by Emily Hauser
‘The nature of song,’ he said, reaching into the shadows for his pouch, which lay beside him, ‘as of life: it is but fleeting.’
It is but fleeting …
Yet if only there were a way of capturing it.
And then, suddenly, it came to me. He had straightened and was turning aside, the lyre slung over his shoulder, when I placed a hand on his arm. ‘Wait.’
I stood, my breath coming fast. ‘Have you ever considered …’ I took a breath, then started again. ‘Have you ever written them?’
A crease appeared between his brows. ‘Written what?’
‘Your songs!’
The crease deepened. ‘I am a singer, my lady. I do not write. My task is to sing the lays of legends past and the stories of our ancestors, to bring pleasure to those who listen. The scratching of the stylus,’ he said, making as if to push past me towards the lords, gathered near the entrance to the tent, ‘is for scribes, for the records of palaces, not the deeds of heroes. Each song is different from the next, for a new audience, a new occasion. They cannot be set down, like a list of bushels of wheat.’
‘But it need not be so!’ I barred his way, willing him to listen to me. ‘I am trained in the art of writing for the recording of herbs. Here.’ I turned, looking around me for something on which to write. When nothing presented itself, I bent to the stool he had been sitting on, untied my stylus from my girdle and scratched there a few words, in a stilted script.
‘And so,’ I read aloud, ‘they buried Hector; and then came the Amazon, the daughter of Ares, the great-hearted man-slayer …’
I looked at him, the words hanging on the air, waiting for him to complete them.
His expression was unreadable – between suspicion and disbelief. ‘The words I sang to you – they are written there, for all to read?’
I nodded, and took his hand in mine, feeling the imprint of the lyre-strings on his fingers, tracing them over the lines scratched into the wood.
‘Young man – I do not even know your name,’ I laughed. ‘I beg of you …’ I looked at him more solemnly, the lamplight casting his face and milky eyes in a strange glow. ‘You are as grieved as I at the fate of the Amazon Hippolyta. I am the daughter of an Amazon, and I knew the Amazon queen once, many years ago. You are a bard, and I a scribe. Together we may make a story, a tale of heroes that will be told down the generations. Will you sing your lament, so that I may write it? So that I may take it back to Greece with me and share your song with my people?’ I saw him waver, and added, ‘So that the tale of the Amazon queen and the Trojans who fought by her side will never die?’
He hesitated. ‘Song – in writing?’
‘Our words,’ I said. ‘Only our words.’
And so it was that, several days later, on the shores of Troy in the camp of the Greeks, a Trojan bard and a daughter of Greece sat together on the sand, the sea-foam lapping at their feet, writing the tale of the Trojan War and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons.
She would be immortal after all.
Epilogue
Calliope leans back with a smile, wondering. What comes next in Hippolyta’s tale? What comes after immortality?
She pauses, still watching the bard on the Trojan shore, vaguely aware of the humming of the cicadas beyond the colonnade and the scent of the pines on the autumn breeze. Then she gets to her feet and moves away from the portico, her robes sweeping the marble floor.
At that moment a couple runs into the Hall of the Fates, the door clattering behind them, laughing and breathless. They are hanging on each other’s arms, her hair disordered and her robe slipping from her shoulder, his wreath lopsided on his head from when he bent to kiss her, for all the world like a young couple newly wed.
Calliope smiles and walks across the hall to welcome them. ‘You seem to have resolved your differences, then.’
Hera laughs and tilts her face up to Zeus, who plants a kiss full on her mouth. ‘What, that?’ she asks, giggling. ‘Oh, we made up ages ago, didn’t we, Zeus?’
He chuckles and pulls her closer to him. ‘Around the time you seduced me on the slopes of Mount Ida to get Achilles back into the war, I’d say.’
She slaps his chest. ‘You know that wasn’t the only reason.’
‘I didn’t say I was complaining.’ He turns aside to Calliope and says, in a mock whisper, ‘She’s been in such a good mood since Hector’s death that we’ve barely had time to watch the war.’
Hera nudges him in the ribs. ‘Zeus!’
‘So,’ Zeus says, striding over to the colonnade where Calliope was seated a few moments earlier, ‘how is the epic coming along?’
