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.
‘Make it so,’ he said with a heavy sigh and an irritated flick of the hand.
Hesione was taken and chained to a rock in the Hellespont to await her fate at the jaws of the sea beast.fn12
All Troy held its breath.
Salvation and Destruction
SEE, THE CONQUERING HERO COMES
At exactly this time, the very moment that Hesione, shackled to her rock, began to cast up prayers to Olympus for her delivery from Poseidon’s sea dragon, Heracles and his band of followers arrived at the gates of Troy on their way back from his Ninth Labour, the acquisition of the girdle of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.fn1
With his friends TELAMON and OICLES by his side, Heracles was ushered into the royal presence. Honoured by the visit of the great hero as the Trojan court was, Laomedon’s mind was more on his plague-ridden and beleaguered city’s depleted storerooms than on the privilege of playing host to Heracles and his followers, however famous and admired they may be. It was a small army that travelled with him, but Laomedon knew that they would all expect to be fed. Heracles alone had the appetite of a hundred men.
‘You’re very welcome, Heracles. Do you plan to honour us with your company for long?’
Heracles looked about the sombre court in some surprise. ‘Why the long faces? I had been told that Troy was the richest and happiest kingdom in the world.’
Laomedon shifted on his throne. ‘You of all men should know that we are but playthings of the gods. What is a man but the hapless victim of their petty whims and vengeful jealousies? Apollo sends us contagion and Poseidon a monster that chokes our sea channel.’
Heracles listened to Laomedon’s self-pitying and largely fabricated version of the events leading up to Hesione’s sacrifice.
‘Doesn’t seem so difficult a problem to me,’ he said. ‘All you need is for someone to clear the seaway of that dragon and save your daughter – what did you say her name was?’
‘Hesione.’fn2
‘Yes, her. The plague will blow through soon enough, I dare say, they always do …’
Laomedon was dubious. ‘That’s all very well, but what about my daughter?’
Heracles bowed. ‘The work of a moment.’
Laomedon, like everyone in the Greek world, had heard stories of the Labours that Heracles had undertaken – the cleaning out of King Augeas’s stables, the taming of the Cretan Bull, the trapping of the great tusked boar of Mount Erymanthus, the killing of the Nemean Lion and the eradication of the Lernaean Hydra … If this lumbering ox of a man with a lion skin for clothing and an oak tree for a club had in truth performed such impossible feats and defeated such terrible creatures, then he might be able to free up the Hellespont and rescue Hesione. But there was always the question of payment.
‘We’re not a rich kingdom …’ Laomedon lied.
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Heracles. ‘All I would ask for in return is your horses.’
‘My horses?’
‘The horses my father Zeus sent to your grandfather Tros.’
‘Ah, those horses.’ Laomedon waved a hand as if to say, ‘Is that all?’ ‘My dear man, clear the channel of that dragon and restore my daughter to me and you shall have them – yes, and their silver bridles too.’