That end, that petering out of a once powerful people, is palpable in the flat lands north of Mycenae. A lone, battered, blue road-sign points to the archaeological site of Archaiai Kleonai. The settlement lies beyond the main road, across a railway track, past row upon row of drying tobacco leaves and low-level vines. Homer describes Kleonai in the Iliad as ‘sturdy, strong Kleonai’.9 Now the settlement is virtually non-existent. In fact, all that is left is a much denuded, much later, Hellenistic Temple of Heracles – there is no sign of Bronze Age glory. Travellers who passed through the area at the beginning of the 20th century reported that a few Mycenaean remains were still standing. But this is prime farmland – when I last visited the site, the rhythmic swish of itinerant labourers’ skirts as they passed to collect the grape harvest was a reminder that agriculture is now the priority here. Those Bronze Age stones and artefacts, which must have been just an irksome impediment to the business of farming, are long gone, chopped up by the plough or cannibalised by locals. Palatial masonry has become the foundations for barns and cow-sheds; sacrifice stones have turned into hearths.
If we estimate that the events described by Homer relate in large part to the late 13th century BC, then a hundred years or so after Helen’s mortal storyline ends, this would have been the fate of many of the great citadels. Some continued in reduced form – at Elateia in Phokis and Lefkandi on Euboia. There would still have been populations on the Mycenaean settlements at Athens, Amyklai and Mycenae itself. But most are abandoned by the ruling elite. From around 1150 BC, instead, squatters live in the ruins of the rooms of kings, pigs root in the sanctuaries of the old gods. As the great Mycenaean civilisation drags to its end, the Greek Dark Ages begin.
Across the Dardanelles, the almighty Hittite civilisation is also crumbling. Hattusa has lost its pole political position, cuneiform writing stops and the site at Boğgazköy with its gold-mine of archives is abandoned. By 1175 BC the Hittites have ceased to exist. Troy was destroyed by fire, perhaps the fire of the invading forces of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus and Achilles, but more likely the fire of native malcontents. Vandals burning down a city that had already been seriously weakened by natural disasters, chronic incursions and in-fighting.
One phrase archaeologists and historians use today to describe the end of these proto-empires is ‘systems collapse’. If the Mycenaeans, the Hittites and the Egyptians were indeed intimately linked, if they consistently traded with one another, married each other’s women and stole each other’s men, then the fall of one would bring the fall of another. Once the nations of heroes, they were now giant skittles tumbling around an empty sea.
The Bronze Age was ending, and with the new Iron Age would come a time of insecurity and inactivity. Gone are the fine twists of Mycenaean painting, the microscopic perfections of delicate, ambitious metalwork. Grand palaces are no longer built, the art of writing is eclipsed, this is a time of retrenchment rather than expansion.
But in those quiet, long, isolated evenings that men and women spent together, clearly what lasted, with absolute vitality, was storytelling. Throughout the ‘Dark Ages’ the bard and his lyre maintain a presence in art – these men did not disappear, they did not stop transmitting their tales. Oral culture is a transparent space in the eyes of the historian or the archaeologist, but within its time it can be the most effective method of transmitting images, information and ideas about the world and the past. And one of the brightest stars in this imaginary firmament was Helen. The rich and headstrong queen of Sparta would not be forgotten, she would not die. Now liberated from the prison of her beautiful body, she was no longer to be worshipped only by a Greek hero or a Trojan prince. This immortal, legendary luminary could now be adored by everyone, man and woman, labourer and lord.
35
‘FRAGRANT TREASURIES’
are you a witch?
a vulture, a hieroglyph,
the sign or the name of a goddess?
what sort of goddess is this?
H.D., Helen in Egypt1 (1961)
TO FIND THE SHRINES ASSOCIATED WITH HELEN, I have had to make difficult, lonely journeys through the Aegean landscape. The travel writer of the Roman period, Pausanias, led me to one holy spot – the sanctuary of Bridal Aphrodite founded, he says, by Theseus when the hero ‘married’ Helen.2 The site is about 18 km up into the mountains from the little harbour of Hermione on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese. To get to the sanctuary from Hermione, as ancient devotants would have done, I had to struggle up a somewhat perilous and neglected path.3 Approaching through the mountains from the west there were no signs to guide me. Even locals have forgotten the stories of the place – ask for directions in the town of Hermione and you are led on a wild goose chase from florist to pharmacy, all enquiries being met with blank stares and shrugs of the shoulder.
