Apollo took Chryses and his daughter back to his temple. Thanks to Agamemnon’s madness, no wealth was promised, nor healing services offered. Odysseus raged over the humiliating display, but Patroclus expressed the opinion that they were all lucky to have escaped the situation alive. Bloody-faced Agamemnon returned to his own temporary camp to find a familiar figure waiting in his tent. A very portly but entirely human-looking man lounged on an out of place couch, dining on sweets.
“Lord Dionysus?” Agamemnon asked, “What brings you here?”
“My friend Aphrodite,” he said, “Well, my aunt I suppose? One downside to incest between immortals is that one tends to lose track of all the ways one is related to any given family member. Anyway, my buxom, 'bosom' friend says that you might need someone to talk to. From the looks of it, she was right.”
Agamemnon didn’t question the strangeness of the situation; he’d gotten fairly used to discussions with gods. He removed his cloak and helmet, and pulled up a stool as Dionysus offered him some of the wine. It was a strange drink - far, far stronger than ordinary wine, and certainly not watered down, and yet, as Agamemnon drank it, he didn't feel his body or mind relaxing. If anything, he felt tenser, more agitated than he had before, but also stronger, bolder.
“Did you hear what happened?”
“Who hasn’t?” Dionysus said, “Every mortal is gossiping about it; how could I not hear? My question is, why did it happen?”
“I’m in love,” Agamemnon answered.
“Balderdash,” Dionysus said, “You’re in lust.”
“No, I’m really in love.”
“Does she love you?”
“Yes.”
“Did she say so?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Did she say anything aside from, ‘please Agamemnon, let me go home with my father, I don’t want to stay with you’?”
“No…” Agamemnon shook his head, “but I’m sure she was just saying that because people expected her too. She really did want me.”
“Again, I say balderdash. If she loved you she would have said it, or something, anything that wasn’t the exact opposite of saying it. And if you really loved her, you’d want to see her home safe, with her family. You’d want what she wants. But you don’t, do you? What do you want?”
Agamemnon stared at the floor silently.
“I said, what do you want?”
“I want… I want her.”
“To have dinner with you? To go shopping in the agora with you?” Dionysus needled, “To go to the theater?”
“No.”
“What do you want her for then?”
Agamemnon ground his teeth, “I want her in my bed.”
“There, was that so hard?” Dionysus said.
“I wanted her so badly that I ruined our negotiation, and completely dishonored myself.”
“Welcome to the real world, Agamemnon,” Dionysus said, “Honor is a polite lie. Humans are animals, and at the end of the day, animals exist for only one purpose – to make more animals. They eat and they fuck, and when they aren’t doing those things, they sleep. Because what else is there? Everything else – art, music, science – it’s all just noise meant to lure men and women into each other’s beds.”
“I remember that you once loved art,” Agamemnon said.
“Oh, I still love art. And drama. But my tastes have evolved. Happy faces and funny jokes are a thin coping mechanism people use to fool themselves into thinking life is tolerable and civilized. Tragedy, pain, is where we see the truth, the real world. Clytemnestra understands this. She understands what’s truly important?”
“And what’s that?”
“Self-gratification of course. Any animal, whether it’s on four legs or two, has wants and needs. Fulfilling those desires is its only purpose. Anything else is irrational. It’s madness.”
“I should be better than that…”
“Better or worse has nothing to do with it. Do you judge the morality of a lion? Or a tiger? They kill and fuck without remorse, because they embrace reality. They know what they are. They don’t dress up in fancy clothes, banter on about ethics, and pretend to be gods. You have thousands of men at your command that understand this already. They know they aren’t here to defend the sanctity of a marriage. They’re here to murder people, because if they hadn’t come when you demanded, you’d have murdered them. There’s no honor or morality there – just self-preservation. They’re willing to burn Troy to the ground, just so they can keep eating and fucking.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that my half-brother Apollo’s holier-than-thou attitude is foolishness, and I'm saying that, maybe, it’s time that someone stood up to him. Showed him where man’s true strength is.”
“How?”
“Take your men to Apollo’s temple, and do what comes naturally to men. Eat the food, drink the wine, fuck the women. Kill the men if they stand in your way. Or fuck them too, whatever. And then take Chryses’s daughter and do what you want with her. Tie her to your bed post and fill her with your seed every night before bed. Be a damned man.” Dionysus smiled, pleased with his own punchline.
“My god,” Agamemnon was sickened by the barbarous of it, but part of him wanted to give in – to do exactly what Dionysus was suggesting.
