In 520 bce, the newfound athenian democracy was threatened by

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THINKING AHEAD

4.1 Compare and contrast the Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean cultures.

4.2 Define the formal features of the Homeric epic, and compare and contrast the Iliad and the Odyssey.

4.3 Discuss the ways in which the values of the Greek polis shaped Greek culture.

4.4 Describe the rise of democracy in Athens.

The Aegean Sea, in the eastern Mediterranean, is filled with islands. Here, beginning in about 3000 bce, sea-faring cultures took hold. So many were the islands, and so close to one another, that navigators were always within sight of land. In the natural harbors where seafar- ers came ashore, port communities developed and trade began to flourish. A house from approximately 1650 bce was excavated at Akrotiri on Thera, one of these islands. The Miniature Ship Fresco, a frieze that extended across the top of at least three walls in a second-story room, suggests a prosperous, seafaring community engaged in a celebration of the sea (Fig. 4.1). People lounge on terraces and rooftops as boats glide by, accompanied by leaping dolphins.

THE CULTURES OF THE AEGEAN

How do the Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean cultures differ?

The later Greeks thought of the Bronze Age Aegean peo- ples as their ancestors—particularly those who inhabited the islands of the Cyclades, the island of Crete, and Myce- nae, on the Peloponnese—and considered their activities and culture part of their own prehistory. They even had a word for the way they knew them—archaiologia, “know- ing the past.” They did not practice archeology as we do today, excavating ancient sites and scientifically analyzing

The Aegean World and the Rise of Greece Trade, War, and Victory4

Fig. 4.1 (left and above) Miniature Ship Fresco (detail and larger view from the left section), from Room 5, West House, Akrotiri, Thera. Before 1623 bce. Height 145⁄16”. National Archeological Museum, Athens. The total length of this fresco is over 24 feet. Harbors such as this one provided shelter to traders who sailed between the islands of the Aegean Sea as early as 3000 bce.

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the artifacts discovered there. Rather, they learned of their past through legends passed down, at first orally and then in writing, from generation to generation. Interestingly, the modern practice of archeology has confirmed much of what was legendary to the Greeks.

The Cyclades The Cyclades are a group of more than 100 islands in the Aegean Sea between mainland Greece and the island of Crete (Map 4.1). They form a roughly circular shape, giv- ing them their name, from the Greek word kyklos, “circle” (also the origin of our word “cycle”). No written records of the early Cycladic people remain, although archeologists have found a good deal of art in and around hillside burial chambers. Marble was abundant in the islands, especially on Naxos and Paros, and these figures were carved with obsidian scrapers—abundant in these volcanic islands— and then polished with crushed emery, mined on Naxos. The most famous of these artifacts are marble figurines in a highly simplified and abstract style that appeals to the modern eye (Fig. 4.2). In fact, Cycladic figurines have deeply influenced modern sculptors. The Cycladic figures originally looked quite different because they were painted. Most of the figurines depict females, but male figures, including seated harpists and acrobats, also exist. The figu- rines range in height from a few inches to life-size, but ana- tomical detail in all of them is reduced to essentials. With their toes pointed down, their heads tilted back, and their arms crossed across their chests, the fully extended figures are corpselike. Their function remains unknown, but since most of these figures were found in graves, it seems likely that they were created for a mortuary purpose.

By about 2200 bce, trade with the larger island of Crete to the south brought the Cyclades into Crete’s political orbit and radically altered Cycladic life. Evidence of this influence survives in the form of wall paintings discovered

in 1967 on the island of Thera (also commonly known as Santorini), at Akrotiri, a community that had been buried beneath one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the last 10,000 years. About 7 cubic miles of magma spewed forth, and the ash cloud that resulted during the first phase of the eruption was about 23 miles high. The enormous size of the eruption caused the volcano at the center of Thera to collapse, producing a caldera, a large basin or depression that filled with seawater. The island of Thera is actually the eastern rim of the original volcano (small volcanoes are still active in the center of Thera’s crescent sea).

The eruption was so great that it left evidence world- wide—in the stunted growth of tree rings as far away as Ire- land and California, and in ash taken from ice core samples in Greenland. With this evidence, scientists have dated the eruption to 1623 bce. In burying the city of Akrotiri, it also preserved it. Not only were the homes of Akrotiri elaborately decorated—with mural paintings such as the Miniature Ship Fresco (see Fig. 4.1), made with water-based

50 km

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Melos

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Aegina

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Knossos

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Orchomenos

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Map 4.1 Crete, the Cyclades, and the island of Thera. Thera lies just north of Crete. Evidence suggests Cretan influence was felt here by about 2000 bce.

Fig. 4.2 Figurine of a woman from the Cyclades. ca. 2400–2100 bce. Marble, height 17". Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Larger examples of such figurines may have been objects of worship.

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pigments on wet plaster—but residents also enjoyed a level of personal hygiene unknown elsewhere in Western culture until Roman times. Clay pipes led from interior toilets and baths to sewers built under winding, paved streets. Straw reinforced the walls of their homes, protecting them against earthquakes and insulating them from the heat of the Med- iterranean sun.

Minoan Culture in Crete Just to the south of the Cyclades lies Crete, the largest of the Aegean islands. Bronze Age civilization developed there as early as 3000 bce. Trade routes from Crete estab- lished communication with such diverse areas as Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Scandinavia, from which the island imported copper, ivory, amethyst, lapis lazuli, carnelian, gold, and amber. From Britain, Crete imported the tin necessary to produce bronze. A distinctive culture called Minoan flourished on Crete from about 1900 to 1375 bce. The name comes from the legendary king Minos, who was said to have ruled the island’s ancient capital of Knossos.

