Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea Read online

  But in the culture of protohistoric Mycenae, as in other parts of Greece, invader and native were coming together, “language mixing with language side-by-side,” as Homer puts it in the Odyssey. So much so that when the curtain rises on the historic period, there is no longer any way of separating these influences, for by 800 B.C. Greece, once a patchwork of conflicting identities (only a few of which we can identify today), emerges from its prehistoric shadows as a diverse but unified world.

  1 The Metamorphoses—a long narrative poem of pithy, sensuous episodes—was slipped to us by a teacher who seemed to understand how deadly was the assigned Latin curriculum for junior year, which consisted entirely of political speeches by the polysyllabic Cicero on topics that could only induce stupor.

  2 According to a recent and controversial study, Mysteries of the Snake Goddess by Kenneth Lapatin, Sir Arthur and his “restorers” may themselves have created these frescoes or at least enhanced them considerably, as well as set up a veritable factory of “Minoan” objects for export. The English archaeologist was indeed an eccentric straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh, both punctilious and batty, but was he capable of wholesale deception? No doubt much scholarly ink will be spilled before we can be sure of the truth of this matter. Whatever the final consensus (which might be difficult to reach, given the considerable investment that museums and private collections throughout the world have in objects that came to them under Sir Arthur’s imprimatur), Linear A will remain part of the valid archaeological record, as will influential elements of Minoan religion and architecture, since examples of these have been uncovered at sites with no link to Sir Arthur.

  I

  THE WARRIOR

  HOW TO FIGHT

  Zeus, who controlled rain and clouds and held in his hand the awful thunderbolt, was Lord of the Sky and greatest of the gods, but not the oldest. He and the eleven other Olympians—the gods and goddesses who dwelt in the heaven at the top of Mount Olympus, Greece’s highest mountain—had been preceded in their reign by the elder gods, the Titans, whom they had overthrown. The Titans had been formed by Father Heaven and Mother Earth, which had existed before any of the gods, having emerged from the primordial Chaos, whose children, Darkness and Death, had given birth to Light and Love (for Night is the mother of Day), which made possible the appearance of Heaven and Earth.

  Zeus, son of the deposed Titan Cronus, was perpetually falling in love, wooing and usually raping beautiful women, both immortal and mortal, who would then give birth to gods and demigods, complicating considerably family relations on Olympus. Hera, Zeus’s wife and sister, was perpetually jealous, scheming to best one rival after another with cruel retribution. But all the goddesses, even the virginal ones, were prone to jealousy; and it was this fault that helped bring on the Trojan War—which began, like Eve’s temptation in Eden, with an apple.

  There was one goddess, Eris, not an Olympian, whom the gods were inclined to leave out of their wonderful celebrations, for she was the Spirit of Discord. True to her nature, when she found she had not been invited to the wedding of King Peleus with the sea nymph Thetis, she hurled into the Olympic banqueting hall a single golden apple with two words on it, tēi kallistēi (to the fairest). All the goddesses wanted to claim it, but the three most powerful were finally left to fight over it: the cow-eyed goddess Hera, the battle goddess Athena—the child of Zeus who had sprung from his head—and Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus, the laughing, irresistible goddess of Love, born from the foam of the sea.

  Zeus wisely declined to be judge of this beauty contest but recommended Paris, prince of Troy, who had been exiled as a shepherd to Mount Ida because his father, King Priam, had received an oracle that his son would one day be the ruin of Troy. Paris, Zeus averred, was known as a judge of female beauty (and of little else, he might have added). The three goddesses lost no time appearing to the astounded shepherd-prince and offering their bribes, Hera promising to make him Lord of Eurasia, Athena to make him victorious in battle against the Greeks, Aphrodite to give him the world’s most beautiful woman. He found for Aphrodite, who gave him Helen, daughter of Zeus and the mortal Leda.

  There was one small complication: Helen was married to Menelaus, king of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon of Mycenae, Greece’s most powerful king. But with Aphrodite’s help, Paris was able in Menelaus’s absence to spirit Helen away from her home and bring her to Troy. When Menelaus returned and found out what had happened, he called on all the Greek chieftains, who had previously sworn an oath to uphold Menelaus’s rights as husband should just such a thing as this occur. Only two were reluctant—shrewd, realistic Odysseus, king of Ithaca, who so loved his home and family that he had to be tricked into signing up for the adventure; and Greece’s greatest warrior, Achilles, whose mother, the sea nymph Thetis, knew he would die if he went to Troy but who joined the Greek forces in the end because he was fated to prefer glorious victory in battle to a long life shorn of pride. Thus did the many ships of the Greek kings, each vessel bearing more than fifty men, set sail for Troy in pursuit of a human face, Helen’s—in Marlowe’s mighty line, “the face that launched a thousand ships.”

