Original subtitles

Narrator: She's been called the most beautiful woman on earth.

She became "the face that launched a thousand ships."

She's been blamed for starting the trojan war--

A war that brought death and suffering to thousands.

Helen of troy.

She's a warning of the terrible power

That boundless beauty can wield,

A reminder that desire can prove stronger than duty.

It's the oldest story of them all:

Boy meets girl; girl meets boy;

Boy and girl get into big trouble;

Lots of boys fight over the girl;

And the good guy wins out in the end.

It's no surprise it's been lapped up down the centuries.

It's the perfect male fantasy.

Helen is exquisite,

And she's an exquisite agent of extermination.

( shouting )

Helen's story is important and irresistible

Because it deals with that strange and worrying combination

Of pleasure and pain, sex and violence, love and hate.

But it's also not just a story.

Helen and the trojan war have become epic and iconic,

But if you look at them closely, they're very human.

The drama starts with a messy love affair

And it ends up in a bloody and disastrous conflict.

I think that helen's tale is rooted in bronze age reality

And that if you look for her

Here in the eastern mediterranean landscape,

You'll find that most of the ancient stories

Are much closer to history than they are to myth.

And it's in that world--

In what's now modern greece and turkey--

That I'm going to look for her, to separate fact from fiction,

To find the real powerful queens who lived here 3,500 years ago.

My journey will take me

Right across the eastern mediterranean.

To try to find helen,

I'm going to explore the magnificent palaces

That controlled this region in the late bronze age.

I'll follow helen's journey, looking again at the myths

That have helped create her image through the ages,

Investigating the wars that were fought in her name.

I'll be looking for clues

In archaeology, manuscripts and art,

Searching for that hidden helen,

One of the real prehistoric queens

Who inhabited this rich and savage time.

My journey in search of helen

Begins at the bodleian library in oxford.

Most women are written out of history.

Helen is written in.

She was an inspiration

For the earliest masterpieces of european literature--

Homer's iliad and odyssey.

These are some of the largest fragments of homer

From antiquity.

They're close on 2,000 years old,

And they've been beautifully written

On papyrus sheets in greek capitals.

Originally these papyrus sheets

Would all have been joined together in one long roll

About 30 foot long.

It's book 2 of the iliad.

You can still make out the names

Of some of the great personalities from the epic.

Here we have achilles the godlike hero.

There's aphrodite, the goddess of love.

And here is "ektor" priamedes--

Hector the firstborn son of priam.

But this little scrap--

"nes" is the last syllable of "helenes," the name of helen.

So what we're looking at

Is the first time that helen enters the written record.

( man reciting in greek )

Translator: "sing, goddess of the wrath of achilles,

"that fatal wrath

"which caused the immeasurable anguish of the acheans

And sent the strong souls of heroes to hades."

Hughes: These poems tell how the trojan and greek heroes

Fought a long and bloody battle over helen,

All stirred up by the deities on mount olympus.

They were written down in about 700 b.C.,

But transmit a much older story, based on actual conflicts

That took place at least 500 years earlier

In what came to be known as the "age of heroes."

Helen's love affair with paris kick-started the drama

Of the iliad and the odyssey.

But homer's a vital ally not just as a poet

But as a historical source, too.

Recent scholarship has shown that a number of his lines

Do relate directly to helen's era-- the late bronze age.

And beyond that, helen is bigger even than homer.

Other great epics were composed

With intimate details of her life story,

Which had been all but lost to time.

They only survive now in tiny fragments--

Works such as the kypria and the sack of troy.

So when you try and understand helen's world,

You have to look beyond the obvious

And pull together all these various strands of evidence.

It's by investigating homer and the archaeology in detail

That we can begin to form a truer picture

Of who helen of troy was.

I've been studying helen for many years,

And here in athens, there's plenty of evidence

Of the myths associated with her.

Helen's image has been adorning beautiful objects for centuries.

Vases for sale show her in a tug of war between suitors,

Preening in front of the mirror, and seducing paris.

Helen also survives in greek tragedy--

Plays still being performed in athens today.

( actor speaking greek )

Hughes: On stage she's portrayed

As either manipulative and destructive

Or a mere pawn of the gods--

A weapon of aphrodite, the goddess of love.

But you have to go beyond the misleading fantasies

To get anywhere near the real helen

And travel back to the late bronze age

When these images of women were painted.

As yet, we have no physical proof

That a woman called helene

Lived in a glittering greek palace 3,500 years ago.

But what we do have is a trail

Left by rich and desirable bronze age aristocrats

Who traveled right across the eastern mediterranean.

And when you follow that trail,

You'll find not just heroes, but heroines.

These aren't pretty little creatures

Wafting around in diaphanous robes

In front of classically fluted columns.

If helen lived, she lived as a prehistoric princess

Right at the heart of a turbulent prehistoric world.

Helen's more than a simple object of beauty,

So you have to wipe from your mind these pictures of her--

All this romantic imagery,

Which is all, without exception, a fantasy-- all made up.

What I'm looking for are the real queens

Who lived in the late bronze age in the 13th century b.C.--

The age which produced these vital clues.

I'm leaving the classical imagery of athens far behind

And traveling deep inside the peloponnese

To where helen's story starts.

Three and a half thousand years ago,

The peloponnese was home to the powerful mycenaean civilization,

Whose tentacles reached from crete to croatia,

From the turkish coast to sicily.

This is an epic setting for helen's story

And for one of the most influential civilizations

In the european bronze age.

And the city that gave its name to the whole civilization

Is mycenae.

( train bell ringing )

Safe behind their mountain ranges,

Each mycenaean kingdom jealously guarded its strategic position,

Its acquired wealth and its precious natural resources.

What's at a real premium around here is flat fertile farmland.

It's incredibly difficult to squeeze the right amount of food

Out of the bronze age landscape.

So you find mycenaean rulers try to keep a tab on every fig,

Every olive, every grain of wheat that's produced,

All the agricultural produce be brought into the citadels

And then redistributed back out again.

So for the people that lived all around here

They weren't just centers of culture.

They controlled whether you lived or died.

Across the greek mainland,

Mycenaean centers show striking similarities.

Because mycenae is the best preserved,

This is where I should be able to get the clearest picture

Of the place of women in the bronze age.

Mycenae was at its peak in 1300 b.C.

This is the century

Most likely to have witnessed the trojan war

And therefore the birth of helen.

Mycenae was a major power, enjoying a golden age

That was to come to an abrupt end only a century later.

Protected all around by mountains

And dominating the fertile plain below,

Mycenae had all the hallmarks of a fairy tale castle

Studded with gold and finery.

The immense walls shielded a muscular warrior culture.

Head for the top of the citadel

And you'll reach the center of power.

These rooms would have been two or three stories high.

They were made of mud, brick and timber,

Which is why they haven't survived.

But it was this place

That was the beating heart of the palace-- the megaron--

Or royal throne room.

In the center, there'd have been a ritual fire

That would have burnt in the hearth day in, day out,

The smoke escaping up through a grand opening in the ceiling.

In the late bronze age,

This would have been fantastically gaudy.

There would have been colored blocks of marble on the floor,

Frescoes all around the rooms

And decorated columns covered in lapis lazuli from afghanistan.

Access here was very restricted, open only to the chosen few.

So had you made it in here to the megaron and looked out,

You would have known that you were lord of all you surveyed.

A highborn woman like helen

Would have been part of this mycenaean elite,

One of the aristocrats

Who enjoyed the riches of the palaces...

And who lavished wealth on weapons and war gear.

This ornate dagger was found in a tomb,

As was this warrior vase.

But just as important

As flaunting wealth and military might

Were measures taken to protect the citadel from attack.

The rulers of mycenae

Took the defense of their city very seriously.

They dug this cistern 18 meters into the bedrock

So they'd have access to fresh water during a siege.

The cistern's a marvel of engineering for the bronze age

And shows how much of a priority security was for the citadel.

No enemy could possibly find out

About this secret water supply in wartime.

But most defensive measures don't tell the whole story.

It's easy to concentrate on the bullish, macho aspects

Of the mycenaean warrior society,

But it wasn't all blood and guts.

If you look at some of their artifacts,

It's clear that they were capable of very subtle feeling.

This little trio's been delicately carved out of ivory.

It's used as an important research tool

To discover exactly what mycenaean women wore.

But when you're close up to it,

You can feel that it's resonant with tenderness.

The women are draped around each other,

And one of them's caressing the other's forearm.

And that child-- it could be a boy or a girl--

Is leaning heavily on their lap, doing that childlike thing

Of taking up as much space as is physically possible.

It's a touching human image of mycenaean society--

A reminder that these monumental ruins

Were occupied by heroines as well as heroes.

I want to explore this city and unravel the mysteries

Of the influential and sophisticated women

Hidden behind its walls.

Mycenae has long attracted visitors

Keen to see the city homer describes as "rich in gold."

The hotels and bars for the tourists

In the village of mikines at the foot of ancient mycenae

Are a roll call of classical celebrities.

( dog barking )

The place I'm staying in

Is dedicated to antiquity's most notorious daughter,

La belle helene-- "beautiful helen."

But it also commemorates the many famous modern personalities

That have come here,

Including the first archaeologist at the site,

The flamboyant heinrich schliemann.