The vault of the sky is blue, endless blue, as the three gods stand at the colonnade’s edge, the rock of Olympus dropping away beneath them, high as eagles perched in their nest, gazing out towards Troy. Calliope shrugs her shoulders. ‘You’ll have to ask the bards. Although,’ her glance shifts towards the Greek camp, ‘it may not be they who make the stories for much longer.’
As she watches, she notices a ship ploughing the sea from the Trojan harbour, heading west through the jaws of the Hellespont. Admete returns, then, to Tiryns. It was the ending Calliope had hoped for. A smile creeps across her face, and hope, an unquenchable joy, as she thinks of the bard plucking the song to the hollow lyre and Admete inscribing it on her tablets, now stored in the ship’s hold and winging their way back to Greece. Her imagination stretches to the years to come: scribes brushing on papyrus, copyists aching over their manuscripts in the guttering candlelight, and ink-fingered printers setting the type as they send the poems further and further over the land of the mortals, across time even, a never-ending song of glory to the gods …
‘An epic of Hercules,’ Hera says, her mouth twisting in distaste. ‘I cannot say I am overjoyed.’
‘Oh, no.’ Calliope stretches out a hand to reassure her. ‘Not Hercules – did I not tell you?’
‘Not Hercules?’ Hera asks. ‘What do you mean?’
Calliope shakes her head. ‘I thought it would be Hercules. But it turned out it was Hippolyta it was meant for, after all.’
Hera gleams a smile at her. ‘Well – I’m glad to hear it.’
The couple wander off, arm in arm, to stroll around the garden of the Muses and – perhaps – to find one of its more private corners. Calliope stands alone a little longer, her hands clasped behind her back. How strange, she thinks, that she stood here, fifteen years ago – or was it a day? – at the dawn of the age of heroes, thinking she would take refuge from Hera in the forests of the earth’s edge, that she would wait until the moment was right to tell the tale of Hercules. And in the end it was Hippolyta to whom she had given the apple of gold, disguising herself as a Trojan herald on the morning of that fateful battle. Hippolyta, whose name would go down the ages, in the words of Admete.
Her eyes are caught by a spiral of blue smoke curling to heaven from Troy. Hippolyta’s burial, of course. The Trojans have built a funeral pyre outside the city walls. The queen is laid upon it, still wearing her battle-armour but helmetless now, her dark hair plaited over one shoulder, her hands resting on her chest holding the hilt of her sword, her eyes closed as if in sleep. Golden shields, ashwood spears, vases of beaten silver – all are placed around her, in tribute to her royal birth. But they do not know the greatest treasure of all, kept in the pouch that still hangs at Hippolyta’s belt.
Calliope lets out a sigh and closes her eyes, inhaling the scent of perfumed oil and incense from the flames as they lick higher. And as she turns away, with a strange hollowness in her chest and an ache in her throat, unable to watch more, she thinks that at least, at the very least, she can ensure that mortals all over the dark-soiled earth will tell the tales of the immortal heroes through the ages …
… and also, the heroines.
Author’s Note
This book differs from the first two in the Golden Apple trilogy, For the Most Beautiful and For the Winner, in that it has its origins in an epic poem wh
ich has not survived to the present day. Many people are not aware that the two most famous archaic Greek epics – the Iliad, the tale of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus’ return – were not, in fact, the only epics circulating at the time. The Iliad and the Odyssey were two of many epic poems, known collectively as the Epic Cycle, which are now lost to us. We know some of their titles, and a little of their subject matter, from a late Roman scholar known as Proclus who recorded the titles and a brief summary for us.
Among these is the Aethiopis, the ‘sequel’ to Homer’s Iliad and supposedly composed by Arctinus of Miletus. Picking up from the end of the Iliad with Hector’s burial, Proclus tells us that it began by describing how ‘the Amazon Penthesilea, daughter of Ares, arrives to fight as an ally with the Trojans … And Achilles kills her as she excels in the fight, and the Trojans bury her’.fn1 Even more suggestively, one eleventh-century CE manuscript of Homer’s Iliad, now held at the British Library, contains a comment written in the margins suggesting that the first line of the Aethiopis – the arrival of the Amazons at Troy – actually continued directly after the last of the Iliad:fn2
And so they buried Hector; and then came the Amazon, the daughter of Ares, the great-hearted man-slayer …fn3
This idea of continuation, a sort of ‘call-and-response’ between the epics of archaic Greece, points to another important feature of early Greek epic in which I am particularly interested: orality. My research as a classicist focuses in part on the history of the early Greek epics – the recent discovery of features of oral tale-telling embedded in the Homeric poems, pointing to a long history of retelling and re-performance by singing bards, long before they were written down.
