was no pause or abatement of their grief.
The next day, preparations were made for the funeral solemnities. For nine days
the people brought wood and built the pile, and on the tenth they placed the body on the
summit and applied the torch; while all Troy thronging forth encompassed the pile.
When it had completely burned, they quenched the cinders with wine, collected the
bones and placed them in a golden urn, which they buried in the earth, and reared a pile
of stones over the spot.
"Such honors Ilium to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade.
Pope.
Chapter XXVIII: Fall Of Troy - Return Of The Greeks - Orestes And Electra
The Fall Of Troy.
The story of the Iliad ends with the death of Hector and it is from the Odyssey
and later poems that we learn the fate of the other heroes. After the death of Hector,
Troy did not immediately fall, but receiving aid from new allies still continued its
resistance. One of these allies was Memnon, the Aethiopian prince, whose story we
have already told. Another was Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who came with a
band of female warriors. All the authorities attest their valor and the fearful effect of
their war cry. Penthesilea slew many of the bravest warriors, but was at last slain by
Achilles. But when the hero bent over his fallen foe, and contemplated her beauty,
youth and valor, he bitterly regretted his victory. Thersites, an insolent brawler and
demagogue, ridiculed his grief, and was in consequence slain by the hero.
Achilles by chance had seen Polyxena, daughter of King Priam, perhaps on
occasion of the truce which was allowed the Trojans for the burial of Hector. He was
captivated with her charms, and to win her in marriage agreed to use his influence with
the Greeks to grant peace to Troy. While in the temple of Apollo, negotiating the
marriage, Paris discharged at him a poisoned arrow, which guided by Apollo, wounded
Achilles in the heel, the only vulnerable part about him. For Thetis his mother had
dipped him when an infant in the river Styx, which made every part of him invulnerable
except the heel by which she held him. ^*
[Footnote *: The story of the invulnerability of Achilles is not found in Homer, and
is inconsistent with his account. For how could Achilles require the aid of celestial
armor if he were invulnerable?]
The body of Achilles so treacherously slain was rescued by Ajax and Ulysses.
Thetis directed the Greeks to bestow her son's armor on the hero who of all the
survivors should be judged most deserving of it. Ajax and Ulysses were the only
claimants; a select number of the other chiefs were appointed to award the prize. It
was awarded to Ulysses, thus placing wisdom before valor; whereupon Ajax slew
himself. On the spot where his blood sank into the earth a flower sprang up, called the
hyacinth, bearing on its leaves the first two letters of the name of Ajax, Ai, the Greek
for "woe." Thus Ajax is a claimant with the boy Hyacinthus for the honor of giving birth
to this flower. There is a species of Larkspur which represents the hyacinth of the
poets in preserving the memory of this event, the Delphinium Ajacis - Ajax's Larkspur.
It was now discovered that Troy could not be taken but by the aid of the arrows of
Hercules. They were in possession of Philoctetes, the friend who had been with
Hercules at the last and lighted his funeral pyre. Philoctetes had joined the Grecian
expedition against Troy, but had accidentally wounded his foot with one of the
poisoned arrows, and the smell from his wound proved so offensive that his
companions carried him to the isle of Lemnos and left him there. Diomed was now
sent to induce him to rejoin the army. He succeeded. Philoctetes was cured of his
wound by Machaon, and Paris was the first victim of the fatal arrows. In his distress
Paris bethought him of one whom in his prosperity he had forgotten. This was the
nymph Oenone, whom he had married when a youth, and had abandoned for the fatal
beauty Helen. Oenone, remembering the wrongs she had suffered, refused to heal the
wound, and Paris went back to Troy and died. Oenone quickly repented, and
hastened after him with remedies, but came too late, and in her grief hung herself. ^*
[Footnote *: Tennyson has chosen Oenone as the subject of a short poem; out
he has omitted the most poetical part of the story, the return of Paris wounded, her
cruelty and subsequent repentance.]
There was in Troy a celebrated statue of Minerva called the Palladium. It was
said to have fallen from heaven, and the belief was that the city could not be taken so
long as this statue remained within it. Ulysses and Diomed entered the city in disguise
and succeeded in obtaining the Palladium, which they carried off to the Grecian camp.
