by Stephen Fry
9 Pronounced ‘I-owe-lay-us’ – not to be confused with Heracles’ nephew of the same name (see Heroes, page 68). The ‘Catalogue of Ships’ records him as having brought forty vessels.
10 Pronounced ‘Pro-teh-si-lay-us’: kind of end-rhyming with Menelaus and Iolaus.
11 Confusingly, Podarces was also Priam’s original name, as you may recall. It means ‘helping with your feet’, ‘running to the rescue’, ‘swift-footed’. Variations of it are used by Homer as an epithet for Achilles, whose speed as a runner was unequalled.
12 Cycnus means ‘swan’, as in our word ‘cygnet’. Phaeton’s lover had the same name and was turned into a swan, too, when the gods took pity on his grief after Phaeton’s death.
13 There was a common belief later that Palamedes, besides devising board and dice games, had ‘invented’ all the consonants in the Greek alphabet except beta and tau (‘b’ and ‘t’). Unhappy maths students can blame him for pi and sigma …
14 Troilus’s name can be seen as combining Tros and Ilus, the names of Troy’s two founding kings. Other interpretations see it as a diminutive, i.e. ‘Little Troy’, or perhaps a fusion of Troi- and the verb luo which means, amongst other things, at a stretch, ‘destroy’ – or at least ‘dissolve’ or ‘disintegrate’ – and, in its middle voice (a special Greek verbal mode), ‘ransom’.
15 In these versions Calchas is not a Greek, as otherwise represented, but a treacherous Trojan who has defected to the Greek side.
16 His name lives on in the English word ‘pander’, which derives from his representation as a procurer and sexual matchmaker. To pander to someone is to accommodate their tastes, to gratify their desires.
17 Just to remind you: unless otherwise stated, plain ‘Ajax’ refers to Telamonian Ajax – Ajax the Great. If Ajax the Lesser appears, he will be called ‘Aias’.
18 The board game is given variously as pessoi or petteia – pessoi being the Greek for ‘pieces’ or ‘men’, as in chess pieces or chessmen. Indeed, the game is sometimes represented as having been played on a chequerboard and has been thought of as a forerunner of draughts (checkers). This is the game believed to have been invented by Palamedes.
19 It’s an important name, so worth thinking how you might pronounce it in your head, which always makes names easier to read. ‘Briss-ace’ is probably the most straightforward pronunciation, or ‘Briss-ay-iss’; though some would prefer ‘Bryce-ace’ or ‘Bryce-ay-iss’.
20 Chrys-, which prefixes all the names here, is from the Greek for ‘gold’ – as in chrysanthemum, literally the ‘golden flower’.
21 Christ, what a criss-crossing crisis of Chryse names … It is worth noting, however, that this scene – the painful embassy of Chryses – is where Homer begins his Iliad.
22 That the plague struck the animals before the men is a pleasing Homeric detail. In truth it is not uncommon for plagues to jump species: from marmots to fleas to rats to humans, and so on. These kinds of ‘zoonotic’ transmission still take place today, as we know to our cost.
23 See Heroes, pages 395, 281 and 204.
24 The sceptre was made by Hephaestus himself, master craftsman of the gods. He gave it to Zeus, who gave it to Hermes, who gave it to Pelops, who gave it to his son Atreus (father of Agamemnon and Menelaus), from whom it was taken by his twin brother Thyestes, from whom it was finally wrested by Agamemnon. Pausanias, the second-century AD traveller, tells us that the sceptre survived down to his own time, when it was worshipped as a god by the people of Chaeronea. It was kept in the priest’s house, and people brought it offerings of cake every day. I wonder if Chaeronea was known for the plumpness of its priests?
25 Homer rather endearingly suggests that Thetis had to wait twelve days before she could get an audience with Zeus, because he and the other gods had travelled overseas to feast with the Ethiopians …
26 Thetis had been personally instrumental in saving Zeus from a rebellion started by the other gods, who had tried to shackle him and usurp his power. Thetis broke the chains and summoned the hundred-handed Briareos (also known as Aegaeon), the fiercest of the three Hecatonchires (see Mythos, page 8), up from Tartarus to sit by Zeus’s throne and scare off the rebels. So Zeus certainly did owe Thetis this favour.
