The Trojan War Read Online Free PDF

Alexander. Troy’s elite moved easily in and out of the Greek world, including Menelaus’s palace.
    In fact, Greeks and Trojans are likely to have forged friendships and kept them going across the generations, because these ties were good for business and they were prestigious. Consider the Greek kingdom of Pylos, west of Sparta, where Linear B texts record a military commander named “Trojan” and a leaseholder of a plot of land named “Trojan Woman.” These names may have been bestowed to mark an international friendship, just as in later Greek times an Athenian friend of Sparta named his son “Lacedaemonius,” that is, the Spartan.
    Some ancient sources insist that Menelaus was about to go abroad: urgent business was calling him away to Crete. If he indeed left Helen alone with Paris, then Menelaus was the most foolish husband since Cronus had trusted Rhea, and she took advantage of him by helping their son Zeus overthrow the old man. Menelaus should have paid more attention to Helen’s feelings: others surely were doing so.
    An indiscreet remark by a Greek ambassador, a letter from a spy, a bawdy song in a Trojan tavern: one or all of these hints of Helen’s unhappiness might have spurred Paris to action. The queen of Sparta had a wandering eye and Paris wanted to fill its field of vision. He loved the ladies, whom he handled with the same skill as his famous bow. But in Helen, he had met his match.
    According to Homer, Helen was passionate, intelligent, and manipulative. He gives her a pair of hands speedy enough to slip a drug into a man’s drink without him noticing. She had a way of leaning back in her chair and resting her feet on a stool, as if she were a judge about to pronounce sentence or a cat getting ready to pounce. She might have been the favorite of Aphrodite, goddess of love, but Helen was nobody’s plaything. Although she was young—perhaps still in her early twenties—Helen was not without experience. She was a royal princess, daughter of King Tyndareus of Sparta or, in some versions of the myth, of Zeus himself; her mother was Leda or Nemesis.
    That is myth, but the power of certain Bronze Age queens is a historical fact. And nowhere was this truer than in Anatolia. Land of the mother goddess, it was the veritable homeland of strong women. Archaeology may yet document a mighty queen in Greece, but in the current state of the evidence, we have to look eastward for that. And perhaps Helen did so too. Perhaps she was ambitious and saw Troy as a place offering her freedom and power.
    Homer’s Paris is handsome and amorous. He is stylish, lithe, athletic, and a talented bowman. History lends credibility to the picture. Anatolians were famous as archers. Troy was older than any city in Greece, so Trojans may have found it easy to pour on Old World charm when on the far side of the Aegean. But the other side of the scale held Greek stereotypes about effete easterners and, indeed, Homer makes Paris just a little cowardly in battle. No doubt the real Paris was charming and a hustler, the latter surely not an uncommon figure in a country of horse traders.
    But charm is not a word that comes to mind in the case of Menelaus. Helen praised his intelligence and good looks, but that was only after she had been dragged home from Troy to Sparta and was eager to get back in Menelaus’s good graces, not that he was fooled. No doubt the Iliad ’s description of Menelaus is closer to the truth. He was a well-built warrior with distinctive red hair. As a speaker he was no-nonsense. We hear nothing of his skill at the lyre or the figure he cut on the dance floor, as we do of his rival Paris. As a soldier Menelaus was second-rate, incapable of going for the enemy’s jugular, let alone fighting the Trojan champion Hector—as he would later have pretensions of doing. He was the kind of warrior who is dismissed again and again in Egyptian texts as