Enthusiasts have come to mycenae

Chasing the heroes that fought in mighty battles

And the bejeweled heroines who were their trophies.

The belle helene is the oldest guesthouse in town.

Yes, yes, yes.

This is virginia woolf's companion, actually.

That was leonard woolf, margery fry and roger fry.

That's the whole bloomsbury group--

They've all come together-- london.

Bloomsbury group, in '32.

Agatha christie came many times here,

But I thought I have...

Hughes: And not just writers--

A scattering of leaders of the nazi party,

Fascinated by the archeology of military might.

Man: And the nazi here--

It says "'44, hermann goering."

Himmler in '41, heinrich.

Dr. Goebbels in 1946, the minister of propaganda.

Goebbels?

Goebbels, yes, that's it.

Hughes: Helen's the only woman from the age of heroes

To have endured as a household name.

But the danger for all visitors here

Is that you can easily forget about the real people

Behind the dramatic archaeology and the later romantic imagery.

So when you explore a site like ancie mycenae,

You have to put aside the picture-book helen

And focus on the palace's real bronze age queens.

Helen's face has been imagined by artists

For nearly three millennia,

But none has come anywhere close to the truth.

Tantalizing discoveries from all across the late bronze age world

Offer up evidence of the striking appearance

Of a prehistoric princess like helen.

These ancient frescoes depict women in detail--

Their jewelry, hairstyles and makeup.

But the most vivid portrayal of a woman is this one.

We don't know exactly who she was,

But since she was found in a religious complex,

It seems she was both an idol and an ideal.

Archaeologist diana wardle

Specializes in mycenaean dress and personal adornment.

She's working with a team to recreate the appearance

Of a high-status bronze age woman.

This is the closest that we can get

To seeing what a late bronze age helen would have looked like.

Hughes: Now, sophia's beautifully dark,

And the ladies on the walls of the mycenaean citadels

Are always dark.

But helen's nearly always described as "golden,"

So what do you think's going on there?

A difficult one.

Maybe her skin was naturally golden,

And if she wasn't dressed up like this all the time,

You would describe her as naturally golden.

And in greece, "golden" or "lighter"

Is usually just a very much lighter dark color.

Hughes: It's almost as if she's glittering.

You would-- covered in gold jewelry as they were.

Wardle: She would glitter a lot.

Yeah, she would glitter a great deal.

She's always described as having white skin,

Gleaming like milk or like a pearl.

But do you think this is what's actually going on,

That she's a mycenaean woman

Who's having her face painted white.

I think it's very likely her face was being painted white

And that she's going to look unnatural

And perhaps even masked.

So what would they have been using to do that?

Oh, white lead, which is a horrible compound to be using.

They can't be putting it on every day,

Because your skin just wouldn't stand it.

Well, you'd die.

You could put it on every day, but you would die.

They would have looked extraordinary, the women,

Once they've got this whole panoply on.

They'd look grotesque, I think, or even clownlike.

Almost like puppets.

Is that the purpose?

Is the purpose to remove the person and produce the mask

So that you've got a... A persona,

Not... Not an individual behind the mask.

So you're acting as a priest,

You're acting as a divinity perhaps.

You're acting a part.

Hughes: Frescoes show women with different hairstyles.

Some of them have shaven heads,

But others have twisted and snakelike coils of hair,

All of which make a bronze age helen

Seem even more otherworldly.

If helen looked like anything,

This is what she'd have looked like in the palace.

Wardle: It's not exactly a face to launch a thousand ships, is it?

Hughes: Yeah.

Well, you never know.

For a late bronze age paris, might have been just the thing.

Could be.

She'd have made some impact.

She'd have made a big impact, wouldn't she?

Hughes: Tomb finds tell us

That helen would have been bedecked with jewelry--

Gold from egypt, hippopotamus ivory from africa,

Amber from the baltic.

She would have worn thick woolen robes,

Rubbed with olive oil to make them shine.

Servants would have combed her hair with a bone comb

And they would have made her skin gleam.

Frescoes show that on ceremonial occasions,

She would have been bare-breasted.

She would have blazed a trail through the palace,

A glorious creature inspiring admiration and fear.

This is prehistory, where images speak louder than words,

So a single person of exceptional beauty

Would have had real worth.

As for daily life of highborn men and women

Of the late bronze age, we know a surprising amount

Because of basic written records kept by the mycenaeans.

The mycenaeans had a script now called linear b,

Which they inscribed on wet clay tablets.

Only surviving by chance,

Scorched and preserved by palace fires,

These are simple documents,

But they give us remarkable insight

Into life in the citadel.

They tell of a rigidly hierarchical society,

Where men took senior political roles.

But they also show that mirroring this male society

Is an equally tightly controlled and influential religious world

Where women played a central role

And controlled the gateway to the gods.

The mycenaeans worshipped some of the greek gods

That we're familiar with--

Zeus and hera and poseidon, for instance.

But there was a whole phalanx

Of gods and goddesses and demigods and spirits

That never made it through to the classical world--

Deities like pipituna and perasia, the goddess of doves.

Some people even suggest there was a female zeus

And a female poseidon.

What there was not was a state-organized pantheon

With a male figure at its head.

Zeus was not predominant.

If anything it was the female divinities

Who were due the greatest honors.

These are powerful female spirits

Standing at the heart of mycenaean culture.

A further insight

Into what actually happened at their ceremonies

Is found on signet rings,

Which depict women in control of intriguing religious rites.

These golden signet rings were worn by men and women.

They were passed down as heirlooms

And we find them left in graves

Or given as offerings to the gods.

It's only an inch or so across,

But there's a whole world marked on that surface.

What you're looking at

Is some kind of sacred rite involving just women.

There's a sun and a moon up at the top,

And a little tiny figure-of-eight shield

With a mysterious divine presence appearing behind it.

I suspect, because trees and plants are so prominent,

That this was a fertility ritual

Designed to keep agricultural produce coming out of the earth.

That seated woman is very important

Because she's shaking a bunch of poppies.

It's one of the clues we have

That opium, derived from poppy seed heads,

Played a central role in religion.

These signet rings show a world of abandonment,

Fueled by narcotics.

In a number of mycenaean sites,

The seeds of opium poppies have been found.

These rites reveal women who aren't weak or decorative,

But powerful and significant.

When it came to communicating with the spirit world,

Women were essential.

If you'd come to worship at the temple,

Then these are the kind of idols that you'd have come across.

You can see that the bulk of them are women.

They're not cozy creatures at all.

I mean, standing here, they appear incredibly grotesque.

Little holes that you can see punctured into the terra-cotta

Are probably so that people

Could have hung votive offerings on them.

And they've got their arms raised

In a gesture that's typical of prayer,

So it's possible that these were actually devotants.

This lady was found with her head turned facing the wall,

Suggesting that she had some kind of evil eye

That had to be faced away from people

As they came into the temple.

It's thought that this

Is probably the representation of a goddess.

She's got a chain of beads around her neck

And bracelets all around her arms,

And she's supporting her breasts

In a very typical attribute of a goddess.

To find out more about these enigmatic female characters,

I'm now heading to the heart of religion in mycenae,

The cult center, which is still being excavated.

This is where those figures were found.

It's a kind of holy of holies--

A temple right in the middle of a more extensive cult complex.

In its heyday it would have been brightly painted

And there'd have been wooden pillars supporting the roof.

When archaeologists excavated it,

It was as if they discovered a moment frozen in time.

The figures were stored up here, but on special occasions,

They'd have been brought and arranged around this hearth.

Sometimes they'd be decorated with jewelry,

Sometimes they'd be given some food or something to drink,

And there'd be little sacrificial offerings

Made to them.

And then once the ritual was over, they were taken

And put away back here in their resting place.

It's that curious paradox of archaeology

That sometimes the most metaphysical of activities,

Like spiritual worship,

Can leave behind the most concrete remains.

All of these female figures

Point to women holding sway in the citadel.

A bronze age helen must have been more

Than just a pretty face.

She would have been feared and honored in mycenaean society--

Someone who walked hand in hand

With spirits, deities and demons.

The best evidence for life in the greek bronze age

Comes from mycenae,

But in the myths, helen was said to have been born in sparta.

Although there aren't such impressive remains there,

Helen certainly left her mark in sparta down the ages.

Spartans celebrated her,

Not just focusing on the way she looks

But on what she did, how she affected those around her.

We remember her

As the fought-over trophy of the trojan war,

But in other tales told by the ancients,

Her story was already inextricably linked

With sex and violence.

It was said that her intimate association with brutality

Went right back to her conception.

Zeus, the king of the gods, in the form of a swan,

Attacked and raped her mortal mother, leda,

As she washed herself here at the river eurotas at sparta.

Leda gave birth to an egg and helen was born,

Daughter of zeus and heiress to the kingdom of sparta.

Today it's a sleepy market town,

But in the late bronze age, sparta was a great power.

Not much remains of the city's glorious past,

But over the ages, people have made the pilgrimage to sparta

To honor its celebrated beauty.

A thousand years or so

After leda was supposed to have laid her egg,

A man called pausanias came here

To track down clues of helen's life.

Pausanias is a really interesting character,

Because he travels right across greece

And writes down what he sees and what he's been told.

