Reading the poems of Homer

Of course there’s nothing very original here, it’s all been said before, but I find the topic one of the utmost fascination, and have read the poems and associated literature ever since I was a teenager. I can remember saving up to buy Gilbert Murray’s Rise of the Greek Epic while I was still at school. Not a school subject, needless to say.
The poet
Homer has been admired as one of the world’s greatest poets for three thousand years. It comes as a surprise to find we know nothing about him. There are those who believe he never existed. The few anecdotes surviving about him – his birth or residence on Chios, his blindness, the etymology of his name, ‘hostage’, suggesting he may have been a slave, perhaps a captured soldier from inland Asia (perhaps even from Troy) – are all conjectures that cannot be verified. The Homeridae of Chios were a group of rhapsodes or performers, suggesting that ‘Homer’ may be a common noun for performer of epic, given an heroic founder – false etymologies abounded in the ancient world. ‘Homer’ really means two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey (and a collection of shorter hymns associated with Homer which were chanted at festivals prior to epic recitation).

Though we don’t know anything for certain about the poet, we do know something of the poems and how they were created, from analogy with other cultures which have evolved in similar ways to those of ancient Greece, and from information mentioned by Herodotus.

The poems are set in the twelfth century BC Bronze Age, and purport to tell the exploits of Bronze Age warriors who were the ancestors of noble families of what are called the dark ages of Greece, the eighth and ninth centuries BC.

These cultures valued honour above all else, even above piety. It was the glue which held their world together. Prowess and success in battle, the accumulation of spoil, ostentatious display of wealth in apparel and building, and fame, were the objective of every young man of noble family. Fame was more important than life, but every survivor in battle made sure that all knew about his exploits. The inscriptions of Ramses II were typical of the values of this type of culture. The great evil was shame, loss of face, of prestige.
The poems almost certainly started as boasting by the protagonists of their valour, fighting ability and resourcefulness. This boasting was a value of their society, not a fault, as it is in our own. At the death of noble clan members bards sung of their exploits, using the tales the men had first told of themselves. These came to be chanted to a lyre accompaniment, and the stories elaborated by the addition of an ‘historical’ framework to explain to later generations just where the protagonists fitted into the scheme of things. As in this society the gods were all about, responsible for mysterious natural phenomena and puzzling human behaviour, they too were given a role, especially as the noble families traced descent from the gods.

We know something about how these chants were transmitted in the period between the 12th and 8th centuries when writing was unknown in Greece, from examination of similar works in Celtic societies such as turn of the century Ireland or nineteenth century Balkans. The chants were not defined works. They were loosely connected narrative structures about a raid, a battle, a journey, held together by rote phrases which helped the bard to structure his chant for the occasion.They often began with a prayer by the poet, calling on god to help his improvisation be worthwhile. Each performance was different, adapted to an occasion and the family for whom it was performed. Their ancestor was featured, and the performance varied in length for each occasion. These performances were in no sense artistic ones, though a gifted bard could make them so. But their essence was social. They were a celebration of the noble clan, and hence of the status quo, and hence of order and stability in society.

We have no idea by what method they were composed. Some bards may have rehearsed, others may have performed extempore. On some occasions a lesser bard may have learned by heart a favourite piece performed by a more famous man.

At some point in the sixth century BC in Greece some of these performances were written down. At some time in the seventh and sixth centuries shorter pieces relating to the same hero were connected to form a longer narrative. We have no idea whether this consolidation was creative, the work of a performing bard, or editorial, the work of a scholar joining associated texts together. Episodes could have been re-used, an admired battle episode, for instance, featuring one hero ancestor could have been recited at another family feast and the name of that family’s hero ancestor substituted for the original. Accuracy was not at stake: honour and prestige were. The name ‘Homer’ probably dates from this period, but could have been used of any bard after Demodokos, the one mentioned in the Odyssey, and perhaps was used of all of them. We do know that the chants were preserved, written down, consolidated and edited by poets or/and scholars under the orders of the tyrant Pisistratos, but have no idea what this work consisted of. ‘Homer’ may have been the first to write his chants down, the first to write down the chants of other bards, or the editor who first shaped the traditional chants into a more literary form. This whole exercise was undertaken because the society of noble houses with their dependent estates of Bronze Age Greece was fading away, and a new form of society, the poleis, taking its place. There were those who did not want the celebration of ancient ways lost. There may have been an appreciation that the chants had reached a valuable and beautiful form worthy in itself of preservation. Or the greatness of the verse may have been imposed on rough traditional material only when it came to be written down.

