by Henry Treece
ELECTRA
On a wind-swept hillside in ancient Greece, a sick and half-crazed old woman confides to her doctor the strange doom-driven story of Agamemnon, High King of Achaea. As her memory plays back and forth over her childhood in the Palace of Mycenae, sometimes idyllically happy, sometimes dark with terror, we sense the strange hulking monsters, the curious taboos and rituals which the early Greeks created for themselves out of their nightmare fears.
In his last novel, Jason, Henry Treece attempted with considerable success to look behind the myths which had accrued about that promiscuous voyager; in Electra he sets himself an even harder task, for this novel is written from the point of view of an old woman who had once been a beautiful princess, with all the emotional conflicts which such a girl might have suffered in the Mycenaean dawn-time, among the jostling kings and princes who prepared themselves excitedly for their interminable war against their neighbour, Troy.
Electra reveals more than the private lives of Electra and Agamemnon, of Clytemnestra and Orestes; it shows in action the many forces which contributed at last to the downfall of Mycenae’s brilliant culture, and the coming of that Dorian Dark Age which was to last for five hundred years and more.
ELECTRA
HENRY TREECE
For Barney Blackley,
in all friendship
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
But, doctor, even you, a Hittite, saw what our Mycenaean shields were like! Oh, don’t smile, I may be an old woman, but I know what I am talking about, and if you will be patient, you will understand, too.
Our shields were formed by stretching a hide on to a frame, made with rounded cross-bars at top and bottom, fixed to a central spar of ash or olive-wood. The leather at either side, not having the support of the cross-bars, shrank away and pulled in tightly when it dried out. So the shield took on its own peculiar shape, not round, nor oval, but more like the form of a woman with her wasp-waist lying between broad breasts and wide hips.
You are smiling again, doctor, because you do not understand; you imagine me to be talking of a shield, or a woman’s body, but these things are only an example, for I am describing the heart speaking out, the mind as you call it.
You do not see how? Soon you will be saying again that words in our Greek mouths are as slippery as fishes; I know you Outlanders. It is because you do not see the wholeness of things, the Virtue, the arete. You observe one fact, the single symptom, like the Hittite doctor you are, but your eyes are blind to the Ananke, the whole Order of things which even the gods cannot infringe.
The shield is formed on a frame; and that frame is the will of man. But after the sun and rain have been on it a week, its shape has changed beyond man’s guiding; and that is Ananke. It is still not clear, doctor? You Hittites are very stupid: no wonder you accuse us here of cheating. Very well, I will tell you simply: though I began upon a firm frame, the hide of my experience has tautened and twisted until now I am as Ananke wills me to be. I am not what I wished, or others wished for me: I am what it was ordained for me to become before ever the seed passed from my Hither to my mother. I am the cow’s hide, tormented to the only shape it can be. Now do you see? Do you see that there may be no anger, no regret, no remorse?
We must all grow and die as the gods have decreed, as the pattern has been woven. Man’s life is like that of the trees. The wind scatters the leaves to the ground; the vigorous forest puts forth others, and they grow in the spring-season. Soon one generation of men comes and another ceases, just as Xanthoi, the brown-haired Achaeans, my own folk, came and flourished where the black Cretan had had their houses. Just as the tow-headed Dorian came and flung our fortress down at last.
That is the endless unrolling, doctor, and I am part of it. I do not weep, for hybris, which is defiance of god’s will, deserves to be punished by the Furies, All we can do is to try to keep on good terms with the gods. And, in any case, Hope is a snare and a temptation; there is even a sort of joy in the agony, the anguish of the struggle with the god. Beyond that, nothing; a man is only truly happy when he is dead.
Oh, I know you are laughing at me, doctor. We Hellenes are used to that by now. You tidy folk with milk for blood have never understood us. You call us sinful because our word for a fault means ‘missing the mark’. While you beat your breast and cry like children to your father-god for pardon, we laugh at our bad marksmanship— and try again, though we know we may fail, may sin once more.
What you have never comprehended is sophrosyne, our whole-mindedness, our persistence in vice or virtue. And this, dear doctor, is the whole secret of my people: we have never given in. Crushed, we have risen again; sons have replaced their fathers and fought under the old helmet-crest as though time had stood still; women have sung in their birth-pains to think that the little child they bear might one day bring the Hellene glory back.
If I could only tell you what it was like in the great days! But you would only rub your long Hittite nose and smile your sly eastern smile. And, in your tent, to your boy, you would say, ‘These Greeks! These liars!’ I know; yes, I know. All the world says it—and we laugh with them. We do not spit and wail like Phoenicians, or run to the temple for revenge like Egyptians. We laugh—because in our hearts we know that all the world is wrong, and we are right! So we can afford to laugh, doctor. It is a precious thing to be born a Hellene. It is even more precious to have been horn, as I was, a princess of the House of Atreus. Yes, that startles you! It will stagger you still more to hear that I am the last of them all, the kin of Atreus. This bent old woman, this wrinkled wine-skin, bone-dry now, the last of them all. Touch my hand. Can you not feel the pulse of Zeus himself in it? God knows what honour I do you in letting you touch the god’s own distant flesh!
