1 OF LEDGERS AND LEGENDS 1500 BCE–c. 1180 BCE

Let us imagine dawn coming up over the Aegean Sea in the year 1500 BCE. Far away to the east and south, the sun is already well above the horizon across the Fertile Crescent that stretches from the top of the Persian Gulf, along the course of the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and westwards all the way to the Mediterranean.

This is the kingdom of the Hittites. Although over the sea it is still barely dawn, the sun rises upon Hattusa, the Hittite capital, which lies not far from the site of the future Turkish capital of Ankara. The Hittite king maintains an army that can field hundreds of war chariots—and another army of a different kind, less visible, that keeps and maintains immense numbers of records in a script known as cuneiform, devised in the Fertile Crescent during the previous millennium. At almost exactly the same moment, far to the south, the valley of the Nile is lit up. The sun first catches the tops of the pyramids of Giza, which are already some fifteen hundred years old. Egypt has been a stable kingdom, with a hierarchical society and a developed system of writing for all that time, and has as many centuries again ahead of it. The wealth and the fabled wisdom of the Egyptians are magnets that draw traders and military rivals from throughout the region.

Back in Anatolia, the light is starting to pour down the river valleys that lead westward from the plateau that is the Hittite heartland, towards the sea.

Moments later, a couple of hundred miles to the north and slightly to the west, the strait known as the Dardanelles, or Hellespont, is beginning to catch the growing light. On the Asian side, and a few miles inland from the Aegean coast, the densely populated streets of an even larger city are waking up to the new day. Built in the middle of a fertile plain, this city is well placed strategically to profit from any traders moving from the Aegean through the straits into the Sea of Marmara or beyond, through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Its citadel is fortified with massive walls. Below them, the much larger lower city is home to some ten thousand people, a significant population for this part of the world at this time. What language the people here speak, or what name they give to the place, will not be recorded for posterity. It is called Wilusa by the Hittites and Wilios, later Ilios or Ilion, by the Greeks—eventually to become known by the alternative Greek name, which may be no less ancient, Troy (Troia).

The dawn light spreads across the Aegean. The first rays catch the peaks, one after another, of the three great mountain ranges that run from east to west across the island of Crete. Two hundred miles long, no more than forty wide, and with no other land of any size visible from its shores, Crete is home to an advanced civilisation that will be dubbed ‘Minoan’, after the island’s legendary king, Minos, when its remains are discovered three and a half millennia later. Crete under the Minoans is a land of prosperity and plenty. As the sunlight reaches down to the coastal lowlands, on the roofs of buildings it picks out the characteristic, stylised representations of bulls’ horns that look a little like medieval crenellations, though they have not been put there for defence.

To most outsiders, even from the perspective of 1500 BCE, the Cretan way of life must seem exotic. Neither the Minoan language nor their writing system is like any other that is in use, anywhere. Minoan architecture has an upside-down appearance: upper storeys are supported on columns that taper downwards from the top. Ceremonial rooms in these palaces are brightly painted, their interior walls covered with stylised frescoes in a range of vibrant colours. Men are depicted wearing short, pointed kilts or loincloths; women, in long, flounced skirts and short jackets that leave their breasts bare and prominent; on occasion they hold live snakes in their hands. Both sexes are shown with unnaturally slim waists. Other scenes depict a public spectacle that must be part hazardous sport, part religious observance: acrobats take it in turns to grasp a running bull by the horns and somersault over its back, to land perfectly poised on their feet, facing the way they have come.

Inside the palaces, tucked away and lit only by lightwells from the upper storey, ‘lustral basins’ flanked by columns lead down into the earth and enable celebrants to communicate with the divine powers below. One of these is often represented in the form of a bull and is probably the forerunner of the ‘Earthshaker’, Poseidon, worshipped in later times. It is possible that the greatest deity of them all is the lithe-waisted, bare-breasted goddess often represented on top of a pinnacle of rock, while wild animals or male humans gaze up at her in adoration.

And the Minoans of Crete have good reason to fear them. The Aegean is a part of the world where the earth’s crust is on the move. Often in the past, their palaces and towns have been laid low by earthquakes. So far, each time this happens, the Minoans have rebuilt them, more splendidly than before. Now, as the sunlight sweeps across the sea, it illuminates the group of islands to the north, that will come to be known as the Cyclades. Among this group, and closest to Crete, rises into the light an awe-inspiring monument to the destructive forces that lie deep within the earth. This is the ring of rocky islands surrounding a sea-filled, volcanically active caldera, that will later be known as Thera and later still as Santorini. The gently sloping coasts on the seaward side, away from the caldera, used to boast several thriving towns. People used to live here in two-storey houses and painted the interiors with brightly coloured frescoes in the Minoan style. There are probably some still living, in 1500 BCE, who remember the catastrophic eruption that hurled volcanic debris many miles into the upper atmosphere and buried every sign of human habitation on Thera under a layer of more than thirty feet of ash and pumice.²

The remains of Akrotiri, as it will come to be called, will lie undiscovered until 1967 (CE). All that can be seen in 1500 BCE are lifeless mounds of white ash, scored with the black streaks of pyroclastic flows whose temperature, at the time of the eruption, would have reached hundreds of degrees centigrade. No life at all on the island could have survived the destruction. Even after almost half a century, only the scrubbiest vegetation has regained a foothold. Sea winds scour the surface, creating treacherous, shifting ravines and blowing ash and grit far out to sea.

At the time of the eruption the winds were blowing from the west. Least affected would have been the people living between one and two hundred miles upwind of the catastrophe on the mainland, whose turn it is, at last, to greet the sunlight on this imagined morning. This is the land that after many centuries will come to be known by the names of Hellas and later Graecia, or Greece. Here, people live in scattered communities, year after year balancing risks of crop failure, drought, and flash floods. Apart from a few fertile coastal plains, land suitable for growing crops and grazing is broken up by mountain ranges that keep communities apart from one another. Subsistence farming and animal husbandry, mostly of sheep and goats, are the norm. The terrain is capable of feeding only so many mouths, human and animal. This is a constant that will never really change in all the centuries to come.

In 1500 BCE there are no buildings anywhere on the mainland to rival those of Crete, either in number or in scale. Until relatively recently, and especially when compared to Crete, the whole area has been a ‘cultural backwater’.⁴ But a change is in the air. This is especially evident at Mycenae, a hilltop settlement on the edge of the plain known as the Argolid, in the northeast Peloponnese, where a wealthy elite has begun to emerge.

