The Argive ambassadors withdrew stiffly from the hall and returned to the house of Antenor. Not till long after they had left the city did they come to learn that, if Deiphobus and Antiphus had been given their way, the three of them might have been murdered in their beds that night. Only Antenor’s outraged protests, fortified by Hector’s sense of honour, had kept them from the crime.
The first assault on Troy turned into a brutal and inconclusive clash which left both sides damaged and thoughtful.
Things began well enough for the Argives when a night raid with blazing torches caused havoc among Priam’s fleet, seriously weakening his ability to guard against invasion. But the same raid had warned the Trojans of the imminence of attack and by the time Agamemnon’s ships approached the shore, a well-positioned army stood waiting to repel them.
To make matters worse, the Argive troops were troubled by rumours of a prophecy that the first man ashore was doomed to die. Even Achilles hesitated at the prow of his ship, reluctant to throw away his life with so little glory gained. Meanwhile the Trojans hurled rocks and stones at the crowded ships, keeping up an unnerving ululation that carried on the harsh wind blowing across the plain.
At last, stung by the insults coming from the enemy before him and from Agamemnon at his back, an old warrior called Iolaus who had once been charioteer to Heracles, gave a mighty shout and jumped into the surf. He was immediately surrounded and cut down on the strand before he could strike a single blow, but the man’s rash courage was to win him undying fame. He was given the title Protesilaus -- ‘first to the fight’ -- and buried with great honour that night on the Thracian shore of the Hellespont.
But now that the first life had been lost, other warriors began to jump from the ships. Achilles and Patroclus were among the leaders, with Phoenix and the Myrmidons behind them. Odysseus, however, held back a while, watching how the battle developed. He had counselled against launching a land attack until more had been done to stretch Priam’s resources, but Agamemnon had been so infuriated by the king’s insolent reply to his terms that he was determined to force the words back down his throat. Now the price of his impatience swiftly came clear as more and more men fell under the volley of arrows that met them as they stumbled towards the shore.
By sheer force of numbers, the Argives forced a landing, only to find themselves embroiled in a fierce and bloody struggle all along the strand. The strongest resistance came from a sector of the front where a Trojan hero called Cycnus hacked his way through the invaders as if he was invulnerable. When Achilles saw what was happening, he shouted for Patroclus to follow and fought his way across the uneven ground until he confronted the Trojan giant. Cycnus laughed in his face, gesturing for the youth to come at him if he dared. A moment later he was astonished by the speed and ferocity of Achilles’ attack. Even so, the fight was long and desperate, and might have gone either way had not Cycnus stumbled over a stone as he sought to avoid a sword thrust. He fell to the ground on his back, pulling Achilles down with him. Both men lost their weapons in the fall, but Cycnus was winded by the weight of his opponent’s armoured body. In a frenzy of violence, Achilles grabbed at the Trojan’s throat and strangled the man with his own helmet straps.
When he stood up, gasping and exultant from the kill, it was to feel Patroclus pulling at his arm. All around him, as a trumpet sounded from Agamemnon’s flagship, he saw the Argive warriors retreating from the shore.
Many recriminations followed the failure of that first attack, but the heavy losses he had taken persuaded Agamemnon that Odysseus had been right to insist that Troy would fall only after a long campaign of attrition. So the war entered a new, sullen phase of sporadic violence that dragged on for a year, and then another, until it became clear that, if Troy ever fell, it would not be until all the long years of the snake had passed.
Battles were fought at sea, and many ships were sunk, and many men burned and drowned before the Argives established their naval superiority. From their stronghold on Tenedos, they were now free to mount raids all along the Asian coastline. The island of Lesbos was taken, and mainland cities smaller than Troy fell before them. Priam’s southern allies in Lydia suffered heavily from these attacks. Colophon, Clazomenae, Smyrna and Antandrus were all left looted and burning, but other important cities such as Sestos and Abydos on either side of the Hellespont held out under siege. So the years of warfare protracted themselves from season to bloody season, and all across Asia, from the Black Sea to Cyprus, even in places far from where the Argives had ever landed, the name of Achilles struck fear in men’s hearts and kept children from their sleep.
