Troy and Other Ten-Year Problems

There's a conundrum I've been puzzling over for, ironically, ten years. I have never been able to figure it out. And it's a little embarrassing, as a fan of mythology, not to have a good reason for it. But nevertheless, it stands.

You know those two epic poems that provide some of the most basic foundations for Western society? The Iliad and the Odyssey? Well, I've read them both. I like them both a lot. I especially like Odysseus, the quintessential lovable trickster. He and Nestor provide the most reliable voices of reason in the Iliad, which makes it great fun to watch him really act out in the Odyssey. I don't really like any of the Iliad's characters as much as I like - no, let's do this right, love - Odysseus.

But despite the fact that many of its main characters are morally deplorable creatures who whine, mope, and pet their own egos, and despite the fact that the Odyssey is a far more thoughtful and touching character study... I like the Iliad better.

Let's be clear. My favorite character in the Iliad alternates between Hector, Diomedes, and Aeneas, depending on the mood I'm in that hour. Menelaus doesn't get enough screen time, Agamemnon's obnoxious, Helen's underused, Zeus is a bitch, and do not get me started on Achilles. I cannot with the glorification of a whiny self-absorbed mama's boy. I just cannot. And the characters I do like? Well, Hector is Hector, i.e. Living Awesome, but sometimes the sheer wow factor gets overwhelming. (Is there anything wrong with him? Anything at all?) Aeneas, to my surprise, turned out to be a very active participant in the war; before I read the Iliad, I thought of him as the sequel guy, and I enjoyed seeing him kick ass before Dido and Virgil got hold of him. And Diomedes... okay, he has basically one chapter, but in that chapter he makes Achilles look like a wuss, gives Aphrodite the bladed bitch-slap we all wanted her to get, and sends the freaking god of war crying home to Dad, in what is arguably the funniest scene in literary antiquity. Including everything in Lysistrata. If you can only have one chapter in which to shine, this is the one to have.

There's really no comparison with Odysseus. He's charismatic, brilliant, fast-thinking, and good at what he does. (Which is everything.) He knows exactly what he's worth, but unlike Achilles or Paris or any of the other entitled "heroes" of the Iliad, he doesn't sit around waiting for the world to give it to him. He goes after it, and if he fails the first time, he comes back with a better plan.

Calypso Takes Pity on Odysseus,
Henry Justice Ford

And oh yeah - he fails sometimes. Big time. He is the only man on his flagship (at least; he took eleven others to Troy) to make it back to Ithaca; that's one lousy rate of retention. He dozes off among his suspicious men, leaving Aeolus' bag of winds carelessly unguarded. Worst of all, he basically gives his address and phone number to an enraged and blinded Cyclops whose father rules the sea, right before he starts off on a long sea voyage. But he pays the price for those failures. He loses the men whose safety is in his keeping; he spends ten years trying to get home; he nearly dies about a million times. And he learns. By the time he gets back home, he's able (with some help from Athena) to diffuse a civil war in the making. He has the best character arc of anyone in Greek mythology.

But I confess it: when I read the Odyssey, I was bored.

Telemachus Arming, Luigi Bienaime

Maybe it's because Odysseus' adventures have crossed so deeply into popular culture that I already knew the whole story. The suspense of his escape from Polyphemus, the seductive threat of Circe, the innocent relief of Nausicaa and the Phoenician episode, all lost their full impact because I already knew how it ended. "Okay, Odysseus, you stabbed the Cyclops in his one eye. Good for you. Can you tell me something new, please?" (Full credit, by the way, to the d'Aulaires, who valiantly refrained from spoiling the Odyssey. That being said, I would have LOVED to read a d'Aulaire version.) What did make an impression on me were the Telemachus side plot and the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. Telemachus surprised me just as Aeneas did; I kind of knew he was there somewhere, but I hadn't expected him to be

Odysseus and Penelope, John Flaxman

energetic and enterprising and very much a worthy son to Odysseus. And even though I knew the plot summary of that reunion, I was utterly unprepared for the exquisite language it's written in, and the aching sweep of love and shock and joy that carries it forward. When I read the Odyssey, I read Penelope's speech to Odysseus aloud. I can't help it. There are sentences that exist to be spoken. I had thought of that scene as the standard capper to the hero's journey; I had never envisioned it as the emotional climax of lovers estranged for twenty years. That scene broke me in all the wonderful ways literature is supposed to break you.