This was not the end of the evolution of the Homeric chants, by now poems in hexameter form. They had been sung for five hundred years in one form or other, and were part of Hellenic self consciousness. They also contained words and references from all the periods of their transmission, some of which were obscure to fifth and fourth century Greeks. The texts were edited, glosses added, and became significantly larger. Eventually they became an institution in Greek culture, recited on public occasions, adapted for tragic performance, quoted by later writers.

Where does the authorship lie in this kind of composition? We need to forget a convention we are very fond of before answering this question. We have a distrust of the collaborative process and prefer to adulate the great artist. Creation by committee doesn’t seem very creative to us, even though we all enjoy musicals and opera collaborated upon by musical composers and lyricists. We’re not comfortable about Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights re-writing older plays. This is an heritage of the Romantic movement of nineteenth century Europe, of the elevation of the ‘inspired’ poet, the man of genius, one of Ruskin’s ‘great men’.

Examination of the working practice of any major artist shows that they proceed by experiment, have more failures than successes, often have no clear idea of their own achievement, and are only recognised when in accord with the times they live in.

Examination of any performing art such as Homer’s, or of a modern play or film, show that a successful work can be the result of many hands, that on occasion one role is dominant, on others not, and that success can often be the result of creative conflict as much as of inspiration.

The dominant role in film making, for instance, can be the producer, the director, one or more of the actors or the editor. Sometimes this dominance makes for a great film, sometimes it results in a failure. Great films have been made under the old studio system, where each crew or cast member had a defined role and rarely went beyond it. To take an example: is Citizen Kane a great film because of the direction of Welles (surely not because of his acting?); or because of the writing of Herman Mankiewicz; or the acting of Joseph Cotten; or the superb photography of Gregg Toland; or the editing of Robert Wise; or the sets of Van Nest Polglase? All (except Cotten) were nominated for Oscars. Is it a great film because they all worked as a team? Is Annie Hall a great film because of the writing and directing talents of Woody Allen, or because editor Ralph Rosenblum cut the original 50 hours down to 93 minutes? We prefer to see just the director, and forget the other film makers involved, or remember the star, and forget the other collaborators, but this is not always an accurate way to describe a successful film.

Homer may have been a successful performer, but he may not have composed the chants he recited. He may have revised and reshaped traditional matter and radically altered it. He may have been the first to write down a performance. Or he may have been an editor of genius who polished rough material into a masterpiece. Or simply a great poet (a concept that evolved only after literacy). Nobody knows. However after their gestation period the poems were preserved, and are pretty good.

But are they really that good? They are written in a dead language. Nobody now speaks ancient Greek except scholars. Do they know how to pronounce it correctly? This is very important where poetry is concerned, because poetry is a form of music. We rely for the most part on translations for our experience of Homer, but can a translation ever be reliable? To what extent are they adaptations and not translations? In a sense we can only understand the evolution of the poems by reciting the ancient Greek hexameters. The measure of the words would help explain why this one was chosen over that one, why the epithets occur at the places they do, where episodes have been joined to form a longer poem.

Some of the characteristics of Homer’s poems can be seen in the fifteenth century border ballads based on heroic conflicts between English and Scottish nomadic bands of warriors. The ballads, like Homer’s poems, are swift moving and direct, employ direct speech, are highly condensed and very dramatic. They often feature supernatural events. The poets who created these poems are also unknown. The verse form however is much simpler than that used by Homer. Another poet who gives a reader of English some of the qualities of Homer’s verse is Chaucer. Chaucer has Homer’s energy and flexibility, also his obscurity (for us) of language, but is not as tragic.

