The Romans claimed their city was founded by descendants of a Trojan War veteran, Aeneas, and therefore stories of Troy were at the heart of Roman inheritance. When the megalomaniac emperor Nero redecorated his opulent Domus Aurea – his Golden House – the elaborate fresco cycles he commissioned told the story of the Trojan War; and when he fiddled while Rome burned, it was said that he sang of Troy.24 Even after the fall of Rome, as the ruling dynasties throughout Europe competed to prove them-selves the true inheritors of Roman power, royal households traced their ancestry back, directly, to the heroes of Troy – men who were made heroic in battling for Helen.
In the 7th century AD, Helen’s rape by the Trojan prince Paris was credited by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies – a work immensely influential in medieval thought – as one of 132 moments that shocked and shaped the world. When William the Conqueror invaded England, his military performance against King Harold was compared (favourably) by one of his biographers, Guillaume de Poitiers, to that of Agamemnon seeking to rescue the Spartan queen: ‘where Agamemnon took ten years to break down Troy, William took one day’.25
Scribes in the ancient and medieval worlds carefully copied Helen’s story on to papyrus, parchment and vellum, and once Caxton had brought the printing press to Westminster in 1476, her tale was mass-produced – the basis of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, 26 the first book ever to be printed in the English language. The initial production of The Recuyell was laborious: it took Caxton between five and six months to print the 700-odd leaves of the book, but from this moment on, Helen would inhabit not just the popular imagination, but the mass media.
Dante, Fra Angelico, Chaucer, Leonardo, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dryden, Goethe, Jacques-Louis David, Rossetti, Gladstone, Yeats, Berlioz, Strauss, Rupert Brooke, Camus, Tippett and Ezra Pound: all have kept the idea of Helen alive. Cultures have created their own Helens, consistent with their own ideals of beauty. She is irresistible because she is recondite. No model, no substitute, is ever quite good enough. Zeuxis’ answer was to manufacture a composite, but even that amalgam fails to satisfy. Because Helen is elusive, her appeal endures. She is prodigious, part of the cultural, and the political, make-up of the West.
Helen-Hunting
They called me Helen. Let me tell you all the truth of what has happened to me.
EURIPIDES, Helen27
ANCIENT AUTHORS TELL US that Helen travelled extensively through the Bronze Age world, zigzagging across Greece, besieged in Anatolia and journeying to Egypt. They believed that after her death her spirit lived on in the landscape.
In Helen’s case, locations are particularly germane because we will never hear her voice, first hand, through textual evidence. Although the character of Helen derived from an epoch that used writing (an early form of Greek now called Linear B), the Linear B tablets that have survived – accidentally preserved when they were baked hard by the very fires that destroyed many Bronze Age palaces – deal with relatively mundane details of Bronze Age life. These are administrative lists, tallies of wine, pots, grain, oils and live-stock – the material culture that warrior-overlords controlled.
The Linear B script is utilised primarily for bureaucracy. In the tablets dug up to date there is little that is immediately recognisable as the inner voice of a civilisation, no self-conscious historical record.28 This is not a culture that employed written symbols as a form of emotional expression. For that, we have to wait until the reintroduction of writing around the time of Homer just after 800 BC. Greece in the 13th century BC, Helen’s age, still stands in pre-history.
But Helen’s is a story of two civilisations – of Greeks and of Trojans. There are fuller written sources from the ‘other’ side. Paris, Helen’s Trojan lover, occupied territory in the Troad, the coastal buffer-zone, now in modern-day Turkey, which in pre-history sat at the edge of the Anatolian landmass dominated by the great Hittite Empire. At the turn of the 20th century, excavators in central Turkey uncovered a cache of Hittite texts: diplomatic treaties, ritual tablets, royal biographies, accounts of trade and conflict. Tens of thousands of inscriptions have since been discovered. Some are carved into rocks and along remote mountain passes, others are still being dug out of the earth. Many tablet fragments have lain, undeciphered, in museum storerooms since they were first excavated a hundred years ago. About seven thousand fragments have yet to be published: there are simply not enough Hittite scholars, or research funds, to do the work.29 These Hittite texts give an eastern perspective to the Troy story that has not been fully explored. If Helen is to be explored as a real woman as well as an icon, and in a Bronze Age context, then they are vital testimonies.
