Menelaus's elder brother was Agamemnon, King of Argos, and he had married Helen's half-sister, Clytemnestra. Moreover, Agamemnon was then top King in Greece and all the others owed allegiance to him. So Menelaus jumped into his fastest chariot and drove hell for leather to Mycenae where he told his tale of woe to Big Brother.
Agamemnon promptly called on all the chaps who had wanted to marry Helen to fulfil their oath, and in addition on all his vassals to bring ships and men to show Paris where he got off. The majority of them—including the giant Ajax, wise old Nestor and brave Diomede—came fairly spoiling for the fray, but two of the best bets in a free-for-all tried to wriggle out.
Odysseus, King of the island of Ithaca, was a most cunning man. Feeling a preference for remaining with his wife, Penelope, and his infant son, Telemachus, rather than join in a war that he thought might prove a long one, he pretended to be mad. However, his bluff was called by a chap named Palamedes, who had been sent to fetch him; so he had to go along.
Once Odysseus had joined the outfit, he proved invaluable. It was he who roped in the other shirker, Achilles. The gentle reader will recall the prophecy that stalled off Zeus and Poseidon from marrying the goddess Thetis—that she would bear a son greater than his father. She did, to the mortal Peleus; and it was Achilles she had by him. Knowing that the Trojan War would be a bloody business, she concealed her son in girl's clothes among the daughters of the King of Scyros. But Odysseus paid them a visit and showed them a really natty line in swords and javelins. Achilles, being a born fighter, seized on them with enthusiasm, so gave his sex away. But his goddess-mama had taken the precaution to dip him in the Styx, which made him invulnerable to any wound, except in the one heel by which she had had to hang on to him.
It was from Mycenae that all these heralds went galloping off, and it was there that the plans were made for a great Armada to sail to Troy; but Agamemnon still hoped that they might get back Helen without a war; so he sent a diplomatic mission, consisting of Odysseus, Palamedes and Menelaus, to say to King Priam: 'Look, your son Paris has put up a shocking black, but we don't want trouble, so if he'll cough up the loot and return the lovely, we won't ask any compensation for his having borrowed her,' or words to that effect.
But their account of Paris's goings-on left his old pop speechless, because Paris hadn't even sent him a postcard. He and Helen were still having a high time on a year-long honeymoon round the eastern Med., renting the biggest villas wherever they stopped off and entertaining the locals to champagne and caviare on the cash that they'd pinched from the Sparta treasury. Knowing nothing of this, Priam told the Ambassadors that he must wait till his boy got home to hear his side of the story; so they returned to Greece empty-handed.
When Paris did get back, there was no end of a rumpus. Lots of the Trojan big-wigs said he could go and boil his head if he thought they were going to war just so that he could keep his girl friend. But Helen had brought along a hand-picked beauty chorus to brush her hair and help her into her two-way stretch. This bunch of cuties got busy playing cat's cradle with the top brass of the Trojan Army, and Paris, still being lousy with Menelaus's money, paid off the mortgages on their houses for them and that sort of thing; so, what with the cash and the cuties, these chaps were all for Helen staying put.
Cassandra came into the picture with one of her doleful prophecies that, if Helen were not put on the doorstep, Troy would be destroyed. However, Apollo had a 'thing' against Cassandra, so he had ordained that nothing she predicted would ever be believed. Finally, Paris's mum, Hecuba, had a heart-to-heart with Helen and asked her had Paris taken her by force? She said: 'No, I was batty about him and I still am.' So, as Paris was Hecuba's favourite son, she persuaded Priam to defy the Greeks.
The war being on, Agamemnon sailed from the Gulf of Argos and ordered all the other ships to rendezvous with him at Aulis, the most handy port in western Greece for an assault on Asia Minor. Getting them together took months and months, so he killed time by going ashore and doing a bit of hunting. Unfortunately, just before D-Day, he killed a hind sacred to Artemis. She was so put out that she decreed a calm that prevented the Armada from sailing. After the calm had lasted for some weeks, everyone got very fed up, so they consulted a seer named Calchas. He said there would be no wind until Agamemnon had pacified the angry goddess by sacrificing his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, to her.
Agamemnon was naturally against this idea, but all the others said he must not let a little thing like the life of one girl stand in the way of their great enterprise, etc., so eventually they nagged him into writing to his wife, Clytemnestra, to bring Iphigenia down from Mycenae to Aulis. But, in his letter, he gave as his reason that he'd fixed up for her to marry Achilles.
Delighted at the thought of this fine match for her girl, Clytemnestra duly arrived and got busy on the trousseau. When she learned the truth, there was hell to pay. Then Achilles found out that he had been used as a lure for this horrid business and he, too, blew his top. What is more, the moment he set eyes on Iphigenia he fell for her in a big way, and threatened to let the daylight into anyone who laid a hand on her.
But Iphigenia turned out to be the whitest girl they ever knew. She said she was quite willing to die for the honour of Greece; so they tied Achilles up, put her on the slab and prepared to cut her throat. Seeing that she had put up such a jolly good show, Artemis's heart was touched. She whisked the girl off up into the clouds and dumped a faun on the altar to be sacrificed instead. That stopped everyone wailing except Clytemnestra, who was livid at having her daughter taken from her. But a fine wind sprang up, so she was left screaming curses while ail the chaps ran to their ships, shouting to the girls: 'We'll be back by Christmas,' and off they sailed for Troy.
The landing was made between the rivers Simois and Scaman-der. There the Greeks hauled all their thousand ships up the beach and used them to form streets, squares and wooden walls, enclosing a vast camp for their hundred thousand men. But, of course, the Trojans had had loads of time to prepare a hot reception for them. Paris's brother, Hector, had been made C.-in-C., and as his Second in Command he had his brother-in-law, Aeneas, the Prince of the Dardanians. This Aeneas was no mean ally, as he was the result of one of Aphrodite's nights out down on earth, and when Priam asked for his help he brought a large army to the support of Troy.
The Heroes on both sides could hardly wait to get at one another, so out came the chariots, the archers, the javelin throwers and the rest, and before long the whole place was littered with corpses. But neither side could get the better of the other; so the battle was renewed week after week, month after month, with truces now and again only for them to lick their wounds and make a bonfire of the dead.
One would have thought that after a while they would have got bored with this senseless slaughter. But not a bit of it. For years on end, they shouted rude things about their enemies' mothers, got blipped on the head for their pains or stuck the other fellow in the gizzard. The Greeks had a much bigger army, but the Trojans had the advantage of the impregnable walls that Poseidon had built round their city. When they felt like a battle they could sally out, and whenever things got too hot for them they could scamper back inside and cock a snook at the Greeks from their battlements.
As both armies had to be fed, the war spread for miles over the countryside between parties sent out to get supplies, and one of the raids made by the Greeks led to the father of all upsets. With the plunder they brought in some girls. One very pretty one, named Chryseis, was the daughter of a priest of Apollo. Agamemnon liked the look of her, so he sent her to his tent and said: 'See you later, ducks.' Another nice little number, named Briseis, he gave to Achilles. Then up came Chryseis's papa and offered to ransom her. Agamemnon said nothing doing; so the priest called on Apollo for help, and the god sent a plague from which the Greeks started to die off like flies. After nine days they were in a fine dither and they consulted old Calchas, their seer. He told them: 'The plague won't let up until the Big Shot returns Chryseis to her clergyman father.'