b. Agamemnon consented to take this course only if the envoys whom he now sent to Troy, demanding Helen’s return and compensation for the injury done to Menelaus, came back empty-handed. When Priam denied all knowledge of the matter-Paris being still in Southern waters-and asked what satisfaction his own envoys had been offered for the rape of Hesione, heralds were sent by Menelaus to every prince who had taken his oath on the bloody joints of the horse, reminding him that Paris’s act was an affront to the whole of Greece. Unless the crime were punished in an exemplary fashion, nobody could henceforth be sure of his wife’s safety. Menelaus now fetched old Nestor from Pylus, and together they travelled over the Greek mainland, summoning the leaders of the expedition.
c. Next, accompanied by Menelaus and Palamedes, the son of Nauplius, Agamemnon visited Ithaca, where he had the greatest difficulty in persuading Odysseus to join the expedition. This Odysseus, though he passed as the son of Laertes, had been secretly begotten by Sisyphus on Anticleia, daughter of the famous thief Autolycus. Just after the birth, Autolycus came to Ithaca and on the first night of his stay, when supper ended, took the infant on his knee. ‘Name him, father,’ said Anticleia. Autolycus answered: ‘In the course of my life I have antagonized many princes, and I shall therefore name this grandson Odysseus, meaning The Angry One, because he will be the victim of my enmities. Yet if he ever comes to Mount Parnassus to reproach me, I shall give him a share of my possessions, and assuage his anger.’
As soon as Odysseus came of age, he duly visited Autolycus but, while out hunting with his uncles, was gashed in the thigh by a boar, and carried the scar to his grave. However, Autolycus looked after him well enough, and he returned to Ithaca laden with the promised gifts.
d. Odysseus married Penelope, daughter of Icarius and the Naiad Periboea; some say, at the request of Icarius’s brother Tyndareus, who arranged for him to win a suitors’ race down the Spartan street called ‘Apheta’. Penelope, formerly named Arnaea, or Arnacia, had been flung into the sea by Nauplius at her father’s order; but a flock of purple-striped ducks buoyed her up, fed her, and towed her ashore. Impressed by this prodigy, Icarius and Periboea relented, and Arnaea won the new name of Penelope, which means ‘duck’.
e. After marrying Penelope to Odysseus, Icarius begged him to remain at Sparta and, when he refused, followed the chariot in which the bridal pair were driving away, entreating her to stay behind. Odysseus, who had hitherto kept his patience, turned and told Penelope: ‘Either come to Ithaca of your own free will; or, if you prefer your father, stay here without me’. Penelope’s only reply was to draw down her veil. Icarius, realizing that Odysseus was within his rights, let her go, and raised an image to Modesty, which is still shown some four miles from the city of Sparta, at the place where this incident happened.
f. Now, Odysseus had been warned by an oracle: ‘If you go to Troy, you will not return until the twentieth year, and then alone and destitute.’ He therefore feigned madness, and Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Palamedes found him wearing a peasant’s felt cap shaped like a half-egg, ploughing with an ass and an ox yoked together, and flinging salt over his shoulder as he went. When he pretended not to recognize his distinguished guests, Palamedes snatched the infant Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and set him on the ground before the advancing team. Odysseus hastily reined them in to avoid killing his only son and, his sanity having thus been established, was obliged to join the expedition.
g. Menelaus and Odysseus then travelled with Agamemnon’s herald Talthybius to Cyprus, where King Cinyras, another of Helen’s former suitors, handed them a breastplate as a gift for Agamemnon, and swore to contribute fifty ships. He kept his promise, but sent only one real ship and forty-me small earthenware ones, with dolls for crews, which the captain launched as he approached the coast of Greece. Invoked by Agamemnon to avenge this fraud, Apollo is said to have killed Cinyras, whereupon his fifty daughters leapt into the sea and became halcyons; the truth is, however, that Cinyras killed himself when he discovered that he had committed incest with his daughter Smyrne.
