Helen of Troy

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Helen of Troy Page 10

by Bettany Hughes


  Excavations in 19677 revealed something extraordinary – an entire and unexplored Bronze Age settlement in the pumice. Here there were streets and courtyards, sanctuaries and houses – many exceptionally well preserved. As more finds emerged it became clear that pre-historic Akrotiri had been a busy, wealthy town. A clever and complicated drainage system under-pinned the settlement, many buildings were two or three storeys high and most were richly appointed. But the greatest discovery was yet to come. As archaeologists delicately brushed away the pumice from a number of the internal walls, they uncovered staggeringly beautiful frescoes; naked boys carrying strings of freshly caught fish, boats decked out for a celebration, exotic rivers populated by fantastical creatures. And, particularly salient to a search for Helen, a number of scenes featuring high-born women at various stages of sexual development.

  The original frescoes are now stored in Athens, but it is worth the journey to Thera to reflect on their provenance. Arriving by boat is best – a chance to appreciate this rocky island as Bronze Age traders would have done. The dark rock mass rears out of the Aegean. Modern-day Thera perches – like frosting on a devil’s-food cake – on the caldera left behind when the central section of the volcano caved into the sea some time between 1650 and 1525 BC. A horrifying pyrotechnic spectacle for the Bronze Age world.

  Now the island has become a playground for world travellers and the rich and famous. Walking through the chic little streets selling Barbie bikinis and killer cocktails, through lanes and passageways that twist from the edges of the cliff to the museum where the replica frescoes are housed, at first it is hard to imagine pre-historic Thera – a brooding giant, fertile and strategically placed, attracting and supporting a hardy merchant population. Thera enjoyed the profits of Bronze Age trade – until the earth started to behave abnormally, sending out warning signs, earthquakes, precursory falls of pumice from the uneasy magma chamber, erratic and inexplicable steam blasts shooting out of the ground. The digs revealed Bronze Age work-shops hastily abandoned with pots of paint and plaster left half-empty as Thera’s population took to the seas, fleeing to nearby Crete with the few possessions they could cram into their boats.

  Inside the Museum of Pre-historic Thera, away from the modern-day tourist attractions, there is a display of replica Bronze Age fresco fragments which sweeps the visitor back to that earlier, evacuated world. In one series of rooms (the Xeste 3 complex) women dominate. Here there are ‘classic’ symbols of divinity: a griffin on a red leash, lotus flowers. A blue monkey reaches up to a central, elevated female figure8 who rests on rich bundles of cloth and is bedecked in jewels. Around her neck is a string of beads, red, yellow and blue, carved in the shapes of ducks and dragonflies. This goddess-girl, whose breasts are just budding,9 is accompanied by four female acolytes. The goddess-figure seems to care for the youngsters; on her wrists are bangles decorated with moon-shapes10 – lunar imagery is often associated with the menarche – a sign that this is a chaperone-spirit who nurtured the girls’ physical development.

  The walls are studded with pastoral scenes.11 Swallows dive through the sky, courting or feeding their young above a variety of natural landscapes. There are craggy rocks – reminiscent of Thera’s own morphology. Young deer confront each other; lilies, the papyrus plant and rock-roses wave in the breeze. This is a celebration of the cycle of the seasons, of the glory of nature and of the place of women and emergent sexuality within both.

  One flower is particularly conspicuous on the walls of Akrotiri: saffron, a frail, delicate plant, the stamens of which were worth more than their weight in gold – a herb used as a yellow dye for fine clothes and as a culinary flavouring. Huge amounts of saffron had to be gathered to be employed effectively – 4,000 stamens to produce just one ounce (28 g) of the distinctive golden colourant.12 Early societies recognised that this diminutive plant also had qualities beyond the cosmetic. Skilfully employed, saffron is an efficacious pain-reliever – this was a highly prized crop. Clumps of saffron crocuses (their formation here probably suggests they were farmed rather than collected wild) cover the back walls of the fresco, the goddess’s bodice is edged with flowers, stamens cover her clothes and mark – possibly tattoo – her cheek.13 Elsewhere at Akrotiri a merchant-boat is decorated with saffron, an indication perhaps that this magical crop was exported in bulk. Certainly, come the historical period, Thera had a reputation for producing the finest saffron flowers in the Eastern Mediterranean.14

