So it was when Paris turned up at Menelaus’ palace at Sparta. He was made welcome, and gifts were exchanged. Above all, Paris had brought gifts for Helen, but it was not these that turned her head. Aphrodite had made Paris irresistible to her. His exotic easternness, his strange accent, his rich clothing and luxurious ways—everything about him fascinated her. And, for his part, he found that Aphrodite had indeed shown herself to him as a perfect likeness of the Spartan beauty. Passionate looks were exchanged, breasts heaved with sighs, fingers tantalizingly brushed. The lovers knew they were destined for each other, but made no further move, for fear of the wrath of Menelaus. And then Menelaus was called away to distant Crete …
Paris and Helen lost no time. As soon as they were sure that Menelaus must have set sail from Sparta’s seaport, Gythium, they plundered the palace and left. Paris stole all Menelaus’ most precious possessions—his wife, his golden tableware, his purple-dyed cloth. In the gods’ eyes, Paris had violated the sacred laws of marriage and hospitality. He and his kin would have to pay. Justice would be done, reparation made.
The lovers too departed from Gythium, where Paris had left his ships, and set their sails east. In order to baffle pursuit, they lingered for a while on Cyprus and the Phoenician seaboard, reveling in eastern luxury and in the love they bore each other. But in due course of time Helen entered Troy, with death as the dowry she brought for her new in-laws, Priam and Hecuba.
The Greeks Prepare for War
While the lovers were taking their long honeymoon in Phoenicia, the Greeks got busy. The pretext for the mobilization of forces to attack Troy was the oath that Helen’s many suitors had been made to swear: they were honorbound to help Menelaus recover his bride, and they were the cream of the Greek aristocracy.
The Greek leaders were summoned by herald to bring their contingents to Aulis by a certain date, from where they would sail across the Aegean Sea to Asia. It was a massive expedition: over a thousand ships lay at anchor just off the coast, while their crews and the fighting men took their ease on land. But then, they would need a massive force to take Troy, one of the greatest cities in the known world, and well supplied with allies from Asia Minor and beyond. Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was chosen to be the overall leader, but he was accompanied by a staff of seasoned counselors and warriors.
But two of the greatest Greek warriors were reluctant to join the expedition. Odysseus of Ithaca feigned madness, for he knew from an oracle that, if he joined the expedition, he was destined not to see his home again for many a long year. As soon as he heard that Agamemnon’s agents had arrived on his island to summon him to Aulis, he yoked a plow team consisting of an ox and an ass. This was crazy in itself, because such a team would hardly plow a straight furrow. But, as if that were not enough, he then went about sowing salt instead of seed—salt that would make the land barren. But one of Agamemnon’s agents was Palamedes, second in cunning only to Odysseus himself. He took from the arms of Odysseus’ wife Penelope their new-born son Telemachus, and placed him in the field that Odysseus was plowing, right in the path of the plow. Odysseus’ ruse was exposed when he halted the plow to avoid killing his son; he wasn’t so crazy after all. So he gathered his men and went to Aulis—but in his pride he swore to avenge himself on Palamedes.
The other absentee was even more critical. Young Achilles had the potential to be the foremost warrior in Greece. His mother Thetis had placed him under the guidance and protection of the wise Centaur Cheiron. But then she learned that her son was essential to the fall of Troy, and that he was faced with a terrible choice: he could live a long but inglorious life, or he could go to Troy and die young and renowned.
The wise Centaur Cheiron tutored young Achilles.[62]
Naturally, Thetis didn’t want her son to die. She removed him from Cheiron’s tutelage, disguised him as a girl, and took him to Scyros, where he was kept safe by Lycomedes, the king of the island. Achilles longed for glory, but agreed to his mother’s scheme to give himself time to think: did he want it badly enough to face certain death? The young prince’s presence was no secret among the womenfolk of the palace; indeed, one of Lycomedes’ daughters, lovely Deidameia, gave herself in secret love to Achilles. But whenever any visitors came, everyone went along with the pretense that he was one of the king’s daughters; he was known as Pyrrha, because of his fair hair.
