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

by Stephen Fry

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.

To understand Troy’s end we must understand her beginning. The background to our story has many twists and turns. A host of place names, personalities, and families enter and exit. It is not necessary to remember every name, every relationship of blood and marriage, every kingdom and province. The story emerges and the important names will, I promise, stick.

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.” If Ilus had heard the story of CADMUS—and who had not?—he would have known that Cadmus and Harmonia, acting in accordance with instructions from an oracle, had followed a cow, and waited for the animal to lie down as an indication of where they were to build what would become Thebes, the first of the great city-states of Greece. It may seem to us that the practice of allowing cows to choose where a city should be built is arbitrary and bizarre, but perhaps a little reflection should tell us that it is not so strange after all. Where there is to be a city, there must also be plentiful sources of meat, milk, leather, and cheese for its citizens. Not to mention strong draft animals—oxen for plowing fields and pulling carts. If a cow is taken enough by the amenities of a region to feel able to lie down, then it is worth paying attention. At any rate, Ilus was content to follow his prize heifer all the way north from Phrygia to the Troad,5 past the slopes of Mount Ida, and onto the great plain of Dardania; and it was here, not far from where Ilus’s great-grandfather’s first city of Dardanus had been built, that ...

There we have the founding line, from Dardanus to his sons Ilus the First and Erichthonius, whose son Tros fathered Ilus the Second, after whom Troy is also called Ilium or Ilion.8

The liquid vowel “i” in ancient Greek and Latin often becomes a consonantal “j” in English: “Jason” for “Iason,” “Jesus” for “Iesus,” “Julius,” “Juno,” “juvenile,” etc. The French have Troyen and Troyenne; in German it’s Trojaner but pronounced “Troy-ahner.” It’s the same “y” sound in Italian and Spanish. The Portuguese spell and say it a bit like us, though: Trojan to rhyme with “explosion.” Modern Greeks say Tro-as, rhyming with “slow ass.”

Zeus punished Tantalus with an eternal torment in the underworld: water and fruit were kept always just out of his reach, giving our language the word “tantalize.”

Heracles lowered his club and spat at the semicircle of soldiers behind which Laomedon was cowering. “Your majesty hasn’t seen the last of me,” he growled. Executing a low bow he turned and left. “I didn’t meant that bow,” he explained to Telamon and Oicles as they made their way back to their ship. “You didn’t mean it?” Heracles rescues Hesione. “It was a sarcastic bow.” “Ah,” said Telamon, “I did wonder.” “Dear me, how uncouth these Greeks are,” said Laomedon, watching from the high walls of his city as Heracles’s ship hoisted her sails and glided away.

Pronounced almost as “Hess irony” . . . but without the “r.” Rhymes with “Hermione” and “Briony.”

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.

Those of you who know the story of Bellerophon and Stheneboea, or of THESEUS’s son Hippolytus and Phaedra,27 or indeed that of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in the book of Genesis, will be familiar with the mytheme or recurrent trope of the “woman scorned” and how it inevitably unwinds. Hot with mortification, Astydameia sent a message to Peleus’s wife Antigone, who was home in Phthia raising their daughter Polydora.

In Greek the —id or —ides ending denotes “descended from,” indicating the paternal line. So the offspring of the sea god NEREUS are NEREIDS, of Oceanus OCEANIDS, of Heracles the Heraclides, and so on. Thetis’s mother was an Oceanid whose name, although a perfectly good Greek name for a girl, will usually cause the modern reader to smile—Doris.

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.

Lacedaemon, a son of Zeus, had been an ancient King of Laconia. He renamed the realm after Sparta, his wife (and niece). The Spartan people in classical times were known for their terseness and directness of speech. They (like stereotypical Yorkshire people, perhaps) didn’t hold with all the book-learning and southern metropolitan nonsense that was found in Athens and other such soft places. There is a story that King Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) besieged the city and threatened them thus: “If I defeat you, we will raze your city to the ground. We will kill every man and boy in the city and take every woman and girl into slavery.” The Spartans sent a one-word reply. “If . . .” This is often thought to be the original laconic reply.

