Natural Born Heroes

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.

So couldn’t there be more to the Minotaur story? Isn’t it possible that some kind of dark deeds really were afoot on Crete, something nefarious involving Athenian teenagers who were saved by a “perfect knight”?

As new curator of Knossos, Pendlebury began his own investigation into what really went on down in King Minos’s basement. According to legend, Minos’s son, Androgeos, was a superb athlete who was murdered after winning all the events at the Athenian Games. To avenge his death, Minos forced Athens to send fourteen of its finest young men and women every year to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, the monster born after Minos’s wife had a fling with a magical sea bull. The Athenian teens would be shoved into a labyrinth, where they’d wander in darkness as the Minotaur sniffed them out and devoured them. Until Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to go.

Theseus was clever enough to increase his manpower by persuading two young men to masquerade as girls, but his big break came when he caught the eye of Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Her heart fluttered at the sight of Theseus, so she snuck him a ball of string and whispered some advice: if he tied one end of the string to the entrance, he could follow it back out of the maze if he defeated the Minotaur. How exactly he’d handle the monster’s horns and bone-crushing strength, Theseus had no idea—until they were face-to-face. The instinct of any creature with horns is to thrash its head, so Theseus got behind the Minotaur and onto its back, locking on to the Minotaur’s neck as it raged and flailed and finally choked itself out.

“He presses out the life, the brute’s savage life, and now it lies dead,” Edith Hamilton writes of that epic battle. “Only the head sways slowly, but the horns are useless now.” Theseus followed the string back to the exit and set sail. The trip home was a disaster; Theseus somehow lost Ariadne along the way and caused his father to commit suicide by raising the wrong signal-sail, so his father, waiting on shore, believed Theseus had died. But he brought the Athenian teenagers home, along with a new way they could defend themselves from future monsters: when the Minotaur died, pankration was born.

Could “circus sports,” as old Arthur Evans insisted, really be the basis for such a dramatic and enduring legend? Pendlebury didn’t buy it. Spectacles come and go, but cruelty lasts forever. Only something horrible would linger so long in the collective memory, and Pendlebury believed the hint was right there in the language.

“Names have a habit of being remembered when the deeds with which they are associated are forgotten or garbled,” Pendlebury mused in his masterpiece, The Archeology of Crete. Theseus means “the one who sets things straight,” while Minotaur is “Minos’s bull.” Labyrinth comes from labrys, or “double-edged ax.” Add the children’s bones discovered in the Labyrinth—“chamber of the double-edged ax”—and a scenario like this takes shape: A priest-king who’s been stampeding across Greece like a bull believes his power comes from a magic ceremony, so he uses captured children to represent weaker nations and kills them with his labrys, shaped like a bull’s horns.

“Do we dare believe he wore the mask of a bull?” Pendlebury wonders. Why not? Executioners hood their heads not only to hide their identities, but to split them; to separate who they are from what they have to do. King Minos becomes a monster only when he pulls on the Minotaur mask, and once the slaughter is over, he’s back to being the benevolent ruler again. Until, that is, a crusading hero storms his way into Knossos at the head of a rebel band. Guards and soldiers can’t stop them, but maybe a supernatural ritual can.

“The final scene takes place in the most dramatic room ever excavated—the Throne Room,” Pendlebury writes. “It looks as if the king had been hurried here to undergo too late some last ceremony in the hopes of saving the people. Theseus and the Minotaur!”

Pendlebury got his own taste of the labrys when he published his theory. “His imagination drove his passion for archeology,” biographer Imogen Grundon would explain, but senior archeologists worried that all that passion and imagination were launching Pendlebury right past science and into science fiction. His article became “notorious,” and he was urged, for his own sake, to “tone down his conclusions.” Realistically, the kind of people Pendlebury was relying on to make his case—murderous bull-wizards and swashbuckling kid saviors—simply didn’t exist.

Didn’t—or don’t? “My theory is not fantastic,” Pendlebury fumed. Just because men and women of our era don’t live up to the myths doesn’t mean no one ever has, or ever will again. Pendlebury was digging into a world that few people alive have ever seen, and it was opening his eyes to electrifying possibilities. We’re hardwired by nature to find common social ground, to believe that whatever we’re doing today is normal and not much different from the way people have always behaved. We assume human achievement is on an upward slope, that learning from the past has made us stronger and smarter than anyone of the past.

But if that’s true, then explain Eumastas.

