by Dilys Powell
there rise before us the grand staircase and columnar hall of approach, practically unchanged since they were traversed, some three and a half millennia back, by Kings and Queens of Minos’ stock, on their way from the scenes of their public and sacertotal functions in the West Wing of the Palace, to the more private quarters of the Royal household.
Naturally the size of the job – excavating, conserving, restoring – meant a growing army of labour. In the first season he employed a number of workmen fluctuating between fifty and one hundred and eighty. The following year he often needed two hundred. By 1902 that had gone up to two hundred and fifty, among them ‘over a score of carpenters and masons’. The record offers an amusing contrast with the balance-sheet of most English archaeologists, lucky if they can scrape together the wages of a dozen pairs of hands; and there were times when Hogarth, who had been digging first at the cave on Mount Dicte which was the legendary birthplace of Zeus and later at Zakros in East Crete and who also drew on the Cretan Exploration Fund for his expenses, was inclined to remonstrate. But after all Evans, not to mention his father, a generous subscriber, had from the start contributed a good deal of his own money. He had bought the site. When in later years he spoke of the extent of his operations a note of unconcealed gratification crept into his voice. It was in his nature to live large, make the grand gesture.
Among the monuments of Knossos was a large paved rectangle with tiers of low steps on two sides: ‘a primitive Theatre’ which he judged might have been used for ceremonial dances. The German archaeologist Dörpfeld, former assistant to Schliemann, was accustomed during an annual island cruise to bring his party to Knossos. To this day the Cretans are splendid dancers; and one year the visitors were entertained in the ‘Theatral Area’ by a dance of the Cretan workmen and their womenfolk – ‘a dance, maybe, as ancient in its origins as the building in which it took place’.
As Evans watched the ‘sinuous, meandering course’ he reflected that the steps resembled the dance which, Plutarch says, Theseus instituted ‘mimicking the mazy turns of the labyrinth’. For the sense of the dramatic was always with him. It was there in the picturesque names he gave, as the seasons came and went, to the quarters and the environs of the great Palace: the Court of the Distaffs, the Hall of the Colonnades, the Room of the Lotus Lamp, the Megaron of the Double Axes, the Magazine of the Knobbed Pithoi, the Hall of the Jewelled Fresco, the House of the Fetish Shrine, the Megaron of the Spotted Bull and – with a touch of perhaps unconscious indelicacy – the Room of the Lady’s Seat.
Tirelessly his mind was busy putting the finds to work. The deep walled pits, now – might they not be prisons? ‘The groans of these Minoan dungeons may well have found an echo in the tale of Theseus.’ Surely the room with the grooved limestone slab and basin was once an olive-press. The stone benches, the low pillar with the hollow on top – the furniture, perhaps, of a schoolroom where clay for writing-tablets was kept moist; perhaps ‘the art of writing was here imparted to the Palace youth’. And the stepped wall of terraces by the northern entrance – ‘it would be quite in keeping with Minoan taste … to suppose that these earth platforms rising step-wise beside the entrance way served as small garden-plots, planted perhaps with palms and flowering shrubs’.
It was natural that when he came to build his own house at Knossos he should give it a name from the mythical past.
By the end of 1905 he had been digging for six seasons. The accumulation of material was already enormous. Obviously he would be coming to Crete for many years. He needed to be at Knossos, on the spot. He had had enough of riding out to the site from Candia; patience was not one of his noticeable qualities. In 1906 he made up his mind. He would build; and he would build on the slopes overlooking the Palace. ‘This is where I shall live when I come to dig Knossos’: now the words spoken to Myres eleven years earlier were justified. Evans planned the building himself ‘with basement rooms’, Joan Evans writes, ‘for coolness, and a flat roof for air, and a steel and cement framework for strength’. Christian Doll, then architect at the British School, was brought from Athens to see to the work, and by October of that year the roof was on. The house was named after that daughter of Minos who gave Theseus the thread which enabled him, after he had killed the Minotaur, to find his way out of the maze – the Villa Ariadne.