  HOW DIFFERENT in feeling the Judgment of Paris from the Sorrows of Demeter. If the earlier story is genuine myth, dramatizing recurrent, inexorable tragedy at the level of cosmic nightmare, the later seems a sort of old-fashioned drawing room melodrama about the characteristic foibles of male and female, in which matters spin monstrously out of control and end in tragic farce. If Demeter takes us back to an agricultural way of life that imagined Earth and its manifestations as aspects of maternal nurturing, the strident gods of Olympus, challenging and overthrowing one another, males always primed for battle and sexual conquest, females seizing control only by wheedling indirection, are projections of a warrior culture that set victory in armed combat above all other goals—or at least seemed to, for there are always, deep within any society, dreams that run in another, even in a contrary, direction from its articulated purposes. But first let’s examine the obvious: the visible surfaces of this bellicose society of gleaming metals and rattling weapons.

  The Mycenaean world that Schliemann discovered was the world of Agamemnon and his predecessors, the world sung by Homer in his two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, set, so far as we can judge, in Aegean Greece of the twelfth century B.C., an age I have called “protohistoric” because a cumbersome form of writing, Linear B, was then in existence, though usable only for accountants’ ledgers. The stories of this age, however, were preserved as oral poetry by wandering bards and written down only much later when a far more flexible form of writing came into currency that permitted the recording of epics of massive length and graceful subtlety.

  The Iliad begins not with the apple and the goddesses but with a far more earthly contest—between Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, and Achilles, the preeminent Greek champion. The Greek fleet has been long since beached on the Trojan shore and the army of the Greek chieftains is wearily besieging the well-fortified city, which has been able to withstand its assaults for nine years. But brilliant, unbeatable Achilles—whom Homer immediately calls dios or “noble,” a word whose Indo-European root means “godlike” or “shining like the divine stars”—has left the field of battle in outrage at his treatment by haughty Agamemnon. For Agamemnon has commandeered Achilles’s concubine, a girl Achilles won as war booty. Agamemnon feels justified in taking Achilles’s concubine because he has had to accede to the unthinkable and give up his battle-won concubine. Her father, Chryses, priest at a nearby shrine of Apollo, called down his god’s wrath upon the Greeks—whom Homer calls “Achaeans,” “Argives,” or “Danaans,” depending on the needs of his meter. Homer’s audience would already have known the details of the story, so they would not have been the least disoriented as he begins thus, summarizing the conflict between the two men, a conflict with fatal consequences for Greeks and Trojans alike:

  Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Ac
hilles,

  murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

  hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

  great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,

  feasts for the dogs and birds,

  and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

  Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

  Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

  What god drove them to fight with such a fury?

  Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king

  he swept a fatal plague through the army—men were dying

  and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo’s priest.

  Yes, Chryses approached the Achaeans’ fast ships

  to win his daughter back, bringing a priceless ransom

  and bearing high in hand, wound on a golden staff,

  the wreaths of the god, the distant deadly Archer.

  He begged the whole Achaean army but most of all

  the two supreme commanders, Atreus’ two sons,

  “Agamemnon, Menelaus—all Argives geared for war!

  May the gods who hold the halls of Olympus give you

  Priam’s city to plunder, then safe passage home.

  Just set my daughter free, my dear one … here,

  accept these gifts, this ransom. Honor the god

  who strikes from worlds away—the son of Zeus, Apollo!”

  And all ranks of Achaeans cried out their assent:

  “Respect the priest, accept the shining ransom!”

  But it brought no joy to the heart of Agamemnon.

  The king dismissed the priest with a brutal order

  ringing in his ears: “Never again, old man,

  let me catch sight of you by the hollow ships!

  Not loitering now, not slinking back tomorrow.

  The staff and the wreaths of god will never save you then.

  The girl—I won’t give up the girl. Long before that,

  old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos,

  far from her fatherland, slaving back and forth

  at the loom, forced to share my bed!

  Now go,

  don’t tempt my wrath—and you may depart alive.”

  The old man was terrified. He obeyed the order,

  turning, trailing away in silence down the shore

  where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag.

  And moving off to a safe distance, over and over

  the old priest prayed to the son of sleek-haired Leto,

  lord Apollo, “Hear me, Apollo! God of the silver bow

  who strides the walls of Chryse and Cilla sacrosanct—

  lord in power of Tenedos—Smintheus, god of the plague!

  If I ever roofed a shrine to please your heart,

  ever burned the long rich bones of bulls and goats

  on your holy altar, now, now bring my prayer to pass.

  Pay the Danaans back—your arrows for my tears!”

  His prayer went up and Phoebus Apollo heard him.

  Down he strode from Olympus’ peaks, storming at heart

  with his bow and hooded quiver slung across his shoulders.

  The arrows clanged at his back as the god quaked with rage,

  the god himself on the march and down he came like night.

  Over against the ships he dropped to a knee, let fly a shaft

  and a terrifying clash rang out from the great silver bow.

  First he went for the mules and circling dogs but then,

  launching a piercing shaft at the men themselves,

  he cut them down in droves—

  and the corpse-fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight.

  I have set out this generous quotation to remind you of Homer’s splendor. If I could, I would now proceed to quote the whole poem before going further—it is so glorious, the foundation masterpiece of Western literature—in this immaculately forged new translation by Robert Fagles, which gives us much of Homer’s precision, resurrecting the terrible beauty of Greece’s Bronze Age in language as swift as Apollo’s arrows—note the overwhelming inevitability of the half line “and down he came like night”—yet enclosing a gorgeous strength capable of burnishing each detail to brilliance.

