationhood within Greece but the Mycenaeans were clearly capable of consolidated action – both in peacetime and in war.28

  The contents of Mycenaean graves speak of a belligerent society. Schliemann calculated that in Shaft Grave V at Mycenae, three men from the 16th century BC had been buried with ninety swords between them. Almost all extant skeletal remains have suffered trauma. A man, in his late twenties,29 has an oblong depression 2.3 cm long in his skull – a healed wound originally inflicted by a sharpened weapon. At the coastal site of Asine a warrior in his mid-thirties has a deeply bruised left shin-bone – a result of the continual impact of a shield during warfare or battle-practice. Abrasions this low on the leg may well have been made by a ‘tower-shield’ – the model owned in the Iliad by Ajax and widely represented in Mycenaean art. The skeleton of a twenty-five-year-old male from Armenoi in Mycenaean-occupied Crete shows ten vicious cut marks, probably from an axe – at some points his bones have been sliced right through.30

  Women too are shown invested with swords, armour and the distinctive Mycenaean ‘figure-of-eight’ shields. Come the 13th century BC (the peak of Mycenaean power) even religious figures (priests and priestesses, gods and goddesses) bear arms.31 Some argue that the Warrior Goddess – a woman who rides in a chariot brandishing a spear and wearing a helmet made of boar tusks – was a Mycenaean invention.32 It was from such an environment as this that Helen’s story was drawn – and in which a Spartan aristocrat would have been raised. These would have been the robust lessons of child-hood for a Mycenaean princess.33

  5

  THE PRE-HISTORIC PRINCESS

  By maunding and imposture Helen came,

  Eater of the white fig, the sugar-bread;

  Some beauty, yes, but not more than her tribe

  Lathe-made for stock embraces on a bed.

  LAWRENCE DURRELL, ‘Troy’ (1966)

  LIFE FOR OUR BRONZE AGE HELEN would have been sensuous and short. The average age of death for Mycenaean females was twenty-eight. Women were mothers at twelve, grandmothers at twenty-four, dead before they were thirty.1 The majority of the population was carried off in its prime by disease. Homer talks about the ‘scurf of age’, but in real terms pre-historic Greece was a land populated by the very young – and it had a cultural energy to match.

  Archaeological finds attest to trade in gold, silver, amber, carnelian, andesite, obsidian, red jasper, lapis lazuli and ivory from both elephants and hippopotamuses. In pithoi, giant storage jars, there are traces of olive oil, frankincense, myrrh and wine; coriander and sesame were used to flavour food, rose-petals, sage and anise to sweeten perfumes.2 The clothes of the richest Mycenaeans, made of wool and linen and even fine wild-silk, were coloured with saffron and a purple dye extracted from a species of sea-snail.3

  The Mycenaeans’ was a magpie culture. Great sea journeys would be undertaken to bring the finest raw materials and manufactured goods back to the Greek mainland. The more successful a clan-leader was, the more his palace would have glittered – storerooms and tombs would have been stacked with relucent treasure. Cult images were dressed in cloth that had been impregnated with olive oil to give the material a distinctive sheen; privileged mortals too would have worn clothes treated in this way.4 Those of the highest rank are – for the first time – literally, illustrious. Perhaps this is what the bards meant when they recalled that Helen was ‘radiant’, ‘fair’, ‘shimmering’, ‘golden’.5

  And so we can imagine the young Helen, starting her day, being decked in the treasures and baubles that marked her out as a princess. Sitting perhaps, with her feet resting on one of the fine footstools inlaid using the ‘aiamenos’ technique, with ivory men, horses, lions or octopuses – a decorative effect recorded both in Homer6 and in the Linear B tablets.7 Her jewels would have been taken out of an ivory trinket box.8 Some extant examples are decorated with human heads, animals and shields, others are in the shape of ducks – a bird that symbolised female sexuality.9

  The necklaces worn by a young noblewoman, a number of which have survived and can be found in the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, are still startling to look at: handsome, colourful things made of agate, steatite, red carnelian and amethysts. Some have matching bangles. Beads range from the size of gobstoppers to split lentils. Gold jewellery also survives: diadems, belts, a chain of showy rosettes separated by delicate triangular cut-outs. Large, gold hoop earrings, portrayed on frescoes and rescued from Late Bronze Age graves, would have dangled and swung in the ears of the highest-born women.

  Those of high rank flashed gold and silver signet rings – or, if they were really exalted, rings decorated with iron, since iron at this stage was a rare and precious metal. A female skeleton discovered in 1965 in Tholos Tomb A at Archanes had, lying on her chest, a giant signet ring, depicting a scene from a tree-cult.10 The position of the ring on the woman’s breast-bone suggests that it (and other rings like it) may have b
een worn as a pendant. These impressive, mysterious jewels were etched with images of religious festivals, bull-leapers, hunters, battles and voluptuous female figures. Red jaspers the size and texture of boiled sweets look disarmingly simple, until you run your finger across the surface and feel the shapes of bees, bulls and leopards, priests and high-priestesses – carved out to mark distinctive seal-stones. These intaglios were important status symbols for both male and female potentates. In one area at Mycenae, tentatively labelled by archaeologists a ‘cult complex’, an enigmatic fresco was excavated in 1968. Women dominate. Of the three shown, certainly two, possibly all three, have seal-stones strapped to their wrists.11 In graves of the 14th and 13th centuries BC, male and female skeletons have been found with the seal-stones still close to their wrist-bones.

  The rooms where a girl like Helen spent most of her time would have been emblazoned with colour. The walls, covered with lime plaster, were decorated with vivid patterns in blue, yellow ochre and deep salmon pink – still visible on the fresco-fragments that have survived. Pattern and form were created using both the buon fresco and fresco secco techniques – the paint being applied in different sections when the plaster was wet and again when it was dry. Even some of the floors were technicolor – decorated with paint or vivid cut stones; at Pylos there are geometric patterns, and an octopus glides close to the central hearth of the palace. Columns as high as three men, also coated in a rich pink wash, would have supported the roof and provided a colonnade through which a young princess could wander – perhaps on her way to the megaron, one of the most richly appointed areas of the building.12