A Prince of Troy

When Euhippe asked her casually about Harpale’s role in the cult, the girl flushed a little, looked away, and said that her own degree was lowly and she was too young to be initiated into such matters. Nor was she prepared to speculate.

‘But there was a smell of fear about her,’ Euhippe decided. ‘She may not know much, but she knows more than she was letting on, and it frightens her.’

With his own suspicions now confirmed, Peleus asked Euhippe to keep her ears open, and eventually more emerged through one of the baron’s wives. It was this woman who first dared to speak of witchcraft, but she did so darkly, casting her suspicions only on the Dolopian, not on Thetis herself, and in a way that left Euhippe feeling the woman meant her to report what she said.

Knowing that Thetis had once offended this woman, Peleus suggested that she might be spreading rumours out of spite, but Euhippe merely shrugged.

‘You truly believe that something terrible is happening?’ he demanded.

‘For you it would be terrible,’ she said.

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘I may be wrong.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

Euhippe thought for a moment, then shook her head.

‘Then what am I to think,’ he demanded, ‘what am I to do?’

‘You need do nothing. Not until the baby is born.’

‘And then?’

‘Let us wait in patience. When the time comes we will see what to do.’

The truth of what happened at that time was known only to Peleus himself and he would not speak of it – not, that is, until some six years later when Odysseus arrived at his court for the first time. By then the child – Peleus’s seventh son, and the only one to survive – was already in the mountains with Cheiron, learning how to live. Peleus lived alone in his gloomy palace under the patient, mostly silent care of Euhippe, and for a time his melancholic condition had been the talk of Argos. Telamon and Theseus had both tried to shake him out of it and failed. Cheiron was too old to come down from the mountains, and Peleus lacked the heart to seek him out. So the King of the Myrmidons wasted in his loneliness, limping from hall to chamber, hardly speaking, and increasingly reliant on trusted ministers to handle the affairs of state. Old friends like Pirithous and Theseus died. Power shifted south to Mycenae. People began to forget about him.

Then Odysseus ran his ship ashore on the strand at Iolcus. King Nestor of Pylos had encouraged him to come. Everyone responded to the lively young prince of Ithaca, he’d said – perhaps old Peleus might. ‘Why not see if you can’t tempt him to join you in your raid along the Mysian coast. Peleus was a good pirate in his day. He might be so again.’

There was, Odysseus quickly saw, no chance of it. The man could barely lift a smile let alone a sword. Shrugging his shoulders, he had made up his mind to cut his losses and push off at dawn, when Peleus looked up from his wine-cup for the first time in nearly an hour and said, ‘It was good of you to come. Everyone has forgotten how to smile around me. You seem to do little else.’

‘It costs me nothing,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘Does it disturb you?’

Unsmiling, Peleus shook his head. After a time he began to talk and a god must have entered him, for once he began it became unstoppable. That night witnessed a huge unburdening because Odysseus was the only person to whom Peleus ever spoke about what happened between himself and his wife. Odysseus listened in spellbound horror to a tormented account of how, at the prompting of Euhippe, he had cleansed himself before Zeus, begged forgiveness of the Goddess, and broken in to the sacred precinct around the sea-cave where Thetis held her rites. It was the dark of the moon after the birth of the child. Pushing aside the drug-intoxicated women who tried to stop him, Peleus entered the cave and saw the dark figures of Thetis and Harpale standing under a primitive wooden idol to the Goddess beside an altar of burning coals. Harpale held a finely meshed net of mail. Thetis was unwrapping the swaddling bands from her howling baby, and Peleus saw at once what they intended to do. If he had he not come in time to prevent it, she and Harpale would have done what they must have done many times before – they would have seined the child with fire, passing its tiny body back and forth along the shimmer of hot air above the altar’s glowing coals until it was immortalized.

With a howl of execration, Peleus drew his sword, cut Harpale down where she stood, and snatched the baby from its screaming mother. Had the child not been squalling in his grip like a small storm, he might have killed Thetis also, but by the time he could lift the sword again the frenzied moment had passed and he could not bring himself to do it. Thetis saw the conflict in his face. Astoundingly, she released a small, frustrated laugh.

