"Menelaus stands there and declares he came to Troy because he wanted a Trojan wife now that Paris has a Greek one. He adores their culture so much he wants to learn how to speak Trojan, to recite some of their great epics and to gorge on that famous Trojan fried pigeon. They listen to him, pondering fertilizer. 

"But he's their jug. And everyone has a sister or daughter they want to get rid of. They think about fertilizer and selling the rest of us into slavery, but maybe it's better to have a marriage of some sort. And if they kill Menelaus maybe, possibly, someone in Greece will seek revenge, or perhaps the deities of hospitality will be vexed. They marry Menelaus off to a very minor princess so ugly she has to sneak up on a fig tree to pick the fruit. They tattoo Menelaus with Trojan emblems, since he professed such admiration for Trojan culture, including one on his back, which, I was reliably informed, signified ‘I am Priam's jug.' And they make him recite thirty lines of poetry every evening."

"That's it?'

"Nothing happens for a long time. Menelaus doesn't want to go home. He realises he's a contender for jug of jugs. And, curiously, life at the Trojan court, even as a jug, isn't bad. He has all he wants, and the fried pigeon is, as they say, remarkably good. He becomes a very fat, very drunk fat drunk. The Trojans mock him mercilessly. They can't believe he's still draining their hospitality years after arriving. ‘You're sure you're not the Menelaus who said he was going to burn Troy?'  ‘Lose any armies today, lard lord?'  Priam joked some rulers have pet lions, some have pet giraffes, I have a pet king. The court magicians used to work him into their displays."

"And what were you doing?"

"I was retinue. Troy had its own bean-growers, so I had to tag onto the ankle of Menelaus. The great Belly-Grower said to me, ‘You. I don't know how long we'll be here or how I'm getting out of this, but we need some verses to cover our red, smacked arses. You, you'll be the wordwarden. We need a yarn when we get back. Get me some good stories and well-wrought epithets or I'll have you impaled. Meanwhile, I'll have a think about how to get out of this.' He thought about it for six years."

"So Troy's towers were untouched?"

"I didn't say that."

"But you said there was no war?"

"You don't need a war to raze a city. It was six years after we had arrived. I was reconciled to dying there. I could have got back, but I, like Menelaus, had nothing to go back to. I got a bit of fried pigeon every now and then, so crisp and yet so succulent, and I had done some work I was very proud of, creating Beta, a bare-breasted princess warrioress of Greece who has a six-year single-combat with Zeta, the bare-crotched princess warrioress of Troy, at very close quarters, if you follow me. Who doesn't like to hear about over-oiled women locking limbs? Well, Menelaus didn't. He felt it wasn't martial enough. Beta's sidekick was a wise talking tortoise, but Menelaus didn't like the tortoise either. He had been bitten by one as a child.