Page 398 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[iZSO-l^O B.C.] The Sack of Troy 335

fortably though scarcely less magnificently, with tapestry hang­
ings and inlaid chairs and bedsteads, with fur rugs on the
wooden floors, and with stores of fine linens in the painted
Egyptian chests along the walls.
Every evening, when the large household gathered to dinner
in the hall, and the maidservants moved along the tables with
the platters of pork and mutton, and the cupbearers poured out
the wine and beer, minstrels would sing to the tones of the harp
of the deeds of the sons of Pelops and the great epic of Troy.
Menelaus had no sons (apart, of course, from his unofficial
issue with slave girls and maidservants) and the throne of Sparta
would pass, after his day, to his daughter’s husband, just as he
had received the kingdom with the hand of the former king’s
daughter. Years ago, while they were encamped outside Troy,
he and Achilles had agreed to the betrothal of his daughter
Hermione, then a child of seven, to Neoptolemos, the young son
of Achilles. And now that Hermione was seventeen and a grown
woman Neoptolemos sent an escort of his wild Thessalians to
fetch his bride. And it was at the farewell feast before Hermione’s
departure that young Telemachos of Ithaka suddenly arrived,
seeking news of his father Odysseus, who had set off for home
from Troy and had not been heard of since.
Some two years later Odysseus himself came visiting. He had
in the meantime returned home, and he had hair-raising stories
to tell of ten years of incredible adventure in the Western Medi­
terranean. Menelaus was too polite to express his doubts at the
time, but he had difficulty believing in the clashing rocks, and
sirens and beautiful goddesses and one-eyed man-eating giants
which Odysseus claimed to have met west of Sicily. For Menelaus
had met Sicilians and Sardinians and even Spaniards at the
courts of Libya and Egypt, and they appeared to be quite ordi­
nary people who regularly sailed the whole length of the Medi­
terranean without meeting navigational hazards other than storms
and sea rovers.
He was more disposed to believe the account given some
years later by this nephew Orestes of a voyage which he had
undertaken to Tauris in the Crimea, to fetch home his elder
sister Iphigeneia, who had been sent to Tauris twenty years