There we have the founding line, from Dardanus to his sons Ilus the First and Erichthonius, whose son Tros fathered Ilus the Second, after whom Troy is also called Ilium or Ilion.fn8
CURSES
There was another royal line in Ionia which we should know about: its importance would be difficult to overstate. You may already know the story of King TANTALUS, who ruled in Lydia, a kingdom to the south of Troy. Tantalus served up his son PELOPS to the gods in a stew.fn9 Young Pelops was reassembled and resurrected by the gods and grew up to be a handsome and popular prince and a lover of POSEIDON, who gave him a chariot drawn by winged horses. This chariot led to a curse which led to … which led to almost everything …
Ilus had been as outraged as anyone by Tantalus’s depravity, enough to expel him by force of arms from the region. You would imagine that Pelops would have no objection to his father’s expulsion – after all, Tantalus had slaughtered him, his own son, butchered him and presented him to the Olympians in a fricassee – but far from it. No sooner had Pelops attained manhood than he raised an army and attacked Ilus, but was easily bested in battle. Pelops left Ionia, settling at last in land far to the west, the peninsula off mainland Greece that is called the Peloponnese after him to this day. On this remarkable piece of land grew up such legendary kingdoms and cities as Sparta, Mycenae, Corinth, Epidaurus, Troezen, Argos and Pisa. This Pisa is not the Italian home of the Leaning Tower, of course, but a Greek city state ruled over at the time of Pelops’s arrival by King OENOMAUS,fn10 a son of the war god Ares.
Oenomaus had a daughter, HIPPODAMIA, whose beauty and lineage attracted many suitors. The king was fearful of a prophecy foretelling his death at the hands of a son-in-law. There were no nunneries in which daughters could be shut up in those days, so he tried another way of ensuring her perpetual spinsterhood – he announced that Hippodamia could only be won by a man who could defeat him in a chariot race. There was a catch: the reward for victory might be Hippodamia’s hand in marriage, but the price of losing the race would be the suitor’s life. Oenomaus believed that no finer charioteer than he existed in the world; consequently he was confident that his daughter would never wed and provide him with the son-in-law that the prophecy had taught him to dread. Despite the drastic cost of losing the race and the unrivalled reputation of Oenomaus as a charioteer, eighteen brave men accepted the challenge. Hippodamia’s beauty was great and the prospect of winning her and the rich city state of Pisa was tempting. Eighteen had raced against Oenomaus and eighteen had been beaten; their heads, in varying stages of decomposition, adorned the poles that ringed the hippodrome.
When Pelops, ejected from his home kingdom of Lydia, arrived in Pisa he was instantly struck by Hippodamia’s beauty. While he believed in his own skills as a horseman, he thought it wise to call upon his one-time lover Poseidon for extra aid. The god of the sea and of horses was happy to send from the waves a chariot and two winged steeds of great power and speed. To make doubly sure, Pelops bribed Oenomaus’s charioteer MYRTILUS, a son of Hermes, to help him win. Motivated by the promise of half Oenomaus’s kingdom and a night in bed with Hippodamia (with whom he too was in love), Myrtilus crept into the stables the night before the race and replaced the bronze linchpins which fixed the axle of Oenomaus’s chariot with substitutes carved from beeswax.
The next day, when the race began, young Pelops dashed into the lead, but so great was King Oenomaus’s skill that he soon began to catch up. He was almost upon Pelops, his javelin raised to strike a deathblow, when the waxen linchpins gave way, the wheels flew from the chariot and Oenomaus was dragged to a bloody death under the hoofs of his own horses.
Myrtilus went to claim what he thought was his just reward – a night with Hippodamia – but she ran complaining to Pelops, who hurled Myrtilus off a cliff into the sea. As the drowning Myrtilus struggled in the water, he cursed Pelops and all his descendants.
Myrtilus is not the best known of Greek heroes. Yet the part of the Aegean into which he fell is still called the Myrtoan Sea. For countless years the local people conducted annual sacrifices to Myrtilus in the temple of his father Hermes, where his corpse lay embalmed after his death. All this devotion for a weak, lustful man who had accepted a bribe and caused the death of his own king.
But the curse on Pelops. This curse matters. For Pelops and Hippodamia had children. And those children had children. And the curse of Myrtilus was on them all. As we shall see.
If this story, the story of Troy, has a meaning or a moral it is the old, simple lesson that actions have consequences. What Tantalus did, exacerbated by what Pelops did … the actions of these two caused a doom to be laid on what was to be the most important royal house of Greece.
Meanwhile, the royal house of Troy was about to invoke a curse of its own …
King Ilus had died and the throne of Troy was now occupied by his son LAOMEDON. Where Ilus had been devout, diligent, industrious, honourable and provident, Laomedon was greedy, ambitious, feckless, indolent and sly. His greed and ambition included a desire to develop the city of Troy still further, to give it great protective walls and ramparts, golden towers and turrets, to endow it with a splendour such as the world had never known. Rather than plan and execute this himself, Laomedon did something that might seem strange to us but which was still possible in the days when gods and men walked the earth together: he commissioned two of the Olympian gods, Apollo and Poseidon, to do the work for him. The immortals were not above a little contract labour and the pair threw themselves into the construction project with energy and skill, piling up great granite boulders and dressing them into neat blocks to create magnificent gleaming walls. In a very short time the work was done and a newly fortified Troy stood proudly on the plain of Ilium, as grand and formidable a fortress city as had ever been seen. But when Apollo and Poseidon presented themselves to Laomedon for payment he did what many householders have done since. He pursed his lips, sucked in between his teeth and shook his head.
‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘The ramparts are bowed, I asked for straight. And the south gates aren’t what I ordered at all. And those buttresses! All wrong. Oh dear me, no, I can’t possibly pay you for shoddy work like that.’
They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all.
The revenge of the cheated gods was swift and merciless. Apollo shot plague arrows over the walls and into the city; within days the sound of wailing and moaning rose up around Troy as at least one member of every family was struck down by deadly disease. At the same time Poseidon sent a huge sea monster to the Hellespont. All shipping east and west was blocked by its ferocious presence and Troy was soon starved of the trade and tolls on which its prosperity depended.
So much for the Palladium and the Luck of Troy.
The terrified citizens flocked to Laomedon’s palace to demand relief. The king turned to his priests and prophets, who were of one mind.
‘It is too late to pay the gods with the gold you owe them, majesty. There is only one way now to placate them. You must sacrifice your daughter HESIONE to the sea creature.’
Laomedon had a large number of children.fn11 While Hesione may have been his favourite, his own flesh and blood mattered more to him than his own flesh and blood (as it were), and he knew that if he ignored the instruction of the prophets, the frightened and angry Trojan populace would tear him to pieces and sacrifice Hesione anyway.