The establishment of the Villa marked a stage in the Knossos story. The main work of excavation seemed to be finished; at any rate the outlines of the great Palace were clear. There were to be no more yearly progress reports from Evans himself, and respectful though one may feel towards the more subdued tones of the articles which between 1905 and 1908 Duncan Mackenzie contributed to the British School Annual one cannot help missing the high-flying style and the enthusiasm of the Old Master’s prose.
Not that the discoveries had come to an end. There was always more to be done. But the explorers no longer lived in amazement. Their operations, with the Villa Ariadne as a working centre, took on an air of regularity. Mackenzie could live and study there. Gilliéron, reconstituting the frescoes, could settle there for months on end, and so could the succession of architects and draughtsmen who came to draw plans of the excavations and devise means of preserving and restoring the Palace. And Evans himself now had a permanent Cretan headquarters. For long periods it would be the centre of his life, and from it he would pour out a great stream of ideas, theories, plans and letters ranging from the exhilarated to the admonitory.
In 1908 news came from England that John Evans, now nearly eighty-five, was ill. ‘There are over a hundred men at work, so you can guess that I have my hands pretty full,’ Evans wrote to his stepmother. ‘But my thoughts are very much with the Padre.’ A week or two later John Evans was dead; to the last he had insisted that there should be no interruption in the operations in Crete. ‘It is hard’, said the next letter from Knossos, ‘to be away from you all at such a time, but I was glad to receive my father’s message that I must do my work here. Indeed there is no question of my getting away just yet, with so many responsibilities on my shoulders and so much that cannot be postponed.’
It is not only in the actor’s life that the show must go on. Indeed the show could go on henceforth with a new assurance, for not only was there a paternal legacy. John Dickinson – the Dickinson of the paper-mills whose daughter John Evans had married – had left a large estate first to his son and then to his son’s sons. But the last of the grandsons died and Arthur Evans inherited. Fourteen years after his first visit to Crete he was a rich man in his own right. He could afford Knossos.
Between 1908 and 1914, then, the exploration of the enormous, enigmatic site and its surroundings continued. Perhaps a Cretan working in his vineyard would accidentally dig up vases and bronze fragments, and the hunt would be on again. A single tomb would be found, then a whole series. Explorers in Greece know that if you are looking for ancient graves it is no bad idea to take local advice. The vegetation gives clues. For instance fennel, which has long roots, is likely to grow in places where at some time or other, perhaps thousands of years earlier, the earth has been deeply disturbed; and Evans, recording the fact in his account of a successful excavation in 1910, gives full credit to his foreman, ‘the most expert tomb-hunter of the Levant’.
This was the year of a particularly gratifying discovery. When one of a series of tombs was opened it was found to be of singular construction. Among the contents was a fragmentary pair of those famous bronze ritual double axes the worship of which had seemed to Evans’s old opponent W. H. D. Rouse so hilarious a notion. The find in a grave was interesting enough, but the surprise came when the cist or burial chamber itself, long ago plundered and by now almost bare, turned out to be cut in the rock in the form of a double axe. The general architecture of the tomb, the disposition of such relics as remained, and various other pieces of evidence were enough to persuade Evans that the whole thing was not only a tomb but a funeral chapel. It might, he thought, have been used by the family for some kind of
memorial service; its sacred symbols might have guaranteed divine protection: ‘and,’ he adds in one of his loftier flights, ‘even in the shades, the direct guardianship of the Great Mother’ might be thus ‘assured to the warrior resting in his emblematic bed’. Anyway there was no difficulty in finding a name, and to the long list of romantic titles was added the Tomb of the Double Axes.
The discovery was described in a paper read by Evans at the end of 1913. Scarcely a year in his adult life passed without his writing some learned article or other (he usually managed to tweak a learned ear or two in the process). But papers and articles and reports were mere fragments of his work. Publication of the huge mass of the Knossos discoveries – an unknown civilisation to be recorded, a vast tract of prehistory to be charted – was the main job. There were always fresh questions to be answered. In 1913 he was back at the Villa, digging again in an attempt to answer them; by 1914 the materials for publication were, as he stoically put it, ‘already in an advanced state’. Then came the 1914–1918 war.