Minoan Painting Many of the motifs in the frescoes at Akrotiri, in the Cyclades, also appear in the art decorating Minoan palaces on Crete, including the palace at Knossos. This suggests the mutual influence of Cycladic and Minoan cultures by the start of the second millennium bce. Unique

to Crete, however, is emphasis on the bull, the central ele- ment of one of the best-preserved frescoes at Knossos, the Toreador Fresco (Fig. 4.3). Three almost-nude figures appear to toy with a charging bull. (As in Egyptian art, women are traditionally depicted with light skin, men with a darker complexion.) The woman on the left holds the bull by the horns, the man vaults over its back, and the woman on the right seems to have either just finished a vault or to have positioned herself to catch the man. It is unclear whether this is a ritual activity, perhaps part of a rite of passage. What we do know is that the Minoans regularly sacrificed bulls, as well as other animals, and that the bull was at least symbolically associated with male virility and strength.

Minoan frescoes, as well as those on Thera, differ from ancient Egyptian frescoes in several ways. The most obvious is that they were painted not in tombs but on the walls of homes and palaces, where they could be enjoyed by the liv- ing. The two kinds of frescoes were made differently as well. Rather than applying pigment to a dry wall in the fresco secco technique of the Egyptians, Minoan artists employed a buon fresco technique similar to that used by Renaissance artists nearly 3,000 years later (see Chapter 13). In buon fresco, pigment is mixed with water and then applied to a wall that has been coated with wet lime plaster. As the wall dries, the painting literally becomes part of it. Buon fresco is far more durable than fresco secco, for the paint will not flake off as easily (though all walls will eventually crumble).

Fig. 4.3 Bull Leaping (Toreador Fresco), from the palace complex at Knossos, Crete. ca. 1450–1375 bce. Fresco, height approx. 241⁄2". Archeological Museum, Iráklion, Crete. The darker patches of the fresco are original fragments. The lighter areas are modern restorations.

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100 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

Minoan Religion The people of Thera and Crete seem to have shared the same religion as well as similar artis- tic motifs. Ample archeological evidence tells us that the Minoans in Crete worshiped female deities. We do not know much more than that, but some students of ancient religions have proposed that the Minoan worship of one or more female deities is evidence that in very early cultures the principal deity was a goddess rather than a god.

It has long been believed that one of the Minoan female deities was a snake goddess, but recently, scholars have questioned the authenticity of most of the existing snake goddess figurines. Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941), who first excavated at the Palace of Minos on Crete, identified images of the Cretan goddess as “Mountain Goddess,” “Snake Goddess,” “Dove Goddess,” “Goddess of the Caves,” “Goddess of the Double Axes,” “Goddess of the Sports,” and “Mother Goddess.” He saw all of these as dif- ferent aspects of a single deity, or Great Goddess. A century after Evans introduced the Snake Goddess (Fig. 4.4) to the world, scholars are still debating its authenticity. In his book Mysteries of the Snake Goddess (2002), Kenneth Lapatin

makes a convincing case that craftspeople employed by Evans manufactured artifacts for the antiquities market. He believes that the body of the statue is an authentic antiquity, but the form in which we see it is largely the imaginative fabrication of Evans’s restorers. Many parts were missing when the figure was unearthed, and so an artist working for Evans fashioned new parts and attached them to the figure. The snake in the goddess’s right hand lacked a head, leaving its identity as a snake open to question. Most of the goddess’s left arm, including the snake in her hand, was absent and later fabricated. When the figure was discovered, it lacked a head, and this one is completely fab- ricated. The cat on the goddess’s head is original, although it was not found with the statue. Lapatin believes that Evans, eager to advance his own theory that Minoan reli- gion was dedicated to the worship of a Great Goddess, never questioned the manner in which the figures were restored. As interesting as the figure is, its identity as a snake god- dess is at best questionable. We cannot even say with cer- tainty that the principal deity of the Minoan culture was female, let alone that she was a snake goddess. There are no images of snake goddesses in surviving Minoan wall fres- coes, engraved gems, or seals, and almost all of the statues depicting her are fakes or imaginative reconstructions.

It is likely, though, that Minoan female goddesses were closely associated with a cult of vegetation and fertility, and the snake is an almost universal symbol of rebirth and fertility. We do know that the Minoans worshiped on mountaintops, closely associated with life- giving rains, and deep in caves, another nearly universal symbol of the womb in particular and origin in general. And in early cultures, the undulations of the earth itself— its hills and ravines, caves and riverbeds—were (and often still are) associated with the curves of the female body and genitalia. But until early Minoan writing is deciphered, the exact nature of Minoan religion will remain a mystery.

The Palace of Minos The Snake Goddess was discovered along with other ritual objects in a storage pit in the Pal- ace of Minos at Knossos. The palace as Evans found it is enormous, covering over 6 acres. There were originally two palaces at the site—an “old palace,” dating from 1900 bce, and a “new palace,” built over the old one after an enor- mous earthquake in 1750 bce. This “new palace” was the focus of Evans’s attention.

It was one of three principal palace sites on Crete (see Map 4.1), and although Knossos is the largest, they are laid out along similar lines, with a central court surrounded by a labyrinth of rooms. They served as administrative, com- mercial, and religious centers ruled by a king, similar to the way palaces functioned in the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The complexity of these unfortified palaces and the richness of the artifacts uncovered there testify to the power and prosperity of Minoan culture.