h. Calchas the priest of Apollo, a Trojan renegade, had foretold that Troy could not be taken without the aid of young Achilles, the seventh son of Peleus. Achilles’s mother Thetis had destroyed his other brothers by burning away their mortal parts, and he would have perished in the same way, had not Peleus snatched him from the fire, replacing his charred ankle-bone with one borrowed from the disinterred skeleton of the giant Damysus. But some say that Thetis dipped him in the river Styx, so that only the heel by which she held him was not immortalized.
i. When Thetis deserted Peleus, he took the child to Cheiron the Centaur, who reared him on Mount Pelion, feeding him on the umbles of lions and wild boars, and the marrow of bears, to give him courage; or, according to another account, on honey-comb, and fawns’ marrow to make him run swiftly. Cheiron instructed him in the arts of riding, hunting, pipe- playing, and healing; the Muse Calliope, also, taught him how to sing at banquets. When only six years of age he killed his first boar, and thenceforth was constantly dragging the panting bodies of boars and lions back to Cheiron’s cave. Athene and Artemis gazed in wonder at this golden-haired child, who was so swift of foot that he could overtake and kill stags without the help of hounds.
j. Now, Thetis knew that her son would never return from Troy if he joined the expedition, since he was fated either to gain glory there and die early, or to live a long but inglorious life at home. She disguised him as a girl, and entrusted him to Lycomedes, king of Scyros, in whose palace he lived under the name of Cercysera, Aissa, or Pyrrha; and had an intrigue with Lycomedes’s daughter Deidameia, by whom he became the father of Pyrrhus, later called Neoptolemus. But some say that Neoptolemus was the son of Achilles and Iphigeneia.
k. Odysseus, Nestor, and Ajax were sent to fetch Achilles from Scyros, where he was rumoured to be hidden. Lycomedes let them search the palace, and they might never have detected Achilles, had not Odysseus laid a pile of gifts-for the most part jewels, girdles, embroidered dresses and such-in the hall, and asked the court-ladies to take their choice. Then Odysseus ordered a sudden trumpet-blast and clash of arms to sound outside the palace and, sure enough, one of the girls stripped herself to the waist and seized the shield and spear which he had included among the gifts. It was Achilles, who now promised to lead his Myrmidons to Troy.
l. Some authorities disdain this as a fanciful tale and say that Nestor and Odysseus came on a recruiting tour to Phthia, where they were entertained by Peleus, who readily allowed Achilles, now fifteen years of age, to go off under the tutorship of Phoenix, the son of Amyntor and Cleobule; and that Thetis gave him a beautiful inlaid chest, packed with tunics, wind-proof cloaks, and thick rugs for the journey? This Phoenix had been accused by Phthia, his father’s concubine, of having violated her. Amyntor blinded Phoenix, at the same time setting a curse of childlessness on him; and whether the accusation was true or false, childless he remained. However, he fled to Phthia, where Peleus not only persuaded Cheiron to restore his sight, but appointed him king of the neighbouring Dolopians. Phoenix then volunteered to become the guardian of Achilles who, in return, became deeply attached to him. Some, therefore, hold that Phoenix’s blindness was not true loss of sight, but metaphorical of impotence-a curse which Peleus lifted by making him a second father to Achilles.
m. Achilles had an inseparable companion: his cousin Patroclus, who was older than he, though neither so strong, nor so swift, nor so well-born. The name of Patroclus’s father is sometimes given as Menoetius of Opus, and sometimes as Aeacus; and his mother is variously called Sthenele, daughter of Acastus; Periopis, daughter of Pheres; Polymele, daughter of Peleus; or Philomele, daughter of Actor. He had fled to Pelcus’s court after killing Amphidamas’s son Cleitonymus, or Aeanes, in a quarrel over a game of dice.