But Troy still held out, and the Greeks began to despair of ever subduing it by
force, and by advice of Ulysses resolved to resort to stratagem. They pretended to be
making preparations to abandon the siege, and a portion of the ships were withdrawn
and lay hid behind a neighboring island. The Greeks then constructed an immense
wooden horse, which they gave out was intended as a propitiatory offering to Minerva,
but in fact was filled with armed men. The remaining Greeks then betook themselves
to their ships and sailed away, as if for a final departure. The Trojans seeing the
encampment broken up, and the fleet gone, concluded the enemy to have abandoned
the siege. The gates were thrown open, and the whole population issued forth
rejoicing at the long-prohibited liberty of passing freely over the scene of the late
encampment. The great horse was the chief object of curiosity. All wondered what it
could be for. Some recommended to take it into the city as a trophy; others felt afraid
of it.
While they hesitate, Laocoon, the priest of Neptune, exclaims, "What madness,
citizens, is this! Have you not learned enough of Grecian fraud to be on your guard
against it? For my part I fear the Greeks even when they offer gifts." ^* So saying he
threw his lance at the horse's side. It struck, and a hollow sound reverberated like a
groan. Then perhaps the people might have taken his advice and destroyed the fatal
horse and all its contents; but just at that moment a group of people appeared
dragging forward one who seemed a prisoner and a Greek. Stupefied with terror he
was brought before the chiefs, who reassured him, promising that his life should be
spared on condition of his returning true answers to the questions asked him. He
informed them that he was a Greek. Sinon by name, and that in consequence of the
malice of Ulysses he had been left behind by his country men at their departure. With
regard to the wooden horse, he told them that it was a propitiatory offering to Minerva,
and made so huge for the express purpose of preventing its being carried within the
city; for Calchas the prophet had told them that if the Trojans took possession of it,
they would assuredly triumph over the Greeks. This language turned the tide of the
people's feelings and they began to think how they might best secure the monstrous
horse and the favorable auguries connected with it, when suddenly a prodigy occurred
which left no room to
doubt. There appeared advancing over the sea two immense
serpents. They came upon the land, and the crowd fled in all directions. The serpents
advanced directly to the spot where Laocoon stood with his two sons. They first
attacked the children, winding round their bodies and breathing their pestilential breath
in their faces. The father attempting to rescue them is next seized and involved in the
serpents' coils. He struggles to tear them away, but they overpower all his efforts and
strangle him and the children in their poisonous folds. This event was regarded as a
clear indication of the displeasure of the gods at Laocoon's irreverent treatment of the
wooden horse, which they no longer hesitated to regard as a sacred object and
prepared to introduce with due solemnity into the city. This was done with songs and
triumphal acclamations, and the day closed with festivity. In the night the armed men
who were enclosed in the body of the horse, being let out by the traitor Sinon, opened
the gates of the city to their friends who had returned under cover of the night. The
city was set on fire; the people, overcome with feasting and sleep, put to the sword,
and Troy completely subdued.
[Footnote *: See Proverbial Expressions, page 478]
One of the most celebrated groups of statuary in existence is that of Laocoon
and his children in the embrace of the serpents. There is a cast of it in the Boston
Athenaeum; the original is in the Vatican at Rome. The following lines are from the
Childe Harold of Byron: -
"Now turning to the Vatican go see
Laocoon's torture dignifying pain:
A father's love and mortal's agony
With an immortal's patience blending; - vain
The struggle! vain against the coiling strain
And gripe and deepening of the dragon's grasp
The old man's clinch; the long envenomed chain
Rivets the living links; the enormous asp
forces pang on pang and stifles gasp on gasp."
The comic poets will also occasionally borrow a classical allusion. The following
is from Swift's Description of a City Shower: -
"Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,
While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits,
And ever and anon with frightful din
The leather sounds; he trembles from within.
So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed
Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed,
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do,
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through;)
Laocoon struck the outside with a spear,
And each imprisoned champion quaked with fear."
King Priam lived to see the downfall of his kingdom, and was slain at last on the
fatal night when the Greeks took the city. He had armed himself and was about to
mingle with the combatants, but was prevailed on by Hecuba, his aged queen, to take
refuge with herself and his daughters as a suppliant at the altar of Jupiter. While there,
his youngest son Polites, pursued by Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, rushed in wounded,
and expired at the feet of his father; whereupon Priam, overcome with indignation,
hurled his spear with feeble hand against Pyrrhus, ^* and was forthwith slain by him.
[Footnote *: Pyrrhus's exclamation, "Not such aid nor such defenders does the
time require," has become proverbial See Prov. Exp. page 478.]
Queen Hecuba and her daughter Cassandra were carried captives to Greece.
Cassandra had been loved by Apollo, and he gave her the gift of prophecy; but
afterwards offended with her, he rendered the gift unavailing by ordaining that her
predictions should never be believed. Polyxena, another daughter, who had been loved
by Achilles, was demanded by the ghost of that warrior, and was sacrificed by the
Greeks upon his tomb.
