Eureka! E-Book

Peter Jones

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The ancient Greeks gave us our alphabet and much of our scientific, medical and cultural language; they invented democracy, atomic theory, and the rules of logic and geometry; laid the foundations of philosophy, history, tragedy and comedy; and debated everything from the good life and the role of women, to making sense of foreigners and the best form of government, all in the most sophisticated terms. But who were they? In Eureka!, Peter Jones tells their epic story, which begins with the Trojan War and ends with the rise of the Roman Empire, by breaking down each major period into a series of informative nuggets. Along the way he introduces the major figures of the age, including Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Euclid and Archimedes; explores the Greek myths and the role of the gods;provides fascinating insights into everyday life in ancient times; and shows us the very foundations of Western culture. Eureka! is both entertaining and illuminating, and will delight anyone who ever wanted to know more about our ancient ancestors.

Leseprobe

Also by Peter Jones

Vote for Caeser

Learn Latin: The Book of the

Daily Telegraph QED series

Veni Vidi Vici

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Peter Jones, 2014.

The moral right of Peter Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78239-514-0

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-515-7

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78239-516-4

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CONTENTS

Maps

Introduction

I2000–800 BC

From Bronze Age to Dark Age

II800–725 BC

Competing for glory

Olympics and the Olympian gods

III725–700 BC

From Homeric hero to Hesiod’s peasants

IVc. 700–593 BC

Tyranny, poetry and speculation

V593–493 BC

Athens: from tyranny to democracy

VI493–450 BC

From Persian empire to Athenian – tyranny?

VII450–421 BC

Athens v. Sparta: the Peloponnesian War

VIII421–399 BC

Athens capitulates: the execution of Socrates

IX399–362 BC

City-states at war in Greece

X360–336 BC

The rise of Macedon: Philip II takes over Greece

XI336–322 BC

Alexander the Great and the end of democracy

XII322–229 BC

After Alexander: the empire divided

XIII229–146 BC

Macedon falls to Rome

XIV146–27 BC

The end of Alexander’s empire

Epilogue: the survival of Greek literature

Reading list

Index

A note on the author

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

If the Greek philosopher Plato is to be believed, the story of this book goes back 12,000 years – all the way to Atlantis. But he was making that story up, so it goes back a mere 3,000 years or so, from the Minotaur’s Crete and the Trojan War to the Olympic Game (yes: it all started with just the one), the invention of our alphabet, the West’s very first literature (the epics of the Iliad and Odyssey), the Persian wars, the subsequent ferocious conflict for mastery of Greece between Athens and Sparta, the emergence of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, Alexander’s conquest of the East as far as India, and the gradual collapse of that ‘empire’ before the unstoppable march of that new power to the West – Rome. It ends in 27 BC, when the last piece of Greek territory receives a Roman governor.

Further along that sometimes inspiring, sometimes dispiriting way, the immense influence of the ancient Greeks on our world will emerge. At almost every point of Western thinking about politics, literature, mathematics, art, architecture, drama, philosophy, education, war, sex, medicine, cosmology, astronomy, biology, the body, the emotions, ethics, linguistics, death, logic, race, slavery, history, quite apart from the wonderful worlds of myths and oracles, the Greeks are somewhere there.

The book (for the title Eureka!, see p. 79) adopts the same format as my Veni Vidi Vici (Atlantic Books, 2013). Each chapter begins with a timeline and a broad summary of the chapter’s contents, followed by a series of brief ‘nuggets’, some fleshing out the summary, others digressing into different areas of interest.

But the contrast with Veni Vidi Vici will soon become apparent. The history of Rome offers a coherent story of one highly influential city that, between 700 BC – AD 500, came to dominate much of Europe, North Africa and the Near East. But neither Athens nor Sparta nor any other Greek community ever dominated as Rome did.

As a result, the ancient Greek world lacks such intense focus. Consequently, while this account will be chronological, it will not tell a single story, but concentrate on the various differing big players as they emerge over the centuries, and over the Mediterranean too. For the Greeks, who mistrusted the sea, were still great adventurers, always on the lookout for the main chance and new experiences, and they established cities all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. That said, there will be a bias towards Athens, because for all its disappointments after its glory years in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, its achievements at that time still electrify the imagination.

Jeannie Cohen (she and I run the charity Friends of Classics) read the whole book in its various forms and made countless improvements. I am most grateful to Martin West for permission to use his superb translations of Hesiod (Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Oxford, 1988) and the Greek lyric poets (Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford, 1993) and, as ever, to Andrew Morley for the maps.

Peter Jones

Newcastle on Tyne

June 2014

NAMES AND NUMBERS

GREEK NAMES

Greek names in English have, by historical convention, been adapted from Latin. Sometimes they are virtually identical in the three languages: Greek Periklês, Latin Pericles, English Pericles. At other times, the Greek and Latin are similar, but the English different: Greek Aristotelês, Latin Aristoteles, but English Aristotle. Sometimes the Latin (and so the English) are very different from the Greek: Thoukudidês, Thucydides, Thucydides (pronounced ‘Thewsiddiddees’).

Note that the Greek long ô was pronounced ‘or’, and the Greek long ê was pronounced ‘air’. So Hellênes was pronounced ‘Hellairness’, arkhôn ‘arkhorn’. On this convention, see my An Intelligent Person’s Guide to the Classics (Bloomsbury 1999, Appendix 1).

