Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  We know from Linear B tablets that flax-products – oil and fibre, used to make clothes, sail-cloth, thread, strings and nets13 – were an important export for the Peloponnese, particularly from the region around Pylos. The flax crop would have lit up the land with a brilliant blue when each plant bloomed from dawn until its petals fell at noon. Many of the grandest women wore moulded glass-paste beads, some the colour of speedwells, some indigo, some deep turquoise. As they passed through their territories, carried in litters by slaves, their jewellery would have been a guileless, bijou echo of the landscape around.

  The finds from the Mycenaean citadels and graves illustrate the centrality of visual signals in pre-history. Before writing was employed as a tool of propaganda, appearance and experience are all-important. Images have to speak louder than words. The ruling classes of the Mycenaeans had access to precious raw materials from across the Eastern Mediterranean – of a calibre and variety never before imagined. And so in marked contrast to the rest of the population, the high-born made sure they gleamed, perpetually, with an artificial lustre. A girl like Helen, sparkling and glinting as she would have done, would have had it reinforced day in and day out, from a very early age, how important, valuable and desirable she was.

  This was an infant society and yet we find on the Greek mainland for the first time a systematic, ubiquitous and extreme division between rich and poor, between town and countryside. Bone evidence speaks of the effects of social segregation – the aristocrats, well-nourished during life and buried within or next to the citadels are on average a full 5 cm taller than the Mycenaean workers, who, in contrast, both in shanty towns and in villages, show the effects of regular starvation.14 The citadels were exalted and exclusive. Fairytale palaces when the resident clan-leaders served your needs or protected your family; sinister castles when they turned their might and their systems against you.15

  Today, the massive building blocks of the grand Mycenaean citadels have been softened. At Mycenae, each year, a million or so tourists trail around the citadel and the stones and footways are gently burnished by centuries of wear and tear. At different points in the year where one stone meets another there are splashes of bright pink and yellow, the flower-heads of tiny wild cyclamen and autumn crocuses clinging to the crevices.

  The sun-baked ruins with their airy, open spaces might present a pretty picture today. But imagine walking through each room closed in with many thousands of tons of solid stone, with exterior walls up to 7.5m thick. Large areas of the palace complexes would have been dark and musty – the smell of burnt vegetable and mutton fat from natural oil lamps lingering in the corridors. And from the workshops in the citadel the acid tang of metal being forged – because towards the end of the Mycenaean age a mass of armaments was produced.16

  For the bulk of the Bronze Age population, life was strained and precarious. Most Mycenaeans did not have Cyclopean walls to protect them. Tomorrow could bring a new earthquake or a new leader, and then those wild flowers would be dancing not in the breeze, but in the back-draught of enemy fires. Rival clans might choose to extend their boundaries to notch up new territories with a body count to match. There was, too, always the chance that devastation could come from across the oceans. Think of the heart-stopping anxiety of looking out to sea, spotting a small speck on the horizon, not knowing whether it was a trader or a messenger, or the advance guard of a hostile force; malcontents making their way slowly and steadily towards you, with the explicit purpose of burning your crops, razing your property to the ground, maiming your husband, enslaving your children or raping your wife.

  In the Iliad, Homer weaves his story around a network of allies – men variously described as the Achaeans, the Danaans or Argives.17 Their clan-leaders – Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus, Achilles and the rest – had a sense of collective identity, but on the battlefield, back at camp and in bed, they were torn apart by personal rivalries and dog-fights – within the Greek confederacy there is a great deal of posturing. These tribal micro-conflicts – in many ways the meat and drink of the Iliad – bear out a likely scenario in the Late Bronze Age in which each territory was run by a warlord, his wife and their loyal coterie of aristocratic elite. Tribes in competition with those across the valley.

