The Homecomings: The "Nostoi": The background to The Arrow of Apollo

The Trojan War itself lasted for 10 years. The story of how the siege was eventually won is famous: the horse that was built and left on the shore as a gift; that was dragged into the rejoicing city; and that in fact was a devious trap, full of Greek soldiers, who slipped out at night and caused carnage.

There are many other stories in the Trojan Cycle: such as when Achilles fought Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons, and fell in love with her as he killed her; or when Memnon, Prince of the Dawn, arrived from Ethiopia with his army. Achilles himself was killed by an arrow in his ankle, so they say, shot by Paris.

After the siege finished, there were many horrors: Hector's son Astynanax killed; Priam's daughter, Polyxena, was called for as a sacrifice by the hungry ghost of Achilles; Ajax the Greater went mad and slaughtered sheep; the Trojan Women are enslaved. But some Trojans did escape: notably, prince Aeneas, who went on, after many travels, to found a city in Italy.

And then the Greeks went home. Some say that Menelaus, stopping at Egypt, was shocked to discover that Helen had been there all the time, and that the Helen in Troy was simply a phantasm. Others say that was a fiction, made only to save Helen's reputation. But one by one they reached home, and went back to the business of their farms and towns. 

Two homecomings were more famous: Odysseus, whose travels made the matter for another epic poem; and Agamemnon. 

When King Agamemnon returned home, it was not to be greeted joyfully by Clytemnestra. She had been nursing revenge in her heart all this time; and so, she, with the help of Aegisthus, slew her husband and his concubine Cassandra. Agamemnon's son Orestes returned later; and with his sister Electra, they too took revenge on their mother and Aegisthus. 

This is where The Arrow of the Apollo picks up the thread: years later, when Orestes is getting old; he has settled his debt with the Furies, and he has a son, Tisamenos. And Aeneas, too, had a son, Silvius: myth and legend do not record much about them, and so there is a satisfyingly blank space where a writer can fill in a story. 

The stage is then set for The Arrow of Apollo: taking place at the end of an era of gods and heroes, and looking forward to a new age. 

THE ARROW OF APOLLO: HELP FUND THE BOOK ON UNBOUND

The Fall of Troy: Part 5

Paris and Helen escaping the Court of Menelaus (Kauffmann)

THE FALL OF TROY

by Philip Womack

PART 5: THE SUITORS OF HELEN

Part 5: The Trojan War

Menelaus woke from the feasting of the night before with a dry throat and a creeping sense of unease. He rolled over, reaching for the pitcher that lay by his bed. Once he had quenched his thirst, he sat up, scratched his belly, and listened. 

There was shouting in the corridors. Something had gone wrong. His first thought was that those Trojans had attacked his men in the night. He groped for a sword.

Somewhat blearily, he made his way along the corridors to the women’s quarters, maids and serving boys ducking out of his way as he went. None would give him a straight answer.

In Helen’s room he found some of her women; one or two were holding their hands up in despair; some were tearing at their hair; others were fruitlessly combing through chests and looking behind couches. Helen's combs were there; her fine dresses were there; the bronze bowl in which she kept her scented water was there, newly filled for her morning refreshment.

But of Helen herself there was no sign.

The rooms that the Trojans had been using were now empty. They had left nothing behind them, except a couple of maids with swelling bellies.

Menelaus snapped a spear in half, and flung the sharp part into the ground, where it stuck.

Another of the threads in this great and complex tale was woven before Helen got married to Menelaus. All the kings and princes of Greece had wanted her hand. Her father, Tyndareus, was presented with a rather tricky problem. How could he stop those who didn’t win her from tearing off each other’s heads? Ajax the Greater, in particular, was not somebody whom you would want to come up against if he bore a grudge against you. The way that he cracked open his nuts was particularly menacing.

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It was Odysseus, of course, who came up with a solution. Helen would choose her husband: and all the other suitors would swear an oath. They would protect the winner from all harm.

Into the fog of Menelaus’s mind came the memory of Odysseus, dark haired, with his pointed chin and his clever eyes. Menelaus had never  liked him, but he had to admit that he was sharp. The oath had been a good idea.  And now that the worst had happened, it was time to call in the favour. Helen, his wife, had been stolen away by a miminy-piminy Trojan, a prancing, preening ex-shepherd: he could not stand for it. The heroes would have to come to his aid. And he would mount an expedition to retrieve her. He ordered the smiths to get to work.

