The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (3 page)

Crete’s Windsor Castle is the palace of Knossos, where the first excavations by Sir Arthur Evans began in 1899. Small, swarthy and immensely strong, Evans gave the best years of his life to the palace, and very remarkable it is: it covers a vast area, well over 10,000 square metres; parts of it were three or even four storeys high; and the plumbing seems to have been better than anything known in Europe before the nineteenth century. The trouble is that in Evans’s day archaeology was still in its infancy, and he was able to indulge his artistic imagination to a degree that leaves the modern visitor aghast. King Minos, entering the palace today, might find vaguely familiar some of the architecture and furnishings that have survived–the gypsum throne, for example (on which one is still allowed to sit), and those curious columns in the Hall of the Palace that taper downwards–but would he recognise Sir Arthur’s attempts to reproduce his interior decoration: the blazing vermilions, the rich butter-yellows, the unmistakable suggestions of art nouveau, or, most astonishing of all, the murals? The most famous of these is based, so far as one can see, on what appears to be a large piece of toffee in one corner, bearing a few barely identifiable traces of colour. From this Evans has extrapolated a wildly exuberant design of leaping dolphins–pleasing, perhaps, but far, far from authentic.

Did King Minos–the question has to be asked–really exist? According to Homer, he was the son of Zeus and Europa, but Diodorus Siculus, writing in Agrigento during the first century
BC
, gives him a rather less elevated lineage and relates how, in a contest for the kingship of Crete, he prayed to Poseidon to send him a bull from the sea for sacrifice. The god obliged, but the bull was so beautiful that Minos could not bear to sacrifice it and kept it for himself. In revenge Poseidon caused Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, to fall in love with the animal, and it was their most unnatural union that engendered the Minotaur, half man and half bull, whom the King kept in a Daedalus-designed labyrinth. None of this, admittedly, suggests a historical personage; on the other hand Thucydides, a historian who normally keeps his feet firmly on the ground, credits Minos with having assembled the first great navy in the Mediterranean, subjugating the Cyclades, largely clearing the sea of pirates and establishing governors on certain islands of the Aegean. As for the labyrinth, there is no better description of the palace of Knossos; the unwary visitor without a guide may well envy Theseus, who, leaving the Minotaur dead behind him, had the advantage of Ariadne’s thread to lead him back to freedom. Finally, the bull. He is seen, or at least suggested, everywhere throughout the palace; there is a fascinating fresco–perhaps a degree or two more authentic than most–showing a charging animal with an intrepid little athlete somersaulting clear over his horns. In the life as well as the religion of the Minoans the bull clearly played a key role; one would love to know more about him.

This extraordinary civilisation–talented, cultivated and extremely rich–ruled an empire covering most of the islands of the Aegean and until around 1400
BC
exercised a powerful influence over the whole eastern Mediterranean, leaving traces as far afield as Transylvania and on the Danube, as well as in Sardinia and the Aeolian Islands just off the northeast coast of Sicily. It must have been fun to be a Minoan. The objects that they left behind them give the impression of a happy, peaceful, carefree people, secure enough to leave their cities unwalled; the invention of the potter’s wheel provided them with drinking vessels, jugs and storage jars in astonishingly sophisticated shapes, which they decorated with swirling abstract patterns or designs of birds, flowers and fish. Their clothes were elaborate–sometimes almost fantastical–with a good deal of toplessness, their jewellery of dazzling golden filigree. They enjoyed a degree of luxury unprecedented in history and not to be equalled until the dissipated days of the Roman Empire. Their life was easy, their climate delectable. They mistrusted all things military. They made love, not war.

But then disaster struck, as sooner or later it always does. Just what happened is unclear. An invasion by a powerful and vindictive enemy has been suggested; in such a case that enemy would most probably have been Mycenae. A likelier explanation–though it does not necessarily rule out the other–lies in the tremendous volcanic eruption which occurred around 1470
BC
on Santorini (the modern Thira), some sixty miles to the north. Knossos was simultaneously shattered by a series of violent earthquakes, while an immense tidal wave swept against the north coast of Crete, flooding every harbour along it. The eruption also threw up a vast cloud of ash similar to that which was to bury Pompeii thirteen centuries later. (Some of this ash has been identified as far away as Israel and Anatolia.) The island, depopulated and defenceless, would have been an easy prey to foreign invaders. Minoan civilisation was over.

Exactly how the civilisation of Greek Mycenae became the heir and successor to that of Crete is not altogether clear. There had been people living in this little mountain stronghold since the sixth millennium
BC
, but not until the middle of the second did they distinguish themselves in any particular way. Then, from one generation to the next around 1500
BC
, they became very much richer and more sophisticated, their shaft graves on the acropolis filled with ornaments and accoutrements of gold. Curiously enough, none of these show any Minoan influence. Did the Mycenaeans, perhaps, hire themselves out as mercenaries to the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, bringing back with them the Egyptian belief in life after death, the custom of packing their graves with necessities for that afterlife, and the fashion for golden death masks–one of which was to cause Heinrich Schliemann, while digging at Mycenae, to cable to the King of Prussia: ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!’? It would be pleasant to think that they did; alas, we shall never know.

