Although it may have taken only three or four days for the volcano to erupt, the effects were far-reaching. The global temperature would have gone down as volcanic aerosols were released, blocking solar radiation to the earth’s surface. As far away as Lake Golcuk in the Bozdag mountain range in Turkey, 320 miles north-east of Thera, a 12 cm-thick layer of Theran tephra has been found.5 Sediment cores from the Black Sea also contain Theran material. Ash would have drifted over an area of 500,000 square km, smothering crops, stifling livestock.
Following the volcanic eruption there were other horrors to come. As sea water was displaced by the shift of the earth and rushed into the collapsed magma chamber – the newly gaping Theran caldera sinking over 480m below sea level – a giant wave, a tsunami, began to gather and hurtle towards shores in the region. It is estimated that the largest tsunami created by the eruption of Thera – just one in a train of waves – would have been up to 12m high, travelling at well over 160 km per hour.6 Just 111 km away, the north coast of Crete was particularly badly hit. Near the Bronze Age palace of Malia on the island, tiny fossilised sea-shells have been found in mud deposits, shells that under normal conditions exist only in deep ocean. Small boats would have been plucked from the shallows and hurled onto the hills. And as the decomposing bodies of the volcano’s victims were washed back ashore, diarrhoeal diseases – cholera and typhoid – would have spread. The destruction and death toll would have been immense. The Bronze Age world was brutalised.
But for one group of people who lived in scattered settlements on the Greek mainland, the explosion of Thera offered an unexpected opportunity.
From the 19th to the 15th centuries BC, the islanders of Crete – the Minoans (thus named in 1895 by the archaeologist Arthur Evans after the legendary ruler of Crete, King Minos) – had dominated the sea-ways of the Aegean.7 Floating between Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the Minoans success-fully exploited their pole position. For five hundred years communities around the Eastern Mediterranean not only traded with ‘the people of Keftiu’, as the Minoans were probably known in the Bronze Age, but also followed their political and religious lead.8 Secure on their island home, the Minoans were wealthy, vigorous and influential. They have been described as a ‘thalassocracy’ – a sea-power, rulers of the waves.
The eruption of Thera changed Minoan fortunes. This was a sophisticated culture, a culture that relied on contacts with the outside world to keep its workshops fed with tin and copper, with semi-precious stones and with oils and unguents. But all boats moored along the busy north and east coasts of the island – a fleet essential for Minoan well-being – would have been destroyed by the tsunami that followed the Thera eruption. Patterns of trade and communication across the Aegean were disrupted. Vital farm-land was flooded. As refugees fled Thera itself they could have brought with them unfamiliar pathogens which would have radiated quickly from the crowded shanty towns that mushroomed on Cretan coastlines.9
The psychological impact of the disaster must have been far-reaching. For a fundamentally superstitious pre-historic culture like the Minoans, a perversion of nature such as this could be explained only in spiritual terms. The column of water which appeared from nowhere and hit the island at a horrifying, incomprehensible speed, the eerie afterglow of the volcanic explosion hanging on the horizon, must have been interpreted as momentous signs from enraged gods. The confidence of the Minoans – who had, for centuries, seemed blessed – would have been shaken to its core.
Helen’s Mycenaean ancestors were equipped to step into the breach.10
The Mycenaean civilisation first comes into focus around 1700 BC. Centred on mainland Greece – particularly its southern landmass, the Peloponnese – the Mycenaeans founded citadels, carved up agricultural districts and established a network of roads and trade-routes. This was a well-organised, ambitious and materialistic culture; each generation of the warrior-elite expanded Mycenaean territories and the treasure stores of Mycenaean palaces. As the Mycenaeans looked to the south, Minoan palaces and ports must have tempted them – control of Cretan territories would have offered a clear trade-route through to Egypt and across to Asia Minor. It is little surprise that after years as a fledgling culture, when the Mycenaeans decided to spread their wings, they had Crete in their sights. Thera’s explosion triggered a political as well as a geological shift in power.
