The Return from Troy

‘Surely it can’t have been that easy?’

‘Well, a couple of the leading citizens did try to organize resistance, but when they were put to death Clytaemnestra had absolute control of the city. There’s unrest in the army, of course, and in the hill country around Mycenae; and none of the other kings look likely to accept Aegisthus as suzerain. After all, who wants to pay tribute to a man who can’t keep the peace in his own backyard?’

‘But no one’s raising a force against him?’

‘There’s talk of it. Agamemnon’s son Orestes is still alive and he won’t have anything to do with his mother now. I hear he’s taken refuge with King Strophius in Phocis. Some of Agamemnon’s men are rallying around him.’

Astounded to learn that the bloody history of Mycenae had taken a further malevolent and vengeful twist, Odysseus asked, ‘What about Menelaus? Does he know what’s happened?’

‘There’s been no sign of him. He’s out east somewhere – Cyprus or Egypt, I don’t know. Cuddled up with Helen, I suppose, and staying out of trouble.’

Odysseus sat in incredulous silence. How could the world have undergone such changes while he lounged on this uneventful beach in a stupor of ignorance? How long must he have been stuck here that such drama could have unfolded while he dozed? And what were its consequences for the lesser kingdoms of Argos? How might Ithaca be affected?

He looked up to see Guneus frowning at him, shaking his head.

‘I’m sorry to have shocked you this way,’ the Thessalian said. ‘I thought you must know what kind of turmoil all Argos is in these days. I thought that’s why you were holed up here.’

‘What do you mean?’ Odysseus demanded with a further lurch of apprehension. ‘What else has happened?’

He listened in disbelief as Guneus informed him how Diomedes had returned to Tiryns after being shipwrecked in Lycia only to find that his wife and her lover had locked the gates of his city against him. Then he was shocked again to learn that Idomeneus had suffered the same humiliating fate on coming home to Crete.

‘The last I heard,’ Guneus said, ‘they were in council together at Corinth, hoping to enlist old Nestor’s help in regaining their lost kingdoms. But that would mean civil war right across Argos and, as you can imagine, there’s no appetite for that. Either way,’ he sighed, ‘it looks as though the poor bloody Thessalians can’t expect much help from the south right now.’

Struck by the cruel irony of it all, Odysseus said, ‘You mean that Agamemnon and the others fought for all those years to bring home another man’s faithless wife, only to find themselves betrayed by their own wives while they were gone?’

A touch uneasily, Guneus kept his gaze on the place where his crew were gathering eagerly around Eurylochus who was pouring wine into their gourds. ‘That’s about the size of it, I suppose.’

‘But that all three of them should have done it …?’ Odysseus puzzled aloud to himself, becoming aware of a dull throbbing at the crown of his head and of pressure building at his temples. ‘Clytaemnestra. Agialeia. Meda. And all around the same time, you say? It couldn’t just have happened by chance. Surely they must have been in conspiracy?’

‘The rumour is,’ Guneus muttered, ‘that King Nauplius of Euboea was behind it.’

‘Nauplius? But he was one of Agamemnon’s principal backers. He put up a huge amount of capital for the war. Without him …’

Odysseus faltered there. He caught the knowing glint in the other man’s eyes. A long-suppressed memory broke through the troubled surface of his mind.

‘Palamedes!’ he whispered.

‘That’s right,’ Guneus nodded and spat into the sand, ‘Palamedes. Old Nauplius never forgave Agamemnon for having his son stoned to death as a traitor. And who can blame him? It always struck me as a dubious business. Palamedes was too popular with the troops for Agamemnon’s liking. Anyway, it must certainly have been Nauplius who ordered the lighting of the false beacons that wrecked the Argive fleet off Euboea. It could never have happened without his consent.’ The Thessalian hesitated, glanced uncertainly at his friend, remembering too late how closely Odysseus had been implicated in the death of Palamedes; then he decided to proceed, though with less of the bluff confidence in his voice. ‘There’s a rumour that Nauplius had been travelling through the kingdoms of Argos long before that, trying to persuade the queens to betray their husbands. He wasn’t strong enough to avenge his son’s death any other way, so he turned himself into a viper pouring poison in their ears. He was definitely seen in Tiryns and Mycenae. It seems fairly clear he was in Knossos too.’

Sensing now that more was withheld, Odysseus said, ‘And Ithaca?’