  On one vase, ranks of elite foot-soldiers march doggedly across the surface. This ‘Warrior Vase’ is a solid, roomy thing – 40 cm high, made late, around 1150 BC and now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. At first glance one can be deceived into thinking that all the figures are male. The automaton warriors are striding into battle, but behind them is a lone figure, waving. It is a woman. Is she a mother saying goodbye? Is she a Mycenaean Greek waving for help? Is she an alien (a Trojan even) about to be attacked? Is she a queen sending her soldiers off to die? We do not know the story of the vase, but we can read its message. At the tail-end of Mycenaean civilisation – in precarious, blood-thirsty times – this is what men are brought up to do: to stand together and fight while women stand and watch.

  PART TWO

  THE LAND OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

  Previous page:

  A bronze figurine of a young female Spartan athlete.

  Found at Dodona. c. 550 BC.

  6

  THE RAPE OF ‘FAIR HELLEN’

  I sat beauty on my lap

  I found her bitter

  And I insulted her.

  RIMBAUD,

  Season in Hell (1873)

  WHEN THEY RECOUNTED HELEN’S LIFE as a young woman growing up in Sparta, the authors of antiquity did not imagine it to have been easy. As well as her most famous abduction, by Paris the prince of Troy, they recalled that Helen – still only a child – had been violated on the banks of the River Eurotas by the aged King of Athens, Theseus.1 Theseus was fifty; some sources say Helen was twelve,2 some ten,3 some as young as seven4 – already ‘excelling all women in beauty’. The princess had been exercising and dancing naked with other young virgins when Theseus, recently widowed, caught sight of her. With eyes for no other, consumed by lust, he seized the Spartan princess.

  Isocrates, writing in the 4th century BC,5 describes how, despite the king’s might and standing, Helen became the summation of all earthly desires: ‘[Theseus] was so captivated by her loveliness that he, accustomed as he was to subdue others, and although the possessor of a fatherland most great, and a kingdom most secure, thought life was not worth living amid the blessings he already had unless he could enjoy intimacy with her.’6

  Tracing the site of those dancing grounds in Sparta early one summer, along the river-banks of the Eurotas, I lost my way.7 The bulrushes here are 3m high – the perfect hiding place for a Theseus, prowling around the young girls. Twisting and turning I ended up in one of the orange groves, hundreds of which now edge the river and carpet the Eurotan plain. In the next-door field, women were lopping olive trees, to allow the top growth all the strength it needed. As they burned the branches, smoke mixed with the smell of the jasmine which wound around the mature boughs. I was investigating the scene of a crime, but the sensuous charge of the place was sweet and overwhelming. The 5th-century BC poet Pindar wrote this about the Greeks’ subterranean equivalent of heaven, Elysium, and he could have been describing Sparta on that balmy afternoon:

  For them the sun shines at full strength. The plains around their city are red with roses And shaded by incense trees, heavy with golden fruit. And some enjoy horses and wrestling, or table games and the lyre And near them blossoms a flower of perfect joy. Perfumes always hover above the land From the frankincense strewn in deep-shining fire of the god’s altars.8

  A poignant place for a rape.9

  Some said that Helen was dancing in a religious sanctuary devoted to the goddess Artemis Orthia when Theseus attacked her. Artemis Orthia was a hybrid deity – a potent conflation of Artemis, the virgin huntress and protector of mothers and children, and Orthia, a Dorian goddess10 associated with youth, fertility rites and the dawn. From at least 700 BC11 this was a site much f
requented by women: a huge number of votive offerings, including over 100,000 small lead figurines, many of girls dancing or riding, have been excavated here; some are thought to represent Helen, left by those who adored her.12

  Today the sanctuary is neglected and ugly. Old plastic bags eddy around the remains of the archaic altar or stick in the chicken-wire fence that hems the site in. The religious complex is close to the River Eurotas and built on swampy ground: gnats whine to and fro across the broken stones. A bumpy, dusty track leads to the archaeological remains. Each time I have visited, there has been unexpected company: the gypsy camp down the road spills over with curious, grubby children, eager to see who it is that is visiting their local ruin.

