Page 379 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

t wane muy were away in Asia Minor. With
a fleet of northerners Thyestes, the old pretender to the throne
had landed on the Peloponnese and, helped by a fifth column
within the palace, had taken Mycenae. A courier had reached

Atreus in Lydia and they had sailed straightway, landed, and
marched on the castle. But Mycenae, which they had been to
such pains to make impregnable, was not to be taken. Atreus and

most of his force had fallen in the assault, and the young
heirs, scarcely out of their teens, had been routed by a chariot
assault from the sally port. They had scarcely escaped with their
lives.

Dynastic struggles and palace revolutions were no unusual
events among the kinglets of Greece, and the courts of the

Achaeans were full of kings in exile. Still, this was a little differ­
ent, for Mycenae was the richest town of the Peloponnese, and
Atreus had been the head of the rather nebulous Peloponnesian

confederacy. And Agamemnon and Menelaus were popular
figures, already experienced leaders of troops. Tyndareos of
Sparta willingly gave them shelter and full support in their plans

for the recovery of their kingdom.
But an open attack on the fortress of Mycenae had been
proved impractical. It took several years of undercover plotting

before the only practical alternative, the assassination of King
Thyestes, could be planned and successfully carried out. In the
meantime the two princes, grown to full manhood, were figures

of distinction at the Spartan court. And none was surprised
that their return to their kingdom, supported by the whole army
of the Spartan king, coincided with the announcement of their

marriage to the two daughters of Tyndareos.
Helen of Sparta, Menelaus’s new bride, was a raging beauty,
and, as the elder daughter, conferred by age-old tradition the

succession to the Spartan throne. It was considered right and
proper, therefore, that Menelaus take up residence in Sparta,
while Agamemnon, with his wife Clytemnestra, assumed the

throne of his father at Mycenae. Even so, the two brothers worked
closely together, re-establishing the Peloponnesian confederacy,
making treaties of friendship with many of the princes north of

the Gulf of Corinth, and sailing once more across the Aegean to