'Playthings of the Gods', a new book by Cathy Smith explores their entwined lives, loves and losses against the backdrop of the epic Trojan War. Chapter One is available to read free below.
Playthings of the Gods
by Cathy Smith
Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon
We are possibly three of the most famous women in the world; one of us – my sister - certainly would rank among the top hundred most famous women of all history. Another, my cousin, is extremely well known too, but my own name and history is largely the province of scholars; I am the more shadowy figure, the one stained by the ultimate guilt. Helen’s name inspires envy and awe, Penelope’s admiration and respect. Mine alone is a hated name, the name of a murderess. Helen was unfaithful to her husband and Penelope waited for hers through twenty years of absence. I am known, if I am known at all, as the one who slew her husband on his return from Troy, Helen’s murderous sister; Clytemnestra.
Who could have foretold, as we grew up together in the royal household in ancient Sparta, that such very different, yet intertwined destinies awaited us? And who could have foretold that the length of the posthumous lives of we three princesses of the Bronze Age would dwarf completely the few short years we lived and breathed on this planet? For three and a half thousand years my sister Helen has been celebrated as the ultimate symbol of the power of women over men’s hearts. She has been acted, sung to, depicted in Art, woven into the fabric of human history like a golden strand among the green and the black. The few dozen years she actually lived were merely the tiny start of her fame and influence...as is true with all our remembered dead. Yet when we were children, playing together in the palace gardens, our own marriages and adulthoods seemed as far away from us as the modern world seems from the times in which we lived then.
I will start with my earliest memories. The first thing I remember is my mother, Leda, leaning over my cot and cooing “Wake up, my darling”. She used to do this every morning. Of course the royal household was full of nursemaids, but I was Leda’s first child, and she insisted on looking after me herself. She was after all only fifteen, and her husband, my father King Tyndareus, was twice her age, and a fierce man who required nothing but obedience from his young wife, as from all his subjects. Her face was beautiful, I can remember that quite clearly. Everyone always said Helen was beautiful (one tires of hearing it), but to me our mother Leda had the tenderest expression and the softest lips and eyes. Her voice was the sweetest, too. She carried me everywhere – I remember sitting on her hip and playing with her long hair as she walked me around. Perhaps I was like a doll to her. She had come from a faraway court, in a distant part of Greece, the third daughter of a King, and matched with Tyndareus to seal the settlement of a long-running trade dispute between the two nations. She must have been lonely, at fourteen, moving to an all-new household, and her baby, when it came, must have been a comfort.
Leda was soft in every way – her voice, her figure, her personality, her face. The Florentine Italian Leonardo da Vinci painted her centuries later; her face was the same as his ‘Virgin of the Rocks’. That is what Leda’s face looked like to me, so tender and soft – especially around the mouth – that you could melt just looking at it. Then only two hundred years before our present time a French writer called Honore be Balzac wrote a novel called Eugenie Grandet; there you can find Leda again in the form of his eponymous heroine; a woman pure and good and governed entirely by tender emotions. Those were my first memories of my mother, Leda.
Those delicious days, of lazing around on Leda’s hip, of playing with her hair, of listening to her sweet voice sing to me...they did not last long. My golden infancy was shattered in one fell swoop, as happens to so many of us, by the cruel and random actions of the Gods. The terrible day began, as such days do, the same as any other. My mother and myself, and our maidservants were bathing in the part of the river that ran through the palace grounds. It was summer; hot and dry, but the riverbanks were lush and green and we had laid out our cloths on the grass. It was not only my mother who adored me, but all the female members of the household, nobles and servants alike –as the firstborn child of Tyndareus I was a valuable little girl, and there were no other royal children as yet. I was merry and funny too, I seem to recall, for I remember making everybody laugh with my little tricks and dances. I must have been three or four years old.
Leda, along with two of the maids, had swum out to a little island part-way across the river, where a patch of camphor grew, that we used in our medicines. They had harvested the patch and were preparing to return, carrying their baskets on their heads, when they accidentally disturbed the nest of a huge white swan. He had not been there the year before, or the one before that, and he was the largest swan any of them had ever seen. Unfortunately, he was sitting on a clutch of eggs at the time – presumably while his partner searched for food – and he was very angry. He leaped out and attacked the three women, beating his great wings and striking out with his beak and strong neck. The carefully-collected camphor was scattered on the ground; the women shrieked and tried to protect themelves with their forearms. And here comes the most dreadful part of the story.
