Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow in Classics at Clare College, Cambridge. His book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, illuminates the most important and informative themes in Ancient Greek history, from the first documented use of
the Greek language around 1400 BCE, through the glories of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, to the foundation of the Byzantine empire in around CE 330. In the excerpt below we learn about the city of Mycenae. Read Carltedge’s other OUPblog posts here.
‘I gazed on the face of Agamemnon’ – so runs the abbreviated headline-grabbing version of a message telegraphed in November 1876 by an overexcited and deeply mistaken Heinrich Schliemann, self-made Prussian multimillionaire businessman turned self-made ‘excavator’, to a Greek newspaper. For an amateur driven by the ambition to find the real-life counterparts of Homer’s characters the identification was not just seductively tempting but inescapable. For the Mycenae of Homer’s epic Iliad was adorned with the personalized, formulaic epithet ‘rich in gold’, and Agamemnon was the great high King of Mycenae, by far the most powerful of the regal lords who banded together to rescue the errant wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus from the adulterously fey clutches of Paris (also know as Alexander), a prince of the royal house of Troy. Schliemann had of course already dug there too, indeed could rightly claim to have found at Hissarlik overlooking the Dardanelles on the Asiatic side the only possible site of Homer’s Troy – if indeed there ever was a precise and uniform, real-world original of that fabled ‘windy’ city. But what he and his team of Greek workmen had in fact discovered at Mycenae, in one of the six hyper-rich shaft-graces enclosed within a much later (c. 1300 BCE) city-wall, was a handsome death-mask of a neatly bearded, compactly expressive adult male datable c. 1650 BCE, well before any sort of Homeric Trojan War could possibly have taken place.
More soberly, accurately, and professionally, if also just a little romantically, Mycenae is the major Late Bronze Age city in the Argolis region of the north-east Peloponnese that has given its name to an entire era: the ‘Mycenaean’ Age. This is thanks to a combination of archaeology and Homer, mainly the former. As we have seen, archaeology and philology between them tell us that in about 1450 BCE Cnossos was overwhelmed by Greek-speaking invaders from the north. These warrior communities had evolved a culture based, like that of Late Bronze Age Crete, on palaces. But whereas the ‘Minoan’ culture looks to have been strikingly peaceful or at least harmonious, the palace-based ruler of Mycenae and other mainland Mycenaean centres north and south of the Corinthian isthmus (Thebes, Iolcus, Pylus) were notably bellicose and like to surround themselves with huge walls (those of Mycenae were over 6 meters thick). Whether or not the rulers themselves were literate, they had their archives kept for them in the primitive bureaucratic form of Greek script know prosaically as L