Read Around the World Tour: Bronze Age Greece

Hosted by Aimie K. Runyan, author of Promised to the Crown, we're traveling the world (and history) with ten great historical fiction books and giving away signed copies of ALL of them at the end! The tour begins Here.

Don’t forget to bring plenty of guest-gifts with you when you travel through Bronze Age Greece. Guest-friendship was one of the most sacred bonds, and your best bet for traveling unmolested in and out of the incredible palaces of the Achaean kings. You won’t want to miss the imposing Lion Gate of Mycenae, or the sprawling palace at Knossos on the island nation of Crete – perhaps not quite so impressive as it was during its height, before the Minotaur was defeated and Minos fell, but worth the journey all the same.

The Rock of Athens has weathered every storm, an impenetrable walled fortress upon the Acropolis from which King Theseus rules Attica and Crete with the advice and counsel of his assembly. Be sure not to snub King Nestor of Pylos, either – an entertaining host with a story for every occasion, you’ll find your poor reputation precedes you if he feels that he’s been slighted.

And of course, across the sea, there is the golden city of Troy, its walls the work of Poseidon himself. You’ll find no finer palaces, no grander treasures than those inside Troy’s towering walls – at least not outside of Egypt. But tread carefully if your curiosity draws you to the Nile Valley, for Egypt is not often known for its kindness to foreign travelers, even when they come with rank and riches aplenty.

...Even if you're Helen of Sparta.

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With divine beauty comes dangerous power.

Helen believed she could escape her destiny and save her people from utter destruction. After defying her family and betraying her intended husband, she found peace with her beloved Theseus, the king of Athens and son of Poseidon.

But peace did not last long. Cruelly separated from Theseus by the gods, and uncertain whether he will live or die, Helen is forced to return to Sparta. In order to avoid marriage to Menelaus, a powerful prince unhinged by desire, Helen assembles an array of suitors to compete for her hand. As the men circle like vultures, Helen dreams again of war—and of a strange prince, meant to steal her away. Every step she takes to protect herself and her people seems to bring destruction nearer. Without Theseus’s strength to support her, can Helen thwart the gods and stop her nightmare from coming to pass?

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The Affairs of the Gods, or, How Could Their Victims Have Been So Clueless?

There are two ways to approach questions like this:
1) The Events of the Myths Really Happened
2) The Events of the Myths Are Stories/Propaganda/Explanations/Metaphors/etc

If you've been hanging around me or my blog(s) for any length of time, you probably now that the fiction writer in me favors the first approach -- and imagining these characters and trying to discover their motivations and understand the choices they might have made is where a lot of the fun of writing about them comes from. So with this question, it's only natural that I'd start with the more literal perspective. (It's more just more interesting guys!)

The Short Answer:
I suspect that they were less clueless and more just uninformed.

The Long Answer:

Here's the thing. Today, if some king's daughter were kidnapped by a really pretty bull, the whole world would know about it. Or at least the part of the world that pays attention to that kind of information, anyway. (She'd also be found and returned home, probably, rather than dumped in another country to marry into their royal bloodline, but I digress.) Back in Europa's time? It was probably more of a quiet, regional event. Why should she expect the bull of being a god in disguise, intent on stealing her away, if she'd never heard of Zeus pulling that kind of stunt?* Maybe, possibly, some kind of rumor of Zeus coming down as a shower of gold to... make sweet love? to Danae** might have been making the rounds somewhere in the Peloponnese, but it is REALLY unlikely the story would have made it as far as Phoenicia, where Europa was hanging out with her maiden friends, enjoying the attentions of a particularly tame bull.

Now maybe these two examples are cheating, because both of these women were earlier victims of Zeus' proclivities, but the fact remains that there are no guarantees that any one of the  importuned women who followed would have had extensive knowledge of the god's other exploits. There's a couple of exceptions of course. Alcmene, for example, was the granddaughter of Perseus, so the story of Great-Grandmother Danae could easily have been part of family lore before her run in with Zeus and the subsequent birth of Heracles. But since Zeus took the form of Alcmene's own husband, Amphitryon, there is really no possibly way that forewarning might have helped her avoid his attentions.

It's easy for us to see all these stories laid out neatly and chronologically, with repeated themes of Zeus putting one over on some poor beautiful girl, and wonder why these people couldn't figure it out. But the truth is, those stories weren't assembled into the written word at all until centuries after the fact. If you consider that the Trojan War was basically the end of the Age of Heroes, and all the philandering that entailed, then the majority of these events would have taken place during the Greek Bronze Age -- the Mycenaean and Minoan periods. At the end of which, civilization kind of collapsed and the Greeks not-so-promptly forgot how to write for several hundred years.

