Page 385 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

332 Bronze and Iron [1430-1160 B.C.]

naked and seeking frantically from group to group to unite their
scattered families. All was assembled outside the walls to await
the great distribution, while working parties of the Achaeans
unhinged the great gates and demolished the mighty walls.
And to Menelaus, as he stood gazing gloomily at the scene
of his triumph, came a party of Ajax’s Locrians, uncertain
whether they were acting as an escort or a guard, bringing Helen
to her husband. Menelaus was at a loss what to say. But Helen
looked him straight in the face and said: “At last.” And there­
after ten years of warfare and separation were never mentioned
between them. Undoubtedly, thought Menelaus, it would save
public embarrassment if it were officially assumed that Helen’s
abduction and sojourn in Troy had been against her will. But
he had an uneasy feeling that for all future time his wife would
be known, not as Helen of Sparta, but as Helen of Troy.
Nor did he feel that, after these years, he could face the
mockery of a triumphal entry into Sparta with its errant queen.
After the division of the spoils, he took his share and his wife on
board and sailed south with his long ships for Crete and Egypt.
There was at this time an uneasy peace in the eastern Medi­
terranean. Although Egypt still claimed Palestine as within her
sphere of influence, Barneses III had made no attempt to re­
impose the garrisons in the coastal cities which had been ex­
pelled during the Philistine war seven years before. North of
Palestine, the former Hittite provinces of the Lebanese coast had
been left without a master when Hattusas was destroyed. They
would just as lief, of course, be without a master. Huddled be­
tween the mountains of the Lebanon and the sea, they had
always lived on sea trade and had been profoundly disinterested
in who ruled the hinterland behind them, if only those rulers
did not tax them too heavily and did not interfere with the free

Sea trade was still the preoccupation of the mixed peoples
of these Lebanese cities (whom people were beginning to call
Phoenicians), and of the mixed Philistine and Canaanite popu­
lation of the Palestine coast towns—and indeed of the cities .of
the Nile delta. But the seas were dangerous as they had never
been before. The freebooters of Libya and Cyprus and the