Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Read online

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Thomas Cahill

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  THE HINGES OF HISTORY® is a registered trademark belonging to Thomas Cahill.

  This page constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Endpaper: “Symposium,” Tomba del Tuffatore, lastra nord, 480 B.C., Paestum, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, © foto pedicini

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:

  Cahill, Thomas.

  Sailing the wine-dark sea : why the Greeks matter / Thomas Cahill.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(Hinges of history ; v. 4)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C. 2. Civilization, Western—Greek influences. I. Title. DF77.C28 2003

  909’.09821—dc21

  2003050725

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75512-4

  Book design by Marysarah Quinn

  Map art by Jackie Aher

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  “Symposium,” Tomba del Tuffatore, lastra nord, 480 B.C.

  “Symposium,” Tomba del Tuffatore, lastra nord, 480 B.C.

  To

  MADELEINE L’ENGLE

  and

  LEAH & DESMOND TUTU

  and in memory of

  PAULINE KAEL

  mentors and models of life and art

  The heart within me never changes toward you so beautiful

  One can achieve his fill of all good things,

  even of sleep, even of making love …

  —HOMER

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  The Way They Came

  I: THE WARRIOR

  How to Fight

  II: THE WANDERER

  How to Feel

  III: THE POET

  How to Party

  IV: THE POLITICIAN AND THE PLAYWRIGHT

  How to Rule

  V: THE PHILOSOPHER

  How to Think

  VI: THE ARTIST

  How to See

  VII: THE WAY THEY WENT

  Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

  The Greek Alphabet

  Pronouncing Glossary

  Notes and Sources

  Chronology

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Index

  Illustrations

  About the Author

  Acclaim for Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

  The Hinges of History

  Other Books by This Author

  INTRODUCTION

  THE WAY THEY CAME

  Demeter’s hair was yellow as the ripe corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle), were her natural worshipers, praying: “May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in a rush of wind, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves, her ample breasts adorned in flowers of the field.”

  Demeter had but one daughter, and she needed no other, for Persephone was the Spirit of Spring. The Lord of Shadows and Death, Hades himself, the Unseen One, carried her off in his jet-black chariot, driven by coal-black steeds, through a crevice in the surface of Earth, down to the realms of the dead. For nine days, Demeter wandered sorrowing over land, sea, and sky in search of her daughter, but no one dared tell her what had happened till she reached the Sun, who had seen it all. With Zeus’s help, the mother retrieved her daughter, but Persephone had already eaten a pomegranate seed, food of the dead, at Hades’s insistence, which meant she must come back to him. In the end, a sort of truce was arranged. Persephone could return to her sorrowing mother but must spend a third of each year with her dark Lord. Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave.

  HISTORY MUST BE learned in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past—shards, ostraca, palimpsests, crumbling codices with missing pages, newsreel clips, snatches of song, faces of idols whose bodies have long since turned to dust—which give us glimpses of what has been but never the whole reality. How could they? We cannot encompass the whole reality even of the times in which we live. Human beings never know more than part, as “through a glass darkly”; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces. That said, it is often easier to encompass the past than the present, for it is past; and its pieces may be set beside one another, examined, contrasted and compared, till one attains an overview.

  Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out for us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality; and the sense of being on alien ground grows with the antiquity of the age we are considering. I first came in contact with people of another time and place in the sayings, stories, and songs my mother taught me when I was little. These were pieces of an oral tradition, passed on to her by her mother, who died before I was born, a countrywoman from the Galway midlands. So many of the words were strange to someone growing up in twentieth-century New York City: “When you’ve harrowed as much as I’ve ploughed, then you’ll know something”; “You never know who’ll take the coal off your foot, when it’s burning you”; “Every old shoe finds an old sock.” I had been to a farm once but had never seen harrow or plough in use, I knew what coal was but had never been warmed at an open coal fire, I surely knew what shoes and socks were but nothing of the archaic courting practices in the Irish countryside. My mother explained patiently that this last was meant as a hilarious sendup of old maids and their prospects. The sexual aspect of the imagery she doubtlessly left me to work out for myself. But her waves of words had a sort of triple (and simultaneous) effect: first, the experience of coming into contact with alien lives through the medium of the words they had left behind; then, an acknowledgment of the humanity I shared with these strangers from another time and place; and, last, the satisfying thrill that concentrated, metaphorical language can give its listener—the electric sensation at the back of the neck announcing the arrival of the gods of poetry.

