Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  ‘The oracle at Delphi is famous for giving advice which appears to be clear, but afterwards turns out to be ambiguous or even the opposite of what was thought by the recipient.’

  ‘True, but that’s because the recipient doesn’t understand it properly or twists it to agree with what he wanted to hear. The oracle you’ve been given is perfectly clear and comprehensible and furthermore it’s not at all what you wanted to hear.’

  ‘The last part is what I wanted to hear, that the god would protect me from the Erinyes.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s absolutely straightforward. There it is, written down. Apollo will protect you. What other meaning can that have?’

  ‘Words, words!’

  ‘Your alternative is to do nothing, to disobey the oracle, to disbelieve the god’s words. Is that sensible?’

  ‘No. I have to do it. What was I born for except to be the carrier of the double curse on the House of Atreus?’

  In this gloomy and reluctant frame of mind Orestes crossed the Corinthian Gulf and walked over the mountains to Argos. Pylades, of course, went with him, and tried to take his mind off his destination with observations of the stars by night and the places they passed through by day. But Orestes obstinately refused to be diverted.

  ‘There it is!’ he would say, as they lay in their cloaks under the night sky. ‘The constellation named “The Charioteer” by my unlucky grandfather Atreus. The miserable Myrtilos himself, winking at us with his everlasting malice.’

  ‘That man would sell his own grandmother,’ said Pylades of a village shoemaker who had driven a hard bargain for a fresh pair of sandals.

  ‘But I doubt if he’d murder his mother,’ said Orestes.

  ‘Somewhere about here must have been where Herakles killed the Nemean Lion,’ said Pylades as they crossed the mountains to the west of Argos and descended into a deep valley.

  ‘I wish he hadn’t,’ said Orestes. ‘I’d like to meet that lion – any lion, for that matter, which would do me the favour of biting my head off.’

  They stopped in Argos long enough to learn that Clytemnestra and Aigisthos were at Mycenae, then walked there through a long hot afternoon, arriving in time to find the Lion Gate still open. Pylades told the gatekeeper that he was the son of one of Agamemnon’s soldiers at Troy and that he and his friend would like to visit the king’s grave. The gatekeeper warned them that they were not permitted to show it any respect and must be careful not to leave any sort of offering to show they had been there, but, secretly disapproving of what had been done, as so many Argives still did, pointed to the cemetery just inside the gate. There they soon found the stone with its plain inscription: ‘Agamemnon, son of Atreus’.

  ‘Nothing more?’ said Orestes bitterly. ‘For the great king and commander-in-chief who led the Greeks to the conquest of Troy?’

  ‘What more could they put?’ said Pylades. ‘“Cut down by his wife and her lover in the hour of his triumph”?’

  ‘I don’t even know what he looked like,’ said Orestes, ‘I was a baby when he left for Troy and they didn’t give me time to see him when he returned.’

  ‘Bear that in mind!’ said Pylades, anxious to stoke up Orestes’ anger so that he would think less of the horror of killing his mother and more of the need to avenge his father.

  ‘Shall I even recognise my mother?’ said Orestes.

  ‘I don’t think that will be a problem. By all accounts she’s a woman that stands out. She would have to be, wouldn’t she, to have done what she did?’

  ‘Will she recognise me?’

  ‘It will give you an initial advantage if she doesn’t.’

  Behind the stone they found a few withered flowers.

  ‘Someone has dared to disobey the edict and honour him,’ said Orestes. ‘I should like to do the same.’

  ‘There are no flowers growing here,’ said Pylades. ‘Nothing but bare earth. I daresay your mother has it kept like that deliberately.’

  ‘Cut off a lock of my hair!’ said Orestes. ‘I shall leave it in front of the stone. If anyone sees it there and reports to my mother, so much the better. It will frighten her perhaps.’

  Pylades was unsure about this. They did not want to put Clytemnestra on her guard. On the other hand, he wanted to encourage Orestes’ new mood of anger and determination, so he cut the lock of hair and Orestes, with a prayer to Apollo for success and a promise to his father’s shade to build him a much greater memorial, laid it in front of the stone. Then, not wanting to draw any attention to themselves inside Mycenae, they went out of the gate again, just as the sun was setting, and walked down the road. There, in the low ridge overlooking the road, they found a shallow cave and slept the night in it.

