Embassy Outbound: The Ithacan League: Trojan War Advent I

By S.W. Bardot

The first work in a trilogy of proto-histories about the advent of the Trojan War, Embassy Outbound offers readers a look at the Trojan War as a real war, waged by descendants of the earliest Greeks a full five hundred years before the birth of Homer. The author disproves the oft-cited allegation that the war was a composite of scattered eras and epochs by diverse bellicose people who lived and fought within the five centuries that intervened between the real Trojan War and Homer’s Iliad.

How the war started and why, and why it raged for a full ten years of intense annual campaigns, remains an issue for historians to resolve. In Embassy Outbound we have a contemporary historian, Mentor son of Alkimos, who tells of the keeping the peace with his oldest and best friend, Odysseus. Together, they steer the Embassy of twelve great galleys into battle and end up fighting the Trojan War for five years in separate theaters of action. Odysseus goes on to tell his friend and fellow warrior about the last five years of the war, after Mentor suffers an incapacitating wound. Here, though, they’re together at Embassy, voyaging at valiant exploit to forestall, even prevent, the war that became an inevitability as told by Ancient Greek literature.

Embassy Outbound was originally released in 2007 as a limited edition hardcover book. The e-Book brings the work to a broader readership and adds a host of color illustrations and important supplementary information.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781937650483

Book preview

THE ITHACAN LEAGUE:

ITS TROJAN WAR TRILOGY

Embassy Outbound was released as a limited bound edition in 2008 with its dust jacket panoramic background. The photograph is by Dana Hyde, the publisher’s wife, from a late afternoon shoot on Rhodes Island. The location was Hagia Agathe’s Lagoon, here, and its Shoal, looking ENE to Anatolia beyond the eastern horizon. Odysseus was reaching from his farthest west to a mission at the farthest orient of his times. 1262 BC demarcates his maritime era at its zenith.

Copyright © 2008 by SW Bardot

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be copied,

transmitted, or reproduced without permission.

ISBN 9781937650483

TABLE

OF

CONTENTS

PART 1. IN IMMEDIATE OUTREACH

Front Pieces

Chapter One . Outbound from Ithaca

Chapter Two . Mentor’s Overland Trek

Chapter Three . Läas

Chapter Four . The Brothers Tyndareid I

Chapter Five . Menelaos to the Fore

Chapter Six . The Brothers Tyndareid II

Chapter Seven . Among the Mantinians

PART II . THE ENEMY WITHIN

Chapter Eight . Great Argos

Chapter Nine . Lagüdakë

Chapter Ten . About Diomedes

Chapter Eleven . Oeax Son of Nauplius

Chapter Twelve . Illustrious Phratsia

PART III . THE LEVANTINE CORRIDOR

Chapter Sixteen . Eurybates

Chapter Seventeen . Cinyras

Chapter Eighteen . Byblos

Chapter Nineteen . Kos to Mount Mykalë

PART IV . THE MILETOW EXCURSUS

Chapter Twenty . Mentor’s Solo Debut

Chapter Twenty-One . A Ransom Scheme

Chapter Twenty-Two . First Audience with Nomion

Chapter Twenty-Three . Nomion’s Demarche

Chapter Twenty-Four . The Vice Regent’s Family

Chapter Twenty-Five . A Confounding Courtship

Chapter Twenty-Six . The Mëandros Valley Tour

PART V . THE ANATOLIAN CORRIDOR

Chapter Twenty-Seven . Old Hostilities

Chapter Twenty-Eight . Imbrassa Island Onward

Chapter Twenty-Nine . Four Days at Feint

Chapter Thirty . A Sea Battle

Chapter Thirty-One . To the Reunion

Chapter Thirty-Two . Parlay

Chapter Thirty-Three . A Brilliant Outlook

Chapter Thirty-Four . Final Feast Day

ADDENDA

Translator’s Epilogue

Appendix A . Endnotes to All Parts

PART I

IN IMMEDIATE OUTREACH

CHAPTER ONE

OUTBOUND FROM ITHACA

THE Cephallene flotilla had embarked as twelve great galleys, almost a thousand men total, just after the elaborate sunrise rituals of departure. Almost everyone in Ithaca had thronged around Rheithron Lagoon for the blessings. The ships had each been anointed for their maiden voyage, foremost among them the spanking new Ameilicha. All had prayed that the crews and their mission be blessed during a year’s service abroad. There had been an especially large conscription that year; as always they were sixteen-year-old youths drawn from every caste and class, including all of Cephellenia’s slave-born young men.

Goddess Eirënë Peace was invoked for the mission, but Goddess Eris Strife was expected to have the strongest hand in any consequence. The expectations of the royal savants and seers were severely slanted to warfare. The portents of that prospect had been undeniable ever since the abduction of Helen.

Especially privy to those forecasts was our chronicler, Mentor Son of Alkimos, from whose first three chronicles of the war’s advent I translate here. Having mastered the twenty-one that follow in several editions, I’ve redacted them down to three volumes in translation: Before the Eastern Conflicts & Outback Campaigns, about Mentor’s contributions to the advent years, the Embassy and his own five years at deep outback warfare; The Wanax’ War, about Odysseus’ campaigns up to the deaths of Achilles and Paris; and finally, The Returns, about the Sack of Troy and the returns of the many heroic campaigners to their rebellious homelands. I’ve subsequently expanded each volume of translation through commentary, by which I have lent them proper prehistorical robustness attuned to modern standards. This has led to eight short books rather than three vastly too large. The title I’ve chosen for this first of the series reflects yet another kind of major redaction. By abbreviating Mentor’s many autobiographical digressions, or by disbursing them to alternative contexts where they’re more appropriate, I have not rob``bed any of these editions of his personality. Ample supplementation has also come from other sources, including the relevant archaeology and forensic science off the digs.

