Olympus

by Devdutt Pattanaik

  Though everyone liked Philoctetes, they decided—on Odysseus’s advice—to leave him on Lemnos to fend for himself and sail onwards to Troy themselves. What the Greeks did not realize was that as long as Philoctetes did not fight by their side, victory would elude them.

  The story of Philoctetes is found in the Little Iliad, which forms part of the Epic Cycle of stories, dating to the seventh century BCE.

  All the great Greek tragedians, including Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, wrote plays on Philoctetes, but only one, Philoctetes by Sophocles, survives.

  Philoctetes is one of the warriors inside the Trojan Horse.

  Protesilaus

  It was foretold that the first Greek soldier to step on Troy would surely die. And so when the Greek ships reached the shores of Troy, not a single soldier was willing to jump on to the land.

  Finally, Odysseus leapt out of his ship, but cleverly landed on his own shield which he had thrown on the ground first, thus technically not stepping on Trojan soil. The next to follow was Protesilaus, under the impression that the first Greek had already landed on Trojan soil. Thus tricked by Odysseus, he was killed, as had been foretold, by Hector, the eldest Trojan prince and a fine warrior.

  The gods felt sorry for Laodamia, Protesilaus’s wife, who had watched her husband set sail for Troy shortly after their wedding. They had not even consummated their marriage. Taking pity on her, the gods decided to let his ghost visit her for a few hours. However, this brief time spent with the ghost of her husband only intensified Laodamia’s misery. She commissioned a statue of him, and spent every waking hour serving it as if it was truly her husband. Fearing for her sanity, her father ordered that the statue be burned. Laodamia protested and finally threw herself into the fire, choosing death over life as a widow.

  A tree grew on the spot where Laodamia died. It grew so high that its topmost branches could see across the sea. But they would wither as soon as they were tall enough to catch sight of the Trojan shores, indicating the rage and bitterness of a husband and wife separated by the tragic war.

  Yearning for a lover from whom one is separated, or viraha, is a common theme in Hindu mythology. Radha yearns for Krishna who leaves Gokul for Mathura. Urmila mourns for Lakshman who goes to the forest with his brother Ram.

  In an alternative version by the Latin writer Conon who lived in the age of the Roman emperor Augustus, Protesilaus survives the Trojan War and wants to set sail for Greece with Priam’s sister, Aethilla, but she and other Trojan women burn the ship and force him and his men to start a new city with them—the city of Scione.

  In the first century CE, the Latin writer Hyginus put together the Fabulae, a collection of mythological narratives from his time. Though not a great work of literature, it does give us an idea of the stories that were current at the time. The story of Laodamia’s tragic love for the statue of her husband is one such tale.

  Briseis

  The Greeks had thought that they would breach the walls of Troy, raid the city, kill Paris and bring back Helen to Greece within a year. But the walls, built by Poseidon, proved formidable. And the part built by the mortal Aeacus was too well fortified.

  So the Greeks had no choice but to camp on the beaches of Troy and lay siege to the city—a siege that stretched for years. Ten long years!

  During this time, the soldiers survived by sacking the settlements around Troy for provisions. In these raids, men were killed and women were captured and turned into concubines who cooked for the Greeks in the day and satisfied their lust at night.

  Amongst these concubines were Chryseis who belonged to Agamemnon, and Briseis, who belonged to Achilles. Chryseis’s father, a priest of Apollo, invoked the god and begged him to strike the Greek soldiers with sickness until they let his daughter go. Apollo shot the arrow of disease amidst the Greeks, until at last, tired of sickness, and having consulted the oracles, the men begged Agamemnon to let his concubine go. ‘Only if she is replaced by Briseis, who is as beautiful as her,’ he said. The Greeks agreed without consulting Achilles.

  When Agamemnon forcibly claimed Briseis, Achilles was so angry that he declared he would not fight in the war until his concubine was returned to him and Agamemnon had apologized.

  Many European Orientalists believed there was much in common between the Greek war epic of Troy and the Hindu war epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. However, they failed to notice that in the Hindu epics, women are not treated with disrespect or captured to serve as concubines.

  The story of the concubines that eventually leads to Achilles withdrawing from the battlefield of Troy forms the theme of Homer’s most celebrated work, the Iliad.

