The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  I tried to make up for the companionship they had been denied, but when I visited them too often in their quarters, their nurse warned me against smothering them. “Too much maternal affection and they will never grow strong and independent,” Xanthippe cautioned. I worried about their future. Would Idaeus and little Helen become resourceful and strong, or would they eventually turn bitter and resentful, blaming their ill-starred parents for their ostracism?

  My hope was that they would reap the best the world had to offer: to live well, marry for love, and treat others as they would themselves be treated. However, it almost seemed like too much to ask; with the war raging outside the city and no end to the violence in sight, I amended my wish to the simple prayer that my darlings survive it.

  Several years into the conflict, both sides suffered a devastating blow that none of us could ever have imagined or anticipated. It was now the ninth year of the never-ending siege. There had been no rainfall all spring. Crops withered and died on the vine. The wheat and barley fields were scorched and sere. Animals dying of thirst were slaughtered to end their slowly increasing misery, but the Troyans feared consuming the flesh of a sickly creature. For season after season we had burned the corpses of our warrior dead, the pyres producing an odor more repulsive and nauseating than any I have ever breathed, but now we were destroying our beasts in their own beds of flame. The gods’ anger with all of us was deemed to be the source of the drought. Never in anyone’s memory, even aged Priam’s, had there been a dry spell so lengthy and so deadly.

  The Olympians had to be propitiated. Queen Hecuba sought to appease Athena with some of the elaborate robes that Paris Alexandros and I had brought from Sidon. A stream of gifts was brought to the temples, blood and wine spilt in libations. The irony was that in making these offerings, more citizens starved. The food and drink left for the gods was, by religious order, on no account to be shared with any layman or woman. Naturally, the offerings most favored by the gods were the choicest: the first fruits of the season; the unblemished yearling. Children and their grandsires, soldiers and farmers, artisans and laborers, all sacrificed their best and finest. Oxen, sheep, and goats, pomegranates, apples, dates, and figs: all were delivered in desperate abundance to the temples. And the children and their grandsires, soldiers and farmers, artisans and laborers—royalty and commoner—went hungry night after night. The only people getting fed—and getting fat—off the drought were the priests and priestesses.

  Down on the beaches, the hulls of the Achaeans’ high-prowed ships swelled and cracked and the Greeks starved, too.

  But the anger of the gods was neither appeased nor assuaged by the myriad sacrifices offered to them by Troyans and Achaeans, soldiers and civilians, the high and lowborn. They tested us even further. Thanatos, god of death, knew no limits.

  The dryness of the plain, the blinding sun, the hordes of black flies that settled on the dead, rotting corpses, and the scarcity of food and fresh water, all contributed to the further decimation of Greek and Troyan alike. The gods turned away from us, and the drought continued with no end in sight.

  And then the pestilence came.

  Although the people of Ilios were taken in great number as well, the Achaeans claimed that we were responsible, that a Hittite merchant admitted to their encampment, his wagon piled high with finely woven, brightly colored robes and attractive trinkets designed to delight the vanity of the camp followers and concubines, had contaminated his goods with plague.

  The slave girls immediately bedecked themselves with the Hittite’s finery and, within a day, seemed to be expelling their vitals from every bodily orifice, gasping their last only hours later. To their lovers, indeed to anyone who had touched their tainted garments or bodies, they brought an equally speedy and painful end. Somehow, Agamemnon and Menelaus cheated Thanatos, as did Agamemnon’s concubines, including his favorite, the golden-haired captive Chryseis. The girl was the daughter of Chryses, a priest at the temple of Apollo in Chryse, one of the cities near Ilios that the Achaeans had sacked before they reached our shores.

  There were those in the Greek camp who believed that the Hittite trader was only an agent of Apollo, that it was the god of light himself who had visited the plague on the Greeks to punish Agamemnon for kidnapping his priest’s daughter and forcing his lustful attentions upon her. Chryses had even come to Ilios to beseech the High King to return his child but was greeted with derision and scorn and sent back out to sea empty-handed.

  While we burned our infected dead and buried their bones, down by their ships the Achaeans quarreled amongst themselves. Agamemnon in his hubris refused to return his captive to her father. He loved her, he claimed. She pleased him more than his own wife and satisfied him greatly in his bed. For that reason alone, despite my prickly relationship with Clytemnestra, I would have stolen a knife, sneaked into his tent, and stabbed the adulterous High King in the heart.