The swan leaped on my mother, Leda, and bore her to the ground. He flogged her with his legs and wings, striking at her tender neck and throat with his beak. Her shrieks pierced the air; we all cried and wept in terror until at last her maids managed to pull her away from under the murderous animal and they struggled off the island, somehow scrambling and swimming with her back to us, wading out as far as we could to meet her. As if it had been me, not her, in danger, the first thing she did when reaching the bank was clasp me to her chest and weep over me, sobbing my name over and over again, telling me that it was all right. But when I raised my eyes and looked across the river, I saw something I will never forget – the swan, standing upright to scream its defiance, its wings outspread, my mother’s blood staining its white feathers.
She fainted, after that, and her maids bore her back to the palace, myself bouncing along, held, carelessly for once, in the arms of a nurse anxiously running behind. News of our disaster had already reached the palace, and the men emerged, armed and with their dogs, setting off to kill the creature that had attacked their Queen. Yet when they reached the spot, and swarmed across the river to the island, they saw the earth trampled flat; the reeds broken and bent and the camphor scattered on the ground. They saw the feathers of the swan and Leda’s blood on the ground. But of the swan, and its nest, there was no sign.
For the first time in my life, I was shut out from my mother’s company. They thought her injuries would frighten me, and so I was kept from her bedchamber. But it got back to me; that her face, neck, belly and thighs were savagely bruised by the creature and that it had drawn blood from her; where I did not know and forever imagined. I cried and cried for my mother but Tyndareus himself had ordered that she be kept in strict seclusion, even from her own daughter. Because the giant swan had vanished, everyone was saying that it was a God, possibly Zeus himself, and our soothsayers and priests were already trying to interpret the omen. And then there was another reason for seclusion, for Leda was pregnant again, and of course it was rumoured that her pregnancy, after three years of barrenness, was connected to the extraordinary event.
It was not difficult to find maids who would testify that their mistress had invoked the gods’ help to bear Tyndareus another child. My father was put in that position which only a man might comprehend, of knowing that his master had fathered a child to his own wife, and of being obliged to be thankful for the fact. What could Tyndareus do? It was rumoured his wife was pregnant by the King of Gods; Tyndasreus was simultaneously envied and pitied, for the offspring would surely be heroes and immensely valuable, bringing him wealth and renown, yet they were not his.
Like many men might, Tyndareus reacted in a duplicitous way. On the surface he professed to be glad, sacrificing to Zeus to ensure a healthy delivery, and giving thanks for his bounty. He was worldly enough to know that the sons or daughters born of this magical union would make him famous forever and assure his continuing dominance over Sparta. He could not afford to cast aside such a powerful story, even if he wanted to. But to Leda he was bitter and cold. Whereas before he had treated her with a distant indulgence, he could scarcely bear to look at her. Under the guise of concern that she be safe from further attacks, he forbade her to leave the palace, and to remain in seclusion at all times. And worst of all, he barred me from her company, again under the false reason of my own protection from her misfortune. The ensuing months were some of the worst in my life. The only comfort I had was Leda’s favourite maid, who was alone permitted to attend her. She smuggled me out sweets from my mother’s hand and kind messages, and kisses, and promises that we would be reunited soon. My life became sombre; my days quiet and reflective. Instead of games and tricks, I was taught weaving, and spent my days beginning to learn the skills of a woman.
I was five years old when my brothers and sisters were born. Leda had swollen to a huge size, and there were rumours that she carried a legion of children within her. I overheard her maid weeping as she told the others how terrified Leda was of what she might give birth to; how she feared she might have some monstrous swan in her very belly, ready to tear itself out with all the violence of its father. Their voices were hushed, but I heard them tell of how her belly leapt and bulged with the activity inside it so that it looked like a living being already, or any number of living beings. It was sworn that shape of a beak, or a wing, or a webbed foot, had been seen stretching the skin across her huge bump.
Her labour began on a spring morning. I was left all alone, weaving on a child-size loom. I had become so subdued and silent that I scarcely needed supervision – I had become accustomed to sit in the spot I was put and do what I was bid until told otherwise; it seemed safest. In her hour of need, the bar on attendance of my mother was lifted, and the finest nursemaids and doctors in the land attended Leda as she began the great task of delivering the unknown burden of her womb. The rest waited anxiously outside, with scarcely a thought for the solemn child determinedly working at the loom; cast, pull, weave and tie, over and over again to block out the screams. It was not as bad as we feared. Within a day, Leda had delivered three infants; a set of twin boys and a single daughter. All appeared to be fully human, for which we thanked the gods fervently, yet there was still a mystery around their birth. The two boys had been born twined together, one grasping the heel of the other, and they were both wrapped in a single white caul - a kind of skin covering them, and the girl had been enclosed in a caul of her own. These white shells were said to be eggs, and it was reported that Leda had given birth to two eggs holding her semi-divine offspring.
