In Search of the Trojan War (24 page)

All mainland finds of this stone on Mycenaean sites – and they are mainly from Mycenae itself – date from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. In the sculptor’s shop at Knossos Evans found an unworked pile of Spartan stone, ready for use. The context of the find led him to think that this area was rebuilt in the final phase of the palace, in which case, on the revised dating of the palace, it should be from the thirteenth century BC, and certainly dates from after the Greek conquest of Crete. Here, then, is a remarkable piece of evidence which shows that at the height of the Mycenaean world a Greek dynast at Knossos was able to have stone quarried in Lakonia and shipped to Crete for use in the royal workshops in Knossos. The port from which the stone was exported was Agios Stephanos, where numerous fragments have been recovered, along with signs of other industrial activity; now overgrown, silted up and abandoned, the place was still being used by small-time Frankish merchants in the thirteenth century AD: memories – or geographical necessity – run deep in Mediterranean history.

There is no mention of mining in the Linear B tablets, so we must conjecture, but it seems plausible to think that just as a Hittite king might control trade and exercise a monopoly on
foreign traders, just as Mycenaean and Hittite kings might have a monopoly on the importing of copper, so they might have controlled the mining of precious stone, and a Mycenaean quarry manager may have lived near Spira. Finds of stone from the Mani in Mycenae and Knossos, and smaller items elsewhere, may be seen as a good example of the Greek kingdoms’ ability to organise themselves; it tells us about their wealth, their connections, their stability at their height, and perhaps is an indicator of the (loose) unity of their world. It may not be extravagant to compare such detail with, for example, the expensive stone used by Roman builders to build and adorn the temple at Colchester – red and green marble from those same Spira quarries, alabaster and black marble from Asia Minor and North Africa. Once again, this is not local kingship.

A PREHISTORIC ARMS RACE?

What was the relation between Mycenae and the other palaces? Historians have been perplexed by the presence of several great fortresses in the same area, as in the plain of Argos. Were Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos and Midea under the same king or independent rulers? Why were such massive fortifications built so close to each other? It seems hard to believe they were wholly independent of each other in such a small area. We must remember that these were unsettled times, constantly threatened by outside attack, and prime agricultural land with its dense population would need a string of fortresses to protect it; Mycenae, so far from the sea, could hardly do that. The rulers of the Argolid may have had royal residences in each place, perhaps lived in by members of the royal family, kings’ brothers, sons and royal mothers, as, say, in the Saudi royal family today. It is even possible that, as now, the different places had separate functions: Tiryns the port, Argos the main market of the plain, Nauplion the posh seaside town and so on. But with its large population and its elaborate drainage system – revealed by recent discovery of a dam near Tiryns – the plain needed to be heavily defended.

It would appear, then, that mainland Greece was divided between a number of powerful ‘city states’ – larger than later classical ones – which might dominate their lesser neighbours and which might acknowledge the leadership of the most powerful in time of war. Much of their military technology may have been intended as defence against each other. In central Greece legend says that Thebes and Orchomenos were deadly enemies, and we know now that Orchomenos defended itself and its elaborate drainage works at Lake Copais by a string of forts and watchtowers around the lake and along the border with Thebes, centring on the huge fort at Gla. Thebes too had a number of fortified towns, including Eutresis whose walls were hardly less extensive than those at Gla. Had the Mycenaean world perhaps broken up into mutally hostile groups by around 1300 BC, with Thebes and Orchomenos contending in central Greece, and Mycenae the leader in the Peloponnese? Certainly we can see from the Argolid and the Copais defences that warfare was of a rather sophisticated kind, on a level recalling city-state warfare in the Near East, with material prosperity and technological skill which allowed numerous massive and elaborate fortifications to be erected in a very brief span of time. In this kind of society it was presumably easy enough to reallocate the mass of the work-force to this work outside the sowing and harvest seasons, though we do not know how compliant they were (did this massive arms race – with its conspicuous expenditure – play its part in the subsequent collapse, one wonders?).

