Pendlebury’s excitement grew as he got off the boat in Crete. Just walking along the waterfront was like seeing Evans’s book come to life. In the frescoes Evans described, Minoan women were curiously graceful and attractive, “gaily dressed in the height of fashion, with elegantly coiffured hair, engaged apparently in gay chit-chat,” as Evans put it, while Minoan men had the sinewy physiques of aerial acrobats. “They were quite unlike the classical Greeks, unlike the Egyptians, unlike the Babylonians, unlike any ancient people whose painted or sculpted representations had survived from the ancient past,” archeological researcher Leonard Cottrell would note. There’s something very right, Evans reflected, about a culture that portrays itself with such sass and strength.
And here they were, alive and well and strolling the streets. “I know of no sight finer than a well-dressed Cretan peasant, and with the dress goes a swing and a lightness of foot which always sets me thinking of the slim athletes of Minoan days,” Pendlebury would write. From the port of Heraklion, Pendlebury made his way three miles south to Knossos, Evans’s spectacular six-acre restoration of an ancient Minoan city. Inside the great palace, Evans had found marvels of sophisticated design: a plumbing system, chess games, four-story architecture, locking doors, a trademark registry, a system of weights and measures, and an astronomical calendar. But deep belowground were hints of darker arts: sinister catacombs with mysterious piles of children’s bones.
Pendlebury got lucky; he found Evans on the porch of the Villa Ariadne, the stone compound that served as his home and a kind of youth hostel and teaching hospital for wandering archeologists. Students from all over the world were constantly bustling through, enjoying Evans’s excellent food and wine before setting off into the mountains or creeping through the thousand interlocking crypts and throne rooms of Knossos. Unlike most scientists, Evans was rich; between his family’s paper mill and his late wife’s estate, he had the cash to entertain scholars and bankroll an army of architects, artists, builders, and diggers in pursuit of his hunches.
And his wildest notion was this: maybe Homer’s and Virgil’s tales about Trojan Horses and man-eating Cyclopes weren’t fairy tales, but historical fiction: fiction, sure, but still historical. Evans knew he was risking a firestorm of ridicule, but at least he was following in a cocksure set of footsteps. Back when he was getting his start in archeology, Evans had been spellbound by Heinrich Schliemann, another rich rebel who sought more than proof that heroes existed; he wanted to visit their homes. Schliemann had been fixated by the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey, despite their magic and monsters, were far too realistic to be just make-believe stories about superhuman warriors and bewitched boat rides. His critics smirked, but that’s because, unlike Schliemann, they’d never amassed a fortune after being broke, homeless, and shipwrecked in a foreign country; they weren’t living proof, in other words, that average people are capable of epic feats.
As a teenager in Germany in the 1830s, Schliemann had hoped to improve his weak lungs by working as a shiphand on a voyage to South America. The boat went down off the Dutch coast, and Schliemann barely made it to shore. Sick and penniless, he slept in an unheated warehouse while running messages by day for a Dutch merchant. By night, he studied so feverishly that by age twenty-two he’d mastered bookkeeping and seven languages. By thirty-three he was boss of his own company and spoke fifteen languages. He became such a financial dynamo that during a short trip to San Francisco to recover the body of his dead brother, Schliemann learned about gold prospecting; quickly set up a frontier savings and loan; and pocketed another pile of cash before heading home.
But Schliemann’s true love was antiquity, and there was something about the Greek classics that always nagged at him. Was Homer really such a creative wizard, or had his stories lasted so long because they gave off a whiff of the real? Take Agamemnon, King of Men. He sounds too operatic to be true, the way he butts heads with Achilles, blood-sacrifices his own daughter, leads an army of warriors in battle for Helen of Troy, and then comes home victorious, only to be murdered by his wife. But if it’s all fantasy, why did Homer crowd his narrative with so many directional details that it reads like a pirate’s map to a treasure chest?
So Schliemann treated it like a map, and treasure is what he found. After decades of puzzling over Homer’s description of, for instance, a stone wall just past a windswept fig tree and not far from an icy-cold spring next to a steaming thermal pool, Schliemann finally sleuthed his way not only to the lost city of Troy but to the ruined palace and hidden jewels of Priam, its king. Triumphantly, he crowned his wife with “Helen of Troy’s tiara,” a stunning headdress of cascading gold he’d uncovered that was certainly worthy of the fabled beauty, if not owned by her.
