A to Z: Teukros and Tekmessa

 

    Technically, I was also considering Thetis, but I decided I had slightly more interesting content for Teukros.  So, starting from the top:  Teukros (better known by his Roman name, Teucer) is the son of Telamon by a concubine.  In the Iliad, the identity of that concubine is not specified, nor are her Trojan origins mentioned (though they can still be surmised even there), but in all later works his mother is specifically Hesione, elder sister of King Priam.  (Which actually makes for one of the spots in the mythic chronology of Troy that feels off.  But that would take several posts to go into in any depth, so I'll leave it for some other time.)   The name Teukros proves his Trojan ancestry pretty efficiently, because Teukros was also the name of one of the mythic founders of Troy, hence that "Teucrian" is one of the words used to describe people or things as being in some manner Trojan.

    Although Teukros features prominently in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, there's also nothing particularly exceptional about him there; he pretty much just follows the standard "devoted brother of Aias" routine that's set out in the original myths.  Which is not to say that he deviates from that in the Atalanta and Ariadne books!  Far from it!  It's just that being set almost twenty years after the war's end, I get to portray an older Teukros, king of a prosperous realm (and particularly wealthy and powerful because he controls copper mines that were so important to making bronze for weapons and armor!), father of a teenage daughter, and proud uncle who had raised Eurysakes to be his father's equal in just about every way.  (Which is only deviating from the myths in that there he would not have gotten to raise his nephew in the original version.)

            “Certainly, [the events in Egypt that were just under discussion] happened long enough ago that the princess wouldn’t know anything about it,” the king added, with a chuckle that made his nephew blush.
            “What, another fiancée?” Atalanta asked, laughing.
            “Of course not,” Eurysakes answered instantly.  It was quite possibly the fastest speech that Ariadne had ever heard from him.  “Egyptian royalty can only marry Egyptian royalty.”
            “That’s the only thing stopping her, from what I’ve heard,” King Teukros confided in the girls, making Eurysakes’ blush grow deeper.
            “I’d never have guessed you were so popular with women,” Ariadne teased him.
            “It’s not that,” he insisted, somewhat weakly.
            “I fail to see what else it could be,” the king laughed.  “You have a gift with the ladies that your father lacked.  Probably because your face looks so like your mother’s.”
            At the moment, Eurysakes’ face looked more like a pomegranate, it had turned so dark.  Ariadne actually started to feel a little sorry for him, so she decided to change the subject.

    Just being devoted and loving doesn't mean he can't do a little teasing. 😉  However, there's actually not much I can quote about Teukros in the present of the novels, because his sole appearance is so deeply mired in the overarching plot of the series that his scenes wouldn't make any sense out of context. 😅  So I'll just talk about the prologue to book five, since I omitted it from the post on Patroclos.

    The prologue actually picks up pretty much exactly where the flashback Eurysakes had in book two (which I quoted part of in the post about him) ended:  since the fields were too muddy for battle, Aias had returned to his hut for a quiet moment with Tekmessa and Eurysakes.  Only then Teukros arrived to let Aias know that Achilles and a few of the other young(er) princes were going to hold games on the beach, just a friendly competition to keep them in fit fighting form, and of course everyone wanted Aias to participate.  Aias agrees to join in the games, and little Eurysakes clamors to go too and watch his father win.  Soon after they arrive on the beach...

            While a number of the others began to argue about whether or not they were expecting any more participants, Teukros hurried over to Achilles’ side, and asked to speak to him in private for a moment.  Achilles looked suspicious about it, but agreed none the less, and they withdrew a short distance from the others.
            “I regret having to ask this,” Teukros started, aware that he might make everything worse if he wasn’t careful, “but I beg you not to compete against Aias in these events!  He’s never yet been able to best you, and it would be so devastating for poor Eurysakes to see his father lose!”
            “Don’t you have any faith in your own brother?” Achilles replied, his voice on the verge of laughter.
            “I have faith that he can easily best any other man in the Achaian camp, but…”  Teukros had to bite his lip to keep himself from adding any comments that would insult Achilles.  If he said the wrong thing, then Achilles was sure to defeat Aias in front of Eurysakes just to vent his anger on Teukros.  “I just don’t want to see the child’s feelings hurt.  He has enough pain in his future as the son of an enslaved concubine.”
            Achilles’ grin faded, and he looked a little guilty.  “Keep him out of my favorite events, and I’ll keep out of his,” he conceded, then went back over to his usual place at the side of the son of Menoitios.  It was better than nothing, but Teukros wasn’t quite sure which constituted Achilles’ favorite events, apart from the footrace, and there had certainly been no risk of Aias entering that anyway.  He was still worrying about it as he took a seat on the beach near Aias, keeping Eurysakes safely between the two of them, so the boy couldn't go running off unchecked.

