Nobody's Princess (22 page)

“Did you see that, La—Glaucus?” Milo’s voice sounded in my ear. He’d woken from his nap and come up behind me unexpectedly. I almost jumped overboard with surprise. “It’s a good sign, isn’t it? Or is it predicting that something’s waiting to snatch
us
away? If that’s so, I swear I won’t let it touch you. But
is
it a good sign after all? Ah, what does it mean?”

“You worry too much, Milo,” I said as if I had no such worries of my own. “If every hero stopped to think about all the what-ifs in his path, none of us would ever take one step beyond our own doorways.”

“But you saw what it did,” Milo protested. “The eagle is Lord Zeus’s bird. We can’t just ignore it. Ah, what does it
mean
?”

“What it
means,
” I said, smiling, “is that you and I have just seen either the world’s most unmistakable omen or the world’s most nearsighted eagle.”
May the gods stand by us,
I thought as I laughed and Milo stared at me in dismay.
May they favor and guide us, but may they never hold us hostage through our fears.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him, wiping sea spray from my eyes. “I haven’t said anything wrong. I love the gods and honor them, but I’m not their slave. Neither are you. From now on we’re going to make our own omens.” I took his hand, and when he pulled it away, I took it again. This time he let me.

We were free.

SOMETHING ABOUT HELEN

People have always loved stories. We love them, and when we find one about the adventures of a truly fascinating character, we hate to see it end. For every storyteller who concludes his tale with “And they lived happily ever after,” there’s always someone in the audience who says, “Great, and
then
what happened?”

Sometimes there
is
nothing more to tell. The dragon is slain, the war is won, the world has been saved from Evil, the main character has fallen off a cliff and
died,
for heaven’s sake! After all that, how can there possibly be a “
then
what happened?”

Never underestimate the power of an eager audience, or the desire of a storyteller to keep that audience happy. There can always be another dragon to slay, another war to fight, another world to save, and as for those characters who died at the end of the first story…well, it was all a dream, or a trick, or a case of mistaken identity. The sequel will go on!

But what about when the climax of the original story is so awesome that the sequel falls flat because “and
then
what happened?” is a letdown by comparison? Sometimes it’s better to have no sequel instead of a lame one. (Though you can always try telling the story of one of the original tale’s supporting characters. Spin-offs have been around since long before TV sitcoms, but I don’t know if Homer would have liked to think of the
Odyssey
as a spin-off of the
Iliad.
)

Never mind, all’s not lost. When a favorite character reaches the unmistakable end of his or her adventures and there’s honestly zero chance for coming up with further exploits that are believable and interesting, there’s something left to tell: “Well then, what happened
before
that?” Which is just what I asked myself before I began to write about Helen of Troy.

I wanted to tell more of Helen’s story than the best-known version, the one that’s come down to us in the
Iliad.
Did she
know
that everyone agreed that she was the most beautiful woman in the world? Did knowing that make her feel proud, or smug, or embarrassed, or bored with all the never-ending compliments? (“Yes, yes, I know I’m gorgeous, but what I
asked
you to do was please pass the olives!”) Did she
like
being thought of as nothing more than The Beautiful One? Did she worry about who she’d be when she got old and her beauty faded away? Was she just another (spectacularly) pretty face, or was there more to her than that? Who
was
Helen?

Daughter of the king of Sparta, she was so beautiful that it was said she couldn’t possibly be an ordinary woman and that her
real
father was Zeus, king of the Greek gods. What did a story like that imply about her father
or
her mother? Did Helen mind hearing her real parents whispered about in that way?

The Trojan prince Paris fell in love with her at first sight, stole her from her husband, Menelaus, and carried her off to his father’s walled city. Was it true love, or was it the work of the gods? Did she go with him willingly, or was she kidnapped? If she didn’t want to leave Sparta, did she ever try to get away from her kidnapper? Did she even believe she had the chance of succeeding if she tried to rescue herself?

Menelaus’s brother, King Agamemnon of Mykenae, rallied an army led by the greatest kings and heroes in Greece and fought for ten years to reclaim her. Countless men died in battle, the great city of Troy was destroyed and its people slaughtered or enslaved, all because of one beautiful woman. When it was over, Paris was dead and Helen was given back to her husband. The end of her story makes her sound like nothing more than a pretty prize to be awarded to the winner of the Trojan War. Was she heartbroken, furious, frightened, relieved, or did she feel anything at all?

And so she went home to Sparta with Menelaus, which is more or less where Helen’s story ends, as far as the Greek writers were concerned. (“Hey, Helen! You just caused a ten-year war and the destruction of one of the world’s mightiest cities! What are you going to do
now
?” “I’m going to Disney World!”)

Helen’s “and
then
what happened?” was pretty well sewn up, but her “well, what happened
before
that?” was wide open. Plenty of her story remained untold, and I wanted to tell it. The only traditional tales about young Helen concern her birth as Zeus’s daughter and her abduction by the Athenian hero Theseus when she was still just a girl but already incredibly beautiful. There’s no mention of her being at the Calydonian boar hunt, though her brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, were. There’s certainly nothing in the old tales about her knowing how to use weapons or hunt or ride. Exploits like these make a good story, but did I have any sound reason for letting her do them?

