The story of Iphigeneia deals with fundamental issues – the conflicts of love and duty, of ambition and humility, of superstition and belief. And because of this the slaughter of a virgin-princess from Mycenae is still enacted on stages across the world. Recently I saw a small poster advertising a production of Goethe’s version of the tragedy in a little theatre above the Prince Albert pub in Notting Hill, West London. Interested to see how a regular theatre crowd would react to the tale of the sacrifice of a pre-pubescent, I bought a ticket on impulse and waited half an hour for the show to start. The theatre audience was sitting in the bar downstairs, talking about film-stars and shopping alongside the fashionable of Notting Hill. Conversations were shouted to compete with the TV and thudding piped music while the electric ceiling fans above whirled busily, necessary in this crowded smoky venue even on a chill November evening. Single men smoked, read the Evening Standard and talked on their mobile phones – a lot of day-to-day business to get through before moving upstairs to be pounded by a drama first staged 2,500 years ago.
And of course all those thoughts about passion and principle, free will and fate, hooked to the story of a woman butchered so that the Greeks could get on with the business of retrieving Helen from Troy. In Euripides’ version of the tale, Iphigeneia’s mother Clytemnestra begs her husband to reconsider his decision, which, even to an ancient Greek mind, seems nefarious.
Tell me: if someone asks why you are killing her, What will you say? Or must I speak your words for you?‘So that Menelaus may get back Helen.’ A splendid act, To pay a child’s life as the ransom for a slut! To buy what we most hate with what we most dearly love!17
Just before he kills her, Agamemnon tries to justify, to his own daughter, her imminent death. He articulates the close connection between eros and eris, blaming a form of the love goddess for rousing his men to a passion to leave Greece and fight. ‘Some kind of Aphrodite has frenzied the army, made them mad to set sail as soon as possible.’18 Small comfort to the young girl.19
Iphigeneia is stretched across the altar and the high priest brings his knife to her throat. In some versions of the story there is a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning and the girl is whisked off by Artemis herself to Tauris (present-day Crimea on the Black Sea). In others, the blade hits home. But the fate of the daughter of Agamemnon is now an irrelevance because suddenly, miraculously, the leaves around the sanctuary begin to stir. The wind is back and the soldiers and generals let out a great sigh – they are on their way to Troy: 1,186 ships, bearing between them 100,000 men, sail from the port of Aulis to reclaim Sparta’s wandering queen.20
Today the coastline of Aulis is a sad place, dominated by a vast cement factory – the intrusion of industrialisation on the landscape is uncompromising. There are classical and indeed Mycenaean ruins here, and a sanctuary of Artemis, but all is covered in a fine layer of cement dust. The air is bitter. Occasionally little posies are left on marble slabs in memory of the young Iphigeneia. An innocent who has come to represent the inexorable brutality of war and of blind ambition.
Homer does not deal with the Iphigeneia story but his famous roll-call of Greek maritime might, ‘the Catalogue of Ships’, sheds an interesting light on the origins of the Iliad. We are told that twenty-nine naval contingents are launched from Aulis in Boiotia, in northern Greece. This catalogue is surprisingly similar to the lists of foodstuffs and taxes and personnel, the property distribution and the hierarchies, which are scratched into the clay of the Linear B tablets. It is bald, bland and repetitive, a blatant and meticulously detailed assertion of power. First listed are the regions and towns that have contributed to the war effort; then we learn the names of the commanders and finally the number of ships and crew members.
It is impossible that this comprehensive list was researched and formulated by one man, concocted as a giant memory test to flesh out an already long poem. Of all 178 names recorded by Homer not one is fabricated and almost every one of the places catalogued is given an appropriate geographical position.21 Indeed, prominent parts of Homer’s 8th-century BC Greece are conspicuous by their absence; the bard is not simply detailing the centres of power in his own Iron Age world. These omissions indicate the historicity of this element of the epic – the excluded towns and regions were indeed not part of ‘Greece’ in the Bronze Age. Described by some as an ‘order of march’ the list is a plausible compilation of the forces available to a Late Bronze Age general.