    This need for what is essentially a political savvy is exactly the sort of thing that would go on to serve Teukros well once he became a king himself, needless to say!  That particular moment is one I enjoy for the way the reality of the situation of someone like Teukros or Eurysakes--both his blood kin!--forces Achilles to admit, even if only inside his own head, just how hyper-privileged he really is, and how his own actions are making things worse.

    Anyway, late in the games, Achilles' ego needs stroking, so Patroclos suggests they hold a swimming race, because how better to make the son of a sea goddess happy than by letting him beat out all the competition with even more ridiculous ease?  Odysseus (already unwelcome as a competitor, being older than the other men) had been making a little wooden boat, and--after weighting it with a rock on a rope--tosses it out into the ocean to be the spot where the swimmers turn around.

            But watching the swimmers had utterly bored Eurysakes, and by the time they were back on land, he was insisting that he wanted to play now!  A few of the other men had also had sons by their concubines, so they went and fetched them, and the fathers watched with diminishing pride as their sons competed in their own little footrace.  Despite that Eurysakes was the youngest of them, he was one of the largest—only the boy of seven years was larger—and he won the footrace with surprising ease.
            Most of the men who had no son in the race then gathered around Aias, congratulating him on having fathered such a fine child, but the other fathers left quite quickly, dragging their disappointing sons with them.  Teukros felt a little sorry for them, but his pride in his own kin prevented his heart from going out to them too far.  Besides, they were all far inferior to Aias, so it was only natural that their sons would be lesser than Aias’ son, surely.
            Once the congratulations were over, most of the men began to leave the beach, and soon Diomedes and Odysseus were the only others on the beach.  “He really is an incredible child,” Odysseus told Aias, crouching to pat Eurysakes on his head.  “Makes me miss my own son,” he added, sighing as he stood again.

    However, as the beach is emptying of the last few people, Aias askes Teukros to watch Eurysakes for a while so he can have some time alone with Tekmessa.  And before long, the two of them are joined by Patroclos, who confesses that Achilles was more jealous of what a great son Eurysakes was than he would ever admit, and that he is thus now 'desperately' trying to get Briseis pregnant.  This leads into a long discussion between Patroclos and Teukros about the pride of the two princes they serve.

            Eurysakes had been continually poking Teukros this whole time, but now he finally stopped, and walked over to Patroclos, poking his arm instead.  “Can you get that?” he asked, pointing at the little wooden boat.
            “With what, a rock?” Patroclos asked, looking at the little face in confusion.
            “A rock?” Eurysakes repeated, sounding and looking even more confused.
            “I think he wants to play with it,” Teukros explained.  [There will be a further line here about how Odysseus had probably been making it to be a plaything for Eurysakes, or at least that was what Teukros had assumed as he was carving it during the games.]

    Patroclos has the idea of using some of the flat, round stones on the beach to teach Eurysakes how to throw a discus, using the little wooden boat as a target.  The first time Eurysakes attempts it, the rock doesn't go very far, but the second time, the angle and speed are just right that it skips across the water.  Neither adult can quite explain why that happens, though Patroclos shares a story of the times he and Achilles would sneak off to Lake Boibeis to skip stones instead of doing whatever task Cheiron had set them to do for their training.  🤣  Then...well, it's a long quote, but this is a sequence I really love, so please forgive my self-indulgence...

