Helen of Troy

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by Bettany Hughes


  I have transliterated all Greek, including the Bronze Age version of ancient Greek, ‘Linear B’; hence PA–MA–KO has become pharmakon (‘useful little things’ – the 3,500 year old root of our word pharmacy). In general I have Latinised figures and place-names from ancient literature. Words from Modern Greek have been given their rough phonetic equivalent.

  I have referenced the works, both ancient and modern, on which I have relied heavily or which might be of further interest to the reader. I am indebted to many scholars and adventurers who have gone before me and in particular to those who have been kind enough to help me with this project. They include: Peter Ackroyd, Robert Arnott, Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield, Professor Jonathan Bate, Professor Mary Beard, Dr Lisa Bendall, Rebecca Bennett, Professor Julia Boffey, Dr Julian Bowsher, Professor Nicholas Boyle, Dr Jerry Brotton, Professor Trevor Bryce, Dr Lucilla Burn, Gill Cannell, Professor Paul Cartledge, Richard Catling, Dr Hector Catling, Nick Chlebnikowski, Dr Paul Cohen, Professor Robin Cormack, Mary Cranitch, Dr James Davidson, Professor Jack Davis, Professor Wolfgang-Dietrich Niemeier, Dr Aude Doody, Nicole Doueck, Professor Christos Doumas, Dr Mark Edwards, Matti and Nicholas Egon, Henry Fajemirokun, Dr Lesley Fitton, Dr Katie Fleming, Professor John France, Dr Elizabeth French, Professor Simon Goldhill, Dr Nikolaos Gonis, Dr Barbara Graziosi, Dr Myrto Hatzaki, Professor David Hawkins, Professor John Henderson, Carol Hershenson, Professor Simon Hornblower, Professor Richard Hunter, Dr Hans Jansen and the Tübingen team working at Troy, Dr Richard Jones, Hari Kakoulakis, Dr Michael Keefer, Professor John Killen, Dr Julia Kindt, Professor Dr Manfred Korfmann, Dr Silvin Kosak, Dr Olga Krzyszkowska, Professor Jennifer Larson, Dr Michael Lane, Dr Miriam Leonard, Dr Maria Liakata, Dr Alistair Logan, Professor Deborah Lyons, Dr Laurie Maguire, Professor Sturt Manning, Professor Rosamund McKitterick, Professor Christopher Mee, Dr Daniel Orrells, Professor Elisabeth Oy-Marra, Professor Thomas G. Palaima, Professor Spyros Pavlides, Paul Pollak, Professor John Prag, Dr Laura Preston, Dr Cemal Pulak, Professor Dr Gilles Quispel, Professor George ‘Rip’ Rapp, Professor Colin Renfrew, Dr Roman Roth, Dr Deborah Ruscillo, Professor Lynne Schepartz, Professor Cynthia Shelmerdine, Professor Alan Shepherd and Dr Kim Yates, Professor James Simpson, Dr Nigel Spivey, Professor Jane Taylor, Dr Theodore Spyropoulos, Dr Natalie Tchernetska, Professor Bella Vivante, Dr Sofia Voutsaki, Dr Diana Wardle, Dr Kenneth Wardle, Professor Peter Warren, Rev. Peter Watkins, Dr Michael Wedde, Dr Martin West, Dr Todd Whitelaw, Dr Gotthelf Wiedermann, Michael Wood, Dr Jenny Wormald, Dr Neil Wright, Dr Sofka Zinovieff.

  The staff at the Ashmolean Museum, British Museum, Louvre Museum, Cambridge University Library, Matthew Parker Library (Corpus Christi College), Trinity Hall Library, the National Gallery of Scotland and Wilton House have been enormously helpful.

  I must reiterate heartfelt and special thanks to Paul Cartledge for his exceptional support and numerous readings; to Ken and Diana Wardle, Trevor Bryce and Lisa Bendall for detailed assistance well beyond the call of duty and to Colin Renfrew, Peter Millett, Richard Bradley, Justin Pollard, Lesley Fitton, Sofia Voutsaki, Cynthia Shelmerdine, Jane Taylor, Alistair Logan, Mark Edwards, John France, Julian Bowsher, Laurie Maguire, Bruce Barker-Benfield and Stephen Haggard for reading chapters or the full manuscript in draft form and responding with invaluable suggestions. Diana Wardle produced the Linear B images on pages 96 and 113 with just a few hours’ notice. Ellah Allfrey elegantly honed the manuscript and Dr Annelise Freisenbruch, who has been my constant ally throughout the research and writing periods, has been nothing other than splendid.