The two little boys, identical in every respect, were named Castor and Pollux, and the girl, of course, was called Helen. Not only were these children not monsters, they were supremely fine and beautiful specimens; of particular note was their colouring, for they were white skinned with golden hair, unlike myself and Tyndareus and the majority of our countrymen, who were black haired and swarthy skinned. Leda’s punishment did not end with her delivery of the children of Zeus, for Tyndareus did not relax his campaign against her; if anything he intensified it. He ordered that the children have a special upbringing, as befitted the children of Zeus (he made capital out of his heirs’ parentage whenever he could), and advertised far and wide for the best nursemaids, instructors and teachers to raise these royal prodigies. Their mother was to have no part in their raising; I believe Tyndareus wanted to forget she existed. It was days before I could eventually sneak into her apartments and be reunited with her, and what a tender and sorrowful moment that was...
She had changed, aged by the violence of her assault; the pregnancy and the birth, but perhaps even more by Tyndareus’s cruel treatment of her. She was still beautiful and soft, but she was like a ghost, she was so pale and thin. Her skin seemed transparent and her eyes huge. Yet it was one of the happiest moments in my life when I beheld her expression when she saw me after such a long absence, and I rushed into her arms. At the tender age of five, I knew regardless that I consoled her as much as she consoled me, and we clung to each other like two survivors of a shipwreck cling to a spar of wood tossing on the open seas.
We swore we would never be parted again. I promised to be good and obedient always, so no-one should notice or need to mind me, and then I should come to her quietly, and we might be together often. She stroked my hair and cried many tears, and so did I, but it was one of the happiest times of my life. She begged me to watch over my baby brothers and sister, and to report to her on how they grew, and what they did, and I promised her I would tell her every single thing.
Tyndareus was not angry with me. As a normal, non-divine, dark-haired child in this family of the Gods, I might have been overlooked or made insignificant, but my father still accorded me every respect due to my station, and was openly affectionate to me, more so than to the sons and daughter of Zeus. Perhaps it is easy to understand why. Maybe he knew of and overlooked my visits to my mother; I certainly never gave him cause for worry or concern. It was a measure of his trust that when Helen and the twin boys had been fed and bathed, I was allowed to play with them. I adored this job of nursemaid and doted on the three of them for hours, tearing myself away only to run to my mother and describe every jerk of their baby limbs and expression on their little faces. It must have been painful but sweet for her to hear from me thus every day.
As my siblings grew strong and bonny, so Leda faded. Soon she was too weak to raise herself from her couch, and I would kneel by her, with my head on her shoulder, holding her hand. She could not live in such cruel seclusion and before the offspring of her trauma were three years old she died – no doubt to the relief of my father, for we resent none so much as those we have wronged. At the same time, the twin boys were sent off to be raised in the most healthful and hardening conditions, on the slopes of Mount Parnassas, where men devoted their lives to the raising of Greek princes and heroes. I said goodbye sadly to my golden baby brothers that had always been laughing. And I was left with only my sister Helen as the object of my affections.
Helen was three years old – a spoilt, happy, enchanting child, and I, at eight, was her devoted slave – quiet and sombre from the years of attending my dying mother – and ready to save Helen, for her sake and for my mother’s, from every scratch, every tear and every worry. I knew our father Tyndareus did not care for Helen personally, and she had never had a mother. So I poured all the love that Leda had poured into me back into my cherubic little sister. And soon we were joined by another object for my love. Our cousin Penelope lost her own mother soon after Leda died, and the little girl was sent to join the royal household, by kind permission of Tyndareus and to help his widowed brother-in-law. Penelope was of a similar age to Helen, but could not have been more different. Where Helen was a well formed girl with white skin, blue eyes and that extraordinary golden hair, Penelope was small and angular, her hair black and dead straight, her eyes beady but full of mischief. We both adored her at once and seized on her as a new playmate. The three of us became inseparable, and this was the beginning of the second golden age of my childhood.