But the agents Agamemnon sent to Scyros included some of the most clever and cunning of the Greek leaders: Nestor, Odysseus, Phoenix, and Diomedes, son of Tydeus, one of the Seven against Thebes. As is proper, they brought gifts for the king’s daughters, but they had included among the cloth, perfume, and jewels some marvelously wrought weapons and armor. The girls fluttered around the gifts, trying out this or that item of jewelry or clothing—but one of the girls was more interested in the weaponry. Quietly, Odysseus picked up a horn and sounded the signal for danger. The terrified girls fled to their quarters as the alarm rang out—but Achilles donned the armor, seized the weapons, and sprang to the city’s defenses.
His true nature was revealed; he cast off his disguise with disgust and went eagerly to Aulis with Odysseus and the others who had been tasked with tracking him down. He accepted the choice of a candle-brief, but glorious, life. And Deidameia wept, for she was pregnant, and suspected that she would never again see her child’s father. Before long she gave birth to a boy, and called him Neoptolemus.
So all the heroes and their troops and ships were assembled at Aulis—but still the expedition could not set sail, for adverse winds kept the fleet pinned on the lee shore. Then Calchas, the wisest soothsayer in the Greek army, told Agamemnon that the wind would never abate until he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to the lady Artemis, Mistress of the Hunt. For Agamemnon, after bringing down a proud stag in a grove sacred to Artemis, had boasted that he was as great a hunter as the goddess.
So Agamemnon, lord of men, sent for Iphigeneia from his rich palace at Mycenae, saying—it was Odysseus’ suggestion—that she was to marry swift-footed Achilles, the bright star of the Greek forces. Arrayed in her bridal finery and with a lovely smile of anticipation, the girl set out, and her mother Clytemestra sped her on her way, but no sooner had the girl reached Aulis than she was bound to the altar and slaughtered. Blood was shed to betoken future bloodshed; Death led the fast ships onward to Troy.
Agamemnon was compelled to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia, before he could set sail for Troy.[63]
But first they were granted one more omen. Many of the leaders were gathered together and saw it. A blood-red serpent slid from beneath an altar and up a nearby tree where there were nine sparrows, a mother and eight chicks. The snake devoured the birds, starting with the chicks, and no sooner had it finished its meal than it was turned to stone. There could be no doubt that this was a powerful omen, but the Greek leaders were at a loss to explain it. Again, wise Calchas read the sign aright. It meant, he said, that the war would last nine years, and only in the tenth would they take Troy. And so it came to pass.
The Greek Landing
The Greeks made more or less directly for Troy. One important stop-off point was the island of Delos, where they picked up the three daughters of King Anius. Dionysus had granted these three young women remarkable gifts: Oeno’s grapes made limitless wine; Spermo’s grains of wheat and barley never failed; and abundant oil flowed thick and green from Elaïs’ olives. Anius let his daughters go with the Greeks to Troy, and the army’s supplies were taken care of for the duration of the war.
As the Greek fleet approached the Trojan coastline, they could see that their arrival was not unexpected: the Trojan army had come out to meet them, to try to prevent their landing. Nevertheless, Agamemnon ordered the Greeks to continue straight on, to try to force a landing. The ships’ prows crunched on the shingle of the beach, and for a split second, pregnant with doom, nothing happened. For there was a prophecy that the first man to touch the soil of Troy would die. But then Protesilaus, the leader of
the Thessalians, jumped from his beaked ship on to the shore.
Back home in Greece, when Protesilaus’ wife Laodamia heard of her husband’s death, she begged the gods that she be allowed just a little more time with him, for they had been married but one day. Her request was granted. Hermes escorted Protesilaus’ ghost from the underworld, and the two lovers were together for a few hours. But when her husband left her again, never to return, Laodamia made a wooden statue of him; she spent all her time with it, and even made love to it in bed. And when her father ordered her to desist, and to burn the statue on the fire, she joined her husband in death by throwing herself into the flames. Protesilaus was cut down by Hector, the son of Priam and the Trojans’ mightiest warrior; but his death paved the way for a mass attack from the Greeks. They all leapt from their ships with blood-curdling cries, and battle was joined.
