Originally from Asia Minor, Pausanias worked his way across the Aegean, producing a tour guide as he went. He noted what he saw, gathering intelligence from locals and other travellers. We are greatly indebted to him when it comes to tracing the physical remains of figures from Greek myth and history through the Aegean landscape – remains which have been described as ‘the archaeology of nostalgia’.24 Although not all of Pausanias’ extensive work is reliable, much does show meticulous research in the field. When finished, his opus, Periegesis Hellados, ‘A Guide to Greece’, ran to ten volumes.25
If you visit the Spartan acropolis today you will no longer find Helen’s egg. With the exception of the Roman theatre, here there are little more than a series of knee-high ruins. The position of the acropolis is splendid, even though its monuments are few and far between – scraps that come to some as a terrible disappointment after the glories of Athens. Visitors are rare. The half-excavated theatre is most favoured by the town’s teenagers – kids who practise bicycle stunts on its slopes. But the northern side of the acropolis is peaceful, sheltered by avenues of eucalyptus trees whose dagger-shaped leaves shudder and shiver in the breeze. Ancient Greece has been described as ‘a spiritual landscape rustling with invisible presences’,26 and sitting up there early in the morning it becomes easier to appreciate why this was believed to be so.
Surveying one of the most fertile valleys in Greece, one can imagine the populations of ancient Greece marvelling at Helen’s relic and honouring the spirit of Helen as they did so. For the Greeks, an egg was a recognised symbol of fertility and sexual potency.27 Immense eggs have not lost their totemic status; ostrich eggs can still be found, gaudily decorated, hanging from Greek Orthodox churches in the region. Throughout antiquity, a trickle of pilgrims would have visited Helen’s egg in the temple, and, standing under the remains of her egg-shell, would have prayed that they too would be blessed with the power of the Tyndareid women, Leda and Helen, of sexual attraction and fecundity.28
What Pausanias saw may well have been a relic from the Late Bronze Age, strung up in the roof of the classical temple of Hilareia and Phoebe – the Mycenaeans did import ostrich eggs from Africa and surviving arte-facts from pre-history were often thought by the ancients to have hidden powers.29 We shall never know. But, whatever its provenance, in the 2nd century AD, an egg – decorated with ribbons and surrounded with stories – was there. Helen, Leda’s hybrid love-child, was commemorated at Sparta under the cracked remains of her curious ovum.
Pausanias’ egg is a cogent reminder that Helen was a much revered presence in the city of Sparta. From at least the 7th century BC onwards, she was venerated at Spartan shrines as a heroine – a patron and protector. Men and women left precious dedications to her. They carried out animal sacrifices in her honour – devotions usually reserved for gods and goddesses. Young Spartan girls would incant her name on the eve of their nuptials.30 Up until the Roman period dynasties of priests and priestesses avidly maintained her cult. Spartans, then and now, fiercely defend their conviction that Helen was a local girl, even though the attitude towards her in the modern-day city is somewhat ambiguous. Waiters in hotel lobbies will still attempt to get the attention of young women by comparing them to their Helen of Troy. The old men who meet every day in the kafeneio to smoke, drink coffee and watch the world go by get surprisingly heated when debating her merits; a number still damn her as a ‘bad woman’31 and yet the city’s first DVD guide has been narrated by the ‘voice of Helen’.
Sparta lies in a valley, surrounded by what Homer describes as ‘Lacedaemon’s lovely hills’. When I was last there, in early spring, from my hotel room I could see the snow-capped peaks of Mount Taygetus in the distance, the eagles wheeling round it, the foothills fringed with fields of wild iris.32 Camomile and thyme grow rampantly in the tiny archaeological sites that are scattered throughout the city, and the evening air is tinged with their scent. This, the ancients told each other, was the rich domain that a newborn Spartan princess would inherit. And it is in this vigorous, redolent landscape that we have to look for traces of our Bronze Age Helen.
3
THE LOST CITADEL
Look, Pisistratus – joy of my heart, my friend – the sheen of bronze, the blaze of gold and amber, silver, ivory too, through all this echoing mansion! Surely Zeus’s court on Olympus must be just like this, the boundless glory of all this wealth inside! My eyes dazzle … I am struck with wonder.
