by Amanda Elyot
NINETEEN
Gradually, I became acclimated to my adopted homeland. I insisted that Paris Alexandros teach me the Phrygian dialect and instruct me on the customs of his country. I was afraid to make even the slightest misstep, for I knew that people were closely watching, eager for me to fail at something or to make an utter fool of myself. Priam’s household was vast. While Hecuba was his queen and sole official wife, he had ninety-nine concubines, many of whom had borne him children. Several of King Priam’s fifty sons and twelve daughters were already grown, or nearly so, and had families of their own, all of whom resided in connecting rooms within the palace bordered by smooth-stoned cloister walks. The king’s kinsmen were called “the great family” and enjoyed special privileges, which they constantly exploited. Priam’s third son, Deiphobus, was particularly abusive. I remember one night after dinner, I was nestled on a cushion at Alexander’s feet, as was my custom, my head in his lap while his fingers entwined themselves in the tendrils of my hair. Deiphobus had been in an angry mood that day, although I must admit that I never saw him when he appeared to be content, or even sanguine, about anything. He was in his cups, too, as far as I could tell and had Eumetes, one of his personal slaves, in attendance simply to keep his golden rhyton filled with wine. The bard had been singing for many minutes; in honor of my Troyan husband he was weaving the yarn of the Judgment of Paris. The story of Alexander’s dream had quickly become the stuff of legend, embellished by the bards. When the blind man sang of Aphrodite’s promise to Paris Alexandros, Eumetes turned to gaze upon me as he went to refill his master’s goblet. In the youth’s inattention, he tripped over my cushion, causing him to stumble and spill the wine all over Deiphobus.
In one swift motion, the scowling prince rose and grabbed the young slave by the wrist, drawing the silver-handled dagger he always wore at his waist. The oinochoe flew out of Eumetes’s hand and clattered to the floor, splashing wine, like a river of blood, across my lap. Cursing Eumetes for his clumsiness, Deiphobus was about to sever the youth’s hand from his body. White with terror, Eumetes pled for mercy before his master could strike the disfiguring blow. I held my breath. Surely such barbarism was not common to such an advanced cosmopolis as Ilios.
Suddenly Hector was between them, his body shielding Eumetes from Deiphobus and his own knife at his younger brother’s throat. They argued openly, Deiphobus asserting his right by law to punish his slave, Hector attempting to convince Deiphobus to see reason: The punishment clearly did not fit the crime.
Paris Alexandros leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “In Wilusa, if a slave displeases his master, the master may punish him by maiming or even killing him—or her. Not only that, it is also within the master’s rights to subject the slave’s relatives to the same punishment, even if they are entirely blameless.” I was stunned. In Achaea, a life of slavery was not without its perils, but we did not hold an entire family to account for the misdeed of a single servant.
“I will not stand by while you torture Eumetes,” said Hector. “The boy knows he did something wrong. Accept his apology and that will make an end of it.”
My husband explained that slaves were forgiven if they admitted their transgression. After all, they were not deemed fully human and therefore could not be held entirely culpable. “In Anatolia, a slave is considered only half a person, and if he commits an offense, he is therefore liable for only half the amount of the penalty, whereas his master, should he commit the same offense, would be responsible for the entirety.”
I was still confused by their laws. “But if the penalty includes mutilation, like the removal of a hand, how does one cut off only half a hand?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to learn the answer. I resolved, however, to observe the slaves more closely, particularly those who served Deiphobus.
Hector skillfully diffused the conflict and Eumetes remained unscathed, but not before Deiphobus fired off a final insult. “You love to play the hero, don’t you, brother,” he taunted Hector. “Brave, spear-famed Hector. Noble Hector. You and our dog of a brother mock me because I remain unwed: you with a wife who is the epitome of loyalty, and Paris with one who is the quintessence of beauty.” It was clear that he was aiming to wound each of his elder brothers by intimating that each of their wives lacked what the other possessed in abundance.