Menelaus And Helen.
Our readers will be anxious to know the fate of Helen, the fair but guilty occasion
of so much slaughter. On the fall of Troy Menelaus recovered possession of his wife,
who had not ceased to love him, though she had yielded to the might of Venus and
deserted him for another. After the death of Paris she aided the Greeks secretly on
several occasions, and in particular when Ulysses and Diomed entered the city in
disguise to carry off the Palladium. She saw and recognized Ulysses, but kept the
secret, and even assisted them in obtaining the image. Thus she became reconciled to
her husband, and they were among the first to leave the shores of Troy for their native
land. But having incurred the displeasure of the gods they were driven by storms from
shore to shore of the Mediterranean, visiting Cyprus, Phoenicia and Egypt. In Egypt
they were kindly treated and presented with rich gifts, of which Helen's share was a
golden spindle and a basket on wheels. The basket was to hold the wool and spools for
the queen's work.
Dyer, in his poem of the Fleece, thus alludes to this incident: -
". . . many yet adhere
To the ancient distaff, at the bosom fixed
Casting the whirling spindle as they walk
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This was of old, in no inglorious days,
The mode of spinning, when the Egyptian prince
A golden distaff gave that beauteous nymph,
Too beauteous Helen; no uncourtly gift."
Milton also alludes to a famous recipe for an invigorating draught, called
Nepenthe, which the Egyptian queen gave to Helen: -
"Not that Nepenthes which the wife of Thone
In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena,
Is of such power to stir up joy as this,
To life so friendly or so cool to thirst."
Comus.
Menelaus and Helen at length arrived in safety at Sparta, resumed their royal
dignity and lived and reigned in splendor; and when Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, in
search of his father, arrived at Sparta, he found Menelaus and Helen celebrating the
marriage of their daughter Hermione to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles.
Agamemnon, Orestes, And Electra.
Agamemnon, the general-in-chief of the Greeks, the brother of Menelaus, and
who had been drawn into the quarrel to avenge his brother's wrongs, not his own, was
not so fortunate in the issue. During his absence his wife Clytemnestra had been false
to him, and when his return was expected, she with her paramour, Aegisthus, laid a plan
for his destruction, and at the banquet given to celebrate his return, murdered him.
It was intended by the conspirators to slay his son Orestes also, a lad not yet old
enough to be an object of apprehension, but from whom, if he should be suffered to
grow up, there might be danger. Electra, the sister of Orestes, saved her brother's life
by sending him secretly away to his uncle Strophius, King of Phocis. In the palace of
Strophius Orestes grew up with the king's son Pylades, and formed with him that ardent
friendship which has become proverbial. Electra frequently reminded her brother by
messengers of the duty of avenging his father's death, and when grown up he consulted
the oracle of Delphi, which confirmed him in his design. He therefore repaired in
disguise to Argos, pretending to be a messenger from Strophius, who had come to
announce the death of Orestes, and brought the ashes of the deceased in a funeral urn.
; After visiting his father's tomb and sacrificing upon it, according to the rites of the
ancients, he made himself known to his sister Electra, and soon after slew both
Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.
This revolting act, the slaughter of a mother by her son, though alleviated by the
guilt of the victim and the express command of the gods, did not fail to awaken in the
breasts of the ancients the same abhorrence that it does in ours. The Eumenides,
avenging deities, seized upon Orestes, and drove him frantic from land to land. Pylades
accompanied him in his wanderings and watched over him. At length in answer to a
second appeal to the oracle, he was directed to go to Tauris in Scythia, and to bring
thence a statue of Diana which was believed to have fallen from heaven. Accordingly
Orestes and Pylades went to Tauris, where the barbarous people were accustomed to
sacrifice to the goddess all strangers who fell into their hands. The two friends were
seized and carried bound to the temple to be made victims. But the priestess of Diana
was no other than Iphigenia, the sister of Orestes, who, our readers will remember, was
snatched away by Diana, at the moment when she was about to be sacrificed.
Ascertaining from the prisoners who they were, Iphigenia disclosed herself to them, and
the three made their escape with the statue of the goddess, and returned to Mycenae.
But Orestes was not yet relieved from the vengeance of the Erinyes. At length
he took refuge with Minerva at Athens. The goddess afforded him protection, and
appointed the court of Areopagus to decide his fate. The Erinyes brought forward their
accusation, and Orestes made the command of the Delphic oracle his excuse. When
the court voted and the voices were equally divided, Orestes was acquitted by the
command of Minerva.
Age of Fable or Beauties of Mythology Page 29