n. When the Greek fleet was already drawn up at Aulis, a protected beach in the Euboean straits, Cretan envoys came to announce that their King Idomeneus, son of Deucalion, would bring a hundred ships to Troy, if Agamemnon agreed to share the supreme command with him; and this condition was accepted. Idomeneus, a former suitor of Helen’s, and famous for his good looks, brought as his lieutenant Meriones, son of Molus, reputedly one of Minos’s bastards. He bore the figure of a cock on his shield, because he was descended from Helius, and wore a helmet garnished with boar’s tusks. Thus the expedition became a Creto-Hellene enterprise. The Hellenic land forces were commanded by Agamemnon, with Odysseus, Palamedes and Diomedes as his lieutenants; and the Hellenic fleet by Achilles, with the support of Great Ajax and Phoenix.
o. Of all his counsellors, Agamemnon set most store by Nestor King of Pylus, whose wisdom was unrivalled, and whose eloquence sweeter than honey. He ruled over three generations of men, but remained, despite his great age, a bold fighter, and the one commander who surpassed the Athenian king Menestheus in cavalry and infantry tactics. His sound judgement was shared by Odysseus, and these two always advised the same course for the successful conduct of the war.
p. Great Ajax, son of Telamon and Periboea, came from Salamis. He was second only to Achilles in courage, strength, and beauty, and stood head and shoulders taller than his nearest rival, carrying a shield of proof made from seven bulls’ hides. His body was invulnerable except in the armpit, and some say, at the neck, because of the charm Heracles had laid upon him. As he went aboard his vessel, Telamon gave him this parting advice: ‘Set your mind on conquest, but always with the help of the gods.’ Ajax boasted: ‘With the help of the gods, any coward or fool can win glory; I trust to do so even without them!’ By this boast, and others like it, he incurred divine anger. On one occasion, when Athene came to urge him on in battle, he shouted back: ‘Be off, Goddess, and encourage my fellow-Greeks: for, where I am, no enemy will ever break through!’ Ajax’s half-brother Teucer, a bastard son of Telamon and Hesione, and the best archer in Greece, used to fight from behind Ajax’s shield, returning to its shelter as a child runs to his mother.
q. Little Ajax the Locrian, son of Oileus and Eriopis, though small, outdid all the Greeks in spear-throwing and, next to Achilles, ran the swiftest. He was the third member of Great Ajax’s team of fighters, and could easily be recognized by his linen corslet and the tame serpent, longer than a man, which followed him everywhere like a dog. His half-brother Medon, a bastard son of Oileus and the nymph Rhene, came from Phytace, where he had been banished for having slain Eriopis’s brother.
r. Diomedes, the son of Tydeus and Deipyle, came from Argos, accompanied by two fellow-Epigoni, namely Sthenelus, son of Capaneus, and Euryalus the Argonaut, son of Mecisteus. He had been deeply in love with Helen, and took her abduction by Paris as a personal affront.
s. Tlepolemus the Argive, a son of Heracles, brought nine ships from Rhodes.
t. Before leaving Aulis, the Greek fleet received supplies of corn, wine, and other provisions from Anius, king of Delos, whom Apollo had secretly begotten on Rhoeo, daughter of Staphylus and Chrysothemis. Rhoeo was locked in a chest and set adrift by her father when he found her with child; but, being washed ashore on the coast of Euboea, gave birth to a boy whom she named Anius, because of the trouble she had suffered on his account; and Apollo made him his own prophetic priest-king at Delos. Some say, however, that Rhoeo’s chest drifted directly to Delos.