  For shame! The war that he claimed was entirely predicated by the lustful actions of a faithless wife was being waged by a commander in chief who was himself false to his own marriage vows; and not just with one lover as I had been, but with slave girls within his Mycenaean household and with every woman he captured as a spoil of war. The man who convinced fifty thousand others to fight for his brother’s dishonor, dishonored my sister every day with women who did not deserve to scrub her floors.

  Thus it was with great interest that I followed this dissension among the most formidable Achaeans. While Agamemnon remained obstinate, his men and their whores continued to die. I wondered how he might explain to a mother that her son was dispatched to Hades by disease while he stubbornly satisfied his brutal lust.

  After several days, Odysseus, considered the voice of reason among the Achaeans, finally persuaded Agamemnon to return his captive to her homeland. The crafty Ithacan sailed with Chryseis back to Chryse and delivered her into the hands of her father, offering the hecatomb of one hundred oxen at the altar of Phoebus Apollo in the hopes of propitiating the great archer and golden god of light.

  Until the advent of the plague had temporarily halted the fighting, the casualties had been fairly evenly distributed. The discord within the Achaean ranks had benefited us as well, allowing our battle-weary warriors to begin to recoup their strength. Now that Chryseis had been returned, the Greeks were once again prepared to rally around their High King.

  And at the temples within the walled citadel, the Troyans, exhausted and fearful, slit the throats of Priam’s yearlings and prayed to the sky gods for a little more time.

  TWENTY-TWO

  They heard us. Or perhaps it was Agamemnon himself, whose subsequent actions after the loss of Chryseis inadvertently contributed to our military advantage. Our spies informed us that Agamemnon had demanded that Achilles forfeit the woman he had taken during the sack of Lyrnessus and deliver her to the High King as a replacement for Chryseis. Priam was overjoyed to learn that Achilles had refused, whereupon Agamemnon took the girl anyway. In retaliation, the spear-famed Achilles immediately withdrew his support for Agamemnon and ordered his fearsome Myrmidons to refrain from fighting as well. Achilles himself, we had learned, was sulking in his tent, playing his seven-stringed lyre and singing sweet lays of heroes past to his kinsman Patroclus while the rest of the Achaeans took to the field.

  Employing the lessons in which Theseus had so assiduously schooled me, I surmised that this quarrel between the two most influential Achaeans had little to do with either of the two slave girls, much as this entire bloody conflict had little to do with my flight from Sparta. The real prize was power. Agamemnon was High King and commander in chief of the Achaean host. His godlike stature was undeniable, but he did bully men into following him. Achilles embodied the Greek concept of arête—heroic excellence. He was younger, stronger, and eminently admired for his extraordinary skill by foot soldier, charioteer, and chieftain alike. He fought not for Helen, but as a mercenary fights: for his own glory and all the plunder he could amass for himself. As Achil
les was not bound by the Oath of Tyndareus, he saw no reason to bow to Agamemnon’s commands and abide by his military strategies. The Thessalian was further angered by Agamemnon’s behavior during the coastal raids before the war began. He had been unleashed to handle the dirty business of battle while the High King languished on his flagship. City after city fell under Achilles’s spear while Agamemnon ravaged only slave women. The final insult to the young warrior was Agamemnon’s demand that all of the spoils be delivered to him.

  Something else was at work here, too. Having been raised in the Achaean culture, I understood what the Troyan herald could not: the other reason that the unfortunate Briseis could not have been one of the genuine causes of the present quarrel. For Achilles to forfeit Briseis to Agamemnon at the High King’s whim or command was tantamount to an acknowledgment of Agamemnon’s supremacy, something the prideful Achilles bristled at, believing himself the better man in every way. It was arrogance, not love, that fueled the fire between the two warriors. I did not doubt that Achilles had bedded the girl, nor doubted his affection for her. But love, the love that accompanies passion and loyalty and friendship, as well as the pleasures of the flesh, the kind of love that the erastes bears for his eromenos, Achilles reserved for another.

