The Return from Troy. Lindsay Clarke

to bring news of their son increased their grief and anxiety. Laertes had been eager to lay down the burdens of kingship for many years, and the business of exacting tribute from men younger and more ambitious than himself, and of giving justice among quarrelsome islanders, was increasingly a trial to his soul. So to Queen Anticleia’s concern for her son was added the further strain of watching her husband’s strength fail. Her nights were sleepless and her appetite poor. Never a large woman, she began to shrink visibly, both in weight and stature. Soon people began to mutter that if her son did not return she might simply die from grief.

      In these circumstances, Penelope had to be strong for everyone and her faith did not fail. Whatever private anxieties troubled her nights, she remained ever hopeful, refusing to allow any other possibility but that her husband was alive and on his way home. Yet she had not seen Odysseus for more than ten years, and there must have been times when she had difficulty remembering what he had looked like then, let alone imagining how he might have been changed by war.

      For a time, everyone’s spirits were lifted by the news that a Zacynthian sailor called Axylus had returned to his island, having walked hundreds of miles overland from Euboea where he had been cast ashore after his ship went down. Summoned to Ithaca, he reported that he had been among the survivors of a disastrous raid on Ismarus in which many men, including the brother of Prince Amphinomus, had been killed. He was certain, however, that Odysseus had managed to escape from the skirmish on the Ciconian shore, though how he had fared in the storm that had wrecked his own ship, Axylus was unable to say.

      This was the first definite news that Penelope had received and she preferred to let it strengthen her hopes rather than darken her fears. Telemachus chose to share her optimism and draw strength from it; but when Amphinomus returned to Ithaca after his time of mourning was complete, and the boy watched his mother receive her friend, weeping, with open arms, his mood turned sullen again.

      Though he tried to elicit my sympathy, I saw nothing wrong in the friendship. Sitting side by side at the high table or walking together on the cliffs above the expansive glitter of the sea, Amphinomus and Penelope might have been taken for a brother and sister who shared a lively affection and were always sensitive to each other’s shifts of mood and feeling. So it seemed to me there was something excessive in the way Telemachus kept watch, like a prick-eared dog, over his absent father’s wife. Only after a time did I come to see that his heart was riven with a kind of jealousy. Perhaps he couldn’t bear it that anyone – least of all this handsome prince out of Dulichion – should be more intimate with his mother than he was himself? Whatever the case, sooner or later his anger was going to turn violent. It happened at the Festival of Pan.

      The Spring Feast is always a bawdy and boisterous affair. Shepherds come from all over the island and, once the sacred offerings have been made, there is much eating and drinking and many hours of dancing and singing of songs. Commonly enough, a fair proportion of the children born each year are sired during the course of that night, not all of them in wedlock. Because the winter had been bitter and everyone had been miserable for so long, the revelry was wild that year. The heat of the sun lay heavy on the afternoon, the wine was strongly mixed, and fathers looked to their daughters as Antinous and a gang of randy young men paraded around the awnings with long leather phalluses protruding from the goatskin clouts they wore.

      I was in luck myself that day – a plump young woman from a village over by Mount Neriton sat near me as I sang. She had honey-brown skin and thick hair, and an encouraging way of dipping her eyes. Later we found our way to a sunlit glade beneath the trees. She was my first, and it wounded my heart to discover a day or two later that she was already pledged to a prosperous shepherd in her own part of the world; but I have sometimes wondered whether his firstborn son has the gift of singing verses too. In any case, being so pleasantly occupied, I didn’t learn what had happened elsewhere until Peiraeus told me after the event.

      Waiting till late in the day when all the royal party apart from the prince had retired, Antinous asked Telemachus if he would judge the merit of a satyr play that he and Eurymachus were improvising for the people’s entertainment. To my friend’s astonishment, Antinous took the part of a woman overwhelmed by the blandishments of her lover, who was played by Eurymachus. Speaking in a high-pitched voice and fluttering his eyelids, Antinous allowed his hand to stray towards the grotesque codpiece protruding from between Eurymachus’s thighs. Only when he released an amorous sigh and squeaked, ‘But what if my husband should return, Amphinomus?’ did the true nature of the game become apparent.

      Before anyone realized what was happening, Telemachus had thrown himself at Antinous, knocked him off the wine-stained trestle-table where the young man reclined like a whore on a couch, and fastened his hands about his throat.

      By the time Eurymachus and Leodes pulled the boy away, Antinous was choking and retching for air. Telemachus was still much smaller than the man he had attacked, and left to his own malevolent devices, Antinous might have inflicted a terrible beating on him. But some of the less drunken shepherds had been disgusted by the play, and many of them had no love for the family of Eupeithes. Three stood up from their benches making it plain that no harm would come to their prince as long as they were there to prevent it. Two of them were very burly. The other, an older man with a broken nose, thoughtfully weighed the curve of his crook in his hand.

      Taking stock of the menace in their faces, Antinous glanced for support to Eurymachus who released Telemachus and stood uncertainly beside his friend with the ridiculous phallus knocked askew at his waist. Sensing that neither Eurymachus nor Leodes had the stomach for a fight, Antinous gasped, ‘What’s the matter with the brat? Can’t he take a joke?’

      ‘There’s jokes and there’s jokes,’ said the grizzled old shepherd with the crook, ‘and if you think that one was funny then you’ll be even more amused when this ash-plant comes down across your ear – which it would have done by now if I wasn’t making allowances for the belly-load of wine you’re carrying.’ Then he turned to Telemachus. ‘And you’d better run along, young sir. If your father was home, he’d tell you that it’s wise to pick a fight only when the odds are with you.’

      Flustered and abashed, Telemachus turned on his heel, shouting, ‘If my father doesn’t kill you when he gets back, Antinous, I promise I’ll do it myself.’

      ‘Wake up, donzel!’ Antinous shouted after him. ‘Your father’s not coming back, and you’re going to have to answer for those words one day.’

      Peiraeus told me that the shepherds would certainly have beaten Antinous in that moment had not Eurymachus had the good sense to hustle him away.

      When I learned what had happened, I set out to look for Telemachus. Last seen heading for the palace, he wasn’t to be found in his chamber and no one in the hall knew where he was. By now darkness had fallen, so there was no point wandering the hillsides in search of him, and I was about to give up and join Penelope and the others in the hall when I heard voices in Eurycleia’s chamber.

      Putting my ear to the door, I heard the hoarse croak of the old nurse’s voice reassuring Telemachus that he was just like his father – too proud and too brave not to put himself at risk. ‘He was about your age when he went hunting boar with his grandfather Autolycus in the woods around Mount Parnassus,’ she was saying, ‘Couldn’t wait for the huntsmen to lay the nets – not him. Couldn’t wait for the boar to come rushing at him neither. He has to leap straight at it with his spear, leaving his grandsire standing aghast behind him. He got his boar sure enough, but not before the great beast gored his thigh. He took such a gash that men wondered whether he’d ever walk straight again, which he did of course, though he bears the scar of it about him still. He was too proud for patience, you see – just like you – though he learned more sense in later years.’

      I was about to walk away and leave them to it when I heard the shaky voice of Telemachus protest, ‘But I’ve been patient. I’ve waited patiently for years and years and it feels like he’s never coming back. I think he must be dead.’

      ‘He’s no deader than I am,’ Eurycleia said. ‘He’s far too good a sailor to get wrecked by any storm, if that’s what you’re thinking. And he’s too crafty to be kept down for long by any villains who may