Since recorded time, men have believed in Helen. They have believed in her both as an actual historical character and as an archetype of beauty, of womanhood, of sex, of danger. In my own pursuit of Helen, I will look not just at what she has come to mean, but what she meant to the populations of the past. I will explore the praxis of Helen, trying to imagine how she was experienced in antiquity and beyond, as men and women walked past her shrines, as they watched the priestesses of her cult inspect bloody entrails to determine her will, as they scratched lewd graffiti about her onto the walls of Rome, as they listened to politicians and philosophers enveloping her in their rhetoric, as they decorated their palaces and their temples with her image.
Helen’s admirers (and her detractors) have been many and various. Medieval nuns pored over an imagined exchange of love-letters between Helen and Paris from the Heroides, written by Ovid – honing their own skills in literary flirtation as versions of the poems were smuggled out to men, or even passed between the girls in the convent.30 In Renaissance England the rebellious named their daughters ‘Helen’ despite its categorisation by pamphleteers as an appellation that would bring disgrace.31 In 17th-century Europe artists were commissioned to decorate buildings with giant scenes of Helen’s abduction. One example, by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, still survives in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A horribly compelling composition, it soars on the ceiling of the Galerie Mazarine. In the neo-classical boom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries men such as the philosopher, historian and dramatist Friedrich Schiller used the name ‘Helen’ as a term of abuse, to mean a flirt, a tart, an immoral woman.32 Strolling through the Montmartre district of Paris in the 1860s you would have rubbed shoulders with a bohemian throng and an occasional royal, the Prince of Wales or the Tsar of Russia – all heading to the Théâtre de Variétés to watch Offenbach’s operetta sensation, La Belle Hélène.33
Dreamy 19th-century paintings portrayed Helen – anachronistically – as a plump, blonde, classical Greek beauty, dressed in diaphanous clothes. Scores of prostitutes found themselves plucked off the streets to be immortalised in oils, as ‘Sweet Helena’. The Spartan queen has spawned some of the most beautiful poetry of the 20th century, and some of its ugliest. There are sites on the internet that today invoke her as a powerful white witch, others that hail her as the first recorded female role-model. Helen encourages speculation in its truest sense – holding a speculum, a mirror, up to her ever-changing face to see what worlds can be glimpsed in the reflection behind.
Goddess, Princess, Whore
There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desirable, that calls either for art or for character.
J.-W. Goethe (from posthumous papers)34
HISTORY IS AT ONCE BAFFLED AND ENRAPTURED BY HELEN; we can trace nearly three millennia of ambiguous attitudes towards her. She is difficult to categorise for good reason; a pursuit of Helen across the ages throws up three distinct, yet intertwined, guises. When we talk about her, we are in fact describing a trinity.
The most familiar Helen is the brilliant regal beauty from the epics, particularly Homer’s Helen: the Spartan princess with divine paternity fought over by the heroes in Greece and then won by Menelaus’ wealth.
The queen who – led on by the goddess of love, Aphrodite – welcomed a Trojan prince into her bed while her husband was overseas. The head-strong, capricious aristocrat who deserted the Greeks, sailed across the Aegean and then languished in Troy, hated by all around her. The exile who watched heroes suffer agonies in her name – fleet-footed Achilles, red-haired Menelaus, sharp-witted Odysseus, Agamemnon, the king of men; and of course the lads from the eastern camp – Hector, breaker of horses, Priam, lord of a glorious citadel, and Paris with his glistening love-locks.
This is the invidious Helen who walked around the Trojan Horse, imitating the voices of the Greek wives, attempting to dislodge her erstwhile countrymen from their equine siege-breaker. The adulteress who, after ten sad, punishing, faithless years in Troy, was still so entrancing that her cuckold husband, Menelaus, could not bear to kill her. The enigmatic figure who sailed back to Sparta while Paris’ body smouldered on the Trojan plain, back to a daughter whom she had left motherless, back to a bed she had left cold. The creature – flawed and yet strangely dignified – who demonstrated that female beauty was something to fear as well as to crave.
