Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  The value of beauty – and specifically of Helen’s beauty – was analysed, publicly, by some of the greatest thinkers and rhetoricians in classical Greece.17 One man, a Sicilian called Gorgias, developed such a popular discourse on the meaning of Helen that he played to crowds of thousands in the Athenian agora – all paying for the pleasure.18 Called the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias’ was a blistering piece of work – a tongue-in-cheek defence which set up Helen as a paragon; his purpose primarily to prove his own wit and alacrity – to demonstrate that he was capable of defending the indefensible. But in doing so he promoted the ‘irresistible force’ of physical beauty. Identifying Helen’s nature and her blood-line as contributors to a beauty that ‘equalled that of the gods’ Gorgias argued that seeing her annihilated resistance or logic. Her beauty was spellbinding – an assertion that, in a superstitious age, carried worrying weight.19

  As an animate attribute, pulchritude needed to be quantified, evaluated and monitored, and as a result kallisteia, ‘beauty contests’, were an important fixture in classical Greece.

  In the 4th century BC, 20 callaesthetic competitions are described in the city of Elis, where the event was called the krisis kallous, ‘the battle’ or ‘the judgement’ of ‘beauty’. There were competitions21 in Tenedos and on Lesbos, where the format sounds remarkably similar to modern-day Miss World events – women being judged as they walked to and fro.22 Men too could enter – although the sexes were always judged separately. The interior of a 5th-century BC drinking cup shows one male competitor transformed into a living maypole – ribbons were tied around particularly winning features of the contestants such as a bicep or a calf-muscle and this well-endowed victor is festooned with strips of cloth.23

  In Sparta we are told there were competitive ritual races in honour of Helen herself, 240 pubescent girls, naked and oiled, charging along the banks of the Eurotas, all hoping to achieve Helen’s level of physical perfection.24 By measuring up against Helen, though, these girls raised the odds too high, winning was an empty victory – no one could ever be as beautiful as the most famous Spartan woman of all time, the very incarnation of physical perfection.25 In the poem that commemorates the race, the competitors castigate themselves for falling so short of Helen’s mark.26 Helen is both winner and prize – the barometer by which all other beauty was judged. In the 4th century BC, the epitaph inscribed for the daughter of a friend of Socrates, who had run a philosophy school at Cyrene, said that she was ‘the splendour of Greece, and possessed the beauty of Helen, the virtue of Thirma, the pen of Aristippus, the soul of Socrates and the tongue of Homer’.27

  The kallisteion also features prominently in myth. One of my favourite stories is of the foundation of a temple of Aphrodite Kallipugos (‘Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks’) in Sicily. The story goes that a decision had to be taken as to where a sanctuary to Aphrodite should be located. A living exemplar of the power of human beauty would make the choice. Two amply proportioned farmer’s daughters battled it out, the best endowed given the honour of choosing the site of the shrine.28 Winning a beauty contest could indeed be a matter of religious importance. Since it was presumed that beauty was both a gift of the gods and a pleasure to them, in some contests, such as at Elis, the winners became prime celebrants in a public religious ritual. Carrying sacred vessels to the goddess Hera, ‘the beautiful people’ led the sacrificial ox to the slaughter stone and then offered up the beast’s innards to the gods on the sacrificial fire.29

  Of course, Helen’s narrative itself begins with a beauty contest, ‘the Judgement of Paris’.30 It could even be said to begin with that universal of human history, the challenge of an overlong guest list for a wedding. Picture the scene – the nectar is flowing, Apollo is tuning up his lyre decorated with silver and ivory, everyone who is anyone is there on Mount Pelion, because Thetis and Peleus are getting married. Thetis was a nymph, and very popular with the Olympian pantheon. Peleus had sailed with Jason as an Argonaut, a hero and a king. All the gods and goddesses turn up to bear witness to the union, but one – Eris, the goddess of discord and strife, has been left out. Limiting numbers at a wedding is always tricky, but this omission was a big mistake.