The more distant origins of the Mycenaeans, as we call these people and their civilisation today, and the Greek language that they spoke, are lost in prehistory. Greek belongs to the Indo-European group of languages, which in prehistoric times spread through many populations, from the Indian subcontinent to Iceland. It is often suggested that the first Indo-European speakers must have arrived in the Greek mainland from the north, sometime between 2300 and 1900 BCE (in prehistory, all dates are approximate). As they mixed with the people who had been there before them, the language that we know as Greek slowly emerged—distinct from others of the Indo-European group and incorporating elements absorbed from the older language, or languages, of the region.⁵ Alternatively, it may be that a form of early Indo-European arrived with the first farmers, when knowledge of the techniques of agriculture first spread this far westward from the Fertile Crescent, some six thousand years ago. In that case, the distant origin of the Greek language may reach all the way back to the beginning of the period that we call the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.⁶ Either way, Greek must have been taking shape as a distinct language in the southernmost tip of the Balkan Peninsula, during several hundreds of years, perhaps even thousands, before our imagined Aegean dawn in the year 1500 BCE.

It was at the imposing citadel of Mycenae that in 1876 the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann first found proof that a complex society had flourished on the European mainland in the Late Bronze Age, a whole millennium before the heyday of ‘classical’ Greece. Buried in what he termed ‘shaft graves’, Schliemann uncovered the remains of the families that had ruled there between about 1600 and 1450 BCE. The bones of the men still showed traces of the wounds and the deformations they had survived during battle-hardened lives. Buried with them was a fearsome array of swords, daggers, and spearpoints. Images represented on grave goods show scenes of fighting, lion and boar hunting, and trapping wild bulls. In six of the burials, the face of the dead man had been covered by a death mask of beaten gold. Women were accompanied by elaborate gold headdresses and finely worked jewellery. In one grave, a small child had been laid to rest encased entirely in gold leaf.⁷

Since then, many more finds have come to light, at Mycenae and elsewhere in the southern and central mainland of today’s Greece. In 2015, American archaeologists working at the site of prehistoric Pylos in Messenia, in the southwest Peloponnese, unearthed very similar treasures of the same period in the grave of the ‘Griffin Warrior’.⁸ Clearly, the elites of the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries BCE on the Greek mainland prided themselves on their strength and skill at arms.

The practice of burying so much wealth out of sight along with the dead has aptly been termed ‘ostentatious waste’.⁹ How these riches came to be in the hands of the Mycenaean warriors and the families buried alongside them is something of a mystery. Their immediate source, on the other hand, is not far to seek. It lies in Minoan Crete. The Minoans at this time had spread their influence right across the southern Aegean. Later traditions that King Minos of Crete had once ruled the seas probably have their origins in the same centuries that saw the beginning of the Mycenaeans’ rise.¹⁰ Minoan outposts had been established on many of the Aegean islands, on the west coast of Anatolia, and as far away even as Cyprus. Trade between Crete and fabulously wealthy Egypt had been going on for centuries. This was the route by which precious materials such as gold and ivory entered the Aegean. It was not only the raw materials that came from Crete. Many of the objects buried in the shaft graves of Mycenae are of recognisably Minoan workmanship. There are so many of these that archaeologists have concluded that craftsmen trained in Crete must have been engaged to work for the local Mycenaean rulers. As they did so, they would have adapted prized Minoan styles and decorations to the artistic tastes, or perhaps the different religious beliefs and customs, of the Mycenaeans.¹¹

But what did the warrior chieftains of obscure places like Mycenae, Athens, Thebes, or Pylos on the mainland have to offer in return for all these rich goods and services? Archaeologists, attuned to modern patterns of exchange and trade, have noted that mining of copper, lead, and silver at Laurion (modern Lavrio) in Attica seems to have begun at about this time. Perhaps the Mycenaeans traded their surpluses for the exotic treasures that would end up buried along with their chieftains? Or were these riches perhaps the reward won by the very feats of arms that the graves were designed to commemorate?

An intriguing hint comes from a fresco found in a house in the Minoan outpost of Akrotiri on Thera. The house had been buried by the eruption that devastated the island some time before 1500 BCE. In one of the scenes shown in the fresco, a line of warriors emerges from the gate of a walled town and forms up, apparently ready to defend their livestock from attackers trying to land from ships, though they have also been interpreted as a raiding party.¹² Either way, the figures are immediately recognisable as Mycenaeans by their beehive-shaped helmets with rows of boars’ tusks stitched to the outside, the enormous rectangular shields that cover the greater part of their bodies, and the spears that they carry, each twice as long as a man. Actual remains of these helmets, traces of the shields, and the points of the spears have all been found in mainland graves and would often be depicted by Mycenaean artists in years to come.

This evidence tells us that Mycenaean warriors were already a recognisable presence in the Minoan-dominated Aegean before 1500 BCE. But the Minoans seem not to have regarded them as a threat to their own way of life. Coastal towns such as Akrotiri had no defensive walls. At least two of the distinctive Minoan palaces in Crete, at Malia and at Kato Zakros, flourished on flat land right by the sea and were not fortified either. It may well be that Mycenaean warriors acquired their wealth by offering their services as paid enforcers for the Minoans in their Aegean possessions, on islands such as Thera.¹³ In this case the communities of the mainland would have been exporting not only copper but also surplus manpower. It would have been a way of solving a demographic problem that the region would often have to confront, in not dissimilar ways, in the future.

Whatever the truth, one of the few things we can be sure of is that, beginning about a hundred years after the Thera eruption, a remarkable reversal took place. Around 1450 BCE, most of the palaces and towns of Minoan Crete were gutted by fire. Only Knossos, already the largest and in some sense the most influential of the palaces, survived intact. But telltale damage to some of the outlying buildings surrounding the palace suggests that the cause of the disaster on this occasion was not uncontrollable forces beneath the earth but human action. Who was responsible?

We have no way of knowing. But we do know who gained by it (which of course is not the same thing). Those who gained the most, in the short term and within Crete, were the rulers of Knossos. This one palace then controlled the greater part of the island, perhaps even all of it. But in the longer term, and over a much wider geographical area, it was the Mycenaeans who benefited.

