by Stephen Fry
‘Left without saying goodbye,’ he told Odysseus. ‘Not to worry. This war will be over soon enough. A little reflection and she’ll understand that I had no choice. Besides, the goddess will have spirited Iphigenia back home anyway. She’ll be there at the palace to welcome them when they return. Of course she will. Hope your ships are all seaworthy and ready, Odysseus. We sail at dawn tomorrow. Ho for Troy!’
‘Ho for Troy,’ echoed Odysseus. Drily.
THE ACHAEANS
And so the largest fleet the world had seen since time began sailed east across the northern Aegean towards the Troad.
In the second book of the Iliad, in a section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’, Homer takes 266 lines to itemize this great armada. In flowing dactylic hexameters – the metrical line of twelve to seventeen syllables – that he used for his verse, he tells us where the ships came from and who led them. Over the centuries, classicists and historians have delighted in analysing this list, comparing it to other sources and weighing the likelihood of each penteconter truly being able to hold up to 120 men, as Homer seems to suggest.fn95 The arithmetic that emerges from Homer’s list gives us an estimation of the forces which puts the total number of ships at something around 1,190 and of fighting men a (more or less) generally agreed 142,320.fn96 Scholars apply archaeological, documentary and historical data (and a deal of guesswork) to make their own estimates.
In some ways all this is not unlike the ‘Great Game’ played by those avid Sherlockians who discuss Holmes and Watson as if they had been real men who truly lived and whose cases as related by Arthur Conan Doyle are to be treated as factual. A fun and fruitful game it is too. So let it be with the Trojan War. How much historical truth lies behind the story of the story I examine in the Appendix (page 335). But even if we believe a great deal of it really did take place, there is much inconsistency to deal with. I have already bellyached about chronology. In the main lines of the story as it has been handed down, there was at least an eight-year gap between the abduction of Helen and the final sailing of the fleet. This messes with the ages of some individuals in ways that I won’t even touch on here. Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have – as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped – thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.
It is enough for our purposes to know that the great Achaean expeditionary force consisted of an unprecedentedly vast fleet carrying warriors drawn from dozens of kingdoms and provinces under the command of the alliance’s High King, Agamemnon of Mycenae.
But before we breast the beaches of Ilium with that force, there is an adventure that befell the Greeks on their way there that we should know about. Although none of the chief actors could have realized at the time, it was an event significant enough to prove decisive to the final outcome of the entire campaign. The origins of this episode, like the origins of the great city and civilization to which the Greeks were headed, could be traced back to the greatest of Zeus’s mortal children – Heracles.
STRANDED
The Achaean fleet approached the opening of the Hellespont straits and laid up off the island of Tenedos.
‘Last stop before Troy,’ said Agamemnon. ‘Let the men have some fun before we begin the grim business of war.’
The Greeks swarmed over the island holding impromptu athletic competitions, hunting down game and searching out the island’s womenfolk.
Achilles was delighted to encounter a most attractive girl bathing in a pool. But before he could make a move on her, a man rushed out from the trees to confront him, brandishing a sword and roaring with anger.
‘Well, well,’ said Achilles. ‘And what have we here?’
‘You trespass on my kingdom, insolent boy.’
‘Your kingdom?’
‘I am TENES, son of Apollo and ruler of this island. Without the decency to ask permission, you savages chase wild animals across our countryside, tearing up our fields and vineyards, and now you dare to approach my sister. You will pay.’
Tenes stamped his feet into the ground and gave another roar. But to Achilles the roar was drowned out by an urgent whisper that echoed inside his head. The voice of his mother Thetis.
‘Achilles, beware! Kill no sons of Apollo, or Apollo will surely kill you.’
Whether she was truly speaking to Achilles, or whether he was recalling words of hers from long ago, he could not be sure. Thetis had been warning him of things ever since he could remember – dangers, revenges, traps, incitements, taboos, prohibitions, curses. All mothers were protective, he knew that. Thetis was unquestionably more protective than most. Perhaps she had once told him that those who kill the sons of gods could expect to be killed by those gods. It was the sort of thing she would say. Achilles was not afraid. He tamped the inner voice down. His hot blood was up. The sight of this self-important islander snarling and shaking his sword at him was intolerable.