But no one spoiled the Iliad for me. I mean, I knew Hector died, but I didn't know Diomedes was a badass, or that there was so much divine machination, or that Helen gave Paris a verbal emasculation that rivals Lady Macbeth. No one told me about the agony of the fight over Patroclus' body. I was unprepared for the scene where Priam begs Achilles for his son's corpse. And most of all, I was stunned to find that the war epic to end all war epics is actually anti-war.

Achilles Triumphant, Howard David Johnson

Really, who does that? Who paints a masterpiece of how art sucks, or compiles a complete and working investment portfolio illuminating all the flaws of Wall Street? The guts and the vision to decry war while writing the war story astounded me. People who dismiss the death lists and the catalogue of ships completely miss the point. For chapter after chapter, the Iliad sets you up with all the glorious claptrap, applying epithets to the war leaders, giving us gorgeous details like the red bows of the Ithacan fleet, the pathetic offering of three ships from Nireus the pretty boy, and Ajax of Salamis' seven-layer shield covered with bronze.

Hector Brought Back to Troy, artist unknown

And then they die. Then they all pour onto the beach and start fighting, and we see all the men who die in their last moments. "The end of death covered over his eyes and nostrils." "The spear-point went right through [his helmet] and smashed the bone, and all his brains were spattered inside, and the man brought down in his fury." "He shrieked as the life breathed from him, and fell screaming in the dust, and his spirit flitted away." These are visceral, claustrophobic moments, rendered with sympathy for the dying and an implicit condemnation of the reason they died. It happens over and over. The Iliad is relentless. It will trick you into thinking you're reading something golden and glorious, and then it'll throw a chapter of death lists in your face and dare you to believe, after all that, that war is a good thing.

I had no idea. And I could not put the thing down.

Ulysses and the Sirens, Roman mosaic, 3rd century CE

The Odyssey, in comparison, is structurally far simpler: it's a quest, told with unusual timing but still straightforward. Odysseus starts at Point A, zigzags through a maze of adventures, and ends up at Point B. The Iliad starts exactly where it ends: two great nations, both with admirable and appalling people, destroying each other. There's no journey, no revelation, no catharsis. Achilles manages to find his humanity in the end, but that's a hollow victory, because we all know he too is soon to die; his emotional progress matters not a jot. Come the next day, these flawed and brave and blind people we've come to know so well are going to go back to that beach and keep killing each other. The Odyssey is the emotional arc of three complicated characters, disguised as a simple story; the Iliad is a message disguised as a series of episodes.

The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy, Domenico Tiepolo

And I have no reason for why I like one better than the other. The secrets that both were hiding blew me away. They're both seminal pieces of Western culture; I wouldn't want to live in a world without them. But the one that moves me most is the story of despair at human nature, not the uplifting and adventurous yarn. Odysseus is the best of all traveling companions, but he's only one man. The Iliad tells me hard truths about human nature, using beautiful language to create horrific images. And in that very act, it affirms the good as well as the bad in humanity: no matter how low we sink, there will always be voices like Homer's, to tell us with such blunt grace what we're doing wrong.

Life After Troy

The Burning of Troy, Francisco Collantes

Part of the sheer fascination we've always had with the Trojan War is its unbelievable death toll. The Iliad spends a whole chapter naming all the kings, sons of kings, and kings' lieutenants who sailed to Troy, only to describe in equally loving detail the manners of their deaths a chapter or so later. Morbid? Of course. But magnetic.