  Early next morning, Elektra paid one of her clandestine visits to her father’s grave and was astonished to see the lock of black hair lying immediately in front of the stone. ‘This is some brave person,’ she thought, ‘but who would put a lock of hair here except some close relative? And who could that be except my brother? Certainly the colour matches mine. Can I really believe that he’s come at last? He’s old enough now, and it seems he’s bold enough. Then I will be bold too.’ And she laid her small bunch of wild flowers beside the lock of hair, then quickly left the cemetery and lingered near its containing wall, mingling with the passers-by going up or coming down the street to avoid suspicion.

  After an hour or so she was about to give up and go home when she saw two young men in travel-stained clothes enter the cemetery and make straight for the grave. She didn’t recognise either of them – how could she when she’d last seen Orestes as a little boy and never set eyes on Pylades? – but her pulse raced as she watched one of them stoop down, pick up her flowers and put them to his lips before dropping them on the grave again. When he looked around to see if he was being observed she turned away and began to walk up the street behind a group of peasant women. But when she returned she saw the two men leave the cemetery and pass out of the Lion Gate, and she followed them as far as a grove of trees, where they stopped and sat down in the shade, deep in conversation. After a while, when they stood up and were about to go away down the road, she decided she must speak to them.

  ‘Are you looking for somewhere to stay?’ she asked, keeping her face partly covered with the flap of her cloak.

  ‘Indeed we are,’ said Pylades.

  ‘I have a room to let,’ said Elektra.

  ‘Inside the walls?’

  ‘No, but not far off, just down the hill on that farm. You can see the roof.’

  ‘Show us the room!’

  ‘Come with me!’

  They walked on down the hill.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked Elektra.

  ‘From Athens,’ said Pylades quickly before the less wary Orestes could say ‘Phokis’.

  ‘Strangers or Argives coming home?’

  ‘A little of each,’ said Pylades.

  But Orestes had had enough of this circuitous caution.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but you look like a villager and speak like someone from a noble family. What is your name?’

  ‘My name is Elektra.’

  ‘And your father’s name?’

  ‘Why should I hide it? My father lies in that grave you visited. His name is carved on the stone. Agamemnon, son of Atreus.’

  ‘It was you who left the flowers?’

  ‘Who else would dare to, but his own daughter?’

  ‘Didn’t he also have a son?’

  ‘He had a son.’

  ‘Who else would dare to honour his grave, but his own son?’

  Elektra threw back her cloak and scanned his face.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘I am Orestes,’ he said and moved forward to embrace her.

  But she stepped back, still doubtful.

  ‘How am I to know that?’ she said.

  ‘This is my friend and our cousin Pylades, prince of Phokis. He will confirm that I am Orestes.’

  ‘How am I to
know that he’s Pylades?’

  ‘Such suspicion! Is this the atmosphere breathed by the people of Argos?’

  ‘Are you surprised? When their king has been murdered and his murderers rule the kingdom? You might have been sent by my mother and her lover to gain my confidence and find a way to destroy my brother Orestes. How they long to do that!’

  Orestes pushed the hair back from his temple and showed her an old scar.

  ‘Perhaps you remember that, Elektra? When I was running with one of the deer-hounds and tripped and fell and cut my head on a rock. You picked me up covered in blood and took me to our nurse to clean and bandage the wound.’

  ‘Yes, I do remember.’

  ‘And this,’ Orestes reached inside his tunic and drew out an ivory ring on the end of a leather string. ‘This ring was my father’s and I believe he had it from his father Atreus. You gave it to my nurse when you sent us away from Mycenae and she kept it carefully and gave it to me when she was dying. She told me it was made from my great-grandfather Pelops’ ivory shoulder, but I never quite believed that. All the same, it’s carved with the trident of the House of Pelops, though my father’s device was the lion. Look!’

  Then at last Elektra was sure that he was her brother. There on that dusty road, their eyes full of tears, they took each other in their arms. Pylades’ eyes too were wet, but he brushed the tears away as he kept looking up and down the road in case they were being watched.

