The Trojan War (4 page)

Paris's Greek name—Alexander—might mean that he was descended from King Alaksandu, who forged Troy's alliance with the Hittites. Certainly, Paris's mission faced a similar problem: how could Troy achieve maximum security at minimum cost and without undue risk? His answer was to treat the enemy like a rival gang leader, whose power depended on his honor and whose honor meant controlling his woman, at a minimum. Dazed and caught off-guard, the squabbling Greeks would either have to unite—in itself no small thing—and wage a very tough war or they would have to accept one very big but cheap triumph for Troy. Paris had played the game well.

But Menelaus knew the rules too. He went to war not because his bed was cold but because his future was shaky. Paris had not only cuckolded the king but abused his hospitality. The Trojan was like a high roller who openly cheats in front of the casino owner. Unless he punished Paris, Menelaus would be branded as an easy mark. Since he ruled Sparta by marriage and not birth, unless he forced the return of his wife, he would eventually face someone wanting to knock him off his throne. But Menelaus had an immediate problem: his treasury was lighter thanks to Helen's decision to take a queen's ransom with her to Troy.

Just what Helen took is unknown; it was certainly not cash, since coinage had not yet been invented. At a minimum, the hoard included her dowry, which must have been substantial because she was a royal princess. Who knows what other loot she and Paris helped themselves to as they left. The treasures surely gleamed. Greek goldsmiths were famous for their craft, and their master-works were matched by the pick of the world's imports. Greek kings and queens enjoyed gold and silver vases and cups, bronze daggers inlaid with gold decoration, solid gold earrings, solid gold rings with inlaid amber or lapis lazuli, silver pins with decorated gold heads, ivory plaques and combs, gold diadems and bracelets, gold necklaces with precious-stone pendants. Their shapes were a forest of swirls and rosettes, and decorated with a gallery of ivy leaves, crocuses, figure-eight shields, bulls, lions, hunters, gods, and priests. It was a collection built up over generations, and it was a thief's dream.

Paris not only made off with Sparta's queen, therefore, but with its Fort Knox. Later, Paris describes the Trojan War as a fight

Agamemnon echoes these words. Homer was much too pragmatic to reduce war to romance.

Regional politics also played a role. Agamemnon's Mycenae was the strongest kingdom in Greece, but the other Greek states could and did go their own ways, and in the age's warrior culture, that meant blood. Around 1250
B.C.
, the great city of Thebes had been sacked by an army that, although largely from other Greek kingdoms, had its roots in a Theban dynastic dispute. Agamemnon would surely rather have the Greeks unite against Troy than turn on one another.

In short, if the question about the Trojan War is, “What's love got to do with it?” the answer is probably, “Nothing.”

In later ages Helen was worshipped as a goddess in Sparta, but opinions were mixed elsewhere. The Athenian classical tragedian Aeschylus no doubt spoke for many when he wrote off the woman who had caused the Trojan War with the puns of Helen the “Helandros” and “Helenaus”—Helen the Man-Killer and Ship-Destroyer. Yet the royal princess of Sparta had been an extraordinarily eligible bride. Her dowry was the kingdom.

Like Helen, Menelaus was born royalty, brother of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, but Menelaus did not inherit the kingship. In Hittite society it was possible for a man to marry into the royal family and so win a throne, and the same may have been true for Greece. This usually happened only when a king had no sons, but Helen had two brothers, Castor and Polydeukes. Perhaps they, like Telemachus in the
Odyssey,
were too young to inherit, or more likely, Tyndareus decided it was worth passing them over in order to ally his family with the powerful dynasty nearby. Menelaus became king of Sparta.

