Menelaus and Helen — Sparta (Menelaus and Helen) (Σπάρτη / Λακεδαίμων), landfall 4 of 5 on the search of telemachus

A double wedding

They arrive at the richest court in Greece in the middle of a double wedding feast — Menelaus is marrying off his daughter Hermione to Achilles' son, and his own son to a Spartan bride. The hall gleams with bronze, gold, amber, silver and ivory; Telemachus whispers to Pisistratus that the court of Zeus must look like this.

Menelaus overhears — and answers with the Odyssey's quiet melancholy: no mortal rivals Zeus; and all this treasure was gathered in eight years of wandering while my brother was murdered at home. I would give two thirds of it to have the men back who died at Troy. And one man above all, whose fate I do not even know: Odysseus.

Helen knows him

Before a name has been spoken, Helen enters — Helen of Troy, serene, restored, spindle of gold in hand — looks once at the young guest and says it aloud: no one was ever so like another as this boy is like Odysseus. This must be Telemachus, the son he left as an infant when the Greeks sailed to war for my sake, shameless that I was.

Pisistratus confirms it; Menelaus overflows; and Telemachus, hearing his father praised in the hall of the war's own cause, hides his face in his purple cloak and weeps. The whole company gives way — Helen, Menelaus, Pisistratus mourning his own brother — until dinner threatens to drown in grief.

The drug against sorrow

So Helen acts. Into the wine-bowl she casts a drug, nēpenthes — 'no-grief' — given her by an Egyptian queen: whoever drinks it will not shed a tear that whole day, not even for a mother or father dead, not even if men killed a brother or a son before his eyes.

Under its calm, the stories of Troy can finally be told at dinner without breaking the tellers. It is one of Homer's strangest, most modern moments: memory made bearable by chemistry, hosted by the woman who caused the memories.

“A drug against grief and anger, bringing forgetfulness of every sorrow.” — Odyssey IV, 221

What was nepenthes?: Homer says the drug came from Egypt, 'where the earth bears drugs in plenty' — and Egyptian medicine knew opium well; poppy juice in wine fits the described effect almost exactly. Theophrastus and later Greek pharmacology took the identification seriously, and many moderns agree.

The beggar inside the walls

(Told by Helen)

Helen's story of Odysseus: at the war's end he flogged his own body with disfiguring blows, threw rags over his shoulders, and entered Troy as a beggar-slave — unrecognizable to every man. I alone knew him, she says; I questioned him, and he evaded me with cunning.

She bathed him, swore an oath not to betray him — and only then, she claims, did he tell her the Greeks' whole plan, before killing many Trojans on his way out. My heart had already turned home, says Helen the Greek. The tale is also her apology, told with Odyssean skill.

The voice around the horse

(Told by Menelaus)

Menelaus answers with a darker story about the same two people. The best of the Greeks crouched in the wooden horse inside Troy — and Helen came down in the night and circled it three times, stroking the timber, calling each hidden captain by name in the voice of his own far-off wife.

Diomedes and Menelaus started up to answer, or to burst out; Anticlus opened his mouth to cry out — and Odysseus clamped his hands over the man's jaws and held them shut, some say until Anticlus died, and held the whole ambush silent by pure will until Athena led Helen away. Two memories of Helen at Troy, told politely across one dinner table: the repentant Greek, and the woman testing the horse for Troy. Homer lets both stand.

Becalmed in Egypt

(Told by Menelaus)

Now Menelaus tells his own wandering — the nostos that took eight years. Becalmed twenty days on the island of Pharos off Egypt, his crews starving on fish-hooks, he is saved by a goddess's pity: Eidothea, daughter of the Old Man of the Sea, teaches him how to trap her father Proteus, the shape-shifting seal-herd who knows all things.

The method is grotesque and glorious: at noon the god comes up to count his seals and sleep among them. Eidothea digs four hiding-pits in the sand, flays four fresh sealskins, and hides Menelaus and three picked men beneath them — saved from the unbearable stench, Homer adds practically, by ambrosia she dabs under their noses.

Noon, and the seal-herd

(Told by Menelaus)

At midday the Old Man rises from the grey water. He counts his seals like a shepherd — counting the four disguised men first among them, suspecting nothing — and lies down to sleep in their midst.

This is the moment. The rule Eidothea taught: seize him as he sleeps, and whatever he becomes — hold on. He will try everything that crawls, flows and burns; your grip is the only question the god cannot slip.

Holding the god

(Told by Menelaus)

They spring, and Proteus becomes a maned lion, then a serpent, a leopard, a great boar; then running water; then a towering leafy tree. Menelaus and his men hold on through every change until the god, worn out, is suddenly himself again — an old man of the sea, asking who taught you this?

Beaten, he must answer truly. How to escape the calm: return to Egypt and pay the gods their hecatombs. And then, because Menelaus asks, the fates of the captains: Ajax drowned in his blasphemy; and your brother — your brother was murdered at his homecoming feast. Menelaus wept on the sand, he tells the table, until he had no more will to live. The sea-god's news service delivers everything, including what breaks you.

The one still living

(Told by Menelaus)

And one more, said the Old Man of the Sea. One I saw shedding great tears on an island, in the halls of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him there by force — no ship, no crew, no way over the broad back of the sea.

This is the sentence Telemachus crossed the Peloponnese to hear: his father, seven years silent, is alive. Not dead at Troy, not drowned — held. The news is years old by now, and no one at this table knows that at this very moment Odysseus' raft is already on the water. The poem's two journeys have touched, through a god's remembered words at a dinner party.

“I saw him on an island, letting fall big tears, in the halls of the nymph Calypso, who holds him there by force.” — Odyssey IV, 556–558

The guest-gift

Menelaus first offers horses and a chariot; Telemachus declines with a farmer's honesty that delights the king — Ithaca is goat-country, steep and small, no plains to run horses on, and dearer to me than any horse-land. Menelaus laughs: good blood speaks.

So the gift is changed: a mixing-bowl of solid silver with a rim of gold, the work of Hephaestus himself, once given to Menelaus by the king of Sidon — the finest and most honoured thing in my house. Helen adds a robe she wove with her own hands, for Telemachus' future bride to wear at his wedding. Guest-friendship, in Homer, is diplomacy, insurance and love in a single institution.

The eagle on the right

As the chariot stands ready, an eagle sweeps past on the right — the lucky side — a white goose from the courtyard in its talons, and the whole farewell party looks up.

It is Helen, not Menelaus, who reads it, prophesying with sudden authority: as this eagle came down from the mountain and took the fat goose of the yard, so shall Odysseus come home from his hard wanderings and take vengeance — or he is home already, sowing trouble for the suitors. Telemachus answers like his father's son: if that proves true, lady, I will pray to you as to a god.