  They slept the night at the farm worked by Elektra’s husband, who, when he came back from the fields, shared his wife’s joy at the return of her brother and brought out his best wine to celebrate. Then they finalised their plan with the farmer’s help.

  ‘Queen Clytemnestra takes few precautions,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t seem to know the meaning of fear, except in others. Most people do fear her and that makes her feel invulnerable. But Aigisthos is different. He’s always afraid. He goes everywhere with four or five armed men around him.’

  ‘Even inside the palace?’ asked Pylades.

  ‘I never go into the palace,’ said the farmer, ‘so I couldn’t be sure of that.’

  ‘What is he so afraid of?’ asked Orestes.

  ‘You, mainly,’ said Elektra, ‘but also the Argives in general. They hate and despise him. They have some sympathy for our mother, for what made her kill Agamemnon, if not for her adultery, but none at all for the adulterer who crept into her bed when her husband was at war and stabbed him while his wife embraced him.’

  ‘All the horrible details are known, are they?’

  ‘When did Greeks ever stay ignorant for long of the details of any family’s troubles?’

  The farmer asked what he could do to help. He was old, he said, and not afraid of death, and would like to see justice done before he died.

  ‘Nothing that might shorten your life,’ said Pylades. ‘But if you can lay your hands on a bronze funeral urn and lend it to me, that would be a great help. You will get it back.’

  ‘A new one, empty? Or one that already has ashes in it.’

  ‘One with ashes might be better. But it should be a well-made urn, a handsome urn, nothing that looks too cheap. And wherever you get it, the loan must be secret.’

  ‘I have a friend,’ said the farmer, ‘who keeps the urn meant for his own ashes in his house. Not something I would care to do myself. I’m sure he’ll lend it and say nothing about it. And if you want it to contain ashes, that’s easily done.’ He pointed to the pile of ashes in the courtyard where Elektra cooked and heated water.

  Since the farm supplied the palace with its produce, Elektra’s husband knew most of the servants there and made careful inquiries about the movements and habits of Clytemnestra and Aigisthos. There were certainly guards at all the doors into the palace, he reported, but Aigisthos’ bodyguard went off duty once he was safely inside. The exception was when the queen and her lover sat on their thrones in the great hall and heard petitions or issued decrees. Then Aigisthos’ bodyguard stood close to him.

  ‘The thought of him sitting on Agamemnon’s throne makes me sick,’ said Orestes.

  ‘I imagine she sits on the king’s throne,’ said Pylades, ‘and her paramour on hers.’

  On a day when they knew that Clytemnestra and Aigisthos were both inside the palace and had no public business to transact, Orestes and Pylades, both armed and wearing their travellers’ cloaks, entered the Lion Gate, walked up the narrow winding street and reached the portico.

  ‘Tell Queen Clytemnestra that we have come from Phokis,’ said Orestes to the guards. ‘We have news for her, which she will prefer to hear in private. She will judge for herself whether the news is good or bad.’

  The guard summoned his officer, to whom Orestes repeated his request. The officer went inside and returned some minutes later to admit them to the entrance hall. There they waited longer, sweating inside their cloaks with the heat and their own apprehension, until a guard at last admitted them to the throne-room. Entering from a door at the back, Clytemnestra came forward to meet them. Aigisthos entered behind her and the pair stopped in the middle of the hall.

  ‘From Phokis?’ said the queen.

  ‘From Phokis, yes,’ said Orestes, in a low voice, looking down at his feet.

  ‘And your news?’

  ‘It concerns your son Orestes.’

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘I regret to say it is not good news.’

  ‘What is it? Speak up!’

  ‘Your son is dead.’

  ‘Is that certain? How did he die?’

  ‘He was never very strong. He caught a chill after exercising too vigorously and his breathing, you know, was difficult at the best of times. He quickly got worse and the doctors could not save him.’

  ‘So my son is dead.’

  ‘Forgive me for being the one that brings you this sad news!’

  ‘Do you have any proof?’

  ‘Only this,’ said Pylades, stepping forward and holding out the borrowed bronze urn which he had kept concealed under his cloak. ‘This contains his ashes, since it was too far at this time of year to bring the body for cremation here.’

