And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts, they murmured one to another, gentle, winged words: ‘Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered years of agony all for her, for such a woman, Beauty, terrible beauty!’13
As she passed along the ramparts of Troy, this is what a Bronze Age Helen would have seen. In the 13th century BC, there were five gateways, three of them massive, on the citadel at Hisarlik Hill, each providing access through the citadel walls – which were, in parts, 9m high. At some point these gates have been burnt to the ground. Watchtowers14 were built into the walls – remembered three thousand years later by Marlowe as ‘the topless towers of Ilium’.15 As at Mycenae, the aristocratic zone is terraced, and two-storeyed mansions surround a central ‘palace’. The streets of Troy, as Homer says, are walled and ‘well-laid’ – although three thousand years on, the broad, cracked flags buckle and bulge.
The excavations begun by Professor Korfmann in 1988 and subsequent magnetometer surveys of the site have delivered a more complete picture of the 13th-century BC city than was ever before available. The south-western ‘Scaean Gate’, operational until just after 1300 BC, was subsequently blocked up – the infill is still clearly visible. Just beyond the gated ramparts there is a marked concentration of small-scale finds (evidence of a busy shanty town at Troy’s walls) and then, further out still, south of the citadel, Troy’s lower town. The lower town (which Schliemann never found – dying before he could begin his planned excavations in 1891) has been shown to be protected by two ditches: one is 400m from the citadel, the other 500 m. Both ditches are U-shaped, cut straight out of the limestone bedrock and around 11½ feet (3.5 m) wide, 6½ feet (1.95 m) deep – almost certainly dug to protect against chariots – that ferocious weapon of the Late Bronze Age. The area, enclosed perhaps by palisades, is at least 270,000 square m (75 acres).16
With this discovery, the city of Troy has now been shown to have been large enough to accommodate anything between seven and ten thousand people. Here there are storage pits, pavements and cobbled streets, traces of figs and vines, and (interestingly) a fair amount of Mycenaean pottery – both imported and imitation; the Trojans clearly had a taste for Greek style.
Typical of other Anatolian fortress-towns of the time, Troy was indeed – as described by Homer – both a trading town and the seat of a royal family.17 And protecting those aristocrats and merchants, circling the citadel were great sloping walls, Homer’s euteikheion, ‘well-walled’ city. In the Iliad, Homer constructs a vivid scene where Achilles’ lover, the Greek hero Patroclus, tries four times to scale the ‘jutting walls’ of Troy. With gargantuan effort, the eager hero nearly succeeds.18 But this is a war between the gods as well as between men and eventually Patroclus is blasted back by the wrath of Apollo, the god worshipped with great piety at Troy, protecting the city that was dear to him.
Homer talks a good deal about Apollo’s love for Troy, and recently archaeologists have turned up a tantalising piece of evidence from the 13th century BC. 19 Across Turkey you will find giant carved ‘god-stones’ at door-ways and gateposts. The Bronze Age Anatolians believed that these megalithic blocks protected the spirits of their deities and spirits. God-stones have been excavated at Troy too – at the time of writing, seventeen have been found. An inscription on the Alaksandu treaty tells us that one of the ‘swear-gods’ particularly revered at Wilusa was a male god, Ap(p)aliunas. Homer makes it clear in the Iliad that the god Apollo was the pre-eminent deity in the city – is this another instance where he was right? Was Ap(p)aliunas, Apollo?
With its god-stones and sanctuaries, its stocks of weapons and mansions, its stores of fine perfumed cloth and its gold, its cosmopolitan population, in both the minds of the ancients, and in Bronze Age reality, Helen or no, Troy would certainly have been a city worth sacking.
The siege of Troy famously lasted for ten years. While looking for reminders of Helen from the classical world, I once travelled to Manchester in the north of England where a number of remarkable pieces are held by the University of Manchester Museum.20 Here there is a finely painted black figure-skyphos (a deep wine-cup) from Attica, which speaks of the yawning stretch of years and the duller, drearier days of such a lengthy campaign. The heroes Achilles and Ajax are bent over a gaming board.21 The men are lost in the counters in front of them, enjoying their absorption in some-thing other than death and destruction. A mitigation from the tense tedium of a protracted – and perhaps pointless – campaign. In the quiet of the museum it is a tacit reminder of the gentler moments of any grand military campaign.
