n. This Aesacus, who learned the art of interpreting dreams from his grandfather Merops, is famous for the great love he showed Asterope, a daughter of the river Cebren: when she died, he tried repeatedly to kill himself by leaping from a sea-cliff until, at last, the gods took pity on his plight. They turned Aesacus into a diving bird, thus allowing him to indulge his obsession with greater decency.23
o. Hecabe, Priam’s second wife – whom the Latins call Hecuba – was a daughter of Dymas and the nymph Eunoë or, some say, of Cisseus and Telecleia; or of the river Sangarius and Metope; or of Glaucippe, the daughter of Xanthus.24 She bore Priam nineteen of his fifty sons, the remainder being the children of concubines; all fifty occupied adjacent bed-chambers of polished stone. Priam’s twelve daughters slept with their husbands on the farther side of the same courtyard.25 Hecabe’s eldest son was Hector, whom some call the son of Apollo; next, she bore Paris; then Creusa, Laodice, and Polyxena; then Deiphobus, Helenus, Cassandra, Pammon, Polites, Antiphus, Hipponous, and Polydorus. But Troilus was certainly begotten on her by Apollo.26
p. Among Hecabe’s younger children were the twins Cassandra and Helenus. At their birthday feast, celebrated in the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo, they grew tired of play and fell asleep in a corner, while their forgetful parents, who had drunk too much wine, staggered home without them. When Hecabe returned to the temple, she found the sacred serpents licking the children’s ears, and screamed for terror. The serpents at once disappeared into a pile of laurel boughs, but from that hour both Cassandra and Helenus possessed the gift of prophecy.27
q. Another account of the matter is that one day Cassandra fell asleep in the temple, Apollo appeared and promised to teach her the art of prophecy if she would lie with him. Cassandra, after accepting his gift, went back on the bargain; but Apollo begged her to give him one kiss and, as she did so, spat into her mouth, thus ensuring that none would ever believe what she prophesied.28
r. When, after several years of prudent government, Priam had restored Troy to its former wealth and power, he summoned a Council to discuss the case of his sister Hesione, whom Telamon the Aeacid had taken away to Greece. Though he himself was in favour of force, the Council recommended that persuasion should first be tried. His brother-in-law Antenor and his cousin Anchises therefore went to Greece and delivered the Trojan demands to the assembled Greeks at Telamon’s court; but were scornfully sent about their business. This incident was a main cause of the Trojan War,29 the gloomy end of which Cassandra was now already predicting. To avoid scandal, Priam locked her up in a pyramidal building on the citadel; the wardress who cared for her had orders to keep him informed of all her prophetic utterances.30
1. Strabo: xiii. 1. 48.
2. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 108; Strabo: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1302.
3. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 1; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 167; Strabo: loc. cit.
4. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Roman Antiquities i. 61 and ii. 70–1; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. 1204; Conon: Narrations 21; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 285.
5. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 1; Lycophron: 72 ff, with Tzetzes’s comments; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xx. 215; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 167; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 29.
6. Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: v. 48; Strabo: Fragment 50; Homer: Iliad xx. 215 ff.
7. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Servius: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.
8. Strabo: loc. cit.; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 61; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. 1204; Conon: Narrations 21; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 166.
9. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 72; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: loc. cit.
10. Servius: loc. cit.; vii. 207 and iii. 15.
11. Apollodorus: iii. 12 2 and iii.15. 3; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 50. 3.
12. Homer: Iliad xx. 220 ff.; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 62; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 2.
13. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 3; Tzetzes: OnLycophron 29 : Lesses of Lampsacus, quoted by Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Pindar: Olympian Odes viii. 30 ff., with scholiast; Strabo: xiii. 1. 3 and 3. 3.
14. Ovid: Fasti vi. 420 ff.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
15. Ovid: loc cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
16. Dictys Cretensis: v. 5.
17. Scholiast on Euripides’s Phoenician Women 1136; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 61; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 166.
18. Clement of Alexandria: Protrepticon iv. 47; Servius: loc. cit.; Pherecydes, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 355; Etymologicum Magnum: sub Palladium pp. 649–50.
19. Dercyllus: Foundations of Cities i, quoted by Plutarch: Parallel Stories 17.
20. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 2 and 3.
21. Apollodorus: ii. 59; ii. 6. 4 and iii. 12. 3; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad iii. 250; Homer: Iliad vi. 23–6; xxi. 446 and vii. 542; Horace: Odes iii. 3. 21; Pindar: Olympic Odes viii. 41, with scholiast; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 32.
22. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 319; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 5; Homer: Iliad ii. 831 and 837; Virgil: Aeneid ix. 176–7.
23. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v. 128; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 755–95.
24. Perecydes, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xvi. 718; and on Euripides’s Hecabe 32; Athenion, quoted by scholiast on Homer: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
25. Homer: Iliad xxiv. 495–7 and vi. 242–50.
26. Stesichorus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 266; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
27. Anticlides, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliad vii. 44.
28. Hyginus: Fabula 93; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 247.
29. Benoit: Roman de Troie 385 and 3187 ff.; The Seege or Batayle of Troye 349 ff. and 385; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 340; Dares: 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 80.
30. Aeschylus: Agamemnon 1210; Tzetzes: Hypothesis of Lycophron’s Alexandra; On Lycophron 29 and 350.
1. The situation of Troy on a well-watered plain at the entrance to the Hellespont, though establishing it as the main centre of Bronze Age trade between East and West, provoked frequent attacks from all quarters. Greek, Cretan, and Phrygian claims to have founded the city were not irreconcilable, since by Classical times it had been destroyed and rebuilt often enough: there were ten Troys in all, the seventh being the Homeric city. The Troy with which Homer is concerned seems to have been peopled by a federation of three tribes – Trojans, Ilians, and Dardanians – a usual arrangement in the Bronze Age.
2. ‘Sminthian Apollo’ points to Crete, Sminthos being the Cretan word for ‘mouse’, a sacred animal not only at Cnossus (see 90. 3), but in Philistia (1 Samuel vi. 4) and Phocis (Pausanias: x. 12. 5); and Erichthonius, the fertilizing North Wind, was worshipped alike by the Pelasgians of Athens and the Thracians (see 48. 3). But the Athenian claim to have founded Troy may be dismissed as political propaganda. The white mice kept in Apollo’s temples were prophylactic both against plague and against sudden invasions of mice such as Aelian (History of Animals xii. 5. and 41) and Aristotle (History of Animals vi. 370) mention. Dardanus may have been a Tyrrhenian from Lydia (see 136.g) or Samothrace; but Servius errs in recording that he came from Etruria, where the Tyrrhenians settled long after the Trojan War. ‘Zacinthus’, a Cretan word, figuring in the Trojan royal pedigree, was the name of an island belonging to Odysseus’s kingdom; and this suggests that he claimed hereditary rights at Troy.
3. The Palladium, which the Vestal Virgins guarded at Rome, as the luck of the city, held immense importance for Italian mythographers; they claimed that it had been rescued from Troy by Aeneas (Pausanias: ii. 23. 5) and brought to Italy. It was perhaps made of porpoise-ivory (see 108. 5). ‘Palladium’ means a stone or other cult-object around which the girls of a particular clan danced, as at Thespiae (see 120. a), or young men leaped, pallas being used indiscriminately for both sexes. The Roman College of Salii was a society of leaping priests. When such cult-objects became identified with tribal prosperity and were carefully guarded against theft or mu
tilation, palladia was read as meaning palta, ‘or things hurled from heaven’. Palta might not be hidden from the sky; thus the sacred thunder-stone of Terminus at Rome stood under a hole in the roof of Juppiter’s temple – which accounts for the similar opening at Troy.
4. Worship of meteorites was easily extended to ancient monoliths, the funerary origin of which had been forgotten; then from monolith to stone image, and from stone image to wooden or ivory image is a short step. But the falling of a shield from heaven – Mars’s ancile (Ovid: Fasti iii. 259–73) is the best-known instance – needs more explanation. At first, meteorites, as the only genuine palta, were taken to be the origin of lightning, which splits forest trees. Next, neolithic stone axes, such as the one recently found in the Mycenaean sanctuary of Asine, and early Bronze Age celts or pestles, such as Cybele’s pestle at Ephesus (Acts xix. 35), were mistaken for thunderbolts. But the shield was also a thunder instrument. Pre-Hellenic rain-makers summoned storms by whirling bull-roarers to imitate the sound of rising wind and, for thunder, beat on huge, tightly-stretched ox-hide shields, with double-headed drum-sticks like those carried by the Salian priests in the Anagni relief. The only way to keep a bull-roarer sounding continuously is to whirl it in a figure-of-eight, as boys do with toy windmills, and since torches, used to imitate lightning, were, it seems, whirled in the same pattern, the rain-making shield was cut to form a figure-of-eight, and the double drum-stick beat continuously on both sides. This is why surviving Cretan icons show the Thunder-spirit descending as a figure-of-eight shield; and why therefore ancient shields were eventually worshipped as palta. A painted limestone tablet from the Acropolis at Mycenae proves, by the colour of the flesh, that the Thunder-spirit was a goddess, rather than a god; on a gold ring found near by, the sex of the descending shield is not indicated.