u. By his wife Dorippe, Anius was the father of three daughters: Elais, Spermo, and Oeno, who are called the Wine-growers; and of a son, Andron, king of Andros, to whom Apollo taught the art of augury. Being himself a priest of Apollo, Anius dedicated the Wine- growers to Dionysus, wishing his family to be under the protection of more than one god. In return, Dionysus granted that whatever Elais touched, after invoking his help, should be turned into oil; whatever Spermo touched, into corn; and whatever Oeno touched, into wine. Thus Anius found it easy enough to provision the Greek fleet. Yet Agamemnon was not satisfied: he sent Menelaus and Odysseus to Delos, where they asked Anius whether they might take the Wine-growers on the expedition. Anius refused this request, telling Menelaus that it was the will of the gods that Troy should be taken only in the tenth year. ‘Why not all remain here on Delos for the intervening period?’ he suggested hospitably. ‘My daughters will keep you supplied with food and drink until the tenth year, and they shall then accompany you to Troy, if necessary.’ But, because Agamemnon had strictly ordered: ‘Bring them to me, whether Anius consents or not!’, Odysseus bound the Wine-growers, and forced them to embark in his vessel. When they escaped, two of them fleeing to Euboea and the other to Andros, Agamemnon sent ships in pursuit, and threatened war if they were not given up. All three surrendered, but called upon Dionysus, who turned them into doves; and to this day doves are closely protected on Delos.
v. At Aulis, while Agamemnon was sacrificing to Zeus and Apollo, a blue serpent with blood-red markings on its back darted from beneath the altar, and made straight for a free plane-tree which grew near by. On the highest branch lay a sparrow’s nest, containing eight young birds and their mother: the serpent devoured them all and then, still coiled around the branch, was turned to stone by Zeus. Calchas explained this portent as strengthening Anius’s prophecy: nine years must pass before Troy could be taken, but taken it would be. Zeus further heartened them all with a flash of lightning on their right, as the fleet set sail.
w. Some say that the Greeks left Aulis a month after Agamemnon had persuaded Odysseus to join them, and Calchas piloted them to Troy by his second-sight. Others, that Oenone sent her son Corythus to guide them. But, according to a third, more generally accepted account, they had no pilot, and sailed in error to Mysia, where they disembarked and began to ravage the country, mistaking it for the Troad. King Telephus drove them back to their ships and killed the brave Thersander, son of Theban Polyneices, who alone had stood his ground. Then up ran Achilles and Patroclus, at sight of whom Telephus turned and fled along the banks of the river Caicus. Now, the Greeks had sacrificed to Dionysus at Aulis, whereas the Mysians had neglected him; as a punishment, therefore, Telephus was tripped up by a vine that sprang unexpectedly from the soil, and Achilles wounded him in the thigh with the famous spear which only he could wield, Cheiron’s gift to his father Peleus.
x. Thersander was buried at Mysian Elaea, where he now has a hero-shrine; the command of his Boeotians passed first to Peneleos and next, when he was killed by Telephus’s son Eurypylus, to Thersander’s son Tisamenus, who had not been of age at the time of his father’s death. But some pretend that Thersander survived, and was one of those who hid in the Wooden Horse.
y. Having bathed their wounded in the hot Ionian springs near Smyrna, called ‘The Baths of Agamenmon’, the Greeks put to sea once more but, their ships being scattered by a violent storm which Hera had raised, each captain steered for his own country. It was on this occasion that Achilles landed at Scyros, and formally married Deidameia. Some believe that Troy fell twenty years after the abduction of Helen: that the Greeks made this false start in the second year; and that eight years elapsed before they embarked again. But it is far more probable that their council of war at Spartan Hellenium was held in the same year as their rerrement from Mysia; they were still, it is said, in great perplexity because they had no competent pilot to steer them to Troy.
z. Meanwhile, Telephus’s wound still festered, and Apollo announced that it could be healed only by its cause. So he visited Agamemnon at Mycenae, clad in rags like a suppliant, and on Clytaemnestra’s advice snatched the infant Orestes from his cradle. ‘I will kill your son,’ he cried, ‘unless you cure me!’ But Agamemnon, having been warned by an oracle that the Greeks could not take Troy without Telephus’s advice, gladly undertook to aid him, if he would guide the fleet to Troy. When Telephus agreed, Achilles, at Agamemnon’s request, scraped some rust off his spear into the wound and thus healed it; with the further help of the herb achilleos, a vulnerary which he had himself discovered. Telephus later refused to join the expedition, on the ground that his wife, Laodice, also called Hiera, or Astyoche, was Priam’s daughter; but he showed the Greeks what course to shape, and Calchas confirmed the accuracy of his advice by divination.