I became a surrogate mother and constant playmate to both motherless little girls. For a full nine years Tyndareus was fully occupied with affairs of state, including countless wars and skirmishes with the more powerful of our neighbours. While we stayed safely in the realm of childhood, he was content to know we were healthy and safe, pawns to be used when the time was right, but of little interest until then. Our days typically went like this. I would wake (we all slept in the same chamber) as soon as the sun came up – a habit I have always had. Then I would tip-toe to the bed where Helen and Penelope slept together. I would then spend the happiest portion of my day gazing on their flushed, sleeping faces, both so different and both so beautiful to me. I would bend over and inhale the sweet smell of their breath, and then I would wake them as Leda always woke me, with the words “Good morning, darlings”. Then I would wait in excitement as their eyes opened and those shiny faces came to life, their bright expressions fixed on my smiling face; the first and the last thing they saw every day.
After a breakfast outside, served by our faithful maids, I would lead my two followers out into the grounds, where we had created bowers from the rushes, wherein we were permitted to sit with our maids watching at a distance. There we would perform endless plays, where we pretended to be abandoned children faring for ourselves. I would send them out with tasks to perform, such as foraging for food, and they would bring back twigs and berries that I “cooked” on a fire. After a while, we began to befriend the animals that inhabited our patch of scrubland, and we named and made pets of a series of lizards and geckoes that we smuggled out breakfast too.
After lunch, we were obliged to spend the heat of the day indoors, and there our formal education as Greek princesses took place, for we were once again taught to weave, and not only that, but were taught the meaning and history of tapestry. We were permitted to look at some of the most famous tapestries of our age, created by the most skilful women in Greece. These beautiful tapestries were better than the richest picture book in the dazzlingness of their colours, the richness of their detail, and the intricacies of their stories. Each work was accompanied by a spoken story, and thus we learned the myths of our age and of our ancestors and our history and the histories of our Gods. We learned that the world had been created by the God Kronos who ate his own children to prevent them overpowering him. Only his son Zeus was strong enough escape his father’s murderous intentions and defeat him, taking the crown and title King of the Gods for himself.
Zeus had grown stronger and stronger over the centuries, taking all power to himself, banishing his brother Hades to the underworld and his brother Poseidon to the sea. Married to Hera, queen of the Gods, he nonetheless coupled with any and every female, and sometimes male, that took his fancy. We shivered to recall that our mother and aunt had been the victim of his unstoppable lust, and that Helen herself had Zeus’s blood in her veins.
After that, out games in the bower grew to include the stories of the early wars of the Gods, with myself pursuing the two little ones as Kronos, crying “’I’m going to eat you!” , while they ran away from me with shrieks of laughter. We enacted the assaults of the evil Zeus (for so we saw him) on the many earth maidens he ravaged; and their escapes into plant or animal form, or their subsequent pregnancies, and disgraces and suffering. And during those long afternoons, we wove our own tapestries, for the best silks and looms and teachers were all at our disposal. I was a skilled weaver already, having practised from an early age, and I found the rhythm of the task soothing and distracting. Helen did not take to weaving so well; she dutifully executed her tasks but she did not have the same obsessive interest in her tapestries that Penelope and I shared; she often stared dreamily out of the window and we knew she was thinking of other matters. Penelope, though, excelled beyond measure at weaving. She was extraordinarily quick and accurate, and had an uncanny eye for the translation of the pictures in her head into threads on a loom. Before she was twelve, her tapestries were already being feted across Greece.
After our supper – served, again, in the seclusion of our quarters by our kind maids, we would bathe and then retire to bed, where I would end every day by telling stories and singing to my two little charges, and kissing them goodnight. The maids watched me from the door, they called me “a little angel”. So our life progressed, in blissful ignorance of the storm that was gathering around us. Of course, some news of the outside world did seep through to us. We heard of battles won and lost, and in particular we heard tales of the prodigious heroism and abilities of our brothers and cousins, Castor and Pollux. By the age of six, we heard, they were already accomplished horsemen, showing a mastery of the animals no man has shown since. At eight, they could beat grown men at wrestling, and at ten they had already carried out feats of daring in raids on our enemies that had earned them the laurels of captains in our father’s armies. Of course, we wove the exploits of our heroic brothers and cousins into our plays, our tapestries and our stories.
Were we aware of the myth that was simultaneously growing up around ourselves; in particular around the semidivine Helen? Not at once, although we gradually became so. We did not really understand that the three daughters of Tyndareus (he had now formally adopted Penelope) were regarded as the three greatest prizes in Greece, but with Helen unmistakably the greatest of the three. As Tyndareus’s eldest daughter and his heir, I was a prize in myself. Penelope was renowned for her precocious skill in tapestry, and as for Helen, she was the golden daughter of Zeus, a radiant beauty who took the breath away of all that saw her for the first time. But to me, her golden curls and Penelope’s straight black locks were equally beautiful, and equally dear.
