Arcadian Nights Read online

  London, August 2015

  AGAMEMNON

  1. THE MURDER

  Sitting on our terrace in Arcadia overlooking the Gulf of Argos, I thought that if we’d been there earlier – three millennia and a century or two earlier – we would have seen Agamemnon’s fleet passing on its way to Troy. According to Homer, who was born some three centuries later, there were 100 ships with 15,000 Argive soldiers on board and 60 ships with 9,000 Arcadians. Arcadia at that time was landlocked and its modern mountainous coastline, a district called Kynouria, was part of Argolis. But the Arcadians had a reputation as fierce warriors, so Agamemnon gladly lent them ships to take them to Troy.

  When they came back, ten years afterwards, there were fewer ships. Thousands of men perished of wounds or disease on the shelterless plain of Troy. Many ships rotted on the beach and their timbers were burned to keep the men warm and cook their meals or to make funeral pyres for the dead. Many others were wrecked on the voyage home.

  So when the remnant docked in Nauplia at the head of the Gulf and the Arcadians made their own way home past the Lernaian Marsh, it was a pitifully small army that marched up the road behind Agamemnon’s chariot to his palace at Mycenae. And this perhaps explains why the coup d’état which immediately followed his arrival met with no resistance and why the most powerful king in all Greece, who had come home victorious with a cargo of rich spoils, could be murdered without anyone lifting a hand to save or avenge him.

  Still, however few soldiers remained, they were hardened fighters. Surely they were a match for any force the conspirators could muster? No doubt. But the conspirators had the advantage of surprise and good warning of the army’s return. Even before he left Greece Agamemnon organised a chain of beacon-fires to announce victory. Each had its watchmen, charged with renewing the faggots and brushwood if necessary year by year and watching for its predecessor in the chain night and day. They could hardly have imagined that the job would last a decade and they must often have thought they would die of boredom, if not old age, at their posts, but none of them failed when the time came. As soon as Troy fell, Agamemnon’s messenger ran to the top of Mount Ida, overlooking the Trojan plain, and the first beacon was set alight just as the flames shot up from burning Troy. The second was on the island of Lemnos, the third on Mount Athos, and so on southwards, via the island of Euboia, Mounts Kithairon and Aigiplanktos, across the Saronic Gulf to the final beacon on the Peloponnese, visible from the palace tower of Mycenae.

  We too, from our terrace in Arcadia, looking north-eastwards, might have seen that last beacon high on Mount Arachnaion, behind the lower range where there is now a stately line of wind-turbines.

  So the conspirators had plenty of time to make their final arrangements. The fleet would take many days, even if the wind and weather were favourable – and as it turned out, they were not – to make that crossing of the Aegean which had been leapt so easily by the message of fire. Nor could the victorious general and his troops have guessed that their triumphant beacons would help to betray them or that they would be received with anything but joy and celebration. And consider the topography of Mycenae.

  The play by Aeschylus, written six to seven centuries after the event, when Mycenae was a forgotten ruin and the whole Mycenaean civilisation had been erased by successive invasions of Greek-speaking northerners, is set in the city of Argos. Agamemnon was indeed King of Argos, but that (or sometimes ‘Argolis’) was the name of the whole kingdom as well as its principal city, and although he had a palace there and another just outside Nauplia in the fortress of Tiryns, the heart of his extensive domains was Mycenae.

  Mycenae is a natural acropolis, a conical hill set in the south-western flank of a range of higher hills, approached from the Argive plain by a steadily rising and winding road which ends at the famous Lion Gate. From there, within the massive walls of the fortress, a steep, narrow, twisting street between the buildings accommodating stores, shops, slaves, servants, administrators, guards and courtiers led up to the royal palace on the summit where, under the colonnaded porch of the palace, Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra awaited him. Her lover Aigisthos, who was Agamemnon’s first cousin, was out of sight inside the entrance-hall with some thirty well-armed men, none of them Argives, but mercenaries, malcontents and outlaws from other states whose only allegiance was to Aigisthos personally. In the open space in front of the palace was a small crowd of white-haired Argives, noblemen, merchants, municipal officials, well-to-do farmers who had been too old, even ten years earlier, to take part in the expedition to Troy.