  Thank you too to Kristan Dowsing for coffee and above all to Jane who put this book before something far, far more important.

  Opposite Page:

  Vase detail showing Helen’s elopement with Paris. Red Attic. c. 490–460 BC

  INTRODUCTION

  Cherchez la Femme

  Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu’on me fait un rapport, je dis: ‘Cherchez la femme’

  There is a woman in every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, ‘Look for the woman’

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS, Les Mohicans de Paris, 2, 3

  IN THE HEART OF THE PELOPONNESE, in the centre of Sparta, there is a small square, filled with palm trees and roses. Across dappled paving stones and behind an erratic fountain is the Sparta Museum. Built with Greek-American money in the 19th century, the museum has seen better days – the paintwork must have been yellow ochre once; now it is patched and peeling, the colour of creamed butter. Classical sculptures, headless, many with limbs missing, flank the entrance. All is quiet and faded. Inside, there is a small number of artefacts from pre-historic, archaic and classical Greece: each is special and precious in its own way, but the labelling is minimal and rather listless: ‘Possibly of the 6th century BC ’; or ‘From Therapne, thought to be an offering to a Goddess’. 1 Every time I visit, the guards are squashed into a back room watching a Greek shopping channel and I have the place to myself.

  My first stop is to pay my respects to a limestone block half a metre high. Two thousand five hundred years old and edged with carved snakes, it dominates one of the rooms. The stone has, front and back, a tantalisingly eroded scene. On one side, a warrior tenderly holds a young girl. On the other, the same warrior is lunging forward, his sword to the woman’s throat, ready to kill. But because the woman has turned towards the man, the impact of her face has transformed his attack into an embrace.2 The man is Menelaus, King of Sparta, the woman, his queen, Helen of Troy.

  Helen, ‘whose beauty summoned Greece to arms, / And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos’,3 has been known for millennia as a symbol of beauty, and also as a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Following her double marriage – first to the Greek king Menelaus and then to the Trojan prince Paris – Helen came to be held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. She was, according to the oldest surviving ancient Greek written sources, put on the earth by Zeus to rid the world of its superfluous population:4 ‘[there was] a god-like race of hero men … grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them … [war] brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helen’s sake.’5 For nearly three thousand years, she has been upheld as an exquisite agent of extermination.

  As soon as men in the West began to write, they made Helen their subject. Hesiod, born around 700 BC and one of the earliest named authors in history, was the first to chronicle her ‘wide renown stretching over all the earth’; the poet Sappho described ‘her beauty surpassing all mankind’.6 The epithets endured; it is how Helen is remembered today. When the New Scientist magazine debated how to quantify beauty, it was suggested that the measure should be the millihelen. 7 In El Paso, Texas, a multimillion-dollar business, Helen of Troy Ltd, distributes beauty products worldwide from its modernist, metal-clad headquarters. The company’s website beckons with the catch-phrase: ‘Look – and feel – fantastic with Helen of Troy.’ She is still a house-hold name, still commemorated as the gold standard of physical perfection.

  A stone’s throw from the candyfloss and the Punch and Judy delights of Bournemouth Pier on the south coast of England, just up the breezy cliff path, is an extravagant Victorian mansion that houses the Russell-Cotes collection of art and curiosities. Inside there is an oil canvas, painted by Edwin Long in 1885 and entitled The Chosen Five. The setting of the painting is a workshop in southern Italy. Pressing in on a middle-aged man are five gorgeous creatures. One is blonde. One, naked apart from a necklace, has a mane of red hair caught up in a gold circlet. A brunette has her back turned, her chiton half-off, draped around her hips. A handsome Romanesque girl leans over a table playing draughts. The fifth, darker than the rest, has a lyre balanced in her naked lap and a leopard-skin rug licking around her thighs. All are statuesque but impassive. The male artist stares hungrily at the women but none meets his gaze.

