Goddess of Yesterday (30 page)

Archaeologists have found the real city of Troy, but was there actually a Trojan War? Was there a Helen or a Paris or a Menelaus? Scholars argue about this, but the ancient world was sure the Trojan War had been a real event.

The most important ancient writer about Troy is Homer, who lived around 800 B.C. He composed
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. I had not read these books since high school, and when I reread them, I was entranced and had to research Homer, and the Trojan War, and the mythology associated with very ancient Greece. When I wrote this book, I was thinking of Homer, but many other ancient writers, like Hesiod, Apollodorus, Virgil, Ovid, Thucydides and Herodotus, also wrote about the Trojan War, and many famous ancient playwrights like Euripides used its characters in their tragedies.

If there was a Trojan War, it happened during the Bronze Age, about 1250 B.C.

Here are the “true” parts of my story—but in this case, “true” means what ancient authors tell us. Perhaps it isn't true; perhaps it's all myth. Ancient writers don't agree with one another; there are different versions of each event.

Agamemnon rules Mycenae. Homer calls him “lord of the far-flung kingdoms.” His younger brother Menelaus,
described by Homer as “the red-haired king of Sparta,” marries Helen, daughter of Zeus, conceived while he was disguised as a swan. There is an oath over the dead horse in which Helen's suitors promise to defend the man of her choice. Helen's brothers are the twins Castor and Pollux (the Gemini sign in the zodiac), and her sister Clytemnestra does marry Agamemnon.

Menelaus goes to Troy to ask the gods to end a plague in his city. This prayer is granted. After he has gone, the king of Troy, Priam, sends his son Paris to Sparta. The figurehead on Paris' flagship is the goddess Aphrodite, and he is escorted by his cousin Aeneas, son of Aphrodite. Aeneas will be one of the few Trojan survivors of the war and will sail west to become a founder of Rome; his story is in Virgil's
Aeneid.

The rescue of Priam's sister Hesione may be a reason for sending Paris to Sparta, but Paris has three other reasons.

First, he is a pirate. Piracy is an honorable profession in
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey.
Odysseus (the pirate for whom
The Odyssey
is named) is always called “sacker of cities,” which is fair, since he destroys more than twenty, while Achilles, the most famous Greek fighter and the main character in
The Iliad
, proudly lists a dozen.

Second, Paris has killed a little boy and will purify himself at the temple of Apollo in Sparta.

Third, in a story that I skip, three goddesses—Hera, Athena and Aphrodite—have quarreled over which one is loveliest. Paris is the beauty contest judge. Aphrodite says that if Paris announces
she's
the loveliest goddess in heaven, Aphrodite in return will give him the loveliest woman on earth. That's Helen. So Paris picks Aphrodite and therefore
Paris gets Helen. It doesn't seem to matter that Helen's already married.

In the midst of Paris' visit, Menelaus leaves for his grandfather's funeral in Crete. Kinados is the name of his captain.

Most sources agree that Helen goes eagerly with Paris; some say she is kidnapped.

Helen and Menelaus have a nine-year-old daughter, Hermione, left behind when Helen goes with Paris. Some sources mention three sons—Aethiolas, Maraphius and Pleisthenes. Helen takes only baby Pleisthenes to Troy. She and Paris also take the palace gold and temple treasure. Getting this treasure back is a major reason for the war. (In Greek, the word “treasure” means “something that can be laid away.” Everybody keeps treasure, whether it's gold, bed linens or spears.)

Helen takes five maids with her, including the former queen Aethra. Aethra's background is complex. She is the mother of a very famous hero, Theseus. Theseus himself kidnapped Helen when she was a small child! Helen was rescued by Castor and Pollux, who then took Aethra as a slave. But Theseus cannot rescue his mother, because he is shortly murdered by a king who throws him off a cliff.

Helen and Paris have their honeymoon on an islet off Gythion, port of Sparta, and then sail for Troy. They're blown far off course. At Sidon, Paris murders and robs the king in his own banquet hall and loses two ships.

