The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  The old herald Peisenor, accompanied by Medon his junior, delivered the petition to Laertes on his farm. With quivering hands the old king put away the skin on which it was written and looked up in dismay. ‘I knew something of the sort must happen sooner or later. Why can’t they leave me to die in peace?’

  ‘That’s what they’re afraid of, lord,’ Peisenor answered. ‘You and I are old men these days, and Telemachus is too young to rule. If you were to die without naming a stronger heir, there would be a struggle for power across the islands, which would do no one any good.’

  Stubbornly Laertes said, ‘Odysseus is my heir.’

  Peisenor nodded and glanced away. ‘But his fate is uncertain, lord.’

  Laertes sat in the porch of his farmstead staring out over his garden. ‘Do you see that orchard over there?’ he pointed. ‘The pears, the apples, those forty fig trees? Odysseus and I planted them all when he was still a child. They were only saplings then, and look what loads they’re bearing now. They belong to him, do you hear me? The fruit of their harvest is his.’

  A younger man aware of the gravity of the mission, Medon shifted uneasily. ‘But the concerns expressed here are not unfounded. How are we to answer them?’

  ‘Don’t answer them,’ Laertes grunted after a time. ‘Not yet. Call Lord Mentor and my old friend Aegyptius together at the palace. I’ll come to them there and we’ll deliberate on this tomorrow. And ask the Lady Penelope to attend on us too. Her counsel is always wise. Together we will see what is best to do.’

  But even that meeting of friends was not without its difficulties. Having been given charge of his affairs by Odysseus, Mentor stood firmly with Penelope in guarding the interests of her son. ‘If we let them come together in council,’ he insisted, ‘they’ll draw strength from one another. Then it’ll be hard to get them to disperse until some decision is made. Better to keep them separate on their own islands. They’re more likely to stay patient that way.’

  But Aegyptius was less certain. ‘As far as we older men go, you may be right,’ he conceded. ’But a whole new generation has grown up during the war - my son Eurynomus among them - and patience is not their strength. They missed the fighting at Troy and they need to make a name for themselves. It’s my guess that Antinous and his friend Eurymachus are somewhere behind this petition. They want to feel their manhood has weight. If we don’t let them come into a council where they can sound off a little, they’re sure to find some other way of making trouble. Better to have it out in the open where we can see it.’ He turned to where the old king sat stroking his cheek with the fingers of one hand. ‘You’re still the High King, Laertes,’ he said. ‘Use the council to assert your authority.’

  Laertes winced at his friend. ‘I know them all, Aegyptius,’ he said. ‘I’ve known them since they were tugging at their mother’s paps. I’ve watched them grow till they have beards at their chins, and I know there’s not one of them measures up to my son. Nor do any of them have a claim on the succession while Odysseus lives or while his son lives after him. I won’t have them thinking I’d consider it.’

  Mentor tapped the table in agreement.

  A little peevishly, having listened to the absent-minded manner in which Laertes had failed to except his son Eurynomus from his general dismissal of the island’s young men, Aegyptius said, ‘Telemachus is a fine boy, but we all know that he’s green still. And who can be sure that Odysseus lives?’

  ‘He lives,’ Penelope quietly interposed.

  ‘So we all pray, my dear,’ Aegyptius answered. ‘Yet the years pass.’

  ‘They have no claim, I say,’ Laertes repeated.

  Again Lord Mentor registered his agreement. ‘Then let that be an end to it.’

  ‘Yet there is talk of how a claim might be legitimised,’ Aegyptius ventured. ‘Not that I endorse it myself, but my son tells me he has heard Antinous say that a time must come when the Lady Penelope will take another husband. One who will act as regent till Telemachus comes of age. He wonders why a prince of Dulichion should be preferred over an Ithacan when the choice is made.’

  Taken by surprise, Penelope flushed. ‘I have a husband already,’ she declared, ‘and will hear no talk of other marriages while my husband lives.’

  Aegyptius raised his hands in a gesture of self-exculpation. ‘Which is exactly what I said myself. However, people still talk.’

