I can see Odysseus lashed to the mast of this
ship, struggling to resist the Sirens’ song
The eerily beautiful wreck discovered in the
Black Sea takes us right back to Homer’s Greece
Published: The Guardian
18:59 CEST dissabte, 27 d’octubre 2018
‘Its
mast stands proud, its rowing benches are in neat lines’: a 2,400-year-old Greek
ship found 2km underwater off the coast of Bulgaria. Photograph: Black Sea map
In 399BC, Socrates drank hemlock to fulfil
the orders of the Athenian law court, which had sentenced him to death for
impiety and corrupting the young.
His friends begged him to leave Athens
instead, accompanying them into banishment. He refused and died as he had lived
for 70 years, arguing the ethical superiority of his own decision. The scene
was immortalised by Plato in his dialogue Phaedo and later by artists
such as Jacques Louis David, whose painting hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum.
Last week, an intact shipwreck from the same
era (archaeologists are dating it as at least 2,400 years old) was found off
the coast of Bulgaria – Thrace, to Socrates and his contemporaries. Its eerie
beauty is extraordinary, filmed in dim light more than two kilometres underwater.
It could have sunk to the bottom of the ocean yesterday. Its mast stands proud,
its rowing benches are in neat lines. Tantalisingly, the contents of its hold
are also intact but not yet examined. If they include amphorae, the style and
contents of the jars may enable us to work out more about the ship’s origin and
destination.
There is something so moving about seeing an
object from the ancient world in such perfect condition, as though the sailors
might return any moment and take up their positions on the benches. The ship is
the same type as the one painted on the Siren Vase in the British Museum. Homer called such ships korōnis – beaked or curved, so they might cut through
the water more cleanly. The Siren Painter (who made his red-figure vase around
470BC) must have used as his model a ship very like the one we saw last week.
That the mast is intact is particularly
astonishing. Extremities hardly ever survive – think how many statues are
missing fingers or hands or even arms. There used to be a room at the Louvre
that contained a vast collection of disembodied noses.
The Siren Vase shows
Odysseus tied to the mast of a ship very like the one just found in the Black
Sea. Photograph: Werner Forman/UIG via Getty Images
And how could that mast fail to make us think
of Odysseus, painted on the Siren Vase, tied to his ship?
When Odysseus and his men left the island of
Circe for the second time, they did so knowing they were about to encounter
lethal monsters. They had already survived an encounter with a man-eating
Cyclops, dodged the cannibalistic giant Laestrygonians and made a visit to the
Underworld. But the Sirens were something else: half-woman, half-bird, their
song was so alluring that it would draw men to their deaths. Desperate to hear
them, men rowed or sailed on to the rocks and drowned.
On Circe’s advice, Odysseus gave small blocks of beeswax to his men
to stop up their ears. But he – the great adventuring hero – wanted to be the
only mortal who heard the Siren song and lived to tell the tale. He was lashed
to the mast so that he could hear the Sirens but not hurl himself into the
ocean to drown. He shouted, begged his men to free him, but the beeswax kept
his words from their ears. And the Sirens knew the secrets of a man’s heart: it
is no accident that they sing to Odysseus of his unrivalled fame, the thing he
desires more than anything.
Artefacts from the ancient world have a
particular resonance that nothing else can give us, even the poetry of Homer
I have spent the past 18 months writing a novel about the Trojan war, its causes and its aftermath, called A
Thousand Ships. Odysseus and his meeting with the Sirens happens
about halfway through the book. The jacket design came through last week. The
cover is ocean-blue, with two beautiful golden ships – accidentally perfect
copies of the one found off the Bulgarian coast – as its focus.
I don’t like to attribute meaning to
coincidence, but I still had to suppress a small shiver. Every book starts out
as a few, rough planks of wood lashed together with twine: an idea and a
structure is something, but you couldn’t set sail in it. Only over the months
of writing and editing does it gradually become seaworthy.
Artefacts from the ancient world have a
resonance that nothing else can give us, even the poetry of Homer. I own a tiny
bronze ram, a votive offering, probably from the 1st century AD. His wool is in
tight clumps and his horns curl neatly around his face. I don’t touch him
often, but when I do I know that I am holding something that was once held by
someone in a temple, praying to a god, part of a society I have spent my adult
life thinking about. The act of touching something touched by someone two
millennia ago is a connection that never fails to jolt me out of complacency
and back to work.
The ship will stay at the bottom of the ocean
– a lack of oxygen will keep it preserved – but it has reminded us that the
past is never lost. It’s just waiting for us to discover it.
Natalie
Haynes’ books include The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
perspective matters – because it might well
be your perspective, too.
