A cache of Linear B tablets from Pylos offers an explanation. At the Mycenaean palace of Nestor 100 km west of Sparta there was a flourishing trade in olive oil. On a number of these tablets have been scratched the words and symbols for ‘perfumed unguents’ – that are to be used on cloth.4 It seems these unguents do more than just soften. Olive oil, rubbed into linen cloth and then washed out again, leaves a distinct afterglow. Using the unguents is a time-consuming, expensive business; wearing ‘shining linen’ would have been an honour reserved only for the finest in the palace. An honour reserved for a queen such as Helen.
A lucrative sideline to the olive oil industry was the manufacture of perfume.5 Fragrances included sweet sage, hyssop, cyperus (an aromatic marsh plant) and rose. Some oils were coloured an earthy red with henna. Women and men (who both wore their hair long) would have massaged the oils into their chests, faces and scalps. The fresco evidence from Mycenaean palaces suggests that women typically twisted and coiled their hair – Helen’s famous golden curls6 may have been decorated with the products of the ‘makers of hair braids’ who lived and worked near Pylos.7
My most recent visit to Pylos8 was with a cameraman, and (as he put it) we looked and felt like something out of a cheesy drinks advertisement. I was driving a white, open-topped jeep, while he filmed in the back seat. Ancient Pylos is perched right on the top of a steep hill, Epano Englianš, and so the road that leads directly up to it from the coast describes a series of neat, hairpin bends. As we screeched around the corners, in his viewfinder you would get the odd wisp of my hair, a very blue sky (when I unwittingly made an emergency stop) and ranks upon ranks of the bright pink oleander that grows wild here and lines the roadsides.
It seemed a fitting environment for a Bronze Age perfume business.9 Given the procedures involved, three and a half thousand years ago you would not have smelt just oleander as you came up that hill. The air would have been saturated with scents – anise and rose and that rich tang from the burning, broken olive stones that were used by artisans and craftsmen as a smokeless fuel.
The organic signals left on the interiors of clay pots now enable us to put together a fuller picture of aromatic workshops across the Eastern Mediterranean. Workers would be chopping and pulverising coriander, cardamom, or the resin from terebinth trees – all substances that have the ability to break down organic material.10 Obsidian blades have been found, used to slice raw ingredients; these are stone razors whose cutting edge can end up a fraction of a millimetre thick – a blade worthy of any medical instrument. One enthusiastic archaeologist in England asked for his own obsidian blades to be used during a surgical operation.
Soaked in wine or water, the plant pulp made an astringent paste which was then boiled up with oil. Aromatics such as sage and rose petals would be crushed and heated. Oil of iris (extracted from the iris root) was an important ingredient: four thousand years on, oil of iris is still being used in the manufacture of perfume, and today sells at around £3,000 per kilo. The Bronze Age vegetable cornucopia would then be left to steep for a few days before it was stored in elegant stirrup jars. Archaeologists working at Mycenae report that when they removed the clay stopper from one of these, a sweet fragrance hung on the air for a moment and then evaporated.11
Pylos clearly produced more perfume than was needed for a local economy. Perfumed oils – liquid gold – were exported by the Mycenaeans in exchange for luxury goods, as well as that raw material that kept the Bronze Age world turning, copper (which combined with tin makes bronze) from Cyprus. Mycenaean stirrup jars – the standard carriers for liquid goods – have been found as far south as Nubia and as far east as the upper Euphrates.
For a Bronze Age Helen, the beauty regime did not stop at a massage with aromatic olive oil. Representations of women reveal dark, smoky eyes – kohl perhaps on their upper and lower lids. Recipes and organic analysis confirm that at this time in Egypt kohl was made from a confection of charred almond shells, soot and frankincense.12 Galena (a dark grey ore of lead) was also used.13 The kohl must have ended up as a sticky gunge – essential because this was beautification with a triple purpose: make-up that protected women’s eyelids from sunburn as well as acting as an insect-repellent.