  I had never met Achilles, but I remembered his cousin Patroclus from a time when life was more innocent; when I thought nothing in the world could be as evil as an arranged marriage. The gentle, fair-haired Patroclus had been one of my suitors. I recalled his fine-boned features and his tender disposition, his love of horses. I had been fond of the boy, though not in the way a woman desires a man. Patroclus was not cut out for war. Although he was my bitter enemy, I hoped that the powerful Achilles would safeguard his eromenos, his beloved. Of all my former suitors, Patroclus was the only one whose survival I prayed for.

  By now the war had dragged on for so long that the young sons left behind by their fathers were grown men themselves and had sailed to Ilios as reinforcements. Now father and son might find themselves fighting side by side. I tried to discover whether my Spartan sons had reached our shores, but received no word. Even little Nico would have been nearly old enough to become a soldier. I didn’t want to imagine my boys on the battlefield. Did they think they would be fighting for their mother when they wielded a sword or spear under the command of Agamemnon, seeking to slaughter a member of my adopted family, or—even more unbearable—one of their own half brothers, my sons by Paris Alexandros? By now we had two more boys, Aganus and Bunomus, lively toddlers barely a year apart, whose curious natures rivaled even that of Nico’s at their age. When these two were on the loose, nothing breakable was safe, no matter how securely Paris Alexandros and I had placed it out of reach. Everything fragile or sharp seemed to find its way into their clumsy grasp or, just as often, into their mouths. All three of my Troyan boys were too young to fight, but still I feared for them every day.

  I received word from Clytemnestra. Nico’s parentage was being falsely claimed by one of my Spartan slaves, a covetous girl named Pieris, whom Menelaus had taken into his bed after my departure. Clytemnestra told me that Pieris had borne him a son, who they named Megapenthes, but maintained that Nico was her child as well. Why else, she boasted, would the boy have been left behind? And many believed her.

  I raged at Menelaus’s betrayal. It galled me that marital infidelities were winked at or shrugged off when instigated or committed by a husband, but a wife was branded a harlot for her indiscretions. Clytemnestra apparently agreed; fully aware that her own husband was a dog, she willfully flouted these unwritten rules. Almost as soon as Agamemnon had sailed for Ilios, my sister took a lover; wily political animal that she was, it was not just any man who satisfied her fancy. Her chosen consort, Aegisthus, was a first cousin to Agamemnon and Menelaus. The curse of the House of Atreus was on him as well. He had spent his youth in exile, fearing that if he returned to Mycenae he would be killed by the Atridae. Their father had stolen the throne from Thyestes, Aegisthus’s father, supplanting Thyestes as High King. For years, Aegisthus bided his time, waiting, serpentlike, for the right moment to strike. I could not be sure whether my sister seduced Aegisthus or if it had happened the other way around, but the two were united in more than white-hot lust. They shared a common hatred for Agamemnon. And Clytemnestra, who was always bolder than I, flaunted her lover before the people of Mycenae. Aegisthus did more than bed Agamemnon’s wife. He sat on Agamemnon’s throne, wore his robes, and ruled his kingdom at my sister’s elbow. And she reveled in her vindication.

  While Mycenae flourished under my sister’s rule and a conniving slave girl who could not keep her legs closed promenaded around Sparta like its de facto queen, the people of Ilios began to starve. The drought and the plague had decimated our crops and livestock and had contaminated the water supply. The hoarded stores buried in the earthen floors of the lower city dwellings had been exhausted. The residents were seeking higher ground; many of the homes nearer the base of the slope had been subject to pilfering and rampant theft, and sometimes violence, by marauding Greeks who scaled the wall and sneaked into the lower city under cover of darkness. The robbers were often caught and killed, but their loss did not seem a great deterrent to others.

  Although there were some night raids that met with limited success, the Achaeans could never have taken the lower city. It was too well defended by archers on nearly every rooftop as well as atop the wall that ringed its perimeter. No one would have been able to survive the deadly hail of arrows that would have greeted the attempt.

  Nevertheless, in the upper city, inside the Scaean Gate, Priam undertook a massive construction project. Gone were our wide avenues in favor of cramped, closely spaced buildings of mud and brick that lacked all glamour. As the looting increased during the ninth and tenth years of the siege and as the fighting grew fiercer, residents of the lower city, particularly the women and children, were decamped to the newly erected quarters where they would be safer and better protected. One now had to look hard for a tree or a patch of greenery to soothe the eye.

