by Byrne Fone
It is late at night. I awake and think I hear voices calling me, coming from the sea. I rise and slip into a thin garment—it is summer now and the nights are rich and redolent with the aroma of myrtle, thyme and honey. I go to the cliff even as the full moon is poised to rise out of the sea and begin its voyage across the heavens. The sea washes upon the shore far below; steady and inviting, like the croon a mother makes to a child half asleep. It calms me; I look at the silver waters and think how they can wash away all pain and memory, and make all things pure. Night birds wheel across the sky, softly adding their own call to the voices; bats flit in and out of the trees. I stand upon the cliff side and the earth is moist and warm to my bare feet. I dig my toes into the sweet grass and the smell of crushed mint rises about me.
I slowly lower myself to sit upon the outcropping of rock to which I have come for years now, when I need to hear the voice of god. It was here that I first felt his power; it was here that I first knew that I could see beyond time and into hearts. It has been long now, though, since I could see so freely. My visions now come in the darkness, born out of the smoke of incense. But tonight I think: “I will wait here. The god will speak.”
In the night the voices, indistinct but familiar, more felt than heard, give me strength. Is it my father I hear? Are these the voices of all who have gone before, the voices of innocents and the dead or the voices of men and women yet unborn? I do not know. But like the chant of priests at some great temple ceremony, stately, royal, mysterious, the voices swirl around me and in me and through me, and as the sea too sends its never-ending throbbing music up to me high above on the cliff, I feel it come. The god is here.
Pain drains away; stiff joints become supple. I rise from my seat, stand up. I am tall and young again. Heart pounding, my blood coursing through my body, I feel as if I am bathed in fire and light. Power flows through me from the earth and sea and sky, and across time and years I see the wine dark sea roll in and out. I see nations and hear the endless litany of life and death, of birth and creation, of war and chaos, women raped and men butchered, cities fallen and temples ruined, their names only surviving as legend on the tongues of men. I see Poseidon, shaker of the earth, rise in rage from the sea and stamp his foot upon the foundations of the earth: cities tremble, waves rise higher than mountains. Mycaene is in ruins. Corinth falls. In island Crete, great Minos seated on his throne in state, surrounded by the pomp of court and majesty, goes pale as the first shock brings down painted columns all around him, and the world goes dark as the bull god roars his rage. Across the islands of the sea my gaze roams: to Pylos, and Sparta, and Arcadia, and to high Olympus itself. I think that I see the gods look out as the heavens quake, and even they shudder at what they see. Darkness settles like a shroud upon the earth, and I hear the sobs of children echo in the mountains, in the empty streets of fallen cities, and across the desolate and barren plains.
Then it fades. I see the moon again. Bats still fly overhead, squeaking as they pursue their evening meal. I again smell the myrtle and the thyme. I look at my hands; they are old once more. My knees are stiff again. But my head is clear and my heart is light. There is one voice only now, speaking in unison with the sea. Still partially wrapped in the shifting images of things that were and things that are yet to come, I look out across the vast expanse of the ocean. I raise my arms in greeting to the rising moon. The world and time are all before me. I take a step to where the cliff edge etches a sharp line against the moon-dappled sea far below. It is the boundary between my old lost world and the new one yet to come. It is a frontier open at last for me to cross. Below me the sea glitters, an undulating sheet of silver, bright with moonbeams. Like a beckoning pathway it stretches out to the distant mountains and to all the lands of men and nations. I stand on the edge of the world. I hear my father call. All I need to do is take a step into the air, into the clouds, into glory.
