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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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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Mycenaean and Homeric Burial Practices

Dying Centaur
(photo by me!)

I've been doing a LOT of reading regarding funerary and burial practices of Mycenaean Greeks, and particularly those living in Bronze Age Thessaly, and I have learned a great many things -- the most important being, while Homer makes much of the funeral pyre and cremation of the dead, there is little to no evidence of cremation taking place in Mainland Greece during the period (LH IIIB ish) of the Trojan War.

There's evidence for it elsewhere, sure. Other cultures absolutely honored their dead with cremation via the funeral pyre. But in Mycenaean Greece? Cremation doesn't seem to show up until the Early Iron Age, and even then, it's not at all widespread. But as someone writing historical fiction built off the mythic traditions and heroes of Homer -- this presents a bit of a quandary to me, as the author.

Historically speaking, the inhumation of the dead into tombs (of varying size and style) or simple graves is more correct. But is the reader more familiar with the funeral pyre? Will they be expecting it? And if I don't make use of it, how do I reconcile or explain the difference between the practices of these heroes before they set out to war, and their sudden alteration while afield?

Ultimately, while the difference between cremation and inhumation APPEARS to be large, it seems that the burial and funerary practices of Mycenaean Greeks are not entirely different from what occurs within the pages of the Iliad. In fact, according to Mylonas (who, I will grant you, was doing his research in the 40s -- which was a very long time ago in terms of Archaeological practices, technology, and the vast amount of new information available to us today), it seems that apart from the actual disposal of the body itself, the practices and rites surrounding that ultimate disposal are VERY much the same, and the Homeric accounts of things like gifts of jars of oil and honey set around the bier for the dead, and even the funeral games and the feasting, seem to be holdovers from the earlier tradition of inhumation, when the shade might have lingered during the much longer process of decomposition of the flesh, and could appreciate the supplies and honors bestowed upon his corpse.

But ultimately, the novel I'm revising is a book in which no one passes peacefully into death. The Centauromachy is a violent slaughter, and the bodies certainly would have piled up. And in my reading and research I have yet to find a reference to any kind of mass burial due to war -- no large numbers of people all entombed together. And I wonder if that might have made a difference in how the bodies of the dead were honored or addressed.

I haven't decided yet how I'll work through this particular challenge -- if Homer or the Archaeological record will rule in this particular novel. But it's a fascinating problem, all the same! And I have to admit, I kind of love the learning along the way.

Poseidon is Classier than Zeus (Poseidon and Tyro)

Neptune with a Hippocamp
Yes it is crooked. I suck at photography.

So here's the thing. I kind of like Poseidon. There's something about him that captures my heart in spite of the fact that he shares MANY of Zeus's flaws -- particularly in the way he uses women to slake his lust. It's possible my appreciate for Poseidon might just be the reflected glory of my absolute adoration of Theseus, his son, but then there's also the story of his affair with Tyro, which could kind of almost be considered romantic maybe if one overlooks the fact that it's all done under false pretenses.

According to Apollodorus (1.9.8):

Now Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus and Alcidice, was brought up by Cretheus, brother of Salmoneus, and conceived a passion for the river Enipeus, and often would she hie to its running waters and utter her plaint to them. But Poseidon in the likeness of Enipeus lay with her, and she secretly gave birth to twin sons, whom she exposed.

But Homer! Oh, the way Homer tells this story, in the Odyssey makes me really appreciate Poseidon's class:

She [Tyro] fell in love with the river Enipeus who is much the most beautiful river in the whole world. Once when she was taking a walk by his side as usual, Neptune, disguised as her lover, lay with her at the mouth of the river, and a huge blue wave arched itself like a mountain over them to hide both woman and god, whereon he loosed her virgin girdle and laid her in a deep slumber. When the god had accomplished the deed of love, he took her hand in his own and said, 'Tyro, rejoice in all good will; the embraces of the gods are not fruitless, and you will have fine twins about this time twelve months. Take great care of them. I am Neptune, so now go home, but hold your tongue and do not tell any one.'