  But the musty atmosphere of the holy site is strangely appropriate. One of the reasons young girls of Classical Sparta – first Greek and then Roman – would visit the place was to celebrate the onset of puberty. Boys too would come, to undergo a brutal rite of passage. Faced with a challenge to reach the goddess’s altar and steal cheeses from it, they had to brave a gauntlet of whips wielded by older adolescents. Meeting the lashes face on, the boys had two options: reach their goal, or die, flayed alive in the name of education and social development. The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia is a sordid site, a site steeped in blood.13

  And Theseus, true to form, precipitated the catalogue of blood-letting when he came here to take Helen by force. This was a hero who lived with the smell of another’s fear in his nostrils. The ancients told each other stories of how, as well as raping young virgins, Theseus famously slew the Minotaur on Crete, attempted to abduct Persephone from the underworld, and made love to the Queen of the Amazons.14 Even after his death, his ghost turned up in the 5th century BC, a giant apparition running in front of the Athenian troops at the Battle of Marathon to spur them on to victory. Theseus was the kind of champion Athens approved of – the mascot of a city-state as famous for its aggressive, ruthless expansionism as for its art, philosophy and politics.

  The story goes that following the rape, Theseus locked Helen in the hill-fortress of Aphidna near Dekeleia.15 While her assailant was off in pursuit of yet another woman (this time Persephone),16 Helen’s brothers, Castor and Pollux, stormed the prison. The abduction of the Spartan princess by the Athenian king had thrown down the gauntlet to the Lakedaimonian clan. The liberation of Helen was used by her noble brothers as a pretext for invading Attica: ‘[they] laid waste all the country round about’17 and then enslaving Theseus’ mother Aethra.18 Theseus’ defilement of Helen was legendary but the outrage burned in the minds of the Spartans – becoming an excuse for further aggression. Each year between 431 and 425, during the Peloponnesian War, Sparta raided Attica.19 The only region they left untouched was Dekeleia – in gratitude to the Dekeleian men of old who, it was said, had led Castor and Pollux to Theseus’ Aphidna hideout.20

  The rape of women from another social group was an act of defiance which required retaliation.21 Helen’s rape was triply offensive: an incursion onto another’s territory, the disruption of a ritual of paramount importance (the dance-display of young virgins in a sacred site) and, of course, an attack on an under-age royal.22 Her abductions became scores that needed settling. In the minds of the Greeks, at a tender age Helen had begun her career as a creator of conflict.

  Helen’s rapes – both by Theseus and by Paris – were of timeless political relevance to the city of Sparta. The Spartans who dominated the classical landscape were in fact interlopers – Dorians who had invaded the region in c.1050 BC. Whereas Sparta’s rivals the Athenians claimed to be autochthonous (sprung from the soil, self-earthed), a tribe born and bred to rule Athenian territory, the Spartans were viewed as Johnnies-come-lately: a historical fact to which they were extremely sensitive. They promoted their antique heritage vigorously – and one of their claims to rightful ownership of Spartan lands was that they were direct descendants of beautiful Helen.

  In the Spartans, Helen found an idiosyncratic fan-base. The epithets Spartan (austere, hardy, rigorous) and Laconic23 (brief, using few words) have made their way into the English language. They are appropriate mementoes of a society which was indeed extreme, hard-line and taciturn. The Spartans believed, above all, in duty and self-sacrifice. Deriving inspiration from a shady – possibly mythical – figure called Lycurgus ‘the Law-Giver’ they outlawed money, banned prostitutes and perfume and shunned the sartorial embellishments much loved by other Greek city-states; the true Spartan lived bare-footed and wore a thin ragged cloak summer and winter. Spartans discouraged outsiders: in a codified policy known as xenelasia (liter-ally ‘the avoidance of strangers’) they forbade overseas trade. All social and political structure was designed to preserve the ‘purity’ and strength of the Spartan city-state.