Generally a translator has a hard choice: to translate literally, and gloss unfamiliar words and phrases, which makes a hard to follow version; to attempt a verse translation, which means, in English, substituting stress for measure, in other words, creating a different form of verse; telling just the story, by creating a prose version; or a combination of verse and prose, as Robert Graves did in his version (he felt the poems were like opera, with recititative and aria, and not continuous verse).
Iliad
The Iliad is a strange work for a national Greek epic. It tells the story of three unpleasant ruffians, arrogant and stiff-necked Agamemnon, vainglorious and petulant Achilles, and crafty and deceitful Odysseus, and their destruction of the family and city of the noble and brave Hector. It seems told from the Trojan perspective. It is violent, and considered accurate in its depiction of battle as it was at that time. The heroes are sliced and chopped by swords, dragged to their deaths by runaway horses, are crushed under chariot wheels, lie on the battlefield expiring in agony. We have to remember though it’s not about winning or losing the war so much as it’s about being seen behaving with valour, acting as a hero should. Compared with this, survival, victory and booty all fade into insignificance. It is a snapshot of a war, 50 days towards the end of a 10 year conflict that has proved indecisive. The battle, in other words, is an end in itself.

Antilochus was the first to kill a Trojan captain,
tough on the front lines, Thalysias’ son, Echepolus.
Antilochus thrust first, speared the horsehair helmet
right at the ridge, and the bronze spearpoint lodged
in the man’s forehead, smashing through his skull
and the dark came whirling down across his eyes -
he toppled down like a tower in the rough assault.
(Fagles trans. II 529-35)

There is a lot of this gory stuff in the Iliad. It begins with the affront offered Achilles, whose loss of face leads to his withdrawal from the fighting. The Trojans gain the advantage, as their leader Hector is second only to Achilles in prowess. Success is due only to fighting ability, and of that of relatively few men, not of strategy or tactics. The leaders of both sides squabble, and so do the gods. At the end Hector is buried with full honours. I’m no soldier, but this seems a true picture of war, of its illusions and futility, given with much authenticity. Someone, if not Homer, was present at such a battle and reported what it was like. It is a powerful depiction of a tragic view of life, and of the presence of death always within it. No wonder the Athenian dramatists drew upon Homer.

When the two armies came to one common ground,
they smashed into each other—shields, spears, fierce angry men
encased in bronze. Studded shields bashed one another.
A huge din arose—human cries of grief and triumph,
those killing and those killed. Earth flowed with blood.
Just as streams swollen with melting snows pour out,
flow downhill into a pool, and meet some torrent
from a great spring in a hollow gully there,
and the shepherd in the distant hills hears the roar—
so the shouts and turmoil resounded then from warriors,
as they collided.

Antilochus was the first to kill a man—
a well-armed Trojan warrior, Echepolus,
son of Thalysius, a courageous man,
who fought in the front ranks. He hit his helmet crest,
topped with horsehair plumes, spearing his forehead.
The bronze point smashed straight through the frontal bone.
Darkness hid his eyes and he collapsed, like a tower,
falling down into that frenzied battle.
(Ian Johnston trans. II, 519-37)
https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/homer/iliad_title.htm

The Iliad has faults and difficulties for modern readers. The verse is such that no translation can accurately capture the poet’s skill. The action is repetitive (unless it’s your ancestor being celebrated). The behaviour of the gods is puzzling. Hidden in the Iliad and one of its many sources is a parodic treatment of the subject, where villanous warriors boast and run away, and empty-headed gods squabble like children. This kind of treatment served some unknown purpose in ancient culture, and we know of one or two examples that have survived in the genre of poetry (some lines of Archilochus) and in tragedy (satyr plays).

