IPHIGENIA
a short story
by Angus Brownfield
***
Published By
Copyright © 2014 by Angus Brownfield
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Iphigenia
At last we were ready. Half of us had sailed from Myssia, the other half had come overland from as far away as Apollonia and Corkyra, outlanders anxious to join the fray. The captains had counted the men and horses and estimated the additional ships needed, the quartermasters were requisitioning hay and grain, the hoplites were diddling the milkmaids and peasant women until I put a stop to it. Meanwhile, the shipwrights sawed and hammered and painted, the sail makers sewed canvas, the wranglers broke horses to saddle and chariot, slaves mucked out the corrals, priests prayed, cooks swore when their offerings were compared to what the slaves were shoveling.
In other words, it was a typical beginning of a military campaign. Before the end of the first week of muster we lost perhaps thirty men to desertion, and every week thereafter the doctors let go five or more laggards and mollies who’d fallen off horses and broke bones, or cut themselves drilling with swords, or developed the flux. I reckoned that, if we didn’t sail soon for Ilium, we wouldn’t have a force large enough to take the land.
I tried to delegate, but you know how it is: everyone wants to shout orders on the battlefield, no one wants to keep order in a bivouac. The implication is, since I've been elected leader of the expeditionary force, I’m stuck with keeping order and inspecting troops and all the other bullshit activities a post commander must carry out.
The ships, crowded together in the anchorage until a man could walk from the nearest to the farthest if he had a plank with him to lay from gunwale to gunwale (until he reached the triremes at the outer edge of the fleet, when the man would have to climb a rope ladder to proceed). This made loading men and provender relatively easy, but it meant sacrificing maneuverability. In short, without an offshore wind we were stuck in the anchorage. It was, you see, impossible to deploy the oars. We saw no risk, the other commanders and I, in packing the ships together, for an offshore breeze blows at Aulis practically every day of the year. The wind died about the time we were ready to sail. The priests dutifully sacrificed to Aeolis and then Boreas and Zephyrus, without success. They consulted the oracles and learned (or chose to learn) that because my falcon had taken a pregnant hare, Artemis was mad at me.
Really? A goddess mad at me for a hare? If there is an Artemis and she chooses to meddle in men’s affairs, then it was something more than a hare that riled her. I'm not a religious man, never have been. I put up with the pother of the priests because it is politic. Oracles are trickier. You commit yourself to the results when you consult an oracle. It’s like going to the doctor: you have a hurt and you commit to doing what the doctor says in order to get well. But at least with the oracle it’s all in the interpretation, and you can usually buy a proper interpretation, one that suits your needs.
“To placate Artemis, you must sacrifice a daughter,” the chief priest said.
“Who’s daughter?”
“One of yours, your excellency.”
“Sacrifice the way I would an ox or a peasant slays a pair of turtledoves?”
“On the altar, with the knife and the basin to catch the blood.”
I said, “Let’s wait and see.”
If blood weren’t at the end of it, this would be fit matter for a troupe of clowns to dance in the theater back home. They would portray me with an ass’s ears and male parts, running between a chorus of slapstick heroes and a wife who looked like a water buffalo. “What shall I do, Clytemnestra, whatever shall I do?” the actor would warble.
A camp of so many idle warriors is no place to lose face. There are enough men from outside our realm to overpower the Myceneans. Who among then cared a fig if my brother reclaimed Helen? It’s the treasure they signed on for. If there weren’t treasure to be garnered in Ilium, I would suggest to Menelaus that he swallow his pride and let Helen stay with the pretty boy. After all, it’s been eight years since Paris abducted her (if that’s what really happened) and she may be fat and blowzy by now, with a pack of half-Trojan brats in tow.
But no, he’s up to his neck in promises he wishes now he hadn’t made. Treasure, slaves, booty and beauty and all that.
I said to him, “What about offering one of your daughters in lieu of one of mine? After all, it’s you are the affronted party.”
“But you, brother, pissed off the goddess.”
Thirty days and not a puff of wind offshore, always in our faces—if it blew at all. More flux. Soldiers wounded in intercity brawls. Complaints from citizens their daughters were being ravaged. In front of the assembled troops I flogged two miscreants caught in the act and promised to garrote the next man who couldn’t satisfy his lust in the brothels instead of jumping local girls in the byways. Between strangulation and a drachma per hump, I trust there is no debate.
Sixty days and some ships had sprung leaks, which at least gave the troops something to do besides piss and moan. A hundred more soldiers deserted, and a couple of pentaconters as well. A third officer was caught fleeing and I had him drowned in the sea as a warning. I am not by nature a harsh commander, but, I rationalized, I really didn’t have jurisdiction over the wind.
Others thought differently. A delegation of leaders came to see me one winter morning and politely—a civility tinged with sarcasm—asked me to fish or cut bait. When they departed Menelaus stayed behind.