Oddly enough, though Helen herself is mythological, much of what I’ve written about her in this book is based on ancient Greek history. Many people used to believe that myth and history had nothing to do with each other. They thought that Troy itself was an imaginary place, like the lost city of Atlantis. Then in 1876, the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was so deeply inspired by the
Iliad
that he decided to search for Troy. He was only a merchant, but a merchant with vision, passion, and an abiding love for a good story. He, too, must have believed that there was more to the tale of the Trojan War than what the
Iliad
had to tell—maybe not “and
then
what happened?” or “what happened
before
that?” but “did it really happen at all?” Using information from that ancient epic, he astonished the world when he uncovered the ruins of a great city on the very spot Homer’s poem described. There was even evidence that the city had been destroyed by violence and been burned, just like Helen’s Troy.

Since Schliemann’s success, we no longer look at myths and legends in the same way. Fantastic stories may contain hidden grains of truth that archaeologists and historians can use to guide them in putting together a more complete picture of the past. Even the sinking of Atlantis might be based on a real event, the volcanic explosion that destroyed most of the Mediterranean island of Thera.

Myths take place in the past, but some of them can be assigned to a
specific
part of the past rather than a vague “once upon a time.” Helen’s story takes place during the Bronze Age, almost 2,500 years ago. We know this for various reasons, including the fact that the great kingdom of Mykenae, where Agamemnon ruled, flourished during this era. Therefore, the weapons, clothing, food, transportation, royal palaces, and such that appear in this book belong to Bronze Age Greece. Most of what is known about this time comes from archaeological finds, including jewelry, statues, wall paintings, pottery, and sites of major ruins. In addition, some of Homer’s descriptions of life in Helen’s day make the archaeological evidence come alive.

Helen’s era was quite different from what most people think of when they hear the words
ancient Greece.
The Parthenon, the graceful statues, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all came nearly a thousand years after Helen’s time, during the classical era. In the Bronze Age, no one yet knew how to make brittle iron flexible enough to use for tools and weapons. Art, especially sculpture of the human form, was stiffer and more stylized. Few people could read or write. Instead of signing important papers, you would use a stone seal to leave an impression on clay tablets. The design on the seal would be as unique as a signature. There
was
a kind of writing in Bronze Age Greece, but it was mostly used to keep track of financial matters, such as royal tax records. Messages, poems, songs, and stories were not written down but were memorized and passed along by word of mouth. Inevitably, they’d change when someone with a poor memory or a rich imagination retold them. Money hadn’t been invented yet. The first coins were centuries in the future, so Helen lived in a barter economy, with lots of haggling, negotiating, and trading goods for goods instead of paying for them outright.

Though markedly different from Helen’s time, there were some aspects of life in classical Greece that influenced me while writing this book. Chiefly, these things concerned the Spartans, who lived a thousand years after Helen. Today we use
Spartan
as an adjective meaning “plain,” “austere,” “strict,” even “harsh.” Spartans of classical times were famous for being all of these, as well as being known for their warcraft. At birth, all infants were brought before the elders, who decided whether a child would be allowed to live or be left in the mountains to die from exposure. This decision was based entirely on whether the child looked strong enough to survive. It’s hard to think of anything harsher than that. The Spartans’ whole way of life seemed to center on physical perfection, endurance, and skill in handling weapons. Most significant was the fact that, unlike other Greeks, they trained their daughters as well as their sons in athletics. The girls ran, wrestled, practiced throwing the javelin or spear, and, like the boys, they exercised unclothed, to strengthen their bodies. Spartan men were frequently away from home for long periods of time, fighting wars. This left Spartan women in charge on the home front. As a result, they were much more independent than other Greek women.

In spite of the centuries separating them, I like to think that the classical Spartans’ attitude toward women might have had its roots in Helen’s time. There is archaeological evidence that Bronze Age women were powerful and respected, holding important positions in their society. One image, taken from a seal, shows a huntress armed with bow and arrows.

No doubt Greek females could also be independent. Mythology is full of stories about such women, but unfortunately they usually end with some great disaster caused by the woman’s independent behavior. Was this the original ending of the story, or was it changed over the course of the centuries and turned into a “lesson” against women’s freedom by those who feared it?

I like to think that the part of Helen’s story I’ve told is about not fearing freedom. Freedom wasn’t something to take for granted in Helen’s time, nor is it now. Slavery was very much a reality of the Bronze Age, classical Greece, and even some parts of the world today. Other kinds of oppression are even more widespread. Little by little, we’re challenging and overcoming the attitude that people are
things.
It’s not easy work, and accomplishing it means that sometimes we have to become warriors, even when we’re told that it’s not the path we’re expected to follow in life. We do it anyway, because it’s the right path.

Helen would approve.