Pendlebury got lucky; he found Evans on the porch of the Villa Ariadne, the stone compound that served as his home and a kind of youth hostel and teaching hospital for wandering archeologists. Students from all over the world were constantly bustling through, enjoying Evans’s excellent food and wine before setting off into the mountains or creeping through the thousand interlocking crypts and throne rooms of Knossos. Unlike most scientists, Evans was rich; between his family’s paper mill and his late wife’s estate, he had the cash to entertain scholars and bankroll an army of architects, artists, builders, and diggers in pursuit of his hunches.
And his wildest notion was this: maybe Homer’s and Virgil’s tales about Trojan Horses and man-eating Cyclopes weren’t fairy tales, but historical fiction: fiction, sure, but still historical. Evans knew he was risking a firestorm of ridicule, but at least he was following in a cock-sure set of footsteps. Back when he was getting his start in archeology, Evans had been spellbound by Heinrich Schliemann, another rich rebel who sought more than proof that heroes existed; he wanted to visit their homes. Schliemann had been fixated by the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey, despite their magic and monsters, were far too realistic to be just make-believe stories about superhuman warriors and bewitched boat rides. His critics smirked, but that’s because, unlike Schliemann, they’d never amassed a fortune after being broke, homeless, and shipwrecked in a foreign country; they weren’t living proof, in other words, that average people are capable of epic feats.
As a teenager in Germany in the 1830s, Schliemann had hoped to improve his weak lungs by working as a shiphand on a voyage to South America. The boat went down off the Dutch coast, and Schliemann barely made it to shore. Sick and penniless, he slept in an unheated warehouse while running messages by day for a Dutch merchant. By night, he studied so feverishly that by age twenty-two he’d mastered bookkeeping and seven languages. By thirty-three he was boss of his own company and spoke fifteen languages. He became such a financial dynamo that during a short trip to San Francisco to recover the body of his dead brother, Schliemann learned about gold prospecting; quickly set up a frontier savings and loan; and pocketed another pile of cash before heading home.
But Schliemann’s true love was antiquity, and there was something about the Greek classics that always nagged at him. Was Homer really such a creative wizard, or had his stories lasted so long because they gave off a whiff of the real? Take Agamemnon, King of Men. He sounds too operatic to be true, the way he butts heads with Achilles, blood-sacrifices his own daughter, leads an army of warriors in battle for Helen of Troy, and then comes home victorious, only to be murdered by his wife. But if it’s all fantasy, why did Homer crowd his narrative with so many directional details that it reads like a pirate’s map to a treasure chest?
So Schliemann treated it like a map, and treasure is what he found. After decades of puzzling over Homer’s description of, for instance, a stone wall just past a windswept fig tree and not far from an icy-cold spring next to a steaming thermal pool, Schliemann finally sleuthed his way not only to the lost city of Troy but to the ruined palace and hidden jewels of Priam, its king. Triumphantly, he crowned his wife with “Helen of Troy’s tiara,” a stunning headdress of cascading gold he’d uncovered that was certainly worthy of the fabled beauty, if not owned by her.
And Schliemann wasn’t finished; he followed his success at Troy by hunting down palaces that matched to an uncanny extent Homer’s descriptions of the homes of Agamemnon and Odysseus. “Here begins an entirely new science,” one converted scientist admitted. All this time, a written road map had been right there, right in two of literature’s best-read texts. No longer would archeologists have to search for the stones and then figure out what happened; they could now read what happened and go in search of the stones.
Schliemann was sixty-four and wearying of a lifetime of underdog battles when he met young Arthur Evans, so he was inclined to pass along a tip: no one had ever solved the mysteries of Crete. Homer told of “a great city called Knossos, and there, for nine years, King Minos ruled and enjoyed the friendship of almighty Zeus.” Thucydides backed up the story, describing Minos as a world shaker whose fleets dominated the mainland and controlled the seas. So Evans followed Schliemann’s lead; relying on myths as his guide and his detective’s eye for landscape clues (Evans knew, for instance, that fennel has long roots and often sprouts where the ground had been deeply disturbed), it wasn’t long before he zeroed in on a pair of dirt mounds not far from the coastal city of Heraklion.
Evans was soon burrowing into a kingdom older and wilder than anything he’d imagined. The Minoans were so remarkable, Evans began wondering if all those awful legends about King Minos weren’t just sour grapes and gossip. “The fabulous accounts of the Minotaur and his victims are themselves expressive of a childish wonder at the mighty creations of a civilization beyond the ken of the new-comers,” Evans would write. “The ogre’s den turns out to be a peaceful abode of priest-kings, in some respects more modern in its equipments than anything produced by classical Greece.” Of course, King Minos didn’t help his public image any by conducting a weird basement ritual that had teenagers somersaulting over the horns of charging bulls. “It may even be that captive children of both sexes were trained to take part in the dangerous circus sports portrayed on the Palace walls,” Evans had to admit.
By the time Pendlebury arrived at the Villa Ariadne, it was Evans’s turn to withdraw from the hunt. He was seventy-seven years old and secretly in some serious hot water. He’d been arrested in London’s Hyde Park for public indecency with a seventeen-year-old boy, and only eased his way out of the scandal by turning over ownership of Knossos and the Villa Ariadne to the British School on the day he appeared in court. John Pendlebury’s timing couldn’t have been better. He arrived at the Villa Ariadne in 1928 as an unknown student and a year later was hired to run the entire operation.
Pendlebury knew right where he wanted to start: with the Minotaur, which he suspected was a lot more sinister than Evans realized.
CHAPTER 16
1,058 POUNDS: weight of boulder discovered on the Greek island of Thera, inscribed in the sixth century B.C. with Eumastas, son of Kritobolos, lifted me from the ground
1,015 POUNDS: heaviest weight any human has raw-deadlifted in the subsequent 2,600 years
TWO THINGS bugged Pendlebury about Evans’s Everybody-Was-Just-Jealous-of-the-Minoans theory.
First, you’ve got to stick to your guns. If you’re going to claim that myths have their roots in reality, then you can’t back away once they get bloody.
Second, King Minos had to be evil, or Theseus couldn’t have been great. Crete was where Theseus came alive as a hero, where his legend was formed and defining characteristics were revealed. Something must have happened, some kind of epic challenge that would test a man who’d become known as both a genius of self-defense and a true champion of the hurt and hopeless.
“He showed himself the perfect knight,” the master mythologist Edith Hamilton would declare. Except where girlfriends were concerned, of course; no matter your excuse, you just don’t strand the princess who saved you from the Labyrinth on a rock at sea, or try to win the love of both an Amazon queen and the future Helen of Troy by dragging them off by force. Theseus’s heart was his weakness—and his strength. He was always pulling his bonehead buddy Pirithous out of some desperate scrape, and when the world turned its back on disgraced and blinded Oedipus, Theseus took Oedipus in and cared for his daughters. After Hercules recovered from a spell of madness to discover he’d murdered his own family, Theseus alone stood by him, talking Hercules down from suicide and bringing him home to heal from his horror. At war, Theseus refused to pillage his defeated enemies. In peace, he granted power to the people and made Athens a true democracy.