by Stephen Fry
THE EMBASSY
The Greek flagship was a sleek black Mycenaean penteconter fronted by a brightly painted prow. On board were Agamemnon’s senior staff of advisers. With the enemy coast now in sight, Agamemnon’s mind raced ahead, picturing the beachhead and drawing up plans for the first assault, but Nestor of Pylos urged him to stay his hand. The High King had had enough of delay, and took no pleasure in being interrupted by anyone, but he always found time for Nestor, who was known to be the wisest man in the Greek world. He was certainly the oldest of Agamemnon’s close counsellors, and while the King of Men could be impatient, impulsive and stubborn, he had sense enough to know that good advice cost nothing and might sometimes save a deal of trouble. Nestor convinced him that before he committed to an all-out attack, it would be prudent for the fleet to lay off at some distance and send forward a single ship with an embassy to King Priam, offering him a final chance to return Helen.
‘They will have observed by now,’ said Nestor, ‘that a force of unprecedented size is bearing down upon them. Priam is accounted a sensible man. He will see the value of an honourable concession.’
Menelaus, Odysseus and Palamedes were chosen to lead the delegation.
‘But demand more than just Helen,’ Agamemnon commanded. ‘Our expenses in equipping for war must be met too. Priam must open his treasury to us.’
The sentinels on the watchtowers of Troy saw a ship break from the line and make its way alone towards the shore. The white flag of Eirene, goddess of peace, fluttered from its mast. A Trojan named ANTENOR – who was to Priam what Nestor was to Agamemnon, a wise and trusted counsellorfn7 – was sent to meet this embassy.
As it awaited news, the Trojan court found itself divided. Hector and Deiphobus, egged on by a hotly furious Paris, convinced Priam that Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’s outrage at Helen’s flight from Sparta was fake, confected, in reality no more than a pretext for aggression.
‘The Atreides couldn’t care less about Helen,’ said Hector. ‘They want the spoils of war.’
‘Hear the legation out! Hear them out!’ said Cassandra.
‘Hector is right,’ said Deiphobus. ‘The Hellenes have cast envious eyes across the Aegean for years.’
‘Hear them out or Troy falls.’
‘It’s our gold and treasure they want.’
‘Hear them out or Troy burns!’
‘They’re not taking Helen away from me,’ said Paris.
Cassandra started to weep. ‘If Helen is not returned, we all die! Every one of us in this room.’
‘Besides,’ said Hector, ‘no city has ever been better defended. No army better prepared. Troy is impregnable.’
‘We should at least make them welcome,’ said Priam, ‘and listen to what they have to say.’
Helios had slipped below the western horizon by the time the truce ship dropped anchor off the Troadic coast. Odysseus, Menelaus and Palamedes, attended by pages, came ashore in a small tender, where they were met by Antenor, who greeted them with great respect and unfeigned civility. Under protective guard, the party made their way across the plain of Ilium, over the River Scamander, through the high Scaean Gate and into the city, where they were led to Priam’s palace. Crowds of Trojans lined the streets and watched in silence as they passed by.
The handsomeness of Menelaus was noted.
‘But nothing like as beautiful as Paris,’ murmured the women.
‘But who is the man smiling as if he knows a great secret?’ others wondered. The whisper went round that it was Odysseus of Ithaca, and some hissed. Word of his duplicity and cunning had reached Troy.
Priam and Hecuba greeted the deputation with solemn dignity. The Trojan princes were polite, but cold. Paris and Helen stayed away. After feasting, music and formal praise poems sung in their honour, the Greek party were taken to Antenor’s house, where they would spend the night, before returning to the palace in the morning to begin the formal discussions.
‘You are welcome under my roof-tree,’ said Antenor. ‘Sleep well, and let us pray to the gods that tomorrow our talks will prosper.’
Back at the palace, Priam sought out Helen in her private apartments.
‘Paris not here?’
