One fragmentary Hittite tablet known as the Alakšandu Treaty, tells us that the sons of concubines could succeed to the throne.7 A liberal interpretation of the text may even draw the conclusion that the Trojan prince referred to in the tablet, a man called Alaksandu, has a Greek concubine as a mother.8 As we have seen, Homer has an alternative name for Paris in the Iliad – Alexander – almost certainly a Greek form of Alaksandu. There is simply not enough evidence to draw a line connecting Alexander the prince of Homer’s Troy – a man with a taste for Greek women – and Alaksandu the Late Bronze Age prince of Wilusa, who possibly was of Greek blood, but the reference bears witness to the international nature of dynastic relations within the great royal courts of pre-history.9
Anatolian royal families, packed together in relatively isolated quarters, seem to have enjoyed familial relations worthy of any soap-opera, and oracles and texts refer to quarrels and catfights. One can just imagine the rivalry – not to mention the insurrections. One of the few texts that speaks of Trojan history describes the deposition of a king there called Walmu.10 As early as 1500 BC, the Edict of Telipinu (following the murder of the eponymous king’s wife and daughter) had tried to put an end to the wranglings and bloody power struggles of the Anatolian courts.
Who will become king after me in future, let his brothers, his sons, his in-laws, his further family members and his troops be united! Thereupon you will hold the country subdued with your might. And don’t speak as follows: ‘I will eradicate it’, for you won’t eradicate anything. On the contrary, you will only implicate yourself! Do not kill anybody of your family, it is not right.11
One woman whose intrigues and power-broking make for apposite – and diverting – reading is Puduhepa: a Hittite queen who was particularly active between 1280 and 1230 BC – the putative era of the Trojan War. We meet Puduhepa face to face in a weathered rock carving in Cappadocia, southern Turkey: the Firaktin relief. Dressed in a priestess’ robes, she pours a libation to one of the premier deities in the Hittite pantheon – the sun goddess Hepat of Arinna. This, our only surviving representation of the queen, is a fitting one. Puduhepa had started off life as a priestess, a ‘hand-maiden of Ishtar’. She had a reputation as a great beauty and the king, Hattusili III, declared that he had been compelled to marry her following a vision in a dream. Years later he writes that the goddess Ishtar has blessed them with ‘the love of husband and wife’.12 Ishtar looked after affairs of the heart in Anatolia as Aphrodite would come to in Archaic Greece and beyond.13
A man and his wife who love each other and carry their love to fulfilment: That has been decreed by you, Ishtar. He who seduces a woman and carries the seduction to fulfilment: That has been decreed by you, Ishtar.
Hurrian Hymn to Ishtar c. 14th century BC14
Deeply pious, Puduhepa energetically re-organised a number of the religious festivals in the Hittite calendar. We know of the extent of her influence because she left behind her an excellent trail – not of paper, but of stone and clay.
As with a number of female consorts of the time, Puduhepa shared a seal with her king. In October 2004, fortified with the Turkish coffee that stands as thick as soup in its cup, following a tour around the vast site of Hattusa, I went to investigate one of the few surviving imprints of this vital tool of royal bureaucracy, now sitting in the quaint Museum of Bogazkale in the modern village that abuts the archaeological site.
The seal imprint has a number of cracks and it crumbles a little at some of the edges, but it is a good size, about an inch across and fairly easy to read. In the palm of my hand, the artefact hardly registered any weight – extraordinary that this discrete, diminutive piece of mud, stamped out over three thousand years ago, has survived at all. On the clay surface it is possible to make out Puduhepa’s name in Luwian hieroglyphs and, next to her name, that of her husband. It was fairly common for Hittite queens to share a seal, and to enjoy some degree of independence from their consorts. But Puduhepa took things one stage further, she had her own seal cast.15 In complex judicial arrangements (for example, a difficult case brought before the royal court regarding ownership of sunken treasure once a ship had been attacked) it is not King Hattusili, but Queen Puduhepa who is, repeatedly, the voice of authority.16
When Puduhepa comes to be involved in the negotiations surrounding her daughter’s marriage to the King of Egypt, Rameses II, we get a real taste of her kudos. Not only does she receive from Rameses exact duplicates of the letters he sends to her husband, but then, not at all happy with the way things are proceeding, she takes the Pharaoh himself to task.