Odysseus’ son Telemachus describes Helen’s and Menelaus’ palace to the son of King Nestor. Homer, Odyssey1
A MYSTERY SURROUNDS HELEN’S PALACE. The Sparta of the Age of Heroes features prominently in the canon of Greek myth – and yet no obvious palatial remains have been uncovered, no monumental Bronze Age structure that one can imagine being a spur to the Homeric tales of court intrigue and warrior honour – or the awestruck hyperbole of Telemachus’ report as he wonders at the opulence of Helen’s Spartan home. Recent archaeological discoveries in Greece2 suggest that modern-day Lakonia was indeed a distinct territory in the Late Bronze Age;3 the poets tell us it was a rich kingdom. So where is the royal seat of Lakedaimonia, the headquarters of the Mycenaean clan that held sway here three and half thousand years ago? Where is the home of a Spartan Queen, our Bronze Age Helen?
Archaeologists have looked for a Mycenaean palatial complex buried beneath present-day Sparta but have drawn a blank. Preliminary investigations suggest that the earliest remains of occupation and permanent settlement under the modern town date from the 10th or 9th century BC. There is a slim chance that Late Bronze Age walls, chambers and grand halls could be hidden there, but until such a footprint has been located we have to look elsewhere to try to identify where the Bronze Age Spartan clan would have been raised.
The prime candidate is just outside Sparta itself on a hill called Therapne. The road to Therapne lies to the south-east of the city. It follows the River Eurotas upstream for a mile or so and then branches – one metal sign for an archaeological site signals a turning right into a low ridge of hills. The situation is impressive, but the archaeology scant. The German archaeologist and adventurer Heinrich Schliemann, who famously ‘discovered’ the site of Troy, came here at the end of the 19th century and was disappointed – he declared this was no home for Homeric heroes. But local farmers had more faith. As they worked their fields primitive artefacts made of bronze and terracotta – votive offerings – were turned up by the plough. Some came forward with their finds; in 1909 archaeologists from the British School at Athens began to dig.4
The earth leading up to the summit of Therapne is a rich burnt red; even in spring the grass that covers the hill has already been bleached to a sandy gold. On the high ground, the warm winds start to move quickly. Here you can see a 50-mile span north to south of a domain rich in natural resources. Stretching out beneath the shadow of the hill is the flat, fertile Tayegetan plain, now a market garden for Athens and beyond – Spartan oranges end up as pulped juice around the world. The horta – wild greens – that gave the ancients a mineral-rich diet, and kept the modern Greeks going through German occupation, still grows on the hillside. Faunal remains attest to the presence, in the Late Bronze Age, of the quarry of hunts enthusiastically portrayed in Mycenaean art: venison, hares, duck, geese, wild boar and partridge.5 The Eurotas meanders through the valley all year round, crystal clear in the spring, rusty after the November rains when it tears its banks.
Up here on this river bluff there are two distinct areas of archaeological significance. The oldest is a truncated Late Bronze Age building surrounded by tantalising clues of human activity: painted pottery sherds, female figurines6 and beads made of semi-precious stones, spindle whorls, loom weights and pots for food preparation. The second archaeological feature, crowning a misshapen natural rock core, is a crumbling rectangle of archaic stone blocks – the remains of a religious structure – a structure that has just been shown to have late Bronze Age foundations. For the last two millennia, this partic
ular remnant of the early days of Greece has been known as the Menelaion. 7 But before that, the building that stood here, dating from the late 8th century BC and rebuilt in the 5th century BC, was called, simply, TES HELENES HIERON – ‘HELEN’S SHRINE’.8
From at least the 7th century BC onwards, ‘Helen’s Shrine’ was believed to be the spot where Helen was buried alongside her husband Menelaus. Here great honours were paid her.9 The Spartans could have chosen to worship anyone at this prominent location: Athena, Heracles, Poseidon, or the king of the gods, Zeus himself. But for at least a thousand years this breath-taking, confident, awe-inspiring site was reserved for Helen and for Helen’s family10 and as late as AD 300 Helen was still described by a poet called Tryphiodorus, who wrote another epic version of her rape, as ‘the bride [nymphe] of Therapne’.11
