Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold (Stephen Fry’s Great Mythology, #3)

by Stephen Fry

If this story, the story of Troy, has a meaning or a moral it is the old, simple lesson that actions have consequences.

They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all.

So it was that, from that day on, Podarces led his people and directed the rebuilding of their ruined city. He did not mind that everyone now called him ‘the One Who Was Bought’, which in the Trojan language was PRIAM. In time that became his name.

Unable to think of a name for his adopted son, Agelaus continued to call him ‘little backpack’. The Greek for backpack is pera, and the boy’s name as he grew up was somehow mangled over time into PARIS.

Pelops, having killed Oenomaus and won Hippodamia, ruled in Elis, and established there, in the kingdom of Olympia, a four-yearly cycle of athletic contests (which continue to this day as the Olympic Games).

The royal house of Troy, Priam and Hecuba and their children, for example. Telamon and Peleus, and their offspring, are important too. And so is the house of Tantalus, which, down through Pelops to his sons and their sons, casts a shadow over the whole history of the Trojan War and its aftermath. The curse on Tantalus was doubled with each succeeding generation, a cascade of curses whose force propels us to the end of everything.

No one had ever seen a warrior as entirely and terrifyingly energized as Diomedes was that day. He was enthused – a word whose literal meaning is ‘to be filled with the spirit of a god’ (en-theos).

The vulnerability, the flaw that every human has recalls the first Achilles heel. Every great champion ever since, in war and in sport, has been a miniature of Achilles, a simulacrum, a tiny speck of a reminder of what real glory can be. He could have chosen for himself a long life of tranquil ease in obscurity, but he knowingly threw himself into a brief, dazzling blaze of glory. His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless.

We recognize that if we had ever encountered the real demon demigod Achilles, we would have feared and dreaded him, hated his temper, despised his pride and been repelled by his savagery. But we know too that we could not have helped loving him.

Whatever country we are from, and however proud we may be of our national claims to tolerance, honour and decency, we cannot dare assume that armies fighting under our flag have not been guilty of atrocities quite as obscene as those perpetrated by the ravening Greeks that night.