Sparta was wealthy and comfortable. Laconia (as the valley in which Sparta lies is known) has yielded many Bronze Age treasures, such as the elegant pair of solid gold cups found in a tomb at a village called Vapheio. These fifteenth-century
B.C.
masterpieces show scenes of bull-chasing. At Amyclae, near Sparta, stood a Bronze Age mansion; here, centuries later, there rose a structure called the Menelaion, a shrine to Menelaus and Helen. Many scholars think the palace of Menelaus and Helen once stood there too. Meanwhile, recent excavations in northern Laconia, outside the village of Pellana, have uncovered a Bronze Age cemetery, complete with big and imposing beehive
(tholos)
tombs—the largest such tombs found anywhere. Nearby is a hill on which the excavator believes that he may have found the palace of Menelaus and Helen. This theory is still unproven, but the big tombs of Pellana add to the impression of Bronze Age Laconia's prosperity.

But Laconia was not Troy. Menelaus was a provincial warrior, while Paris was a cosmopolitan prince. Troy was the city of light and life at the meeting place of the world. And it was a good place to be a woman. Women in Bronze Age Anatolia had more freedom and power than their sisters in Mycenaean Greece. The evidence of archaeology, epigraphy, and Homer all agree on this point. Consider a recent and remarkable discovery by the excavators of Troy: a bronze disk, which is convex on both sides, not quite an inch in diameter and just a half inch thick. It weighs only four ounces. Yet it offers an important insight into the society of Troy. Each side of the disk is incised with writing, which shows that it was a seal. The Trojan seal was last used ca.1150–1100
B.C.
, but it was probably an heirloom. Its style went out of fashion after 1200 and its worn surface suggests long use. So the seal may well tell us about the world of Priam.

The practice of sealing was common in the ancient Near East, including Anatolia. Seals were used to stamp land deeds, court decisions, treaties, royal pronouncements, and even clay “envelopes” in which contracts were stored. Seals were also an important part of commerce, used to mark containers and other merchandise. If the seal was broken, the container had been opened. A respected merchant's seal on a product, then as now, was a guarantee of quality.

The Trojan seal catches the eye for two reasons. First, it is the only writing ever found in Bronze Age Troy. Second the seal is inscribed on both sides. One side bears the name of a man, who was a scribe, while the other side bears the name of a woman, presumably his wife. The writing system is Luwian hieroglyphic, as was standard for Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The bronze is too worn for us to read either name but the signs for “man” and “woman” are each clear. In short, the seal testifies to a degree of freedom and equality for women.

That is not unusual for Bronze Age Anatolia. In the Hittite kingdom, for instance, there was nothing remarkable about married couples, whether royalty or commoners, using seal stones with the husband's name on one side and the woman's on the other. A Hittite woman might even have a seal of her own.

The Greek world had nothing similar to Troy's husband-wife seal. While seals were tools of commerce in Anatolia, in Greece they were used mainly as ornaments. Although Greek bureaucrats stamped goods in the warehouse with seals, in general the Greeks treated their seals as jewelry, as signs of wealth and display, meant to be worn around the neck. Greek seals were not inscribed with writing. Women were sometimes depicted but men predominated, and that seems to fit Mycenaean culture.

In Homer, Trojan men, such as Hector, worry about the opinion of the women of Troy. When Hector's wife, Andromache, asks him to leave the battlefield for her sake and for the sake of their child, Hector replies:

Homer's Greeks display no corresponding concern for what their women thought.

Hittite history is punctuated by the careers of powerful royal women. Yes, the Hittite Great King, like other Anatolian monarchs, practiced polygamy. But the power of the chief wife was potentially enormous, especially if she was in charge of raising and marrying off all the royal children. The greatest Hittite queen had those powers and many others: she was Queen Puduhepa, wife of King Hattushilish III. Puduhepa came from a noble family of high priests in southern Anatolia and went on to play a pivotal role in Hittite religion. She also took a hand in law and diplomacy. She had both a joint seal with her husband and her own independent seal. When, for example, Egypt and the Hittites negotiated a peace treaty, which was recorded on a silver tablet, the seal of King Hattushilish appeared on one side of the tablet and the seal of Queen Puduhepa appeared on the other. She corresponded as an equal with Pharaoh Rameses II.