In the sixth century B.C., Eumastas hoisted a stone so huge that no one has lifted its equal in 2,600 years. How did he get air under those 1,058 pounds without the aid of steroids, padded gloves, or gym equipment? Or is the question its own answer: was it because he had to rely on his own body genius and struggle with bumpy boulders, instead of smooth modern steel, that Eumastas learned more than we’ll ever know about leverage, balance, and explosive power?

And if that’s the case, then Pheidippides also makes sense.

In 490 B.C., Pheidippides is believed to have run more than ten consecutive marathons, nonstop, racing up and over mountains for three straight days. He wasn’t one of a kind, either; he was one of a corps. Pheidippides was an hemerodromos, or “all-day runner,” a foot messenger who was faster over rough hills than a horse and tougher in the heat. When Athens was under attack by Persia at the Battle of Marathon, Pheidippides ran 280 miles round-trip to ask Sparta for reinforcements. At the finish, he wasn’t wrapped in a silvery space blanket and handed an orange slice; he still had enough juice to yank his sword and plunge right into the fight. As amazing as that sounds, Pheidippides wasn’t even best of class. “A young boy but nine years old,” Roman historian Plinius Secundus reminds us, “between noon and evening ran 650 stadia”—that’s seventy-five miles—while two other couriers, Lanisis and Philonides, whipped through 144 miles in twenty-four hours: four miles more than Pheidippides’s first leg in twelve fewer hours.

And John Pendlebury was supposed to “tone down his conclusions”? Please. His imagination could barely keep up with the realities he was unearthing from the buried world. Take Homer: he turned out to be right about the places he described, so why not the people? Were his heroes truer to life than we believed? Homer was no fan of perfect golden boys, after all; he was more intrigued by the guy who’s off his game, past his prime, always one step closer to losing than winning.

Like Odysseus. In Homer’s tales, Odysseus’s best days are behind him, and the young warriors won’t let him forget it. “You know, stranger, I’ve seen a lot of sportsmen and you don’t look like one to me at all,” a strapping fighter named Euryalus taunts Odysseus during an afternoon of athletic contests in Phaeacia. “You look more like the captain of a merchant ship, plying the seas with a crew of hired hands and keeping a sharp eye on his cargo, greedy for profit. No, you’re no athlete.”

Odysseus gets to his feet, and school is in session. “Now I’m slowed down by my aches and pains and the suffering I’ve had in war and at sea,” he concedes, but that’s all he’ll concede. Swirling back his cloak, Odysseus reaches for a discus and grabs not the lightest, for more control, but the heaviest, for maximum momentum. He uncoils from his windup and lets fly, hissing the discus on a flight path so low and perfectly angled it nearly takes the Phaeacians’ heads off. It lands so far ahead of the field it doesn’t even need to be measured.

“And if anyone has the urge to try me, step right up,” Odysseus snarls. “I don’t care if it’s boxing, wrestling, or even running. Come one, come all.”

His young man’s body is gone, but he’s an expert at using what’s left. Earlier in the Iliad, Odysseus races two younger men. He’s the underdog once again, but his tactics are terrific as he slipstreams right behind the leader. “His feet stepped in Ajax’s footprints before the dust settled into them, and his warm breath from inches behind streamed down onto Ajax’s head.” Just before the finish, Odysseus surges so suddenly that Ajax is startled and falls. Ajax leaps to his feet, flinging horse dung off his face and complaining that the goddess Athena tripped him. But the runner who came in last saw it all and tells it straight.

“Odysseus is of an earlier generation,” Antilochus explains. “He is a tough old bird, as they say; it is hard for any of us to beat him, except for Achilles.”

John Pendlebury was running into the same tough old birds all over Crete.

The more he wandered the island after he took over as curator of Knossos, the more of these ageless, bounding, Odyssean mountain men he ran into. He couldn’t swear any were as strong as Eumastas; on the other hand, he kept coming across cheese huts high in the hills stacked from head-scratchingly huge stones. The great messenger Pheidippides was said to be Cretan; so were many of the other all-day runners, including Alexander the Great’s special courier, Philonides. And Pheidippides was certainly no youngster; he held the rank of “master hemerodromos,” so his heroic effort during the Battle of Marathon would have come during the twilight of his career.

So why should it be any different for Pendlebury? Now that he was living in an open-air performance lab, he had another way to test his theory that myths were based on real men and women: he could experiment on himself. Like Lawrence, Pendlebury loved role playing, so total immersion came naturally. He also shared Lawrence’s trick for getting inside someone else’s skin: first, get inside their clothes.