Reading for pleasure is very different from studying. Anyone who wants to enjoy the Iliad should read E V Rieu’s prose version. I have yet to read a poetic version of the poem that wasn’t odd at times, and often boring. But Rieu I read with great enjoyment. It was a wonderful introduction to Homer.
Odyssey
The Odyssey, or adventures of Odysseus, is a treatment of the mythic journey that once had religious significance in ancient societies. It is thought later than the Iliad, and opinion is divided as to whether Homer composed it or another. In fact it would have gone through as many hands as the Iliad did. Perhaps a ritual story involving a test, and a descent to the underworld, it was adapted to stories about Odysseus. Stories about other heroes were added, such as Jason, and the hero’s name altered. It became a bardic chant recited for the families claiming descent from Odysseus, and one version of this was eventually written down. Again, we don’t know who adapted the recitation to hexameter form, or whether the extreme mastery the verse came to acquire was the work of many or just one man.

There seems to be two components of the poem, a marvellous voyage in the style of Sindbad’s (and there might have been a Persian precursor of The Thousand Nights and One Night for ‘Homer’ to draw on) or Jason’s, and which included a voyage to the underworld, to which has been added the story of the hero Odyssey and his return to Ithika and the revenge he wrought on the unruly suitors who had beseiged his palace.
The marvellous voyage, Kirke, Polyphemus, Kalypso, the Phaeacians and the underworld seem quite different in spirit to the problems of Telemachus and the subterfuge of Penelope, the return of Odysseus and the slaughter of the suitors. The return and Odysseus’ resumption of power seems similar to the world of the Iliad, but it is far from that heroic world, with a concern for restoring order which may derive from a later period. The marvellous voyage could be derived from later material still, but more likely from Persian or Middle Eastern sources. Perhaps Gilgamesh had a hand in its composition.

‘Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of action,
no more tears now, calm these tides of sorrow.
Well I know what pains you bore on the swarming sea
What punishment you endured from hostile men on land.
But come now, eat your food and drink your wine
till the same courage fills your chests, now as then,
when you first set sail from native land, from rocky Ithaca’
(Fagles trans. X 502-08)

After the bloody and tragic world of the Iliad, the Odyssey seems almost an anti-climax. The dramatic tension in even the more perilous encounters is much lower. This is a tale you could tell to children. Our version may be a rewrite of a more powerfully dramatic version more similar in spirit to the Iliad. Yet there is magic here, in the tale.
Zeus, who marshals the clouds, now sent my fleet a terrible gale from the north. He covered the sea and the land alike with a canopy of cloud; and darkness swept down on us from the sky. Our ships were driven sidelong by the wind, and the force of their gusts tore the sails to rags and tatters. With the fear of death upon us, we lowered these to the decks, and rowed the bare ships landward with all our might.

For me the skilfully written prose of E V Riew captures this magic far more successfully than Fagles or Fitzgerald.

There were two processes going on with both poems, over centuries. The first was the evolution of the matter contained in the poem. A warrior’s vaunt of his exploits, a tribute to him at his funeral, a clan story recited at clan ceremonies, expansion to form a structured narrative, addition of other matter, a status as a common story of Greek achievement. Episodes would have been added or omitted until the basic form we have was achieved. Originally a recitation in honour of a clan, and not a poem as we know it, it went through a long period of enhancement, and at some stage was written down. It was glossed, edited, conflated with other versions, and, from an extempore hero story, became a sacred text which could not be altered.

Eventually the two poems became one of the only three things that were truly national in the ancient Greek world. Nationality was a foreign concept to them. But all Greeks came together for the Olympic and other Games, consulted the great oracles of the gods, and listened to recitations of Homer.

There could have been many gifted performers of the poems while they were in a stage of oral transmission over the period 1200-700 BC, but their poetic content is likely to date from the time they were first written down. Sometime in the period 600-200 BC they achieved mastery of verse form, the work of one poet or several we have no way of telling after 1700 years of editorial intervention. Yet what matters is not how the poems were written nor who wrote them, but the skill of the writing and the magic of the verse.

©2010 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.