In 1993, the discovery of a single Linear B tablet in Thebes22 threw an entirely new light on the Catalogue question. The tablet was uncovered by accident, when a water pipe was being laid in Pelopidas Street in central Thebes. The waterworks were suspended and an archaeological investigation begun. The dig has been productive and, to date, over 250 tablets have surfaced. These tablets show that Thebes was in fact the centre of a massive territory, a territory larger than Pylos or Sparta or Mycenae itself.23 If the Theban district was a vitally powerful region in the Late Bronze Age, it suddenly makes sense that a consolidated movement of Greeks should set sail from Thebes’ port – the port of Aulis.
The new Theban tablets list a town, Eleon, which had always given archaeologists and historians some trouble – it is mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships, part of the naval contingent from Boiotia. Yet Eleon seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. As a northern Greek settlement it is not mentioned in any other source from antiquity. And so, scholars argued, this town must have been simply a figment of Homer’s imagination.
The Thebes tablets dating from the 13th century BC tell a different story. Eleon appears on tablet TH Ft 140. 24 Homer’s lines, in this case (as in many others), are transmitting information direct from the Bronze Age past.
And by comparing Homer’s verse with the hard evidence of the Late Bronze Age, another snag in the Trojan story can be unravelled. It has often been asked why Homer uses two names for Troy. Why does he call the town both Troia and Ilios? Why do we have a book called the ‘Iliad’ that tells the story of the ‘Trojan’ war? The answer has now revealed itself thanks to a collaboration between linguists and historians of the Hittite world.
Homer was probably an Ionian Greek; he could have lived in Smyrna or in Chios. By the time his words were written down in the 7th century BC, in the Ionian region the ‘w’ that often preceded the letter ‘i’ would have been lost (the Aeolian dialects kept their ‘w’ for longer; Sappho, for example, would have used it). The Hittite texts tell us that in the Troad there were two territories in the region of Troy – one was called Wilusa, the other Taruwisa.25 If these names are remembered down the centuries, and then sung by a bard who drops his ’W’s, Wilusa becomes (W)Ilusa, then (W)Ilios and eventually Ilios, and Taru(w)isa, becomes Taruisa and eventually Troia. Hence we get the story of Ilios, the Iliad, and the wars of Troia, Troy.
The rhythm of the Iliad too can guide us towards the certain knowledge that a number of Homer’s lines were composed in the Mycenaean period. The entire poem is written in hexameter. Many of the verses read perfectly, and yet the meter of some lines is simply unsatisfying, there are jolts and jars where normally the poetry flows. But write those lines using elements of Linear B, Bronze Age rather than Classical Greek – in the language that the Mycenaeans would have used – and the lines scan perfectly.26
Despite the historical roots of the Catalogue of Ships the quest to reclaim a wayward queen could never have launched a thousand ships. If the Mycenaean elite had left for Troy in such a number, with each fifty-oared boat carrying thirty warriors, each of those warriors with at least one high-born valet, the Mycenaean economy would simply have disintegrated. In the 13th century BC, the sighting of just seven ships off the coast of the Levant spread panic through the region.27 And in legend, Heracles was said to have sacked an older city of Troy with a mere six ships. We have to wait close on a thousand years before a fleet remotely approaching the size of Homer’s Catalogue is ever recorded and even then (when the Persians sail to Greece in the hop
e of a takeover) the number reaches only five hundred or so.28
Back in the Cyclades where those stunning Bronze Age frescoes were preserved by the violent eruption of the Thera volcano, one diminutive example shows a nautical procession setting sail. Here the boats are finely decked out, fluttering with garlands of flowers, the skins of sacrificed animals, flags, and coloured cloths – they are clearly ready for some kind of grand state occasion. In the background men and women scurry around a vast citadel; soldiers are in evidence, and it is difficult to tell whether the boats are being welcomed or repulsed. There were no dedicated war-fleets in the Late Bronze Age. Those boats in the paintings would have been multi-purpose vessels that delivered sometimes goods, sometimes traders and diplomats, sometimes soldiers to far-flung shores. Camphor and incense could be burnt in the prows – there would have been lights to deal with the endless blackness of the ocean.29
It would have been boats like these that carried the contingents of Mycenaean Greeks to Beşik Bay. And, if there is any truth in the stories, it would have been boats such as these that brought Ajax, Achilles, Odysseus and the glory of Greece hurtling eastwards across the surf, the greatest warriors of the known world, leaving their homes and families, leaving their citadels unprotected, their crops rotting in the fields, to honour a promise made on a plain close to Sparta ten years earlier.30 And keenest of all, the cuckhold King of Sparta, Menelaus, with the sails on his boat bellying, crossing the high seas, to bring back his queen.