The best horses were chosen, and messengers galloped out across all Greece. Menelaus and the rest of his court began to make their way to the palace of his brother, Agamemnon, the High King of all the Greeks.

They found Agamemnon playing dice with a smooth young chap called Aegisthus, whilst his wife, Clytemnestra, sat by the side, pouring them cool drinks. A little girl called Iphigenia clung to her mother’s skirts, watching the warriors with their flashing armour stamp into the courtyard. They paused in their drinks, and looked up, and gathered by the look on Menelaus's face that he was not here to pay a social call.

The links in the chain were forged. Agamemnon set up camp at the Port of Aulis, and went out hunting with his men, and found many fine deer, including a beautiful hind which they chased all day and caught as the sun set. Menelaus was surprised to find that those suitors who had sworn the oath were not all that keen to fulfill it. Odysseus himself pretended to be mad, until they placed his baby son in front of a plough he was pulling.  Achilles was hidden on an island filled with girls; they found him when they threw a ball at him, and he caught it by bringing his knees together. The others came, reluctantly or not, leaving their farmlands and their own wives and children, all at the behest of their High King, and an oath they'd sworn years before.

Eventually they all gathered, at the port of Aulis. There were other reasons why they wanted to attack Troy: she was rich, and had many acres of fertile plains; she had access to trades and to cattle, and there were many townspeople who could be enslaved, and whose gold could enrich the halls of the Greeks. Ajax the Greater was tickled by the idea of adding to his flocks, and went about boasting about the time he'd bested someone who'd fought someone who'd once had a drink with Hercules.

By the time the last king arrived, and they were encamped with their armies around the ships at Aulis, the men as well as the chiefs were beginning to think that this was actually a noble war, with a noble aim. 

They were all ready. The ships were drawn up, their black hulls bare on the sand. The provisions were being loaded. The men were being told tales of honour and glory, of the heroic generations before them, and the deeds that they would achieve when they got to Troy. The blare of the trumpet filled the skies. 

 There was only one problem. There was no wind. And so the great fleet of the Greeks sat in the still harbour at Aulis, and the men grew bored and began fighting among themselves, and the kings and chiefs began to think of their halls and their hunts. 

Menelaus came to Agamemnon. "What can we do? We can't march over land." 

Agamemnon was more decisive than his brother, though he was not always right. He called his chief seers together, and ordered them to inquire into the causes of the calm. If only, Agamemnon thought privately, to stop the men's petty fights, which were beginning to become troublesome. 

Soon enough, after much peering into entrails, the chief of the seers, Calchas, came to Agamemnon. "My king..."

"Get on with it," said Agamemnon.

"You killed a hind." 

"I have killed many."

"This hind, my king, was sacred to the goddess Artemis."

Agamemnon sat up straighter. He could feel a pressure on his temples.

"For the fleet to sail to Troy, you will need to propitiate her. And Artemis is not a kindly goddess. In place of the deer, she demands..." The old priest's voice faltered. "Your daughter. Iphigenia."

The wine from Agamemnon's goblet spilled over his robe, and nobody could ever get out the stain.

NEXT WEEK: Iphigenia at Aulis. 

Read Part 4 here.
Read Part 3 Here.

Read Part 2 here.

Read Part 1 here.

A Homeric simile

At some point in my life I want to do (amongst many other things) an in depth study of Homer's similes. I've been dipping (re-dipping?) into the epic recently; the other day I was mightily struck (as if by a spear) by this example:

“But the son of Atreus kept plying his attack along the rest of the Trojan line, with spear and sword and huge stones, as long as the blood still gushed warm from his wound. But when the wound started to dry and the flow ceased, then sharp pains began to overcome his strength of spirit. As when a woman in labour is taken with the sharp stab of piercing pain sent by the Eileithyiai, daughters of Hera, who bring the bitter pangs of childbirth, so sharp pains began to overcome the son of Atreus’ strength.”

This is Agamemnon, King of the Achaeans, having been stabbed by Koön in the middle of battle; it’s a superimposition of the domestic onto the warlike, a reminder that the mightiest fighter is woman-born and also that women endure perhaps greater pain than that on the field; Agamemnon is the father of his people, so it seems apt that he is compared to a mother in the bloody throes of birth, as death is all around him and blood feeds the ground for a different reason. Homer is so good at showing us inversions of what's going on; always reminding us of other worlds, other lives, and of the endless cycle of generation and death.

