Greek Mythology, page 25
Parts of the circuit wall remain, including the Lion Gate. They say this was built by Cyclopes, who also built Tiryns. Among the ruins is the spring called Perseia and subterranean chambers, treasuries where Atreus and his sons stored their wealth. Atreus’ grave is there, as well as graves of those who returned from Troy, who were killed at the banquet by Aegisthus.
Pausanias’ account of Agamemnon’s death at a banquet is confused, and his (or his guide’s) identification of the tholos tombs as treasuries is wrong. The error persists – the largest tholos is still signposted ‘The Treasury of Atreus’. Mycenae’s romance attracted many travellers wishing to soak up its atmosphere. One first-century AD poet wrote:
There is but little of the age of heroes left to see – though still some ruins jut up from the plain. As I passed by, I recognized poor, suffering Mycenae, now quite abandoned. Not even goats go there. A herdsman showed the place to me. He was an old man, and he said: ‘This was the city rich in gold, which once the Cyclopes built.’
In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann, inspired by Homeric legend and wishing to prove it true, began excavations at Mycenae. They have continued ever since.
Mycenae
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
c. 4000 BC
Early Neolithic settlements.
c. 1750 BC
Early circuit walls and cist graves.
c. 1500 BC
First tholos tombs.
c. 1250 BC
‘Cyclopean’ walls and palace constructed.
c. 1200 BC
Mycenae burned, probably by attackers.
480 BC
Mycenae sends 80 men to fight the Persians.
468 BC
Argos destroys Mycenae.
? C3rd BC
Theatre built over ‘Grave of Clytemnestra’.
AD 1841
Kyriakos Pittakis discovers the Lion Gate.
AD 1876
Heinrich Schliemann begins excavations.
Approaching Mycenae, foundations of a Bronze Age bridge lie in the valley (right). Soon shaft graves can be seen cut into the rock (left). Before the main car park, is a parking area (left) for the so-called Treasury of Atreus, a magnificent tholos tomb, unusually containing a small side chamber.
From the main site entrance, the path leads to the Lion Gate. Next, right of the well-paved road, is Grave Circle A (no access), where Schliemann discovered many gold masks and grave-goods. A path leads upwards to the palace with its megaron (no access), approached through a series of antechambers. The view down the valley towards Argos is sublime. Higher up are living quarters, including bathing facilities, and the foundations of a temple. Near the further of two postern gates (through which Orestes was supposedly smuggled to safety) is an impressive well-house or cistern, with stone-cut steps leading deep below ground. Visitors should exercise extreme caution and not attempt descent alone, without good footwear and a torch.
Outside the walls, are further tholos tombs, remains of a Hellenistic theatre and foundations of houses. Other tholos tombs lie on the far side of the hill (behind the car park), on which stands the chapel of the Panagia, the view from which is well worth the short detour.
Most of the finds from Mycenae are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, but Mycenae’s own museum, situated near the Lion Tomb contains an impressive selection of grave-goods and frescoes, as well as replicas and a model of the site.
Travellers wishing to immerse themselves more fully in Mycenae’s past can stay at the Hotel La Belle Hélène, Schliemann’s ‘dig house’ (now run by Agamemnon Dasis), the temporary home to many archaeologists and writers (including Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf), psychologists (including Carl Jung) and composers (including Claude Debussy). They can even sleep in Schliemann’s bed.
20
Troy: A City Contested by Gods & Men
And did you then turn traitor, Zeus, betray your temple here at Troy, your altar sweet with incense … the wisps of myrrh that rose in fragrance to the sky, the sacred citadel, the Pergamum, the glens of Ida where the ivies cling, the rivers white with melted snow that froth down to the sea and the light that bathes the far horizon with the first pale blush of dawn, this sacred place, this shining, sacred homeland?
Your sacrifices now are gone, gone too the choral liturgy of hymns, the all-night festivals in darkness to the gods, all gone, the icons and the effigies all glittering with gold, yes, even the most sacred relics of them all, the twelve gold moons of Troy. I want to know, Zeus, how I want to know if, as you sit there on your lofty throne in heaven, you care at all as this, my city, is destroyed and fire consumes it.
Euripides, Trojan Women, 1060ff.