All the women on Mycenaean frescoes have gleaming white skin. The range of implements and mixing bowls found in women’s graves indicates that substantial quantities of make-up were produced – enough to cover parts of the body as well as the face. White lead oxide was available in the Late Bronze Age, and the iconography of the frescoes suggests that, for particular religious and state occasions, women’s heads, breasts, hands and arms would have been painted white and then decorated with colourful symbols.
A striking painted sculpture of a female head dating from the 13th century BC, found at Mycenae and now sitting in a case at the National Archaeological Museum, stares, glazed, through narrowed kohl-rimmed eyes.14 Her lips are a cherry red, on her cheeks and chin are red circles, surrounded by dots – they have the appearance of scarlet suns. These symbols also appear on the cheeks of terracotta female figures (such as the ‘goddess’ from the cult centre) and of a number of women on Mycenaean frescoes. On other frescoes from Pylos, Malia and Thera, women seem to have had their ears rimmed with scarlet. The overall effect is mesmerising.15 Women made up in this way have great impact: they become walking effigies. Their faces take on the appearance of a mask – their painted bodies move from the natural to the supernatural.16
The sartorial culture of the world in which a Late Bronze Age queen grew up would have been the same for generations. Dresses represented in the art of the Mycenaean citadels are almost identical to those originating, three hundred years earlier, on Minoan Crete, and indeed on the Cycladic island of Thera. The clothes a Helen could have worn would have mimicked those of her great-great-great-great-grandmother. Made from wool or linen, her dresses, skirts, cloaks and under-skirts would have been dyed with saffron, indigo, purple, madder red, onion skins or cochineal from the eggs of the coccus. All the colours were made fast with vinegar, salt or urine.
Linen – the Linear B word for flax is linon – stretched to the point where it becomes a flimsy, frivolous material, more reminiscent of organza, would have wrapped around her legs. Richly decorated, heavier fabrics, layered in strips one on top of the other, like roof tiles, were pleated over the top.17 And still emerging from the earth are punched gold discs – also from the wardrobe of a Mycenaean aristocrat. For decades archaeologists assumed these were a form of coinage; but in fact they are decorations – giant Mycenaean ‘sparkles’ liberally sewn onto the clothes of their most honoured.
Ivory carvings, frescoes and inlaid gold rings show that aristocratic women, at least on special occasions such as a state celebration or a religious ritual, wore their breasts bare or covered only with a gossamer cloth of silk and linen, and there is no reason to think that a Spartan queen would have dressed differently.18 The classical Greeks certainly presumed that at times Helen had an extreme décolletée. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, Paris’ mother Hecuba warns Menelaus not to meet Helen again after the fall of Troy, in case the sight of the reprobrate in all her half-dressed glory overwhelms him. He does and it does. Helen’s shawl has slipped to her waist, she kneels and clutches his knees,19 the position of a suppliant, but also, with breasts exposed, an act of erotic stimulation.
Whether or not it was sexualised, the female breast was certainly idolised in the Late Bronze Age. Women appear with bare breasts during rituals involving trees and plants clearly associating the mature female figure with a celebration of fertility and procreation. A female breast, cupped in the hand, was the arresting design of a string of delicate beads made of gold, cornelian and lapis lazuli.20 On one particularly striking fresco from the Mycenaean palace at Thebes, a procession of bare-breasted women – all of generous proportions – stride purposefully together.