In Crete itself, huge changes took place, seemingly very soon after the destructions. Most of the sinister lustral basins were filled in and no new ones would be built thereafter. On the remote northeast coast, in the town of Palaikastro, the destruction seems to have targeted objects of religious significance. A rare idol, made of ivory and other precious materials, was smashed and burned. Here and elsewhere, fragments of the ubiquitous sacred symbol, the horns of consecration, have been found thrown away or mixed with building material.¹⁴ Things that the Minoans had once held sacred were now being trashed.

At the same time, parts of the Palace of Minos itself, at Knossos, were drastically remodelled and redecorated. The wall paintings in the Throne Room, that visitors still queue up to enter, belong to this period—though what you see today is an imaginative reconstruction created in the early twentieth century. Painstaking examination of the fragments of painted plaster has revealed that the original design adapted traditional motifs for a purpose not found in Minoan art before this time: to concentrate the attention of the viewer on the majesty of the king, sitting on his throne. Elsewhere at Knossos, tombs began to appear that closely resemble those of the Greek mainland. Minoan burial customs during the previous centuries had been for the most part communal and inconspicuous—it has been suggested that the Minoans paid little attention to their ancestors. By contrast, the ostentatious graves and rich displays, including many weapons buried along with the dead in the environs of Knossos between about 1450 and 1375 BCE, closely match the customs of the Mycenaeans on the mainland at the same time.¹⁵ Archaeologists are now reluctant to conclude that there was anything so systematic as a Mycenaean ‘takeover’, or even an invasion of Crete, to explain these developments. But it does look very much as though the palace of Knossos, and therefore at this time most of the island, had come under the control of people with close ties to the Greek mainland.

It was not just in Crete that these changes were taking place. All over the Aegean, within a few decades either side of 1400 BCE, it was no longer Minoan customs and artefacts that were setting the trend but Mycenaean. In Crete itself, centralised arrangements for the collection and distribution of goods and the organisation of craftwork were now controlled by a single centre at Knossos. Crete became more prosperous than it had ever been.¹⁶ And it was here, at the very heart of the Minoan system, that archaeologists found the equivalent of the smoking gun that proves the presence of Greek-speaking Mycenaeans at the top of the new hierarchy in Crete.

Minoan society had already developed more than one system of writing during the preceding centuries. From about 1900 BCE, the series of signs, each representing a spoken syllable, that we know today as Linear A had been used to keep the palace ledgers. Administrative records were incised into tablets made of soft clay. The documents created in this way were not intended to be permanent. But when fire ripped through the palaces, the clay became baked hard and, as a result, preserved for archaeologists to uncover almost four millennia later. This had happened on more than one occasion before the general destruction around the year 1450 BCE—enabling us to recover some of the day-to-day records of the destroyed palaces.

But when it was the turn of Knossos to experience a damaging fire, the clay tablets preserved in the debris were no longer being written in the Linear A script and in the Minoan language, which has never been deciphered. Within only a few decades after the upheavals of 1450 BCE, the writing system at Knossos had been adapted to produce its close cousin, known as Linear B. For half a century after the first discoveries of documents written in Linear B, by Sir Arthur Evans and his team digging at Knossos, no one could decipher this script either. The breakthrough came in 1952, when a young architect and amateur code breaker by the name of Michael Ventris, working alongside the Cambridge classical scholar John Chadwick, proved that the language of these ledgers was an early form of Greek. Since then, a total of almost six thousand Linear B tablets, more than half of them found at Knossos, have been deciphered and translated. The oldest of these, again from Knossos, are now thought to date from not long after 1400 BCE. Specialists have even detected, in their hesitant, scratchy handwriting, the traces of a new generation of scribes learning to adjust to the new system of writing. If this observation and this dating are correct, then the cache of documents found in the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos represents the earliest surviving records in the Greek language ever found.¹⁷

Whatever happened in Crete during the decades that followed the destructions of 1450 BCE, the consequence was to install a Greek-speaking Mycenaean elite at the head of an island-wide bureaucratic system. It was in this way that the Greek language first made it into writing, and Greek speakers first found themselves running a complex economic and political system, which had already been developed by others before they arrived. No wonder, then, if the Greek language, along with the stories and some of the beliefs that would later come to be recorded in it, bear many traces of this formative period. Mycenaean civilisation was a fusion born out of the encounter between these two very different languages and cultures, of the Greek-speaking mainland and Minoan Crete.

At the same time as Crete was being transformed, the Mycenaeans began to build palaces of their own on the mainland. These were designed along different lines. But evidently, they were intended to function in exactly the same way. And it appears that they did—indeed, with as much success as the new Greek-speaking elite had begun to achieve at Knossos. For two centuries at least, and perhaps nearer to three, the Mycenaeans who ran these palaces were able to create an economic system that has been called a ‘massive redistributive operation’, sufficient to support a population far beyond anything that had been possible before or indeed would be again until modern times.¹⁸

Scribes were employed to keep detailed inventories, in just the same way as they were in Crete. Several fragments written in Linear B, discovered at a house outside the citadel of Mycenae, and another at the site known as Iklaina in southwest Greece, both excavated in the twenty-first century, confirm that the new technology of writing and its bureaucratic purpose had spread to the mainland by 1350 BCE.¹⁹ Many more Linear B documents, most of them dating from the end of the following century, have also been discovered at the mainland sites of Pylos, Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes, Volos, and Agios Vasileios near Sparta, as well as at other sites in Crete. The total number found on the Greek mainland is around two thousand five hundred. Between about 1300 BCE, at the latest, and shortly after 1200 BCE, the Mycenaean elite was sitting at the top of a rigidly defined hierarchy of offices run by micromanaging bureaucrats.

These documents enable us to understand many details of how the economy and administration of the Mycenaean palaces were organised. At the top was the king (wanax). At the opposite end of the scale, below a long list of named officials, the local village community was called the damos—forerunner of the later Greek demos, which would give us the word democracy, meaning ‘power of the people’. But the Linear B records give us no insight into the thoughts and feelings of the rulers who commissioned them, still less of the small professional class of scribes who alone possessed the skill to create and read them. The Mycenaeans seem never to have used the art of writing for anything other than bookkeeping. It is possible, of course, that they preserved other kinds of records on perishable materials such as parchment or papyrus, as we know the Minoans did before them. But no evidence has yet been found to prove that they did.²⁰

Stories and storytelling, on the other hand, must have played a large part in life in the Mycenaean palaces. We know from archaeology that the rulers went to great lengths to keep alive the memory of ruling families from the past. The shaft graves at Mycenae had always been marked by carved gravestones. Some two centuries after the last burials were made there, a ceremonial precinct was built to set apart and preserve the place where the illustrious dead and their treasures had been laid to rest. At about the same time, the fortification walls of the citadel were extended so as to enclose this cemetery. These elaborate and expensive projects would have had no meaning unless the people who commissioned them had had a highly developed method for handing down memories from one generation to the next.