Some distinguished archaeological figures were to play a part in it. Hogarth became the adviser of Lawrence of Arabia. Myres commanded small buccaneering ships in the Mediterranean (there is a story, apocryphal no doubt, that he once demanded identification of some sizeable British warship; back came the signal: ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’). And Evans, though at the outbreak of war he was already sixty-three, was far from inactive. He fought the War Cabinet’s plan (‘the breaking in of the jungle’, he called it) to requisition the British Museum. He protested against the removal of enemy nationals from the roll of honorary Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries. One of numerous Presidential addresses to learned bodies gave him the chance to illustrate from ancient precedent the advantages of a through railway between western and south-eastern Europe – a project, Myres afterwards pointed out, ‘which was in fact realised later by the Simplon Express’. When the war ended Evans hastened to attend the Peace Conference in the interests of the Southern Slavs.
But all this time he had been cut off from Crete. There were all sorts of adjustments to be made. New evidence had come out of the Knossos finds. Elsewhere Greek, American, Italian and French archaeologists were making discoveries which had to be taken into account. In 1920 he despatched Mackenzie on a confirmatory expedition in Crete. A year later – twenty-one years after the first campaign at Knossos – Volume One of The Palace of Minos appeared.
There were to be three more, the last in 1935, and a separate Index, the bulk of which Joan Evans compiled. The enormous discoveries demanded enormous exposition, and got it. And Minoan archaeology (it was Evans who first used the word Minoan) was always providing fresh material. The book changed as it grew; adapted itself to new knowledge; luxuriated. Of course he went on adding to his own discoveries. In 1922 he was back at the Villa Ariadne ‘seriously implicated in digging’. There were finds ‘below what seems to have been the Magazine of the Arsenal’. The discovery of ‘another large staircase (or rather the evidence of it) in our West Wing’ necessitated ‘large works of reconstruction’. At Arkhanes, a big village south of Knossos, a circle of stone blocks under the projected living-room of a half-built house turned out to be a Minoan cistern. ‘I have had what remains’, he wrote with typical glee in the audacity of the operation, ‘excavated after pulling down the owner’s front wall.’
His pleasure in the Cretan landscape was never blunted. The letters to his family during the 1920s sometimes mention the flowers. ‘Here every bank is gay with dwarf iris, from blue to mauve, and many-coloured anemones’ – he had a feeling for flowers; and the delight with which he had planned the setting of the Villa, that comes out too: ‘The garden here has also been very pleasant with the growing palms and masses of roses and honeysuckle. The scarlet pomegranate flowers are just now in full bloom.’ But something else was showing itself: an anxiety about financing the never-ending exploration of Knossos. The wages of the workmen had risen, and he was beginning to sell some of the antiquities collected by his father. ‘It is sad’, he wrote to Joan Evans in 1922, ‘parting from some of the old things, but they have been already “researched” and I feel that my father would be quite content that they should serve as stepping-stones to other work.’
The same letter goes farther. ‘I am trying to carry out a scheme for handing over the house and site here to the British School.’
Today it is extraordinary to think of a British subject owning not simply land and a house in Crete but the site of one of the most celebrated archaeological discoveries in the world; owning not only the ground on which the Palace of Minos stood, but the Palace itself. That phase of archaeological history ended long ago. But for a few more years Evans was to have absolute control. He dug, he conserved, he reconstructed (or in his word ‘reconstituted’); he was the King Minos of his day. He finds evidence of ‘a monumental stepped portico running up from the South’. Fragments of a fresco take four expert workmen a month to extract, and to piece the thing together he sends to Athens for young Gilliéron, son of the original restorer. There are ‘extraordinary developments’ at the deep pit which he calls ‘the lair’ – the Minotaur’s lair. In his letters from the Villa references to the financial burden grow more frequent; the necessary ‘restoration of the old structure … is rather ruinous on my side!’ But he still has time and attention to spare for family affairs, and intertwined with accounts of excavation and discovery there is concern about the future employment of one young relative, there are exasperated comments on the matrimonial projects of another (‘I had to write to him quite brutally’).