‘He is making plans,’ said Helen. ‘He worries that Menelaus and Odysseus will somehow persuade you to give me up.’
‘That is what I came to ask you about. Is it truly your wish to stay?’
‘Paris is my husband and this is my home.’
‘No part of you would rather go back to Sparta with Menelaus?’
‘Not the smallest part of me.’
‘That is all I needed to know.’
In fact, Paris had slipped out of the palace and made his way to the house of ANTIMACHUS, a well-born but far from affluent courtier who owed Paris more than he could ever hope to repay. He had been entrusted by Priam to lead the negotiations with the Greeks.
Paris pressed gold into his hand. ‘Not only is your debt forgotten,’ he said, ‘but there is more gold to come.’
‘If?’ said Antimachus.
‘If,’ said Paris, ‘you persuade the negotiators to stop their ears to Achaean lies and false promises. And there is more gold than you have ever seen or dreamed of if the Achaean dogs now asleep in Antenor’s house never make it back to their ship alive.’
Menelaus had found it a torment to be inside the city, so close to Helen yet forced by the requirements of diplomacy to hold his tongue and temper. As he had lain in bed trying to sleep he had considered stealing out of Antenor’s house and making his way to the palace. If he found the vile Paris lying next to his adored wife, he would slit the coward’s throat. No, he would beat him to death with his fists. Beat him and beat him and beat him …
With this delicious scenario playing in his mind – fists crashing and smashing Paris’s pretty and insolent face into a mush – the sound of urgent banging at the door jerked him awake.
Antenor was a seasoned courtier. Courtiers do not survive long enough to be seasoned unless they maintain an efficient network of spies and informers. Antenor’s spies had followed Paris all the way to Antimachus’s house and overheard every word of his plot against the Greek legation.
‘I am ashamed of my own people,’ he said, hurrying Menelaus and the others into his hallway. ‘We are not all so treacherous. But it is no longer safe for you to remain in the city. I urge you to come with me.’
Under cover of night he led the Greeks back to their boat.
When they reached the flagship and relayed the news of Paris’s murderous intent, Agamemnon roared in fury; but in his heart of hearts he was not displeased. An all-out campaign against Troy would bring him glory such as no man – not Jason, not Perseus, not Theseus, not even the great Heracles – had ever won. Gold and treasure and slaves and eternal fame. The gods might even raise him to Olympus. He could not confess it even to himself, but had the peace mission been successful, he would have been hugely disappointed.
There was another advantage to the embassy’s failure. Word of Paris’s secret plot spread from ship to ship like wildfire, filling every Achaean heart with fury. If energy and morale had been sapped by the seemingly endless preparations and the succession of dark portents that had hung over their enterprise since the beginning, this confirmation of Trojan perfidy was just what was needed to inflame the passion and reinforce the commitment of every member of the invasion force.
BEACHHEAD
At dawn the following morning Agamemnon commanded that the signal be sent down the line. The oarsmen bent their backs and the fleet advanced.
Each ship had a prow, or beak, painted in bright colours and usually carved into a figurehead. On Agamemnon’s flagship the head of Hera, Queen of Heaven, glared out with imperious scorn. Other ships showed the faces of gods and divinities local to their kingdom or province.
Picture the sight of a thousand hulls fizzing to a stop in the sand, beaks grinning, glowering and scowling; hear the sound of tens of thousands of warriors bang
ing their swords on their shields and yelling out their war cries. Enough to curdle the blood.
But Hector, shining in his armour, splendid in his chariot, led the Trojans out of their city, over the bridges that spanned the Scamander and towards the invading Greeks, calling out encouragement.
Agamemnon’s flagship slid to a halt on the beach and dropped her anchor stone from the stern. Achilles climbed up onto the prow’s peak.
‘Follow me,’ he yelled, pointing his sword towards the dunes. ‘We can be inside the city before the sun sets.’
Agamemnon was being fitted into his armour at that moment. It annoyed him to have the grand moment of his own landing on enemy territory upstaged. He was about to bark a terse counter-order when the seer Calchas shouted at Achilles to stop.
