The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  “I can’t,” I lamented, completely exhausted and soaked in sweat. “I’ve been pushing for an eternity and nothing is happening.” How in all the gods’ names was woman ever designed for birthing? Push?! It was like trying to push a boulder through the narrow opening of a perfume alabastron. I swore I was dying of thirst, and Clytemnestra held a cup of cool water to my lips, encouraging me to sip it slowly, before resuming the pushing. “I can’t do it anymore! Please don’t make me!” I collapsed back into her arms.

  “You must,” she urged me, and began to mimic the breathing pattern she and Aethra had taught me. “I’ll do it with you. Push! Push! Push! Push!”

  “It’s coming,” Aethra announced excitedly.

  “Push! Push! Push! Push! Push! Push! Push! Push!”

  I thought I would be torn in two like the victims of Polypemon who stretched his houseguests on a bed of torture until Theseus killed him in the same manner. “Theseus!” I cried his name. “Theseus! Your child is being born.”

  “Push! Push! Push! Push!”

  The agony became excruciating. I was not woman, not human, not Helen. I was Pain.

  “The baby’s crowning,” Aethra said, and the news did not sound at all comforting. “She’s too small to expel it.” I saw her take the sharp knife from the pocket of her apron. “If I don’t cut her, the child will die within her.”

  “Noooo!” I cried, and pushed with every dram of strength within my feeble body until all went black as Hades.

  NINE

  I had fainted for just a few seconds. The sound of a mewling child jolted me back to consciousness, and the cool compress on my face revived me almost immediately.

  “It’s a girl,” Aethra said as I pushed out the rest of her tiny torso and limbs. I looked at all three of them—Aethra, Clytemnestra, and the little wondrous darling just removed from my loins—and wept.

  My sister handed me the posset of dissolved dittany leaves and urged me to sip it slowly. I had no idea how its bitter taste would help me expel the placenta. Aethra determined that my infant girl was healthy in every way, from her lusty cry to the flexibility of her four limbs to the sensitivity of her skin to another’s touch, to the normalcy of each of her tiny body cavities. She cut the umbilical cord with her sharp knife, gently squeezing the blood from it and ligating the end with a sturdy woolen thread; then she pressed the bent cord back into the umbilicus, covering the navel with a small piece of lambswool soaked in olive oil. She cleansed the babe of my bodily fluids with the mixture of salt, honey, and barley water, rinsed her off with warm water, and repeated the process until her skin was thoroughly clean. Finally, Aethra dabbed a bit of olive oil on another puff of lambswool and ever so gently washed the areas around my baby’s eyes, ridding them of birth residue.

  Aethra swaddled my daughter and laid her gently on the cushion we had secured for the purpose, and then she and Clytemnestra helped me back into bed. “I must hold her,” I insisted, and Aethra brought her to me and placed her on my chest. She was warm and smelled of flowers. And she was beautiful, with her sweet little head lying between my breasts, gripping my finger with all the strength of Heracles. Now that she was clean, I could see that her soft corona of red-gold hair was indeed mine. When she opened her eyes, they were the green-gray-blue of her father’s—all the moods of the Aegean Sea.

  “Perhaps Helen should not suckle her,” Clytemnestra said, “since I will be the one to raise her as my own. My breasts have been aching to nurse since I lost my own daughter a few weeks ago.”

  I looked to Aethra for comfort. Surely they would not take my little girl from me so soon. “But I have not even named her yet,” I protested, protectively wrapping my arms around her tiny form.

  “She was born with a name,” my sister replied. “She is Iphigenia.” Clytemnestra reached for Iphigenia and I roared at her like a mother bear deprived of her cub.

  “It is for the best, Helen,” Aethra said sadly. “Your sister is right. She, not you, must be the one to nurse Iphigenia, and the sooner she begins, the sooner your body will forget its purpose and begin to heal.” I looked at her uncomprehendingly. “Now that you have just given birth, your breasts will ready themselves to produce milk; but without a babe to suckle, they will dry up sooner. Clytemnestra and Iphigenia must not even share this chamber with you, for when you hear your daughter cry, your breasts as well as your ears will respond.”