Bronze Age Greece offers the occasional image of a powerful queen like the
Odyssey
's Queen Arete of the probably fictional kingdom of Phaeacia, but otherwise it had no room for Puduhepas or for gender equality. It was a world whose captains and kings called their bedmates “prizes” and traded them like bric-a-brac. Helen's response was neither to accept nor to protest; Helen's response, one might posit, was to opt out.

From Sparta the lovers fled to Paris's ships, loaded with treasure. They were in a hurry, but found time to stop at Cranae, an island off the coast, where they consummated their passion, or so tradition says. Then came the Aegean crossing. As they neared the Anatolian coast, Helen could hardly have helped noticing the light gleaming on Troy's towers. After disembarking at Troy's harbor, she might have seen, as she rode to town, the wheat fields on the low hills in the distance. Unlike their ancestors, who lived on barley and lentils, the prosperous Trojans of Paris's day grew an abundance of wheat.

As she reached the city, Helen surely found it as foreign as she did exciting. At the gates of the city stood steles, standing stones honoring the gods, a common Anatolian custom but not Greek. Another typical Anatolian feature was the layout awaiting her inside the wooden walls: a lower town around a fortified citadel. Inside Troy's imposing gates, Helen would have found a bustling city of narrow alleys around paved streets with inset drains, a city of shrines, markets, courtyards, ovens, and houses built of stone, mud brick, and wood.

At dawn and sunset the town would have echoed with the din of cattle and sheep and the herders who brought them out to graze and back. The day was filled with the cries of merchants, the talk of slaves and housewives heading out to the springs to do laundry, and the laughter of children. The night rang with the clatter of pottery at the evening meal, the footsteps of the night watch, and the twang of the lute mixed with the whistle of pipes. And on a hot summer afternoon, when anyone sensible was taking a siesta, the city heard nothing at all.

The lower city was so thickly settled that its buildings reached right up to the wall of the citadel, or Pergamos, as Homer calls it. Pergamos rose about one hundred feet above the plain, a half-acre stronghold protected by an 1,150-foot circuit of walls standing 30 feet high. The serpentine path that led up from the lower city would have brought Helen to the royal palace atop the hill.

Helen is likely to have formally divorced Menelaus. Hittite law allowed a woman to initiate divorce proceedings, and society would not have looked kindly on ongoing adultery. The Amarna Letters, for example, consider a woman without a husband as a symbol of desolation, neglect, and futility—like a field without a cultivator. Paris saved Helen from such a fate. The two of them lived in style: Their beautiful house on Pergamos was built by the best craftsmen in the Troad. There they slept in a high-vaulted, perfumed bedroom. She was attended by a group of Trojan handmaids, whom she directed in such household chores as weaving. She enjoyed all the freedom of an Anatolian princess as well as the cosmopolitan pleasures of life in a big city on the crossroads of international trade. Some of Troy's nobles grumbled about her presence, but King Priam was her champion and she called him father. There was only one problem: the long arm of her rightful husband.

Arranged dynastic marriage was a staple of Bronze Age diplomacy. A marriage was, in effect, a treaty. Take, for example, Madduwatta, a wily Hittite vassal king in western Anatolia around 1400
B.C.
Madduwatta married off his daughter to King Kupanta-Kurunta of the nearby land of Arzawa. This was the beginning of an alliance between two former enemies, as the Hittite Great King recognized, with no little annoyance. How could he trust Madduwatta to uphold Hittite interests against Kupanta-Kurunta now that the latter was Madduwatta's son-in-law?

If a royal marriage was an alliance, a royal seduction was an act of war. Hittite law uses this striking image for a man who runs off with a woman without her family's consent: “You have become a wolf.” It meant, in effect, that he was banished. Adultery was considered an even worse crime, and Hittite law pardoned a husband for killing his wife and her lover if he caught them in the act. But while a man who raped another man's wife got the death penalty, a man who seduced another man's wife got off; in that case, only the wife was executed. If Greek or Trojan law were similar, Helen would have known that she had put her life on the line by running off with Paris. Either she didn't care or she expected to get away with it.