Priam painter women at a fountain house

Cultural Activity Report

97

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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98 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

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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ATTICA

Melos

Thera

Naxos ParosSeriphos

Aegina

Phylakopi

Samos Andros

Tenos Icaria

Mykonos C Y C L A D E S

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Hagia Triada Phaistos

Knossos

Akrotiri

Phira

Corinth Athens

Orchomenos

Sparta

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Vapheio Pylos

Mycenae

Mediterranean Sea

Cretan Sea

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

pillar crypt main shrine

corridor access to magazines

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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.

See Isaac Julien, from Paradise Omeros, 2002,

at MyArtsLab 3-channel projection, 16mm

b/w / color film, DVD playback, sound, 20:29. Installation view

from Documenta 11, 2002

The CONTINUING PRESENCE of the PAST

M04_P0096-0133_CH04.indd 106 13/11/2013 07:30

CHAPTER 4 The Aegean World and the Rise of Greece 107

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.