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The soldier held tightly to the twisting figure. The weapon he’d killed with many times before remained hanging at his side; he needed this one alive. His hands, burned dark by the sun, ached as he struggled to maintain a firm grasp. After years of fighting an unpopular war, he would do whatever it took to get home.
Menelaus, king of Sparta, the fiery brother of Agamemnon and husband of the beauty Helen, was on his journey home following the ten-year-long Trojan War. Shipwrecked on the island of Pharos , Menelaus was desperate when the goddess Eidothea told him of her father , the immortal Proteus—the Old Man of the Sea. If Menelaus could defeat him, Proteus would surrender the secrets Menelaus needed to lead his men home to Sparta.
Defeating Proteus would be difficult because the god possessed a special power: he was a shape-shifter, a polymorph. So Menelaus and his men, disguised in sealskins , lay in ambush on the beach. As Proteus emerged salty and frothing from the roiling sea, they sprang into action....
First he shifted into a great bearded lion
and then a serpent—
a panther—
a ramping wild boar—
a torrent of water—
a tree with soaring branch tops —
But the Greeks clung firmly. Their normal weapons of little use, with each shift, they shifted, with each new challenge, they changed, clenching their legs tight around the necks of animals that appeared, or digging their fingers into the wooden limbs of trees, or wrapping their arms around swirling balls of mercurial fire.
The Old Man of the Sea was defeated. By adapting, the Greeks found their way home.
A true story, 860 miles to the east of Pharos, three thousand years later...