With the baby tussling in his arm, he stared at her as at a mad woman. She held his gaze, and they stood unmoving in the heat and sea-smell of the cave, knowing that the infant might have been spared its flames, but the fire that Thetis had lit had instantly consumed all traces of their love for one another.

Heart-broken, and unwilling to command the death of Cheiron’s daughter, Peleus had her kept under close confinement for a time. The child he gave to a wet-nurse, one of Euhippe’s friends, a Centaur woman who had been brought back from a hunt, freed at Peleus’s insistence, and now lived with one of the palace cooks. It was she who named her tiny charge Achilles, the lipless one, because his lips had never been warmed into life at his mother’s breast. But Peleus found it hard even to look at his son because the child’s cries always recalled the horror of that night. On one thing, however, he was resolved – that Thetis should never come close either to the child or to himself. So in the end, on the understanding that she would die if ever she returned to Thessaly, he gave her leave to do what she had always wished to do and Thetis joined her mother’s people on the remote island of Skyros.

‘But the boy lived,’ Odysseus said at last, filled with sympathy for the man who sat across from him, staring at the dying embers of the fire. ‘You have a son and heir.’

‘Whom I hardly know,’ Peleus answered, ‘and who knows nothing of me.’

‘That can be repaired. You can recall him from Cheiron’s school at any time.’

‘To live in this darkness with me?’

‘The child might lighten it.’

Sighing, Peleus searched the young Ithacan’s face. ‘Fortunately, it was prophesied that the boy will be a greater man than his father.’

Odysseus said, ‘Then he will be a great soul indeed.’

Warmed by the company of this new friend, Peleus asked Odysseus to stay with him in Iolcus for a time. The Ithacan gladly agreed and the two men talked often together, exchanging stories of former exploits and discussing the changes in the world now that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, had reclaimed the throne in Mycenae and was expanding his power to such an extent that he must soon be acclaimed as High King of all Argos. They talked of lighter matters too and Odysseus had at last got his host laughing merrily one evening when the arrival of another visitor was announced.

As a bastard son of King Actor, Menoetius was loosely related to Peleus by marriage, and he had sailed around the straits from the Locrian city of Opus in search of help from him. Menoetius had a six year old son who was in trouble, having killed one of his friends when an argument over a game of knucklebones turned into a fight.

‘There’s no great harm in the boy,’ he said, frowning, ‘apart from his passionate temper. And it breaks my heart, but I can’t keep him with me in Opus. There’s blood guilt on him now, and the father of the boy he killed loved his son as much as I do mine.’

Peleus nodded. ‘So what are you asking of me?’

Menoetius asked if he might bring his son into the hall, and when permission was given, Peleus and Odysseus found themselves confronted by a scrawny six-year-old with a thick shock of hair and a downcast gaze firmly fixed on his own freshly scrubbed feet. Remembering how his own early fate had been shaped by the death of another, Peleus said, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

Briefly the small face glowered up at him in sulky defiance, then immediately looked down again, saying nothing.

‘His name’s Patroclus,’ Menoetius said, ‘though, as you see, he hasn’t brought much glory on his father so far.’

‘There’s still plenty of time,’ Odysseus put in lightly.

Menoetius looked back at Peleus in appeal. ‘I hear that you’ve sent your own son to the Centaur?’ When Peleus nodded again, he added. ‘I was wondering if you thought he might be able to sort this boy out.’

‘He sorted me out,’ Peleus said quietly.

‘But that dreadful business at the wedding of Pirithous … when they got drunk …’ Menoetius saw Peleus frown. He hesitated and began again. ‘I mean, weren’t you already a man when you went to Cheiron.’

‘I was more of a man when I came away. As were Pirithous and Jason, though they were sent to him as boys. And I might have been a better man still if I’d stayed among the Centaurs.’ Peleus shook his head. ‘But that was not my fate. As it is, I was glad to send my son to Cheiron. And since then a number of my Myrmidons have done the same.’ He turned back to where Patroclus shifted uneasily on his feet. ‘Look at me, boy.’ Grimly, Patroclus did as he was bidden. ‘Would you like to hunt and learn how to talk to horses? Would you like to know the magic locked in herbs, and how to sing and finger the lyre so that the animals come out of the trees to listen?’