The leathery, scarred face of the Thessalian looked up at him.

‘Yes,’ Guneus said, ‘in Ithaca too.’

‘Tell me,’ Odysseus said, and tightened his lips.

‘It’s all rumour,’ Guneus answered uncomfortably. ‘Ithaca’s a long way off and … I don’t know. We go away to fight a war and while we’re gone, while all our backs are turned …’ He smacked at a fly that was buzzing about his cheek. ‘Anyway, ten years is a long time, I suppose, but … who knows what’s to be believed?’

‘Tell me,’ Odysseus said again.

Guneus studied his friend grimly for a moment. ‘It’s only hearsay,’ he said, twisting the bronze-plated wrist-guard he wore. ‘It’s probably not true at all, but the word is that there’s some young prince out of Dulichion – Amphinomus I think his name was – who’s been … Well, he’s been spending a lot of time on Ithaca …’

Odysseus gave a small laugh of relief. ‘Amphinomus? I know the boy. I know him well. He’s the youngest son of old King Nisus. We lost his brother in Thrace. Amphinomus is harmless enough. He was too young to come to Troy with us and nearly broke his heart over it.’

Guneus cleared his throat. ‘That was more than ten years ago, Odysseus.’

‘Yes, but …’ Odysseus faltered again. He watched the man’s eyes shift away.

A burst of coarse laughter rose from where the two crews were drinking together.

Odysseus narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you saying, Guneus?’

The Thessalian lifted the palms of his hands. ‘I’m not saying anything … not for certain. But times change and the world changes with them. As I said a minute ago, ten years is a long time … Boys turn into men. Women can get restless … And no one knows what’s happened to you, remember. By the time I left Argos everybody had pretty much given you up for dead.’

In a voice low with menace, Odysseus declared, ‘Not Penelope.’

Guneus shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps she’s different from the rest.’

‘You don’t know her. There’s no perhaps about it.’

Sensing the heat in the man, Guneus made to withdraw. ‘I’m sure you’re in the right of it. Like I said, it’s only hearsay.’

‘Then you shouldn’t go spreading it about.’

But the voice was so malignant now that Guneus got to his feet, reflexively checking the dagger at his belt.

‘This is unjust,’ he said. ‘I spoke only because you forced me to speak. Left to myself I would have said nothing.’

Odysseus glared at him through hot eyes. ‘You would have done better to keep silent sooner.’

Guneus grunted as a man will who feels himself badly done by. ‘If my words have troubled you, Lord Odysseus, I’m sorry for it.’ Adjusting the strap of the leather corselet he wore, he looked up, expecting some acknowledgment of his apology. When none came he grunted again, stared out to sea a moment, and then looked back to where Odysseus sat glowering with one fist tightly clenched. A fine trickle of sand was falling from it, down onto the fringes of his mat, as though he had ground a stone to dust in his bare hand.

‘Well, I don’t care to leave a man gnawing on his own vitals,’ Guneus said, ‘but I think it best if I withdraw.’

‘Do as you like,’ Odysseus snapped back, ‘it makes no difference to me.’

Guneus looked down at him for a moment with an uneasy mixture of pity and contempt in his scarred face. Deciding to call his crew together and drag his ship back into the surf, he turned away, but he had taken no more than a dozen strides when Odysseus shouted after him, ‘If you value your life, Guneus, you’ll keep this slander to yourself.’

Guneus stopped in his tracks. When he turned to face Odysseus again there was something closer to mockery in his eyes. ‘I’ll defend my own honour before any man,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’ll keep silent as and when I choose. But for the sake of the respect I once had for you, I’ll say this much: take a look around you, Odysseus. I don’t know what’s been going on here and I don’t want to know; but this camp’s a pigsty and there isn’t one of your crew who’s in a fit condition to stand up against mine. Take a good look at yourself while you’re at it. You’ve got a belly on you like an Aulis tavern-keeper. If I wanted to, I could knock you down as soon as spit at you. You’d better start shaping up and get out of this squalid hole if you’re to stand any chance of winning your wife and island back again.’

He had turned on his heel and started walking back towards his men when he heard Odysseus running across the sand towards him. With no difficulty at all he dodged the first blow that came at him and merely leaned the other way to avoid the loosely swinging second. Then, being a taller man than Odysseus, with a longer reach, he pushed the palm of his hand into the Ithacan’s chest and stiffened his arm to hold him at bay.