The long mark ^ is applied only to transliterated Greek words in italics, not to their English form. Thus Periklês, exactly representing the Greek, but Pericles in English. Observe that the Greek k becomes the English c (drakhma: drachma), and the Greek u becomes the English y (Olumpikos: Olympic).

GREEK MONEY, WEIGHTS AND DISTANCES

Obol[os] is the lowest unit of money:

These are related to the weight of the coins. On the Attic standard, an obol is about 0.72 grams, a drachma 4.31 grams, a mina 431 grams (about 1 lb), a talent 25.86 kg (about 60 lb). Other cities adopted different weight standards.

VALUE OF MONEY

As ever, there are no meaningful correspondences between ancient Greek money and ours. One calculation suggests that, for a family of four in Athens c. 400 BC, the cost of living varied from 2.5 to 6 obols a day (see p. 178-9 on pay for jury service and p. 247 on pay for attending the Assembly). The pay for a skilled craftsman varied from 6 to 9 obols (1 to 1.5 drachmas) a day.

DISTANCES

These are given in modern measurements, roughly equivalent to the Greek ones. Thus the 200 metres of the first Olympic game (p. 37) represent one stadion in Greek (whence ‘stadium’).

WHO WERE THE GREEKS?

When ‘ancient Greeks’ are being discussed, it is usually assumed that they are people who live in Greece. But Greeks did not think of themselves first and foremost in that way. What made them Greek, as the historian Herodotus tells us in the fifth century BC, was not their location but their shared stock, language, culture and gods (but not politics, interestingly). And Herodotus meant it, because Greeks established settlements all over the Mediterranean, ‘like frogs around a pond’ (as Plato put it), without compromising their Greekness.

So to talk of ‘ancient Greece’ and ‘ancient Greeks’, is not to imply a politically unified country and people as in, for instance, ‘England’ and ‘the English’, but people who spoke Greek and lived, in their own separate, autonomous Greek communities, not only on the Greek mainland but also (in time) in Asia Minor (roughly modern Turkey), the Black Sea, the Near East, parts of North Africa, southern Italy, Sicily and the coastal regions of southern France (Gaul) and Spain. Nor did their common heritage mean they all lived in harmony. On the Greek mainland, in particular, these independent communities – Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, Corinthians and so on – were regularly at each other’s throats.

Hint: every time you come across a place-name, find it on the map. That will make the point most forcefully that not all Greeks lived in Greece, let alone in Athens. Greeks lived and worked all over the place. Indeed, Greeks living on the west coast of Asia Minor (Turkey) were, arguably, the originators of ‘the Greek miracle’.

Finally, and rather surprisingly, Greeks did not call themselves ‘Greeks’: they called themselves Hellênes and their country Hellas (see p. 46), and still do. Why, then, do we call them ‘Greeks’ and say they lived in ‘Greece’? Because of the Romans, as usual, who were captivated by Greek language and culture and transmitted so much of it to us. They called the people Graeci (‘Gr-eye-kee’) and the country Graecia, and we anglicized the Roman forms into ‘Greeks’ and ‘Greece’.

And why did the Romans call them that? We do not know, but see p. 79 for two possible guesses.

I

2000–800 BC

TIMELINE

2000–1600 BC

Minoan Crete – the golden age

c. 1600 BC

The explosion of Minoan Thera

1600–1150 BC

Late Bronze Age; the rise and fall of ‘Mycenaean’ Greeks

1450 BC

Mycenaeans move into Knossos

1400 BC

(Greek) Linear B writing

1350 BC

Knossos destroyed

c. 1200 BC

Mycenaean attack on Hisarlik?

c. 1150–800 BC

End of Bronze Age society and culture; the Dark Ages

FROM BRONZE AGE TO DARK AGE

This is a much debated period of history because we have virtually no written sources for it. Two peoples and one site will dominate the greatly simplified story of the Bronze Age world presented here: Minoan Cretans; Mycenaean Greeks; and Hisarlik, a site of major importance in what is now north-west Turkey (Asia Minor) at the entrance to the Dardanelles.

Crete at this period is called ‘Minoan’ merely because Minos was a famous mythical king of Crete and Knossos’ excavator Sir Arthur Evans decided to call it that; but – this is important – Crete at this time was not inhabited by Greeks. Who the inhabitants were, we do not know.

From about 2100 to 1700 BC the Minoans developed the building of impressive courtyard-centred ‘palaces’ on Near Eastern models. Those at Knossos and Phaestos are especially notable. The wealth required to do this came from their fleets trading all round the eastern Mediterranean, especially to get copper and tin (Crete lacked any metal deposits). There is evidence of Minoan ‘colonies’ along the coast of Asia Minor set up, among other things, to get a foothold in the trade routes and inland resources.

These palaces were seats of political, administrative and ceremonial power rather than urban concentrations. They were held by a chieftain, many of whose acolytes lived in nearby ‘mansions’. They stored and redistributed goods: grain, especially drought-resistant barley, olive oil, wine (the Mediterranean’s staple foods), spices like saffron, coriander and woollen products. The script Linear A, so called by Evans and as yet undeciphered, was used to administer the system. Knossos could serve (it has been roughly calculated) around 15,000 people.

