The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  In the absence of my mother, I had selected Aethra to be the daidouxein, which was essentially the maternal role in the proceedings. Her honor was to carry the torches beside the proegetes, the leader of the procession, a role filled by Clytemnestra. Agamemnon served as his brother’s paranumphos, the groom’s attendant.

  Other runners, maidens, carried torches to light the way, while young boys, the paides propempontes, danced along the path, whirling madly to the sound of flute and lyre. Spartan women carried baskets filled with apples and quince, violets and roses, even sandals. At the king’s quarters, my amphithales retrieved a basket of bread that had been specially placed there and distributed morsels of it to the wedding guests. The basket represented nature tamed—civilized agriculture—while the bread was a symbol of the final product of my union with Menelaus: a child. Another child placed a grain sieve at the entrance to the king’s quarters, where a pestle and a grill for toasting barley already lay.

  Announcing my arrival at what would be my new home with Menelaus, the amphithales declaimed, “I fled worse and found better.” Menelaus lifted me down from the chariot. Had his mother been alive, she would have been at the entrance to greet us. As the next step in the ritual, I ate a quince taken from one of the baskets, and then burned one of the chariot axles to signify the preclusion of a journey back to my former home. Since I was born and raised in the Spartan palace and was going to reside in it as the queen for the rest of my days, I thought the axle-burning a bit silly. The gesture was, however, also meant to indicate a renunciation of the past, and that, I admit, was something that was indeed painful and difficult for me to achieve.

  Finally, I was offered a plate of dried dates, figs, and nuts, from which I daintily partook; and in front of all of the wedding guests and witnesses, Menelaus lifted my veil. I was now his. He offered me his arm and I favored him with my warmest smile. Before all, I had promised to renounce the past. He was my future, and our future was about to begin.

  We were alone now in the bridal chamber. Oil lamps provided a gentle glow. Then, for the first time since we had been introduced, Menelaus took me in his arms and kissed me. His lips were soft and warm and tasted of Rhodian wine. It was a gentle first kiss, an affectionate one. I hoped that his desires would teach his body how to obey them. Virgin that I was supposed to be, I could not take the lead, nor were my passions at such a height that the urges of my own body preempted all else. Outside, women began to sing. The lyric was meant to reassure the bride on her passage to womanhood and to encourage the newlyweds to produce a boy.

  “Can we shut them up?!” Menelaus whispered. I began to laugh. Then he began to laugh, and finally, we looked each other in the eye with the full realization that for better or worse we were now partners. Still laughing, we collapsed in each other’s arms upon the bed.

  A bride’s girdle is tied in a special way. Only the bridegroom is supposed to be able to untie and remove it, just as only a midwife can undo the special knots in the girdle worn by a woman about to give birth. Our mirthful response to the chanting on the other side of the wall relaxed both of us, but poor Menelaus just couldn’t untie my girdle, and thus undress me. “I suppose I could just pull my chiton up to the waist,” I joked.

  “I have a better idea,” Menelaus said. When he unsheathed his knife, I hoped he didn’t mean murder. There I was on the marriage bed, a sacrificial ewe on the altar. “Killing the queen of Sparta would not be an auspicious way for the new king of Sparta to begin their marriage,” he said, then raised me to my feet again and deftly sliced through the girdle. When I frowned at the wasted beauty of the now-useless accessory, he added, “Well, you weren’t planning to wear it for another marriage, were you?”

  He undressed me and laid me down on the bed and then removed his own garments. He was a well-formed man, and as he turned around to face me, he looked quite handsome in the lamplight. He stood by the bed for a moment or two, examining my naked form with a stunned expression on his face. “My god, Helen, you are truly as beautiful as they say.” He slid into bed beside me and confessed that until now, he had tried to conceal his feelings for me for fear of mockery by both men and gods—to have gained all only to lose it when he awoke from what revealed itself to have been but a beautiful dream.