  Clytemnestra took the urn and looked at Aigisthos. If she had shown any sign of sorrow then, Orestes would perhaps have been unable to do what he had come for. But he saw the smile that passed between his mother and her lover, saw the bowed shoulders of Aigisthos straighten, saw his mother pass the urn to him with her whole face lightening, with a look almost of joy, saw Aigisthos jauntily set it down on the floor and even push it aside with his foot. Truly, he saw that he had brought them the best news they could hear.

  ‘Well, then, he is dead,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘We thank you for bringing us the news and the poor boy’s ashes. You will be entertained.’

  Only then did Orestes raise his head and look his mother in the eye. For a moment her eyes were troubled, as if she thought she had seen the face before but couldn’t remember who it belonged to, then she turned to leave. Pylades instantly drew his sword and intercepted her, while Orestes also drew his and went for Aigisthos. Aigisthos’ cry of alarm as he tried to escape and stumbled over the bronze urn on the floor brought guards running into the room, but they stopped when they saw Orestes thrust his sword with savage fury through Aigisthos’ body and, withdrawing it without a pause as his victim collapsed with a yell of pain, turn to threaten the queen. Pylades, meanwhile, went and stood over the dying Aigisthos writhing in blood on the floor and told the guards not to throw away their own lives for the sake of two criminals who richly deserved to die.

  ‘Don’t you know your own son?’ said Orestes to his mother, and raising his voice so that the guards could hear him: ‘Yes, I am Orestes, son of Agamemnon, sent here by command of the god Apollo to punish my father’s murderers.’

  ‘You have killed Aigisthos,’ said Clytemnestra, ‘and perhaps for that you have right on your side. But surely you would not kill your mother?’

  Orestes, with his blade pointed at her, he
sitated.

  ‘Look!’ she said and bared her breasts. ‘These nourished you. You came out of my belly and sucked from these. You would not kill your mother.’

  ‘Must I do it?’ Orestes asked Pylades, his eyes still on his mother, his sword wavering.

  ‘It’s what you came for,’ said Pylades. ‘It’s what the god told you to do.’

  ‘And gods must be obeyed,’ said Orestes, repeating without knowing it the very phrase with which his sister Iphigeneia justified her own sacrifice.

  ‘What god can tell you to kill your own mother?’ said Clytemnestra, kneeling in front of him with her breasts held in her hands.

  ‘Apollo himself, the god of light and the sun. The same light, the same sun that shone on that day when my father returned from Troy and his own wife cut off his head,’ said Orestes, and with sudden resolution, pierced his mother’s throat with his sword. But as she fell forward choking with blood, he flung the sword away, knelt beside her and held her in his arms as she died.

  The account that has Orestes swing his sword and sweep his mother’s head from her shoulders with a single blow cannot be true, since the bronze swords of that time before the use of iron had no cutting edge. She herself had used an axe to behead Agamemnon. But all accounts agree that from that moment or soon afterwards Orestes went mad. He was in no state to occupy the vacant throne of Argos. Some say that a son of Aigisthos took it, but that is unlikely. Did he have any children at all and would the Council of Elders have elected a son of the murderer of their great king Agamemnon? All the accounts, of course, date from long afterwards and perhaps the whole story was invented. Yet the Trojan War was not invented, nor the destruction of Troy, nor Mycenae and its period of wealth and power. Agamemnon and his unlucky family were surely not altogether mythical people.

  Elektra was the person to hold the kingdom together when Orestes went mad, and with her kindly old husband’s heartfelt consent she divorced him and married Pylades. But first Pylades had to get Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, back to Delphi to claim Apollo’s promised protection. That was not straightforward. Apollo had promised more than even he, the god of light and order, could easily perform. Although the new gods of Olympos had crushed the old gods of the earth – those that had sprung up during the chaos of its creation – or at least pushed them down out of sight into caves and crannies or even, in the case of the defeated Titans, to the depths of Tartaros, they could not be altogether eliminated. They were no threat to the immortal Olympians themselves, but could be deadly to humans, whether as the heaving, spewing volcanic mountains under which the Titans lay pinned, as poisonous or ravening monsters such as the Lernaian Hydra or the Nemean Lion, or as inward disorders, mental or physical, causing madness and death.