Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They talked together, sitting by the window, but we were not in the room.’

  ‘Did you overhear what they said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  ‘We heard his last words.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Something like “you are disgusting”. He was very upset and ran out of the house.’

  ‘And she?’

  ‘She was raving mad. She was beating the walls and crying and drove us out of the house.’

  ‘And her arms were bleeding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What have you done to me with your lies?’ said Theseus, rising abruptly from his seat. ‘What have you done to my son who told nothing but the truth? Your lives will be spared, since I promised it, but you will be severely punished.’

  He immediately ordered horsemen to ride out along every road and if possible overtake Hippolytos, tell him his father had been altogether mistaken, and bring him back to Troezen. Then he had an altar set up and made sacrifices to Poseidon, begging him to forget what had been demanded in ignorance and folly.

  But gods can no more wipe out what has already happened than mortals can. The horsemen who took the northward road along the seashore found Hippolytos at the point where the road became little more than a track between the mountains and the sea. He was lying beside his wrecked chariot with his two horses standing by, still in their harness. He was alive, but his limbs were broken, his skull cracked, his spine twisted, his whole body blackening with bruises and leaking blood. A huge wave, he said, had suddenly risen out of the sea and surged towards him, the horses had panicked, the chariot struck a tree and then a rock and overturned, and the terrified horses had galloped on dragging the chariot and himself, tangled in the reins, for a mile or more over the rocky track. Some storytellers say that the wave contained a sea monster or a bull which vanished back into the sea as soon as Poseidon had accomplished what Theseus asked of him, but what need of more than a tsunami?

  Hippolytos was brought back to Troezen, but only lived long enough to forgive his sorrowful father. Aphrodite’s vengeance was complete, but why did Artemis do nothing to save her devoted follower? It may be that she in turn took revenge by bringing about the death of Aphrodite’s mortal lover Adonis, gored by a boar and metamorphosed into the blood-red anemone that grows in the hills around our house, but his death is also attributed to a quarrel between Aphrodite and Persephone. Gods frequently fall out with one another, but seldom interfere with each other’s schemes, perhaps because doing so would involve them in never-ending feuds and tear apart the whole fabric of their power. During the Trojan War, not long after this, the gods took different sides and many squabbles flared up and had to be stamped out by Zeus. Better the loss of one mortal, even the favourite of a particular god, than division in heaven. Mortals, after all, do not live very long and have to die one way or another. And there are always plenty more to come.

  11. THE DAUGHTERS

  Peirithoös sailed from Thessaly to Troezen to attend the funerals of his friend’s wife and son and stayed some time to comfort Theseus. They spent the nights drinking together and the days sleeping off the effects. Theseus spoke very little, but sat staring into space in a trance of grief and alcoholic stupor. Peirithoös did most of the talking, and one night he proposed that now they were both widowers they should look about for new wives. Theseus at first rejected the idea outright, but Peirithoös was not discouraged and waited a week or two before mentioning it again.

  ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘will soon be old. We only have one life. Are we going to waste our last opportunity, while we still have health and strength, to add to the stories they already tell about us, the battle with the centaurs, our expedition against the Amazons, the Minotaur?’

  Theseus did not respond. He was thinking that his own name was much better known than Peirithoös’ and that his friend was presuming a little too much in suggesting that their deeds were of equal weight. Apart from that, he was not proud of some of the stories in which he himself figured: the desertion of Ariadne, the death of his father because he forgot to change the sails, and now Phaedra’s lust for Hippolytos, her suicide and his own disastrous treatment of Hippolytos. He smiled without humour and changed the subject. But Peirithoös returned to it a few days later.

  ‘I have an idea,’ he said, ‘an absolutely brilliant idea. We will marry two daughters of Zeus.’

  ‘How would we go about that?’

  ‘The women I have in mind are Helen of Sparta and Persephone.’

  ‘Isn’t Helen the daughter of the King of Sparta, Tyndareus?’

  ‘In theory. But it’s well known that Zeus seduced her mother Leda and that Helen is really his child.’

