Oracle (26 page)

As in Ancient Greece, every politician today has people to please, problems to gloss over. But the Oracle, independent of any single political leader, could not only tell the truth: she had the means to know what that truth might be, guided by the group of ‘wise women’ who helped and watched over the Oracle and her rites.

There was also the gas, ethylene (see below) seeping up from the earth, which stupefied the mind so that perhaps only the truth could be told. It might have been a bit like today’s ‘truth serum’ which doesn’t so much stop you lying as make you gabble out whatever you think of first—which is usually what your captors want to know. The Oracle had no power to dissemble—and little reason to. And if her prophecies were sometimes a bit obscure…well, that stopped the client getting too angry until he was far away, and might as well accept what the truth meant.

I am not saying that the Oracle of Delphi was never a prophet. I am saying, however, that she may not have needed mysterious power to be one.

Certainly Thetis in this book has no magic. She watches, analyses, deduces…and finally, under the gas, speaks. But this book is supposition. I simply do not know how much truth is in it.

I do know, however, that this wasn’t the book I meant to write. I have written many books: I outlined them, sketched them out, and then followed that design pretty closely. But from the first paragraph, this book changed everything I had meant to say. It was almost as though the story took me over, rather than the other way about.

I write in a study surrounded by a garden. I wrote this book in autumn, and the world outside my study was filled with the reds and blues and purples of sage flowers, late roses, passionfruit and scented camellias. Perhaps, with this book, the flowers outside my study gave off the ethylene I have described below, wafting into my study, and I too breathed in just a little of the Oracle’s ‘pneuma’, or spirit.

The mysterious gas, or ‘pneuma’, that caused the goats to run in circles and the Oracle to speak, is mentioned in the earliest recorded stories of the Oracle of Delphi. But in modern times there is no sign of the gas in the region, nor of any cleft in the ground.

Was the gas just a legend?

For many centuries it was thought it was. But in the early years of this century various scientists from the USA and Holland studied air and water samples from Delphi. They discovered that ethylene—once used as an anaesthetic—as well as perhaps a little ethane too, still seeped out of some rocks near Delphi, though in almost untraceable amounts. It seems that one earthquake opened up rifts in the ground that let out the gas and another earthquake closed them. The ancient
descriptions of the Oracle—her slumping posture, her harsh voice, her out-of-control actions—all fit the symptoms of someone who is inhaling ethylene.

Ethylene is given off by ripening fruit and some flowers; it is also given off by oil deposits or oily rocks, deep below the ground. It smells slightly sweet—as did the ‘pneuma’ at Delphi. According to ancient texts the Oracle also forgot her prophecies afterward…and that too would fit in with someone who was slowly being anaesthetised.

In ancient Greece a woman was less valuable than a good hunting dog. No one listened to women, and girls would have grown up feeling that their opinions didn’t matter, as they were themselves so much less worthy than men.

But the Oracle was different. She spoke with the authority of Apollo, never doubting her powers because they came from him. And the gas—the sweet, relaxing ethylene gas—allowed her to drop her inhibitions and speak with her mind and heart.

By 1000 BC the Oracle gave her prophecies in a small temple, hidden from the questioner by a curtain. This would have concentrated the ethylene fumes in her room and protected the questioners…though the gas might also have left them feeling just disoriented enough to feel overawed, as though something otherworldly had happened.

I have simplified the religion of Mycenaean days into a single form of worship of an earth goddess, the
‘Mother’. It’s likely the reality was far more complex, that some ‘fertility symbol’ was worshipped in many different ways by different peoples, who may also have worshipped other local gods—the mountain behind their village, the spirits of the stream, the demons who caused meat to rot. The more centralised religious system—the Zeus and Apollo, Aphrodite and Athena that we know as the ‘Greek Gods’—probably came some time later, and took over the roles of the local gods and goddesses.

The Oracle spoke for about 1000 years. Then in 83 BC the shrine was damaged by one or maybe several earthquakes. Some say that this was when the Oracle lost the power of true predictions. (Had the quakes shut off the gas?) Delphi was still a sacred site, though, and the Oracle still consulted.

