A BROKEN HORSE: A Story of Helen's Suitors and the Trojan War

 UPDATE: A BROKEN HORSE is no longer available.

 

Episode ONE of my serialized podcast retelling of A BROKEN HORSE is now available to listen to for FREE--and if you like what you hear, there are SIX MORE episodes over on patreon you can binge for as little as a dollar a month! 

Go grab that Bronze Age Mythic Retelling goodness!

This audio format of A BROKEN HORSE would not have been possible without the help of Libbie Hawker/Grant who acted as my producer, piecing together the episodes for me after I recorded them chapter by chapter! 

As hero after hero falls before the walls of Troy, Achaean and Trojan alike, two reluctant warriors--neither remembered as a hero--must sacrifice themselves for the sake of the people they love. 

Prince Paris has all the fame he ever wanted, anointed by the gods, honored as a youth for both his bravery and judgment, and gifted the most beautiful woman in the world by Aphrodite. If his theft of Helen results in a war, surely he is not meant to stop it. Let all the world burn to ash; so long as Paris has Helen, he is content to leave the destinies of kings and nations in the gods’ hands. But to keep Helen, they must survive. Paris must survive.

Even as a grandson of Zeus, Polypoetes is a king of little consequence—his kingdom beyond the long-armed reach of Mycenae in ordinary times, yet forced still by oath and duty into a war he doesn’t want to fight. Desperate to save his lover Leonteus and protect the rest of his people, left behind in Thessaly, Polypoetes struggles to keep his forces out of harm’s way, even if it means making himself an enemy of Achilles.

While A BROKEN HORSE can be enjoyed as a standalone work, if you haven't read or listened to my other mythic retellings, don't miss HELEN OF SPARTA and BY HELEN'S HAND, the story of Helen's life BEFORE she was stolen away to Troy!

Support Amalia and get early access to more episodes of A BROKEN HORSE at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/Amaliad⁠

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On Writing Women in the Bronze Age

I am not going to try to tell you that the Bronze Age Aegean was some kind of egalitarian utopia. Far from it! We can see that men had significant authority in the names that were recorded, noting who was transacting with the king in those Linear B tablets that provide us with the bulk of contextual archeological knowledge of the period in which I've grounded my stories. And we see it too, reflected again in the myths.

But what I am going to tell you is that even in a society where men have significant authority, that doesn't mean that women have no rights at all over their own lives, no room to exist in public, no role of importance within their own culture. What I am going to tell you is that just because men had documented authority, economically, it does not mean that women did not have authority of their own inside their palaces, their homes, and their communities, still.

What I am going to tell you is that we are not constrained by the historical record to imagine, for those women of the Aegean Bronze Age, a life constrained by the most absolute and extreme interpretation of patriarchy.

Even in later Greece (and the Aegean on the whole), where the lives of women are considerably better documented (though still, we know much more about the lives of men), we see a wide variety of ways of living inside that Patriarchal framework. Is it not possible, even PROBABLE, that there was a wide variety of ways that women lived in the Aegean Bronze Age, too? That not all palace-centers, not all kingdoms, had the same rules? 

For me, what makes the Aegean Bronze Age so fascinating and so attractive as a background to retelling these myths (besides the fact that it makes the most sense to set them in that period, using the Trojan War as a fixed point in history), is that there is so much ROOM to imagine a world where women took part in their own lives and stories.

When you read the Lion of Troezen or Tamer of Horses, Ariadne and the Beast or Helen of Sparta, and encounter the mythic figures of Aethra and Hippodamia and Antiope, Helen and Ariadne, women whose names have endured for literal millennia, does it not make more sense that the reason they were remembered (by so many, many, many men in order to reach us now in the present) might have been, in part, because they were exceptional?

For myself, I would rather err on the side of giving them too much power rather than too little or none. I would rather believe that exceptional women found ways to exercise their power, rather than be stifled and hidden away in a dark, interior room, only allowed out in answer to their father or their husband's summons, meant neither to be seen OR heard. 

There are such tantalizing glimpses of bigger lives inside their own myths! Aethra advising her son, King Theseus of Athens, who listens to and acknowledges her wisdom. Helen standing openly upon the walls of Troy, accepted by Priam as an authority on the Achaean Kings, battling below, and then later welcoming guests into her Spartan palace, presiding over them as the consummate hostess, having clearly taken charge of her husband and her home. Hippodamia, who was said to be kin to the Centaurs, an entirely different and decidedly UN-Greek society; Antiope, an Amazon queen--an even more foreign bride. And Ariadne. Ariadne who was so exceptional, so rare a woman, she was brought to Olympus and made a consort-wife to a god!