Meanwhile, Menelaus goes to Troy to demand his wife's return; he takes along the grandsons of Aethra. (I was not able to find a story that explains why these grandsons hadn't rescued their grandmother from slavery in the first place; perhaps they were too young.)

King Priam hasn't heard from Paris, doesn't know what has happened and cannot deliver Helen or the stolen treasure. He sends Menelaus away, though many Trojans think it would be better to kill Menelaus.

Paris and Helen arrive in Troy.

Agamemnon and Menelaus gather armies but cannot sail, because there is no wind. (Sailing distances for ancient ships are known: with a favorable wind, 200 miles or two days from Mycenae to Crete; 350 miles or three or four days from Crete to Egypt.) Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is sacrificed. (Clytemnestra will never forgive Agamemnon for killing their daughter; many ancient Greek playwrights will write tragedies about what happens to that family next.)

War begins. It will last ten years. Although Homer says the Greeks never go home in all this time, it seems unlikely; the distances are short, there is loot to carry back from all the pillaging, and the Greeks never actually beseige Troy in the sense of closing it up and starving it out.

Even though they fight ten years to get her back, the Greeks do not love Helen. Achilles, who is on the Greek side, calls her “that blood-chilling horror.” Euripides, who lives about four hundred years after Homer, says Helen is “loathed of God.” In his play
The Trojan Women
he writes that Helen “has drawn her breath from many fathers: Madness, Hate, red Death and every rotting poison of the sky.”

But Troy adores Helen. King Priam never holds her responsible for the ten years of war and the ruin of his city.

What does Helen look like? Homer does not say. One of the most famous phrases about her—“the face that launched a thousand ships”—is not by Homer but by Christopher Marlowe, a sixteenth-century English dramatist.

Homer does not use the word “Greece” or “Greeks”; these words come later in history. The fighters on Menelaus' side are called Argives, Danaans or Lacaedemonians. Each separate tribe is also referred to by its own name, so Achilles' men, for example, are Myrmidons. This is too many labels, so I do use the word “Greek.”

What language do these people speak? In
The Iliad
, everybody can talk to everybody, though Homer does say that the allies of Troy speak many languages. I have everybody speaking at least some Greek.

Ancient Troy is not literate. The Trojans have no alphabet and no writing.

Parts of Greece, especially Mycenae, Agamemnon's capital, use a script we now call Linear B. The keeping-track lines I describe are among those deciphered. There is no personal writing—no letters, no diaries. Writing seems to be exclusively for lists and records.

Horses are highly regarded, but not much used, since saddle and stirrups are not yet invented. There is no “horsepower” yet either, because no one has come up with a yoke for a horse.

Priam has fifty sons and twelve daughters. All but one son will die in the course of the war. (His name, confusingly, is Helenus.) Cassandra is a daughter with the gift of prophecy, her sad doom that nobody ever believes her. She is considered mad and is usually locked up. She is alive at the end of the war and taken home as concubine by King Agamemnon. Cassandra and Agamemnon are murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, as they walk in the door of his palace. (His son Orestes and his other daughter Electra later murder Clytemnestra to avenge their father's death.)

The Palladium may have been a primitive wooden statue
of Athena, or it may have been a meteorite. Stealing it, which Aeneas does at the very end of the Trojan War, results in the collapse of the city.

Hector is called “tamer of horses,” and his horses do have the names I used. Hector does say that Paris should have been stoned to death.

Andromache is the daughter of the king of Cilicia. Later on, Achilles will pirate in Cilicia and kill her father and all seven of her brothers. By the end of the war, she and Hector are married and have a little son whom they name for the Scamander River but who is also called Astyanax. One of the loveliest passages in
The Iliad
is when Andromache and Hector hug their little boy before Hector goes to die in battle.

