Troy
Page 35
3 Despite Acamas having married Priam’s daughter Laodice.
4 Just to remind you: many years earlier Theseus had kidnapped the very young Helen with a view to marrying her (see Heroes for further details). He left Aethra in charge of her while he went off to find a wife for his friend Pirithous, an adventure that resulted in his being imprisoned by Hades in the underworld. Meanwhile, Helen’s brothers, the Dioscuri (Castor and Polydeuces), rescued Helen and – to punish Theseus – took Aethra with them to be Helen’s slave. She had remained by Helen’s side ever since, first in Sparta and then in Troy.
5 Aethra’s long life was an extraordinary one. It spanned the Age of Heroes. As a young girl she had been engaged to marry Bellerophon of Corinth, the hero who tamed Pegasus and rode him to defeat the Chimera. Later she was seduced in one intense night by both Aegeus, King of Athens, and the sea god Poseidon. Theseus was the issue of one of these acts of union, but no one is quite sure which …
Appendix
1 Though whether ‘literary’ is the right word remains a matter for debate.
2 Archaeologists sometimes refer to it as the ‘Mycenae – Tiryns – Pylos civilization’; those being the three great citadels of the empire.
3 Linear A and B used syllabic and ‘ideographic’ signs (like glyphs) rather than the phonetically representative characters (letters) that the Greeks (and we) were later to use in alphabets.
4 Just as the Vandals, Goths, Visigoths and other Germanic tribes invaded the Roman Empire and ushered in the western European ‘Dark Ages’, so the Sea Peoples conquered Egypt, the Levant and the Greek islands and mainland, ushering in an early equivalent. No one is quite sure who they actually were: the consensus seems to suggest that they were some kind of loosely federated group of seafarers from the eastern coastal regions of the Mediterranean. Another name for the Greek Dark Ages is the Geometric Age, on account of the style of ornamentation – ceramics and so forth – that emanated from that period. Interestingly, if one thinks of Celtic jewellery and metalwork, the later Dark Ages produced pronouncedly geometric art too … The mainland and islands of Greece have long been thought to have also been conquered by a people called the Dorians. Their true identity and origin is as mysterious as that of the Sea Peoples.
5 Until the brilliant Michael Ventris (and his collaborator John Chadwick) deciphered it more than three thousand years later, in 1955.
6 Including the technology of the time. Archaic Greeks were not interested in or aware of such a thing as archaeology (so far as we can tell). How Homer could have had so clear a picture of bronze tool-making and armoury can only be explained by precise and well-remembered oral transmission over a very very long time.
7 Unlike Homer’s two epics, Hesiod’s works were self-consciously written – ‘authored’, you might say. They were the Theogony (Birth of the Gods), the Works and Days and the Shield of Heracles. They include tantalizing gobbets of autobiography as well as thoughts on agronomy, time-keeping and economics. It is generally accepted that even if Hesiod didn’t actually write his works down, he at least dictated them to a scribe.
8 Alexander is said to have taken a copy of the Iliad with him to war, a copy with notes and amendments written in the margins by his tutor, Aristotle.
9 It’s a long and fascinating story, the development of this line of thinking. The formulaic nature of so many Homeric epithets and images has inclined scholars to the thought (inspired by a study of extant forms of oral poetry in the Balkans) that the bards (known as rhapsodes) used these prefabricated tropes as modules with which they could build the poem’s structure as they recited. Think of jazz. The rhapsodes knew the melody and the key, as it were, and could therefore vamp at will.
List of Characters
1 Hades spent all of his time in the underworld, so technically he is often not regarded as one of the twelve Olympians.