Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  4. THE SACRIFICE

  Sitting on our terrace in Arcadia overlooking the Gulf of Argos, I had thought of seeing Agamemnon’s great fleet leaving for Troy and returning much depleted ten years later. But what about all the other fleets I might have seen? Seven hundred years after the War of Troy, in the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, when Sparta was strongest by land, but Athens by sea, Athenian triremes must have sailed past us to nearby Thyrea (now called Astros). Thyrea belonged to Athens’ ally Argos, but had been seized and fortified by the Spartans. And I might have seen the Athenian ships returning victorious with a cargo of prisoners, including the Spartan governor, Tantalos, whose namesake was still doing time in Tartaros.

  Then, after the Roman conquest of Greece in 27 BC, I would have seen Roman navies and traders coming and going from Nauplia, and later still the Byzantines, who still called themselves Romans. In the sixth century AD came Slavs and Avars from the north, in the ninth and tenth centuries Arab pirates from the south, and after the Fourth Crusade in 1204 Frankish knights from Burgundy and Flanders, Champagne Charlies who built castles all over the Peloponnese and turned it into the feudal Principality of Achaea. Geoffrey de Villehardouin captured Nauplia in 1210, but in 1388 the latest heir to the Franks, Marie d’Enghien, sold it to the Venetians, who lost it to the Turks in 1540, recovered it in 1686 and lost it again in 1715. In 1770 a Russian fleet sailed up the Gulf to Nauplia but didn’t stay to occupy it.

  In 1822 the Greeks at last recovered Nauplia from the Turks, but its two mighty fortresses were occupied by rival warlords conducting their own civil war, until sailing past me to the rescue of the benighted inhabitants came a British fleet, under Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, commander of the combined British, French and Russian fleets that had recently destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Navarino (now Pylos) on the far side of the Peloponnese. Six years later, after the assassination in Nauplia of Capodistrias, the first regent of newly independent Greece, the Greeks elected their first modern king, the young prince Otho, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. He too sailed past to claim his throne in Nauplia and returned a year later when his capital was transferred to Athens.

  Then, on the night of 26 April 1941, I might have seen the disastrous evacuation of some seven thousand British troops in the face of the German invasion: huge explosions of light and sound as Stukas dive-bombed the British transport ships and destroyers, sinking several with the loss of many lives. Finally, in October 1944, after the German withdrawal, I would have seen a British fleet return to Nauplia to organise the surrender of the Germans’ Greek collaborators, the Security Battalions, and their removal to the island of Spetses, just over there from where I’m sitting, on the other side of the Gulf, where it opens into the Myrtoan Sea.

  After Agamemnon’s 160 ships on their way to Troy had rounded Spetses, then called Pityoussa, or ‘pine tree island’, they turned north to rendezvous with all the other Greek fleets at Aulis on the coast of Boeotia. Sheltered from the north-east wind by the long island of Euboia, this was a good place for so many ships to meet and wait, but impossible to leave if the north-easterly persisted. As it did on this occasion, and day by day the troops became more and more restless. Agamemnon consulted the priest he had brought from Argos, a man called Calchas, whose father Thestor had been a notable prophet and taught his son to be an even better one. Calchas made sacrifices, consulted the omens, spoke to the gods in his dreams, and finally informed Agamemnon that Artemis, the goddess of hunting and wild creatures, was angry with him.

  ‘What have I done?’ asked Agamemnon. ‘Is this still the curse on my family?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Calchas, ‘but I can’t tell you exactly. Gods have long memories for injuries. Long ago, when you were passing through Arcadia on your way to Sparta, did you shoot any deer?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Agamemnon. ‘We had to eat.’

  ‘Arcadia is her own hunting ground,’ said Calchas, ‘and perhaps you were so unfortunate as to bring down one of her favourite animals.’

  ‘How was I to know?’

