There were bronze tripods and urns, jewels of gold and of silver. Pelts of bears, lions and leopards, finely engraved shells from the sea, helmets, shields and spears. And there were women with high, rounded hips, with black eyes still moist with regret for all they had lost.
The king took very little for himself. He kept the golden armour which had been gifted him by the chief of the Lycians, Glaucus, after they met in battle, and he kept the divine horses he had taken from Aeneas. Only he and Sthenelus knew what was hidden in the hold of the royal ship; the reason why Diomedes could promise his men that the city they would found would be invincible, a kingdom destined to reign over the world.
Diomedes bid his comrades farewell and turned to Sthenelus to give him the orders of departure for the fleet. But Sthenelus turned towards those who had decided to stay, and said: ‘I shall remain here with them. I want to see the sun rising over the sky of Argos. I want to enter through the southern gate, to see the people and the market where we played as children, chasing after one another with little wooden swords. I’ve fought long enough. Not even for you, my friend, could I return to sea and face the weariness, the cold, the solitude.’
Diomedes understood. And although he felt oppressed by immense sorrow, he knew that his friend was not speaking out of fear. He simply could not abandon their remaining comrades to their destiny. He would enter Argos with them and he would die with them. He was the other half of Diomedes, as Patroclus had been the other half of Achilles: and so he had to remain with his men, those who would not take to the sea again.
‘Farewell, my friend,’ said the king to him. ‘When the sun rises high in the sky of Argos and over the palace of Tiryns, look up at it, touch the door jamb for me as well. And if you see Aigialeia. . tell her that. .’
He could not go on. Emotion overcame him and his words died in his throat.
‘I’ll tell her, if I can,’ said Sthenelus. ‘Farewell. Perhaps we’ll meet again one day, but if we don’t, remember that although I’ve decided to remain, I am your friend. Forever.’
And thus the son of Tydeus, Diomedes, left the shores of the land which he had desired so fervently, to face the sea once again.
It was still dark when they weighed anchor but the sky was turning lighter at the horizon. He ordered his comrades to row as fast as they could and to hoist the sail. He wanted to be far off on the water when the sun rose: he couldn’t bear the sight of his beloved land as he was being forced to abandon it and he didn’t want his comrades to suffer for the same reason or to regret having followed him. He donned the golden armour of Glaucus and stood straight at the stern under the royal standard so that all of them could see him and take courage.
When the aurora rose from the east to illuminate the world he was far away: on his right loomed the high rocks of Cape Malea.
He would never know what fate befell the comrades who remained behind. In his heart he hoped that they had been spared and that, with Diomedes gone, the city would no longer have any reason to destroy valiant men, formidable warriors.
But I imagine that a wretched destiny awaited them, no different from the fate of Agamemnon and his comrades when they returned to their homeland. The only word that was ever heard about those men was that Sthenelus had become Aigialeia’s lover. I believe that it was the queen herself who spread this story. Since she could no longer reach Diomedes and kill him herself, she hoped that Rumour — a winged monster with one hundred mouths — could overtake him more rapidly than her ships, shattering his mind and making him die of desperation.
Sthenelus died with his sword in hand, honourably, as he had always lived, toppled from his chariot by the cast of a spear or perhaps pierced through his neck by an arrow. The horses harnessed to his chariot were no longer the divine steeds that Diomedes had taken from Aeneas and he could no longer fly like he had over the plains of Ilium, swifter than the Trojans’ arrows, faster than the wind. A man of no worth, perhaps, tore the armour from his shoulders as he fell, crashing into the dust. And watched as his soul fled, groaning, to the Kingdom of the Dead.
2
The sun had set and all the paths of land and sea had darkened when Agamemnon’s fleet cast anchor at Nauplia. Victory weighed more heavily upon his shoulders than defeat would have and the gods had chosen for him to behold his homeland under the veil of night as well.
He descended from the ship and breathed in the unforgettable odour of his own land. For a moment that scent rushed to his head like the aroma of a strong wine. But then it swiftly called to mind his daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed on the altar to propitiate their departure for war ten years before, and he realized that all the glory he had won, that the priceless treasure that he was bringing back — the one and only reason that he and his brother Menelaus had set off this war — were not worth the breath of his lost daughter.
How bewildered were her eyes as they took her to the altar! He remembered how she had drunk the potion that would numb her, believing that it would induce the sacred sleep of prophecy. ‘The goddess will appear to you in a dream,’ they had told her, ‘because you are pure. To you she will reveal the reason for her ire. She will tell you why she will not send favourable winds and allow the fleet to depart. When you awaken you will reveal her words to us.’
He, the Atreid, remembered how he had turned away from the altar when the priest grasped the flint knife he would use to open the vein of her neck. He had to be present so that the sacrifice would be accepted, so the gods would be satisfied with his pain and with the life of a still-innocent child.
He thought of how the demon of power invades the soul like a disease. A king is branded by the gods, cursed by a destiny impossible to avoid. Kings are made to do things that no other man could do, in good and in evil. They give death like the gods and suffer like mortal men, and they cannot count on one or on the other.
I have long pondered on what Agamemnon did to achieve his ends and I have asked myself if it is possible for a man to go so far solely to lay claim to power. Still today I cannot answer that question. But in the light of what happened later, perhaps an explanation does exist; perhaps his intentions were good, perhaps he thought he could save his people from total disaster and ward off the end awaiting them all.
As king, he knew that the war would bring death to thousands of his people’s sons. As king he showed them that he was prepared to offer the life of his most beloved daughter.
If this is true, then his death was a terrible injustice. After suffering all that a man could suffer in his life, he was made to suffer the most shameful death, the same that would have befallen Diomedes had he not been so prudent.
Agamemnon had the Trojan prisoners disembark, and among them Cassandra, daughter of Priam, but left the spoils of war on board the ships; he would send men and carts the next day from Mycenae to load it all up and bring it to his palace. His charioteer accompanied him, as did all his most trusted comrades, the noblemen who had fought by his side during the whole war. The others remained on the beach to sleep and wait for the booty to be divided up the next day so they could return to their families. They could not go home empty-handed after having been away for so long.
Silence shrouded the countryside, but as the armed column passed, the dogs sleeping in front of the sheep pens and the farms awoke and started barking, and a horn sounded from on high. But its long, wavering blow was full of anguish, as if it signalled the passage of an invading enemy.
When Agamemnon came within sight of Mycenae, he realized that the city was expecting him: armed guards on the bastions held flaming torches, and more torches were burning at the sides of the great gate. The coat of arms of the Mycenaean kings, two gold-headed lions facing each other on either side of a red column over a field of blue, stood out on the huge architrave, on the gigantic jambs, over the wide black opening. The king was moved to see his emblem, the symbol of the mightiest dynasty of the Achaeans, but the dark gateway below loomed before him like the door to the House of Hades. The soldiers on the bastions clanged the spears against their shields to greet him, as his horses plodded up the ramp that led to the palace.
Beyond the gate, to his right, more torches illuminated the tombs of the Perseid kings, the first to have reigned over the city. They had descended from Perseus, the city’s founder, he who had defeated Medusa. The sacred enclosure had been restored when the new Pelopid dynasty had come to power, signifying continuity and respect for tradition. On the other side of the valley, the enormous stone dome of Agamemnon’s own tomb rose on the mountainside, the tomb he had prepared for himself before he had left for the war. One day he too would rest