And he still, at over seventy, is equal to the rigours of Cretan travel. ‘I had to break off work here’, he begins his account of an expedition in 1923, ‘and took the opportunity of doing some exploring, camping out with tents in the very wild ranges of the South side of the island.’ Mackenzie and the architect-draughtsman Piet de Jong were with him on this occasion, and the party settled for the night ‘on the shore’ he writes ‘of Fair Haven where (as the sailors said it was safe) I pitched my tent a few yards from the sea opposite St Paul’s island, the others camping more inland’.
St Paul’s island – the Acts of the Apostles, reporting the Pauline voyages, has the relevant passages. ‘… We sailed’, they begin ‘under Crete … And, hardly passing it, came unto a place which is called The fair havens; nigh whereunto was the city of Lasea.’ The master of St Paul’s ship, however, finding the haven ‘not commodious to winter in’, presently sailed on ‘close by Crete. But not long after there arose against it a tempestuous wind, called Euroclydon. And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up into the wind, we let her drive. And running under a certain island which is called Clauda, we had much work to come by the boat …’ Evans had reason to recall the story. ‘In the night’, his letter goes on,
Euroclydon – it was the same wind – suddenly arose in his might, brought up the sea and nearly swept me and the tent away! Happily some sailors whose own boat was being swamped roused my men and the tent and myself were got off in the right direction – not before a large wave broke into the middle of it! It was quite weird. Next morning breakers rolled where my tent had been pitched!
‘Got off in the right direction’: Evans was night-blind. When he was dealing with coins and gems his microscopic sight ‘enabled him’, Myres says, ‘to detect artists’ signatures and other minute details of style’. But at the onset of darkness he was helpless. I remember once in Athens finding him ready even in the mild dusk of spring to take my arm as we walked across the British School garden. It was a readiness which had nothing to do with age; he was as spry as a sparrow. One can understand how gravely the disability complicated the Fair Haven mishap – which was to be among the most often-recounted of his adventures. After the lapse of nearly forty years Evans’s servant Kosti was still eager to describe his own rôle in the event – a rôle presented as one of self-abnegating heroism. It is with satisfaction that one identifies the spot where Euro
clydon struck. Kali Limenes, says the map: Good Harbours, or, in the New Testament phrase, Fair Havens.
Evans was not deterred. Two years later he was off to ‘a place where the French are digging an early Palace’. The place was Mallia, about twenty-five miles from the Villa Ariadne. Today the bus takes you from Herakleion in an hour, but in 1925 it was an expedition involving some forethought, and Evans, again with Mackenzie as his companion, set out prepared to spend two nights in tents on the mountainside. He was interested but acid. At present, he wrote, the French ‘are employing three men and two boys so it will take some time before they are through’.
His expeditions were not confined to Crete. On one occasion he went on ‘a pilgrimage into the Morea in quest of a “magic ring” … a great gold signet ring from a beehive tomb’. Though about this time the references to finance appear more often in his letters (‘I have 45 men on the job, and wages are about double what they were, so you can see that I am absolutely reckless’) anxiety is always brushed aside. Everything which holds up his work or impedes his curiosity is disregarded – the ‘enervating South wind’; ‘paths like torrent beds and once’ (this was on the trip to Fair Haven) ‘12 hours at a stretch without passing a village’; temperatures of up to 105 degrees in the shade – ‘I resist, as the Italians say.’ He went everywhere, said one of his workmen. Never, on his Minoan excursions, alone. Eye-witness accounts give the impression of a retinue – not only British companions, not only Piet de Jong and Mackenzie, but also Manolaki the current foreman, Kosti as cook and a boy as handyman. He would travel by car, when cars became available, as far as possible; then he would ride on mule-back. He never, according to Piet, slept in a village. Tents were always used; Evans had his own and, as the Fair Haven incident shows, his own ideas of where to pitch it.