  Turning to her father-in-law, Penelope laid her fingers across his mottled hand. ‘I cannot control how people speak of me behind closed doors, but I will not have this question raised in public council.’

  ‘Never fear it, my dear.’ Laertes turned a reproachful glance at his friend. ‘There will be no council. I will send my heralds out to all the islands with the message that I remain High King still and my royal writ still runs. It is my will that my son Odysseus succeeds me. If it is the will of the gods that he dies before me, then I shall live on until his son Telemachus is old enough to be king in my place.’

  But the expenditure of moral energy had cost the old man in physical strength. He began to cough, patting his chest with the flat of his hand. Penelope had turned to him in concern when he drew in his breath with a noisy sniff. Sagging back on his throne, Laertes said, ‘Now may I please go back to my farm?’

  One by one, and then in increasing numbers, they began to present themselves at the palace. Each of them declared that he understood Penelope’s grief over her absent husband and deeply sympathized with it; but they claimed that, with each passing year, it pained them more to watch her waste the sweetness of her prime in hopeless yearning for a man who must certainly now be dead. What else could explain his failure to return? Why would he not at least have sent a message explaining what kept him away? Odysseus had never been a wilfully cruel man. If he was alive he would surely have found some means of sparing her the distress of this uncertainty. And if, as they believed, he had passed away, then he would certainly not want her to grieve as a widow for the rest of her days. Had he not, like all the other husbands departing for the war, given his wife his blessing to remarry once she knew that he was dead? Many women had already done so, even though, in their case, there was none of the same responsibility for the continuing welfare of the state that devolved on Penelope’s shoulders. So it was in that spirit of public service, as well as out of esteem for her own person, that they now humbly presented themselves before her as suitors for her hand.

  At first Amphinomus was not among them. He had not been seen on Ithaca for some time, for when she learned how their names were abused in the gossip of the islands, Penelope decided to forgo the pleasure of his company in order to preserve her good name. Amphinomus was saddened and hurt by her decision, but as a gentleman he felt obliged to comply with her wishes.

  Telemachus rejoiced at his departure, taking it as a further auspicious omen that his father must come home. At the same time, he tried to become more considerate of his mother’s feelings, though on more than one occasion I heard him complain to me that she failed to respond as cheerily to his efforts as he would have liked. Certainly none of the royal household were pleased when Antinous and Eurymachus arrived at the palace, preening in their finery, each offering himself as the desirable solution to Penelope’s troubles. Politely but firmly they were turned away, and we hoped that might be the end of the matter; but boat after boat put in during the weeks that followed, and more and more suitors came calling at the palace from every island in the archipelago.

  ‘It’s got to be some sort of conspiracy,’ Telemachus growled when he saw Antinous and Eurymachus return to join the throng of contenders now gathered at the court, ‘They’ve worked this up between them. They’re trying to force her to declare my father dead. If I was a few years older I’d dear out this whole foul stable with my sword.’

  With his grandfather permanently retired to his farm these days, Telemachus turned for advice to Lord Mentor, demanding to know whether it was truly the royal family’s responsibility, as the suitors seemed t
o think, to house them for as long as they chose to stay, and feed them, and keep them in good wine while they pledged their unwelcome suits.

  ‘The law of hospitality requires it,’ old Mentor sighed. ‘It is a law your father would want us to respect.’

  ‘Then my mother must learn to be shorter with them.’

  ‘As always, your mother thinks only of the good name of your father’s house.’

  ‘As I do myself.’

  ‘Then I presume,’ Mentor reproved him gently, ‘that you would not have it become a byword for meanness across the islands?’

  ‘Rather that,’ Telemachus retorted, ‘than watch it turned into a tavern.’

  Ctesippus of Same happened to pass at that moment, intending to join a party of suitors who were drinking wine on the balcony that overlooked the sea. ‘Why the sour face, Telemachus?’ he grinned. ‘Has something disagreed with you?’

  ‘This whole state of affairs disagrees with me,’ Telemachus scowled.

  ‘Then get your mother to put a stop to it by making up her mind.’

  Flushed with anger, Telemachus spat back, ‘She would die sooner than marry any of you.’

