by Jack Lindsay
We seem certainly to have here a narrative with three phases. The couple emerge, go up to the boat (hailed by the tall man), then go down into the cabin. Generally the scene has been interpreted as a departure, but Nilsson saw it as a homecoming. Some critics have taken it as depicting an early stage of the tales about Theseus and Ariadne, or about Paris and Helen; others have seen in it a ritual scene of the departure of a goddess over the waters, or merely the account of a marriage. One writer has even seen it specifically as Helen and Menelaos off for the Elysian Fields.[76] Before we decide let us consider more examples of the same sort of theme.
A ring found near Canea, probably from the port of Knossos, shows a ship to the right with six rowers sitting in a row (oars not marked) and a steersman with a strong rudder-oar. The waves beat up against the ship in sharp angles; under them are three dolphins and some markings to suggest a rocky sea-bottom. On the shore stand a man and a woman. The man turns with an inviting gesture to the ship, stretching out his left arm, while with his right hand he holds the woman behind him by her wrist. He wears a waist-length shirt and his hair falls down his back; she has a flounced skirt. Behind them is an elliptical object with an upper part looking like a cut-off slab, which may be a baetyl or sacred table, but may also be part of a large pithos with a rim opening. Over the ship is a tree and a woman with relatively short skirt, one leg shown; she stretches out her right arm before her, with her left arm bent down. Above the outstretched arm of the man on shore is a knob-like mark which, like the marks before his feet, seem meant to indicate the ground. The ship lies in a bay, and the tree and second woman are not meant to be in the air, but are depicted with bird’s-eye perspective. The tree and the idol-like figure with its single leg show that there is a sanctuary on the shore. To interpret this scene as a marriage is not so easy; we seem rather to see a goddess leaving her shrine to cross the waters. Whether she does of her own accord or not, or what is the function of the man, is not made clear.[77]
We jump half a millennium when we turn to the next item, a three-footed ovoid pithos of Knossos; the polychrome decoration belongs to the archaic orientalizing period, late eighth or early seventh century. Between the handles we see a man and a woman set on bases: a detail common in Minoan art. She has a rounded coiffure and seems naked to the waist; he wears a plumed helmet and boots. He raises his two arms; she in a similar gesture touches his chin with her right hand. (Helen makes the same gesture on a protocorinthian aryballos which shows her rape by Theseus and Peirithoos, and her return with her brothers.) If the woman here is Helen, she seems rather to be confronting Menelaos after the sack of Troy than to be turning to Paris.[78]
A dinos found at Thebes is Late Geometric (second half of the eighth century) but probably made in Attika. A man holds a woman by the wrist and prepares to mount a boat with two rows of oars. She holds a wreath. The scene may well be Helen’s departure. The wreath has made some scholars take the woman to be Ariadne; but archaic art does not show Ariadne’s magic crown lighting up the labyrinth. The wreath indeed can be simply a love emblem, and as such it appears in scenes of Paris or Menelaos with Helen. The man has his foot on the gangway of the ship and is eagerly springing aboard.[79]
The ship scene reappears in an ivory relief from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. The ship floats above three fish; it seems to have just arrived — or else to be pulling up anchor for departure. Three warriors sit on the bridge with lances; one has a plumed helmet. Five round shields, decorated with geometrical patterns, hang over the edge of the deck. One of the crew fishes at the raised prow and hooks a fish; another crouches on the low beak beneath. The steersman sits under the high curved stern, facing forward, three sailors work the rigging. One at the bow hauls at the forestay; two by the mast raise the yard with halyards. At the stern a bearded man (? captain) grasps the hand of a woman facing him. He has been interpreted as saying goodbye; but his grasp may signify possession, so that he is about to draw the woman aboard. Through exigencies of space she is shown standing on one of the two steering-paddles. The man grasps her right wrist and she lays her left hand on his shoulder. Behind her is a large bird; and on the prow is an inscription, Orthaia (with digamma), so the relief was a votive offering to the goddess.[80]