PART EIGHT
TROY BESIEGED
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Arrow and spear heads (possibly Mycenaean) discovered outside the walls of Troy. 13th century BC.
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HELEN – DESTROYER OF CITIES
So now let no man hurry to sail for home, not yet … not till he beds down with a faithful Trojan wife, payment in full for the groans and shocks of war we have borne for Helen.
Nestor, in Homer, Iliad1
THE GREEK VERB φρíσσω(phrisso) is an interesting one, the root of our word frisson. A useful word, it is flexible and while it can be interpreted in a number of ways it is always evocative. It is a word used by Homer in connection with Helen. In Troy we learn from her that πάυτεδ δέ με πεφρíkαιυ, ‘all around me cringe or bristle with fear’. Elsewhere she is ριγεδαυή Eλέυη, ‘Helen who makes you shudder’ or ‘makes you tremble’. She is sweet poison – both dreadful and delicious.2 And now that she has come to Troy, because Helen trails disaster in her wake, the plains of Troy too will bristle with arms. As Cassandra has predicted, as Zeus has planned, the Greeks want Helen back.
Homer paints a vivid picture of the boats, clustered up on the shore of the Bosphorus, row upon row, blackening the sand with their hulls until the beach below is submerged. The armies are like swarms of flies, seething over freshly collected milk.3 Elsewhere in the Iliad he speaks of the fires around the new Greek camp glowing in the dark, and the men in their bivouacs, tense and expectant. And he imagines these soldiers rank with aggression. Listen to the first lines of the Iliad.
Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.4
Homer makes it clear from the outset of the epic that the Iliad is a story of hate as well as of love, of human lives adulterated by the maw of conflict. Furious passages in Book 1 describe two men jarring over a woman – not Menelaus and Paris over Helen, but ‘brilliant’ Achilles and Agamemnon ‘lord of men’ over Briseis ‘the girl with the sparkling eyes’. Agamemnon has already been filibustering about another girl, Chryseis. We do not hear much about Chryseis directly, but we are told that her father, the priest Chryses, loves her and is outraged that she is being used as Agamemnon’s whore. She has been dragged from the temple of Apollo and seems destined to become a spoil of war, as Agamemnon barks at Chryses:
The girl – I won’t give up the girl. Long before that, old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos, far from her fatherland, slaving back and forth at the loom, forced to share my bed!5
There are echoes of Helen’s fate, if we believe that she too is a woman forced to share the bed of a foreigner a long way from home. The lines also pre-echo the fate of the women of Troy, a fate described with sometimes unbearable brilliance by the tragedians Euripides and Aeschylus. Homer makes it clear to us that men will always use the possession of women to score points over one another. Agamemnon brags to Achilles that he will have another woman, Achilles’ Briseis: ‘So you can learn just how much greater I am than you.’ The Greeks are on Trojan soil and they are ready to punish all women, who, like Helen, weaken men by love. Ready to force open the gates of Troy and to force open the women protected by the city’s sloping walls.
As Homer fleshes out the narrative of the Trojan War, we come across a use of language that does not presume a dividing line between the lust for love and the lust for blood. Swords and rapiers stab at yielding bodies. The heroes seek satisfaction in slicing open their enemies’ flesh. Hector teases and intimidates Ajax: ‘My long spear will devour your white flesh.’6 Or, as Fagles puts it in his translation of the same line: ‘If you have the daring to stand against my heavy spear, its point will rip your soft warm skin to shreds!’7 Suddenly, in the heat of battle, towering Ajax has become female: in Greek artistic and literary iconography it is usually women who boast soft, lily-white flesh.