Each and several, Mentor’s chronicles have mostly invalidated, by this translator’s assessment, the current consensus about the ancient world’s greatest and oldest war. To wit, first, it definitely existed as over ten years of individual campaigns overlapped by a four-year advent; while the modern consensus is still doubtful that any such war ever took place in reality. Second, the war was about Helen, but also about the imperial ambitions of the Argives under Agamemnon; and not only Agamemnon’s ambitions but those by that race’s predatory kin and underlings. For the Trojans, the war became about their redress of wrongs perpetrated against them by a long-prior generation, with the abduction of a high royal and most sacral Trojan woman, the princess and priestess Hesionë Daughter of Laomedon.

Scholars of ancient antiquity, steeped in its literature extant from both sides of the Aegean Sea, still can’t agree about who Helen was, what sovereign powers she actually represented, by whom born naturally (as the female offspring of fraternal twins), or who her brother was — assuming the foster parentage of Lëda and Tyndareos. Often she’s presented as a conflation of her natural mother Nemesis and her foster mother Lëda, with either of whom Zeus mated as some kind of mortal incarnation of goose or swan.

Helen has been made a mess of. So, too, her mothers.

Mentor adored her for just who she was, his own liege sovereign of their shared nation race. He first gave his fealty to her when she was an exemplary maiden of sixteen under the tutelage and foster parentage of the Lakonians’ royal house. Mentor was foremost counselor to the brilliantly fostered princess until she became his wanassa upon her marriage to Menelaos. As his queen of queens so translated, she became the only woman in his world whom everyone must fight for unequivocally — regardless of her complicity, or not, in her own abduction.

Third, the Trojan War was foreordained but not inevitable. It happened as a serendipity made large, then huge, and then tragically engulfing of all its participants. Yet according to recent scholarship — please consider carefully — the grievances could have been factors in a pan-Aegean peace instead of the first real world war.

A man convinced that a just war was in prospect, Mentor had ably prepared for his long stay away. Not so Odysseus, the recently consecrated Wanax of Cephallenia (swapping his old title of Sea Wanax with that of his father). He would argue that Helen could be restored, that old crimes could be redressed, and that a greater maritime peace might emerge between rival imperial land masses on both sides of the Aegean Sea. We begin to examine the erosion of those hopes, accordingly, even as their potential to nay-say the grim outlook proves just as well-founded. We’ll peruse vital factors of peace-keeping and war promulgation, and discover, as duly promised, the serendipity that permeates the several preambles to an easily avoidable war.

Sixty oarsmen manned each ship, all raw young muscle from that year’s muster. The oarages were complemented by eight billets apiece of sail masters, shipwrights and archers. Each man was proven and fit to his calling, chosen to an elite cadre by his captain. With all that experience aboard the maiden ships, their crews were strong and unabashed, eager to meet the long odds against them.

Despite being so very full from the regular rotations that spelled their oarages, the hulls settled high. Without crews’ baggage, ample long stores and full inboard arsenals in cache, they could row away and sail onward both lightly and briskly. The League had sent all that heavy lading ahead earlier, with the Supply Fleet, under an escort of 190 of Cephallenia’s best war galleys.

Let’s not be confused by the large numbers at this outset. The Ithacan League was the sea power of its age as a veteran war navy, if not yet thought of as the greatest merchant marine of its time as well. Yet because of the imminence of the Trojan War it could not look imperial. So honesty and good sense dictated that it would not be or become so. The ships, with more to be built and launched off the slipways, would achieve a final count of 450 superb war vessels, but only should the Embassy fail. Soon to be re-commissioned, soon to come under High Chief Ikarios’ commission as a revitalized Lakonian Expeditionary Navy, that final count would meet up at Aulis after every attempt to prevent hostilities against High King Priam and the House of Laomedon had failed.

There had been past transgressions. They demanded redress. The West had been inattentive. Now it was awake and eager to make amends. Any war must be just. Helen made that so, whatever the consensus about her conduct during the advent.

That first leg of the voyage outbound would prove the raw oarsmen’s conditioning until the embarkation. Conscripts, freshmen yearlings, the hardiest veteran oarsmen made a progression. By the time the flotilla regrouped with its many older sisters, everyone would likely be a veteran oar.

Of the ships themselves, Mentor waxes particularly sentimental about two great galleys afloat that morning of the formal embarkation:

I recall how Lütrökas [Loo-TROW-kass], Laërtes’ command ship, followed us out of the Lagoon. She turned back after we’d lofted sail. I didn’t expect to see her ever again. In a way, longboats are destined to be youthful all their life — just as our twelve ships had to be. For to be other than a young war vessel is to be useless where contentiousness at sea is concerned. Lütrökas was still a saucy lady despite the many seas through which she’d already dashed and dared. But only a few more years, five at the most, remained to her paramountcy over all the Near Fleets of the League.

When I did see her again — if ever I should — she would be a beached carcass hull, stripped of her fine fittings. Her pillar ornament would have been detached as her memorial, to be oiled and varnished thereafter by handmaidens of Manor Ridge. There, visiting seafarers from other lands and ports would behold and admire the head of her Ram Ibex affixed to the walls of Penelopë’s proud entrance hallway. The forehead and long horns of the ram would be plated anew in copper, and his eyes emboldened by the glint of hammered tin foil.

Perhaps by then Odysseus would be home again. He would show the bow ornament to his guests, relate the ship’s provenance and his own adventures of many years abroad. He’d tell how he’d helped design such an admirable vessel for his father, but also how he’d far bettered even the best features of her class with his own Ameilicha.