As its floor plan and reconstruction drawing make clear, the palace at Knossos was only loosely organized around a central, open courtyard (Fig. 4.5). Leading from

Fig. 4.4 Snake Goddess or Priestess, from the palace at Knossos, Crete. ca. 1500 bce. Faience, height 115⁄8". Archeological Museum, Iráklion, Crete. Faience is a kind of earthenware ceramic decorated with glazes. Modern faience is easily distinguishable from ancient because it is markedly lighter in tone.

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Fig. 4.5 Reconstruction drawing and floor plan of the new palace complex at Knossos, Crete. The complexity of the labyrinthine layout is obvious.

Fig. 4.6 Grand Staircase, east wing, palace complex at Knossos, Crete. ca. 1500 bce. As reconstructed by Sir Arthur Evans. The staircase served as a light well and linked all five stories of the palace.

the courtyard were corridors, staircases, and passageways that connected living quarters, ritual spaces, baths, and administrative offices, in no discernible order or design. Workshops surrounded the complex, and vast storerooms could easily provide for the needs of both the palace popula- tion and the population of the surrounding countryside. In just one storeroom, excavators discovered enough ceramic jars to hold 20,000 gallons of olive oil.

Hundreds of wooden columns decorated the palace. Only fragments have survived, but we know from paint- ings and ceramic house models how they must have looked. Evans created concrete replicas displayed today at the West Portico and the Grand Staircase (Fig. 4.6). The originals were made of huge timbers cut on Crete and then turned upside down so that the top of each is broader than the base.

throne roomtemplerepositories staircase

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The columns were painted bright red with black capitals, the sculpted blocks that top them. The capitals are shaped like pillows or cushions. (In fact, they are very close to the shape of an evergreen’s root ball, as if the original design were suggested by trees felled in a storm.) Over time, as the columns rotted or were destroyed by earthquakes or possibly burned by invaders, they must have become increasingly difficult to replace, for Minoan builders gradually deforested the island. This may be one reason why the palace complex was abandoned sometime around 1450 bce.

Representations of double axes decorated the palace at every turn, and indeed the Palace of Minos was known in Greek times as the House of the Double Axes. In fact, the Greek word for the palace was labyrinth, from labrys, “dou- ble ax.” Over time, the Greeks came to associate the House of the Double Axes with its inordinately complex layout, and labyrinth came to mean “maze.”

The Legend of Minos and the Minotaur The Greeks solidi- fied the meaning of the labyrinth in a powerful legend. King Minos boasted that the gods would grant him anything he wished, so he prayed that a bull might emerge from the sea that he might sacrifice to the god of the sea, Poseidon. A white bull did emerge from the sea, one so beautiful that Minos decided to keep it for himself and sacrifice a differ- ent one from his herd instead. This angered Poseidon, who took revenge by causing Minos’ queen, Pasiphae, to fall in love with the bull. To consummate her passion, she con- vinced Minos’ chief craftsperson, Daedalus, to construct a hollow wooden cow into which she might place herself and attract the bull. The result of this union was a horrid crea- ture, half man, half bull: the Minotaur.

To appease the monster’s appetite for human flesh, Minos ordered the city of Athens, which he also ruled, to send him 14 young men and women each year as sacrificial victims. Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, vowed to kill the Minotaur. As he set sail for Crete with 13 others, he promised his father that he would return under white sails (instead of the black sails of the sacrificial ship) to announce his victory. At Crete, he seduced Ariadne, daughter of Minos. Wishing to help The- seus, she gave him a sword with which to kill the Minotaur and a spindle of thread to lead himself out of the maze in which the Minotaur lived. Victorious, Theseus sailed home with Ariadne but aban- doned her on the island of Naxos, where she was discovered by the god of wine, Dionysus, who married her and made her his queen. Theseus, sailing into the harbor at Athens, neglected to raise the white sails, perhaps intentionally. When his father, King Aegeus, saw the ship still sailing under black sails, he threw himself into the sea, which from then on took his name, the Aegean. Theseus, of course, then became king.

The story is a creation or origin myth, like the Zuni emer- gence tale (see Reading 1.1 in Chapter 1) or the Hebrew

story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. But it differs from them on one important point: Rather than narrating the origin of humankind in general, it tells the story of the birth of one culture out of another. It is the Athenian Greeks’ way of knowing their past, their archaiologia. The tale of the labyrinth explained to the later Greeks where and how their culture came to be. It correctly suggests a close link to Crete, but it also emphasizes Greek independence from that powerful island. It tells us, furthermore, much about the emerging Greek character, for Theseus would, by the fifth century bce, achieve the status of a national hero. The great tragedies of Greek theater represent Theseus as wily, ambitious, and strong. He stops at nothing to achieve what he thinks he must. If he is not altogether admirable, he mirrors behavior the Greeks attributed to their gods. Nev- ertheless, he is anything but idealized or godlike. He is, almost to a fault, completely human.

It was precisely this search for the origins of Greek cul- ture that led Sir Arthur Evans to the discovery of the Palace of Minos in Crete. He confirmed “the truth” in the legend of the Minotaur. If there was no actual monster, there was indeed a labyrinth. And that labyrinth was the palace itself.

Mycenaean Culture on the Mainland When the Minoans abandoned the palace at Knossos in about 1450 bce, warriors from the mainland culture of Mycenae, on the Greek mainland, quickly occupied Crete (see Map 4.1). One reason for the abandonment of Knos- sos was suggested earlier—the deforestation of the island. Another might be that Minoan culture was severely weak- ened in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption on Thera, and therefore susceptible to invasion or internal revolu- tion. A third might be that the Mycenaean army simply

Fig. 4.7 Vaphio Cup, from a tomb at Vaphio, south of Sparta, Greece. ca. 1650–1450 bce. Gold, height 31⁄2". National Archeological Museum, Iráklion, Crete. Mycenaean invaders used Crete as a base for operations for several centuries, and probably acquired the cup there.