How are we to interpret the ship-boarding series? A remarkable continuity runs from the Tiryns ring to the Spartan relief. One way of explaining this away is to say that all the scenes represent marriage. In the Greek ceremony, after a banquet where the women would be present in their own corner with the veiled bride, the bride removed her veil and received in return gifts from the groom. He then grasped her by the wrist, and that was the final act of the rite. It sealed the contract, symbolizing the passage of the bride into the groom’s complete possession. Still holding her by the wrist, he led her to the bridal carriage; and the pompe, procession or fetching-home, began. Artists then naturally used the gesture of wrist-grasping to express marriage; but they also naturally used it for an abduction. The lover thus grasping the woman was supplanting the husband. The connection of ship and possession-gesture does not however suggest a marriage so much as an abduction, a slipping away from normal pieties.[81]
The ambiguity of the gesture appears in the two figures on a signet-ring (provenance unknown), probably dated early seventh century. The woman, posed frontally, turns her head to the bearded man, who wears a wreath and a short chiton with a three-coiled belt. She has her hair elaborately arranged under a crown studded with raised circle-ornaments. Her short-sleeved chiton is secured by a double belt; from her waist hang at least five globular ornaments, suspended by fillets. The man grasps her right wrist and she lifts her left arm in a vigorous salutation or in surprise. The dramatic aspect makes clear that here is no genre scene, and it has been suggested the actors are Zeus and Hera in the sacred marriage.
The likelihood that the ship scenes have a ritual or symbolic meaning at least in origin is strengthened by other early works of art, such as a gold ring from Mochlos on which is depicted a boat with its forepart shaped like a sea-horse or hippocamp. A woman sits in the boat, seeming to steady herself with her right hand; her bent left arm has the effect of making a gesture of greeting. On the extreme right is a construction best interpreted as entrance to a holy place, with a part of the high enclosing wall. Apparently placed in the boat (actually behind it) is a tree within an enclosure of rough masonry, with a similar sort of construction before it. Some strange objects appear above the boat; to the right are two rounded shapes (possibly a figure-of-eight shield on its side), behind which are leafless bushes. The shapes have been recognized as squib or sea-onion, which was thought in ancient times to have therapeutic and apotropaic virtues. The woman here is alone; there is no question of a marriage; the accompanying details suggest herbal magic. In a seal-impression from Hagia Triada the boat in prow and stern suggests a bird’s head and tail.[82]
Now this effort to render the living nature of animals or monsters, moving across the waters, acting as boats, again calls to mind a series of early Mesopotamian seals. On these the fantastic mythological creature subdued by the deity is transformed into a boat — still, however, clearly preserving the features of its real nature — in order to carry the divinity in its journey through the heavenly or subterranean waters. In some cases there is a hybrid man-boat, or man-fish, in which a part of the boat is anthropomorphised, ending in a human bust holding an oar. Elsewhere, on the other hand, the monster is recognisable, transformed into a boat, its head forming a prow and its tail the stern, and the deity sails within it: e.g. Ea, or Bau, with her characteristic bird, on the cylinder in the Hague Museum. (C. Levi)[83]
It is of interest, in connection with the Tiryns ring, that two of these seals link the boat with a wide door in full view on the shore, and in one seal there is a group of figures in lively conversation before the door.[84]
We may suggest then that the great goddess of the Minoans, an earth-mother connected with vegetation, had a ritual and myth of departure o
ver the seas, and that some rape or carrying-off (of the kind later associated with Korē or Persephone) was the explanation of her going away. Further we may suggest that tales of ravished or abducted heroines developed out of this pattern, and that the story of Helen, whether or not it had its origin in such ritual myths, was at some phase strongly affected by them.