  Agamemnon’s chariot, followed by the chariot carrying his principal prize from the war, a daughter of King Priam of Troy, the princess Cassandra, followed by the wagons carrying the lion’s share of looted Trojan gold and silver, votive statues, precious cups and bowls, armour and weapons, fine robes, carpets and hangings, climbed the steep street with difficulty. The horses were tired after the twelve-mile journey from the ships. So were the soldiers marching behind the wagons. By the time Agamemnon’s and Cassandra’s chariots reached the plateau at the top, his soldiers were only halfway up the narrow street, cut off from their general and his Trojan mistress by the labouring wagons of treasure.

  Now, as if Agamemnon had not already sufficiently offended the gods by violating a princess who was also a virgin priestess dedicated to the service of the god Apollo, Clytemnestra had prepared another offence for him to commit. This was before she’d seen and understood the offence to both the gods and herself represented by the woman in the second chariot. Clytemnestra ordered her slaves to unroll a crimson carpet, a huge length of blood-red silk stretching from the chariot up over the shallow steps of the portico, and invited Agamemnon to walk along it into his palace. He refused, saying it was wrong to tread on such costly stuff, wrong for a mortal to behave as if he were a god. She insisted. He refused again and again. Their increasingly vehement argument in front of the goggling audience of old men threatened to continue until his soldiers reached the top of the hill. Inside the entrance-hall Aigisthos began to lose his nerve.

  ‘Gods above, woman,’ he muttered in the hearing of his mercenaries, ‘pull him out of the bloody chariot if he won’t get down by himself!’

  Finally Clytemnestra found the clinching argument:

  ‘You are the mighty conqueror of Troy,’ she said, ‘the champion of Greece, the winner of battles and treasure beyond anything achieved by your ancestors. Allow me, a poor weak woman, to win this trivial argument!’

  Fifty years ago in the huge stone theatre at Epidauros I first saw the red carpet rolled out and Agamemnon persuaded against his better judgment to walk it. Considering what it led to, you’d think people would have avoided walking on red carpets ever since, but no, you often see them, innocently laid out for visits by heads of state or when film-stars are drifting in for first-nights and prize-givings.

  By the time his treasure and his exhausted soldiers reached the top of the hill, Agamemnon had disappeared into the inner rooms of the palace, been conducted to a ritual bath and, stepping out of the bath, been swathed in a thick towel by his wife. Then, as she held his arms to his sides in a tight embrace, his cousin Aigisthos came forward with a long knife – the kind used for sacrificing bulls or goats – and stabbed him to death. But fallen there, half-in and half-out of the bath, he was still breathing, still seeing with dimming sight, his blood streaming over the polished marble floor, when Clytemnestra stood over him with a double-headed axe – she had laid it ready out of sight behind the door.

  ‘My sacrifice now,’ she said, ‘my sacrifice for yours, yours for mine!’

  And she cut off his head.

  This part we didn’t see in the theatre at Epidauros – Greek drama, unlike Roman or British, keeps actual brutality off-stage – but we saw Clytemnestra reappear brandishing the bloodstained axe and we saw the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra brought out, for she too, after predicting Agamemnon’s and her own fate to the shocked but disbelieving crowd of ol
d men outside, had been taken inside the palace and slaughtered.

  None of this happened, of course, quite the way it does in Aeschylus’ play. Plays, especially Greek tragedies, condense and elide. Agamemnon’s soldiers, when they finally reached the palace, were welcomed by Aigisthos and invited, with the assembled Argive elders, to a victory feast. Slaves brought out tables, sacrifices and libations were made to the gods, sheep and oxen slaughtered and roasted, brimming bowls of wine passed round, arms and armour laid aside. A few of them wondered what was keeping Agamemnon, why he wasn’t presiding over the feast, but others guessed that he was making up for lost time with his wife, or with his Trojan mistress, or both, and soon enough they were all far too full of meat and wine, too relaxed to care. By the time they came to their senses next day their arms and armour, together with the Trojan treasure, had been locked away in the palace storehouses and with small gifts of gold and wine they were discharged and told they could now return to their towns or villages, greet their families and resume their normal life. As for their king and commander-in-chief, no, he was not available. If any of them wanted to know more, they were told he was indisposed.