Those familiar with the story of the birth of Heracles will be aware of the concept of heteropaternal superfecundation.53 Common enough in littering animals like pigs, dogs, and cats, this biological phenomenon is rare, but not unknown, in humans. There was a well-documented case in 2019.54 It is a form of what is known as polyspermy—the fertilizing of the same egg as a result of different acts of sexual congress, causing a set of twins to be born, each of whom has a different father. In the case of Leda, this crazed zygotic quirk was even more remarkable, for she gave birth to two sets of twins. Actually, that is not strictly true. It was odder even than that. When she came to term, Leda laid two eggs, each of which contained a set of twins. I know. But stay with me. From one egg came a girl and boy whom they named CLYTEMNESTRA and CASTOR, from the other a girl and boy whom they named Helen and POLYDEUCES (also known as Pollux). Tradition has it that Zeus was the father of Polydeuces and Helen, and Tyndareus of Clytemnestra and Castor. Castor and Polydeuces were brought up together as loving twin brothers, inseparably devoted each to the other.

Meaning “sons of the god,” specifically “sons of Zeus”: the words Zeus, Deus, and Dios are kindred, or “cognate,” as a linguist might say. The appellation Dioscuri is commonly applied to the twins despite only Polydeuces being Zeus’s true biological son.

He didn’t strip right down. It wasn’t until the mid-eighth century BC that full nudity became compulsory for athletic events. An idea introduced by the Spartans, probably. Gumnos is the Greek word for naked—hence “gymnasium,” a place in which to be naked. Modern gym management insists on a modicum of clothing these days and won’t listen to any arguments about the real origins of the word—I’ve given up trying and usually wear at least a little shred of something when I work out these days.

“Let me take ships to Salamis,” said Paris, growing in confidence. “Ships laden with costly gifts—you know, silks, spices, wine, and treasure. I will convey your warm and courteous messages to Telamon and perhaps diplomacy will free my aunt.” “It is a wonderful idea!” said Priam. “I shall see Phereclus at once about putting together a small fleet. You’re a good boy, Paris, and I bless the day you were restored to us.” 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.

In some ways all this is not unlike the “Great Game” played by those avid Sherlockians who discuss Holmes and Watson as if they had been real men who truly lived and whose cases as related by Arthur Conan Doyle are to be treated as factual. A fun and fruitful game it is too. So let it be with the Trojan War. How much historical truth lies behind the story of the story I examine in the Appendix (page 240). But even if we believe a great deal of it really did take place, there is much inconsistency to deal with. I have already bellyached about chronology. In the main lines of the story as it has been handed down, there was at least an eight-year gap between the abduction of Helen and the final sailing of the fleet. This messes with the ages of some individuals in ways that I won’t even touch on here. Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have—as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped—thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.

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.

But Zeus had neither the focus, the insight, nor the eye for detail to formulate or drive such a plan to a properly thought-through conclusion. He was more in the mold of the one who maddens the dogs and lets them fight it out, or of the Roman emperor who looks down on the slaves and gladiators, gloating at all the blood and gore that soaks into the sand. He was neither puppet-master nor grandmaster tactician. He hadn’t the patience to pull every string. He took no pleasure in surveying the board, fingers pressed to temples, deep in analytical thought, foreseeing every move and countermove. Give a good shake and see what happens, that was his way. Light the blue touchpaper and retire. Let mankind tear itself to pieces all on its own.

We have the benefit of relatively recent history to know that confident expeditionary forces and confident defenders, each armed with equal technologies, resources, and tactical intelligence, can quickly become entrenched in insoluble stalemate. We know how wars that each side believed would soon be decided can stretch out over months and years. The Greeks and Trojans were perhaps the first to discover this unhappy truth.

At this time (in Shakespeare’s version at least) the Greeks hold captive the senior Trojan lord Antenor, savior of Menelaus and the earlier Greek deputation, and so an exchange is negotiated: Cressida for Antenor. But Diomedes falls for Cressida and she, in turn, falls for him. Troilus hears of this betrayal and vows revenge on Diomedes. Strangely, in Shakespeare’s play—which is considered one of the most problematic and beguilingly odd of his entire canon—neither Troilus nor Cressida suffer the usual fate of star-crossed lovers. The play ends with the killing of Hector and an address to the audience from Pandarus in which he bemoans the lot of the “bawd” (pimp) and bequeaths the audience his venereal diseases. Troilus and Cressida are left alive and their story is entirely unresolved.

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.

That the plague struck the animals before the men is a pleasing Homeric detail. In truth it is not uncommon for plagues to jump species: from marmots to fleas to rats to humans, and so on. These kinds of “zoonotic” transmission still take place today, as we know to our cost.