Throughout the 16th century BC the Minoans appear slowly to lose their grip on the Aegean; then, around 1450 BC we find Mycenaean pottery simply replacing Minoan artefacts. At the great palace complex of Knossos in the north of the island, a Mycenaean administration takes the reins. Across the island, fires destroy all other palatial centres. All Minoan administrative records come to be written in the Greek language. Independent Minoan culture is eclipsed. For the next three hundred years it would be the Mycenaean Greeks, not the Minoans, who dominated the region. Following the eruption of Thera, the leaders of the mainland Greeks slowly join the ranks of the most powerful men on earth – by the 13th century BC Helen’s ancestors are, like the rulers11 of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Anatolia, described as ‘Great Kings’.12
And so, although many artists have imagined Helen and her peers as soft, sun-kissed creatures, wafting indolently in front of classically fluted columns in diaphanous chitons, if we are to hold in our mind a picture of the real women of the Late Bronze Age and the environment they inhabited, we must add harsher colours to the palette.
The eruption of Thera was the most showy disaster in the Late Bronze Age, but there were others. This was a fragile, edgy epoch in which communities were frequently destabilised by both political and environmental forces. The Eastern Mediterranean stretches over a tectonic-plate boundary – a zone where two plates in the earth’s crust push and pull like testy lovers; Helen’s story is set in one of the most seismic – as well as one of the most volcanic – regions of the world. In addition to the extreme eruption of Thera, for the Late Bronze Age populations of the Aegean natural disasters were regular and unwelcome visitors. There were ‘storms’ of earthquakes, as well as unusually frequent cosmic activity.13 From the 14th to the 12th centuries, on average, the Peloponnese would have suffered an earth tremor, an earthquake, or a cosmic strike every decade.
Across the Bronze Age Aegean there is evidence of these disasters in the form of ‘destruction layers’ – jumbled masses of disjointed architecture, artefacts, plant and animal remains. Everyday objects in the archaeological strata are in unlikely places or positions. In the most extreme examples, debris has been pulverised or burnt, human bones are crushed in rubble; the disorder bears witness to moments of great crisis. At Thebes – the main Mycenaean settlement in Boiotia, central Greece, which Homer tells us contributed fifty ships to the Trojan War effort – a destruction layer from a Mycenaean building on the hill of Kadmeia is a full metre thick. Trapped in one horribly compressed upper room is a skeleton, probably that of a woman aged between twenty and twenty-five, who seems to have been killed by a violent blow to the head as the building was ripped apart.14
Destruction layers witness trauma. They are public signifiers of private tragedies – but there were also devastating events that leave little archaeological trace. Landslides and dust-clouds, water springs blocked at the source, flash floods, rivers diverted: life abrupted.15 From 1800 to 1100 BC many of the settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean appear to have been hit not once, but repeatedly.16 Helen’s inheritance was vexed. She was born as a woman or as an idea when heaven and earth were in pugnacious mood. The mortar binding the foundation myths in a court such as hers would have been streaked with blood. The Mycenaeans clawed their way to prominence in the Eastern Mediterranean over rubble and detritus and broken lives; theirs was an ascent back-lit by flames. As they reach supremacy in the 13th century BC, the smell of death – whether brought by man or by nature – still hangs in the air.
Little surprise that Helen’s story is brooding and uncomfortable.
2
A RAPE, A B
IRTH
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.
W.B. YEATS, ‘Leda and the Swan’ (1928)
HELEN’S TRADITIONAL breeding-place, the Peloponnese in the southern Greek mainland, is, even when not rocked by natural disasters, a place of extremes. In her home town, Sparta, summer temperatures can reach up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), while in the winter choking mists clog up the valleys and the almond trees are laced with hoar-frost. High in the mountains that ring the town, there are icicles the size of a grown man. Widows at the roadside will tell how the weak and very poor still die from the cold. This can be a savage land and it has given birth to correspondingly savage stories.
Helen’s conception is a prime example. According to Greek myths, Helen came from good stock, but her genesis was violent. Her father, Zeus, was chief among the pantheon on Mount Olympus. Helen was Zeus’ cherished and only mortal daughter. Her mother, Leda,1 the wife of Tyndareus, King of Sparta, was famed for her beauty. One day, as Leda bathed on the banks of the Eurotas, the lush river that irrigates the Spartan plain, Zeus saw the young queen and was enraptured. Determined to have Leda, he turned himself into a giant swan and raped her.