The first Trojan to die was the albino Cycnus, a son of Poseidon. Cycnus was invulnerable to iron or bronze, so Achilles laid aside his weapons and throttled the man to death with the straps from his own helmet; and as he died he turned into a swan and flew off.
The force of the Greek charge was irresistible, and they drove the Trojans back in disarray to the city walls. The Greeks had succeeded in their first objective and established a beachhead. They made their camp on the shore by Troy, with the farmland plain between them and the city, two miles distant. They beached the ships safely near their tents, and protected the entire camp, ships and all, with a palisade. They dug in, but no one expected the war to last long.
Once they had established themselves, the Greeks sent envoys under a flag of truce to the city of Troy, to demand the return of Helen and to threaten all-out war if their demand was refused. Agamemnon’s war council chose Odysseus, Menelaus, and the herald Talthybius to head the mission to the city. The Trojan counselors met, and the Greek envoys addressed them at length, warning above all about the danger of hubris and asking them whether they really wanted to die for Helen.
The Trojans listened mostly in silence, but Paris had bribed Antimachus to urge the assembled Trojans to murder the Greek envoys while they were defenseless in the city. Antimachus’ words met with approval among the Trojan counselors, but noble Antenor, the king’s most trusted adviser, was disgusted at such a cowardly and impious suggestion (for heralds are under the protection of the gods). He spoke out sharply against it, and argued that Helen should be returned to the Greeks—that she was not worth dying for. He failed to persuade the assembly, but at least the Greek envoys were allowed to leave. Their demand had not been satisfied, but their lives had been spared.
And so the first nine years of the war passed. Heroes fell on either side by the dozen, and ordinary soldiers by the hundred; Priam, king of Troy and father of fifty sons and fifty daughters by various wives, lost many sons, to his enduring sorrow. This too is the inscrutable way of the gods. One of those sons was Troilus, of whom it had been prophesied that if he reached the age of twenty, Troy would never fall. Swift-footed Achilles ambushed the lad outside the city as he was exercising his horses. Ares filled the Greek’s soul. He dragged Troilus off his mount, pulled back his head, and slit his throat.
A major loss from the Greek side was the hero Palamedes, unjustly done to death by Odysseus, seeking revenge for his discovery on Ithaca. Ever ready with all the deceptions required in war, Odysseus forged a letter from Priam to Palamedes, offering him gold if he would betray the Greeks, and buried that amount of guilty gold in Palamedes’ quarters. When letter and gold were revealed, Palamedes was condemned for treason, and ritually drowned by Odysseus and Diomedes. But Nauplius, Palamedes’ father, had his revenge: he convinced Anticlea, the mother of Odysseus, that her son had died at Troy, and in abject grief she killed herself.
Hector, Ajax (the son of Peleus’ friend Telamon), and the other leaders on both sides distinguished themselves. Achilles more than fulfilled his potential, and rose high in everyone’s esteem; at one point, he even managed singlehandedly to quell a mutiny. The Greeks made gains, but never quite broke into the city; the Trojan defense was solid and, although they were cut off from the sea, they were able to supply themselves from inland. The Greeks were never able to put the city under siege, and were forced to engage in an endless series of skirmishes on the plain. They stuck to their frustrating task, but at the end of nine years of unbroken warfare, the position was little different from what it had been at the beginning.
Achilles Withdraws
Many prisoners were taken in the course of the war, to be made slaves or concubines to their new masters, or to be ransomed for personal profit. Among these prisoners was Chryseis, captured from a town allied to the Trojans, the fair daughter of the priest of Apollo, Chryses. Agamemnon, lord of men, took her for his own, to warm his bed and work his loom. Chryses made his way under a truce to the Greek camp, and offered Agamemnon a generous ransom for his daughter, for she was all that was left to him. But Agamemnon haughtily refused, against the advice of his staff officers.