And when he came to sparta,

He saw helen's egg dangling from the roof of a temple

On the spartan acropolis.

This is what he wrote about it.

"here there has been hung from the roof an egg tied to ribands,

"and they say that it is the famous egg

That legend says leda brought forth."

The birth of helen, who's half mortal, half divine,

Might seem completely bizarre to us,

But the greeks were very used to the idea

That the gods and men met on earth.

And so helen was a heady mix:

Enough of a real woman to be a wife and a lover,

Enough of a god to be sublime.

This was to be the location

For another defining moment in the myths associated with helen.

The greeks told stories of how helen would come here

To the banks of the river eurotas

To dance all night with other young girls.

Centuries later, these dances were restaged

In some kind of an attempt to capture the spirit of helen.

We still have fragments of the poetry

That the girls sang to each other.

Poet: "olympian goddesses, my heart is seized with desire

"at hearing a new song, and the chorus of girls in lovely melody

"will scatter sweet sleep and lead me to the contest

"where I'll be tossing my blonde hair,

"a dance of delicate feet with limb-loosening desire,

Her glance more melting than sleep or death."

Hughes: These rites are vital to understanding helen's appeal.

The gift she's giving the young girls isn't beauty

But what the greeks called charis.

Charis is the root of our word "charisma,"

And it can simply mean grace,

But it also has an erotic connotation.

By invoking the spirit of helen,

The young girls are learning to become charismatic,

Sexually aware.

And certainly these rituals

Would have been highly charged affairs.

They were here alone together all night;

There was drinking and torch light;

And they danced naked until dawn.

But this commemoration was more than just exuberant dancing.

It recalled an horrific and symbolic moment in helen's life.

According to the myths,

It was while helen was dancing on the riverbank

That, like her mother, she was attacked and raped.

The perpettor was theseus, king of athens.

Helen was a girl, he was 70 years old.

Theseus was prowling through the reeds

When he spotted helen.

Once he'd seen her, he didn't care about the other girls.

He only had eyes for the spartan princess.

That's what helen does to people--

She makes them yearn and long for her.

One ancient author said that theseus,

Amidst all the blessings that he had,

Thought that life wasn't worth living

Unless he could enjoy her.

A brutal conception and then attacked on the riverbank--

Helen would from hereon in

Always be linked with passion and pain.

She'd begun her career as an irresistible prize

And a creator of conflict.

In the real world of the late bronze age,

A spartan princess like helen was indeed a great catch.

Her principal value was as a marriage prospect

With a kingdom to give away.

The myths reflect this, too, and they describe

A great marriage contest held near sparta in helen's honor.

The most powerful heroes of the day gathered to compete

For the hand of the beautiful spartan princess.

The suitors came from all over greece

To get to helen's marriage contest,

Journeys that would have been possible in the late bronze age.

In the peloponnesian landscape,

You can still see the ghosts of the tracks and byways

That connected the great power bases of the mycenaean world.

But this is one of the few bits of highway engineering

That's still standing.

Just by looking at it, you can tell it's been built

In exactly the same way as the citadels,

And doubtless there was a team of slaves here

Heaving those giant blocks into place.

In some accounts, helen's eager suitors gathered here

At amyclae.

They had come to challenge each other for helen's hand.

Later authors indulged in poetic descriptions

Of how the heroes had come here to fight for helen

With her richly tressed hair, her neat ankles

And her sparkling eyes.

But in the 13th century b.C.

She'd have been appealing for other reasons, too.

In the late bronze age,

We haven't yet got to a point in history

Where men have all rights to land.

We know from the linear b tablets

That women could have land holdings, too,

"onato," they're called.

And we also know that they were subjected to religious taxes,

Which means they must have had disposable wealth.

And just look at what you'd have won

If you'd come here to fight for helen.

The foothills of mount taygetus are teeming with game,

And this is some of the most fertile land

In the whole of greece.

Marrying for love was a low priority for these suitors.

They'd arrived for the chance to improve their lot

And to display their physical prowess.

You can imagine the hopeful suitors coming here,

Their blood running high, checking each other out,

Limbering up, ready for the contest ahead.

In classical greece these competitions are called "agon,"

It's where we get our word "agony" from--

So you get a sense of just how tough they were.

( men grunting; bodies thudding )

As for the range of sports that would have taken place

At a grand event like helen's marriage contest,

There is good evidence from the bronze age.

A fresco from thera depicts two young men boxing.

I've come to the pammachon gym to meet kostas dervenis

Who teaches the sports that would have been practiced

In the late bronze age.

Hughes: What's the objective here?

What are they doing?

The objective is to try to make

One or the other submit.

You know, it goes on and on, it's like a game of chess,

And finally one person will get tired or make a mistake

That the other person can't escape from

And be forced to tap out.

No one really gets hurt.

I mean, the point is not to injure the other party,

It's to make him give up.

( tapping mat )

Hughes: So what kinds of combat sports

Do you think you'd have had

At a marriage contest like helen's?

They most certainly did the submission wrestling,

Because that was the basis

Of their close-quarter combat skills.

They might have done some boxing.

Well, it was happening all over the near east

And all over the mediterranean.

And for sure we know that in 2000 b.C.E.,

On the tomb paintings of beni hasan

We have over 300 depictions of submission wrestling.

So I think we can be very sure that it was taking place

In the mycenaean world.

Hughes: We talk a lot about the age of heroes,

But it's a very nebulous concept...

Why is it a nebulous concept?

For me, it's very clear.

So tell me then, what do you think it is?

Well, you know, the word eros in ancient greek,

Which is the same root at the goddess hera, you know,

Or the sanskrit word vera,

Simply means "he who is worthy."

Who gets the spoils in this campaign?

It's obviously the one

Who contributes most to acquiring these things.

There was very little pretension in their lives.

You know, when they traded, they traded;

When they got married, they got married;

When they fought, they fought.

I mean, it was a... A more vital time.

Hughes: You've obviously thought a lot about helen.

What does she mean to you?

I once spent an entire summer looking for helen

In the areas where she lived in the peloponnes

In the company of my wife, actually.

Now, the reason I'm saying that

Is because I think even today every greek man

Is still in love with helen.

Hughes: At helen's marriage games

The heroes wrestled and boxed in vain.

In the end, it came down to spending power.

Agamemnon, the great king of mycenae,

Impressed with the largest amount of treasure

And won helen for his brother, menelaus.

The poor guy needed big brother's wealth

To get the girl.

So helen and menelaus were to be united,

Bringing together two of the strongest dynasties

In the region.

In the third century b.C.,

The poet theocrates describes 12 spartan girls

Commemorating helen's last night of freedom.

Under a plane tree near sparta,

12 virgins recreated the last few hours

Before helen married menelaus.

Once again, they were alone together.

They danced around the tree,

And then tipping up a silver flask

They smothered the bark in olive oil, inscribing a message:

"revere me, I am helen's tree."

Woman: "we shall be the first to plant for you

"a wreath of ground-loving clover

"to hang on a shady plane tree.

"and we shall be the first to make an offering

"of gleaming oil, dripped from our silver flasks,

"under that plane tree shade.

"in its bark, we shall cut these words

"that passersby may read its message:

'respect me, I am helen's tree.'"

Helen's beauty is described as being like the dawn,

Like the return of spring after winter.

It's all very idyllic and sensual,

But you get the impression that what is being remembered

Are helen's happier days

Before she becomes menelaus's trophy wife.

To celebrate a prestigious marriage back in the bronze age,

There would have been a gamos, or wedding celebration.

We have no detailed description

Of exactly what that would have entailed,

But we do know from food lists on linear b tablets,

That the mycenaeans loved their feasts.

The linear b tablets show that this is

About the number of sheep that you'd expect at one feast.

What's interesting is that

It's not the king who's laying on the spread

But the aristocrats who are bringing the raw ingredients.

The more animals that you could provide,

The higher up you proved you were in status.

In one tablet, we hear about 350 animals being brought in

To be slaughtered for a single feast.

But meat wasn't all that was being consumed.

Now pioneering archeological research

Examining the residue left behind in cooking pots

Is able to tell us exactly what was on offer in the citadels.

Archaeologist holley martlew has been leading this research

And found that

While some of the food residue gave predictable results,

Like the use of lentils and figs,

The real surprise was what they drank.

Martlew: One of the interesting things

About the cult center at mycenae

Is that we found a cooking pot

With true retsina in it,

And that means wine with pine resin.

And of course nobody suspected

Or even as far as I know

Discusses the history of retsina,

But we found it about 1250 b.C. In mycenae.

Well, I had no idea

That retsina was being produced this early.

And it was heated, we think,

Because it was found in a cooking pot.

Hughes: This is the first time it's been proved that retsina,

The greek national drink

Made from a mix of wine and pine resin,

Has been in existence for 3,500 years

And was drunk by bronze age aristocrats.

Hughes: So retsina on its own or mixed?

Amazingly, we found evidence

That probably they consumed a cocktail

Composed of retsina--

Pine resin, wine with pine resin--

Barley beer and honey mead.

Sounds amazing, doesn't it?

Sounds fairly potent.

I'm sure it was very potent.

Shall we try it?

I think we should-- absolutely.

( both chuckling )

Now, what do you think about proportions?

Where will we start?