  The women and girls who harvest the saffron crop are clearly the highest-born and are distinguished, in minute detail, by their clothes and hairstyles: these frescoes present detailed impressions of a Bronze Age princess.15 This is how Helen would (almost certainly) have looked had she walked through a Mycenaean citadel – first as a juvenile and then with the new hairstyle of a bride-to-be. The youngest girls of Thera have their heads close-shaved with just a lock of hair above the forehead and a tiny ponytail at the back. Blue paint has been used to designate shaving and so the youngsters look as though they are wearing blue skull caps with tufts of hair escaping at jaunty angles. The four attending the goddess have had a rectangular area of hair removed just above their ears. One carries a shell-shaped incense burner – her lips and ears have been picked out in deep-red make-up. Another girl approaches a doorway which drips with blood.16 The appearance is extreme and exotic – these tonsured young aristocrats could not be further from the saccharine-sweet, rose-coloured princess Helens conjured up by the artist’s brush down the centuries.

  In adolescence it appears that girls were allowed to grow their hair slightly longer and curlier (although still with a bushy forelock and pony-tail), and then, once they reached full maturity, the razor was put away. Mature women have luxuriant locks, sometimes elaborately bound with ribbons and beads – and buxom, exposed breasts. While adult women wear full-length robes, the girls have calf-length dresses with short sleeves. The youngsters chat as they collect their valuable saffron harvest. One young woman has hurt herself and sits on the floor cradling her foot, peering at her bleeding sole, her hand clasping her head in pain.17 A girl walks forward holding out a necklace, an offering perhaps for the deity; another, smiling, wends her way through a field. A number of the women wear large hoop earrings and chunky ankle-bracelets – jewellery which is matched precisely by finds in the archaeological record.

  During preservation work, it became clear that at least one of the girls, standing directly behind the girl-goddess, has tawny-red hair and blue eyes.18 This was unforeseen – an intriguing revelation, and again one relevant to Helen’s story. The Homeric heroes and heroines are frequently referred to as being xanthos, red- or golden-haired – think of red-haired Odysseus, red-haired Menelaus, golden Helen. For years it was presumed that xanthos was simply a trope, a literary device used to indicate ‘goldenness’ – heroic or divine status. But the Thera frescoes suggest something else. The gene for tawny or blonde or red hair must have been present or at the very least recognised in Bronze Age aristocratic circles. All other women represented across the Aegean Bronze Age have dark hair. In a population that would have been predominantly brunette, perhaps women and men born blond were thought to be blessed in some way, worthy of special status.19 The red-head at Thera is positioned close to the deity and is the only ‘mortal’ allowed to wear a necklace, made, apparently, of cornelians, stones much prized because of their rich red colour.

  The beatified young women in paintings like these – particularly those who are xanthai – might not be divine but, rather, thought to be touched by divinity. The religious imagery implies some kind of ritual activity. Is this red-head the prototype for Helen? A golden-haired girl who was thought to be ‘special’ and was therefore entrusted with particular religious authority? A woman who appeared to carry with her a divine gift? A woman who, centuries later, in the epics of Homer, came to be remembered as a child of the gods? Speculation – and yet at the same time, a historical possibility: the golden girl at Thera was honoured with immort
alisation on the walls of a rich mansion; ‘golden’ Helen was honoured with immortalisation by the bards of the Peloponnese.

  What we see at Thera when we look at those busy young girls is a sub-set of society so cherished, so consequential, that as they approach sexual maturity they are entrusted with the care of one of the most estimable crops in the ancient world.20 Perhaps picking saffron itself was a rite of passage, an apprenticeship in stewarding nature – a neat combination of both commercial and spiritual activity. Without a written history, interpretations of the rich frescoes in the Xeste 3 complex on Thera have to remain just that – interpretations. But however we read the wall-paintings one thing is glaringly obvious: men barely get a look in.21 It is instead well-dressed young women, the female elite of society, who are responsible for the precious saffron flower. If we are to carry an image in our minds of a Bronze Age princess such as Helen on the cusp of marriage, a rich prize, a woman believed to hold both temporal and religious sway, then the adolescents on the frescoes at Thera should be our first point of reference.