And Schliemann wasn’t finished; he followed his success at Troy by hunting down palaces that matched to an uncanny extent Homer’s descriptions of the homes of Agamemnon and Odysseus. “Here begins an entirely new science,” one converted scientist admitted. All this time, a written road map had been right there, right in two of literature’s best-read texts. No longer would archeologists have to search for the stones and then figure out what happened; they could now read what happened and go in search of the stones.
Schliemann was sixty-four and wearying of a lifetime of underdog battles when he met young Arthur Evans, so he was inclined to pass along a tip: no one had ever solved the mysteries of Crete. Homer told of “a great city called Knossos, and there, for nine years, King Minos ruled and enjoyed the friendship of almighty Zeus.” Thucydides backed up the story, describing Minos as a world shaker whose fleets dominated the mainland and controlled the seas. So Evans followed Schliemann’s lead; relying on myths as his guide and his detective’s eye for landscape clues (Evans knew, for instance, that fennel has long roots and often sprouts where the ground had been deeply disturbed), it wasn’t long before he zeroed in on a pair of dirt mounds not far from the coastal city of Heraklion.
Evans was soon burrowing into a kingdom older and wilder than anything he’d imagined. The Minoans were so remarkable, Evans began wondering if all those awful legends about King Minos weren’t just sour grapes and gossip. “The fabulous accounts of the Minotaur and his victims are themselves expressive of a childish wonder at the mighty creations of a civilization beyond the ken of the new-comers,” Evans would write. “The ogre’s den turns out to be a peaceful abode of priest-kings, in some respects more modern in its equipments than anything produced by classical Greece.” Of course, King Minos didn’t help his public image any by conducting a weird basement ritual that had teenagers somersaulting over the horns of charging bulls. “It may even be that captive children of both sexes were trained to take part in the dangerous circus sports portrayed on the Palace walls,” Evans had to admit.
By the time Pendlebury arrived at the Villa Ariadne, it was Evans’s turn to withdraw from the hunt. He was seventy-seven years old and secretly in some serious hot water. He’d been arrested in London’s Hyde Park for public indecency with a seventeen-year-old boy, and only eased his way out of the scandal by turning over ownership of Knossos and the Villa Ariadne to the British School on the day he appeared in court. John Pendlebury’s timing couldn’t have been better. He arrived at the Villa Ariadne in 1928 as an unknown student and a year later was hired to run the entire operation.
Pendlebury knew right where he wanted to start: with the Minotaur, which he suspected was a lot more sinister than Evans realized.
CHAPTER 16
1,058 POUNDS: weight of boulder discovered on the Greek island of Thera, inscribed in the sixth century B.C. with Eumastas, son of Kritobolos, lifted me from the ground
1,015 POUNDS: heaviest weight any human has raw-deadlifted in the subsequent 2,600 years
TWO THINGS bugged Pendlebury about Evans’s Everybody-Was-Just-Jealous-of-the-Minoans theory.
First, you’ve got to stick to your guns. If you’re going to claim that myths have their roots in reality, then you can’t back away once t
hey get bloody.
Second, King Minos had to be evil, or Theseus couldn’t have been great. Crete was where Theseus came alive as a hero, where his legend was formed and defining characteristics were revealed. Something must have happened, some kind of epic challenge that would test a man who’d become known as both a genius of self-defense and a true champion of the hurt and hopeless.
“He showed himself the perfect knight,” the master mythologist Edith Hamilton would declare. Except where girlfriends were concerned, of course; no matter your excuse, you just don’t strand the princess who saved you from the Labyrinth on a rock at sea, or try to win the love of both an Amazon queen and the future Helen of Troy by dragging them off by force. Theseus’s heart was his weakness—and his strength. He was always pulling his bonehead buddy Pirithous out of some desperate scrape, and when the world turned its back on disgraced and blinded Oedipus, Theseus took Oedipus in and cared for his daughters. After Hercules recovered from a spell of madness to discover he’d murdered his own family, Theseus alone stood by him, talking Hercules down from suicide and bringing him home to heal from his horror. At war, Theseus refused to pillage his defeated enemies. In peace, he granted power to the people and made Athens a true democracy.