  ‘That’s not what she says,’ Ctesippus grinned, and turned away. The boy might have thrown himself after him but Lord Mentor caught him with a restraining arm.

  ‘I think you should talk with the Lady Penelope,’ he said in a low, cautionary voice. ‘She may be wiser in this matter than you think.’

  Telemachus found his mother at her loom with Eurycleia and the other women about her and so was forced to restrain some of the heat he had brought with him. When they were alone, however, he gave vent to an intemperate assault on her for the humiliations he was suffering.

  ‘Antinous swaggers about the court promising to teach me better manners as soon as he becomes my step-father, and the others are just as bad. I don’t understand why you don’t just throw them all out,’ he said. ‘You shame us all by entertaining their advances. If my father was here …’

  ‘If your father was here there would be no problem,’ she interrupted him sharply. ‘But he’s not here, and I have to think what he would advise me to do.’

  ‘Whatever it was it wouldn’t be this. I think he’d kill you sooner than watch you pander to these louts.’

  ‘You will speak to me with respect,’ Penelope reprimanded him, ‘or we will not speak at all. What you’ve just shown me is that you have no understanding how shrewd a man your father is. You have a great deal to learn from him when he gets back.’

  ‘If he ever bothers to come back!’ Telemachus glanced back into his mother’s reproving face. ‘So what would he expect us to do?’

  ‘Are you prepared to listen to me now?’

  Staring out of the window at the restive sea, Telemachus nodded.

  ‘Your father once dealt with a situation rather like this in Sparta a long time ago. All the most powerful princes of Argos had gathered there, vying for the hand of my cousin Helen. Her father King Tyndareus had been weakened by a stroke and he couldn’t see how to choose any one of them without making enemies of all the rest. Odysseus showed him how to make use of them against each other. And that’s precisely what I’m trying to do now. If I were to do what you want and send all these men packing, it would only be a question of time before one of them made a violent bid for the throne. There would be revolution here, as has already happened in Mycenae and Tiryns, and I doubt very much that you would be allowed to survive it. But if I can keep each of them in hopes of becoming my consort one day, then none of them will have reason to cause trouble.’ She sighed with impatience at a fate that left her fighting even with her own son. ‘Can’t you see, Telemachus? We’re just not strong enough to keep them at bay any other way. The gods know, I want nothing to do with any of them. I’m simply playing for time until your father comes home. Each day I pray to Athena for the strength to carry on. And it would help me a great deal if you could try not to make my life any more difficult than it already is.’

  Telemachus told me of this conversation shortly afterwards, and we agreed that - hard as it came to both of us - we would do what we could to preserve the balance of Penelope’s desperate strategy until Odysseus came home. While I made it my business to pacify the rowdy guests with my songs and stories, Telemachus overcame his revulsion and began to act the part of the genial host. Led by Antinous, a few of the suitors took advantage of this to make his life a misery, but most of them responded to the change with good humour. Even so, after weeks of hanging about the palace, each of them hoping for more time alone with Penelope than she ever granted, the contenders grew bored and impatient. Their behaviour became noisier and more insufferable, their demands more importunate. The strain of concealing her true feelings before men she despised began to show on Penelope’s face. Yet when she reproached them, they merely reminded her that she was prolonging this unsatisfactory state of affairs by refusing to make up her mind.

  ‘Choose one of us — preferably me, of course,’ Antinous smiled, ‘and all your troubles will be over.’ He turned, smirking, to his friends before glancing back at the unhappy woman. ‘I promise that your bed will be warmer too!’

  To get out of that rancorous atmosphere, Telemachus and I used to take long walks around the cliffs of Ithaca with his father’s grizzled old hunting-dog at our heels. We were returning late one hot afternoon when we saw Amphinomus walking up the slope to the palace from the harbour. A few minutes later Telemachus watched with a sickly scowl on his face as his mother fell into her friend’s arms with a little cry of pleasure and relief.

  ‘It’s so good to see you again,’ she said. ‘Life has become impossible here. You must help me, Amphinomus.’