Archaeological discoveries back up the connection made with Helen in the literary record. The hilltop was first excavated in a rather piecemeal way in 1909 and 1910 – and then left fallow for over sixty years. But when archaeologists started to work more systematically in 1974 they immediately turned up evidence of cultic activity; pits at the corner of ‘Helen’s Shrine’ to accommodate offerings of holy food; in front of her shrine a deep cistern providing water for the purification of celebrants and for the communal feasts that played a key part in cult worship.12 The words ‘For Helen’ have been incised into a 6th-century harpax, 13 a meat-hook dedicated as an offering. This vicious-looking eight-clawed instrument (now in the Sparta Museum), used for hanging meat, suggests that Helen was worshipped with animal sacrifices and feasting: ‘sacrifices worthy of gods not just heroes’, says Isocrates in the middle of the 4th century BC. 14 A fine bronze perfume jar, an aryballos, was also found here. Dating from the 7th century BC, it too is inscribed, roughly, with Helen’s name.15 Difficult to make out, the inscription reads: ‘Deini[s] dedicated these things [in gratitude] to Helen (wife) of Menelaos.’16
Three hundred or so terracotta figurines, a number of them women, riding horses, have been excavated at Therapne. These could be images of Helen herself 17 or, perhaps more likely, of her worshippers. Fibulae – sturdy bronze and iron dress pins – have also been found on the hill; dedicated perhaps by girls who communed with the spirit of Helen and then left their girlhood and their girlish clothes behind them, descending the hill as a rite of passage when dressed as mature women.18 A steady flow would have tramped up that hill between c. 700 and 200 BC clutching their gifts for Helen, thinking fervently of her as they came.19
So if this was the location of Helen’s shrine, could the Late Bronze Age building, a hundred yards off, be Helen’s palace? For years excavators and romantics have debated whether the compact Late Bronze Age remains – described by the most generous as a ‘mansion’ – might have held the royal household, might have been where Helen grew up, the palace to which she was brought by Menelaus after her dangerous liaison with a prince of Troy, where – in a scene that was vividly imagined by Homer – she entertained Odysseus’ son Telemachus and heard stories told of how the Western world had risen in arms to bring her home from a foreign city.20 However, there is a problem. Other palatial complexes, built and ruined at about the same time are significantly larger. ‘Nestor’s Palace’ at Pylos, a hundred kilometres west, appears to be five times the size of the Spartan offering. The other grand citadels in the Peloponnese dwarf the Therapne remains. In the Argolid plain the palace complex of Mycenae covers an area of c. 110,000 square feet (10,220 square m) with a surrounding community spread over c. 32 hectares; the Tiryns and Pylos complexes are c. 55,000 square feet (5,110 square m).21 Helen, always billed as a wealthy woman, would surely have inhabited something approaching this scale.
Here then is a bewildering state of affairs; at Therapne evidence of a vigorous cult of Helen – and a fortifiable hill standing above a fertile plain just as the Mycenaeans liked it (almost without exception they favour elevated defensive positions). Here is a Late Bronze Age building of the 13th century BC, the most likely date of a Trojan War, scattered with Mycenaean pottery. We have a Linear B reference to a district called Lakedaimon; and yet visible signs of a palace are absent. There is no hint of the grand citadel-complexes found at the other seedbeds of Mycenaean culture. No showy home for a rich Spartan queen.
The latest research does, however, shed some light.22 The eastern slopes of the hill of Therapne are very exposed – the summit is particularly prone to erosion and the clay sub-soil easily subsides. The remains of that little ‘mansion’ have now been identified simply as substantial basement storage areas. Late Bronze Age sealings for clay stoppers have been found here; this is where food and wine supplies would have been stored. These modest remains do not look like a palace, because they were not one. Any Mycenaean palace would have towered high above, away and to the left as you stand facing the setting sun. There are faint traces of this building on the highest point of the hill and a rough staircase leading from the ‘basements’ to where the upper rooms would once have been. The basements are a fraction of a larger complex and have survived only because of their more protected position on the hillside.
