of the locality and the direction, they landed by mistake in Teuthrania,
a part of Mysia near the river Caicus, and began to ravage the country
under the persuasion that it was the neighborhood of Troy. Telephus, the
king of the country, opposed and repelled them, but was ultimately
defeated and severely wounded by Achilles. The Greeks, now discovering
their mistake, retired; but their fleet was dispersed by a storm and
driven back to Greece. Achilles attacked and took Scyrus, and there
married Deidamia, the daughter of Lycomedes. Telephus, suffering from
his wounds, was directed by the oracle to come to Greece and present
himself to Achilles to be healed, by applying the scrapings of the spear
with which the wound had been given; thus restored, he became the guide
of the Greeks when they were prepared to renew their expedition.
The armament was again assembled at Aulis, but the goddess Artemis,
displeased with the boastful language of Agamemnon, prolonged the
duration of adverse winds, and the offending chief was compelled to
appease her by the well-known sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. They
then proceeded to Tenedos, from whence Odysseus and Menelaus were
dispatched as envoys to Troy, to redemand Helen and the stolen property.
In spite of the prudent counsels of Antenor, who received the two
Grecian chiefs with friendly hospitality, the Trojans rejected the
demand, and the attack was resolved upon. It was foredoomed by the gods
that the Greek who first landed should perish: Protesilaus was generous
enough to put himself upon this forlorn hope, and accordingly fell by
the hand of Hector.
Meanwhile, the Trojans had assembled a large body of allies from
various parts of Asia Minor and Thrace: Dardanians under Æneas, Lycians
under Sarpedon, Mysians, Carians, Mæonians, Alizonians, Phrygians,
Thracians, and Pæonians. But vain was the attempt to oppose the landing
of the Greeks: the Trojans were routed, and even the invulnerable
Cyncus, son of Poseidon, one of the great bulwarks of the defense, was
slain by Achilles. Having driven the Trojans within their walls,
Achilles attacked and stormed Lyrnessus, Pedasus, Lesbos, and other
places in the neighborhood, twelve towns on the sea-coast, and eleven in
the interior: he drove off the oxen of Æneas and pursued the hero
himself, who narrowly escaped with his life: he surprised and killed the
youthful Troilus, son of Priam, and captured several of the other sons,
whom he sold as prisoners into the islands of the Ægean. He acquired as
his captive the fair Briseis, while Chryseis was awarded to Agamemnon;
he was, moreover, eager to see the divine Helen, the prize and stimulus
of this memorable struggle; and Aphrodite and Thetis contrived to bring
about an interview between them.
At this period of the war the Grecian army was deprived of Palamedes,
one of its ablest chiefs. Odysseus had not forgiven the artifice by
which Palamedes had detected his simulated insanity, nor was he without
jealousy of a rival clever and cunning in a degree equal, if not
superior, to himself; one who had enriched the Greeks with the invention
of letters of dice for amusement of night-watches as well as with other
useful suggestions. According to the old Cyprian epic, Palamedes was
drowned while fishing by the hands of Odysseus and Diomedes. Neither in
the _Iliad_ nor the _Odyssey_ does the name of Palamedes occur; the
lofty position which Odysseus occupies in both those poems--noticed with
some degree of displeasure even by Pindar, who described Palamedes as
the wiser man of the two--is sufficient to explain the omission. But in
the more advanced period of the Greek mind, when intellectual
superiority came to acquire a higher place in the public esteem as
compared with military prowess, the character of Palamedes, combined
with his unhappy fate, rendered him one of the most interesting
personages in the Trojan legend. Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides each
consecrated to him a special tragedy; but the mode of his death as
described in the old epic was not suitable to Athenian ideas, and
accordingly he was represented as having been falsely accused of treason
by Odysseus, who caused gold to be buried in his tent, and persuaded
Agamemnon and the Grecian chiefs that Palamedes had received it from the
Trojans. He thus forfeited his life, a victim to the calumny of Odysseus
and to the delusion of the leading Greeks. The philosopher Socrates, in
the last speech made to his Athenian judges, alludes with solemnity and
fellow-feeling to the unjust condemnation of Palamedes as analogous to
that which he himself was about to suffer; and his companions seem to
have dwelt with satisfaction on the comparison. Palamedes passed for an
instance of the slanderous enmity and misfortune which so often wait
upon superior genius.