And it explains why imagination clings so desperately to those lucky few who make it out alive. Odysseus, Aeneas, Cassandra (for a while), Andromache, the house of Atreus - all are names to conjure with. They're the survivors. Be it luck, courage, or determination, they were still standing at the end. They're the ones we want to know more about.

But there's a very distinct line drawn even among the survivors. It's apparently not enough to survive a ten-year siege of nonstop brutality. The survivors who live past the war are the ones who get as far from the war as they possibly can.

Captive Andromache, Frederic Leighton

This dooms most of the women from the start. Women's fortunes in ancient Greece were tied directly to their men and their city. When both those mainstays disappear, the women have no status anymore. Andromache suffers the humiliation of slavery and gets lusted after by the son of the man who killed her

Ajax and Cassandra,
Solomon J. Solomon

husband. Cassandra - princess, priestess, and prophet - is raped by two Greek commanders and murdered as collateral damage in Clytemnestra's vengeance. (An alternate version lets her run away to start a new line, but while I'd love to believe it - Cassandra's one of my Iliad favorites - I can envision a bloodthirsty Clytemnestra mowing down everyone in her path much more easily than I can see an escape for Cassandra.) Hecuba, powerless to save her husband or her children, gets claimed as a slave by Odysseus, which means that unless she was on the ship he himself left Troy in, it's very likely that she drowned en route to Ithaca. Only Helen manages to be female and in a safe place by the end of the war, and even her peace comes through depressing self-slander. Women in a society shaped by fighting men have very few tools for forging their own paths beyond destruction.

Even among the men, it's tough to break away from the defining episode of their lives. Agamemnon is most obviously tripped by

Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Pierre-Narcisse Guerin

it, and through his death his entire family becomes accessory to the destruction of the Trojan War. Ajax of Locris earns the enmity of Athena when he rapes Cassandra inside her temple; his prideful refusal to atone, or to acknowledge the power of the gods, is so outrageous that Athena and Poseidon put aside their own feud to tag-team on drowning Ajax. Menelaus jumps at the chance to relive the war when Telemachus comes to visit. In the guise of telling the young man about his unknown father, he journeys back to the thrill of war, something he's evidently missed in the past ten years of domestic calm. Keep in mind here that Menelaus is by far the most successful, of the men who get back to Greece, in living beyond the war. Even he can't get over it.

Ulysses and the Sirens, Roman mosaic, 3rd century CE

What about Odysseus, you say? Well, sure, Odysseus is really good at making his own life. The Odyssey is arguably more famous than the Iliad. And he does indeed return home, to where his loving wife and valiant son await him. But don't forget that it takes him ten years to get home, on top of the ten years he spent fighting at Troy. Don't forget that one stupid remark to Poseidon's Cyclops son dogs him throughout those ten years. And don't forget - however much you might want to - that tradition, if not Homer, sends him on still further journeys after his return to Ithaca. Odysseus' success in shaking off the Trojan War wakes in him a wanderlust that he cannot ignore. He all but creates the archetype of the restless wanderer, searching for something new and different. His life is big enough to contain the war and his own travels, but one snares him as completely as the other snares the women.

Aeneas and Dido, Pierre-Narcisse Guerin

And then there's Aeneas. Flat-out awesome in the Iliad, with no ending given him by tradition, he gets co-opted into a spectacular piece of poetic propaganda written to justify the Roman Empire. He's the only one who gets a truly happy ending: his journey done, his quest fulfilled, his line and city firmly founded. Like Odysseus, he has rough seas to sail; unlike Odysseus, he knows what he's looking for and when he's found it. In one sense, of course Aeneas triumphs in the creation of a life free of the Trojan War; the rise of Augustus Caesar demands the legitimation that only Aeneas can provide. But even within the story, as a character, Aeneas tries harder than anyone to break free. He may be haunted by his failure to save his wife from Troy, but it doesn't stop him from falling in love with Dido or marrying Lavinia. Offered the chance to call it quits and rule Carthage, he refuses. He clings to his search for a new city, far from his home, precisely because it is the only way to escape Troy. He creates his own life on his own terms, refusing to be defined by the war, and he alone manages to get a satisfying happily ever after. (It's telling, too, that in the happy-ending alternate version of Cassandra's fate, she also finds a home and a life far beyond Troy or the Greek city-states. Getting out of Dodge is the only way to escape.)