  One group, however, was not satisfied with this answer and demanded to see their general. Another group, looking for their armour and weapons, became angry when told they had been taken into safe-keeping and would be restored to them in a week or two. Both groups became more and more suspicious and others, overhearing their protests, joined them when they knocked aside the guards in the portico and crowded into the entrance hall. There they were met by Aigisthos and his mercenaries. Thoroughly frightened now, Aigisthos told his men to use their shields and push the soldiers out. That was ineffective, there were too few against too many, and suddenly two or three of the mercenaries began to use their swords. Soldiers fell bleeding and in a moment the hall became a savage slaughterhouse where Agamemnon’s veterans fought with knives and bare hands against armoured men with swords. So it was that scores of the soldiers who had sacked Troy and butchered its inhabitants were themselves butchered in their own king’s palace.

  Rumours multiplied as the weeks passed and there was still no sign of Agamemnon or any definite news of him. Those of his soldiers who had not entered the palace got safely home to their families, but they dared not reveal to other families who were not so lucky that men they had last seen feasting beside them in Mycenae had since disappeared. They took refuge in vague commiseration: many comrades had died in the war, they said, and many more on the way home.

  Clytemnestra and Aigisthos had been running the kingdom for the past ten years in Agamemnon’s absence, so there was no immediate change to people’s lives, only a groundswell of uneasiness as the assumption grew that a king who was never seen and for whom no public funeral was held, while his wife and her lover continued to exercise power, must have been murdered. But few within the borders of Argos would say so openly, and the other Greek leaders who had fought at Troy with Agamemnon had their own problems and were in no position to intervene. Some, like his brother Menelaos, king of Sparta, and Odysseus, king of Ithaka, were still trying to reach home, others, like Ajax, son of Oileus, had been drowned without ever reaching home. The second and more famous Ajax, the mighty warrior from Salamis, had gone mad and killed himself. Nestor had returned safely to his small kingdom of Pylos, but that was on the other side of the Peloponnese and he was very old. Achilles had died in battle, Diomedes had been wrecked on the coast of Lycia and captured by its king, a former ally of Troy, who was proposing to sacrifice him to Ares, the god of war. The gods were divided over the Trojan War, which was no doubt why it lasted so long. Ares, together with Aphrodite and Apollo, had supported the Trojans.

  As for Agamemnon’s three surviving children, one son and two daughters, they were still young. The daughters, Elektra and Chrysothemis, were in their teens, the son, Orestes, was only a child. During the planning stage of their coup, Aigisthos wanted to eliminate Orestes, since as soon as he was old enough he would be bound by customary law to take revenge for his father. The girls were not such a threat. Clytemnestra, however, would not agree in advance to kill her only son and since Aigisthos always gave way to her, the final decision was left till later. After the murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra and the slaughter of Agamemnon’s soldiers, Clytemnestra reluctantly admitted that the boy would have to be destroyed, but she asked Aigisthos to do it without ever telling her how or when or where.

  Her daughters, of course, could not help guessing that their father had been murdered and suspecting what would happen to their little brother. The younger daughter, Chrysothemis, was a sleepy, passive girl, always submissive to her domineering mother, but Elektra was more like her mother, with a powerful will and an independent mind, and she told their elderly nurse, who adored both her and Orestes, what she feared. One day when Clytemnestra and Aigisthos were attending a religious ceremony in Argos, Elektra and the nurse took Orestes out of the palace to visit one of the royal farms, worked by the nurse’s son. Elektra returned to Mycenae, but the nurse and the boy, on donkeys provided by the farmer, crossed the border into Corinthia and later, afraid that the Corinthians might be intimidated by the superior power of Argos into handing them back, went on to Phokis on the far side of the Gulf of Corinth. Strophios, the king of Phokis, had married Orestes’ aunt Anaxibia, Agamemnon’s sister. Their son Pylades soon became his cousin’s greatest friend and Orestes grew up in happiness and safety. But he had an unenviable task ahead of him.

