Page 372 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[lag0”1160 B‘CJ T7?e Sack of Troy 319

captains were already apportioning themselves estates—and
wives—when I left.”
Menelaus had a lot of questions to ask his elder brother when
they went to bed that night. How the kings of Libya, where the
people were black, could be cousins of his fair-haired father, and
who the Etruscans and Philistines were, and whether the
Canaanites would now hire the Israelites to drive out the Philis­
tines from their cities. And Agamemnon explained that the
Libyans were no more black than they were, and that their rulers
were people of their own race from the coasts of Europe who
had settled there a hundred years or so ago. Certainly their kings
were cousins of theirs. Mother was the great-granddaughter of
Andromeda, who was daughter of Cepheus, king of Libya, and
had been rescued from a dragon by their great-great-grandfather
Perseus, way back in the days when the Achaeans had destroyed
the might of the sea kings of Crete. Perseus had brought
Andromeda back as his queen, and had been the first king of
Mycenae in their own line. As for the Etruscans and the Philis­
tines, they were cousins too, living on the coasts of Asia Minor
just across the Aegean, not far from where Atreus’s grandfather
Tantalus had been king. But there had been famine in Asia
Minor in the last year or two, and many people were emigrating
to other parts of the Mediterranean. The Sikels and Sardinians
were in process of establishing colonies on the islands south and
west of Italy, and the Etruscans were said to have an eye on Italy
itself. Whether the Philistines would be satisfied to stay in Ca­
naan none could say; probably if they married Canaanite wives
they would have to, he added with the matter-of-factness of the
eight-year-old. Nor did Menelaus question this, for he already
knew that men settled where their wives lived, just as his own
father ruled Mycenae because he had married their mother, the
daughter of the last king of Mycenae. “When I grow up,” he said,
“I’ll marry a king’s daughter and be a king myself; you can be
king of Mycenae.”
The days passed pleasantly enough for the two young
princes, and built up with astonishing rapidity into years. In
summer there was hunting and fowling and hawking, in winter
the long evenings by the deal tables, where the returned free-