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overwhelmed the island. The Mycenaeans were certainly acquainted with the Minoan culture some 92 miles to their south, across the Aegean.

Minoan metalwork was prized on the mainland. Its fine quality is very evident in the Vaphio Cup, one of two golden cups found in the nineteenth century in a tomb at Vaphio, just south of Sparta, on the Peloponnese (Fig. 4.7). This cup was executed in repoussé, a technique in which the artist hammers out the design from the inside. It depicts a man in an olive grove capturing a bull by tethering its hind legs. The bull motif is classically Minoan. The Myce- naeans, however, could not have been more different from the Minoans. Whereas Minoan towns were unfortified, and battle scenes were virtually nonexistent in their art, the Mycenaeans lived in communities surrounding fortified hilltops, and battle and hunting scenes dominate their art. Minoan culture appears to have been peaceful, while the warlike Mycenaeans lived and died by the sword.

The ancient city of Mycenae, which gave its name to the larger Mycenaean culture, was discovered by German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90) in the late nineteenth century, before Sir Arthur Evans discovered

Knossos. Its citadel looks down across a broad plain to the sea. Its walls—20 feet thick and 50 feet high—were built from huge blocks of rough-hewn stone, in a technique called cyclopean masonry because it was believed by later Greeks that only a race of monsters known as the Cyclo- pes could have managed them. Visitors to the city entered through a massive Lion Gate at the top of a steep path that led from the valley below (Fig. 4.8). The lionesses that stood above the gate’s lintel were themselves 9 feet high. It is likely that their missing heads originally turned in the direction of approaching visitors, as if to ward off evil or, perhaps, humble them in their tracks, like Sargon’s human- headed bull gates at Khorsabad (see Fig. 2.13 in Chapter 2). They were probably made of a different stone than the bod- ies and may have been plundered at a later time. From the gate, a long, stone street wound up the hill to the citadel itself. Here, overseeing all, was the king’s palace.

Mycenae was only one of several fortified cities on main- land Greece that were flourishing by 1500 bce and that have come to be called Mycenaean. Mycenaean culture was the forerunner of ancient Greek culture and was essentially feudal in nature—that is, a system of political organization

Fig. 4.8 Lion Gate, Mycenae, Greece. ca. 1300 bce. Limestone relief, panel approx. 9'6" high. The lionesses are carved on a triangle of stone that relieves the weight of the massive doorway from the lintel. The original heads, which have never been found, were attached to the bodies with dowels.

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104 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

held together by ties of allegiance between a lord and those who relied on him for protection. Kings controlled not only their own cities but also the surrounding countryside. Merchants, farmers, and artisans owed their own prosperity to the king and paid high taxes for the privilege of living under his protection. More powerful kings, such as those at Mycenae itself, also expected the loyalty (and financial sup- port) of other cities and nobles over whom they exercised authority. A large bureaucracy of tax collectors, civil serv- ants, and military personnel ensured the state’s continued prosperity. Like the Minoans, they engaged in trade, espe- cially for the copper and tin required to make bronze.

The feudal system allowed Mycenae’s kings to amass enormous wealth, as Schliemann’s excavations confirmed. He discovered gold and silver death masks of fallen heroes (Fig. 4.9), as well as swords and daggers inlaid with imagery of events such as a royal lion hunt. He also found delicately carved ivory, from the tusks of hippopotamuses and ele- phants, suggesting if not the breadth of Mycenae’s power, then the extent of its trade, which clearly included Africa. It seems likely, in fact, that the Mycenaean taste for war, and certainly their occupation of Crete, was motivated by the desire to control trade routes throughout the region.

Schliemann discovered most of this wealth in shaft graves, vertical pits some 20 or 25 feet deep enclosed in a circle of stone slabs. These all date from the early years of Mycenaean civilization, about 1500 bce. Beginning in about 1300 bce, the Mycenaeans used a new architectural

form, the tholos, to bury their kings. A tholos is a round building often called a beehive because of its shape. The most famous of these tombs is the Treasury of Atreus,

Fig. 4.9 Funerary mask (Mask of Agamemnon), from Grave Circle A, Mycenae, Greece. ca. 1600–1550 bce. Gold, height approx. 12". National Archeological Museum, Athens. When Schliemann discovered this mask, he believed it was the death mask of King Agamemnon, but it predates the Trojan War by some 300 years. Recent scholarship suggests that Schliemann may have added the handlebar mustache and large ears, perhaps to make the mask appear more “heroic.”

Fig. 4.10 and Fig. 4.11 Facade and sectioned view of the tholos of the Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae, Greece. ca. 1250 bce. Interior vault height, 43', diameter 47'6". The interior space of this tholos—a round building—remained the largest uninterrupted space in Europe until the Pantheon was built in Rome 1,000 years later. The dome is an example of corbeled construction: As the roof’s squared stones curve inward toward the top, they were buttressed, or supported, on the outside by earth. Because of the conical shape of such burial chambers, they are known as beehive tombs.

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the name Schliemann attributed to it (Figs. 4.10, 4.11). Atreus was the father of Agamemnon, an early king of Mycenae known to us from the literature of later Greeks. However, no evidence supports Schliemann’s attribution except the structure’s extraordinary size, which was befitting of a legendary king, and the fact that it dates from approximately the time of the Trojan War. (Agamemnon led the Greeks in the ten-year war against Trojans that would form the background for Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, discussed next.) The approach to the Treasury of Atreus is by way of a long, open-air passage nearly 115 feet long and 20 feet wide leading to a 16-foot- high door. Over the door is a relieving triangle, a triangular opening above the lintel designed to relieve some of the weight the lintel has to bear. (See the discussions of lintels in Chapter 1.) Surviving fragments reveal that a pair of green marble columns topped by two red marble columns originally adorned the facade of the Treasury of Atreus. The columns were engaged—that is, they projected in relief from the wall but served no structural purpose. Behind the door lay the burial chamber, a giant domed space, in which the dead would have been laid out together with gold and silver artifacts, ceremonial weapons, helmets, armor, and other items that would indicate power, wealth, and prestige.

