In Search of the Trojan War (23 page)

A VISIT TO MYCENAE AT THE TIME OF THE TROJAN WAR

Mycenae was built for war. In its origin, it must have been what the Turks call a
dervendji
– that is, a castle built at a juncture of mountain passes for the purpose of levying tribute or tax on all traffic that passes through; a stronghold of robber barons. It stands on a craggy hill underneath two triangular peaks, its back to the mountains, ‘folded up into a menacing crouch’, as Henry Miller put it. In front, southwards, the rich plain of Argos opens to the sea. To the north are mountains beyond which lie the plain of Corinth and Sicyon, areas which Homer says were in the
kingdom of Agamemnon. Among these mountains stands Mycenae, massively walled, armed to the teeth. Tucked away up in the north-western corner of the plain, it is not near the sea and does not have good arable land within its immediate grasp. It is hard to see how such a place could thrive, or why it needed such great walls, until you walk round it and notice that it stands at the meeting-place of an ancient system of tracks leading north and south, linking the Argive and Corinthian plains, and the smaller plain of Berbati and the Kontoporeia pass. If the life of Mycenae began as a local chief’s stronghold, it had risen to great wealth by the sixteenth century BC when Schliemann’s shaft graves were constructed. From then on the place must have depended for its greatness upon industry and commerce with a wider world.

I begin with a general impression, admittedly subjective, but I think not misguided, which is that Mycenae in the thirteenth century BC has
imperial
characteristics, both in its architectural style and in the artistic and material links which connect it to other Mycenaean centres. Such ideas are naturally approached with some reluctance by professional archaeologists – they perhaps run beyond the strictly observable facts in the ground, but they are immediately striking to the political journalist in terms of parallels with other cultures, especially the Near Eastern ‘empires’ of the thirteenth century BC. Mycenae quite simply
looks like
an imperial city. Let me explain what I mean by imagining a visit to Agamemnon’s capital at the height of its power and architectural development, say around 1250 BC. If we think of our visitor as an ambassador from one of the other great empires of the time, the Hittites or the Egyptians, it will serve to remind us that Mycenaean Greece had contacts with the great kingships of the Near East, and was influenced by their styles. They certainly had such contacts (as we shall see in
Chapter 6
): the record has been discovered recently of an Egyptian embassy to Greece, including Mycenae, around 1380 BC. We can even point to the kind of men who went on such high-level exchanges (
see here
). Let us try to see Mycenae through the
eyes of such a man as well as our own. If we do, I suggest its architecture and outward display shows it to be an imperial city in the same way as the Hittites’ Hattusas, Dark-Age Aachen or Winchester – or even, in a distant way, late-nineteenth-century London for that matter.

That said, a word of warning about terminology is necessary. If we use the term ‘empire’ let us not understand by this the unitary kind of control and communications we see in modern empires like the British, or even the Roman. The analogies are with ‘empires’ like that of the Hittites (
see here
): controlling a heartland which was ruled by the king, neighbouring which lay allied states bound by treaty or oath to the overlord, beyond which in turn existed the coercive arrangements made by an overlord towards his subject peoples: the payment of tribute, the exchange of gifts, the taking of hostages. In these outside lands power shelved into ‘segmentary’ rule through local men, and finally into subject relations guaranteed by a sophisticated kind of protection money.

By definition an emperor ruled other kings. Hittite treaties survive from this period showing the kind of obligations which subject kings owed their overlords. Frontiers were laid out and guaranteed, promises were made for mutual aid in offensive or defensive campaigns, extradition treaties and terms for the return of fugitives were drawn up. These kind of obligations existed in all early Indo-European kingships and can be closely paralleled in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and continental Germanic kingship in the European Dark Ages. ‘Empires’ then advanced and receded rapidly, depending on the power and ability of the individual ‘Great King’ to guarantee them. Frequently on a king’s accession the ‘empire’ had to be enforced anew by vigorous campaigning. The benefits for the lesser kingdoms were stability, protection from outside attack, and support of their own dynasty against rivals. Ideas like these are a plausible way of interpreting some of our evidence for Greece. The obligation which Homer alleges that the other kings owed Agamemnon
in war
makes great sense in terms of such obligations as we know they existed among the
Hittites – or the Anglo-Saxons for that matter. This, then, is the loose sense in which I use the term ‘empire’, but such was the power of Mycenae at this time that it may have exerted a cultural uniformity on the other kingdoms of southern Greece.

