This week may have been our most packed week yet as well as one of the most interesting and exciting. It began with with a trip back to the Acropolis for those of us in the Myth and Reception course to look at the temples on top of the Acropolis again, particularly the Parthenon, after our study of Athena and other gods represented and depicted there. While we discussed this on our visit with Alex it was nice to be able to both learn about Athena having already seen the Parthenon and so be able to see it again with additional knowledge. We then went as a class to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens during our Tuesday class. This was followed with a lecture on Thursday to prepare us with the background knowledge and history for the sites we were about to see over the weekend. Then bright and early Friday morning we were off to see Corinth and Mycenae and Tiryns and The Palamidi Fortress at Nafplio. On Saturday we then saw the Palace of Nestor, including the Grave of the Griffen Warrior and some Tholos tombs that we were given strict instructions not to write about or photograph because they have yet to be published. We also saw Niokastro at Pylos where we were staying, which was beautiful and had some of the most gorgeous views of the trip so far, but seeing the excavations in progress by the Palace of Nestor and to get all sorts of amazing background information about them was an unbeatable highlight of the day. On Sunday we got to see Olympia and Nemea, two incredible sites of pan-hellenic games! I’ve heard so much about throughout my time studying Classics at Carleton as well as just generally, especially with the Olympics coming up again this summer. Unfortunately we were not in Olympia during the ceremony for the Olympic torch and our weekend trip this weekend meant we missed seeing the ceremony on Friday where the flame was brought to the first modern Olympic stadium right by where we have classes.
My reading for the bus rides on Friday, and the whole weekend, were ancient Greek tragedies. The book I brought with me included Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, and Helen. I was reading Hippolytus as we approached Mycenae and finished it and read Electra during our ride to Tiryns and then Nafplio. This was unintentionally one of my favorite parts of the weekend. I had not fully considered that I was going to be reading Electra which tells the story of Clytemnestra’s children, Electra and Orestes, killing her and her lover Aegisthus because the two of them had killed the children’s father, Agamemnon, upon his return from the Trojan war, at least partially because he killed Iphigenia, another of his children with Clytemnestra, through trickery in order to appease Artemis and get wind to sail to Troy with the Greek army. I knew this basic plot and was familiar with the characters from previous reading, but I had not fully understood just how different it would feel to read this story as we visited Mycenae, which includes the fictitiously named tomb of Clytemnestra, and drove past Argos and the Argive plain, where they keep mentioning they are, and went to Nafplio, which is referenced as where Helen and Menelaus are arriving at the end of the play. Visiting the site in which this mythological play is set and reading it while I visit the various spots added so much context to the story and made it feel much more magical and real—and also made me feel more connected to the sites.
The characters I was reading about may not actually be historical people who lived and died at these palaces, but it helps breath life into the ruins. The day itself also added context to the play as it showed how close the palaces of Mycenae and Argos are; they are visible from each other. It also made very clear the importance and logic of Helen and Menelaus landing at Nafplio, which was also where they said they would head for in Helen when they leave Egypt. Visiting these sites is incredibly helpful for the history of Greece and the site as well as the historical importance and relevancy of the palaces and architecture and such, but it also adds a lot to the literature that comes out of these places.
Related both to the sites themselves and to what I was reading was the naming of the sites. We have talked in class before about Schliemann and his ahistorical naming of his finds and one of his most famous finds and claims—that he had “gazed upon the face of Agamemnon” when he found an elaborate gold death mask in what is now known as Grave Circle A at Mycenae. These shaft graves, as we were told, are not contemporary with when Agamemnon, if he was real, would have lived, but it maintains the name “The Mask of Agamemnon.” It is a catchy, name, which, as we were told at the Palace of Nestor when we were being told about the Grave of the Griffen Warrior, is incredibly important to archaeology because you need eye catching names to get attention so that you can raise money to actually excavate. Schliemann, as a rich hobby archaeologist, probably would not be naming his finds in this way to help raise money but instead just to build up his own reputation through claiming increased importance for his finds. This knowingly false naming has stuck at Mycenae, with, perhaps most notably to me because of my affinity for Clytemnestra, the tombs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
We have no evidence that these people were buried here, and given the mythology around their deaths it would be odd for them to be built massive tools tombs as are named after them (and for all of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus to have been buried separately as more than one person was buried in the Tholos tomb and they were reopened for additional burials and for the burial style between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to be so different). Despite this the names persist.
This odd naming practice is also present with material finds that are in museums, such as with the so called “frying pans” and “sauce boats.” As we discussed when we were at the National Archaeological Museum and in our guest lecture from Dr. Boyd, we don’t truly know what purpose these objects served. This bothers me most with the frying pans because we know, or at least scholars seem to agree, that they were not used as frying pans but instead the leading hypotheses are that were were used as mirrors. Navigation devices, or drums. Again however, the name persists. I cannot help but wonder if these names are more helpful or harmful and misleading to museum guests.
While we were driving to and from Olympia we also passed several fairly modern graveyards and, given how much of our knowledge about the older history of Nestor’s palace comes from the surrounding burial practices, I was wondering about what future archaeologists might claim based on our changing burial practices in the past few hundred years. I know Greek practices are different from discussions with some of my friends in the SOAN course on this trip, but at least in the USA there seems to be a trend of fewer people being buried. Many of those people are choosing to be cremated instead, and some of those people are having their ashes scattered. This means that there seems to be a decrease in the number of people buried in graveyards and depending on the number of urns that are found and how many of them are properly identified as such there could appear to be a population decline-if fewer people are dying there must be fewer people living if life expectancy does not seem to be radically increasing. This could be doubly true if this time is tied to the pandemic that happened recently and the invention of nuclear weaponry. I do not think that this is an inevitability, but it was an interesting thought experiment as it made me think about what sort of claims we are drawing from so little evidence and how we might be interpreting that evidence.
On a similar note, seeing so many people living their lives outside of the city once again reinforced the touristic nature of this trip. We are bussing around visiting a variety of incredible ancient and historical sites, but these are also people’s homes’ that we are driving past, visiting, and disturbing. It reminds me of some of the comments that John Papadopoulos made when he gave us a tour of the Athenian Agora about double colonialism. I know the intention of the trip is not strictly tourism but is also academic and I am studying Classics so it is doubly applicable to me-but are we reinforcing some of this colonialism with the trip.