There were also long periods of inactivity while both sides licked their wounds, or when fever, dysentery and pestilence robbed men of the will to walk let alone fight. Sometimes the troops could not be stirred in the torrid summer heat, and the dark winter months were always wretched and bitter. A maddening wind blew across the Trojan plain throughout much of the year but in winter there was ice on its breath. It left the springs frozen, the tents heavy with snow, and battle-hardened warriors groaning over chilblains and frostbite. And even when the weather was clement not a day went by without men questioning why they had ever got into this insane fight and wondering whether they would ever sit by their homeland hearths again. But those who deserted faced a long trek home through hostile territory and most of the Argives grudgingly decided that having endured so much, it made no sense to turn for home with little to show for their pains but wounds and stories. So the war went on.
In the ninth year, with Troy’s western sea lanes cut, and many of her allies demoralized by constant raids, it began to look as though the war was finally moving Agamemnon’s way. Late in the summer he decided to attack Mysia.
The Mysians are a Thracian people who had crossed from Europe a century earlier. Their king, Telephus, was a bastard son of Heracles who had gained the Mysian throne with Priam’s help after marrying one of the High King’s many daughters. His fertile lands were now keeping Troy supplied with wheat, olives, figs and wine that were carried along inland routes beyond the reach of raiders. Agamemnon had been convinced by Odysseus that if Mysia fell, then Troy might be starved into submission. So leaving behind him a force strong enough to hold Tenedos, he brought the bulk of his fleet to the island of Lesbos and used the harbour at Mytilene as a base for his assault on that part of Mysia around the mouth of the river Caicus which is called Teuthrania. But once again he miscalculated the strength of the resistance and the battle took much the same shape as his failed advance on Troy many years earlier. The landing was made more quickly this time but the Mysians had the advantage of the ground and by the time Agamemnon had seen half of his advance guard cut down, he was struggling to avoid a rout among his troops.
Again Achilles and the Myrmidons came to his rescue with a swift flanking movement that descended on Telephus behind his own front line and forced him to pull back along the river bank. Sprinting in pursuit of the fleeing king, Achilles hurled his spear and struck Telephus in the thigh, bringing him down among a tangle of vines. The battle might have been won in that moment but the king’s lifeguards rallied to hold off Achilles while one of them pulled out the spear and carried the wounded Telephus away. Meanwhile, the Mysian warriors on the shore remained unaware that their king had almost been killed and fought on with such resolve that once again Agamemnon called a retreat.
Reluctant to return to Tenedos with such dispiriting news, he ordered the fleet southwards in search of weaker places to attack. Having burned a small town to the north of Smyrna, the weary leaders spent a few days bathing their wounds and easing their stiff limbs in the waters of some hot springs they found there. Ever afterwards those springs were known as the Baths of Agamemnon.
The weather was clear and it should have been a leisurely time, but the mood of the frustrated commanders soon turned as acrid and sulphurous as the steam rising round them. Achilles was still furious that his own brilliance on the battlefield had again been waste
d merely because the Lion of Mycenae had failed to keep his nerve. He and Patroclus kept themselves apart from the others, finding comfort only in each other’s company. Then, on the second evening, a quarrel broke out between Odysseus and Palamedes about whether they should persist with the Mysian campaign or concentrate their strength near Troy. Agamemnon’s testy vacillation only made matters worse. Meanwhile, Diomedes grieved over the death of his friend Thersander, who had fallen as he led the advance guard against the Mysians, and Menelaus spent much time asleep or brooding alone.
Weary of the fractious company and feeling the need for fresh meat, Agamemnon decided to go hunting. Only Palamedes had the energy to accompany him. They dragooned a local huntsman into leading a pack of hounds pillaged from a burned-out estate and spent most of the day in a fruitless search for game. By mid-afternoon Agamemnon was ready to kill the sullen huntsman out of sheer frustration, but then the hounds put up a pretty white hart. Baying and whooping, they set off in chase with Agamemnon following in the lead as the deer weaved and darted among the brakes. Unaware of his surroundings and determined to make a kill, he plunged into a silent grove of trees, following the white flicker of the hart’s rear-quarters until the panting creature was brought to bay. He hurled his spear. The hart staggered on its slender legs then fell bleeding in the glade.