But there are still two visible clues to the vicinity of the shrine: a mountain spring and a gargantuan stone known as ‘Theseus’ Rock’. It was under this rock that the ancients believed King Aegeus had hidden a sword and a pair of lattice-leather boots for his son Theseus. When the adolescent Theseus was strong enough to lift the rock with his bare hands, then and only then – resplendent in his new footwear and brandishing a glinting weapon – could he claim to have come of age.
Sitting there in the sun on Theseus’ rock with one small tortoise for company, I tried to think back two-thousand-odd years. To picture the scene, when a farmer or fisherman or weaver from the region would have made the selfsame journey here in order to celebrate or assuage the sexual power of Bridal Aphrodite, a power made manifest by beautiful Helen. Although the position of the sanctuary is sylvan in the extreme – peaceful now as it was two thousand years ago (judging from the modest remains here, this was not a large religious complex) – the settlements it served along the coast were lively, populous developments.
In antiquity, Hermione was famous for its water-sports. It held a kind of mini-aqua-olympics, with boat racing and what may be translated either as diving or swimming competitions.4 Boys were sent underwater to rescue objects from the bottom of the harbour; in the bays nearby they can still be found doing the same thing. These were popular events and attracted quite a crowd – one-man rowing boats jostling for position with the bigger sailing boats, rigging and linen sail-cloths fluttering as the craft lined up for the regatta.
There were musical contests at Hermione too, the fun and games all in honour of Dionysus of the Black Goat – the most debauched of all the Olympian deities. But in the maudlin hours after the drinking and carousing, one can imagine men’s minds turning to their ‘hero ancestors’, those who had sailed and rowed from the harbour with a more serious purpose – to avenge Greek honour in the Trojan War. Homer lists in his Catalogue of Ships the contingent that left from Hermione.5 Along with ‘the men of Argos and Tiryns with her tremendous walls’, he talks of ‘[the men of] Hermione and Asine commanding the deep wide gulf ’. In Hermione’s folk memory the Trojan War was writ large. And as those locals recalled their long-dead ancestors, their thoughts, inevitably, must have turned to the cause of the war – white-armed, loose-robed Helen.
As I sat on that rock way above Hermione, the Bay of Hydra below, I tried to envisage how Aphrodite – and her earthly counterpart Helen – would have been commemorated at the nearby shrine. To help, I picked from Pausanias a selection of entries for ritual activity in the region.6 These were rites actively practised in the 2nd century AD, many having their roots in classical Greek culture. To 21st-century sensibilities, few made comfort-able reading.
One entry describes rites at the sanctuary of Demeter. Here (Pausanias writes), men, women and children – dressed in white, with wreaths of wild hyacinths woven into their hair – led a wild heifer ‘still untamed and prancing’, to Demeter’s temple. Other cows lined up behind. Within the temple four old women waited with a scythe. The leading cow would be coaxed into the religious building and the doors shut. Then the slaughter would begin, first one cow and then another an
d another and another.
In nearby Methana, Pausanias recounts another ritual whereby each year, farmers tried to calm the fierce winds that threatened their newly shooting vines. A pair of farm-hands would take a white cockerel and tear it in half. The two men would then run around the vineyard in opposite directions – their hands wet with blood, the bird’s torn feathers flying – before they buried the cockerel where they met. These were visceral times. We know that Helen too was honoured with animal sacrifice.7 Helen’s cult worshippers would typically have been men and women whose fingernails were black with grime and gore.
Pausanias paints a vivid picture of ritual activity in the 2nd century AD– but in most instances much of the finer detail of the mechanics of worship has been lost. The fixtures and fittings of religious sanctuaries and shrines rarely survive in the archaeological record. Religious paraphernalia were generally too flimsy, too transient to last or too precious to leave in situ. That which is left – the hefty, basic building blocks of ancient religious centres, bleached bones lying in the grass or still standing proud – give a rather reserved feel to temples and sanctuaries and shrines. But the impressions of an Ancient Greek visitor, of an acolyte of Helen, would have been very different.
