Greek Mythology, page 21
Athens
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
c. 5000 BC
First human activity in Athens.
c. 3500 BC
Settlements in areas of Acropolis and Agora.
c. 1600 BC
Mycenaean walls and palace on Acropolis.
? c. 1000 BC
Mycenaean Athens destroyed by fire or earthquake.
c. 650 BC
Temple of Athene Polias on Acropolis.
c. 594 BC
Solon’s reforms.
556 BC
Greater Panathenaic Games inaugurated.
534 BC
Drama festival (City Dionysia) inaugurated.
507 BC
Reforms of Cleisthenes introduce isonomia.
490 BC
First Persian invasion; Battle of Marathon.
480 BC
Second Persian invasion; temples burned; Battle of Salamis.
478 BC
Delian League formed (leading to Athenian Empire).
476 BC
Cimon recovers Theseus’ bones from Scyros.
449 BC
Pericles begins building programme, including Parthenon (dedicated 438 BC).
431–404 BC
Peloponnesian War, ending in Athens’ defeat.
393 BC
Athens rebuilds fortifications.
338 BC
Philip II defeats Athens and Greek states at Chaironea.
86 BC
Sulla sacks Athens.
AD 120
Hadrian undertakes further building programmes, including completion of Temple of Olympian Zeus.
c. AD 150
Herodes Atticus (i.e. of Attica) adorns Athens, including building Odeon.
AD 267
Heruli plunder Athens.
AD 396
Alaric the Goth plunders Athens.
AD 529
Justinian closes philosophy schools.
AD 1205
Duchy of Athens created after Fourth Crusade.
AD 1458
Athens becomes part of Ottoman Empire.
AD 1687
Parthenon partially destroyed during Venetian bombardment.
AD 1801
Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, receives permission from Turkish authorities ‘to take away any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon’ from the Parthenon.
AD 1834
Athens capital of newly independent Greece.
AD 1896
First modern Olympic Games celebrated in Athens.
Athens is a treasure trove of archaeology. At its heart is the Acropolis. A steep climb leads through the Propylaia with the graceful Temple of Athene Nike on a bastion (right). Grey Eleusinian limestone forms a sacred threshold. Two temples dominate the Acropolis: the Parthenon, once home to Pheidias’ gold-and-ivory statue of Athene; and the Erechtheum (or Temple of Athene Polias), containing several distinct chapels, the roof of whose Porch is supported by sculptures of six girls, the Caryatids (casts). In antiquity it was of greater religious significance than the Parthenon. The foundations of the earlier Temple of Athene Polias, burned by the Persians in 480 BC, lie between the Parthenon and the Erechtheum.
The stunning Acropolis Museum is housed to the south on Dionysiou Areopagitou. Further west along this street are the Arch of Hadrian and Temple of Olympian Zeus, with fine views of the Acropolis.
On the Acropolis’ southern slopes are the Theatre of Dionysus and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus (still used for performances). Just west of the Acropolis is the Areopagus (Hill of Ares), not for the faint hearted – there is a steep climb and slippery surface. Below this is the Agora, dominated to the east by the Stoa of Attalus (reconstructed by the American School of Archaeology, now housing the Agora Museum) and on the west by the Temple of Hephaestus (sometimes wrongly called the Theseum). Further east are the Roman Agora and Tower of Winds.
West from the Agora is the Ceramicus (Kerameikos), one of classical Athens’ cemeteries, whose boundaries include part of the ancient wall. From the Sacred Gate one road led to Eleusis, another to Plato’s Academy. The haunt of tortoises and butterflies, the Ceramicus is a haven for the harassed traveller. It has an excellent museum.
The National Archaeological Museum contains finds from Athens and all Greece. Innumerable treasures include gold death masks from Mycenae, Cycladic figurines, Classical sculptures including the fine bronze Poseidon (or Zeus), the Varvakeion Athene (a marble scale copy of Pheidias’ statue for the Parthenon) and a stunning second-century BC life-size bronze galloping racehorse.
Several days are needed even to skim the surface of Athens’ sites and museums. Many close early and are popular with coach parties, so it is advisable to time visits for early morning. To avoid being overwhelmed, take frequent breaks for refreshment and reflection.
