Page 380 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

their Lydian dependencies. The death of Tyndareos not many
years later, and the accession of Menelaus to the throne of Sparta,
only served to strengthen the Achaean alliance.
They had been married seven years—Agamemnon had

three children growing up in his palace and Menelaus a single
charming daughter—when news came to Menelaus, visiting in
Mycenae, of the abduction of his wife. Half out of his mind,
and unable to imagine how a slave raid could have penetrated so

far inland as Sparta, Menelaus urged his horses over the sixty
miles of rocky road separating Mycenae from Sparta. Beside him
drove his brother.

The full story reduced them to speechless fury. It was no
slave raid which had carried off Helen. She had been kidnapped
(and, some whispered, not against her will) by a guest, visiting

under the laws of hospitality, Prince Paris, the son of Priam of
Troy.
Pursuit was scarcely practical. Paris had a two-day start, and

in any case the guard commander had sent a squadron down
the valley road as soon as the abduction was discovered. But, for
what it was worth, the brothers drove on, with a change of
horses, the twenty miles to the coast. And there confirmed that

Paris had sailed two days before, for Crete and Asia Minor.
There, in the royal lodge by the harbor, the two kings sat

down to discuss what their next step must be. The matter could
not be ignored, and whether Helen had acquiesced was irrele­
vant. Not merely their honor but the sacred laws of hospitality,
and therewith the gods themselves, had been mocked. And any

guest who had ever enjoyed the hospitality of Sparta would be
under an obligation to avenge the sacrilege. In any case, honor
demanded that the Achaean kings avenge the insult to their

family. But all this Paris must have known. And unless he was
completely blinded by infatuation, there must be a deeper mean­
ing behind the abduction.

The more Agamemnon speculated, the clearer it became that
the action of the Trojan prince must be intended as a challenge.
And the challenge could only be concerned with one thing—the

Achaean provinces in Asia Minor.
Now everything began to fall into place. Asia Minor was in