Mycenaean Saga

Good morning and welcome to LLT121 Classical Mythology. Sit around the fire and listen to me recount the ancient myths of yore. Today we pick up with the ultimate circle of myths of all Greco-Roman mythology, the Trojan War. The Trojan War, as I think I told you last time, starts when Paris, a prince from the award winning city of Troy, which is over here. I cannot draw a map of Greece that does not look like a Rorschach map of ancient Greece. You’ll recall that Paris was selected to be the judge at a beauty contest in effect between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Any person with any brains would refuse to judge a beauty contest between Athena, Hera and Aphrodite. Zeus was offered the chance to judge this beauty contest and he said, “No, I don’t want to.” So they found somebody really dumb, this guy named Paris, a Trojan prince. As the story goes, Hera offered him power. Athena offered him wisdom. Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful girl in the world. He picked Aphrodite, thereby angering Hera and Athena most severely.
The only problem was, the most beautiful girl in the world was married. She was Helen. She wasn’t Helen of Troy yet. She was Helen of Sparta. She was married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Apparently, she wasn’t a fanatic about it. Paris invited her to get on the love boat and sail back to Troy, which she did. She did that. Aphrodite made her do it. Menelaus immediately runs to whine to his brother, Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae. This is where we get into, well, Agamemnon launches a thousand ships and we have the Trojan War. We’ll get to that later. Right now, I need to give you some background on the award winning city of Mycenae. Crystal. Agamemnon, yes, I wrote him here. I will also write him here. The Mycenaean Saga is also known as the House of Atrius, which is yet another misnomer, because the award winning Mycenaean saga actually begins in Asia Minor with a small boy named Pelops. Does anybody remember who Pelops’s dad was? Phil, do you remember? His father’s name was Tantalus. Tantalus was an ancient king who invited the gods and goddesses over for dinner and then tried to serve them Pelops for supper. He chopped him up into little bits. The gods and goddesses got very mad at him. I think Demeter took a bite out of the shoulder and said, “Yuck, this is human.” They put little Pelops back together again with an ivory shoulder and they sentenced Tantalus to stand in hip deep water with a Bavarian cream doughnut tree over his head. Whenever he reached up for a Bavarian cream doughnut, the branch retreated. Whenever he bent down to drink some of the water, the water retreated. You remember that. Well, this is his son.
Over here in Asia Minor, Pelops hears that the king of Elis, one Oenomaüs. Now let’s put Oenomaüs over here. Actually it’s Oenomaüs. The umlaut over the U does not mean that he is a heavy metal band. It means that they’re to be pronounced separately. His name, in ancient Greek, means wine bag. King Oenomaüs and his wife, Mrs. Oenomaüs, had one daughter by the name of Hippodamia. I should point out that today when you say the word “hippo” you normally think, not of a horse, but of a large river-bound animal with a thick hide. Do hippopotamuses have a big horn on their head or is that a rhinoceros? It is a rhinoceros. I remember hippos are really cute. They look like this, right? Unless you make one mad, in which case you look like this. I just drew a big flat circle. That’s what you look like when a hippo steps on you. Hippo, in ancient Greece really means horse. The hippopotamus is a river horse. Hippodamea  means horse tamer, which is I would suggest a very nice name for a girl who rides horses. Well, at any rate Hippodamea  is their only child. Since only a boy can be the king, Hippodamea has to find herself a husband. King Oenomaüs decides, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll start up a chariot race. Whoever wins the chariot race gets to marry my beautiful daughter, Hippodamea, whose name means horse tamer. Anybody who loses a chariot race with me dies.” So King Oenomaüs is riding a 13 race winning streak. He’s got the fastest, hottest, chariot in all of Elis. He has super wide performance tires on his chariot. You know how they keep the tires on chariots in ancient Greece? With a lynchpin. The idea is that this little pin keeps the wheel from spinning off once the chariot gets up to ramming speed. Does that make sense? Any of you ever have a wheel go on a car while you were driving it? I have had this joy. So has my dad. Actually the tie rod went for me, but my dad actually got to see his right front tire bouncing down the street after a brake job. It did about $2500 damage to the 1975 Cordoba. This, by the way, is foreshadowing.
There are two versions of how it was that Pelops won. There are two versions of how this happened. Version number one is intensely boring and I will never, ever test you on it. It was put forth by one of my least, probably my least, favorite poet of all antiquity, the sniveling little snot named Pindar, who made money by sucking up to kings and writing poetry about wonderful kings like King Greer. May you never drown in your beer. You will never know any fear, because I rejoice you are here. Pay me. That is the kind of poetry Pindar wrote. Pindar says that the god Poseidon just showed up and gave Pelops six special horses. Don’t write that on any of your aetiologies. I will give you a very bad grade. As a matter of fact, I think, if Pindar showed up in my class, I would flunk him for the sheer joy of flunking him. He’s really a pain to read in ancient Greek. That’s why I hate him so much.