For both ships I felt an affection and also a joy renewed in beholding their supreme elegance in profile whenever they floated by each other. Odysseus’ own feelings had been stirred that morning in saying goodbye to the nurse who’d nurtured him to manhood. The Lütrökas had served him as well and as grandly as had that nurse, and had seasoned him in comparable ways. So as the fine vessel turned to, breasted oars and swept back to Rheithron Lagoon, he bid it aloud a fond farewell.

Why shouldn’t he? He also said good-bye to his own youth that day.

And when his mother waved to him in parting, teary-eyed with a brave smile, how was he to know that it was fated to be for the last time? I, as he, then thought the sight of her as eternal as each rising day. Yet that very last wave and smile of hers was all her son would ever see of dia-Anticleia again.

It remains my only piteous memory of that day.

Ameilicha blossomed her sails on a nearly straight downwind heading into the south. She left Ithaca a new ship of entirely novel design, fully fit to Odysseus’ design and accession. Her eleven sisters formed flank to leeward in tight array, their masters teasing their sails into loose luffs billowing to starboard reach. Their emblazons, with the leaping dolphin across a russet expanse of striped light-weather sails, made for me, a landsman, a thrill most marvelously soaring. And they seemed to me doubly enchanting as I imagined their appearance for all the young spectators ashore.

That impressive effect was deliberate, of course. This flotilla wished to be known everywhere for what it meant to serve. Odysseus believed in the endurance of the Great Peace, but should he fail, he wished to be remembered for any mission of preservation. He always remained convinced that the only peacemakers sure to survive beyond wars were the original, most ardently determined ones.

Odysseus took the helm in hand outbound, and the cruising soon balanced perfectly upon a strong following wind off the starboard quarter. To give release to the crew’s tumultuous spirits after the overly ceremonious morning, Eurybates turned out a first rotation of the oarage for skimming of their blades. She was fully manned, and only a river’s current could have lent greater speed than those 56 oars as they moved briskly over light comber waves and shallow swells.

The eastern shore of Zakynthos in his wake, Odysseus soon needed the sweeps to nudge all prows landward. He wanted a close-hauled profile for his farewell passage by the first of Cephallenia’s primordial mainland dominions. There had lain the House’s formerly most recalcitrant sea chiefs, yet the households of their every matriarch had amassed their subjects at the landfalls to yell their farewells. Even from far off, leaping and littlest children could be seen ashore. Thrilled to know their new wanax setting out for the first time, how could they know what was beginning then — an absence that would linger for over twenty epochal years?

THE EMBARKATION FROM ITHACA

CHAPTER TWO

MENTOR’S OVERLAND TREK

. . . . BELOW Kyllenë in Elaea we steered straight south for Cape Katakolon, resting the oars upon the rising of the midday zephyr. Onward from there under sails alone, with all the delight of the dolphins coursing beside us, we soon found ourselves off the Alpheios Debouch. There, many more ships awaited us from out of the Great Gulf Alliance to say farewell and wish good fortune to our mission. The afternoon breeze abating, with much distance already behind us, we settled into Letrini Cove, within the cape’s headland, where our well-wishers made a feast for the occasion.

I disembarked there for my own inland journey. I took the newly widened road wending inland to Olympia Sanctuary, arriving late at a hostelry there. It took me the next two days to achieve Mount Pholöe, where my father had assembled all the high chiefs of the Pellenian and Erymanthian Highlanders. Father had spent every day since the abduction of Helen in polling the far tribes for seasoned volunteers for her rescue. He never once considered that a mandatory conscription would be necessary. The eagerness for the restoration of the Wanassa was already beyond his most optimistic expectations.

Remember, however: My own people were poor even unto destitution as my prime years began. Our tribes were most certainly the poorest of all the Southland Highlanders. Volunteering to arms was the best alternative to that condition. The clans of the Aigialaian Brotherhood, therefore, were different from those who fight for fit cause, who will seize upon its worth, and make war accordingly.¹

Under Father, whom all my race held in esteem for his promises by good judgement, going to war was a much better occupation than mountaineer guiding or hunting.

Because of the largess of the League’s south mainland plantations, the Cephallenes had offered some hospice and charity to Highlander women and very young children. Fewer women had died in childbirth, and fewer children succumbed to the afflictions of infancy and the stripling years that followed. Nonetheless, whatever Father and I gained back for the welfare of the clans, tribes and phratries must always be spread too thin over all those saved of a generation’s new increase. We had not failed to consider that whoever we saved must then be fed and ultimately allowed an occupation to sustain themselves well. No wonder all those young boys and men thronged Mount Pholöe! Rallying to warfare was their greatest hope of sustenance.

No wonder either that so many were oldest sons or youngest brothers who’d become too strong and hungry to feed adequately. Their mothers and sisters were glad to have them off and overseas. They even feared they might return too soon.

Of those volunteers there were already many tough and sturdy lads who’d barely achieved their ‘tween years. Lads of fit age proved far too numerous for Alkimos and Mentor, father and son, to accouter or train. Alkimos had every right to be proud of what Helen’s spirit meant to her subjects. He could easily imagine that volunteers were amassing in the same proportions throughout all the north mainland phratries of the Genos.

Over the subsequent six days, Alkimos presented Mentor with the fittest chieftain candidates to serve at elementary drill. They’d season to arms all new men brought to a first campaign’s assault complements. Menelaos, their supreme wanax, had already drawn off and prepared fully initiated Highlanders — mostly tribesmen of the Arkadians and Mantinians — to meet his finest reserve contingents. Most of them he had commanded to lay aside their deep-seated tribal and clan affiliations. Those men who’d not been trained under his direct auspices, like those of the Mantinian Phratry, were still under the elite training to arms by Helen’s enormously respected brothers Kastor and Polydeukes, whose temporary adjutant status would have to suffice over that coming winter. The brothers’ deliberate demotion meant nothing: with the full mobilization appointed for Aulis at just before the spring equinox, their elevation to a highest allied command would be assured.

