Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Helen is a piece of creation so perfectly beautiful that like the butterfly, called by the Greeks psyche – a soul or life-breath – she was thought to hover somewhere between the real and the fantastical.28 But Helen is also a perfect exemplar of the butterfly effect. In the grand scheme of things, she is of little significance – she is a regent in Lakonia and Paris a princeling of Troy. This is not the story of the greatest power-brokers of the age, a scandal involving the Queen of Mycenae or Thebes, the King of Troy himself or his heroic, firstborn son Hector. Helen and Paris start out as bit-players, but their sexual peccadillo changes the world: a private, local act that ends up dragging human history along behind it.

  So as the Troy-bound lovers listen to the sounds of the night, and stroke each other’s arms, as the waves lap the boat’s side and Helen pushes her ‘loose and lustrous hair’ back out of her eyes, the picture of mortal bliss, there is a dreadful inevitability about what is going to happen next.29 A butterfly has flapped its wings. Chaos is on its way.

  24

  THE FAIR TROAD

  Oh Violet it’s too wonderful for belief. I had not imagined Fate could be so benign … I’ve been looking at the maps. Do you think perhaps the fort on the Asiatic corner will want quelling, and we’ll land and come at it from behind and they’ll make a sortie and meet us on the plains of Troy? … Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine dark and unvintageable … ?

  RUPERT BROOKE (February 1915)1

  IT IS ONLY ON HEADING EAST from Sparta’s port of Gythion by boat that it becomes clear just how close Troy is to the Greek mainland. Hugging the coastline, the safest route passes through the Aegean Sea and then wends its way around the Cycladic islands and thereon up into the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. With a fair wind, this is a simple journey. On foot, following the Mycenaean roads and trackways that still appear as ghosts in the Peloponnesian landscape, the trek from Mycenae to Sparta would have taken over three days. By sea the Mycenaean Greeks could have reached a whole new continent in the same time. For the warrior-lords of Greece, the Anatolian coast must have felt very close; and very tempting.

  I first arrived at Troy by boat.2 In the owl-light, the sea heaved with an ugly, oily swell. It was a disturbed night. Homer describes moments like this perfectly: ‘wave on blacker wave, cresting, heaving a tangled mass of seaweed out along the surf ’. For hours I watched the breakers on the coast line, but then, as dawn lit up the land, the bleakness of the Turkish coast came as a shock. The sea, now an innocent, speedwell blue stretch, was broken by squat hills and long listless beaches. Troy inhabits a raw landscape – an appropriate setting for the raw passion and attenuated, desperate fighting that Homer tells us it once sustained.

  On the opposite side of the Dardanelles, there were other pilgrims visiting another battlefield. One day I walked behind them along a narrow stony path. The dust in front and behind was kicked up by these serious young men and women, heads down, making their own pilgrimage to the site of Gallipoli where in 1915 during the First World War so many died, thirty-odd centuries after the Trojan War. The dead at Gallipoli are commemorated in row upon row of simple marble tombs. On their headstones they are promised a uniform comfort: ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVER-MORE.’

  The small museum near to the battleground houses a smattering of artefacts that belonged to these young martyrs. When I first visited the site in the mid-1980s, in one glass case were the remains of a tin of chocolate and a pair of hand-knitted woollen mittens, sent by a British woman to keep her teenage grandson warm. My back was wet with the sweat from the long walk in baking heat, and inside the museum my eyes took some time to adjust after the glare of the sun: no gift could have felt more in-appropriate. Nor indeed could the bright-eyed verve of the soldiers who sailed up the Dardanelles – boys who left home with Homer’s words spinning in their heads – an irony not lost on those they left behind:

  Bees hummed and rooks called hoarsely outside the quiet room Where by an open window Gervais, the restless boy, Fretting the while for cricket, read of Patroclus’ doom And flower of youth a-dying by far-off windy Troy.

  Do the old tales, half-remembered, come back to haunt him now Who leaving his glad school-days and putting boyhood by Joined England’s bitter Iliad? Greek beauty on the brow That frowns with dying wonder up to Hissarlik’s sky!3

  There are many ghosts along the coast of the Troad. This is a place where innocents died in both the 20th century AD and, perhaps, in the 13th century BC, far from home, men fighting for political and military juggernauts whose cause was obfuscated or long forgotten.