After about 1400 BCE, monumental ‘tholos’ tombs began to appear all over southern Greece. These were excavated out of hillsides, with spectacular entranceways dressed with stone, and topped with stone-built vaults that rose above ground level and punctuated the landscape. The fancifully named Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae is the most architecturally ambitious of these. Long ago ransacked and emptied of the burials and goods it must once have contained, its shell has been admired by visitors since at least the second century CE. This was another way to remember and honour kings, heroes, and their families long after their lifetime. In some form or other, stories about them must have been just as vigorously perpetuated.

Signs of a taste for storytelling have often been noted in Mycenaean visual art, too. Surviving fragments of the frescoes that once covered the interiors of their palaces show vivid scenes of fighting or hunting. In the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, the frescoes covering the walls, as a visitor approaches the central hearth and the throne of the wanax, seem to mirror the solemnity of actual processions that would have passed that way in honour of the king. To the side, a white-robed man sits on a rock. His head is tiny in proportion to the five-stringed lyre he holds in his left hand while he plucks the strings with his right. Just in front of the lyre, and flying away from him, is a bird proportionally even larger. It is hard not to think of the stock phrase ‘winged words’ that would later be immortalised in the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. There was a place in the bureaucratic system of the palaces for lyre players: a Linear B tablet from Thebes lists two as due to receive rations. Foreshadowing later times, the lyre player was surely not just a musician but also a ‘singer of tales’.²¹

The functions of the palaces combined political and economic authority with religious ritual and belief, just as they had in Minoan Crete. Mycenaean religion overlapped with Minoan, but there seem to have been many differences too. These would only increase over time as the Mycenaean elites began to emerge from the shadows of the earlier civilisation of the Minoans. The tablets from Pylos, which date from the very end of the Mycenaean civilisation, between 1200 and about 1180 BCE, give us some snapshots of religious practice as it had evolved on the mainland by that time.

Gods were both male and female. It is evident from the tablets, as well as from remains of animal sacrifices found in the palace itself, that the most important deity was the bull god Poseidon, in later mythology associated with earthquakes, as he almost certainly had been previously in Minoan Crete. His name appears in the form Po-se-da-o. A warrior goddess not unlike the later Athena seems to have been worshipped at Mycenae, and the name A-ta-na Po-ti-ni-i-ja (meaning ‘Lady Athena’) occurs in a Linear B tablet from Knossos. Names or epithets found on the Linear B tablets can be matched with most of the Greek divine ‘family’ that in later centuries would be imagined as living on the cloud-capped peaks of Mount Olympus. But the fussy preoccupation of palace officials with making sure that each deity received its due, in full and on the prescribed date, tells us little about the nature of the rituals involved, still less of the beliefs of the people who carried them out.²²

One thing the records do tell us, and which is abundantly confirmed by archaeology, is that these palace rituals would culminate in massive communal feasts. Just as in later times, the gods would receive their due portion of the animals slaughtered in their honour. But it was the sharing of meat among the mortal participants that affirmed the self-belief of the community. If we may judge by visual representations, those feasts were shared by women as well as men. Women feature prominently in Mycenaean art, as well as in Minoan. Frescoes show women riding in chariots and as spectators watching a battle. But they are rarely shown bare-breasted like Minoan women. It seems that aristocratic women did enjoy high status in the world of the Mycenaean palaces—in death, as well as in life, on the evidence of burials that have been excavated. But when women are mentioned in the Linear B tablets, it is almost always in menial capacities, quite possibly as slave workers. The only woman of high status who has so far been identified in the records was a priestess. There is no indication that any female Mycenaean ever exercised particular authority in a palace hierarchy. Not even a royal consort or female royal title is mentioned in the tablets.²³

Mainland palaces were built in naturally defensible positions above the surrounding terrain. But, to begin with, they had no defensive walls. This had been the Minoan way, and indeed in Crete would remain so even when Mycenaeans seem to have been in charge. On the mainland, by contrast, the palace builders and pioneers of the new centralised economy soon found the need to protect the stored surplus produce and the high-value artefacts they had accumulated inside. First at Tiryns, in the Argolid just outside the modern port town of Nafplio, then at Mycenae itself, a few miles inland, mighty walls began to rise around the citadels. These are no ordinary fortifications. So massive are the stones of which they are built that later generations could not believe they had been raised into position by human beings at all but must have been the work of mythical one-eyed giants, called Cyclopes. The circuit walls of Tiryns and Mycenae in the Argolid and Gla in Boeotia are still called ‘cyclopean’.

These fortifications bear witness to the power of the rulers to command the labour of many thousands of men. Labourers must have been recruited from a wide area. To house so many and to keep them fed for the duration of the work would have required both resources and organisation. Though hardly on a comparable scale to the much older pyramids of Egypt, the cyclopean walls of the Mycenaean citadels would have presented logistical and engineering challenges very similar in kind. Where did all this manpower come from? And why was such a stupendous expenditure of resources and effort needed at all? Some have wondered whether the purpose might have been simply ‘to impress and confer great status on the rulers of the sites’.²⁴ If this was so, it would have been an even more remarkable case of ostentatious waste than burying such a quantity of gold in the shaft graves.

The first fortifications went up around 1375 BCE at Tiryns and 1350 BCE at Mycenae. A century later, at both sites, they were extended farther. This was when the shaft graves and their ceremonial precinct at Mycenae were brought inside the circuit of the walls. At the same time, the famous Lion Gate was added. Above its lintel can still be seen a monumental version of a design adapted from Minoan Crete. Two lionesses flank a central pillar that may once have been topped with the figure of a deity, most probably a goddess. In a final phase of fortification, considerable engineering ingenuity must have been required, as well as heavy lifting, to enclose access to underground springs at both Mycenae and Tiryns. The same thing was done on the Acropolis of Athens, where few other traces have been preserved to indicate that a Mycenaean palace must once have existed. These efforts cannot be put down to mere ostentation. Around 1200 BCE, when the palaces were about two hundred years old, the elites who administered their economy were expecting to have to last out a siege.