A feint to the left, a dance to the right, a dart forward, a sharp twist of the wrist and Tenes’ sword was on the ground without the need for Achilles even to bring out a weapon of his own. One more sharp twist and Tenes’ neck was broken and his life extinguished. His sister screamed and ran away.
Meanwhile, a royal party headed by the Atreidesfn97 had left Tenedos for the smaller neighbouring island of Chryse. It was their intent to make a sacrifice there to Heracles, who had himself burned offerings to the gods on the island before his attack on Laomedon of Troy. They were being led to the very spot by one of Heracles’ most loyal followers, Philoctetes, son of King Poeas of Meliboea, who had been there with Heracles all those years ago.
Philoctetes had also been present at the moment of the great hero’s death. He had watched in helpless despair as corrosive poison from the shirt that once belonged to the vengeful centaur Nessus ate its way into Heracles’ flesh.fn98 In his agonized frenzy Heracles had uprooted trees for his own funeral pyre. When he begged his friends to set it alight they had all drawn back. Only Philoctetes had had the heart to do it. In gratitude the dying Heracles bequeathed him his bow and legendary arrows. Philoctetes, tears in his eyes, set a lighted torch to the pyre and watched Heracles’ huge and tormented soul leave his huge and tormented body.fn99
The bow had been given to the young Heracles, some say, by the archer god Apollo himself. But it was the arrows that really mattered. Heracles had dipped their tips in the venomous blood of the many-headed water dragon, the Lernaean Hydra. These lethal arrows had secured him victory in many subsequent encounters.fn100 But now, since his death – or rather, since his raising up to Olympian immortality – the bow and arrows were held in the fierce keeping of faithful Philoctetes, who had, in due course of time, numbered himself amongst the great press of noble suitors that gathered in Sparta for the hand of Helen. And so it was that Philoctetes, along with the others, had sworn the oath to defend the marriage and duly supplemented Agamemnon’s grand invasion force with his own seven ships.
Philoctetes’ contribution to the Greek cause appeared to end before it began, however. For in leading Agamemnon and the others to the site where he remembered Heracles making sacrifices all those years earlier, he had the ill luck to tread on a viper, which instantly struck out and buried its fangs in his foot. Within moments the flesh around the foot had swollen up and Philoctetes could barely walk. Diomedes helped him across the island to the boat which should have carried them all back to their ships, but by this time the wound was suppurating and giving off the most terrible stench. Odysseus whispered to Agamemnon and Menelaus that such an infection could not be cured and would risk spreading contagion through the ships. The Atreides decreed that Philoctetes should be left behind. They were considerate enough – considerate in their own estimation if not in that of the outraged Philoctetes – to agree that Chryse was too small and inhospitable for him.fn101 And so the hobbling, howling, outraged Philoctetes was abandoned on
the neighbouring isle of Lemnos which, at this time, was deserted.fn102 Command of his seven ships, with their complement of 350 oarsmen-archers, was given to Medon, a half-brother of Aias, Ajax the Lesser.
Philoctetes was to remain on Lemnos, suffering from the agony of a wound that refused to heal and living off the flesh of such birds and animals as he could shoot with his bow and venomous arrows, for the next ten years. Store his name somewhere in the back of your mind, for he will return.
‘Now,’ said Agamemnon, ‘let the signals be sent. The fleet strikes out at dawn tomorrow.’
The word spread from deck to deck across the ships.
‘Troy!’
‘Troy!’
‘Troy!’
Ilium
ARRIVAL
The topless towers of Troy gleam in the sun. From the city’s walls the sentries and watchmen cry out and sound their horns. They have seen a sight to strike fear into the bravest heart.
Far out to the west, the horizon that separates the sea from the sky has turned black. The soft bar of haze that every day, until this day, has separated the sea from the sky is now a broad black line, stretching left and right as far as the eye can see. As the Trojans watch, the line thickens. It is as if Poseidon is pushing up a new island or a new continent.