The years passed, and I entered my sixteenth year. Helen and Penelope were eleven. Normally, I would be betrothed and married by this age, but Tyndareus had decided to announce all three of our bethrothals on the same day; so I would have to wait until Helen and Penelope were of marriageable age. This I did not mind at all. The thought of marriage to a fearsome man such as my father terrified me. Sometimes we watched from behind the pillars on the balconies while the men feasted below. How they roared, and bellowed, and shouted for what they wanted! The idea of closeness to such animals frightened me, and made me think of the swan, spreading its wings and screeching.
My father was planning to betroth us all on the same day for maximum advantage in our bridal negotiations. He had also taken the calculated step of making Helen his heir in my place, thus combining the advantages of her rare beauty and divine descent with the throne of Sparta and all the wealth of its land. At one stroke he had made Helen the most desirable prize in all Greece. Every Greek prince and king from Thebes to Ithica sought her hand in marriage, and as her fame spread, suitors began to pour in from overseas, as far away as Turkey, and the islands of Africa. Bride-gifts poured in at the gates of my father’s palace, but still Tyndareus waited, to let her suitors out-do each other.
Penelope and Helen had changed, aware of their impending womanhood, and our childhood plays had subsided. We spent the time talking instead, and at the forefront of our conversations was who our husbands might be. Penelope made us laugh by miming the advances of a gorilla-like husband. “At least it’s not Zeus disguised as a tree” We prayed to Zeus, of course, and the household sacrificed to him daily and we would never have voiced our private thoughts where Zeus himself might get to hear of it – but even Zeus could not hear everything. Our future was rushing upon us, when an event occurred, that was to force Tyndareus’s hand. Helen was abducted.
It happened in her twelfth year, and at precisely that moment when she passed from girlhood to womanhood. Her childhood beauty blossomed into its adult form, and her body looked more than ever like a swan’s, in the curve of her throat, her neck and her back. Even I, who was used to her beauty, sometimes caught my breath in awe when she turned into the sunlight. It is a question I was often asked about Helen; was she personally vain? I answered, of course she was, but no more so than most women. And I am asked, was she catty? Was she kind? I can answer that as a child, Helen was dreamy, accident-prone, and lovable. But she had to grow up fast, at the age of twelve.
The abduction was relatively civilised, by all accounts, but was still a great shock to us all. For once, Penelope and I were not with Helen, being involved in a large votive tapestry for the temple to Artemis, who as goddess of childbirth was our patron goddess. She had gone to the river to bathe, at a spot very near the awful even of twelve years earlier. The rules on bathing had been relaxed gradually over the years, and Helen was escorted by a retinue of twenty maids, but no soldiers. A force of Athenian warriors burst upon the maidens; at their head the grizzled figure of Theseus, the legendary king and hero. His deeds were sung far and wide, indeed part of the tapestry we were making depicted his slaying of the minotaur and the liberation of Crete.
The maids, confronted by the terrifying sight of the heavily armed men, cried and flung themselves to the ground. Only Helen stood erect, knowing there was no point in concealing her identity. At this point, according to the maids who peeked up through their hands, she showed a trace of her divine origins for the first time. She did not cower or try to conceal her nakedness, as any other girl of her age might. She stood erect, calmly and without fear, meeting Theseus’s fierce eyes with her own calm blue ones, and the maids said a shaft of light at that moment pierced the shade, illuminating her body, so it shone like a beacon. The great king approached her and she did not tremble. It was he who knelt before her, and it was his hands that trembled as her passed up to her her garment, only moments before discarded, so that she could cover her nudity. Once she had done so, he took her arm and led her away respectfully, his warriors escorting them, though casting a few longing glances back at the maids; one or two of whom cast longing glances back.
Tyndareus was beside himself with rage. Because Theseus was a hero, he thought he was entitled to any woman he chose – well he wouldn’t have Helen, Tyndareus’s prize and his most valuable asset. He immediately began to raise an army to march on Athens and seize Helen back. At the head of the army were Helen’s twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, both now twelve, but the size of fully grown men, and with equestrian and fighting skills second to none. A message was sent to Theseus ordering the immediate release of Helen into the care of her family, on pain of immediate invasion and death. Theseus replied as follows. “I had heard of Argive Helen and her unsurpassable beauty, and an overpowering curiosity came upon me to see this famous beauty with my own eyes. For this reason I equipped a company of men, for I had quarrelled with my neighbour king of Sparta and he would not allow my suit of Helen, nor let ne in the country. Therefore my men and I travelled at night, and concealed ourselves, waiting for Helen and her maids to bathe in the river. We showed ourselves, only to catch a glimpse of the beauty that had been denied to me. When I saw Helen naked, my heart was seized with passionate love, such that she should be mine at all costs.”
