Finally, Odysseus (Ulysses), the most popular of the Greek heroes of the Trojan war, was a son of Laërtes, king of Ithaca, by Anticlea, the daughter of Autolycus. Autolycus inhabited a district on Mount Parnassus, and was renowned for his cunning. His grandson seems to have inherited no small part of his grandfather’s disposition. Through his noble and virtuous wife Penelope, Odysseus was closely related to the Atridæ; Penelope being the daughter of Icarius, who was a brother of the Spartan king Tyndareüs. He was therefore obliged—though much against his will—to comply with the request of Menelaüs, and join the expedition against Troy. On account of his wisdom and eloquence, his dexterity in all feats of strength, and his dauntless valour in the midst of danger, he also was a special favourite of Pallas.
II. The War.—The Iliad of Homer, the most important source of our information with regard to the Trojan war, does not deal with the events of the first nine years; and of those of the tenth and last year it only gives such episodes as relate to the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon. Of the origin of the war, and the events of the first nine years, it speaks only incidentally, for the sake of explanation. The gap has to be filled up from the works of those writers who had access to other epic poems of the Trojan cycle, which are now no longer extant.
Eris, the goddess of discord, not having been invited to the marriage festivities of Peleus and Thetis, avenged herself by casting into the assembly a golden apple, with the inscription—“To the fairest.” The three rival goddesses—Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite—each claimed the apple for herself, but were referred by Zeus to the decision of Paris. Paris was a son of Priam, the Trojan king. Immediately after birth, he was exposed on Mount Ida, in consequence of an ill-omened dream which his mother Hecuba had during her pregnancy. He was found, however, and brought up by some shepherds. He decided in favour of Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman on earth as his wife. Soon afterwards, at some games given by the king, the youth, who was equally distinguished for his handsome person and his bodily dexterity, after having wrested the prize from all his brethren, was recognised by the prophetess Cassandra, and received into his father’s favour. He next undertook a journey across the sea to Greece, and, among other places, visited the court of Menelaüs, king of Sparta, by whom he was hospitably received and entertained. Aphrodite kindled in the breast of the young wife of Menelaüs a fatal love for their handsome guest, who dazzled her as much by the beauty of his person as by the oriental splendour of his appearance. While Menelaüs was absent in Crete, and her brothers, the Dioscuri, were engaged in their strife with the sons of Aphareus, Helen fled with her seducer to Troy. On the refusal of the king of Troy to surrender Helen, Menelaüs succeeded in rousing the whole of Greece to a war of revenge. This task was the more easy, as most of the Grecian chieftains had been suitors of Helen, and had bound themselves by an oath to Tyndareüs to unite in support of the husband whom Helen should choose, in the event of his ever being injured or attacked. The well-manned ships of the Greeks assembled in the Bœotian port of Aulis. Their number amounted to eleven hundred and eighty-six, according to Homer; of which Agamemnon, who had been chosen leader of the expedition, alone furnished over one hundred. Agamemnon, however, having offended Artemis by killing a hind sacred to the goddess, the departure of the expedition was delayed by continuous calms, until at length, at the command of the priest Calchas, Agamemnon determined to appease the wrath of the goddess by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia on her altar. At the fatal moment Artemis rescued the victim, and, after substituting a hind in her stead, conveyed Iphigenia to Tauris, where she became a priestess in the temple of the goddess. The fleet now sailed with a fair wind. The expedition first stopped at Tenedos, opposite the coast of Troy. Here, on the occasion of a banquet, Philoctetes, who possessed the bow and arrows of Heracles on which the conquest of Troy depended, was bitten in the foot by a serpent, and on account of his cries and the offensive smell of the wound was carried to Lemnos, and there left to his fate. The Greeks next effected a landing on the coast of Troy, in spite of the opposition of Hector and Æneas; for Protesilaüs devoted himself to death for the Greeks, and sprang first on the Trojan shore. Even Cycnus, the mighty son of Poseidon, who was king of Colonæ in Troas, and came to the assistance of the Trojans, was unable to stem the advance of the Greeks; and his body being invulnerable, he was strangled by Achilles by means of a thong twisted round his neck.
After the Greeks had made a station for their ships, the war began in earnest. Several of their attacks on the town having been successfully repelled by the Trojans, the Greeks now confined themselves to making inroads and plundering excursions into the surrounding country, in which Achilles was always the most prominent actor. The first nine years of the war were by no means fruitful in important events, and the wearisome monotony of the siege was broken only by the single combat between Achilles and Troïlus, the youngest son of Priam, in which Troïlus was slain, and by the fall of Palamedes of Eubœa, the head of the Greek peace-party, which was brought about by the treachery of Odysseus. At length, in the tenth year of the war, a quarrel broke out between Achilles and Agamemnon respecting a female slave who had been taken captive, and gave for the time quite another aspect to affairs. It is at this point that the Iliad commences. Achilles, in his wrath, retired to his tent, and refused to take any further part in the war; whilst the Trojans, who feared him more than all the other Greeks, became bolder, and no longer kept to the protection of their walls. Zeus, at the request of Thetis, gave them the victory in their first engagement with the Greeks. Hector drove the latter back to their ships, and was already about to set them on fire, when Achilles consented to allow his friend Patroclus to don his armour and lead his Myrmidons to the assistance of the Greeks. The Trojans were now driven back, but Patroclus, in the ardour of pursuit, was slain by Hector, and deprived of his armour, and Menelaüs, with the help of the greater Ajax and other heroes, only succeeded in rescuing his corpse after a bloody and obstinate struggle. The wrath of Achilles was now entirely diverted by the desire of avenging on Hector the death of his much-loved friend Patroclus. He was scarcely willing even to wait for the new armour which his goddess-mother procured him from the workshop of Hephæstus. No sooner was he in possession of it than he again appeared on the field, and Hector—the bulwark of Troy—soon succumbed to his furious onslaught. Achilles, however, was generous enough to surrender his corpse to the entreaties of Priam. The Iliad concludes with the solemn funeral of Hector.