Helen: the journey from Sparta to Troy

The story of Helen of Troy can probably never be unravelled. It has both a political and a religious dimension, and has been passed down through a series of literary creations which haven’t had anything like an historical or religious purpose. Some clues have survived that make a glimpse into ancient times possible though, and that is worth the effort.

What follows is inspired by reading Bettany Hughes Helen of Troy: goddess, princess, whore (2005), and seeing her documentary of the same name (also 2005). At times I’ve gone off at a tangent, and she would probably think some of my conclusions were not scholarly, which they aren’t. I recommend anyone interested to find her book. It contains some stimulating reading.

History
The time is before the Trojan War, which ancient scholars calculated must have begun 1184 BC. There is archaeological evidence that the site of Troy was destroyed in what could have been a war in about 1250 BC.

The players were, firstly, the Hittites, whose 400 year old empire covered most of Anatolia and Asia Minor. About 1300 BC the Hittite emperor Muwatallis clashed with the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II at Kadesh in Syria. The conflict of these two super powers of the day weakened both, and Hittite power seems to have vanished after 1200 BC. As Hittite power weakened, it’s network of alliances with client kingdoms weakened also. One of these kingdoms was that of Troy, located in a key trading position at the mouth of the Dardanelles and extremely wealthy as a result. The Trojans were a Turkish people of Indo-European descent, whose language, culture and way of life was very similar to another Indo-European group of peoples, whom Homer calls the Achaeans, who settled in the Greek peninsula and islands.

At that period there was no Greece, and hence no Greeks. Each group of tribes that moved into the area saw themselves as a separate people with their own traditions. Most of the groups we know about settled in the northern Peloponnesus, in what became the classical poleis of Achaea, Peloponnesus and Argos. The culture these people evolved is similar to that of the ancient Celts, whose Irish hero, Finn MacCool, is celebrated in the Fianna cycle. The highest value in these cultures is success in battle, and the display and celebration of that success in rich apparel and bardic song. They were not effective as empire builders, and Homer’s poems reveal the amount of discord and rivalry there was between clan leaders. But they were good scavengers. One of the earliest groups to invade the Balkan peninsula took advantage of the earthquake that created the island of Thera and destroyed the Minoan hegemony in the Aegean in 1450 BC to pick off the major Minoan centres of power, including the cultic centre, Knossos. Now, 200 years later, they were a culture in decline themselves, but they saw an opportunity to raid the weakening outposts of the Hittites, including Troy.

Before the Trojan War there was trade, political negotiation, perhaps the hiring of mercenaries, between the Hittite power, its ally Troy, and Achaean poleis. To understand how this proceeded, some explanation of the way Achaean society was organised is necessary.

Society
Political power and property was inherited through the female line. Aristocratic and royal males held and exercised political and military power, but they had to marry it to become legitimate. Female aristocrats and royalty, on the other hand, held a lot of religious power, and at one time might have held supreme power through their religious role. So in Mycenae, Aegisthos was disinherited of the kingdom when Clytemnestra married Agamemnon (and nursed a grudge accordingly). Succession was determined by clan precedence, not by geographical power base. In Sparta, the queen heiress Helen was betrothed to a Hittite prince according to a story told by Herodotus. This may have been the Paris/Alexander of Homer’s story. In terms of the mores of that society, this represented a claim by the Hittites of political power over mainland Greece. Not an attempt at conquest, but a request for favourable alignment in the politics of the day. As Hittite power began to wane, a rival candidate put himself forward, Menelaus of Mycenae. His brother Agamemnon had done very well for himself by marrying Clytemnestra and becoming king of Mycenae. Now Menelaus attempted the same consolidation by marrying Clytemnesta’s sister Helen. It was a blow in the face to the still dominant Hittite power, and guaranteed a fight, something the Achaeans would have looked forward to.

It is Homer who describes Helen as the most beautiful woman in the world. Perhaps he was exaggerating. Helen would still have been fought over had she had a big nose and frizzy hair. Helen’s story was one of political negotiation before it became a love story. In this respect it is relevant to remember that the story would have been passed down in song, as the deeds of the heroes were remembered. Over time, as invasion of Dorian tribes from the north followed one another, the language would have changed, and these songs would have been sung in an archaic language which eventually not many would have fully understood, leaving scope for Homer and his predecessors to elaborate creatively.