It was nonsense, of course. What Theseus wanted was a ransom, to pay him off for refraining to despoil her, and the kudos of abducting the most desirable woman in Greece from under the nose of her father. Such ploys were familiar to us all. But Tyndareus had no intention of paying tribute to Theseus to regain his daughter; he was too angry and his pride was too hurt. “He’s no son of a God,” he raged, “Her brothers Castor and Pollux are the sons of Zeus, he cannot hope to hide her from their armies.” Perhaps Theseus realised he had gone too far when he heard of the massing of the Spartan armies. At any rate, he deposited Helen on the Isle of Aphidna in the care of his mother Aethra and then departed on another adventure. Castor and Pollux led their troops there and destroyed the Athenian force guarding them, before rescuing Helen and taking the aged Aethra for good measure, to be a maid to Helen and to pay Theseus back for his impudence. Thus it was that Helen was returned to us, unhurt and whole, and that Aethra the mother of Theseus became a maid in our household.
Aethra was a source of great curiosity to all three of us. We had never known a woman so old, who had lived through so much, and we were eager to learn from her wisdom. She kept us entertained for hours with her stories, but warned us not to expect happiness, for the Gods were cruel and capricious. She was especially attached to Helen, having comforted her during her abduction, and she declared Helen a true daughter of Zeus. As for her son, Theseus, she was simply in awe of him. She told us the story of his conception and birth. King Aegeus of Athens was visiting at the court of her father, a lesser king. Eagar to mate his daughter with the more powerful monarch, her father got Aegeus drunk on unmixed wine and then led him to Aethra’s bed. (After sleeping with Aegeus, Aethra told us she was visited by the God Poseidon in her dreams. So perhaps Tyndareus was wrong, and Theseus was the son of a God after all.)
At any rate, Aegeus left, on discovering that Aethra was pregnant, and she raised Theseus on her own for fifteen years, until he was strong enough to roll aside the great rock under which his father had hidden the sword and sandals that were to be his. Thus began Theseus’s heroic career, as he set off across dangerous lands to find his father, and from then on she heard only stories of his exploits. His fame grew and grew, culminating in the slaying of the fearsome minotaur, and when she saw him next, he was a man, and a great king, and had provided for her the island retreat from whence Castor and Pollux had rescued Helen. “Yet nothing is certain in life,” she told us sadly. Her son had unified the country around Athens, and made his city-state the most powerful in Greece, yet he could not cease his bachelor antics. Despite being happily married, he insisted on adventuring with his friends, and in the absence of monsters to slay, would carry off beautiful brides and boys from neighbouring states, daring their outraged husbands and fathers to seize their booty back. “Now I am become a servant, at my age, because of my son’s ceaseless philandering,” she mourned. But Aethra was not really unhappy. Our society was sweet to her, for she had no daughters of her own, and we did not make her work hard or treat her disrespectfully.
The biggest impact of the abduction was the effect it had on the plans of Tyndareus. He decided he could wait no longer to announce our joint betrothals, for what if Helen should be carried off again, and this time not be successfully returned? She and Penelope were twelve now; of a fit age for betrothal, and I was well past the age when a princess might be expected to be married. But another danger remained and Tyndareus went one step further. On the advice of Odysseus, the Prince of Ithaca, he made all Helen’s suitors swear an oath of fealty to her future husband. This stated that, once the engagement had been announced, should any king or prince attempt to abduct Helen away from her husband, the rest of the suitors would put themselves and all their armies at the disposal of her husband, to help win her back. Furthermore, they had to swear they would not desist from the fight until Helen was returned.
Tyndareus took this step to forestall the very real possibility that disappointed suitors might try to abduct Helen if they could not gain her by fair means, and that civil war might otherwise ensue. He made every suitor swear the solemn blood-oath on the altar of Ares; hoping through these means to avoid conflict. The suitors agreed and took the oath, such was Helen’s lure, and the date was announced – a great feast, to which all suitors were invited, and at which Tyndareus would announce husbands for his three daughters.
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If you enjoyed this, and would like to purchase the full (50,000 words) version of the book for $3.99, you can buy Playthings of the Gods online.