Down the centuries Helen’s beautiful breasts have been fetishised. The Roman elegiac poet Propertius talks
amorously about Helen and her family: ‘Thus on the sands of Eurotas Pollux was to excel in riding and Castor in wrestling, and Helen is said to have armed for exercise just like them, breasts uncovered, and her divine brothers did not blush.’21 And the poet Ovid goes further: in his imagined love-letter from Paris to Helen – the author lingers just that moment too long when he remarks:
Once, I remember, your robes fell open and your breasts were revealed to my eyes – breasts so much whiter than snow or milk or whiter than Jove as he embraced your mother.22
The Roman author, Pliny the Elder, in his popular work Natural History, 23 tells the story of a ritual goblet in the Temple of Athena at Lindus on Rhodes, made of electrum and reputed to be cast in the dimensions of one of Helen’s breasts. Breast-shaped cups were on occasion used by the ancient Greeks to hold holy liquid – one survives and is on display in the British Museum.24 Fifteen centuries later, Madame de Pompadour was said to drink out of champagne goblets inspired by Helen’s chest. Maurice des Ombiaux in his essay ‘Le Sein d’Hélène’ gives the ‘mythological’ background to the story:
Helen appeared with her attendants, looking as radiant as a Phoebe among the stars … the veil which covered her bosom was lifted and one of the two globes was revealed, pink as the dawn, white as the snows of Mount Rhodope, smooth as the goat’s milk of Arcadia … with wax provided by the golden daughter of Hymettus, the shepherd Paris … took the cast of the breast, which looked like a luscious fruit on the point of falling into a gardener’s hand. When Paris had removed the wax cast, the attendants hastened to replace the veil over Helen’s gorgeous breast, but not before her admirers had glimpsed a teat whose freshness was as tempting as a strawberry.25
Helen’s chest in the Late Bronze Age might have been covered with the sheer ‘wild’ silk spun from the cocoon of the native silk-moth, or with finely stretched linen, but whether bare or translucently veiled, her breasts would have been framed by a tight corset. This bodice, which looks from the art of the time to be intentionally figure-hugging, was edged with braid, crossed over the torso and fastened tightly below the diaphragm. On some frescoes (from Akrotiri on Thera) women wear tassels which swing to and fro at elbow level.
As Helen, or a woman like her, emerged from her sleeping quarters, dressed in all her finery, she must have seemed a vision. Plump from the choicest meats, nourished by the produce of one of the most fertile regions in Greece, her skin rubbed down with perfumed oil, she would have appeared extraordinary. ‘Sashed and lovely’, as Homer says, ‘in all her radiance, her long robes’;26 her own countrymen, as well as visiting diplomats and traders, would have caught glimpses of her moving from one area of the palace to another, or officiating at a ceremony: all that gold draped around her, catching the light and reflecting up onto her face and arms27 – turning her flesh the colour of freshly collected honey.
Just think of the chink and clatter those generous decorations would have made as the women moved around their palaces. Passing through the corridors, Helen would have been heard before she was seen. There is some-thing fabulously proud about a noisy entrance. No need to slip in or out of sight: when you have high status, the world must take you on your own terms. And in the Mycenaean citadels there would have been a swish and rustle of skirts, outsize sequins clanking, jewellery jangling, hand-held beads click-clacking, leather shoes tapping, as the feet of a Bronze Age queen paced across her decorated floors.
We cannot say what actual value beauty had in the Late Bronze Age: how a beautiful woman was assessed or what she was thought to be worth. But the importance of outward show and of material culture is self-evident. The rulers of the Bronze Age loved and invested in bright, beautiful things. Beauty was traded in the form of gifts. When the richest died, they made their spiritual journeys accompanied by the things that had sparkled around them in life. To associate oneself with beauty was a mark of success and power. Come the 8th or 7th century BC when Homer composed his epics, possession of a living, breathing beauty was thought to enhance both kleos (heroic fame) and kudos (standing in the eyes of humanity). Late Bronze Age texts from the Near East show that princesses were avidly traded between one ruler and another – their beauty vaunted in the diplomatic letters that set up the deal. In both Bronze Age and Iron Age culture, kharis and kallos, beauty, and kleos and kudos, reputation, were powerful currencies. Currencies in which Helen was rich.
PART FIVE
A LOVER’S GAME
Previous page:
Linear B symbols for man and woman.
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THE GOLDEN APPLE
… for beauty she [Helen] possessed in the highest degree, and beauty is of all things the most venerated, the most precious and the most divine. And it is easy to determine its power; for while many things which do not have any attributes of courage, wisdom, or justice will be seen to be more highly valued than any one of these attributes, yet of those things which lack beauty we shall find not one that is beloved.