The island of Thera exploded in a massive volcanic eruption c. 1600 BC. This may have had some effect on Minoan power; it certainly did on nearby islands. The major change to Minoan power came around 1450 BC. This was when people who were Greeks from mainland Greece attacked Crete or took it over. We call these ‘Mycenaean’ Greeks. The epithet ‘Mycenaean’ is, like Minoan Crete, a modern invention to denote ‘Bronze Age Greeks’. Mycenae itself is simply an impressive Bronze Age palace site on the Greek mainland, rich in gold (to judge from its graves). Many Minoan palace sites were destroyed or abandoned at this time.

Mycenaean Greeks were warriors and traders. Their trade expanded widely after Crete was taken over, possibly because the Minoan navy no longer controlled the seas. When the Mycenaeans moved into Crete, they converted the signs of Linear A to create both in Crete and in Greece a new, Greek script, Linear B, for purposes of administration. The palace of Knossos was finally destroyed – why, we do not know – around 1350 BC. Further, around 1200 BC, Mycenaean Greeks may have been involved in the demise of the important site of Hisarlik, on the Turkish coast near the entrance to the Dardanelles.

But around 1200 BC this Bronze Age culture was beginning to collapse in the Greek, Egyptian and Hittite worlds: sites were being destroyed or abandoned, for reasons that still remain mysterious, and skills (including writing) were being lost. Many Greeks began to leave the mainland and make their way east to the coast of Asia Minor (western Turkey). The Iron Age had begun, and the Dark Ages were about to close in.

THE BRONZE AGE

The Bronze Age is so called because bronze was the standard metal in use. This metal is a combination of tin and copper. Our word ‘copper’ derives from Greek Kupros, ‘Cyprus’, which was well known for its copper mines (copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu, from Latin cuprum, via the Greek). Tin is assumed not to have been available around the Mediterranean and was perhaps brought in mainly from the East, or even from Cornwall.

BEFORE THE WRITTEN WORD

‘Pre-history’ is defined as a period of time from which we have no written records.

The Greek world of the second millennium BC does not quite count because written clay tablets, called ‘Linear B’, survive from this time (see p. 12). But since these are simply economic accounts for one year, they give us no help with establishing a sequence of events. So we rely primarily on archaeology, though written accounts from Hittites (in central Turkey), for instance, and Egyptians also come into play.

DATING THE UNWRITTEN WORLD

Archaeology does not tell a story. But it can reveal processes of change over time, for instance a settlement’s population expanding or contracting, becoming more or less wealthy, forging trading connections, or new populations with different styles of goods coming in, and so on. Burial sites in particular often yield highly informative hauls, such as prestige goods and precious metals from distant lands.

Dates are very cautiously attached to the period – as far as they can be – mainly by the following methods:

(i)

Tracing the changes in style of decoration on pots. Because some of this pottery is found in dateable locations abroad (e.g. Egypt, where a dating system survives), scholars have been able to draw up a system of rough-and-ready dating by changing pottery style.

(ii)

Radiocarbon dating of objects and dendrochronology (tree-ring analysis). These techniques are used to firm up the results, though they often suggest earlier dates than the pottery analysis.

THERA THEORY

The middle of the ancient island of Thera, modern Santorini, just south of Crete, blew up some time around 1600 BC. It did so because it was and still is a volcanic island, which will one day blow up again as the volcanic core slowly rebuilds itself in the middle of the roughly circular caldera, the ‘cauldron’-like shape left by the explosion. The explosion is calculated to have been one of the largest ever, punching about 24 cubic miles of material (15 billion tons) into the air, many times larger than the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The fallout and accompanying tsunamis must have caused widespread devastation, though scholars still argue over the details and the precise dating. Some think that memories of this explosion influenced Plato’s story of Atlantis some 1200 years later (see p. 9).

Incidentally, the name ‘Santorini’ derives from Santa Irene (‘Holy Peace’). This was the name of a local church, given to it in the thirteenth century AD when it was part of a short-lived ‘Latin’ empire. Its official name in modern Greek is Thira.

AKROTIRI

The town on Santorini known today as Akrotiri was a Bronze Age settlement. It was buried Pompeii-like by the explosion, and since 1967 it has been excavated. Houses were rectangular, with flat roofs, two, sometimes three, stories high; the main door opened onto wide streets or squares. Storerooms and workrooms were on the ground floor. They provide evidence of businesses in farming, fishing, woodwork, textiles and metalwork; jars from Lebanon, stone vases from Egypt, ivory work and ostrich eggshells testify to flourishing trade abroad. Living accommodation was on the upper floor or floors. Each private house (of those so far excavated) has a fresco, often visible from outside via a large window. Santorini is typical of many Aegean islands in having strong connections with Minoan Crete: its wonderful frescoes are thoroughly Minoan in style – landscapes in exotic locations, featuring monkeys, leopards and antelopes – and Linear A writing was found there. There is a cache of clay impressions from seal-stones, all of them common in Crete but not made of clay from Thera – clear evidence of flourishing trade connections.

SECURITY-SEALS

Seal-stones are gems or stones, engraved with depictions and/or writing. They are miraculous works of miniature art in themselves: about an inch long, exquisitely engraved with a whole range of images, from ceremonials to wild animals (craftsmen engraving them were helped by miniature ‘magnifying glasses’ that survive naturally in rock crystal).