And still you do not believe. Then I shall convince you. I shall describe what it was like, before your father’s father lay upon his woman, tented on the plains at the world’s misty edge.
In the beginning, there was Mycenae, and greatest of all since Minos, Atreus himself. I have heard folk praise Tiryns of the High Wall—but it was nothing to Mycenae.
No, I never saw Tiryns, doctor; but why should I go there, when I had Mycenae? And when all the world came to Mycenae to see my father, Agamemnon? Some fools will tell you he had a face like a dog: but I can put you right. His face was that of a lion, all golden and bushy and his eyes and nose showing through his hair and beard. And sometimes, if he was angry, it was like a boar’s head, with the white tusks pushing up from the dark bristles and the eyes growing small and red with fury. Now can you see Agamemnon? Can you picture such a man wearing the high horse-plumed war-helm? Do you wonder that the children screamed and the mothers turned away if they were carrying babies? Oh, he was a man. There has never been a man in the world since.
Our city was built on and about a rocky hill that jutted
up from The plain of Argolis before the big mountains began. We stood at the world’s cross-roads and from Mycenae you could go anywhere. But we stayed there and let all the world come to us, for it was always summer in Mycenae. Not the simple summer of mere sunshine; the high summer of glory, with my father as the High King of that season.
We knew, as though the god had put it into our inner hearts, that we were the Chosen, born to rule the world of men. Even the dark-eyed Cretan who lived on the lower slopes of our hill felt this, the folk my great-grandfather had first conquered. They had forgotten this conquest, for we treated them well and married into their best families, and now they claimed a share of our glory too.
We were good tyrants, not bad ones, doctor. If there was something to learn, we learned it, though it came from the folk we had conquered, and thought it no disgrace. They showed us how to write, and make pretty dresses, and how to store the wine in great jars, and to drink from pretty little cups with high handles. From them, we learned how to paint pictures on our walls and how to bury our dead with gold masks on their faces to do them honour.
From us, in their turn, they learned to respect land-soldiers—to forget their grandfathers’ ships and to give praise to the swift chariot. They were never great soldiers, but at least we helped them half-way towards it.
I don’t think the god meant them to be warriors, really. They were an amusing brown-skinned folk with eyes like a deer’s, and there was nothing prettier than those tiny bronze-haired babies that came from the mixture of our peoples. Indeed, my own mother had been such a one, coming from the south, from Laconica, where most folk were Cretan.
Yes, we dealt with them well, doctor; there’s no gainsaying it. And if, in wine, they bragged about their ancient king Minos, we tried to hold our peace and not boast about our own flaming-haired Pelops, the father of all kings.
It was the same in the shrines. ‘Allow us to honour Zeus of the Sky and Poseidon Fish-father, Sea-stirrer, Earth-shaker,’ we would say, ‘and you shall have as many altars to the Mother as you wish. You can worship her as maiden, wife or crone, and no one will deny you.’ This we always did, though some of us hardly approved of their sacrifices. Yet it worked well enough, this give and take. Why, at Delphi itself, we let our Apollo leave his shrine for three months in the year, so that their wine-god, Dionysus, could take his place. And down at Amylcae, near my mother’s birth-place, we permitted a joint-festival in honour both of their Hyacinthus and our Apollo. There could be nothing fairer than that: though some young barons, my cousins, who had been there, told me that the first day of the festival made them vomit, seeing how the women are the chosen one. These barons really went down for the second days’ wine-drinking , they said, when a man might feel safe and could pay his respects to the man-god who protected him.
Still, live and let live, we said. And there were other things to think about, besides gods and goddesses; though, I confess, they always lay behind our thoughts and deeds. But we shook them off, whenever we could, and got on with our business, until Zeus sent us a warning dream and brought us before his shrine again—or Poseidon made the seas boil and the earth shudder beneath the feet. So, the gods kept us in our places, and we did not hold it against them. It was Ananke Order.
Why, Ananke governed Mycenae, from its thatched houses among the olive groves on the plain, to our great family fortress on the Hill-top; High Town, they called it. Here, my father, mother, sisters and brother lived, and all our kindred who had no kingdom of their own—with their warrior-companions, servants and slaves. This was as it should be, for the kindred to live on the hill-top; though, naturally, when the distant kings and lords gathered for my father to lead them against the Trojan horse-tamers, there was not room enough at High Town, and our visitors had to lodge down the hill in the pine houses thatched with rushes, and only come up on invitation, to dine in our great hall.
Our hall was in the middle of High Town. Oh, it was magnificent with its tapering pillars and painted walls, and the round fireplace in the centre where the olive-logs blazed noisily. The vestibule was nearly as big, where the lords gathered before coming in. And the white stairway that led down to the small court was the finest in the world, my father said. When I was little I lost count of all the other rooms that led off from the great hall; there was the women’s room, the bath-house, the armoury, the dairy…. Oh, scores of rooms! There were some I never went in, even; little dark places set within the thick stone walls of our palace.