Oral history is a lot more limited, regionally, though Homer provides us with evidence that even oral stories could be spread -- if the bard thought the audience would be interested. But if he didn't?

Well. It sure makes me appreciate the bounty of the internet for self-education, that's for sure.


*Europa was mother to Minos, which means she was at least one, maybe two generations before Theseus and Heracles.

**Danae was the mother of Perseus, who was himself the very FIRST of the Greek Heroes. He did not actually ride Pegasus, and the Kraken is a sea monster out of Scandinavia. Just for the record.

The (modern?) Bull Dance (II)

To recap briefly: Bull Dancing is way awesomer than the modern day Bull Fight, so what happened?

Well. First of all, Crete fell and the Minoan civilization, such as it was,* collapsed. (Perhaps because Theseus slayed a Minotaur?) The long and the short of it is, we have no real idea or evidence for what happened. Mycenae seems to have conquered them, and then not long after that we have the Dark Ages where we know absolutely nothing about what went on outside of the oral history of Homer's epics.

Not that we really have a lot of information on Mycenaean Greece, either, outside of the palace life, but the major point of all this is that Bull Dancing did not make the LEAP to the mainland of Greece whereby it might have been preserved and passed on to common culture. There's some stylistic art representing it--Mycenae stole a lot of art from the Minoans--but no evidence that it ever took place within Greece itself.

Except the bull dance isn't really dead. Cow-Leaping (aka Course Landaise) is still practiced in modern day France, and Bull-Leaping (aka Recortes) takes place in parts of Spain (seriously, there's pole vaulting involved! and the bull totally survives to be leapt another day!). Wikipedia even suggests that there's a practice of bull leaping in India as well--though there obviously is no proof that any of this descends at all from the Minoans.

There are a few clips of bull-leaping in France online. That link will take you to some really crazy guys who tie their legs together before jumping. I'm not kidding. It's fantastic. But this is maybe my favorite youtube video-- it's about 5 minutes long, but has some great information.


  and this video is pretty great at giving an overview of the array of stunts, from pole vaulting to leaping somersaults, and so on:

*Minoan and Mycenaean are Archaeological terms, really. We know there was a Palace at Knossos. We know there were a bunch of palaces on the Greek mainland, including a fantastic site in Mycenae. Did they refer to themselves as Minoans? HIGHLY unlikely. Minos was kind of cursed after all.

Not all Demigods are Created Equal

Just because a person is a son or daughter of a god doesn't mean they're a hero. A lot of their Hero Status really depends on what they do with that divine ichor -- after all, Odysseus is only the great-grandson of Hermes, but he's 100% Hero in the Greekest sense of the word.

So let's talk about a couple of other examples. The guys who don't make the cut.

Tantalus, King of ... well, no one can quite agree where. So let's say--

Tantalus, the Wealthy King
A son of Zeus by Pluto, herself a woman of heavily-ichored blood, Tantalus had a very close relationship to the gods. Some say that he was even invited into Zeus' confidences, and entrusted with divine secrets, which he then betrayed. Others say, he invited the Olympians to his house, and wanting to test them, he killed and cooked one of his sons, serving him to Zeus and the other gods for dinner. The stories say that Zeus, realizing what he had done, restored his son to life (missing a bit of his shoulder, as one of the more hapless gods had not been so discerning in regard to the menu) and cast Tantalus into eternal punishment in Tartarus. He was made to stand in a pool of water from which he could never drink (the water receding every time he bent to take a sip), with the boughs of fruit trees hanging over his head from which he could never eat (the branches pulled away out of reach when he stretched out his arm to grasp the fruit). The story of Tantalus the un-hero was so famous and so well known that we get the word "Tantalize" from his name.

Minos, King of Crete
A son of Zeus by Europa, Minos is rarely categorized as a hero, and aside from the ever-present flaw of Hubris, he doesn't seem to have much in the way of Heroic characteristics. Like Tantalus before him, he takes advantage of his close ties and kinship with the gods, but doesn't show the proper amount of respect. When Minos asks the gods for a bull in order to take the crown, he's given the gift, but he doesn't follow through on his own promise to offer it back in sacrifice, and as a result, he's punished. And by "he" I mean, his pride more than anything, because it's his wife, Pasiphae who is struck with lust for the bull, and cuckolds him with the bovine -- likely Poseidon himself. As a result, she gives birth to the minotaur, a lasting reminder of Minos' error in judgment and a blight upon his house.

It seems to me that the message of these two stories is clear. Divine Ichor or not, know your place. This is something the real heroes don't seem to have so much trouble with -- they know the gods are above them, and they act accordingly. When they DO overstep themselves, war or punishment follows swiftly. But these guys? Minos and Tantalus? Their errors are so grievous that if they accomplished anything heroic, it's been overshadowed forever by their wrongs.