But the area of ground where that palace would have stood has been eaten by the elements. The hill of Therapne is itself now much smaller than it would have been three thousand years ago – as a result of natural erosion vast quantities of earth have, over time, slowly but surely slipped down the hillside. And as the ground disappeared so too the Spartan palace walls would have cracked and tumbled. Mycenaean treasures, broken and exposed, would have been eagerly picked off by human scavengers. We cannot find the palatial complex of the Late Bronze Age king and queen of Sparta, because in its entirety it is no longer there to find. Even if Helen has not escaped from history, her home has almost certainly escaped the archaeological record.
But one enigmatic woman from the Late Bronze Age has been left up on Therapne hill. While excavating close to the basements, archaeologists found three skeletons.23 The first was a human female – aged about thirty; the two others were children. The woman has her legs drawn up to her chin, suggesting she has been trussed up with her hands behind her back.24 She was unworthy of even a shallow grave, her body left on a rubbish tip. Hers was no natural death. She was, almost certainly, either the victim of an attack or has been left as a human offering – a sacrifice. At the time that she died the basements had been scorched by a fire of such intensity that large areas of the palace above must have been weakened or destroyed. Here, towards the end of the 13th century BC, the community living at Therapne witnessed a dreadful calamity. The destruction of the palatial buildings at Sparta is symptomatic of the closure of the ‘Age of Heroes’, when across the Greek mainland once powerful Mycenaean centres crumble and fall. Archaeological evidence describes the features of this demise but not its cause. At Sparta we have only one adult witness left – and she is long silent.
It seems as though the Spartan palace, immortalised by Homer as blazing with gold, amber, bronze, silver and ivory,25 will never be teased back out of the earth. So, to envisage more fruitfully how a Late Bronze Age princess such as Helen would have spent her early years, we have to look elsewhere: we have to travel 120 kilometres north-east of Sparta to the plain of Argos and the place that gave Mycenaean civilisation its name – the grand citadel of Mycenae.
4
THE MYCENAEANS
Mycenae rich in gold
HOMER, Odyssey1
IN 1871, HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN, a man who had started life as a sickly grocer’s assistant but accumulated a fortune – in the indigo trade in St Petersburg, during the gold rush in California, and finally dealing in saltpetre and brimstone at the inception of the Crimean War – went to the Eastern Mediterranean in pursuit of Helen of Troy and the old gold of the Age of Heroes. Schliemann was ravenous for knowledge and archaeological experience. He had taught himself eighteen languages, including Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and, as an adorer of the works of Homer, he determined to find physical proof of the Iliad and the O
dyssey. At the age of forty-eight he travelled to Turkey in search of Troy and started to dig – in the right place.
Schliemann’s luck matched his millions. Throwing his money at the excavation of a hill called Hisarlik he swiftly uncovered a wealth of pre-historic artefacts. Within a year the German amateur declared he had discovered King Priam’s splendid citadel and the jewels of Homer’s heroes. But then came a problem. Failing to share his treasure-trove with the Ottoman authorities as agreed, Schliemann was banned from excavating on Turkish soil. Frustrated, fired up, irrepressible, he fixed his sights on Greece. In 1874 he moved to the Peloponnese and began a series of unofficial excavations at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae.
Mycenae was the legendary home of the greatest of all the Greek tribal leaders: Agamemnon, ‘the king of men’; the warrior who returned home victorious, a purple cloth laid beneath his feet as he stepped back through the gates of his citadel;2 a short-lived welcome as it transpired, for lying in his bath the returning hero was stabbed to death by his unfaithful wife – Helen’s half-sister, Clytemnestra – and his bones thrown to the dogs. The gruesome tale appealed to the dark imagination of the ancient Greeks. In the Hellenistic period tourists visited Mycenae to see the drama played out in front of them during alfresco performances of Greek tragedies (such as the Oresteia) above the very scenes of these legendary crimes.3
For Schliemann, Mycenae would prove as rich a vault as Troy. On discovering a gold death mask from one of the royal shaft graves within the citadel at Mycenae, Schliemann made his – famously exaggerated – claim that he had located another home of a warrior hero and had ‘gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’.4 Following the showman-archaeologist’s romantic pronouncement, a motley crew of scholars, writers, poets, artists and empire builders converged on Mycenae, to gaze and wonder. We know about the influx of these archaeo-tourists in unusual detail because many stayed in Schliemann’s old lodgings just down the road from the Bronze Age citadel, a little house called La Belle Hélène.
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