In reality it would have been impossible for the Trojans (or for any Late Bronze Age city) to endure a ten-year siege. The Mycenaeans too would have been entirely debilitated after camping out in the Troad for ten winters.22 But arrowheads and stores of sling-shot and burnt walls do show that Troy suffered sustained periods of attack in the Late Bronze Age. Throughout the second millennium BC the fortifications of the site are built with increasing vigour, and new archaeology reveals that the population of Troy would have had the wherewithal to withstand and survive shorter onslaughts. Homer talks about underground springs and rivers at Troy. Not only have references to ‘subterranean water channels’ been traced in the Hittite texts which describe Wilusa,23 but recent excavations24 have revealed Troy’s hidden strength, a concealed underground water channel – a ‘water-mine’ possibly built as early as 3000 BC. Up to 306 gallons (1,400 litres) of water still run through it every day.25
When I last visited, the place was easy to find. Reeds grow around it and one of the dogs that make the site their home will lead you there to have a quick drink from the oozing puddle outside the mouth of the channel, now barred by a metal grille. Behind the grille stretch four channels – one large, three small; the deepest is 100 metres long. Deep in the cave is a reservoir, the overflow caught in storage tanks. Although aesthetically uninspiring, this is a strangely moving spot. Perhaps these man-made water cisterns complemented the ‘washing pools’ that Homer describes close to the banks of the Scamander River (itself still ‘broad and sandy’) at Troy.26 Hearing the gentle splash of water one is reminded that whether or not this natural resource kept Helen alive, it would, over years of Trojan history, have saved the lives of many.
So what inspired those stories of a ten-year siege? A muscular Mycenaean presence on Trojan territory? An aggressive neighbour staking out a patch in a cosmopolitan little kingdom? Or maybe the story of the Trojan War is a conflation of any number of micro-conflicts suffered by those on the glittering crescent of coastal land around the Troad? Skirmishes over land and taxes and trading routes and slave labour, ugly little squabbles that become inflated into an epic event in the popular imagination? All interpretations are possible.27
What is certain is that in the 13th century BC and again c. 1180 BC, the Trojans experienced great perdition.28 Cracks in the citadel’s fortifications and massive rock-falls have been diagnosed as earthquake damage – fires followed.29 Could a natural disaster have sounded the death knell for a city already weakened by human agency? There are a few human skeletons from this period at Troy; all have been mutilated. By 1180 BC the ‘topless towers of Ilium’ were destroyed. Archaeology cannot yet give us the definitive cause of its destruction – but for over two and a half thousand years men have been swift to blame not fire, or earthquakes, or military ambition, but Helen.
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DEATH’S DARK CLOUD
Idomeneus skewered Erymas straight through the mouth,
the merciless brazen spear point raking through,
up under the brain to split his glistening skull –
teeth shattered out, both eyes brimmed to the lids
with a gush of blood and both nostrils spurting,
mouth gaping, blowing convulsive sprays of blood,
and death’s dark cloud closed down around his corpse.
HOMER, Iliad1
TROY MAY HAVE SMELLED SWEET ONCE
but it would soon be running with filth. Fighting for possession of Helen, the Greeks and the Trojans lock in a tortuous struggle, as first one, and then the other, gains the upper hand.
Paris and Menelaus challenge each other to a duel. Too many lives are being squandered. This is a matter of honour and so they will sort out the whole deranged business the hero’s way, man to man, close-quarter fighting. Dressed in their finest, glinting armour they march to the dust-bowl that was once arable and mark out the ground. The duel begins symbolically, with showy moves: each throws a spear; Menelaus runs at Paris with a silver-studded sword. But then it becomes messier, more personal; the Greek king and the Trojan prince hurl themselves at each other, grappling together on no man’s land. Menelaus is the stronger, and the more experienced warrior, it is clear he is going to win. He grabs Paris by the strap of his helmet and begins to drag him towards the points of Greek swords.