Uncertainly Patroclus nodded.

‘I think I’d like to go to this school myself,’ Odysseus smiled.

Astounded by himself, Peleus said suddenly, ‘Then come up the mountain with me tomorrow.’

Odysseus looked up, surprised at the transformation in his friend. Some god must be at work here. He felt the hairs prickle at the nape of his neck. But he smiled and nodded. Why not? Yes, he would be glad to go.

Peleus turned back to Menoetius. ‘It’s time I went to see how my own son’s doing. You’ve done the right thing. Leave your boy with me.’

Apart from a tree that had been struck by lightning and the number of scruffy children to be fed, Peleus found the gorge hardly changed since the last time he had been there. But Cheiron felt much older, his cheeks were hollower than Peleus remembered, and the wrinkles deeply pouched about his eyes. His movements were slower too, though he was still limber, and his hands trembled as he offered a libation of mare’s milk in thanksgiving for the return of his son and friend. He welcomed Odysseus warmly among his people, and smiled kindly at Patroclus, questioning him a little, before packing him off to play with some of the other children by the stream. A boy was sent to search for Achilles in the woods and, as they walked to the cave, Peleus explained why Patroclus had been sent to him. But Cheiron merely nodded in reply, and then shook his head over the way Peleus was limping across the rocks. ‘You should have come to me sooner,’ he said, ‘then as now.’

As they ate together, Odysseus expressed his admiration for Cheiron’s way of life. ‘We still like to keep things simple on Ithaca,’ he said. ‘Some people find us rude and barbarous, yet we’re honest and we have all we need there. It’s only a restless lust for adventure that draws me away, but I’m always glad to get home again.’

Peleus sighed. ‘I should never have left this place.’

‘A man must follow his fate,’ Cheiron said, ‘and yours has been a hard one. I should have seen it sooner, but there are things the heart sees and will not believe.’ Peleus insisted that none of the blame for his fate had been Cheiron’s, but the old king gravely shook his head. ‘Though she followed her mother’s ways, Thetis is of my blood, and I have failed as a father.’

When Odysseus protested that Cheiron had been a good father to many of the greatest heroes of the age, the old Centaur sighed that a man could care well for the children of others yet be a fumbler with his own. ‘It is only boys who come to me here,’ he said, ‘and though the power in the world may have passed to Sky-Father Zeus, the Goddess still has her claims to make on us – though sometimes it is hard for men to understand her mysteries.’ He gazed up into the troubled eyes of Peleus and drew in his breath. ‘But you have a fine son. He’s already a skilful huntsman and he runs like the wind. Also he has a singing voice that will break your heart. You will be proud of Achilles – as he is already proud of you.’ Cheiron took in the dubious tilt of Peleus’s head. ‘Oh yes, he knows that his father is a great king in Thessaly and has already taken a knock or two for bragging of it.’

At that moment all three men heard the eager, rowdy sound of boy’s voices shouting in the gorge. They tried to resume their conversation, but the noise went on until Cheiron got up and said, ‘It’s time I put a stop to it.’

His guests followed him to the mouth of the cave where they looked down at the sward of rough grass among the rocks and saw two boys scrapping like fighting dogs inside a shifting circle of young, tousle-headed spectators who were urging them on. When they struggled back to their feet from where they had been flinging punches at each other on the ground, blood was bubbling from both their noses.

Peleus recognized Patroclus by the dark red tunic he was wearing. ‘His father warned me that he had a bad temper, but this is a poor start. I trust the other fellow is strong enough to stand up to him.’

‘I should think so,’ Cheiron turned to him and smiled. ‘He is your son.’

An Oracle of Fire

After the wedding-day of Peleus and Thetis a whole generation passed in the world of mortals, but the quarrel among the goddesses raged on and Zeus was no nearer to finding a solution. At last, out of all patience with the bitter atmosphere around him, he called a council among the gods, and Hermes, the shrewdest and most eloquent of the immortals, conceived of a possible way through.

It was obvious, he said, that none of the three goddesses would be satisfied until a judgement was made. It was equally clear that none of the immortals were in a position to choose among them without giving everlasting offence. Therefore it was his opinion that the decision should be placed in the hands of an impartial mortal.