‘I have foreseen that the first man to step down onto Trojan soil will be killed,’ he said. ‘If that man is you, Peleides,fn8 then our cause is lost before it is begun.’
‘There are more prophecies to my name than there are days in a year,’ said Achilles with disdain. ‘I am not afraid. Besides, that isn’t soil – it’s sand.’
But whether it would have brought his death or not, Achilles was to be denied the moment. Before he could spring down, a voice behind him cried out, ‘I’ll be the first to fight!’
A young man leapt from the ship.
‘Who was that?’ shouted Agamemnon.
The young man turned with a broad smile and beckoned to the rest. They recognized the face of Iolaus, leader of the Phylacean contingent.fn9
The sight of him, so young, so cheerful and so confident, inspired the others. They swarmed down from their ships to join him, in turn putting heart into the troops up and down the line. Within moments the whole beachhead was filled with Greek warriors beating their shields and crying, ‘Hellas! Hellas! Greece! Greece!’ They streamed up the dunes and followed Iolaus onto the plain. The war had begun.
Iolaus threw himself into the ranks of Trojans massed on the plain to meet the Greek advance. He killed four, and wounded a dozen others, before the enemy around him suddenly melted away and he found himself facing a tall warrior alone. The warrior’s helmet obscured his features, but the cries of ‘Hector!’ from the Trojan ranks made it clear to Iolaus who his opponent was. He put up a fierce fight, but was no match for Hector’s skill and strength, and in a blur of sword strokes, feints and parries, was quickly cut down. He died where he fell. Calchas’s prophecy had been fulfilled. The first Achaean to touch Trojan ground had died.
Two of Iolaus’s Phylacean contingent pulled his body back towards the Greek line. Hector let them go. He admired courage, but above all he respected the custom, so profoundly serious for Greeks and Trojans alike, that the dead be given up to be cleansed and burned or buried by their people. For their corpses to be left above ground to rot was the greatest dishonour that could befall them. Such sacrilege shamed both sides. The war that was to rage for so many years would see unspeakable violence, barbaric acts and monstrous bloodletting of the most cruel and merciless savagery; but there were, nonetheless, conventions and rituals to be observed, and their importance cannot be overstated. As time will show.
From that moment on Iolaus was given the name PROTESILAUS – ‘the first to step forward’.fn10 For generations and generations, long after the war, shrines and statues to him were erected and venerated around the Greek world. His brother PODARCES took over command of the forty ships that the Phylaceans had brought to the alliance.fn11
With Protesilaus’s body safely behind the lines, battle was now joined in earnest. Achilles and Hector were in the thick of it, but it was a Trojan by the name of CYCNUS who swiftly emerged as the most fearsome warrior on the field. He roared forward, hacking to the left and right with his sword.
‘I am Cycnus, son of Poseidon,’ he yelled, ‘and no spear, sword nor arrow can pierce my skin.’
The slaughter he inflicted began to turn the tide of battle, and it looked as if the Greek cause was lost almost before it had begun. It really did seem to be true that he was invincible. Teucer’s arrows bounced off him; Ajax’s spearpoints glanced away too. Achilles, entirely unafraid, exulting in the fighting, ran straight at him with a whooping cry, shield up. The force of this sudden rush and the shield smashing into his face knocked Cycnus to the ground. Achilles was instantly on him, grabbing at the fallen man’s helmet straps and twisting them tighter and tighter around his throat until the life was strangled from him. His hide might have been impenetrable, but like any mortal man he needed to breathe.
While for the most part Poseidon favoured the Achaean cause, Cycnus had been his son, and he did not forget him now. No sooner had the last choking breath left his body than he was transformed into a white swan which rose up high above the battlefield and flew away, westwards. Away from Troy.fn12
The Trojans took this for a sign and turned and ran for the sanctuary of their city.