27 In Book 2 of the Iliad, Agamemnon first tests the Greek armies by saying they are free to go home, fully expecting them to cry out as one that they would rather stay and fight. To his dismay they hurl themselves into the ships and only the combined rhetorical skill and persuasive power of Odysseus and Nestor (the real Nestor) persuade them back from the brink of desertion.
28 A principle that was adhered to as recently as the Great War of 1914–1918. Lord Kitchener thought along the same lines as Nestor. Soldiers would fight more cheerfully and with greater resolution if they were alongside those they knew, he ruled. But a crucial difference between the Bronze Age and the Steel Age soon became apparent: as local regiments were decimated by the slaughter, telegrams began to arrive bearing news of casualties that touched neighbouring houses, streets, villages and counties. Whole communities were blighted by the losses, and morale on the home front suffered accordingly.
29 Aias – Ajax the Lesser – may have been a short man, but Homer makes it clear that no one in all the Greek armies surpassed his skill with the spear. And what he lacked in height he more than made up for in bravery.
30 They were ‘chirruping like grasshoppers’, Homer says.
31 Fishermen believed that the phenomenon we know as St Elmo’s fire was also a manifestation of the Dioscuri.
32 ‘Like a mother flicking a fly from her sleeping child,’ says Homer.
33 Machaon was one of the sons of Asclepius. The divine healer, you will remember, had, like Achilles, been tutored by the centaur Chiron.
34 From the old royal house of Argos and a loyal companion of Diomedes.
35 This episode, which forms Book 10 of the Iliad, is considered by many scholars to be the work of someone other than Homer. It certainly is capable of being left out without in any way changing the story, which is not true of the other books in the epic. Its casual and somewhat gleeful cruelty might be thought of as a later addition, put there to please less sophisticated audiences. I include it and you can judge.
36 Not to be confused with Diomedes’ fellow Argive, Sthenelus.
37 Like Sarpedon, Glaucus was a grandson of the great hero Bellerophon, tamer and rider of the winged horse Pegasus: see Heroes, page 152.
38 Hence the story of Antigone: see Heroes, page 323.
39 Who happened to share Hector’s birthday – one of those rather charming details in which Homer specializes.
40 Homer tells us that by this time Hephaestus had a new wife: Charis (also known as Aglaea), the youngest of the Three Graces.
41 He bounced off the mountainside, injuring his leg, and giving him the permanent limp with which he is associated. See Mythos, page 71.
42 You might remember that Peleus’s sword had been given to him by Zeus, that Acastus hid it in a dunghill when he left Peleus to be killed by marauding centaurs, and that Chiron helped Peleus recover it. Later, as a wedding present, Chiron had given Peleus a spear possessing miraculous properties – as we will see in due course. That sword and that spear (like the horses Balius and Xanthus) had been passed down to Achilles.
43 Homer has Achilles in his desperation conjure the image of a peasant struggling to ford a stream. ‘Don’t let me be swept away like some farm boy trying to cross a flooded river with his pigs,’ he cries out.
44 And so ends Homer’s Iliad.
45 ‘Pen-theh-suh-lay-er’ is the usual way to pronounce her name. It is thought by many that the name of the Star Wars character Princess Leia was inspired by Penthesilea.
46 See Heroes (pages 88 and 397) for a more complete description of the Amazons.
47 Many great writers favoured the narrative line in which Hippolyta marries Theseus. In Heroes I suggest that Antiope marries him, and that Hippolyta was killed by Hera
cles in a fit of temper. Theseus and Antiope (or ‘an Amazon’) are referred to as a couple in Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra (and Racine’s Phèdre); and, of course, ‘Duke’ Theseus and Hippolyta appear together in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
48 Quintus Smyrnaeus in his post-Homeric Fall of Troy names them as Alcibie, Antandre, Antibrote, Bremusa, Clonie, Derimacheia, Derinoe, Evandre, Harmothoe, Hippothoe, Polemusa and Thermodosa.