  As befits the very best of the bad fairies (Eris is rarely portrayed in classical art, but when she is, she is often ugly, sometimes with black wings and pointy, black boots), the goddess of strife is enraged by this social slight, and turns up regardless. Arriving at the wedding feast, Eris hurls down a golden apple (probably a quince) with the words ‘For the fairest’, written on it. It is a subtle and clever little act of de-stabilisation.

  The three most powerful goddesses from Mount Olympus, Hera (Zeus’ wife), Athena (Zeus’ daughter) and Aphrodite (the goddess of sexual love), each assumes the apple is meant for her. Zeus does not want to get drawn into a cat-fight, so he sends the trio with his messenger Hermes, to Mount Ida near Troy, to nominate Paris as judge. At this point in his career, Paris is simply a young (lyre-playing) herdsman, exiled by his father the mighty King Priam because of a prophecy that the prince will bring destruction to the great walls of Troy. The goddesses assume it will be easy to sway such an ingénu with worldly gifts and so each proffers a bribe.

  Hera offers Paris sovereignty over a vast empire, Athena tempts with invincible prowess in war and Aphrodite, fluttering her eyelashes and stroking her thighs, simply promises him the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris is a young man – he is swayed by Aphrodite’s bribe, he chooses Helen.

  So Aphrodite wins the golden apple. And with that judgement, Paris – having made himself a couple of divine enemies (heaven and hell hath no fury like a goddess scorned) – is granted by Aphrodite machlosyne, ‘the aura of sexual attraction radiating onto others’.31The handsome young prince of Troy is on course to get the Queen of Sparta. He musters an elite force of men – his cousin Aeneas among them – and points the prows of his black-beaked, cypress-wood ships towards the Peloponnese. Homer was right to commemorate Paris’ boats as ‘trim freighters of death’. Paris’ lust spelt trouble: hidden amongst his cargo of glittering gifts and olive branches, there were swords.

  17

  BEARING GIFTS

  Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.

  Quotation attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius1 c. 4th century BC

  EXHIBIT NO. 13396 in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is a slightly larger-than-life-size statue of Paris, frozen at the moment the Trojan prince stretches out to offer the golden apple to Aphrodite.2 Even in the bustle of Athens’ busiest museum the Trojan prince commands attention. He challenges one to stop; a proud expression, perfect features. When I have been in the musem before opening hours, cleaners, fags dangling, who have swept past Paris at 5.00 a.m. for years, still pay him their respects with a nod and a sigh.

  The sculpture, made in around 340 BC and rescued from the sea off the coast of the island of Antikythera, has been cast in bronze, its eyes picked out in rock crystal. Each muscle and sinew is lovingly modelled, the lips are full and slightly parted. Famous himself for being wonderfully beautiful, in many of his classical representations Paris glares balefully out at the world. A passionate specimen, although one destined to be the cipher of a more memorable lover.

  According to Homer, the second-born prince of Troy was a bit of a peacock, a man enamoured of his own good looks and eager to further contrive his god-given loveliness.3 In the anxious minds of many classical Greeks,4 aware in the 6th and 5th centuries BC of the very real threat of invasion by their forceful neighbours across the Bosphorus, the Persians, Paris came from ‘the East’, from the ‘other side’. Depending on the political machinations of the moment, Helen was either landing a rich and exotic catch or she was sleeping with the enemy.

  Western Turkey was Paris’ playground, in particular, the Troad, the rich crescent of land that borders the Bosphorus and the Aegean Sea. The myth-stories divulged that early on in life Paris had learnt to cope the hard way.5 While
the first-born prince, Hector, stayed on in the palace, as an infant Paris was exposed on Mount Ida, left to die because his father, King Priam, had been warned in a vision that his handsome newborn son would bring great destruction to the mighty city of Troy. But he survived and returned as an angry young man to take his place in the palace and, eventually, to fulfil his father’s prophecy.