Worn round the neck or wrist, these seal-stones had a practical use. To seal a document or lid in the Minoan world, one tied it up, pressed clay around the knotted fastening, and then ‘sealed’ the clay by impressing it with your own seal-stone, which could indicate personal ownership or controlling authority. That ‘seal’ should be unbroken when the item was delivered.

This was all part of the Minoan system of the control and distribution of goods and produce. In Phaestos, there is an archive of 6,500 clay seal impressions, indicating the vast scale of this operation. When the Mycenaeans arrived in Knossos, seals began to feature the Linear B script.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

We do not know what the people of Crete called themselves. In Egypt, however, there are paintings in tombs of Cretan young men (one can tell by the clothing) called Keftiu. They are bringing gifts – evidence of Cretan trade. There is also a bull-leaping fresco in the Nile delta (see p. 15). The Syrians called Crete ‘Kaptaru’, the Bible ‘Kaphtor’. So the letters ‘K’, ‘p’ or ‘f’ and ‘t’ should feature in the name.

KNOSSOS AND LINEAR A

Knossos in Crete was the name of the fabled palace of the mythical Cretan king Minos. When coins bearing the name of that place emerged from the ground near modern Heraklion, Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, decided to investigate. He had already become excited by the possibility that signs on seal-stones from Crete bought in Greek antique shops were a form of writing; here was a chance to prove it. In 1900 he bought up the location, convinced that Minoan Crete, as he called it, was history, not myth, and started to excavate. To his great excitement, he immediately started turning up seal-stones and clay tablets. The language on them turned out to be the language of Minoan Cretans, which Evans called Linear (‘script written in lines’) A. This language turned out not to be Greek (see p. 12). So whoever the Minoans were, Greek they were not.

KNOSSOS AND LINEAR B

At the same time, Evans also began turning up evidence of a different script, which he called Linear B, clearly related to the script of Linear A but significantly different from it. He found great quantities of this script in continuous lines of writing, inscribed on clay tablets (around 1,800 in all), bunched together like files or dossiers of some sort, datable to around 1400 BC. Even more exciting, in 1939–40 Carl Blegen, leading an American expedition excavating near Navarino bay in south-west Greece, was excavating a palace which we know to be Pylos (mentioned in Homer), and he too uncovered a great cache of writing on clay tablets (636 of them), exactly like the Linear B from Minoan Crete, datable to around 1200 BC. What was this script doing in Greece? Had the Minoans taken over Greece? In fact, as we know, it was the other way round. What language was it? We now have some 5,000 clay tablets inscribed with Linear B from Crete and the Greek mainland (including Mycenae, Tiryns and Thebes), all dated to c. 1450–1200 BC, and all from large settlements.

TAXING DOCUMENTS

In 1953 the Linear B puzzle was solved. Building on a great deal of earlier work and inspired by the Second World War code-crackers at Bletchley Park, the young architect Michael Ventris and the Cambridge Greek scholar Dr John Chadwick announced that Linear B was a form of ancient Greek. But far from being exquisite early poetry or accounts of battles between Greeks and Trojans, the Linear B clay tablets were not evidence for general literacy but the work of an official class of trained bureaucrats. The tablets describe a society labelled, inspected, rationed and controlled by an officialdom of a sort to make the heart of any EU bureaucrat beat that little bit faster. Records of economic activity, the tablets cover four main types of transaction: taxation (on an annual basis, with recurrent formulas for assessment, payments and deficit, if any); agricultural production; maintenance of palace staff; and craft production (chariots, textiles, furniture, leather goods, etc.). Religious activity was also monitored, and records kept of offerings, land and allowances that were given to gods, workers (in return for services) and priests. Interestingly, nearly all the Greek Olympian gods feature – Zeus, Athena, Hermes, even Dionysus, who was once thought to be a late arrival in the Greek pantheon. The only exceptions are Aphrodite and Apollo. The palace bureaucrats clearly had no business plans for sex and the arts.

COMMAND ECONOMY

We must forget about markets and money. Minoan Crete was a command economy, under palace control. From the territory they controlled, officials drew foodstuff and raw materials. This was then given to workers in the palace and the region: food, so that they did not struggle to stay alive, and raw materials to be turned into manufactured goods to palace specifications. These included textiles, metalwork, furniture and perfumes, both for internal consumption and for bartering (how trade was carried on before money or its equivalent was invented).

RECORD SURVIVAL

There is a delicious paradox about these clay tablets. They were meant to be only temporary records, before the information was transferred to more ‘permanent’ materials such as skins. But when the palaces were burned down, the clay was fired hard and so preserved, whereas the ‘permanent’ materials were destroyed! We know the tablets were a temporary record because they refer to just one year’s economic activity, mentioning only ‘this year’s’ flocks (etc.), and occasionally ‘last year’s’ (for comparative purposes).

TAXING DETAILS

The details of the records give us some idea of the enthusiasm of the civil servants. Stocks of spare chariot wheels are recorded: ‘one pair of wheels, bound with silver’; ‘one pair of cypress-wood with borders, and one single wheel’; ‘six pairs, unfit for use’. Among much else we also learn:

•

what the acreage of Alektryon’s estate is and how much he should pay in annual tax, as well as to the gods Poseidon and Diwieus (Zeus);

•

that in one Cretan village two nurses, one girl and one boy are being employed;

•

that Dynios owes to the palace 2,220 litres of barley, 526 litres of olives, 468 litres of wine, fifteen rams, eight yearlings, one ewe, thirteen he-goats, twelve pigs, one fat hog, one cow and two bulls;

•

who is looking after Thalamatas’ cattle;

•

the amount of tax to be paid in linen by the town of Rhion (with certain deductions for a certain class of workmen);

•

the wheat and fig rations for thirty-seven female bath attendants and twenty-eight children at Pylos;

•

the number of hammers, brushes and fire-tongs to be found in a room in the palace; and

•

the names of four oxen: Dusky, Dapple, Whitefoot and Noisy.