So couldn’t there be more to the Minotaur story? Isn’t it possible that some kind of dark deeds really were afoot on Crete, something nefarious involving Athenian teenagers who were saved by a “perfect knight”?
As new curator of Knossos, Pendlebury began his own investigation into what really went on down in King Minos’s basement. According to legend, Minos’s son, Androgeos, was a superb athlete who was murdered after winning all the events at the Athenian Games. To avenge his death, Minos forced Athens to send fourteen of its finest young men and women every year to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, the monster born after Minos’s wife had a fling with a magical sea bull. The Athenian teens would be shoved into a labyrinth, where they’d wander in darkness as the Minotaur sniffed them out and devoured them. Until Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to go.
Theseus was clever enough to increase his manpower by persuading two young men to masquerade as girls, but his big break came when he caught the eye of Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Her heart fluttered at the sight of Theseus, so she snuck him a ball of string and whispered some advice: if he tied one end of the string to the entrance, he could follow it back out of the maze if he defeated the Minotaur. How exactly he’d handle the monster’s horns and bone-crushing strength, Theseus had no idea—until they were face-to-face. The instinct of any creature with horns is to thrash its head, so Theseus got behind the Minotaur and onto its back, locking on to the Minotaur’s neck as it raged and flailed and finally choked itself out.
“He presses out the life, the brute’s savage life, and now it lies dead,” Edith Hamilton writes of that epic battle. “Only the head sways slowly, but the horns are useless now.” Theseus followed the string back to the exit and set sail. The trip home was a disaster; Theseus somehow lost Ariadne along the way and caused his father to commit suicide by raising the wrong signal-sail, so his father, waiting on shore, believed Theseus had died. But he brought the Athenian teenagers home, along with a new way they could defend themselves from future monsters: when the Minotaur died, pankration was born.
Could “circus sports,” as old Arthur Evans insisted, really be the basis for such a dramatic and enduring legend? Pendlebury didn’t buy it. Spectacles come and go, but cruelty lasts forever. Only something horrible would linger so long in the collective memory, and Pendlebury believed the hint was right there in the language.
“Names have a habit of being remembered when the deeds with which they are associated are forgotten or garbled,” Pendlebury mused in his masterpiece, The Archeology of Crete. Theseus means “the one who sets things straight,” while Minotaur is “Minos’s bull.” Labyrinth comes from labrys, or “double-edged ax.” Add the children’s bones discovered in the Labyrinth—“chamber of the double-edged ax”—and a scenario like this takes shape: A priest-king who’s been stampeding across Greece like a bull believes his power comes from a magic ceremony, so he uses captured children to represent weaker nations and kills them with his labrys, shaped like a bull’s horns.
“Do we dare believe he wore the mask of a bull?” Pendlebury wonders. Why not? Executioners hood their heads not only to hide their identities, but to split them; to separate who they are from what they have to do. King Minos becomes a monster only when he pulls on the Minotaur mask, and once the slaughter is over, he’s back to being the benevolent ruler again. Until, that is, a crusading hero storms his way into Knossos at the head of a rebel band. Guards and soldiers can’t stop them, but maybe a supernatural ritual can.
“The final scene takes place in the most dramatic room ever excavated—the Throne Room,” Pendlebury writes. “It looks as if the king had been hurried here to undergo too late some last ceremony in the hopes of saving the people. Theseus and the Minotaur!”
Pendlebury got his own taste of the labrys when he published his theory. “His imagination drove his passion for archeology,” biographer Imogen Grundon would explain, but senior archeologists worried that all that passion and imagination were launching Pendlebury right past science and into science fiction. His article became “notorious,” and he was urged, for his own sake, to “tone down his conclusions.” Realistically, the kind of people Pendlebury was relying on to make his case—murderous bull-wizards and swashbuckling kid saviors—simply didn’t exist.