  The active, bucolic, abandoned representations from pre-historic Thera stand in marked contrast to the prevailing, repressive view of young Greek women, particularly Athenian women, which had developed a thousand or so years later, by the 5th century BC. This is the century that generated some of the most enduring takes on the Helen story. The century that took Helen and turned her into a ‘lustful bitch’, a ‘destroyer of cities’. The comparison is made beautifully explicit by a little pyxis – a cosmetics box – dating from 470 BC featuring Helen, now in the British Museum.22 Here Helen sits as a demure young girl with her sister Clytemnestra. Helen is positioned by a basket of wool, ready to sew: the perfect pursuit for a docile Athenian girl – only a mirror, hovering between the siblings, suggests the presence of a worrying beauty.

  There are other memorable heroines here too – but all are trapped indoors, grooming themselves or fruitfully employed in domestic labour. Iphigeneia ties a band around her head; Cassandra, the sister of Paris, is handed a work-basket; Clytemnestra holds out a perfume bottle. All images appropriate for the owner of the pyxis, a well-to-do wife who sat at home and took out jewels or ointments to beautify herself.

  Unlike their pre-historic Greek ancestors – the Bronze Age pre-pubescents from Thera – these restricted vase-girls are not living full lives, the sun on their faces, stones underfoot, a lucrative crop to secure. Nor are they dancing around a tree, their breasts bare, high on opiates – as you will find Mycenaean women on a number of rings and seal-stones.23 Alia tempora, alii mores. Athenians suppressed, feared and demoted the female sex. The Classical Greeks never went to war over a woman. Although the Helen most familiar to us has been filtered through the Classical Greek world, the essence of a primordial Helen should not be sought in the vase-painting work-shops of Athens and Corinth, but on the colourful, crumbling walls of the Late Bronze Age.24

  PART THREE

  THE WORLD’S DESIRE

  Previous page:

  Gold diadem of a princess, found in Shaft Grave III at Mycenae. c. 1550–1500 BC.

  9

  A TROPHY FOR HEROES

  Wise men in Greece in the meanwhile to swagger so about a whore

  THOMAS NASHE, Of Lenten Stuff (1599)

  THE FRESCOES AT THERA suggest that a pubescent, pre-historic princess was quite some prize. And now, the architects of Helen’s story tell us, in Sparta, in the Age of Heroes, this was a prize that had to be played for. Helen’s brush with sexuality on the banks of the Eurotas had been premature. In one sense she was a spoiled woman. But her assailant Theseus was, at least, a king. Helen had not been defiled by a nobody. This was a princess with land and standing – she still had worth. Whoever married her might not get a virgin, but they would get the rich Spartan kingdom. They would – we are told – also get a fair woman, shining, golden, a young girl blessed with incomparable beauty. Messengers were sent across Greece and beyond: Tyndareus’ peerless daughter was to be fought for. Down to the 3rd century BC, Greek families boasted that their ancestors had gone to Sparta to vie for Helen’s hand. Losing was no shame – competing with such a prize at stake was honour enough in itself.1

  Because Helen was worthy of only the finest, her father, Tyndareus, organised a marriage contest in which all the warriors of the land had to compete in shows of strength and offers of wealth.2 There is no consensus as to where the contest took place, other than at Tyndareus’ home. Some ancient writers say Sparta itself,3 others just leave a blank. But in Euripides we find Tyndareus’ domain coupled with a reference to the name Amyklai.4 Amyklai was originally a pre-historic settlement 7 km due south of Sparta. It is surrounded by plenty of flat land which could have accommodated the contests of heroes – chariot-driving, foot-racing, wrestling – not to mention the bulkier bribes the suitors brought with them: the poet Hesiod tells us that in a bid to win Helen, the hopeful heroes imported vast herds of oxen and sheep as well as gleaming pots, pans and cauldrons.5 So let us imagine the marriage contest for Helen taking place here.

  Amyklai is an atmospheric place – face east and at your back is the Tayegetan mountain range that keeps its snow long into the summer. Look out across the little promontory of the site and you are greeted by a soft green patchwork of farmland – hummocky and ramshackle, where elfin fields are peppered with copses of olives. Sapling trees and oleanders grow over half-excavated blocks of stone. The peace is broken only by the sound of tractors chugging up and down the lane below, delivering the agricultural produce which has always been particularly plentiful in this sheltered spot.