  ‘But still only a child. And as for Persephone, she’s married to Hades and lives half the year with him in the underworld.’

  ‘Precisely. Do you think she’s happy down there with him? We’ll fetch her up and give her a better life.’

  ‘Persephone is an immortal. Why should she want to marry a mortal?’

  ‘For the reason I gave. She cannot be happy to be queen of the shades, much better to be queen of the Lapiths or Athenians. But we’ll try for Helen first.’

  ‘How old is Helen?’

  ‘Eleven? Twelve? She’s said to be already a beauty and what better could she ask than to be the wife of either of us?’

  ‘Her father – her theoretical father – Tyndareus, will hardly be looking for a husband for her yet.’

  ‘No. We’ll have to abduct her.’

  Astonishingly, Theseus agreed to this hare-brained scheme. The years of political struggle in Athens had sapped his energy, and the deep wounds of Phaedra’s shameful suicide and his own complicity in Hippolytos’ death had damaged his self-confidence, as well as depriving him almost at one blow of the two people who meant most to him. He simply didn’t care any more what he did or what became of him. Peirithoös’ cheerful good fellowship made his life seem less empty. Peirithoös himself, on the other hand, unconsciously envying his friend’s much greater fame and achievements, was glad of the chance to increase his influence over him and become inseparably associated with him. It was no doubt late at night and they were both quite drunk when they agreed that if they succeeded in seizing Helen they would draw lots for her, the loser taking Persephone. On their return to Athens, when they must have been more sober but hardly less misguided, they swore a solemn oath to help each other in abducting these two daughters of Zeus.

  Entering the Peloponnese with a small force of horsemen, they rode down the central valley between the mountains (where the motorway runs now), through Arcadia into Lakonike. The city of Sparta had no walls, since the Spartans with their formidable military regime prided themselves on being strong enough to repel invaders from any of their surrounding territory. Riding swiftly ahead of their troops, Theseus and Peirithoös were lucky enough to surprise a group of women making sacrifices in the temple of Artemis on the outskirts of Sparta and to find that Helen was among them. They immediately seized her and galloped back to their troops, when the whole force returned northwards and were over the border into Arcadia before their pursuers could catch up with them. In the Arcadian city of Tegea they drew lots, as agreed, and Theseus won Helen.

  But what was he to do with her now? She was more beautiful even than people had said or than her abductors had imagined, and, considering her sudden change of circumstances, extraordinarily calm, as if she already knew that all men everywhere would fall at her feet rather than harm her. Many years later, Homer tells us, after she had married Menelaos and been abducted by Paris, after the best warriors of Greece and Troy had fought and died over her for a decade, after she had been brought safely home from burning Troy, she was encountered by Odysseus’ son Telemachos back in her husband’s rich palace in Sparta. There she sat gossiping and telling stories, placidly reaching into her silver work basket for a golden s
pindle and a hank of blue wool. But now she was too young to marry and the Spartans would stop at nothing to get her back. Theseus decided that he could not keep her in his household in Athens or Troezen. He brought his mother from Troezen to look after her and hid them both in the small Attic village of Aphidna.

  The success of this first phase of their piratical enterprise meant that Theseus had to keep his word and go down to Hades with Peirithoös in order to abduct Persephone. They went by a back route which avoided crossing the River Styx and reached the gates of Hades’ palace, where they were received by the King of the Dead himself. Peirithoös had the nerve, citing instructions from an oracle of Zeus which were either an invention of his own or else deliberately intended by Zeus to bring him to grief as a punishment for his insolence, to ask Hades to his face if he would be so kind as to hand over his wife. Hades smiled under his black helmet and politely asked them both to be seated. They did so and found themselves stuck on the Chairs of Forgetfulness, from which Herakles rescued Theseus four years later, but where Peirithoös continued to sit for ever after.

