The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  “What does that mean for us?”

  “It means that my brother—among others, of course—is tired of paying tariffs to Priam on the corn, spices, hides, silks, and other goods that pass through the Hellespont. After all, the name of the strait is not an Asian one. It’s Greek. Comes from Hellas. We are the Hellenes and that part of the world is rightfully ours.”

  Clytemnestra had confirmed it. She had sent me word on more than one occasion that Agamemnon was itching for a fight. He had a warrior’s spirit and was not content to remain in Mycenae for any length of time. She often told me that he wasn’t happy unless he was hacking and slashing and conquering things. Ironically, my sister was more like her brutal husband than she thought, or would perhaps admit. A taste for blood and a volatile temperament were qualities they shared in abundance.

  “Do you think we will go to war with Troy over customs duties?” I asked Menelaus. I knew that if his older brother was contemplating a raid of major proportions, Menelaus was certain to be right beside him. By now my husband had grown accustomed to my interest in politics and diplomacy. In that, I confided to him, I had indeed been schooled by Theseus. Menelaus was never sure what to make of my desire to fully comprehend what he was quick to remind me were manly arts; although he had to acknowledge, begrudgingly, that the queen of Sparta was no foolish girl content to ply her loom and play with her cosmetics and her babies all day.

  “I have opened negotiations with Priam for better trade concessions, but we are at an impasse,” Menelaus said. “He keeps promising to dispatch an envoy, but it is hard to credit his commitment to diplomacy when no such man has appeared.”

  “You are content to settle the matter by diplomacy, then?”

  Menelaus fixed me with an unfathomable gaze. It was often his way, I learned, and for years I struggled to penetrate his inscrutability. What tempests lay behind the storm-cloud gray of his eyes? “You think me too much like my brother, Helen. I would talk first, and when that fails, use the sword. Agamemnon has always done the reverse. To answer your question, we are fully aware that Mycenae and Sparta alone cannot take Troy. The city is far too powerful for two small Achaean kingdoms to challenge its superiority; and Priam’s vast wealth, which dwarfs that of my brother’s, enables the old king and his fifty sons to outnumber us with weaponry and with warriors. I am my brother’s right hand wherever he chooses to venture, but the other Achaean chieftains have far less reason to risk all in order to topple Priam’s stronghold. Agamemnon knows that they would require a very compelling reason to join forces with Argos and Laconia.”

  Our discourse was interrupted by the arrival of a messenger from Mycenae. He had been dispatched by Lycomedes, king of Skyros, to bring news of great import to the High King concerning the future of Athens; Agamemnon, upon hearing it, had sent the runner to us.

  As was the custom, food and drink were ordered and consumed, and the herald was treated as an honored guest before he was permitted to perform the duties for which he had been engaged. Anxious and impatient, I awaited the delivery of the youth’s news. Finally, after a dessert of honeyed figs, Menelaus permitted him to discharge his office.

  It was delivered in few words and with no show of emotion. Theseus was dead and Menestheus was now the Athenian king.

  The news caught me with such force, it was as though a hand had grabbed me by the throat, crushing my windpipe until I could no longer breathe. The room swirled out of focus before my eyes, and I sank to the floor, sliding from my seat by Menelaus’s throne and sending my footstool toppling off the platform. My next memory was of a servant bathing my forehead with a moist cloth and offering me a drink of wine. “Tell me what happened,” I begged the messenger.

  “He has done his office,” Menelaus said tersely, evidently having received the particulars while I lay between wake and sleep.

  “Please, you must tell me,” I insisted, becoming hysterical. “The queen of Sparta commands you!”

  At this, the young runner could not fail to repeat his message. “After a four-year sojourn in Tartarus, Theseus returned to Attica to find his kingdom in a shambles. In his absence, the usurper Menestheus had gained a stronghold. Although he struggled mightily to restore order and to regain the confidence of the Athenian people, Theseus could not recapture their support. They were all for Menestheus; there was nothing he could do. Theseus therefore went to Skyros where he had property in the rocky kingdom, thinking to live out his days in solitude. But an accident befell him while he was walking along the cliffs of his estate, surveying his lands. Losing his footing on a loose stone, he stumbled and, pitching forward, plunged to his death in the churning waters below.”