You might say they're the Cautionary Tales of the ancient world.

Europa and the Bull

Europa at the National Gallery

Europa was probably the daughter of a Phoenician King, Agenor, and the story goes that one day she was out in the fields with a passel of other maids when she came across a bull of uncommon beauty. Not only that, but this bull was so tame it let her weave wreaths of flowers around his horns (and I can just picture this group of girls making flower wreaths and laughing and daring one another to toss them around the bulls horns -- I don't know about you.)

Europa, enamored by his gentleness as well as his beauty, and maybe not really aware of Zeus' propensity for making off with women since she isn't exactly Greek, climbed up on the bull's back. The bull, really Zeus in disguise, promptly runs for it. He goes straight for the sea, where he swims and swims and swims until they reach Crete, and Europa is well beyond the reach of any help. At this point, he either reveals himself, and then consorts with her, or consorts with her and then reveals himself. There isn't really any knowing. But either way, Europa is made off with, and either way, she ends up married to a Cretan prince, giving birth to Minos, and becoming the grandmother of Ariadne.

According to Apollodorus:

Zeus loved her, and turning himself into a tame bull, he mounted her on his back and conveyed her through the sea to Crete. There Zeus bedded with her, and she bore Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthys;

One of the things that strikes me about this story is how very different Europa's response is to an impressive specimen of bull-ness. In this day and age, how many princesses are spending time with the cattle? And how many wouldn't hesitate to climb up on the back of one, no matter how tame it seemed? Maybe if you were raised on the farm, it would be one thing -- but bulls? They're big animals, and no matter how familiar, they deserve a healthy dose of respect.

Sure, part of it might be Zeus' mojo, but part of it is definitely the difference in context and culture. Back in the Bronze Age, the wealth came from the land, from the farm and livestock, and while I doubt Europa was mucking stables or herding her father's cows, you can bet she was a lot more familiar with cattle than the majority of the western world is, today. Bulls and cattle wandering around? Nothing to worry about at all!

Not to say all the women were leaping up on their backs, but -- it's not nearly as outrageous for then as it sounds to us now.

images in this post © me!

Ariadne and Dionysus

We've talked a little bit about Ariadne before, in relation to the role of women in Mycenaean civilization (and the truth is, there is no certainty at all, in that regard) but I wanted to talk a little bit more about her, and her relationship to the gods -- particularly Dionysus.

Ariadne and Dionysus -- Ariadne looks a little
bit annoyed with her husband/consort.

Ariadne was a daughter of Minos, sometimes considered a high priestess, sometimes associated with the goddess of the labyrinth, if such a goddess existed. Certainly she was no less a princess than Theseus was a king, and just as certainly, her life was turned upside down by Theseus' arrival on Crete with the tributes sent to King Minos (and King Minos himself was a son of Europa, most probably by Zeus -- more on him in a future post.)

Whether Ariadne deliberately cultivated Theseus or was simply taken in by his charm and valor, there isn't really any knowing. Some people theorize that she, as a goddess/high priestess herself, used Theseus to escape the Labyrinth and whatever magic held her upon Crete (and I kind of like that idea, if only because it gives Ariadne some agency of her own), but more often, she's just in love with our hero, and she and Theseus run off together after his triumph over the Minotaur. At which point Theseus either abandons her (with no scruples at all) or is made to give her up to the god Dionysus. Sometimes she dies in childbirth on the island or just of grief, too, though it's generally agreed she ends up as Dionysus' consort and wife, and elevated to the rank of goddess. All in all, not SO bad a fate, if so!

Ariadne looks a lot happier from this angle

Dionysus himself is an interesting character, though, and as a son of Zeus himself, Ariadne would be both his niece and his wife, before all was said and done. This isn't anywhere close to the worst case of incest among the gods, and doesn't really seem to occur to anyone as worth commenting upon, in the source material. And I wonder what drew Dionysus to Ariadne in particular -- if he did not specifically demand her, might he have been summoned to her because she had abandoned herself to her grief, wholeheartedly? Or perhaps the fact that she had given herself up completely into Theseus' keeping, given herself up to her emotions in the face of all reason. That does seem like kind of Dionysus' specialty, after all, as a god of  madness. If he had already claimed her as his own before Theseus ever arrived -- well, I'm not sure why, but beauty has been reason enough in the past for any god to act.

One thing we know for certain: no one can agree on exactly what happened between Ariadne and Theseus, or even between Ariadne and Dionysus. But maybe that isn't what matters. Maybe what matters is that we're still wondering, all these years later.

above images © Amalia