‘That’s enough,’ he hissed so that the men watching in dismay down the beach should not hear him. ‘Stop it now or I’ll humiliate you.’ His fierce, imperative stare was fixed on Odysseus’s bewildered grey eyes. A moment later, to his immense consternation and surprise, he saw tears starting there.

The Young Lions

In my later travels across Argos I encountered a chronicler who insisted that more than eight hundred thousand people had died in the war for Troy. Though his estimate strikes me as more bloodthirsty than accurate, many thousands of men and women must have lost their lives in what proved, in the end, to be a wholly destructive enterprise. Countless more came back with injuries that disfigured them for the rest of their days. But what of its effects on those other, unsung casualties of the war – those who were too young to fight?

Having grown up without a father’s guidance, they were forced either to endure the wretched silence of those who could not bring themselves to talk about the war at all, or to listen again and again to stories which left them feeling that real life had passed them by. This is what Odysseus came to recognize as the dreadful patrimony of war. Even as he identified its corrosive power, he was aware of the shadow that his own glorious reputation cast across the life of his son; but I know that he was also thinking about Neoptolemus and Agamemnon’s tragic son, Orestes.

The fierce young son of Achilles – his true name was Pyrrhus – was of a different order than other boys who had been left behind at home. Though he was only twelve years old in the final year of the war, he had been summoned to the fight by an oracle. It was prophesied that Troy would not fall until he came to the city, and so, against the will of his mother Deidameia and his grandmother Thetis, who were both devastated by the news of Achilles’ death, he was fetched out of Skyros. No one expected him to take an active part in the fighting. He was seen merely as a kind of mascot, a talismanic presence required by the gods; one who might rouse the flagging morale of the host by reviving the memory of his father. Yet he was given the name Neoptolemus – the new warrior – and quickly astounded them all. It seemed that he put on his father’s intrepid spirit with his gilded suit of armour, and the Myrmidons guarded his young life with a loyalty that encouraged him to such fearless acts that some said his soul was possessed by his father’s ghost.

Odysseus believed the boy to be possessed rather by the idea of what his father’s ghost demanded of him, for Neoptolemus was a child whose sense of manhood was shaped by the desire both to avenge the death of Achilles and to equal him in glory. It was a consuming appetite, unqualified by such tenderness as Achilles had known in his love for Patroclus and Briseis, and perhaps also for Polyxena. And so, long before he left Troy without a wound on his young body, Neoptolemus was a casualty of the war.

What could Andromache have made of him as she was forced to submit to his embraces on board his father’s black ship? Here was a woman who had lain in Hector’s arms. She had known the devotion of a man for whom warfare was not the chief goal and glory of a man’s existence but a violent fate forced on him by other men. She in turn was forced to watch as Hector fell under Achilles’ spear. She had seen her husband’s body dragged around the walls of Troy. The son of Achilles had hurled her child from a balcony onto the stones below; and now she must endure the thrust of his callow hips as Neoptolemus strove to plant his seed in her loins.

Yet if her body was captive, her spirit was not, and the boy can have found little pleasure in her bed. After a time, he began to leave her alone; and though his Myrmidons may have guessed that she emerged the victor from those loveless encounters, those grim men were too loyal to reveal their amusement and contempt. But Neoptolemus knew what had happened, and the knowledge made him all that more furious a fighter. Returning from Troy to recover his father’s lost lands, he was unable to land in Iolcus, which remained in Dorian hands; so he navigated the straits between Euboea and southern Thessaly and then marched inland in search of glory. The march brought him to the Orthris Mountains, where his grandfather Peleus – an old man aged further by the death of his son – had withdrawn his forces to make his stand against the alien invasion.

Before the day when his grandson marched the advance-guard of Myrmidons up into the mountains, Peleus and Neoptolemus had never met. The boy had been raised on the island of Skyros, in thrall to his formidable grandmother Thetis, from whom Peleus had been estranged for many years. Through her influence, Neoptolemus had developed a profound attachment to his heritage among the Dolopian people, some of whom had long since migrated from Epirus in the far west, through Thessaly, and on to Skyros. In these circumstances, Neoptolemus might have felt little attachment to Peleus, who was, for him, a remote and dubious figure, one who had long outlived the noble achievements of his youth. But the Myrmidons belonged to Peleus, and he had given them to Achilles; and since Neoptolemus had acquired an appetite for blood at Troy he had begun to think of himself as a Myrmidon first above all things. So now he was eager to make a stand beside his grandfather, and swear on his father’s shade that the soldierants of Thessaly would not rest until they saw King Peleus seated again on his rightful throne in Iolcus.