Aphrodite cannot bear to see her beautiful prince pulverised. She conceals herself within a cloud of mist and swoops down to scoop Paris off the battlefield – laying him out languidly on his ‘large carved bed’. Disguised as an old woman, the goddess seeks out Helen and orders her back to service her second husband. Helen is furious – both with Aphrodite ‘who supplied the lust that led to disaster’ and with the feeble failure of her cocksure amour. She tries to resist both the goddess and the goddess’ plaything, but Aphrodite, chilling, threatens to dash Helen’s beauty, her one security. Helen slinks back to Paris’ chamber where the beautiful boy is in infuriatingly ebullient mood. He has danced away from death and although Helen scorns him he begs her to lose herself in love: ‘He led the way to the bed. His wife went with him./ And now, while the two made love in the large carved bed,/ Menelaus stalked like a wild beast, up and down the lines –/ where could he catch a glimpse of magnificent Paris?’2
Deprived of his prey, the King of Sparta succumbs to redoubled hate. And as Paris and Helen worship Aphrodite under the ‘high-vaulted roof ’ of the prince’s ‘sumptuous halls’, outside in the dust the battle and the atrocities continue. At one point Menelaus suggests making a Trojan soldier a prisoner-of-war rather than executing him. His elder brother Agamemnon, saturated with blood-lust, roars at the disgraced King of Sparta:
No baby boy still in his mother’s belly, not even he escape – all Ilium blotted out, no tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!3
The Iliad is an orgy of killing. Homer’s poetry pairs heart-piercing verse with a delight in the minutiae of death and suffering. To read it can be distressing.4 In one extended narrative scene that would have filled a number of parchment or papyrus sheets, the Greek Diomedes drives his way through the Trojan ranks:
One he stabbed with a bronze lance above the nipple, the other his heavy sword hacked at the collarbone, right on the shoulder, cleaving the whole shoulder clear of neck and back.
Over a hundred lines on, the butchery continues …
With that he hurled and Athena drove the shaft and it split the archer’s nose between the eyes – it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze cut his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.5
The bone evidence from the Late Bronze Age bears out Homer’s assertion that there were many ways to die in armed combat. Forensic studies reveal the dreadful injuries sustained by both Bronze Age Anatolians and Greeks. Within the city of Troy itself a girl aged between sixteen and seventeen has been hastily buried, her feet burned by fire.6 At the balmy site of Asine on the Greek mainland – a place mentioned in Homer’s Catalogue of Ships,7 where a picture-perfect sea abuts the Mycenaean remains and prickly oak grows among the stones – was the body of a man who had been subject to therapeutic trepanations. The scalp has been cut back in flaps, to remove cranial bone fragments that had been driven into the brain during armed conflict. There is skeletal re-growth, suggesting that the warrior survived both the initial head injury and the subsequent operation.8
Near the Athenian agora, a middle-aged, Late Bronze Age man has had an incision carved into his right shoulder-blade – almost certainly gouged by a spear or a rear arrow attack. Warriors have sustained severe trauma as the result of ‘parry thrusts’ to their right forearms. And to counter the injuries made by the weapons they had invented – the rapiers, the slashing swords, the daggers – the Bronze Age populations developed an impressive array of medical equipment. At the Palamidi-Pronoia cemetery near the seaside town of Nafplion a hoard of what seem to be surgical instruments was found during excavations in 1971 – a long saw, forceps, a curved razor, a scoop, two long probes and three chisels.9
A gruesome and primitive array – and yet much Bronze Age surgery seems to have worked. The body of a woman from Grave Circle B in Mycenae (clearly an aristocrat) has a perfectly healed, fractured humerus – someone has given her excellent medical attention. On Linear B tablets we find the words pharmakon (as remarked in the Foreword, origin of our ‘pharmacy’), and on tablet Eq 146 from Pylos is iater, which means ‘doctor’. E-ri-ka (possibly hibiscus) and Althea officianalis (marshmallow) crop up on Linear B tablets; today marshmallow root is one of the key ingredients of detoxifying teas as it mollifies gastro-intestinal problems. The terebinth resin (kirtanos in the Linear B tablets, the sap from the ‘turpentine tree’) – used in the perfume industry – also had medicinal qualities. Its efficacy as an antiseptic was clearly exploited: a staggering quantity of it, a whole ton’s weight, carefully packed into a hundred jars, was found in the Uluburun shipwreck. When the resin was taken out of its pots and rolled between the fingers of the excavators, the tangy, terebinth smell came stealing out.
