b. Tyndareus sent no suitor away, but would, on the other hand, accept none of the proffered gifts; fearing that his partiality for any one prince might set the others quarrelling. Odysseus asked him one day:
‘If I tell you how to avoid a quarrel will you, in return, help me to marry Icarius’s daughter Penelope?’
‘It is a bargain,’ cried Tyndareus.
‘Then,’ continued Odysseus, ‘my advice to you is: insist that all Helen’s suitors swear to defend her chosen husband against whoever resents his good fortune.’
Tyndareus agreed that this was a prudent course. After sacrificing a horse, and jointing it, he made the suitors stand on its bloody pieces, and repeat the oath which Odysseus had formulated; the joints were then buried at a place still called ‘The Horse’s Tomb’.
c. It is not known whether Tyndareus himself chose Helen’s husband, or whether she declared her own preference by crowning him with a wreath. At all events, she married Menelaus, who became King of Sparta after the death of Tyndareus and the deification of the Dioscuri. Yet their marriage was doomed to failure: years before, while sacrificing to the gods, Tyndareus had stupidly overlooked Aphrodite, who took her revenge by swearing to make all three of his daughters - Clytaemnestra, Timandra, and Helen - notorious for their adulteries.
d. Menelaus had one daughter by Helen, whom she named Hermione; their sons were Aethiolas, Maraphius-from whom the Persian family of the Maraphions claim descent-and Pleisthenes. An Aetolian slave-girl named Pieris later bore Menelaus twin bastards: Nicostratus and Megapenthes.
e. Why, it is asked, had Zeus and Themis planned the Trojan War? Was it to make Helen famous for having embroiled Europe and Asia? Or to exalt the race of the demi-gods, and at the same time to thin out the populous tribes that were oppressing the surface of Mother Earth? Their reason must remain obscure, but the decision had already been taken when Eris threw down a golden apple inscribed ‘For the Fairest’ at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Almighty Zeus refused to decide the ensuing dispute between Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite, and let Hermes lead the goddesses to Mount Ida, where Priam’s lost son Paris would act as arbiter.
f. Now, just before the birth of Paris, Hecabe had dreamed that she brought forth a faggot from which wriggled countless fiery serpents. She awoke screaming that the city of Troy and the forests of Mount Ida were ablaze. Priam at once consulted his son Aesacus, the seer, who announced: ‘The child about to be born will be the ruin of our country! I beg you to do away with him.’
g. A few days later, Aesacus made a further announcement: ‘The royal Trojan who brings forth a child today must be destroyed, and so must her offspring!’ Priam thereupon killed his sister Cilla, and her infant son Munippus, born that morning from a secret union with Thymoetes, and buried them in the sacred precinct of Tros. But Hecabe was delivered of a son before nightfall, and Priam spared both their lives, although Herophile, priestess of Apollo, and other seers, urged Hecabe at least to kill the child. She could not bring herself to do so; and in the end Priam was prevailed upon to send for his chief herdsman, one Agelaus, and entrust him with the task. Agelaus, being too soft-hearted to use a rope or a sword, exposed the infant on Mount Ida, where he was suckled by a she-bear. Returning after five days, Agelaus was amazed at the portent, and brought the waif home in a wallet hence the name ‘Paris’-to rear with his own new-born son; and took a dog’s tongue to Priam as evidence that his command had been obeyed. But some say that Hecabe bribed Agelaus to spare Paris and keep the secret from Priam.
h. Paris’s noble birth was soon disclosed by his outstanding behaviour, intelligence, and strength: when little more than a child, he routed band of cattle-thieves and recovered the cows they had stolen, thus winning the surname Alexander. Though ranking no higher than a slave at this time, Paris became the chosen lover of Oenone, daughter of the river Oeneus, a fountain-nymph. She had been taught the art of prophecy by Rhea, and that of medicine by Apollo while he was serving as Laomedon’s herdsman. Paris and Oenone used to herd their cattle and hunt together; he carved her name in the bark of beech-trees and poplars. His chief amusement was setting Agelaus’s bulls to fight one another; he would crown the victor with flowers, and the loser with straw. When one bull began to win consistently, Paris pitted it against the champions of his neighbours’ herds, all of which were defeated. At last he offered to set a golden crown upon the horns of any bull that could overcome his own; so, for a jest, Ares turned himself into a bull, and won the prize. Paris’s unhesitating award of this crown to Ares surprised and pleased the gods as they watched from Olympus; which is why Zeus chose him to arbitrate between the three goddesses.
i. He was herding his cattle on Mount Gargarus, the highest peak of Ida, when Hermes, accompanied by Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite, delivered the golden apple and Zeus’s message: ‘Paris, since you are as handsome as you are wise in affairs of the heart, Zeus
commands you to judge which of these goddesses is the fairest.’ Paris accepted the apple doubtfully.