He said, “I have heard the rumor that one of your offspring was not a chip off the old block.”
I stared him down until he said, looking at his sandals and hemming and hawing, “Look, I'm not trying to tar you with the cuckold brush like me, one set of horns in the family is enough. I'm just suggesting that you may not have as much reluctance to sacrifice a child who isn’t yours.”
“Who I'd like to sacrifice is that harlot, Clytemnestra. If I had her on the altar I wouldn’t slit her throat, I'd run my xithos through her liver and let her bleed out slowly. And as for Iphigenia, the daughter you’re referring to, she doesn’t know who her father is. ‘A child has only one mother, but the father can be anyone–a slave or a freeman, a prince or a knave.’ Iphigenia is no more mine than is the strapping cuckoo chick in the tiny sparrow’s nest. But she not only doesn’t know that, she is a model daughter, giving me love as well as respect.”
At a hundred days, when the contingent from Corkyra pulled out of the coalition, I sent a note home by a mounted courier, telling Clytemnestra to send one of the girls of marriageable age, to wed Achilles.
Having heard of the oracle, Clytemnestra (she had her spies in the camp) sent Iphigenia, knowing my fondness for the girl. Distraught, looking to rationalize the inevitable, I asked that lying seer, Calchas, if the child could inherit her mother’s sin and he replied, “No more than the father’s.”
“But what if the father’s identity is questionable?” I said.
Smiling a s
marmy smile, Calchas replied, “The gods know who the father is and what his sins are.”
The soldiers, on the other hand, have a different test: “Family is everything.” Be it Zeus, be it Apollo, a private in the ranks would defy any god before slitting his daughter’s throat. I put the question to one Theticles, a hoplite from Tauris. He replied, chewing on his mustache, “Kill me outright or chain me to a rock and let Zeus’s eagle devour my liver for all eternity, I would not.” And he from the land that worships Artemis, who’s demanded this sacrifice. He added that for a general it would be a different matter, a general having to look out for so many more persons and all.
I wish I were a private instead of the leader of this expedition. I wish I had nothing more to worry me than how sharp I could hone my sword while the fleet awaits a wind blowing away from Aulis and straight at Troy. I would allay my bivouac boredom by imagining myself standing fast before the Trojan spears flashing as their hoard sweeps down from the citadel.
Oh Iphigenia, I would gladly take your place, bastard though you be, I would lay myself out on the gory altar and let the priests spill my blood in return for a stiff wind to Ilium, but the gods won’t let me. I am the leader. More than my honor, it is my fate to make this war a reality. While lieutenants and captains drill their men, I sit with my brother, the cuckolded Menelaus, and the other elite, and they don’t say, “Pretty please, Agamemnon,” they say I must and I shall. Honor is at stake. “Besides,” my brother adds, “the Trojans sell their most excellent horses to the Scythians, who then ride down on our Attic homesteads, rape our women and enslave our children.” He knows that recovering Helen, who ran off with the lute-playing pretty boy, isn’t reason enough to spend our blood and gold tearing down the walls of Troy. Helen has been passed around like a drinking cup. She has no virtue to defend, and he confesses, when he and I are alone, that if our champions hadn’t made such a hue and cry about honor, he would have taken another wife and let the matter go.
The priests tell me they have it all worked out. They will cover Iphigenia with the hide of a doe, and after I’ve driven the knife into her breast, they’ll pull back the hide and, miracle of miracles, a real four-legged deer will lie on the altar in the girl’s place. Sorry, priestlings, but in the end there is blood between Clytemnestra and me. I know that while I'm gone she will take up with Aegisthus again, uniting Argos and Mycenae, to pollute my bed while I'm off butchering Trojans. Let his daughter hide behind my name, I know a cuckoo’s chick when I see one.
Nestor, trying to comfort me, said, “Think, sire, of the pain and sorrow you’ll be saving the lass: the monthly curse, the agony of childbirth, the grief when you and her mother pass away, the anxiety of palace intrigues and jealousies.”
“Aye,” I replied, “and consider what I'll deprive her of: the wonder of forty more springs—fifty, if she’s lucky—the magic of her first love, the pride of seeing her son home from foreign contests an honored warrior.”
They’re calling for me. A hundred days the wind has been in their faces. They’re beginning to think of reasons they ought to be home instead of camped out here by the harbor of Aulis. I'm nothing but a political pawn of seventy thousand bored bastards. If I renege, they may well vent their bloodlust on Argos. I have my people to consider. I understand the equation: one poor girl’s life to save a thousand of my subjects.
“Has the girl been drugged?”
“She has, my lord.”
“Is the blade sharp?”
“We had the butcher hone it.”
“Then let’s get this over with.”