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  Homer had written that in Crete was “a countless multitude of men and ninety cities. Among these is the great city of Knossos.” If one wanted to find samples of Crete’s ancient writing, surely they would be in the island’s greatest city. But where was Knossos?

  A Greek archeologist, Minos Kalokairinos, told the Englishman that he had a strong suspicion about a wild, overgrown mound called Kephala. The Greek had dug a little there himself, but he didn’t have the money co buy the land or hire a team. The rich Englishman did.

  On March 23, 1900, Arthur Evans’s team of Cretan laborers set their shovels into Kephala. Within two days they unearthed the remains of a palace. As its walls were exposed to the brilliant sunshine, the diggers could see fragments of wall paintings. Later, the fragments were pieced together to reveal bronze-skinned athletes leaping over bulls (shades of the Minotaur!), and beautiful women with black curls (as lovely as Princess Ariadne!).

  Excitedly waving the walking stick he always carried (he called it Prodger), Arthur paced the emerging ruins. After only a few more days, the workmen began finding clay tablets covered with strange marks. They looked like the marks on those stones in the Athens antique stores. People long ago had written on the clay when it was damp enough to press in a mark, and then let it harden. But while most clay tablets didn’t last long, these ones did, because a dreadful fire in the palace had baked them rock-solid.

  Arthur had no idea what language he was looking at. The symbols looked like mugs and bow ties and forks. Anyone who could read this language had been dead for over three thousand years. Waving Prodger, he urged his diggers to bring him more samples. Meanwhile, he sent word back to London that he had found King Minos’s palace at Knossos, and that he’d found writing from the long-lost civilization as well. The news flashed round the world. A reporter at The New York Times got so carried away with enthusiasm that he wrote, “Are we to catch a glimpse of a Homeric god as he lived in the flesh?”

  In Greek myths, the gods like to tease mere mortals. Perhaps they were teasing Arthur Evans. He was knighted in 1911, and built a grand house near the diggings and named it the Villa Ariadne, after King Minos’s daughter. For thirty years, he and his team sweated and slaved under the blazing blue Cretan sky. More wall paintings, treasures, and tablets emerged from Kephala’s soil Yet Sir Arthur could never decode the tablets.

  The best he could do was identify three different kinds of writing. The oldest, from the deepest layers of the digging, seemed to be a kind of picture-writing. Then came what he called Linear A – part picture, part alphabet. The writing from the upper layers he called Linear B.

  Linear B consisted of about ninety unfamiliar characters. That number was important; picture-based systems of writing, like Chinese, have thousands of characters. The closer you get to an alphabet-based system of writing, using letters like blocks to build the sounds of words, the fewer characters you need (our alphabet has twenty-six letters; the modern Greek alphabet has only twenty-four letters). So Sir Arthur figured that with ninety marks, Linear B was probably in between a picture system and an alphabet-based system – some sort of syllable system, where the characters didn’t stand for single letters but for sounds (a little like license-plate code: I C U, Q T!).

  Michael Ventris (shown here in the early 1950s) made the first breakthrough in decoding Linear B, but he turned for help to John Chadwick, a specialist in ancient Greek who had worked as a military code-breaker during World War II.

  The problem is that you can only figure out a code if you know what language it is written in. Because Sir Arthur had discovered Minoan civilization, he insisted that “his” Minoans were utterly unique, and had dominated their ancient world. When other scholars dared to suggest that the people of Knossos might have spoken ancient Greek, he used his considerable influence to have them shut up and shut out of scholarly conferences. He insisted that everyone from the time of King Minos had spoken Minoan – whatever that was.

  Now another person comes into the story. In 1936, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris went to one of Sir Arthur’s lectures, and he heard the great man admit again that he could not read Linear B, After the lecture, Michael was introduced to Sir Arthur, who was leaning heavily on his stick, Prodger, for support. Sir Arthur’s accomplishments, and his frustration, left Michael feeling impressed.