In c. 1270 BC there had been a fire in Puduhepa’s treasure house at Hattusa.17 The queen contacts Rameses to tell him that as a result, diplomatic affairs are delayed, in the immediate future she will not be able to send over one of her daughters as a bride to the Egyptian court. Rameses seems to be pushing her to advance the matter – presumably because he wants to get hold of the girl’s dowry as well as the girl. Puduhepa’s response is acerbic.
Does my brother possess nothing at all? Only if the son of the Sun-God, the son of the Storm-God, and the sea have nothing do you have nothing! Yet, my brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense. That is worthy of neither your reputation, nor your status.18
Puduhepa was confident enough to chastise one of the most powerful men on earth. Her history reminds us that in the 13th century BC, given sufficient force of character, aristocratic women could make a lasting mark on the world around them. When you turn the spotlight onto a queen such as her, it becomes apparent that this was not just an Age of Heroes but an Age of Heroines too.
As well as giving us a sense of courtly life, the texts from Hattusa are invaluable when trying to understand the central premise of Helen and Paris’ story. A vast selection deal with legal affairs and a number of these texts show that rape, abduction and adultery were live issues. Within the collection of Hittite state laws, out of 200 clauses, fourteen deal with sexual misdemeanours.19
There is an assumption in the Hittite texts that, in order to be protected by law, marriages are monogamous and that such unions brought with them material gain and material responsibilities. If a man ran off with another man’s betrothed then he (not the girl’s family) would be personally responsible for recompensing the rejected suitor with the equivalent value of the girl’s dowry.20 Generally, marriages were arranged and it was accepted that on occasion they would not work out; if there was an amicable divorce then any property would be divided equally between both husband and wife. In the case of rape though there was less equity. Although women did have redress in law, if a woman was raped in her own home then there was an assumption that she was complicit and therefore guilty.
If a man seizes a woman in the mountains (and rapes her), the man is guilty and shall die, but if he seizes her in her house, the woman is guilty and shall die. If the woman’s husband catches them (in the act) and kills them, he has committed no offence.21
Suspected rape or adultery might bring the death penalty.22 The Hittites recognised that passion could interrupt a well-planned marriage – there is ample legislation that deals with elopement. The concept of a lover is given a name, the ‘pupu’. But if you made love to another man’s wife you diced with death. Under Anatolian law, Helen’s liaison with Paris was, potentially, a capital offence. A Bronze Age Paris and his illegitimate amour would not have been surprised to hear that a vengeful husband was in pursuit, the cuckold confident that he would be justified in meting out the harshest possible punishment.
27
A FLEET SETS SAIL
Because of his longing for something gone across the sea
a phantom seems to rule the rooms,
and the grace of statues shaped in beauty
comes to be an object of hate for the man.
In the absence of eyes
all Aphrodite is vacant, gone.
AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon1 (c.458 BC)
IN TROY, AS THE HELEN OF THE EPIC CYCLE looked o
ut west, across the sea, she would have seen two small dark shapes on the horizon.2 Two boats – preliminary envoys from Greece.3 We hear from a variety of literary sources that when he learns of his wife’s absence, Menelaus’ first reaction is not to spill blood, not to effect a lightning strike, but instead to attempt to sort out the whole sorry business with diplomacy.4 The Greek army has already been raised and is waiting in Tenedos, but the hapless Spartan king sails with Odysseus to negotiate for Helen’s release.