16
Knossos: King Minos & the Labyrinth
There is a land called Crete, midpoint in the wine-dark sea, a beautiful land and fertile, gushing with flowing water. Many people live there – too many men to count – and there are ninety cities. They do not all speak the same language but a variety of tongues. There are Achaeans and big-hearted native Cretans, Cydonians and Dorians and wealthy Pelasgians. Here is the great city of Knossos, where Minos ruled, who every nine years spoke with mighty Zeus.
Homer, Odyssey, 172–79
With lazy grace a harem of peahens sashays across the palace’s West Court. A peacock, his coat plumage an iridescent blue, watches with proprietary eye, fanning his tail feathers and puffing out his chest before executing an elaborately geometric dance beneath the dull red-ochre columns. From the lush valley, hens’ squabbling provides an earthy counterpoint to the sighing of wood-pigeons from tall trees, their chorus punctuated intermittently by the hoarse barking of dogs.
In the strong light, edges seem razor-sharp. Palace buildings – low and rectangular, both startlingly modern and primordial – gleam in the sunshine, clean lines cleaving the profoundest shadow. Yet their regular profiles conceal an exuberant vitality. Frescoes and reliefs unfurl across their walls: griffins in a deep red landscape; blue dolphins gambolling amid a shoal of blue and orange fish; bronzed youths in pale-blue loincloths bearing vessels of all shapes and colours; wasp-waisted women with coiffed hair, kohled eyes and startling red lips.
Elsewhere a charging bull is frozen in midair, head down, hooves flying. On either side a woman, bare-breasted, bangles on her arms, with calf-length boots and hair cascading down her back, frames the animal. One seizes the bull’s horns; the other stands behind it, arms outstretched; while, poised above the bull’s back, lithe and sinuous, a young man somersaults towards her. It is all so tantalizing, all so pregnant with significance – for such a scene may well have spawned the legend of the Minotaur.
The Birth & Early Life of Minos
Bulls were in Minos’ blood. As the Tyrian princess Europa walked wide-eyed by the shore, she saw among her father’s herds a handsome bull. The second-century BC poet Moschus describes it: ‘Its body was tawny. In the middle of its forehead shone a dazzling white ring, and its grey eyes flashed with desire. Its horns curved upwards, the one the mirror image of the other, as if the rim of the horned moon had been divided into two rounded arcs.’
As Europa approached, captivated, the bull allowed her to pet it and then climb on to its back. Then, with Europa riding it, it ambled into the waves. Soon it was swimming out to sea. Afraid now, Europa tried to urge it back. In vain. Turning its head, it spoke and revealed the truth – it was Zeus, disguised, intent on being Europa’s lover.
They came ashore in Crete, where at Gortyn beneath an evergreen plane-tree, they made love. Europa bore three sons – Rhadamanthus, Sarpedon (who shared his name with a later Trojan hero) and Minos. Unable to wed Zeus, Europa married Asterius, the king of Crete, who accepted the boys as his own. But Minos quarrelled with Sarpedon over a young man’s love, and banished him; and, when Rhadamanthus, was forced into exile after spilling a kinsman’s blood, the arrogant Minos became undisputed king.
Boasting that the gods would grant whatever he asked, Minos erected an altar and prayed to Poseidon to send a bull from the sea that he might sacrifice it. As the crowds watched, a gleaming white bull rose out of the waves and walked proudly to the altar. Its beauty was so breathtaking, that – rather than destroy it – Minos ordered that it should be spared and kept among his herds, while another animal was slaughtered in its place. Deprived of his promised sacrifice, Poseidon seethed.
Minos, his Loves & his Family
With his wife Pasiphaë (the daughter of Helios) Minos had many children, including two daughters, Ariadne and Phaedra, and a son, Androgeus. But Minos was a tireless womanizer, and weary of his infidelities, Pasiphaë (an accomplished sorceress) laid a spell on him. Henceforth, Minos ejaculated millipedes and scorpions, whose sting caused his lovers unimaginable pain.