Euneus is the king of Lemnos, and he does stay neutral and sell supplies to both sides. Early in the war, when things are not so bloodthirsty, the Greeks take many prisoners and ship them to Lemnos, where they are either enslaved or ransomed home. Euneus' father is the very famous Jason, captain of the Argonauts, who a generation earlier sailed across the Black Sea to find the Golden Fleece.

Homer does say, “It is a shivery thing to kill a prince of royal blood.”

Hector does yell, “Bird signs! Fight for your country. That is the best, the only omen.”

Anaxandra's prayer is actually uttered by Telemachus in
The Odyssey
, who says, “O God of yesterday, listen and be near me.”

My description of Anaxandra's hair is actually the description of Odysseus: “curls like petals of wild hyacinth but all red-golden.”

Aristophanes, another ancient Greek playwright, says that rain is Zeus pissing through a sieve.

The scrap of poem I quote (
Seven ways of terror in a forest all of pine. The empty.
) is actually by a poet named Sappho, who lives two hundred years after Homer.

Medusa is a Gorgon. Her sisters are goddesses, but she is mortal. She has snakes for hair, and her eyes can transform people into stone. When she dies, she gives birth to the winged horse Pegasus.

Most people just want to know about the wooden horse. This story is not in
The Iliad.
It is referred to in
The Odyssey
(Book 4) and
The Aeneid
(Book 2).

Nicander, Petra and Callisto are fictional. Iris and Chrysaor are fictional. Anaxandra is fictional. The rocky isle without a name is fictional.

One name is intentionally spelled incorrectly. Herakles is the famous Greek hero, but we usually call him Hercules, so I too use the Latin spelling.

There is an island of Siphnos. One fateful year, its king does send a leaden egg to Delphi instead of gold, and as a result his gold mines are flooded.

When Troy is finally sacked, a Greek fighter from Lokris named Ajax defiles the Palladium. His descendents must make up for this sacrilege. For many generations, the Lokrians send daughters to serve the goddess. These girls are conducted in secrecy and darkness to the temple, forced to shave their heads and live in grim poverty. If they are seen in public, they are killed. In A.D. 100—more than a thousand years after Troy falls—this is still happening!

There are many translations of Homer. Even Lawrence of Arabia did one.

You can read
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
as poetry, translated by Lattimore, Fitzgerald or Fagles and others, or as prose, by Rouse and others. The best young people's versions of Homer are by Rosemary Sutcliffe and illustrated by Alan Lee:
Black Ships Before Troy
and
The Wanderings of Odysseus.

But since Homer himself sang the work and did not write it down, I think listening to
The Iliad
on tape is the best way.

What is
The Iliad
?

The word “Ilium” is just another name for Troy, so “Iliad” means “story of Troy.” But
The Iliad
is not the story of Troy. It is the story of the Greek warrior Achilles and his manic behavior. Menelaus and Helen are minor characters. In the final year of the war, Agamemnon has taken away a girl Achilles loves. Agamemnon orders Achilles to submit cheerfully to this insult because Agamemnon is king and much more important. Achilles is outraged. To prove which of them is more important, he refuses to continue the fight against Troy. Fine, he says to Agamemnon. Do it without me.

But they can't. The Greeks may lose the war after all.

The gods and goddesses are very involved in the action. Apollo loves Troy; Athena supports the Greeks. Since there is an important temple to Athena in Troy, you would expect her to support the Trojans. She hates them because Paris didn't choose her to win the loveliest goddess contest. There is an enormous amount of slaughter in
The Iliad
—very detailed descriptions of how men die in hand-to-hand combat. When
The Iliad
ends, Hector is dead, but the war is not over.

In
The Odyssey
, ten years have passed since the end of the Trojan War. Once again, Helen and Menelaus are minor characters. Paris is dead and they're home again, an oddly dull husband and wife who can barely remember all that unpleasantness.
Helen is now claiming that the war was all Aphrodite's fault and nobody should blame her for anything.