Cursing that there was no one near to help, Agamemnon threw the carcass of the beast across his shoulders and carried it out of the wood. As he came out into the light, sweating and bloody, he saw Palamedes and the huntsman staring at him white-faced. Only then did he observe the offerings dangling from the boughs around him. He had killed the hart in a grove that was sacred to Artemis.
The next day they set sail for Tenedos but they had not been long at sea when a north-easterly gale gusted down on the fleet from the plains of Asia. The billows clashed and rose, the ships shook and dipped on the steep swell. In such treacherous weather the helmsmen were reluctant to put in on a hostile coast, so they tried to ride out the storm under reefed sails. But by late afternoon the rain slanting down against them was so dense that the ships could barely see each other. The sky turned dirty green, and then a malign, thunderous black. The tempest blew harder throughout the night, and by dawn the whole of Agamemnon’s fleet had been scattered like driftwood across the turbulent eastern sea.
More than ten years later, I learned from Odysseus that my father, Terpis, was in one of the ships that were lost in that storm, and there must have been many like him who died wretched, unwitnessed deaths at sea. As for the rest, one by one during the course of the next few days, the ships staggered into port, shaken and damaged, back where they had begun, nine long years earlier, in Aulis.
The Altar at Aulis
A woman who loathes and despises both her father and her husband is likely to want to prove herself a better man than either. This was certainly the case with Clytaemnestra, and even while her body was employed on the arduous business of providing the House of Atreus with an heir and two daughters, she turned her will and her powerful mind to the better management of affairs in Agamemnon’s mighty kingdom.
Mycenae’s massive walls stand on a crag that commands the mountain passes between the rich plains of Argos and Corinth. Various brigands had taken plunder there for centuries before the house of Atreus seized the stronghold and started to build an empire around it. As their power increased, tributes and loot poured into the city, and Agamemnon had not been idly boasting when he told Clytaemnestra that he was the wealthiest of the Argive kings. But his aptitude was for warfare and the brutal use of power, not for the dull routine of administration, so his queen had not been in Mycenae very long before her quick eyes saw how much of his wealth was draining away through poor management and corruption. She suggested that her husband place spies to watch over some of his principal ministers and tribute-gatherers. Shortly afterwards, those officials lost both their posts and their lives.
Faced with the problem of finding reliable successors, Agamemnon looked to the advice of his wife and was impressed by the immediate increase in his revenue. Thereafter he began to trust her judgement in other matters of policy. More appointments were made on her recommendation. Soon, in effect if not in name, the whole complex system of public administration was under her control.
Meanwhile, in those easy years before the war, reports reached Mycenae of the way that Helen and Menelaus were renovating the city of Sparta. From the first Clytaemnestra had felt uneasy in the gloomy palace that she had inherited. Its draughty chambers had witnessed murder, betrayal, incest, the unwitting slaughter of children by their fathers, and even -- it was rumoured -- cannibal feasts. When she had complained about the place to Agamemnon, he replied that money was hard to come by and he had better things to do with it than waste it on unnecessary luxuries. Infuriated by this mean streak in his nature, she shamed him into action by suggesting that his younger brother was now outshining him and everybody knew it. Agamemnon promptly gave her leave to spend as she liked on improvements.
Skilled architects, masons, sculptors and painters were commissioned and set to work. Under the queen’s strict scrutiny, designs were drawn up and approved. Large quantities of Spartan stone -- that curiously mottled porphyry for which her homeland was famous -- were brought to Mycenae along with many tons of green and rose-coloured marble from quarries across the Peloponnese. Within a couple of years the haunted fastness in which Agamemnon had been born was transformed into a city that set a new standard for splendour among the Argive kingdoms and impressed the ambassadors who came from further abroad.