The succeeding events, up to the death of Achilles and the contest for his arms, were narrated in the Æthiopis of Arctinus of Miletus, with the contents of which we have some slight acquaintance, although the work itself is lost. All kinds of brilliant exploits are reported to have been performed by Achilles before the walls of Troy, which were manifestly unknown to the earlier story. In the first place, immediately after Hector’s death, Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, came to the assistance of the Trojans, and fought so bravely at the head of her army that the Greeks were hard pressed. Achilles at length overcame the heroic daughter of Ares. After her fall, a new ally of the Trojans appeared in Memnon, king of Æthiopia, who is called a son of Eos, because the Æthiopians were supposed to dwell in the far East. Among those who fell by the hand of this handsome and courageous hero was Antilochus, the valiant son of Nestor. When Memnon, however, ventured to meet the invincible Achilles, he also was vanquished, after a brave struggle. The fresh morning dew, which springs from the tears of Eos, proves that she has never ceased to lament her heroic son. But death was soon to overtake him before whom so many heroes had bitten the dust. In an assault on the Scæan gate, Achilles was killed, at the head of his Myrmidons, by an arrow of Paris, which was directed by Apollo. According to later writers, whose accounts were followed by the tragic poets, he was treacherously murdered here on the occasion of his betrothal to Polyxena, the beautiful daughter of Priam. A furious contest, lasting the whole day, took place for the possession of his corpse and armour: at length Odysseus and Ajax succeeded in conveying it to a place of safety. Mourning and confusion reigned among the Greeks at his death. During seventeen days and nights Thetis, with the whole band of Nereids, bewailed his untimely fate in mourning melodies, so sad and touching that neither gods nor men could refrain from tears.
“See, tears are shed by every god and goddess, to survey
How soon the Beautiful is past, the Perfect dies away!”
The death of the bravest of the Greeks was followed by an unhappy quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus respecting his arms. Ajax, on account of his near relationship to the deceased hero, and the great services he had rendered to the cause of the Greeks, seemed to have the best claim; but Agamemnon, by the advice of Athene, adjudged them to Odysseus. Ajax was so mortified at this decision that he became insane, and put an end to his own life. An entire tragedy of Sophocles, treating of the mournful fate of the son of Telamon, has come down to us.
After Ajax had quitted the scene, Odysseus became decidedly the chief personage among the Greeks. It was he who captured the Trojan seer Helenus, and extorted from him the secret that Ilium could not be taken without the arrows of Heracles. Hereupon Philoctetes, who was still lying sick at Lemnos, was fetched, and his wound healed by Machaon. Paris soon afterwards fell by his hand. It was Odysseus, moreover, who, in company with Diomedes, undertook the perilous task of entering Troy in disguise and stealing the Palladium, on which the safety of the city depended. It was he who fetched Neoptolemus, the young son of Achilles, from Scyros to the Trojan camp, it having been decreed that his presence was necessary to the success of the Greeks. Lastly—and this was his greatest service—it was Odysseus who devised the celebrated wooden horse, and the stratagem which led to the final capture of the city. In the belly of the horse, which was built by Epeüs, one hundred chosen warriors of the Greeks concealed themselves. The rest of the Greeks set fire to their camp, and sailed away to Tenedos; whereupon the Trojans, deceived by the assurances of Sinon, dragged the fatal horse, amid cries of joy, into the city. In vain did the Trojan priest of Apollo, Laocoön, seek to divert them from their folly. None would give heed to his warnings; and when, soon afterwards, both he and his sons, whilst sacrificing to Poseidon on the sea-shore, were strangled by two serpents that came up out of the sea, the Trojans regarded this as a punishment sent by the gods for his evil counsel, and were the more confirmed in their purpose.
The death of Laocoön and his sons forms the subject of one of the most splendid of the creations of Greek art that have come down to us from antiquity. The group was found, in the year 1506, by a Roman citizen in his vineyard, close to the former Thermæ of Titus, and was made over by him, for a considerable annuity, to Pope Julius II., who then placed it in the Vatican collection. The right arm of Laocoön, which was wanting, has, unfortunately, been incorrectly restored. This is attested by a copy of the group which was subsequently discovered in Naples. We give an engraving of the group in its original form (Fig. 61).