  I confess that my own heart fell in that moment too. Yet if Penelope was looking to Amphinomus for unquestioning sympathy she was to be disappointed. He was permitted more time in her private company than anyone else, and there is no knowing exactly what was said between them; but he cannot have wasted the opportunity to remind her, however gently, that he had made strenuous efforts to get news of Odysseus without success, and now, more than four years since the war had ended, it was very unlikely that he would ever return.

  One can be sure that he pressed his own claims on her affections. Amphinomus would have pointed out that he had been at pains to prove himself worthy of her. Though it had grieved him sorely at the time, he had stayed away from Ithaca at her request, and the moment she asked him to return he had done so. He stood ready and eager to marry her now. If Penelope would only consent to give herself to him, all her troubles would be at an end, for as heir to the only other large island in the archipelago still ruled by a single king, he was strong enough to protect both Penelope and Telemachus until her son was old enough to claim the High Kingship for himself.

  For all her loyalty to Odysseus, Penelope must surely have been tempted by the prospect. Her fondness for Amphinomus was clear; his grasp of the political situation was sound; and his consideration for the rights of another man’s son appeared sincere. And having seen the far from downcast expression on his face as he left her apartment, I would guess that her refusal to give him an immediate answer was less resolute than it had been when others pressed her.

  Yet his disappointment was evident two days later when he called his rivals to order in the great hall of the palace. He announced that he too had asked for Penelope’s hand in marriage and he too had been told that she would not consider remarriage until she was absolutely certain that her husband was dead.

  ‘We’ve heard this before!’ Antinous shouted. ‘How are we supposed to prove he’s dead? Without a body to show, she can keep us hanging on for as long as she likes.’

  ‘No,’ Amphinomus silenced him, ‘for she has now agreed that a time limit be set, after which Penelope will accept that she is widowed and will reconsider the question of marriage.’

  ‘So how long are we supposed to wait?’ Ctesippus called out.

  ‘King Laertes has asked
her to begin work on weaving his funeral shroud. She has promised me that she will give her decision when the work is done.’

  The scoffing voice of Antinous rose over the general murmur in the hall. ‘Have you ever heard those women chattering at their looms? If she puts her mind to it, she could make that task last for ever.’

  ‘I think,’ Amphinomus retorted, ‘that those who care for the lady’s honour will trust her in this matter. Her own estimate is that the task will keep her occupied for the next two years.’ He waited for the loud groans of complaint to die down a little before raising his voice again. ‘Can I suggest that she is more likely to make progress with the work if she is not distracted by the demands of a large houseful of guests?’ The hall fell silent at that point. ‘I for one intend to return to Dulichion tomorrow,’ Amphinomus declared. ‘If you hope for success in contending for the lady’s hand you would do well to respect her desire for peace, for when the prize is so precious, anyone who thinks the wait too long has already declared himself unworthy.’ He let the words settle on the silence before ending. ‘Come, gentlemen, let us leave this house in good order and agree to return at the Spring Festival in two years’ time. We can fairly look for her answer then.’

  Not everyone was happy with this judgement, but enough of them saw the sense of it to make it impossible for the rest to stay. By the end of the next day the hall was cleared of suitors, and it was generally agreed that though the prince of Dulichion might not have won the reward he thought he merited, he had done Penelope a great service. Even Telemachus expressed his thanks.

  The customary quiet routine of life in the palace was resumed. Penelope drew up her design for the richly woven winding-sheet in which the body of Laertes would one day be buried, and began to dress her great loom with a fine warp. The feast days of one year came and went; another began; Laertes tended his vines and garden or spent time recalling the past with Eumaeus at his side; and at all seasons, Telemachus practised the arts of war, sharpening his skills with sword and spear, strengthening his sinews and putting on height until, as a youth of seventeen, he was becoming a force to reckon with. By that time too, his confidence had grown from his success in loosening a girdle or two across the island; so he was no longer the same impetuous boy that his mother had worried over. But by then the violets were raising their heads in the glades of Ithaca once more; and still, despite all the efforts that Amphinomus claimed he had made to find him, there was no word of Odysseus.