Eighty Percent Right

A popular academic trend in dealing with larger-than-life classical scholars of the past, archeologists in particular, is what might be termed mythicide. As J. Lesley Fitton wrote in that excellent work, “The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age” (1996): “We perhaps live in an age when worms are too prone to creep round the feet of great men to see if they are made of clay.”

The wealthy amateur scholar who couldn’t be bribed or bullied, whose fantasies weren’t answerable to professional control, has attracted particularly venomous charges, from inventing prehistory out of a perfervid imagination to slanting or even faking the evidence to fit his theories. The first and most famous of these victims was Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, accused, among other things, of salting his digs with finds either acquired on the antiquities market or made up for him by local goldsmiths. Now it’s the turn of Sir Arthur Evans, who first bought, then dug and finally restored the site of Minoan Knossos in Crete, now second only to the Parthenon as Greek tourist-bait.

In both men’s cases, it didn’t help that the only literary sources for their discoveries available at the time were late and highly colored mythic narratives, from Homer on the Trojan War to lurid Knossian stuff about Daedalus, Minos, the Labyrinth and Pasiphae’s act of taurine miscegenation that produced that bullheaded monster, the Minotaur. Worse, both Schliemann and Evans started out in the firm belief that the myths were, in essence, true, something that ran flatly counter to every scholarly axiom then current. Worst of all, to the general public it seemed clear that in both cases the amateur had triumphantly vindicated his trust in tradition and by doing so had made the academic theorists look more than a little stupid. Thus resentment and envy--not only of the freedom and financial resources enjoyed by Schliemann and Evans, but also of the success achieved by their repugnantly romantic ideas--played a larger part than is often acknowledged in this story. No one, least of all a professor, likes being made a fool of. There was also a growing, and uncomfortable, realization that the wholesale skepticism so badly dented by these archeologists’ spades was itself something of an arbitrary myth.

So despite the undeniable, and enormous, contribution both men made to prehistoric archeology, there has always remained a persistent core of distaste for them among some professionals, and Joseph Alexander MacGillivray’s new biography of Evans stands squarely in this tradition. Its subject is presented as a racist, an obsessional fantasist and, for good measure, a closet homosexual for whom the unnatural beast crouching at the heart of the Labyrinth symbolized his own secret erotic drive.

After such a bill of particulars, the claim that Evans also fudged the evidence in his daybooks for the dating of the Linear B tablets, those clay-inscribed administrative records fired--and thus preserved--in the final burning of Knossos, may sound to the uninitiated like an anticlimax, but in fact is far more serious. That particular charge--the subject of a peculiarly acrid academic debate in the 1960s between the archeologist John Boardman and the late Leonard Palmer, a comparative linguist--still smolders, unresolved to this day, even though Sinclair Hood, then director of the ongoing Knossos dig, declared that when Palmer made his accusation, “all right-minded people rose hissing like snakes.” Let’s hear it for cool scholarly objectivity.

In Evans’ favor it has to be said at once that he was a far more professional archeologist than Schliemann: He learned from others and from his own mistakes, he understood the science of stratigraphy (the technique of mapping a dig downward in reverse, layer by thin layer), he maintained tight discipline in the field and he kept detailed records. It should be emphasized, too, that MacGillivray’s main contentions are nothing new but had circulated from the start. Fitton, in the book quoted above, asks the central question: “Did Arthur Evans simply discover the world of Minoan Crete, or did he to some extent invent it?” A century of follow-up work offers reassuring answers. Some invention indeed there was, but far less than critics such as MacGillivray allege. Evans’ wholesale restoration of the Knossos palace complex, undertaken in the first instance as a protection against bad weather, came in for the most vigorous criticism but is now, in the light of subsequent excavations on Crete, generally conceded to be at least 80% correct. Evans’ reported bad-pun mot about his final achievement, “A poor thing, but Minoan,” may well have been fathered on him by bare-ruin purists, with the clear implication that the elaborate reconstruction was indeed his own and very far from Minoan. The Art Nouveau movement imitated Knossos rather than, as so often alleged, the other way around.