FLOCK STOCKS

By far the largest interest of the Minoan Linear B tablets is in sheep. Over 800 of the tablets, each dealing with a single flock, produce a total of around 100,000 sheep in Crete. They are identified by sex and categorized as ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘this year’s’ and ‘last year’s’. The purpose of this was to ensure that flocks of castrated rams, which produced the wool, were kept up to strength. Target figures for wool production (about 2 lb/0.9 kg per ram, 1 lb/0.45 kg per breeding ewe) and actual figures were recorded: they had targets and league tables even then. Presumably each sheep was marked with a baa-code. Then on to textile production: we can follow the process from the wool being ordered; collected; spun and carded; woven and finished; and finally turned into everything from headbands to heavy rugs. Every step of the way, restless officialdom wielded its stern recording clipboard. Incidentally, since the Linear B tablets consist largely of lists of objects, very few verbs are used.

DANGEROUS SPORTS, CRETAN STYLE

Seal-stones and frescoes from Crete provide hundreds of depictions of men leaping over bulls. In one type, it appears that a man grasps the bull’s horns and, as it tosses its head, levers himself up over the bull in a backward somersault. Another type depicts a man diving head-first over the horns and using his hands to somersault backwards off the bull’s back. Young women may also have had a role – though it is hard to be certain – as they seem to be depicted standing in front of and behind the bull. Since in many Mediterranean countries bulls were venerated – they were the largest and most dangerous animals on Crete – this may well have been part of a religious ceremonial. But it could equally be some sort of spectacular involving man and beast. Bull-leaping can still be seen in parts of Spain and south-west France.

MYTHS OF KNOSSOS (I): MINI-MINOS

When King Minos, the myth went, broke his promise to sacrifice an especially fine bull to the sea-god Poseidon, Poseidon made his wife Pasiphae (sister of the witch Circe) fall in love with it. This created a technical problem; but fortunately for her, the great craftsman Daedalus was a prisoner in the palace at the time. So, she invited him to turn his mighty brain to the solution. He constructed a cow-frame on wheels and covered it with the skin of a cow he had killed. He then inserted Pasiphae into it and pulled it into the meadow where the bull grazed. The bull was duly Pasiphaed, and the result was the birth of the bull-headed man, the Minotaur (literally, ‘Minos-bull’). Minos, less than impressed, imprisoned it in the maze-like labyrinth which Daedalus built, on Minos’ orders, to keep it hidden from sight (of which maze, in 1914, a Cambridge academic said the swastika was the model; see p. 68).

Incidentally, Pasiphae grew tired of Minos’ various love affairs and, using her witchcraft, caused him to ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes. These killed his lovers, but she sensibly took precautions, nullifying their effects on herself.

MYTHS OF KNOSSOS (II): INTO THE LABYRINTH

Aegeus, king of Athens, while passing through Troezen, had a brief fling with Aethra, daughter of the local king. Aegeus left a sword and a pair of sandals under a heavy stone and told Aethra that, if she bore a son strong enough to move the stone, she should send him, with the gear, to Athens. Aethra called her son Theseus. When he grew up, Theseus retrieved the gear and made his way to Athens by a route that required him to deal with a varied assortment of monsters (a sort of alternative labours of Heracles). Aegeus recognized him as his son and enlisted him to deal with a dreadful promise the Athenians had made to King Minos: to send him, every nine years, a tribute of seven girls and seven boys to provide food for the Minotaur. The third tribute was about to be paid, and lots to be drawn to select the youths. Theseus volunteered, and Aegeus instructed him, if he killed the Minotaur, to hoist white sails on the ship when he returned. When Theseus arrived in Knossos, Ariadne, daughter of Minos, fell in love with him and begged Daedalus (himself an Athenian) to help her. Daedalus told her to give Theseus a ball of thread to attach at the entrance to the maze. He should spool it out behind him as he searched for the Minotaur, and follow it back after he had done the deed. Theseus duly did so, beating the Minotaur to death with his fists. Theseus, Ariadne and the others fought their way back to the ship and set sail for Athens. On the island of Naxos, the two lovers fell out, and Ariadne was abandoned. Theseus sailed on, but forgot to change the sails. The watching Aegeus hurled himself into the sea (hence the ‘Aegean’ Sea), and Theseus was both joyfully and sorrowfully welcomed back and made king.

THE ATHENIAN CONNECTION

Athens did not have much in the way of great heroes, but after all that Heracles-style giant-killing on top of the Minotaur episode, Theseus seemed to fit the bill. The Minos story was one way of fitting him into Athenian ‘history’ with an Athenian adventure all of his own, even though he was the son of a woman from Troezen, and not Athenian-born (see p. 45). The fact that he did not have many sanctuaries in Attica suggests he was a ‘late arrival’ in Athens’s story of its own history; he subsequently featured in a number of major Athenian festivals.