Pre covid wisdom from our man, Mr Fry

The scepter was made by Hephaestus himself, master craftsman of the gods. He gave it to Zeus, who gave it to Hermes, who gave it to Pelops, who gave it to his son Atreus (father of Agamemnon and Menelaus), from whom it was taken by his twin brother Thyestes, from whom it was finally wrested by Agamemnon. Pausanias, the second-century AD traveler, tells us that the scepter survived down to his own time, when it was worshipped as a god by the people of Chaeronea. It was kept in the priest’s house, and people brought it offerings of cake every day. I wonder if Chaeronea was known for the plumpness of its priests?

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.

Achilles snarled with contempt. “I have no interest in deals. Hunters make no deals with lions. Wolves make no deals with lambs.”

The smoke rose in the air and the cries of every soldier, servant, and slave mingled to make a noise louder than the greatest clamor of the war. The smoke and the sound reached Olympus where the gods wept too. Golden Achilles, the son of Peleus and Thetis, was gone from the world. 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. 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. 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 the...

The story of Troy resonates with curses, of course, and these symbols offer a sense that everything to do with all-out war is by its very nature accursed.

All this death. Even now she could hear the screams of the dying and the clash of arms down on the plain. So many brave men killed and good women widowed. So many parents bereaved and children orphaned. All because of her. If it were not for her, Hector would be alive, Andromache would have a husband and Astyanax a father. And for what? All for a vain, cheating liar like Paris. He had not only ruined her life, and the life of all those in Sparta whom he had forced her to abandon, but he had betrayed his first wife Oenone and this son, this poor, awkward, gulping boy shuffling before her. But she had to be honest. Everything Paris had done, she had done. She was cursed. She was death . .

“Don’t play games with your king. Out with it, man!” snaps Deiphobus. “Tell us in plain language what you found.” “In plain language, highness,” says the captain, too euphoric to be brought up short by Deiphobus’s harsh tone, “we found . . . a horse.” “Well, I’m sure there’s nothing so very strange in that,” says Hecuba. “But no!” says the captain, unable to stop smiling. “This is a horse like you’ve never seen before. A horse”—he points up at the ceiling—“a horse as high as this roof. A horse made of wood!”

And his name will be remembered for ever. How strange is our mortal zest for fame. Perhaps it is the only way humans can be gods. We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song. Achilles knew he could live a long and happy life, but chose blood, pain, and glory over serene obscurity. I don’t give a fig for fame.

Diomedes’s second wife. The name Aegialia, with more than a little disrespect, was latterly given by science to thirty different species of dung beetle.

The Trojans were caught completely by surprise. No compassion was shown. We are used to stories of atrocities perpetrated by victors drunk with violence in time of war. No matter how much you side with the Greeks and cheer for Odysseus, Menelaus, and the rest, you cannot but be moved to deep sorrowing pity by the plight of Troy and its citizens. We know how brutal soldiers can be. Years of homesickness, hardship, and the loss of comrades while under the constant danger of life-threatening injury harden the heart and stifle the small voice of mercy. We know how the Red Army, for example, raped, looted, and murdered their way into Berlin in 1945. How cruelly British troops tortured and mutilated rebels rounded up after the Indian Mutiny. What the American army did at My Lai in Vietnam. Whatever country we are from, and however proud we may be of our national claims to tolerance, honor, 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.

The events told here took place—if ever they really did take place—in a period that historians and others refer to as the Bronze Age. The most significant source for our knowledge of the Trojan War is the poet Homer, who lived—if ever he really did live—in the succeeding Iron Age, the better part of five centuries later. I look at Homer and his period in more detail in the second part of this Appendix. Homer wrote about a time long in his past, when the gods still appeared before mortals—befriended them, persecuted them, favored them, cursed them, blessed them, harried them, and sometimes even married them.

The involvement or noninvolvement of the gods in the story of the Trojan War is an indicator of how much one might want to treat the story as history and how much as myth. It is perfectly possible to do without the presence of the immortals entirely, as the Wolfgang Petersen film Troy (2004) with Brad Pitt as Achilles and Brian Cox as Agamemnon showed very clearly. Not an Olympian in sight. In the course of this book, I have occasionally paused to make the point that it is possible to interpret Homer’s description of gods assisting mortals as being metaphorical. When writers or artists of the most rational and skeptical stamp find themselves especially inspired or energized they will often describe themselves as “having had the Muse with them.” Greek archers who fired an accurate shot were bound to whisper, “Thanks, Apollo.” It’s hardly different from boxers crossing themselves before a fight or thanking Jesus after one. Cricketers talk about “Mother Cricket,” actors talk about “Doctor Theatre.” When Achilles hears the voice of Athena telling him to calm down during his confrontation with Agamemnon, is he really hearing a goddess or is he listening to his own wiser counsels, the better angels of his nature? The beauty of Homer, and of myth, is that you can always take it to be both at once.