This, then, suggests a much more complicated picture of archaic Greek epic than that to which most of us are accustomed. Instead of thinking of the two mammoth (and fixed) Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, we need instead to think of a complex interweaving of spoken stories, some picking up from where the others left off, exchanging ideas, phrases, tropes and motifs, all told orally over many generations until – at some point – two of the tales were recorded in writing and survived for us to read.
So, this book is as much a search for a lost epic as anything else. Rather than following (and responding to) a literary text, it is based on a conglomeration of different myths from all sorts of sources, from the poems of Homer in the eighth century BCE, to the retelling of the story of Penthesilea by Quintus of Smyrna (late fourth century CE), to the scholarship of the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes in the twelfth century CE, to recent discoveries of Scythian graves in modern-day Ukraine and Russia – all in an attempt to re-envisage the lost epics of archaic Greece, and the Aethiopis in particular, the opening line of which has been so tantalizingly preserved for us.
As such, given the huge variety of the sources drawn on here and their likely general unfamiliarity, I will go into greater length here to describe the historical background of For the Immortal. (See also Suggestions for Further Reading.)
To begin with the Amazons. From a Greek perspective (and, as a classicist, this is where I always begin), the Amazons first appear in Greek literature in Homer’s Iliad, where they are described as antianeirai – a difficult word, which (depending on your interpretative slant) can mean either ‘opponents of men’ or ‘equivalents of men’. The Amazons continue to appear in Greek history, myth and art from then on, as a kind of counterfactual to the Greeks – an all-female, martial, ‘barbaric’ society in counterpoint to which Greek men could define themselves. One of our most important literary sources is the Greek historian Herodotus (writing in the fifth century BCE), who devotes a section of his Histories to an ethnography of the Scythians; Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Justin and Orosius all provide additional helpful accounts.fn4 The Greeks envisaged the Amazons as a band of women fighters, living at the mythical eastern edge of the world, who rode on horseback and fought with bows and arrows. They were said to live without men, and (so it was said) had sex purely for the purposes of procreation, exposing any male children to die. Amazons also appear on vase paintings in archaic and classical Greece, depicted in their trademark outfit of patterned trousers, tunic and felt cap.
Throughout these Greek accounts, the stories of three Amazon queens – and sisters – emerge particularly vividly, each focused around their interactions with a different Greek hero. Their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, and Penthesilea. Hippolyta was said to be queen of the Amazons, and it was her war-belt that Hercules was sent to claim as one of his labours. Antiope, her sister, was captured by Theseus, king of Athens, during Hercules’ raid on the Amazon camp and was taken to Athens, to be rescued by the Amazons in a battle that formed one of the early myths of the city. And Penthesilea led the Amazon troops to Troy against the Greeks, and was struck and killed by Achilles, who – so it was said – fell in love with her at the moment their eyes met. (A later Byzantine tradition, which I have followed here, has Achilles and Penthesilea meeting before the Trojan War and having a son together, Cayster.)
As with Briseis and Chryseis in the post-Homeric tradition, however, their names were often confused. To give the most well-known example, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/6) has Hippolyta, instead of Antiope, as Theseus’ wife.fn5 Even in antiquity, however, there was confusion over the names and identities of the Amazon sisters. The historian Plutarch cites Simonides and Clidemus, who apparently named Hippolyta as Theseus’ wife; the Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes is emphatic in asserting that it was Antiope, not Hippolyta, who was stolen by Theseus. To me, this is a signal of not only the importance, but also the flexibility and interpenetrability of these myths – and led me to merge the figures of the three sisters into one, Hippolyta, who, through Shakespeare, became the best-known Amazon in the post-classical tradition. The three sections of the novel – Amazon, Greek and Immortal – can thus also be read as the stories of the three Amazon sisters: Hippolyta in Amazon; Antiope in Greek; and Penthesilea in Immortal.