Chryses left in despair, and from the depths of his grieving heart prayed to Apollo to punish the Greeks in their arrogance. By the rules of war a captor should accept a generous ransom, and Chryses’ offer for his daughter had been more than adequate. Apollo heard the plea of his priest and sent a plague into the Greek camp. First the dogs and mules began to sicken and die, and then the disease spread to the troops. Every day dozens more succumbed, until the situation became critical: it looked as though, after all this time, the Greeks would have to abandon their effort and sail back home empty-handed.
With the men huddled together in little groups, complaining that all they could do was await a foul and pestilential death—with the men muttering defeatist thoughts out loud for the first time—Achilles, at Hera’s prompting, summoned a general assembly of the army. After pointing out how desperate the situation was, the chief of the Myrmidons wondered out loud why Apollo, the god of pestilence and disease, had made them the targets of his wrath.
He was answered by Calchas, the soothsayer. The plague would continue until Agamemnon had restored Chryseis to her father without ransom, and made a splendid sacrifice to the god. Agamemnon spat out his anger at Calchas, but, as the commander of the Greek forces, he had no choice: the good of his men had to take precedence over his own desires. He agreed to return Chryseis—but only if he was compensated. He felt that he would lose face if he lost both girl and ransom. “Of all the Greeks,” he said, “it’s unthinkable that I should be left without my due.” Achilles vehemently pointed out that all the booty had been distributed: there was nothing left in the common pool that Agamemnon could claim as his own. “I am the commander-in-chief,” Agamemnon hurled back. “I’ll take what I want, even if it’s something of yours! None of the Greeks is my equal; I can do as I like!” He was claiming to stand to his subordinates as Zeus stands to the other gods.
The quarrel grew ever more fierce, until Agamemnon declared that as compensation for Chryseis he would take from Achilles his own favorite concubine, the captive Briseis. Achilles was so enraged by now that he began to draw his sword to kill Agamemnon, but Athena appeared to him and stayed his hand.
Instead, Achilles cursed Agamemnon in the vilest language, and declared in front of all the assembled Greeks that if Agamemnon stole Briseis from him, he and his men, the fearsome Myrmidons, would withdraw from the fighting. He knew how important he was to the eventual success of the expedition. It was not just that he had killed more of the enemy than anyone else, but also that the men had come to admire him. Not knowing that he was more or less invulnerable, they were impressed with his cool courage. Agamemnon was taking a big risk in alienating his most important ally.
Aged Nestor of Pylos, the wisest of the Greeks in council, tried to pour oil on the troubled waters. “The Trojans would be delighted,” he said, “if they could see you now. Agamemnon, please don’t try to take the girl from Achilles; and you, Achilles, should not insult our commander like that. Respect each other, both of you.”
Good words, sensible words—but both men were too far gone in anger to heed them. The assembly broke up in disarray, and swift-footed Achilles and his men returned to their tents to see what would happen next. Patroclus, Achilles’ tent-mate and dearest companion, knew his friend well enough to be sure that he meant what he said. Idleness would sit poorly with Achilles, but his will was unbendable.
Agamemnon duly returned Chryseis and carried out the propitiatory sacrifice to Apollo, as ordered by Calchas. But then he sent men to fetch Briseis from Achilles. The leader of the Myrmidons bade the envoys peace, because he had no quarrel with them. But he reiterated his determination to take no further part in the war. However badly things were going for his former friends, he would neither take up arms nor participate in their war councils.
Agamemnon’s Dream
In his sorrow and wounded pride, Achilles called on his mother Thetis, who came from the depths of the sea and sat beside him. She was highly favored by Father Zeus, and Achilles asked her to persuade him to side with the Trojans and tip the scales of the war in their direction, at least for a while. Then the Greeks would learn how much they needed him.
Thetis knelt before Zeus and begged him to punish the Greeks for insulting Achilles.[64]
Thetis recognized the signs that heralded the end of her son’s candle-brief life, but she did as he asked. And Zeus agreed, though he knew it would get him into trouble with Hera, who favored the Greeks; for Paris had denied her the golden apple, and in claiming his prize from Aphrodite had violated the sacred bond of marriage, which is Hera’s domain. But Zeus cowed his wife into silence, and then he pondered. How should he ensure that the tide of war turned in the Trojans’ favor?
The Greek Myths Page 18