It would be impossible to tell the story of the Trojan War without reference to Homer’s Iliad, long regarded as the first great literary work of the Western canon.186 The Iliad begins with rage and ends with sorrow: the rage of Achilles at Agamemnon’s appropriation of the slave girl Briseis and the sorrow of the Trojan people as they mourn the death of their champion Hector. This fractional part of the ten-year siege takes 15,693 lines of verse—each comprising between twelve and seventeen syllables—divided into twenty-four books. The concentrated unity of action, the complex and convincing characterizations, the depictions of such a multiplicity of human emotion and impulse, the cinematic shifts in perspective and point of view, the relentless energy and drive, the unflinching representation of violence, the flashbacks and foreshadowings, the depth, deftness, and daring of imagery—these qualities and more have caused poets, artists, scholars, and readers over the centuries to regard the Iliad, along with its companion piece the Odyssey, as the supreme works of narrative art to which all others aspire and by which all others are judged. And yet there remains a fundamental question which anyone encountering these works is bound to ask. Homer and the Trojan War—did they even exist?

So much of who and how we are flows from the idea of Homer. Our culture may be Judeo-Christian in its religious and moral grounding, but it is Greco-Roman to at least an equal degree in these and other domains. If the Greeks and Romans looked back to Homer as the author and founder of so much of their identity—and they did—then it is unsurprising that settling the Homeric Question has long been something of a scholastic Holy Grail for our civilization.

There exist History and Prehistory. Put simply, prehistory is what happened in the human world before the development of writing. Prehistory can therefore be studied only by reading not words but objects. This study is archaeology: the analysis and imaginative reconstruction of ancient buildings and their ruins, the excavation and interpretation of artifacts, relics, and remains. History, conversely, is mostly analyzed through documentary records—manuscripts, tablets, inscriptions, and books. Human prehistory is understood to have begun around three and half million years ago, when our hominin ancestors first constructed stone tools whose archaeological traces we can unearth and examine. Anything before that time we call paleontology, where the only indications left behind are fossils. History, on the other hand, is extraordinarily recent. It began not much more than five thousand years ago, with the invention of phonetic scripts in Babylonian Sumer, writing systems that were spread by the trading Phoenicians all around the Mediterranean world, developing into the alphabets we still use today—chiefly Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic. Separately, and a little later, the Chinese and other civilizations further east developed their own, nonphonetic, ideographic systems. That is a sweeping outline; a closer look reveals squiggles and wrinkles as we shall see.

The periods of the prehistorical era are named according to the prevalent materials of those ages. The first and longest period (three million years at least) was the Stone Age. Then, around seven and a half thousand years ago, the first metallic age was entered when humankind learned the trick of smelting copper. With the addition of a little tin (and maybe some nickel, zinc, or arsenic if there was any to hand), the alloy bronze came into being a couple of thousand years later. Harder and stronger than its constituent metals, bronze could be fashioned into tools, weapons, armor, and ornaments. Another two thousand years or so after this, techniques were developed that allowed the mining and smelting of an even more versatile metal—iro...

Schliemann’s obsession from first to last was in finding the “true locations” of Homeric legend. He was to excavate sites in the Peloponnese, where his search for Mycenaean treasures certainly resulted in some spectacular finds. In 1876, a gold funerary mask of stunning beauty and workmanship was unearthed and instantly designated by Schliemann (on no compelling evidentiary grounds) “The Mask of Agamemnon.” We now know that this artifact predated the Trojan War, and therefore the life of Agamemnon, by a good four hundred years.

Boring old historical truth and evidence were more or less irrelevant to this outrageous fudger, fantasist, fabricator, and outright smuggler, but this is not to deny the value of his work, especially the effect of his fanfares of self-publicity on scholarship and the popular imagination. His methods (including the cavalier use of dynamite) were so damaging to the archaeological record that successive professionals have wryly congratulated him on achieving what even the Greek armies couldn’t—the complete leveling and destruction of Troy. Nonetheless, the discovery of so many strata of Hittite and Trojan civilizations was proof at least of a flourishing civilization and a great city, with evidence of devastating fire and siege, consistent with the Homeric canon.