21 Men are portrayed in other contexts at Thera. For an excellent survey see S. Sherratt (ed) (2000) The Wall Paintings of Thera. Proceedings of the First International Symposium. Petros M. Nomikos Conference Centre, Thera, Hellas, 30 August – 4 September 1997. 2 Vols. Athens: Petros M. Nomikos and The Thera Foundation.
22 British Museum, E773.
23 See Chapter 14.
24 Visitors should check which representations of the frescoes are on display before visiting Thera.
CHAPTER NINE
A Trophy for Heroes
1 This episode in Helen’s story has its counterpart in other sagas dealing with contests for the hand of a heroine: women such as Atalanta – who forced suitors to compete with her in foot-races; Jocasta – whose son Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and won the right to sleep with his mother and control the kingdom of Thebes; and Hippodamia, whose father took part in the chariot-races with her suitors and always won. But Hippodamia loved Pelops and wanted to share with him the kingdom of Elis, so when he took up the challenge she had wax pegs inserted into her father’s chariot’s wheels – the wax melted as the race went on and the chariot overturned, killing her father. The treachery eventually resulted in a curse being put on the House of Atreus. See Pindar, Olympian Ode 1.25–96 and Apollodorus, Epitome 2.3–10. All these women were competed for. Like Helen, they too had substantial estates to share with men who proved themselves worthy.
2 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
3 Apollodorus, The Library 3.10.8.
4 Euripides, Trojan Women, 987.
5 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
6 Excavation report: C. Tsountas (1889) ‘Ereuna en te Lakonike kai ho taphos tou Vapheiou’, in Archaiologike Ephemeris 129–72.
7 In the classical period, a statue of Apollo 9m high would have towered above the site. Fragment 53 of Alcman’s poetry describes the spread at one festival – moon-shaped buns with sesame-seeds, sweets of honey and flax seeds for the children. Although there is no specific reference to the worship of Helen at the Hyakinthia, similarities with the Heleneia are very strong – see Xenophon, Agesilaus 8.7 and Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 4.138e–139b.
8 Hesychius 1999. Hesychius of Alexandria compiled his Greek lexicon in the fifth century AD: it survives in a single manuscript from the fifteenth century.
9 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 4.139ff; Xenophon, Agesilaus 8.7; Plutarch, Agesilaus 19.5–6.
10 Helen’s rape by Theseus was commemorated on a throne at Amyklai along with other episodes from the Trojan War cycle. Pausanias, 3.18.10–16.
11 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
12 See Hesiod, fragments 204.78ff. and 197.4ff. in the Merkelbach and West edition (1967).
13 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.102–5. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
14 At every turn in Mycenaean society one’s standing (or lack of it) was reinforced by the bureaucrats – Linear B tablets show, for example, that only certain men were allowed the finest quality wool for their cloaks.
15 Iliad 2.56 [LCL 2.47].
16 Iliad 2.539–43 [LCL 2.455–8].
17 Iliad 10.306–10 [LCL 10.262–5].
18 Site visit Wildwood, UK, 2002.
19 See Chapter 17 for further details.
20 The Horse Book of Kikkuli of the Mitanni was already widely employed in the 14th century in Anatolia. Tablets inscribed with training methods can be seen in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum; for example, Bo 10407 (KBo III 5, IBOT II 136).
21 See Hood (1953).
22 See Konsolaki-Yannopoulou (1999) and (2000).
23 Iliad 2.26 [LCL 2.23].
24 Troy also earns this epithet [LCL 2.287].
25 Helen’s brothers were also famous for their equestrian prowess. A Homeric Hymn describes them as ‘riders on swift steeds’; the poet Alcman talks of them as ‘masters of swift colts, skilled horsemen’; and Alcaeus as ‘Castor and Polydeuces, who traverse the broad earth and oceans on swift-footed horses’.
26 And would our Bronze Age Helen have ridden out to meet them? There are images of women handling horses from the Late Bronze Age but they all appear in a religious context. There is one statuette from 13th-century BC Attica that represents a female figure riding side-saddle. From the Hélène Stathatos collection: see Collection Hélène Stathatos (1963) Vol. III: Objets Antiques et Byzantins (Strasbourg), 23–4 (no. 6) and Plate II, no. 6. Finely painted images from Mycenaean frescoes show women driving chariots. Their progress is stately, they wear elaborate hats – probably a religious procession. On the frescoes at Tiryns, females thunder across the walls in chariots, their boar’s-tusk helmets an indication that these are perhaps the prototype warrior goddesses.