  This scene tells the story of a master-painter from the 5th century BC: Zeuxis, a man much in demand, particularly in Magna Grae
cia.8 Commissioned to produce a picture of Helen of Troy for the temple of Hera at Agrigentum in Sicily, Zeuxis decided he could realise his task only if the city supplied him with the five most beautiful maidens in the region as models – the sum of their beauty might at least approach Helen’s. The selection process started in the town’s gymnasium. Inspecting young men as they exercised, Zeuxis asked to see the siblings of the most handsome. Word went out and the pretty sisters of the pretty boys began to line up. Edwin Long created another painting, The Search for Beauty, which illustrates what happened next. It is a voluptuous scene. Here Zeuxis is ‘auditioning’ his models. Scores of women crowd around him; many begin to remove their clothes. One woman is drawing out a pin to let fall her blue-black hair. These girls had to be palpably perfect, perfect in every last detail if they were to become second Helens.9 Zeuxis surveys them eagerly, relishing the task in hand.

  Across the English Channel and on the second floor of the Louvre in Paris there is another Zeuxis, attempting to paint another Helen.10 The scale of this 18th-century canvas is worthy of its surroundings: it is a mammoth thing, 4m across and 3.3m tall. Here there are five eager girls – again, each is a wonderful specimen. One blonde, with a blue ribbon in her hair and pearls around her neck, is undressed, her modesty precariously preserved by a flimsy drape of cloth – an old woman pokes at her, staring covetously at the plump young flesh which is about to be immortalised. Yet what dominates this painting is not the cluster of beauties – it is the bleak, virtually empty canvas in the centre of the composition. This is where Helen should be: a void that Zeuxis is desperately, abortively, trying to fill.

  Because, of course, the wonderful irony about the most beautiful woman in the world is that she is faceless. There are no contemporary representations of a Spartan queen from the 13th century BC, the putative date of the Trojan War. The extant images of high-born Greek women from this period – the Late Bronze Age – are all standards, all recycled replicas within a genre. At this time there was no characterisation in Greek art. Excavators have turned up striking Bronze Age death masks – but only of men. There are precious signet rings belonging to the aristocrats of the time, but the female faces they bear are of abstracted, quasi-divine creatures; these are no portraits.

  By the 7th century BC the ancient world does start to paint Helen’s picture, or inscribe her form on stone, clay and bronze.11 Yet these too are stylised, copybook approximations – the vase painters, sculptors and fresco artists of Greece and Rome worked to a recognised formula; we have no lifelike representation of Helen from antiquity. Museum storerooms around the world have shelves crammed with vases showing Helen at various points in her life-story and in her evolution as an idol – Helen as a girl, Helen as queen, Helen as a demi-goddess, Helen as a whore – but these images, without exception, are all made up; they reveal not who Helen was, but who men have wanted her to be.

  An Evil Destiny

  On us the gods have set an evil destiny, That we should be a singer’s theme For generations to come.

  Helen, from Homer, Iliad 12

  ALTHOUGH HELEN HAS COME TO BE MEMORIALISED for the patina of her beauty, she is far more than just a pretty face. She also represented something so potent, complex and charismatic that the finest author of the ancient world composed an epic masterpiece in which she is pivotal. Just a few generations after the ancient Greek alphabet was invented13 at the beginning of the 8th century BC, the Iliad, an epic poem running to 15,693 lines, was written down.14 Thirty or so years later came the Odyssey. In over 200,000 words of ancient Greek, Homer told the world what women like Helen could make men do. He gave the West its earliest and most influential work of literature. He promoted Helen as a captivating and troubling icon.

  Homer’s poetry roars and whispers. He talks of passion and revenge and duty and disloyalty, of loss and love, deploying characters who wear wolf-pelts and leopard-skins: they think like us and they dress like cavemen. At the most basic of readings the Iliad – which describes the Achaean Greeks and the Trojans battling it out for possession of Helen – is a tale of boy meets girl meets boy – leading to the mother of all bust-ups. At its most complex, it is an exploration of the relationship between gods and mortals, women and men, sex and violence, duty and desire, delight and death. It asks why humanity chooses paths it knows to be destructive; why we desire what we do not have.