THE HOMERIC EPICS

What is an epic, and how do Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey differ?

One of the most fascinating aspects of the eastern Medi- terranean in the Bronze Age is the development of written language. First, around the middle of the sec- ond millennium bce, as trade increasingly flour- ished between and among the Greek islands and the mainland, a linear Minoan script began to appear on tablets and objects across the region. Then, 600 to 700 years later, the Phoenicians, the great traders of the area, began to spread a distinctly new writing system, based on an alpha- bet (apparently of their own invention), across the entire Mediterranean basin.

But if the Greeks plundered Phoenician traders, they also were quick to take advantage of their writing system. Their alphabet allowed the Phoenicians to keep records more easily and succinctly than their competitors. It could be quickly taught to others, which facilitated com- munication in the far-flung regions where their ships sailed, and, written on papyrus, it was much more portable than the clay tablets used in Mesopotamia.

Once the ancient Greeks adopted the Phoenician alpha- bet in about 800 bce, they began to write down the stories from and about their past—their archaiologia—that had been passed down, generation to generation, by word of mouth. The most important of these stories were composed

by an author whom history calls Homer. Homer was most likely a bard, a singer of songs about the deeds of heroes and the ways of the gods. His stories were part of a long-stand- ing oral tradition that dated back to the time of the Trojan War, which we believe occurred sometime around 1200 bce. Out of the oral materials he inherited, Homer com- posed two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first narrates an episode in the ten-year Trojan War, which, according to Homer, began when the Greeks launched a large fleet of ships under King Agamemnon of Mycenae to bring back Helen, the wife of his brother King Menelaus of Sparta, who had eloped with Paris, son of King Priam of Troy. The Odyssey narrates the adventures of one of the principal Greek leaders, Odysseus (also known as Ulysses), on his return home from the fighting.

Most scholars believed that these Homeric epics were pure fiction until the discovery by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s of the actual site of Troy, a multilayered site near modern-day Hissarlik, in northwestern Turkey. The Troy of Homer’s epic was discovered at the sixth layer. (Schliemann also believed that the shaft graves at Myce- nae, where he found so much treasure, were those of Agam- emnon and his royal family, but modern dating techniques have ruled that out.) Suddenly, the Iliad assumed, if not the authority, then the aura of historical fact. Scholars studying both the poem and a Mycenaean vase known as the Warrior Vase have been struck by the similarity of many passages in the Iliad and scenes depicted on the vase. Those similarities testify to the accuracy of many of the poem’s descriptions of Bronze Age Greece (Fig. 4.12).

Fig. 4.12 Warrior Vase, from Mycenae, Greece. ca. 1300–1100 bce. Ceramic, height 16". National Archeological Museum, Athens. Dating from the time of the Trojan War, the vase depicts a woman, on the left, waving goodbye to departing troops.

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How Homer came to compose two works as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey has been the subject of much debate. Did he improvise each oral performance from memory, or did he rely on written texts? There is clear evidence that formulaic epithets—descriptive phrases applied to a per- son or thing—helped him, suggesting that improvisation played an important part in the poem’s composition. Com- mon epithets in the Iliad include such phrases as “fleet- footed Achilles” and “bronze-armed Achaeans.” (Achaean is the term Homer uses to designate the Greeks whom we associate with the Mycenaeans.) These epithets appear to have been chosen to allow the performing poet to fit a given name easily into the hexameter structure of the verse line—what we today call “epic” meter. Each hexameter line

of Homer’s verse is composed of six metrical units, which can be made up of either dactyls (a long syllable plus two short ones) or spondees (two long syllables). “Fleet-footed” is a dactyl; “bronze-armed” a spondee. The first four units of the line can be either dactyls or spondees; the last two must be dactyl and spondee, in that order. This regular meter, and the insertion of stock phrases into it, undoubtedly helped the poet to memorize and repeat the poem.

In order to perform the 15,693 lines of the Iliad, it became increasingly necessary to write the poem down. By the sixth century bce, it was recited every four years in Athens (without omission, according to law), and many copies of it circulated around Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries bce. Finally, in Alexandria, Egypt, in the

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Map 4.2 Possible routes of the Greek fleets as they gathered and then sailed to Troy. At the end of Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer catalogs the participating parties in the Trojan War. He lists kings and their followers from more than 150 places. It seems doubtful that the conflict was truly precipitated by the abduction of Helen from Sparta. More likely, the Greeks wanted to wrest control of the Hellespont (today known as the Dardanelles) from the Trojans, in order to gain access to trading opportunities in the Black Sea and Asia.

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late fourth century bce, scribes wrote the poem on papyrus scrolls, perhaps dividing it into the 24 manageable units we refer to today as the poem’s books.

The poem was so influential that it established certain epic conventions, standard ways of composing an epic that were followed for centuries to come. Examples include starting the poem in medias res, Latin for “in the middle of things,” that is, in the middle of the story; invoking the muse at the poem’s outset; and stating the poem’s subject at the outset.