Kastor, although Lakonian born, was deemed by the Highlanders to be the son of Aetolian Lëda, who was herself by great lineage of that tribe. There were also his two first cousins by his uncle Ikarios’ first marriage to the late Polykastë, a tribal leader over the north mainland’s High Achelous Divide, where dwelt her subject Dryopians and Dolopians.

Polydeukes, of course, was Helen’s natural twin brother,² . . . . and almost as hallowed as she. He knew how to turn hunters into fighters, and stalkers into the best light skirmishers that woodland and high terrain warfare can produce.

Mentor’s job proved easy because the standing reserves created and expanded by Menelaos were already capable fighting men of heavy and light specialties at arms. To the Highlanders next along the avenue of his tour, he needed only to further emphasize the importance of fighting as a single nation-race. Even as they had been in peacetime for the Genos, so they must remain for a war still in advent but not yet formally impending.

His father fully capable of managing the muster, Mentor took the eastern traverses back down to Mount Lynkaios, using this time to inform the tribal elders along that way. What made the journey worthwhile was his early discovery that these tribal elders, elderly matrons and wise crones all, felt vague about just what had actually happened to Helen.

They were in a quandary that had beset even the most informed of our nation race at that time. Here was the question so repeatedly posed: Had Helen been abducted or had she eloped?

Now the way you, my audience, take what I next say about that will depend upon how you might be predisposed to answer. So do not prejudge my answer to this question lest you be proved fools for ignoring the frame of mind that prevailed then and at the earliest musters.

The fact is, you must know, Menelaos was himself convinced she had eloped and that he was cuckolded. That opinion he cited in reference to numerous findings about the events preceding the flight of the Trojan princes from the delegation he’d hosted in Lakonia. He could add to them several others, about the circumstances of the day when she was too easily stolen away.

The sense of seers and prophets was quite opposite to Menelaos’. The consensus of their revelation was that she was entranced, rendered resistless, and slyly abducted. And from Haliatherses, Son of Mastor, our foremost seer in Cephallenia, I’ve gained firm faith in that consensus — despite my knowledge of Menelaos’ belief in Helen’s betrayal. Then, too, I was myself witness to his wonderful ways as her husband and home provider. There never was the least rumor that he was otherwise than vigorous, potent and pleasuring. I can attest to her devotion as a nursing mother to the tiny Hermionë. Most of all I can recall her exclamations of delight in the generous reserves that her good husband had provided for herself and for their nation race. Those young chiefs had proudly served her as a rotating honor guard while their sisters served in entourage as her proudest honor maidens. How we had loved our Helen, while also admiring Menelaos as our first and greatest wanax!

I felt that for my people plain truth must always guide best beliefs, but only so long as it was told to both sides in fair argument. That had been my constant lesson as the ward of the Wanax Laërtes. I could, and I did, elaborate the opinions that upheld the thesis of an elopement just as strongly as I explained the consensus of the seers and savants.

By the latter, too, there was the finding of a divinely inspired abduction, wherein our Wanassa Helen had as much disappeared as been stolen away. By this finding we, her alpine subjects, were at the worst disadvantage in pursuing her. And please consider that a long war for her restoration likely lay ahead of us, so she had better be entirely worth any effort of recovery. In that matter the real backbone of my people promptly expressed itself — that Helen was by her conduct and person up until the abduction worthy of the hardship accrued to regain her.

Don’t accept, however, anything as trite as the idea that the Goddess willed an abduction of Helen. No weakling victim of Atë the Black Fate was our Wanassa of the Wilds. We were still, then, a people with strong memories of her mother Nemesis, fated by a true Black Fate to wander the wilderness for our people under an ever impending doom. Fated to birth twins of opposite sex, as prophesied twenty generations earlier to her ancestry over the Genos, our wilderness existence, with all its bounty that we’d always enjoyed, would then end. We would be supplanted by a new people amidst the wilds of the Great Land. Our future, the Oracle of Parnassos had duly declared, Helen, the only daughter of Nemesis, would reveal – either by her maiden wisdom or through her matron folly. ³

That was the abiding riddle to her free will, aptly expressed at the outset, but befuddling nonetheless.

So our crones and matrons, who knew the excessive passions of our race so well, had embraced Helen during her girlhood years with the wisdom of womanhood which must never be disclosed to my sex. And they had a sense of her almost immediately, of her own spectacular comportment. The sustained high regard for the Wanassa was unanimous because of what both they and she had achieved.

The Black Fate, if any, was the reckless delusion that caught Helen, as it had her mother. She believed she could avoid any fate that imposed upon her a worse nature. But like mother, like daughter: If ever proved a fool by an inevitable outcome, she must serve on as a debased woman, and never again rule, even as a once worshiped wanassa, over mortal men. That’s also to say she must inevitably wed a man of divine person and providence, thus fully and abjectly become subjected to him. That had been the outcome of her mother’s life after the maternity: she’d just disappeared into an oblivion.

Helen was an answer to any man’s prayer. Perhaps, accordingly, she was pledged to her abductor by divine will, as boon. If so, just as her mother Nemesis had suffered, so must she too, to become powerless of resistance — especially if one fated to be futile.

Accept all that as you might be disposed to. Truth and tradition are on your side; what comes upon one’s forbears can cycle anew as the fate of any of their progeny.

Helen remained within the proclaimed fate in succumbing to an abduction. But in the yielding to that man of divine providence lay another brilliant destiny that she would someday create for herself and her subject Highlanders.