  “Not ’til this moment have I dared to believe it was all true,” he murmured. “I have never won anything in my life. Agamemnon has always been the favored one. Now the gods have seen fit to smile upon me.”

  He kissed me on the mouth and placed his hand on my breast, leaving it there as though he was not sure what to do next. I could not guide him. I could make no suggestions without giving myself away. Given his confession of a moment earlier, a man like Menelaus did not want to learn that his young and beautiful wife had even the minutest degree of experience in the arts of love. Perhaps I had not sufficiently propitiated Aphrodite or had forgotten to ask her to grant my husband both proficiency and prowess in the bedchamber. Just as Menelaus began to become confident in his own nature, there was a terrible ruckus outside the door.

  “What in Zeus’s name is that?” he exclaimed, completely startled out of his burgeoning desire.

  “Oh, gods,” I moaned. “Ktupia.”

  “What’s ktupia?”

  “They’re banging on the door to scare away the spirits of the underworld. Those obscene songs they’re singing and the scatological jokes, that’s all part of it. I forgot to tell you. Clytemnestra told me to expect this.”

  “Can we kill them?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  After several minutes, the cacophony died down. The guests must have finally decided to return to their homes. I thought it would not reveal too much if I just kissed Menelaus, so I nestled into his arms and tasted his lips again. It was not long before his ardor was kindled, and with scant attention to preliminaries, he mounted me. “Don’t worry, little Helen,” he said to me, “I, too, have never made love. Together, we will learn to please each other.” He took his pleasure quickly, keeping his gray eyes shut tight as if the vision behind their lids was more magical than the vision of the woman who lay beneath his loins, receiving his seed as the dry earth does the spring rain. “My Helen, my queen,” he cried, covering my mouth with kisses when he reached the pinnacle of ecstasy. I smiled up at him and gently wicked away the sweat from his brow, smoothing a recalcitrant copper curl off his damp forehead.

  His passion spent, Menelaus kissed my lips once more, then rolled over into a deep and satiated slumber. My own desires unsatisfied, I gazed at the ceiling, listening to his muffled snores. And thus my new life begins, I thought. Yoked like oxen, together we would pull the plow of a royal marriage, plodding dully through our days. I watched Menelaus deep in the spell of Hypnos and thought about what he had told me—that he had never before won anything until Tyndareus awarded him my hand. I recalled how he had consistently taken second place in the athletic contests and how he always looked to Agamemnon for guidance, forever walking in the larger footprints of his older brother.

  I propped myself on an elbow and watched Menelaus for several minutes, wishing I could forgive myself for so quickly passing judgment on my new husband. Wishing that I, too, was able to enter the land of Sleep, if only to quiet my brain of a single increasingly distressing thought: If destiny ruled our lives and the three Fates determined its outcome, had I, Helen of Sparta, been born to marry mediocrity?

  TWELVE

  Menelaus and I were awakened by another serenade. The rowdy men and women who had sung outside our door the night before had returned to celebrate the final day of the wedding festivities, the epaulia, named for the bridal gifts I would receive during the day. Once again, the odes focused on my transition from maiden to woman. I had barely slept and had a headache from all the Rhodian wine, which had not been as watered down as it usually was, and was in a mood to open the door and tell them all to save their breath. They would have done better to sing to Menelaus about becoming a man.

  “Good m
orning, wife,” Menelaus said to me, smiling and kissing my cheek with the kind of benign amiability that was better suited to long-married spouses well after their initial passion had died. With Menelaus and I, there was no initial passion. When I embraced him, he responded, but his caresses were clumsy. I had never considered that there might be men who lacked the natural ability to make love. It stunned me, and I tried to suppress my surprise. Was it still his fear of losing me that held him back from committing fully to love’s commands? A person may be taught a dance if they are already possessed of an innate grace and a sense of rhythm. Menelaus was five and twenty. It was astonishing enough that he had never before made love to a woman, particularly since his older brother numbered lechery among his several excesses. Was this how it would be every night from now on? I was sixteen years old and despaired of spending the remainder of my husband’s days in a disappointingly passionless marriage.