Well, what are you starting with?

The mead. Mead.

So just a bit?

Just a little splash of mead.

Thank you.

Okay, here goes the beer.

Oh, right, okay.

What do you think?

I think more beer,

Because if we top this out with retsina,

We'll be on the floor in two minutes.

Oh, I'm sure we're going to be on the floor.

Good.

Today's the day, I'm afraid.

Yes.

I think all my greek friends shied away

Because they thought, definitely dangerous.

So are we going to live in danger?

Yeah, I think we are.

Who will we toast?

Um... Well...

The queen of sparta.

The queen of sparta, why not.

I thought it was going to be disgusting

And it's actually rather pleasant.

I did, too.

That's delicious.

It's amazing, it's not bad at all.

Our fortunes are made.

( man reciting in greek )

Hughes: So, according to the epics, helen and menelaus were married

And ruled over the rich lands of the spartan kingdom together.

As to where a real bronze age queen of sparta like helen

Would have lived,

The location of her palace has always been a matter for debate.

This is the obvious candidate for helen's home.

It's a series of late bronze age remains up above sparta

And it's on a fortified hill, just as the mycenaeans liked it.

But it's baffled archaeologists for years

Because it's just so small.

You can hardly describe that as a mansion, let alone a palace.

But new research seems to have solved the mystery.

These are just basement storage depots.

3,000 years ago, this would have been an entire palatial complex.

It's right up on a summit,

So it's particularly prone to erosion.

And what seems to have happened is that the glittering palace

Of the king and queen of sparta has simply dropped off the edge.

Archaeology shows that despite a lack of existing remains,

In the mycenaean period,

There were three impressive buildings

Constructed on this site.

( man reciting in greek )

Hughes: Homer describes the palace of the royal couple

As set "in many-ravined sparta,"

And it's certainly a good vantage point

For control of the plain below.

So here, the archaeology and the homeric description

Do back each other up.

Life for menelaus and helen may be going as planned

In their comfortable home in sparta,

But speeding through the white-topped seas of the aegean

Is a visitor from a faraway land

Who will turn both their lives upside down.

In the myth, the meeting of paris and helen was predestined.

Paris, the second son of the king of troy,

Had been called on to judge a beauty contest

Between the three most powerful goddesses on mount olympus.

The prize was a golden apple

Engraved with the word, kallisti-- "for the fairest."

Each of the goddesses tried to bribe him,

But paris chose aphrodite, the goddess of love,

Who had promised him the world's desire.

His prize was helen of sparta, and in the myth,

Paris sets sail from troy to claim helen for himself.

So here he is, paris,

Frozen at the moment that he hands aphrodite the golden apple

And chooses her as the fairest of the goddesses.

And in return, she promises him helen.

What people often forget about him is that he, too,

Was supposed to be perfectly beautiful--

"our prince of beauty," says homer,

"with his glistening love locks."

But in the iliad, he's a bit of a peacock,

Too proud of his physique, too keen on the girls.

This statue was made in the fourth century b.C.

And it's very romantic, but I'm afraid to say,

A trojan prince of the 13th century b.C.

Would have looked nothing like this.

He'd have had long hair and earrings in his ears

And be draped all around in amulets--

Bit more of a medallion man.

But he is beautiful and he knows it,

And it's this delectable creature who,

According to mythology, arrives in sparta

At the court of menelaus and helen.

We hear from the epic poem, the kypria,

That paris was entertained in sparta as a "xenos,"

The greek word meaning "stranger" or "guest."

This title guaranteed safety to a foreign envoy,

But to secure this status,

Anyone on foreign business from the late bronze age onwards

Would have had to arrive

With gifts of goodwill to present to the court.

The rulers of the late bronze age world

Showered each other with gifts.

Chestloads, boatloads of treasure exchanged hands.

On the face of it,

This was simply a way of keeping each other sweet

And proving who had the deepest pockets to dig into.

But there was also a hidden agenda.

This was a world before codified international law,

So by orchestrating a complicated etiquette

Around gift-giving and guest-host relations,

The bronze age world could come to a common understanding.

And if you breached the unwritten rules

Of that international convention,

Then you were in big trouble.

It seems that paris barely had time

To pay his respects to the king of sparta when, we're told,

That menelaus hurriedly and unexpectedly set sail for crete

To attend to a family funeral.

His queen was left to offer appropriate entertainment

To the foreign visitor.

But helen and paris weren't alone.

In the minds of the ancient greeks,

Demonic forces were there, too.

Himeros, the spirit of desire, was plucking at paris's cloak;

Eros was there with his arrows of love;

Peitho-- persuasion-- was pushing helen

Towards paris's door;

And masterminding it all was aphrodite, the goddess of love,

Kindling the slow fires of longing,

Infusing the atmosphere with maklozenae, the glow of desire.

What follows has been the subject of art and literature

For centuries.

Helen is shown being abducted in one image,

And just as convincingly,

Happy to acquire another husband and his riches in another.

Perhaps helen intended to play the perfect hostess

And show her guest some spartan hospitality;

Maybe they were just left together for a moment too long.

So who hovered on whose doorway?

Who, in fact, stole whom?

It's a key moment in the story,

And it's at this point that you make your judgment of helen.

Either she's a victim or she's a harlot

Or she's simply an independent woman.

Homer certainly never suggests that she was seized by force.

She follows paris, he says.

Sappho is interesting, too,

Because she seems to suggest it was helen's call.

It's worth taking note of sappho,

Because she's a rare surviving female voice

From the ancient world.

"helen, the woman who by far

"surpassed all others in her beauty,

"left her husband, the best of men, behind

"and sailed far away to troy.

"she didn't spare a single thought for her child

"nor for her dear parents,

But the goddess of love led her astray to desire."

There's no hint of an abduction here.

If anything, sappho's saying that paris is helen's plaything,

Not vice versa.

Sappho's scenario gives helen the upper hand,

But it didn't prove to be an enduring take on events.

As the story gets retold down the centuries,

One version of it becomes increasingly popular--

That helen was forcibly abducted.

But I tell you, when you come here to the spartan citadel,

Which would have been incredibly heavily fortified

In the bronze age,

There is no way that an outsider like paris

Would have been able to steal away the spartan queen

Against her will.

If helen and paris went to troy,

It would have been with some collusion on helen's part.

And so the die is cast.

Helen and paris are on the run,

Heading down towards the little port of githeion

Where paris has his ships waiting.

And as they do so, they're hurtling their way into history,

Because from now on,

Helen's name is never going to be forgotten.

Homer gives her a strangely prophetic line in the iliad,

Which starts off: ( reciting in greek )

"on us, the gods have sent an evil destiny--

That we shall be a singer's theme for generations to come."

Once they'd found their ships,

Paris and helen decamped to an island nearby, cranae.

Today a causeway connects it to the mainland.

It's a tiny place,

Populated only by fishermen and occasional day trippers.

"cranae" means "rocky,"

And this island certainly lives up to its name.

The lovers would have known

That the retaliations would soon begin,

Not least because paris had loaded up his ships

With spartan treasure.

Homer tells us that the fugitive lovers

Allowed themselves just one night on cranae

Before they headed out for the open sea.

Not surprisingly, it's a moment

That's been immortalized by poets for nearly 3,000 years.

But I still think that homer has the best lines.

Years later, in troy, paris remembers the night

When they consummated their dangerous affair--

"when irresistible longing laid me low," he says,

"and we locked in love on rocky island."

Their immediate future was as fugitives on the open sea.

Ahead lay troy.

What fate will await them there?

( seagulls crying )

The next day, the myths tell us

That paris and helen boarded paris's ships

And prepared for the journey back to troy.

I'm heading out by sea from greece to turkey

To retrace helen and paris's voyage.

We'll be sailing through the islands

Dotted across the eastern mediterranean to troy,

Which is on the coast of modern-day turkey.

We tend to think of seas and oceans as barriers,

But back in antiquity,

These were the great highways and byways.

Homer even calls them, "the sea's foaming lanes."

So if you'd been traveling on a stretch of water like this,

You'd have seen little skiffs hugging the coastline,

Smaller sailing boats with just a few oars,

And then the grand galleys owned by the aristocrats of the day.

And crisscrossing these waters,

There would indeed have been female aristocrats like helen--

Women who, as we've seen,

Enjoyed influence and standing in their homelands.

But now I'm leaving greek waters,

Heading for the turkish coast, to troy,

Where helen's story reaches its dramatic climax.

She may have been born helen of sparta

But she would be remembered as helen of troy,

Always associated with the blood to be shed there in her name.

( men yelling )

I'm retracing helen's journey,

Following the route she's said to have taken

With her trojan lover, paris.

Ahead of me, in what is now turkey, lies the city

That has come to dominate helen's story, troy.

In the stories of the trojan war, this is where

Helen becomes the face that launched a thousand ships.

A huge greek fleet sails to troy ready to fight for her return,

Eventually triumphing

By tricking their way into the city,

Hiding elite troops inside a giant wooden horse.

But where do the myths

About the most beautiful woman in the world

And the war she inspired coincide with reality here,

Over 3,000 years ago?

It's only once you get on a boat that you realize

That troy and sparta are actually relatively close.

There's a fragment from one of the lost epics called the kypria

That says it took just three days

For paris and helen to make their journey.