The Iliad The Iliad tells but a small fraction of the story of the Trojan War, which was launched by Agamemnon of Mycenae and his allies to attack Troy around 1200 bce (Map 4.2). The tale begins after the war is under way and narrates what is commonly called “the rage of Achilles,” a phrase drawn from the first line of the poem. Already encamped on the Trojan plain, Agamemnon has been forced to give up a girl that he has taken in one of his raids, but he takes the beau- tiful Briseis from Achilles as compensation. Achilles, by far the greatest of the Greek warriors, is outraged, suppresses his urge to kill Agamemnon, but withdraws from the war. He knows that the Greeks cannot succeed without him, and in his rage he believes they deserve their fate. Indeed, Hec- tor, the great Trojan prince, soon drives the Greeks back to their ships, and Agamemnon sends ambassadors to Achilles to offer him gifts and beg him to return to the battle. Achil- les refuses: “His gifts, I loathe his gifts … I wouldn’t give you a splinter for that man! Not if he gave me ten times as much, twenty times over.” When the battle resumes, things become desperate for the Greeks. Achilles partially relents, permitting Patroclus, his close friend and perhaps his lover, to wear his armor in order to put fear into the Trojans. Led by Patroclus, the Achaeans drive the Trojans back.

An excerpt from Book 16 of the Iliad narrates the fall of the Trojan warrior Sarpedon at the hands of Patroclus (see Reading 4.1, page 128). The passage opens with one of the scene’s many Homeric similes: The charging Trojan forces described as “an onrush dark as autumn days / when the whole earth flattens black beneath a gale.” Most notable, however, is the unflinching verbal picture Homer paints of the realities of war, not only its cowardice, panic, and bru- tality, but its compelling attraction as well. In this arena, the Greek soldier is able to demonstrate one of the most important values in Greek culture, his areté, often trans- lated as “virtue,” but actually meaning something closer to “being the best you can be” or “reaching your highest human potential.” Homer uses the term to describe both Greek and Trojan heroes, and it refers not only to their bravery but to their effectiveness in battle.

The sixth-century bce painting on the side of the Botkin Class Amphora—an amphora is a Greek jar, with an egg- shaped body and two curved handles, used for storing oil or wine—embodies the concept of areté (Fig. 4.13). Here, two warriors, one armed with a sword, the other with a spear,

confront each other with unwavering determination and purpose. At one point in the Iliad, Homer describes two such warriors, holding their own against one another, as “rejoicing in the joy of battle.” They rejoice because they find themselves in a place where they can demonstrate their areté.

The following passage, from Book 24, the final section of the Iliad, shows the other side of war and the other side of the poem, the compassion and humanity that distinguish Homer’s narration (Reading 4.1a). Soon after Patroclus kills Sarpedon, Hector, son of the king of Troy, strikes down Patroclus with the aid of the god Apollo. On hearing the news, Achilles is devastated and finally enters the fray. Until now, fuming over Agamemnon’s insult, he has sat out the battle, refusing, in effect, to demonstrate his own areté. But now, he redirects his rage from Agamemnon to the Trojan warrior Hector, whom he meets and kills. He then ties Hector’s body to his chariot and drags it to his tent. The act is pure sacrilege, a violation of the dignity due the great Trojan warrior and an insult to his memory. Late that night, Priam, the king of Troy, steals across enemy lines to Achilles’ tent and begs for the body of his son:

Fig. 4.13 Botkin Class Amphora, Greek. ca. 540–530 bce. Black-figure decoration on ceramic, height 119⁄16", diameter 91⁄2". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 98.923. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. On the other side of this vase are two heavily armed warriors, one pursuing the other.

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“doubleness” of the human spirit, its cruelty and its human- ity, its blindness and its insight, that perhaps best defines the power and vision of the Homeric epic.

The Odyssey The fall of Troy to the Greek army after the famous ruse of the Trojan Horse (Fig. 4.14) is actually described in Book 4 of the Odyssey, the Iliad’s 24-book sequel. In Reading 4.2a, Menelaus, now returned home with Helen, addresses her, while Telemachus, son of the Greek commander Odysseus, listens:

Reading 4.1a

from Homer, Iliad, Book 24 (ca. 750 bce)

“Remember your own father, great godlike achilles— as old as i am, past the threshold of deadly old age! no doubt the countrymen round about him plague him now, with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster. no one—but at least he hears you’re still alive and his old heart rejoices, hopes rising, day by day, to see his beloved son come sailing home from Troy. But i—dear god, my life so cursed by fate … i fathered hero sons in the wide realm of Troy and now not a single one is left, i tell you. Fifty sons i had when the sons of achaea came, nineteen born to me from a single mother’s womb and the rest by other women in the palace. Many, most of them violent ares cut the knees from under. But one, one was left me, to guard my wall, my people— the one you killed the other day, defending his fatherland, my Hector! it’s all for him i’ve come to the ships now, to win him back from you—i bring a priceless ransom. Revere the gods, achilles! Pity me in my own right, remember your own father! i deserve more pity … i have endured what no one on earth has ever done

before— i put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”

Those words stirred within achilles a deep desire to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand he gently moved him back. and overpowered by memory both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching before achilles’ feet as achilles wept himself, now for his father, now for Patroclus once again, and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. … Then achilles called the serving-women out: “Bathe and anoint the body— bear it aside first. Priam must not see his son.” He feared that, overwhelmed by the sight of Hector, wild with grief, Priam might let his anger flare and achilles might fly into fresh rage himself, cut the old man down and break the laws of Zeus. So when the maids had bathed and anointed the body sleek with olive oil and wrapped it round and round in a braided battle-shirt and handsome battle-cape, then achilles lifted Hector up in his own arms and laid him down on a bier, and comrades helped him raise the bier and body onto a sturdy wagon … Then with a groan he called his dear friend by name: “Feel no anger at me, Patroclus, if you learn— ever there in the House of death—i let his father have Prince Hector back. He gave me worthy ransom and you shall have your share from me, as always, your fitting, lordly share.”