  12. THE ESTATE

  The absence of Theseus on this ill-fated adventure caused him further disasters. First, the Spartans, led by Helen’s grown-up brothers Castor and Polydeukes, known as the Dioskouroi (Zeus’ boys), invaded Attica, discovered Helen’s hiding place and took her back to Sparta. They also took Theseus’ mother Aithra, to whom Helen had become attached, and made her Helen’s permanent attendant. She even accompanied Helen to Troy, though she must by then have been extremely old. The loss of his mother and her reduction to the status of a servant was a greater blow to Theseus than the loss of Helen. His imprisonment in the underworld had brought him to his senses, and he could see now that Peirithoös had been a bad influence and that he should never have embarked on either of those foolhardy enterprises.

  Secondly, by marching into his leaderless kingdom without meeting any serious opposition, the Spartans had demonstrated to the world and especially the Athenians that Theseus was a hero in decline. So that when he returned at last to Athens, he found that he was no longer its king. His cousin Menestheus had usurped the vacant throne. Theseus was now an exile.

  Ageing and battered by ill fortune, for which he could only blame himself, Theseus, who had always counted on the gods’ favour, now felt that the gods had deserted him and that his days of glory would never return. Making his way first to the island of Euboia, where his two sons had taken refuge from Menestheus, he and they boarded a ship sailing to Crete, where their uncle Deukalion, Minos’ son and Phaedra’s brother, had promised to give them asylum. A storm drove them off course – a sign, surely, of Poseidon’s disfavour – and they landed on the island of Skyros. Here things seemed to look up. The king of the island, Lykomedes, was a close friend of Menestheus, but he welcomed Theseus with royal honours and when Theseus, his spirits reviving, suggested that he might after all settle here rather than in Crete, Lykomedes offered to show him an estate that might suit him. The island, he said, was well watered and fertile. In this northern part of it there was pasture for cattle and sheep, fruit trees and crops grew almost by themselves, bees flourished, while in the southern part there were forests of oak, pine and beech and also quarries of the variegated marble for which the island was famous. They walked up from the city of Skyros to its acropolis on a beetling precipice. Theseus, turning from the vertiginous view of the Aegean sea, named after his father, to look at the land, saw that his host had not deceived him about its beauty and fertility.

  ‘What is this mountain called?’ he asked, pointing to where the ground rose still higher to the west.

  ‘Olympos,’ said Lykomedes. ‘But, of course, it’s only a pimple compared to the mountain of the same name on the mainland.’

  ‘Surely this is an Isle of the Blessed,’ said Theseus, meaning the place, also called the Elysian Fields, where far out in the west, on the edge of encircling Ocean, some believed that the souls of fortunate heroes went instead of to Hades. ‘I think even the gods may sometimes mistake your Mount Olympos for their own.’

  ‘You are very kind.’

  ‘I shall be more than happy to settle here and spend my old age growing fruit and keeping bees. Now point me out the estate you think might suit me!’

  He was standing as he spoke near the edge of the precipice with his back to the sea. Lykomedes approached him as if to take his arm, but instead gave him a great shove in the chest, knocking him backwards.

  ‘There is your estate,’ he said, ‘behind you!’ and as Theseus staggered, trying to regain his balance, shoved him again.

  Theseus fell, remembering how he had once treated a brigand called Skiron on his famous journey from Troezen to Athens much as this treacherous king of Skyros had now treated him, and thought that the curious similarity of these names bracketing the story of his life seemed to confirm that fate more than chance or their own intentions ruled the lives of men, before he was smashed on the rocks below.

  A few years after his death, Helen, now grown into the wife of King Menelaos of Sparta, was abducted a second time and carried off to Troy by Paris, one of the many sons of King Priam. It was Theseus’ usurping cousin Menestheus who led the Athenian contingent when Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon called all Greeks to unite in recapturing Helen and punishing Troy. Menestheus, unlike so many other Greek leaders, returned safely from the Trojan War, but he was not one of its famous heroes. Centuries later, when the Mycenaean age was almost forgotten and the power of Athens was rising, the bones of Theseus were discovered on the island of Skyros and transported to Athens for reburial. His mistakes and failings were forgotten or forgiven and the Athenians recognised that he was the dead hero they needed in order to compete with Argos and Tiryns, Mycenae and Corinth.