This sort of Korē ritual may have influenced Spartan marriage customs, in which there was a strong tradition of the bride as a prize gained by capture. The lad who carried her off took her to her new home where the bridesmaid cut her hair short and dressed her in a man’s cloak and sandals. The cutting of a bride’s hair is common among primitive folk; and much argument has gone on as to whether it denotes chastity or subjection to the husband, or both. It may have developed such secondary significances; but at root it is a mode of initiation ritual, a passage rite, expressing the change from one form or level of life into another. At Athens males were enrolled in the phratriai or clans at the Apatouria, and the ceremony was called Homopatoria (the rite of those with the same fathers); on the third day came the Hair-cutting when lads competed in recitations. But the original nature of the rite is given away by the fact that the sacrifice was made by women to the Mother, the Bearer of Children, at the crossroads.
One of the Lives of Homer tells us how he was at Samos celebrating the Apatouria when a man recognized him and told the clansmen; they bade him bring the poet along to the feast. ‘And as he went, he lighted on the women who were sacrificing at the crossways to Kourotrophos; and the priestess looked at him in anger and said: “Man, get away from the holy things”.’ So we see that at the festival of the fathers no man might be present at the sacrifice. Photios explains the word oiniastemia (wine-doings) as ‘a libation to Herakles performed by the epheboi before the cutting of their hair’. At Troizen every girl before marriage cut a lock of her hair and dedicated it in the temple to Hippolytos. Indeed the very words koros and korē may well have the same root as keirein, to cut. Apollo was Phoibos of the Unshorn Hair — the initiate before the shearing. Ploutarch tells us that at Athens the lads passing from childhood to manhood dedicated ‘the first fruits of their hair’ to Apollo at Delphoi; a special sort of tonsure was called Theseis in commemoration of Theseus having been said to cut his hair in that way at Delphoi.[85]
Diōgma, Pursuit, was the name given to ‘a sacrifice at Athens performed in secret by the women at the Thesmophoria’. All men were excluded. In general we may say that it is a mistake to see cult-myths such as the carrying off of Korē the earthmaiden by Hades as merely reflecting the seasonal changes of winter, with the ascent of the maiden as the rebirth of vegetation in the spring. Such myths enter deeply into the experiences of the celebrants because they also express the death-rebirth of initiation ritual. Patterns of natural and social process continually and richly merge in primitive thought and feeling.
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The Helen of the early chants, if we are right in imagining that there were such early chants — doubtless more like Keret than the Iliad — would not have lived the life of a lady of the oikos, as we see Helen living it in the Odyssey. We must imagine her in the settings shown by Mykenean art — or by Minoan art as well, since the ruling class of the Mykenean cities clearly took over much of the manners as well as the arts of Minoan Crete. The ladies are represented in styles essentially Minoan, and we may accept this as reflecting contemporary fashion, since the men are shown in non-Minoan chitons. In a fresco from Mykenai we see a group of women seated at a window; and fragments from Thebes and Tiryns show women full length, walking in procession and carrying ritual vessels. They are dressed in close-fitting jackets and bell-skirts. At Thebes a lady wears a chemise under her jacket, as does a dancing-girl at Knossos. Female charioteers in the boar-hunt at Tiryns wear a straight garment covering them from the neck downwards, as far as their bodies are visible.