Not at all displeased by the idea of returning the dispute to the mortal realm, Zeus asked if he had anyone particular in mind.

‘I think,’ smiled Hermes, ‘that this is a matter for Paris to decide.’

Ares looked up at the mention of the name. That handsome bully of a god, who had come swaggering back from Thrace where they make war their sport and take as much delight in the lopping off of heads as others do in the finer points of art, had no doubt about which of the goddesses should be given the apple. He had long since grown bored therefore by a conflict that lacked real violence. Now he declared impatiently that Paris was an excellent choice. He knew him to be a fair-minded fellow with a good eye for the best fighting bulls in the Idaean Mountains.

Though she was restless to get back into the wilds, Artemis pointed out that being a bull fancier might not be the ideal qualification for the matter in hand. But before Hermes could respond, Ares went on to tell how Paris had once offered a crown as prize for any bull that could beat the champion he had raised. Just for the sport of it, Ares had transformed himself into a bull and thoroughly trounced Paris’s beast. Yet even though the odds had been stacked against him, Paris had cheerfully awarded him the crown. So yes, Ares was quite sure of it – Paris could be relied on to give a fair judgement.

‘I should perhaps add,’ said Hermes, smiling amiably at the goddesses, who had, at that moment, no passionate interest in fighting bulls, ‘that Paris is also the most handsome of mortal men.’

Zeus grunted at that. Sternly he looked back at the goddesses. ‘Will all three of you be content to submit to this handsome mortal’s judgement?’ And when they nodded their assent, the lord of Olympus sighed with relief.

‘Very well, Paris it shall be.’ And asking Hermes to conduct the goddesses to Mount Ida, Zeus gratefully turned his thoughts to other matters.

As he sat in the sunlight watching his herd graze the pastures of Mount Ida, Paris was, of course, quite unaware that the gods had elected him to solve a problem that they could not solve themselves. But at that time he was ignorant of many other matters too, not least of the mystery of his own birth, for the youth entrusted with this awesome responsibility was rather more than the humble herdsman he believed himself to be.

Many years earlier, in the hours before he was born, his pregnant mother had woken in terror from a prophetic dream, and that dream was now beginning to cast a lurid light across the world. Yet as parents beget children, so one story begets another, and one cannot understand who Paris was without also knowing something about his parents, and something of his father’s father too.

There were many Troys before the last Troy fell. One of them was ruled by a king called Laomedon, and the lore of the city tells how, as a humiliating punishment for displeasing Zeus, the gods Apollo and Poseidon were once forced to work for a year as day-labourers in that king’s service. In return for a stipulated fee, Apollo played the lyre and tended Laomedon’s flocks on Mount Ida while Poseidon toiled to build the walls around the city. Knowing that the walls would never fall unless some mortal was also involved in their construction, Poseidon delegated part of the work to Aeacus, who was the father of Peleus and Telamon. But Laomedon had a perfidious streak in his nature, and when the work was done he refused to make the agreed payment of all the cattle born in the kingdom during the course of that year.

It was not he but Zeus, he argued, who had put the gods to their tasks, and in any case what needs did the immortals have that they could not supply for themselves? So he turned them away from the city empty-handed.

The gods were not slow to take their revenge. In his aspect of a mouse-god, Apollo visited a plague upon Troy, while Earthshaker Poseidon unleashed a huge sea-monster to terrorize its coastline. When a people already sickening from pestilence found their land made infertile by the huge breakers of salt-water that the monster set crashing across their fields, they demanded that Laomedon seek counsel from the oracle of Zeus as to how the gods might be appeased. The answer came that nothing less than the sacrifice of his beloved daughter Hesione would suffice.

Laomedon did all he could to resist the judgement, trying to force others in the city to offer their own daughters to the monster in Hesione’s place. But the members of the Trojan assembly were fully aware that the king’s perfidy was the cause of their grief, and would consent to no more than a casting of lots. In accordance with the will of the gods, the lot fell on Hesione. So Laomedon had to look on helplessly as his daughter was stripped of everything but her jewels, chained to a rock by the shore, and left alone to die.