Mentor would have us believe, at the outset of this account of the Embassy, that a most backward and primitive people were capable of his own subtle intelligence because they were of his native race. The Highlanders, he also assumes, possessed a practical mien after refined reflection upon any difficult issue — even the issue, a quandary, over an eloped or easily abducted queen who was their holy matriarch. Yet even most lowlanders of highest refinement and insight could scarcely have appreciated his manner of dueling persuasion.

Allow the advent of a true Trojan War, therefore, to rest upon a preponderance of agreement with his posture: Helen had been abducted, but too easily. The man who had her was far less worthy than the husband she still loved, while her love for that abductor was won too readily.

How is this so different from the consensus of scholars, so long and so steeped in the brews of pre-Classicism? They still insist with mulled and marinated mind on a fey, flighty and fatuous Helen; they agree collegially that she was swept off her feet for sure. But whether she caressed the arms that clutched her close, or flailed futilely at them with her own, she was nonetheless swept away.

Alas, there will be other, supposed proofs to build on those blithely stated as fact.

Mentor left the Matron Elders exhilarated by his own balanced viewpoint. He then made a long descent into the Eurotas Valley by its midstream affluent, passing above Therapnë by the high traverse along and down the Amykai Range. Wending high until a southwest descent beyond Mount Taygetos, he reached Läas Portside at the time appointed for his reunion with Odysseus.

There, however, his good mood was instantly shattered. Before learning the reason, we must pause here. For there’s also what Odysseus had to say, and subsequently dictated to Mentor, about his flotilla’s continued embarkation upon the Embassy.

THE LANGDADAS GORGE, ITS LOWER EXTENT

CHAPTER THREE

LÄAS

THE flotilla had made a layover at a headland lee shore by Letrini. Bearing next day on the line between Cape Katakalon and Protë Islet, the galleys took the midday land breeze under sails alone, on course southward to Pylos Portside. Nestor had his fleet of merchant ships under sail to greet Odysseus and there was much cheering as they passed Boldokoitia Inlet above Sphakteria Headland. The Cephallenes served Nestor fast escort on a straight southern heading, then rested at landfall in the lee of the Messenian Strait. The weather had been perfect thus far, and they’d made best use of it.

Rounding Point Akritas on another early rising, the two navies took the lee of the western shoreline to breast anew the oars. Eurybates put the young crews to hard drill. The Cephallenes challenged Nestor’s embassy ships and his few elite warships to short sprints into and up the Bay of Andania. The flotilla profiled the single galleries of twenty six-oars sweeping long style to Nestor’s double galleries of sixty rapidly stabbing blades stacked broadside. All this exercise was played out in good oncoming view for the entertainment of their host for that night, the High Chief Ortilichos of Pharë. About him Odysseus explains,

Since Father had chosen to shun long sea voyages, Ortilichos’ friendship had rested on periodic stays, usually too brief, at the Big House. The protective alliance over his clan house was old, however, and repeatedly affirmed. His small coastal realm was surrounded by friendly lands who gave him ample measure of their produce for security. He’d passed that generosity to all our ships in transit through the Gulf of Andania. He owed his autonomy to the League, but the independence of his principality derived from the early years of his guardianship over Nestor, the new Master-of-House, until he could become a young man and adept warrior. Neleus, his liege sovereign, in tribute to that able guardianship over Nestor, made Ortilichos his governor over Pharë, a coastal demesne and sole port of the so-called Thither Kingdom. Instead of reverting that seat to Pylos, the capital of his Hither Kingdom, Nestor, once newly acceded as Wanax of Messenia, granted the realm over and outright to Ortilichos. It became a tiny principality for his own sons to inherit, a small coastal dominion within a vast thither region, itself much better known and revered as Andania.

That autonomy by grant would bode well, as Odysseus formed at this time his special friendship with Diokles, the King’s son just then having attained sixteen years of age. The bonds created by their mutual sovereign interests in the South Sea Passage would prove strong if not intimate. While Diokles was younger than Odysseus by half a generation, both felt the span of years between them to be meager. Odysseus was just as congenial with Nestor, despite an even greater separation of their years. Diokles already commanded as much popularity among his people as Odysseus did. That and his budding maritime career would work well towards their lasting and effective amity.

Pharë was the flourishing port of an elongated interior extension to the Pamissos River Valley that passed into the Stenchlerian Plain. That vale reached into the Arkadian tribal lands of the South Highlanders, neighbors to Mentor’s Erymanthians. Ever since Odysseus’ grandfather Arceisius’ time, the Gulf of Andania [named only much later the Gulf of Messenia] and Pharë had long been a coastal protectorate of the Ithacan League. There was much, therefore, of old friendship besides new amity among young men coming into the powers of their prime years.

Ortilichos was a benign overlord in service to six primary matriarchal dominions. That had him in complete reliance upon the Ithacan League for deterrence of piracy. The Argives were newly ambitious to extend their imperial ambit across the South Sea. Their many generations of imperial rulers held the merchant traffic along its fareway as fair game for depredation. It had taken the League to quash or ruthlessly avenge their forays, whose terror endured until Thyestes Son of Pelops became Great Wanax Regent over Argolis. Upon his accession the Argives retired their vaunted naval hegemony and made themselves over into a preeminent merchant maritime power. As they burgeoned and prospered under Thyestes, until late into the Great Regent’s reign, the Argives stood off from the nascent, yet formidable, seemingly ever-ascendant Cephallenia and its ever-evolving League. Upon the accession of Agamemnon, however, frosty relations had ensued. There had n two occasions upon which naval intervention had been necessary to thwart his ambitions.