  Were they the real bones of Theseus? Was there a real man called Theseus? Does it matter? Half the world probably believes that there was a real man called Sherlock Holmes who lived in Baker Street, London, and it is his statue, not his creator Conan Doyle’s, that stands outside Baker Street tube station. Our lives disappear and can only be superficially reconstructed by archaeology and history. But stories, biographical or fictional or a mixture of both, tell us what we are and have been and probably always will be. Stories reflect our dreams and desires, our ephemeral relationships and secret selves as well as our actions and reactions. Stories are the inner substance of the cities and landscapes we inhabit, the pulse beneath the skin of our outward lives, the meaning behind all the things and routines that clutter our visible existence.

  Sitting on this Arcadian terrace on the first evening of the New Year, with a view of the darkening sea and the mountains, with the scent of the last honeysuckle flower, with the laboured honking of the donkeys and the mewing of the goat’s new kids, with the friendly New Year greetings of passing neighbours (‘chrónia pollá’), Greece also gives me its substance, its pulse, its inner life in these stored, shared, continually retold stories, almost as changeable in shape as Nereus, the sea god encountered by Herakles, always in their essential character changeless.

  Behind me on a higher terrace is an olive tree, the oldest in the village, four-and-a-half metres round its base, still bearing olives. Who planted it and when? Was it a seedling when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 or is it older still, already growing when the feudal Franks ruled the Peloponnese in the thirteenth century?

  A dendrologist might know when it was planted, nobody can ever know by whom. But I can tell you its mythical ancestry. The first olive tree was the goddess Athene’s gift to the new city of Athens.

  GLOSSARY OF NAMES

  These descriptions are only outlines, by no means definitive, since the myths were frequently altered, added to or varied according to period, locality and the imagination of poets and dramatists.

  Abderos Friend of Herakles who accompanied him to Thrace to capture the four man-eating mares of Diomedes.

  Acheloös River god in Aitolia, father of all Greek rivers. Compe
ted with Herakles for the hand of Deïaneira.

  Achilles Legendary warrior from Thessaly, chief hero of the Trojan War, in which, after killing the Trojan hero Hector, he was killed by Hector’s brother Paris with help from the god Apollo, by an arrow in the heel, his only vulnerable point. His mother was the sea nymph Thetis; his father Peleus, king of the Myrmidons.

  Admete Daughter of Herakles’ cousin Eurystheus. She set Herakles his ninth labour: to fetch the girdle of Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons.

  Admetos King of Pherai in Thessaly, whom Apollo served as a shepherd when he was being punished by his father Zeus for killing the Cyclops.

  Adonis Son of the King of Paphos, loved by the goddess Aphrodite, but gored to death by a boar he was hunting. The red anemone was supposed to have grown from the place where his blood was spilled.

  Aegeus Legendary king of Athens, father of Theseus. When Theseus returned from Crete but forgot to change the ship’s black sails to white, Aegeus in grief threw himself off a cliff into the sea, giving his name to the Aegean.

  Aeneas Legendary son of the goddess Aphrodite and her mortal lover Anchises. Fought for Troy in the Trojan War, escaped from the burning city and sailed to Italy, where he settled in Latium and founded the Roman race.

  Aerope Granddaughter of King Minos of Crete, wife of King Atreus of Argos, mother of Agamemnon, Menelaos and Anaxibia.

  Aeschylus (525-456 BC) Athenian dramatist and founder of Greek tragedy, in that he was the first dramatist to introduce a second actor. Author of the trilogy of tragedies, the Oresteia, telling the story of Agamemnon and his ill-fated family.

  Aithra Daughter of King Pittheus of Troezen, mother of Theseus.

  Agamemnon King of Argos, son of Atreus, grandson of Pelops. Commander-in-chief of the Greeks in the Trojan War. Husband to Clytemnestra and first cousin to Aigisthos who together murdered him on his return from Troy. Father of Iphigeneia, Elektra, Chrysothemis and Orestes. Brother of Menelaos, King of Sparta.