  “Iphigenia,” I whispered to her, “I hope you will live up to your name and become the mother of a strong race. You are very like your mother, indeed—conceived during one ecstatic coupling by a father you will never know. Please—please—don’t ever forget her.” I lowered my arms and allowed my sister to take my precious girl into her own. My sobs filled the room. Iphigenia, brought into this world without a father present only to lose her mother in the blink of an eye. And as I had lost Theseus, so did I lose my firstborn child. It was as though the last year of my life had never happened.

  I had lost the will to heal as well. For ten days I could not sit comfortably, nor during that time could I expel my body’s waste without feeling as though I was giving birth all over again. Within two days after Iphigenia was born, although Aethra had swaddled my breasts with a close-fitting bandage, they became painfully engorged with milk and were hard as marble. Had I Aethra’s sharp knife at my disposal, I would have considered attempting to slice them from my torso. Aethra removed the bandage and applied poultices of bread soaked in water and olive oil, and others that had been soaked in water infused with hydromel or fenugreek, but the agony remained excruciating. To relieve some of the pain as well as the milk, Aethra had me submerge myself to the neck in the terra-cotta bathing tub, in water as warm as my body could tolerate, while she massaged my breasts and milked me into the water as though I were a dairy cow.

  “We must get you up and about as soon as possible,” she said, once ten days had passed. “You must strengthen yourself. Your six-month period of penitence will end in just three weeks, and Tyndareus will begin to make the preparations for your marriage. Clytemnestra is departing today. It is time for you to leave all thoughts of Iphigenia behind and turn them toward becoming a bride.”

  While Aethra helped Clytemnestra prepare for her journey, I visited her in her room. My sister thought I should not have done so. She said I was making things difficult for all of us and creating unnecessary anxiety, but I could not bear to think of my daughter leaving Sparta forever without my kissing her good-bye. “She has none of your coloring,” I remarked with quiet spite to Clytemnestra.

  “But she has enough of Agamemnon’s.” There was a chill in her voice that frightened me.

  I held my baby one last time before Clytemnestra left the gynaeceum to proudly present Iphigenia to her grandfather. That was a spectacle I would never have been able to withstand, so I returned to my room and barred the door until I heard the charioteer’s crack of the whip on the horses that would speed my sister, and my new niece, to Mycenae.

  “Call for a runner,” I said to Aethra. “I wish to send a message to Theseus.” I knew that by the time the runner delivered his message to another who would sail to Athens with it and deliver it to another runner who would make his way from Piraeus to the Athenian acropolis, it might be several days, but I refused to get out of bed until I knew that Theseus would get the news. “We will tell him that on a recent visit to Sparta to see her younger sister, Clytemnestra the queen of Mycenae was blessed with a daughter, whom she named Iphigenia. The babe bears the russet-colored hair of the High King and her eyes are the color of the changing Aegean. Her grip is already so strong that she could grasp the horns of a bull and safely vault herself over its back—”

  “Too much,” Aethra said, holding up her hand to halt my extemporaneous dictation. “It’s enough that you told him about the child’s complexion. There is no need to refer to jumping the bull. My son is no fool. And you can never be too careful about a message falling into the wrong hands.”

  Reluctantly,
I deferred to her wisdom. But my heart wanted to tell Theseus everything about our daughter. The sound of her cry, her placid countenance and peach-skin softness, her scent of wildflowers. I hoped that she would grow up in a world where she could have a husband of her own choosing, and where—unlike my poor sister—all of her children would be conceived in love.

  Aethra insisted on my regaining my figure and my strength as rapidly as possible, pushing me to succeed as though I were an athlete preparing to compete in the games at the Festival of Hera. The irony of what we were doing—ridding my body of its childbed excess in order to enter a marriage bed for the purpose of getting a child—did not escape either of us. “I’ll never love again,” I said petulantly as I begrudgingly performed one of Aethra’s calisthenic exercises.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she scolded. “Of course you will. And there is nothing like a great love to make one forget one’s first love.” Once again she took pains to remind me that her advanced years bore testimony to her experiences, although I didn’t believe she had ever lain with any man other than Aegeus.