  I thought about the message of congratulations that I received from my cousin Penelope. It had not cheered me. She and Odysseus had remained in far-off Ithaca, rather than journey to Sparta for the wedding that her husband was largely responsible for orchestrating. Where I saw the conniving Odysseus as the architect of my connubial misfortune, he was likewise the clever engineer of her conjugal happiness. The simple lifestyle of Ithaca suited her well, she informed me, and Odysseus was much beloved by his people for retaining his humility as a ruler. Then Penelope shed her pragmatic mantle and revealed what was beneath her serene, resourceful, and reliable exterior. She and Odysseus were deliriously in love with each other, so much so that he could scarcely bring himself to quit her presence even to plow his fields. She rhapsodized about the enormous bed he had built for the two of them, carved from the trunk and branches of an olive tree that still grew in the middle of their bedchamber. Of course I envied her. But I had to accept that our destinies were as different as our natures.

  Foolish people have a way of confusing extraordinary beauty or immense wealth with a concordant happiness. Beauty was bestowed upon me from birth. I inherited wealth. But it was a permanent happiness—the kind that Penelope had found—that I would always continue to seek.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and addressed Menelaus. “Today you will become a king, my lord.” I gently raked my nails through the matted russet curls on his chest, and he responded to the caress with an appreciative murmur. In that instant, I silently pledged to make every effort to see our marriage succeed. Thus far, although I was aggravated by his reliance upon his older brother and disappointed by his limited lovemaking skills, Menelaus had done nothing to earn my enmity. It was not meet for me to punish him as though he had done me some injury. From now on, I would banish self-pity from my life as I had earlier banished shame.

  The hour had come for us to rise, bathe and dress, and then greet Tyndareus, who would formally hand the kingdom of Sparta to my husband. As their queen, my people would look to me for guidance and wisdom, even for leadership. I knew how important it was to show a brave and lovely face to the world, regardless of my true feelings. The time for public mourning for my brothers had passed. My private sorrows must now be reserved for my solitude and the solace of my loom. In my present sadness, I realized how much I must have resembled my mother as I remembered her most.

  I wore golden robes and a brazen girdle. My sojourn in Athens had given me a taste for silks above any other textiles; the sensation of its softness against my bare skin was incomparable. But as it was coronation day, my jewelry was cunningly crafted from Krokeai lapis, as I wanted to demonstrate my love for Sparta. Menelaus donned a tunic of purest white linen. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra were waiting for us in the Great Hall. Tyndareus entered the room, wielding the silver-studded staff with the carved heads of the lion and griffin that echoed the relief work on his throne and that were emblematic of the Spartan king. He looked tired and somewhat relieved to be passing the scepter. My stepfather had not been the same man since the Dioscuri had met their death. He seemed defeated, a shadowy figure who had lost the will to concentrate on affairs of state, instead discoursing frequently on the improvements he sought to make to his orchards.

  Tyndareus handed Menelaus his staff, speaking the words “A double bind is doubly blessed,” a reference to the kingdoms of Sparta and Mycenae now being ruled by brother kings and sister queens. We led a processional to the temple of Zeus, followed by several dozen of our countrymen and women. Along the road they danced, their dexterously manipulated castanets accompanying the songs of praise for Menelaus and me as their new rulers. Proper libations were poured at the temple, and the blood of a ram was spilt to ensure Menelaus a lengthy, strong, and secure reign, free from invaders and inner strife. It would have been a grave error not to have propitiated Eris, goddess of strife, along with the other gods we honored that day.