The sea was rising and breaking round Hesione’s naked body when she was found by Heracles as he returned with his friend Telamon from their expedition to the land of the Amazons. Using his prodigious strength, Heracles broke the chains and set Hesione free. But the sea-monster was still at large, so the hero struck a bargain with Laomedon, offering to put an end to the beast in return for two immortal white mares which were the pride of the king’s herd.

The king accepted the offer and, after a fight that lasted for three terrible days, Heracles managed to kill the monster.

Once again Laomedon proved faithless. Ignoring the counsel of his son Podarces, he substituted mortal horses for the immortal mares that had been promised, and when Heracles discovered the deceit he declared war on Troy.

It was a war that left the city ravaged. As the son of Aeacus, Telamon was able to discover which part of Troy’s walls had been built by his father and were, therefore, the weakest. He breached the city’s defences at that place, Heracles joined him in the assault, and the palace was sacked. Driven by vengeful rage, Heracles killed Laomedon together with most of his family. Though Hesione’s life was spared, she was given against her will to Telamon, and carried off by him to his stronghold on Salamis. But before she left Troy, Hesione was allowed to ransom the life of one other captive. The life she chose to save was that of her sole surviving brother, Podarces. It was he whom Heracles appointed as the king of a city reduced to smoking rubble. The new king was known ever afterwards as Priam, the ransomed one.

That anyway is how the story is told among the Trojan bards, and there were aspects of the tale that Telamon and Heracles were pleased to propagate among the Argives. But Odysseus was given a rather different version of the story by Telamon’s brother Peleus. This is how he told it to me.

When they were boys, Telamon and Peleus had known for years of the longstanding feud between their father and King Laomedon of Troy. As a man widely known for his wisdom and skill, Aeacus had indeed been commissioned to rebuild and strengthen the ring wall around Troy. Because the city stood on a site prone to earthquakes, Aeacus entreated the divine help of Poseidon and those who understood his mysteries. He also brought with him a bard consecrated to Apollo. It was he who led the music which eased the men in the hard labour of carving, moving and lifting the great blocks of stone. The work went well. Lofty new gates guarded by bastions were built. The limestone blocks were skilfully laid to give a steeply angled batter to the lower part of the wall. Above it rose a gleaming crenellated parapet. So the new walls of Troy, rising from the windy hill above the plain, were both robust and beautiful.

Before the work was complete, however, it became clear that Laomedon was running short of money. When Aeacus saw that the king was unlikely to pay for the remainder of the work, he downed tools and returned to Salamis, leaving a stretch of the western wall unimproved and vulnerable. Eventually, infuriated by Laomedon’s failure to come up with the money he was still owed, he called down the curses of Poseidon and Apollo on the city.

Many years later the Trojans were woken one morning by a dreadful sound. The waters of the bay between their two headlands were being sucked back towards the Hellespont, leaving the sea-bed exposed as a stinking marsh, strewn with rocks and slime and the carcasses of ancient ships. The ground under the city began to move. Buildings cracked, sagged and collapsed. People fled their houses as the sea came crashing back in a huge tumbling wall, higher than a house, that did not stop at the shore but rushed on to flood the fertile plain, destroying the harvest and salting the land.

Though the walls of Aeacus withstood the shock, the western defences and many houses inside the walls did not. Hundreds of lives were lost that day, trapped under fallen masonry or drowned by the wave. Soon a stench of decay polluted the city’s air. Within a few days pestilence came.

Telamon and Heracles were caught in the turbulent waters as they sailed through the Black Sea into the Hellespont in the single ship that remained to them after their violent expedition to the land of the Amazons. By the time they sailed along the coast of Troy, the dirty weather had cleared and the waters calmed a little. But as they followed the shoreline, they were amazed to see a naked young woman bound to the rocks with the breakers surging round her.

The girl was half-dead from cold and fear, but Heracles cut her down, took her aboard ship and brought her round. She was not Princess Hesione, of course, for Laomedon had taken precautions to withhold his daughter’s name from the lottery that had been held in the city. It was from the young woman on whom the lot had fallen that they learned of the city’s desperate condition. Reduced to a primitive state of terror by their misfortunes, the Trojan people had resorted to human sacrifice to propitiate the gods.