WAR AND PEACE

There is a striking difference between Minoan and Mycenaean palaces. Minoan palaces were not fortified, and their magnificent frescoes show scenes not of warfare, typical elsewhere, but of plant and animal life (birds, monkeys, cats), processions and ceremonies, goddesses and (often bare-breasted) women (compare, in this respect, Akrotiri, p. 9 above).

Many of the Mycenaean palaces were heavily fortified. Mycenae’s walls were up to 40 feet (12.5 metres) high and 25 feet (7 metres) thick. The stones used are up to 120 tons in weight, e.g. the lintel across the door-posts of the beehive tomb misnamed the ‘Treasury of Mycenae’. (Such vast stones were cut to shape by huge saws suspended from pendulums, swung back and forth by workers.) No wonder the walls were later called Cyclopean, as if made by the Cyclopses (see p. 42). Mycenae’s rich graves were full of arms and armour. Mycenaean frescoes imitated Minoan ones to some extent, but also featured notable scenes of warfare, such as horses, chariots, warriors, death in battle, and huntsmen closing in for the kill.

KNOSSOS AS PARIS

One of the problems we have with Knossos today is that Evans reconstructed it in accordance with his own theories about its ‘meaning’. He registered Knossos’ absence of defensive walls, saw the many images of goddesses and bull-worship, made links with the myth of the Minotaur and became convinced that there was some truth to the story of Theseus and Ariadne. So, in accordance with the fashions of the day, he concluded that Knossos was a pacifist, matriarchal kingdom, full of goddess-worshippers. The bare-breasted ladies (see above) suggested to others a hippie society enjoying ‘a free and well-balanced sex-life’, where in all likelihood ‘drugs were sometimes taken to encourage a sense of revelation, possession and trance’. It was all in strong contrast with those horrid, unbalanced, undoped Mycenaeans.

The first fresco Evans uncovered was at once proclaimed to be Ariadne (it was in fact male); as soon as the room with a decorated gypsum chair was revealed, it was a ‘throne room’; the nearby bath was ‘Ariadne’s bath’. Evans compared Minoan civilization to Medici Florence, the Renaissance and baroque Europe. One of the restored frescoes of a woman’s face was entitled (daringly) ‘La Parisienne’ – the height of French sophistication. Evans was determined to prove that Minoan civilization ‘was at once the starting point and the earliest stage in the highway of European civilisation’ and King Minos ‘a beneficent ruler, patron of the arts, founder of palaces, stablisher of civilised dominion’. How, then, to explain the Minotaur and labyrinth? Evans argued that they were the result of Athenian propaganda, designed ‘so to exaggerate the tyrannical side of the early sea-dominion as to convert the Palace of a long series of great rulers into an ogre’s den’.

KNOSSOS AS VOGUE

Evans hired the Swiss artist and restorer Émile Gilliéron, later to be joined by his son, to get to work restoring the fragments of frescoes and artefacts. They turned them into precisely what Evans wanted to see. In 1929 Evelyn Waugh visited Knossos and commented that it was not easy to judge the merits of Minoan painting since ‘only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last twenty years, and it is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for the covers of Vogue’.

Evans’s restorers were indeed very keen to confirm their master’s prejudices. The fresco of a monkey gathering saffron was restored by them as a ‘Blue Boy’; a fresco of a complete procession of ladies appeared from a row of ankles; from a heap of fresco fragments emerged ‘a crowd of spectators… overlooking an orgiastic dance’. Evans said of Gilliéron’s son, ‘I had at hand not only a competent artist, but one whose admirable studies of Minoan Art in all its branches had thoroughly imbued him with its spirit.’ Evans really meant his own spirit.

FAKING IT UP

The finds at Knossos were not just enormously romantic in themselves, but were also actively romanticized by Evans in line with his theories. Forgers flourish under such conditions, and they were quick to provide punters – and Evans – with what they wanted. Evans was well aware of the problem; indeed, he visited the home of a forger betrayed to the police. One of the most famous examples of what is almost certainly a fake is a gold and ivory (‘chryselephantine’) snake goddess, 6½ inches/16.1 centimetres high. She sports impressive bare breasts (one nipple the tip of a golden nail) and both hands hold snakes that, twined round her arms, stretch outwards, tongues flickering. The forger whom Evans visited had everything that was needed to construct such an image: ivory, gold, acid baths to give the ageing effect, and so on. Such statuettes in gold, ivory and stone poured out of Knossos into the hands of museums and collectors, all eager to have them. It is suspected that the Gilliérons were at the centre of this, producing many fakes like the chryselephantine snake goddess.

LOST IN THE RAIN

Linear B consists of pictorial representations of people and objects (some very recognizable, e.g. sword, horse, pig), symbols, and about ninety signs for vowels (a, e, i, o, u, etc.) and syllables (e.g. da, de, di, do, du, ka, ke, ki, ko, ku, etc.). The relation between pictures and syllables was a vital aid to deciphering the language. For example, our word ‘tripod’ derives from the Greek stem tripod-. When the Linear B tablets were deciphered, the depiction of three-legged objects was found to be accompanied by the syllables ti-ri-po-de. But while the script of Linear B is clearly derived from Linear A, applying the syllabic values of Linear B to similar signs in Linear A produced linguistic nonsense. That is what makes it highly likely that Linear A is a different language entirely, perhaps a branch of Semitic. But we need to find a lot more before we can begin to make a guess at what language it might be; only then can we apply appropriate values to the various signs to see if they produce results.