And Agamemnon liked what his queen had done. He was also happy to take the credit for it and, for a time, as his military power grew, and the reach of his tributes and trade agreements extended across Argos and the islands, he came to believe that the ancestral curse on the house of Atreus must have been lifted at last. The gods had smiled on what was already accomplished, and there was more to be done. But power is an appetite that grows with feeding, and the Lion of Mycenae had to face ever-rising costs -- not least those incurred by his wife’s majestic rebuilding of his city. Raids across the eastern sea brought back some of the gold, silver, slaves, cattle and other booty that he needed to feed his court, reward his retainers and keep his army equipped with horses, chariots and weapons. But when prices began to rise and the state’s expenditure threatened to outrun her husband’s income, Clytaemnestra saw that there might be much to be gained from a foreign war. Already she had cast envious eyes on the wealth of Asia, and she knew both from her own spies and from talks with the foreign legations that came to Mycenae, that the guardian of the gate to the eastern treasury was Troy. So it was she, before any of his comrades and counsellors, who first persuaded Agamemnon to contemplate the possibility that Priam’s city might be taken.
The marriage between Menelaus and Helen was also Clytaemnestra’s plan. She had been quick to point out that if anyone other than the High King’s brother won Helen’s hand, Sparta might pose a western threat to Agamemnon’s power at a time when his attention should be firmly fixed on the east. With the shrewd help of Odysseus her plan had matured. So with the brothers of Mycenae wedded to the sisters of Sparta, and further plans in place for Clytaemnestra’s son Orestes to marry Helen’s daughter Hermione, the High King and his Queen could look forward with confidence to a time when the House of Atreus would be the undisputed ruler of the world.
And then Helen had astounded them all by running off with Paris.
At first Clytaemnestra had been furious with her sister for throwing her carefully thought-out ambitions into disarray, and it was some time before she could admit to herself that some part of her fury was attributable, once again, to envy.
What must it be like, Clytaemnestra wondered, to know a passion so great that you were prepared to stake your life on it? Only a god could be strong enough to wreak the havoc that Helen had wrought. So perhaps, like their mother Leda, Helen had been swept up on mighty wings and ravished into immortali
ty, while Clytaemnestra sat alone among her children in Mycenae, constrained by the tiresome duties of a mother and queen, and hungry each day for news of the war her sister’s lust had precipitated.
Nor had she imagined that the war would drag on for so long, for the years of the snake had passed slowly in the Lion House at Mycenae. Rumours came and went. Good news was followed by bad. In some weeks wealth flowed into the coffers, usually after some rich city had been sacked along the coast of Asia, and then, like the tide, it went out again to meet some new demand of this costly and seemingly interminable war. So as her husband fought his way from Thrace to Lycia and back again, and Troy showed no sign of falling, Clytaemnestra sat in Mycenae with all the instruments of power in her hands, and waited and watched.
One afternoon, Clytaemnestra was trying to wind up negotiations with a barely comprehensible sesame factor out of Mesopotamia, who was the last of the many people with whom she had dealt that day. The man was too long-winded and her mind had wandered, for rumours were rife about the fleet’s unexpected appearance back in Aulis. Clearly the weather must have much to do with it, for such a storm as had blown in from the north-east had not been seen in years and fierce gales had continued to gust from that quarter for the past three weeks. But there were also alarming, if unconfirmed, reports that the storm had scattered the ships while they were beating back from a massive defeat in Mysia. Thersander, commander of the Boeotians, was certainly among the dead, and the whole land around Aulis was said to be in mourning. It was also reported that another great hero, Philoctetes, was suffering from so noxious a wound that no one could bear to be near him, and he had been abandoned to live or die, as the gods decided, on the island of Lemnos. A few days earlier King Nauplius of Euboea had sent Clytaemnestra a note of reassurance that the principal Argive leaders, including her husband and his son Palamedes, were all alive and well, though as yet the overall situation remained confused. But from Agamemnon there had been no word, despite his queen’s repeated request for news.
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