5. Cassandra and the serpents recall the myth of Melampus (see 122. c), and Apollo’s spitting into her mouth that of Glaucus (see 90. f). Her prison was probably a bee-hive tomb from which she uttered prophecies in the name of the hero who lay buried there (see 43. 2 and 154. 1).
6. Aesacus, the name of Priam’s prophetic son, meant the myrtle-branch which was passed around at Greek banquets as a challenge to sing or compose. Myrtle being a death-tree (see 101.1 and 109. 4), such poems may originally have been prophecies made at a hero-feast. The diving bird was sacred to Athene in Attica and associated with the drowning of the royal pharmacos (see 94. 1). Scamander’s leaping into the river Xanthus must refer to a similar Trojan custom of drowning the old king (see 108.3); his ghost supposedly impregnated girls when they came there to bathe (see 137. 3). Tantalus, who appears to have suffered the same fate, married Xanthus’s daughter (see 108. b).
7. Priam had fifty sons, nineteen of whom were legitimate; this suggests that at Troy the length of the king’s reign was governed by the nineteen-year metonic cycle, not the cycle of one hundred lunations shared between king and tanist, as in Crete (see 138. 5) and Arcadia (see 38. 2). His twelve daughters were perhaps guardians of the months.
8. The importance of Aeacus’s share in building the walls of Troy should not be overlooked: Apollo had prophesied that his descendants should be present at its capture both in the first and the fourth generation (see 66. i), and only the part built by Aeacus could be breached (Pindar: Pythian Odes viii. 39–46). Andromache reminded Hector that this part was the curtain on the west side of the wall ‘near the fig tree’, where the city might be most easily assailed (Homer: Iliad vi. 431–9), and ‘where the most valiant men who follow the two Ajax’s have thrice attempted to force an entry – whether some soothsayer has revealed the secret to them, or whether their own spirit urges them on.’ Dörpfeld’s excavations of Troy proved that the wall was, unaccountably, weakest at this point; but the Ajax’s or ‘Aeacans’ needed no soothsayer to inform them of this if, as Polybius suggests, ‘Aeacus’ came from Little Ajax’s city of Opuntian Locris. Locris, which seems to have provided the Ilian element in Homeric Troy, and enjoyed the privilege of nominating Trojan priestesses (see 168. 2), was a pre-Hellenic Lelegian district with matrilinear and even matriarchal institutions (see 136. 4); another tribe of Lelegians, perhaps of Locrian descent, lived at Pedasus in the Troad. One of their princesses, Laothoë, came to Troy and had a child by Priam (Homer: Iliad xxi. 86). It seems to have been the Locrian priestesses’ readiness to smuggle away the Palladium to safety in Locris that facilitated the Greeks’ capture of the city (see 168.4).
9. Since one Teucer was Scamander’s son, and another was Aeacus’s grandson and son of Priam’s sister Hesione (see 137. 2), the Teucrian element at Troy may be identified with the Lelegian, or Aeacan, or Ilian; the other two elements being the Lydian, or Dardanian, or Tyrrhenian; and the Trojan, or Phrygian.
159
PARIS AND HELEN
WHEN Helen, Leda’s beautiful daughter, grew to womanhood at Sparta in the palace of her foster-father Tyndareus, all the princes of Greece came with rich gifts as her suitors, or sent their kinsmen to represent them. Diomedes, fresh from his victory at Thebes, was there with Ajax, Teucer, Philoctetes, Idomeneus, Patroclus, Menestheus, and many others. Odysseus came too, but empty-handed, because he had not the least chance of success – for, even though the Dioscuri, Helen’s brothers, wanted her to marry Menestheus of Athens, she would, Odysseus knew, be given to Prince Menelaus, the richest of the Achaeans, represented by Tyndareus’s powerful son-in-law Agamemnon.1
b. Tyndareus sent no suitor away, but would, on the other hand, accept none of the proffered gifts; fearing that his partiality for any one prince might set the others quarrelling. Odysseus asked him one day: ‘If I tell you how to avoid a quarrel will you, in return, help me to marry Icarius’s daughter Penelope?’ ‘It is a bargain,’ cried Tyndareus ‘Then,’ continued Odysseus, ‘my advice to you is: insist that all Helen’s suitors swear to defend her chosen husband against whoever resents his good fortune.’ Tyndareus agreed that this was a prudent course. After sacrificing a horse, and jointing it, he made the suitors stand on its bloody pieces, and repeat the oath which Odysseus had formulated; the joints were then buried at a place still called ‘The Horse’s Tomb.’