Religion
Helen’s function was not just that of a pawn exchanged between competing states. To understand her role more fully you have to look at the role of religion in ancient society, and the first thing to notice is that there is no clear delineation of boundaries as we are used to today. Because the gods are all around, ritual formed an integral part of public and private life. A religious ceremony might involve, therefore, state gods (such as a dramatic festival), city gods (the worship of a city founder), family gods (worship of ancestors), and a host of rituals we would regard as superstitious (oracles, auguries, charms, magic, dream divination).

The family of Tyndareus king of Sparta was human, but Tyndaeus’ wife Leda was visited by Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods. Later mythographers blithely recount how Zeus took the form of a swan, and Leda afterwards laid two eggs, though why intercourse with a swan would have changed her reproductive system is not explained. One egg contained divine progeny, one mortal. In this way Leda’s daughter Helen was a goddess, not a human being, and as a goddess she was worshipped in Sparta through classical times. This story is quite different to Homer’s, in which a human queen is seduced and abducted by Paris of Troy.

The two stories are not quite so contradictory once we realise they have been recast and retold in very different cultures over the centuries, with no awareness in later times of how earlier societies functioned. The Achaeans lived in the 13th century BC. Their way of life was interpreted by an 8th century poet, Homer, based on material in traditional songs in an archaic language. And Homer in turn was interpreted by scholars of the 2nd century who codified his references and explained them as well as they could. There was plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding.

In Homer, all the cast are gods, because they are all ancestors, and this uniformity of status helps to explain why some nominal gods, such as Aphrodite, are treated as human beings, while others, who are human, such as Achilles, are treated as gods, as determined by the dramatic structure of each scene depicted (Homer is the founder of ancient Greek drama).

In ancient Sparta Helen was queen, but she was also priestess. Much of her power was expressed through ritual which interceded with the gods. Here the swan, strangely enough, reappears. The swan in ancient mythology sang a beautiful song just before it died (swansong). The word swan is associated with singing in several cultures, including that of the Celts. Throughout Greek mythology there are echoes of a rite involving the underworld, the gaining of mystic knowledge from the gods, and the singing of that wisdom. Think of Orpheus, the Pythoness of Delphi – and Helen of Troy. It is probable that the priestess Helen in archaic Sparta made sacrifice, retreated to an isolated, closed place that was ritually pure, and when she emerged, sung her wisdom to those who could interpret it. This mystical kind of religion lasted throughout Greek culture, predated it, and in the form of the Eleusian Mysteries, influenced the emerging rituals of early Christianity.

Another kind of rite widespread in ancient societies but repudiated by later ones was sexual in nature. The queen priestess spoke with god, and she prayed for fertility in field and in womenfolk. Her role here involved public sexual intercourse with a male representing the god. This rite was gradually dropped from Greek religion, though it lasted till classical times in Corinth, but was much more prevalent in Syria and probably Troy. Although Helen might have practised ritual intercourse as part of her role as priestess, it is unlikely to have been with a visiting prince such as Paris. But conflation of two unfamiliar roles of Helen’s, sexual and political, might have resulted in the love story told in later times.

The story
Helen had many suitors, but the most important were Paris and Menelaos. These represented, respectively, the peace party and the war party. Under consideration was whether to conciliate the still enormous power of the Hittites by an alliance with the royal house of Priam of Troy. Tyndareus of Sparta inclined to this approach, as did Helen. Troy represented not just the political power of the Hittites. It also meant riches, sophisticated civilization and lucrative trade for the relatively backward Achaeans. But the Atriadae of Mycenae thought otherwise. Agamemnon and Menelaos thought the Hittite fruit was ready for the plucking. They appealed to the warlike traditions of their people. At a clan meeting in which alliance with Sparta was also attempted, they carried the day. The war party had precedence.

