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

by Stephen Fry

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

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 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.

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.”

The King of Mycenae was the kind of man who did not mind referring to himself in the third person.

On the way to join Agamemnon, Odysseus stopped off at Cyprus to secure the alliance of King CINYRAS, who had promised to provide a fleet of fifty. It was something of a disappointment when his son Mygdalion arrived at Aulis with only the single vessel that he commanded. “Fifty were promised!” thundered an enraged Agamemnon.

“And fifty there are,” said Mygdalion, launching forty-nine miniature model ships of Cypriot clay, each filled with little ceramic figures representing warriors.

lol

“My mother is not one to be refused,” said Achilles with a rueful smile. “She has a strange bee buzzing in her ear. She is convinced there is a war coming and that if I fight in it I will be killed.” “Then she is right to take you away!” “I’m not afraid of dying!” “No,” said Patroclus, “but you are afraid of your mother.”

What this rambling excursion is trying to suggest is that the Hydra venom is woven through the tapestry of Greek myth, from beginning to end, like a serpentine thread. The painful symmetry of its final use to end the Trojan War and bring down the curtain on the Olympian Age—gods, heroes, and all—calls to mind the ouroboros: the serpent that eats its own tail. Typhon was to have his revenge after all.