Soon they realize that the black line is not a great cliff rising from the sea. It is an unimaginably huge fleet of ships approaching line abreast. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of them.
The Trojans have readied themselves for war. For month after month they have been making their defensive preparations. All Troy knows that the cursed Achaeans are coming, but the scale of the fleet, the sight of it … For that, nothing could prepare them.
Hector and Paris climb to the ramparts at the first sound of the horns.
‘How many?’ says Paris.
Hector looks. It has been no more than an hour since Eos flung wide the gates of dawn for her brother Helios to drive his chariot through. The Titan of the sun is already high enough in the sky for his rays to set the sea sparkling. Through the haze, Hector sees flashes in the far distance as sunlight strikes prows and masts and hulls and dipping oars.
‘They will be close enough to count before long,’ he says. ‘Come. Time to make sacrifices and then … we arm.’
While we wait for the fleet to arrive and for the Trojans to prepare and make their offerings to the gods, there is also time to consider the question of which gods the Trojans make those offerings to. To the same gods as the Greeks? Have the gods chosen sides?
OLYMPUS
The gods have been growing more and more excited by the spectacle of the gathering mortal storm. They have watched with fascination and mounting excitement as the Achaeans made their preparations and set a course for the Troad.
The Olympians enjoy the mauling and brawling of their playthings, their little human pets. They thrill to mortal war. They are as fired up and involved as Elizabethan nobles wagering on the outcome of a bearbaiting, or Regency lords ringside at a cockpit in the East End, or Wall Street bankers at an illicit downtown cage fight. ‘Slumming it’, nineteenth-century sprigs of the nobility called such excursions into the mud and blood of the commonality. The appalling appeal of the dirt and its heady threat of violence. And like those sporting aristocrats, the gods have their favourites. Rather than wagering with gold, the immortals stake honour, status and pride on the outcome. Also like those sporting aristocrats, the gods – as we shall see – are not above nobbling the runners and riders they disfavour and unfairly assisting those they support.
By quieting the winds and demanding the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, Artemis, the divinity of the hunt and the bow, had held up and dispirited the Greeks at Aulis, which gives us a clue as to where her loyalties lie. She and her twin Apollo favour the Trojans, and over the coming years they each will do what they can to advance that cause. As will their mother, the ancient Titaness LETO. Aphrodite has naturally been on the Trojan side ever since Paris awarded her the Apple of Discord (and perhaps before, when she coupled with Anchises and bore his child, Aeneas). Ares too, the god of war and Aphrodite’s lover, has aligned himself with Troy.fn1 These four Olympians will prove hugely powerful allies for the Trojans.
The Achaeans can look to support from Hera and Athena, who still smart from the insult of being spurned, as they see it, by Paris. Besides this, Athena has always had a special fondness for Diomedes and Odysseus and will always watch over them. Hermes favours Odysseus too,fn2 but the slippery messenger god’s first loyalty is always to his father Zeus. Poseidon, ruler of the sea, takes the Achaean side, as does Hephaestus, god of fire and forge – perhaps for no other reason than that his unfaithful wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares prefer Troy. Naturally Thetis, for the sake of her son Achilles, will always do what she can to advance the Greek cause.
Hades could not care less who wins: it is enough that the conflict will fill his underworld with new dead souls. He hopes the war will be a long and bloody one.
Dionysus takes no active part but is satisfied by the knowledge that libations of wine will be poured, wild dances held and sacrifices made in his honour during the periods of feasting and revelry which must inevitably punctuate the crises and climaxes of battle.
Demeter and Hestia, goddesses of fertility and the hearth, are the two Olympians with the least interest in or connection to warfare of any kind. Their concern is with the women and children left at home, with the grieving families and with the workers and slaves who labour in the fields and vineyards, with those – as a phrase from our time has it – who keep the home fires burning.
Zeus, ruler of heaven and king of all the gods, what of him?
