Arcadian Nights Read online

  Sure enough, as they turned a corner at the end of a straight stretch of the road, he thought he had seen a small cloud of dust in the distance.

  ‘How far to go?’

  ‘Not very far, I think. But as I said I’ve never been this far before.’

  ‘Your father told me that you’d show me the temple of Zeus.’

  ‘He always makes the same joke.’

  The next time Pelops looked back, the cloud of dust was closer. His own horses were evidently exhausted and as they descended a slope towards a blind corner, they slowed and faltered. Taking the corner they slowed again to a trot, and they had not travelled far when, rounding the corner still at the gallop, came the chariot driven by Myrtilos, with the king beside him, his face a grinning mask of sweat and dust, his right hand already reaching for his spear. Pelops clutched Hippodameia’s hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it was not to be.’

  But at that moment the pursuing chariot swayed and wobbled. Oinomaos nearly lost his footing and was clinging to the side with one hand, still grasping his spear in the other. The wobbling chariot now began to swerve, and they saw Myrtilos suddenly jump clear and land in the undergrowth at the side of the road. As he did so, a wheel flew off the chariot towards the river, the chariot lurched and turned over, while the horses, still trying to gallop, dragged it on for two or three hundred yards before stopping.

  Pelops and Hippodameia looked at each other with dazed expressions as Pelops brought his own chariot to a halt.

  ‘What now?’ he said. ‘Will he still come after me on foot? Should we press on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid he will be hurt.’

  Pelops looked as if he thought this would be the least they could hope.

  ‘He is my father, you know,’ she said, ‘and I love him, though I can well understand that you don’t.’

  But when they reached the overturned chariot they found Oinomaos dead, pierced by his own spear. Myrtilos, limping, joined them.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Pelops.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It was deliberate?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  He would say no more in front of Hippodameia, who was weeping over her father’s body, but he told Pelops aside that he had removed the axle pins and substituted wax. It had taken longer to melt than he expected and he was afraid it wasn’t going to melt at all before they caught up with Pelops and Hippodameia. That was why he’d taken the last dangerous corner at such reckless speed. And he looked meaningfully at Pelops, as if to say, ‘I’ve kept my side of the bargain, now you do the same for yours.’

  It was only fitting, when Pelops had married Hippodameia and become king of Elis, that he restored the partly ruined temple of Zeus at Olympia, as well as the stadium, and re-started the Games. After his death, his grateful people – the Games brought them wealth as well as kudos – buried him near the temple and built a sanctuary, the Pelopion, over his bones. Perhaps a millennium later, his famous chariot race was commemorated on the eastern pediment of a huge new temple of Zeus. Twenty-one figures, sculpted in Parian marble by an unknown fifth-century master, are lined up ready for the contest, with Zeus at the centre, King Oenomaos, Myrtilos and their horses on one side and Pelops, Hippodameia and their horses on the other. Reclining in the corners of the triangular space are the river gods Alpheios and Kladeos. The battered remains of this masterpiece, magnificently displayed, can still be seen today in the new Archaeological Museum at Olympia.

  Across the Gulf of Argos from our village in modern Arcadia we can see the low-lying island of Spetses. Beyond that to the south and beneath the sheer cliffs on our side, the Gulf opens out into the Myrtoan Sea, a subdivision of the Aegean, as the Aegean is of the Mediterranean. The Myrtoan Sea, the books tell us, is named after Myrtilos. But how was it, after their successful chariot-race, that the happy bride and groom from Elis on the far side of the Peloponnese, came to be travelling on this side of it, in a chariot driven by Myrtilos? The explanation given by some storytellers is not very credible. Before the race, they say, Poseidon gave Pelops a golden chariot with wings and a pair of flying horses and with this equipment Pelops and Hippodameia were easily able to outdistance her father and Myrtilos, especially since the course was impossibly long for ordinary horses. It went from Olympia to the Isthmus of Corinth over mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, to make doubly sure, Myrtilos was still required to insert wax axle-pins and the king’s chariot duly crashed just before it reached the Isthmus. After that, all three survivors took off for the island of Euboia and then down the east side of the Peloponnese in the flying chariot. The main objections to this explanation are obvious: first, there was no need for Pelops, once he had Poseidon’s winged chariot, to make a bargain with Myrtilos; secondly, the king’s earth-bound chariot, with or without wax axle pins, would never have made it as far as the Isthmus.

