The connection between Helen and Monica was made explicit by Jeffrey Toobin following the Clinton affair: ‘As is demonstrated by the history of scandal from Helen of Troy to Monica of Beverly Hills, sex has a way of befogging the higher intellectual faculties.’11 Like Helen, Monica Lewinsky was memorably described by Bill Clinton not by name but as ‘that woman’.
Helen is an archetype. Men fall for her, have sex with her and then, when terrible things happen, it is she who gets the blame.12
We still – with woeful partiality – focus on the ‘shame’ rather than the triumph of Helen’s life-story. For centuries we have chosen to adopt the post-Homeric, misogynist world-view, a view codified in cities such as Athens from the 5th century BC onwards, as a precedent for our own – but Helen springs from an earlier time. Since the birth of history her name has never been forgotten. Her very survival is proof of her significance. She is special because she is a consistent female presence, both sacred and profane, across three millennia. Worlds have changed, civilisations have come and gone, social, cultural and political sensibilities have shifted, poets have sung and been silenced, but Helen has outlasted them all.
And what of that elusive pre-historic Helen, the Bronze Age queen who sat on the limestone blocks of the Spartan palace? The aristocrat who controlled the men around her. The hieratic potentate who owned land. The woman who glistened as she passed, smelling of olive oil and roses, and who left the palace by night to officiate at heady cultic rituals. The queen who lived in a palace adorned with images, high priestesses, goddess-girls: who prepared narcotics, who walked hand in hand with the spirits of her land. A woman who had pole position – power, wealth and respect.
Evidence of this woman’s life is embedded in the Peloponnesian and Anatolian landscape. She has left us many clues, but she has not left us a corpse. Although it seems from the conditions on the Spartan citadel that this is the one piece of Helen that has escaped for certain from the record, I will share my private fantasy of ‘the world’s desire’: that one day her body will be found. Because it is only when Helen of Troy becomes a desiccated pile of bones, when men can look at a toothless jaw, a tarnished ring and hand that has become an incomplete claw, that she can, finally, be laid to rest. Only then that we will stop hounding her, stop blaming her for being the most beautiful woman in the world.
HELEN
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands
and the white hands
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white
remembering past enchantments
and past ills
Greece sees,
unmoved, God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees
could love indeed the maid
only if she were laid
white ash amid funeral cypresses.13
APPENDICES
Previous page:
A votary of the ‘Snake Goddess’ discovered at Knossos on Crete. Made of faience c. 1600 BC
APPENDIX ONE
THE MINOTAUR’S ISLAND
There is a land called Crete …
ringed by the wine-dark sea with rolling whitecaps –
handsome country, fertile, thronged with people
well past counting …
HOMER, Odyssey 1
To understand Helen’s world more fully, we first have to go to the Peloponnesian coast and stare south, out in the direction of Africa, and search for Bronze Age Crete just beyond the horizon. Crete, the Minotaur’s island, homeland of the legendary King Minos, the centre of Minoan culture, was taken over by invading Mycenaean forces sometime around 1450 BC. The urgent, vigorous Mycenaeans are vastly indebted to the Minoans. Minoan civilisation had by 1450 BC already been established on its island home for well over a millenium, dominant in the Aegean for close on five hundred years.
Before Jason went in search of the Golden Fleece, before Paris stole Helen and sparked the Trojan Wars, Crete was the jewel of the Aegean, a pre-historic land of milk and honey. Naturally lush and fertile and protected on all sides by miles of sea, the island was a secure, cultural hothouse.
Crete’s axial position between three continents meant it became unusually cosmopolitan, unusually early. Archaeologists have found evidence of pre-historic ports and international trade on its north, south and east coasts. It seems this was a favoured stopping-off point for traders from all over the Eastern Mediterranean: from Egypt, from Syria, from the Greek mainland and from Italy. In the east of the island at Vaï (where picture-postcard palm trees shade an idyllic sandy beach) locals claim the first palm grew when a pre-historic Egyptian sailor spat out the stone from one of the dates he had brought with him from the banks of the Nile.