c. It is not known whether Tyndareus himself chose Helen’s husband, or whether she declared her own preference by crowning him with a wreath.2 At all events, she married Menelaus, who became King of Sparta after the death of Tyndareus and the deification of the Dioscuri. Yet their marriage was doomed to failure: years before, while sacrificing to the gods, Tyndareus had stupidly overlooked Aphrodite, who took her revenge by swearing to make all three of his daughters – Clytaemnestra, Timandra, and Helen – notorious for their adulteries.3
d. Menelaus had one daughter by Helen, whom she named Hermione; their sons were Aethiolas, Maraphius – from whom the Persian family of the Maraphions claim descent – and Pleisthenes. An Aetolian slave-girl named Pieris later bore Menelaus twin bastards: Nicostratus and Megapenthes.4
e. Why, it is asked, had Zeus and Themis planned the Trojan War? Was it to make Helen famous for having embroiled Europe and Asia? Or to exalt the race of the demi-gods, and at the same time to thin out the populous tribes that were oppressing the surface of Mother Earth? Their reason must remain obscure, but the decision had already been taken when Eris threw down a golden apple inscribed ‘For the Fairest’ at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Almighty Zeus refused to decide the ensuing dispute between Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite, and let Hermes lead the goddesses to Mount Ida, where Priam’s lost son Paris would act as arbiter.5
f. Now, just before the birth of Paris, Hecabe had dreamed that she brought forth a faggot from which wriggled countless fiery serpents. She awoke screaming that the city of Troy and the forests of Mount Ida were ablaze. Priam at once consulted his son Aesacus, the seer, who announced: ‘The child about to be born will be the ruin of our country! I beg you to do away with him.’6
g. A few days later, Aesacus made a further announcement: ‘The royal Trojan who brings forth a child today must be
destroyed, and so must her offspring!’ Priam thereupon killed his sister Cilia, and her infant son Munippus, born that morning from a secret union with Thymoetes, and buried them in the sacred precinct of Tros. But Hecabe was delivered of a son before nightfall, and Priam spared both their lives, although Herophile, priestess of Apollo, and other seers, urged Hecabe at least to kill the child. She could not bring herself to do so; and in the end Priam was prevailed upon to send for his chief herdsman, one Agelaus, and entrust him with the task. Agelaus, being too soft-hearted to use a rope or a sword, exposed the infant on Mount Ida, where he was suckled by a she-bear. Returning after five days, Agelaus was amazed at the portent, and brought the waif home in a wallet – hence the name ‘Paris’ – to rear with his own new-born son;7 and took a dog’s tongue to Priam as evidence that his command had been obeyed. But some say that Hecabe bribed Agelaus to spare Paris and keep the secret from Priam.8
h. Paris’s noble birth was soon disclosed by his outstanding beauty, intelligence, and strength: when little more than a child, he routed a band of cattle-thieves and recovered the cows they had stolen, thus winning the surname Alexander.9 Though ranking no higher than a slave at this time, Paris became the chosen lover of Oenone, daughter of the river Oeneus, a fountain-nymph. She had been taught the art of prophecy by Rhea, and that of medicine by Apollo while he was acting as Laomedon’s herdsman. Paris and Oenone used to herd their flocks and hunt together; he carved her name in the bark of beech-trees and poplars.10 His chief amusement was setting Agelaus’s bulls to fight one another; he would crown the victor with flowers, and the loser with straw. When one bull began to win consistently, Paris pitted it against the champions of his neighbours’ herds, all of which were defeated. At last he offered to set a golden crown upon the horns of any bull that could overcome his own; so, for a jest, Ares turned himself into a bull, and won the prize. Paris’s unhesitating award of this crown to Ares surprised and pleased the gods as they watched from Olympus; which is why Zeus chose him to arbitrate between the three goddesses.11