  Close by at Vapheio, up a neat avenue of olive trees, there is a deep beehive tomb dating from the 15th century BC – the final resting place of a Mycenaean warrior. The tomb had been plundered down the centuries, but robbers overlooked a sunken burial pit, which was then excavated in 1889 by the Greek archaeologist Christos Tsountas. Here alongside the accoutrements of the dead – perfume vases, a mirror, daggers, knives, hunting spears, axes, beads and an ear-pick – were found two lavish gold cups, both moulded with rippling scenes of bull-taming.6

  At Amyklai itself there are only a few remnants from pre-history. The site seems to have been occupied after many of the larger palatial complexes such as Mycenae had been destroyed around 1200 BC. The Mycenaean objects uncovered here included unique finds – human clay figures of almost life-size who would have overseen some kind of ritual activity. Here too there was a plethora of rough female figurines. This was a place of cultic significance. Amyklai, serene now, once witnessed idiosyncratic and fervent rites, long since lost to time.

  Throughout the archaic and classical periods this was the home to alfresco festivals such as the Hyakinthia which was held in honour of Apollo and Hyakinthus.7 The textual references are matted, but there is a strong possibility that Helen was worshipped here too in a festival called the Heleneia. 8 Families would take tents, picnics and plenty of wine to the sanctuary and eat, drink and dance long into the night. Girls would drive here in kannathra from the town of Sparta: some of these gaudily decorated carts were in the shape of fantastical creatures – griffins or goat-stags.9 The whoops and cries of the drivers and the jingle of tack would be heard for miles about as the young Spartans raced each other in Helen’s honour. The course ran through the outskirts of Sparta to Amyklai, or to ‘eis to Helenes’ – to Helen’s sanctuary.10 The races were popular, the competition fierce. It is all a far cry from Athens, where women were allowed to ride in chariots only to weddings and funerals.

  The notion of a Bronze Age precinct here at Amyklai, or at Sparta itself, packed with suitors, the tense and sweaty pick of male Mycenaean society, is vivid – and was inspirational to the earliest known authors in the West. Hesiod lists the heroes who came to fight for the Spartan princess on that first occasion – because, of course, they are to meet again, competing for Helen on the battlefields of Troy. He mentions one suitor, Philoctetes, and then quickly, and elegantly, moves on to describe the hero
es’ prize. Throughout this catalogue of the great and the good Hesiod drops in little reminders of Helen’s beauty. She is ‘neat-ankled’, ‘rich-haired’, ‘the girl whose renown spread all over the holy earth’.11

  We have only fragments of Hesiod’s poem and so cannot trace a complete list of heroes, although tradition has it that anywhere between twenty-nine and ninety-nine men turned up. Helen’s husband-to-be, Menelaus, one of the princes of Mycenae, did not attend, although his older, richer brother Agamemnon was there.12 Achilles, being too young to come, was conspicuous by his absence. Hesiod points out, in a barbed aside, how lucky Menelaus was to get Helen: ‘Menelaus could not have won Helen nor would any other mortal suitor, if swift Achilles returning home from Pelion had encountered her.’13

  Each hero, each clan-leader in the stories, had his own coterie of likely lads, or ‘etai ’. This was a social rank that has its counterpart in the Late Bronze Age hequetai, who seem to have been a chariot-driving warrior caste. Contests such as these are not figments of the classical imagination. The Bronze Age elite would certainly have met together in fierce combat-sports to sort out the men from the boys: to determine among them which of the aristocrats really was the best (aristos in ancient Greek) and who there-fore deserved control (kratos). On a variety of visual sources from the Bronze Age we find men slugging it out – not in battle, but in complicated ‘friendly’ combats, engagements that were designed to perfect close-quarter combat skills. Submission fighting, submission wrestling, mock battles with pikes and shields and boxing are all represented. These contests were important preparation for war, but also served to identify the real ‘heroes’ within the citadels. Their ancient Greek name, agones, is the root of ‘agony’; the etymology goes some way to convey the intensity of such contention.

 

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