These were not meek women, eyes kept downcast, unable to exert any power or authority over their peoples or their lives. These mythic figures are opportunities to see how the women inside a patriarchal society might have MADE space for themselves, through sheer force of personality and will, through the power granted to them by birth or marriage, by the blessings of the very gods. Just like Medea or Circe, like the murderous Clytemnestra, just as women in history, like Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, Zenobia of Palmyra and Empress Aelia Pulcheria of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Queens Victoria and Elizabeth of England did much, much, much later too.

When opportunities present themselves, even inside a strict patriarchy, people without power can and do find ways to claim it, particularly when they're born on its periphery or adjacent to the structure which grants it. And people have always been people, we know that. So there is no reason at all to think that these women, these mythic figures whose stories we love to tell and retell, couldn't have done so, too.

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Polypoetes and the Trojan War

“You ask me why, if she did not want this war, she has not given herself up to Menelaus since,” Polypoetes said, “but perhaps the question you should ask instead is why has Menelaus not given up Helen? Why, knowing where it might lead, did he insist upon marrying her to begin with? When she had made it clear she did not want him or the future that would follow. When she went so far as to arrange her own abduction, barely more than a child at the time, to escape his claim upon her body, her beauty, her life? This war was not caused by Helen, even if she escaped Sparta with Paris of her own free will—which Helen’s own brothers denied. It was caused by Menelaus, when he would not accept her refusal. Not as a girl, or as a woman, or as his wife. He could have ended this war long before it ever started and saved us all so much pain and suffering.” 

--A Broken Horse

You all know I swore I would never write the Trojan War. I was sure I had nothing new to say and didn't want to retread the same ground that had been overtrod already before me. But then, some time after I finished writing By Helen's Hand, I remembered Polypoetes.

Alexandre Jacovleff's Trojan Horse, via Wiki Commons

Who is Polypoetes?

I've talked about him before, I'm sure. A lesser king. Unremarkable by most accounts. There is no real mythology, no real fame attached to his name beyond being named as one of Helen's suitors. We know he earned a prize at Patroclus's funeral games. He is explicitly named as one of the men inside the Trojan Horse, though we don't know what he did inside it or after he slithered out of it. And he's the only named son of Pirithous, who together with Leonteus (a grandson of Caeneus, who we also talked about recently) led their region and the Lapith people in the fighting at Troy. (There were quite a few ships of them, if I recall correctly, too.)

He is a Background King who inexplicably takes a front row seat in the clutch moment of the Trojan War, where he continues to be treated as a Background Character still.

Fam, it's weird. And weird, to me, offers opportunity.

One of the things that strikes me about Trojan War retellings on the whole is how they focus themselves so entirely on the same handful of players. The great heroes who were all about fame and glory and embodied what we consider to be the prevailing cultural drives and sentiments of the time. Might makes right. Conquer and enslave! Get that Fame and Glory! 

Even the retellings that try to offer "a new perspective" are often just showing us these same characters and stale motivations through the eyes of the women around these heroes, sometimes romanticized, sometimes in order to reveal "the reality of abuse" they suffered inside a war camp, or the ugliness of war (which the Iliad itself doesn't shy from, either.) Often, the repeated stampedes of the rest of the men to their boats when Agamemnon tests them, in the Iliad, are entirely scrubbed out of the narrative. But those moments offer a key perspective: Agamemnon and Menelaus and the rest of the hero-kings and -princes we all know and love were leading a DEEPLY UNPOPULAR war.

And there were A LOT OF PEOPLE in that camp who were desperate to go home, with or without the sack of Troy.

There is no reason to think a Background King could not have been one of them.

And now we have a new story and untrod ground. We have something DIFFERENT.

"But Amalia," I hear you say, "What about glory and fame?! Those were driving forces!!"

WHY does EVERY HERO get a CHOICE, if a long life and a death of old age at home surrounded by your family is not some kind of temptation still? If they all, ALWAYS, choose glory and fame then the choice means nothing. We have to allow for the fact that there were some people in this society who chose OTHERWISE. It's right there in the construction of the myths. 

Part of what makes those particular heroes exceptional is that they chose glory--when other people MIGHT NOT.