“Have just got a Cretan costume—perfectly gorgeous, a great show,” Pendlebury was soon writing his father. For a Cambridge academic, it was quite the makeover, even outdoing Pendlebury’s previous phase of wearing a white cape to high-jump competitions. Cretan shepherds dress more like buccaneers than farmhands, so Pendlebury kitted himself out almost Halloweenishly, in an embroidered black waistcoat, black breeches with a knee-length crotch, knee-high boots, a black headkerchief, a wide sash wrapped around his waist, and a black cloak with red-silk lining.

Every morning before breakfast, he did a fifteen-minute skipping drill that mimicked the light, skittering shepherd’s stride. “I find it quickens the muscles which walking is apt to increase but slow down,” he commented. To uncramp his body after long hours hunched over potsherds, he had masks and foils shipped to Crete and began fencing so he could stretch into full-length lunges and sharpen his balance, enlisting his plucky wife as a sparring partner. He even began high-jumping again, and gradually found he could sail higher than ever. As a university athlete, he’d barely cleared six feet, but that now looked easy. “Very fit and all the spring in the world,” he wrote to his father. “I think I shall have a good chance at the Greek record, it is only 6 ft or just under.”

Every afternoon, he stopped work and pushed into the hills for a ten-or twelve-mile hike. His range and curiosity were impressive—until they became astonishing. During one season alone, Pendlebury hiked more than a thousand miles across the island. One afternoon, he scrambled all the way over Mount Ida and still made it back to Knossos before sundown: “26 miles over filthy country in 6 hrs 25 m,” he jotted, always exact about his journeys. Cretan highlanders who at first didn’t know what to make of this eager, one-eyed stranger got used to having him ramble into their villages at night—famished, exhausted, and half-lost, yet ready to lift a wineglass and learn some new songs.

“He was making friends everywhere,” recalled Dilys Powell, who met the Pendleburys and became their occasional expedition companion when her husband took over as head of the British School in Athens. “By now he had travelled on foot from one end of the island to the other. It was only natural that its people should feel affection and respect for this tireless young Englishman, his fair skin burned dark, his hair the color of stubble, who turned up everywhere, slept anywhere, drank with them, talked with them, spoke their own kind of language.”

Pendlebury felt the same way about the Cretans, and he was ready to prove it. By the time Hitler had driven English forces out of Europe and was threatening London, Pendlebury had spent ten years on Crete and decided to make his stand where he was. He was pushing forty, but a decade of learning from tough old birds had left him lean and fit as a teenager. “Record time to the summit,” he noted with satisfaction after speed-climbing Mount Ida. “And a resultant waist measurement, pulled in a bit, of 22½ inches.”

But the War Office wasn’t in the market for middle-aged, half-blind academics, regardless of trouser size. Pendlebury was convinced his Mediterranean expertise could be invaluable to naval intelligence, but they brushed him off. He tried the military attaché in Athens, then army intelligence, before finally volunteering for the job of last resort: stretcher bearer. Before he was to start duty, however, word spread along the Cambridge-Oxford old boys’ network that certain, um … characters were needed for a new “special services” operation. No fighting know-how required.

“Seems tough and generally desirable” was the shrugging appraisal after Pendlebury finally got his interview, and he was soon heading back to Crete. His cover story: he was vice-consul, a midlevel, do-little diplomat. But to get a whiff of what he was really up to, Pendlebury’s friends learned to check his bedside table. “On his more nefarious expeditions,” Dilys Powell was told by one Pendlebury confidant, “he used to take out his glass eye and wear a black eye-patch. He would leave the eye on the table by his bed—if you found it there you knew he was away on some excursion or other.”

Pendlebury regularly slipped away from the Villa Ariadne and climbed into the mountains to scout hideouts and organize rebel bands. As a student of ancient warfare, he knew Crete was critical, and his own eye for the island’s defenses told him two things: the attack would have to come by air, and the real battle would be high in the hills. The Germans had crushed every ground force they’d faced, but they had yet to run into anything as elusive and unrelenting as a Cretan bandit. If Pendlebury could get ten thousand rifles into the hands of the highlanders, he was sure the Germans would have a fight on their hands.