THE REGION OF AMYKAI : LAKONIA & ANDANIA

So Nestor and Odysseus held serious discussion on the subject of the greatly enlarged naval powers over the South Sea that both of them would have to grant over to High Chief Ortilichos. Should the Peace Embassy fail to restore Helen, the strength of the Messenian and League navies would likely be diminished by both their long absences at great distance overseas. Ortilichos should at least match the regular naval surveillance that until then obtained, by building up his own war fleet. To this end, the High Chief agreed to commission his own small navy, out of a resolve to alliance built between the three principals during the lay-over.

Odysseus and Nestor had been received in Pharë with a festive air. The region of Andania, the Pamissos River Valley in particular, had enjoyed a most prosperous and high yielding summer season. Many of the High Sisters and High Matrons over the Valley and the small, contiguous Nedon Vale had been invited to bless the diplomats on their way. Alas, that pleasant landfall marked the last time that Odysseus saw the Sisters Leukippidais, the priestesses Hilaiïra and Phoebe. They were the lovely, bright hearted loves of his closest Lakonian friends, the Twins Kastor and Polydeukes, the Brothers Tyndareid, who were also nearest and dearest first cousins to his Penelopë.⁴ Just then the sisters were foremost among the hostesses who composed the royal entourage of Ortilichos.

The Sisters’ generous provisions from their sanctuaries, which included heavy-weather apparel for his crews, would also serve as token of ransom goods by which to bring home Helen. The spirit of Odysseus’ gratitude for such lavish good will toward the Embassy and all the crews betokened naught of what would come so frightfully upon all of Andania eight days later.

The next morning, they blessed the two embarking fleets under their sacred authorities as High Sisters of the shrine — Hilaiïra for the Huntress Maiden and Phoebe for the Sea Mistress Amphitritë. They performed a splendid ritual which the twelve crews, mostly youngsters, were never to forget. And the provision of heavy-weather attire would later save them from the besetting perils of a storm-tossed Cretan Sea.

On the same morning of the Sisters’ generous ministrations, Nestor dispatched heralds by chariot over Point Tainaron, by its low pass, into Lakonia. The two flotillas made way with good preparations and provisions for their further itinerary until Läas, the chief port of the House of Oebalos.

What is explained now comes by other chronicles of Mentor, his so-called Royal Chronicles, which he wrote in his early youth. I extract from their content despite my scholarly alert to readers that they have not yet been brought to a fully approved translation by either myself or my colleagues. First, though, what survives from good sources other than Mentor.

Stories brought to myth and legend about ancient Lakonia abound, many of them about Ikarios’ deep animosity toward Odysseus. They all run to the theme that Ikarios loved his daughter Penelopë too much. He had been made overlord by her and her older sister Iphthimë, by which grants of stewardship he held all the powers and yields of both their richly landed demesnes. His dependency upon Penelopë in administrative matters had been absolute since she was only a child precocious at numbers and sums. He believed that no husband could ever love or care for her as well as he could.

The actual episodes of his outright hostility toward Odysseus, from variously attributed sources, coincide with Odysseus’ stumbling courtship of a barely nubile Penelopë. The hostility became overt after a tentative betrothal, with its near dissolution by a breach of alliance, and it endured vehemently into the early months of the marriage itself while Penelopë and Odysseus had to reside within Lakonia. Most of the tales seem to be of a common purpose, to prove how Odysseus invariably stymied Ikarios, who was otherwise a man reputed for his sly scheming, brilliant duplicity, and most nasty, tricky plots.

All the tales attest to Ikarios’ determined efforts to enforce a marriage alliance that required Odysseus’ lifetime habitation in Lakonia. That was hardly an imposition; it was the old fashioned way of royal marriages. Not only Lakonian brides had all the land and most of the property! Ikarios intended the young couple to dwell idyllically upon Penelopë’s plantations of Pharis, for which fine land Ikarios had condemned himself to a most wretched sacral marriage to her wicked mother, the Nyad Priestess Periboea.

But let’s go back a bit further, to when the real animosity of Ikarios and Odysseus took root and flourished.

Ikarios wanted particular riddance of Odysseus as his daughter’s suitor, because he deemed Cephallenia a rude amalgamation of upstart pirate haunts. He thought Odysseus a brigand, a dressed up ravager, a man utterly treacherous, by evil isles. Too, he was extremely partial to the Argives, the race of his maternal forbears. He wanted Penelopë wed to one of them, or, even better, to a Cretan princeling.

Minoa was then resurgent despite a century of decadence that had ended in a thorough pillage of Crete. It had first destroyed the Great Minos’ heir, the Minotaur Asterion, and then the Minos himself, who met his death day almost immediately afterwards, at about 1353BCE. Crete, however, had shown her resilience and made a strong comeback. Almost a century later, in the last years of the Minos Katreos, the imperium had become a prosperous and outgoing island of very good businessmen and genteel mariner magnates. The old royal families had drawn good mainland blood, reared their own good petty kings off that hybrid vigor, and by it, also, a progression and ilk of peerage aptly called princelings.

Alas, the princelings of an age eligible to court Penelopë were often weaklings, unmanly in general and given to overly snotty ways. Over those resurgent years, moreover, Minoan social company had not deigned to include upstart Cephallenes out of the far west. In fact, they were held as rivals, greatly scorned for their oldest (and long-retired) tradition of paddled dugouts, crude vessels exceedingly long and broad of beam, always outrigged to wear sails. Such, indeed, had been the magnificent legacy that preceded the several classes of great galleys over the 13th Century BCE.