I last visited Crete to study new digs in the east of the island at Palaikastro.2 As the white sand at Vaï burnt the soles of my feet and the 46-degree midday sun blistered my shoulders, I understood why archaeologists prefer to describe the island as an outpost of the Middle East rather than to use its more traditional, Edwardian title, ‘the birthplace of Europe’. After those cosmopolitan beginnings, Crete has never lost its eastern feel. During my stay I was lured into local bars by the siren song of Crete’s native beat, a mixture of Rai, bouzouki and Afro-pop. Home-grown bananas line the streets like sunny chandeliers. Crete’s micro-climate then and now yields exceptional crops. The island has a charmed feel about it; those who believe in their gods think it is blessed.
And in the Bronze Age, Crete, wealthy and highly cultured, was a prize worth claiming – Cretan palaces and ports offered rich pickings. Then the gods of the earth appeared to give another ambitious civilisation the opportunity they needed. The Minoans had already been weakened by the debilitating effects of a number of earlier earthquakes. The grand, terrible, spectacular eruption of the volcano at Thera set in train a series of religious and social dislocations. This was, perhaps, not ‘apocalypse now’, for the Minoans, but a slow lingering death.3
So when the ambitious Mycenaeans arrived in Crete, these would have been exciting times. In the centuries that preceded the takeover (a coup or a philanthropic rescue depending on your interpretation of the evidence), the Greek mainlanders perhaps felt they were living in the shadow of the big island to the south: Crete produced the finest of everything. The Cretans have been compared to the Japanese in the 1970s4 – soaking up the best of global culture, adapting it and sending it out with a fresh, unique Minoan spin.
Name a technique or a material and as like as not the Minoans worked it up with audacious skill. Ultra-realistic stone-carving, exquisite jewellery, fresco paintings whose pastoral verve is both touching and uplifting: flying fish cover one wall, on another a cat stalks a richly plumed bird. There are jadeite axes made in the shape of black panthers and stone bulls with gilded horns, their rock-crystal eyes still contemplating the world around them.
Crete was also a breeding ground for vivid myths and stories. It was here that Europa was raped by Zeus in the form of a bull. Here the Minotaur, the monstrous half-man, half-bull hybrid, whose lair was at the heart of the palace of Knossos, and who lived off human flesh, was conceived when Queen Pasiphae satisfied her lust mounted by a great white bull. In Cretan skies, Icarus, the callow youth who tried to push human achievement just too far, headed for the sun and was sent plunging back down to earth, his home-made waxen wings bubbling, his flesh burnt.
But there is another myth from Crete, less well known. It tells of a giant metal robot made by that consummate inventor and craftsman, Daedalus (father of ill-fated Icarus). This robot, Talos, had one task – to protect his birth-land, Crete, at all costs. The special island had to be shielded from unwanted intruders and invaders. Just as importantly, native Cretans must be prevented from leaving Crete’s shores in search of
pastures new. Talos made Crete a prison-fortress. In the Bronze Age imagination, Minoan talent was well worth guarding.
In one sense such xenophobia was justified: there would have been plenty of chances for international exchange throughout the second millennium BC. The contact that Bronze Age Crete enjoyed with its neighbours is clearly demonstrated by a number of archaeological finds. In Heraklion Museum an elephant’s tusk survives from Africa one of the storerooms at the palace at Zakro. Perhaps it had been displayed in the palace as an exotic novelty, or perhaps it was used for barter. Now the tusk is cinder-grey and sickeningly decayed, with a choppy perforated surface.
Time has been kinder to other artefacts. In the Sitia Museum there is an exquisitely carved kouros, a boy – probably a boy-god – dressed in hippopotamus ivory, a material prized for its delicate flesh-pink tone. The boy, found shattered in a sanctuary at Palaikastro on the east coast of Crete and then pieced back together again, with his gold and ivory decorations, earns the epithet a chryselephantine statuette.