It isn't even going against the grain. It's not modern to look at what is presented as options inside the myths themselves and connect the dots, to take the OTHER path presented. Odysseus never wanted to go to war, but we don't act like that's a break with history. If fame and glory were all that mattered, all that drove the people of this culture EVER, then Odysseus would not have playacted his own madness in order to get out from under the oath he designed.

Do you see what I mean, now, when I say: we are making choices TODAY to create in these myths something more monstrous, more violent, more cruel when we discard the variations that present something other? 

Dozens, maybe hundreds of people have retold this story. But if they keep leaving out the part where PEOPLE REALLY DID NOT WANT TO BE THERE, half of it, and all the nuance, is lost. To suggest that everyone in the past was driven by a bloodthirsty desire for fame and glory at any cost is a profound disservice to history and our ancestors. Perhaps even more so than by allowing people inside problematic power dynamics to fall in love (as attested inside the myths themselves.)

I think we all know why as a society we focus on a mythic hero falling in love as the bigger problem, though. Why that's the thing we need to expunge from the record, above all, by pushing to make sure those relationships are more "realistically" portrayed primarily as violence and assault, in our so modern and enlightened age. We are INVESTED in the idea that these heroes never looked at women as anything but objects, never saw value in them as people beyond the child they might provide. And we've been invested in that idea for a VERY long time.

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Bronze Age Greece Hist Fic Reading Order

It occurred to me this past weekend that you all might benefit from a reading order reference for the books all set in the shared world of HELEN OF SPARTA, in Bronze Age Greece, so I'm here to make it happen today!

These books, so far, except for SON OF ZEUS, all take place between the conception of Theseus and Odysseus's return home to Ithaca. That... probably will change, because I'm working on a Heracles book as we speak, and I have a larger Aethra project in the works as well! Something to look forward to, I suppose, and of course I will update this list when/if those titles are completed and released.

As things stand right now, if you'd like to read these works in chronological order inside the Bronze Age, here's where to start:

1) The Lion of Troezen (Novelette--launching on Patreon, January 2023) 

More than 40 years before Helen of Sparta, this novelette retells the myth of Theseus's conception, focusing on Aethra's extremely intimate relationship with Poseidon, and how that relationship alters the course of her life.

 

2) Ariadne and the Beast: A Short Story 

A little more than 25 years before Helen of Sparta. I guesstimate Theseus is in his late teens during the events of this story!

 

3) Tamer of Horses

~20 years before Helen of Sparta. Theseus and Pirithous are both kings of their respective domains, but still learning what that means.

 

4) Helen of Sparta

Theseus and Pirithous are both in their 40s and Heracles is older, still. 

 

5) By Helen's Hand 

Picks up right where Helen of Sparta leaves off. Pirithous's son by Hippodamia, Polypoetes, is of age to take over for his father as king of the Lapiths.

 

5a) A Broken Horse 

This novel is written but not yet published--I'm looking for an agent!--and follows both Paris and Polypoetes as they navigate the Trojan War.

 

6) The Siren's Song/A Sea of Sorrow

Takes place after the close of the Trojan War, as a retelling of The Odyssey. A Sea of Sorrow is in continuity with A Song of War, History 360's retelling of The Iliad, but my revised author's cut edition of The Siren's Song novella does exist within the same world as Helen of Sparta.

 

7) Son of Zeus

~3000 years or so after Helen of Sparta, this novel takes place in our modern world, and Pirithous is still in his 40s after being trapped in the chair of forgetfulness for millennia.

 All these titles, with the exception of Helen of Sparta and By Helen's Hand, were written to stand alone. You don't need to have read Tamer of Horses to enjoy Son of Zeus (I wrote Son of Zeus immediately after I finished writing Helen of Sparta, actually, before I had even written Tamer of Horses or By Helen's Hand.) And you don't need to read Ariadne to enjoy Helen of Sparta, though Theseus appears in both. 

You probably DO want to have read Helen of Sparta before you pick up By Helen's Hand, though, as they were written as a duology of Helen's life leading up to the Trojan War. And if you did happen to read Tamer of Horses before or after Helen of Sparta, it might enrich the experience of both books! If I've done my job right, you shouldn't need to have read either of Helen's books before A Broken Horse, either, when/if that makes it out into the wider world. Do I think you'll enjoy it more if you have? Yeah, of course. And even more again if you've read Tamer of Horses as well, since that's the story of Polypoetes's parents. But it shouldn't be a necessity. 

