Page 399 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

336 Bronze and Iron [1230-1160 b.c.]

before as priestess of a shrine of Artemis at an Achaean trading

colony there. Orestes had sailed past Troy, and could report
that the site was deserted, except by shepherds who had made
roughly habitable some of the burnt shells of buildings. Farther
on, on the Black Sea coast of Thrace, he had met princes of half-
nomadic nations who were planning to move southward with
all their possessions, and to cross into Asia Minor like the Moski
and the Phrygians before them who had overthrown the Hittite
empire. From the mouth of the Danube Orestes had crossed

direct to the Crimea, and there, in the little half-Achaean half­
native trading colony, he had spent several months. He described
the bands of farmers and herdsmen who would come into town,
brightly clad in their best embroidered felts and homespuns, to
barter their hides and wolfskins and sacks of grain for the wine
and olive oil and bronze jewelry of Greece.
In truth, though Menelaus in his old age sat at home, there

was no lack of visitors to tell him how it fared in the world
outside. When he was sixty-five he heard from a Cypriote sea
captain that his former employer, Rameses HI of Egypt, was
dead and that another Rameses had succeeded. But it all seemed
far away and long ago. He was more interested when his son-in-
law Neoptolemos visited him, and talked of his plans to move his
Thessalians, or a large part of them, south to settle in the hill
country of Sparta, which was still sparsely inhabited. For the
people living north of Thessaly had been getting more and

more restless under pressure from tribes expanding into and
along the Danube valley; and it would be good policy to put
the Gulf of Corinth between his people and possible invasion.
Menelaus wondered what the original farmers of Sparta would
say to the sudden arrival of several thousand wild Thessalians,
but he was now an old and failing man, and Neoptolemos was

his heir. It seemed as though the future presaged movements
of whole peoples, instead of the swift raids of bands of young
men which had been his way of fighting in his day.
As he sat by the hearth in the great hall of Sparta, his
thoughts went back to the weapon training of his youth in
Mycenae, to sparring bouts and chariot racing with his brother
Agamemnon, now twenty years in his grave, and to the thousand