The artists who made him carefully coloured the kouros with Egyptian blue and embedded rock crystal for his eyes. His hands are clenched and the veins and sinews in his flesh stick out. Each toenail and fingernail is perfectly carved – even though the latter dig into his palms and are there-fore invisible to the human eye. The golden filaments that represented his hair would have been pressed around his beautifully proportioned face. Each time I stand and look at this powerful, poised creature I have to remind myself that this boy comes not from Michelangelo’s studio, but from pre-history. It is no surprise that Minoan aesthetics were lauded and copied throughout the Aegean.
A number of communities around the Mediterranean, Thera included, appear to have been under the Minoan spell. When the Mycenaeans dress, it is Minoan fashions they ape; when they paint frescoes, they follow the example of the Minoan masters; when they make pots, they work to a Minoan pattern. A woman such as Helen apparently paraded in fashions dreamt up by her Cretan cousins, the sartorial innovators themselves having lain dead for centuries.
Giant pots with distinctive designs, octopuses and seaweed whorls – images previously thought to be exclusively Minoan – have recently been dug up near Sparta.5 On the gold cups decorated with bulls and jumping figures from Vapheio, just south of Sparta, the Minoan influence (or craftsmanship) is striking. Sailing due north from Crete, the island of Kythera and the Lakonian port of Gythion would have been the Minoans’ first ports of call. Carry on travelling due north, inland for half a day, and there is Sparta. While Minoan style has more élan, the Mycenaeans were masters of pottery production: their use of clays and slips is more discriminating, they understand better the technology of the furnace. Pots from the main-land are of finer quality. There would have been a consistent and comprehensive two-way traffic of goods and ideas between Lakedaimonia and the fervent Cretan islanders before and during Helen’s lifetime. In the Iliad, Helen describes the close connection between Crete and the Peloponnese. Speaking of the Cretan king, Idomeneus, she says: ‘How often Menelaus, my good soldier, would host him in our halls.’6 King Idomeneus sends eighty ‘black ships’7 to the Trojan war effort. And of course Menelaus was burying his grandfather on Crete when Paris stayed at Sparta and took a fancy to the Spartans’ queen, Helen.
Minoan hallmarks crop up throughout the Argolid and Lakonia. Around 1550 BC the Mycenaeans even start to bury their dead in round tholos tombs as their Minoan counterparts did in the south of Crete. But there is one marked difference: for the Minoans these were shared graves, where large numbers of the community would end up together, but in the settlements such as Mycenae the tombs are for kings, aristocrats and their families. It is a telling enthusiasm for an architecture that, even in death, gives individual warriors preferential treatment, raises them even further above the group. Minoan burial chambers were there for the community; Mycenaean tombs celebrate heroic achievement and encourage clan posturing.
One of the most significant Minoan attributes, gathered up by the Mycenaeans, and then used for their own purposes, seems to have been the gift of writing.
The Cretans invented the first-ever script in Old Europe, ‘Cretan Hiero-glyphic’, around 2000 BC, closely followed by another, Linear A; to date, both remain undeciphered. Evidence of these two scripts was uncovered by Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos on Crete in 1900. But Evans also discovered another script – Linear B – that would prove not quite so elusive. Twelve years after Evans’ death, in 1953, Michael Ventris, an architect who had worked closely with the brilliant, chain-smoking American scholar Alice E. Kober (the 180,000 rectangles of graph paper that represented much of the leg-work necessary for cracking Linear B were filed in old Lucky and Fleetwood cigarette boxes),8 deciphered Linear B and showed it to be an early form of Greek.
Inspired by the innovators to the south, it appears the Mycenaeans took the idea of writing from the Minoans, but used it to express the early form of Greek that they spoke.
At a stroke, thanks to Ventris’ decipherment, the Greeks had been given approximately one thousand years more attributable history. The excitement of Ventris and his collaborator John Chadwick is endearing and contagious. When Chadwick took the first Linear B documents to Cambridge University Press he celebrated by writing a postcard to Ventris (who was then in Greece) in Linear B.9
.1 i-jo-a-na, mi-kae, ka-re-e
.2 sa-me-ro, pu-pi-ri-jo
.3 tu-po-ka-ra-pe-u-si
.4 a-ka-ta, tu-ka
.5 ka-mo-jo, ke-pu ra, i-jo-u-ni-jo-jo
.6 me-no, A-ME-RA 7
.1 John to Michael, Greetings!
