by Amanda Elyot
I remember being summoned to the Great Hall the following morning and noting the irony in that the throne room, which Menelaus had so ostentatiously enhanced in order to rival that of his brother’s in Mycenae, was now being stripped of any bronze fittings by many of the same laborers who had been engaged to install them. Menelaus took me aside and told me to dress and adorn myself as if for a state occasion. “You took all my mirrors,” I responded tartly.
“You have plenty of servants to be your looking glass.”
I surmised that Menelaus was secretly pleased that his brother’s orders meant that I would spend fewer hours at my toilette. I struggled daily to come to terms with my husband’s philia-aphilia, his love-in-hate for my beauty. He swelled with pride when other men congratulated him on my loveliness, as though he were somehow responsible for its existence; yet inwardly he fumed, fearing at any moment that the selfsame exquisiteness would somehow bring him to ruin.
Later that day I returned to the Great Hall, attired all in white, my ears, throat, and bare arms glittering with precious stones. “Do not make me do this,” I begged of Menelaus. “I am the daughter of a long line of priestesses.” When he became king, he made me relinquish all vestiges of the old ways. Now, the Atridae sought to desecrate the new religion as well. The sky gods they revered would surely take their revenge, and I, as injured as the rest of my people by Agamemnon’s hubris, wanted no part of their wrath. “The Spartans look to their queen to respect and preserve their shrines,” I insisted. My pleas may as well have been shouted into the wind.
As I expected, our procession was marred by jeers and taunts. How different was this progress from the one Menelaus and I enjoyed some eight years earlier when we toured Sparta together for the first time as its king and queen. On the day we rode out to supervise the stripping of the shrines and temples, we were pelted with olives, and one distraught woman even threw a rock, which grazed Menelaus on his upper arm. He ordered one of his guard to arrest her, and I pleaded with him to try to understand how angry she must have been to assault the king. “These people—your people—are true believers in the gods,” I warned. “The gods you want them to worship. To take their idols and defile their altars implicates them in your crimes. They fear retribution.”
“They should fear Agamemnon’s retribution if they attempt to prevent us from complying with the commands of the High King.”
“This is your religion! Bronze! War! You worship the power to take, not what you can receive.” Perhaps, I thought fleetingly, that is the fundamental difference between man and woman. The man takes the woman, who receives his seed. That day, of all days, made me rue my birthright. “Would that I had never been born in Sparta,” I spat. “Would that I lived in a realm where every day was not given over to war—talks of war, threats of war, training for war, plans for war—where death was not the grandest reason for living.”
To the earsplitting sound of women’s wailing commingled with men’s insults and children’s taunts, bronze mixing bowls for libations and sacrifices were taken from the temples, along with the statues depicting their respective patrons. Artemis, Aphrodite, Zeus, even Athena, all were seized to become weaponry for Agamemnon’s upcoming raid. Supplicants’ gifts that had been left upon altars to propitiate the various gods were snatched up as well. Mycenaean greed recast itself as Spartan pragmatism. Menelaus, evincing neither love nor sympathy for his subjects, proclaimed that there were greater riches to be found within the temples than in the palace treasury and that there was no need to enrich the priests and priestesses at the expense of Sparta’s security.
Our people followed us as we then journeyed to the beehive tomb that was the family crypt for the House of Tyndareus. Menelaus might just as well have sliced through my breast and taken my beating heart when he insisted that I be the one to desecrate my own ancestors’ resting place.
I balked, refusing his command. I wept and tore off my jewels, flinging them at my husband’s feet, begging him to accept them in place of my forbears’ dignity. “To insist upon this piracy reaches far beyond the humiliation of Sparta’s queen; it is an insult to Sparta herself.” I tried to run, but two of the king’s guard impeded my escape, and the words of Menelaus stunned me.
“Helen, if you continue to defy my order, these men have my permission to compel you to obey it. I urge you to spare yourself—and the Spartan people—any further indignity.”
With a sorrow I had not known since their deaths, I removed my brothers’ armaments and my mother’s jewelry from their monuments and gave them, with trembling hands, to the palace guard.