27 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.1–6. Trans. H. G. Evelyn-White.
28 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68; Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 49–71; Apollodorus, The Library 3.10.8; Hyginus, Fables 78.
29 Horses buried in the Bronze Age with their owners presumably were killed at the time of the owner’s death (Marathon, Dendra). Pausanias 3.20.9 tells us there was a tomb called ‘The Horse’s Tomb’ on the Sparta-Arcadia road which held the body of the very horse sacrificed by Tyndareus.
CHAPTER TEN
The Kingmaker
1 Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 67–75. Trans. P. Vellacott.
2 It is clear from extant Hittite texts that athletic contests were mounted for the benefit of the gods at large social gatherings. Hoffner (2003) lists the events: boxing, wrestling, stone-throwing, foot-racing, archery and chariot-racing.
3 Diethnes Politistiki Enosi Pammachon – the International Cultural Pammachon Union. Many thanks to Kostas Dervenis for co-ordination of this event.
4 See Dervenis and Lykiardopoulos (2005).
5 See Arnott (1999), 500.
6 Herodotus, 6.126ff.
7 For a fuller account of these issues, see Finkelberg (1991).
8 Pausanias 2.18.6.
9 Odyssey 4.12–14 [LCL 4.10–12].
10 Interesting that Megapenthes is not described as a bastard even though his mother was a slave, hinting perhaps at an accepted system of surrogate births. See Finley (1954).
11 Settlements along the Turkish coast show evidence of strong trading links – Mycenaean pottery has been found at Clazomenae, Panaztepe, Colophon and Ephesus. This was not unfamiliar territory.
12 See Neville (1977), 5 and n. 13.
13 The Gortyn law code from Crete – inscribed in the 5th century BC but it may well describe legislation rooted in the Late Bronze Age – also details the rights a woman has over property.
14 Linear B information in this paragraph derived from personal correspondence with Dr Michael Lane, May 2004–April 2005. See also Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 232ff.
15 At a place called pakijana. The scribes seem to recognise an unresolved dispute between Erita and ‘allotment-holders’ who can claim certain benefits to the land. Erita has a special plot of land described as etonijo which appears to be dedicated to some ‘god’ and also has given a woman named uwamija a kera a ‘gift of honour’ in the form of the benefit of a parcel of land. In the eyes of the scribes, Erita the priestess has clear rights to the possession and disposal of her property in land, which include passing claims on to another woman.
16 In another series, many landholders are subjected to religious ‘taxes’ – perhaps one tenth of the product of their land as suggested by another series of tablets from Pylos (Es series). These tablets imply that ‘taxation’ is proportionate to the ‘benefit’ a person holds.
17 Hyginus, Fables 78 – see note by the translator M. Grant, 74, who mentions a similar story told by Aristotle as quoted in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists 576, where the daughter of a Gallic king, Petta, chooses her husband. See also Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 68–75.
18 The custom certainly fed through to some parts of western Europe and was still practised until recently in parts of
rural Germany, where young girls were auctioned to become the ‘May-wife’. These girls started the spring as passive, obedient ‘spouses’ but come the early summer they got to choose their own ‘dancing partners’. If a girl wanted to stay with her mate, she announced the fact by pinning a bunch of flowers to his hat. See West (1975), 12.
19 Iphigeneia in Aulis 68–75. Trans. P. Vellacott.
20 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.
21 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68, 98–100.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A ROYAL WEDDING
1 Also called Idyll 18. Trans. A. Verity.
2 Epithalamia were songs or poems traditionally performed on the eve of a wedding, literally ‘epi’ outside the ‘thalamos’, the bridal chamber.
3 The choral leader who wrote so expressively in the 7th century BC about rituals for young Spartan girls down on the banks of the Eurotas.
4 Theocritus may also have got some of his detail from another poem written about Helen in the 6th century BC by the Sicilian poet Stesichorus. Only the tiniest fragments of Stesichorus survive now, but it seems this poem covered Helen’s early life in some detail. See notes in Hunter (2002), 109.