In version number two, the interesting mythological version, Pelops bribes the charioteer of Oenomaüs, a guy by the name of Myrtilus. He bribes Myrtilus the charioteer to pull the lynch pin on Oenomaüs’s chariot. Oenomaüs gets into the chariot, Myrtilus pulls the lynchpin, and the race begins. The chariot starts going. The performance tire falls off. Oenomaüs is killed in a tragic chariot wreck. Since he is dead, he automatically loses the race by disqualification. It looks like Hippodamea  has a husband. As indeed they do. So Pelops marries Hippodamia, but this is ancient Greece. This is ancient Greek heroic legend. Whoever raises their hand and can answer this question correctly can put his or her head down on the desk and sleep for the rest of the hour or tell a bald joke or whatever. I want to see how well I’m teaching you people. What is this story lacking up to this point to really make things happen? Yes, Crystal. We need some miasma, or ritual impurity caused by killing somebody, is often a great motivating factor in Greek myth, Greek legend, or tragedy because it brings interesting curses down on entire families. It makes you travel to far off foreign places where queens hit on you and monsters try to kill you and stuff. Yes, we need a little miasma. So it turns out that Myrtilus, the guy who pulled the lynch pin, thought he had a deal with Pelops. Myrtilus believed that he had the right of first congress with the would be bride. He should first enjoy the favors of the aforementioned bride person. Needless to say, Pelops did not feel like sharing. Instead, he pushed Myrtilus off the walls of the city of Elis. You are ghoulish. As he was being propelled backwards from the wall, Myrtilus yelled out, “My curse on you and your entire family.” A little cloud of dust rose up from where Myrtilus hit the ground. Unlike Wile E. Coyote, folks… you know, like Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff and an anvil falls on him and stuff. Myrtilus never gets up again. It so happens that Myrtilus is the son of the influential god Hermes. So his curse is duly registered and poured out like a bucket of dung all over Pelops, Hippodamia, and their descendants.
I pause for a question. This curse, by the way, is one of the biggest doozy curses in all of classical mythology. It doesn’t affect Pelops and Hippodamia. It really doesn’t. Pelops and Hippodamia mingle in love and have two kids names Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus is married to a wonderful woman by the name of Aerope. By and by, Atreus and Aerope have two kids. We’ll get there in a second. One day a message comes from the city of Elis saying that the people of Mycenae, which is just been founded, are looking for a son of Pelops to be their new king. This, folks is a big deal. You will recall that the period of Greek history from 1800 or maybe 2000 until 1200 BC is known as the Mycenaean Greek era. It is called the Mycenaean age because the most important city in all of Greece during these days is Mycenae. I remind you not to think of Greece as a nation-state of people who all spoke Greek. The idea of Greece was actually just a cultural idea at this time. You could find Greeks, so to speak, in mainland Greece. You could find them in Thrace. You could find them in Asia Minor. You could find them on islands. You could find them in Sicily and Italy. The Greeks have a series of city-states, the city-state of Springfield, the city-state of St. Louis, the city-state of Sedalia, and so on and so forth, each of whom is a sovereign state. It’s just that the king of Mycenae is the most kingly king and has the most influence over all of the other kings. He is the head king of all the kings, but what he is not is the absolute ruler of every corner of ancient Greece. Being the king of Mycenae means you are the most kingly king of all the ancient Greeks. So you can imagine how badly both Atreus and Thyestes would like to be king of Mycenae.
Is this making sense? Ask me a question? Does anybody have a question? Mitch. Yeah, I was giving you a little historical background. It was destined to be such a powerful city. I would guess so. Ray. No they’re picking the new king. Mark. Shut up. Josh. You two may no longer sit together. The story won’t work any other way. Word has it that the next day a golden ram will descend out of the sky. Why out of the sky? Why a golden ram and not a silver one? Why not a platinum ram? Why not a sheep? Why didn’t they get RAM Doubler and get two rams? The gods, Zeus sent it. Pan was supposed to lead the ram to the tent of the person who got to be king. Supposedly, the deal was done. Supposedly, the ram was to go to Atreus. Zeus had decided. In the dark of night, Thyestes crept into his brother’s tent while his brother was out and hornswaggled Aerope, so that the next morning, guess who shows up with the ram? It is Thyestes. He talked Aerope out of the ram, which she apparently had gotten and was taking care of for the night or something. I can’t remember and I don’t even care about. The idea is that Atreus was supposed to be the guy who got the ram because, Ray, he was the destined king of Mycenae. He’ll get to be king of Mycenae. What happened was this human named Thyestes threw a monkey wrench into the works by hornswaggling his sister-in-law. He wound up with the ram. So the next day, when everybody’s out on the parade ground waiting for Atreus to come out with the golden ram, they all give him a golf clap. He gets named king of Mycenae. Here comes Thyestes leading the ram. Supposedly, Zeus was so angry that he made the sun walk backwards in the sky.