IT ALL ADDS UP

MYCENAEAN COOK-OUTS

Cooks are among the groups of workers mentioned in the Linear B tablets, and rectangular clay pans for cooking kebabs (souvlaki) have been excavated. These have indentations on the raised sides, across which metal rods were placed with chunks of meat skewered on them. Charcoal was then heaped into the bottom of the pan to cook the kebabs above. Such trays were portable and would be ideal for outdoor picnics, though the Linear B for ‘picnic’ is not currently known. Incidentally, Mycenaeans drank their wine flavoured with pine resin. Retsina has a long history.

MYCENAEAN SHIPWRECK (1)

In 1954 a shipwreck dated around 1200 BC was indentified at Cape Gelidonya off the southern coast of Turkey and excavated six years later. The main cargo was a ton of metal, most of it nearly pure copper from Cyprus. There was a lot of scrap bronze as well for melting and recasting, and a white material (with the ‘consistency of toothpaste’) that turned out to be tin oxide. Also on board were pan-scales with weights set to Near Eastern standards, so this ship probably came from northern Israel or southern Lebanon (the same region as the Uluburun wreck; see below). Interestingly, later excavations with a metal detector revealed a trail of material on the sea-bed leading to the very rock on which the ship foundered.

MYCENAEAN SHIPWRECK (2)

In 1982 the world’s oldest-known shipwreck was discovered at Uluburun, a few miles along the coast from the town of Kaş in southern Turkey. Carbon dating and items from the cargo suggest it sank around 1315 BC. Its journey is thought to have begun from a port in what is now northern Israel or southern Lebanon because a major item of cargo was 150 clay jars of a type known to have come from that region. Some of the jars contained olives and one contained beads, but most contained terebinth, a turpentine-like substance used as a base for perfumes and medicines, from around the Dead Sea in Israel. There were also copper and tin ingots – the tin from southern central Turkey and around Afghanistan, analysis suggests – which together would make about 11 tons of bronze; 175 glass ingots of cobalt blue, turquoise and lavender; logs of blackwood from Africa (a hard, heavy wood, used for carving luxury ornaments); ivory tusks, hippos’ teeth, tortoise-shells, three ostrich eggshells (one intact), semi-precious stones, jewellery, gold and silver items, weapons (arrows, spearheads, maces, daggers) and food (almonds, pine-nuts, figs, grapes, pomegranates). There was a wooden ‘diptych’ inside – a double writing tablet – on the waxed surface of which could be kept a running record of details of the cargo, in and out; and pan-scales, some for precision-weighing of precious objects, some for heavier duty. The presence – to judge from the finds – of two Mycenaeans on board suggests that some of the precious cargo was bound for Greece, and they were there to ensure safe delivery. In all, 18,000 items were catalogued from places as far apart as Mycenaean Greece, Syria-Palestine, Cyprus, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and northern Sudan. Such was international trade in the late Bronze Age – though perhaps Copper and Tin Age would be more accurate.

MASTERS OF EVERY ART

The skill level of Bronze Age craftsmen in Greece, Crete and the Near East was remarkable. Fire is a powerful tool but needs careful controlling. Bronze Age Greeks had open fires, which could be enclosed, and bellows, but no other control mechanisms, let alone thermometers. They simply tested as they went along. Though the failure rate was doubtless high, they were masters of metal-working – smelting and gold- and silver-work involving fusing and soldering. Ceramics, including faience (a form of high-gloss, multicoloured vitreous ceramic) and glass, which also required careful heat control, were mostly imported from Egypt and elsewhere. Frescoes of great sophistication decorated plaster-lined rooms, with pigments from soils (though blue was artificial) and colours freely combined. Stone-work is everywhere, ranging from the massive walls of Mycenae to stone jars, seal-stones and jewellery. So too decorative ivory, bone and shells, often inlaid, often combined into elegant figurines, and so too woodworking, perfume and textile manufacture.

HISARLIK: GROWTH TO POWER

Hisarlik was an extremely important site for ancient Greeks. Located in an earthquake-prone area in what is now north-western Turkey, it was inhabited from about 3000 BC and consisted of a small central citadel and, as was discovered in 1993, a lower area for the local population. Its interest is that it may have had very significant dealings with Mycenaean Greeks. The town’s wealth must surely be connected to its location, controlling the entrance to the Dardanelles and therefore lucrative trade links between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Archaeologists identify nine phases (Hisarlik I, starting around 3000 BC, II, III, etc.), differentiated by changes in such things as pottery styles, imports, or degrees of grandeur and therefore wealth. There is no doubt that it was very wealthy. Gold items have been found there from around 2400 BC.

HISARLIK: THE FINAL YEARS

Hisarlik VI (around 1700 BC) represented the town at its most splendid, far larger and better constructed than any of its predecessors. It was notable for its monumental architecture – huge stone walls, gateways and towers – and a water-supply system via shafts and tunnels tapping into aquifers. The citadel was surrounded by a large settlement, encircled by a defensive ditch. Horses were kept there (Hisarlik was a main entry point for the horse into western Europe). But the town was partially destroyed around 1270 BC, by earthquake or war. Hisarlik VIIA was patched up and partly rebuilt by survivors before it too was destroyed by fire and perhaps war around 1190 BC. Hisarlik VIIB, further patched up, lasted into the Iron Age till around 950 BC, when it was again destroyed by fire. That marks the end of Hisarlik as a place of economic and political significance. The site was then (perhaps) abandoned till about 700 BC, when Greek colonists settled there.

