Phocus had never been more excited about anything. A pentathlon! And his big brothers were urging him to take part. He had always imagined that they didn’t like him very much. Perhaps it was because he had been too young to join in with their hunting expeditions. This must be a sign that they now thought him grown up enough.
‘You’ll need to practise,’ Peleus warned.
‘Oh yes,’ said Telamon. ‘We don’t want you to make a fool of yourself in front of the king and the court.’
‘I won’t let you down,’ said Phocus earnestly. ‘I’ll practise every hour of every day, I promise.’
From the shelter of a stand of trees Telamon and Peleus watched their little brother throwing his discus in a field outside the palace walls. He was disconcertingly good.
‘How can someone that size throw it so far?’ asked Telamon.
Peleus held up his own discus and weighed it in his hands. ‘I can throw further,’ he said. Taking aim, he turned, twisted his body round and released. The discus flew flat and fast through the air and struck Phocus on the back of the head. The boy went down without a sound.
The brothers raced to the spot. Phocus was quite dead.
‘An accident,’ whispered the panicked Telamon. ‘We were all practising and he ran in front of your throw.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Peleus, white in the face. ‘Will we be believed? The whole court knows how much we resented him.’
They gazed down at the body, exchanged glances, nodded and grasped each other firmly by the forearms by way of sealing an unspoken bond. Twenty minutes later they were spreading dried leaves and twigs over the bare earth beneath which their young half-brother’s body lay buried.
When word spread around the palace and grounds that Prince Phocus was missing, no one could have been more anxious to find him than Endeis and her sons. While Endeis patted the hand of her hated rival Psamathe and poured words of hope into her ear, Telamon and Peleus noisily joined the hue and cry.
King Aeacus had climbed onto the roof of the palace and from this high vantage point he called down in an ever more frantic voice the name of his beloved young son into the fields and woods on all sides. He was interrupted by a shy cough. A dusty and begrimed old slave was approaching him.
‘What are you doing up here?’
The old slave bowed low. ‘Forgive me, lord king, I know where the young prince is.’
‘Where?’
‘I come up to these roofs every day, your majesty. It’s my job to keep everything watertight with thatch and pitch. Around noontide I chanced to look down and I saw it. I saw it all.’
The roofer led the king to the spot where Phocus was buried. Peleus and Telamon were summoned, confessed their crime and found themselves banished from the kingdom of their birth.
TELAMON IN EXILE
Telamon made his way to the nearby island of Salamis, ruled over by King CYCHREUS, whose mother, the sea nymph Salamis, gave the island its name.fn7 Cychreus took a liking to Telamon and – as only kings, priests and immortals could – he offered to cleanse him of his abominable blood crime of fratricide.fn8 This done, he appointed Telamon his heir, giving him his daughter Glauce’s hand in marriage. In due course Glauce presented her husband with a baby son of magnificent size, weight and lustiness, whom they named AJAX, a name which would one day be known in every corner of the world (usually prefixed by the words ‘the mighty’).fn9
We have already followed Telamon’s later adventures and seen how he helped Heracles revenge himself on Laomedon. After the sack of Troy and the slaughter of the entire Trojan royal male line (save Priam), Telamon returned to Salamis with his prize, Hesione, by whom he had another son, TEUCER, who was to make a name for himself as the greatest of the Greek archers.fn10
We are more or less done with Telamon now. He featured as a kind of lieutenant to great heroes like Jason, Meleager and Heracles, but his importance to us in the telling of the tale of Troy is in his fathering of those two sons, Ajax and Teucer. The same could be said of his brother Peleus. But the son of Peleus was so much more important to our story, and the manner of his birth so remarkable, that Peleus himself deserves more attention.
PELEUS IN EXILE
When the brothers were banished from Aegina for the killing of young Prince Phocus, Peleus went further afield than Telamon. He crossed the Greek mainland and travelled north to the small kingdom of Phthia in Aeolia. It was no random choice: these were ancestral lands. We must go back in time to find out the connection between Aegina in the south and Phthia in the north.
You will recall that Peleus’s father Aeacus was the son of Zeus and the sea nymph Aegina. HERA, as ever ragingly jealous of her husband’s affairs, had waited until Aeacus grew to manhood before sending a plague to the island which wiped out the human population, all but Aeacus.
Alone and unhappy, Aeacus wandered his island praying to his father Zeus for help. Falling into a sleep under a tree he was awoken by a column of ants marching over his face. He looked around and saw a whole colony swarming about him.
‘Father Zeus!’ he cried out. ‘Only let there be as many mortals to keep me company on this island as there are ants on this tree.’
He caught Zeus in a good mood. In answer to his son’s prayer the King of the Gods transformed the ants into people, whom Aeacus called the Myrmidons after myrmex, the Greek word for ant. In time most of the Myrmidons left Aegina and made their home in Phthia. And that is the reason Peleus chose Phthia as a place for exile and expiation: to be with the Myrmidons.fn11
EURYTION, Phthia’s king, welcomed Peleus and – just as Cychreus of Salamis had done for Telamon – cleansed him of his crime, appointed him heir, and gave him his daughter in marriage.
Marriage to the king’s daughter ANTIGONE;fn12 the birth of a girl, Polydora; high status in Phthia as heir apparent to the throne of the Myrmidons; purification from his crime – things looked good for Peleus. But he and Telamon were made of energetic, restless material, and the settled domesticity of married life suited neither. Over the coming years they distinguished themselves on board the Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece and afterwards, like so many of the Argonaut veterans, they flocked to Calydon to join in the hunt for the monstrous boar that Artemis had sent to ravage the countryside there.fn13 In the heat of that legendary chase, Peleus’s spear went wide and fatally wounded his father-in-law Eurytion. Accident or no accident, this was another blood crime, another kin-slaying, and Peleus once more found himself in need of royal expiation.
The king who offered to cleanse him this time was ACASTUS, the son of Jason’s old enemy Pelias; and so now it was to Acastus’s Aeolian kingdom of Iolcos that Peleus made his way.fn14 Bear with me, reader.
By this time, Peleus had outgrown the unappealing characteristics that had caused him to play so monstrous a part in the killing of his young half-brother Phocus, and he was now recognized by all to be a modest, amiable and charming man. So modest, so charming, so amiable – and so handsome too – that it was not long before Acastus’s wife ASTYDAMEIA found herself overcome by desire for Peleus. She came to his bedchamber one night and did everything she could to seduce him, but with no success. His sense of propriety as a guest and friend of Acastus froze him in horror as she repeatedly pushed her body against his. Stung by the rejection, Astydameia turned her love to hate.