Very soon after this, however–and still well before the eruption and earthquake–Minoan ideas took hold. Here, suddenly, all over Mycenae, are the bulls, the double axes, the horns of consecration and all the insignia of Knossos. Were they the result of one or more important dynastic marriages? Probably: it is hard to think of any other convincing explanation. At all events, Mycenae underwent a rapid education, and when the Minoans suffered their mysterious eclipse their successors were ready. By about 1400
BC
their cultural influence had spread all over the Peloponnese, with commercial links extending yet further afield. In Italy, which they seem to have reached towards the end of the fifteenth century
BC
, there were Mycenaean settlements along the southern coast of the Adriatic, the Gulf of Taranto and even as far as Sardinia, Ischia and the Bay of Naples. In Mycenae itself the Cyclopean walls surrounding the acropolis, with their famous Lion Gate in the northwest corner, went up around 1300
BC
; there was gold and bronze in abundance, with craftsmanship sufficiently developed to produce the massive chariots for which the city had long been famous. Mycenae, then at the height of its power, was ready for the Trojan War.

Troy stands at the northwestern corner of Asia Minor. The city today–or what remains of it–seems a small enough settlement, and indeed the war itself, which is nowadays usually ascribed to some time in the middle of the thirteenth century
BC
, may well have been of no great historical significance. Culturally, on the other hand, it was one of the most important wars ever fought, since it supplied the subject for the world’s first great epic poems. Homer’s
Iliad
, written in the eighth century
BC
, tells the story of the ten-year siege of Troy; its successor, the
Odyssey
, follows the wanderings of the war’s hero Odysseus before he eventually returns to his own kingdom of Ithaca. Here is the beginning of poetry–and perhaps of history too–as we know it today.

The story is familiar to us all. Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, abducts Helen, who is not only the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, but is also–having been hatched out of an egg laid by Leda after her adventure with Zeus in the guise of a swan–the most beautiful woman in the world. In revenge, a league of Greek cities declares war on Troy and sends against it a huge fleet, carrying an army under the command of Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. For ten years the Greeks besiege the city; finally, by means of the wooden horse, they capture it. The horse can safely be ascribed to legend; so, too, can the beauty of Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’; so, very probably, can Helen herself. But the
Iliad
is by no means all myth. When Heinrich Schliemann first visited the site of Troy in 1868, there was a substantial body of opinion which held that the city had never existed at all, and the majority of those who did believe in it favoured a completely different location, a place called Bunarbashi; it was Schliemann who first identified Hisarlik, some six miles away to the north, as the true site, entirely on the basis of the geographical evidence given in the
Iliad.
One of the reasons for his rejection of Bunarbashi was that it was three hours’ journey from the coast: Homer specifically states that the Greeks were able to go back and forth several times a day between their ships and the beleaguered city. Another was the steepness of the slope:

I left my guide with the horse at the top and I went down the precipice, which inclines at first at an angle of 45 degrees and then at an angle of about 65 degrees so that I was forced to go down on all fours. It took me almost fifteen minutes to get down and I came away convinced that no mortal, not even a goat, was ever able to run down a slope of 65 degrees and that Homer, always so precise in his topography, could not have wanted us to believe that Hector and Achilles ran down this impossible slope three times.

At Hisarlik the situation was very different:

The slopes which one has to cross in going around the city are so gentle that they can be traversed at running speed without risk of falling. In running three times around the city Hector and Achilles thus covered fifteen kilometres.

Unfortunately, Homer clearly states in the
Iliad
that there were two springs at Troy, one hot and one cold; none could be found at Hisarlik. At Bunarbashi, on the other hand, the situation was even less as he describes: Schliemann found no fewer than thirty-four–all, according to his pocket thermometer, of precisely equal temperature–and was later told that there were six more that he had missed. He got over the difficulty by assuming that the underground watercourses had been changed by subsequent earthquakes, which indeed they very probably had.

There also exists historical evidence for the Trojan War, or for something very like it. Records left by the Hittites of Anatolia
⁶
indicate a large-scale Mycenaean military expedition to Asia Minor during the thirteenth century
BC
; moreover, the city that is revealed in the sixth of the nine archaeological layers discovered on the site at Hisarlik–which is now generally accepted to be that of the Homeric Troy–shows every sign of having come to a violent end. We shall have to be content with that–not, of course, that Schliemann was. He had burrowed right down to the second layer when suddenly, on the penultimate day of the dig, he came upon a quantity of golden treasure and later proclaimed to the world that he had found the jewels of Helen of Troy; he even had a photograph taken of his beautiful Greek wife–whom he had previously sent for, sight unseen, by mail order from Athens–bedecked with them. We now know, however, that that treasure belonged to a period almost a thousand years earlier than the days of King Priam. Poor Schliemann: he never knew how wrong he was.
⁷

The three or four centuries following the Trojan War were marked by no outstanding civilisation of the kind we have been discussing. This was a period of change and transition, with invasions of Dorian tribes from the north and consequent shifts of population which involved considerable new Greek settlements in Asia Minor. It was not until about 800
BC
that things finally settled down again, with the lands bordering the Aegean finally united by a single language and culture. Even then, among the countless isolated feudal communities which made up the Greek world, we find no single town or city rising to the top or in any way standing out from the rest; but trade and communications had been restored, and–more important still–the alphabet had been revived and improved, above all by the introduction of vowels. The stage was thus set for the beginnings of literature, and promptly on cue, probably around 750
BC
, Homer made his appearance. Had he been born any earlier, his two great epics might never have existed; the language would not have been ready for him and he himself would almost certainly have been illiterate. (Several scholars have indeed argued that he was; both works betray signs of oral composition and transmission, and both contain occasional inconsistencies where the poet seems to contradict himself.
⁸
) Even if they were originally written, we know for a fact that it was only under the rule of Peisistratus, around 540
BC
, that they were first transcribed in what must pass for an authentic edition.