So Pendlebury strolled about, pretending to be a diplomat while carrying an innocent-looking walking stick with a sword inside, which he judged perfect for skewering paratroopers. No matter what happened, he decided, he wasn’t leaving. “He felt himself a Cretan and in Crete he would stay until victory was won,” recalled Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge don who’d been one of Pendlebury’s archeology students and came to Crete to join his special operations force. For extra secrecy, but mostly to show off, Pendlebury and Hammond encoded their conversations by speaking to each other in their specialty dialects, Cretan versus Epirotic.

Hammond and Pendlebury teamed up with a swashbuckling boat captain, the gold-earringed Mike Cumberlege, who growled into Crete at the wheel of a combat-ready fishing boat called the Dolphin. Together, the three men hatched a scheme to glide by night out to the Italian-held island of Kasos and kidnap some Italian soldiers they could haul back to Crete and sweat for information about the looming German invasion. Just to be safe, Cumberlege decided to take Hammond with him on a last recon trip across the channel to Kasos. They tucked in beside an offshore island to hide until dark … and then the engine refused to start. While Cumberlege struggled to fix it, German warplanes suddenly began thundering overhead. Bomb bursts flashed across the water from Crete, followed by mushroom puffs of parachutes.

While his gang was marooned offshore during the invasion, Pendlebury threw off his diplomat’s disguise and joined the street fighting alongside Satan, the Cretan guerrilla leader. When it became clear that Allied forces had given up and were ready to abandon the island, he and Satan strode into the British command cave and volunteered to cover the retreat. “I was enormously impressed by that splendid figure,” recalled Paddy Leigh Fermor, who’d been deployed to Crete just before the invasion. “He had a Cretan fighter with him, festooned with bandoliers, and John Pendlebury himself made a wonderfully buccaneer and rakish impression.”

Paddy was in awe, not least because, as every other Allied soldier was scrambling toward the evacuation beach, “the one-eyed giant,” as Paddy called him, refused to follow. “His single sparkling eye, his slung guerrilla’s rifle and bandolier and his famous swordstick brought a stimulating flash of romance and fun into the khaki gloom.” Paddy managed to escape Crete, and he was still hearing about Pendlebury’s adventures long after he made it back to Cairo. “The German SS got to know of Pendlebury,” Paddy would say. “They called him ‘der kretische Lawrence’—the Cretan Lawrence—and rumours spread amongst Pendlebury’s hillmen that Hitler could not rest until he had Pendlebury’s glass eye on his desk in Berlin.”

Two days into the invasion, the Dolphin fired back to life, and Cumberlege steered stealthily into a hidden cove near Heraklion. Hammond and Cumberlege’s cousin, Cle, each grabbed a Mauser rifle and crept ashore. Dead and dying soldiers were tumbled together in the streets of Heraklion, while bullets whizzed from house-to-house firefights. Hammond and Cle realized they had no chance of finding Pendlebury, so they slunk back to the boat and pushed off toward safety in North Africa.

The Dolphin never made it. Cle was killed by fighter-plane fire, and Mike Cumberlege was wounded, surviving only because another captain came to his rescue. Three weeks later, Cumberlege was recovering in Egypt when he tuned in to a radio broadcast from Berlin. “The bandit Pendlebury,” Cumberlege heard, “will be caught and he can expect short shrift when he is found.”

Thank goodness! That still left Cumberlege a chance to find him first. As soon he could get to his feet, he secured another boat and was off, threading his way through German patrol ships to search for his friend. The trouble was, Pendlebury could be anywhere. During his thousands of miles of archeological hikes, he’d learned the mountains “stone by stone,” as he liked to say. He’d been a whirlwind of preparation before the invasion, setting up weapons stashes and hideouts in places only he and the canniest old shepherds could ever find. He’d even made a mountain more mountainous, persuading a small army of Cretan volunteers to trek to Mount Ida and, “with Herculean efforts,” as Antony Beevor reports, “they shifted boulders down to its smooth areas to prevent aircraft landings.”

So where was he now?

“There were persistent tales of an Englishman who had been seen at Hagia Galini, a village on the south coast near Tymbaki,” Dilys Powell would learn. “What was more, it was an officer who had lost an eye.” Three months after the evacuation of Crete, Britain’s chief of military intelligence in Cairo personally told Churchill, “We also tried to drop a wireless set by parachute to Pendlebury, who at the moment is largely controlling guerrilla activities in the Cretan hills.”

But if anyone knew how to actually find Pendlebury and his Thugs, they weren’t talking. No matter where Cumberlege looked, Pendlebury always seemed tantalizingly close, yet nowhere to be found. The champion of heroic myths was turning into one himself.