Consider them all just--companion novels, that allow you to travel a little deeper into the world and the stories of the characters you've met, either in reading Helen of Sparta, or in your own exploration of the myths themselves.

Tamer of Horses, Son of Zeus, and Ariadne and the Beast are all available in wide release through the digital retailer of your choice. Tamer of Horses and Son of Zeus are also both available in paperback for your physical reading pleasure--you should be able to order them from pretty much anywhere. (Here's a bookshop.org link to prove it! Alas, the Son of Zeus hardcover is Amazon Exclusive.) 

Ah! and before you go, The Siren's Song is going wide this week! Look for it in your library apps and available from non-amazon vendors at this link very soon!!!

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The Judgment of Paris and Imposition by the Gods

 After I published last night's blog post about consent as it relates to rape, and the divine, I started thinking about Paris and his Judgment. When those three goddesses appeared before him and told him it was his job to pick one--it wasn't like he could refuse the task. Not without risking offending them, and there was no way that FULFILLING the task didn't risk offense of at least two of them, too. It was an entirely no-win situation for him.

And he had no real choice. He had to do as the gods asked. He couldn't say no without endangering himself. And not just because it might offend the three goddesses, but since ZEUS had commanded it, Paris risked offending HIM, too.

Angelica Kauffman's The Judgment of Paris via Wiki Commons

Then again, if we're to believe that Zeus basically organized and orchestrated the entirety of the events that would lead to the Trojan War (as some sources allege), then Zeus had to have known exactly what he was doing, sending those goddesses to Paris to begin with--including the outcome of Paris's choice.

Paris was set-up to be the fall-guy for the gods.

All that disdain with which his character is treated basically plays right into their hands. Like a magician's flash of distraction, while he springs the trapdoor in a disappearing act. We have spent three thousand years blaming the victims of Zeus's machinations--between Paris, Helen, and Achilles (the only person who seemed to wake up and recognize the injustice of the whole situation, and we act like he's a sulky teenager and scorn him.)

The idea of Fate and everything it implies is totally WILD (and so is the idea of a omniscient, omnipotent power, because one can't really exist without the other.) And I'll grant you, it's hard to wrap our minds around it all as mortals living a finite existence. Personal responsibility for one's actions is also a thing that matters, a means by which we hold members of the community accountable in the present--In The Present.

But when we're engaging with these myths, we aren't only engaging with the present. We're engaging, also, with the past. And a past that played by different rules than we do, now, in relation to the divine and the gods, the tension between the mortal and the immortal. Acknowledging that the mortals involved LACKED a certain amount of choice, recognizing their limitations, and the role and power of the gods over their lives seems critical to me.

And this is part of why I dislike retellings that excise the gods from the story. Because removing them unravels the entire tapestry when peoples lives and fortunes are dependent upon their engagement and interference.

Without the gods, Paris is a coward who fled the field when facing off against Menelaus in a challenge he couldn't win.

With the gods, knowing he isn't likely to win the challenge, Paris faces Menelaus anyway, and it's ONLY because Aphrodite whisks him from the field that he lives.

(Sidenote: when Hector breaks and runs from Achilles, we give him a pass and treat him still as a hero, but not Paris, who is physically stolen from the field--Paris just gets trashed as a worthless coward. Interesting to consider which characters we are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to and which characters we are inclined to assassinate.)

And all of this brings me back to the question at the heart of my last post:
If you are chosen by a god for ANY reason, can you ever really say no?

Paris sure couldn't.

In the PAST, the periods from which these myths come to us, the answer seems clear.

But what should that mean for the stories we're REtelling in the present?

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Paris, Polypoetes, and the Trojan War I Swore I'd Never Write

Urteil des Paris By Eduard Lebiedzki (1862-1915) (Dorotheum) [PD], via Wikimedia Commons

I should have known better than to say I would never write the Trojan War. I knew I had no intention of doing it as part of Helen's story, for sure, and maybe I should have qualified my statement then--but I genuinely didn't think that five years later I'd be back in this place, desperate to continue Paris's story. Paris of all people!

And yet, here I am.

Since 2018 is the year that I give my authorself a break, and try to remember to write for the love of writing first and foremost, I started writing it. And once I started writing it, I realized something else: It wasn't only Paris's story I wanted to tell. There was Pirithous's son, Polypoetes, too, who was begging for more.

