A prologue in prose-- "The Trojan War began with a woman"

It began, as these things often do, with a woman.

It was a tale they would tell for the millennia to follow, the Great War waged when a son of the house of Atreus lost his young bride to Ilium. Some said the Trojan prince stole her, took her against her will from her rightful lord. Others say she was seduced, by the cunning of an artful young man with a silver tongue. Or perhaps she ran away, Helen herself, away from the aged husband she was given to for a boy that was more to her liking. However it came to be, the stories agreed on one thing— that Helen was beautiful, the most beautiful, so that neither Menelaus nor his brethren of Greece would bear the insult of her loss.

And so the kings and commanders gathered up their men and packed them into the thousand ships that would assail the gates of Troy. Across the land, women saw their husbands and fathers, brothers and sons, summoned away from their duties to home and family to serve this their higher calling, their lord’s honor at war. And for ten years their women would bear life’s burdens without them, until Helen was returned or despaired of. But Helen was beautiful, the most beautiful, and so a thousand ships was a small price to pay to reclaim her.

The war raged on in epic fashion, a bloody clash that chewed up men in waves. Best beloveds were lost, fine sons lay slain, and rivers choked with those dead in the wake of grief’s unheeding fury. And all the while, the women at home had no choice but to tend the fires and work the fields, keep the house and uphold the state. The burden was great, in that it was all burdens. But so it often is, for those whose lot it is to wait, to obey, to sacrifice, to submit.

But ten years had passed. Ten years of men clashing for their honor and soldiers bleeding out on the Ilium sands, of wives watching the shores and sending their sons off to die. Ten years is a long time to wait.

And so across the sea, those at home decided. Faithful Penelope had grown tired of waiting. Clytemnestra would lose no more children to Agamemnon’s whim. And at last, Cassandra would make her voice heard.

When finally the war ended— with a trick, and not with a rout —the invading kings gathered the remains of their army to return to their homes in Greece. Victory was theirs, in that beautiful Helen was returned to the kingdom of her husband. But the surviving soldiers straggled back to those long-awaited shores to find their wives and daughters in the fields, at the helms, and in the offices they’d abandoned. Once left to their province alone, all the burdens and the powers that came of bearing them now rested in their women’s hands. And the women now knew they neither wanted nor needed to hand that province back over. After ten years, they would wait, obey, sacrifice, and submit no longer.

A regnant queen, with her own power Penelope cast all her vile suitors from her hall as Odysseus was lost to the angry sea. After surviving the whole of the war, Agamemnon’s throat was opened in his own bath. And rather than slay the Trojan princess he’d taken captive, Clytemnestra heard her words that would spread like wildfire across the land. There would be, Cassandra said, no more dominion over women by men. And those handfuls of returning soldiers, too few and too broken by years of war, found they had no power left to work their will.

Helen’s aged husband died, leaving a wearied kingdom bereft of sons. Once again, all eyes turned to her, the woman whose beauty sent ripples through the world. But she was queen now, a queen for a new age, where the silence of the cities of men echoed in testament of their folly. So Helen took those eyes, and made them follow her, the beautiful queen, the most beautiful. Not content with their eyes, she took their ears too, telling a new story into that silence. From mother to daughter it was handed down, from Greek to generation of Greek, among Helen’s descendants in all the people who would bear her name. Until at the time came when the granddaughters of Dido— not that lumbering cipher upon whom she wasted no time when he washed up on her kingdom’s shores —grew up to found the most magnificent city in the world.

It began with a woman, and so would it go on.