Troy today is at once the most evocative and the most sterile of all the great centres of mythology. The site is guarded by a gigantic wooden horse towering in the trees above the coach park, its flank pierced by square windows from which tourists can grin down and wave and have their pictures taken. It is perhaps a fitting introduction to what can seem a soulless site – all cordoned walkways, joyless information boards and a tightly choreographed route that twists relentlessly across deep trenches ripping through millennia of history. It is a place which could well disappoint.
And yet this once was Troy. Stand on the low hill, where the Temple of Athene used to sparkle in the sun; look out towards the far-off Dardanelles, the tankers rippling indistinct and ghostly in the rising haze; imagine that the fertile fields are flooded, that a vast bay bellies close, its shores black, teeming with a thousand ships; think of Achilles as he dragged Hector’s broken body around the sloping walls; think of Andromache weeping for her husband whom she loved more than the world; think of Cassandra, Hecabe and Priam; think of Paris; think of Helen; think of the passions that made all Greece fight for ten years to reclaim her; think of the legends clinging to these stones. And Troy becomes alive.
Foundation(s) of Troy & Divine Interventions
There are several contradictory myths about Troy’s foundation. One tells that Cretans escaping famine first occupied the land. When mice overran their camp, they recalled an oracle advising them to settle where ‘earth-born adversaries’ attacked them. So they built a temple to Apollo Smintheus (‘Mouse-God’), subdued the Troad (as the region is called), named the local mountain Ida (like the one in Crete), and thrived under their king, Teucer. Others maintained that Teucer was an Athenian, who founded a colony in the Troad and passed the crown to an Arcadian called Dardanus – but the Romans claimed that Dardanus was an Italian-born Etruscan.
Troy and the Troad were named from Dardanus’ grandson Troas, himself the father of Ilus, from whom the city took its other name of Ilion. Like Cadmus at Thebes, Ilus was told by the gods to found a city where a piebald cow lay down to sleep. It chose the summit of the low Hill of Atē (‘destructive infatuation’), where Ilus erected a temple to Athene. This housed the Palladium, an olive-wood statue of Athene, which had fallen from the skies and would protect Troy as long as Troy protected it.
Ilus’ brother, too, the handsome, Ganymede was god-kissed. Seeing him herding cattle on Mount Ida, Zeus transformed himself into an eagle, swooped down and abducted him to Mount Olympus, to serve him as cupbearer. In the divine bedchamber Ganymede performed those boyish duties, too, associated with his Latin name, Catamitus. In compensation, Zeus gave his father Troas twelve white horses, sired by the north wind, Boreas.
Another Trojan prince, Tithonus, was less fortunate. Eos, the rosy-fingered goddess of the dawn, abducted him to be her lover, persuading Zeus to grant him eternal life. She should have asked for everlasting youth: when Tithonus was so old he could no longer move, Eos locked him in a cell, where he ‘chattered on incessantly, the strength of his once lissom limbs all gone’. In sympathy, Zeus transformed him into a cicada.
The gods were less content with another Trojan king. When Ilus’ son Laomedon built walls around Troy’s citadel, he hired two tireless workmen for a modest daily rate – Poseidon and Apollo, sentenced to serve him for a year as punishment for trying to topple Zeus. While Poseidon laboured (helped by Aegina’s King Aeacus), Apollo tended Troy’s flocks, but in the end Laomedon refused to pay them. In retribution, Poseidon sent a sea-monster to ravage the Troad, demanding that Ilus sacrifice his daughter, Hesione.
Enter Heracles. On his way back to Tiryns from one of his labours, he found Hesione, richly bejewelled but otherwise naked, chained to a rock, awaiting the monster. Chivalrously, he released her, agreeing with Laomedon to kill the creature in return for Hesione’s hand in marriage – and the white horses that Zeus had given Troas. Then Heracles attacked the creature, leaping down its throat, hacking at its innards until it died. But when he demanded payment from Laomedon, the king reneged.
