Paris and Helen
The expedition of Paris, son of Priam king of Troy, into Greece, appears to have been a marauding adventure, such as was then usual. It is said indeed that he was received very hospitably, and entertained very kindly, by Menelaus king of Sparta. But this also was consonant to the spirit of the times; for hospitality has always been the virtue of barbarous ages: it is at this day no less characteristical of the wild Arabs than their spirit of robbery; and in the Scottish highlands we know robbery and hospitality flourished together till very lately. Hospitality indeed will be generally found in different ages and countries very nearly in proportion to the need of it; that is, in proportion to the deficiency of jurisprudence, and the weakness of government. Paris concluded his visit at Sparta with carrying off Helen, wife of Menelaus, together with a considerable treasure: and whether this was effected by fraud, or as some have supposed, by open violence, it is probable enough that as Herodotus relates, it was first concerted, and afterward supported, in revenge for some similar injury done by the Greeks to the Trojans.
An outrage however so grossly injurious to one of the greatest princes of Greece, especially if attended with a breach of the rights of hospitality, might not unreasonably be urged as a cause requiring the united revenge of all the Grecian chieftains. But there were other motives to engage them in the quarrel. The hope of returning laden with the spoil of the richer provinces of Asia was a strong incentive to leaders poor at home, and bred to rapine. The authority and influence of Agamemnon, king of Argos, brother of Menelaus, were also weighty. The spirit of the age, his own temper, the extent of his power, the natural desire of exerting it on a splendid occasion, would all incite this prince eagerly to adopt his brother’s quarrel. He is besides represented by character qualified to create and command a powerful league; ambitious, active, brave, generous, humane; vain indeed and haughty, sometimes to his own injury; yet commonly repressing those hurtful qualities, and watchful to cultivate popularity. Under this leader all the Grecian chieftains from the end of Peloponnesus to the end of Thessaly, together with Idomeneus from Crete, and other commanders from some of the smaller islands, assembled at Aulis, a seaport of Bœotia. The Acarnanians alone, separated from the rest of Greece by lofty mountains and a sea at that time little navigated, had no share in the expedition.
The Siege of Troy
A story acquired celebrity in aftertimes, that, the fleet being long detained at Aulis by contrary winds, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia as a propitiatory offering to obtain from the gods a safe and speedy passage to the Trojan coast. To the credit of his character however it is added that he submitted to this abominable cruelty with extreme reluctance, compelled by the clamours of the army, who were persuaded that the gods required the victim; nor were there wanting those who asserted that by a humane fraud the princess was at last saved, under favour of a report that a fawn was miraculously sent by the goddess Diana to be sacrificed in her stead. Indeed the story, though of such fame, and so warranted by early authorities, that some notice of it seemed requisite, wants, it must be confessed, wholly the best authentication for matters of that very early age; for neither Homer, though he enumerates Agamemnon’s daughters, nor Hesiod, who not only mentions the assembling of the Grecian forces under his command at Aulis, but specifies their detentions by bad weather, has left one word about so remarkable an event as this sacrifice.