The Trojan War is a paradigm-breaker. It's massive, spanning generations and continents; its consequences define "far-reaching." It makes sense that a world trying to patch itself back together in the image of the past is a world doomed to failure. Aeneas and Odysseus are the only ones who realize the impossibility of going home after the breaking of the world, and only Aeneas realizes it in time.

Give a Girl a Break

The Peacock Complaining to Juno, Gustave Moreau

As every Greek myth will tell you ad nauseam, Zeus's wife Hera is one jealous meanie. She's territorial to the point of obsession, with a nasty vengeful streak and a vivid imagination. The queen of the gods is, to put it bluntly, a cow.

All of which is true. As gods go, she's one of the worst to cross. (Only Artemis really equals her in terms of vicious retribution. The men, in contrast to either woman, are sissies who can't deal out pain.) But the classic portrait of her is rather one-sided. She deserves far more of a break than she gets.

Why, you ask? Well, let's start off with some early childhood trauma. The girl was swallowed whole and alive by her father at the moment of her birth. And stayed alive, in his stomach, until her littlest brother was ballsy enough to fight back. That right there should win our sympathy.

Oh, and that littlest brother? With a woman already on his arm (Metis, mother of Athena and all-around badass herself), Zeus decided to sleep with his older sisters. Demeter said yes, which is how we get Persephone; Hestia just snorted and went back to her fire; Hera flat-out

Hera and Zeus, Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

refused him. Zeus, selfish even then, would not let this stand. His solution? He made a thunderstorm, turned himself into a bird, and flew to Hera for shelter. Moved by pity, she cuddled the bird close, when all of a sudden - whoops! It's Zeus, and it looks like he just moved you both into Rapetown-on-Incest.

Who else thinks that the subsequent wedding of Zeus and Hera must have been the most awkward event ever?

Right now, we've got a plucky young goddess who survived life inside Dad's belly, only to be claimed as spoils by her liberator. At this point, Hera does one of two things. Either she decides that she might as well make good on what she's got, or she decides to spend her whole life avenging herself on the bastard brother who dealt her this crappy hand. It depends on your interpretation, really, but it's understandable either way. She can be admirable for doing her best, or she can be tragic in the same way as Macbeth. Whichever you prefer, it makes her a far more interesting character than a cardboard villainess.

Hera Imprisons Io, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

I can never make up my mind about her choice there. When you consider the outright torture she perpetrates on Zeus's other conquests - keeping Io a cow, inciting Semele to arrange her own death, screwing up Heracles's entire life with vindictive abandon - it's easy to think that this is a woman consumed by vengeance, with no pity or sympathy left in her. But then you run into her relationship with her son Hephaestus, who backed her in a fight with Zeus at incredible bodily cost to himself. And her patronage of Jason is downright tender during the quest for the Golden Fleece, and lasts all the way until he throws Medea over. (And come on, Jason - did you really think Hera, of all goddesses, would support a cheater?)