Many of the themes of Homer’s second epic are embed- ded in this short reminiscence. For although the poem nar- rates the adventures of Odysseus on his ten-year journey home from the war in Troy—his encounters with mon- sters, giants, and a seductive enchantress, and a sojourn on a floating island and in the underworld—its subject is, above all, Odysseus’ passionate desire to once more see his wife, Penelope, and Penelope’s fidelity to him. Where anger and lust drive the Iliad—remember Achilles’ angry sulk and Helen’s fickleness—love and familial affection drive the Odyssey. Penelope is gifted with areté in her own right, since for the 20 years of her husband’s absence, she uses all the cunning in her power to ward off the many suitors who flock to marry her, convinced that Odysseus is never com- ing home.

A second important theme taken up by Menelaus is the role of the gods in determining the outcome of human

Reading 4.2a

from Homer, Odyssey, Book 4 (ca. 725 bce)

… never have i seen one like Odysseus for steadiness and stout heart. Here, for instance, is what he did—had the cold nerve to do— inside the hollow horse, where we were waiting, picked men all of us, for the Trojan slaughter, when all of a sudden, you [Helen] came by—i dare say drawn by some superhuman power that planned an exploit for the Trojans; and deïphobos, that handsome man, came with you. Three times you walked around it, patting it everywhere, and called by name the flower of our fighters, making your voice sound like their wives, calling. diomêdês and i crouched in the center along with Odysseus; we could hear you plainly; and listening, we two were swept by waves of longing—to reply, or go. Odysseus fought us down, despite our craving, and all the akhaians kept their lips shut tight, all but antiklos. desire moved his throat to hail you, but Odysseus’ great hands clamped over his jaws, and held. So he saved us all, till Pallas athena led you away at last.

Homer clearly recognizes the ability of these warriors to exceed their mere humanity, to raise themselves not only to a level of great military achievement, but to a state of com- passion, nobility, and honor. It is this exploration of the

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Fig. 4.14 The Trojan Horse, detail from a storage jar from Chora, Mykonos. ca. 650 bce. Total height of jar 5", detail as shown approx. 1". Archeological Museum, Mykonos. This is the earliest known depiction of the Trojan Horse, the hollow “gift” that the supposedly departing Greeks left to King Priam and his followers. The artist has opened little windows in its side, showing the Greeks hiding within, ready to attack.

events. Helen, he says, must have been drawn to the Tro- jan Horse “by some superhuman / power that planned an exploit for the Trojans”—some god, in other words, on the Trojans’ side. And, indeed, Pallas Athena, goddess of war and wisdom and protectress of the Achaeans, leads Helen away from the horse. But in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer is careful to distinguish between how people believe the gods exercise control over events (Reading 4.2b) and what control they actually exercise. In fact, early on in Book 1 of the Odyssey, Zeus, king of the gods, exclaims:

Reading 4.2b

from Homer, Odyssey, Book 1 (ca. 725 bce)

My word, how mortals take the gods to task! all their afflictions come from us, we hear. and what of their own failings? greed and folly double the suffering in the lot of man.

The Greek view of the universe contrasts dramatically with that of the Hebrews. If the Greek gods exercise some authority over the lives of human beings—they do control their ultimate fate—human beings are in complete control of how they live. By exercising selflessness and wisdom, as opposed to greed and folly, they could at least halve their suffering, Zeus implies. In the Iliad, the crimes that Paris and Achilles commit do not violate a divine code of ethics like the Ten Commandments but, rather, a code of behav- ior defined by their fellow Greeks. In the Greek world, humans are ultimately responsible for their own actions.

This is the real point of the fantastic episode of Odys- seus’ cunning trickery of the Cyclops Polyphemus in Book 9 of the Odyssey, related by Odysseus himself to Alkinoös, King of Phaeacia (see Reading 4.2, pages 130–133 for the full tale). It is Odysseus’ craftiness—his wit and his intel- ligence—not the intervention of the gods, that saves him and his men. Compared to the stories that have come down to us from other Bronze Age cultures such as Egypt or Mes- opotamia, Homer is less concerned with what happened than how it happened. We encounter Odysseus’ trickery, his skill at making weapons, and his wordplay (Odysseus

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110 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

calling himself “Nobody” in anticipation of Polyphemus being asked by the other Cyclopes who has blinded him and Polyphemus replying, “Nobody”).

Greek artists shared this concern. They would try to refer to as many of Odysseus’ talents as they could in a single work, depicting successive actions around the diameter of a vase or, as in the case of a drinking cup from Sparta, packing more than one action into a single scene (Fig. 4.15). We saw this form of synoptic pictorial narrative in Mesopotamia, in the sculptural relief of Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions (see Fig. 2.12 in Chapter 2). It is also similar to the pictorial narrative used in the Last Judgment of Hunefer in an Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day, where instead of reading left to right, the actions are compounded one upon the other (see Fig. 3.25 in Chapter 3).

In later Greek culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey were the basis of Greek education. Every schoolchild learned the two poems by heart. They were the principal vehicles through which the Greeks came to know the past, and through the past, they came to know themselves. The poems embodied what might be called the Greeks’ own cultural, as opposed to purely personal, areté, their desire to achieve a place of preeminence among all states. But in defining this larger cultural ambition, the Iliad and Odyssey laid out the indi- vidual values and responsibilities that all Greeks under- stood to be their personal obligations and duties if the state were ever to realize its goals.

