Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology #3)

by Stephen Fry

Troy. The most marvelous kingdom in all the world. The Jewel of the Aegean. Glittering Ilium, the city that rose and fell not once but twice. Gatekeeper of traffic in and out of the barbarous east. Kingdom of gold and horses. Fierce nurse of prophets, princes, heroes, warriors, and poets. Under the protection of ARES, ARTEMIS, APOLLO, and APHRODITE, she stood for years as the paragon of all that can be achieved in the arts of war and peace, trade and treaty, love and art, statecraft, piety, and civil harmony. When she fell, a hole opened in the human world that may never be filled, save in memory. Poets must sing the story over and over again, passing it from generation to generation, lest in losing Troy we lose a part of ourselves.

Horses and riches: always, when we talk of Troy, we find ourselves talking of wondrous horses and uncountable riches.

The story of Prince Ganymede is well known. His beauty was so great that Zeus himself was seized by an overmastering passion for him. Taking the form of an eagle, the god swooped down and bore the boy up to Olympus, where he served as Zeus’s beloved minion, companion, and cupbearer. To compensate Tros for the loss of his son, Zeus sent HERMES to him, bearing the gift of two divine horses, so swift and light they could gallop over water. Tros was consoled by these magical animals and by Hermes’s assurance that Ganymede was now and—by definition always would be—immortal.

It was Ganymede’s brother Prince Ilus who founded the new city that would be named Troy in Tros’s honor. He won a wrestling match at the Phrygian Games, the prize consisting of fifty youths and fifty maidens, but—more importantly—a cow. A very special cow that an oracle directed Ilus to use for the founding of a city. “Wherever the cow lies down, there shall you build.”

You may already know the story of King TANTALUS, who ruled in Lydia, a kingdom to the south of Troy. Tantalus served up his son PELOPS to the gods in a stew.9 Young Pelops was reassembled and resurrected by the gods and grew up to be a handsome and popular prince and a lover of POSEIDON, who gave him a chariot drawn by winged horses. This chariot led to a curse which led to . . . which led to almost everything . . .

Myrtilus went to claim what he thought was his just reward—a night with Hippodamia—but she ran complaining to Pelops, who hurled Myrtilus off a cliff into the sea. As the drowning Myrtilus struggled in the water, he cursed Pelops and all his descendants.

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.

The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death.

Among the people of the area he earned another name, Alexander, or “defender of men.”

Who else but Zeus? Leda was beautiful and—looking down on Sparta that afternoon—the sight of her lying naked on a riverbank had been more than he had been able to resist. In order to have his way with beautiful girls, boys, nymphs, and sprites of one kind or another, the King of the Gods had transformed himself in many extraordinary ways over the course of a long lustful career. Eagles, bears, goats, lizards, bulls, boars—even a shower of golden rain in one case. A swan seems almost routine by comparison.

Zeus was Helen’s father, but she was raised by Leda and Tyndareus as their own, along with her sister Clytemnestra and their brothers Castor and Polydeuces.

Castor and Polydeuces were decidedly handsome. Clytemnestra’s looks drew admiration from all who saw her, but Helen . . . From the first it was clear that Helen’s beauty was of the kind that is seen once in every generation. Less often than that. Once in every two, three, four, or five generations. Maybe once in the lifetime of a whole epoch

Beauty may seem like one of the greatest of blessings, but it can be a curse too. Some are born with a beauty that seems to turn people mad. Fortunately there are very few of us like that, but our power can be unsettling and even eruptive. This proved the case with Helen.

“When the gods play so deep a part in our affairs, we should count ourselves cursed.”

The priestess’s name was Cassandra, and she had chosen a holy calling over the life of a princess. The most beautiful and gifted of the daughters of Priam and Hecuba, she had devoted herself to this temple of Apollo in Troy. It was her ill luck to have caught the eye of the god himself, who—captivated by her beauty—gave her the gift of prophecy. More a bribe than a gift. He moved in to take her into his arms. “No!” Cassandra said at once. “I give myself to no one, god or mortal. I do not consent. No, no . . . !” “But I gave you as great a gift as any mortal can have,” said Apollo, outraged. “That’s as may be. But I never asked for it and certainly never agreed to give you my body in return. No. I refuse you. No.” Apollo could not take back the gift—it was an adamantine law that no immortal could undo what they or another immortal had done81—so, in his fury, he spat into Cassandra’s mouth just as it was rounding for a repetition of the word “No.” The spit was a curse. It meant that Cassandra’s prophecies would always go unheeded. No matter how accurately she foretold the future, no one would ever believe her. It was her fate to be ignored.