And really, what's the Trojan War without the Greeks? What's the point of retelling the story unless you can see a little bit behind the lines on both sides? The Trojan War has been done and redone a thousand times, but it was always about Achilles and Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. It was always Hector and Helen and Paris as a convenient scapegoat and coward.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe, this would be enough to set my retelling apart. If I showed the war through the eyes of a less invested hero on the Greek side. If I let Paris be the hero that I knew in my heart he could be. A flawed hero, a failure in the end, but not the coward we've all painted him as again and again--all flash and no substance.

In August's Newsletter I included a little bit of a sneak peek--I've only got six more chapters or so to go, and in a huge change of pace for my authorself, I even have them outlined. But I'm still not done, and honestly? Because it's still 2018, I'm not putting any pressure on myself to finish it yet. (Which leaves you plenty of time to catch up by reading HELEN OF SPARTA and BY HELEN'S HAND before I do!)

Even so, I'm excited. So excited, that I wanted to include another brief peek behind the curtain for you all, here!

“You wish me to speak with them?” Her hands knotted into the fabric of her overskirt, her eyes casting about the room, avoiding his own. “With Menelaus among them?”

“Perhaps,” Paris said, taking her hands in his and guiding her to a seat upon the bed’s edge, hoping to settle her. Never before had he ever seen her so unnerved. Not since that first day after she had returned to him in Egypt. “But Helen, you will not face them alone. Hector and I will stand beside you, and Priam and Hecuba as well. You need not fear them. They cannot touch you while you dwell behind Troy’s walls as my wife.”

She swallowed hard, twisting her fingers through his and staring out at the city beyond the balcony. What he would have given to know her thoughts—but though they shared much, Helen still kept her own counsel more often than he liked. Whatever else had changed between them when she had given herself up, at last, that much had stayed the same.

“I do not see what good it will do,” she murmured. “To parade me before them again, to tease them with what they will not have—what they would have never kept. By leaving Menelaus, have I not left them all? Chosen a foreign prince over everything they offered.”

He squeezed her hands. “But you did not choose, not truly. The gods chose for us. Zeus and Aphrodite bound our fates together, our lives and our hearts. In truth, were we not both powerless? How can any man expect you to defy the gods? To defy your own father?”

She pressed her lips together, her gaze returning to the city, to the horizon beyond it. As if, if she only looked hard enough, she could see the ships themselves and the men upon them. And then she tipped her head, just slightly, and he knew she had made her decision.

“When?” she asked.

“A sevenday, perhaps. No more than a fortnight, to be sure.” He grimaced. “There are few villages left for them to plunder on their way here.”

Her eyes sharpened, her gaze finding his and the corners of her mouth turning down. “Hector sent out messengers, did he not? To warn them.”

“Yes,” he assured her, wishing he had never mentioned it at all. She hated it, he knew. Every bit of blood spilled, every life taken in her name. She tried to hide it, but it was not hard to see if you knew how to look. And ever since Egypt, her true face had been open to him, the queen’s mask torn away. She had become guileless in a way she had never been in Sparta, and that, beyond anything she had said or done, had convinced him of her love. Persuaded him that he had finally won her. “Our swiftest ships and our fastest horses, and we have taken in all the men, women, and children who have heeded our warning. To the good, truly, for it will mean more men to swell our ranks as soldiers when we must fight. A greater show of force. The nearer the Achaean ships get to Troy, the fewer innocents they will find to slaughter. We are doing everything we can, I promise you.”

She nodded, but he knew it was not enough. The way worried lines creased her forehead, and her pretty mouth still curved down instead of up. The way her gaze had slipped from his again, even if she had not turned away.

“Helen,” he said softly, tipping her face up to his to catch her eyes, willing her to hear him. “If the gods are determined upon this course—there is nothing you or I can do to stop it. You must remember that. You must remember that none of this blood is on your hands or mine. We have only done as the gods wished us to do, as they demanded in truth, and there is no turning back now.”

If you're interested in more of my musings on Paris's character while you wait for me to finish writing this hopefully-will-stay-novella-length project, check out my post on Paris and Oenone, and maybe The Sins of Paris, as well. And of course, there's plenty of Paris to be found in BY HELEN'S HAND, too!

And if you'd like a little bit more of a taste of this book, I have a couple additional scenes on Patreon, which you can read for as little as a dollar a month!

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