  With the Iliad and the Odyssey, for the first time in the West, we find notions of personal morality being tested. Helen is a vital part of this interrogation because she is a paradox. A bedazzling, unfaithful queen, a duplicitous home-wrecker who causes decades of misery, she none the less survives unscathed: an inscrutable mix of self-will and suggestibility, intellect and instinct, frailty and power. Created at a time before good and evil were regarded as distinct entities, Helen embraces both. She is physically perfect and yet her perfection spawns disaster. She is clearly dangerous and still men cannot stop loving her. She enters the record as a woman who demands engagement.

  When Homer was composing the Iliad in the 8th century BC, there were no preconceived ideas of how societies should constitute or conduct themselves. Everything was an experiment. The Eastern Mediterranean was a vast social and political laboratory. During Homer’s lifetime and for the three hundred years after his death, the Greeks tried all manner of ventures: tyrannies, democracies, totalitarian boot camps, proto-communist utopias. Anything went, but there was one important constant. All these experiments measured their own success against the achievements of a distant past described by the epic poets, and, in particular, by Homer. This glittering epoch became known as ‘the Age of Heroes’.15 And the single most important female figure from this heroic age was the Spartan queen, orea Eleni, ‘beautiful Helen’. Helen’s story therefore became a benchmark by which the classical world judged itself.

  The long-dead heroes (and heroines) from the Bronze Age were envisaged as giants in mind, body and spirit. Dinosaur bones were touted around classical Greece and Rome as relics of the über-men and women who were believed to have inhabited the pre-historic past.16 Enormous stone building blocks, the remains of Bronze Age fortifications, were described as ‘Cyclopean’ because it was presumed only giants – such as the one-eyed Cyclopes – could have moved them into place.17 At Olympia, a monstrous shoulder-blade – thought to belong to Heracles’ great-grandson Pelops – was displayed with deep reverence in a specially built shrine.18 All this was considered proof-positive that the Greeks’ ancestral heroes were men and women to revere. In their outsize lives could be found the ultimate expression of what it meant to be human.19

  Homer’s words20 were as close as the pagan, polytheistic Greeks got to an over-arching orthodoxy, and so his ideas became theirs. For the ancients, the bard’s work was canonical – in many quarters the Iliad had the authority of a sacred text. Sappho, Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristotle picked up Helen’s theme. The conflict at Troy came to represent the war not to end, but to start, all wars. Homer’s Helen became a paradigm for the female sex and for the hazards of the entangling female embrace.

  Yet Helen is not contained by the works of Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey deal with only a fraction of her narrative. These two epic poems cover only a short period (the Iliad only fifty-one days) in a rich and eventful life. When Helen is first mentioned by Homer in Book 2 of the Iliad she is given no introduction. The author presumed his audience was familiar with her colourful back-story. Although Helen’s presence is felt throughout the poem – hovering in the wings, a hated casus belli – there is a great deal that Homer does not tell us about her. We know from vase paintings and fragments of stories that turn up in plays, poems, or philosophical debates that the men and women of antiquity were well versed in other intimate details of Helen’s extraordinary tale.

  Alternative epics were to carry on where Homer left off. Most of these are long lost – or displaced; some we can assemble piecemeal, others survive in name only: works such as the Little Iliad, the Sack of I
lium, the Homecomings and the Cypria. 21 Helen was writ particularly large in the Cypria, a group of poems composed soon after Homer’s death.22 Originally part of an Epic Cycle that dealt with the origins of the world and reached to the end of the Age of Heroes, this collection seems to have focused on Helen’s early years. Now in desultory fragments, this would have been one of our best sources for Helen’s epic life.

  In this book I will follow Helen’s fortunes as recounted by Homer. I will also explore the evidence offered by these other less familiar literary sources and by archaeology – piecing together Helen’s life-story from her conception to her grave. I will trace her evolution as a human character from the Late Bronze Age, as a spiritual power and as an icon of peerless beauty and erotic love; and follow in her footsteps across the Eastern Mediterranean.

  Mine will be a physical journey and a journey across time. Helen’s lament in the Iliad, that on her the gods had laid an evil curse, making her ‘A singer’s theme for generations to come’, was prophetic. How Helen has been sung. Where women have in general been written out of history, Helen has been written in. She is one of the few, evergreen female personalities to survive from antiquity.23

 

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