  It is through such wisps of words and such tantalizingly incomplete images that we touch the past and its peoples. When I attended a Jesuit high school in New York City and was taught to read Latin and ancient Greek, I had my first scholarly taste of
the strangeness of other ages. In Homer’s gods and heroes and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,1 I discovered the fleeting reflections of what was once a complete world: Odysseus putting out the giant’s single eye, enormous in his forehead and balefully glistening; Niobe’s many children, struck dead one at a time by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis, as Niobe stood by helpless, in mounting hysteria, finally consumed by insensate despair. Nothing like their plights had ever happened, or would ever happen, to me. I would never encounter a cyclops or be hunted by Apollo, but I could nonetheless feel as their victims felt: I could take on Odysseus’s twitching anxiety in the face of an unbeatable enemy and the hopelessness of terminal captivity in the service of a monster (even if I had as yet but scant experience of being someone’s employee); I could resonate with Niobe’s heartsickness, fevered attempts to protect her children, and catatonic despair. I too had known impossible opponents; I too understood how much a mother loved her children.

  Just around the corner from my school was the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which I discovered without the help of the Jesuits, who were verbal but not visual. There, in the old gallery of classical art, I first saw the faint traces of paint on the classical marble statuary and learned that the eyeless bronzes had once been fitted with lifelike irises. There I saw an accurate model of the Parthenon with its excited and boldly colored frieze of gods and heroes. I came to understand that ancient Greece had not been a collection of tasteful white marble statues but a place on fire with color. I made the connection between these astonishing figures that now lived along Fifth Avenue and the brilliant colors of Homer’s metaphors: “the wine-dark sea,” “the rosy-fingered dawn.” I had, without knowing it, put the literature in a context.

  I tell you these things now because my methods of approaching the past have scarcely changed since childhood and adolescence. I assemble what pieces there are, contrast and compare, and try to remain in their presence till I can begin to see and hear and love what living men and women once saw and heard and loved, till from these scraps and fragments living men and women begin to emerge and move and live again—and then I try to communicate these sensations to my reader. So you will find in this book no breakthrough discoveries, no cutting-edge scholarship, just, if I have succeeded, the feelings and perceptions of another age and, insofar as possible, real and rounded men and women. For me, the historian’s principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

  To keep a sense of how fragmented are the materials we are dealing with, I have set a story at the head of each chapter, such as the story of Demeter with which this introduction began. These fragments, which we usually call “myths,” are pieces of the elaborate mythology of the Greeks, a mythology woven from many sources over the course of Greece’s (largely unknowable) prehistory and with many adumbrations of sights and sounds still to be found faintly in our own world. (In Demeter’s story, for instance, the attentive reader may catch dark prefigurings of the Christian Mother of Sorrows and the novenas—penitential nine-day cycles—commemorating her pain at the loss of her magical Child, who rises from the grave in late March or early April.) These fragments also give the reader another way of approaching the material in the body of the chapter, another dark glass to look through.

  At times, however, the fragments I lay out for your inspection may seem not to fit well together, as if they were stray pieces from separate puzzles. In such cases, I would counsel patience. There are moments when a large enough fragment can become a low wall, a second fragment another wall to be raised at right angles to the first. A few struts and beams later, and we may have made ourselves a rough lean-to in which to take momentary shelter from the contrary buffetings of raw history. But it can consume the better part of a chapter to build such a lean-to; and as we do so the fragment we are examining may seem unconnected to the larger whole. Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.

  THEIR ORIGINS LIE in mystery. Who the Greeks were to begin with and where they came from are matters obscured by the thick mists that envelop our understanding of prehistoric Europe. Without written records, we must make do with the clues that linguistics and archaeology can offer. The likelihood is that the mounted warriors who rode into the valleys of Greece in the middle of the second millennium B.C. had their origins in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas. Gradually, these aggressive equestrians made their way southwest through the Balkans till they reached the rugged peninsulas, striated with mountains not unlike their mountains of origin, and the volcanic isles and inlets of the Aegean Sea that would serve as their permanent home. The language they spoke was a cat’s cradle of Indo-European roots, which means that their speech betrayed their distant links to other bellicose bands—the haughty Aryans of India; the rocklike Slavs with their great joys and even greater sorrows; the crazy Celts of Galatia, Central Europe, Gaul, Britain, and Ireland; the icy, relentless Germans and Vikings—who before and after them ride out of the dim north to terrify and subdue farming cultures unprepared to do battle with armed men on horseback.

