The Riddle of the Labyrinth (45 page)

On receiving Blegen's transcription, Ventris telephoned Chadwick in Cambridge. Making a long-distance call was noteworthy in those days; more noteworthy still, as Chadwick recalled, was the “great state of excitement” in Ventris's voice. “He rarely showed signs of emotion,” Chadwick wrote, “but for him this was a dramatic moment.”

There could be little doubt now that coincidence was excluded: The tablets were unquestionably written in Greek. Even Bennett, until then a holdout, wrote to Ventris, “Looks hard to beat!” after seeing the “Tripod” tablet, as P641 quickly became known. Some time afterward, addressing an international classical conference in Copenhagen, Ventris showed a slide of the “Tripod” tablet. On seeing it, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. (It “went off all right” was how he described the talk to Chadwick afterward.)

Ventris was in constant demand now, giving lectures all over the world, often in the host country's native language. He spoke before the king of Sweden. He spoke at Oxford. He spoke at Cambridge. In June 1953 he lectured at Burlington House in London, coming full circle to the place where as a boy he had excitedly queried Arthur Evans. The next day, the
Times
of London carried an account of Ventris's lecture on page 1, opposite an article by Edmund Hillary about his summit of Mount Everest the month before. As a result, the decipherment became known as “the Everest of Greek archaeology,” a description whose Olympian hyperbole Ventris found galling.

But in fact, as the classicist Maurice Pope has written, Ventris's accomplishment is in many ways the more spectacular of the two: “Whichever is regarded as the greatest personal feat or the most important in its consequences, there can be no question which of them belongs to the rarest category of achievement,” he says in
The Story of Archaeological Decipherment
. “People in other societies have climbed mountains. . . . But the recovery of the key to an extinct writing system is a thing which has never been attempted, let alone accomplished, by anybody except in the last two or three centuries of our own civilization.”

In August 1953, the joint article by Ventris and Chadwick, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives,” appeared in the
Journal of Hellenic Studies
, a major British academic publication. In it, they proposed sound-values for more than sixty signs and gave long lists of vocabulary: place-names; men's and women's names; names of occupations like priest, armorer, physician, cook, and baker; and names of commodities like chariots, grain, and pigs.

Most telling of all was the authors' decision to abandon the term
Minoan
, so beloved by Arthur Evans, and call all Linear B inscriptions—be they Cretan or mainland—Mycenaean. What they were saying, as Chadwick later wrote, was that “the label ‘Minoan' had been out of date as far as Linear B was concerned since 1939. . . . With our conviction that Linear B contained Greek went the irresistible conclusion that Knossos in [that] period formed part of the Mycenaean world.” Evans's beloved Minoans, with their high style and sophisticated civilization, would have to wait for Linear A to be unraveled for their language to be revealed. (The script, used between about 1750 and 1450 B.C., remains undeciphered to this day. It may forever remain so: there is simply not enough text from which to work.)

In the spring of 1954, an article by Ventris about the “Tripod” tablet, “King Nestor's Four-Handled Cups,” was published in the American journal
Archaeology
, helping to bring the decipherment to an international readership. Ventris was truly world-famous now, showered with interview requests, and with honors. In 1955, the young Queen Elizabeth appointed him to the Order of the British Empire. “Offers to join the academic world . . . were now his for the asking,” Robinson writes. But Ventris, no doubt keenly conscious of his lack of a university education, and his mere three years of schoolboy Greek, turned them all down.

Like Kober, Ventris never saw the decipherment as a contest, and was ill at ease in the spotlight. Despite the vindication of the “Tripod” tablet, and despite his growing renown, he was still racked with worry about his solution. “After the
Times
article I had a letter from a crank,” he wrote Chadwick in the summer of 1953. “The trouble is that, ridiculous as his ideas are, one always has the uneasy feeling of ‘there, but for the grace of God. . .'; and one's worst nightmare is that one has oneself been a victim of a similar delusion.”

In the summer of 1953, Ventris, Lois, and the children moved into a Modernist house he had designed for them in Hampstead, an exclusive part of London. But he was otherwise uninvolved with his family. His abrupt, youthful marriage to Lois appeared to have run its course; given Ventris's seeming inability to make deep connections with other people, it is surprising that it endured as long as it did, for Lois turned out to share neither his profound intellectualism nor his passion for Linear B. As Robinson writes:

Nor did Ventris seem to have forged strong bonds with his children. “I didn't find him easy to live with,” his daughter, Tessa, then in her fifties, said in the documentary film
A Very English Genius
. “I think his relationships with people were on his own terms. . . . If he wanted to be amusing and charming, he would be amusing and charming. And if he wanted to go away and work, he would go away and work. . . . I admired him, but don't think I liked him.” She added: “That was probably just jealousy, because he got all the attention.”

In July 1955, Ventris and Chadwick completed the manuscript of their 450-page book,
Documents in Mycenaean Greek
. Though work on the script still beckoned—thanks to the decipherment, Ventris had lectures to give, international meetings to attend, journal articles to write, and longs lists of Linear B vocabulary to type up for fellow scholars on a special typewriter called a Varityper—he soon tried to bow out of the field one more time.