But if the period of the Mycenaean heyday was characterised by frequent internecine warfare, it was nevertheless one of common culture and political ideas. When we think of the exporting of building stone from Lakonia to Mycenae and Knossos; the exporting of stirrup jars from Crete to the mainland palaces of Thebes, Mycenae, Tiryns and Eleusis; the identical design and measurements of the ‘treasuries’ at Mycenae and Orchomenos; the identical bureaucracy, even down to mistakes in the ‘form’, at Pylos and Knossos – then we are entitled to
assume that the rulers of this period moved in the same world, cultivated the same ideas, and employed the same artists, architects and painters. In this light it is plausible that these ‘city states’ could at one time or other have acknowledged the pre-eminence of a ‘first among equals’. Such ‘kings of the Achaiwoi’ need not have been from the same kingdom, but tradition held that three generations of the Atreids at Mycenae wielded such power over southern Greece, and it remains a possibility. They cannot have literally ‘ruled’ Greece, of course, let alone
all
Greece, but we can imagine a chief king in the Argolid having leadership of much of the Peloponnese in time of war, and being bound to others by alliance or marriage: let us remember here that legend held that the king of Sparta was Agamemnon’s brother, just as the kings of Pylos were of the same kin as the royal family of Iolkos. The aid of such a king might be sought by dynasties outside his immediate influence if they were confronted by powerful rivals, as, say, was the case between Orchomenos and Thebes – the legend says that Thebes sacked Orchomenos and ruined its dykes, and that forces from ‘Argos’ then burned Thebes.

It is, then, not impossible that a king of Mycenae could have called himself ‘king of the Achaians’. Admittedly our knowledge of such relations in Greece is speculative. But in Anatolia and the Near East in the second millennium BC there is a mass of detail about the relations between vassals and lords, kings and overkings, particularly from Hittite treaties of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. These relationships were frequently expressed in terms of ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sonship’, and they were defined with legal obligations imposed on the vassal. If you were ‘lord’ of your ‘brother’ king, or ‘father’ to a ‘son’, then he had accepted a legal bond; ‘brotherhood’ seems to have had a different connotation: in that case – strikingly like the Homeric model – you might be a member of a confederation which accepted the Great King’s leadership in foreign policy and war, but you were not as fully subject to him as his ‘sons’. This might be a helpful model for Agamemnon’s ‘empire’. In the Hittite empire a
distinction was made between ‘associated’ states, where obligations might be partially reciprocal – no tribute exacted, but foreign policy subordinate to the Great King and help given in time of war – and on the other hand purely vassal states who paid tribute and fought in the Great King’s own ranks. ‘Sons’, then, were usually subordinate kings, ‘brothers’ often equals. Such ideas may help us imagine relations between Mycenae and, say, Pylos or Orchomenos. But if there was at times a ‘Great King’ of ‘Achaia-land’ (and we shall see in
Chapter 6
that the Hittites thought there was), then by definition he was a king who ruled other kings.

HEROIC KINGSHIP?

What kind of kingship was it? What would the rule of Agamemnon have been like? Because of the paucity of hard facts in the Linear B tablets, historians have been tempted to return to Homer and call Late-Bronze-Age Greek kingship ‘heroic’. What is meant by this?

Over the last century much work has been done by scholars on ‘heroic’ kingship in Dark-Age western Europe, both Celtic and Germanic, where abundant material survives in the form of annals, laws and homilies defining the role of the king in societies which in some respects bear a resemblance to that portrayed in Homer. Here too epic poems, such as
Beowulf
, formed the basis of the interpretation. Indeed the parallels between Anglo-Saxon and Homeric epic poetry inspired one of the earliest attempts to draw together these early European traditions of ‘heroic’ kingship, the classic
Heroic Age
of H.M. Chadwick (1911), a book which heavily influenced Homeric scholars in the English-speaking world. Chadwick was convinced that the ideals and the way of life portrayed in early Germanic epic had much in common with Homer, and that the later Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon traditions were very similar. In some ways this was right: it was inevitable that broad social and material characteristics – even political ones too – should have coincided
in similar militarist aristocratic societies where the king surrounded himself with warriors attracted by his generosity and success in war, where the warlike ideals of the royal clan and its military retinue found their expression in the trappings of war weaponry, fine war gear, good horses. But while there were similarities, these are the similarities found in oral epic in many cultures, whether it be
Beowulf
, the
Iliad
or the early Indian epics. The closeness, then, is a product of the epic, not necessarily of the societies; historians and anthropologists now tend to see these ‘heroic’ traits as literary creations, characteristic of periods of nostalgic decay. Nevertheless archaeology has often brought the ‘heroic’ age of the epic tantalisingly close. The discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial thirty years after Chadwick wrote had much the same effect on Anglo-Saxon studies as Schliemann’s dig at Mycenae had on Homeric scholarship: here once again the world of epic poetry found its correlation in real artefacts (the boar’s-crest helmet described in
Beowulf
and found at Sutton Hoo immediately springs to mind as a Homeric parallel). With a necessary caveat, we will stick to our use of the word ‘heroic’ as it applies to a society geared to war with aristocratic martial ideals, the world of the ‘sackers of cities’.