In classical Athens, remembering these distant stories, the chorus in Euripides’ play Helen bemoans the moment: ‘so sorrowful was that destiny, lady mine, that befell you, a life better unlived given to you, yes given, when Zeus blazed in the bright air, in the snowflash of the swan’s wing to beget you upon your mother. What grief is there you have not known? What in life have you not lived through?’2
It was a beginning recalled as being at once brutal and erotic. In a mosaic from a sanctuary of Aphrodite at Paphos on Cyprus a gloriously plump-bottomed Leda, with her back to us, runs the edge of her gossamer shawl over the swan’s beak.3 Early Greek representations of the story are relatively tame, the bird small, with Leda simply petting him. But as time goes on, the bird grows bigger, the atmosphere more violent. In Argos, a tombstone commissioned by a rich Greek merchant immortalises in marble the moment when the swan enters the young woman.4 The sculpture stands at the entrance of the small Argos Museum. Leda is doubled over – in pain or in ecstasy – her hand making its way towards her vulva. It is impossible to tell whether she is trying to drag Zeus out or help him in. In a wall-painting from Herculaneum, the town buried along with Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, the fowl-god bites Leda’s neck. Michelan-gelo’s 16th-century Leda5 seems to be abandoned to sensual pleasure; after its donation in 1838, a copy of the painting was hung in the office of the director of London’s National Gallery rather than put on display as it was considered inappropriate for the public gaze.6
Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of the subject was rumoured to have been destroyed by the Vatican,7 but copies were made just before the work was consigned to the flames. Rubens painted his explicit oil (here the swan is pressed tight into Leda as she sucks his beak) from one of the hastily done sketches.8 In the 18th century, gentlemen would carry pocket watches that concealed the scene of Leda’s brush with bestiality and rape under a golden, finely worked lid. In one of D.H. Lawrence’s paintings, Leda is lying on her back, while the swan’s neck snakes its way up between her breasts. When Lawrence’s painting was shown in 1929 in the Warren Gallery in London, after 12,000 people had seen it, and the Daily Telegraph had dubbed the exhibition ‘gross and obscene’, the Leda (along with twelve other paintings) was seized as pornographic material by the police and impounded. Like her daughter Helen, Leda pays for the blessing of beauty. The perfection of these women cannot simply be enjoyed; it has to be tampered with, its abuse dwelt upon.
Although time can give representations of this story the veneer of respectability, we have to imagine many in their ruddy, primal form. Recently I visited the Palazzo Nuovo in Rome, now a part of the Capitoline Museums, at sunset.9 It was one of those halcyon days of late January. The low sun on the brick of the courtyard, refracting through the thick old glass of the windows, gave everything a soft, pale tinge – the light was the colour of apricots and cream. The galleries are lined with one marble sculpture after another, and turning right at the top of two flights of broad, generous steps, I stumbled upon a Leda from the 1st century BC.
With her pallid companions this young woman looked serene and demure – the two figures, the swan and the queen, carved from the same block of stone, have a companionable unity. But imagine the sculpture coloured as it would originally have been. Painted, the thick column of the swan’s neck, resting on Leda’s stomach and between her legs, would take on the appearance of a phallus – the swan’s beak its glans tip. Leda pulls up her cloak to hide her face, revealing one perfect carmine breast. Sand-blasted and neutralised, the statue blends into the crowd, and becomes inoffensive fodder for the tourists who file past. But when created this was a lurid and shocking scene, a titillating work of art which bore witness to an unnatural, forceful impregnation.
Although we give no credence to the stories of Helen’s bestial conception, the ancients would have been very comfortable with the idea that Helen’s divine genes came to her in the form of a bird. Birds (eagles, swans, larks, doves, swallows) were believed to be wherry-men for divine spirits.10 With the beat of the Swan-Zeus’ wings on Leda’s thigh came immortal power. The beautiful monster conceived on the banks of the Eurotas was an intoxicating mix – enough of a woman to be enjoyed, enough of a deity to be sublime.