  A few days later, Tyndareus summoned me to the Great Hall to announce that preparations were being made to receive all the eligible chieftains of Achaea: If they were too old or already married, they would send their eldest son in their stead. There were to be two weeks of feasting and games, at the end of which time he would choose a husband for me. My cousin Penelope sat by his right hand. After my abduction, he had sent her back to live with her mother, but now he thought that her obedient nature and quiet pragmatism would make her an appropriate companion for me during this time, half jesting that I would do well to emulate her, since the lash of my Laconian tongue would invariably scare off my suitors. I suspected he had other things in mind. Tyndareus and his late brother Icarius, Penelope’s father, had quarreled over the rights of kingship, and I was sure that finding pretty, dark-haired Penelope a suitable match from one of my leavings was in the forefront of my stepfather’s mind.

  His greed had the unintended effect of adding days to my postpartum recuperation schedule. There were so many suitors on his list that he had to enlarge the palace in order to accommodate all of them. He couldn’t very well have asked them to pitch tents in the Eurotas valley! Laborers were brought in to give a fresh coat of whitewash to the inner walls of the palace, to patch up cracks and chinks in the stucco outer walls, and to displace any birds that had found within the orifices a convenient dwelling.

  Craftsmen and artisans were hired to construct additional furniture. Ordinarily, Tyndareus and his honored guests dined at a table made from volcanic rock the color of onyx. But one table, although it was impressive in size, would be insufficient for the number of visitors he expected. We needed enough couches for all of those would-be bridegrooms to be able to recline at dinner. I watched the men construct the simple pieces from wooden frames and the webbings of cords or leather thongs, and then shape the legs of the trapezai, the three-legged stools that were placed in front of the couches and served as individual dining tables. I wondered why Tyndareus did not reduce his expenses by letting the men share long tables with groaning boards full of food. “I suppose he wants each one of them to feel like a High King and not a foot soldier,” Penelope mused. “At least, with a little effort, the furniture can be dismantled and the timber and cords reemployed elsewhere, should it come to that.”

  “Tyndareus will probably sell them back to the very craftsmen who built them!” I said, only half in jest. I assumed that there would soon come a time when he would find a way to make me feel responsible for all these renovations. Viewed through the prism of Penelope’s pragmatic gaze, the king of Sparta would receive bride-gifts that far exceeded the cost of his ameliorations. The chariots, livestock, grain, metals, textiles, spices—none of that would be bestowed upon the bride herself, but given to her kyrios, who would be tempted by them to reward the highest bidder. And the already legendary beauty of Helen of Sparta was certain to encourage an extraordinarily intense competition.

  Competition. There would be games, too. My betrothal might as well have been an Olympiad. “Are you expecting to award me to the best athlete?” I asked Tyndareus. He reminded me of the value Sparta placed on the integration of body and mind, of strength and spirit. “If his body is insufficiently accomplished, so will be his judgment,” he said. “Remember, Helen, now that Clytemnestra has left Laconia and dwells in Mycenae as its queen, and your half brothers have declined their birthright and have no wish to rule, you are the heiress to the throne of Sparta. The man you marry will be my successor. In choosing your bridegroom, I also choose a king.”

  The suitors descended in droves, as though they had come to collectively raid the Spartan treasury. In a way, they had. Tyndareus had already depleted his coffers of a hundred talents of gold in order to ransom me from Theseus. And within a year, he had gone to great expense to prepare for the arrival of the Achaean chieftains. The cost went far beyond the renovations and repairs to his palace. The suitors needed to be provisioned. Great stores of grain, wine, and foodstuffs were laid by. To flaunt the wealth of Laconia, Tyndareus served meat every night as though the suitors’ sojourn was one long festival.

  On the first night, I was summoned to appear beside Tyndareus so that the chiefs could admire for themselves the golden bauble they were vying for. That’s truly how I felt; even my name—Helen—means shining. The men well knew that the kingdom was on the market, but I was on display as the most precious object among its vast assets.