But Helen was not just a finely drawn character from the Greek epics, not just a ‘sex-goddess’ in literary terms. She was also a demi-god, a heroine, worshipped and honoured at shrines across the Eastern Mediterranean. She was perceived as an integral part of the spiritual landscape. Men and women made propitiation to her earthy power. In Sparta she was invoked by young virgins; in Egypt she had uxorial duties, caring for newlyweds and old wives; and in Etruscan society her half-dressed form was carved on the funerary urns of high-born women – a valued companion for the journey into the afterlife.35 Some scholars believe that a mortal Helen never existed, but that she is, instead, simply the human face of an ancient nature-goddess, a full-blown divinity, a pan-Hellenic spirit of vegetation and fertility. A visceral force that brings with it both life and death.
Then there is the ‘shameless whore’,36 the ‘traitorous bitch’37; the ‘Aegeyan bitch, her of the three husbands, who bare only female children’;38 the ‘strumpet’;39 the beautiful, libidinous creature irresistible to men; the pin-up, golden-haired, phantom Helen, lambasted in theological texts and draped across the art galleries of Europe, an erotic eidolon – a Greek word meaning a ghost, an image or idea – an idol of female beauty and sexuality, both lusted after and despised.40
I believe that all three incarnations – princess, goddess and whore – find their root in a Bronze Age Helen, that the template for Helen of Troy was provided by one of the rich Spartan queens who lived and died on the Greek mainland in the 13th century BC; a woman who slept at night and woke at dawn, a flesh-and-blood icon, an aristocrat responsible for orgia – secretive, mysterious fertility rites – a woman so blessed, so honoured, so powerful, she appeared to walk with the gods. A mortal who, down the centuries, has become larger than life.
Because Helen is such an alluring figure of fantasy, because she dazzles as she goes, she can make it hard to see the women of substance who walked through the Bronze Age palaces of the Eastern Mediterranean. But ongoing archaeological and historical projects demonstrate that these women were prominent and significant: broken writing tablets tell us that female aristocrats were used as diplomatic trading chips, highly valued commodities passed from one state to another, the Bronze Age equivalent of the Black Tulip. Within the context of her world, Helen is a historical possibility.
Greece and Anatolia had a complicated, fractious and intense relation-ship at the end of the Bronze Age. Magnates from both sides married each other’s women, fought over each other’s territories and joined together in trade. In Turkish waters divers have found Bronze Age ocean-worthy vessels laden with precious goods, which sank as they made the journey between the Greek mainland and Asia Minor. Official letters sent across the Aegean from one great leader to another can flatter or they can simmer with scarcely contained fury. Stockpiles of sling-shot have been discovered at the walls of Troy. And the civilisations that Helen and Paris represent – the Mycenaeans (based on the Greek mainland) and the Hittites (in command of much of Turkey and the Middle East), along with their allies such as Troy – imploded in a dramatic rush of flame and confusion at the end of the 13th century BC. At the height of their power, something or someone brought these giants to their knees.
Slowly pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are fitting together. As more Bronze Age texts are translated, as more material culture is recovered in archaeological excavations, Homer’s epic, describing the conflict between the Greeks41 and the Trojans, edges closer to fact and Helen’s story rings ever more true. Digs at Troy have not yet produced Prince Hector’s mangled body, nor the remains of a god-like hero called Achilles, an arrow piercing his heel, nor, miraculously preserved in anaerobic conditions, the fetlock of a giant wooden horse. And they are never likely to do so. But what they have yielded is a city destroyed by fire and a culture rocked to its core. The Hittites and the Mycenaeans were mighty – less than a hundred years after the putative date of the Trojan War, they disappear.42 What Helen has come to mean is universal; but her story is proving increasingly appropriate to the circumstances of the Late Bronze Age.