Zeus likes to think himself a wise and benign onlooker, a disinterested spectator far above the fray. He accepts the role of referee and grand arbiter. He has instructed the other Olympians not to interfere, but he will turn a blind eye when they do. He will not be above being persuaded to make interventions himself. His own mortal daughter Helen is, of course, the proschema, the casus belli, the flame that has lit the fuse; this might be thought to lead him to side with the Trojans, but Zeus has skin in the Achaean game too. His beloved son Heracles was responsible for installing Tyndareus on the throne of Spartafn3 and for the sacking of Laomedon’s Troy. Another son, Aeacus, is the grandfather of three of the Greek alliance’s most important warriors – Ajax, Teucer and Achilles. Zeus has lost count of how many other of his descendants are numbered amongst the Greek (and indeed Trojan) forces. But he believes himself to be magnificently neutral.
Some historians and mythographers have put forward the notion that the Trojan War was initiated by Zeus as a deliberate attempt to end the human project. To wipe mankind from the map once and for all. Or at least to thin out the population, which was growing larger and larger. As it did so, mankind was becoming more difficult to control. Even the immortal gods couldn’t engage, relate, interbreed and command the destinies of so swelling a number of ambitious, inventive and self-obsessed beings. Why, they were becoming as arrogant and entitled as the gods themselves. And more and more forgetful of their obligations by way of temples, prayers and burnt offerings. They were forgetting their place. Especially those who were descended from Zeus himself, or from his fellow Olympians. A world stocked with demigod heroes was unstable and dangerous. Heracles had saved Olympus, but maybe another could arise with the presumption and strength to dislodge the gods.fn4 Zeus had dispossessed his father Kronos who had usurped his father Ouranos. Thetis had been avoided by Zeus on account of the prophecy that foretold how great any son by her would grow to be. Achilles seemed to be showing the truth of that.
But Zeus had neither the focus, the insight nor the eye for detail to formulate or drive such a plan to a properly thought-through conclusion. He was more in the mould of the one who maddens the dogs and lets them fight it out, or of the Roman emperor who looks down on the slaves and gladiators, gloating at all the blood and gore that soaks into the sa
nd. He was neither puppet-master nor grandmaster tactician. He hadn’t the patience to pull every string. He took no pleasure in surveying the board, fingers pressed to temples, deep in analytical thought, foreseeing every move and countermove. Give a good shake and see what happens, that was his way. Light the blue touchpaper and retire.
Let mankind tear itself to pieces all on its own.
THE TROJAN FORCES
We know that the Achaean expeditionary force is made up of over a hundred thousand men drawn from dozens of the kingdoms, island realms and provinces that constitute the Greek world. But what of their enemy, the defenders of Troy? Is there no more than one people in one walled city to repel this unprecedented threat?
In reality the Trojan alliance is made up of almost as many disparate elements as the Achaean. Hector and Priam have cemented a coalition of forces from the neighbouring states of the Troad and beyond, from as far north as Macedonian Paeonia and Thrace (today’s Bulgaria) to as far south as continental Africa. A ‘Catalogue of Trojans’ appears in Book 2 of the Iliad alongside the more exhaustive ‘Catalogue of Ships’. Over the course of the war, Prince Aeneas will lead the Dardanian allies;fn5 MEMNON of Ethiopia, Zeus’s son SARPEDON of Lycia, and PENTHESILEA, Queen of the Amazons, will fight for the Trojans too. Other significant warriors from the coalition will make themselves known as the war unfolds.
Homer seems to suggest that all the Achaeans converse in Greek and that the Trojans – while understanding Greek and speaking it to the enemy on the few occasions when they meet to parley or exchange messages – have to contend with allies who ‘bleat like sheep’ in hundreds of languages, which means that Hector and his fellow generals are forced to rely on interpreters in the field to relay their messages and instructions. Modern philology proposes that the Trojans in reality spoke a Hittite language called Luwian.fn6 We will allow the convention begun by Homer and continued by Shakespeare and almost all playwrights, historical novelists and film-makers since. Unless a particular moment in the story calls for different tongues, all the participants understand each other and speak the same language. Happily for us it is this language. The one that you are reading now …