49 There is archaeological and historical evidence to support the idea of a race of horse-riding warriors like the Amazons – and, indeed, for fabulous fighters like the centaurs: riders so at one with their horses that it might seem natural for legend and tall tales to describe them as a single united horse–man creature in the case of the centaurs or as uniquely wild and gifted horsewomen in the case of the Amazons. In both instances the Greeks recognized that such people came from further east even than Troy. We know now, of course, that it was the Mongols from the Far East and then the Magyars who introduced to the west the idea of the horse-mounted bowman.
50 He was stunted and bow-legged, Homer tells us. According to some sources, this was a result of injuries sustained after being thrown from a cliff by Meleager for showing cowardice during the Calydonian Boar Hunt. Thersites (the name actually seems to mean ‘audacious’ and ‘brave’) plays a significant part in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (and, when played by Simon Russell Beale in a memorable Royal Shakespeare Company production, a hilarious one), not caring who suffers from the lash of his vilely abusive tongue.
51 There are those (Robert Graves among them) who have suggested Thersites is usually portrayed as ugly and deformed because he had the guts to speak truth to power … It is the powerful who write (or commission) history, of course.
52 In Shakespeare’s play Achilles is one of the few characters who actually tolerates Thersites and is amused by him.
53 The ‘niddering Thersites’ wretched corse’ (in Arthur Sanders Way’s endearingly archaic translation of Quintus Smyrnaeus’s Fall of Troy), however, was thrown into a pit.
54 The name means ‘steadfast’ and ‘resolute’ – also ‘patient’, and so often used of asses for that reason. The prefix aga- is an intensifier meaning ‘very’ or ‘fully’. One might think Agamemnon ill-named therefore, given his impatience and emotional volatility …
55 He aged, withered and weakened so terribly, without dying, that at last Eos took pity on him and turned him into a grasshopper (or cicada, if you prefer). See Mythos, page 320.
56 This is duplicitous Odysseus at his most mischievous. Actually, according to Homer, Achilles intervened in the fight before two of the Achaeans’ most valuable warriors could tear themselves to pieces. The fight was declared to be a draw.
57 Quintus Smyrnaeus’s Fall of Troy puts it like this (in Arthur Sanders Way’s translation):
So Aias, his fierce heart
With agony stabbed, in maddened misery raved.
Foam frothed about his lips; a beast-like roar
Howled from his throat.
58 The second formal duel between Greek and Trojan heroes, you will recall, the one between Hector and Ajax (the first being the aborted confrontation between Paris and Menelaus), ended with a courteous exchange between the two combatants: Ajax gave Hector his war belt and Hector presented Ajax with the sword which was to be the instrument of his suicide. The belt, which Hector wore from the day of the duel forward, was used by Achilles to lash Hector’s body to his chariot and drag it so cruelly through the dust. These gallant tokens became emblems of the worst and most tragic elements of the war. Achilles’ first set of armour – worn by Patroclus and Hector – the wondrous second panoply forged by Hephaestus, the war belt of Ajax and the sword of Hector: they all seem to have been imbued with ill luck. The story of Troy resonates with curses, of course, and these symbols offer a sense that everything to do with all-out war is by its very nature accursed.
59 The boy was named after Ajax’s great shield. He went on to rule in Salamis. Sophocles wrote a play about him which has not survived. His tragedy Ajax, which presents the hero’s madness and suicide, does exist, however, and is still performed, translated and adapted from time to time.
60 They were both the grandchildren of Aeacus, who had two sons, Telamon and Peleus, you will remember. You. Will. Remember.
61 According to the historian and geographer Strabo, a statue of Ajax from the tomb was looted by Mark Antony and given to Cleopatra. Pausanias, on the other hand, records meeting a Mysian who told him that when the tomb was being washed away, amongst the bones of Ajax they recovered were his kneecaps, which were ‘just the size of a discus for the boys’ pentathlon’.