The ladies clearly had much freedom in social activities, and were ready to show their breasts like their Minoan sisters. Crude terracottas, often found in tombs, suggest that the women of the native population, of the lower classes, always covered their bosom and did not go in for bell-skirts; they seem to have worn sleeves; whether their dresses were one-piece or two-piece is unclear. The latter point applies also to the woman on the Warrior vase, though a two-piece dress is more likely and she seems to have long sleeves. In the Homeric epics women wear a single garment, apart from head-dress or veil. The woman’s peplos, the man’s garb or zōstra, and the sheets of the bed, make up the entire laundry of a great house. We must no doubt see Helen of the Odyssey in a blanket-dress with big pins.[86]
Chapter Four – The Cyclic Poets and Hesiod
The dates of the Homeric poems and the methods by which they were orally transmitted and ultimately put into writing cannot be dealt with here; but we may suggest that the Iliad was composed in the earlier part of the second half of the eighth century BC.[87] Tradition associated Homer with Smyrna and Chios; and Chios had a rhapsodic guild called Homeridai in the late sixth century. But Kymē and Kolophon also claimed him, and by the Roman period other places had put in their claim. The link with Chios and Smyrna goes back to Pindar, and near the end of the seventh century Simonides of Amorgos quoted the Iliadic line about the generations of men as being by ‘the man of Chios’. Pindar knew Homeridai; and his scholiast, probably guessing, stated that they were at first members of the poet’s family, then rhapsodists or reciters with no direct descent. They developed from a clan into a gild where co-option was possible. One of them, Kynaithos of Chios, was the first to declaim the Homeric poems at Syracuse in 504. The first Homeridai may indeed have been members of Homer’s own circle, and we may put them back into the eighth century.[88] Sparta, at that time not yet militarized and full of a vivid cultural life, attracted poets from all over Greece. Terpandros instituted musical contests at the Karneia, and Alkman made a ballet of the ball-game at which Odysseus surprised Nausikaa. Probably at this early date the Homeridai established themselves at Sparta, as also at Argos (perhaps a little later). They were at Kyrene and in Cypros by the later seventh century.[89]
What is beyond argument is that the two epics were composed in Ionia on the basis of formular material handed down and worked on by Ionian bards for several generations. Whether the same poet composed the two epics cannot be simply decided. Certainly there are strong differences between them, and some critics have even tried to date the Odyssey to the mid-sixth century.[90] But that is certainly going too far. The qualities in the epic which are not shared by the Iliad might come from the different sort of material, the strong folktale element and the closer relation to everyday life — or from changes going on in the poet himself. We shall here assume that the same poet composed the two epics, the Iliad in his younger years, the Odyssey as he was ageing. The works are closely linked, not only by much of their vocabulary, but also by a host of identical lines or half-lines. An analysis of the metre shows a remarkable similarity in the two poems; the differences are slight. Compared with other early poems in hexameters, such as the Hymns or Hesiod, the epics present a common front. In short, the differences that they show in method, diction, material, ideas, metre, can be attributed to a variation in date, in the poet’s growth, apart from contrasts flowing from the themes.
The poems seem composed for different festivals. We must not think of Homer or the Homeridai as court poets, even if they inherited a tradition going back to heroic days when bards chanted before lords and warriors. The Ionian bards sang at the markets of busy sea-ports, at the fairs such as the one at Delos, which were great religious festivals. Pilgrims came to such gatherings from all over Greece, and we hear of early choral contests. A chorus from Messenia was at Delos in the early eighth century with a hymn by a Corinthian. By Solon’s day Athenians were competing, and no doubt much earlier. There was a proverbial saying for a hearty singer: He sings as if he were bound for Delos.[91]
Hesiod gives us a picture of life on the mainland at this phase of Greek hist
ory. The men of power were the local nobles, whom he feared and mistrusted; they held the best land on the fertile plains between sea and mountains; they could afford hired men and slaves; they had houses in the walled cities that were growing up in suitable positions near good regions of plain-land. The cities, prospering, tamed the neighbouring hillmen and formed local leagues, or they asserted supremacy over lesser settlements, as did Argos and Sparta. Soon the nobles lessened the powers of the city-king who had been needed as war-leader in more difficult and cruder times. The kingship faded out except occasionally for some harmless religious survival. Throughout the centuries the Greeks clung to certain tribal forms, of which the core was the assembly of all free men. These forms were reorganized and reoriented to meet new needs and situations. There were many changes. The tribal systems were long dominated by nobles who reconstructed the clans for their own advantage; at times membership was limited to men who could afford armour, and so on. Yet at certain key points the tribal idea and the persisting forms provided the basis for a drive forward, which finally led to Athenian democracy as the highest level of development. The kingship was never re-established; there were no organized temple-priesthoods.