  It was almost the same way his father had perished. And there was something about the image that disturbed me deeply. I found it too much to believe that after all his extraordinary exploits, where Theseus had met danger and faced it down with the courage of a leopard, that he would lose his life in the simple act of taking a stroll. I refused to believe it, refused to accept that there was not some foul play involved. But all my suspicions would not bring him back. My only love, the father of my firstborn child, was gone.

  To escape the quotidian dullness of my Spartan existence and my loveless marriage, I had often allowed my most private thoughts to travel, daydreaming of an alternate universe where Theseus would come for me; we would leave everything else behind and create a new life for ourselves, subsisting exclusively on love. Now, even my fantasies had been cruelly destroyed. No more would I hope to see the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and the smile lines that heralded his amusement. Those orbs that changed their color to reflect the myriad shades of the cool Aegean would never look upon those waters again. The muscled body in whose arms I only once found the greatest delight a woman can know would decay into dust; only his shade would wander the underworld, returning to Tartarus sooner than he had ever anticipated.

  “Was there any word from my sister?” I wanted to know, speaking through my tears.

  “The queen of Mycenae said that Argos grieves for Theseus and libations were made in his memory.”

  Was that what I wanted to hear? I thought of poor Iphigenia, barely seven years old, robbed forever of the father she never knew. I had hoped that Clytemnestra would give me a hint, however thickly veiled, that she had done Theseus some special honor for the child’s sake. But all the spilt wine and blood in the world would not wash away my sorrow, and all the offerings of milk and honey could not sweeten it.

  Once the messenger had departed, Menelaus chided me for my unseemly behavior. “Any fool would think you were in love with Theseus,” he scolded. “How dare you shame me—and Sparta—and the House of Atreus—in the presence of a lowly messenger!” My husband was enraged, but my ire was perhaps even stronger.

  “What will it avail you to know whether or not I loved him? What can it change? Nothing! But since you have always been so keen to know the truth—yes, I loved Theseus! Deeply. More than that, you have no need to know. He cannot touch you now, nor ever could have, save in your jealousies. You know me to be a faithful wife. My memories, however, are my own. I beg you to leave me in peace with them.” I swept from the Great Hall and retreated to the shadowed solitude of my rooms.

  Summoning Aethra, I disclosed to her, with an aching heart, the most devastating and sorrowful news a mother can ever hear. Aethra keened and cried loud enough for the sky gods on Mount Olympus to hear her lamentations. She tore clumps of hair from her old white head and rent her garments. For several hours afterward, I held Theseus’s grieving mother in my arms as if she were my helpless babe.

  That night, Menelaus took me with such a fevered passion, it felt as though he was trying to flood my body with his seed in an attempt to purge it forever of all thoughts of Theseus.

  FOURTEEN

  Little Nicostratus was the issue of that near violation. By the eighth year of my marriage, he was learning to walk, possessed of a toddler’s insatiable curiosity and indefatigable energy. Aethr
a spent half her days running after him in an effort to prevent him from doing himself some injury through one of his exploratory perambulations. By that time, you, Hermione, were beginning to blossom into a very grave young lady. I remember the way you would walk by your father’s side, your strawberry-colored hair tousled by an errant breeze, barely speaking yet absorbing everything. It seemed as though you were storing away each recollection, every nuance of human action and interaction, every conversation. Pleisthenes, having reached the age of seven, was taken by the Spartan elders into the agogi system to receive the ritual indoctrination and rigorous training demanded of a hoplite, our elite warrior class. Next year, the twins would be sent away as well.