  Then war came, and distracted the world from the mysteries of lost languages. In April 1941, Greece fell to the Nazis, The Greek royal family fled to Crete, and hid at Sir Arthur’s Villa Ariadne, By the end of May they fled again – because the Nazis stormed ashore and made the Villa Ariadne their headquarters. The Nazis shot Greek and English archeologists. Back in England, old Sir Arthur heard about the bloodshed, and was heartsick. He died on July 11, 1941.

  But after his death, archeologists were free to try out new ideas. Legions of them, inspired by visions of the heroic times of Theseus and Troy, turned their brains to the job of decoding the lost language of Crete.

  Some tried comparing Linear B to other unusual languages – Basque (from a region in Spain) and even Finnish. None had any luck. One – Alice Kober, who taught classical Greek at Brooklyn College in New York – got closer than all the others, by using a code-breaker strategy from the world of military intelligence. She assigned each of the Linear B characters a number, and marked down which combinations of numbers occurred most frequently. Then she published charts showing the most common combinations of syllables.

  Five years after the war ended, the now grown-up Michael Ventris studied Alice Kober’s work and, excited, wrote her a letter. She was dying of lung cancer, and never wrote back, so Ventris plowed on alone. What if the most frequent combinations on the Kober charts were the names of places? He tried out a hunch that 70-52-12 might be Ko-no-so … Knossos?

  Using place names as a key, Ventris assigned sounds to other numbers. Things clicked into place. Sir Arthur Evans had been wrong; Linear B seemed to be some early form of Greek. Working with John Chadwick, a Cambridge University professor, Michael Ventris announced in June 1953 that Linear B could finally be read once more. (Alas, Linear A remains a mystery to this day.)

  But what a shock for the romantically inspired archeologists who had devoted their lives to rediscovering the world of Homer’s tales! Deciphered, the Linear B tablets turned out to be official records of chariot repairs, grain-storage orders, and cloth shipments. The writing revealed a lost civilization, not of godlike heroes, but of bureaucrats and customs agents.

  And war. The state in which the tablets were found – baked by catastrophic fires – confirmed that whatever civilization flourished at Knossos had been destroyed by invaders around 1300 BCE. The historians gradually pieced together what had happened, and it was a reminder that reading is a precious skill that can always be lost. The invasions of Knossos by people from the mainland had crushed the civilization of the elegant, stylish people who wrote in Linear B, A Dark Age had followed, a time of violence and destruction. People on Crete and in mainland Greece had slipped backwards into illiteracy and ignorance. Struggling to survive, they had forgotten how to paint on walls, make complex weapons, or write things down. They had forgotten a lot – except for their stories, which were passed down through the generations by poets like Homer, Finally, around 700 BCE – just after the time of Homer – they adopted a brand-new alphabet from the Phoenicians, who lived west of Ur, and started all over again to learn reading and writing.

  Today, thanks to people such as Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans, we have proof that Troy and Knossos existed. But after all the archeologists’ digging, we still don’t know if the heroes of Homer (or whoever composed the Iliad and the Odyssey) knew any alphabet at all. There are passages in Homer where the warriors sing heroic songs. There are none in which they can read.

  The Poet and the Emperor

  WRITERS OFTEN HOPE that what they set down will change the ideas of other people and of future generations. But these world-changing ambitions can put wr
iters themselves into deadly danger.

  arcus Annaeus Lucan ordered his slaves to carry his litter into the jostling crowds of the city of Rome. The crowds stank of sweat and fried food. You could smell the raw sewage. Yet Lucan was very pleased to be back at the center of the Roman Empire, after his years of study in Greece. In AD 60, rich young Romans often went to Greece to round out their education – in fact, the Romans respected Greek civilization so much that they claimed Rome had been founded by a Trojan prince who’d fled after the Trojan War. But Greece’s days of glory were dimming, and by the first century after the time of Christ, Rome, with a population of more than a million people, was one of the greatest cities in the world.