  That morning, my husband held his head high, and I, too, prayed that he would prove every inch a king. It amused me to notice the difference in the way the Spartans treated me. The girls who had played with Clytemnestra and who had so rudely snubbed and even ostracized me just a few short years ago now strewed my path with petals. There might come a time when they would need to petition the royal family, to settle a dispute, for example. Their smiles, they believed, purchased my leniency. Had I been Clytemnestra, I would have relished the opportunity for retribution. But on that day I smiled, too, for I knew I had already gained it. I wore embroidered silk where they clothed themselves in flax and woolens. I adorned myself with gold and precious gems where they lacked the means to purchase much in the way of ornamentation other than leather and local stones. Moreover, I was now Sparta’s queen and had the power to affect their lives in far graver ways than being shoved into gorse bushes or excluded from girlish games.

  An official tour of the palace stores was part of Tyndareus’s formal abdication. For all my stepfather’s miserly griping about Sparta’s dwindling treasury, I had expected to see scant quantities of provisions. We could not hope to rival Mycenae for wealth, but what Tyndareus showed us far exceeded my anticipation of our holdings. He pointed out enormous amphorae of wine and olive oil, numerous tubs of barley and wheat, and bronze ingots that would be traded as currency or for smelting to forge armor and weapons and to fashion ornamental plate, jewelry, and accessories. There were kraters of alum used in dying textiles, amber for funeral rites, and stores of ivory, tin, copper, silver, and gold, in addition to items such as carved chests and footstools inlaid with these precious commodities. In a corner of the storerooms were the clay tablets containing the records of all barters and information regarding our import, export, and ownership of the weapons, seeds, and all other merchandise and supplies that were the property of the Spartan royal household. In another area, collecting dust, were the many bride-gifts that had been bestowed upon Tyndareus by Menelaus’s rivals in anticipation that my stepfather would offer my body and his kingdom as a fair exchange: more chests, chariots, quantities of fabrics, metals, perfumes, and spices. Menelaus was especially enamored of an ebony footstool adorned with coral-colored shell that had been artfully inlaid to represent a hunting scene: A red-bearded man was chasing a deer with a bow and arrow. He ordered it brought up to the Great Hall where he would make good use of it from his throne.

  I, too, found items of delight among the stores, ordering lengths of fabric and perfumes and cosmetics from Egypt and the East to be delivered to our private rooms.

  “I do not like the way he looked at you,” Menelaus said to me after the servant had brought us our treasures. “That man could not take his eyes off your body. He was too familiar. I will not tolerate such behavior in my court.”

  “He merely smiled at me, husband. I would not call that overfriendly or overreaching his status.” This was a difference in opinion that—much to my distress—would remain unreconciled.

  Later that morning, Menelaus and I journeyed into the countryside so that the Spartan people could officially welcome us. In fact, the excursion afforded us the opportunity
to visit the farms and inspect the output of crops, livestock, and grain. It was a lovely drive. The air was scented with the sweet yet pungent fragrances of olive and oregano, and the sun peeked through the clouds to kiss our bodies with its golden warmth. There was no rush, the day was glorious, and I asked the chariot driver to slow his pace so we could enjoy the idyll. A gentle breeze rustled through the reeds along the riverbank; and beyond the palace’s shadow Menelaus relaxed his grip on his tightly held sense of formality.

  Farmers harvesting their olives waved as we passed. One man was culling them directly from his perch amid the lush verdant branches; others were beating the branches with long sticks to knock the ovoid gems to the ground, while young boys and girls merrily scampered to retrieve them.

  The reaction of the Spartan men to my appearance among them was not lost on Menelaus. “I trust they understand that despite your making this progress by my side today that Sparta will be governed by a king, and it is to me they will look for guidance and leadership.”

  “Then you will require this, my lord.” I removed a gilded cuff from my wrist and handed it to him, receiving an uncomprehending look in reply. “It appears that you desire nothing more than a glittering bauble to accessorize your reign. You forget that you will now warm the Spartan throne not because you have inherited it, but because you are married to Helen.” He began to respond but I had not finished my thought. “I suppose you intend to go off on raiding parties like your brother.”