So much for the literary tradition of the Amazons. But I was also keen to make my Amazons as historically accurate as possible, and that meant delving into the archaeological evidence. Adrienne Mayor’s outstanding book, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), was my constant companion and guide in this respect, as was the catalogue to the British Museum’s recent acclaimed Scythians exhibition (Hippolyta’s war-belt, as well as other artefacts, are based on Scythian finds displayed there). Mayor describes how recent archaeological excavations across the Eurasian steppe have shed light on ancient cultures that seem to correspond to the Amazons. Skeletons have been excavated from kurgans (burial mounds) across the steppes, buried with weapons, armour, and sometimes even horses – and analysis with modern bio-archaeological techniques has demonstrated that, in Mayor’s words, ‘armed females represent as many as 37 percent of the burials’ (Mayor 2014: 63). This is extraordinary evidence of a nomadic, horse-riding culture to the north and east of the Black Sea where women could fight as well as men – and provides an insight into both the truths and the prejudices revealed by the Greek myth of the Amazons. My depiction of the world of the Amazons in this book is as close to the world of the Scythian nomadic tribes discovered in archaeological excavations and described in Mayor as I could make it, combined with the ethnographic descriptions of the Scythians in Herodotus: from the armour and weapons they used, to the clothes they wore, the food they ate, their customs, religion, language and names. (For more information on the Amazons’ names, see the Glossary of Characters.)
A brief word on the Scythian language. The symbols that precede Hippolyta’s scenes in this book are something of an anachronism as there is no evidence for a written Scythian language. The few words we do know – and which are included in this book – come mostly from Herodotus, quoted and transliterated in Greek, from which we can assume that Scythian was an ancient north Iranian language. (A usef
ul example is Herodotus’ explication of the word oiorpata, used here as a battle-cry: ‘the Scythians call the Amazons Oiorpata, which could be translated in Greek as “man-killers”; for oior means “man” and pata “to kill”’, Hdt. 4.110.) In a nod to this heritage, I have used the cuneiform script of old Persian – one of two attested Old Iranian languages to have left inscriptional evidence, though from a much later period than the Bronze Age treated in this book – to transliterate Hippolyta’s name (the cuneiform literally reads ha-i-pa-la-u-ta-a, which is closest to the Greek Hippoluté). Throughout the novel I have kept both Greek and Scythian terms where both are attested: thus, for example, Hippolyta calls the Scythians Saka, a word attested in the Persian Behistun Inscription, while Admete uses the Greek Scythian or Skythos. You will find both terms included in the Glossary of Characters and Places. On the subject of names, readers will notice that I have chosen to use the Latinized version of Hercules’ name (Greek: Herakles) (as well as the patronymic Alcides, which Apollodorus tells us was Hercules’ name before he completed his labours). This is consistent with the spellings I have used elsewhere in the trilogy – for example, Latin Achilles instead of Greek Achilleus, Latin Hecuba instead of Greek Hekabe and so on.
As for Admete and the voyage for the war-belt of Hippolyta: the evidence for Admete’s request for the war-belt and her accompaniment of Hercules come from two different sources, the first or second century CE mythographer Apollodorus, and the Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes, who suggests that ‘Admete, daughter of Eurystheus, wanted to have Hippolyta’s war-belt; and she voyaged in a ship with Hercules, Theseus and the rest’ to retrieve it. The additional story of Admete’s mother as an Amazon is my invention, though suggested to me by the record of Eurystheus’ wife’s name as Antimache (‘fighter-against’), an attested Amazon name. The ancient sources claim that Admete wanted the war-belt as a source of power – but this seemed to me a typically ‘masculine’ interpretation. When I delved into the myth, the theme of motherhood clearly resonates around the war-belt, which was a gift from Hippolyta’s mother – and thus a symbol both of motherhood, lineage/heredity, and the paradox (from a Greek point of view) of a female fighter. It was from this starting-point that I began to imagine Admete’s search for her mother and her identity as an Amazon, and a woman, within a very male world.