  Held aloft by his slaves, Lucan moved happily through the city’s teeming streets, ignoring the foreigners from all over the empire who babbled in exotic languages, the cries from merchants selling furs from Germania, wool from Britannia, and spices from Africa and Asia. At last his litter came to an entire street devoted to the publishing industry. Scribes copied out manuscripts here, and merchants shipped the scrolls to the far corners of the empire. The shops also sold a new kind of book called a codex – square, with pages that turned instead of unrolling (the Roman emperor Julius Caesar had found these books more convenient than scrolls when he was a military commander fighting on the battlefield).

  This colossal marble head of Nero Claudius Caesar was carved a year or two after the emperor murdered his mother. His expression looks haunted; Nero used to complain that ghosts followed him around with whips and flaming torches.

  Lucan was pleased to see that the publishing business was booming. For the first time in human history, the booksellers boasted, it was possible to be an international bestselling author. This claim interested Lucan deeply. He was not just an ordinary rich young man. He was a poet – a poet living at the center of an empire ruled by someone who might just prove to be one of the greatest champions of writers the world had yet seen: Emperor Nero Claudius Drusus Caesar.

  Of course, Emperor Nero was crazy, A strange-looking redhead, Nero liked to think of himself as a talented singer and actor. This scandalized Rome – an emperor was supposed to be worshiped as a god, yet Nero would go before an audience to play the part of a woman, or a slave! But that wasn’t the biggest scandal Nero came from a bad family – the family of Julius Caesar, who had destroyed the Roman republic more than a century before, in a civil war. Ever since Julius Caesar had made himself the first emperor, Rome’s politics had been dominated by ruthless men. Nero’s uncle, the insane Emperor Caligula, had murdered many people (including his own pregnant sister), and had been so jealous of Homer, for being more famous than Caligula, that he had ordered Homer’s books to be burned in public.

  And all Rome had heard the story that Nero’s mother, Agrippina, had once been told by an astrologer, “You will give birth to a son who will be emperor but who will kill you.” At which the ambitious Agrippina had shrugged. “Necet me dum regnet” she had said. (“Let him kill me, so long as he rules.”) Sure enough, the year before Lucan’s return from Greece, in AD 59, Nero had tried to kill his mother – not once but three times.

  Even so, it seemed like a good time for a young writer like Lucan to capture the public’s attention. The usual way to do that was by giving public readings in auditoriums, or in open-air theaters. Over in Greece, people used to sit in theaters listening to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey told aloud by special reciters known as rhapsodes (our word “rhapsody” comes from this) who could recite all sixteen thousand lines from memory. By Lucan’s time, upper-class Greeks and Romans had their own private libraries, but public performances were still the test of a good poet. And Emperor Nero loved public readings. Lucan decided it would be good for his career to arrange to read before the emperor. He asked his uncle, who just happened to be Seneca, Nero’s private adviser, for an introduction.

  Lucan and Uncle Seneca no doubt discussed whether it was a wise idea to get close to a man as crazy as Nero. They surely discussed the rumors about Nero’s mother, too. All Rome knew that Agrippina had been blocking Nero’s plans to ditch his wife and marry his girlfriend. The emperor had told his meddling mother to take a cruise in the Bay of Naples, where he arranged to have a ship’s mast fall and crush her. But it missed. So the sailors threw Agrippina overboard. The emperor’s mother swam ashore! Finally, someone stabbed her – someone in Nero’s pay. In any case, she was gone.

  And yet it seemed that she wasn’t gone. After Agrippina’s death, the emperor started seeing ghosts. Old Seneca advised Nero to seek comfort in books, and the company of writers such as his amusing nephew Lucan. But be careful, said Seneca to Lucan. Don’t get too close.

  Lucan was sure he could handle the situation. The two men were introduced. The emperor decided that he liked Lucan, who was just two years younger than he was. Best of all, he liked Lucan’s poetry. Nero made his new best friend a Roman senator at age twenty-four, the youngest senator in Rome’s history. Soon, the two young men were carousing around the city in true imperial style, stuffing themselves on larks and pigs and figs and cheese and wine at noisy banquets, and then staggering down to the room known as the vomitorium to empty themselves so they could enjoy yet more food and drink. Late into the night they carried on, roaring out poems and complimenting each other on their talent, and planning the city’s biggest public spectacle ever: the first Neronian Games, modeled on the Olympics, with chariot races, gladiators, acrobats, and poets – starring themselves, of course.