A caveat: to date, no human remains of a 13th-century BC Spartan queen have been identified. Until we discover a Late Bronze Age burial in Sparta itself, containing a skeleton with sufficient uncontaminated DNA to test positively as female, lying next to a Greek king, both corpses wearing Trojan gold, the site surrounded by dedications marked ‘eleni ’ written in a Bronze Age script; then, and only then, can we say, categorically, we have found our human Helen. And the wait for such an eventuality will almost certainly be interminable.
Pre-history is a temporal land of ifs, buts and maybes, a land that up until a hundred and fifty years ago still lay buried and mute. But it conceived the idea of a woman who became the cause célèbre of the most influential work of epic literature in the West. We have the story, and now it is up to us to find its roots.
If Helen is a confection, an artistic construct, she was originally the construct of the pre-historic mind; if she is a nature divinity, her worship began in pre-history; if she is real, she lived and loved as a pre-historic princess. To understand all three Helens, we have to start our journey in her pre-historic world. A world which is other, rich and strange.
PART ONE
HELEN’S BIRTH IN PRE-HISTORY
Previous page:
Gold signet ring discovered at Tiryns in the Peloponnese. Daimons approach a seated female figure and offer libations. The polos hat worn by the woman suggests she has religious authority and is perhaps a goddess. c. 1400 BC.
1
A DANGEROUS LANDSCAPE
Suddenly down from the mountain’s rocky crags Poseidon stormed with giant, lightning strides and the looming peaks and tall timber quaked beneath his immortal feet as the sea lord surged on.
HOMER, Iliad1
TO UNDERSTAND THE DISQUIET LANDSCAPE that nurtured Helen, we must begin our story 175 miles south-east from Sparta, Helen’s traditional birthplace, across the Aegean Sea on the Cycladic island of Thera.2 Here, over three and a half thousand years ago, a single, cataclysmic event directed the course of western civilisation.
Between 1859 and 1869, labour-gangs were employed on the island of Thera to quarry raw materials for cement. Huge amounts were needed: this was preparatory work for the construction of the new canal at Suez. The workers were after pozzolan, a powdered pumice-stone which, combined with lime, produces a cement so fine that it is like plaster; they were digging in the right place. Here were layers of pumice a full 10m thick: the tell-tale sign of massive geo-physical activity. The volcanic island of Thera had erupted a number of times, and as the navvies dug deeper and deeper it became clear that the most spectacular explosion pre-dated the Romans, the classical Greeks and Homer himself. When the pick-axes finally hit the bedrock, the workers had made their way through extruded volcanic material 3,500 years old to the archaeologica
l level of the Aegean Bronze Age. What was being quarried was the fall-out of a gargantuan natural disaster.
The landscape of present-day Thera still signals the force of an earth that is uneasy. Take a little boat out to the collapsed centre of the volcano and you crunch your way through its hills and hummocks built up of dusty, aerated lava. Pumice stones skitter and slide underfoot at the approach to the volcano’s centre. The ground still breathes out attenuated plumes and wisps of smoke. Footpaths wind past giant rocky outcrops: once molten ooze, these subterranean minerals have now hardened into titanic chunks of shiny, black, broken treacle. For centuries, the Theran landscape would have been a stark aide-memoire, telling the ancients that men were mere matchwood when it came to the anger of the earth, the sea and the sky.
Thera is a shocking and savage enough place today – just imagine it as the volcano erupted around 1550 BC. 3 Earthquakes a month or so before would have been the first signal that the gods were uneasy. Then the massive mountain in the sea would have started to exhale clouds of ash, a dark stain in the sky, an ugly blur visible for a hundred miles. With a scream of released pressure, steam would have escaped in voluminous billows and tight jet-blasts. And then the coup de théâtre: between 30 and 40 km of pumice, rock-shards and ash hurtling into the atmosphere in the giant eruption column. Magma spewing up from the volcano’s mouth; pyroclastic flows leaving deposits 20 to 50m thick in some places; electrical storms ripping open the sky.4
Helen of Troy Page 4