And then there's the hilarious, but also touching, scene in the Iliad where Hera seduces Zeus to distract him from the fighting so Poseidon can help the Greeks. His opening gambit is to recite a list of women he's slept with, something usually guaranteed to send Hera into a rage. But

Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida,
James Barry

then he tells her that of all of those women, none of them - not even Hera herself, way back when he pulled the wet-bird trick - was as beautiful and enticing as she is now. And then he makes a move that even I get a little swoony over: he takes her to Mount Ida and wraps them both in a golden cloud through which no one can see their lovemaking. Granted, Hera's motivated here by resentment at Zeus for not allowing the gods to interfere with Troy; granted, Zeus does not start out as the smoothest of operators. But it's bizarrely sweet, after all these tales where you assume it's a hellish marriage of a philanderer and a shrew, to see that Zeus at least has strong feelings for his wife, and that she is well aware of them. Later, when Zeus wakes up and sees Poseidon running rampant, he blames Hera; she swears her innocence by their marriage bed, a vow she says she would never make falsely. Despite their horrible beginning, there's something there that's important to them both.

Juno Ludovisi, artist unknown

And if Hera does care for Zeus, in spite of it all, it explains why she pursues his mistresses with such rabid hatred. She might not like the fact that she cares about her lousy husband, which means she might find it difficult to admit to his face. For a woman whose adult life was inexorably shaped by trauma, the kind of abuse Hera inflicts on her "rivals" might be the psychologically safest way for her to express love.

It doesn't make it right, and I still feel awful for poor innocents like Semele. But it does make more of Hera than she usually gets. And she gets so little that there's got to be some parts of the story missing.

Not Like It's Important

Why does everyone ignore the prophet?

The Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David

Plenty of legends come equipped with a voice of either doom or reason, laying out the future in five easy steps, free of charge. Soothsayers, hedge witches, fortune tellers: if you're living in a legend, there's almost always a prophet of some sort lurking around the next corner. What's better, their prophecy will come true.

But if you're living in a legend, it's all but required that you ignore it.

Cassandra wailed of doom for Troy for ten years, to no avail. Moses pulled off an astounding number of miracles while Pharaoh just scoffed. Merlin, taking it perhaps farther than any other prophet, foresaw the exact manner of his own death and still fell into Nimue's trap. Once, okay, you ignore portents of ruin and hope for the best. But when they come true, it would make sense to listen next time.

Moses and Aaron Before Pharaoh, Robert Leinweber

And these prophets in particular had excellent track records. Arthur has no excuse for ignoring Merlin's warning; when the brain behind your throne tells you something, you'd better pay attention. Moses turned the only source of water in a desert kingdom to blood on, essentially, a dare. That alone should have made Pharaoh sit up and take notice. Cassandra had been foreseeing all manner of unpleasant things for years, although her case is particularly cruel. Because she refused a randy god's booty call, no one was ever going to be able to believe her.

Ignoring the prophet creates not only a crushing loss in-story, but a particularly frustrating read. While characters blunder on down the plot road, the readers are left scowling and upset with their heroes, who just can't seem to clean the wax out of their ears long enough to hear the crucial tidbit. "Why didn't you just not marry Guinevere?" I've wanted to yell. "Why can't they just give Helen back? Why don't you let his freaking people go?" Like the prophets, we see it coming a mile away. Watching doom draw closer and closer is agonizing, especially when it's coming for people we've grown to care about.

King Arthur and Merlin at the Lake, W. Otway Cannell

And that's exactly the point of including a prophet. It's a fantastic writer's tool for creating narrative tension. We want to assume that Camelot would always stand; once Merlin tells us that it will fall through the illicit passion of the Queen and her champion, we're on the lookout for every hint the story lets fall. Lancelot's arrival is doubly portentous because we already know what he brings to Camelot. The ten plagues would be completely anticlimactic without Pharaoh ignoring the prophet; Moses would never truly prove his strength as an individual rather than a mouthpiece for God, and God wouldn't be able to demonstrate his complete dominance over the gods and people of Egypt. (Not to mention that if the story ran on common sense rather than escalating tension, there'd probably be only one plague and no Red Sea miracle.) Cassandra's prophecies of doom add even more poignancy to the fact that most of the major characters in the Iliad are vividly aware of what will happen when they die. Hector's speech to Andromache about how he most fears her falling into enemy hands as a slave is extra heartbreaking because we know, even if he doesn't, that his worst fear will come horribly true.