Not all the Mycenaean palaces were fortified, at least on anything like the scale of Tiryns, Mycenae, the Acropolis of Athens, or Gla in Boeotia. Where they were, they tend to be clustered close together. In the small area of the Argolid, there are no fewer than three, and all were walled in the cyclopean style. By contrast, palaces that according to the bureaucratic record controlled a larger territory seem to have required less elaborate defences. This is the case at Pylos and Thebes.²⁵ So it may be that those elites who chose to fortify their palaces did so for protection not against any external threat but from each other. If so, that rationale would be in accord with much of later Greek history.

Nothing in the archaeological record or in the written documents indicates whether administration or any form of mutual obligation extended beyond the territory controlled by each palace. These territories could be quite extensive, particularly when compared to the generally much smaller city-states of later times. It is rare to find references in the documents to transactions between regional centres. From Mycenae, we have a record of a consignment of cloth being sent to Thebes. Tablets from Thebes refer to ‘Lacedaemonians’, which ought to mean people from the region of later (and modern) Sparta in the southern Peloponnese. But there is nothing to give us a clue to how the separate palatial administrations interacted with one other. Nor is there any hint of a higher level of political authority than that of the wanax who ruled over the territory of each palace.²⁶

The picture presented by the Linear B tablets is consistent with the evidence of archaeology. Overwhelmingly this is a picture of autonomous kingdoms, each managing its own affairs, but all of them doing so in much the same way, with common standards of language, writing, architecture, arts and crafts, and religious practice. Did all those things that they had in common ever lead to an overarching political structure, with a single geographical centre and a single overall ruler, as was the norm in other civilisations at this time? In the search for answers, we have to look beyond the Mycenaean world to see what outsiders looking in made of it.

The Hittites, with their capital far to the east in the highlands of Anatolia, came into contact with the Mycenaeans only when the latter began to impinge on their own side of the Aegean. Fragments of Hittite diplomatic correspondence covering the period between 1400 and 1200 BCE—the heyday of the Mycenaean mainland palaces—make reference to a maritime power on the western edge of the Hittite sphere of influence. At first this was named as Ahhiya, later as Ahhiyawa. In approximately 1250 BCE, the reigning king at Hattusa wrote at length to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa, addressing him as his ‘brother’ and equal. Some forty years later, another Hittite king, Tudhaliya IV, declared in the formal text of a treaty: ‘the Kings who are my equals in rank are the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria, and the King of Ahhiyawa.’ The last phrase has been erased by the scribe, who seems to have recognised at once that he wasn’t supposed to include it. But the fact that a professional scribe could have made such an error suggests that kings of Ahhiyawa had until very recently enjoyed this level of recognition at the Hittite capital. The same treaty places an embargo on ‘any ship of Ahhiyawa’ going to the king of Assyria, with whom the Hittites were currently at war. This could refer either to trade or to military reinforcements. In any case, it is evident that Ahhiyawa, by about 1220 BCE, had become a power to be reckoned with at sea, and indeed one of a handful of superpowers of the day.²⁷

During the same centuries, the Egyptians, too, were in contact with the Aegean world. The Egyptians had long been trading with Minoan Crete, which they called ‘Keftiu’. Then, shortly after the presence of the Mycenaeans began to make itself felt throughout the region, a new name enters the Egyptian records. The forty-second year of the reign of the pharaoh Thutmose III is usually reckoned to be equivalent to the year 1438 BCE, by our system of counting. In that year, the pharaoh accepted a diplomatic gift from a place called ‘T-n-j’. Because Egyptian hieroglyphics record only consonants, not vowels, we can only guess at the exact sound of the name represented. But it was probably something like ‘Tanaja’ or ‘Tanaju’. From the description of the gifts, which included a piece ‘of Cretan workmanship’, we can only suppose that ‘Tanaju’ is to be found somewhere in the Aegean—other than Crete, since the same text already mentions Keftiu. Almost a hundred years later, during the reign of Amenhotep III, who died in 1353 BCE, an Egyptian monumental mason recorded a list of regions that may have been destinations for an embassy or trade mission to the Aegean. This time Keftiu and Tanaju appear as separate headings. Several of the readings are uncertain, but the listed destinations clearly imply that the territory known to the Egyptians as Tanaju covered all of the Peloponnese, Boeotia (because Thebes is included), and perhaps some islands.²⁸

It seems from this evidence that the Hittites and the Egyptians had different names for what we call the Mycenaean world. But the scribes and officials of both civilisations take it for granted that they were dealing with a kingdom, ruled over by a king whose status their own monarch was prepared to recognise. The Hittite texts are quite explicit about this. Even if we understand Tanaju as a geographical term, rather than necessarily the name of a political state, for an Egyptian pharaoh to accept a diplomatic gift implies that whoever ruled there was regarded as worthy to take part in this kind of formal exchange.

If there was a single kingdom that encompassed the whole Greek-speaking, Mycenaean world of southern Greece, the most likely candidate for its capital would be Mycenae, though Thebes has also been proposed. Or there may never have been a unitary kingdom at all, but rather some sort of confederacy of smaller states, whose different names might have confused outsiders.²⁹ Either way, the Hittite and Egyptian sources reveal a geopolitical dimension to the Mycenaean world that must have some basis in fact, even if we still don’t know how to square this information with the evidence of archaeology and the Greek records.

But how did the Mycenaeans define themselves and the land where they lived, in their own language? Both the Hittite name, Ahhiya or Ahhiyawa, and the Egyptian, Tanaju, would find close echoes in Greek several centuries after the Mycenaean civilisation had ended. We find these in the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. There, the people who lay siege to the city of Troy are known collectively not by the later name of ‘Hellenes’ but as ‘Achaeans’ (echoing Ahhiya) or ‘Danaans’ (echoing Tanaju). The place name Achaea would continue in use for centuries, though not always attached to the same place, right through to the end of the Roman period. It seems most likely that, if the Mycenaeans did have a single name for all the lands they lived in, it was something like Achaiwia, an early form of Achaea. And those whom we call Mycenaeans most likely thought of themselves, as Homer’s heroes would later do, as both Achaeans (Achaiwoi) and Danaans—because where else could the Hittite and Egyptian names have come from?