  Paris’ beauty is much talked about in the Iliad. He has the grace of a dancer and a face framed by glistening love-locks. If Sparta was the land of beautiful women, then the Troad was thought to be the land of beautiful men – the mythical home of Ganymede, the son of an early king of Troy, who felled Zeus himself with his unwarranted physical perfection. It was geographically appropriate that a prince of Troy should be stunning. Fitting that he should enter the Iliad – and therefore the written record – with the flourish of a matinée idol:

  … Paris sprang from the Trojan forward ranks, a challenger, lithe, magnificent as a god, the skin of a leopard slung across his shoulders.6

  Down the centuries, Paris has been described as having a youthful, fine, peachy beauty that would make any girl jealous. Euripides details his ‘gown gleaming with flowers’. In a 6th-century AD version of the Trojan War story, his hair is ‘soft and blond ’.7 Later accounts, written from an ‘eastern’, Byzantine perspective, picture Paris as a luscious thirteen-year-old: ‘… a blossom of spring and a fresh rose, admired by all those who look upon him. He outshines Aphrodite herself …’ 8

  Paris may have had his admirers, but the consensus of both the ancient and the modern worlds is that his dewy good looks made him weak and effeminate – that he was a sap. The Roman poet Horace revels in a description of Paris fleeing Menelaus ‘as the deer flees the wolf ’. Over one and a half millennia later, translating Horace’s Odes in 1684, Thomas Creech sneers:9

  In vain shalt thou thy Safety place In Venus’ Aid, and paint thy Face; In vain adorn thy Hair; In vain thy feeble Harp shall move, And sing soft Tales of easie Love, To please the wanton and the fair.10

  Although designed to censure, overblown descriptions such as this unwittingly give a better impression of how a Bronze Age Paris would have looked than does that classical statue in the National Archaeological Museum. The rulers of the Near East commemorated themselves on rock carvings and tombs, they detailed their personal possessions in carefully kept state archives, and so we have an extremely good idea of 13th-century BC court fashions. An Anatolian prince would indeed have ‘adorned his hair’. He would also have been crusted with the jewels and dazzlers that were the mark of the Anatolian aristocracy – earrings, necklaces and finger-rings. The statue in Athens is heroically naked, with cropped locks, but a Bronze Age Paris would have been clean-shaven with his hair hanging to his shoulders or below.11 If he followed Hittite fashions he would have sported shoes with extravagantly turned-up points and round his neck glittering pendants – little groups of charms and amulets, lunate or in the shape of animals and fancy footwear.12 These Anatolian boys were the original medallion men.

  And just as Homer describes Paris with a leopard-skin flung across his shoulders, so too a prince of the Late Bronze Age would have been draped in furs on the battlefield. Late Bronze Age representations from both the Greek mainland and Anatolia show men dressed in animal hides. On the walls of the palace of Pylos, Mycenaean Greeks fight shaggy, skin-clad warriors. Homer talks of the heroes of the Trojan War wrapped in lion-skins, the pelts of grey wolves, caps of weasel-skin and leopard hides.13 During the excavation season of 1995 at the Bronze Age site of Troy, a lion’s jaw – dumped in the refuse along with horses’ bones – was dug up in a ditch in the lower town.14 The warrior-princes of Troy would have identified with hunters from the animal world, borrowing the coats of the kings of beasts, lionising themselves in order to swagger and intimidate on the battlefield.

  So, the story goes that Paris, a rich young man with the body of a god and a weakness for women, sailed from Turkey to the Greek mainland.15 This was a troublesome prince. Strong and lithe, he focused his energies on making love. ‘Paris, appalling Paris!’ his elder brother Hector wails. ‘Our prince of beauty – mad for women, you lure them all to ruin!’16 The poets of Greece imagined him racing across the white-flecked waters of the Aegean, accompanied by Aeneas17 – drawn to the court of the king and queen of Sparta, tracking Helen down.

  We hear from fragments of the Cypria, the epic that dealt with those early years of Helen’s life, that Paris was entertained in Sparta as a ‘xenos’.18 Xenos is an important, though equivocal, Greek word that translates as a stranger, guest or friend. The concept of xenos was fundamentally important to Greek society. Its derivative, xenia, denoted an understanding that bound together neighbours and travellers, guest and host. Xenia was a code of conduct, an unwritten convention that crossed state boundaries and stitched together the communities of the Eastern Mediterranean. It was demonstrated by a recognised etiquette, involving gift-giving and feasting, and originated in the Late Bronze Age – xenwia (which becomes xenia in ancient Greek) appears on Linear B tablets where it translates as ‘for guest-gifts’.19 Xenwia would indeed have ordered the ingress and egress of foreign visitors to the palaces of the Peloponnese in the 13th century BC.