  What happened was this: in the immediate aftermath of the chariot race there could be no wedding until a funeral had been held for the dead king and the period of mourning prescribed by the Council of Elders had been observed. Hippodameia was now ruler of Elis and until Pelops married her he had no kingdom to share with Myrtilos. His bargain, especially the second part of it, naturally preyed on his mind, since Hippodameia herself knew nothing about it. Myrtilos, however, since he was only a charioteer and there had been no witnesses to the bargain, was not in a strong position. Pelops, therefore, made him a new promise. He would marry Hippodameia, but he would not consummate the marriage until Myrtilos had received his reward, both of the bride and half the kingdom. Myrtilos had little choice but to agree.

  As soon as they were married, Pelops carried his bride away for a honeymoon, a trip to see other parts of the peninsula, with Myrtilos driving their chariot. They stayed the night mostly with other kings and were royally received. But Myrtilos, accommodated with the servants and having no means of knowing whether Pelops was keeping his promise or not, became increasingly suspicious and sulky. One day, when the going over the bare Arcadian mountains had been particularly hard, they stopped to let the tired horses rest – it was midsummer and very hot. They found a patch of shade under a rock, but Hippodameia was thirsty and they had drunk all the water in their sheepskin flask. Pelops went in search of a spring, which he eventually found some way off. As he was filling his helmet, he heard Hippodameia shouting for help. Hurrying back he met her running towards him.

  ‘Myrtilos!’ she said. ‘Myrtilos tried to rape me.’

  Indeed Myrtilos, still pursuing her, was not far behind. Pelops ran straight at him and knocked him down with a single blow to the face.

  ‘Is this how you keep your promise?’ said Myrtilos, through broken teeth, squirming with pain on the rocky ground and trying to shield his face with his hands as Pelops leant over him and seemed about to hit him again.

  ‘There was no promise of rape,’ said Pelops, ‘and you’ve certainly made it impossible now for me to keep my promise.’

  ‘And my half of your kingdom? Is that another promise impossible to keep?’

  ‘We’ll talk about that another time.’

  Hippodameia was all for leaving Myrtilos in the mountains as a prey for the lions, but Pelops argued that one could not count on lions – they had seen none so far – and told her he would find some surer way to lose him. So they rode on, and one can imagine the explosive feelings of hatred, guilt, fear and indignation that filled those three tight-lipped persons packed into one small chariot.

  As the sun began to sink behind them they came in sight of the sea and were soon following a narrow track on the edge of the cliffs, looking for a way down to one of the fishing villages far below in small bays along the shore. The exhausted horses began to stumble and the dispirited Myrtilos, nursing his painful mouth, was hardly able to control the chariot, which swayed alarmingly towards the precipitous edge of the track.

  ‘Watch out there!’ cried Hippodameia.
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br />   ‘Wake up, you lousy lecher!’ said Pelops.

  Myrtilos’ suppressed fury and sense of grievance welled up and he burst out:

  ‘You are a pair! Didn’t you both ask me to rig the race? Didn’t you, Pelops, make promises which you had no intention of keeping? Didn’t I kill the king for your convenience? I wish I’d let him kill you. You are a pair of cheats and liars.’

  That was all Pelops needed. He tore the reins from the charioteer’s hands and threw them to Hippodameia, seized Myrtilos round the waist, lifted him bodily and tossed him over the side of the chariot and the cliff. They heard him scream, as he hurtled down towards the sea:

  ‘My curse on you, Pelops. My curse on your seed!’

  Not everyone’s curses are effective, of course. But Myrtilos was the child of Hermes, the god of shepherds and travellers, who promised, as he escorted his dead son’s soul to the underworld, to see the curse fulfilled. Pelops himself, ever the favourite of the gods, seems to have got away with no more than a ritual cleansing from the crime of murder, and the Peloponnese was named after him because by the end of his life he ruled most of it.