Hector, with his dignity and quiet strength, was always kind to me. Never had I met a man with a stronger sense of decency. Where I was concerned, he was not one to be swayed by the inconsiderate behavior and unpleasant opinions of others, including his loving wife, Andromache, to whom he was utterly devoted. Although it pained me greatly, as the moons waxed and waned, I learned to live without the affection of Alexander’s kinsmen and women. Most of them made a deliberate show of ignoring me, which was preferable to outright hostility. I was not at all at ease around Deiphobus and tried to avoid his company whenever possible without appearing blatantly rude. He made it quite clear to me that he did not consider my marriage to Paris Alexandros a legitimate one—after all, Menelaus still lived, and it was I who had cast him off, and not the reverse. In Deiphobus’s eyes I was nothing but a sweet-smelling, glorified whore, ripe for the taking. I confided my anxiety, even fear, to Paris Alexandros, who assured me of his constant protection; if I encountered Deiphobus alone, he counseled me to continue the course of action I had already undertaken. Paris Alexandros understood my predicament all too well. After all, the xenophobic Deiphobus had been willing to spit him upon his spear when he believed him to be a mere shepherd who had bested him in an athletic competition.
I had been in Ilios for a little over a year when we received extremely disturbing news. King Priam could never be certain that the information provided by traders was reliable, but my intelligence arrived from an impeccable source. Ominously addressed to “The Widowmaker of Troy,” my ordinarily placid cousin Penelope sent word that in his capacity as High King, Agamemnon had invoked the Oath of Tyndareus, by which all of my former suitors were compelled to come to the aid of Menelaus. The very plan that her husband Odysseus had craftily designed was coming back to haunt him. Aware that he was about to be tripped up by his own scheme, and having been warned by a seer that if he went to war at Agamemnon’s behest, he would not return home for twenty years, the Ithacan chieftain feigned madness. Thus, when Agamemnon and his kinsman Palamedes came to rocky Ithaca to recruit him, Odysseus was found sowing his fields with salt instead of seeds, his plow pulled by an ass and a cow. Only a madman would salt his own soil. Salting was so devastating to the land that it had even become an effective military tactic: An army might salt the fields of their adversary, rendering the earth completely infertile for generations to come. Without the ability to grow crops, the enemy and their families would starve. And here was Odysseus risking the utter destruction of his estate, his tiny son’s inheritance. Palamedes, who could be even wilier than Odysseus, had snatched Penelope’s infant Telemachus from her arms and laid him before Odysseus’s plow. While she and their baby shrieked with terror, Odysseus made straight for the child, and just before the ill-matched livestock were about to crush Telemachus under their hooves, he steered the plow away. Odysseus’s reaction had been my cousin’s greatest relief, but also her greatest sorrow, for it meant that her clever husband had been overmatched by Palamedes and had no choice but to abide by the Oath of Tyndareus. His ruse revealed, Odysseus then attempted—unsuccessfully—to weasel out of his pledge by reasoning with Agamemnon, holding up a mirror to the High King’s motive for war and arguing that if the Achaean chieftains abandoned their homes to plunder Ilios, their own cities would thus be ripe for the taking while they were miles away in Anatolia.
“Your lust has robbed me of my beloved,” Penelope said, “and my son will grow to manhood never having known his father. How many other men will you rip from the arms of their wives, from the eager grasp of their children, from the handles of their plows, from their forges, and from their cobblers’ benches?”
Although I loved Pe
nelope, I was less sorry for her than might have been expected. I respected Odysseus’s mental agility and knew that he was a man to be feared because of it. But had he not devised the Oath of Tyndareus, which effectively sealed our individual and collective doom? Had there not been such a pledge, I might not have been married off to Menelaus. Had there not been such a pledge, Agamemnon would have had a far more difficult time convincing the leading Achaean chieftains to commit themselves and their subjects to a protracted war with Troy. At whose feet then, should the guilt for “widowmaking” be laid? I was prepared to accept my share of the blame, but it was not mine alone.
This was only the first taste I was to have of the wrath of my own countrywomen. Naturally it stung, but Penelope’s words were doubly painful because she was my kin: a friend from childhood who became a woman I admired, if not envied, for the abiding and passionate love she shared with her husband. Widowmaker. The word tasted bitter and metallic, as if I had laid a knife across my tongue. It clutched at my heart like the talons of a hawk.