In these expeditions the Grecian army consumed nine years, during which
the subdued Trojans dared not give battle without their walls for fear
of Achilles. Ten years was the fixed epical duration of the siege of
Troy, just as five years was the duration of the siege of Camicus by the
Cretan armament which came to avenge the death of Minos: ten years of
preparation, ten years of siege, and ten years of wandering for Odysseus
were periods suited to the rough chronological dashes of the ancient
epic, and suggesting no doubts nor difficulties with the original
hearers. But it was otherwise when the same events came to be
contemplated by the historicizing Greeks, who could not be satisfied
without either finding or inventing satisfactory bonds of coherence
between the separate events. Thucydides tells us that the Greeks were
less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being, moreover,
very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant provisions:
hence they were compelled to disperse their army, and to employ a part
of it in cultivating the Chersonese--a part in marauding expeditions
over the neighborhood. Could the whole army have been employed against
Troy at once (he says), the siege would have been much more speedily and
easily concluded. If the great historian could permit himself thus to
amend the legend in so many points, we might have imagined that a
simpler course would have been to include the duration of the siege
among the list of poetical exaggerations and to affirm that the real
siege had lasted only one year instead of ten. But it seems that the ten
years' duration was so capital a feature in the ancient tale that no
critic ventured to meddle with it.
A period of comparative intermission, however, was now at hand for the
Trojans. The gods brought about the memorable fit of anger of Achilles,
under the influence of which he refused to put on his armor, and kept
his Myrmidons in camp. According to the _Cypria_ this was the behest of
Zeus, who had compassion on the Trojans: according to the _Iliad_,
Apollo was the originating cause, from anxiety to avenge the injury
which his priest Chryses had endured from Agamemnon. For a considerable
time, the combats of the Greeks against Troy were conducted without
their best warrior, and severe, indeed, was the humiliation which they
underwent in consequence. How the remaining Grecian chiefs vainly strove
to make amends for his absence--how Hector and the Trojans defeated and
drove them to their ships--how the actual blaze of the destroying flame,
applied by Hector to the ship of Protesilaus, roused up the anxious and
sympathizing Patroclus, and extorted a reluctant consent from Achilles
to allow his friend and his followers to go forth and avert the last
extremity of ruin--how Achilles, when Patroclus had been killed by
Hector, forgetting his anger in grief for the death of his friend,
reëntered the fight, drove the Trojans within their walls with immense
slaughter, and satiated his revenge both upon the living and the dead
Hector,--all these events have been chronicled, together with those
divine dispensations on which most of them are made to depend, in the
immortal verse of the _Iliad_.
Homer breaks off with the burial of Hector, whose body has just been
ransomed by the disconsolate Priam; while the lost poem of Arctinus,
entitled the _Æthiopis_, so far as we can judge from the argument still
remaining of it, handled only the subsequent events of the siege. The
poem of Quintus Smyrnæus, composed about the fourth century of the
Christian era, seems in its first books to coincide with _Æthiopis_, in
the subsequent books partly with the _Ilias Minor_ of Lesches.
The Trojans, dismayed by the death of Hector, were again animated with
hope by the appearance of the warlike and beautiful queen of the
Amazons, Penthesilia, daughter of Ares, hitherto invincible in the
field, who came to their assistance from Thrace at the head of a band of
her country-women. She again led the besieged without the walls to
encounter the Greeks in the open field; and under her auspices the
latter were at first driven back, until she, too, was slain by the
invincible arm of Achilles. The victor, on taking off the helmet of his
fair enemy as she lay on the ground, was profoundly affected and
captivated by her charms, for which he was scornfully taunted by
Thersites; exasperated by this rash insult, he killed Thersites on the
spot with a blow of his fist. A violent dispute among the Grecian chiefs
was the result, for Diomedes, the kinsman of Thersites, warmly resented
the proceeding; and Achilles was obliged to go to Lesbos, where he was
purified from the act of homicide by Odysseus.