We are approaching Mycenae from the sea at Tiryns, up the paved Mycenaean road which runs northwards up the Chavos ravine. The road we are on is one of at least five paved roads which have so far been traced running from Mycenae; all of them have elaborate bridges and culverts. The main road from Prosymna, for instance, had at least five bridges and the impressive remains of one can still be seen today on the right of the modern road: though the arch is gone the massive southern end is preserved, over 12 feet high and 20 feet wide and built of finely laid courses of stone. This bridge spans the winter torrent which sweeps down from the citadel; it was over 14 feet wide in the middle, so chariots could pass each other, and what it looked like when complete can be seen from the surviving intact bridge at Kasarma, east of Tiryns. The road system is a clear indication of the centralised power of Mycenae; almost certainly it linked the city with the formerly independent city states of the Argive plain: Argos, Tiryns, Midea and Prosymna. The individual
territoria
of the cities were marked out with watchposts on their borders.

At the Chavos bridge the citadel comes into view with the palace on top, between the two mountains, one of which is capped by a watchtower and beacon post: perhaps news of our arrival by sea has been communicated by beacon to the citadel. At this point, the visitor of around 1250 BC would have passed on his left hand the first of the immense royal tombs of the Atreid dynasty: the so-called Treasury of Atreus. It was clearly intended as a great public monument, for inside its low-walled forecourt, at the end of the long entrance, you faced a façade over 30 feet high framing tremendous wooden doors, 17½ feet high, decorated with bronze; the façade itself was decorated by half columns in green marble with finely cut zigzag decorations; above it, framed by smaller half columns, was an elaborate linear
decoration of red and green marble. If we had been privileged enough to be allowed to look inside this spectacular monument, we would have seen its lower courses lined with bronze plates, the last of which were removed by Lord Aberdeen in 1803. The most recent of these great tombs, the so-called tomb of Clytemnestra (
c
.AD 1250), was equally impressive with blue and white marble on its façade, the relieving triangle perhaps containing the triangular bull relief found by Lord Elgin: bulls were an emblem of kingship and it is not impossible that this is the tomb of Agamemnon himself. Had these magnificent monuments survived in a better condition (the half columns were still on the Atreus façade as late as 1801) our mental impression of the ‘typology’ of Mycenaean kingship – which tends to be governed by the impressive but crude ‘Cyclopean’ walls – would be very different. These were undeniably the most sophisticated monuments from prehistoric Europe.

We now approach the citadel itself. The road led under the enormous Cyclopean bastion which still stands 26 feet high on top of the rock outcrop, and may originally have been nearer 36 feet. The main gate is set back in a narrow entrance with another bastion on the right hand. The gateway itself is surmounted by a muscular relief of lions on either side of a column bearing the entablature of a building – the palace itself. Made of hard, blackish limestone, it is 10 feet high and a little wider. The heads of the lions are missing today, but were probably of a softer material such as steatite and would have looked out frontally to greet the approaching visitor with flashing eyes of metal or precious stone. The whole relief symbolises the palace guarded by lions, the house of Atreus itself: an emblem of Mycenae and the dynasty of Agamemnon. The altar on which the column rests signifies divine blessing on the house’s right to rule. In effect, then, the Lion Gate sculpture is a coat of arms: the lions, like the bull, are the oldest symbols of kingship in the Near East.