The problem with all of this, of course, is that it's still incredibly deceitful. But I suppose if she thought she was making love with the River (or did he put her to sleep and then make love to her? I'm going to hope that wasn't the situation) then at least she must have rejoiced in her unrequited love being fulfilled at last, maybe. Until Poseidon revealed himself, anyway. But even then. The way this particular translation presents it feels very... Old Testament Word of God to Mary regarding Jesus. And of course, if we're to believe Apollodorus, it seems that Tyro wastes no time in discarding the fruits of that union, but that could very well have been because of other pressures -- her father, perhaps, who wanted to see her married, and feared anyone worth anything as a match would refuse if she came with twin bastard sons of Poseidon. And let's face it, that was bound to be a consideration. Unlike the Aegeus/Poseidon/Aethra business which resulted in Theseus, these twins weren't coming with a kingdom for their future inheritance. They were just coming.

But I've got to admit that I do love the image of the giant blue wave arching itself over the two of them as a little love shack. And, wonder of wonders, aside from being knocked up, Tyro didn't get smote by any other gods or goddesses for the trouble Poseidon brought her! (In this instance, I think Tyro won the lottery--Poseidon's consort/wife Amphitrite did not seem NEARLY as interested in taking revenge on the women he seduced.) She just went on to be married to Cretheus -- father of Aeson, and as a result, grandfather of that Jason.

The twins she bore Poseidon were Pelias and Neleus. As you might imagine, they survived their exposure to grow up and cause trouble in the usual heroic style. Learning their true heritage and killing some people while earning the enmity of the gods. Pelias in particular seemed to get on Hera's bad side, which isn't typically the BEST idea.

According to Apollodorus, Neleus founded Pylos, and was the father of Nestor, a hero/wise-old-king from the Iliad.*  At the opposite end of Greece, Pelias wound up in Thessaly where he became King of Iolcus and eventually sent Jason (his half-brother, Aeson's son) on his famous quest for the Golden Fleece with the Argonauts.

Like I said. Trouble in the usual heroic style.


*Pretty sure this means that Nestor is Theseus's nephew, since Theseus would have been a half-brother of  Neleus. Which is pretty fascinating. All these guys are related like weirdy/awesome, and I really find it strange that it doesn't get pointed out more in our modern retellings. I get that the Greeks might not have cared, or even considered it a true relation, but for a modern audience, it might be a useful framing.

Crooked and non-crooked photographs belong to me.

The Iliad as Historical Record

The Trojan War is a fascinating event, at once both myth and understood as historical in nature. To the Greeks, there was no question of the fact that it had occurred-- even Thucydides accepts it as fact. They believed it had happened. Perhaps not to the scale of the poem, but a war had been waged between the Greeks and the Trojans. The poem was treated as historical record for a very, very long time, as much as it was a view into legend and later, the myths of the gods, and a work of art and literature.

Homer's Iliad (perhaps not quite as long as it is today, and certainly not exactly as it was written) was an oral recitation before it ever made it to paper--or scrolls, but we can still see in its language the devices used by a bard or story teller to complete the meter of the lines and allow the poet to remember what comes next. The poem is full of repetition. Phrases, even entire passages are reiterated. Some of these things are identifying characteristics such as "white-armed goddess Hera" and "bright-eyed Athena" and others are ritual, such as the description of how offerings and sacrifices were made to the gods. That the repetition is preserved in the poem as it was written down is fascinating, and it's a veritable gold mine of an example for writers who may be interested in trying to adapt their written work into something that could be sold on iTunes to the world of people attached to their mp3 players. These devices could serve us just as well as they did ancient bards.

The other beautiful (and problematic) thing about The Iliad is the smorgasbord of customs! Because it comes from an oral tradition, and the poem was refined by each teller for his time, using this catalog of phrases, they could and did insert new, more modern ones, as time went on, adding them to the archaic phrases and customs already in place. This means that looking at the Iliad for daily customs for a particular time is probably not going to give you a good picture of any specific time and place, but rather, an overview of customs for an extensive period in history from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, thrown back on the Trojan war as an historical event.