Only the Athenian princess Procris knew how to circumvent the curse. A lusty huntress, abandoned by her husband Cephalus (himself once the lover of the goddess of the dawn), she was seduced by Minos’ charms and his gift of the magical hound Laelaps, which never failed to catch its prey. Before succumbing, Procris made Minos use a prophylactic drug to counteract the spell. Later, Procris returned with Laelaps to the mainland, where she was first reconciled with Cephalus, then accidentally killed by him. In mourning, Cephalus and Laelaps went to Thebes, which was being plagued by an aggressive vixen, whose fate was never to be caught. The solution seemed clear: set Laelaps to give chase. Such was the conundrum this posed – the inescapable in pursuit of the uncatchable – that the gods resolved it only by turning both creatures to stone.
Bored with Minos’ embraces, Pasiphaë lusted after the white bull Poseidon had sent from the sea. So she commanded the court craftsman Daedalus to build a hollow heifer, crawled inside it and had it taken to the fields. The resultant offspring was a savage hybrid, half-human and half-bull, with a penchant for human flesh. Pasiphaë named it after its grandfather Asterius, but we know it better as the Minotaur. Determined to conceal Pasiphaë’s unnatural child and protect Crete from its appetites, Minos commissioned Daedalus to build a prison for it, approached by such a maze of corridors that it could never escape. Hidden beneath the palace of Knossos, this was the labyrinth.
Theseus & the Minotaur
As for Poseidon’s white bull, which was now rampaging free, Heracles abducted it as one of his labours to mainland Greece, where it settled at Marathon, near Athens. When it continued to wreak havoc, Aegeus, king of Athens, promised to reward whoever who could destroy it. Among those who tried was Minos’ son Androgeus, but in the encounter it was he, not the bull, who lost his life. (Another version of Androgeus’ death suggests that, while in Athens to compete in games, he conspired with Aegeus’ enemies, so Aegeus had him murdered.)
Victorious, Theseus drags the dead Minotaur from the labyrinth. (Fifth-century BC Athenian red figure wine cup.)
By chance, Minos was at that time attacking mainland Greece with his incomparable navy. When the news reached him, he called down a curse. At once earthquakes struck, crops failed, and people and animals died of starvation; and while other Greek states managed to appease the gods, in Attica the situation worsened. Urgently Aegeus consulted the Delphic oracle, which announced that the curse would be lifted only if Athens sent seven young men and seven young women every nine years to Crete as offerings to the Minotaur.
When Theseus came to Athens to claim his inheritance, he overcame the bull, dragged it up to the Acropolis and sacrificed it to Poseidon. Then, since it was time for the next consignment of Athenian youth to be sent Knossos, he announced his intention to join them and, with the gods’ support, kill the Minotaur. In Crete, Minos greeted Theseus with a challenge – to prove he was the son not merely of Aegeus but of Poseidon by retrieving a gold ring that Minos hurled far out to sea. Immediately, Theseus dived off the quayside and disappeared, resurfacing after long minutes to wade ashore, the ring held high. All marvelled – and none more than Ariadne. For, as soon as Minos’ daughter saw him, she fell in love with Theseus.
That night she met with him. Daedalus had taught her the secret of the labyrinth, which she agreed to share if Theseus took her back to Athens as his wife. The prince agreed, and, evading Minos’ guards, they crept to the mouth of the labyrinth. Here Ariadne gave Theseus a sword. Then, placing in his hands a ball of wool, she took hold of the loose end and instructed him to let the rest unravel as he walked through the twisting corridors. By rolling the ball up again he would find his way back out.
Into the inky blackness of the low-roofed passageway Theseus disappeared, his only guide the fetid stench and ever louder bellows of the Minotaur. Finally he reached its lair, and with a roar the Minotaur attacked. Clutching at the hair between its deadly horns, Theseus lunged with his sword, calling to Poseidon to accept his sacrifice. The blade sank home. The Minotaur fell gasping to the ground. Leaving it to thrash in its own blood, Theseus escaped, rewinding the wool until he regained the entrance and the sweet night air.