  One morning I stood beside Priam on the battlements. A breeze caught my trailing robes and whipped them about my ankles; I clutched my wreath-shaped diadem to keep it from being blown off and bestowed by the wind on some unsuspecting warrior like a golden laurel. The men were fighting just below the walls. Lately I had grown accustomed to avoiding the position of spectator, preferring the solitude of my home, the warm embrace of Paris Alexandros (who had hung up his bow after the death of Penthesilea), the companionship of our children, and the comforting routine of my weaving. When I ascended the walls, I was reviled as being solely responsible for the carnage below. But I was condemned no matter what I did. When I remained indoors, I was roundly criticized for hiding from the ugliness I was accused of sparking.

  From the south tower of the ramparts I could readily identify the Spartan hoplites in their tightly formed phalanxes. They fought differently from their other Achaean brethren, advancing in seven or eight rows, fifty abreast, the man to the right protecting the one to his immediate left with his enormous shield. Unlike other armies, in Sparta it was a privilege to be in the front rows. That was where the sons of the richest and most powerful citizens marched, with the sons of the lower orders bringing up the rear. The rear flanks provided the traction, pushing the vast human killing machine toward the enemy until they were close enough to destroy them. The men in the first three rows of the phalanx were perforce the bravest. They were the fighters who were within range of the enemy’s spears, once the forces engaged.

  The Spartan discipline was legendary as well. A hoplite was never permitted to relax his left arm, which bore the twenty-pound shield covered with several layers of tanned ox hides embossed with a family insignia (such as a lion, bull, or snake), and embellished with bronze. For a man’s shield arm to falter was considered not only dangerous, but also unmanly.

  A few of the greatest Achaeans were distinguishable from where I stood, and those I identif
ied to aged Priam. “See there? The tallest of them; a near giant among the men. No, there—with the bare head, bald, and no breastplate. That’s Telamonian Ajax. Ajax the Greater, his men call him, for his incomparable size.”

  “Then his father was Telamon?” Priam asked.

  I nodded my head. “The very same Telamon who once took Ilios under mighty Heracles. His sons have returned to seek their own glory.”

  “Then Ajax—the Big One’s—brother, Teucer, is my nephew. My sister Hesione’s son. Where is he?” Priam looked bewildered. “Should he not be fighting for his mother’s people?”

  I did not know how to reply. The aged king remained silent for several moments. Finally he returned to our earlier conversation. “He who wears the helm plated in boars’ teeth and fights so skillfully against my men, who is that?”

  “Odysseus,” I said. “You have met him before—without his unusual helmet. When he and Menelaus sailed here so long ago to demand my release. And there is Menelaus.” I pointed out my former husband, grown squatter and more barrel-chested over the years, his russet beard now threaded with strands of gray. We watched intently as his Gorgon-emblazoned shield repelled a thrust from the sword of brave Aeneas. “And there, his brother Agamemnon,” I said, pointing to the imposing High King, his long red hair streaming from beneath his crested helm. Not only was he distinguished by his height and lion’s mane of hair, but his armor was unmistakable for its embellishment and for the size of his shield.

  The corselet, a gift from King Kinryas of Cyprus, was adorned with circlets of cobalt, gold, and tin. Toward the throat, on either side, three serpents, also wrought of sea-blue cobalt, reared up and twisted their bodies to gaze at one another from across the High King’s broad chest. The round shield was large enough to enclose his entire body and was fitted with concentric circles of bronze and knobs of tin and cobalt. At its center, a Gorgon’s head dared the enemy to look upon her. Even the shield strap was ornately fashioned with silver findings and a three-headed cobalt snake whose faces twisted back to fix on one another. The four-horned, crested helmet befitted a high king as well. Priam was amazed that a warrior could fight so well and wear so much, for the armor alone was equivalent to the weight of a man. Many of the Troyans went bare-chested and bare-headed into battle, which was something I never understood. The unhelmed Troyan fighters kept their hair out of the reach of their enemies by plaiting it waspwise into beadlike cylinders of gold and silver.