Fig. 4.15 The Blinding of Polyphemus, inside of drinking cup from Sparta. ca. 550 bce. Ceramic, diameter 81⁄4". Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque nationale de France. At the same time that Odysseus and his companions blind Polyphemus with the pointed pole, they offer him the drink that inebriates him sufficiently to allow them to complete their task, and he finishes eating one of their companions, whose two legs he holds in his hands.

THE GREEK POLIS

How are the values of the Greek polis reflected in its art and architecture?

After the fall of Mycenae in about 1100 bce, some 100 years after the Trojan War, Greece endured a long period of cultural decline that many refer to as the Dark Ages. Greek legend has it that a tribe from the north, the Dorians, overran the Greek mainland and the Pelopon- nese (Map 4.3), but there is little historical evidence to support this story. Whatever caused the decline, the Greek people almost forgot the rudiments of culture, and reading and writing fell into disuse. For the most part, the Greeks lived in small rural communities that often warred with one another. But despite these conditions, which hardly favored the development of art and architecture, the Greeks man- aged to sustain a sense of identity and even, as the survival of the Trojan War legends suggests, some idea of their cul- tural heritage.

The Greek polis—or city-state—arose during the eighth century bce, around the time of Homer. Colonists set sail from cities on the Greek mainland to establish new set- tlements. Eventually, there were as many as 1,500 Greek poleis (plural of polis) scattered around the Mediterra- nean and the Black Sea from Spain to the Crimea, includ- ing large colonies in Italy (Fig. 4.16). This process of

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Fig. 4.16 The Temple of Hera I (background), ca. 540 bce, and the Temple of Hera II (foreground), ca. 460 bce, Paestum, Italy. Two of the best-preserved Greek temples can be found in Italy, at Paestum, south of Naples, in a place the Greeks called Poseidonia, after the god of the sea, Poseidon.

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colonization occurred gradually. First, across Greece, com- munities began to organize themselves and exercise author- ity over their own limited geographical regions, which were defined by natural boundaries—mountains, rivers, and plains. The population of even the largest communities was largely dedicated to agriculture, and agricultural values—a life of hard, honest work and self-reliance—predominated. The great pastoral poem of the poet Hesiod (flourished ca. 700 bce), Works and Days, testifies to this. Works and Days was written at about the same time as the Homeric epics in Boeotia, the region of Greece dominated by the city-state of Thebes. Particularly interesting is Hesiod’s narration of the duties of the farmer as the seasons progress. Here are his words regarding the farmer’s obligation to plow his fields (Reading 4.3):

Behavior of the Gods Of particular interest here—as in Homer’s Iliad—is that the gods are as susceptible to Eros, or Desire, as is humankind. In fact, the Greek gods are sometimes more human than humans—susceptible to every human foible. Like many a family on earth, the father, Zeus, is an all- powerful philanderer, whose wife, Hera, is watchful, jeal- ous, and capable of inflicting great pain upon rivals for her husband’s affections. Their children are scheming and self- serving in their competition for their parents’ attention. The gods think like humans, act like humans, and speak like humans. They sometimes seem to differ from humans only in the fact that they are immortal. Unlike the Hebrew God, who is sometimes portrayed as arbitrary, the Greek gods present humans with no clear principles of behav- ior, and the priests and priestesses who oversaw the rituals dedicated to them produced no scriptures or doctrines. The gods were capricious, capable of changing their minds, sus- ceptible to argument and persuasion, alternately obstinate and malleable. If these qualities created a kind of cosmic

In this extract, Hesiod gives us a clear insight not only into many of the details of Greek agricultural production, but into social conditions as well. He mentions slaves twice in this short passage, and, indeed, all landowners possessed slaves (taken in warfare), who comprised over half the population. He also mentions the Greek gods Zeus, king of the gods and master of the sky, and Demeter, goddess of agriculture and grain (see Context, page 114). In fact, it was Hesiod, in his Theogony (The Birth of the Gods), who first detailed the Greek pantheon (literally, “all the gods”). The story of the creation of the world that he tells in this work (Reading 4.4) resembles the origin myths from the Zuni emergence tale (see Reading 1.1 in Chap- ter 1) and the Japanese Shinto Kojiki (see Reading 1.2 in Chapter 1):

Reading 4.3

from Hesiod, Works and Days (ca. 700 bce)

Autumn

Mind now, when you hear the call of the crane Coming from the clouds, as it does year by year: That’s the sign for plowing, and the onset of winter and the rainy season. That cry bites the heart Of the man with no ox.

Time then to feed your oxen in their stall. You know it’s easy to say, “Loan me a wagon and a team of oxen.” and it’s easy to answer, “got work for my oxen.” it takes a good imagination for a man to think He’ll just peg together a wagon. damn fool, doesn’t realize there’s a hundred timbers make up a wagon and you have to have ‘em laid up beforehand at home. Soon as you get the first signs for plowing get a move on, yourself and your workers, and plow straight through wet weather and dry, getting a good start at dawn, so your fields Will fill up. Work the land in spring, too, But fallow turned in summer won’t let you down. Sow your fallow land while the soil’s still light. Fallow’s the charm that keeps wee-uns well-fed. Pray to Zeus-in-the-ground and to demeter sacred For demeter’s holy grain to grow thick and full. Pray when you first start plowing, when you Take hold of the handle and come down with your stick On the backs of the oxen straining at the yoke-pins. a little behind, have a slave follow with a hoe To make trouble for the birds by covering the seeds. Doing things right is the best thing in the world, Just like doing ’em wrong is the absolute worst. This way you’ll have ears of grain bending Clear to the ground …