            “It was an impressive showing, though,” Teukros said.  “You almost sank the ship.”
            “I don’t want to do that!  Do I?” Eurysakes added, looking up at the adults with wide, confused eyes.
            “You mean you don’t know?” Patroclos asked, laughing.  “That ship’s full of tiny pirates!”
            “What’s that?!” Eurysakes asked excitedly.
            “They’re bandits who live only on the water, coming ashore only to rape and pillage and burn everything they see!” Patroclos explained, just as excitedly.  The description made Teukros decidedly uneasy; it didn’t seem that different from how the Achaian raiding parties must seem to the local towns they sacked.  “If the ship comes in to land, we’ll all have to be fighting for our lives!  We should sink it while we can!”
            “Can we do that?” the boy asked, his voice almost hushed with fear.
            “We have to try,” Patroclos told him urgently.  Despite his claims of ignorance of children, Teukros thought the son of Menoitios was displaying considerable skill with the boy.  Too bad he had never seemed to show any interest in having children of his own…
            With that, Patroclos took up another rock, and threw it out towards the little boat, but he far overshot the mark, and the rock splashed down harmlessly beyond it.
            Teukros laughed.  “If our lives depended on your arm, we’d be in a sorry state indeed,” he chuckled, before attempting to sink the little boat himself.  Unfortunately, because he was so intent on not overshooting, his throw was much too short, and the rock fell not halfway out to the boat, making Patroclos laugh at him.
            “My turn!” Eurysakes exclaimed excitedly, picking up another small rock.  But it was round, not flat, and didn’t skip at all, so his throw fell even more short than his uncle’s had.
            “You need a flat rock, like this one,” Patroclos explained, showing him a rock before launching it out towards the boat.  This throw wasn’t nearly as far beyond the boat, and the water it displaced splashed onto the wooden construct.  “Ah, did you see that?!” Patroclos shouted.  “The little pirates were jumping off for their lives!  They know we’re after them!  We have to hurry before they all get away!”
            Eurysakes tried again, with a flat rock this time, and it skipped once before sinking, still falling short.  “They’re laughing at me,” Eurysakes said, frowning sadly.  Teukros wondered idly if his little nephew really thought there were tiny people on the boat, or if he was just playing along.
            “Well, I’ll put a stop to that,” Teukros assured the boy, taking a new stone.  This time, his throw was almost perfect, in terms of distance, but his aim was off, and it splashed harmlessly into the water, so far from the boat that it was barely jostled by the impact.
            “You did as you said,” Patroclos agreed, “because now they’re laughing at you instead.”
            “All right, let’s see you sink it, then,” Teukros challenged him.
            Patroclos selected another stone from the beach, and flung it out to sea, but his throw was much too far again, and had no impact on the ship at all, much to Teukros’ amusement.
            Eurysakes picked up another stone while Teukros was still laughing, and had thrown it even before his uncle could stop laughing to tell him that it was really much too large a stone for him.  This time, it skipped a number of times, and actually struck the ship.  One of the little wooden ‘sails’ fell off, but the rest of the ship remained undamaged.
            “Good job!” Patroclos exclaimed, patting the boy on the back.  “They’re scared now!  But that means they’ll be even meaner if they come ashore!  We have to finish them quickly, or all our friends back in the camp will be in danger!”
            “I won’t let them hurt Mama,” Eurysakes said solemnly, nodding his head.  “Or Papa.”
            “I think your father can take care of himself,” Patroclos chuckled.
            Eurysakes nodded.  “But someday he will be old.  And then I will have to take care of him.  Mama said so.”
            Teukros wanted to embrace the boy for being so incredibly sweet and dutiful, but he had a feeling that was not the normal response, so he did nothing.
            “I hope you still feel that way when the time comes,” Patroclos told Eurysakes, “but I don’t think our little piratical intruders are likely to wait that long.”
            The boy nodded, looking determined, and picked up another stone, throwing it towards the ship.  It didn’t skip enough times to reach, though, so he tried again.  With every successive throw, whether it reached the little target or not, Teukros and Patroclos continued the story of the vicious marauders on board the boat, and how terrified they were of the giant rocks Eurysakes was hurling at them, and how terrible they would be to everyone in the camp if they were allowed to land.  By the time the boy finally managed to sink the little ship, Teukros’ throat hurt from all the encouraging, and his brain had long since run out of things to say about the tiny, imaginary pirates.

    Changing the subject entirely while also not changing it at all, let's talk about Tekmessa, Aias' concubine and Eurysakes' mother.  Concubines occupy an uncomfortable position in the Greek myths, to say the least.  The word 'concubine' is used as the English translation for an assortment of different positions--for example, in talking about Imperial China, it essentially means 'secondary (or tertiary, or whatever-iary) wife' and doesn't necessarily imply any unwillingness--but in the case of the Greek myths, it designates a very specific kind of slave.  Specifically, a woman of noble birth--preferably royal birth, in fact--who has been captured as a result of warfare, and is being made to serve her captor as a wife would.