  Part of the purpose of his honeymoon trip with Hippodameia was no doubt to put off his reckoning with Myrtilos – he surely never intended to kill him from the outset, or he would have done so sooner. His main purpose was to see the peninsula for himself, not quite as a simple tourist, rather as a king who meant to enlarge his dominions. He did not call on his fellow kings out of mere convenience or courtesy, but to observe their characters and even more their resources, both in specie and manpower. And since most of the Peloponnesian kings in those days were hardly more than the chief men and principal landowners in territories containing a market town and a few dozen scattered villages, he was encouraged by what he saw. So, having recruited and trained an army from Hippodameia’s people, augmented by special forces (rough tough shepherds and hunters from his own domains in Arcadia), he set about acquiring the rest of the peninsula by a combination of political manoeuvre (allying himself with one king, against whom he later allied himself with another), friendly or unfriendly persuasion, and as the last resort, armed force. He didn’t have to fight many battles. The kings he overthrew were most of them weak and lazy and their people fared much better under Pelops’ unified rule than before. When at last he died of old age he was widely mourned and the Peloponnese reverted to a patchwork of small kingdoms.

  3. THE BROTHERS

  The curse fell on his seed. Argos, the largest and richest kingdom of the Peloponnese, was disputed between two of his many sons, Atreus and Thyestes, who agreed to put themselves up for election by the Argives. Since they were both notable astronomers and the Argives were passionate star-gazers, their election turned on which of them could make the most impressive contribution to their science – perhaps the first and last time in history or even myth that the choice of a ruler depended on such a test. Thyestes, the younger brother, observed that the sun rose in different parts of the sky according to the time of year, but Atreus said that it was not the sun that rose and set, but the earth, travelling in the opposite direction from the sun; and for good measure he made mathematical calculations to predict an eclipse of the sun.

  Atreus was understandably elected king, took up residence at Mycenae and married a granddaughter of Minos, the late great king of Crete. It was surely this woman, Queen Aerope, who brought the sophisticated arts and fashions of her grandfather’s highly civilised court at Knossos to Mycenae, so that when Knossos was destroyed by an earthquake, Mycenae succeeded it as the centre of Greek civilisation. She also brought to Mycenae the symbol of Cretan sovereignty, the sacred and sacrificial double-headed axe, with which her elder son Agamemnon was in due course beheaded by his wife Clytemnestra. Was it Aerope too who installed Cretan sanitation and a bathroom at Mycenae? And was it mere coincidence or the repetitive pattern of heredity that caused her son Agamemnon to die in that bath, or just out of it? Aerope’s grandfather King Minos had also died in a bath, when boiling water was poured down on him from a pipe in the ceiling – the first recorded shower – constructed by his ingenious engineer, Daidalos, creator of the famous labyrinth at Knossos.

  Unfortunately the innovating and civilising Aerope was seduced by King Atreus’ envious brother Thyestes. Perhaps this was Thyestes’ revenge for his failure to win the throne or perhaps it was simply that Aerope, like her grandfather, found monogamy boring and did not imagine the frightful consequences. Either way, it hardly mattered. The essential element in this appalling story was that the brothers Atreus and Thyestes detested one another. Myrtilos’ curse had settled on them.

  Concealing his black fury over Aerope’s adultery, Atreus sent a message to his brother proposing to divide the kingdom with him and inviting him to dinner. The messenger was evidently a persuasive, ingratiating person and Thyestes came. Atreus welcomed him in person and led him into the great hall, where only two places were laid and no one else was present except guards and servants.

  ‘No need for ceremony between brothers,’ said Atreus pleasantly, ‘and besides we have a matter to discuss which concerns us two alone.’

  However, as they settled on their couches and the first courses were brought in, they did not discuss the kingdom but the stars.

  ‘There is a constellation I have decided to name “The Charioteer”,’ said Atreus, ‘after that poor fellow Myrtilos who fell over a cliff when he was driving Mother and Father on their honeymoon. What do you think?’

  ‘Does he deserve such an honour?’ said Thyestes. ‘Didn’t he try to rape Mother?’

  ‘But he didn’t succeed,’ said Atreus, ‘and certainly paid for his insolence.’

  ‘And put a curse on our family,’ said Thyestes.

  ‘Do you think we should take that seriously?’