I was a broken woman that day. I could not stand before my people and tell them outright that my husband, their king, was a traitor to his religion and to his subjects, that he only worshipped his elder brother, the High King, and all that Agamemnon’s political ambitions could bring them. I did not say that I condoned his actions, and yet, by my very presence, robed and gowned and jeweled and coiffed as though it were a state festival, despite my tears, I had been complicit in his crimes.
Old wounds had been reopened and bled afresh. I mourned anew for my mother and half brothers. That night I looked heavenward and asked the twin stars what they thought of Agamemnon’s decree and the resulting desecration of our sacred sites. I asked the Dioscuri to intercede for me with Zeus, my father. “Punish the Atridae,” I prayed.
What had become of my life? Where Clytemnestra wielded power on the Mycenaean throne, I was but a cipher on Sparta’s, no more than ornamentation for Menelaus. If I had been forged of bronze instead of flesh, I, too, would have been destroyed only to be recast as a helmet or the hilt of a dagger for one of Agamemnon’s minions.
Love had eluded me as well. I had long since forgotten my promise to make the best of my marriage, to cherish Menelaus. By now, we viewed each other with the kind of philia-aphilia that I was all too accustomed to receiving from Clytemnestra, Tyndareus, and, often, the women of Sparta. I continued to honor Menelaus—in that I had never been unfaithful—but I could no longer will my body to desire his, to yearn for his touch in the night. Despite many years in my bed, Menelaus never became practiced in the arts of Eros. I had borne him five children, and we had both lost interest in actively seeking to beget any more of them. I could not love a man who respected the will of his power-mad brother over the wishes of his queen and the needs of his people. Therein lay much of the problem, I thought as I continued to ruminate over my husband’s actions. The Spartans were only his people by virtue of a royal marriage. I was the true Spartan, while Menelaus had remained in all but proximity a Mycenaean.
I began to pay regular visits to what remained of the shrine of Aphrodite, leaving her offerings of milk and honey, combs of tortoise shell, and baskets of pomegranates. Daily, I entreated her to grant me love. I had so much to bestow and nowhere to confer it. I prayed for her to turn my husband’s heart away from his kin and toward his wife. I implored her to fill my heart with affection for Menelaus; to fill my spirit with the philia of loving amity as well as Eros and Himeros—the lust and desire—that my loins so desperately craved.
But the gods are as capricious as the men who exercised their free will to invent them. As I made my daily ablutions and paid my tributes to the goddess of love, Aethra—who often acted as my conscience—would shake her head and wring her hands, murmuring, “Be careful what you wish for.”
FIFTEEN
The gods did answer one of my prayers. But in punishing Menelaus for desecrating their temples, the rest of Sparta suffered as well. Not too many days after my husband carried out Agamemnon’s wishes, the southern Peloponnese was shattered by a violent splitting of the earth. Zeus was angry and visited his wrath on the homes and the people of Laconia. At first, when we heard the rumbles, we thought the great sky god was merely threatening us with his thunderbolt. Rain would have been much welcomed. For months, we had endured a drought that had withered the crops on the vines and in the fields, starving many of our citizens, who then came
to the palace stores seeking handouts. Menelaus and I dispensed grain, olive oil, and wine to the needy and thought we had ameliorated matters, if only temporarily, but the effects of the drought were nothing compared to the aftershocks of the defiling of the temples.
I was at my loom when I felt the first tremors. Hermione, you were at my side, stitching a little tapestry of your own. I thought little of it until a chunk of plaster as big as a date landed beside my right foot, and a dusting of powder sprinkled my shoulder. I remember glancing up very cautiously and discovering that there was a small hole in the ceiling.
A second tremor sent my dressing table sliding toward me, and Hermione, I recall as if it were yesterday how you flung your arms about my waist. I leapt up and, taking your hand, making you promise not to let go, we went in search of Nico and the twins. Aethra had herded the boys to the plain beyond the palace walls where nothing could fall upon them. Fortunately, they were too young to realize the potential for disaster. “Look, Mitera!” they called to me; full of mirthful giggles, they danced around in a circle, thinking that the earth had turned into a giant pony that was bouncing them about.