According to Troyan spies, the Achaeans continued to ply their trickery in their efforts to strengthen the Greek forces. Agamemnon claimed that it had been foretold that he could not conquer Ilios without the aid of the young Achilles and his father Peleus’s elite army of Myrmidons. To that end, he had sent the crafty Odysseus to the kingdom of Lycomedes in Skyros. The Ithacan’s errand was to smoke out the valiant youth who had been squirreled away on the rocky island by his mother Thetis, disguised there among the old king’s fifty daughters, one of whom had secretly become Achilles’s lover and had borne him a son, Neoptolemus. Like Hecuba, the pregnant Thetis had also experienced a prophetic dream: Her son would end up either dying gloriously in battle, or, if he never went to war, would enjoy old age in the bosom of his family. Thus warned, Thetis sought to protect her boy from the clash of bronze and the pungent stench of winedark blood and rotting flesh. Because his mother was said to be a sea nymph, the young Achilles and I shared a demimortality. I felt another unusual connection to the youth, although we had never met. In the now-famous dream of Paris Alexandros, it was Achilles’s parents’ wedding feast that Eris had interrupted with the golden apple. In the story, Eris’s appearance had led to the Great Judgment of Paris Alexandros, which led to my union with the Troyan prince.
And now Paris Alexandros and I had a son of our own: little Idaeus, as affectionate as his father. Like Thetis, I despaired of him ever going to war. No mother rejoices in her son’s thirst to die young. I had already lost my other boys to the rigorous Spartan military training program. Now it seemed that my destiny was to bring the Achaean warriors to Anatolian shores. Would my newborn babe one day be called to fight against my old countrymen—and perhaps his half brothers—to defend his family and his own homeland?
A personal attack on family honor had escalated into an international crisis. Several of the chieftains were bound by the Oath of Tyndareus because they had sworn it personally; but their soldiers were held by no such pledge and needed to be convinced to leave their homes, their fields and farms, and their families to sail to distant shores for the sake of one man’s marital honor. Agamemnon’s strategy, wrote Penelope, was to convince the common man that if the home of the powerful King of Sparta was not safe, and his hospitality so flagrantly breached by an honored houseguest, then no Achaean home was secure from such treachery; no wife’s fidelity nor daughter’s chastity could be taken for granted or guaranteed. To fight for Helen was to fight for all of the women of Achaea.
Recalling Theseus’s words—men do not go to war over a woman—I despaired of the High King’s manipulation of so many trusting and malleable souls. If I could not explain to Penelope, who was the most intelligent and rational woman I knew, that the misogynistic Agamemnon would never wage war for the sake of a woman, not one, not thousands, then how could I make the case to women who had even more cause to despise me?
According to the news we received from Achaea, it took nearly two years from the time I eloped with Paris Alexandros before the High King was able to amass his coalition. Odysseus and Achilles—who had never even sworn the Oath of Tyndareus, having been a mere boy at the time and far too young to have been my suitor—had both been tricked into going to war. A thousand ships, which meant fifty thousand men to man their oars, were now assembled on the mainland at Aulis on the Euboean Strait, but already there was dissension within the ranks. The chieftains who were among the first to join their own forces with those of Agamemnon’s had been waiting many months for him to decide that he had amassed enough soldiers to successfully sack Troy. In the meantime, there was no one left at home to till their fields and tend their flocks; and their families, abandoned indefinitely by men who had never even left Achaean shores, were starving and suffering. The men themselves were going hungry in their makeshift tents in Aulis. Threatening mutiny, they demanded that Agamemnon slaughter the hundred bulls he had intended to sacrifice as a hecatomb to the gods for a safe and successful voyage to Ilios, using the meat to fill their groaning bellies instead.
Fearing rebellion, the High King reluctantly capitulated. The men were fed and the wind kicked up—a sure sign that warriors’ stomachs merited the precedence over the Olympians—but no sooner had they sailed through the Euboean Strait than a contrary high wind, a norther, blew them back to port. Once more, they laid in wait for favorable conditions.
And then . . . when we finally received word that the Argive host was again ready to sail . . . the winds off Aulis became uncooperative and died.