.2 Today I gave the book
.3 to the printers.
.4 Good luck!
.5 At the Bridge of Cam …
.6 … Month of June, Day 7
It is thanks to these code-breakers that we have a direct textual window onto Helen’s world. The Linear B tablets, found predominantly at Knossos and Chania on Crete and at Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes on the mainland, turned out not to bear fine poems or diplomatic treatises – in a first flush of disappointment, scholars called them ‘laundry lists’. But still, laundry lists can tell us what men and women wear, how much washing costs and who runs the launderettes. Although the language is abbreviated and riddled with baffling terms, the equivalent of the legalese we might struggle through in the small print of a mortgage application, these sludgy-coloured blocks yield vivid details – odd words that can carry the reader back into the Mycenaean world. Some, for instance, detail the number of sheep in one shepherd’s herd, others the impressive amount of olive oil given as a gift to a high priestess, there are even the names of individual cattle: Blacky, Spotty, White-Nose and White-foot.10
Once they were writing, the Mycenaeans did not look back. Year by year more of the Cretans’ turf became theirs, until the moment came when the Greek mainlanders themselves were in charge. The Mycenaeans, a great civilisation in their own right, were also great plagiarists, happy to appropriate the successes of another culture to serve their own ends. The Minoans were to the Mycenaeans what the ancient Greeks would be to Rome – an inspiration and a pervasive cultural resource. They became a civilisation whose ghosts appear in a world tightly controlled by Mycenaean bureau-crats.11 A woman such as Helen would have benefited greatly from her Cretan inheritance.
For me it is at the hilltop burial site of Phourni, near the north coast of Crete, that the shift from Minoan to Mycenaean can be felt most poignantly. As the sun falls behind Mount Juktas – itself sheltering the sacred cave of Anemospilia – the haloes of buttery-yellow sunset-light around the graves are extinguished in a stroke. Suddenly all that is left are the hunched shapes of the reconstructed burial chambers of the Early Minoan period, modest stone igloos designed to shelter the bodies of men and women who lived in a changing world – at a time when infant societies were each jostling for pole position. And further down the hill, just visible, are the later Mycenaean tholos tombs. Now the Mycenaean
s are burying their dead in separate clan groups, with swaggering pomp.
Investigating the graves, one has a strong sense of peoples and powers moving through time, leaving footprints as they pass. It is odd to think that up there on the hillside, many of the sounds can have changed not an iota over the millennia, regardless of which ruler was enjoying the upper hand in Crete: Minoan, Mycenaean, Turkish, German or Greek. There are ducks in the farm down below, bees buzzing from one wild sage to another and a dog’s chipper bark, followed by a man’s voice drifting up from the valley, shouting out a word that appears on the Linear B tablets, written three and a half thousand years ago, as ME-RI: ‘MELI!’ the man calls. ‘Bring more honey!’
APPENDIX TWO
LA PARISIENNE
From what source, then, did the beauty of Helen whom men fought for shine out, or that of all women like Aphrodite in beauty?
PLOTINUS, On the Intelligible Beauty1 c. AD 260
What is desperately difficult to judge is how far the Minoans influenced the Mycenaean mind-set; particularly when it came to women and religion. And yet it is a compelling line of inquiry, particularly because, on Crete, the ‘fairer sex’ (in Minoan-Mycenaean art, women are painted white, men brown) appear prominent, dynamic and distinctive. When Arthur Evans began to dig at the site of Knossos in 1900, on Day 2 he found a figurine ‘goddess’ whom he immediately labelled Aphrodite. When frescoes were uncovered in the ‘palace-complexes’ women were found, clustering on the surface, often with symbols of divinity around them. Topless girls hurl themselves across golden signet rings, shaking trees, carrying armfuls of vegetation. Women collapse onto altars, they sit high on thrones.
Helen of Troy Page 38