The storytellers recounted that, following Leda’s rape on the banks of the Eurotas, the young queen produced a curious clutch of eggs.11 Some said Leda was pregnant at the time, and so Helen shared Leda’s womb with Tyndareus’ brood.12 They were a singular group of siblings. Helen’s half-sister Clytemnestra would go on to murder her husband Agamemnon in cold blood, and then be murdered in turn by her son Orestes. Helen’s twin brothers Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri,13 boys famous for riding white stallions and for their own successful rape of two sisters – Hilareia and Phoebe (known as the Leucippides)14 – would spend their short lives trying, with varying degrees of success, to protect their much sought-after sister.
Harbouring her testy chicks, Leda’s eggs were left to hatch in the protective foothills of Mount Taygetus, the king mountain in the range that flanks the west side of Sparta – then, as now, fragrant with rosemary, myrtle, wild pear and juniper.15 The eggs were found by a shepherd, gathered up, and taken back to the Spartan palace. It was from here that Helen would assert her position as a matrilineal heiress to a great temporal power.
Artists have been intrigued by the idea of Helen’s unconventional birth. In a number of canvases she is shown emerging from her egg, a white, fat, grub-like little thing. One such example, painted on wood between 1506 and 1510 by Cesare da Sesto in Leonardo’s Milan studio, now hangs in Wilton House, a stately home on the Dorset/Wiltshire borders in the south of England. Dimly lit in a corner, this is a masterpiece well worth seeking out. Strawberries, a symbol of fertility and abundance, cluster in the bottom left-hand corner around Helen’s egg. The skin of the newborn princess has a pallid, waxy quality. Helen’s avian gestation was given as one reason for her fine, albuminous beauty: ‘She is white, as is natural in the daughter of a swan, and delicate, since she was nurtured in an egg-shell.’16
Bizarrely enough, the last time I went to study the painting, a new version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was being filmed in the gardens of the house. The star was an English beauty, famous for her pale skin. I asked one of the staff why they thought this porcelain creature was a good choice – ‘She looks like a doll,’ he said, ‘men like that.’
Helen’s pallor was deemed an important part of her desirability. Having white skin was certainly a mark of supreme beauty when Homer composed his epics, and most likely in the Late Bronze Age too. Goddesses were frequently described as ‘white-armed’ and ‘pale-faced’.17 Mycenaean fresco fragments of high-born women always show them with chalky limbs and faces
. Some of the most exquisite and highly valued anthropomorphic arte-facts from the Mycenaean world, male and female, are carved out of ivory. Traces of white-lead in a number of Athenian tombs housing female skeletons show that a thousand years on, in the 3rd century BC, women blanched their skin in pursuit of physical perfection.18
In the West, whiteness came to have its own currency – little surprise that the most beautiful woman in the world was always imagined to be perfectly pale. In one representation of Helen’s story by Johann Georg Platzer19 (now hung at the Wallace Collection in London) a death-white, half-naked Helen is being bundled onto a boat by Paris and his troops. The sea and sky glower. The men pressing around the Spartan queen are hoary and dark. Her pallid body stands out, a pearl being wrenched from its shell.20
Helen’s snow-whiteness, perfection waiting to be spoiled, was an inspirational theme for writers too, allowing poets and prosaists to relate Helen’s brutal origins in delicate terms. A search through the 14th-century manuscripts at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, yields this description of Helen by a medieval theologian, Joseph of Exeter:
Leda’s daughter partakes more deeply of Juppiter’s starry character, and there breathes through all her limbs the spirit of the milk-white swan which deceived her mother. Her forehead flaunts its natural ivory, her head produces the gold of her hair in even tresses, her white cheek is like linen, her hands like snow, her teeth like lilies, and her neck like white privet.21
The Greek author Pausanias,22 writing around AD 160, tells us that, once Helen had hatched, her birth-egg was lovingly preserved and that in the middle of the 2nd century AD, the remains of her egg-shell, tied up in ribbons, were still suspended from the roof of a temple on the Spartan acropolis.23 Pausanias travelled to Sparta to visit the sanctuary, dedicated to Hilareia and Phoebe (those sisters who, according to myth, were stolen during a cattle raid by Helen’s twin brothers Castor and Pollux), in order to see this curious relic for himself.
Helen of Troy Page 5