  ‘We have had our differences,’ said Thyestes, with a smile, ‘but no more perhaps than most families.’

  ‘Just so. But it’s worrying to have a curse hanging over us and this might be a way of neutralising it. After dinner we’ll go outside and I’ll show you the constellation I mean.’

  The main course was a casserole. But this time, unlike their grandfather Tantalos’ casserole, it was not meant to please the guest and the host didn’t touch it. It contained the juiciest parts of Thyestes’ sons, including the latest, the child of his liaison with Queen Aerope, and while Thyestes was eating it, Atreus’ suppressed rage suddenly got the better of him and he stood up:

  ‘You have an appetite, don’t you, Thyestes? Yes, you are a greedy man. You want to swallow half my kingdom and you’ve already helped yourself to my wife. And now you’re eating up Aglaos, Callileon, Orchomenos and little Pleisthenes, my wife’s bastard.’

  At that, the servants brought in on silver platters the heads and hands and feet of the slaughtered children. Vomiting on the floor of the great hall, blinded by tears, lunging at his cruelly laughing brother, whose guards seized him and dragged him out into the night where his chariot waited for him under the starry sky, Thyestes shouted back at the ill-omened palace as he was carried away down the steep street:

  ‘My curse on you, Atreus! My curse on all your House!’

  After this Atreus’ anger was still not satiated and he took his wife to Nauplia.

  ‘On a bad day for me,’ said Atreus as they stood on the jetty, ‘you came over the sea from Crete and landed here at Nauplia, and now on a bad day for you, you can go back where you came from.’

  Then he had his men carry her into the sea and hold her under until she drowned.

  Thyestes, meanwhile, left his brother’s kingdom and went to Delphi to ask Apollo’s oracle what he should do to cure the horror of eating his own children and to punish his brother. Apparently the oracle replied that he must get a child with his daughter Pelopeia and this child would avenge him. This was indeed the truth, but can we believe that the god’s oracle unambiguously encouraged incest? More likely, in view of what happened, Thyestes himself gave this twist to an
oracle which merely told him that another son would, as sons were bound to by customary law, do the deed for him.

  Leaving Delphi and crossing the Corinthian Gulf, Thyestes came to the city of Sikyon, where his daughter Pelopeia was a priestess in the temple. He arrived by night and found the city enjoying a festival. Inside a large tent erected in the public gardens he could hear laughter, music and dancing. In his desperate state of vengeful misery, hating the very thought of people enjoying themselves, he was about to turn away, when he saw a woman leave the tent and make for a nearby fish pond. He followed her stealthily. Reaching the pond, she removed her tunic and began washing out a red stain. Thyestes glimpsed her exposed breasts and saw that she was young and perhaps even a virgin. His misery turned to lust. Pulling his cap over the upper part of his face so as not to be known, he rushed forward, seized hold of her and clapping his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming, hurried her into a grove of trees. There he forced her to the ground and raped her. She was indeed a virgin. As soon as he had enjoyed her, Thyestes withdrew and hurried away into the darkness, forgetting that he had laid his sword aside during the rape. When he discovered its absence he was afraid to go back for it in case the girl’s friends or relations would be looking for him. In fact, he was her nearest relation, for though he didn’t recognise her in the dark, nor she him, she was his daughter Pelopeia. During one of the sacred dances performed by the priestesses, she had slipped in the blood of the sacrificial victim and stained her tunic. Now her skirt was also stained, with her own blood.

  Thyestes left Sikyon that same night and fled eastwards past Corinth until he came to a small seaport. From there he travelled from island to island across the Aegean, until he reached Lydia on the coast of Asia Minor, where he had cousins and could hope to find a wife to bear him the son who would avenge him. But that son was already in the making. His daughter, though she didn’t know it, was pregnant. She had found her attacker’s sword and hidden it in the temple, but she couldn’t, now that she was no longer a virgin, remain a priestess. However, her high birth gave her access to the queen of Sikyon, to whom she explained what had been done to her. The queen spoke to her husband, King Thesprotos, and this kindly couple took Pelopeia into the palace and treated her as their own daughter, little knowing that they were helping to fulfil the curse, the two curses now on the House of Atreus.