Then there were the stables and work-rooms beyond that, and the shed for our sacrificial oxen, whose blood must be unmixed with that of lesser breeds.
Mostly, the cattle and sheep grazed beyond our orchards at the hack of the palace, round about the ancient bullring that we called the Womb of Hera, and were only brought inside the high walls, into the big outer court, if danger threatened.
There was a grave-circle in the outer court, too. I don’t know who lay there, but there were about eleven men and six women, called the kindred because they were perhaps ancestors of ours. My father said that once they had lain outside the wall that clenched its fist round High Town, in the big tombs called tholoi; but that King Atreus had had them brought inside because there were grave-robbers about.
I will tell you about the tholoi some time, doctor. They seemed very strange to me when I was little. My sisters and I used to call them the Beehives, because they had great domes and wild bees made their homes in the dark spaces between the blocks of stone. All through the summer these bees buzzed so loudly, there in the hollow darkness, that you could hear them all over High Town, through the Lion Gate and half-way down the steep ramp that led to the wooden houses and the farms. I can still hear them, doctor; it was a furious noise, as menacing as the bone bull-roarers that the Libyans use before they run naked into battle.
When we were children, my sisters and I used to put our hands over our ears to shut out this droning from the tombs, because we thought the old dead were calling to us, mocking us, threatening us.
While I have been telling you this, I remember now that these bees made every summer hideous for me. It is strange, I had never realised that before. I cannot go on, doctor. You must wait a while.
1
i was eleven when my father the king went away in the ships; and. my brother Orestes had only just begun to walk a step or two. He was perhaps only a year old. He was always a forward boy, but a very quiet baby.
I can only just remember what Agamemnon looked like then— a huge man, a giant in his bronze armour and with the high horsetail plume on his helmet. All the lords were afraid of him, though in his presence they did a lot of laughing and even touched his arm. But I could tell.
I do not think that I was afraid. I am not sure now. When he was at home, in High Town, by our hearth-fire, he played with me on his hands and knees, growling like a hill-bear or roaring like a desert lion, and tickling me with his bristly hair and sharp heard. He made all the lords wear their hair long, so that the world should see they were Hellenes who prayed openly and upright to the god with the heard, and not the conquered folk who muttered in the dark at the Mother shrine.
If my mother the queen ever came into the hall while father was playing with me, he would stop and stare at her till she went out again, sniffing and shaking her long bronze-coloured hair. He would stare after her even though she had gone, as though his eyes would follow her down the dark corridors, and push her along to her own chamber. He used to do the same with my two elder sisters, who said they wanted to be priestesses at the Mother shrine when they grew up.
But it was all right when the nurse, smiling Geilissa, brought baby Orestes in. Father would play with him too and call him ‘baron’. And though the king was so big, Orestes was never afraid of him, and never used to cry when the stiff beard brushed him. I used to scream out when the king whiskered me, but I was only pretending, as girls do, to see what else would happen.
But when the king was dressed in his war-gear, with the side-flap
s of his helmet down, so that you could only see his bright eyes staring, this did frighten me, because he was no longer my father. He was like Zeus then, with his voice booming out of the closed bronze, and echoing till the words lost all their meaning, like the bees in the tholoi.
Then he would swing me up onto his shoulder and the sharp edges of his corselet used to pinch me. I tried not to say that I was hurt, but I did cry out once, I recall. This made the king very angry with me, and he turned up my tunic and smacked me with the flat of his sword. I can remember what he said while he was doing it. He said, ‘You, an Achaean, and howling because you are hurt! What an example to the world.’
The sword hurt me, too, but I didn’t mind that kind of hurting. I cannot explain, hut in a way it made me love the king all the more for doing it.
And when the king had gone after this heating, I told my corn doll that I would marry him one day. He was the man for me, the biggest man in the world. I was only about nine then, but for the first years he was away over the sea in Troy I longed for the day he would come back, so that I could marry him. It got very had at times and even turned me against the boys of my own age in Mycenae.
In fact, it was so bad that I used to dream I would take the king away from Clytemnestra, my mother. Such thoughts made me ashamed at first, but Geilissa told me that all dreams were sent by Zeus, so after that I told myself that it was the god speaking in the night, not I.
All the same, in those days, there was nothing wrong about loving your father. Most of the girls I knew, of good family, said they were in love with their fathers and would marry them when they came back from the fighting. Some of them did, I know for a fact, if their mothers had died in the meantime. It was something to do with land-tenure, I think. Only a few, slave girls mostly, liked boys of their own age; but we of the House of Atreus had our own ideas of what was right, and we did not do as the slaves did in those days. Though, the god knows, before we were finished, we lost our pride and were willing to do anything that would put bread into us.