But Helen had enormous power. She spoke for the gods. We don’t know the name of her god, but Homer assumed it was Aphrodite, whom in his time was one of the most powerful gods. And the gods told her to negotiate with Paris. It is likely her party went to Troy to do so. In her absence the militant party stirred up disaffection and spread stories of seduction and rape. Had Helen been present she could have toppled Agamemnon by persuading her sister Clytemnestra to repudiate him, something Clytemnestra did do eventually, as she saw her husband responsible not only for the death of her sister Helen but of her daughter Iphigeneia. The vote for war gave Agamemnon leadership of a loose federation of states hungry for plunder. It also forced Sparta onto the war side. Tyndareus might want to wait for Helen’s return from Troy, but once war was declared, Menelaos either had to ally himself with his brother or lose his kingdom, as he was king only while married to Helen. The choice was whether to stay neutral until Helen’s return, and suffer depredations from the other states of the war party, or join the war party, go in pursuit of Helen, and wipe out the dishonour her alleged seduction by Paris had caused him by killing her. This is the course he followed.

Interpretation
The next people to invade the Balkan peninsula from the north were the Dorians of about 1000 BC. Although we group all these tribes together as Indo-European, it must not be forgotten this is a term of linguistics: the existence of a common stock has been deduced from similarity in grammar roots within what traces of each language has survived. The Dorians would have seen the Achaeans as foreigners, just as the Achaeans saw the aboriginal stock they displaced, whom they called Pelagians, as foreigners. They found a society in ruins, who knew as much about their glorious past as monks in medieval France knew about Republican Rome, even though both groups preserved traditions and literature from earlier times.

Many things about the Achaeans needed explaining. The Dorians confined their women to the home; the Achaeans gave them freedom and religious power. Kings in Dorian society were war leaders; in Achaean society they were legitimised by marriage to the priestess queen. The language the people spoke was hard to understand, and the traditional songs would have needed an interpreter. The role of Helen would have been incomprehensible to the Dorians.

One thing they did understand was ancestor worship. The Dorians found prestige by claiming members of the Achaeans as ancestors. It helped that these Achaeans were physically different, tall, blue eyed with light brown hair which sometimes was golden brown or red. They were Steppe people in origin (cousins to Conan the Barbarian) and their height and colouring were remembered in classical depictions of the gods. To cement this claim of ancestry their bards got busy with the ancient tales they heard, in the incomprehensible language of the old people. The songs they sung were of course not history, but designed to honour the tribal leaders of the day by remembering the exploits of the alleged ancestors Herakles, Odysseus and Agamemnon. In the process the reputation of the queens priestesses, such as Leda and her daughter Helen, took a nose dive. But they acquired a new kind of reputation.

The Iliad can be regarded as the story of two gods, Helen and Achilles. Helen, through whom the power of Aphrodite worked to bewitch Paris, and Achilles, the agent of retribution. The power of the goddess has become the allure of the prostitute, just as it has in the Garden of Eden, where the Mistress of snakes, the queen priestess Eve, tempts Adam with the fruit and brings about the Fall of Man.

“…as Helen in all her radiance climbed the steps
to the bedroom under the high, vaulting roof.”

Paris: “Never has longing for you overwhelmed me so,
no, not even then, I tell you, that first time
when I swept you up from the lovely hills of Lacedaemon…”
(Fagles, Illiad, 3, 492-3, 518-20)

©2009 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.

Goddess, princess, whore: Helen of Troy

I found Bettany Hughes very beautiful and couldn’t take my eyes off her in this program as she explored sources of information about Helen of Troy, a reaction that seems very appropriate given Helen’s reputation. Hughes has done a previous program on Sparta which rehabilitates them somewhat and is rumored as making another one on Socrates.

This 2005 PBS broadcast runs for two hours and covers a lot of ground. Hughes states she is interested in exploring how a Bronze Age Queen such as Helen might have lived. Her premise is that there was really a Helen and that the story of the part she played in the Trojan War is based on fact. This approach, which ignores Helen’s mythological roles, enables Hughes to restrict herself to the archaeological record, where the life of the Bronze Age elite of Greece has left some trace.