In 2002 an excavation on the island of Kythnos in the Cyclades produced a rare and precious glimpse into the elusive world of Greek religious ritual.8 Here, a shrine dating to the 7th century BC was destroyed in the 5th century BC by one of the region’s traumatic earthquakes. This was not a shrine dedicated to Helen but it did house a female deity – almost certainly Hera or Aphrodite. The shrine was in use at the moment of disaster and, as a result, a moment in historical time has been frozen.
The goddess here commanded quite some respect. The most sacred part of the sanctuary, the adyton (literally ‘no-go area’) was preserved intact when it was covered in rubble by the earthquake. Protected by its very destruction, none of the adyton’s ephemera had been removed by locals, grave-robbers or amateur archaeologists. In the first stage of the excavations alone, a staggering 1,500 precious and significant artefacts – the majority of them left as votive offerings – have been discovered. This uniquely rich excavation offers us an unusually holistic sense of the ambient and rich experience of goddess-worship in the distant past.
It seems this adyton, a small sunken room, was partially obscured by a curtain of laced sea-shells. Niches in the walls held little clay figures. On one shelf, around the time that Homer’s words were being written down, someone has dedicated jewellery from the Minoan-Mycenaean period – a grand heirloom given the greatest honour, becoming a gift for the gods. Scattered around the adyton were beads – carnelian and rock crystal: shiny objects appropriate for the magpie tastes of divinities. There are skeletal remains here too and little pots containing organic matter. On another surface are rows of coral – the offering of the ‘common’ crowd, harvested straight from the sea. For the poor 5th-century BC inhabitants of the Cyclades, coral was a gift that could be garnered without trade, without barter or cash.9
The 5th-century BC poet Pindar was right to call these inner sanctums ‘fragrant treasuries’.10 As well as burning oils and incense, there would have been animal sacrifices here; the olfactory hint of roast meat and the sharp smell of blood – and all heightened by an aural environment. Worshippers met their gods accompanied by the other-worldly tone of the aulos, the rattle of the sistra, and the clash of cymbals. And when the musicians stopped, there was another drone – the insistent and intrusive hum of swarms of flies, hiding in the cool shade of the inner sanctum or feeding off the sweat of transported ritual dancers.
It would have been in environments such as this that Helen would have been worshipped. And not just in the Peloponnese. Because she had come to be of particular significance to the Dorians – the arriviste inhabitants of Sparta – as they travelled, they took her cult westwards to Magna Graecia, east to Rhodes and across the Libyan Sea to Egypt, helping to keep the name, not just of Helen of Troy, but Helen of Sparta, alive.
In Egypt, where there had been Spartan–Arcadian incursions,11 there was a tenacious Helen cult.12 Herodotus tells us in his Histories of the statue of Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus, at Memphis where she was worshipped as ‘the foreign Aphrodite’.13 That particular identification may have been incorrect, but there were certainly cults of Helen in North Africa.14 In the Cairo Museum there is a lovely gold dish, fairly beaten up, but with a series of minute letters – each only about a millimetre high – just legible around the edge:15 a dedication, scratched into the surface, offering the gold object, used in the preparation of cosmetics, to ‘Helen, sister of Aphrodite’;16 Helen the sister or rather the equal of Aphrodite in beauty is probably the implication.17
The Thorikos calendar – inscribed in stone at some point around 340 BC – records devotions to Helen in Attica too.18 Here, in the month of Elaphebolion (the month of shooting stars: March/April), full-grown animals were sacrificed to her. This was indeed an honour. Other heroines are typically given only trapezai – wine and grain; blood is not shed for them. In the poem Alexandra written by Lycophron of Chalcis at the end of the 4th century BC, we hear that at Iapygia in southern Italy, Helen’s fur-lined slippers were venerated in a shrine.19 The story went that the footwear was dedicated by a dejected, lonely Menelaus as he searched for Helen after the fall of Troy – having discovered that all the Trojan city protected was an eidolon, a ghost.