HISARLIK: THE HITTITE CONNECTION

Whatever the archaeologists tell us about Hisarlik, the evidence from the powerful kingdom of the Hittites, in central Turkey, adds to the possibilities. Stored on clay tablets in the public state archives are copies of letters sent by Hittite kings in the thirteenth century BC which mention:

(i)

a powerful area in north-western Turkey called Wilusa, under the general control of the Hittite king;

(ii)

a king of Wilusa called Alaksandu; and

(iii)

dealings between the Hittite king and an overseas power called Ahhiyawa. At this time, it appears, Ahhiyawa is extending its influence on the Turkish coast, and the Hittite king does not like it much.

Since there was only one powerful city in north-western Turkey, ancient Wilusa was surely modern Hisarlik. Further, ‘Ahhiyawa’ looks linguistically close enough to the Greek word Akhaioi, ‘Achaeans’ – Greeks living in southern Greece. So were Mycenaean Greeks causing trouble in that part of the world? Were they responsible for an actual attack on King Alaksandu of Wilusa? It is possible, though there is no archaeological evidence of an attack by Greeks.

That summarizes the state of our hard knowledge about Hisarlik. Until, that is, half a millennium later when, quite out of the blue, the first poet of the western world hurled a gigantic spanner into the ointment… To him, or her, we shall turn in chapter 3.

THE END OF THE MYCENAEANS

The archaeological record is clear: from around 1200 BC, major sites including Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes and many smaller ones across Greece were destroyed by fire and/or abandoned. Many were not reoccupied for centuries. Where there was rebuilding, it was not on anything like the earlier scale, nor were new buildings put up. Linear B, seal-stones, frescoes and all the rest disappear. So do palaces, kings and royal families. Unstable population movements seem to have been the order of the day. There is no uniform pattern of collapse – Crete, for instance, comes off better than mainland Greece – but the relatively stable and prosperous world of the Bronze Age is gone.

Three explanations have been offered: warfare, internal or external (Greek myth tells of Dorian Greeks, ‘sons of Heracles’, living outside the Mycenaean world, causing mayhem and finally settling in the Peloponnese; Egyptian documents talk of raiding ‘sea peoples’); natural disaster (earthquake? famine? disease?); or some sort of economic collapse. That said, this was an environmentally fragile and uncertain world. It would not be surprising if men were drawn to plunder those parts of it that had enjoyed such notable economic success. One consequence of this breakdown was a movement of Greeks from the mainland across the Aegean to resettle on the coast of Turkey and its nearby islands – the first of a number of Greek migrations.

THE END IS NIGH?

Linear B tablets in Thebes at the time of its destruction were burned while the clay was still wet. This might suggest a sudden, quite unexpected attack, catching the scribes wholly unawares. A set of tablets from Pylos is even more suggestive. One mentions the establishment of a coastguard operation – 800 men (one every 220 yards/201 metres) along the coast; another mentions movement of troops; another 600 rowers; another requisitions scrap bronze ‘for points for javelins and spears’; another demands unnaturally large payments of gold from local governors; and another, written in great haste, refers to gifts (gold cups) and ‘victims’ for the gods – human sacrifice as a last desperate measure to stave off disaster? But it must also be said that these tablets may be entirely innocent records of regular deployments and requisitions in the Pylos region. Romance is – or may be – dead.

INTO THE DARK AGES

The end of the Mycenaean–Minoan world was so final that when the Greek world emerged into some sort of daylight in the eighth century BC, it bore very little relationship to what had gone before. To generalize from the archaeology: there were no more big, palatial buildings; no more graves filled with rich goods; little contact with the wider world. Given that the whole palace system, and with it the leadership it entailed, had collapsed, we can assume that people were thrown back on their own resources. That spelled trouble for craftsmen, who relied on the community to buy their goods. To produce bronze required access to markets abroad – that surely hastened the use of locally available iron. However, some features lived on:

•

the Greek language; thanks to Linear B, it now has a continuous history for some 3000 years and provides our language with words from drama, skeleton, squirrel and butter to rhinoceros, pterodactyl, hypocrite and helicopter;

•

the Olympian gods, though not the rituals typical of Mycenaean culture;

•

the myths associated with the gods;

•

memories of a heroic past.

900–750 BC: LIGHT DAWNS?

The concurrent collapse of Near Eastern civilizations at the same time at least meant that Greece was free from foreign invasion. As a result, the scattered communities, now deprived of centralized control, were left to work out their own salvation with whatever resources they had. It is perhaps this feature that resulted in the emergence of the independent, autonomous communities called poleis that were to characterize classical Greece (see p. 69). What leadership such communities had is hard to assess. In Athens there was a traditional belief that kings had given way to three arkhôns (‘rulers’ or ‘officials’), two elected and one appointed, with tenure for life, later changed to ten years; and then nine arkhôns each for one year (from 683 BC, it was claimed). If these positions were dominated by powerful families, it would not be surprising, especially as later developments point strongly to the desire of people to have some sort of political say in their communities, against the wishes of the elite.

II

800–725 BC

TIMELINE

776 BC

The Olympic Game

750 BC

Greek alphabet invented Hesiod on the gods