So Heracles returned to Greece, raised an army, sailed in six ships back to Troy and attacked the city. Led by Telamon, the son of Aeacus (who had built this section), they stormed Troy’s western walls where they were weakest and (in Homer’s poignant words) ‘made desolate her streets’. The only survivor was the young prince Podarces, who had championed Heracles when Laomedon refused to pay him. Now he became Troy’s king, changed his name to Priam (‘Redeemed’), and rebuilt the city. As for Hesione, Heracles gave her to Telamon; but he kept the horses.
The Children of Priam
With his wife Hecabe (whose own parentage was famously obscure), Priam had fifty sons and fifty daughters, among them the warriors Hector and Deiphobus, the handsome Troilus and the prophetic twins Helenus and Cassandra.
When Apollo wooed Cassandra with promises that, if she slept with him, he would grant her the gift of prophecy, the princess agreed and the god breathed his power into her. But at the last moment Cassandra changed her mind and haughtily rebuffed him. There was little that Apollo could do. He could not withdraw his gift. So instead he added a curse: none of Cassandra’s prophecies would be believed.
Predictions of disaster already haunted Troy. When Hecabe was pregnant with her second son, she dreamt she bore a baby with a hundred hands, each holding a blazing firebrand. The meaning was clear: if allowed to live, the boy would ruin Troy; only his death would save the city. Reluctantly Hecabe wrapped the newborn in a fine embroidered cloth and gave him to a herdsman to expose on nearby Mount Ida. Here, though, the child was suckled by a she-bear. Finding him still alive nine days later, the herdsman pitied him and took him in his knapsack (in Greek, ‘pera’) to his steading, where he reared him as his own. The boy grew strong and handsome. When he fought off a band of cattle-rustlers, the herdsmen called him Alexander (‘Protector of Men’), though – in memory of the knapsack – he had already been named Paris.
The Judgment & Triumph of Paris
Paris had two passions: the mountain nymph Oenone, a skilful healer; and battles between bulls. His prize beast could beat any rivals, until a wild bull thundered into the ring. After a vicious duel it won, and Paris ungrudgingly placed the victor’s garland on its head. At once it changed its form, revealing its true identity: it was the war-god Ares. He had been searching for an honest judge to arbitrate a vexed dispute. He had found the perfect man.
So, carrying the golden apple inscribed with the words ‘for the most beautiful’, with which Eris had once disrupted Peleus and Thetis’ wedding on Mount Pelion, Hermes descended to Mount Ida with three goddesses: Hera, Athene and Aphrodite. Each claimed the apple for herself. Euripides’ Andromache tells how they came ‘to win the prize for beauty, dressed for war, equipped for horrid strife, to the steading, to the isolated homestead, to the lonely shepherd boy. When they reached the dappled glen, they bathed their dazzling bodies in the mountain streams, and trading promises (so fulsome yet deceptive), they faced Priam’s son.’
On Mount Ida, Hermes leads the three goddesses – Hera, Athene and Aphrodite – to Paris for his judgment. (Attic red figure wine cup, c. 440 BC.)
Paris could not choose between them. So each made him an offer. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, Helen of Sparta summarizes their terms:
The gift Athene promised Paris was to lead an army out from Asia and destroy Greece. Hera promised kingship over all of Asia and Europe, if Paris chose her. But Aphrodite, who admired my beauty and my body, promised that she’d give him me if he awarded her the prize.
Aroused by the bewitching goddesses, seduced by the prospect of Helen, and forgetting his love for Oenone, Paris awarded Aphrodite the apple and struck out for Troy.
He found the city celebrating games in memory of the royal baby exposed on Mount Ida twenty years before. Magnanimously Priam let Paris compete, and to widespread surprise he emerged as champion. Deiphobus was incensed and, with Hecabe, plotted Paris’ murder. But Cassandra recognized him – or perhaps the herdsman revealed his true identity – and, dismissing her dream as superstition, Hecabe with Priam welcomed their son Paris back to Troy.
Then, at the head of a magnificent flotilla and accompanied by his cousin Aeneas (the son of Aphrodite by Anchises), Paris sailed to Sparta to claim his prize. He rode inland from Sparta’s port to the royal palace. The late fifth-/early sixth-century AD epic poet Coluthus imagines Helen:
unlocking the doors of her welcoming chamber, running into the courtyard, seeing him standing there before the palace gates. At once she called to him, and led him in, and sat him on a new-made silver chair. And she gazed on him and could not satisfy her eyes with gazing.