  It has been written by others that there were a dozen suitors—thirteen if you include Odysseus, who, as it turned out, had different motives for coming to Sparta. Not true. On the night of their arrival, dressed in a snow-white silk chiton with a golden girdle and matching amber necklace and ear dangles, my hair ringleted in the Athenian style, I stood beside the thronos of Tyndareus and counted forty-five heads, fair and dark, russet and silver, enjoying my stepfather’s hospitality. Libations were made and the feasting, as well as the competition, began.

  They seemed to me no more than a cacophonous muddle of masculinity, behaving as though they were on a military campaign rather than a wooing expedition and speaking loudly in their various Achaean dialects. If it had been up to me to choose, I would have sent every last one of them home.

  “You can’t pine for the one who will not come,” Aethra murmured in my ear. It was the third night and not one of the suitors had paid me the slightest heed except to gawk at my breasts and buttocks and legs and act tongue-tied when they were compelled to look me in the eye and address me to my face. In my imagination, Theseus would stride into the Great Hall in the middle of the evening meal and whisk me away on horseback.

  As the days went by, the suitors began to distinguish themselves from one another, not necessarily to their benefit. At first they were like a great tangle of weaving silks. Then I began to pluck out the individual colors, separating them from the giant hank of threads. I began by learning the distinction between the two men named Ajax. Ajax, son of Telamon, whom I took to calling Ajax the Greater because of his size, was a huge ox of a man with a brain no larger than a pomegranate seed and half as useful. Naturally, he excelled in the weightlifting events of what Penelope, Aethra, and I now called the Heleniad. I despaired of Tyndareus favoring him. Penelope reminded me that my bridegroom would eventually have to rule Sparta, which gave me some comfort. With more than forty alternatives, Tyndareus could surely find one who was capable of issuing a decree without first having to learn how to spell it.

  Ajax the Greater was competing for my hand with his younger half brother, Teucer. I can’t recall much about Teucer, other than that he was at least a head shorter than Ajax, dark haired, and the finest archer among the rivals. What I do remember about both sons of Telamon was that their mother was not Greek but originally from Phrygia. The one conversation I recall having with Teucer was about their mother Hesione, the older sister of Priam, who was now king of Troy.

  “My fathe
r fell in love with her while he was in Troy on . . . on a diplomatic mission with Heracles,” Teucer told me, his vocabulary strangely diplomatic, “but he was . . . unable to arrange marriage terms. For some reason, her family was reluctant to let her wed an Achaean. So he took her with him when he went back to Salamis!”

  “Did they love each other?” I asked him. I suppose I wanted to learn whether Hesione had been kidnapped by Telamon or whether she had eloped with him. Naturally, it was all the difference between romance and rape.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t born yet, of course. I can tell you this, though. They have always seemed very happily married.”

  Teucer seemed more pleasant than many of his rivals, although I can’t say that there was anything truly remarkable about him. Theseus was my secret touchstone against which all men would be judged and—with respect to my forty-five suitors—found lacking.

  Ajax of Locris, whom I nicknamed Ajax the Lesser, was darkly complected, of middling height with a runner’s build, and had a talent for spear throwing. This Ajax, who went everywhere with a giant serpent draped like a necklace about his shoulders and torso, was a very intense young man, quick to pick a quarrel with the other suitors. He gave the impression that a woman was as useful to him as an oinochoe, which, once emptied and his pleasure in its contents taken, was good for nothing until it was refilled with wine. Perhaps, since the people of Locris were still primarily a matrilinear culture that followed the old ways, Ajax the Lesser was determined to denigrate or despise womankind. “He frightens me,” I admitted to Aethra.

  “Not so much as he should,” she said, discreetly pointing out the suitor from Crete. “Idomeneus.” His handsomeness was marred by his demeanor, being a thin-lipped young man who never smiled. One thing I will never forget about Idomeneus is that his chestnut-colored hair didn’t move with the breeze, even when he competed in the footraces.