  The Neronian Games were duly held. Lucan dazzled the audiences with a sort of rap performance – a made-up-on-the-spot poem about the Greek legend of Orpheus. What earned him first prize, however, was his poem “Laudes Neroni,” which means “In Praise of Nero.” Soldiers were stationed throughout the crowds to encourage cheering. Audience members who didn’t cheer soon got the message. The Neronian Games were a huge success.

  But when the cheering stopped, the emperor’s bad dreams returned. And now Nero had a new nightmare: What if the Romans thought Lucan was a better poet than he was?

  Meanwhile, Lucan was pleased by the attention his public readings were getting, the way his words could move a crowd to excitement and tears. Perhaps he had fallen in love with the idea that he could use his poetry for a good cause, such as saving Rome. If so, he wouldn’t have been the first or last poet to believe that his words had the power to change the world.

  Lucan began to write an epic poem that would show how things had started to go wrong for Rome with Julius Caesar’s civil war. Late in the year 63, he announced that he would give a public reading. Invitations went out, seating was assembled in the auditorium, wine was poured, torches were lit. Scores of people turned up, maybe hundreds, for Lucan was a star. The emperor himself swept in, his bulgy blue eyes watching Lucan closely. Nero’s presence was an honor. The audience murmured in excitement.

  As Lucan began to recite his Bellum Civile (The Civil War), a rhapsody of blood and heroism, his listeners noted that Nero seemed to enjoy the opening sequences. The emperor especially liked the lines about the civil war being worth all the suffering because it would ultimately bring Nero to power. Everyone cheered Lucan’s stirring descriptions of Julius Caesar smiting the Belgians and the long-haired Gauls.

  After a time, however, the audience began to stir uneasily in their chairs and to sneak glances at the emperor. For by now Lucan’s story was about Romans fighting Romans. In one particularly gory sequence, Lucan described a Roman naval leader who chose to die rather than surrender to Julius Caesar. The audience could scarcely believe it; Lucan was making Caesar sound like a power-hungry villain.

  Nero’s smile grew cold and thin. This foolish poet was insulting the emperor’s own ancestor. As the Roman historian Suetonius tells it, Nero may have attended the event just to give Lucan the Big Freeze (Suetonius actually uses the word refrigerandi). Nero suddenly stood up and strode from the auditorium, his guards following. If he thought Lucan would take the hint, he was mista
ken.

  The summer of 64 was hot and dry. One July night, fire broke out in the oldest quarter of the city. Fanned by summer winds, it swept through Rome for six days. Though Nero personally helped to fight the flames, the story spread that the crazy emperor had purposely set the fire just so he could redesign the city. The Romans also whispered that Nero had fiddled – played music, that is – while Rome burned. The emperor blamed the fire on the Christians (he hated them, in any case, for denying his godliness), and put a few hundred to death. It was no use; ordinary Romans were starting to turn against him.

  The wild partying and the Romans’ growing hatred of Nero were making Lucan and Seneca think hard about the good old days of the Roman republic, when the people had elected senators who ruled wisely. They weren’t the only ones thinking such treasonous thoughts. Many longed for better government than Rome was getting from its lunatic emperor.

  After Lucan performed another offensive public reading, this one about the fire, Nero issued a decree forbidding him to give any more such readings. The punishment was mild compared to the tortures the emperor routinely ordered for the Christians. But this was in the time before printing presses, when readings were the best way to reach the public. Lucan was being censored, shut down. As a popular poet admired throughout Rome for his performances, he was finished.

  Lucan shrugged when he heard the sentence. In his elegant villa, he kept on writing. His work-in-progress, Bellum Civile, was becoming more openly critical of Nero. He didn’t seem to care if it was treasonous; he was swept along by the power of the story he was telling. When he went out, according to Suetonius, people overheard him making jokes about the emperor in public baths and public toilets, the places where Romans met to gossip. It got so bad that Lucan was scaring the other customers.