Little surprise that antiseptic was needed in such quantities in the period. If a warrior was not killed in hand-to-hand combat (or subsequently by the surgeon’s knife) there was still the risk of Apollo’s ‘black bolts of plague’ which, Homer tells us, sought out many soldiers on the plains of Troy.10 For nine days, in the Iliad, following the outbreak of plague ‘the corpse-fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight’.11 Once again, the skeletal evidence attests to relentless epidemics in the region. And even for those who managed to avoid fighting or disease, each day’s pillaging could bring a premature death. There are descriptions in Homer of the rank and file dividing up loot – no cash economy here, so anyone in the path of the invading army would have been mercilessly plundered.
While bearing in mind their real and extraordinary achievements, and their sometime sophistication, when we try to imagine the life of a pre-historic princess and her peers we should never forget to what degree superstition, prejudice and ignorance would have been a part of their lives. One particular ritual act bears relevance to Helen’s story. At the beginning of the 13th century BC, the Hittite king’s wife, Gassulawiya, was mortally ill. In desperation she sent a substitute, a human representative, to the temple of the great goddess Lelwani. This was a woman chosen specifically for her beauty. The sick queen begs: ‘this woman shall be my substitute. I am presenting her to you in fine attire. Compared to me she is excellent, she is pure, she is brilliant, she is white, she is decked out with everything. Now, O God, My Lord, look well on her. Let this woman stand before the god, My Lord.’12
Perhaps this ‘brilliant’, ‘white’ woman was to be sacrificed. The text is so damaged we shall never know. But it is certain that her beauty made her worthy of sacrifice, of becoming sacred. A dying queen – one of the most powerful women in the Near East – believed that of all the things on the known earth, of all the things the massive wealth of the Hittite empire could buy, a beautiful woman would be most pleasing to the goddess. A beautiful woman was her single hope. If there had been a preternaturally beautiful woman born in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC we should not be surprised to find her totemic. We should not be surprised to hear that men went to war over “a Helen”. But just as Menelaus and Paris found that Helen’s beauty did not bring the perfect world it promised, so for Gassulawiya the sorcery of beauty prov
ed sour. The queen died.
30
A BEAUTIFUL DEATH – KALOS THANATOS
Tales of great war and strong hearts wrung,
Of clash of arms, of council’s brawl,
Of beauty that must early fall,
Of battle hate and battle joy
By the old windy walls of Troy
And now the fight begins again
The old war-joy, the old war-pain.
Sons of one school across the sea
We have no fear to fight –
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY, ‘I Have Not Brought My Odyssey’1
ALTHOUGH THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD was – in Greek eyes – a credible trigger for the war to end all wars, the heroes of Troy were fighting not just for a woman, but for honour and for all the glories that death could bring. Kalos thanatos, ‘a beautiful death’, euklees thanatos, ‘a glorious death’ and kleos aphthiton, ‘deathless fame’ were fundamental reasons to live (and die). The Iliad articulated a code for male, aristocratic Greek society – a belief-system embodied in the ultimate warrior, Achilles. The true hero was a man who loved both a glorious life and a glorious death.2
Yet where was the glory in the agony and putrescence of the battle-field? How could the call of fame be heard when the screams of death and pain were all around? When swords and spears ripped open linen armour, when careering chariots splintered bones and stretched skin from muscle, when poisoned arrows turned blood black, made the hero shit and vomit uncontrollably, when fathers, brothers, sons died hundreds of miles from home, and the crows pecked out their eyes: how could that be a thing of honour? How could it be the mark of a real man, to be cut off in what the Greeks called his akme, his prime?
Helen of Troy Page 26