No one listens to the prophet because he's not in the story for the characters. He's there for us. The prophet exists to make us nervous, to remind us that happiness is transitory, to let us know what to watch out for. A prophet can't teach his or her fellow characters anything; it's too late for them, their story's already set in stone. The people who can learn from a prophet are the readers for whom he or she is the surrogate within the story, the more detached observer who can tell how things will play out.

The Coward's Weapon

Say I handed you a weapon. It was something completely unlike anything you'd seen before: a device that could take out an attacker before he even knew you were there. It could be wielded in complete stealth, with excellent accuracy, and it wasn't expensive to make.

I am speaking, of course, of the bow.

As long as there have been bows, there have been legends associated with them. It makes perfect sense: at heart, the bow is an impossibly miraculous weapon. It puts the rich man in armor on the same playing field as the peasant with good aim and access to a yew tree. It ensures a certain amount of protection for its wielder - a good archer can get rid of a lot of foes before they get close enough to hit him back. Legends can't ignore the bow; they're full of archers, most of them crack shots. But no one can quite make up their mind about what the weapon says about the wielder.

Mostly, anyway. There is one true cowardly archer: Paris of Troy. In a culture where courage is measured by risking life and limb in a chariot melee, the pretty boy who shoots arrows from behind his city walls is never going to get much respect. When Paris and Menelaus fight their duel over Helen, it's implicit that the bow is not an allowed weapon: real men fight face-to-face, not bow-to-shield. Paris's slaying of Achilles is hideously ironic - the greatest warrior of the age, a man who physically attacked a river and won, is killed with the weapon of a coward. It's deliciously karmic that the Greeks turn Paris's own weapon against him; his killer, Philoctetes, inherited from Heracles the bow and poisoned arrows he uses to take out Paris. But that very act takes some of the sting out of the taunting of Paris as a fraidy-cat archer. He may sleep around with another man's wife while his brothers die in the dust, but his archery was something not only to be feared, but to be emulated. Even when it's the coward's weapon, a good bow is worth having on your side.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Warner Bros.

Things could only get better for the bow, and did they ever. From the moment Robin Hood shot his first arrow, the bow was enshrined in legend as the weapon of the underdog. So you can't afford a sword or chain mail or a war horse? No problem! You can go them one better. For a few hours of labor, you can make yourself an armor-piercing weapon that keeps you out of reach of a sword's edge or a horse's hooves. Rebels from William Tell to Katniss Everdeen embrace the bow's practical and symbolic value. Armed with bows, the oppressed masses are no longer defenseless. Singlehandedly, an archer can start a rebellion; get a group of Merry Men together, and you've got a full-scale coup on your hands. The sheer nature of the weapon - requiring forethought and planning - also seems to influence its wielders: legendary archers tend to be far more strategically minded than swordsmen.

Eventually, nobility is allowed to use the bow. One of the engagement challenges for the hand of Princess Yasodhara requires her suitors to string and bend a massive bow. Siddhartha, the future Buddha, calmly fires off an arrow as well, when no other suitor had even managed to string the weapon. Similarly, Odysseus is the only man who can use his own personal bow; his reclamation of kingdom and queen truly begins when he completes Penelope's impossible challenge. But the nobility is still weird about archery; both instances are the only times we see either hero use a bow, and they're relegated firmly to the arena of showmanship, with no practical side in evidence. Rama is rarely depicted without a bow, but Rama is in a strange fix: undeniably royal, he's also a prince in exile. He may be the only noble to escape without censure from the practical wartime use of a bow.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, Lionsgate

Most recently, the bow has become an oddly gendered weapon. In an unfortunate modern transposition, the "cowardly" archer has become "feminine." The two best-known archers in pop culture are Katniss and Legolas. One's a girl, one's played by Orlando Bloom. Women in stories set in or influenced by the Middle Ages have a choice of two weapons: the knife, for close work when her protection has failed, or the bow, to keep her out of danger but still enable her to please a modern audience by fighting. It's the same stigma that Paris dealt with: men don't fight from a distance, ergo men don't use bows. And the complexity of Katniss, currently the most visible archer around, means that while we admire her incredible aim and accuracy, we are always horrifyingly aware of what it costs her to use her skill to kill. She's not a good-versus-evil hero, and while her weapon represents rebellion, she's not one with it in the same way that Robin Hood is.