However they organised their affairs in their homeland, the Mycenaeans increasingly made their presence felt far beyond it. On several occasions, the Hittite vassal states on the Aegean coast of Anatolia attempted to rebel. The first time this happened was around the year 1400 BCE. A revolt by some twenty cities or states in northwestern Anatolia was serious enough to require a military expedition led by King Tudhaliya himself to put it down. Among the rebels was Wilusa (Troy). Once it was over, among the spoils dedicated to the Hittite Storm God in his temple was a bronze sword, of Mycenaean type, that would be discovered by archaeologists in the twentieth century. The weapon bears an inscription in Hittite giving thanks for victory in putting down the revolt. Support for the rebels, then, seems to have come from Ahhiyawa—that is to say, from the Greek speakers across the Aegean.³⁰

Not long after this, a Hittite inscription records a ‘ruler of Ahhiya’ making new trouble for Hattusa. The name of this ruler, Attarissiya, would be preserved by much later Greek legends as Atreus, the father of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Attarissiya is not dignified in the Hittite document with a royal title. Nonetheless, he was apparently capable of mustering a force of a hundred war chariots on the Anatolian mainland. Sometime later, this same Attarissiya took part in a raid on Cyprus, another Hittite vassal. This is the first clear indication that the Mycenaeans had at their disposal a significant naval force. It may also have been the first time that Greek speakers began to make their presence felt in Cyprus.³¹

The height of Mycenaean power abroad seems to have been reached between about 1350 and 1250 BCE. This was achieved not by feats of arms alone. The rulers of the Mycenaean palaces were also capable of exercising something resembling ‘soft power’, as we understand it today. Documents written in the Linear B script mention goods such as textiles and scented oils as being ‘for export’. Trade will have taken the form of barter and exchange. It is presumed that the Mycenaeans also took part in ritualised exchanges of gifts between rulers, such as that recorded with Pharaoh Thutmose. Frustratingly, no comparable records of international transactions have so far been discovered on the Greek side.

Despite this absence of documents, we know from archaeology that Mycenaean traders at the time were exchanging goods all over the Mediterranean. Their ships travelled as far west as Sardinia and the coast of Spain, in the opposite direction to the ports of Egypt and the Levant, and through the straits of the Hellespont and the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Specialist raw materials came from places even more distant. Amber, used to make necklaces, must have been transported partway by river or overland from the Baltic. Tin, an essential ingredient of bronze, most probably came from Afghanistan, via the Levant coast.

The cargo of a ship that sank in about 1300 BCE while on its way from the Levant via Cyprus towards the Mycenaean Aegean included ten tonnes of copper ingots together with quantities of tin, jars that would have contained olive oil and apparently resinated wine, coloured glass, raw ivory, and several precious objects. Personal items belonging to the crew or passengers also turned up on the seabed. These included tools, weapons, cosmetics, and jewellery, as well as the remains of what they ate onboard and a wax tablet that must have been used for writing—though sadly with no trace of anything that might once have been written on it. Some of the personal possessions reveal from their design that their owners were Mycenaeans heading for home when their ship foundered off the headland in southern Turkey known as Uluburun, which gives the wreck its name today. Objects recovered have been identified as ‘Egyptian, Nubian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Cypriot, Mycenaean, Italian, Balkan, and Baltic’—showing what a truly worldwide network of exchange, relative to the possibilities of the time, already existed in 1300 BCE.³²

Those early Greeks, and the ships they must have built to carry them and their goods in all these directions, were already a major trading force. This seafaring tradition, which has given Greeks their preeminent place in the modern world of shipping today, began early—though it is worth noting, this, too, was something that they must first have learned from their Minoan predecessors.

One other export, this time almost invisible in the archaeological record but destined eventually to become the most important of all, can also be traced back to the Mycenaean world of the thirteenth century BCE. This was the Greek language. Other than in Crete, no written records in the Linear B script have been found outside the Greek mainland. But it is a reasonable bet that wherever Mycenaean goods were exported, some knowledge of the language spoken by the manufacturers and traders would have reached there too. As a result, in places where the local people were not Mycenaean at all, it was becoming fashionable to give people names that we can recognise today as Greek.

Our best evidence for this comes from Crete. Within a few generations of the arrival of Greek-speaking rulers at Knossos, many of the individuals who appear in Linear B documents have Greek names. Those named go far beyond the ranks of the elite. Often they are humble shepherds and craftsmen, who must surely have been local people.³³ Possibly, these names were handed out by the bureaucracy—much as condescending colonial masters in more recent times would do with native servants. Or it might be better to think of something more like the practice traditional in Greece closer to our own day, whereby parents invite a wealthy or influential godfather to baptise their children, who then carry the name of a designated benefactor as their own. In this way, ‘becoming Mycenaean’ might have been a conscious choice made by individuals in a fluid and changing society.

A more surprising case was Troy. Culturally, archaeologists are agreed, Troy was an Anatolian city, on the fringe of the Hittite world. But during the reign of the Hittite king Muwattalli II, who ruled from 1290 to 1271 BCE, a treaty was drawn up with the ruler of Wilusa (Troy), who is named as Alaksandu.³⁴ This can only be the Hittite rendering of the Greek name ‘Alexandros’ (Alexander), which means, literally, ‘defender against men’. In later Greek legends, Alexander would be an alternative name for the Trojan prince better known as Paris. There could be a connection between this Alaksandu and a dynastic marriage that had apparently taken place about a century before, between a king of Ahhiyawa and a princess of the confederacy that had rebelled against Hittite rule, and had included Wilusa.³⁵ Or perhaps Greek names were becoming popular here, too, during the heyday of the Mycenaean palaces? Royal outsiders as far away as Troy might have wished to adopt what they saw as a winning fashion—as indeed another dynasty of Alexanders would do almost a thousand years later, and end up conquering the whole of the known world.

The Mycenaean ascendancy came to an end during a period of only a few decades either side of the year 1200 BCE. As always in archaeology, the exact sequence of events across many different sites is hard to piece together. Establishing the causes of the Mycenaean collapse is even harder. Palaces and fortifications had been severely damaged before but had then been rebuilt. The Mycenaeans had proved themselves as capable as the Minoans before them of withstanding natural disasters and carrying on. But at a certain point, each of the great Mycenaean palaces was destroyed. Most were burnt out. Whether they were actively ransacked is less clear.