Meanwhile back at Troy, in the 2nd century AD, we learn from a letter written to the Roman co-emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, that Helen was even invoked by the city which she had brought to its knees. In AD 176 a Christian called Athenagoras begged the emperors for tolerance, pointing out that across their empire all other kinds of eccentric cults were practised without persecution:
The inhabitants of your empire, greatest of kings, follow many customs and laws, and none of them is prevented by law or fear of punishment from cherishing his ancestral ways, however ridiculous they may be. The Trojan calls Hector a god and worships Helen, regarding her as Adrasteia; the Lacedaemonian venerates Agamemnon as Zeus.20
Adrasteia is an alternative name for the vengeful spirit Nemesis. With the broken walls of Troy as their backdrop, locals clearly remembered Helen as a potent and malign force.
As I write, an excavation of a Mycenaean complex in Pellana, 25 km north-west of Sparta, is reaching its final stages. Today Pellana is one of those sites that gives the impression of hunkering back down into the ground, quietly collapsing, contented and insignificant; dormant until archaeologists start to poke at it and encourage it to speak of the past. When I last visited the excavations out of hours, a tethered donkey in the adjacent farmyard, unused to visitors, brayed and hollered incessantly.21 I asked the donkey’s owners about the digs, as they tried to sell me their home-grown cabbages, they laughed at the idea that the ruin in their backyard might be the haunt of heroes.
Yet one of the chief excavators, Dr T.G. Spyropoulos, has made an extraordinary claim. Pellana, he says, was Lakedaimon, the capital of ancient Lakedaimonia, or Lakonia – and it was Helen’s home. To date the digs have focused on two giant tholos-style tombs (cut into the rock these are in fact chamber tombs), 50 feet (15 m) deep, the graves of Mycenaean aristocrats. Rich artefacts have emerged. There are gorgeous piriform vases, one, for instance, decorated with a lush marine landscape, the surface wrapped with a seaweed motif and inlaid with ivory. The style of decoration is evidence of close contact with Minoan Crete. A monumental Mycenaean wall, snaking up from the foot of the acropolis, is an indication that a wealthy clan controlled this rich corner of the Peloponnese.
Along with the magnificence of the Late Bronze Age architecture here, the excavators’ key evidence for this being the home of the famous King and Queen of Lacedaemon is a temple monument erected in the proto-geometric period c. 1050 BC and rebuilt c. 700 BC. Someone has left offerings for the spirit or deity honoured here. The votive gifts – a hoard of pottery and a collection
of perforated clay discs (so far, thirty have been found) – are credible evidence of cult activity. The discs are all inscribed with an epsilon, a Greek ‘E’. E, some claim, for Eleni.22
A number of tholos-style tombs have yet to be excavated. The new digs at Pellana are a chance to make more sense, if not of Helen’s home then certainly her homeland. Spyropoulos’ claims are significant not just because they witness the emergence of another Late Bronze Age centre from the ground, another cult of a female spirit, but also because they are a reminder that Helen is still a woman that men are drawn to, whom they choose to pursue.
36
THE DAUGHTER OF THE OCEAN
APOLLO (to Orestes): First as to Helen, whom you meant to kill, and move/ Menelaus to rage – your purpose failed; for this is she, whom you see here, enfolded in the sparkling sky;/ Not dead at your hands, but preserved. I snatched her up/ At Zeus her father’sbidding, and saved her from your sword./ From Zeus immortal born, immortal she must live,/ Reverenced as the goddess who savesseamen’s lives,/ enthroned beside her brothers in the folds of heaven.
So, Menelaus, choose for your home another wife;/ For Helen’sbeauty was to the gods their instrument/ For setting Greeks and Trojans face to face in war/ And multiplying deaths, to purge the bloated earth/ Of its superfluous welter of mortality. So much for Helen.
…
MENELAUS: Helen, daughter of Zeus, farewell! What happiness For you, to find a home among the blessed gods!
EURIPIDES, Orestes1
AT SPARTA HELEN WAS WORSHIPPED both as a goddess and as a heroine, in Egypt as a decorous, seemly wife, and across the Greek mainland as a spirit of earth, air and sky. She is chameleon. But just as in the epics she makes long physical journeys across the vast water-ways of the Aegean, so her most common guise is that of a spirit associated with water.
Helen of Troy Page 30