It's a weird full-circle situation, with the bow slipping off its rebellious pedestal into, if not ill repute, certainly a loss of luster. And it's hard to predict exactly where the bow will wind up next. But it will probably always be the weapon of revolution; its equalizing nature will never change. It will circle back around to pure uncomplicated heroism, and then around again as we remember what long-range weapons do to a gallant charge of heroes. It's a complicated weapon, and it'll probably always make us a little bit nervous.

In Defense of Menelaus

As a rule of thumb, I cheer for the underdog. Watching someone beat the odds is a marvelous thing. It gives you hope for yourself, for the future, for the world in general. The big guys don't always win, and the little guy who cares can actually stand up and show them what's what.

And I have never seen a more under underdog than Menelaus.

Helen and Paris, Howard David Johnson

Everyone knows how this goes. We saw a preview for it in Aphrodite and Hephaestus' disastrous marriage, but even the gods couldn't outdo the mortals on this one. Anyone planning to hook up with The Most Beautiful [fill-in-the-blank] Ever should take note: there will always be an upgrade. Menelaus is the guy Helen had to marry; Paris is the guy she wanted to marry. Or at least the guy she shacked up with for a decade and (according to Homer) had pretty awesome hate sex with. Menelaus is the guy with metaphorical egg on his face who has to fight his wife's boy toy, who quite possibly has non-metaphorical afterglow in his hair. Someone is losing here, big time.

Rubbing salt in that ten-year wound, no one can say a nice word about Menelaus' appearance. Helen's beauty goes without saying; Paris is called "godlike" by Homer, who otherwise has no time for the whiny little brat. The best Menelaus gets in terms of physical description is that he

The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (detail of Menelaus), Roman
copy of the painting by Timanthes

has red hair. Damned by faint praise if anyone ever was. If Paris is Helen's upgrade, it's hard not to imagine that Helen was Menelaus's. The younger brother of an ambitious king could expect very little in Bronze Age Greece, but marriage to Helen got Menelaus a kingdom, prestige, and an incredibly hot wife all in one stroke. All of a sudden it makes a bit more sense why he'd fight so devastating a war to get her back: she's the ticket to his future, and possibly his self-esteem too.

But that's not enough. This humiliation conga's just beginning. Menelaus is very clearly subordinate to his brother for the entirety of the war, despite having the most at stake. Hera and Athena are nominally on his side, but they have to remind themselves to help him out, while Aphrodite springs into action when Paris is in danger. And in every adaptation of the story since Homer, he's recharacterized as unsavory: neglectful, abusive, careless, vengeful, anything to make him seem unworthy of the prize that is Helen.

So why do I cheer for him? Because he's awesome, that's why.

Helen and Menelaus, 6th century Greek relief

Homer tells us right from the start that what Menelaus wants most of all is to defend Helen's honor. Don't forget, Homer's Helen isn't in love with Paris; the first time we see them together, she quite rightly bitches him out for his wimpiness, comparing him to Menelaus in devastating terms. No one listens, least of all Paris, but Helen is not happy in Troy. Who wants to protect her? Who wants to make her happy? Who wants to restore her good name? Menelaus. Her husband. After nine years of daily humiliation, his goal is still to please her. In a Big Manly Epic full of blood and death and talk of honor, that is just sweet.