Theseus and Ariadne freed the other Athenians and escaped across the low hills to the sea. Hurriedly they smashed holes in Minos’ ships to prevent pursuit, boarded their own boat and set sail. By sunrise they reached the island of Dia. But here (or at Naxos), despite his promises, Theseus abandoned Ariadne as she was sleeping. When she found him gone, the princess cursed Theseus, but she was not downcast for long. Dionysus saw her, fell in love with her and – transporting her to the stars – made her his bride. (In Dionysus’ rescue and transformation of the abandoned heroine some discern a distant echo of a story similar to that of Persephone or Adonis exploring the cycles of death and rebirth. In another version of the myth, Homer tells how Ariadne was killed on Dia by Artemis ‘before Theseus could take pleasure in her’, while Plutarch records that she died in childbirth on Cyprus.)
Theseus sailed on to Delos, where he sacrificed to Apollo and choreographed the Crane Dance, performed in historical times, whose intricate patterns retraced the winding of the labyrinth and replicated the pattern on the dancing floor which, Homer says, ‘Daedalus once built for Ariadne of the lovely hair in the wide open spaces of Knossos’. Theseus set course for Athens, but because of Ariadne’s curse he forgot to change his sail from black to white. When Aegeus saw it, thinking his son was dead, he threw himself into the sea.
Daedalus, Icarus & the Death of Minos
Minos’ craftsman Daedalus was also an Athenian, but he had fled to Knossos when he murdered one of his apprentices. Now that the labyrinth’s security was breached, he desperately needed to quit Crete. Minos’ warships were repaired, so escape by sea was impossible. Instead, Daedalus crafted two sets of wings from feathers held together with wax – one pair for himself, the other for his son Icarus.
Wings spread wide, father and son launched themselves from a high cliff and were soon skimming northeastwards across the vastness of the sea. But Icarus was headstrong and eager to experiment and he ignored Daedalus’ advice not to fly too near the sun. As he soared ever higher, the sun’s heat grew more intense. The wax that held the feathers to the wings began to melt, and in a welter of feathers Icarus plunged headlong to his death. Today the island near where he fell is called Icaria.
Daedalus could not stop. Instead he turned west. Landing at Camicus in south Sicily, he built strong walls for Cocalus, the king, and made exquisite dolls for the princesses. Meanwhile Minos launched his fleet. At every port he offered a reward to whomsoever could pass a thread through the twisting interior of a conch shell, a problem he knew only Daedalus could solve. At last he reached Camicus.
Eager for the reward, King Cocalus set Daedalus to work. Rising to the challenge, he bored a tiny hole into the shell’s tip, round which he trickled drops of honey. Then he tied a thread to an ant, and introduced it into the wider opening below. Lured by the honey, the ant navigated the shell’s spiral labyrinth until it emerged – with the thread – out of the honey-smeared hole. Cocalus was triumphant. So was Minos. He had located Daedalus.
Cocalus and his daughters would not surrender him. Instead they tricked Minos, inviting him to the palace and offering every hospitality. But as Minos wallowed in his bath, the princesses opened the valves of a pipe that Daedalus had installed above it. A flood of boiling water engulfed the Cretan king. Returning his corpse to his fleet, a convincingly regretful Cocalus blamed faulty plumbing.
With Minos dead, Knossos crumbled. But his spirit lived on. In Hades, Minos ruled as one of the three judges of the dead, together with his estranged brother Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, who had once ruled Aegina.
Knossos in History & Today
Archaeology confirms Knossos’ wealth – though interpretation of much of the accumulated evidence is problematic. By around 1400 BC the palace complex at Knossos was probably the largest and richest in the Aegean, the centre of a Cretan (or ‘Minoan’) empire. Art and traded artifacts show that its influence extended throughout the south Aegean and Near East (a Minoan interpreter may have been employed at Ugarit in Syria in the early eighteenth century BC), west to Sicily and north perhaps as far as Samothrace. There was also considerable contact with Egypt: Egyptian motifs appear in Cretan art; fifteenth-century BC Egyptian tomb paintings from the reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III show Cretans bringing gifts to the Pharaoh; and a fresco at Avaris in the Nile Delta appears to show Cretan bull-leaping.