62 I can find reference to the version of the Corythus story I have recounted only in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tale of Troy and in Book 4 of the poem Helen of Troy by the prolific nineteenth-century folklorist Andrew Lang, which I guess must be Lancelyn Green’s source and which I further guess is an elaboration by Lang on the more familiar narrative. That is given by the splendidly named Erotica Pathemata (‘The Sorrows of Love’), which was written in the first century BC by Parthenius of Nicaea, and combines two earlier historians of Troy: Cephalon of Gergitha – a pseudonym under which Hegesianax of Alexandria Trous (fl. late third–early second century BC) wrote – and the fifth-century Hellanicus of Lesbos. As the Erotica Pathemata (in Stephen Gaselee’s translation) puts it:
‘Of the union of Oenone and Alexander [i.e. Paris] was born a boy named Corythus. He came to Troy to help the Trojans, and there fell in love with Helen. She indeed received him with the greatest warmth – he was of extreme beauty – but his father discovered his aims and killed him. Nicander however says that he was the son, not of Oenone, but of Helen and Alexander, speaking of him as follows: –
“There was the tomb of fallen Corythus,
Whom Helen bare, the fruit of marriage-rape,
In bitter woe, the Herdsman’s evil brood.”
(‘The Herdsman’, of course, refers to Paris too.)
Lancelyn Green, though, has Helen ‘read’ a message, and Lang talks of ‘tokens’ and (rather confusingly) ‘runes’ … I must suppose that if Oenone did write, then it would have been in some distant Ionian cousin of Linear B, the Mycenaean syllabic script that had died out by Homer’s time, but which preceded the post-Homeric Greek alphabet. Or perhaps the message was written in Linear B’s predecessor, the Minoan Linear A – a script that is yet to be deciphered. Linear B was famously unlocked by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1920s, ten years after Lang’s death. Homer never refers to reading or writing in either of his epics, and we have to rid our minds of any notions of messengers bearing despatches, heralds declaiming from scrolls or soldiers’ letters being sent to and from home. This Andrew Lang version of the Corythus episode depends on some kind of message, however, and your guess as to how these ‘tokens’ were read is as good as mine. Even so, I – like Lancelyn Green – prefer Lang’s idea, tokens, runes and all …
63 In Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, Odysseus takes Neoptolemus to Lemnos with him (Diomedes is not present) and a great psychological game of trickery and deception is played out. Philoctetes refuses to come to the Greek army’s aid, but in the end Heracles descends onto the stage as a deus ex machina, revealing to Philoctetes that a cure and heroic victory await him in Troy.
64 Diomedes knew how invaluable to the Achaean forces Odysseus was, for all his tendencies towards the duplicitous and treacherous. In historical Athens, and all over the Greek world for centuries, the phrase ‘Diomedes’ choice’, or ‘a Diomedean necessity’, was used to describe a situation where one is compelled to do something one would rather not do because it is for the greater good – like Diomedes sparing Odysseus, sacrificing his natural desire to revenge himself for the sake of the wider Greek cause.
Beware of Greeks …
1 See Heroes (page 344) for more on Theseus and his invention of pankration.
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2 Diomedes’ second wife. The name Aegialia, with more than a little disrespect, was latterly given by science to thirty different species of dung beetle.
The End
1 History has not been so kind. Inasmuch as Sinon is remembered at all, he is remembered as a rat. Dante put him deep in the Fraudulent Circle of his Inferno, reserved for liars and deceivers. (Dante is no sentimentalist or hero-worshipper. Diomedes and Odysseus are in that circle too.) There Sinon is, burning up with fever for eternity. Shakespeare mentions him several times, using words like ‘false’, ‘perjured’, ‘subtle’ and ‘bewitching’. Richard, Duke of Gloucester in the famous speech in Henry VI Part Three in which he reveals he will be ruthless in his fight for the crown, says:
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
So at least the villainous future Richard III credits Sinon with Troy’s fall …
2 The further adventures of Aeneas, Anchises, Achates, Creusa and Ascanius form the basis of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, which tells the legend of the founding of Rome.