  Briseis is described as a princess, the daughter of a local king, who is captured during the Greek raids and turned into a concubine to serve the Greek warriors.

  In medieval times, Briseis becomes Briseida, or Cressida, daughter of Calchas, the Trojan oracle who defects to the Greek camp. She is in love with the Trojan prince Troilus, but when she is allowed to go over to the Greek camp on her father’s request, she meets and falls in love with the Greek warrior Diomedes, thus breaking Troilus’s heart.

  Patroclus

  Briseis was not returned, and Agamemnon refused to apologize. So Achilles would not fight. As a result, after nine years of continuously winning battles against the Trojans on the beaches, the Greek army started facing defeat. More and more Greeks began to die in battle, or return injured. The formidable army that had once been offensive now became defensive and afraid.

  Achilles, however, did not care. He would not take up arms, not until his conditions were met and his humiliation by Agamemnon avenged. Patroclus tried to convince his lover, but Achilles refused to budge, like a petulant child.

  Finally, to motivate the disheartened Greeks, Patroclus entered the battlefield wearing Achilles’ helmet. Mistaking him for Achilles, the Greeks were revitalized, fighting with a renewed vigour, and the terrorized Trojans became defensive.

  But then tragedy struck: Hector caught hold of Patroclus, and assuming that he was Achilles, killed him with a spear.

  Mistaken identity is a common theme in mythological stories. In the Mahabharata, Ashwatthama kills five youths he finds sleeping in the Pandava camp at night, mistaking them to be the five Pandavas.

  In his childhood, Patroclus had accidentally killed his friend Clysonymus following a fight over a game of dice. Forced into exile as punishment for his crime, he found shelter in Peleus’s home. Shortly after his arrival, Achilles and he were sent to study under Chiron.

  Patroclus kills Sarpedon, the son of Zeus and king of Lycia, who fights on the side of Troy as an ally though he has nothing against the Greeks and feels the Trojans are wrong. Sarpedon is sometimes identified as the brother of Minos of Crete, who was gifted with a very long life.

  In Classical Greece, Plato, the philosopher, describes the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as a model of romantic love while Xenophon disagrees. In the twentieth century, the Hollywood movie Troy shows the relationship between the two men as asexual, while in the contemporary novel Song of Achilles, author Madeline Miller makes the relationship romantic as well as sexual. People have seen the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus differently depending on their comfort with homosexuality.

  Alexander the Great’s love for his male friend Hephaeston was probably inspired by the story of Achilles’ love for Patroclus. Alexander loved the epic the Iliad and Achilles was his hero. It is reported that both he and Hephaeston visited the tomb of Achilles and that when Hephaeston died, Alexander was plagued by dreams of his own death, just as Achilles could not bear to live without Patroclus.

  Hector

  When news of his lover’s death reached Achilles, his rage knew no bounds. He blamed Hector, not his own intransigence, for Patroclus’s death and challenged the Trojan prince to a duel. His mother tried to stop him but he refused to listen to reason, so she gifted him with a divine armour made by Hephaestus himself to protect him from
harm. Hephaestus owed Thetis a favour for she had raised him by the sea when he had been cast out of Olympus by his own mother, Hera, who found him ugly.

  The fight between Achilles and Hector was witnessed by all. Priam, Hecabe, Andromache, Paris and Helen watched from above the city walls. Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus and Menelaus watched from their camp by the sea. After a long and gruelling duel, Achilles triumphed. He plunged his spear in Hector’s chest and let out a cry of victory whose rage disturbed even the gods.

  Not content with merely killing Hector, Achilles tied the corpse by the ankles to his chariot and rode around Troy three times, thus defiling the body. All those who saw this—the Greeks, the Trojans, even the Olympians—were disgusted. But Achilles was beyond caring. He was angry and heartbroken and wanted nothing else in the world now but to die.

  That night, while everyone slept, Priam slipped into the Greek camp and fell at Achilles’ feet, begging him to return the body of his beloved eldest son so that he might be cremated as befitted a royal warrior. ‘I will give you a cartful of gold in exchange,’ said the sad king.

  Achilles did not care for the gold for in his heart he knew he had crossed the lines of propriety in rage and the gods were upset with him. A broken man, this greatest of Greek warriors let the weeping king take the body of his eldest son back to Troy.