  The parents of sons training to become hoplites would not see their boys again until they attained their majority. Losing Pleisthenes was very difficult for me. I had barely gotten to know my firstborn son and he was being ripped from me. I had finally remembered which butterflies were his favorites, had nearly cured him of his childish lisp, and he was just beginning to learn the lyre, musicianship being considered an accomplishment for Achaean boys. The elders were taking away a little boy who still tripped over his sandal laces. Pleisthenes would return to me a strong and stoic young man who I was sure I would scarcely recognize. Menelaus was more resigned to the farewell. It was an honor to the family. In my view, we were honored enough, by virtue of being the royal household. But there was nothing I could do to prevent Pleisthenes’s departure even if I had wanted to. It was the Spartan way and I was Sparta.

  Menelaus consoled himself for his loss by favoring Hermione all the more. He rarely spent time with Maraphius and Aethiolas, figuring that the twins would be taken from us in another year, so there was no reason to make their loss any greater by getting to know them. I disagreed and sought to compensate for their father’s dwindling affections and increasing love for Hermione by lavishing more attention on the twins. Besides, they reminded me so much of my twin half brothers. Their dark curls and their sportive, highly competitive natures were Castor and Polydeuces in miniature.

  As the years wore on, I became increasingly disaffected: not only with the dullness of my daily existence, but also with the entire ethos of the Spartan culture. Pleisthenes being taken away from me to be raised as a warrior not too many years after he had learned to run, encapsulated the Laconian virtues of pragmatism. I remembered how much pride Theseus had taken in his Athenian cosmopolis. In marked contrast, we Spartans had no art to admire and no architecture to take one’s breath away. We were a culture focused on a solitary aim: to be prepared for war at a moment’s notice; and even more to the point, to be possessed of the most advanced and best-trained elite forces ever known to the civilized world.

  I had endured Menelaus’s continual jealousies, often in silence. Yes, all eyes were upon me when I appeared in public, but I was their queen: where else should my subjects gaze? Yet in every look he interpreted desire. This, too, I will acknowledge was most likely true, but never did I encourage a man to act upon his thoughts. My husband blamed me for my beauty, and many times in the presence of others he rued the day when we were wed, for he had not known a moment’s peace since our epaulia. Dark dreams of infidelity tormented him, and he shrugged off my repeated sweet assurances that he was being plagued by mere fantasy. The climate in the royal household was always tense. Whenever I was in the presence of my lord and others, I felt the watchful gaze of his gray eyes, their ever-present downward slant of disapproval. I did my best to love him and harbored guilt when I admitted how difficult that was. I honored Menelaus and did my duty by him, but I knew the difference between dignified tolerance and a genuine passion. How greatly my union contrasted with that of Penelope and Odysseus. After the same number of years of marriage, the flame of their love still blazed as bright as it had done on the day they left Sparta. On that day, Penelope, riding off in Odysseus’s chariot, lowered her veil to shield her face from her family as a sign that she was choosing her husband over them.

  It was also in the eighth year of my marriage that the fetid stench of war’s hot breath threatened our realm. And yet, my husband did not speak of it with me directly, nor did he bring me into his official counsel or take me into his private confidences. One morning as I was making my toilette, two of the armed palace guard violated the sanctity of my rooms by entering my chamber unannounced. Nico, afraid of the burly metal-clad giants, immediately burst into frightened sobs and scurried for my skirts like a terrified puppy.

  “What does this mean?” I demanded as they searched the room. “Look, you have frightened the young prince!”

  “We have come for the bronze, Your Majesty.” One of the soldiers grabbed the mirror in my hand and tried to wrest it from me. Nico’s wails grew louder and more agonized seeing his mitera so rudely handled. “The king’s orders,” one of the men insisted as we struggled for the ornament. He was bruising my wrist with his grip, which was of course much stronger than my own. The mirror flew out of my hand and landed a few feet away. Like thieves, the guards ransacked my rooms, clearing my dressing table with one swipe, spilling pots of ointments and cosmetics. They informed me that they had been ordered to investigate every room in the gynaeceum for items containing even the smallest scrap of bronze.

  Wasting no time, I dispatched Aethra to find my husband and bring him to me. Two of my maids immediately threw themselves to the floor to recover as much of my precious makeup as they could, but most of the powder had been ground into the stone by the soldiers’ sandals, staining it carmine, lapis, ochre, and black.