  In pre-history, pulling into the Bay of Bes¸ik, five miles or so south-west of Troy, would have been a welcome respite from the challenging sailing conditions of the Dardanelles. Between May and October, watermen would have to deal with the double trouble of strong currents powering from the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean and a north-easterly wind blowing head on as they tried to enter the straits.4 Three and a half thousand years ago an arm of the sea would also have stretched inland from the coastline here – some think right to the town of Troy itself. Little surprise that the ports of Troy and their associated citadel, positioned as they were to serve the three seas, the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, should become so iconic, so hallowed.5 It must have been with some relief that sailors arrived within sight of Bes¸ik Bay. Here, at last, was some security and an opportunity to trade.

  Every new boatload that turned up to anchor at Troy’s ports would have merited a turn of the head, a greedy glance from the merchants and slaves who worked there. This would have been both a crossroads and a check-point. Here there would certainly have been a great bar-baring, but it would be the sound of men from all over the Eastern Mediterranean talking to each other. Doing deals, learning each other’s songs, worshipping each other’s gods. The variegated Anatolian states in the Hittite commonwealth were not sea-powers, but they relied on foreign boats to bring in the raw materials that motivated the civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean – tin and copper, to make the bronze that was so coveted by the rulers of the age.

  The range of pottery and other artefacts retrieved from the site of Troy and its environs bears out the city’s literary reputation as a cosmopolitan hub; there are ivory beads here from Greece, amber from the Baltic, pottery from Crete and foodstuffs from Babylon, Cyprus and the Lebanon.6 The foundations of exceptionally spacious buildings within Troy itself have been diagnosed as massive storage centres for grain, oil and wine. The Uluburun shipwreck heading west from the Turkish coast, contained traces of pomegranates, almonds, pine nuts, ostrich eggs and a full ton of the pungent terebinth resin. These are the kinds of goods that would have been lowered, along with human cargo, at the anchorage points close to Troy.

  Any Mycenaean Greek arriving at Bes¸ik Bay would have been greeted by a babble of different voices. No one knows for sure what the lingua franca would have been. Eight written languages are recorded at the Hittite capital Hattusa,7 and in order to operate here, linguistic competence would have been essential.8 Scholars in the past have used the fact that Trojans and Greeks appear to communicate effortlessly on the battlefield to dispute the Iliad’s historicity. But even were this intended only as a dramatic device, it would also have been a historical possibility.9 Given their close trading links, Bronze Age Trojans and Mycenaean Greeks would indeed have been used to understanding one another.10

  Beşik Bay is a strange, forgotten place now. Sandy enough to pass for a pleasure beach, on occasion it hosts visitors – mainly locals – for walks and dips in the sea. Approaching the site of the Late Bronze Age anchorage points, there is a scrubby area that serves as a car park, boasting an occasional broken bin, from which the litter escaped long ago; plastic bags perch and flutter in the nearby trees like flocks of ragged, brightly-plumed birds. Onto the shoreline itself, grey seaweed has been tossed in giant clumps. Herds of goats pick their way through the dunes, defecating as they go.

  On first impression, t
here is nothing here that speaks of heroes or of the cosmopolitan interchange that the bay would have witnessed three and half thousand years ago. But excavations in 1984 and 1985 produced irrefutable evidence of Mycenaean presence. Just three hundred yards inland a cemetery was discovered. Here there are well over a hundred burials of men, women and children.11 Identification of the goods found within the graves shows them to be from the 13th century BC and not all Anatolian, but predominantly Greek or Greek imitation. In one elaborate ‘grave-house’ melted metal suggests that men were cremated along with their swords and daggers. Some of the dead have been buried in giant pithoi. Elsewhere cenotaphs have been found, marking empty graves.

  The human remains at Beşik Bay may represent a subsidiary Mycenaean group providing supplies to a hostile force of Greeks, or even just a mongrel trading community, men and women who dealt peaceably with the Trojans. From the evidence we have, this is clearly not the graveyard of an epic battlefield. If the remains speak of violence, they are more likely to tell of a series of small skirmishes in the area around Troy. But whatever the circumstances of the deaths in that little Grecophile community, whether the Mycenaeans came to the shores near Troy in peace or in war, there is no doubt that they were here.