Didn’t—or don’t? “My theory is not fantastic,” Pendlebury fumed. Just because men and women of our era don’t live up to the myths doesn’t mean no one ever has, or ever will again. Pendlebury was digging into a world that few people alive have ever seen, and it was opening his eyes to electrifying possibilities. We’re hardwired by nature to find common social ground, to believe that whatever we’re doing today is normal and not much different from the way people have always behaved. We assume human achievement is on an upward slope, that learning from the past has made us stronger and smarter than anyone of the past.
But if that’s true, then explain Eumastas.
In the sixth century B.C., Eumastas hoisted a stone so huge that no one has lifted its equal in 2,600 years. How did he get air under those 1,058 pounds without the aid of steroids, padded gloves, or gym equipment? Or is the question its own answer: was it because he had to rely on his own body genius and struggle with bumpy boulders, instead of smooth modern steel, that Eumastas learned more than we’ll ever know about leverage, balance, and explosive power?
And if that’s the case, then Pheidippides also makes sense.
In 490 B.C., Pheidippides is believed to have run more than ten consecutive marathons, nonstop, racing up and over mountains for three straight days. He wasn’t one of a kind, either; he was one of a corps. Pheidippides was an hemerodromos, or “all-day runner,” a foot messenger who was faster over rough hills than a horse and tougher in the heat. When Athens was under attack by Persia at the Battle of Marathon, Pheidippides ran 280 miles round-trip to ask Sparta for reinforcements. At the finish, he wasn’t wrapped in a silvery space blanket and handed an orange slice; he still had enough juice to yank his sword and plunge right into the fight. As amazing as that sounds, Pheidippides wasn’t even best of class. “A young boy but nine years old,” Roman historian Plinius Secundus reminds us, “between noon and evening ran 650 stadia”—that’s seventy-five miles—while two other couriers, Lanisis and Philonides, whipped through 144 miles in twenty-four hours: four miles more than Pheidippides’s first leg in twelve fewer hours.
And John Pendlebury was supposed to “tone down his conclusions”? Please. His imagination could barely keep up with the realities he was unearthing from the buried world. Take Homer: he turned out to be right about the places he described, so why not the people? Were his heroes truer to life than we believed? Homer was no fan of perfect golden boys, after all; he was more intrigued by the guy who’s off his
game, past his prime, always one step closer to losing than winning.
Like Odysseus. In Homer’s tales, Odysseus’s best days are behind him, and the young warriors won’t let him forget it. “You know, stranger, I’ve seen a lot of sportsmen and you don’t look like one to me at all,” a strapping fighter named Euryalus taunts Odysseus during an afternoon of athletic contests in Phaeacia. “You look more like the captain of a merchant ship, plying the seas with a crew of hired hands and keeping a sharp eye on his cargo, greedy for profit. No, you’re no athlete.”
Odysseus gets to his feet, and school is in session. “Now I’m slowed down by my aches and pains and the suffering I’ve had in war and at sea,” he concedes, but that’s all he’ll concede. Swirling back his cloak, Odysseus reaches for a discus and grabs not the lightest, for more control, but the heaviest, for maximum momentum. He uncoils from his windup and lets fly, hissing the discus on a flight path so low and perfectly angled it nearly takes the Phaeacians’ heads off. It lands so far ahead of the field it doesn’t even need to be measured.
“And if anyone has the urge to try me, step right up,” Odysseus snarls. “I don’t care if it’s boxing, wrestling, or even running. Come one, come all.”
His young man’s body is gone, but he’s an expert at using what’s left. Earlier in the Iliad, Odysseus races two younger men. He’s the underdog once again, but his tactics are terrific as he slipstreams right behind the leader. “His feet stepped in Ajax’s footprints before the dust settled into them, and his warm breath from inches behind streamed down onto Ajax’s head.” Just before the finish, Odysseus surges so suddenly that Ajax is startled and falls. Ajax leaps to his feet, flinging horse dung off his face and complaining that the goddess Athena tripped him. But the runner who came in last saw it all and tells it straight.
“Odysseus is of an earlier generation,” Antilochus explains. “He is a tough old bird, as they say; it is hard for any of us to beat him, except for Achilles.”
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