  ‘You weren’t. It’s all too easy to offend a god without being aware of it, but that is no excuse in the god’s eyes. You might, on top of that, have been particularly proud of the accuracy of your aim and remarked to your companions – or even muttered to yourself under your breath – something like “Bravo, Agamemnon, what a shot! Artemis couldn’t have done it better.” That would have been ultra-offensive.’

  ‘Well, I got some good shots, certainly. I’ve always been a first-rate archer –’

  ‘Careful, sir, careful!’

  ‘– but I don’t recall comparing myself to Artemis. Even at that young age, when most people are boasters and show-offs, I knew that could only lead to trouble. Anyway, assuming you’re right and that I have somehow offended her, what can I do now to appease her? This expedition against Troy is finished, everybody is going to go home unless the wind changes.’

  ‘You will not like the remedy. I am even reluctant to say what it is.’

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘Remember I am only the messenger! Please don’t shoot the messenger!’

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘You have three daughters. You must sacrifice the most beautiful to Artemis.’

  ‘Iphigeneia! No! No! Nobody makes human sacrifices. You must have got your message wrong.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. It’s true that most of the gods dislike human sacrifices, but Artemis does sometimes demand them. She is a goddess, you see, who regards all creatures on earth as essentially wild, as either hunters or their game, and she has as little compunction in taking humans or even human young, if that suits her, as we have in taking a deer or a fawn or a lion-cub.’

  Agamemnon called all the Greek leaders to his tent and told them what Calchas had told him.

  ‘I cannot do it,’ he said. ‘Even if I could, my wife Clytemnestra would never allow it. We must all disperse and go home.’

  The other Greek leaders sympathised with him, but refused to accept that there would be no war with Troy. Menelaos, in particular, though he was Agamemnon’s brother, was adamant.

  ‘The effect of your refusing to sacrifice your beautiful daughter Iphigeneia,’ he said, ‘is that I must sacrifice my still more beautiful wife Helen to her Trojan abductor. What does this tell the world about Greeks? That we sit down meekly under any insult and injury barbarians care to offer us?’

  Odysseus, king of the little island of Ithaka, was cleverer.

  ‘Send for Iphigeneia!’ he said. ‘There’s no need to tell your wife why. In any case, I’m sure that your willingness to sacrifice your daughter will be quite enough to appease the goddess and she’ll relent when she sees all the preparations made, especially if you promise to give Iphigeneia to her service as a priestess.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Agamemnon, ‘but my wife will not send Iphigeneia without some good reason.’

  Odysseus thought for a moment, looked round the assembled leaders and said:

  ‘Tell her that you want to marry her to the prince Achilles!’

  ‘Achilles is not here. He’s promised to sail directly from Thessaly to Troy.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Odysseus.

  So on this pretext, Agamemnon sent a message to Clytemnestra, who was only too delighted to send her daughter to Aulis for what she thought would be the most prestigious marriage any girl could make. But what Agamemnon – clever with his bow and spear, but not with his head – had not foreseen was that Clytemnestra herself would accompany her daughter. When they arrived, the wind was still blowing from the north-east and the pyre on which Iphigeneia was to be burnt after having her throat cut was already being heaped up. What could Agamemnon say to his wife now? He helped her and their daughter disembark, sent them to his quarters to settle in, and summoned crafty Odysseus.

  ‘You’ve landed me in no end of trouble,’ said Agamemnon.

  ‘Women always outwit us,’ said Odysseus, ‘even the
cleverest of us.’

  ‘Well, what am I to do?’

  ‘Your wife has the reputation of being the most formidable woman in Greece. She is, of course, the niece of my wife Penelope, Tyndareus’ sister, who is the next most formidable.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘And so, to judge by my own experience, any further attempt to deceive her will be useless. You must tell her the truth.’

  ‘Tell her that I’m proposing to sacrifice our daughter!’