  There is another clue in the landscape to the significance of Beşik Bay: a peculiar hummock, a further 455m inshore, now named Beşik Tepe but for centuries known as the ‘Mound of Achilles’. This grand extrusion has been the focus of much political posturing and was visited by the great generals of antiquity;12 Xerxes, the leader of the Persians came here in 480 BC, having already honoured the dead Trojan heroes with libations and the sacrifice of a thousand cattle to Athena of Troy.13 Alexander the Great, visiting in 334 BC, styled himself a second Achilles, with his beloved companion Hephaestion ably filling the role of Patroclus: ‘Fortunate youth, to have found in Homer an herald of thy valour!’14 we are told he shouted out during his visit, jealous of Achilles’ immortality.15

  As it stands, this cone of earth, the ‘Mound of Achilles’, is an accretion of the centuries. Excavations have shown the bulk of the construction to be Hellenistic – so Alexander and others were honouring a phantom grave. When I last visited Beşik Tepe, the excavation had been back-filled, the mound restored. Braving the vipers and brambles I scrambled to the top. Standing on the stony summit with my back to the sea, I could just pick out, five miles inland, perched on a small hill called Hisarlik, the extant remains of Troy. It was almost certainly this settlement that Homer had in mind when he wrote his tale of Ilios and this is where countless authors and adventurers from both the ancient and the modern worlds have wanted to believe that King Priam’s glorious palace once stood.

  A huge gateway has been identified on the western edge of Hisarlik Hill. It is 3.5 to 4m across, and looks out to sea, facing west. Recent excavations show that from this gate a paved roadway would have led out across the Scamander Plain towards Beşik Bay.16 Naturally a town such as Troy that looked to the travelling salesmen of the sea for its income would save one of its most imposing approaches for the ocean. Another major gateway in the southern section of the citadel walls stands next to the remains of what would have been an imposing watchtower – the Trojans knew they attracted enemies as well as acolytes. The ingress and egress of vessels and cargo in Beşik Bay and up to Troy’s harbour would have been carefully monitored. Boats could bring disease and enemies as well as trade. They could bring a Helen.

  25

  THE TOPLESS TOWERS OF ILIUM

  a suspect stranger from Greece,

  is she a slave or a queen?

  H.D., Helen in Egypt (1961)1

  HISARLIK HAS ATTRACTED VISITORS AND INTEREST for millennia. The Late Bronze Age buildings here would have been abandoned at the latest in 950 BC but there was an unbroken local tradition – almost certainly transmitted by Homer – that this ruined site was indeed the Ilios of the Age of Heroes.2 Overlooking the rich, arable plain of the River Scamander the citadel was rebuilt and reoccupied in the Archaic, Hellenistic and Roman periods.3 In AD 324 the Emperor Constantine began to found his ‘new Rome’ close by at Yenishehir before he moved the operation 200 miles north to Byzantium, or, as he rechristened the city, Constantinople. Amateur classicists were thrilled to think they had found in the region tangible evidence of Troy and the Trojan War. In 1631 an endearingly callow sailor-boy left his mark on a piece of masonry he believed to be Hector’s tomb:

  I do suppose that here stood Troy My Name it is William a jolly boy, My other Name it is Hudson, and so, God Bless the Sailors, where ever they do go. I was here in the Year of our Lord 1631, and was bound to Old England, God Bless her.4

  Another English traveller, Edward Clarke, was the first formally to identify Hisarlik as the site of Troy but half a century would pass before any exploratory soundings were made of the large grassy knoll.5 In the 19th century AD, the land to the east of the hill was owned by the Calvert family – a dynasty involved in the region for some time as landowners, diplomats and businessmen. One son, Frank was convinced he had the ‘topless towers of Ilium’ on his doorstep. In 1865 he started to dig, tentatively: Calvert’s investigations were careful and perceptive, but there was insufficient cash to mount a serious excavation. Troy looked set to keep its secrets until an angel of mercy (or despair, depending on your view of his methods of excavation) came in the form of the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann.