That's pretty optimistic for a bronze age boat,

Although they could just about have done it

If they'd had perfect sailing conditions.

Now we imagine the world divided into east and west,

But for prehistoric populations,

That concept would have been incomprehensible.

There was no invisible line dividing europe and asia,

Over which travelers like paris and helen would have crossed.

This was simply a fractious theater of power

With the aegean sea at its center.

There was plenty to provoke conflict.

As well as wealthy cities like troy that dotted the coasts,

There was control of the rich trade routes

That crossed these seas, carrying everything

From ostrich eggs from egypt, ivory from syria,

Dyes from crete and copper from cyprus.

It isn't a coincidence that homer associated helen's story

So closely with this particular region,

Where trade and aggression ran hand in hand.

The trojan war has become a morality tale,

Warning men away from headstrong and seductive women.

But there's a deeper truth here,

Based on the reality of the rich pickings at stake.

You can get a good idea of what a valuable prize troy was

Here at çanakkale, the nearest modern turkish harbor,

Just 12 miles from the archaeological site of troy.

Over 3,000 years after the time of the trojan war,

These waters-- the dardanelles--

Are still one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Anything passing from the mediterranean to the black sea

Has to travel through these narrow straits.

Control them and you control a fortune.

Nearby troy was perfectly placed

To exploit the potential value of this setting.

It had its own beach harbor at beshik bay,

So it's little surprise that the ambitious mycenaean greeks

Should have traveled overseas to make their presence felt here.

Back in the 13th century b.C.,

This is where any ship coming to troy would have beached.

The bay would have curved much further inland back then,

And that headland afforded real protection

Against the tricky winds and currents that you start to get

Once you move from the aegean up the dardanelles.

Because it was such a perfect spot to stop,

This was a favorite port of call

For vessels from all over the eastern mediterranean.

So had helen stepped down a gangplank

Onto these sands 3,000 years ago,

She'd have come to a place full of the sounds and smells

Of exotic lands.

Just five miles inland stood the magnificent city of troy.

The citadel crowned a small hill,

Commanding the fertile plain and seaways

From behind its massive walls.

The story of the rediscovery of troy took its most dramatic turn

Over 130 years ago.

The german archaeologist heinrich schliemann

Spent a fortune excavating this unpromising hill,

Driven on by his quest to find the real locations

Of homer's iliad

And the treasures owned by its key characters.

It seems that helen was most important to schliemann

As a kind of fantasy woman.

In his personal life,

He had already acquired a beautiful young greek wife,

Who could recite homer perfectly.

And then he found a crown for his fairy tale princess.

Excavating 30 feet or so underneath

That little fig tree,

He came across an extraordinary treasure horde--

Golden necklaces, finger rings and diadems,

Which he immediately dubbed "the jewels of helen"

And draped around his mail-order bride.

Schliemann got his young wife to pose in the ancient jewels,

But he was hardly recreating helen.

Poor sophie's allure fell well short

Of history's greatest beauty.

And to add further insult,

It was later realized that this was all a nonsense.

These jewels would have been worn

By a woman living 1,200 years earlier than any real helen.

But in truth, schliemann was underwhelmed by what he found;

The site just seemed too small to be king priam's city.

When I first came here 20 years ago,

It was actually pretty disappointing

And very hard to imagine

That this could ever have been priam's glorious citadel.

But archaeologists have been excavating here

Every summer since then,

And they now realize that the site

Is a full 15 times larger than they previously thought.

This was a jewel in the region.

Before helen's age,

This mud-brick palace had already been standing

For a thousand years.

A newly-arrived visitor from greece over 3,000 years ago

Couldn't help but be impressed

By troy's wealth and sophistication.

Where these stones now stand, there were walls 30 feet tall

Guarding a city of about 10,000 people.

Archaeologists have found evidence

For visitors and produce coming here

From all over the eastern mediterranean.

These striped pots unearthed in troy showed direct contact

With the mycenaeans.

There's even evidence for settlers from greece.

A whole mycenaean graveyard has been found near the coast.

So a woman arriving here from sparta in the late bronze age

Would certainly not have been the first greek to come to troy.

Whether she came as paris's bride or as his whore,

Helen now belonged to troy.

Had you been walking down here back in the 13th century b.C.,

You'd have been joined

By a whole stream of women making their way to the citadel.

Contemporary evidence tells us

That these courts had giant harems

With a very strict hierarchy.

There was the first wife, secondary wives,

Freeborn concubines called ersatu,

And then below that,

A whole rank of women who were captives--

Basically little more than sex slaves.

So women, often themselves the spoils of war,

Formed part of the lucrative trade

Coming and going through these gates.

Even a high-status woman like helen was a commodity

With diplomatic value.

To help me explore the nature of late bronze age warfare,

I've been joined by weapons expert mike loades.

Most ancient battles started with a barrage of missiles.

So there were bows, there were javelins,

And there were slings.

And it's a very simple weapon.

It's a stone and a little pouch on a string.

And you simply...

Throw it.

And it can go quite a long way.

And you get 20, 30 people like that throwing missiles

And then you really pin the enemy down.

Probably the most iconic weapon of this age, though,

Is the mycenaean figure-of-eight shield.

And it's an insignum of a goddess.

Hughes: Yeah.

So maybe that shape is simply doing that.

Showing the shape of a woman?

Showing the voluptuous shape of a curvy woman.

But I think there's another reason

Which is structural.

If you look at this model-- little wicker model--

It hasn't really got the figure in yet.

Something that big, made like that,

Is very weak, it's very pliable,

So spears, stones flying in, it would simply do that.

But as soon as I give it a waist,

Soon as I pinch it and give it some shape,

Then the engineering of curves...

Yeah, that's much stronger.

...Gives it tremendous structural strength.

Yeah.

So I think that's one reason why they're like that.

Another reason quite possibly

Is so that they could use their spears.

And it just gives a good gap

For the spears or the swords.

Both sides would have had spears

And both sides would have had swords.

Bronze age swords are relatively short

But ideal both for slashing and for thrusting.

( men grunting )

Now, what would a weapon combination like that

Do against a weapon combination like this?

You would think perhaps

This was the superior system.

Obviously the spear has got reach

And I can really get in there.

If I get in too close...

There are those depictions

Of them getting their swords

Over the top of the shields.

If he defeats the shield,

I can knock it away with the spear

And I can clear him.

He, of course, can use the sword.

It's not only used for thrusting,

But also for cutting.

I can thrust back at him.

And with all combat,

There's going to be body checks and wrestling

And hard, physical stuff.

Perhaps a disadvantage of the spear

Is it can be easily knocked aside.

But an advantage is

It can be used with both ends.

But what else would have been coming out of the ships,

Because you haven't just got your shields and your weapon.

Obviously they'd have had their armor,

Which means more to them than just protecting them.

Armor was something to be prized.

Armor was the physical incarnation of their honor.

Hughes: So display is incredibly important,

The impact you made?

Glimmering in bronze or gleaming in white--

Whatever they're wearing,

They need to look splendid.

I mean, not a thousand ships, though?

No, I mean, I'm sure

That the thousand ships is either an exaggeration

Or a metaphor for saying "all our available resources."

What's the motivation of the men

To follow menelaus?

The ships are going to be privately owned.

The soldiers are going to be privately recruited.

The only thing he can offer them

Is the rich pickings of troy.

Hughes: Homer goes on about that:

You fight and then you get a bit of booty;

You fight and then you raid

The treasure from the temple.

A thousand ships is 30,000 men.

That's going to make the rich pickings

Go around a bit thinly.

So I think it's a much smaller force

Coming for fame, for glory, menelaus for revenge,

And the rest for the rich pickings.

Hughes: Mike is going to undertake further tests

Of late bronze age fighting techniques.

But I want to discover

What it might have been like to live in troy.

Because troy has been leveled and then reoccupied

So many times down the centuries,

As you walk through the ruins

It's hard to get a sense for the remarkable dynamism

Of the late bronze age city.

But travel beyond the dardanelles

And you'll find its 21st-century equivalent:

Istanbul.

Like ancient troy, istanbul is a crossroads,

A cosmopolitan trading post standing at the gateway

From the mediterranean to the black sea.

When you come here, it's about as close as you'll get

To the atmosphere of bronze age troy.

We know that there they spoke at least eight different languages,

And I've already heard four around me.

There are people here from both sides of the bosphorus,

From east and west.

And their one reason for being here is to buy and sell.

The city is full of produce from all over the world.

From local specialties...

To some luxuries that would have been for sale

In the markets of the late bronze age.

Excuse me? Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, welcome.

Do you have any rose petals?

Yes, I have.

Yeah?

Oh, lovely, yeah.

Can I smell them?

Please.

Oh, that's lovely.

We know from linear b tablets and fresco evidence

That the mycenaeans traded in coriander and cumin

And rose petals and saffron.

It's lovely stuff that was worth its weight in gold.

Only women were allowed to pick this.

But what's really surprising is the quantities

That they're trading in.

It's almost as if the mycenaean aristocrats wanted

To scent mark their territory, sort of proving in some way

That they had the time and money to make themselves smell sweet.

So when homer talks about helen dressed in fragrant robes

And lying asleep in scented rooms,

It probably wasn't just poetic imagination.