  The killing of the good Hector who fights for his family, despite all its faults, inspired Michael Madhusudan Dutt to write the Bengali epic Meghnad-vadh Kavya in the nineteenth century on similar lines: Meghnad, son of Ravana who had remained true to his family despite their many flaws, is killed by Ram’s brother Lakshman, unfairly. In oral tales based on the Ramayana, Sulochana, Meghnad’s widow, goes alone to Ram’s battle camp to fetch the body of her husband, just as Priam goes to Achilles to retrieve the body of his son, Hector.

  During the course of the war, Hector once challenges the Greeks to a duel. Ajax, son of Telamon, is chosen by lots. In the long clash that follows, both warriors are equally matched and the fight ends in a stalemate. The duellists express admiration for each other; Hector gifts Ajax a sword and Ajax gives Hector a girdle.

  In Dante’s thirteenth-century work Inferno, Hector and his family are located in Limbo, the space reserved for virtuous non-Christians.

  Hector is the only asteroid named after a Trojan in the Greek cluster of asteroids around Jupiter.

  Penthesilea

  As the war continued, the Trojans called upon their allies to help; they begged the Amazons to come to their rescue.

  Penthesilea, the Amazon queen, came to fight but she came with a death wish. She had accidentally slain her Amazon sister with a spear during a deer hunt and wanted to punish herself. But suicide was not a noble option. She wanted to die in battle and so readily accepted Priam’s invitation to war.

  Penthesilea was a magnificent warrior and fought so bravely that Achilles did not realize he was fighting a woman. Finally, after he had killed her and removed her helmet, he realized she was a woman, a beautiful woman. In fact, her beauty was so great that, enamoured of her, he embraced her passionately, causing the soldiers around him, especially one Thersites, to jeer. Angry and humiliated, Achilles killed Thersites.

  In the Mahabharata, Bhishma refuses to fight a warrior called Shikhandi as he was born with a female body and acquired a male body only later in life; women were not allowed on the battlefield. Yet the Puranas, composed centuries after the Mahabharata, speak of the Goddess and her army of female warriors, the Matrikas.

  All Greek heroes are connected in one way or the other with the Amazons. Theseus meets, fights, falls in love and is responsible for the death of Antiope. As it is with Heracles and Hippolyta, and Achilles and Penthesilea.

  The story of Achilles’ battle with the Amazons is found in Aethiopis, which forms part of the Epic Cycle of stories, dating to 700 BCE.

  The reason why Penthesilea wants to fight the Trojan War comes from Posthomerica, written by Quintus Smyrnaeus, a Greek poet who lived around the fourth century CE.

  Memnon

  After the Amazons came the Ethiopians, led by Memnon.

  Memnon was the son of Eos, the goddess of dawn, and a Trojan prince called Tithonus. Eos had asked the Olympians to grant Tithonus immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. So as time passed, he grew weaker and older, shrinking with age. Taking pity on him, the goddess turned him into a cicada, or tree cricket, whose mating chirp is the cry of Tithonus who belongs neither to the world of mortals nor to that of the immortals.

  Family ties compelled Memnon to help the Trojans. In the course of battle he killed young Antilochus, who tried to save his old father Nestor of Pylos. Nestor then challenged Memnon to a duel, but Memnon refused to fight him as he was too old. Nestor then asked Achilles to fight the Ethiopian on his behalf, and the duel that followed lasted for days, for both warriors were equally matched. In the end Achilles was able to defeat and kill him.

  As soon as Memnon was cremated, his entire army turned into birds and flew away to the west. Since his death, his mother Eos weeps for him at dawn every day, her tears taking the form of dewdrops.

  In Hindu mythology, dawn is both a god called Aruna and a goddess called Usha. In art, the dawn god is depicted as the charioteer of the sun god whose body is perfectly formed only till the waist, not below, which makes him a deity of uncertain gender.

  The story of Achilles’ battles with the Ethiopians is also found in Aethiopis, as well as Posthomerica, composed a thousand years later.

  The killing of Memnon follows the pattern of the killing of Hector. Achilles was provoked to fight Hector after he killed young Patroclus, and Achilles is provoked to kill Memnon after he slays Antilochus.