Agamemnon ordered no pursuit. ‘Time enough soon,’ he said. ‘We know now we have their measure. First we attend to our dead, send up sacrifices to the gods and make all the proper preparations.’
THE BATTLE LINES HARDEN
The Achaean fleet could not remain stretched out so thinly along the beachhead, out of sight from the central command vessels in both directions and open to attack from Trojan raiding parties. But to cluster the ships close was to render them even more vulnerable. Above all to fire. Agamemnon had conducted enough campaigns by sea to know that lines of shipping could be sitting targets for flaming pitch or oil. Fire was able to spread from deck to deck with terrifying speed. He instructed each contingent of the fleet to go deeper into such protected inlets and creeks as they could find, or further out to sea. Twenty-four-hour guards to be posted on all moored ships. The punishment for falling asleep on sentry duty to be death.
Next, the construction of a defensive stockade was undertaken. Behind this outwardly pointing palisade of sharpened stakes the Greeks could set up a secure encampment. Temporary, of course – Troy would be theirs within a week, two weeks at most – but there was no reason to be slapdash about things. For most of the time the Aegean’s tides were as gentle as the lapping of a lake, but Eurus, the East Wind, had been known to buffet and blow with destructive force when his temper was up. Only Agamemnon’s flagship and the vessels of the most important leaders were to remain close in to the stockade. The supply ships with their slaves, servants, sutlers, craftsmen, priests, cooks, carpenters, musicians, dancers and other essential camp-followers could shuttle back and forth between land and sea as required.
Nestor and Odysseus between them devised a rudimentary signalling language of handclaps, horns, flags and fires by which some element of ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore, shore-to-shore and shore-to-ship communications could be established. Tents were erected for senior generals and their retinues. The campaign would be over too quickly for the miniature settlement to need to grow much more.
Agamemnon was content. Morale was high.
Across the plain of Ilium stood a great city ready to repel any assault and weather any siege. Over the past year, under the supervision of Priam and Hector, Troy’s already mighty walls had been reinforced and a network of secret tunnels and inland waterways dug. Seaports and trading stations could be reached by river as well as by tunnel. The city was in no danger of being starved into submission. Watchers on the ramparts had a full 360-degree field of vision from which to survey the land around and warn of incoming hostile troops.
Within the city walls every household had been given three huge pithoi, or storage jars, each one as high as a man, with the capacity to hold enough grain, oil and wine to support a small family and its servants and slaves for a year. A spirit of determination and fellowship bonded Trojans of all ranks and classes together, united in unshakable loyalty to their city and royal house and in their detestation of the foe.
Priam was content. Morale was high.
STALEMATE
We have the benefit of relatively recent histor
y to know that confident expeditionary forces and confident defenders, each armed with equal technologies, resources and tactical intelligence, can quickly become entrenched in insoluble stalemate. We know how wars that each side believed would soon be decided can stretch out over months and years. The Greeks and Trojans were perhaps the first to discover this unhappy truth.
Agamemnon and his generals soon realized that Troy was too big to encircle in a siege and the Trojans too wise to be coaxed out for one great decisive battle.
Months went by. The passing of the first year was marked with songs, sacrifices and games. Then another year was over. And another. The period of stalemate, from Protesilaus planting his feet on Trojan soil to the full engagement of the armies, lasted an extraordinary nine years. There was a fear that to make the first move was to create a weakness – a bind that chess players call zugzwang.
During this time the Achaean stockade naturally grew more and more set, solid and substantial. The encampment under its protection added more tented accommodation and weatherproofed huts, more supply lines and more features of what could only be called town life. Makeshift markets, drinking dens and shrines soon became indistinguishable from the kinds the Greeks knew back home. The pathways that ran along between the ships and the stockade turned now and then into side tracks, or opened up into areas for assembly, until they began to resemble civic roads, streets and squares. In time they were given names. Corinth Avenue. Thessaly Street. Theban Way. An air of permanence descended.