  To mark his arrival at the Spartan palace, Paris was honoured as a xenos with a great feast and in return he brought rich gifts from his homeland for Helen and her king. Later authors, knowing of the outrage that was to follow, recognised the irony of the situation: they tell us that at the outset of his stay, Paris, the adulterer, was ‘welcomed’ into Menelaus’ palace.20 But at this point in the story the Spartan queen and the Trojan prince are dealing with each other in an entirely appropriate way – both in moral and in historical terms. Paris fills Helen’s palace with treasures,21 she fills his plate with the best food Lakonia can offer.

  Thanks to contemporary Near Eastern records, we know in minute detail of the luxurious and exotic gifts that aristocrats and ambassadors would have brought to their hosts on a diplomatic or trading trip such as this in the Bronze Age. These were not mere knick-knacks – the token gifts and delicate bribes of modern-day diplomacy: chest-loads, boat-loads of treasure exchanged hands. Each item was designed to impress and to solidify relations between rulers. A tacit way for the aristocracy to engage in trade without seeming to lower themselves to the ranks of merchantmen.

  In the Late Bronze Age the Hittites controlled the area we now know as Turkey. An Indo-European people whose ancestors had crept over eastern Anatolia during the third millennium BC, they established a central power-base by incremental expansion of their territories. At the height of their command in the 14th and 13th centuries BC the Hittites ruled over a vast landmass, an area that covered much of modern-day Turkey and extended through to northern Syria, the Black Sea and the western fringes of Mesopotamia, abutting the frontiers of the Egyptian kingdom in southern Syria. The Hittites were active participants in the politics of the region; fortunately for us, they were also excellent record-keepers.

  The city of Troy was part of an entity known as Wilusa on the fringes of this influential empire. Wilusa was almost certainly a wealthy vassal – a principality, loyal and subordinate to the giant powerhouse that ruled from the east. Documentary evidence attests to (sometimes) friendly relations between Trojan and Hittite authorities stretching back 150 years from the mid-13th century, a relationship maintained by envoys travelling between the two. Troy was a very useful, and very rich, buffer.22

  Throughout the 19th century AD, western travellers had sent back reports of curious stone carvings and abandoned cities in central Anatolia. Their context remained an enigma: it was only in 1876, in a lecture given to the Society of Biblical Archaeology by the Rev. Archibald Sayce, a professor of Assyriology at Oxford, that the Hittites were ‘officially’ re-discovered. Having recognised similarities between rock carvings at Bo? gazköy, Karabel and Carchemish, Sayce proposed that a great empire had once straddled Asia Minor. Could these, he asked, be the enigmatic Hi
ttites or sons of Heth who are given passing references in the Bible but who had been presumed to be a Canaanite tribe living in Palestine?23

  Considering the Battle of Kadesh in 1275 BC between the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II and the Great King of Hatti (a battle which halted the northward expansion of the Egyptians), Sayce realised that he had identified, in the King of Hatti, a leader for the sons of Heth. An archive of clay tablets found in El Amarna (1887) included two letters from the ‘Kings of Hatti’. Slowly Bronze Age Anatolia was coming into focus, showing itself to be the homeland of one of the great ‘lost’ civilisations of the world.

  Today the journey from Istanbul to Hattusa, the Bronze Age capital of the Hittite Empire, takes a good twelve hours, but on my first visit, twenty years ago, hitch-hiking my way east, it lasted two days. These are the high heartlands of Anatolia, reached by travelling for many hundreds of miles across sparsely inhabited plains, via modern industrial centres and through deep, wooded valleys. I was drawn by excavations in the area where new fragments of inscribed stone and clay tablets had been discovered. The voices, ideas and wealth of information flowing from the finds were extraordinary. Having already seen some of the texts in translation in London, I now wanted to investigate their provenance.