(The translation is Martin Hammond’s fine 1987 version, published in a nifty Penguin paperback which I own that is sadly lacking a few pages from Book VI.) 

The Apprentice as Greek Tragedy

The Apprentice as Tragedy

A fearsome presence descends from the heavens, attended by two hovering Furies clashing their teeth, ready to dispense justice upon the mortals quivering below. An unearthly light permeates the air: the scene is metaphorically dripping with blood. It is, as Cassandra says when she arrives at the house of Atreus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, ‘a human slaughterhouse’; a body has just been displayed to the baying audience, whilst the other characters have been through a test of psychological and physical endurance. Yet one person will be saved; one who has performed correctly; one person to make some sort of order out of the chaos left behind by a glut of misunderstandings and errors. You might be forgiven for thinking that I’m describing the end of a Greek tragedy. I am – up to a point. In fact, it’s The Apprentice, with Lord Sugar as the deus ex machina, and Karen and Nick as the crime-pursuing Furies.



Yes, it’s the closest thing we have today that both follows the same arc and has the same effect as a traditional Attic tragedy. An audience of Athenians, settling in at the City Dionysia (a festival of plays and other events), would have known exactly what to expect from what was put in front of them. When it came to tragedies, they were in for a bout of kin-killing, incest, or another sort of god-defying behaviour; the point being, according to Aristotle, that having watched the antics of a Pentheus (torn apart by his own mother) or an Agamemnon (slain by his wife), afterwards they would be ‘purged’ of pity and fear, and thus be able to live happily.



So it is with The Apprentice. Like the City Dionysia, it brings the country together in voyeuristic pleasure – what Mrs Radcliffe called ‘the strange delights of artificial grief’. We settle down in front of the television, and as ‘Montagues and Capulets’ kicks in, our brains spark with the knowledge of what we are about to receive. We are gripped by the consistency of the narrative, with all its dramatic ironies and reversals of fortune, just as the Attic audiences were. The formal nature of the program feeds our synapses in exactly the same way. Aristotle posited that a tragedy has unities of time and space. The tasks in The Apprentice take place over 24 hours. The house and the boardroom function as fixed loci, with the beautiful London townhouse standing in for the ancient palaces of the nobility (the skene, from which characters emerged to meet their fates); and the contestants’ tasks do tend to be confined to a certain place, such as a shopping centre.



Greek tragedy concerned the misbehaviour of people in an elevated position – kings, queens and heroes. In our meritocratic society, what more elevated position could there be than someone in Lord Sugar’s ambit? Fighting for position in an ‘agon’ (contest), just as the actors in the Dionysia contested to win a prize, these are Brtain’s ‘brightest business hopes’. And, in the same way as Pentheus refuses to believe in Bacchus, or Agamemnon walks upon the purple cloth, thus showing his pride, the contestants yap and bark about their brilliance at various different skills (well, mostly selling.). They’re riding for a fall. They have committed hubris – an assault on the gods.

Of course the real tragedy in all this is that the prize of the one who’s saved is a job with Lord Sugar. This, to my mind, makes The Apprentice a far more effective tragedy than even the Agamemnon. That cycle came to an end with the Furies tamed; we know, however, that The Apprentice could go on for ever. And that is what makes it so brilliantly tragic: with no limit, it reflects the endless vicissitudes of human existence. So let us pour libations to Lord Sugar (anax glukus?) and joyously acclaim the next series.

(Incidentally, Chris Bates should have won. Anax Glukus seems always to be swayed by where people come from. Is that prejudice? I think so.)

Me Tarzan! You...

I recently read Tarzan of the Apes for the first time in my life. Here is a link to my review: CLICK HERE

It is, really, a reimagining of the story of Romulus. References to the story abound. There are plenty of moments of comedy, and of great excitement and action. Tarzan rules over a lost, primeval world of Iliadic values - the scene where he dispenses justice amongst the apes reminded me of nothing less than Agamemnon and Achilles. He is a hero - a demigod - a version of Achilles, of Hercules, even of Aeneas (he has a natural piety). The film poster for Greystoke even depicts him as a Christ like figure, which is pushing it....