In any case, Ikarios’ obloquy of Odysseus had been vocal and persistent throughout the unwanted courtship — until, that is, he himself was suddenly smitten with a passion for Odysseus’ mother, Anticleia. Traveling to Lakonia, she’d interceded on her son’s behalf and conducted all the treated marriage arrangements in person. Soon she had both Tyndareos brothers on her side as well, and then Lëda, Penelopë’s most cherished aunt. Her husband Laërtes had gladly finalized the elementary stipulations, and she’d proven herself a boon once again after Odysseus’ suit of Penelopë had become frustrated anew by Ikarios’ pig-headed, last gasp hopes for a royal Cretan alliance. Odysseus relates:

. . . For once he’d failed to persuade his daughter that I was a crass interloper into the competitions for Helen — and once he’d failed as well to seduce the pirate king Laërtes’ fair wife, my mother, his allegations were laughed off with considerable ridicule. Thereafter, he became obsessed with the idea that I marry his daughter as a New Man of Lakonia, in service to his prerogatives of realm and to her broad demesnes at Pharis.

Accordingly, there’s a rugged sense of our abiding bad relations throughout the many fables taught still, ever since, to Lakonian children. It’s especially the case in the story about the time Ikarios tried to rig a running race against me. By fortune of its great distance over two days of meets, I won the race handily, despite his well bribed recruits and other ineligible opponents that he’d inserted midway, after the first day’s meet. He’d guessed for himself that I’d surpass all rivals to become his daughter’s champion runner. He sought to thwart the result, but I made his nasty scheme into one of his biggest blunders.

I can laugh now, imagining what he would have done if any of his hireling runners had actually won through over me . . . .

The most popular of the tales, Odysseus’ own favorite, tells what happened after that test of his stamina on foot. It came six months after the footrace, a duration to which his stay in Lakonia at wedlock had been reduced from the two years stipulated to his mother Anticleia. It’s actually a story about a figurine, placed seven miles north of Läas, which was still to be seen a millennium later by the traveler Pausanias. It commemorated Penelopë’s farewell to her obstinate father, when he deplored aloud and in misery her abandonment of Lakonia in favor of Ithaca.

I admit that I could not resist going to take a look at it during my layover. Sculptured figurines standing in open air are rare, and this one was reputed to be nicely fashioned.

I handed care of the fleet to Eurybates, for him to put the crews through the drill of rowing dry goods provisions and cached stores at Binglaphia across to Kythera Island and back. And early the next morning I traveled to where the statue stood.

It represents an erect, forward leaning form of my dearest Penelopë. Her head is finely molded under her delicately curled tresses, and from her face peer two lovely almond-colored eyes. The head is cocked as though to cast her gaze slightly back upon the roadway receding behind her; her expression wistful, hesitant, bashful. The deep remorse in her gaze is meant to cheer the native Lakonians with her warmth and abiding love for her homeland — if not for her father.

The figurine stands upon a tiny wooden chariot with large wheels. There beside her is a stiff hulk of a driver with a close tucked mane of hair on his head — her useless new husband, his oafishness in contrast to the grace of Penelopë’s figure. Clearly he’s secondary in importance.

I’d styled my headdress for the Trials of Helen in the manner in which the figured statue caught me, or somewhat like it. But on the face of that crudely formed dolt, for so he was made to seem, was cast the suggestion of an open, happy smirk. He peers forward stupidly, with a silly hint of ecstasy in his eyes.

The rendering of my dearest is excellent, nonetheless, even if not very close to nature in either her form or her likeness. It conveys majestically what’s intended by the inscription upon the statue’s base, Aidos, or Modesty. That speaks for Penelopë’s words of farewell to her father. They are still famous throughout Lakonia. Somehow they chanced to be overheard:

Do not burden me further, Father, with the presumptuous sin of a belief that I’m indispensable due to our people’s adoration for me, when I do leave them today for another fair land — and for a husband whom I love far more than my homeland or you.

My beloved wife, having spoken these words, then promised Ikarios to visit Helos every springtime — for family reunions and to safeguard her minions of estate. Her father, heedless of her admonition and ignoring her promise, became even more obdurate in his protests. At this, she dropped the veil that she’d wrapped about her hair. It fell over her face and down to her shoulders so that she was completely shrouded. She then whispered me to drive on while she wept profusely in silence, her gaze set fully ahead, never again to look backward until we were aboard Lütrökas.

That day when first I saw the figurine, I choked up a little to see how the tillers and drovers had bedecked the chariot upon which she stood. Her head was festooned with dried flowers. All around the site was planted ivy. A little wreath of new myrtle shoots stood upon my own figure’s head. Most endearing of all, a tiny veil fell from the tresses of the figurine. It just barely concealed her face so that any child could peer beneath it and see her modest expression of deep sorrow. It had the magic to convey both feelings — modesty and sorrow — as one.

That last was a most loving, caring touch . . . .

Odysseus had to admit that the relations between himself and Ikarios had already been tested hard. He must even have blamed his marriage father for being an awfully poor sport. Admittedly, if he had lost as many times as Ikarios had, he himself might not have been very generous in the spirit of good sportsmanship. The tests over Penelopë, a most sacral princess as well as a royal family’s favorite daughter, had tested two determined and stubborn men in their respective heartfelt wants. Those tests well offered, and subsequently well met, had resulted since in a cooperative spirit. By it had evolved a well honed alliance that already had several times been revised since the marriage. If not always contracted or amended with the best goodwill from one man toward the other, its reach into shared alliances with others — by both their Houses at common demarche — had forged to fine temper a Lakonian Expeditionary Force for Menelaos.