Modifications there have certainly been. Evans saw the Minoans as not just pre- but anti-Hellenic and thus, inter alia, peace-loving: He therefore ignored the fortresses and must have been turning in his grave in the 1970s, when compelling evidence of Cretan human sacrifice surfaced (to more serpentine hissing, incidentally, from the right-minded). He underestimated Minoan self-sufficient isolation and correspondingly over-stressed influence from the Near East and, in particular, Egypt. On the other hand, he was the first investigator to spot the importance of those baked clay tablets inscribed with what he labeled the Linear A and B scripts (his names have stuck)--though the very last thing he expected, or would have wanted, was the discovery by Michael Ventris that Linear B was a species of proto-Greek. In short, the real surprise turns out to be not that Evans’ Minoan civilization was some kind of fantasy but that he got such a high percentage of it right.

Indeed, even the most garish aspects of Cretan mythology have turned out to have at least some echo in the archeological record. The great palace court could well have been the dancing-floor that Homer claims Daedalus built there; the mazy palace was itself a kind of labyrinth; while the ubiquitous images of bulls--and the athletes who challenged them--could hardly fail to recall Theseus’ encounter with the Minotaur. MacGillivray, long the British school at Athens’ Knossian curator, is first-rate at describing the nuts and bolts of the actual excavation but hopeless when flogging his pop-psych theories to explain Evans’ inner demons. One arrest at the age of 73 for soliciting some rough trade in London’s Hyde Park is a pretty frail peg on which to hang the motivating force for Evans’ lifetime pursuit of an archeological dream.

In fact, the interested reader will get just about all the important highlights of Evans’ life--his inherited wealth, the example set him by his scholarly yet worldly father, his early career as a political reporter in the Balkans, his transformation of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and above all the cavalier arrogance that his wealth gave him--from Fitton’s exemplary chapter on him. MacGillivray’s own sour mythologizing of his subject’s personality ultimately fails to convince. I found myself wondering, in a mischievous way, what kind of personal scenario he would dream up to explain Nanno Marinatos’ pursuit, in “The Goddess and the Warrior,” of dangerous, if apotropaic, sexual power as evinced in a whole series of images--on seal-rings, amulets, reliefs, clay miniatures, vase paintings--of naked goddesses in prehistoric Greece and the Near East. Imagination boggles.

The daughter of one of the most powerful figures in Greek archeology and herself a first-class scholar with a very solid publication record, Marinatos has clearly decided it’s time for her to risk some bolder-than-usual speculation. “The Goddess and the Warrior” is an exciting monograph, which in its conclusion challenges one of Evans’ favorite shibboleths, that, in her words, “the Minoan goddess survived to become Artemis, Rhea, and several other Greek goddesses, even Kybele.” Challenging this popular view puts Marinatos in a clear minority, but she argues her case for a Near East, rather than a Minoan, derivation of the Greek Mistress of Animals (a common avatar of the generic naked goddess) with skill and ingenuity. Along the way she deals, inter alia, with hideous lolling-tongue Gorgons, Old Syrian demons, magical divine triads and various predecessors of Circe.

I’d guess that this book had its original genesis in a lecture course with slides, because there’s a clear demonstrative affinity between her text and the numerous illustrations it discusses. My sole nagging worry about an investigation of this sort, dependent almost exclusively on iconographic evidence, is the acute subjectivism involved. Once, as an experiment, I gave to a graduate seminar a blown-up photo of a Minoan seal-ring. Write down, I told them: (a) what’s in the picture and (b) your interpretation of it. I expected diversity in (b), but what took me aback was the wild and conflicting variety of answers for (a).

Reading Marinatos, I remembered that experiment. Illustration after illustration in my copy of her book is penciled all over with my queries: Why no comment on this weird creature? Is that figure really female? And so on. Her arguments by and large make excellent sense but, without literary corroboration for her visual evidence, they must perforce remain tentative. Still, I think she could have done more by analogy (Navajos have something very similar) with the idea of the goddess-in-the-wild, Artemis included, as initiatrix through hunting for adolescent warriors-to-be. She still left me wondering, too, what social quirk it was, after the archaic age, that put clothes on hitherto mostly naked divinities and what this may have done to their sexual power. I’m sure MacGillivray has his own answer to that one, but I’d really rather not hear it.