Cut off from the rest of the army, Menelaus and Odysseus are exposed and outnumbered. As they take their request to the Trojans, Paris attempts to engineer an assassination, bribing another Trojan, Antimachos, to persuade the assembly to butcher the Greek heroes.5 But the libidinous prince could have saved his gold. The assassination attempt is bungled and the stalwart Greeks endeavour to persuade Priam and the assembled court to hand Helen back – adding, with more than a glimmer of a threat, that by doing so they will save themselves much adversity. The Trojans choose the path of greatest resistance and vote not to give up their prize. Greek audiences would have watched this moment played out in a drama by Sophocles, now lost, called Helenes Apaitesis, ‘The Request for Helen’. It is an eternally popular theme – the empty privilege of hindsight – an impotent vision of blood shed avoided, of the better, happier place the world could have been.
But there is more than just pathos in play here. This version of events reflects international relations in the Late Bronze Age, when pacts and treaties and diplomatic negotiation stitched populations together; war was an expensive and unpredictable business. Great store was set by negotiation. The King of the Hurrians negotiates with the King of Babylon, the King of the Hittites writes to rulers on the Greek mainland and, in one of the most celebrated treaties from the ancient world, the Hittites and the Egyptians enter into a peace treaty, the ‘Eternal Treaty’ (now popularly known as the Treaty of Kadesh) to try to prevent widespread, unsustainable, mass conflict. A copy of the clay tablet on which the treaty was inscribed in 1259 BC is posted outside the United Nations Security Council. It was an agreement sealed thirteen years later by a royal marriage – that of a Hittite princess to the King of Egypt, Rameses the Great:
[The treaty which] Ramses [Beloved] of Amon, Great King, King [of Egypt, Hero, concluded] on [a tablet of silver] with Hattusili [Great King], King of Hatti, his brother, in order to establish [great] peace and great [brotherhood] between them forever … I have now established good brotherhood and good peace between us forever, in order likewise to establish good peace and good brotherhood in [the relations] of Egypt with Hatti forever.6
The clay and bronze tablets that carried messages and information from one head of state to another were written by men and women who clearly had a common understanding although the icy respect and honey-tongued, thinly veiled threats of some of these diplomatic texts are only too familiar. The language of diplomacy seems to have changed very little down the millennia. Take, for example, the King of the Hittites, writing to Kadashman-Enlil II, the King of Babylon, some time between 1263 and 1255 BC:
When your father and I established diplomatic relations and when we became like loving brothers, we did not become brothers for one day only; did we not establish permanent brotherly relations based on equal understanding?
… after the death of your father, I dried my tears and dispatched a messenger to the Land of Babylon, and sent the following message to the high officials of Babylon; ‘If you do not keep the son of my brother as ruler, I shall become your enemy, I will go and invade Babylon; but (if you do, then) send me word if an enemy rises against you or if any difficulty threatens you, and I will come to your aid!’7
The tablets reveal something of central importance to the Late Bronze Age. In many ways, it was appropriate that this distant era should be nominated as heroic. Not simply because this was a time of storybook wealth, vigorous ambition and massive achievement before an age of retrenchment that we have labelled ‘the Dark Ages’, but also because those in charge of the palace-citadels of the Eastern Mediterranean were, in a sense, giants of men. Read the treaties written by the Hittites and the other great leaders of the day and the language used clearly demonstrates that these are agreements not between states, but between individuals: between singular men (and sometimes women) – heroes and heroines whose actions could indeed direct the course of entire civilisations.
The Hittite king, for example, frequently styles himself ‘Great King, Hero’.8 Given that single aristocrats could mobilise vast forces in the Late Bronze Age – 47,500 allied Hittite forces at the Battle of Kadesh,9 we are told by ancient accounts – it is little surprise that these all-powerful rulers became larger-than-life characters in the popular imagination and that their decisions and actions became legendary.
Still, even if this was an age of diplomacy, of negotiation between heroes, in the narrative of the Trojan War, diplomacy failed. Paris would not release his exotic new queen, and the Greeks were sent back to their ships empty-handed. Whether Helen had walked lightly into Priam’s great city, or had been dragged through the gates, bruised and traumatised by her rape, the Trojans were not going to give her up. Licking their wounds, the Greek leaders Menelaus, Odysseus and Agamemnon began to draw up their battle plan.