In my personal opinion, the a lot of the value of The Iliad is not its preservation of an historical event, but in the preservation of the gods and their characters. Sure, it also gives us a look at how war was glorified and the ideas of the Greek culture in that regard, but it's hardly of the same historical significance in regard to the actual event it transcribes as, say, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. From the epics of Homer we are given a lot of information about the society and culture as a whole, especially its reverence for the gods that were worshipped. But its those gods that give the story mythological and legendary proportion. The gods involving themselves in mortal affairs, from Athena sweeping down to stay Achilles hand from striking at Agamemnon to Achilles own immortal heritage, and Helen's.

It's not unlike the Old Testament, when Prophets walked the earth and the voice of God boomed from the heavens. The destruction of Troy as a vendetta by Hera and Athena isn't that far different (though much more mercurial) than God's own destruction of cities and peoples that displeased Him. But the story does more than just capture these moments between gods and men, and goes so far as to show us the infighting and strife that must have been ongoing between Zeus and his wife and his entire family. We are given the understanding of the gods as a disagreeing family under the rule but not entirely submissive to, their patriarch.

We are also given to understand that a great war such as the one waged against Ilium was more than just mortal rage and lust for plunder, but set in motion by forces beyond mortal understanding and control. Ordained and encouraged by the gods, so to speak. A theme which I find fascinating to the extreme.

The Iliad, an Example of Completely Unabridged Storytelling

Picture by Hay Kranen / PD via wiki commons

One of the things I always found incredibly frustrating when reading through Homer's Iliad is the alarming number of characters, and the excessive ongoing genealogies. There are so many people who are mentioned, along with their entire history of breeding, only so that their death can be cataloged as someone's (with an equally irritatingly elaborated upon list of forefathers) kill. Achaean and Trojan alike. If Homer were writing today, I can only imagine how much red ink would be spilled across the pages of his manuscripts in the ever-pressing drive to "tighten this up." But that said, if it weren't for Homer and his painstakingly unabridged storytelling, how much of the histories and genealogies of these heroes would have survived?

Part of this, I know, is related to the culture. Having your name remembered, even after your death, was a big deal. Going through the trouble of mapping out the ancestry of each particular hero could easily have been a gesture of respect to those ancestors and the hero himself. Not only that, but it's possible that some of his audience might have claimed descent from these same heroes, and in those cases they were certainly more likely to be recognized and the recitation would have carried that much more weight. From a strictly storytelling angle, it makes sense that Homer would want to make each of these men more sympathetic -- instead of a faceless, characterless name, with the inclusion of the genealogies of those fighting and dying, these warriors and soldiers become someone's son, someone's father, someone's husband, or long lost cousin, or shared ancestor. It humanizes the death and horror and glory of war in some small way, perhaps.

The fact that Odysseus ends up with an epic poem named for him and his journey home makes me wonder if we're missing a lot of other, smaller, tales as well. Stories and poems that go with, perhaps not every one of the characters named and described in depth, but many of these other men who go to their deaths in this war. Agamemnon does seem to have at his disposal a large number of men capable of heroic feats. An incredible number of kings and allies. What if these other characters and secondary heroes were adapted and created for the regional audiences? A poet in Sparta, might emphasize the Spartan contingent of warriors and heroes. If the poet is in the islands, he talks up the Ithacans or whichever other men are from the area. What if this is just another part of the catalog, depending on the audience that was listening, drawn from and excised as necessary for each regional retelling?

And isn't that one of the rules for writing? Know Your Audience! I can't imagine Homer wouldn't have taken that into account, that any bard wouldn't have lived and died by that same law. Even if the laws of hospitality were sacred, accidents could still happen, and I can only imagine they might have happened with greater frequency to men who offended the kings who hosted them.