The fleet at length had a prosperous voyage. It consisted of about twelve hundred open vessels, each carrying from fifty to a hundred and twenty men. The number of men in the whole armament, computed from the mean of those two numbers mentioned by Homer as the complement of different ships, would be something more than a hundred thousand; and Thucydides, whose opinion is of the highest authority, has reckoned this within the bounds of probability; though a poet, he adds, would go to the utmost of current reports. The army, landing on the Trojan coast, was immediately so superior to the enemy as to oblige them to seek shelter within the city walls: but here the operations were at a stand. The hazards to which unfortified and solitary dwellings were exposed from pirates and freebooters had driven the more peaceable of mankind to assemble in towns for mutual security. To erect lofty walls around those towns for defence was then an obvious resource, requiring little more than labour for the execution. More thought, more art, more experience were necessary for forcing the rudest fortification, if defended with vigilance and courage. But the Trojan walls were singularly strong: Agamemnon’s army could make no impression upon them. He was therefore reduced to the method most common for ages after, of turning the siege into a blockade, and patiently waiting till want of necessaries should force the enemy to quit their shelter. But neither did the policy of the times amount by many degrees to the art of subsisting so numerous an army for any length of time, nor would the revenues of Greece have been equal to it with more knowledge, nor indeed would the state of things have admitted it, scarcely with any wealth, or by any means. For in countries without commerce, the people providing for their own wants only, supplies cannot be found equal to the maintenance of a superadded army. No sooner therefore did the Trojans shut themselves within their walls than the Greeks were obliged to give their principal attention to the means of subsisting their numerous forces. The common method of the times was to ravage the adjacent countries; and this was immediately put in practice. But such a resource soon destroys itself. To have therefore a more permanent and certain supply, a part of their army was sent to cultivate the vales of the Thracian Chersonesus, then abandoned by the inhabitants on account of the frequent and destructive incursions of the wild people who occupied the interior of that continent.
Large bodies being thus detached from the army, the remainder scarcely sufficed to deter the Trojans from taking the field again, and could not prevent succour and supplies from being carried into the town. Thus the siege was protracted to the enormous length of ten years. It was probably their success in marauding marches and pirating voyages that induced the Greeks to persevere so long. Achilles is said to have plundered no less than twelve maritime and eleven inland towns. Lesbos, then under the dominion of the monarch of Troy, was among his conquests; and the women of that island were apportioned to the victorious army as a part of the booty. But these circumstances alarming all neighbouring people contributed to procure numerous and powerful allies to the Trojans. Not only the Asiatic states, to a great extent eastward and southward, sent auxiliary troops, but also the European, westward, as far as the Pæonians of that country about the river Axius, which afterwards became Macedonia.
At length, in the tenth year of the war, after great exertions of valour and the slaughter of numbers on both sides, among whom were many of the highest rank, Troy yielded to its fate. Yet was it not then overcome by open force; stratagem is reported by Homer; fraud and treachery have been supposed by later writers. It was, however, taken and plundered: the venerable monarch was slain: the queen and her daughters, together with only one son remaining of a very numerous male progeny, were led into captivity. According to some, the city was totally destroyed, and the survivors of the people so dispersed that their very name was from that time lost. But the tradition supported by better authority, and in no small degree by that of Homer himself, whose words upon the occasion seem indeed scarcely doubtful, is, that Æneas and his posterity reigned over the Trojan country and people for some generations; the seat of government however being removed from Troy to Scepsis: and Xenophon has marked his respect for this tradition, ascribing the final ruin of the Trojan state and name to that following inundation of Greeks called the Æolic emigration.
Agamemnon’s Sad Home-coming
Agamemnon, we are told, triumphed over Troy; and the historical evidence to the fact is large. But the Grecian poets themselves universally acknowledge that it was a dear-bought, a mournful triumph. Few of the princes, who survived to partake of it, had any enjoyment of their hard-earned glory in their native country. None expecting that the war would detain them so long from home, had made due provision for the regular administration of their affairs during such an absence. It is indeed probable that the utmost wisdom and forethought would have been unequal to the purpose. For, in the half-formed governments of those days, the constant presence of the prince as supreme regulator was necessary towards keeping the whole from running presently into utter confusion. Seditions and revolutions accordingly remain recorded almost as numerous as the cities of Greece. Many of the princes on their return were compelled to embark again with their adherents, to seek settlements in distant countries. A more tragical fate awaited Agamemnon. His queen, Clytemnestra, having given her affection to his kinsman Ægisthus, concurred in a plot against her husband, and the unfortunate monarch on his return to Argos was assassinated; those of his friends who escaped the massacre were compelled to fly with his son Orestes; and, so strong was the party which their long possession of the government had enabled the conspirators to form, the usurper obtained complete possession of the throne. Orestes found refuge at Athens; where alone among the Grecian states there seems to have been then a constitution capable of bearing both the absence and the return of the army and its commander without any essential derangement.