I pause here because we’ll leave the sun in mid-sky, heading backward for a second, because I want to remind you what a great scholar has said. A great scholar with a red beard and a slightly receding hairline, “Legend, by its very nature, contains a kernel of historical fact.” I’d like to ask one of our experts in the back row. Does the sun ever go backwards? Do you ever see the sun go backwards? Me, either. I mean it doesn’t. It always rises in the east and sets in the west. It does it everyday, 24-7. No, when, I’m right you say, “You’re right.” These kids now a days. I’m right. I’m always right, darn it. Can anybody think of a natural event Phil? Go ahead keep explaining Phil. You’re so smart. You’ll see who is so smart on the final exam. There’s hope for you, Phil. The idea is that if you have ever experienced a total eclipse of the sun, the moon will pass. Here let me draw a diagram. Here’s the sun. The moon passes in front of it, and guess what? There is no light. You think it’s dark. The sun has set again. Then the moon moves away. It’s bright again. We don’t have astronomers like Phil to tell us what’s actually happening. So they say the sun has stopped in its tracts and gone backwards. Back in 1800 BC, that’s as good an explanation as anybody can come up with.
Let me tell you a very brief story about my own bad self that you can probably each come up with. In April of 1986 I had gotten a really nice watch from my dad for Christmas. Some day in April I had this nice, expensive watch. I was walking through the fourth floor in the University of Iowa library in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa commanding a panoramic view of the beautiful Iowa River valley. It’s not beautiful, but it’ll do. I was walking towards a window when there was an enormous clap of thunder, a bright huge, orange flash. It turned out that a lightning bolt had struck a transformer across the street. That was afterwards. I flung my arms out and apparently bellowed at the top of my lungs, “The gods are p___ed,” making quite a spectacle of myself. Unfortunately, trashing the expensive watch that my dad had given me for Christmas. I took it to the watch shop and they said, “You must have done a number on it.” I don’t have it anymore. I had as a testimony a watch that was smashed that said 7:00 pm on April 4, 1987, to testify to me. If you’ve ever been caught in a natural occurrence, if you have ever seen, for example, thunderstorm with snow, if you have ever seen a transformer get fried, if you have ever seen water rush up and flood a street and carry a truck away, you might recapture some of that sense of wonder that people walked around with all the time in the ancient world.
It’s not all that difficult to think, if there had been an eclipse, that the sun was going backwards. From there, it’s a natural jump to somebody, some god or goddess really is very angry. Obviously, this story about the sun going backwards is a reference to a total eclipse of the sun. As a matter of fact, scholars are able, in some instances to determine dates, chronology, by, one, figuring out references to celestial phenomenon such as these. Then interpolating or working backwards with the help of astronomers to determine when a particular eclipse, visible in that part of the world, could have taken place. It’s so silly it sounds dopey. There is a kernel of historical fact among there.
Questions. I thought that was utterly brilliant myself. At any rate, Thyestes gets to be king of Mycenae. Suffice it to say and we don’t know. This part of the story is lost, so I can’t even answer. Don’t even bother asking me, Jeremy, because I don’t know. Nobody knows the way it comes, the way it goes. I don’t know but, Atreus winds up being king. No, Atreus didn’t die. Okay, he just stole the ram back. I don’t care, but Thyestes is very unhappy now, because he is off stalking in the woods. It’s good to be king. It’s bad when you’re not king and Atreus just to let bygones be bygones. Just for some reason or another, he says, “Thyestes come on over for dinner. I’ll fix you dinner.” “Yes, uh oh.” Guess what’s for dinner? That is not a bad guess. It’s not a good guess, either. Where did you come up with that? That is what happens. Atreus serves Thyestes his own kids for supper. That’s what happens. My god. You’re learning to think like a writer of ancient Greek mythology. Yes, and it does run in the family. You were right in all accounts. Atreus serves Thyestes’s kids for supper. Thyestes is so disgusted, he rushes out into the woods and marries his daughter Pelopia, very funny. They have a kid named Aegisthus, more about him later. Why are you laughing? Well, any of you geniuses are welcome to write an aetiology explaining why it happened. That is to say, yeah, the first nonsequitur you caught it. That is pretty pathetic, if we’ve been having class for four months and you catch one nonsequitur. Wake up.
