The Trojan War Read Online Free PDF Page A

about her forehead, and long, glossy curls that fall below her waist. Her maids arrange her tawny hair every morning and night with ivory combs. Her cheeks are glowing with health and rouge, and her shining eyes are lined with carefully applied kohl. She wears a delicate perfume scented with oil of iris and carnation. Love runs after her like puppies, to quote a Hittite proverb.
    But on this night, it is a man who pursues her. Paris, prince of Troy, has come to Greece, having commissioned new ships especially for the occasion. He knows that he has to put his best foot forward, because Troy and Greece are rivals, and the Greeks would seize on any sign of weakness. By the same token, Paris is supposed to be at his diplomatic best. By accepting the hospitality of the king of Sparta, Menelaus, Paris has an unspoken obligation to behave like a gentleman. But all’s fair in love and war.
    Imagine the first meeting of Helen and Paris at a state banquet in his honor, no doubt in Menelaus’s palace, which was surely set among the pines in the rich hills of Lacedaemon, the countryside around Sparta. The company sits in the throne room, a large, high-roofed hall with four columns surrounding a central hearth, whose smoke is drawn up and out through an opening in the ceiling. Armed sentries stand along walls frescoed with scenes of lions attacking deer and griffins standing guard. After a procession and offerings to the gods, the guests sit down, in silver-studded chairs. Paris sits in a place of honor, between the king and queen.
    Paris and Menelaus are probably each wearing a linen tunic and below it a belted kilt of finely woven wool, possibly made into patterned panels and with a fringed edge and a tassel. Menelaus probably wears a diadem in the sign of royalty favored by the Greeks, while Paris might have the horned tiara of royalty common in Anatolia. Each is likely to have a gold signet ring. Menelaus probably has shoulder-length hair and a trimmed beard but no mustache. Paris might be clean-shaven in the Hittite fashion, but with long hair tied in a knot at the nape of his neck. Greek royalty and nobles all wore leather sandals, while Paris might have worn the boots of an Anatolian king.
    Barefoot servants hurry to and fro with oil lamps and silver-and-gold pitchers and bowls for the ritual washing of hands. Then comes the meal. There would be honey, figs, and bread, and a selection of the finest meat from the royal stock: lamb, kid, pork, hare, venison, or wild boar. For a special guest from a royal house, there would be fish. In Greece meat was available even to ordinary people, but fish was food for a king. Fishing was labor-intensive, transport overland was expensive, and fish was not as easy to preserve as meat.
    The food would be washed down with plenty of alcohol. The preferred beverage was a cocktail, mixed in a large bowl, of wine, beer, and honey mead, possibly with a taste of pine resin; resinated wine was already popular in Bronze Age Greece. The partygoers drank out of two-handled cups with a wide, shallow bowl above a stem, and made of either the finest painted pottery or of silver or gold. A bard playing the lyre would have entertained the banqueters with heroic song. In between the figs and the lamb, Helen and Paris might have exchanged their first words.
    They might well have spoken Greek. Troy’s language was probably either Luwian, the main tongue of southern and western Anatolia, or Palaic, the main language of the north. Both were Indo-European tongues, closely related to Hittite. But foreign languages were surely widespread in an entrepôt like Troy, especially Greek, which was spoken by traders and potters as well as nobles who had married into the Anatolian nobility. It seems that Troy’s elite were bilingual in their own language and Greek; they had dual names, such as Paris—itself perhaps just Homer’s rendition in Greek of a Luwian name, Pari-zitis, whose Greek name was