These catastrophes happened without warning. At Thebes, a routine list of barley rations, due to be handed out to a list of named individuals, had only just been completed. The clay had not yet had time to dry when the entire palace succumbed to fire. At Pylos, no human remains were found inside or near the palace, as might be expected if defenders had fought to save it from invaders or if an earthquake had trapped victims under the rubble. But archaeologists did find the bones of at least ten cattle. Evidently, a sacrifice had just taken place. The bones had been ritually burnt, then brought indoors, perhaps for the archivists to record the details. The expected feast would have been in full swing outside, in the open air. This was the moment when flames engulfed the palace.³⁶ Even today in southern Greece, summer wildfires frequently destroy homes and whole villages, sometimes with the loss of dozens of lives. It could have been an accident.

Any number of more dramatic explanations have been offered to account for this accumulation of disasters: invasion by sea, civil war, popular uprising, climate change, crop failure, or some combination of these. But none addresses the key question. This is not how or why each palace came to be destroyed, but why it was never rebuilt. And what can have caused other settlements to be abandoned at the same time, without any sign of destruction? Why, even at sites like Mycenae and Tiryns, where some reoccupation and rebuilding did take place, were the ruins of the palaces left untouched?

Since the 1970s and 1980s, systems-based theories have been developed to account for the collapse of an entire civilisation on such a scale.³⁷ Systems collapse will reappear several times in the course of this longer history as an explanation for catastrophic changes that affected Greeks at different times and in different historical circumstances. According to this theory, it is the very complexity of the system that brings about its downfall. Collapse is explained by an economic model that shows how an increase in complexity brings large benefits at first, then just about sustainable ones, until in a final phase the cost of maintaining the system outweighs the benefits. At this point, instead of gently falling back upon an earlier phase of the cycle, the system becomes vulnerable to increasing threats. Once upon a time, these threats would have been easily seen off. The steps taken would have brought a further increase in the complexity of the system. But with complexity already past its peak, the costs of further action outweigh the benefits and cannot be met.³⁸

A good example of how this might have worked in practice can be seen in the fortifications of the Mycenaean palaces. Up to a certain point, it must have made sense to the rulers to mobilise vast resources and command huge workforces in order to bring more of the palace’s essential functions and personnel within the area protected by the walls. Later, when the perceived threat became more acute, it still seemed worth the effort and expense to enclose access to the water supply within the circuit. But what do you do when the next threat appears, and this time the cost of meeting it is greater than the system can bear? At this point, following the theory of systems collapse, competing sections within society begin to doubt that their own interest is best served by the system that supports all. The mechanism of collapse now sets in. Unless a rival power is on hand to take over and incorporate the failing society into its own more viable system, collapse becomes inevitable.³⁹ The first of these possible outcomes would well account for what happened in Crete around 1450 BCE, when an internal collapse of Minoan civilisation seems to have been reversed by intervention from the rising power of the Mycenaean mainland. The second would account very well for the demise of the entire Mycenaean political and economic system around 1200 BCE.

It wasn’t just in Greece and the Aegean that this happened. At about the same time, a similar fate befell Troy. All the other cities of the Anatolian coast went the same way. So did the entire Hittite empire and most other civilisations of the Levant. Egypt alone survived with its institutions intact, although only after several decades of upheaval. Much has been made of Egyptian records which refer to attacks on the coast of Egypt by ‘Sea Peoples’. Certainly, large numbers of people must have been on the move around the eastern Mediterranean after the multiple collapses. But at least in the Greek-speaking world, these movements were a consequence, not a cause. Whatever happened elsewhere, seaborne invaders cannot account convincingly for the destructions in Greece, where most of the destroyed or abandoned sites were not on open coasts. The same must apply to the destruction and abandonment of the Hittite capital of Hattusa, which lies many hundreds of kilometres inland. In all probability it was the sheer weight of all these cyclopean fortresses, and of the top-heavy bureaucracy that had grown up around them, that brought them down.⁴⁰

The first attempt by Greek speakers to emulate the more advanced complex societies (or civilisations) of the Near East had ended in failure. No more palace records seem to have been kept after about 1180 BCE. The Linear B script would soon be forgotten, except in faraway Cyprus. Despite this, stories about the Greeks’ legendary past would continue to pass from generation to generation by word of mouth. To an extent that can be traced for few other prehistoric societies, the Mycenaean age gave birth to collective memories that would later take on a new life as a result of being written down. The stories that resulted—the myths and legends of ancient Greece as we know them today—would never subsequently cease to be read, copied, embellished, and commented upon.

Consider the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. According to the story, the king of Athens is obliged to send a regular tribute of seven lads and seven maidens to King Minos of Crete to be devoured by a monster that is half-man, half-bull and lives in a ‘labyrinth’ beneath his palace. With the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne, Theseus kills the beast and escapes with his companions back to Athens. On the way, as well as ungratefully abandoning Ariadne on the island of Naxos, he destroys the Cretan war fleet, thereby putting an end to the tribute and, implicitly, to the supremacy of King Minos at sea.⁴¹ We have abundant evidence that between about 1700 and 1450 BCE the Minoans did indeed enjoy such supremacy. Certainly, they exercised a great deal of cultural influence in all the mainland centres that have been excavated. There was a Minoan settlement on the island of Keos, which is about as close to Athens and the silver mines at Lavrio as you can get without coming ashore on the mainland. It is perfectly possible that Athens and its surrounding region, Attica, had once been a Minoan dependency.