  Of the indigenous farming folk they encountered we know even less, save that they worshiped not sky-dwelling Zeus of the thunderbolts but the fecund Earth herself, source of their bounty—“the earth that feeds us all,” as Homer will call her. The primeval presence of Greece’s aboriginal natives may still be sensed in stories, such as Demeter’s, of the annual death and rebirth of the natural world. However woeful their clashes with the Caucasians may have been, farmers and invaders became in time one culture, united in language, religion, and custom. There are hints in archaeological strata uncovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of how this unified culture might have come to be.

  At Cnossos in north-central Crete, the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans found the long-abandoned capital of a civilization he dubbed “Minoan” (after the legendary King Minos), a court of graceful buildings designed to withstand earthquakes and shelter sophisticated living. Brightly colored frescoes give us entrance to a strange world of long-haired, lightly clad Minoans, beardless men in belts and codpieces, women in skirts and corsets that leave the breasts exposed, naked young acrobats of both sexes who sportingly somersault over the backs of bulls. The Minoans had the rudiments of a written language, known to scholars by a few fragmented examples and called Linear A.2 So far as we can tell, the writing is pictographic and syllabic, like the writing of the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians, but the symbols seem to have been employed only to make inventories that kept account of the Minoans’ extensive commercial endeavors, never for more literary purposes. The symbols almost certainly do not represent Greek, for the Minoans were the acme of an indigenous culture that worshiped the Great Mother. They flourished from about 2000 to 1400 B.C., at which point they were destroyed, why or how we can’t be sure but probably in the overflow from a stupendous volcano on the isle of Thera (modern Santorini), which lies just north of central Crete. This island, which before its catastrophic eruptions was much larger, may well have given rise to the legend of the lost “continent” of Atlantis.

  The discovery of the Minoans in the early 1900s had been preceded by other discoveries that electrified Europe. In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann, a self-made German businessman and Barnum-like promoter, declared that he had discovered the remains of ancient Troy, the city described in the Iliad as besieged for ten years by Greek forces who are finally able to destroy it through the famous ruse of the Wooden Horse. Schliemann discovered as well a horde of treasure, which he proclaimed to be “the treasure of Priam,” king of the Trojans. He decked out his slinky Greek-born wife in the ancient trinkets, photographed her, and proclaimed her a dead ringer for Helen of Troy. Even if the “treasure of Priam” belongs to a period that predates the setting of the Iliad by a millennium or more, there is general consensus that Schliemann did indeed discover Troy just where it ought to be—on the coast of Asia Minor at the entrance to the Hellespont (today the Dardanelles).
>
  Though the discovery of Troy won the biggest headlines, Schliemann’s more important discovery—at least from the point of view of understanding Greek origins—was his unearthing of shaft graves in the area of Mycenae in the northeast Peloponnese. Here Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces at Troy, had ruled; and here, according to legend, he had been slain on his return from the war by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Once again, the irrepressible Schliemann overshot, claiming that the graves contained the soldiers of Agamemnon and even the legendary king himself, masked in gold. “I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon,” said Schliemann. Though both mask and graves proved to have been fashioned centuries before Agamemnon and the Trojan War, the find yielded much information about the gradual marriage of Greek invader with indigenous farmer.

  Long before Agamemnon had ruled, his ancestors, buried in the shafts—“there in the tomb stand the dead upright,” Yeats had written of similar Bronze Age burials in Ireland—showed themselves to be typical Indo-European warriors, tall, bristling with weapons, in love with precious metals and their display, but already in their symbolic pottery and jewelry adopting the native cult of the Mother Goddess. The ruined court of this Mycenae of the Heroes likewise shows admired borrowings from the general layout of Minoan architecture, if somewhat less grand and graceful and far more fortress-like than its exemplar. The language of the Mycenaeans was an early form of Greek, as became clear once the written code called Linear B was cracked, revealing a pictographic-syllabic set of markings, a language of accounting derived from Linear A but full of Greek roots and proper names. This writing system would be lost to the Mycenaeans after the tenth century B.C. in a “Dark Age” of Greece we know little about. (Eventually, the Greeks would require a new form of writing that could sustain not only commercial but literary needs.)