“I shan't be able to devote time to any other major commitments,” he wrote Chadwick in December. “Once the two present pieces of typing are done, there's not much for me to do anyway.”

THIS TIME, AT LEAST, Ventris was bowing out for a good reason: He'd been given the chance to return to architecture.
Architects' Journal
, the field's principal publication in Britain, had just inaugurated a fellowship: a thousand pounds to a member of the profession to support a year's research on an architectural topic. Its first recipient—a signal honor—was Ventris, who would begin his research project at the start of 1956. The topic he chose was “Information for the Architect: What Does He Need and Where Will It Come From?”

At the time, British architects were working more or less in isolation. There was no universally available information on materials or methods, and members of the profession depended on word of mouth (and their time-honored ways of doing things) to ply their trade. “There were almost no books on architectural design, explaining how to design a school, a hospital or a factory,” Robinson writes. “The typical architects' design office did not even have a bookshelf.” In many ways, the predicament of architects mirrored that of midcentury Linear B scholars: both entailed isolation, ignorance of far-flung colleagues' work, and the lack of reliable guides to practicing one's craft.

What Ventris sought to do was to create a large-scale, architectural version of his Linear B questionnaire of 1949, from which he could produce a state-of-the-field dossier much like his Mid-Century Report. Just as he (and Kober before him) had dreamed of setting up a central clearing house for Linear B, he now envisioned one for architectural information of all kinds. “One might ring up the information centre to ask for any information, say, on
aluminium schools
in Australia,” Ventris wrote in a preliminary report. “The information officer would operate a keyboard with the . . . numbers for
aluminium
,
school
and
Australia
; the microcards comprising the complete information of the centre would be sorted for those sharing these codings; the selected cards would have their articles transmitted electronically to a view or printer at the subscriber's desk.” What he was proposing was essentially a high-tech version of Kober's cigarette-carton database.

But the project soon paled, and Ventris began to feel like an outsider in this field, too. In the wake of the decipherment, with all its attendant publicity, he had become far better known for his work on Linear B. In a sense, he had lost two careers: He was conducting research
about
architecture but not actually practicing architecture; nor was he a decipherer anymore. He had been drawn to Linear B by the pure mathematics of decipherment, with its crystalline clarity and relative certainties. Its humanities aspects—what could be gleaned from the tablets about a long-ago civilization—interested him far less. Though his work gave birth to an entire branch of ancient history known as Mycenology, Ventris would eventually tell Emmett Bennett “that he himself saw no future in Linear B,” as Robinson writes. By mid-1956, Ventris had become an interloper twice over, with a foot in each of two worlds but secure bearings in neither.

In June, Ventris turned in the first half of his fellowship report to
Architects' Journal
. He would never write the second: The work, as he later put it, had become “cold and dull.” Oliver Cox, his architecture-school classmate, “was aware,” Robinson writes, “that his gifted friend was constantly depressed that spring and summer.”

On August 22, Ventris sat down and composed what Robinson calls an “extraordinary, shocking, abject, private letter” to the editor of
Architects' Journal
. Written by hand in his impeccable printlike script, it renounced the remainder of the fellowship. It recalls Ventris's letter of abdication to Myres in 1948, but is even more raw, more self-lacerating, and more final:

Very late at night on September 5, 1956, Ventris left home alone in his car. He apparently told his family that he was going to retrieve his wallet, which he had left at the home of Lois's parents. But what wallet cannot wait until morning?

Just after midnight on September 6, Ventris, north of London, pulled at high speed into a rest area off the main road. He collided with a parked truck and was killed instantly. His magnum opus,
Documents in Mycenaean Greek
, written with Chadwick, was published by Cambridge University Press a few weeks later. It remains a seminal text in Mycenaean studies.

At the coroner's inquest, the death of Ventris, thirty-four, was ruled an accident. But the question of whether he took his own life is debated by classicists to this day. His family has long maintained that his death was accidental. “I don't think he committed suicide,” Tessa Ventris said in
A Very English Genius
. “He was much too positive for that.” She said she thought her father had a heart attack and blacked out at the wheel. Heart disease may well have run in the family: Ventris's son, Nikki, died of a heart attack in 1984, in his early forties.

In the end, it is impossible to know exactly what happened. Perhaps it does not matter. For Ventris's achievement—startling, monumental, and incontrovertible—will endure down the ages.

AND SO THE STORY ENDS, bracketed by two architects: Daedalus, who built the Minoan labyrinth, and Ventris, who found the thread that unraveled the tangle of writing unearthed there. But however Olympian his accomplishment, it should not be forgotten that Ventris attained it by standing on the small, round shoulders of an unheralded American giant, a fact he acknowledged less conspicuously than he might have.

In his pathbreaking BBC announcement of July 1952, when he unveiled his discovery to the world, Ventris took pains to credit Bennett and Myres by name. But he did not mention Kober, whose syllabic grid, with its carefully worked-out abstract values, was the foundation stone of his decipherment.