Could Ursa Have Existed?
It comes as a surprise to many people when I tell them that we know really very little about this period of history and even less about the people themselves; what they were like, how they behaved. Perhaps the best work in this area was a Ph.D. dissertation turned novels by Mary Renault entitled, The King Must Die and Funeral Games. In these works she portrayed people from the world of Mythology and Minoan Mycenaean society. But these works are still quite scholarly, and, to my taste, the characters a little rigid by modern standards. They seem to be totally preoccupied with religion and what the gods are thinking and doing and concocting. My own sense tells me that people then were much like us and paid lip service to religion and mostly did what they wanted or could get away with. The intelligentsia the cognoscenti were cynical and knew the score, the rest fell in line, more or less. In essence, I believe people are, and always will be, people. I have them curse and swear and get drunk and raise Hades in taverns. They have likes and dislikes. Some people do not like other people along cultural lines. The Phoenicians are disliked because they make a lot of money and have largely come to control the sea trade. They also play both ends against the middle. Rehena does not like them because she was a Phoenician slave and was mistreated. Ursa, who is Minoan, does not like the Greeks, the Achaians, because they invaded her homeland a hundred years before and decimated the land and destroyed her culture, and now run things. Also, the Renault works were written in the 1950s and anyone writing Ursa stories in the 50s would have been relegated to the dankest and lowest levels of underground literature. I mean, after all, Ursa and Rehena swear and use naughty words and engage in sex out of wedlock. And Rehena can’t keep her clothes on.
And on that subject, much behavior that the Mycenaeans engaged in would be difficult to deal with even in such free erotica as is presented here. Apparently, sailors were nude much of the time and male nudity in general was common as were male/male sexual relations. In fact, male sexual relations were so common and unthought of that the Greeks had no word for homosexuality. They also had no real word for conjugal love in the sense we have. The ancient Greek word for wife is literally "bed mate", nothing more. I have avoided all of the these things in my stories because I feel that they would be so imposing on our modern mores as to detract and overwhelm any story line. There are many things part and parcel of Mycenaean life which would be shocking and disturbing to modern eyes. Life then could be hard and choices cruel by our standards, so I have just left them out. What I have chosen to include in the erotic, the humorous and hopefully the fascinating.
Mycenaean society differs from later Roman society and perhaps later Greek society in that there exists the possibility that women may have had more freedom in these earlier times. Conventional thinking suggests that Mycenaean women were essentially under male domination almost totally, but this might not be the case. Apparently women could and did run brothels and likely were engaged in other businesses as well. It’s just very hard to tell; not much in the way of daily life or private life stuff remains upon which to form arguments one way or another. We know that societal aberrations did occur; Sparta being one example, where women did acquire considerable power and could own land and largely managed the affairs of the home on a business level, but this occurred later in history. This was also the wild and woolly age of the warrior kings and in some ways was more freewheeling than later society. After all, in the Aeneid, which takes place after the fall of Troy, 1250 BC, Vergil talks of Camilla, the leader of the warrior women, "Her hand knew not the loom or spindle but was fitted to the bow and lance." Is this just pure fantasy, or are we privileged to some tiny bit information about things which existed in society which we otherwise know nothing about. Camilla is the leader of a bunch of these bellicose muscle chicks, and they ride around on horses and engage in battle; amazing, who are they? How do they fit into Latin tribal society? Do people create these women just to fantasize over them, or were they real?
Well, if they do just create them, lets join in the fun. As Diana the Valkyrie says, "let’s pretend".
Below are some Egyptians having fun. Yes, even Egyptians had fun. I always liked this picture, it makes them seen so real, so much like us.
Nothing like a scantily-clad, bare-breasted dancer and some naked slavegirls handing out booze to liven up the evening. The other dancer is playing the double end-blown flute and the pair are backed-up by a harp band and percussionist. We have nothing but our imaginations to tell us what this music was like, but I'll bet it was lively and rhythmic and beautiful to hear - can't you hear it, just a little?
And Ursa's people, the Minoans, could have a little fun as well. Here, in this attempt at a moving picture (the three lads are the same lad in different stages of the jump), a Minoan is shown taking the bull by the horns and doing a full back flip.