In 66 AD the riches of Delphi were looted by the ancient Roman Emperor Nero—possibly insane, and definitely greedy. By this time the Oracle—or oracles—gave only an almost meaningless mutter, ‘translated’ by the priests of Apollo. Possibly by then it was the priest who chose which prophecy to give rather than the woman on the tripod.

The shrine of the Oracle was ordered to close by the Christian Emperor Theodosius I in 395 AD. The site was then abandoned for almost 100 years, but slowly people started to come back and, by 600 AD, the village of Kastri had grown up nearby.

In the time of this book—and to this day, if in different forms—it was common to sacrifice to the gods to give thanks or to ask for a good harvest or a baby or whatever you wanted. The wealthier you were, and the more urgent your plea, the greater the sacrifice. At some times, and in some places, the king might sacrifice himself (or an unfortunate substitute dressed up as the king) to ensure victory or to try to break a drought or plague. The firstborn child was especially valuable as a sacrifice, as the sooner your children became adults the sooner they could help feed the family and look after you in turn. There are many stories of firstborn sons and daughters being sacrificed by their own families.

A ‘consenting sacrifice’ brought the best luck of all: an animal or human who didn’t try to escape from the knife. Sometimes in bad times like hard winters, a ‘scapegoat’ would be killed, or at least badly beaten or driven away from a village, to drive out the bad luck.

Nikko and Thetis’s parents came from that culture, and their decision to sacrifice their children for the good of the village needs to be seen in that light. They were a people who were used to the concept of sacrifice.

Most sacrifices, however, were animals or other offerings of food. Sometimes they were burned; at other times they might be eaten by the guardians of the shrine. Often their entrails would be examined to make sure they were healthy—healthy entrails meant that the sacrifice was a good one, and would be effective.

There were many other ways, though, that ‘augurs’ attempted to forecast the future: watching the flight of
birds, spitting seeds, looking at the pattern of rocks, wheat, barley or sticks split on the ground. Any major natural event, like an earthquake, a comet, an eclipse or a fire, was held to be a message from the gods, one which might herald something good, or a disaster. It was the augurs’ job to work out (tactfully) which.

Humans’ first tools were made of stone—often flint, that could be split into shards as sharp as most knives today, but nowhere near as durable. ‘Meteor glass’ or ‘sky iron’, molten metals from meteor strikes, was also used.

After the ‘Stone Age’ came the ‘Bronze Age’, in which this story is set. But the name is a bit misleading, for there were five metals used about that time: gold, probably imported from Egypt, mostly for ornamentation and very valuable, silver, copper, tin and lead. Iron was known but very rare.

Bronze—an amalgam of copper and tin—was hard, shiny and durable. It was also expensive, so in most poorer places stone would still have been used for knives and spear points.

As I said at the beginning of this note, most of what we know about the way people lived at Mycenae comes from excavations of the site, including its huge stone walls. Our information also comes from the pictures on walls, tiles and pots found at Mycenae and the other major Bronze Age
Greek cities mentioned in this book, as well as from the grave goods in the giant tombs prepared for their kings. There were two written languages in Mycenae. Linear B has been mostly translated, and was used for tributes and trading accounts. Linear A is still undeciphered.

Mycenae ruled both by force and by its trading wealth, bartering many fine types of cloth (mostly wool but also linen made from flax) for metal and luxuries. But Mycenae and Mycenaean culture dominated the Greek world for only about 200 years, 1400 BC to 1200 BC. It is most famous, perhaps, for the war against Troy—a rival trading nation—in which the Greek cities under the leadership of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, son of Atreus, destroyed Troy and burned it to the ground after a ten-year war, recorded in the ancient poems
The Odyssey
and
The Iliad.
For many years the city of Troy was regarded as a legend, until archaeologists dug down and found its ruins.

The historical Atreus was murdered, not killed in an earthquake.