Afterword: The Reality of Troy
For Homer, Troy was no myth and the war that destroyed it was real, an event that resonated down the ages from the time that Troy’s walls were razed by Agamemnon to Homer’s own, some four hundred years after the time that most in the ancient world believed that Troy fell. Nor did ancient authors doubt the historicity of Troy and the war that destroyed it. The Greek historian Herodotus assigned the date of Troy’s fall to about 1250 BCE. Eratosthenes of Alexandria believed it to be about 1185, and a marble tablet called the Parian Marble, discovered on the Greek island of Paros, dated the fall of the city precisely to June 5, 1209 BCE. From Thucidydes, writing in the fifth century BCE to Josephus writing in the First century AD, Homer’s story was accepted as an accurate depiction of a real place and of real events. Indeed age after age has believed the story of Troy, and so over two millennia, in art, in music, and in literature, and lately in film and in shreds of popular culture, Troy and the terrible war that engulfed it and the names that made it an all-too human tale, has remained a story that is central to our understanding of those times and through them of ours.
Homer probably wrote the Iliad about 850BCE. In it he—or they, for some still claim that “Homer” is a collective name for several poets—tells the story of the last days of the ten year war that ended with the fall of Troy to a coalition of nations led by Agamemon, King of Mycenae, the most powerful of all the kings of the ancient Greek world. Coming from dozens of tribes, nations, petty fiefdoms and kingdoms all around the Aegean Sea--on mainlaind Greece, on the shores of Asia Minor to the east, north to Thrace and Macedonia and south to Crete and variously called Acheaens, Argives and Danaans by Homer--for the words “Greek” and “Greece” were not used by him--this huge coalition sailed, Homer claims, in more than a thousand ships to the shores of the Troad and the sacred city of Troy. Their mission was to bring back Helen, wife of his brother Menelaus of Sparta, who had been abducted by Paris, Prince of Troy, son of Priam, Troy’s king.
Homer’s story begins only a few weeks before the end of the war. In twenty-four books he describes the plague that nearly decimates the Achaean army, brought down upon them by the arrogance of Agamemnon, the wrath of Achilles that arises from a dispute between him and Agamemon which in turn led to a crippling stalemate in the war. But once the deadlock is broken, there follows--told in excruciatingly gory detail—descriptions of bloody battles during which Patroclus, Achilles’ special friend—and as ancient authors believed, his lover and companion--is killed by Hector, heir to the throne of Troy, who then is slain by Achilles. There follows the agonizing funeral of Patroclus during which Achilles vents his grief. Finally, Hector’s body is returned to Priam by Achilles. For the end of the story—the death of Achilles, the wooden horse, the fall of the city, the death of Priam, the abduction of Hecabe, Andromache, and Kassandra, and the aftermath of the war including, primarily, Odysseus’ twenty years of wandering, one must turn to Homer’s Odyssey.
For the ancients, Troy was a sacred city. Its light and sanctity shone across the ancient world, and its reputation for unrivalled riches, military power, and as huge and impregnable was a staple of ancient descriptions of it. Homer describes it as “holy” and a “well-walled” city with four “lofty gates,” “fine towers,” one of which was the “great tower of Ilios,” and “wide streets.” He describes its huge royal palace with fifty chambers for the king’s fifty sons. Modern research has confirmed that it stood in Asia Minor in modern-day Anatolia near the seacoast of northwest Turkey and southwest of the Dardenelles, and thus at a crossroads of major trading routes upon which it could send a large variety of goods and receive riches from the entire Agean and beyond. Thus, whether or not Helen’s abduction was a fact and sufficient cause for an invasion, Troy’s power, size and wealth was enough to tempt the Achaean forces to invade and destroy it so as to seize its riches and remove it forever as both a military and commercial threat.
The Iliad and the Odyssey, which are among the oldest texts of ancient literature to survive intact into modern times, were for the Greeks--the descendants o
f Homer’s Achaeans—virtually sacred texts. The Greeks believed them to tell the real history of their race. They read them to learn about war and its conduct, and found in Homer’s epic codes of conduct for the ideal hero and cautionary tales about greed, impiety, cowardice, and deceit. They learned there too about the power and unpredictability of their gods, and the death, whether terrible or glorious, that must eventually come to all men.