  2. THE CURSE

  Even before the gruesome murder of Agamemnon, this family, the House of Atreus, had a curse on it – in fact, two curses. The first was acquired by Agamemnon’s grandfather, Pelops, who gave his name to the whole peninsula, Peloponnesos, the island of Pelops. Pelops was the son of Tantalos, said to be a child of Father Zeus and a favourite of the gods; such a favourite that they even invited him to their divine banquets of ambrosia and nectar and when he invited them back, accepted. This was altogether too much for his sanity. He was beside himself with self-importance, promising his human friends that next time he was invited to Mount Olympos he would put aside a little of the gods’ food and drink and bring it back for them to taste, and asking them meanwhile to find him the choicest foods and wines in Greece to set before the gods. He knew, of course, that the gods never touch human food or wine. They like us to offer them a prime ram or bull and to pour on the ground a libation of the costliest wine, but not for them to consume, only to demonstrate our love and esteem, our sense of gratitude for what earth gives us, our willingness to sacrifice the best things we have in their honour.

  So when the twelve Olympian gods came to dinner at Tantalos’ place in Arcadia – that made thirteen at the table, including the host – Tantalos did not expect them to eat any of the twenty or thirty courses he provided, nor to drink any of the choice wines from Thasos and Chios, Rhodes and Cos, and nearby Nemea. What he did expect them to do, as each delectable dish was brought in and placed on the table with its aroma wafting around the hall, as each superlative wine was opened and poured into the mixing-bowl and then both dishes and wine removed untouched, was to appreciate his very special, very expensive sacrifice. And they did. They smiled and laughed and sniffed the wonderful scents of the wines and the powerful aromas drifting round the hall from every sort of meat and game and fish and vegetable and herb. But Tantalos’ disastrous mistake was the pièce de résistance. It was a huge casserole and Tantalos in his blind pride dared to set the gods a test. Could any of them, he asked, lifting the lid himself with a flourish so that the savour rose up in a rush with the steam, tell him what was in the casserole? A dreadful silence followed, but Tantalos thought it was only because they were flummoxed. He took a juicy piece of meat out of the pot and held it up for them to see. He even bit into it and chewed it with relish.

  ‘Delicious!’ he said, smiling slyly, ‘But what can it be? It doesn’t taste quite like anything else the good earth provides.’

  Of course all t
he gods knew exactly what it was, but it was Demeter who spoke. She, the goddess of crops and fruits and the earth’s plenty, had never smiled or laughed throughout the banquet, but sat there glum and silent. Her thoughts were on her daughter, Persephone, who had been kidnapped and then married by Hades, the god of the underworld, and had to spend half the year in that miserable place among the shades of the dead. Now suddenly Tantalos’ boastfulness and self-satisfaction irritated her beyond bearing.

  ‘You stupid, insufferable creature!’ she said. ‘Did you really imagine that we would want a sacrifice of that sort? Have we entertained you on Olympos and favoured you beyond all other men only for you to misunderstand completely what sort of gods we are? It’s your son, little Pelops.’

  Tantalos tried to explain that he had not meant to offend them, but on the contrary to show them that nothing he possessed, not even his son, was too precious to sacrifice to the masters of the universe, but his guests had already risen from their seats and vanished, leaving Tantalos in tears of shame and despair beside his casseroled son. Outside in the courtyard the rest of his magnificent dinner was eaten and drunk or carried away by the servants and the friends and neighbours who had gathered round his house. None of them, not even the servants who brought in the food and drink, had been able to see the gods, though they felt the earth shake and a great gust of wind go by as they left.