The written record is not too helpful. Homer contents himself with calling Helen the most beautiful woman without giving further details, knowing his audience will fill in the blanks themselves. But, examining Homer closely, it is possible to see how many details he writes about were of an earlier time than his own and reflect the passing down of an oral tradition from as early as the 12th century BC, the time of the War. Just as Michael Wood did in In Search of the Trojan War, Hughes finds experts who can reconstruct Bronze Age weaponry from Homer’s descriptions. It seems there is a lot of recoverable detail about how people lived in those times. But all this is supporting detail and doesn’t help much where Helen is concerned.

Hughes drives from Mycenae to Sparta, crosses the Aegean to Troy, travels up the Hellespont to Istanbul for a taste of what Troy might have seemed like in its heyday, then travels east to explore the Hittites, the dominant political power of the Bronze Age in western Asia. While filling in a lot of social and political detail, Hughes is not able to fully demonstrate one of her major points, the relative freedom and access to power accorded to women in many societies of that time. There’s really not enough evidence to make more than conjectures.

There is another aspect to Helen that Hughes does not really explore, as her search is for a historical figure. Helen is a daughter of Zeus, king of the Greek gods. She and her sister Clytemnestra were hatched from an egg, even though her mother, Leda, was of human form (though divine). Her brothers were the gods Castor and Pollux. Both Helen and Clytemnestra were to prove fatal to the Greek forces through their involvement with the brothers Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army and married to Clytemnestra, and Menelaus, married to Helen.

The Greeks often gave divine honors to their ancestors. If the involvement of Zeus and Aphrodite in Helen’s tale are seen as part of this process, then the bloody feud of the Atridae, detailed in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and which was an indirect cause of the Trojan War, as well as the story of the Seven against Thebes and of Oedipus, of Perseus, of Jason and Medea and of the Trojan War itself can be read as history, with the very large qualification that the stories, based on fact but created to gain tribal and clan renown, were passed on as part of songs in honor of the ancestors and in rituals enacted at family shrines. In this process the ancestors became heroes, the heroes became gods and children of gods. Five hundred years after these Bronze Age societies had passed away a gifted poet named Homer, who definitely did not ascribe to the religious beliefs of the age he depicted, recreated one such story: so tale became legend, became ritual, became ceremonial song and then became one of the world’s greatest poems. Finding the historical elements in this is not an easy job.

Had Hughes wished to she could have looked at Bronze Age rituals that evidently did give status and authority to women and which can be seen on the surviving frescoes from Minoan Crete, thought to be the parent civilisation to that of Mycenean Greece. Women were bare breasted, their femininity was honored, they predominated in ceremonies below ground to invoke the snake goddess who gave wisdom and the bull god who gave life (I can’t help thinking of the Canaanite Eve who might have been once such a priestess/goddess). Medea could have been another such figure, as was the Pythoness who gave way to Apollo at Delphi.

The trouble with looking at the past is that other societies had vastly different ways of looking at things than we do. We notice skin color, many ancient societies didn’t (which Roman Emperors were black?) We like facts, ancient societies didn’t think facts were nearly as important as clan honour. We separate concepts such as patriotism and religion, the Greeks didn’t. Nobody’s going to find a biography of Helen or a history of the Trojan War surviving on clay tablets because nobody in the Bronze Age had thought of such things.

From the remains we have: a few battered artifacts, an excavated city’s outline, deductions from a few lines of poetry, historians such as Hughes try to interpret a vanished way of life. The lack of evidence means there can be more than one such interpretation, and none conclusive. This is the fascination of the past.

One sad fact Hughes is able to confirm is that the scale of things was much smaller than we imagine. Smaller cities, smaller populations, fewer soldiers and ships, raids more common than battles, deaths (despite Homer’s gruesome descriptions) more often among the peasantry than the nobility. “The face that launched a thousand ships” was said of Helen almost 3000 years after her time, the tale having grown with the telling.

©2009 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.