When the wooden gates were opened you went through to see a ramp rising ahead (the steps at the bottom are modern). To
your right was a great circle of upright, flat stones. This area, the visitor would have been informed, was the circle of the ancestral graves. It was only in the thirteenth century BC that this circle, originally outside the citadel walls, was brought inside with a new wall and supporting terrace. At the same time the graves were refurbished and inscribed gravestones erected, so that the area, so conspicuous inside the main gate, became an object of show and cult (there is an interesting parallel in ‘archaeological’ work on the restoration of royal graves in Egypt in the mid-thirteenth century BC). Whether these dead kings – the shaft grave people found by Schliemann – were of the same dynasty as the Atreids we do not know; perhaps they were what legend calls the Perseids, the family of the city’s founder, Perseus. Whoever they were, the later kings of the Atreid line clearly wished to use their graves to show their own sense of history and pedigree, perhaps also their association with the older dynasty. The Bronze-Age visitor would probably make a sacrifice here before passing on up the ramp.

As we go up the ramp we remember that below it, in debris fallen from further up the hill, Schliemann found fragments of red porphyry friezes suggesting that higher up, on our left hand, palace buildings had been decorated with elaborate stone reliefs cut with spirals, rosettes and palmettes. At the top of the ramp you reached the royal apartments themselves with their wonderful view over the Argive plain. While the chambers were not comparable in size or grandeur to an Egyptian or Babylonian royal palace, they compare favourably with the Hittite palace in the ‘great fort’ at Hattusas: a large outer room with stucco and gypsum floors, its portico columned and painted; the throne-room itself decorated with shield frescoes and depictions of warfare and a siege scene showing a hero falling from the battlements of a town. Here the Mycenaean king would receive ambassadors, who would be feasted to the strains of lyre players and bards reciting the great deeds of the king and his ancestors, surrounded by the Mycenaean nobility resplendent in ‘royal cloaks’ with ornate war gear.

Of course the observant visitor could have found out much more about Mycenae’s contacts had he nosed about a little. He would have discovered Asian slave women seized on piratical raids working in the textile industry in the lower town. In the (merchants’?) houses he would have seen spices – ‘ginger grass’ from Syria, cumin from Egypt, sesame from Mesopotamia, cyperus seed from Cyprus; he may have seen dyed stuffs and condiments from Canaan. As at Pylos or Knossos, he might have met natives of Egypt, Cyprus and Anatolia. But it is the outward show we are concerned with here. Kings, I suspect, do not differ much in their basic attitudes to their royalty whether they be Hittites or Anglo-Saxons; on these grounds it is difficult not to see this architectural achievement as in some way ‘imperial’, with its vast expenditure on superfluous ornament, on royal cult, on royal tombs with public decoration, on the reliefs, columns and gates with heraldic devices, elaborate defences, bridges and road systems. This is not small-scale kingship, not the kingship of a small city state; its wealth is inexplicable as merely the product of the domination of its immediate neighbours. An interesting indication of this is provided by the red and green marble used in the Treasury of Atreus. It is now known that the red marble,
rosso antico
, comes from quarries at Kyprianon in the south of the Mani in the Peloponnese; the green marble seems to have come from the same place, a group of five quarries 3 miles or so from the sea, where a little Mycenaean port existed above the modern village of Spira. These quarries were used from the fifteenth century BC until the Renaissance, and the Atreus decorations show that the king of Mycenae was able to bring tons of the stone from the Mani to the Argolid, a sea journey of over 125 miles, followed by 10 miles overland up the plain.

The source of the white marble used in the Treasury of Atreus has not been ascertained – there is no quarry for good-quality white marble in Lakonia – but it is likely that it comes from the Pentelic quarries 12 miles north-east of Athens, which seem to be the source of the white marble used for the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenos; the grey in the latter is from Levadhia.

Another interesting example of this aspect of Mycenaean authority and technology also comes from Lakonia. Here, in the hills above the Evrótas valley near Krokeai, are the overgrown quarries which are the only source of the strange mottled porphyry known as ‘Spartan stone’ which ranges from dark green flecked with yellow to a reddish colour. This stone was widely sought after for luxury items in the Late Bronze Age, and was massively exploited in the Roman period when there was an imperial monopoly with a
dispensator
living on site – it is very likely that a similar arrangement existed in the Mycenaean period. In classical times the stone was particularly used for decorating holy places, as Pausanias noted, and was highly valued in the Renaissance: the visitor to the Vatican, for instance, may notice that the cobbles around the obelisk in St Peter’s Square are made of alternate green Spartan stone and
rosso antico
from Spira.