Next arrived Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos, the most stately of living
men, with a powerful band of black Ethiopians, to the assistance of
Troy. Sallying forth against the Greeks, he made great havoc among them:
the brave and popular Antilochus perished by his hand, a victim to
filial devotion in defence of Nestor. Achilles at length attacked him,
and for a long time the combat was doubtful between them: the prowess of
Achilles and the supplication of Thetis with Zeus finally prevailed;
while Eos obtained for her vanquished son the consoling gift of
immortality. His tomb, however, was shown near the Propontis, within a
few miles of the mouth of the river Æsopus, and was visited annually by
the birds called Memnonides, who swept it and bedewed it with water from
the stream. So the traveller Pausanias was told, even in the second
century after the Christian era, by the Hellespontine Greeks.
But the fate of Achilles himself was now at hand. After routing the
Trojans and chasing them into the town, he was slain near the Scæan gate
by an arrow from the quiver of Paris, directed under the unerring
auspices of Apollo. The greatest efforts were made by the Trojans to
possess themselves of the body, which was, however, rescued and borne
off to the Grecian camp by the valor of Ajax and Odysseus. Bitter was
the grief of Thetis for the loss of her son; she came into the camp with
the Muses and the Nereids to mourn over him; and when a magnificent
funeral-pile had been prepared by the Greeks to burn him with every mark
of honor, she stole away the body and conveyed it to a renewed and
immortal life in the island of Leuce in the Euxine Sea. According to
some accounts he was there blest with the nuptials and company of Helen.
Thetis celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of her son, and
offered the unrivalled panoply which Hephæstus had forged and wrought
for him as a prize to the most distinguished warrior in the Grecian
army. Odysseus and Ajax became rivals for the distinction, when Athene,
together with some Trojan prisoners, who were asked from which of the
two their country had sustained greatest injury, decided in favor of the
former. The gallant Ajax lost his senses with grief and humiliation: in
a fit of frenzy he slew some sheep, mistaking them for the men who had
wronged him, and then fell upon his own sword.
Odysseus now learned from Helenus, son of Priam, whom he had captured in
an ambuscade, that Troy could not be taken unless both Philoctetes and
Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, could be prevailed upon to join the
besiegers. The former, having been stung in the foot by a serpent, and
becoming insupportable to the Greeks from the stench of his wound, had
been left at Lemnos in the commencement of the expedition, and had spent
ten years in misery on that desolate island; but he still possessed the
peerless bow and arrows of Heracles, which were said to be essential to
the capture of Troy. Diomedes fetched Philoctetes from Lemnos to the
Grecian camp, where he was healed by the skill of Machaon, and took an
active part against the Trojans--engaging in single combat with Paris,
and killing him with one of the Heracleian arrows. The Trojans were
allowed to carry away for burial the body of this prince, the fatal
cause of all their sufferings; but not until it had been mangled by the
hand of Menelaus. Odysseus went to the island of Scyros to invite
Neoptolemus to the army. The untried but impetuous youth, gladly obeying
the call, received from Odysseus his father's armor; while, on the other
hand, Eurypylus, son of Telephus, came from Mysia as auxiliary to the
Trojans and rendered to them valuable service turning the tide of
fortune for a time against the Greeks, and killing some of their
bravest chiefs, among whom were numbered Peneleos, and the unrivalled
leech Machaon. The exploits of Neoptolemus were numerous, worthy of the
glory of his race and the renown of his father. He encountered and slew
Eurypylus, together with numbers of the Mysian warriors: he routed the
Trojans and drove them within their walls, from whence they never again
emerged to give battle: and he was not less distinguished for good sense
and persuasive diction than for forward energy in the field.
Troy, however, was still impregnable so long as the Palladium, a statue
given by Zeus himself to Dardanus, remained in the citadel; and great
care had been taken by the Trojans not only to conceal this valuable
present, but to construct other statues so like it as to mislead any
intruding robber. Nevertheless, the enterprising Odysseus, having
disguised his person with miserable clothing and self-inflicted
injuries, found means to penetrate into the city and to convey the
Palladium by stealth away. Helen alone recognized him; but she was now
anxious to return to Greece, and even assisted Odysseus in concerting
means for the capture of the town.