The old man gazed at the armoured youth with tears in his eyes. He recognized more of his wife’s features in the humourless yet unexpectedly soft young face than he did his own. The hair blowing about the boy’s head had the same reddish tinge to it as hers; the eyes were the same grey-green: and Peleus wondered whether something of her rage still ran through his veins. But there was a colder edge about him too – the coldness of a blade in winter – as if the things he had done at Troy had cancelled all feeling from his heart and left only ambition there.

Standing on the windy mountainside Peleus knew that when this boy fought on his behalf, it would not be for love of him, but merely out of a voracious appetite for battle. He shook his head, remembering the disastrous quarrel among the goddesses at his wedding feast at Mount Pelion all those years ago. There were those who claimed that the seeds of the war at Troy had been sown that day. Well, here was its harvest now – an unsmiling boy who had lopped off King Priam’s head and led a murderous assault on his beautiful city. And the dreadful truth was that Peleus had need of such warriors now.

‘Did you come here directly from Troy?’ he asked. ‘You must be weary.’

‘I am rested well enough,’ Neoptolemus answered stiffly.

Peleus nodded. ‘Did you not put in at Skyros?’

The youth glanced away. ‘For one night only. Iolcus had already fallen, so one night could make no difference.’ He hesitated a moment before adding, ‘Also I wished to speak with my mother.’

Peleus nodded. ‘And with your grandmother no doubt?’

‘Yes, with my grandmother also.’

So he had guessed right. Thetis had dropped some of her old poison in the boy’s ears. Yet she had not been able to prevent him from coming at his call. Loyalty to his father’s Myrmidon heritage had brought Neoptolemus to the fight for Thessaly. Peleus could build on that. Somehow he must find a way to win his love and respect as well as his cold service.

Smiling into those calculating eyes, he said, ‘May I see the spear you carry?’

Neoptolemus considered a moment before relinquishing his weapon. ‘This was my father’s spear,’ he said.

‘I know it was,’ Peleus answered, feeling the familiar weight in his hand, and balancing it there as if for the throw. ‘And it was his father’s before him. This spear was given to me by the gods as a wedding gift. The head was forged in the smithy of Hephaistus. This ash-wood shaft was carved by Divine Athena.’

Unable quite to conceal his boyish awe, Neoptolemus said, ‘You truly stood in the presence of the gods?’

‘As we all do, all the time,’ answered Peleus, ‘though not all of us are privileged to see them. Your father once took down this spear from the hooks where it hung beside my hearth. He was no more than a restless boy at the time, younger than you are now. I found him hurling it at a tree for target-practice and was angry with him because he had taken my spear without seeking my consent. But it was on that day that Achilles declared his desire to become a Myrmidon.’ Peleus smiled at the memory. ‘I told him that he should have his wish but that I would keep my spear until I could be sure that I had a son who was fit to wield it.’

As stiffly as if some insult had been intended, Neoptolemus declared, ‘No man was ever worthier than my father.’

‘I know that,’ Peleus answered him, unsmiling, ‘and no father was ever prouder than myself. And now this spear is yours.’

The youth narrowed his eyes against the wind. The beardless jut of his chin was held high as he said, ‘My hand shall never dishonour it.’

‘I trust not, Son of Achilles.’ Gravely, Peleus handed back the ash-wood spear. ‘I am proud to have you at my side,’ he said. ‘I hope to be made prouder still. Now come, let us make our offerings to the gods and to your father’s shade.’

Many weeks later, some fifty miles to the south, at the city of Crisa in Phocis, another son of the war – a sandy-haired youth with truculent eyes, some two or three years older than Neoptolemus – was practising sword-play with his friend. They wielded only wooden swords and carried light duelling shields, but both of them sweated from the length of the bout even though a cold wind was gusting off the rugged slopes of Mount Parnassus.

Growing suddenly impatient of his failure to break through his opponent’s guard, the sandy-haired youth came at him with a swift series of swingeing blows that drove him back on the defensive; but the vigour of his assault left his shield-arm swinging almost as widely as his sword. Just as he was about to deliver what must be the winning stroke, he felt the blunt point of his opponent’s weapon nudging at his ribs.