For several hundred years after the fall of the great Mycenaean trading cities, Greece became a land of tribespeople, with camps of cattle herders and small villages, rather than a land of fortified towns dominated by grand palaces, trading with other nations. Even the skills of writing vanished.

By about 800 BC writing was widespread throughout Greece again. But this was a different script, based on the Phoenician alphabet, probably developed by Greek merchants.

By then much of Mycenaean history had been lost.

These days most sheep are white, as white fleece is easiest to dye, but there would also have been many dark and piebald sheep in Mycenaean times.

First the wool was shorn from the sheep. Then it had to be combed, to get out bits of burr and dung, and make the fibres lay straight and almost separate. Several strands were then spun together over and over to make wool’s relatively short fibres into long threads, not with a spinning wheel but by hand, using a ‘distaff’, a small object often made of wood—which soon became polished by the lanolin in the wool—or even carved stone. The long threads could then be woven into cloth.

Most spun wool was pretty chunky, but a skilled spinner could create a strong yet thin yarn that could be woven into the lightest of wool cloth. This skill was prized, and fine cloth very valuable.

White wool could be dyed after being soaked in pots of urine to leech out the lanolin, or natural grease. The dyer would then boil leaves, bark, flowers, small snails, shellfish, lichen, saps or many other ingredients to give a variety of strong colours. They’d be cooked until the desired colour was reached, often with a ‘mordant’ like tin added to help the colour set fast, so it wouldn’t wash out when it rained or the cloth was washed. The dyeing materials would be strained out, and then the wool itself would be boiled and soaked in the coloured water. Thread was dyed, rather than raw wool, as the long boiling process could matt raw wool together to make felt—useful in its own right, but impossible to spin into thread.

After dyeing, the thread would be woven on large looms or small hand ones for narrower widths of cloth. A good weaver could add complex patterns and a range of colours.

Linen came from the flax plant. (The flaxes that may be in your garden are close relatives of the ones used to make cloth.) The leaves were soaked in water till the green stuff rotted. The long fibres left were then spun in much the same way wool was, then dyed and woven. Other fibrous plants, like nettles, were also used to make cloth, and sometimes wool and flax or other fibres from plants, goats, or even human hair might be woven together. Mycenae was known for its vast range of different cloths, possibly many more than we commonly use today, and the spinners, dyers and weavers must have been extraordinarily skilled.

There were no forks back then, and possibly not even spoons were used at mealtimes. You hacked off your bread and meat with a knife and ate it or, in rich households, pointed to your choice and a servant or slave cut it for you.

Greens were gathered from creeks and damp forest areas and mostly eaten raw, with bread and meat if you had it. Most meat was cooked on a spit over a fire, usually outside, though there were indoor fires, with a big hole above them in the roof instead of a chimney to carry away the smoke.

A ‘posset’ of thickened barley or wheat meal would be drunk straight from the cup or bowl. Metal pots that
food could be cooked in were known, but bronze was probably too precious to be used much for cooking. Bones would be left with herbs in a clay pot to steep by a fire to make broth, and grain was soaked in the same way to make a sort of porridge, sweetened with honey perhaps, or flavoured with onions or cheese. Food could also be cooked in a leather bag suspended over a low fire, with the water replenished as it seeped through the leather. But by and large the idea of boiling food came later.

From the scenes painted on walls it seems likely that men ate first, and then women and children dined on what was left. Feasting was a male-only affair, apart from the girls there for entertainment.

But, as in many societies, it was good manners—especially for a king—to make sure that his feast contained far more than his guests could eat. That way not only were the women and servants of his house fed on the leftovers, but any stranger arriving at the door would be given food too. One of the worst things you could say about a man was that he was selfish or niggardly with food, or that he turned a stranger away without food and shelter.

Flour from emmer wheat—an ancient variety still available today—or barley was ground either in a small ‘quirn’, usually held between the knees while you pounded and ground the contents with a stone, or in a large three-legged quirn, where the woman stood to do
the grinding—a much faster way to produce lots of flour.