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. 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.

All things, Troy included, begin and end with ZEUS, the King of the Gods, Ruler of Olympus, Lord of Thunder, Cloud-Gatherer, and Bringer of Storms.

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.

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.

Indeed, the cupbearer lives two immortal lives in the night sky: as the constellation Aquarius, the Water-Carrier, and as a moon of his lover, Jupiter (the planets all take on the gods’ Roman names).

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.

Some people are constitutionally unable to learn from their mistakes.

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.”

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. We will leave young Priam, standing proud among the ashes and rubble of Troy, and travel over the sea to Greece. Things worth taking note of are happening there.

In due course Glauce presented her husband with a baby son of magnificent size, weight, and lustiness, whom they named AJAX, a name which would one day be known in every corner of the world (usually prefixed by the words “the mighty”).

Salamis was a sister of Aegina, which makes Cychreus, what . . . ? I’m so bad at kindred and affinity . . . Telamon’s grandmother’s sister’s son would be his . . . ? A cousin of some sort, at least.

To make matters more complicated, as we will discover, there were two warriors called Ajax/Aias who fought for the Greek side in the Trojan War: but more on that later.

Bear with me, reader.

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.

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.

“I know that face. You dared one night to fix me with a stare. What was in that look? It disturbed me.” “It . . . it was love.” “Oh, love. Is that all? I thought I saw something else, something I cannot name. I see it still.”

Who in the world was Helen?

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.

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

No, Paris was not a good boy.

“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.”

“I had heard he was honorable. Report lied. He is neither. He is dishonorable. In rousing Agamemnon he has proved himself to be a fool.” The King of Mycenae was the kind of man who did not mind referring to himself in the third person.

“I still don’t understand why you have to leave.” “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.” Achilles grinned and punched his friend on the arm. “Not as afraid as you are.”

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.

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.

Homer seems to suggest that all the Achaeans converse in Greek and that the Trojans—while understanding Greek and speaking it to the enemy on the few occasions when they meet to parley or exchange messages—have to contend with allies who “bleat like sheep” in hundreds of languages, which means that Hector and his fellow generals are forced to rely on interpreters in the field to relay their messages and instructions. Modern philology proposes that the Trojans in reality spoke a Hittite language called Luwian.120 We will allow the convention begun by Homer and continued by Shakespeare and almost all playwrights, historical novelists, and filmmakers since. Unless a particular moment in the story calls for different tongues, all the participants understand each other and speak the same language. Happily for us it is this language. The one that you are reading now

Calchas persuades Agamemnon to sue for his daughter’s return. 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.

“We are born with our fate and no one has ever avoided theirs,” said Hector. “Besides, how could I live with the shame of knowing that where so many of my brothers and fellow Trojans have risked their lives I slunk home and hid? Death is better than dishonor. I fight for you and Scamandrius too. If we give in now, the Danaans will sack the city and kill us all anyway. And you would be taken off to be a slave in some Greek household. That I will not allow.”

Apollo was the god of archery, so anyone who fired accurately might say, “Apollo guided my hand with that one,” just as even now a writer often says, “The Muse was with me that day.”

The first requirement for a sniping bowman was patience.

“Sometimes,” said Odysseus, who knew he still had work to do to regain the trust of everyone around him, “sometimes what the gods write man must rewrite.” “Meaning?” said Agamemnon. “Meaning, I’ve had an idea,” said Odysseus. “And though I say so myself, it’s rather a good one. So good that I suspect Athena herself must have put it in my mind.”

“Majesty, they have gone! They truly have gone. Not a Greek left behind. Well, no sire, that is not quite true. There is . . . We came across . . .” “Get your breath back, young man,” says Priam, “and tell us what you found at the Achaean camp.” “The Achaean camp is not a camp. Not anymore. It is dug up, burnt, abandoned. We did find one man there. We left a guard on him because, as well as this one man, we found—” The captain breaks off unable to suppress a great grin. “Sire, you will never guess what we found!” “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!”

“A bad omen?” said Diomedes. “A sign?” “A sign that fools fall heavily,”

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.”

Over the millennia, and the last two centuries especially, so much dissent and disagreement, factionalism, and feuding has enlivened and inflamed the world of Homeric scholarship that the field has taken on some of the characteristics of a kind of religious war. We have seen the Separatists versus the Analysts versus the Unitarians versus the Neoanalysts. A similar schism has obtained (right up to the time of my writing this) in the fevered world of Trojan studies. German antiquarians, classicists, and archaeologists have dominated both realms, with American scholars coming a close second. Academics can get heated and intemperate about the most esoteric and obscure matters, as is well known, but in the case of Homer the stakes have always been high: proving or disproving his existence, definitively describing his modes of creation, and settling the question of how much of what he wrote is fact or fable . . . These can almost be regarded as the secular equivalent of establishing the historical existence of Christ and his crucifixion. 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 civil...

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.

Another possibility—given the strategic and commercial importance of Troy perched as the city was on the Dardanelles strait, the Hellespont—is that some kind of conflict over tariffs and the passage of commerce erupted between the kingdoms of the western and eastern Aegean. Hard for us to credit it, so sophisticated and wise are we today, but back then the primitive fools could find themselves sucked into trade wars