  ‘Tell her that if Troy is to be punished for abducting her sister Helen, Greece must make this terrible sacrifice! If not, we end our expedition here and all disperse. That is the truth and you must show her our mighty armada and legions of soldiers and appeal to her sense of honour. This sacrifice is not yours or hers, it is demanded by a goddess, it is for the sake of all Greece. And aren’t we all, kings and princes and soldiers alike, the pick of our people, ready to sacrifice our lives on the plain of Troy for the same cause, for the injury done to her own sister?’

  In those words or as many of them as he could remember, clumsily, without Odysseus’ fluent flow of rhetoric, Agamemnon told Clytemnestra the truth. The outcome was exactly what he expected. His wife’s rage could be heard all over the camp. The lie about a marriage with Achilles infuriated her even more than the idea of her daughter being sacrificed. She wanted the priest Calchas to be put to death for his unholy and unsubstantiated prophecy and she swore that if Iphigeneia were to be sacrificed, she would never forgive any member of the expedition, least of all its commander-in-chief Agamemnon.

  But Iphigeneia herself had heard the quarrel between her parents, the stumbling apologies and halting arguments of her father and the bitter recriminations of her mother. When at last they fell silent, staring at one another with smouldering hatred, this beautiful girl who had come expecting to be married to Achilles astonished them both by taking her father’s side.

  ‘No one’s life is secure,’ she said, ‘and all of us have to die one day, perhaps even today or tomorrow. Every man here, as Father said, is ready to die for the honour of Greece and many of them surely will. Why should I, just because I am a woman, be more afraid to die than they are? Why shouldn’t I show them the way to go into the underworld with courage? I thought I was coming here to marry Achilles. What a match, what an honour for me! But would he have considered it an honour? Let me show him that it would have been! My little brother Orestes is still a baby, but if he were my age he would be going to fight at Troy with all the other young princes, Achilles, Diomedes, Ajax. Do you think that King Agamemnon’s eldest daughter is not as brave as if she were his son, as brave as any prince? If I am to be the first to sacrifice my life, I shall be the one that everyone will remember. Even my aunt Helen and the Trojans will hear of it and understand what it means to stir up Greeks. How could I return to Argos knowing that because I was afraid to die Troy was not punished? Besides, if the goddess Artemis demands my life, how can I refuse? Gods must be obeyed.’

  Never was any sacrifice performed with such solemnity and emotion as Iphigeneia’s at Aulis. Tens of thousands of men in full armour, their spears reversed to point at the ground, their heads bowed in sorrow and admiration, their eyes running tears, stood in complete silence as the girl, dressed all in white and garlanded with flowers, walked out alone to the altar where Calchas awaited her with the sacrificial knife. Ten years later, after the sack of Troy, when Odysseus demanded the sacrifice of King Priam’s daughter Polyxena as an offering to the shade of the dead Achilles, there can be little doubt that this atrocity was meant to mirror at the end of the war the atrocity committed at its outset, to inflict on the Trojans what the Greeks had inflicted on themselves. And when Polyxena took the sacrifice to herself, insisted on going willingly to her death and slitting her own throat, she was surely imitating Iphigeneia’s self-sacrifice and demonstrating that a princess of Troy could match the courage of a princess of Argos. But because one sacrifice marked the beginning of violence and slaughter and the other the end, there was a significant difference: Iphigeneia offered herself to her own people in a spirit of hope for their future, while Polyxena, in front of her burning city, with her people dead or enslaved, surrounded by the implacable ranks of her enemies, can only have felt despair.

  One story has it that Iphigeneia did not die at Aulis, that at the last moment Artemis substituted a deer for the human victim and secretly carried Iphigeneia away to become her priestess at Tauris in a savage northern land (now the Crimea) beyond the Pontos Euxeinos (now the Black Sea). It might be comforting to believe that – except that as a priestess in Tauris she would have been offering human sacrifices – and perhaps many of the horrified witnesses of the sacrifice at Aulis afterwards preferred to believe it, but it must have been done with such secrecy, such divine subterfuge that none of those present knew it. Otherwise Clytemnestra would not have returned to Mycenae with such an incandescent rage for revenge that it had still not cooled ten and more years later when the burning beacon on Mount Arachnaion would have been not only the signal of her husband’s triumphant return, but in her eyes the re-ignition of that monstrous bonfire at Aulis which consumed her daughter and for which Agamemnon would now at last pay with his head. Whichever is true, that Artemis accepted the sacrifice of Iphigeneia or that she only pretended to, the immediate result was the same. The wind changed and blew the Greek fleet to Troy.