5 Theocritus, Idyll 18.
6 Theocritus, Idyll 18. 43.6 Trans. S. B. Pomeroy (2002), 115.
7 Eighteen was late to marry by Greek standards, a peculiarity of the Spartan city-state, apparently endorsed from the Late Archaic period onwards.
8 Plutarch, Lycurgus 15.4.
9 See Hagnon of Tarsus in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.602d–e.
10 See discussion in David (1992), 1.
11 See Griffiths (1972), 27.
12 Theocritus, Idyll 18.8.
13 V 659 (from Mycenae) and Vn 851 (from Pylos) on pallets.
14 For detailed analysis of foodstuffs at various sites, see Tzedakis and Martlew (1999), passim.
15 A tradition also referred to by Homer: e.g. the wedding feast at Sparta for Hermione; a feast in honour of Poseidon at Pylos; and something marked by its absence in the unruly, improper behaviour of Penelope’s suitors. It is worth noting that a feast in honour of Poseidon at Pylos is recorded in the Linear B. tablets. See Sherratt (2004), 315.
16 There is an interesting comparison here with Iron Age British tribal gatherings.
17 Tablet Cn 1287.
18 Un 138. See also Un 418, 718, 853 and Cn 418.
19 Another tablet records the delivery of 197 sheep for a feast. Uc 161, from Knossos.
20 Some animals travelled ‘over water’ and across distances of 50 km to get to the table. Palaima (2004), 226.
21 Un 2 from Pylos, in Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 221.
22 Pylos Ta 716.
23 See Isaakidou et al. (2002). The flesh has been cut off the mandibles – this could, perhaps, correlate to the sacrifice of tongues described by Homer in Odyssey 3.373 (LCL 3.332).
24 Agia Triada sarcophagus: see Fitton (2002), 192 and Immerwahr (1990), 100–2.
25 Some figures in this and the following paragraph are derived from a lecture given by Lisa Bendall on 6 May 2004, ‘Mycenaean Feasting at Pylos’, at the McDonald Institute, Cambridge. Also conversations with John Killen and reference to Ventris and Chadwick (1973).
26 Uc 161, from Knossos.
27 Analysis of the pottery at cult sites shows that wine played a significant part in the more intimate sacral rituals of the Late Bronze Age as well as in the grand feasts – where huge amounts would have been drunk. In another room (Room 9) of the palace of Pylos, there are a further 600 kylikes. The traces of organic materials found in the cult centre at Mycenae bear witness to resinated wine, both locally made and imported from producers along the Palestinian coasts at Ugarit and Ras Shamra in large Canaanite jars. A clay mug held a mix of wine and mead. Elsewhere there is alcohol steeped in rue and sage. We think of rue as a token of remembrance but it can act too as a sedative; today pharmacists warn against its use because the risk:benefit ratio is too unstable. So while the gods might have felt very close to the inhabitants of the Late Bronze Age it seems that men and women were happy to use drugs, as well as alcohol, to bring them closer still.
28 Iliad 4.401 [LCL 4.346]. Honeyed wine is referred to on a sealing nodule recording a wine delivery at Pylos. I tried this Bronze Age drink with archaeologist Holley Martlew in October 2004. It is delicious and extremely efficacious.
29 The ‘Campstool Fresco’ from Knossos.
30 See Bendall (2004), on Room 60 at Pylos.
31 Sufficiently significant to be buried with the aristocrats – for example, at Vapheio two bronze jugs, a bronze ladle and a silver ladle, and a brazier.
32 For a fuller discussion of the topic of feasting and social display, see Bendall (2004).
33 For an excellent collection of references see Sherratt (2004), 316, n. 46.
34 Odyssey 9.3–11 [LCL 9.3–11].
35 Odyssey 17.270–1. Trans. E.V. Rieu. [LCL 17.270–1].
36 On the battlefield too, when the heroes describe the real pleasures of life, music and dancing are nearly always mentioned. In the midst of a seething, passionate torrent of abuse that a vengeful Menelaus is hurling at the Trojans, we get an idea – certainly of Iron Age pleasures, and most probably of Bronze Age ones.
One can achieve his fill of all good things, even sleep, even of making love … rapturous song and the beat and sway of dancing. A man will yearn for his fill of all these joys before his fill of war. But not these Trojans – No one can glut their lust for battle! Iliad 13.733–8 [LCL 13.636–9].