Atreus and Aerope are cursed. This curse of Myrtilus is passed on from Pelops to Atreus and Aerope. It’s going to be passed on to Agamemnon and Menelaus, also. Jeremy? No, they fed Thyestes’s kids to him. Thyestes’s own kids. Yes, and I know what you’re going to say. No, see Atreus, I think was smarter than his grandfather, Tantalus. Tantalus tried to chop up his own kid and feed him to the gods. Why not chop up your brother’s kids? Why not chop up your nephews and feed them to people? Yeah, Farrah Lynn. Well, if you don’t like that version, I’m sure Jeremy or Mark can come up with something better after class. Please be quiet. Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, in ancient Sparta, as a matter of fact, there is a lovely young woman by the name of Leda. She’s a very pretty young woman who draws the attention, shall we say, of no less an individual than the cosmic swinger himself, Zeus. Zeus, in order to achieve consummation of his full-throated desire for this young woman, hornswaggles himself into a swan. When the fulfillment of their love is complete, when the consummation has been achieved, he puts his wing around her, lights a cigarette and nine months later this woman Leda gives birth to two eggs. Why not? Now you’re getting the right attitude.
In one egg there is a little girl named Clytemnestra and a boy named Castor. In the other egg, there is a boy named Pollux and a girl named Helen. Pollux and Helen are immortal. They get that from their dad. Clytemnestra and Castor are mortal. They’re humans. They will die. They get this from their mom. Castor and Pollux, a nice story about them is they go off on all sorts of heroic adventures together, even though Pollux is immortal and Castor is mortal. One day, Castor gets killed in some brawl or something like that and dies, as people will normally do in these circumstances. Pollux is so distraught that he makes a deal with Zeus. He says, “I tell you what. I can’t stand living forever while my brother is dead. Why don’t we be together as dead people one day and be alive together the next day?” Zeus grants them this wish. It’s really sweet. I can just imagine what my little brother would say if I died. “Ha, ha,” that is what he would say. Not really, but this is what you tell your kids, right? Do you guys ever get in fights with each other? Good, my brother and I used to fight all the time, too. Now he has two little boys and guess what? They fight all the time. I know but these guys liked each other so much it’s weird. Helen is really beautiful. Clytemnestra gets married to Agamemnon because Agamemnon is older and smarter of the two. So Menelaus gets the hottest of the babes. Helen is so beautiful, everybody wants to marry her. Everybody thinks she is just the hottest babe in the entire Greek world. Supposedly, all of the suitors, all the guys who sniffed around Helen were compelled to swear an oath that, whatever lucky dog gets to marry Helen, if anybody ever steals Helen, we’ll help him go back and get Helen.
I pause for a question here. Good. Now here’s the action. Menelaus one day is off on a business trip. Paris comes knocking. Remember Aphrodite has promised him the most beautiful girl in the world. It turns out to be Helen. Helen and Paris go off to Troy. Here’s what happens. Menelaus comes whining to his big brother. Agamemnon gets ready to kick butt. He calls all the Greeks together. I’ll give you more of the details about that later. There is only one problem. How beautiful is Helen? She is so beautiful her face launches a thousand ships. These poor Greeks are all in their boats, just boatload after boatload of manly Greeks, bottled up in the port of Elis in their boats, waiting to go kick Trojan tail. They can’t get out.
They can’t get out because the wind won’t blow. The wind won’t blow because some goddess or god is angry, the way it always was back then. It turns out that the goddess Artemis is mad because of a botched sacrifice. Apparently they sacrificed to all the other deities except for Artemis. Yes, Crystal I know that is lame. It’s a plot device. If you can make up a better one, have at it. In order to let the ships get out, in order to make Artemis happy again, supposedly, Agamemnon is required to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have three kids. A boy named Orestes, a girl named Electra, a very complex young woman, and Iphigenia. Agamemnon is in a horrible dilemma. He has a choice between two alternatives, both of which stink. Today we would call it a no-brainer. Today, any daddy who loves his little girl is obviously going to say, “No, I am not going to kill my daughter just so I can go out and get my sister-in-law back from the bums who stole her. I mean I’m a dad first and king of the kings of Greece second. I might be sorely tempted sometimes, but, no, I am not going to kill my child.”