But Paris was not a good boy. He had no intention of sailing to Salamis to negotiate the return of some old aunt for whom he cared nothing. What was Hesione to him, or he to Hesione? Aphrodite had whispered his true destination. Sparta and the promised Helen. No, Paris was not a good boy.

“Look what it makes you do! All of you. Every shred of dignity falls away. In the throes of your desire for the most ordinary and worthless mortals you turn yourselves into pigs, goats, and bulls—in every way. Anything to chase down the objects of your lust. It’s too funny.”

“You forget who I am.” “Yes, you can shoot a thunderbolt, yet my son EROS and I shoot something much stronger. A thunderbolt might blast an enemy to atoms, but love’s dart can bring down whole kingdoms and dynasties—even, perhaps one day, your own kingdom and the dynasty of Olympus itself.”

“Blood, fire, slaughter, destruction, and death to us all!” she howled. “Here’s to Helen,” said Priam, raising a cup of wine. “To Helen!” cried the court. “To Helen of Troy!”

The arithmetic that emerges from Homer’s list gives us an estimation of the forces which puts the total number of ships at something around 1,190 and of fighting men a (more or less) generally agreed 142,320.108

The Olympians enjoy the mauling and brawling of their playthings, their little human pets. They thrill to mortal war. They are as fired up and involved as Elizabethan nobles wagering on the outcome of a bearbaiting, or Regency lords ringside at a cockpit in the East End, or Wall Street bankers at an illicit downtown cage fight. “Slumming it,” nineteenth-century sprigs of the nobility called such excursions into the mud and blood of the commonality. The appalling appeal of the dirt and its heady threat of violence. And like those sporting aristocrats, the gods have their favorites.

By quieting the winds and demanding the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, Artemis, the divinity of the hunt and the bow, had held up and dispirited the Greeks at Aulis, which gives us a clue as to where her loyalties lie. She and her twin Apollo favor the Trojans, and over the coming years they each will do what they can to advance that cause. As will their mother, the ancient Titaness Leto.

Aphrodite has naturally been on the Trojan side ever since Paris awarded her the Apple of Discord (and perhaps before, when she coupled with Anchises and bore his child, Aeneas). Ares too, the god of war and Aphrodite’s lover, has aligned himself with Troy.

The Achaeans can look to support from Hera and Athena, who still smart from the insult of being spurned, as they see it, by Paris. Besides this, Athena has always had a special fondness for Diomedes and Odysseus and will always watch over them. Hermes favors Odysseus too,116 but the slippery messenger god’s first loyalty is always to his father Zeus. Poseidon, ruler of the sea, takes the Achaean side, as does Hephaestus, god of fire and forge—perhaps for no other reason than that his unfaithful wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares prefer Troy. Naturally Thetis, for the sake of her son Achilles, will always do what she can to advance the Greek cause.

Hades could not care less who wins: it is enough that the conflict will fill his underworld with new dead souls. He hopes the war will be a long and bloody one. Dionysus takes no active part but is satisfied by the knowledge that libations of wine will be poured, wild dances held, and sacrifices made in his honor during the periods of feasting and revelry which must inevitably punctuate the crises and climaxes of battle.

Demeter and Hestia, goddesses of fertility and the hearth, are the two Olympians with the least interest in or connection to warfare of any kind. Their concern is with the women and children left at home, with the grieving families, and with the workers and slaves who labor in the fields and vineyard...

Zeus likes to think himself a wise and benign onlooker, a disinterested spectator far above the fray. He accepts the role of referee and grand arbiter. He has instructed the other Olympians not to interfere, but he will turn a blind eye when they do. He will not be above being persuaded to make interventions himself. His own mortal daughter Helen is, of course, the proschema, the casus belli, the flame that has lit the fuse; this might be thought to lead him to side with the Trojans, but Zeus has skin in the Achaean game too. His beloved son Heracles was responsible for installing Tyndareus on the throne of Sparta117 and for the sacking of Laomedon’s Troy. Another son, Aeacus, is the grandfather of three of the Greek alliance’s most important warriors—Ajax, Teucer, and Achilles. Zeus has lost count of how many other of his descendants are numbered among the Greek (and indeed Trojan) forces. But he believes himself to be magnificently neutral.