THE RISE OF MYCENAE

A brief sketch of the rise of Mycenaean power would be as follows. Greek-speaking peoples are thought to have entered what is now Greece soon after 1900 BC, though some scholars think they may have been present since Neolithic times (a minority think their arrival was much later, but this seems unlikely). At this time the great age of the Cretan palaces was beginning, a civilisation modelled on the Egyptian–Syrian;also at this time the Hurrian civilisation (which preceded the Hittite) was developing in Anatolia, strongly influenced by the Mesopotamian–Old Assyrian culture with which it had close contacts down the Euphrates valley: Assyrian merchant colonies of considerable size were already established in several places in
Anatolia by 1800 BC. In Greece between 1700 and 1600 BC there seems to have been a sudden flowering of Mycenaean civilisation, strongly coloured by Cretan elements; this flowering is exemplified in the shaft graves found by Schliemann at Mycenae, dating from the sixteenth century BC. Before this time mainland civilisation does not appear to have been palace-based, though the ‘House of Tiles’ at Lerna (third millennium BC) looks like an early form of the mainland ‘megaron’. It would seem a plausible guess that large mainland kingdoms like Mycenae grew from local chiefdoms centred on glorified farms by conquering and assimilating lesser local dynasties in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BC, though exactly
how
the shaft grave dynasty became so wealthy is as yet unknown, and neither do we know when Mycenae took over places like Berbati and Prosymna, which look like former independent local centres. Even more of a problem is the relation of Mycenae to the other big palace sites in the Argolid, namely Argos, Tiryns and Midea. Classical tradition may perhaps be used to help us here, though with the necessary caution. Ancient tradition said that Mycenae was founded by the Perseid dynasty and that the Atreids (Pelops, Atreus, Agamemnon) were outsiders. The same kind of story is told of the Cadmeans of Thebes. The origins of the Atreids are said to have been Anatolian, Lydian, where we know that there was a Greek presence from the fifteenth century BC, but fascinating as this story is, the present state of our knowledge does not allow us to say anything more about the alleged outside origin of some of the Late-Bronze-Age Greek dynasties. If the essential lines of the tradition are correct, though, the shaft grave dynasty found by Schliemann might be the Perseids, and hence the great wealth of those graves the wealth of that clan. The Atreids would be later (originally installed at Midea by the Perseids). Their power would cover the late fourteenth and the thirteenth centuries BC, and this fits well, for what it is worth, with the traditional attribution of the great tholos tombs of Mycenae to their dynasty: the so-called treasuries of Atreus and Clytemnestra could actually be those of Atreus and his son
Agamemnon. Again, the legends are insistent that the rise of Mycenae to pre-eminence in the mainland only took place late, under the Atreids. In this context the earlier local extension of Mycenaean power across the Argive plain to places like Nemea, Lerna, and even Tiryns itself, may be reflected in legend: the Labours of Hercules (Herakles) of Tiryns were performed for Eurystheus, the last Perseid king of Mycenae; after Eurystheus’ death fighting the children of Herakles, the people of Mycenae are said to have chosen his brother-in-law Atreus to rule over them, for he was best able to protect them from their neighbouring enemies. Looking at the archaeology in relation to the legendary account, impressive as is the gold of the shaft grave people (sixteenth century BC), experts have not detected a Mycenaean presence outside the Argolid at that stage, and the general level of civilisation – the architecture, for example – was no higher than in the first centuries of the second millennium. In other words we can observe certain facts about the rise of the mainland kingdoms, and especially Mycenae, but we cannot as yet explain the extraordinary transformation of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, with the great building of what I have termed ‘imperial’ Mycenae. By then its power, as well as its influence and material culture, had surely extended well beyond the Argolid.