  Although Sparta was totalitarian and secretive, the Spartans’ rigid political and social systems were attractive to a number of Greeks – appearing to guarantee eunomia, good order. ‘Lakonophiles’ – lovers of Lakonia – included the philosopher Socrates and the historian Xenophon. Eunomia was largely maintained thanks to rigid social engineering. Boy-children were taken away from their mothers at the age of seven and reared in the agoge – an all-male training camp: the overriding purpose of their instruction, to manufacture loyal and invincible soldiers. Spartan men did not have to trouble themselves with the more variegated demands of life – the Spartan state was supported by helots, a slave population, and the perioikoi, craftsmen who lived ‘round about’. Spartan citizens lived to be professional soldiers; a male Spartiate was commemorated with a named headstone only if he fell in battle and a female Spartiate only if she died in childbirth. There was no interaction between the ranks. Spartan women (in theory) bred exclusively with full-blown Spartan citizens.24 Because all Spartan men between the ages of seven and thirty spent their days in army camp, and their nights together in the syssition (the mess), the running of the household and, on occasion, of day-to-day affairs of state fell to Spartan women.25

  Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans despised the pursuit of visible wealth and the pomp of grandiose monuments. The Spartans did not trouble themselves with large-scale artistic patronage – they never built a Parthenon. The lucid, terse 5th-century historian Thucydides pointed out that, had Sparta been deserted (and only the foundations of its sacred and secular buildings left standing), no one would have had any idea from its meagre architecture how important a city it was.26 The remains of the ancient polis are indeed sparse, and because it promised little, Sparta was one of the last sites to be excavated in the nineteenth-century race between European states to lay claim to ancient monuments. The first spades breached the soil of the Spartan acropolis only in 1906.

  The British led the Spartan digs. Conditions were challenging, progress slow; the mid-19th-century neo-classical town of Sparti had been built directly on top of the ancient city.27 Then, intriguing artefacts started to come out of the earth. There were the anticipated figurines of hoplite soldiers,28 inscriptions commemorating glorious achievements in brutal close-combat competitions and sculptures of the warrior-perfect Spartan Ideal. But there were also more sensual objects: fine ivory combs, perfume bottles, kohl eye-liners, intricate mirrors and terracotta and bronze figurines: girl musicians, girl dancers, female equestrians – some riding side-saddle – many dedicated at Helen’s cult sites. Yet the female figurines were put aside in cardboard boxes and tucked away in the bottom of archives – many undisturbed to this day. This disrespect towards the detritus of female cults, including the cult of Helen, the ancient Spartans would have found unconscionable.

  Every man, woman and child of ancient Sparta lived with vivid, tangible mementoes of their celebrated ancestor. In the form of carvings, inscriptions and figurines, Helen was present across the city until the end of Roman rule. As well as her cult sites at the Menelaion and Platanistas, she had a shrine in the centre of the city near the tombs of the poet Alcman and Heracles.29 Stone steles featuring Helen – created to be displayed in public – were c
arved by one generation after another. One dating from the 6th century BC, shows Helen with her birth-egg.30 On another, from the 2nd century BC, Helen is flanked by her brothers, the Dioscuri; she is striking, her head crowned with long rays of light – a representation of the celestial sphere.31 Curious fillets dangle down from her hands – to the untrained modern eye these look like strings of onions, but to the Ancient Greeks, who knew that these knotted bands of cloth or rope had a sacral nature, they would have signified Helen’s ritual power.32

  From the Hellenistic period onwards,33 exclusive societies – whose members’ names were inscribed on slabs of stone – organised feasts and sacrifices for Helen and her twin brothers.34 Only those who were ‘in’ could worship Leda’s children in this way. There were strict codes of behaviour. One of the club officials was a ‘gynaikonomos’: an individual who made sure that women in the religious society dressed and behaved appropriately. In the Roman period, hereditary priesthoods – priests and priestesses – claimed Helen and the Dioscuri as their ancestors; Helen’s seers inspected the entrails of sacrificed animals for divine messages.35 Spartan girls prepared themselves each year for the lush, orgiastic festivals of the spring, anniversaries of Helen’s youthful dances at Artemis Orthia’s sanctum and on the banks of the River Eurotas. Helen’s name was sung, her memory lauded at formal civic occasions. Whether or not ‘the world’s desire’ enjoyed a mortal life, there is no question that she lived, vividly, prominently, in the minds of the ancient Spartans. We call her Helen of Troy – for the Greeks she was, indisputably, Helen of Sparta.36