This could be said, and much more, to Ikarios’ personal credit, because of what he then did for Odysseus at Läas. There was nothing, either in the muster of the Embassy’s escorts, or in the plans for Aulis near to come, or yet in the second mobilization there that would come much later, that could ever diminish Odysseus’ estimation of Ikarios’ consultative capacities. First, there was gratitude for Ikarios’ execution of Penelopë’s generous preparations for his sake, in which Ikarios had acted as her assiduous surrogate. Odysseus became keenly aware that Ikarios deeply regretted his marriage son’s circumstances, which were also to bereave his daughter’s. He had worked solely for Odysseus’ good, and especially for his advancement by their coalition. And, too, there would be Ikarios’ irrevocable devotion to his most beloved niece Helen.

His was perhaps the keenest mind of all for the great complexity of issues that had to be tackled before supreme command moved over to Menelaos. Nestor was Ikarios’ equal, but Nestor did not and could not repose trust in young men. Ikarios could, even if he had once been himself a notorious scolder of hot brash youth. Now, he lavished his trust upon Odysseus and Mentor out of necessity and also high respect for both young men. Menelaos, to whom the essential war grievance belonged, had the determination and self-confidence to repose complete trust in Ikarios. He was respected by his own following, the youngest suitors and most especially the few prominent mariners upon whom he was going to become so dependent. Menelaos, moreover, a rearguard’s man by reputation at command, needed a supreme allied commander. Ikarios was a brilliant one even if he, too, would never become a great martial-at-field.

They had excellent young men to be those fighting men.

So what Ikarios boldly counseled, Menelaos implemented and enforced, leaving to Nestor’s diplomacy the persuasion of elder sovereigns, the parents of the young suitors sworn to protect the marriage of Helen and Menelaos.

Then and there in Lakonia, after taking measure of strengths and weaknesses, after due heed as well for seniority and youthful special prowess, a strong peacekeeping faction formed. Put forth and supported by the foremost sovereigns against the most bellicose of imperial peerages, a race was started to cross the Northern Sea. Forces for peace would meet upon its other side, there to make close ranks and hem in Priam and his chief counselors. With due deliberation, under stress of haste, the Embassy must endure rebuffs while ever gradually building affirmative, constructive counter responses. Already they faced dire warnings from their most bellicose allies, that any restoration of Helen through diplomacy would be bound to fail.

Odysseus arrived at Läas to find that Ikarios had sent four heralds of protest to the Island of Lemnos. From there the heralds had made consecutive excursions onward to Troias for formal audiences with Priam. One herald after another had brought home the best intelligence of where Prince Alexander and Helen were rumored to be. Meanwhile, Agamemnon’s herald, Talthybios, had returned long before any of Ikarios’ four men to announce the futility of anyone’s further searching.

Ikarios took no heed: To accept futility was to accept the loss of all control over any possibility of Helen’s restoration. Ikarios knew Talthybios, as proxy for Agamemnon, was the kiss of death upon any rapprochement. There was no way that man, the greatest herald and liaison of the age, would ever serve as an agency for peace. He was all about rendering hard positions, about unattainable ultimata, about roiling everything to create the most ado about nothing.

But then had come a surprise, even to Ikarios, and very much contrary to any former opinions: Talthybios had gone and returned once again, very promptly, but this second time he reported Priam’s honest ignorance of the abduction’s aftermath. Priam’s son had erased his naval wake, then his overland traces, and by planting myriad misleading rumors about his whereabouts had confounded chase, even by the most peace-minded members of his own family within the House of Laomedon.

The well-counseled counter-ploys that Menelaos should next expect from a fully informed Priam were, first, his procrastination, then his protest against more heated demands, and finally some firm excuse for his imperious indifference. The last would feign expressions of affront, as cast against all Priam’s many prior demands for his sister Hesionë’s restoration, even her settled custody through reparations, which had been indifferently scorned by the abettors to her captor Telamon.

And there was that redress to perform before any repair of relations newly ruptured by the filch of Helen. Ikarios observed that whoever had not known beforehand about Hesionë, by now knew all about that earlier nasty abduction. The High King Priam’s own and only surviving sister had been debauched by Telamon, a great grandson of the great Aiakos. Hesionë had gone with the Salaminian willingly in order to keep him from slaying her youngest brother. Too eager to save her, he’d almost been chopped down during Telamon’s rapid retreat from and pillage of his homeland. During that rearguard action, moreover, Telamon had tumbled much of the northern and western walls of Citadel Pergamon by City Troy.

It was an unpardonable seizure, although dia-Hesionë had since borne to her captor chieftain a fine and fully ennobled son. No one ever denied that Teukros, then an accomplished archer of eighteen years, was born from a union of love. Telamon may once have been a lusty master to a slave brought to debasing circumstances, but he’d become ever since an adoring and generous consort to his beloved princess. He’d made her a queen consort elevated higher than his estranged, often pathetic wife, Eriboea of Attica — a bride by a peace treaty that had compelled an unwanted and subsequently useless alliance.

There were other ploys, each and collectively just, by which Priam might wear down the determination of Menelaos for Helen’s peaceful restoration. Foremost among them, Priam could use Menelaos’ own brother against any formative coalition. Within the three years just passed, most of the high Houses had appeased, in quick succession, Agamemnon’s reckless raid upon Sikyon against his first cousin Pelopia, and then his huge hand in the assassination of his kinsman Tantalos, the late High Chief of Elaea and head of the House of Broteas. Tantalos, father of three small girls by his wife Klytaimnestra — herself the oldest of Penelopë’s first cousins — had always been an excellent neighbor to the Highlanders and the Cephallenes. Everyone believed — with Odysseus fully credited as the successful sleuth — that Agamemnon had abetted the escape of the Epeian assassins.

Menelaos’ Helen, to her lasting credit, had single-mindedly prevented the betrothal of Agamemnon to the widowed wanassa Klytaimnestra, daughter of Tyndareos. Even after Helen was abducted, her persuasion kept both her brothers standing strong at the breach between that betrothal and its consummation.