If that were the case, Theseus’s expedition and its successful outcome would be a distant reflection of the tussle for power that must have taken place in the Aegean, between the mainland and Crete, in the years either side of 1450 BCE. The non-Greek name ‘Minos’ may well reflect a dynasty or a royal title rather than the name of an individual. The ‘labyrinth’ in which the monstrous Minotaur was housed can be interpreted as a memory of the Palace of Minos at Knossos, the remains of which do indeed very much resemble the later metaphorical meaning of the term, as a maze. It has been speculated that ‘Labyrinthos’, or something like it, may have been the original name for the palace of Knossos in the Minoan language, and indeed a version of it occurs on a Linear B tablet.⁴²

The Minotaur itself, supposedly the issue of a union between Minos’s queen Pasiphae and a miraculous bull sent by the god Poseidon, similarly reflects the importance of the cult of the bull in Minoan worship and iconography. And the story’s most shocking and memorable element of all, that the Cretans nourished their monster on the flesh of young human victims, has even found its counterpart in the butchered bones of children found together with cooking pots in a building close to the palace at Knossos. These bones date from shortly before the upheavals that led to the Mycenaean presence in Crete after 1450 BCE. Whatever grim ritual lay behind these remains, it would hardly be surprising if the memory of being at the receiving end had persisted for hundreds of years afterwards.⁴³

Other features of these stories may also preserve distorted historical memories, unless they reflect fundamental human anxieties—or perhaps more accurately, male anxieties. It is partly thanks to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, that everyone has heard of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother (though without knowing who they were). Freud relied heavily on one version of this story, as told by the Athenian dramatist Sophocles in the fifth century BCE, as evidence to support his theory of the Oedipus complex. According to this, every male child at a certain stage of development experiences impulses that mirror the actions of Oedipus.⁴⁴

These stories are full of powerful, feisty women. Think of Clytemnestra, who murders her husband Agamemnon on his return from war, and their daughter Electra, who eggs on her brother, Orestes, to kill their own mother in revenge. Or the enchantress Medea, who in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece performs much the same role as Ariadne in the tale of Theseus; instead of being dumped on the way home, Medea becomes Jason’s wife and the mother of his children—only to murder them later in revenge for his infidelity. The gorgon, Medusa, whose hair is made of snakes and whose gaze turns men to stone, has become literally a monster. Minos’s insatiable queen, Pasiphae, was fairly monstrous, too, and her alleged sexual appetites gave birth to a monster: the Minotaur.⁴⁵

It has sometimes been speculated that these stories reflect a dimly remembered Minoan society in which women had enjoyed a much stronger public presence, and quite possibly also more political power, than in any Greek society that we know about. The notion that Minoan Crete had been a form of matriarchy (that is to say, actually ruled by women) was popularised in the twentieth century and still has its adherents today—although it has been pointed out that no such society is known to have existed anywhere in the world. But it is a striking fact that Greeks of the classical age reserved prime positions for dominant females in their stories, while largely excluding women from public roles or positions of authority in real life. Is this the result of perennial male anxieties, of the sort proposed by Freud, or an enduring revulsion from a different type of society that Greek speakers had once been closely involved with and ever since were determined to shun?⁴⁶

In some respects the most powerful—and dangerous—of all these legendary women was Helen. The most beautiful woman in the world, Helen was capable of arousing undying enmity among immortal goddesses and causing the great war that ever afterwards would become a focal point of all the interconnected web of myths and legends. This was the war between a combined force of Greeks and the city of Troy. When Helen deserted her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta, and eloped with the handsome Trojan prince Paris, also known as Alexander, the Greeks mounted a mighty expedition to bring her back. In later times, even Helen’s name would be routinely held up as a warning by Greek authors who liked to pun on its first part, which can also mean ‘destroyer’.

The war lasted ten years, so the story goes. In the end it would be won not by overwhelming force but by ingenuity. As famous as Troy or Helen is the stratagem of the Wooden Horse, or Trojan Horse. This was the device that enabled the besiegers to send a concealed advance guard inside the city to open the gates for the rest, while the Greeks pretended to give up the siege and sail for home. After totally destroying the city, murdering its inhabitants, and taking the women as slaves, the victors gained little from their triumph. Helen’s return to the husband she had abandoned back in Sparta, and to a life of blameless domesticity, is an anticlimax. Most of the men who had led their contingents to the war would find only troubles on their return. Odysseus, who had devised the ruse of the Wooden Horse, would have to endure a further ten years of wandering upon the seas before reaching his home in Ithaca. Even then, he would have to fight to repossess his kingdom and be reunited with his faithful wife Penelope—whose constancy in the face of adversity would often be held up as a foil to the behaviour of the more flamboyant heroines of Greek myth.

Does this legendary war, too, derive from real events in the lost history of the Mycenaean age? Opinions have been divided ever since ancient times. At least one popular retelling of the story for the twenty-first century takes it for granted that there really was a Trojan War. Heinrich Schliemann, back in the nineteenth, had never doubted it. Schliemann’s discovery during the 1870s, that great Bronze Age cities had flourished at Troy and at Mycenae, seemed to prove him right. But since then, any chance of locating Homer’s sack of Troy in the archaeological record has seemed to recede. These days, most archaeologists are sceptical, if they do not dismiss the possibility altogether.⁴⁷

If such a war did take place, the most likely context for it might be during the twilight of the Mycenaean world rather than during its heyday. By 1200 BCE, the Mycenaeans had been driven by the Hittites from the coast of Anatolia. But then the Hittites, too, disappeared suddenly from the scene. There must have been a power vacuum in western Anatolia during the first years of the twelfth century BCE. Troy may have been the richest city in the whole region still left standing, a prize quite literally ‘to die for’, in a time of failed and failing states. Excavations at the site reveal that Troy was violently destroyed, and probably also sacked, around 1180 BCE. It may be only coincidence, but according to one set of calculations made in the ancient world, the War of Troy was supposed to have lasted from 1194 to 1184 BCE, by our system of counting.⁴⁸

During the same years, archaeology tells us that on the northern edge of the Mycenaean world, in the coastal part of Thessaly, a late arrival among Mycenaean palaces briefly flourished before it, too, collapsed a few decades later. This was the region where, according to legend, the young Achilles ruled. In later retellings of the story, much is made of the tussle between the king of Mycenae, Agamemnon—presented as higher in authority but a hopeless leader—and Achilles, who proves himself the greater hero. Perhaps the rivalry between the two dramatises a distant historical memory of a power struggle between a youthful offshoot of the Mycenaean world in Thessaly and the traditional centre, whose authority was failing, at a time when the Mycenaean system was crumbling and some of its survivors had set their sights on the glittering prize of Troy?⁴⁹

If we were to think of the Greek expedition not so much as an organised show of strength by a united force in its prime but more like a desperate act of piracy by a warrior elite whose world back home was falling apart, we would not be all that far from the picture that emerges from the later written versions. It is striking that many of the heroes have no expectation that they will ever return home. Those who do have a hard time of it. And as the story would later be told, there is a lingering sense that the effort to conquer Troy had been the last gasp of a dying age.⁵⁰