    That service is not merely sexual, however.  For example, in the Iliad, the concubines are the ones who serve visitors to their masters' huts their drinks.  (And as we see in the Odyssey, that is the wife's duty:  Helen serves Telemachos his drink personally.  (And when Achilles is without a concubine in the Iliad, Patroclos serves the drinks, providing a very strong proof of the romantic/sexual nature of their relationship.))  Furthermore, they're a very important source of outside blood, as any children borne by a concubine is fair game to inherit a throne, or at least make a handy son/daughter for making marital alliances.  So while a concubine is a slave, her children--though born in slavery in a technical sense--have the potential to become important members of their father's society, a marked difference from what would be expected if an ordinary slave was impregnated by her master.  (Not a subject that the myths ever address, naturally enough.)

    So that brings me around to the point that is occasionally brought up within the books:  every time they hear talk about someone like Briseis or Tekmessa, the girls are astonished and appalled, because what they hear is always the same, that they loved their masters devotedly.  Having been raised in normal slavery, Atalanta and Ariadne can't imagine loving a man who abused the master/slave relationship to force sexual acts on a woman in his power.  And, indeed, there are other concubines who are never said to love their masters:  Cassandra isn't said to love Agamemnon, and Andromache is certainly never claimed to have loved Neoptoloemos!

    But Briseis and Tekmessa always are said to be in love, and Tekmessa remains devoted to Aias even after his shameful death.  So why is that?

    Well, part of it is just because of who their masters are:  Achilles so effortlessly made conquests that there are something like three or four different cities where a princess of the city allegedly fell in love with him from afar and opened the gates to let the invading Achaian army inside the walls, and Aias was also said to be one of the most handsome of the men in the force attempting to recover Helen.  (This is, in part, because in ancient Greece it was believed that the interior and the exterior mirrored each other, and thus a great man would also be exceedingly handsome.  (Or so they say, and yet if that's the case, then how do they explain Alexander/Paris, who is so very fair of face and so very lacking in any redeeming qualities other than his face?))

    I think, however, that it's partially due to the fact that what the concubines are put through is actually not that different from what wives were put through.  Drawing here on known practices from the historic period rather than the unknown practices of the Bronze Age, it wasn't unusual for a wife not to meet her husband until the wedding night, and I'm fairly sure I've read it at least theorized that some regions may have had marriage rituals that actually mimicked kidnappings.  (I'm not positive on that last one, so please don't quote me on it. 😅)  Additionally, they didn't necessarily have any way of getting out of a marriage that was unacceptable to them (though in some cases they would have, particularly if they were the heiress who gave their husband a throne, as Helen was) which would make an average wife's situation even more like that of a concubine.

    A particularly pertinent example is Clytemnestra.  (Another problem name in terms of actual ancient use and the modern commonly known spelling.  Like, to the extent that I think maybe I had decided to use a different spelling and I've forgotten about which one it was.  😅)  This isn't the case in every version of the myth, but it is sometimes the case that before being married to Agamemnon, she was married to Tantalos, a son of Thyestes, father (and grandfather) of her future lover, Aigisthos.  In those versions, Agamemnon murders her husband and her infant son, then forcibly marries her, since that's the union her own father prefers for her, and Clytemnestra is given no choice about whether or not she wants to marry the murderer of her previous husband and her son.  The only difference between that and the fate Briseis suffered--being made concubine of the man who widowed her--was that she had no son, and her father had no voice in her fate.  (In fact, though I don't think we know about what happened to Briseis' father, I'd lay odds that Achilles killed him, too.)

    So, yeah, long story short, I think that's why it's not uncommon for the myths to have concubines like Tekmessa fall in love with their masters, because it's no different from having a wife fall in love with her husband.  At least, not in the eyes of their society at the time.  Thus, while I don't want to deny the myths and claim that women like Tekmessa and Briseis didn't actually love the men they had been awarded to after all, I at least throw in some commentary about how messed up that is.

    Hesione, to bring it back around to Teukros, is a harder case, because we don't have a big surviving text illustrating what she thought of becoming Telamon's concubine.  Especially since she obviously had to continue performing concubine duties after he returned to Salamis where he had a legal wife on hand.  (Though despite Aias' importance, the identity of his mother is so rarely mentioned that there's actual disagreement in the ancient sources as to who she was.)  I think it safe to say she loved her son, though, regardless of whatever her feelings towards Telamon were.

    Okay...so I didn't really have much to say about Tekmessa as a character in my writing (her appearances are fairly brief, after all) and mostly just wanted to talk about her situation.