But Menelaus isn't just all heart. He plans nighttime initiatives with Agamemnon. His most-used epithet is "master of the war-cry." Helen sings his praises as a fighter, and his battle with Paris more than proves her right. He never oversteps his boundaries as second-in-command, but when he needs to act, he brings it. He's a king you could be proud to follow, which in the Iliad is rare indeed.

Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus, Roman copy
of Greek statue

And lest we forget, he carries Patroclus's body back to the Greek lines, weaponless and endangered for the sake of his dead comrade's honor.

This. Guy. Rocks.

I dare you to find a more well-rounded man in all of Greek mythology. Menelaus has it all. Plus he wins. Plus Helen is happy to be reunited with him and their daughter. (Hey, they had a daughter? That means they must have slept together! Crazy times!)

And he never brags about how awesome he is. He just is. And it's a crying shame that he's constantly belittled in favor of a spoiled manwhore who hasn't a fraction of Menelaus's qualities, or the grace with which he carries them.

Oh, princess, how they'll whisper your name...

Hands up if you knew Cassandra had a suitor. (Not counting Apollo, that is, or Ajax of Rapetown in the shire of Rapesly.) Two suitors, in fact. At least. Coroebus and Othronus, foreign princes who fought and died for Troy because they wanted to marry Cassandra.

Cassandra, Frederick Sandys

I wonder why so few Iliad adaptations mention that? What part of "feared and shunned prophesying madwoman" doesn't
scream dude magnet?

I like that Cassandra had suitors. It's a canon confirmation of how fascinating a character she's always been. We're not the only ones interested in a dead-on accurate and utterly ignored prophet. Even then, even among the people who stuffed their fingers in their ears, someone saw something in her that made them want to know more.

And in a serious way, too. It would be different if Coroebus came to Troy, saw a hot princess (Homer compares Cassandra to Aphrodite at one point), and decided she wasn't interesting enough to risk his life for. Instead, he made it all the way through the war fighting for Troy, only to die trying to defend Cassandra from Ajax of Locris.

Cassandra Dragged from Athena's Temple, Antoine Rivalz

Poor Othronus comes late and leaves early, arriving and dying in the Iliad. Homer takes the time to inform us that Othronus is there only so he can marry Cassandra, and that he would have married her even without a dowry.

We're not talking puppy love here. There was something about this woman. (Sure, at the beginning an alliance with Troy probably helped. But after ten years of war, with all its deprivations and losses, there was something else keeping them on that battlefield.)

So what is it about Cassandra that's so magnetic? Her own people don't like her, at least one god has a serious vendetta against her, and she cares very little for her own personal image, or she wouldn't be quite so prone to public screaming prophecies. I'm going to hazard a guess that whatever drew Coroebus and Othronus to her was not the prophetic gift that so enthralls modern readers. That particular blessing had very little value, either to Cassandra or to anyone who heard her. The benefit of hindsight makes it easier for us to appreciate Cassandra than it was for the Trojans.

Cassandra, Evelyn De Morgan

And she never stops fighting. In the face of scorn, ridicule, and disbelief, she never falters or betrays what she knows to be true. A Trojan, living day-to-day with an uncanny child prophet who grows more unhinged with each year, would not be kindly disposed toward her; an outsider, already prepared to like a rich and lovely princess, could easily be surprised and touched by her tenacity and her struggles. (Loyalty and courage being traits that ancient Greek society prized highly.)

But the repercussions of a lifetime of denial would have been very visible. Cassandra's a loner, a dreamer, a half-mad voice of reason at the mercy of unwanted powers.

So it's a lot to read into three characters who barely rate a mention in the Iliad. But it's a hard question to answer, and one that few people have even tackled. And in my head, at least, it gives Cassandra a measure of the sympathy and kindness that her people couldn't find for her.

And now you know what a softy I really am.

For extra fun: this song, from which I took the title of the post, might as well have been written by one of Cassandra's suitors.