Aphrodite’s lovers were Ares the god of War, and Hermes the guide of the dead.8 And so unfortunately for Paris and for Helen, where love travels, eris (discord or strife or deadly conflict) will follow. Helen’s is a gutsy love in pursuit of which much blood will be spilled. She is as deadly as she is delectable. When we talk about desire and death, sex and violence, we couple them because they are distinct, contra. But for the ancients these were close cousins, the malign progeny of unbridled nature, building blocks of the cosmos, creatures close to Chaos. Helen’s love was lethal. She is famous for inspiring men to fuck and to fight. Consequently we remember her, not as Helen of Sparta, but as Helen of Troy.9
The conflation of sex and violence in the Greek mind can be traced through the language. Both lovers and warriors can mingle together: meignymi. Damazo could mean to slaughter or rape or to seduce or subdue. Kredemna denotes either a city’s battlements or the veils of a woman. When Troy falls, both will be ripped and blasted – the thing they had hidden will be defiled and destroyed. Writers such as Thucydides and Euripides used the word eros in metaphors to describe the fever that roused men to fight. The Spartans sacrificed to the spirit of Eros before they went into battle.
It is little surprise that ‘much-desired’ Helen enters extant written record as spoil. We first hear about her in Book 2 of the Iliad where she is described both as ‘a trophy’ and as an instrument of destruction. The gods are gossiping. Hera is warning Athena that the Argives have lost hope and are sailing home:
… Inconceivable!/ … All the Argives flying home to their fatherland,/ sailing over the sea’s broad back? Leaving Priam/ and all the men of Troy a trophy to glory over,/ Helen of Argos, Helen for whom so many Argives/ lost their lives in Troy, far from native land.10
Helen’s casual introduction here into the plot of the Iliad demonstrates that Homer does not need to explain her origins, confident as he was that his audience was already familiar with a fuller Helen narrative. The poems of the Epic Cycle, written a hundred years or so after Homer, which tell of Helen’s earlier life, must have been echoes of older songs, lost now, that dealt in more detail with the tale of the Queen of Sparta.
When we meet Helen face to face in the Iliad, in Book 3, she is brought in to survey the men fighting for her on the plains of Troy. Priam, the great king who is about to see the pride of Greece crawling over his lands, slaughtering his men and enslaving his women, calls her over to watch: ‘Come over here, dear child. Sit in front of me … I don’t blame you’.11 So there is Helen, famous, beautiful and desired. A prize for Trojans and Greeks alike. She is watching men slug
it out for her, just as they did twenty years before in the marriage contest arranged by her father. But now the bar has been raised as Anatolian heroes too have entered the fray. The need to possess the ultimate beauty will spur Greeks and Trojans alike to a ruthless odium.
Today it is still possible to stand on the citadel walls of Troy to look over the Scamander plain which does indeed stretch out beyond the ‘Scaean Gate’. Tourist guides promote a rag-bag of Trojan tales in an impressive array of languages as they shepherd their charges along the walls. Walking the ramparts, looking down over the ‘lower town’, now scrubland, with a copy of the Iliad in hand, the romantic can fancy, following Homer’s lead, the hungry, worn Trojans gathering to watch as Helen, a willing captive, was shown off to the assembled crowd. The displays were intended as morale-boosters, reminding the tired, benighted inhabitants why they had to endure such suffering and why, with such a prize at stake, it was still worth fighting this long and bloody war.
These showy personal appearances were designed to galvanise spirits, and they worked, even after years of privation and personal loss; the elders at Troy, according to Homer, declare that Helen’s radiance is indeed worth the disintegration of their lives. As she passes, the old men start to chatter; their voices rising and falling like cicadas.12 She has a face like a goddess they say. In a world where divine power could be malign or benign, that might be a terrible as well as a wonderful thing:
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