  In Egypt there are two tall statues built in honour of Amenhotep, the pharaoh who ruled the Nile civilization 3400 years ago. They were considered in Graeco-Roman worlds as the ‘colossi of Memnon’ that made sounds as the ancient warrior spoke to his celestial mother. Oracles interpreted these sounds for many ancient travellers.

  In Roman mythology, Eos is known as Aurora.

  Troilus

  Patroclus’s death had driven Achilles mad, and so perhaps he was looking for love everywhere. First, it was the corpse of the Amazon queen Penthesilea. Then it would be the Trojan prince Troilus. And then, Troilus’s twin sister, Polyxena.

  He saw the Trojan prince and his sister riding secretly out of Troy one night, and making their way to a mountain spring. Troilus, with his long hair, was beautiful and reminded Achilles of Patroclus, so Achilles approached him and offered him his love but the boy rejected it as one rejects the attentions of a lunatic, especially one who was clearly Greek, not Trojan. When he tried to leave on his horse, Achilles grabbed him by the hair and dashed his head on the ground.

  It had been foretold that if Troilus lived till the age of twenty, the walls of Troy would never be breached. His death at Achilles’ hands before he turned twenty sealed the fate of Troy.

  Achilles then turned his attention to the girl who had accompanied the boy. She looked just like him. Her name was Polyxena and instead of fearing or resisting the Greek warrior, she charmed him with her manners and words and spent time talking to him. Achilles liked her and in the course of the conversation revealed, as a gesture of his true love for her, that he could not be killed unless he was injured in his heel.

  Greek mythology is replete with tales of twin brother–sister pairs such as Helle and Phrixus, Polyxena and Troilus, Artemis and Apollo, Eris and Ares. Similar twin brother–sister pairings are found in Hindu mythology as well: Yama and Yami in the Vedas, and Kripa and Kripi, Hidimba and Hidimbi in the Mahabharata.

  Ancient Greek writers described Troilus as a Trojan prince with a love for horses who was killed brutally by the lustful Achilles. However, in medieval times, writers, including Shakespeare, spoke of Troilus as a Trojan prince who is infatuated with Cressida, the daughter of a man who defected to the Greek side. When she is exchanged for hostages, Troilus is heartbrok
en to learn that she has switched affections and chosen the Greek Diomedes instead.

  The name Troilus can be interpreted in many ways: as a combination of ‘Tros’ and ‘Ilus’, the founders of Troy; as ‘little Troy’; as ‘about-to-be-destroyed Troy’.

  Images found on ancient Greek pottery suggest that Athena directs Achilles to kill Troilus. The images show Achilles pulling Troilus by the hair as he attempts to ride away on his horse. Achilles then mutilates the body of Troilus at the mountain spring that is sacred to Apollo, thus earning the god’s wrath.

  Polyxena

  Polyxena told her father about Achilles’ love for her and his desire to marry her. Priam liked this idea and believed that it might put an end to the wretched siege. So he organized a secret meeting with Achilles in good faith.

  Paris, however, opposed the idea for he feared that a truce between the Trojans and the Greeks would mean that he would have to give up Helen. When he learned from his sister about Achilles’ vulnerable heel, he planned an ambush.

  As the secret meeting between Achilles and Priam was taking place, Paris climbed the high walls of Troy and shot a poisoned arrow that struck Achilles in the heel.

  A dying Achilles accused Polyxena of treachery and refused to listen to her pleas of innocence. ‘From the land of the dead I shall have my vengeance,’ he swore, breathing his last.

  The tale of Achilles’ vulnerable heel was not known to Homer. It comes to us much later, from the Latin work Achilleid by the Roman poet Statius, who lived in the first century CE. Just as Thetis tries to protect her son Achilles, in the folk versions of the Mahabharata, Gandhari tries to protect her son Duryodhana. The Kaurava queen, who has kept herself blindfolded for years, knows that when she removes her blindfold, whatever she lays eyes on first will become invulnerable to weapons. She tells her son to come naked before her so that she can make him invincible. But Duryodhana, in shame, covers his loins. So like Achilles’ heel, his loins remain vulnerable to injury, and eventually become the cause of his death.