Back in the bronze age, you find men and women buried

With bits of beaten bronze like this,

Which were used as mirrors.

And people often imagined helen in troy

Surrounded by her female servants

And puffing herself with scents

And looking into the golden mirrors

That young girls delight in.

And then way up till to roman period and beyond,

You'll find helen actually inscribed on mirrors.

It's almost as if people imagined

That her beauty would reflect

Back onto the person who was looking into them.

As a rich trading center,

The trojans were hardly without friends--

Or at least commanding neighbors

Who wanted a piece of the economic and political action.

Lying to the east was the enormous hittite empire

That dominated much of the area

Right down to the frontier with egyptian territories.

On the edge of all of this was troy--

Known in the late bronze age as wilusa--

Sandwiched between the worlds of the hittites

And to the west, the mycenaeans.

No written records have survived in troy,

But their neighbors, the hittites,

Were great bureaucrats.

And as a superpower,

The hittites were intimately involved

In the life of the wealthy maritime city of troy.

Their records allow us a glimpse of trojan life and politics.

This is a lovely little piece of evidence

That shows how strong the ties were

Between the hittites and the trojans.

It's a personal treaty between the king of troy, alexander,

And the king of the hittites, muwatallis ii.

Basically it's a pact of nonaggression,

But it also sets down the dynamic

Of the relationship between the two.

The king of the hittites, muwatallis,

Thunders, "if I write to you, alexander,

"take charge of infantry and chariots.

Send them to my aid immediately."

It's very clear who has the upper hand.

Muwatallis carries on.

"if you, alexander, transgress the words

"that stand on this tablet,

"then the thousand gods of the hittites shall eradicate you,

"your wife, your sons, your lands, your cities,

"your threshing floor, your fields, your cattle, your sheep.

"but if you observe these words,

You shall thrive in the hand of my majesty."

It's only a little thing, but it shouts loud and clear:

The hittites have muscle;

You have to keep on the right side of them.

Study the hittites,

And the men and women who inhabited this part of world

In the bronze age start to come into focus.

I'm heading to the hittite capital, hattusa.

It lies over 500 miles to the east

In the high heartlands of anatolia.

Even today, it takes a good 12 hours

To drive to the hittite capital from western turkey.

Like troy, hattusa was an eastern city

Famed for its great wealth.

The classical greeks made a lot of the fact

That helen wasn't just lured away by paris

But by the wealth of the east.

There's a great line in one of euripides' plays

Where hecuba, who's paris's mother, spits out at helen:

"once you'd left the spartan city,

"you looked forward to a deluxe of extravagance in troy

"with its rivers of gold.

"menelaus's halls weren't large enough

For your luxury to wanton in."

The classical writers weren't exaggerating.

The trail I'm following brings me this far east

Because here it's uniquely possible to glimpse

The material wealth and far-reaching influence

That some women enjoyed at the time of helen.

Exploring hattusa, you're again reminded

Why the aristocrats of the late bronze age became legendary.

Their achievements over 3,000 years ago were extraordinary.

This spectacular rampart is over a hundred feet tall

And 800 feet across.

It's a magnificent display of royal authority,

Both to inhabitants and visitors alike.

Like everything here, entry was carefully controlled.

This corridor was called yerkapu,

Which means "the gateway into the earth,"

And it actually tunnels right up through the rampart

And runs well over 200 feet.

Had you come here 3,000 years ago,

It would have been a lot brighter

Because the floor would've been painted white.

I suspect there'd have been little lamps

In all these niches.

But it does make a very theatrical

Impressive entrance to the city.

It's almost as if you're moving from one world into another.

Once you finally emerged from the tunnel,

You'd have been in no doubt

That you'd been embraced by a superpower.

Hattusa is a massive complex.

Those square footprints that you can see

Would all have been temples.

And beyond that, there's a royal citadel,

And then as far as the eye can see,

The land is controlled by the hittites.

Not only that, but hittite power can be felt

As far south as syria, to the east in the euphrates,

And way, way out west in troy.

And that power was wielded by both men and women.

It's a real treat to be holding this,

Considering it was last used over 3,000 years ago.

This is an imprint of a seal of king hattusilis iii

And queen puduhepa.

You can see her name is written down here phonetically: Puduhepa.

It was actually quite common for kings and queens to share seals

And for aristocratic women to have

A degree of independence from their consorts.

But puduhepa pushes things that bit further.

She has her own seal,

And through sheer force of character

Becomes one of the movers and shakers of the late bronze age.

Some of the hittite queen's correspondence,

With her personal seal attached, still survives.

It shows that she could face down the mightiest rulers

Of the region.

Puduhepa kept up a correspondence

With all the great leaders of the day,

And she had a particularly feisty exchange

With the pharaoh of egypt, rameses ii.

He was complaining that she hadn't sent her daughter

To be married off to one of the egyptians in the court,

And she replies, "I cannot give my daughter to you right now

"because, as you well know,

The treasure house of hatti has been burned out."

I.E., she can't send her daughter

Because she hasn't got a dowry to go with her.

But then puduhepa can't resist adding in a little jibe.

"does my brother possess nothing at all?

"only if the son of the sun god, the son of the storm god

"and the sea have nothing, do you have nothing.

"yet, my brother, you seek to enrich yourself at my expense.

That is worthy of neither your reputation nor your status."

She's clearly a woman who knows how to stick up for herself.

It's further evidence that the late bronze age,

The time of helen,

Was an era when forceful women could make their mark.

The hittite treaties are made

In the names of individual rulers, not states.

They bear this out as a period when individual leaders

Could control the fate of vast populations.

So this was an age of heroes and of heroines.

Here in hattusa, over 3,000 years ago,

Extraordinary documents were written

That give a voice to the age of helen.

They don't only tell us

About the powerful personalities of their leaders,

But also how relations between men and women were defined.

Reader: "if a man sins with his mother, it is an abomination.

"if a man sins with his daughter,

"it is also an abomination.

"if a man has a wife and the man dies,

"his brother shall take his wife.

"then his father shall take her.

There shall be no punishment."

Hughes: Hittite laws frequently cover

The breakdown of family relations

And questions of sexual consent--

Just the sort of issues

At the heart of the story of helen and paris.

It might seem rather convenient that the helen and paris story

Has all the ingredients of a potboiler,

But back in the late bronze age, just like today,

Rape and abduction and adultery were live issues.

Quite a number of the tablets found here at hattusa

Lay down the law about who was to blame

And what kind of punishments they should have.

For instance, one reads,

"if a man seizes a woman in the mountains,

"it is the man's offense, and he shall die.

"but if he seizes her in the house,

It's the woman's offense, and the woman shall die."

In other words, if a woman is raped at home,

Then in hittite eyes, she was asking for it.

"if the husband finds them and then slays them,

There shall be no punishment for him."

So if he catches them in the act,

He can kill them with impunity.

Mind you, things were never quite the same again,

Because if you were a cuckold,

It seems that you dropped an entire social rank.

And when adultery reached the ranks of aristocracy,

The crisis could escalate.

In one particular case, the hittites had to be brought in

To cool down two states who were at the brink of war

Because of the behavior of a princess.

A royal bride had been sent to the young king of ugarit.

Things didn't quite go to plan.

It seems that she had a love affair

When she got to the court

And she was sent back home in disgrace.

But then her husband demanded her return,

Presumably to execute her.

The two states didn't actually end up fighting,

But clearly this kind of a problem

Could have international significance.

And so the behavior of a woman like helen

In the late bronze age

Could spark serious diplomatic incidents.

The hittite records even give us clues about strife over troy.

In one of the letters from hattusa

To a king of the mycenaean greeks,

We have direct evidence

That there were hostilities over troy itself.

It's only a passing reference, little more than a line,

But it speaks volumes.

"in that matter of wilusa-- troy--

"over which we were at enmity,

"the king of the hittites has changed his mind

"and we are now friends.

A war is wrong for us."

There is no question that in the late bronze age

There was some kind of a conflict over troy.

As more hittite texts are translated,

It's becoming increasingly clear that parts of homer ring true;

That his stories are rooted firmly in the late bronze age.

I think homer is recalling a series of conflicts over troy,

As evidenced by the hittite tablets,

And he spun them into one story centered around helen.

In this world, the dubious behavior of a high-born woman

Would have been a valid excuse to start a war,

Especially when the prize was a city as valuable as troy.

It's therefore appropriate that homer remembers helen

As an active protagonist in the conflict.

When helen's at troy,

We hear that she spent a great deal of her time

Weaving a giant tapestry-- such a rich, dark purple

It was the color of congealed blood.

Onto it she was immortalizing the deeds of the heroes,

The endless bloody struggles of stallion-breaking trojans

And greeks armed in bronze, homer says.

Bronze age women did weave,

But I think homer's telling us something different here.

This is helen's story.

She's in charge.

It's helen who's pulling together the threads

Of all these men's lives.

Homer composed the epic of helen and the trojan war

400 years after the event,

But he was drawing on a bardic tradition of storytelling

That had been repeating the epic stories

Down through the centuries.

So some of homer's lines do correspond directly

With late bronze age archeological evidence

Such as the description of armory

That had disappeared by homer's era.