‘Ha, you’re dead, Orestes!’ cried the darker youth. He gave a gay, slightly mocking laugh that was picked up by the four girls wrapped in brightly coloured shawls who had been watching them from the balcony above. Their clapping set the doves whirring their wings across the court.

Orestes glowered briefly up at them and flushed.

‘Take no notice of them,’ said Pylades, who was the king’s son in Phocis and the most intimate friend to the youth he had just stabbed with his wooden sword. ‘Their applause is as empty as their heads. In any case, it’s you they fancy!’

‘It was a lucky stroke,’ Orestes scowled.

Smiling still, Pylades arched his brow. ‘Even if that were so, you would still be dead. But I was waiting for you to lose control and that’s just what you did.’ Putting down his sword and shield, he wiped the back of his arm across his brow. ‘You’re still far too hot-headed. It’s part of your passionate nature, and I love you for it. But if you want to live long enough to take your vengeance, you’re going to have to rein in that temper of yours.’

‘That’s easy enough for you to say.’ Doing his best to ignore the tittering of the girls, Orestes threw down his sword. ‘The gods have always been kind to you. What complaint can you possibly have against this life?’

‘None,’ Pylades answered, ‘except that it has treated my friend very ill.’ He took a towel from the heap on the bench beside him and tossed it across to Orestes. ‘Come, let’s take a bath together. Then I’ll give you a game of knucklebones before we eat.’

The two youths were cousins and had been friends since they were children, though it was not a friendship of which Clytaemnestra had recently approved. Even before the death of his sister Iphigenaia at Aulis, Orestes had become a major source of concern to his mother. His temperament was pugnacious and impatient, his manner verging on the insolent. In a court where everyone else went in fear of her power, Orestes had begun to take liberties, trying her patience in ways that he would not have dared to risk with his father. Yet Clytaemnestra found it hard to be firm with her son, even though she often devastated others with her cruel reproofs.

From the first, she had always entertained such hopes of him. One day he would marry his cousin Hermione and unite the thrones of Mycenae and Sparta, thus confirming the hegemony of their royal house across all Argos. And he would become the kind of king that her first husband might have been had Agamemnon not murdered him. A king who ruled supreme over a world of artistic beauty and intellectual excellence, a world such as she would have chosen for herself if a strong fate had not willed otherwise.

Yet with her mind preoccupied with the cares of state, Clytaemnestra had found it impossible to give her son the quality of attention that such ambitions required. She had recruited the best mentors she could find to teach him eloquence and music, to cultivate his aesthetic sensibility and encourage him in philosophical enquiry as well as instructing him in the elements of politics and statecraft. But the plain fact was that Orestes wanted to be at the war. More than that, he wanted to be fighting alongside Achilles – to serve as his cup-bearer or humble armour-polisher if no more glorious role was available. Anything to be close to the man whom he idolized above all others. While Troy still stood and there were deeds of glory waiting to be done, what interest could he have in poring over old clay tablets and the finer points of sophistry?

And then when Clytaemnestra returned to Mycenae with the bitter news that his father had put Iphigenaia to death on the altar of Artemis at Aulis, the mind of Orestes had taken a darker turn. What was he to make of this – that his sister, whose beautiful face and exquisite singing voice had always been sources of wonder and delight to him, should have been murdered by his father? How could such a thing make sense unless the gods themselves were mad? In his confusion, he raged against his mother. How could she have permitted this to happen? Why had he not been informed of what his father intended so that he could have offered himself up in Iphigenaia’s place? But Clytaemnestra seemed remote and frozen inside her grief, and where Orestes looked to find maternal understanding, he met only silence or the impatient snarl of an injured lioness.

Eventually he found consolation in the company of his friend Pylades, who had been brought from Phocis to Mycenae in the hope that his companionship might make Orestes’ hours of study less solitary. The two boys had always been fond of one another, but now their imaginations were ignited by the same hopes and dreams. At last Orestes had found someone willing to play Patroclus to his own Achilles; and the cheerful modesty of his friend elicited a greater generosity of spirit from the spoiled prince. The two boys became inseparable. They swore the same oaths of undying love for one another as their heroes had sworn. Secretly they began to sleep in each other’s arms.