“Shoulder his crutch, and show how fields were won,”
before any Homer could have sung of the Trojan war. Even now, we are ready to listen readily to the veteran’s reminiscences of a past generation, whether in war or peace, who has a retentive memory and a pleasant style—only he now commonly tells his story in print.
Nestor proceeds to tell his guests how the gods, after Troy was taken, had stirred up strife between the brother-kings Agamemnon and Menelaus; and how, in consequence, the fleet had divided, Menelaus with one division sailing straight for home, while the rest had waited with Agamemnon in the hope of appeasing the wrath of heaven. Ulysses, who had at first set sail with Menelaus, had turned back and rejoined his leader. Of his subsequent fate Nestor knows nothing; but he bids the young man take courage. He has heard of the troubles that beset him at home; but if Minerva vouchsafes to the son the love and favour which (as was known to all the Greeks) she bore to his father, all will go well with him yet. Neither Nestor nor Telemachus are aware (though the reader is) that the Wisdom which had made Ulysses a great name was even now guiding the steps of his son. One thing yet the youth longs to hear from the lips of his father’s ancient friend—the terrible story of Agamemnon’s death by the hands of his wife and her paramour, and the vengeance taken by his son Orestes. It is a tale which he has heard as yet but darkly, but has dwelt upon in his heart ever since the goddess, at her visit under the shape of Mentes, made such significant reference to the story. Nestor tells it now at length—the bloody legend which, variously shaped, became the theme of the poet and the dramatist from generation to generation of Greek literature. In Homer’s version we miss some of the horrors which later writers wove into the tale; and it is not unlikely that, in the simpler form in which it is here given, we have the main facts of an actual domestic tragedy. During Agamemnon’s long absence in the Trojan war, his queen Clytemnestra, sister of Helen, had been seduced from her marriage faith by her husband’s cousin Ægisthus. In vain had the household bard, faithful to the trust committed to him by his lord in his absence, counselled and warned his lady against the peril; and Ægisthus at last, hopeless of his object so long as she had these honest eyes upon her, had caused him to be carried to a desert island to perish with hunger. So she fell, and Ægisthus ruled palace and kingdom. At last Agamemnon returned from the weary siege, and, landing on the shore of his kingdom, knelt down and kissed the soil in a transport of joyful tears. It is probably with no conscious imitation, but merely from the correspondence of the poet’s mind, that Shakespeare attributes the very same expression of feeling to his Richard II.:—
“I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs:
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favour with my royal hands.”
Agamemnon meets with as tragical a reception from the usurper of his rights as did Richard Plantagenet:—
“Many the warm tears from his eyelids shed,
When through the mist of his long-hoped delight
He saw the lovely land before him spread.
Him from high watch-tower marked the watchman wight
Set by Ægisthus to watch day and night,
Two talents of pure gold his promised hire.
Twelve months he watched, lest the Avenger light
Unheeded, and remember his old fire;
Then to his lord made haste to show the tidings dire.
“Forthwith Ægisthus, shaping a dark snare,
Score of his bravest chose, and ambush set,
And bade rich banquets close at hand prepare.
Then he with horses and with chariots met
The king, and welcomed him with fair words, yet
With fraud at heart, and to the feast him led;
There, like a stalled ox, smote him while he fed.”
For seven years the adulterer and usurper reigned in security at Mycenæ. But meanwhile the boy Orestes, stolen away from the guilty court by his elder sister, was growing up to manhood, the destined avenger of blood, at Athens. In the seventh year he came back in disguise to his father’s house, slew Ægisthus, and recovered his inheritance. There was a darker shadow still thrown over Agamemnon’s death by later poets, which finds no place in Homer. The tragic interest in the dramas of Æschylus and Sophocles, which are founded on this story, lies in their representing Clytemnestra herself as the murderess of her husband, and Orestes, as his father’s avenger, not hesitating to become the executioner of his mother as well as of her paramour.
Nestor has finished his story, and the travellers offer to return to their vessel and continue their quest; but the old chieftain will not hear of it. That night, at least, they must remain as his guests—on the morrow he will send them on to the court of Menelaus at Sparta, where they may chance to learn the latest tidings of Ulysses. Telemachus’s guardian bids him accept the invitation, then suddenly spreads wings, and takes to flight in the likeness of a sea-eagle; and both Nestor and Telemachus recognise at last that, in the shape of Mentor, the goddess of wisdom has been so long his guide. A sacrifice is forthwith offered in her honour—a heifer, with horns overlaid with gold; a public banquet is held as before, and then, according to promise, Telemachus is sped on his journey. A pair of swift and strong-limbed horses—the old chief knew what a good horse was, and charged his sons specially to take the best in his stalls—are harnessed for the journey, and good provision of corn and wine, “such as was fit for princes,” stored in the chariot. Pisistratus himself mounts beside his new friend as driver. Their first day’s stage is Pheræ, where they are hospitably entertained by Nestor’s friend, Diocles; and, after driving all the following day, they reach the palace gates of Menelaus, in Sparta, when the sun has set upon the yellow harvest fields, “and all the ways are dim.”
At Sparta, too, as at Pylos, the city is holding high festival on the evening of their arrival. A double marriage is being celebrated in the halls of Menelaus. Hermione, his sole child by Helen, is leaving her parents to become the bride of Neoptolemus (otherwise known as Pyrrhus, the “red-haired”), son of the great Achilles; and at the same time the young Megapenthes, Menelaus’s son by a slave wife, is to be married in his father’s house. There is music and dancing in the halls when the travellers arrive; but Menelaus, like Nestor, will ask no questions of the strangers until the bath, and food, and wine in plenty, have refreshed them, and their horses have good barley-meal and rye set before them in the mangers. The magnificence of Menelaus’s palace, as described by the poet, is a very remarkable feature in the tale. It reads far more like a scene from the ‘Arabian Nights’ than a lay of early Greece. The lofty roofs fling back a flashing light as the travellers enter, “like as the splendour of the sun or moon.” Gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and electrum, combine their brilliancy in the decorations. The guests wash in lavers of silver, and the water is poured from golden ewers. Telemachus is struck with wonder at the sight, and can compare it to nothing earthly.