“Yes,” Dionysus said, “I am your god now, and you know it. I’m your true god. Not Athena, or Hera, or Zeus. Because you’ve seen my truth, and you know I’m right. Now up, up. Rally your men. It’s time to rape and pillage like a good little man.”
Agamemnon stood up, feeling dissociated from his own body, as if someone else were commanding it. He donned his helmet and cloak, and walked out to talk to his officers.
***
Dionysus stood on the summit of Mt. Ida sipping wine as the temple below him was consumed by screams of terror and anguish, trimmed with men’s laughter and groans of ecstasy. Hearing it was like smelling pure ambrosia. Without a moon in the sky, Artemis wouldn’t dare challenge him, and Apollo wouldn’t be able to intervene until sunrise. By that time, it would be too late. The temple of Apollo would be wholly his. A cathedral of callous hedonism and sadism, tainted for all of eternity.
“So,” he said, “Aphrodite used the same science that controls Helen, on Agamemnon?”
“A derivation of it," Athena nodded, "Instead of a single bauble that manipulates brain chemistry in the presence of a target individual, she administered a sort of gene therapy to both Agamemnon and Astynome. She manipulated their pheromones and libidos to ensure that Agamemnon would become infatuated with the priest’s daughter the moment he was in her presence, and that she would just as strongly revile him.”
“And the whole point of that was to create an opportunity for the Greeks to slight Apollo, so that Apollo – and Artemis by extension - would join Aphrodite and Poseidon in defending Troy.”
“Essentially.”
“But it didn’t work.”
“No, Aphrodite – like everyone else – underestimated both the strength of Agamemnon’s character and the forgiving nature of Apollo. Agamemnon reigned himself in just enough that Odysseus could maintain Apollo’s neutrality.”
“Until I pushed Agamemnon over the edge.”
“Exactly.”
“You have my payment, I assume?”
Athena pulled a pair of glass phials wrapped in soft cloth from behind her shield, “Two samples of Lycomedes’s blood, containing the pathogen that Artemis used to transform him into a beast.”
“Oh, excellent, excellent…” Dionysus took the glass vials happily, “One thing I still don’t understand, though, is …. Why? Why help Aphrodite sway Apollo and Artemis to ally themselves with her, and against you?”
“You’ve always been an artist, Dionysus; would you want to show off a work in progress? Or wait until your creation is finished to reveal it to the world?”
Dionysus rolled the vials in his hands, considering his plans for the blood samples within, “I suppose I’d want to keep it under wraps until it was ready.”
“We are masters of our arts, Dionysus. Perfectionists. That may be the only way in which we are similar, little brother, but for now, let that be enough for us to respect each other’s privacy.” Athena vanished in a blur of light, and Dionysus headed down to the temple to begin planning his redecoration.
When Odysseus found out what had happened at Apollo’s temple that night, he had expected the sun god’s revenge to be immediate. Apollo was as much the god of plagues as Artemis was, and from what Athena had told Odysseus, Apollo preferred plagues that were quick and clean – fine one night, dead the next morning. Odysseus had done the math on the worst plagues he knew – they would be desperate within ten days, and by the end of the month, there would be more dogs in the Greek camp than Greeks. But no such lightning plague came.
Instead, the men seemed fine at first, except for a spreading aversion to the sun. Bronze-skinned men who’d spent their lives laboring in sun-scorched fields or working aboard fishing boats under cloudless skies were suddenly burning under the Mediterranean sun as if they’d never set foot outside in the day. It started with those who participated in the sack of Apollo’s temple, but as the months ground by, every mortal man in the Greek camp was eventually affected by the subtle malady – even Odysseus, normally shielded from such things by his own divine patron, became unable to set foot outside without a cloak to shield him from the sun. The dark spots came next, then the lesions, and then finally the deaths.
Achilles, Odysseus, Menelaus, Nestor, and others had confronted Agamemnon after his attack on Apollo’s temple, but they’d backed off that day. Agamemnon was their king, and he was riding high on the support of hundreds, thousands of Greek soldiers who liked his new, completely unfettered approach to war. Since then they’d done what they could to keep their men in line, but by the time a year had passed, the sun was doing more to control the Greeks’ savagery than the kings were. The cult of Dionysus that had formed within the Greek camp went out at night and terrorized the surrounding countryside, preying on any Trojan who had the misfortune to be caught out in the dark with them. Thebe and Lyrnessus were sacked, their peoples enslaved, and their buildings burned to the ground.
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