‘How can a simple cattle-man like myself become an arbiter of divine beauty?’ he cried. ‘I shall divide this apple between all three.’
‘No, no, you cannot disobey Almighty Zeus!’ Hermes replied hurriedly. ‘Nor am I authorized to give you advice. Use your native intelligence!’
‘So be it,’ sighed Paris. ‘But first I beg the losers not to be vexed with me. I am only a human being, liable to make the stupidest mistakes.’ The goddesses all agreed to abide by his decision.
‘Will it be enough to judge them as they are?’ Paris asked Hermes, ‘or should they be naked?’
‘The rules of the contest are for you to decide,’ Hermes answered with a discreet smile. ‘In that case, will they kindly disrobe?’
Hermes told the goddesses to do so, and politely turned his back.
j. Aphrodite was soon ready, but Athene insisted that she should remove the famous magic girdle, which gave her an unfair advantage by making everyone fall in love with the wearer.
‘Very well,’ said Aphrodite spitefully. ‘I will, on condition that you remove your helmet -you look hideous without it.’
‘Now, if you please, I must judge you one at a time,’ announced Paris, ‘to avoid distractive arguments. Come here, Divine Hera! Will you other two goddesses be good enough to leave us for awhile?’
‘Examine me conscientiously,’ said Hera, turning slowly around, and displaying her magnificent figure, ‘and remember that if you judge me the fairest, I will make you lord of all Asia, and the richest man alive.’
‘I am not to be bribed, my Lady ... Very well, thank you. Now I have seen all that I need to see. Come, Divine Athene!’
k. ‘Here I am,’ said Athene, striding purposefully forward. ‘Listen, Paris, if you have enough common sense to award me the prize, I will make you victorious in all your battles, as well as the handsomest and wisest man in the world.’
‘I am a humble herdsman, not a soldier,’ said Paris. ‘You can see for yourself that peace reigns throughout Lydia and Phrygia, and that King Priam’s sovereignty is uncontested. But I promise to consider fairly your claim to the apple. Now you are at liberty to put on your clothes and helmet again. Is Aphrodite ready?’
l. Aphrodite sidled up to him, and Paris blushed because she came so close that they were almost touching.
‘Look carefully, please, pass nothing over .... By the way, as soon as I saw you, I said to myself: “Upon my word, there goes the handsomest young man in Phrygia! Why does he waste himself here in the wilderness herding stupid cattle?” Well, why do you, Paris? Why not move into a city and lead a civilized life? What have you to lose by marrying someone like Helen of Sparta, who is as beautiful as I am, and no less passionate? I am convinced that, once you two have met, she would abandon her home, her family, everything, to become your mistress. Surely you have heard of Helen?’
‘Never until now, my Lady. I should be most grateful if you describe her.’
m. ‘Helen is of fair and delicate complexion, having been born from a swan’s egg. She can claim Zeus for a father, loves hunting and wrestling, caused one war while she was still a child-and, when she came of age, all the princes of Greece were her suitors. At present she is married to Menelaus, brother of the High King Agamemnon; but that makes no odds-you can have her if you like.’
‘How is that possible, if she is already married?’
‘Heavens! How innocent you are! Have you never heard that it is my divine duty to arrange affairs of this sort? I suggest now that you tour Greece with my son Eros as your guide. Once you reach Sparta, he and I will see that Helen falls head over heels in love with you.’
‘Would you swear to that?’ Paris asked excitedly.
Aphrodite uttered a solemn oath, and Paris, without a second thought, awarded her the golden apple. By this judgement he incurred the smothered hatred of both Hera and Athene, who went off arm-in-arm to plot the destruction of Troy; while Aphrodite, with a naughty smile, stood wondering how best to keep her promise.
n. Soon afterwards, Priam sent his servants to fetch a bull from Agelaus’s herd. It was to be a prize at the funeral games now annually celebrated in honour of his dead son. When the servants chose the champion bull, Paris was seized by a sudden desire to attend the games, and ran after them. Agelaus tried to restrain him: ‘You have your own private bull fights, what more do you want?’ But Paris persisted and, in the end, Agelaus accompanied him to Troy.