Odysseus, for instance, is described

As wearing a helmet like this, thickly covered in boar's tusks,

Typical of those actually excavated from mycenaean sites.

So you sometimes have accurate military detail

Heightened by dramatic poetry.

( man reciting in greek )

"the trojan squadrons advanced with a clamor of weapons

"and shouting voices,

"wave upon wave, like birds rising before the face of heaven

Promising evil strife to their foe."

( man reciting in greek )

"but the greeks came on in silence, breathing fury,

Resolved to stand shoulder to shoulder."

Hughes: But homer didn't simply concentrate

On the macho posturings of the heroes.

Like other greeks,

He saw an intimate connection between war and lust.

We think of sex and violence as distinct entities,

But for the greeks,

They were two sides to the same coin--

Two primordial urges

That brought a great deal of trouble to mankind.

It's easier to understand the relationship between the two

When you remember how the greeks regarded eros.

For them, eros was not yet cupid--

A sweet little thing fluttering across valentine cards--

But a rangy, malevolent boy who invaded body and soul,

Grinding down your resolve to a powder.

Like cupid, eros did have arrows,

But his arrows were tipped with a burning poison,

And you were just as likely to find him on the battlefield

As you were in bed.

Before they went to war,

Spartan soldiers would sacrifice to eros,

And homer uses the word ( speaks greek word )

To describe engagement

Both in the act of sex and the act of war.

For the greeks, there was no dividing line

Between the lust for love and the lust for blood.

In homer's version of the trojan war,

Written centuries after the actual fighting,

Some of the lines clearly refer to his own era, the iron age.

For instance, he describes all the fighting

As taking place on foot, whereas in the late bronze age,

The real time of the trojan war,

One weapon in particular was supreme on the battlefield--

The chariot.

The time of helen abounds with images of chariots at war.

This was the high-status weapon.

These carvings show the hittites taking on the egyptians

At the battle of kadesh,

Contemporary with the era of the trojan war.

( man bellows )

( horses neighing )

To investigate whether this really was fighting

Fit for the mycenaean and trojan heroes--

An ajax or a hector--

We've brought accurate, replica late bronze age chariots

Back to the plains of troy.

Mike loades, an expert in ancient weapons,

Has trained horses he's hired from local gypsies to pull them.

Usually these animals pull farm carts,

But today they're war horses.

They've got a lot to live up to.

The hittites wrote extensively

About how to get a horse into peak condition.

( horse whinnies )

Hughes: I'm very glad to see you're grooming,

Because the hittites were very keen

On their horse care, weren't they?

Well, I mean, kikkuli, kikkuli of the mitanni,

Wrote this wonderful text which really...

It pays a lot of attention to the grooming techniques

And really calculated feeding regimes

To get them to peak fitness.

Yeah.

I'm not sure how fit these are.

You know, one day they would go so many miles

And then they would rest,

And then the next day

They would have certain things to eat,

And then they would do so many miles trotting,

So many miles galloping,

And so building up-- just like an athlete--

Building up peak fitness.

And these would have been superb equine athletes.

Hughes: We wouldn't have done this in the late bronze age--

It's men and women separately.

But we're not in the bronze age.

Indeed-- we can break a few rules.

Keep your legs flexed to take the shock of the bounce.

We'll go very sedately to start with.

Fantastic.

Does it always, um,

Creak like this?

Get on!

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean it's... It's a wonderful soundtrack

Of the bronze age, isn't it?

There's the leather and the wood

And it creaks and the harness jingles

And that's what it sounds like being on a chariot.

I love the bells.

I've never imagined it had bells on them.

Yeah, well, the bells are great,

Because the horse have the bells on

All their life, even when they're grazing,

So they're used to that constant ringing.

And the function of that is that becomes

The dominant sound in their ear.

Get up, you lazy mare!

( hughes laughs )

And so all the cacophony of battle,

They're going to hear that in the background.

It's not going to spook them and frighten them.

Hughes: So it's always got their familiar noise with them.

Well, homer talks a lot about that--

About the screams and cries of anguish on the battlefield--

So I guess if they've got that as a familiar

Then, as you say, it's not going to spook them.

Get on!

( trills tongue )

They can really get on-- ha!

Get on!

( trills tongue )

Ha!

( laughing ): They really can!

Whoa!

( loades encouraging horses )

Wow, she corners like she's on rails!

( loades firing on horses )

Hughes: Composing in the iron age, homer describes chariots

As little more than battle taxis,

Dropping off his heroes to do the real fighting on foot.

( men shouting )

But the carvings show that in the late bronze age,

Chariots were also used in the heat of the action,

Sometimes pitched directly against each other.

Our large hittite-style chariot

Is going to do battle with this lighter mycenaean vehicle.

Hughes: So this is the greek chariot?

The traditional view is that the mycenaeans

Wouldn't have used them for warfare,

Just for taxis.

Loades: At this period everybody is fighting in chariots.

And if the mycenaeans have come over here to fight

On this chariot country--

I mean, this is chariot country.

Yeah, exactly.

So if they're going to take them on,

And we know they had chariots...

They're going to use them.

( loades shouting )

Hughes: To understand how chariots

Would have fought each other in practice,

Mike has turned once again to the ancient carvings.

They show chariots as fast-moving firing platforms.

Loades: The great thing about the chariot

As a mobile missile platform

Is it can take the archer where he needs to be

And then he can start picking off the enemy.

You can get really quite good accuracy,

Even over this terrain.

And of course I could have been shooting at the horses.

( cheering )

Hughes: In the late bronze age,

The bow was the weapon of kings and pharaohs.

Not the case 400 years later in homer's time.

For him, bows weren't purely heroic.

Instead they were often the weapon of the coward--

Killing at long range.

For example, he puts a bow into the hands of paris

To kill unbeatable achilles.

And in the iron age, this grand chariot warfare

Was nearly all gone as well.

But the larger-than-life bronze age characters

Skilled in its practice, outlived their time,

Surviving in popular imagination and in homer's poetry.

Homer would have loved all of this,

Because if you read the iliad,

It is almost cover-to-cover gore.

I mean, he was bothered

By the inconsistencies and messiness of war,

But he certainly didn't mince his words

When it came to describing

The various gruesome ways that men could die.

And this is a passage from book 16,

And if you're squeamish, you should cover your ears.

( reading in greek )

Hughes: "idomeneus skewered erymas straight through the mouth,

"the merciless brazen spearpoint raking through

"up under the brain to split his glistening skull.

"teeth shattered out,

"both eyes brimmed to the lids with a gush of blood

"and both nostrils spurting,

Mouth gaping, blowing convulsive sprays of blood

And death's dark cloud closed down around his corpse."

And, of course, all this was laid at helen's door.

It was just that one moment of

( speaks ancient greek ) is the greek word,

Abandonment, that caused the deaths

Of thousands and thousands and thousands of men.

Once again, it's eros and ares, love and strife,

Sex and violence walking together hand in hand.

( men shouting )

Loades: Homer has latched on to an oral tradition

Where heroes fought, where people made their name.

( hooves thundering )

Loades: Chariot warfare is spectacular;

It is show-offy; it is glamorous.

So it is the sort of thing they would do here

On this theater.

Hughes: Yeah.

Loades: If you're fighting warfare like this,

People are going to make their names--

Names that will last forever.

( men shouting )

Hughes: Many of the most dramatic scenes in homer

Involve heroic single combat.

In one of the most famous episodes in the iliad,

Homer tells how paris agrees

To take on helen's aggrieved husband menelaus

In full view of the city.

Helen's sitting in her rooms,

But iris, the messenger of the gods, calls her out.

"you can't miss this," she says.

"your two husbands are fighting to the death over you."

And as she walks onto the walls,

King priam asks her to pick out the greek heroes.

"there's wily odysseus," she says.

"there's ajax-- he's a giant of a man.

There's red-haired menelaus."

And then she stands up here in full view of everyone.

She's a prize for greeks and trojans alike.

The old men of troy start to gossip,

Whispering in their dry voices like cicadas.

"ah, there she goes," they say.

"now I understand why we're suffering such agony.

What beauty-- terrible beauty."

We've only got homer's word for all of that,

But if you come to troy, the archaeology fits.

I'm standing on the ramparts of the royal citadel.

Just below me there, that pile of stones

Is a late bronze age gate

Which has been blocked in at some point.

Behind that there's the edges of the town

And then just beyond a broad, flat plain.

Travel west and you hit beshik bay,

Where greek ships beached.

Everything points to this being the perfect vantage point.

From here, helen could have watched her two husbands

Fighting to the death.

Homer accounts it as classic heroic single combat,

Heavy with ritual.

First of all, the battleground is marked out.

The two fighters draw lots, and paris hurls the first spear.

( man bellows )

It pierces menelaus's shield,

But doesn't wound him.

He then throws, but now paris's shield holds firm.

Then the fighting becomes less ordered, less honorable.

( armor clashing, fighters grunting )

Helen's first husband grabs paris by the helmet

And drags him back to his comrades.

The greeks are going to hack paris to death.

Yet once again,

Where there's violence, sex is never far away.

Homer brings the goddess of love, aphrodite,

Back into the story.

She covers the battlefield in mist,

Releases the forlorn paris

And spirits him back to safety in troy.