  5. THE MATRICIDE

  So now the curses of Myrtilos and Thyestes passed to the third generation of Pelops’ seed. Elektra had long since grown up and been married to that same farmer who had lent her the donkeys. This was her punishment for smuggling her little brother out of Argos. But she did not have to suffer the extra humiliation of bearing the children of a peasant, since her now elderly husband would not sleep with her and did not even expect her to perform the usual household duties of a wife. Elektra, however, in gratitude for his kindness and respect, preferred to cook and clean, draw water and help him with the animals and crops. She even felt satisfaction when she received a visit from her pliant sister Chrysothemis, still living in the palace with her mother and Aigisthos, and compared her white skin, soft hands and fine leather sandals with her own sunburnt complexion, calloused hands and bare, hardened, discoloured feet. She was sure that somewhere far away Orestes was growing into a man and that when he did it would be her mother’s and Aigisthos’ turn to suffer.

  Meanwhile, from time to time she went secretly, dressed as the peasant she now was, with the flap of her cloak pulled over her face, and laid a few wild flowers behind her father’s grave in the cemetery just inside Mycenae’s Lion Gate. These precautions were necessary since to pay any respect to the former king was forbidden under penalty of death. She spoke to him in a whisper, but as if he could still hear her, reminding him of his days of glory in the war with Troy and promising that he would not go unavenged for ever. It’s not likely that he heard her, since the shades in Hades’ kingdom of the dead no longer have any knowledge of our world, unless a living visitor brings it to them, and there have been few of those. But Elektra was really speaking to herself, for, kind as her husband was, there was little she could talk about to him or the other peasant wives. She went about her work mostly in silence. She was like a once brightly-coloured song-bird that was fed and watered but, hanging in a dusty cage under the eaves of a low, dark house, had lost its bright plumage and ceased to sing. When she did speak to her father’s shade, it was in bitter anger. Her mother’s rage for revenge had ended with the murder of Agamemnon, but now, like an infection, it had passed into the daughter, who wanted nothing more than her mother’s death.

  Orestes, when he was old enough, was sent by his aunt Anaxibia, Agamemnon’s sister, to consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. He didn’t have far to go, since Delphi was in his uncle’s kingdom of Phokis. He went there to ask if he really must avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother and her lover, his cousin Aigisthos. The god’s reply was unequivocal: yes, he must. But wouldn’t
he be liable to be pursued by the three fearful Erinyes or Avengers – ancient goddesses of the earth and underworld, older even than the Olympian gods, who enforced curses and punished crimes against mothers in particular? Apollo’s oracle assured him that, if necessary, the god himself would protect him from the Erinyes.

  Orestes was a gentle young man, always in delicate health, subject to asthma and fainting fits, who had been happy living in obscurity at his uncle’s court in Phokis, where he studied mathematics and astronomy, philosophy and music with passion and skill. The oracle’s reply, though he had expected it, horrified him, and he did not entirely believe the god’s promise of protection. Fortunately, his cousin and close friend Pylades, son of King Strophios and Queen Anaxibia, who had accompanied him to Delphi, was a more robust person. Pylades said he would go with Orestes wherever he went and help him do whatever he had to do. And he waved away his anxieties.

  ‘What more do you want, Orestes? Apollo has given you his word.’

  ‘The priestess at Delphi has given me Apollo’s word, or what she says is his word. It’s not quite the same thing.’

  ‘You want to hear from the god’s own mouth? I don’t think that’s likely, and if you did, it would probably drive you mad. People who see or hear the gods directly seldom come out of it well. Think of our ancestor Tantalos!’