They recalled the vows of loyalty that they and all the other heroes of Greece had made to each other over the sacrificed corpse of a horse when contesting for Helen’s hand. They agreed that when an infiltrator, a foreigner, came and made a mockery of their honour and their self-sacrifice, came and took Helen while a guest of the Spartan palace, they had sustained a collective affront. Agamemnon, the most powerful king in Greece and the elder brother of the cuckolded Menelaus, had the perfect excuse to mobilise the army. Doubly, triply insulted, next time the Greek tribal-leaders were not going to take no for an answer.
As Helen lay in Paris’ bed, weeping or laughing at the news that Menelaus had been sent back from his diplomatic sortie empty-handed, his tail between his legs,10 the Greek fleet, following an earlier, abortive attempt to land on the Troad, was gathering at Aulis on the eastern coast of Greece near Thebes.11 The Greeks were not to be cheated of their prize-woman. Supplies were loaded, and the drummers drummed as soldier after soldier marched up and down the beaches preparing for battle. The glory of Greece was there – the warrior-heroes who between them ruled over Crete and the Greek mainland. Women had been left in charge in palace-fortresses back in Greece and the clans had put aside their differences to form a unified war machine. Their blood was up. The shores of Troy promised revenge and plunder and women a-plenty. Later in the narrative of the conflict, Thersites provides an inventory of the spoils of war: bronze, gold and ‘Best of the lot, the beauties’.12 Spurring one of his men on, Agamemnon offers ‘a tripod, or purebred team with their own car or a fine woman to mount and share your bed’.13
Everything was set and yet the wind was against the Greeks; the boats, lined up at Aulis, could not set sail. An enervating lingering dragged out, day after day. Only an extreme act would bring catharsis. Helen’s was an act of love that famously precipitated an act of war, but the killing starts long before the Greeks land on the Anatolian coast. Her affair set in train a whole catalogue of murders. The first victim was a young child – Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia.14
The reason the Greek ships had found themselves trapped at Aulis was because a Greek soldier – some whispered Agamemnon himself – had killed a deer in the sanctuary of the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. To make matters worse, the arrogant hunter then boasted that this was a feat that bettered any kill of the gods. The goddess was enraged. Artemis would only be appeased with a blood gift of the most perfect kind. And so Agamemnon sends wily-tongued Odysseus to tempt his young daughter Iphigeneia to her death. ‘Tell her that Achilles is waiting,’ says the desperate king, ‘tell her she shall be married to the greatest of all heroes.’15 Iphigeneia travels from Mycenae with her mother Clytemnestra. But when she arrives, she is not taken
to put on her wedding clothes, but instead to an altar slab by her father. Here she is to be sacrificed; ostensibly to appease the goddess – but in reality for Greek honour, to ensure that men can fight for an emblem of beauty. It is a desperate moment. Iphigeneia cries out to her father, but is still lifted ‘like a goat, face downward, above the altar’. She is ‘gagged, the bit yanked roughly, stifling a cry that would have brought a curse down on the house’. She knows all her assailants, but she can do nothing but ‘with pitiful arrows from her eyes’ shoot the sacrificers, ‘vivid as in a picture, wanting to speak, to call each one by name.’ And all this, as the watchman acidly points out, is Helen’s fault. Iphigeneia is sacrificed to ‘safeguard, / A war of vengeance over a woman’.16
The hideous brutality of Iphigeneia’s death drives Agamemnon’s wife, Helen’s half-sister, Clytemnestra, to kill Agamemnon on his return from Troy. Horror at his father’s murder, in turn, spurs Orestes to kill his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes is persecuted, driven mad by the Furies for his unfilial hatred. Helen is the catalyst of one of the most famous tragic cycles in the world.
Helen of Troy Page 24