But aphrodite hasn't finished yet.

She leaves paris stretched out languidly on his bed

And goes to fetch helen,

Forcing her to pay homage with aphrodisia--

The things of sex.

But helen doesn't want to sleep with paris.

She's embarrassed by him; he's dishonored her.

She tries to resist him; she tries to fight aphrodite.

But you can't take on the goddess of love and win.

The more helen pours scorn on paris,

The more she provokes him, the more lustful he becomes.

It's one of the most erotic moments in the iliad.

"'but come,' paris says.

"'never has longing for you overwhelmed me so.'

"he led the way to the bed.

"his wife went with him.

"and now while the two made love in the large carved bed,

"menelaus stalked like a wild beast up and down the lines.

Where could he catch a glimpse of magnificent paris?"

The fighting rages on and on, and one by one, the heroes fall.

Paris himself is eventually killed--

Ironically with a poisoned arrow.

Desperate to win the day,

The greeks come up with an extraordinary plan.

If there really was a trojan horse,

It certainly didn't look like this one at troy today.

It's hard to imagine anyone hiding troops in here.

The trojan horse has become an icon of the war

And of the superiority of greek brain

Over trojan brawn.

And it's helped to cement helen's reputation as dangerous

And untrustworthy.

As she endeavors to betray her greek kinsmen inside the horse,

She's once again the archetypal fickle woman.

She walks around the horse three times, stroking its flank.

As she goes, she imitates the voices of the women

That the soldiers have left behind them in greece,

Murmuring sweet nothings,

Calling out the names of the heroes.

It must have been torture for them.

They'd been on campaign for ten long years.

But for once, helen's charms weren't quite powerful enough,

And troy's fate was sealed.

As the city slept, the greek heroes crept out

And threw open the gates.

The women of troy were taken as slaves,

The men slaughtered.

And what of helen?

Was she cowering in a corner of the city somewhere,

Or waiting, praying,

Desperate for menelaus to come and rescue her?

Well, the greeks keep their options open,

And they tell both sides of the story.

On vast paintings that portray the episode,

Helen's often plucking at her veil,

And it's very difficult to tell

Whether she's covering herself up in fear

Or loosening her clothes to welcome menelaus back.

But whatever helen felt,

Menelaus just wanted to kill her.

He tears through the city hunting her down,

His sword held high.

And then when he sees her again,

All he wants is to have her back.

The greek playwrights made a great deal of this,

Saying it wasn't helen's beautiful face,

But her beautiful breasts that turned his hate to lust.

Once again, helen is an irresistible force of nature.

The spartan queen was returning home.

The ancients tell us that beacons were lit

On summits across the eastern mediterranean,

Exactly the way in the late bronze age

That the news of the fall of troy could have been carried

All the way back to mycenae and sparta.

Meanwhile, helen and menelaus

Were taking a slower route home by sea.

When they travel back to sparta, they take with them

Many glittering treasures to decorate their palace,

And one of the gifts that helen is given is a golden spindle.

A golden spindle has been found in a bronze age grave.

So once again, homer isn't just concocting a fairy tale;

He's itemizing specific details from the distant past.

Helen and menelaus eventually return to their palace

High above the spartan plain.

This is one of the most surprising points

In homer's story,

Because there are hardly any recriminations.

Helen's a home wrecker-- she's destroyed men's lives--

And yet she seems to be getting off scot-free.

Once she's back in sparta,

She's in charge of the palace once more.

She welcomes trojan war veterans to her halls,

Mixing up a magical brew.

Into the potion she slips drugs

That will make them forget everything,

Soothing away the pain

Of the psychological and physical wounds

That she has caused.

She might be playing the good wife,

But she's still a sorceress.

So even in her later years,

Helen still crackles with danger.

She still controls things, undimmed by her disgrace.

But, like a flame that burns brightest before it gutters,

Helen and her golden age of heroes

Were about to be extinguished.

Archaeologists have discovered

That shortly after the period of the trojan war,

Round about 1200 b.C.,

The civilizations of the eastern mediterranean

All suffered major catastrophes.

The hittite empire collapsed.

At troy, there's evidence of destruction

By earthquake and fire.

And in mycenae, the figures in the cult center were stowed away

And the palace appears to have gone up in flames.

The dark ages had come to greece.

There were great fires here in the spartan citadel, too.

The only clue we have to the human tragedy

Are three skeletons--

One of a woman about 30 years old who'd been trussed up

And then hurriedly buried in a shallow grave,

And two small children.

From now on, this palace would be abandoned.

But helen refuses to go away.

If there's one thing I've learned about her,

It's that she's a survivor.

Civilizations might come and go, but no one forgets her name.

And although down the centuries

The beautiful helen came to be vilified,

Here at sparta she lived on, a vital life force,

Worshipped as a godlike creature.

And on this hill, right next to the spartan palace--

Her likely bronze age home--

This shrine was raised to menelaus and his wandering wife,

A place known for centuries simply as "helen's temple."

Helen had moved from real woman to sublime beauty.

There'd have been a small wooden idol of helen up here,

And men and women would have come to pay their devotions

To their dynamic heroine.

They left her gifts and made sacrifices in her name.

Archaeologists have found

A little perfume jar inscribed to her

And a fleshhook used for hanging sacrificial meat.

It's helen who's given the honor

Of what has to be one of the most spectacular locations

In the whole of greece.

I'm convinced that helen, the gorgeous spirit worshipped here

And the fatal beauty at the heart of homer's epic,

Derived from a woman of real flesh and blood.

The earliest written sources for helen describe

A brilliant and brutal queen,

And that is an accurate picture of the late bronze age world.

There's no doubt that here at sparta there lived

A dazzling, aristocratic woman

Who had a special relationship with her gods

And who controlled the lives of the men around her.

A figure of such power and allure couldn't be allowed

To fade from history.

She'd inspire desires, fantasies and fears

For millennia.

Helen was remembered as such a vital force

That her name came to be associated

With a number of natural phenomena.

She has her own flower-- helen's flower, the helenium--

That was said to have sprung from her tears.

And st. Elmo's fire, that vivid electrical charge

That can occur during storms at sea,

Was throughout antiquity known as helena.

A belief in helen's natural strength

Still exists in greece today.

Here at a little peloponnesian town named loutro elenis

Are the baths of helen.

For 2,000 years, people have been coming here to honor helen.

It's a really curious little spot, because you've got

This mountain stream gushing out into the aegean,

And apparently if you stand right in the epicenter,

Then the jets have got magical restorative powers,

So you go... Right down where it's really cold!

Oh, it's really cold.

I don't know if it's giving me helen's beauty,

But it's certainly invigorating.

And the spring still draws a steady stream of bathers

Seeking the healing power of helen.

What kinds of things does the spring cure?

In the ancient world,

Fertility idols were often brought to springs

To be ritually cleansed,

And aphrodite, the goddess of love herself,

Was born out of the sea.

So I think what's happening here is that helen's being remembered

As a woman of such potent and extraordinary sex appeal

That when she's worshipped,

She's being worshipped in a way appropriate to a sex goddess.

Throughout my journey, I've seen that as a sex goddess,

Helen's been perpetually hijacked

For the purposes both of men and women.

Homer made her the excuse for war,

Her abduction justifying the death of thousands,

A dangerous ally of the gods.

In greek plays, she's an effortless manipulator,

The cause of hatred between east and west.

Right through history, she's been an object lesson

In women as victims-- sometimes passively,

Sometimes as rape fantasy.

At other times, she's the skilled seductress,

The powerful woman able to control men to suit her will.

But women revered her for her potency and beauty.

Spartan girls rode chariots in her honor

And danced by the river

To recall her coming-of-age and marriage,

Hoping to catch some of her charis--

Charisma and sexual power.

From greece to hollywood, helen the myth endures.

But what of the bronze age helen--

The spartan queen who lived in the peloponnese

Over 3,000 years ago?

With her palace obliterated, no evidence has ever been found

For a tomb of helen.

But we do know how a mycenaean aristocrat of helen's status

Would have been buried.

Magnificent tombs of the late bronze age

Have been excavated across the peloponnese.

A spartan queen would probably have been buried

In one of these vast man-made caverns.

It's still easy to imagine that echoing cacophony

As official mourners extolled the dead.

We can piece together the ceremony

From archaeological discoveries in tombs.

The corpse would be laid down on the ground or on a bench

And surrounded with rich goods.

In one grave, a woman's been buried

With a bronze mirror pressed right up close against her face.

Religious figurines were placed around the body.

Daggers have been found in women's graves...

Along with the tools used in life to enhance their beauty.

The corpse was finally covered in a shroud

Decorated with gold.

There'd be little incense burners here and oil lamps, too.

A final toast would be made, the final libation poured,

And then the tomb would be closed

And the woman would be left alone in the dark.

Because the late bronze age tombs

Of the king and queen of sparta have disappeared,

We will never find helen's body.

And so it seems her prophecy from the iliad,

That she has an evil destiny

To be a singer's theme for generations to come,

Will always be fulfilled.

Until we've seen helen as a dry, dusty corpse,

A sad, flawed mortal,

We will never stop fantasizing about her,

Never stop blaming her

For being the most beautiful woman in the world.

Captioned by media access group at wgbh access.Wgbh.Org