Helen’s husband Menelaus entertained his guest lavishly. Then he departed for Crete. Within hours, Paris and Helen crept from the palace and that night on tiny Cranaë, a stone’s throw from the coast, they made love. Then they set sail for Troy.
The Coming of the Greeks
When Menelaus learned the news, he reminded Helen’s suitors of their oath to her father Tyndareus to help him should anyone abduct her. So they assembled a mighty army, led by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and containing the greatest heroes of the age. Some, such as Achilles (from Phthia near Iolcus), joined reluctantly.
Achilles’ mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, coddled him from birth, purifying him in a fire, immersing him (held tightly by the right heel) in the River Styx to make him invulnerable, and sending him to Cheiron the Centaur to be educated. Now, knowing that he might die at Troy, she persuaded him to hide on Scyros at the court of King Lycomedes. But Odysseus of Ithaca, Nestor of Pylos and Ajax son of Telamon heard rumours of his whereabouts. Arriving at Scyros, they laid out a wealth of jewelry as gifts of friendship. As the women crowded round excitedly, Odysseus sounded the alarm as if the palace was under attack, at the same time throwing a sword high in the air. Instinctively a hand shot up and caught it. It was Achilles, dressed in women’s clothes. Sulkily he joined the expedition. (His mood was not improved when, at Aulis, Agamemnon used him as bait to lure Iphigenia to her death.)
The fleet attempted to make landfall at Tenedos, the island close to Troy, but it met with opposition. In the fighting Achilles showed his bravery, killing Tenedos’ ruler, Tenes. But when he discovered that Tenes’ father was Apollo, he remembered Thetis’ warning: if he killed Apollo’s son he would one day perish at Apollo’s hand.
From captured Tenedos the Greeks sent a demand for Helen’s return. It was refused. War was inevitable. So the Greek fleet nosed into Troy’s bay, where, after a brief skirmish, the Trojans withdrew behind the walls, the Greeks built a stockade around their ships, and both sides settled down for a long siege. For already Agamemnon’s prophet Calchas had predicted that Troy would be captured in the tenth year.
Nine Years of Attrition: Troilus & Palamedes
Troy’s fate was governed by a number of preconditions. The first said that the city could not be defeated if its young prince Troilus reached his twentieth birthday. So Achilles plotted Troilus’ death. In one myth he ambushed Troilus as he and his sister Polyxena fetched water from a fountain house. Achilles killed Troilus, and although Polyxena escaped, she aroused a desire in Achilles, which would prove her undoing. In a variant version Achilles ambushed Troilus as he exercised his horses on ground sacred to Apollo – having already provoked Apollo’s anger, Achilles had no longer anything to lose. A third, darker version has Achilles fall in love with Troilus and arrange to meet him at Apollo’s shrine. When the boy refused to yield to his advances, the frustrated Achilles murdered him. But it was the fact, not the means, of Troilus’ death that was important. The first stipulation for Troy’s downfall had been met.
The Greeks spent much of the war’s first nine years raiding nearby cities. While here, too, Achilles shone, among other Greek leaders arguments festered, breeding bitter hatreds. Thus Odysseus loathed the brilliantly clever and creative Palamedes, king of Nauplion and inventor of writing, dice and lighthouses. So, planting a letter on a dead Trojan’s corpse and a bag of gold in Palamedes’ tent, Odysseus convinced the Greeks that Palamedes was an enemy agent. Enraged, the army stoned the innocent Palamedes to death. When his father Nauplius found out, he took revenge, encouraging Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra to be unfaithful with Aegisthus. Then, when Troy had fallen, he positioned false beacons, causing the homecoming Greek fleet to run aground on rocks.
The Iliad & Achilles’ Wrath
In the tenth year hostilities broke out in earnest. But there was further internal conflict in the Greek camp. Angered by Agamemnon’s refusal to restore the captured daughter of Chryses, his priest, to her father, Apollo sent a plague against the Greeks, lifting it only after they complied. But when, as compensation, Agamemnon took Achilles’ slave girl, Briseis, Achilles refused to fight. Instead, with his comrade Patroclus, he sulked in his tent, singing moodily of the famous deeds of men.