So powerful and real was Troy’s legend to the ancient world that the city became a reverenced site for visitation. Xerxes, the Persian king, according to Herodotus, visited there in 480 BCE when crossing the Hellespont, and sacrificed to Athena. Alexander, who carried with him everywhere a copy of the Iliad, and who admired Achilles as a paragon of heroism, visited the city in 330 BCE and dedicated his armor to Athena and laid a wreath at Achilles’ tomb, famously declaiming “Oh fortunate youth, to have found Homer as the herald of your glory.” But three hundred years later, when Julius Caesar visited the city, there was little left to see. The small city that stood there, he must have thought, could not have been the glorious city of Homer’s tale and the city from which Aeneas set sail to found Rome. Caesar toyed with the idea of rebuilding it and the Emperor Constantine imagined his new capital as rising on the site of old Troy. The Emperor Julian, who so detested the Christianity that Constantine brought to the Roman Empire that he was called the Apostate because of his rejection of the faith and his attempt to revive the worship of the old gods, was pleased to discover upon his visit to the remains of Troy in AD 355 that the shrine of Hector and the Tomb of Achilles were intact and that before their altars fires of sacrifice still burned to show that the memory of Troy had survived even after a thousand years.
That memory has indeed survived intact and untarnished down the ages. From the fall of Rome to the Italian renaissance, into the sixteenth century and until the nineteenth, the “matter of Troy” as medieval writers called it, provides the subject for a huge body of literature and images in the visual arts. From Virgil’s Latin Aeneid to Saxon writers of the middle ages and to romances of the twelfth century like the Roman de Troie, to Chaucer’s Troylus and Criseyde, through Chapman’s translation of the Iliad in 1598, to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and to Alexander Pope’s great verse translation in the 18th century, the story lived on. Like the ancient Greeks, British Victorian students found in the Iliad inspiration that helped them found an empire, and even now, American movie stars don armor to become Achilles.
Even as the myth survived, the remains of the city disappeared beneath the shifting soil of two millennia. Some came to think that Troy was only a myth and that the city and the war were a figment of the imagination of a poet whose identity was itself in doubt. The story of how that perception has changed over the last century parallels the rise of archeology as a branch of exact and rigorous science. The names and work of a dozen explorers—some dreamers, some careful scientists, some part charlatans, figure in the resurrection of Troy. So exhaustive has been the research to unearth this ancient city that it has now been proven that Homer’s account is a remarkably accurate portrayal of the physical location of the city and there is now little doubt that Troy was real, a great city that war destroyed.
From both the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as from the legends of Greece I have taken the events that I recount in the voice of the women over whom the war was fought and to whom I give a voice in this book. The first of them Chryseis, daughter of the Trojan priest Chryses appears in only a few lines in the text of the Iliad. But her capture by Achilles first leads to the devastating plague brought upon the Greeks because Agememnon refuses to return her to her father and then to the disastrous argument between the Agamemnon and Achilles that nearly destroys the Greeks battle plan. Briseis, another captive of Achilles, is also a minor player in the Iliad, but a major one in my story. Both allow me to see the Greek side of the battle through the eyes of captive Trojan women. From withion the besiged city of Troy, Hecabe, Queen of Troy, Andromache, Hector’s wife, and Kassandra, Hecabe’s and Priam’s daughter, whose prophecies of the terrible end of the city no will believe, look from their walls and see the terrible threat that will destroy them. And of course Helen, the pawn over whom the war is fought and because of whom the thousand ships were launched, occupies both worlds—at once that of Greece from whence she came and Troy where she waits to to see who will win her. Homer tells his story from the viewpoint of the omniscient author. I narrate this book--not precisely a re-telling but a re-imagining of the Iliad-- in the first person voice of those women of Troy who were buffeted, torn, puzzled and in some cases destroyed by the unexpected and inexplicable complications of this violent clash of cultures that has come down to us as a dreadful exemplar of the horrors of war. Thus my title: Trojan Women
Byrne Fone is the author of the three novels in the Trojan Trilogy (Achilles: A Love Story, Trojan Women, and War Stories). His other works include an architectural and historical study, Historic Hudson: An Architectural Portrait, and several books in Gay Studies including A Road to Stonewall, Homophobia: A History, and Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. He is editor of The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the City University of New York. He lives in France.