The reign of Erichthonius was peaceful and prosperous. In the lee of Mount Ida his lands were fed by the waters of the benign river gods Simoeis and Scamander, who blessed the land of Dardania with great fertility. Erichthonius grew to become the richest man in the known world, famous for his three thousand mares and their countless foals. Boreas, the North Wind, took the form of a wild stallion and fathered a remarkable race of horses by the filly foals of Erichthonius’s herd. These colts were so agile and light of foot they could gallop through fields of corn without bending a stalk. So they say.
Horses and riches: always, when we talk of Troy, we find ourselves talking of wondrous horses and uncountable riches.
FOUNDATION
After the death of Erichthonius, his son TROS succeeded to the throne. Tros had a daughter, Cleopatra, and three sons, ILUS (named in honour of his great-uncle), Assaracus and GANYMEDE. The story of Prince Ganymede is well known. His beauty was so great that Zeus himself was seized by an overmastering passion for him. Taking the form of an eagle, the god swooped down and bore the boy up to Olympus, where he served as Zeus’s beloved minion, companion and cupbearer. To compensate Tros for the loss of his son, Zeus sent HERMES to him, bearing the gift of two divine horses, so swift and light they could gallop over water. Tros was consoled by these magical animals and by Hermes’ assurance that Ganymede was now and – by definition always would be – immortal.fn4
It was Ganymede’s brother Prince Ilus who founded the new city that would be named Troy in Tros’s honour. He won a wrestling match at the Phrygian Games, the prize consisting of fifty youths and fifty maidens, but – more importantly – a cow. A very special cow that an oracle directed Ilus to use for the founding of a city.
‘Wherever the cow lies down, there shall you build.’
If Ilus had heard the story of CADMUS – and who had not? – he would have known that Cadmus and Harmonia, acting in accordance with instructions from an oracle, had followed a cow, and waited for the animal to lie down as an indication of where they were to build what would become Thebes, the first of the great city states of Greece. It may seem to us that the practice of allowing cows to choose where a city should be built is arbitrary and bizarre, but perhaps a little reflection should tell us that it is not so strange after all. Where there is to be a city, there must also be plentiful sources of meat, milk, leather and cheese for its citizens. Not to mention strong draught animals – oxen for ploughing fields and pulling carts. If a cow is taken enough by the amenities of a region to feel able to lie down, then it is worth paying attention. At any rate, Ilus was content to follow his prize heifer all the way north from Phrygia to the Troad,fn5 past the slopes of Mount Ida and onto the great plain of Dardania; and it was here, not far from where Ilus’s great-grandfather’s first city of Dardanus had been built, that the heifer lay down at last.
Ilus looked about him. It was a fine place for a new city. To the south rose the massif of Mount Ida and at some distance to the north ran the straits of the Hellespont. To the east the blue of the Aegean could be glimpsed, and through the green and fertile plain itself threaded the rivers Simoeis and Scamander.
Ilus knelt down and prayed to the gods for a sign that he had made no mistake. In immediate answer a wooden object fell from the sky and landed at his feet in a great cloud of dust. It was about the height of a ten-year-old childfn6 and carved into a likeness of PALLAS ATHENA, a spear in one upraised hand and a distaff and spindle in the other, representing the arts of war and the arts of peace, over which the grey-eyed goddess held dominion.
The act of looking at so sacred an object struck Ilus instantly blind. He was wise enough in the ways of the Olympians not to panic. Falling to his knees he cast up prayers of thanks to the heavens. After a week of steadfast devotion he was rewarded with the restoration of his sight. Brimming with revived energy and zeal, he began at once to lay out the foundations for his new city. He planned the streets so that they radiated like the spokes of a wheel from a central temple which he would dedicate to Athena. In the innermost sanctum of the temple he placed the wooden carving of Pallas Athena that fell from the sky: the xoanon, the Luck of Troy, the symbol and assurance of the city’s divine status. So long as this sacred totem reposed there unmolested, so long would Troy prosper and endure. So Ilus believed and so the people who flocked to help him build and populate this new city believed too. They called the wooden carving the PALLADIUM, and after Ilus’s father Tros they gave their city and themselves the new names of Troy and Trojans.fn7
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.