Some historians and mythographers have put forward the notion that the Trojan War was initiated by Zeus as a deliberate attempt to end the human project. To wipe mankind from the map once and for all. Or at least to thin out the population, which was growing larger and larger. As it did so, mankind was becoming more difficult to control.

Across the plain of Ilium stood a great city ready to repel any assault and weather any siege. Over the past year, under the supervision of Priam and Hector, Troy’s already mighty walls had been reinforced and a network of secret tunnels and inland waterways dug. Seaports and trading stations could be reached by river as well as by tunnel. The city was in no danger of being starved into submission. Watchers on the ramparts had a full 360-degree field of vision from which to survey the land around and warn of incoming hostile troops.

Within the city walls every household had been given three huge pithoi, or storage jars, each one as high as a man, with the capacity to hold enough grain, oil, and wine to support a small family and its servants and slaves for a year.

The city of Troy itself might have been unassailable, but there was nothing to stop Achilles, Diomedes, Odysseus, Ajax, Menelaus, and the others from leading war parties to raid, scavenge, and maraud the countryside around. Wine, grain, livestock, slave women—all were fair game, all could help feed the great encampment. For nine years the Trojan War was more plunder than thunder.

These raids were the specialty of the Myrmidons. Homer relates that under Achilles’s relentless and ruthless direction they sacked more than twenty cities and coastal towns over the course of the nine years.

Motherhood was hard for Thetis to bear. The knowledge that she would live forever and her son for a brief burst of mortal time was a constant torment. To see him so unhappy, and for this to cause unhappiness for her, was an experience for which she had no defense. Empathy did not come naturally to immortals and, when it did, it came as pain.

He was enthused—a word whose literal meaning is “to be filled with the spirit of a god” (en-theos).

If there were such a word in English, we might say that Diomedes was “engodded”—Athena being the god in question. She even gave him the power to discern the immortals themselves. “Engage with any of them if you need to,” Athena whispered to him, “any but Aphrodite. She is not a battle deity and should be left alone.”

He embraced Thetis warmly and shuffled to his forge. Overnight he labored at the furnace. Before the first flush of dawn he had created what many held to be his masterpiece—the Shield of Achilles. Five layers thick, two of bronze, two of tin and a central core of solid gold. On its glittering surface, rimmed with bronze, silver and gold, he portrayed the night sky—the constellations of the PLEIADES and HYADES, Ursa Major and ORION the Hunter. He delicately beat out whole cities, complete with wedding feasts, marketplaces, music and dancing. In marvelous detail he depicted armies and wars; flocks, herds, vineyards and harvests. All human life beneath the heavens. By dawn he had finished and was able to present Thetis with not just the shield but a four-plated helmet with a crest of gold, a bright breastplate and—to protect the legs from the knee down—shining greaves of light, flexible tin. Nothing more beautiful had ever been made for mortal man.

His death meant more than the loss to the Achaeans of their foremost warrior and champion. Humanity had lost a mortal of greater glory than had ever been known. Wild, petulant, headstrong, stubborn, sentimental, and cruel as he could be, his leaving marked a change in the human world. Something great had gone that could never—and would never—be replaced.

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.

In our world all athletes know that their years are short; they understand too that they have to be mean, passionate, merciless, and unrelenting if they wish to rise to their own kind of lasting fame. Achilles will always be their patron and their guardian divinity. We each of us know, or have known, someone with a glimmer of Achilles’s flame in them. We have loved and loathed them. We have admired them, sometimes even shyly worshipped them, often needed them.

That sweet and silver Paris had long been replaced by something hard and spoiled, tarnished and mean. Aphrodite, Helen, status, treasure, and show had turned his head and soured his heart. And now this pathetic end. If that she-bear had eaten the baby it found on the mountaintop instead of nursing it, how different the world would now have been.

“They must pay in full for their profanities,” said Artemis. Zeus sighed heavily. “I wish, all those years ago, Prometheus hadn’t persuaded me to make mankind,” he said. “I knew it was a mistake.”