1. After the fall of Cnossus, about the year 1400 BC, a contest for sea arose between the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. This is decked in Herodotus’s account, which John Malalas supports; the raids preceding Helen’s abduction, and in Apollodorus’s record of how Paris raided Sidon, and Agamemnon’s people, Mysia. A Trojan confederacy offered the chief obstacle to Greek mercantile ambitions, until the High King of Mycenae gathered his allies, including the Greek overlords of Crete, for a concerted attack on Troy. The naval war, supposed to the siege of Troy, may well have lasted for nine or ten years.
2. Among Agamemnon’s independent allies were the islanders of Samos, Dulichium, and Zacynthus led by Odysseus; the Southern Thessalians led by Achilles; and their Aeacan cousins from Locris and led by the two Ajaxes. These chieftains proved an awkward to handle and Agamenmon could keep them from each other’s only by intrigue, with the loyal support of his Peloponnesian henchmen Menelaus of Sparta, Diomedes of Argos, and Nestor of Pylus. Ajax’s rejection of the Olympian gods and his affront to the Zeus-born Athene have been misrepresented as evidence of atheism; they record, rather, his religious conservatism. The Aeacids were of Lelegian stock and worshipped the pre-Hellenic goddess.
3. The Thebans and Athenians seem to have kept out of the war; though Athenian forces are mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships, they play no memorable part before Troy. But the presence of King Menestheus has been emphasized to justify later Athenian expansion along the Black Sea coast. Odysseus is a key-figure in Greek mythology. Despite his birth from a daughter of the Corinthian Sun-god and his old-fashioned foot-race winning of Penelope, he breaks the ancient matrilocal rule by insisting that Penelope shall come to his kingdom, rather than he to hers. Also, like his father Sisyphus, and Cretan Cinyras, he refuses to die at the end of his proper term-which is the central allegory of the Odyssey. Odysseus, moreover, is the first mythical character credited with an irrelevant physical peculiarity: legs short in proportion to his body, so that he ‘looks nobler sitting than standing.’ The scarred thigh, however, should be read as a sign that he escaped the death incumbent on boar-cult kings.
4. Odysseus’s pretended madness, though consistent with his novel reluctance to act as behoved a king, seems to be misreported. What he did was to demonstrate prophetically the uselessness of the war to which he had been summoned. Wearing a conical hat which marked the mystagogue or seer, he ploughed a field up and down. Ox and ass stood for Zeus and Cronus, or summer and winter; and each furrow, soaked with salt, for a wasted year. Palamedes, who also had prophetic powers, then seized Telemachus and halted the plough, doubtless at the tenth furrow, by setting him in front of the team: he thereby showed that the decisive battle, which is the meaning of ‘Telemachus’, would take place then.
5. Achilles, a more conservative character, hides among women, as befits a solar hero (White Goddess) and takes arms in the fourth month, when the Sun has passed the equinox and so escapes from the tutelage of his mother, Night. Cretan boys were called scotioi, ‘children of darkness’, while confined to the women’s quarters, not having yet been given arms and liberty by the priestess-mother. In the Mabinogion, Odysseus’s ruse for arming Achilles is used by Gwydion (the god Odin, or Woden) on a similar occasion: wishing to release Llew Llaw Gyffes, another solar hero, from the power of his mother Arianrhod, he creates a noise of battle outside the castle and frightens her into giving Llew Llaw sword and shield. The Welsh is probably the elder version of the myth, which the Argives dramatized on the first day of the fourth month by a fight between boys dressed in girls’ clothes and women dressed in men’s-the festival being called the Hybristica (‘shameful behaviour’). Its historical excuse was that, early in the fifth century, the poetess Telesilla, with a company of women, had contrived to hold Argos against King Cleomenes of Sparta, after the total defeat of the Argive army (Plutarch: On the Virtues of Women). Since Patroclus bears an inappropriately patriarchal name (‘glory of the father’), he may have once been Phoenix (‘blood red’), Achilles’s twin and tanist under the matrilineal system.