  Within minutes, Menelaus appeared in the doorway. “Explain yourself!” I commanded. “Why have you sent the palace guard to my rooms to rummage through my personal effects, behaving like common sea raiders? Where is their respect for their queen? They barge into a woman’s private chambers unannounced. They request no audience with me and then have the audacity to plunder my possessions!” By now I had to raise my voice to be heard above the sound of Nico’s terrified bawling. “Look what they did to your son!” I said, scooping the toddler into my arms, trying to soothe him with honeyed whispers and soft caresses while around me chaos reigned.

  “Matters of state,” Menelaus muttered, tugging at his beard and looking somewhat sheepish.

  His answer was unsatisfactory to me. I accused him of speaking even more laconically than native Laconians. “For Sparta’s sake you would let the elders take my sons; is not that enough? Will you rob me of everything that is precious to me? I am not some serving woman or farmer’s wife. I am the queen!”

  “This is only the beginning,” he said as any artifacts of bronze—my mirrors, combs, hairbrushes, jewelry—were tossed into woven sacks by his loutish soldiers. “The High King is planning a raid of great proportions and is in need of more weaponry. He has called for bronze from all sources to be collected and melted down to forge armor and armaments.”

  “Then let the High King find his bronze elsewhere. Sparta is not some petty, frightened village to be despoiled at will by your brother’s ambitions. Let him pillage where he always does—from the coast of Anatolia, from the Cyclades, or from Egypt.”

  “Helen, I must,” Menelaus insisted grimly. “It will take more than a few women’s trinkets to arm hundreds of men. Agamemnon has commanded me to collect all the bronze to be found in Sparta. He is not depriving you alone of your little baubles. The entire kingdom must contribute.”

  “Do you intend to send your guards house to house?” When Menelaus nodded but did not expound, my heart grew heavy in my chest, for I feared that something dreadful was still to come.

  “Not just the homes, but the temples as well.”

  “The temples? Your brother would have us despoil our own sacred sites?!” I was aghast. Even Agamemnon could not intend for the shrines to be plundered, for the sacred images of the gods and goddesses whom he believed controlled our destinies to be treated as scrap metal.

  “And the tombs, Helen. Including the royal tomb.” Menelaus lo
oked as though he wished there had been a way to break the news to me more gently, but his voice had assumed a tone of finality that after eight years I recognized all too well.

  “You would desecrate the tomb of the House of Tyndareus for your brother’s ends?!” If I had not been holding our son, I would have hurled a perfume alabastron at my husband’s head. I was not prone to fits of temper; that was always Clytemnestra’s way of handling betrayal or disappointment. My ferocity lay within me like a lion slumbering in the summer heat, but now it was awake and eager for blood. “Is there no end to the hubris of the sons of Atreus? My brothers—national heroes—whose helmets and shields, their breastplates and their swords, lie as tributes to them in the royal crypt—these you would turn to molten bronze to satisfy the whims of a power-mad tyrant?” My tears flowed like hot rain down my cheeks and throat, splashing little Nico, who still clung to my breast. Hubris is more than mere pride: it encompasses inappropriate violence against the innocent, including the dead. It includes insolence—which Agamemnon possessed in abundance—and impiety—as exhibited by the High King’s order to desecrate altars, shrines, and temples. Not even Tyndareus, a man well known for his covetousness, would have dared to challenge the gods, but the ethos of the House of Atreus was all about the complete subjugation of everything to personal power.

  “If you believe that your brother is in the right, you are as mad a man as he is, and I despise you for it,” I told Menelaus. “And if you disagree with his commands, yet execute them nonetheless, you are a weak man, and for that I despise you even more. If you do not believe that hubris leads to at¯e—ruin—then you are as foolish as you are weak and unfit to rule any kingdom, let alone Sparta, the strongest realm in all Achaea.”

  I dismissed him from my sight. Unable to calm Nico, I gave him to Aethra, whose soothing voice and healing hands always produced the desired effect, while, with the help of my serving maids, I reassembled the remaining items of my toilette.