Apparently, the High King was placing great store in the prognostications of a man named Kalchas, a Troyan priest gifted in augury. Kalchas had been sent by Priam as a trustworthy emissary on a peacemaking mission but had defected from his errand and elected to serve Agamemnon instead. After seeing a snake devour a mother bird and her eight nestlings, Kalchas foresaw a nine-year siege outside the walls of Troy. In the tenth year, he claimed, the city would finally fall. Agamemnon sought to keep this news from his army. Should they learn that the quick skirmish they had expected would drag on for a decade, their chieftains would surely seek to withdraw before hoisting a single sail.
No wind. A reason for every man, woman, and child in Ilios to exhale. Depending on one’s belief, either time or the gods were truly on the Troyan side of the imminent conflict.
And then . . . the most devastating news of all.
Clytemnestra, with whom I had not communicated since I’d left Sparta, sent a message through a Troyan silver trader she encountered in Aulis. She laid the lengthwise warp of her missive and with each sentence wove a crosswise strand of the weft until the entire hideous picture was before me: The climate at Aulis was stagnant, the winds absent, and the soldiers, many of whom had been encamped on the beaches for several moons waiting for the order to sail, were impatient and demoralized.
Agamemnon, bolstered by yet another vision from Kalchas—prophecies that Clytemnestra believed were paid for by her husband—claimed the gods had told him that the only way to awaken the winds and ensure a victory in Ilios was for him to make the ultimate personal sacrifice as High King and leader of the Achaean armada.
Sharing his evil secret with no one, not even Menelaus, Agamemnon summoned Iphigenia to Aulis on the pretext of marrying her off to young Achilles, the Greeks’ most promising warrior. My sister could not comprehend why her husband did not want her to be present for this prestigious union and contrived to accompany Iphigenia to Aulis nonetheless.
The story was becoming darker. Each word of Clytemnestra’s tasted more bitter than the last.
Achilles, too, knew nothing of Agamemnon’s plans, other than that he was to be the bridegroom to the eldest princess of Mycenae. According to Clytemnestra, he resented the High King’s orchestration of his future. Achilles’s sword thirsted to spill rivers of Trojan blood because, as his mother foretold, his martial prowess would be immortalized by the bards; he did not fight for the sake of Agamemnon’s overweening greed.
&nbs
p; Thus, were the colors laid by Clytemnestra.
“She is gone!” were her next words. “My Iphigenia! How soon she went from blushing and expectant bride to courageous victim, baring her breast according to custom so that the blow would be clean. Her flawless beauty stunned the soldiers into silence. I wept and tore my hair as a woman already in the throes of mourning. Several times I threw myself between them and tried to stop the brute, but Agamemnon shoved me to the ground as though I were no better than one of his bandy-legged serving girls.
“ ‘Don’t butcher my baby for Helen’s sake,’ I pleaded. ‘Perhaps the whore doesn’t want to come home!’
“ ‘This pains me more than it could ever injure you,’ he swore, and knocked me once more onto the dusty earth.
“ ‘And if Menelaus is as brutal as you are, I wouldn’t blame her!’ I spat, ignoring his feeble disclaimer.
“Agamemnon himself wielded the knife that made the fatal incision across Iphigenia’s milk-white throat. Her blood, as bright as berries, drenched her yellow bridal dress and speckled my body and my garments. The blood of the only child I ever loved was on my hands as well as his. My virginal daughter, slaughtered on the altar like an animal! For the sake of favorable winds. For Athena and Poseidon the earth-shaker and Zeus who, while created in man’s image, have no love for humankind. For the sake of my faithless whore of a sister, no paragon of female perfection in my eyes, but merely another bastard child of Zeus who could not keep her legs together and whose lust has brought shame and ruin on our house and an unnatural death to my beloved Iphigenia!”
Iphigenia? Her Iphigenia? My precious, beautiful daughter was no more, cut down like a yearling upon the altar! With the “sacrifice” of Iphigenia, the war between Achaea and Ilios had already begun, and the first blood to be shed was that of a child. My child, though unbeknownst to Agamemnon, who believed he had willingly butchered the first fruit of his own repellent loins in exchange for victory. Villains will bedeck their lies in the finery of clever words, but the stench of their rotten deeds will soon destroy their silken dressing, revealing the ugly truth beneath. Still, Agamemnon’s self-serving and deliberate deceit of his troops did not alter the cold fact of death: Iphigenia, by his hand, now dwelled in Hades.