The tale of Clytemnestra, a Queen of Ancient Greece, has been told many times, having come down to us through Homer’s Iliad, the story of the Siege of Troy. But the queen didn’t set sail for Troy, and Hannah M. Lynn stands fast with this Spartan woman, left behind to hold court for ten long years. A SPARTAN’S SORROW focuses on the woman behind the story of revenge, murder and grief.
Make no mistake, the Bronze Age Greek legends are often tragedies, but this is also a crime story. Knowing what happens, I was intrigued to see motivations created in the characters, as their life experiences push them in one direction or another, while the words of gods, interpreted by oracles, cause more problems than they resolve. I’ll go easy on the details.
Clytemnestra was a spoil of war, forced to become the wife of Agamemnon. Helen, her sister, eloped with handsome Paris to Troy, leaving her husband Menelaus furious. Supporting his brother in retrieving what he saw as property, Agamemnon raised a great fleet but had to perform a cruel deed before he could sail. This retelling omits the reasoning given in Colleen McCullogh’s The Song OfTroy – that the city of Troy guarded the Dardanelles ship passage and taxed boats laden with the tin needed to make bronze. Helen was a convenient excuse to wage war.
Left to run the kingdom with her staff, Clytemnestra devotes herself to raising her remaining children, Electra, Orestes and Chrysothemis. The Romans in later years derided the queen: Stephen Saylor's character in a historical crime fiction scorned a woman as ‘Clytemnestra for a quadrans,’ which was a small coin, as the queen took a lover after some years had passed. Women were expected to be chaste while men were not. When the beacon fires are finally lit, to signal the return of the king’s fleet, the only time of peace the queen has known ends.
The later part of the story follows the young man Orestes, whose tribulations include perhaps the first recorded instance of schizophrenia as he hears the angry voices of the Furies. He has good friends who try to help him, including Electra. The Grecian Women Trilogy by Hannah M. Lynn begins with Athena’s Child, which is the tale of Medusa the Gorgon. This proves that the author is bravely depicting women that history and myth may have written unfairly. A SPARTAN’S SORROW conveys the mother’s point of view and tells us a great deal about Ancient Greece.
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