To accomplish this object, one final stratagem was resorted to. By the
hands of Epeius of Panopeus, and at the suggestion of Athene, a
capacious hollow wooden horse was constructed, capable of containing one
hundred men. In the inside of this horse the elite of the Grecian
heroes, Neoptolemus, Odysseus, Menelaus, and others, concealed
themselves while the entire Grecian army sailed away to Tenedos, burning
their tents and pretending to have abandoned the siege. The Trojans,
overjoyed to find themselves free, issued from the city and contemplated
with astonishment the fabric which their enemies had left behind. They
long doubted what should be done with it; and the anxious heroes from
within heard the surrounding consultations, as well as the voice of
Helen when she pronounced their names and counterfeited the accents of
their wives. Many of the Trojans were anxious to dedicate it to the gods
in the city as a token of gratitude for their deliverance; but the more
cautious spirits inculcated distrust of an enemy's legacy. Laocoon, the
priest of Poseidon, manifested his aversion by striking the side of the
horse with his spear.
The sound revealed that the horse was hollow, but the Trojans heeded
not this warning of possible fraud. The unfortunate Laocoon, a victim to
his own sagacity and patriotism, miserably perished before the eyes of
his countrymen, together with one of his sons: two serpents being sent
expressly by the gods out of the sea to destroy him. By this terrific
spectacle, together with the perfidious counsels of Simon--a traitor
whom the Greeks had left behind for the special purpose of giving false
information--the Trojans were induced to make a breach in their own
walls, and to drag the fatal fabric with triumph and exultation into
their city.
The destruction of Troy, according to the decree of the gods, was now
irrevocably sealed. While the Trojans indulged in a night of riotous
festivity, Simon kindled the fire-signal to the Greeks at Tenedos,
loosening the bolts of the wooden horse, from out of which the enclosed
heroes descended. The city, assailed both from within and from without,
was thoroughly sacked and destroyed, with the slaughter or captivity of
the larger portion of its heroes as well as its people. The venerable
Priam perished by the hand of Neoptolemus, having in vain sought shelter
at the domestic altar of Zeus Herceius. But his son Deiphobus, who since
the death of Paris had become the husband of Helen, defended his house
desperately against Odysseus and Menelaus, and sold his life dearly.
After he was slain, his body was fearfully mutilated by the latter.
Thus was Troy utterly destroyed--the city, the altars and temples, and
the population. Æneas and Antenor were permitted to escape, with their
families, having been always more favorably regarded by the Greeks than
the remaining Trojans. According to one version of the story they had
betrayed the city to the Greeks: a panther's skin had been hung over the
door of Antenor's house as a signal for the victorious besiegers to
spare it in general plunder. In the distribution of the principal
captives, Astyanax, the infant son of Hector, was cast from the top of
the wall and killed by Odysseus or Neoptolemus: Polyxena, the daughter
of Priam, was immolated on the tomb of Achilles, in compliance with a
requisition made by the shade of the deceased hero to his countrymen;
while her sister Cassandra was presented as a prize to Agamemnon. She
had sought sanctuary at the altar of Athene, where Ajax, the son of
Oileus, making a guilty attempt to seize her, had drawn both upon
himself and upon the army the serious wrath of the goddess, insomuch
that the Greeks could hardly be restrained from stoning him to death.
Andromache and Helenus were both given to Neoptolemus, who, according to
the _Ilias Minor_, carried away also Æneas as his captive.
Helen gladly resumed her union with Menelaus; she accompanied him back
to Sparta, and lived with him there many years in comfort and dignity,
passing afterward to a happy immortality in the Elysian fields. She was
worshipped as a goddess, with her brothers, the Dioscuri, and her
husband, having her temple, statue, and altar at Therapnæ and elsewhere.