As we are going to find out, that Greek social customs of this time are based on the following code, death before dishonor. We’re going to find out that ancient Greeks judged men in these days, not by how nice we are and how many times we helped the little old lady across the street or bought a bum thanksgiving dinner. Rather it is the number of times you kicked butt. It’s like the wild, wild west. The number of times that somebody messed with you and you made them pay. That is what glory and virtue are measured in. Agamemnon, on the one hand he would kill his daughter. On the other hand, if he does not kill his daughter, that means that the ships will never get out of the port of Elis. The road is long with many a winding turn, but if he doesn’t kill his daughter, he will be branded forever as that woosy who wouldn’t even go to Troy to get his brother’s wife when all he had to do was kill a mere female child. What a wimp! Long after his death they will remember him as king Agamemnon, the wimp who let other people push him around. “Oh you’re Orates, son of King Agamemnon the wimp.” Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s all about dumb things men do to other men because of women. So there, but yeah, it is. It’s a hoot, more on which later. Of course, it’s a no-brainer for Agamemnon, because he is so imbued in this quote/unquote Greek heroic code, death before dishonor, that he send his daughter Iphigenia a telegram saying, “Iphigenia, Achilles has asked me for your hand. Achilles, the hottest stud of all the Greek heroes, the most eligible bachelor of all of Greece.” Poor Iphigenia packs up her hope chest and says to her mom, Clytemnestra, “I’m so happy,” and reports to Elis, where her dad kills her. The wind picks up and the boats all skitter off to Elis. They sail off to the Trojan War.
Who won the Trojan War? There were no winners in the Trojan War. Everybody lost. Another truism of history, another kernel of historical fact lurking in these legends. Remember that legend, by definition, contains a kernel of historical fact. Is that while the cat’s away, the mice will play. We need only look to, let’s say, how many of you in this room where alive during the Second World War? At the turn of the century, say 1900, it was engraved in stone that men worked and women stayed home and took care of the house and babies. During the First World War, men were sent off to fight in Europe and women started working in the factories and replacing the men, who went off to war and got killed by thousands in this ridiculous war. The process was repeated during the Second World War in the United States and elsewhere, as just about any man who could hold a rifle and point it at somebody bad found himself fighting either in the Pacific or in the European front. Somebody had to build the guns. Somebody had to build the tanks. Somebody had to keep the United States of America going while the able-bodied men were off fighting. The able-bodied women got jobs. They found out that women are good at building tanks. Women are good at building planes and shelves and running trains and doing everything that the guys were doing.
The men came back from the war and said, “Okay, girls. Let’s get back to the house. Go off and fix me some supper and fetch me some beer. I’m ready to go back to work.” Many of these women thought, “Wow. I like getting a check with my name on it.” Many of these women thought, “Hey. I’m pretty good at this job, and I like it. My mom can watch the kids. I’m going to go work. We set up a new social dynamic, etc.” The thing I want to focus on is, just because the men are going off to war doesn’t mean that all life stops back on the home front. It is not true. It wasn’t true during the Second World War. It was not true during the Trojan War. While Agamemnon and his manly men were off fighting before the walls of Troy where mingle in glory, life has to go on back in Greece. Scott, how would you react if you were Clytemnestra? You would be upset that he left? How about the kid, you humanitarian? Would you be a little ticked that the husband killed your kid?
Scott, you’ll have to get past five women before you get out the door and I wish you luck. I’ll give you a hint. She is mad. Not only that, who is her dad? She’s nobody’s baby. She’s nobody to mess around with. While the cat’s away, the mice will play. Clytemnestra sits herself up as ruler of Mycenae. Oh sure, she starts having a relationship on the sly with that draft dodger Aegisthus. As we’re going to find out, Aegisthus isn’t calling the shots. He’s just, like, some guy. He’s just, like, Madonna’s husband. Do you know what I mean? Clytemnestra is ruling the award winning city of Mycenae for ten years while Agamemnon is gone. You can guess how happy Clytemnestra is to see Agamemnon come back from the victorious and heroic war.
As I’ve tried to get through to Scott, here, she’s been nursing a grudge for a while because he slaughtered their youngest daughter in order for this men’s night out. She’s also found out that she likes being the queen. She likes bossing people around. She’s good at it. She’s got this dweeb of a boyfriend that she can order around. All of a sudden she gets word. The Greeks have won the Trojan War. The lordly great Agamemnon is coming back and she busies herself to make the correct preparations to welcome home her lord and master Agamemnon. “Agamemnon,” she says, “you’re home. I missed you, stud muffin. You’re my hero. Why don’t you come in and take a nice bath?” Agamemnon, we’re going to leave him there for your entire vacation. He’s standing there looking at the door. Clytemnestra is looking pretty good. It’s been a while. He paws at the ground and goes in. See you next time.