6. All the Greek leaders before Troy are sacred kings. Little Ajax’s tame serpent cannot have accompanied him into battle: he did not have one until he became an oracular hero. Idomeneus’s boar’s tusk helmet, attested by finds in Crete and Mycenaean Greece, was originally perhaps worn by the tanist; his cock, sacred to the sun, and representing Zeus Velchanos, must be a late addition to Homer because the domestic hen did not reach Greece until the sixth century BC. The original device is likely to have been a cock partridge. These cumbrous shields consisted of bull’s hides sewn together, the extremities being rounded off, and the waist nipped, in figure-of-eight shape, for ritual use. They covered the entire body from chin to ankle. Achilles (‘lipless’) seems to have been a common title of oracular heroes, since there were Achilles cults at Scyros, Phthia, and Elis (Pausanias).
7. Rhoeo, daughter of Staphylus and Chrysothemis (‘Pomegranate, daughter of Bunch of Grapes and Golden Order’) came to Delos in a thest and is the familiar fertility-goddess with her new-moon boat. She also appears in triad as her grand-daughters the Wine-growers, whose names mean ‘olive oil’, ‘grain’ and ‘wine’. Their mother is Dorippe, or ‘gift mare’, which suggests that Rhoeo was the mare-headed Demeter. Her cult survives vestigially today in the three-cupped kernos, a vessel used by Greek Orthodox priests to hold the gifts of oil, grain, and wine brought to church for sanctification. A kernos of the same type has been found in an early Minoan tomb at Koumasa; and the Wine-growers, being great-grandchildren of Ariadne, must have come to Delos from Crete.
8. The Greeks’ difficulty in finding their way to Troy is contradicted by the ease with which Menelaus had sailed there; perhaps in the original legend Trojan Aphrodite cast a spell which fogged their memory, as she afterwards dispersed the fleets on the return voyage.
9. Achilles’s treatment of the spear wound, based on the ancient homeopathic principle that ‘like cures like’, recalls Melampus’s use of rust from a gelding-knife to restore Iphiclus.
10. Maenads, in vase-paintings, sometimes have their limbs tattooed with a woof-and- warp pattern formalized as a ladder. If their faces were once similarly tattooed as a camouflage for woodland revelling, this might explain the name Penelope (‘with a web over her face’), as a title of the orgiastic mountain-goddess; alternatively, she may have worn a net in her orgies, like Dictynna and the British goddess Goda. Pan’s alleged birth from Penelope, after she had slept promiscuously with all her suitors in Odysseus’s absence, records a tradition of pre-Hellenic sexual orgies; the penelope duck, like the swan, was probably a totem-bird of Sparta.
11. No commentator has hitherto troubled to explain precisely why Calchas’s nest of birds should have been set on a plane-tree and devoured by a serpent; but the fact is that serpents cast their slough each year and renew themselves, and so do plane-trees-which makes them both symbols of regeneration. Calchas therefore knew that the birds which were devoured stood for years, not months. Though later appropriated by Apollo, the plane was the Goddess’s sacred tree in Crete and Sparta, because its leaf resembled a green hand with the fingers stretched out to bless-a gesture frequently found in her archaic statuettes. The blue spots on the serpent showed that it was sent by Zeus, who wore a blue nimbus as god of the sky. Cinyras’s toy ships perhaps reflect a Cyprian custom borrowed from Egypt, of burying terracotta ships beside dead princes for their voyage to the Otherworld.
12. The fifty daughters of Cinyras’s who turned into halcyons will have been a college of Aphrodite’s priestesses. One of her rifles was ‘Alcyone’, ‘the queen who wards off [storms]’, and the halcyons, or king-fishers, which were sacred to her, portended calms.
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