ISOCRATES, Encomium of Helen1 (c. 380 BC)
A BRONZE AGE HELEN would certainly have been aware of her own beauty. One female skeleton from the 13th century BC discovered in Archanes on Crete was buried holding a mirror, its cold surface pressed right up close to her face. Early mirrors such as this are made of metal – some curved, many about the same proportions as our own hand-mirrors. Like our mirrors too, the frames and handles of those from pre-history were often finely decorated. They are familiar, instantly recognisable objects. One can readily imagine men and women picking them up and searching for their image in the disc in front – trying to understand who they were from the outside, in.2
In the classical world, an image of Helen often appears at the base of a mirror. It is almost as if the owners can fool themselves that the representation of Helen in front of them is, in fact, their own reflection, or that by holding an image of Helen, some of her superlative, iconic beauty might rub off on to them.3 There is a particularly fine example of Helen on the back of a mirror in the Victorian grandeur and gloaming of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Fitzwilliam is neo-classical, charmingly romantic; Corinthian pillars on the outside, plum and taupe marble within. The Helen mirror here was made sometime between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC out of bronze. Now the metal is a dull green but in its day it would have been buffed to a high, reflective gloss.4 Helen sits with Zeus, in his rapist guise as a swan, and a wantonly naked Aphrodite – she is in powerful company.
A popular vase design of the 4th century BC, much replicated, showed Helen leaning forward, staring into a mirror, lost in her own image while Paris stands behind brandishing his spear.5 In Trojan Women by Euripides – where Helen is a sinister figure – much play is made of the fact that Helen owns ‘the golden mirrors in which maidens delight’,6 and in Orestes, the anti-hero scoffs at Helen’s Trojan slaves, ‘chaps who polish her mirrors and set out her scents’.7
Despite the corpus of created Helens we have surprisingly few clues from antiquity as to what men and women imagined Helen saw as she looked into her mirrors of gold. When she is described, stock epithets are used; she is ‘white-armed’,8 her hair is ‘lustrous’9 and ‘golden’.10 The ancients were in no doubt that she existed yet there is no attempt to define, physically and severally, what made her so beautiful. Quintus of Smyrna retelling The Fall of Troy in the 4th century AD writes that ‘shame sat on her dark-blue eyes and cast its flush over her lovely cheeks’.11 This is about as specific as we get; the further back in history one travels, the more the face that launched a thousand ships is an irrelevance. Helen’s physiognomy is less important than how she made people feel – what her extraordinary charisma made them do. She is not just invisible, she is ineffable.
For classical, pagan antiquity her beauty is too important, too powerful simply to set down, to shackle with portraits or words. Helen’s beauty cannot be defined by a face alone. It is literally unspeakable. To witness Helen’s beauty, coming as it does from the gods, verges on a religious experience. When t
he old men of Troy see her walking along the ramparts, they know that this is a war worth fighting, but they describe her beauty as ‘terrible’ – like that of a goddess.
‘Terrible beauty’ would have meant more to the ancients than it does to us today – they knew of the dreadful things that could happen if one looked on the transcendental face of a goddess or a monster-woman. The Gorgon’s stare turns her victims to stone; when Actaeon, a young man hunting in the woods, catches sight of the goddess Diana bathing naked in a pool, she turns him into a stag who is then chased down and torn to pieces by his own faithful hounds as unwitting friends urge the dogs on.12 This is why Helen becomes Byron’s Greek Eve.13 If we understand the Spartan Queen in the way the ancients did, her beauty cannot simply be viewed, it is coercive: she forces men and women alike into a state of longing, she forces them to act. Those who look at her cannot walk away unscathed. She catalyses desire. She is an eidolon that burns with projected emotion.
Discourses on the power and meaning of beauty have been mulled over since the advent of the written record.14 Sappho, Plato and St Augustine all put their minds to the thorny question of where beauty came from, what it meant and what it was for. Considered a gift of the gods, beauty clamoured for attention. In Greek thought everything had an intrinsic meaning, nothing was pointless – beauty had a purpose, it was an active, independent reality, not a passive and nebulous quality that came into being only once it was discerned. Men such as Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Euripides would have had some trouble with Hume’s oft-repeated sentiment of the 18th century AD – beauty is in the mind of the beholder. For them, nonsense. A discrete entity, beauty could be measured and quantified. It was a psycho-physical parcel that had as much to do with inner character as with chest-size.15 Far from being insubstantial it was thought to wield distinct and determinate power.16
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