The royal family was lucky to escape unscathed, but when Menelaus joined us in the field, he took me aside and told me with fear in his eyes and sorrow in his heart that we had lost a young serving girl and one of the palace guard who had been crushed by falling debris. My husband was more distressed than I had ever seen him. All his grand improvements had now been rendered for naught. The pillars in the Great Hall were in danger of crumbling completely, ceilings had collapsed, the eastern wall of the treasury had all but disintegrated into dust, and our marital rooms had been utterly destroyed by the earthquake. Even the servants’ quarters had suffered. Only the gynaeceum had remained primarily intact. It would take numerous masons several weeks, if not moons, to make the palace habitable again.
“We must inspect the damage in the rest of the city,” I insisted, and leaving the boys and Hermione in Aethra’s care, we commanded the equerry to saddle our horses.
I was not prepared for the devastation. In the town, the houses, comprised primarily of dried mud, had tumbled like dominoes upon one another, the weight of one damaged dwelling causing the destruction of its neighbor, and so on, often for several yards. Men andwomen, too dazed to flee or to aid in a rescue sat by the edge of the road, their panic and fear etched deeply into their frightened faces. We bore witness to the lifeless forms, looking as though they had been rolled in wheat flour, dragged from where they fell, crushed by falling plaster, wood, and stone. The bodies of children—too many to count—were lifted onto wagons to the earsplitting accompaniment of their keening mothers. The air was filled with the sounds of grief and the pungent onset of decay. Livestock, too—chickens and goats—had been felled by Zeus’s wrath. There were so many bodies that it would have made individual funeral rites an imposition on the priests.
An old woman, swaybacked and struggling under the weight of a corpse no bigger than a rag doll, spat in the dust in front of Menelaus. “You! You, in your fine palace with your beautiful wife and your fine robes and your fine food and drink, what care you for the common people of Sparta? You are to blame for this!” she cried, shoving the inert bundle at the king. I left his side to comfort her, but she turned her invectives on me. Was this carnage indeed great Zeus’s vengeance for the hubris of the Atridae or for something else entirely? It had been foretold that I would bring death to my countrymen; and now the prophecy, like a wayward bird on the wing, had come home to roost. Was this then the revenge of the Goddess for my having forsaken her? Tearful and trembling, I beseeched the sobbing crone to permit me to relieve her of her burden, and taking the dead infant from her, I cradled him in my arms. Surely, I should be made to bear some of the weight of my destiny. It could well have been Nico instead of some commoner’s grandson.
Menelaus gathered together the members of the mourning families and suggested that a single state funeral be performed for all of the fallen. It was the least he could do to atone for a loss that might have been prevented, in our subjects’ view, had he and his brother not flouted the gods. I believed that I had my own transgressions to cleanse, and I stood by him. In that moment, Menelaus was not a politician. He comported himself like a ruler and a diplomat and his offer was a genuine response that came from the heart. If he could one day establish an identity independent of Agamemnon, I was certain that the goodness within him would reveal itself in time. But if he remained in his brother’s thrall for the rest of his days, Sparta and her neighbors were permanently imperiled as well.
There was much to be done to repair the destruction of Sparta’s dwellings and to heal the rift between the people and their king, for we depended on their loyalty as well as their respect. Menelaus had promised them that all would be made new again before the celebration of Kronia began in the late summer.