  Schliemann claimed he had had an obsessive determination to find Homer’s Troy from the tender age of eight. Forty years later, conversations with Calvert convinced him that it was on Hisarlik that he should focus his search. In 1868 he declared to Calvert in a letter: ‘I am now quite decided to dig away the whole artificial mount of Hisarlik.’6 He was true to his word. In 1870, with dogged enthusiasm he and his workmen, a force that could number 160 at any one time, cut a vast trench from north to south through Hisarlik Hill, 14m deep and 79m wide, gouging out the central and potentially most fecund area of the archaeological site. Hisarlik had been a trading centre since c. 3000 BC. There are forty-one habitation layers on the site at Troy, and in his haste to find Helen, Achilles, Hector and the rest, Schliemann tore through most of them, destroying irreplaceable evidence of the past.7

  The self-taught showman-archaeologist was, at first, disappointed. Schliemann was looking for the grand palace of Priam, the man with fifty sons and untold wealth – and yet, he admitted in private to a colleague, the entire settlement seemed to be ‘hardly larger than Trafalgar Square’.8 Still, his core enthusiasm was not dampened. Schliemann’s driving motive, rather than to understand the Late Bronze Age, was to try to find proof of Homer’s stories and – behaving like a puppy with its first toy – when he came across a sloping road (dating in fact from 2500 BC, over a thousand years before the most likely date of the Trojan War) he triumphantly concluded that this was none other than the broad pathway up which the Trojans had pulled the malevolent Wooden Horse.9

  Convinced he had rediscovered Helen’s love-nest, Schliemann tried to bring Helen back to life. His methods, if not cavalier, were certainly wilful. When his workers dug up a terracotta statuette at Troy, he immediately identified it as a ‘bust of Helen’.10 And in May 1873, 11 as he came across an extraordinary hoard – copper lances, silver knife-blades, gold cups, a large silver vase – Schliemann fell on the finds, dubbing these ‘Priam’s Treasure’12, and the diadems, necklaces, bracelets and finger rings – packed tight in the vase – ‘The Jewels of Helen’. Schliemann’s fantasies about the Spartan queen continued beyond the grave. At his funeral, while copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey were lodged next to his corpse, Helen’s funeral speech for the dead hero Hector was recited – by his own Greek wife – over his grave.13

  For Schliemann had already gone so far as to ship in a Greek beauty to glide through the ruins of Troy. Before he divorced his first, Russian wife (with whom he had three children), Schliemann had instructed a Greek archbishop, Theokletos Vimpos, to find for him someone … ‘of the G
reek type, with black hair and, if possible, beautiful …’14 A sixteen-year-old Greek girl called Sophia Engastromenos was sourced and an interview was arranged at her family home. Schliemann – whose stipulations also included poverty and education – asked the girl to recite Homer and to answer a question about Roman history. Sophia delivered, and shortly after the inter-view the two were married. According to Schliemann it was a happy match: ‘She loves me as a Greek, with passion, and I love her no less. I speak only Greek with her, for this is the most beautiful language in the world. It is the language of the gods.’15

  Schliemann dressed his newly acquired Hellenic spouse in ‘the Jewels of Helen’ and photographed her, creating for the chattering classes who followed his digs a dazzling image of a legendary queen. The tiny finger rings (8,750 gold ornaments in all were found) are too delicate for this matron’s fingers. Her jet-black hair might set off one of the jewelled head-dresses rather well, but she is no Helen. The diadem, made up of fine gold-wire and of 16,353 worked gold pieces,16 would have complemented Helen’s famous golden curls, the tresses that men found so hard to resist. But it is all chimerical. Expert examination of the treasures shows them to be 1,200 years too old to have been worn by a 13th-century Bronze Age queen – these could have belonged only to a woman who would have been dust in the earth at the time a real Helen arrived at Troy.17

  Just as Schliemann dressed Sophia up in ‘Helen’s Jewels’, so he built for her a Trojan palace in the heart of Athens: Iliou Melathron, he called it, the great hall of Troy.18 Here he kept his wife, their two children and a complement of servants. The children’s bedrooms are decorated with hand-painted picture-postcard scenes of Greek landscapes and half-excavated ruins. During one visit to the Iliou Melathron I found archaeologists and art students in the process of renovating the frescoes – neglected for decades. Refreshed, the images gleamed with an ebullient clarity. Schliemann clearly hoped his own offspring – little Agamemnon and Andromache – would fall asleep dreaming of the heroic adventures to come in their technicolor Mediterranean playground.19