o. It was a Trojan custom that, at the close of the sixth lap of the chariot race, those who had entered for the boxing match should begin fighting in front of the throne. Paris decided to compete and, despite Agelaus’s entreaties, sprang into the arena and won the crown, by sheer courage rather than by skill. He also came home first in the footrace, which so exasperated Priam’s sons that they challenged him to another; thus he won his third crown. Ashamed at this public defeat, they decided to kill him and set an armed guard at every exit of the stadium, while Hector and Deiphobus attacked him with their swords. Paris leaped for the protection of Zeus’s altar, and Agelaus ran towards Priam, crying: ‘Your Majesty, this youth is your long-lost son!’ Priam at once summoned Hecabe who, when Agelaus displayed a rattle which had been found in Paris’s hands, confirmed his identity. He was taken triumphantly to the palace, where Priam celebrated his return with a huge banquet and sacrifices to the gods. Yet, as soon as the priests of Apollo heard the news, they announced that Paris must be put to death immediately, else Troy would perish. This was reported to Priam, who answered: ‘Better that Troy should fall, than that my wonderful son should die!’
p. Paris’s married brothers presently urged him to take a wife; but he told them that he trusted Aphrodite to choose one for him, and used to offer her prayers every day. When another Council was called to discuss the rescue of Hesione, peaceful overtures having failed, Paris volunteered to lead the expedition, if Priam would provide him with a large, well- manned fleet. He cunningly added that, should he fail to bring Hesione back, he might perhaps carry off a Greek princess of equal rank to hold in ransom for her. His heart was, of course, secretly set on going to Sparta to fetch back Helen.
q. That very day, Menelaus arrived unexpectedly at Troy and enquired for the tombs of Lycus and Chimaerus, Prometheus’s sons by Celaeno the Atlantid: he explained that the remedy which the Delphic Oracle had prescribed him for a plague now ravaging Sparta was to offer them heroic sacrifices. Paris entertained Menelaus and begged, as a favour, to be purified by him at Sparta, since he had accidentally killed Antenor’s young son Antheus with a toy sword. When Menelaus agreed, Paris, on Aphrodite’s advice, commissioned Phereclus, the son of Tecton, to build the fleet which Priam had promised him; the figurehead of his flag- ship was to be an Aphrodite holding a miniature Eros. Paris’s cousin Aeneas, Anchises’s son, agreed to accompany him. Cassandra, her hair streaming loose, foretold the conflagration that the voyage would cause, and Helenus concurred; but Priam took no notice of either of his prophetic children. Even Oenone failed to dissuade Paris from the fatal journey, although he wept when kissing her good-bye. ‘Come back to me if ever you are wounded,’ she said, ‘because I alone can heal you.’
r. The fleet put out to sea, Aphrodite sent a favouring breeze, and Paris soon reached Sparta, where Menelaus feasted him for nine days. At the banquet, Paris presented Helen with the gifts that he had brought from Troy; and his shameless glances, loud sighs and bold signals caused her considerable embarrassment. Picking up her goblet he would set his lips to that part of the rim from which she had drunk; and once she found the words ‘I love you, Helen!’ traced in wine on the table top. She grew terrified that Menelaus might suspect her of encouraging Paris’s passion; but, being an unobservant man, he cheerfully sailed off to Crete, where he had to attend the obsequies of his grandfather Catreus, leaving her to entertain the guests and rule the kingdom during his absence?
s. Helen eloped with Paris that very night, and gave herself to him in love at the first port of call, which was the island of Cranaë. On the mainland, opposite Cranaë, stands a shrine of Aphrodite the Uniter, founded by Paris to celebrate this occasion. Some record untruthfully that Helen rejected his advances, and that he carried her off by force while she was out hunting; or by a sudden raid on the city of Sparta; or by disguising himself, with Aphrodite’s aid, as Menelaus. She abandoned her daughter Hermione, then nine years of age, but took away her son Pleisthenes, the greater part of the palace treasures, and gold to the value of three talents stolen from Apollo’s temple; as well as five serving women, among whom were the two former queens, Aethra the mother of Theseus, and Theisadie, Peirithotis’s sister.
t. As they steered towards Troy, a great storm sent by Hera forced Paris to touch at Cyprus. Thence he sailed to Sidon, and was entertained by the king whom, being now instructed in the ways of the Greek world, he treacherously murdered and robbed in his own banqueting hall. While the rich booty was being embarked, a company of Sidonians attacked him; these he beat off, after a bloody fight and the loss of two ships, and came safely away. Fearing pursuit by Menelaus, Paris delayed for several months in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt; but, reaching Troy at last, he celebrated his wedding with Helen. The Trojans welcomed her, entranced by such divine beauty; and one day, finding a stone on the Trojan citadel, which dripped blood when rubbed against another, she recognized this as a powerful aphrodisiac and used it to keep Paris’s passion ablaze. What was more, all Troy, not Paris only, fell in love with her; and Priam took an oath never to let her go.
u. An altogether different account of the matter is that Hermes stole Helen at Zeus’s command, and entrusted her to King Proteus of Egypt; meanwhile, a phantom Helen, fashioned from clouds by Hera (or, some say, by Proteus) was sent to Troy at Paris’s side: with the sole purpose of provoking strife.