Kronia was an annual festival lasting eighteen days that embodied what I liked to think of as the light and dark in our culture. Nine days of religiously sanctioned outrageous excesses of all kinds were followed by another nine days of strict abstemiousness and atonement, during which no coupling was permitted, no entertainment employed, no fighting could occur, and all formal battling ceased. The celebration—particularly the first half of it, where men and women were free to relieve their sexual mania in any way they chose, including adultery and homosexual encounters—was always greeted with great anticipation. It was a ritual that bore echoes of a more primitive time, when the Peloponnese was peopled by quiet agrarian villages whose inhabitants were close to the land and respected both the bounty and the power of the earth that was the source of their life and their livelihood. Occasionally, of course, there were those, like Clytemnestra, for whom neither mania nor atonement held any allure. My sister worshipped power and had little use for popular frivolities and their inevitable aftermath and counterpoint. I had always enjoyed the idea of the festival, for it appealed to my lustful nature; even the staged mock battles and sporting competitions were tinged with erotic excitement. Before I was abducted by Theseus, I was too young to indulge in the sexual excesses of the celebration, and once I was married to Menelaus, I resisted all temptation, although my licentiousness would have been perfectly permissible under the laws of Kronia. As for my husband’s conduct during Kronia, I cannot say, but he never shamed me with it before our subjects.
The Spartan people had much to celebrate that year. The drought had finally ended and their homes had been speedily repaired following the death and devastation wrought by the earthquake. For the next nine days, their mourning would be ameliorated with banquets, games and contests, and libidinous mania bordering on mayhem. Garlands were hung from every window, perfuming the air with a fragrant headiness that whispered “lust.” Men and women, and the most nubile of the Spartan youth, bedecked themselves in their finest garments, oiled their hair and perfumed their limbs, the better to be prepared for any amorous encounters. Young girls happily demonstrated to any willing spectator why they had earned the sobriquet thigh-flashers. Boys in the throes of adolescence availed themselves of freedoms conferred upon them by the festival to press their advantage with girls they were too timid to approach during the rest of the year. At night, lanterns would be strung across rooftops or left dangling from poles placed in the fertile earth to light the way to carnal paradise. Passion flowed like wine.
Menelaus had charged me with decorating the Great Hall for Kronia. To that end, fertility statues of both sexes graced the entrance to the throne room, and I had commissioned a new fresco to depict the courtship and ritual capture of the sea nymph Thetis. After Thetis led King Peleus on a merry chase, many times shifting her shape to elude him, he overcame her and eventually wed her at the greatest nuptial feast ever known. It was the last time men dined side by side with the gods. In their story, where a mortal man claims an immortal woman as his consort, there was something of my own lineage in reverse and it secretly pleased me. Menelaus offered no comment o
ther than to say that he liked the theme of man and god in harmony. He found the premise soothing after the summer earthquake had followed so hard upon the desecration of the sacred sites.
I was directing the servants as to the placement of the incense braziers that would fill the room with the pungent aromas of jasmine and sandalwood when Menelaus entered, followed by two of his palace guard and two strangers, foreign-born, as evidenced by their garb of elaborately embroidered saffron and crimson-colored silk. “Welcome to Sparta,” he told them, approaching his throne and ordering two chairs to be placed beside him for his guests.
“It is not the custom of Wilusa to speak of diplomatic matters in the presence of women,” said the shorter of the two men. He wore his sand-colored hair to his shoulders and sported a long, though well-trimmed, beard.
“This woman will gladly inform you that she is an exception, Aeneas,” Menelaus replied, and summoned me to stand beside him. Honeysuckle perfume trailing in my wake, I glided to the throne with an excess of queenly grace and dignity; after all, it was Kronia and excess in all things was the custom. “Before you stands the most beautiful woman in the world,” Menelaus added, speaking the words with pride for the first time in my recollection. “Queen Helen of Sparta.”
The two men bowed low and reverentially, and when they stood again, my eyes locked with those of the taller of the two, like and yet unlike his companion: clean shaven, with a fine strong jaw and a head of golden curls that made me believe that I gazed upon Apollo incarnate. He wore the aura of clear, crisp mountain air like an invisible cloak. It reminded me of the days when I used to ride and run wild in the hills of Mount Taygetos without a care for weighty affairs of state and wifely obligations. The young man smelled like freedom, and such a man had never visited Sparta in my lifetime. “My queen, before you stand two ambassadors from Ilios: Aeneas, son of Anchises, and his cousin, Prince Paris Alexandros, son of Priam.”