Various examples of her miraculous intervention were cited among the
Greeks. The lyric poet Stesichorus had ventured to denounce her,
conjointly with her sister Clytemnestra, in a tone of rude and
plain-spoken severity, resembling that of Euripides and Lycophron
afterward, but strikingly opposite to the delicacy and respect with
which she is always handled by Homer, who never admits reproaches
against her except from her own lips. He was smitten with blindness, and
made sensible of his impiety; but, having repented and composed a
special poem formally retracting the calumny, was permitted to recover
his sight. In his poem of recantation (the famous _Palinode_ now
unfortunately lost) he pointedly contradicted the Homeric narrative,
affirming that Helen had never been at Troy at all, and that the Trojans
had carried thither nothing but her image or _eidolon_. It is, probably,
to the excited religious feelings of Stesichorus that we owe the first
idea of this glaring deviation from the old legend, which could never
have been recommended by any considerations of poetical interest.
Other versions were afterward started, forming a sort of compromise
between Homer and Stesichorus, admitting that Helen had never really
been at Troy, without altogether denying her elopement. Such is the
story of her having been detained in Egypt during the whole term of the
siege. Paris, on his departure from Sparta, had been driven thither by
storms, and the Egyptian king Proteus, hearing of the grievous wrong
which he had committed toward Menelaus, had sent him away from the
country with severe menaces, detaining Helen until her lawful husband
should come to seek her. When the Greeks reclaimed Helen from Troy, the
Trojans assured them solemnly that she neither was nor ever had been in
the town; but the Greeks, treating this allegation as fraudulent,
prosecuted the siege until their ultimate success confirmed the
correctness of the statement. Menelaus did not recover Helen until, on
his return from Troy, he visited Egypt. Such was the story told by the
Egyptian priests to Herodotus, and it appeared satisfactory to his
historicizing mind. "For if Helen had really been at Troy," he argues,
"she would certainly have been given up, even had she been mistress of
Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and
all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and
irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her: their
misfortune was that, while they did not possess and therefore could not
restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that
such was the fact." Assuming the historical character of the war of
Troy, the remark of Herodotus admits of no reply; nor can we greatly
wonder that he acquiesced in the tale of Helen's Egyptian detention, as
a substitute for the "incredible insanity" which the genuine legend
imputes to Priam and the Trojans. Pausanias, upon the same ground and by
the same mode of reasoning, pronounced that the Trojan horse must have
been, in point of fact, a battering-engine, because to admit the literal
narrative would be to impute utter childishness to the defenders of the
city. And Mr. Payne Knight rejects Helen altogether as the real cause of
the Trojan war, though she may have been the pretext of it; for he
thinks that neither the Greeks nor the Trojans could have been so mad
and silly as to endure calamities of such magnitude "for one little
woman." Mr. Knight suggests various political causes as substitutes;
these might deserve consideration, either if any evidence could be
produced to countenance them, or if the subject on which they are
brought to bear could be shown to belong to the domain of history.
The return of the Grecian chiefs from Troy furnished matter to the
ancient epic hardly less copious than the siege itself, and the more
susceptible of indefinite diversity, inasmuch as those who had before
acted in concert were now dispersed and isolated. Moreover, the stormy
voyages and compulsory wanderings of the heroes exactly fell in with the
common aspirations after an heroic founder, and enabled even the most
remote Hellenic settlers to connect the origin of their town with this
prominent event of their ante-historical and semi-divine world. And an
absence of ten years afforded room for the supposition of many domestic
changes in their native abode, and many family misfortunes and misdeeds
during the interval. One of these historic "Returns," that of Odysseus,
has been immortalized by the verse of Homer. The hero, after a series of
long protracted suffering and expatriation inflicted on him by the anger
of Poseidon, at last reaches his native island, but finds his wife
beset, his youthful son insulted, and his substance plundered by a troop
of insolent suitors; he is forced to appear as a wretched beggar, and to
endure in his own person their scornful treatment; but finally, by the
interference of Athene coming in aid of his own courage and stratagem,
he is enabled to overwhelm his enemies, to resume his family position,
and to recover his property. The return of several other Grecian chiefs
was the subject of an epic poem by Hagias which is now lost, but of
which a brief abstract or argument still remains: there were in
antiquity various other poems of similar title and analogous matter.