v. Egyptian priests record, no less improbably, that the Trojan fleet blown of its course, and that Paris landed at Salinas in the Canopic mouth of the Nile. There stands Heracles’s temple, a sanctuary for runaway slaves who, on arrival, dedicate themselves to the god and receive certain sacred marks on their bodies. Paris’s servants fled here and, after securing the priests’ protection, accused him of having abducted Helen. The Canopic warden took cognizance of the matter and reported it to King Proteus at Memphis, who had Paris arrested and brought before him, together with Helen and the stolen treasure. After a close interrogation, Proteus banished Paris but detained Helen and the treasure in Egypt, until Menelaus should come to recover them. In Memphis stands a temple of Aphrodite the Stranger, said to have been dedicated by Helen herself.
w. Helen bore Paris three sons, Bunomus, Aganus, and Idaeus, all of them killed at Troy while still infants by the collapse of a roof; and one daughter, also called Helen. Paris had an elder son by Oenone, named Corythus, whom, in jealousy of Helen, she sent to guide the avenging Greeks to Troy.
1. Stesichorus, the sixth-century Sicilian poet, is credited with the story that Helen never went to Troy and that the war was fought for ‘only a phantom’. After writing a poem which presented her in a most unfavourable light, he went blind, and afterwards learned that he lay under her posthumous displeasure. Hence his palinode beginning:
‘This tale is true, thou didst not go aboard
The well-benched ships, nor reach the towers of Troy,’
a public declamation of which restored his sight (Plato: Phaedrus). And, indeed, it is not clear in what sense Paris, or Theseus before him, had abducted Helen. ‘Helen’ was the name of the Spartan Moon-goddess, marriage to whom, after a horse-sacrifice, made Menelaus king; yet Paris did not usurp the throne. It is of course possible that the Trojans raided Sparta, carrying off the heiress and the palace treasures in retaliation for a Greek sack of Troy, which Hesione’s story implies. Yet though Theseus’s Helen was, perhaps, flesh and blood, the Trojan Helen is far more likely to have been ‘only a phantom’, as Stesichorus claimed.
2. This is to suggest that the mnesteres tes Helenes, ‘suitors of Helen’, were really mnesteres tou Hellespontou, ‘those who were mindful of the Hellespont’, and that the solemn oath which these kings took on the bloody joints of the horse sacred to Poseidon, the chief patron of the expedition, was to support the rights of any member of the confederacy to navigate the Hellespont, despite the Trojans and their Asiatic allies. After all, the Hellespont bore the name of their own goddess Helle. The Helen story comes, in fact, from the Ugarit epic Keret, in which Keret’s lawful wife Huray is abducted to Udm.
3. Paris’s birth follows the mythical pattern of Aeolus, Pelias, Oedipus, Jason, and the rest; he is the familiar New Year child, with Agelaus’s son for twin. His defeat of the fifty sons of Priam in a foot-race is no less familiar. ‘Oenone’ seems to have been a title of the princess whom he won on this occasion. He did not, in fact, award the apple to the fairest of the three goddesses. This tale is mistakenly deduced from the icon which showed Heracles being given an apple-bough by the Hesperides-the naked Nymph-goddess in triad-Adanus of Hebron being immortalized by the Canaanite Mother of All Living, or the victor of the foot-race at Olympia receiving his prize; as is proved by the presence of Hermes, Conductor of Souls, his guide to the Elysian Fields.
4. During the fourteenth century BC, Egypt and Phoenicia suffered from frequent raids by the Keftiu, or ‘peoples of the sea’, in which the Trojans seem to have taken a leading part. Among the tribes that gained a foothold in Palestine were the Girgashites (Genesis), namely Teucrians from Gergis, or Gergithium, in the Troad (Homer: Iliad; Herodotus; Livy). Priam and Anchise; figure in the Old Testament as Piram and Achish (Joshua and Samuel); and Pharez, an ancestor of the racially mixed tribe of Judah, who fought with his twin inside their mother’s womb (Genesis), seems to be Paris. Helen’s ‘bleeding stone’, found on the Trojan citadel, is explained by the execution there of Priam’s nephew Munippus: Paris remained the queen’s consort at the price of annual child sacrifice. Antheus (‘flowery’), is a similar victim: his name, a title of the Spring Dionysus, was given to other unfortunate princes, cut down in the flower of their lives; among them the son of Poseidon, killed and rayed by Cleomenes (Philostephanus: Fragment); and Antheus of Halicarnassus, drowned in a well by Cleobis (Parthenius: Narrations 14).
5. Cilla, whose name means ‘the divinatory dice made from ass’s bone’ (Hesychius sub Cillae) must be Athene, the goddess of the Trojan citadel, who invented this art of prognostication and presided over the death of Munippus.
Comments
Post a Comment