  The upshot of Apollo’s plague is that all the Greeks come to realize the cause of their misfortune and that the priest’s daughter needs to be returned to her father if the plague is to leave them. Their leader Agamemnon, forced to assent to their consensus, takes as his consolation prize Achilles’s concubine, thus precipitating Achilles’s withdrawal from the war. For most of the poem’s twenty-four books Achilles sits in his tent in a rage, deliberating whether to remain on the sidelines or to abandon the Greeks altogether, raise his sails, and push off for home, along with the fellow countrymen who are under his command.

  What a strange world this is, so far from our own. The theme of the poem, as Homer tells us in his very first word, is a hero’s rage—“wrath” in the older translations—but rage and wrath seem to be everywhere: in Achilles, Agamemnon, Chryses, and Apollo, in every character to whom we are introduced in the course of the first fifty lines. Homer begins with a prayer of invocation—to the Muse of epic poetry—but within a few lines we hear a second prayer: from the priest to his many-named god, the consummately graceful but “deadly Archer” Apollo. And a third god is invoked: Zeus, to whom Achilles and Apollo are both “dear” and who, it is implied, is the hidden force behind the story, somehow pulling the strings of the action, for, as Homer tells us in an arresting phrase, “the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.”

  Homer has little time for comment on his characters. They reveal themselves in word and action, not in the poet’s commentary. But we feel from the outset that the human characters are caught like strong swimmers in an undertow that is much stronger than their most strenuous strivings, an undertow that will take them where it will, despite their efforts. At the same time, this undertow is not entirely a substance apart: it is rather the sum of all the characters, both gods and men, for both gods and men are driven by their need for honor. Hera and Athena’s dishonor at the hands of Aphrodite and Menelaus’s subsequent dishonor at the hands of Paris have made the war inevitable; Apollo is dishonored by the dishonor shown his suppliant, Chryses; Agamemnon’s need to appear as supreme commander clashes with Achilles’s need to be honored as supreme warrior.

  Somehow, we feel, these motivations—and others’ yet to be revealed—are propelling the action of the poem toward its inevitable conclusion. As the seer Calchas says in his fear of Agamemnon’s rage:

  A mighty king,

  raging against an inferior, is too strong.

  Even if he can swallow down his wrath today,

  still he will nurse the burning in his chest

  until, sooner or later, he sends it bursting forth.

  That’s just the way of mighty kings; there’s nothing to be done about it. But it’s not as if Agamemnon can in his rage own the field. His rage must contend with the rage and will of others. When he taunts Achilles that he will come personally to take away Achilles’s concubine—“so you can learn just how much greater I am than you”—Homer shows us Achilles’s heart pounding “in his rugged chest,” torn between alternatives:

  Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,

  thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—

  or check his rage and beat his fury down?

  Only the intervention of Hera “of the white arms,” who “loved both men and cared for both alike,” prevents Achilles’s wrath from finding its target. She speeds down to earth the battle goddess Athena, who, unseen by all but Achilles, constrains him, seizing his “fiery hair”; and Achilles submits, though, as he says, “his heart breaks with fury,” so dearly would he love to see Agamemnon’s “black blood gush and spurt around my spear!” But “if a man obeys the gods, they’re quick to hear his prayer.”

&n
bsp; These conflicting forces—all the rages and outrages of gods and men—seemingly balanced in an endless seesaw, will in the end produce a result, the fall of Troy. In the view of the ancients, however, to which Homer is here giving expression, this result is but another swing of the seesaw, which will eventually be balanced in its turn by an opposite result. This view of the ancients, then, is a true worldview, that is, an attempt to see the reality of human experience as a totality, both psychological (in its assessment of human motivations) and theological (in its assumption that heaven intervenes in human affairs). The results of human motivations and heavenly interventions make for preordained results, but preordained only in a way so complicated and with so many conflicting strands that no one but a seer or prophet could sort it all out beforehand and identify in the present the seeds of future results. This means that human beings—and even to some extent the gods themselves—are caught, like figures in a tapestry who cannot undo their thread, playing out their assigned roles of hero or king, loving mother or sexual prize, divine patron of this or that person or city, with only flickering insight into what result their character and needs will have upon the whole of the human enterprise.

  From time to time, an omen announces a future outcome. Once the Greek armada had been assembled many years before and while the Greek forces were offering their sacrifices “under a spreading plane tree” at Aulis prior to setting sail for Troy, just such an omen appeared, as Odysseus reminds the troops in their despair:

  “A snake, and his back streaked red with blood,

  a thing of terror! Olympian Zeus himself

  had launched him into the clean light of day …

  He slid from under the altar, glided up the tree

  and there the brood of a sparrow, helpless young ones,

  teetered high on the topmost branch-tips, cowering

  under the leaves there, eight they were all told

  and the mother made the ninth, she’d borne them all—