A Prince of Troy. Lindsay Clarke
naked body when she was found by Heracles as he returned with his friend Telamon from their expedition to the land of the Amazons. Using his prodigious strength, Heracles broke the chains and set Hesione free. But the sea-monster was still at large, so the hero struck a bargain with Laomedon, offering to put an end to the beast in return for two immortal white mares which were the pride of the king’s herd.
The king accepted the offer and, after a fight that lasted for three terrible days, Heracles managed to kill the monster.
Once again Laomedon proved faithless. Ignoring the counsel of his son Podarces, he substituted mortal horses for the immortal mares that had been promised, and when Heracles discovered the deceit he declared war on Troy.
It was a war that left the city ravaged. As the son of Aeacus, Telamon was able to discover which part of Troy’s walls had been built by his father and were, therefore, the weakest. He breached the city’s defences at that place, Heracles joined him in the assault, and the palace was sacked. Driven by vengeful rage, Heracles killed Laomedon together with most of his family. Though Hesione’s life was spared, she was given against her will to Telamon, and carried off by him to his stronghold on Salamis. But before she left Troy, Hesione was allowed to ransom the life of one other captive. The life she chose to save was that of her sole surviving brother, Podarces. It was he whom Heracles appointed as the king of a city reduced to smoking rubble. The new king was known ever afterwards as Priam, the ransomed one.
That anyway is how the story is told among the Trojan bards, and there were aspects of the tale that Telamon and Heracles were pleased to propagate among the Argives. But Odysseus was given a rather different version of the story by Telamon’s brother Peleus. This is how he told it to me.
When they were boys, Telamon and Peleus had known for years of the longstanding feud between their father and King Laomedon of Troy. As a man widely known for his wisdom and skill, Aeacus had indeed been commissioned to rebuild and strengthen the ring wall around Troy. Because the city stood on a site prone to earthquakes, Aeacus entreated the divine help of Poseidon and those who understood his mysteries. He also brought with him a bard consecrated to Apollo. It was he who led the music which eased the men in the hard labour of carving, moving and lifting the great blocks of stone. The work went well. Lofty new gates guarded by bastions were built. The limestone blocks were skilfully laid to give a steeply angled batter to the lower part of the wall. Above it rose a gleaming crenellated parapet. So the new walls of Troy, rising from the windy hill above the plain, were both robust and beautiful.
Before the work was complete, however, it became clear that Laomedon was running short of money. When Aeacus saw that the king was unlikely to pay for the remainder of the work, he downed tools and returned to Salamis, leaving a stretch of the western wall unimproved and vulnerable. Eventually, infuriated by Laomedon’s failure to come up with the money he was still owed, he called down the curses of Poseidon and Apollo on the city.
Many years later the Trojans were woken one morning by a dreadful sound. The waters of the bay between their two headlands were being sucked back towards the Hellespont, leaving the sea-bed exposed as a stinking marsh, strewn with rocks and slime and the carcasses of ancient ships. The ground under the city began to move. Buildings cracked, sagged and collapsed. People fled their houses as the sea came crashing back in a huge tumbling wall, higher than a house, that did not stop at the shore but rushed on to flood the fertile plain, destroying the harvest and salting the land.
Though the walls of Aeacus withstood the shock, the western defences and many houses inside the walls did not. Hundreds of lives were lost that day, trapped under fallen masonry or drowned by the wave. Soon a stench of decay polluted the city’s air. Within a few days pestilence came.
Telamon and Heracles were caught in the turbulent waters as they sailed through the Black Sea into the Hellespont in the single ship that remained to them after their violent expedition to the land of the Amazons. By the time they sailed along the coast of Troy, the dirty weather had cleared and the waters calmed a little. But as they followed the shoreline, they were amazed to see a naked young woman bound to the rocks with the breakers surging round her.
The girl was half-dead from cold and fear, but Heracles cut her down, took her aboard ship and brought her round. She was not Princess Hesione, of course, for Laomedon had taken precautions to withhold his daughter’s name from the lottery that had been held in the city. It was from the young woman on whom the lot had fallen that they learned of the city’s desperate condition. Reduced to a primitive state of terror by their misfortunes, the Trojan people had resorted to human sacrifice to propitiate the gods.
Seeing an opportunity, Telamon sailed to Aegina and told his father that his curse had finally born fruit. If Aeacus would finance ten ships, he would return to Troy and take as plunder what had been withheld as payment. Aeacus agreed to put up only part of the money, so Telamon approached Peleus for the rest, but without success. In the end he and Heracles advanced against Troy with only six ships, but they carried enough men to breach the weakest part of the wall and sack the already devastated city.
In terms of hard coin and plunder, the expedition failed to make much profit, but Laomedon was killed and Telamon took his beautiful daughter Hesione as part of his share in the spoils. Priam’s most prudent son, Podarces, only survived the slaughter when he ransomed his life by revealing where Laomedon had hidden what was left of his treasure. Before sailing away, Telamon placed a battered crown on the young Trojan’s head and hailed him as King Priam.
Terrified, humiliated, but alive, Podarces swore to himself that he would wear the new name with pride, that he would do whatever was needed to redeem the fortunes of Troy, and that one day he would have his revenge on the barbarians from across the sea.
Before that time the Trojan people had tended to look westwards across the sea to Argos from where their ancestors had come in previous generations. The young King Priam now turned eastwards, opening up negotiations with the great bureaucratic regime of the Hittite empire, looking for loans to help him rebuild, and for trade to repay them. He met with a favourable response. Merchants of the Asian seaboard were also quick to see the advantages of a well-ruled city on a site commanding access to the Black Sea trade. Soon ships were putting in from Egypt too. New buildings began to rise inside the walls of Troy, not just new palaces and houses but also great weaving halls where the people were put to work manufacturing textiles from the raw materials that came into the city from the east as well as from their own mountain flocks. The Trojans’ capacity for work became proverbial and the quality of that work was high, so trade profited. Beyond the city walls, Priam encouraged his people’s traditional skills as horse-breakers until discriminating buyers began to look to Troy for their horses. And the king also took a particular delight in the powerful strain of bulls raised by his Dardanian kinsmen on the pastures of the Idaean Mountains.
Priam was not slow to thank the gods for the favour they had shown him. Soon after coming to the throne, he endowed an ancient mountain shrine to Apollo Smintheus, the bringer and healer of pestilence. Next he gave a new temple to the god inside the city, and then dedicated another on the sacred site at Thymbra. As his wealth increased, he built a spacious market square, surrounded by workshops and warehouses, and overlooked by a new temple which housed the Palladium, an ancient wooden image of the goddess standing only three cubits high that had been made by Pallas Athena herself, and on which the preservation of the city was said to depend.
Meanwhile the king had married. His wife Hecuba was the daughter of a Thracian king and their wedding sealed an important military and trading alliance. But there was also love between them, and Priam’s happiness seemed complete when his queen gave birth to a strong son whom they named Hector because he was destined to be the mainstay of the city. Not long afterwards, Hecuba fell pregnant again and everything seemed set fair until a night shortly before the new child was due, when Hecuba woke in terror from an ominous dream.
In the dream she had given birth to a burning brand from which a spawn of fiery serpents swarmed until the entire city of Troy and all the forests of Mount Ida were ablaze. Disturbed by this dreadful oracle of fire, Priam summoned his soothsayer, who was the priest to Apollo at Thymbra and had the gift of interpreting dreams. The priest confirmed the king’s fears – that if the child in Hecuba’s womb was allowed to live,