37 Although ethno-musicologists have a difficult time reconstructing the sounds of the very distant past because many musical instruments were made entirely of organic material, and have simply rotted away, a few examples do remain. There could be a wealth – particularly of percussion instruments – enjoyed by Bronze Age society, which we cannot imagine today because their remains have been swallowed by time. One survivor is a rattle (sometimes made of bronze, sometimes of terracotta) called a sistrum. The sistrum is prevalent in antiquity. A strange hybrid of a fork, a maraca and an abacus, the sistrum gives out a sound that is at once eerie and intrusive. Bronze finger cymbals, not unlike those used today by Hari Krishna devotees, were probably an oriental import to Greece. Found on Crete and in the Uluburun shipwreck. See Bass (1987) and (1996). Another import was a large whistle carved out of the tooth of a hippopotamus, and unworked tortoise shells destined for use as resonating boxes. In 1981, H. Roberts reconstructed a tortoiseshell lyre for the British Museum. See Younger (1998), 17 and H. Roberts (1981), ‘Reconstructing the Greek Tortoise-Shell Lyre’, in World Archaeology 12: 303–12. In the Mycenaean sanctuary of Phylakopi, on Melos, Late Bronze Age tortoise-shells were excavated with holes carefully drilled into the sides to allow for the attachment of lyre arms. See Renfrew (1985), 325–6. The tortoise-shell fragments were recovered from the east and west shrines, during the excavations between 1974 and 1977 by the British School of Archaeology at Athens. Renfrew notes that tortoises can still be found in the countryside around Phylakopi. A Homeric Hymn describes the creation of these musical instruments (also called the chelys-lyre) by Hermes.
38 See Younger (1998), 37 and Plate 24.3 (CMS II. 3.7).
39 Agios Nikolaos, Archaeological Museum 11246.
40 This is from Malia, and was found in a building at the far north-east corner of the palace. It dates from LM1 (16th–15th centuries BC). See C. Baurain and P. Darcque (1983), ‘Un triton en pierre à Mallia’, in Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 107:3–73. Thank you to Peter Warren for details.
41 Iliad 9.225 [LCL 9.189].
42 See Plutarch, for the Life of Alexander (15) and Aelian, Historical Miscellany 9.38.
43 The Judgement of Paris, Attic black-figure amphora, c. 575–550 BC. Paris, Louvre F13.
44 Paris, Louvre, Département des Peintures INV. 3696.
45 Women, it seems, would on occasion play. From Palaikastro in East Crete there is a crude terracotta group of a woman holding a
lyre while three others hold hands and dance in a semi-circle in front of her.
46 There is a particularly fine example from Amyklai, just 8 cm tall.
47 Lang (1969).
48 Odyssey 17.287 [LCL 17.261].
49 Theocritus, Idylls 18.54–5. Trans. A. Verity.
50 See Pantelia (1995), 79 for further discussion. The author points out that Ptolemy’s marriage to (his sister) Arsinoe would also have ‘strengthened both his claim to the Egyptian throne and his position as a figure of cult in Egypt’. There are echoes here perhaps of Helen’s story.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HERMIONE
1 Ovid, The Art of Love 2.690f Trans. R. Humphries.
2 Although most literary sources say that Helen had only one child, a comprehensive account of ‘Helen’ references yields quite a list of children – from her liaison with Theseus, Iphigeneia; with Paris, Corythos, Boumonos, Idaios and Aganos as well as the seemingly fatherless Aithiolas and Nicostratus (for latter see Apollodorus, The Library 2ii, 2i). Pleisthenes is mentioned in fragment 12 of the Cypria as another child of Helen and Menelaus.
3 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 204.94–5, in Merkelbach and West (1967).
4 Could he be talking about a system of surrogacy, where aristocrats use slaves to increase the number of their offspring? Odyssey 4.14–17 [LCL 4.12–14]. Hittite tablets of the time indicate that in Anatolia at least, surrogacy was acceptable; ‘if within two years the wife does not produce children, she will purchase a slave woman for her husband; but as soon as the slave produces a [male] child, the wife can sell the slave as she wishes’: Darga (1993), 34.
5 Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 127 and 310.
6 Material from 2002 site visit.
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