Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  One crisp December day I visited the Louvre, in my search for Helen, armed with a list of archive references and the numbers of scores of display cases; I was expecting a visual journey through Helen’s life.7 Instead, what I saw was a catalogue of sexual violence. Throughout the ages, whether in the illuminations of a medieval manuscript, on a grand canvas or a ceramic plate destined for the Pope’s table, artists and their patrons have wanted to remember one thing above all else: the fact that Helen was taken by force. I spent an afternoon looking at thirty ways to rape a woman.

  On one platter, almost 18 inches (45 cm) in diameter, painted by Avelli in 1540, a muscly Helen has become the subject of a tug of war.8 Watched over by a kindergarten golden sunset whose neat rays are reflected in the seething, swirling sea, Spartan guards drag Helen back by her cloak, while the Trojans, with their arms around her waist, manhandle her onto their waiting boat. Helen grabs one of the Trojans by the hair; she is desperate. On another plate made in the same year, Helen is strangely childlike.9 Innocent and sexual at the same time, half-naked, she clings to her captor with her legs wrapped around him. She looks as though she is being given a piggy-back, but her eyes, wide with shock and terror, tell a darker story.

  A medallion, just 10 cm across, primarily monochrome with a hint of blue, shows an anguished Helen surrounded by a rough, primitive looking crowd – wild men from the East who apparently cannot wait to sully this pure Greek beauty.10 A bronze statuette from the 18th century has a more positive passion. Only a couple of feet high, the two figures dominate the room. Originally this piece could be seen in the Palais des Tuileries during the reign of Louis XV. Helen and Paris are caught up in a whirlwind of their own creation. The artwork is vital. Helen surges above Paris, he stares up at her, and their clothes billow around them. She seems weightless, his face lifted by hers rather than she by his arms.11

  It was that moment of passion enjoyed by Paris and Helen – a moment not of violence but ‘ate’12 (abandonment or delusion) – that brought about the deaths of thousands of men, women and children, and tied up the Greek heroes in a pointless and protracted war. One sexual slip that took on epic proportions. A peccadillo that grew in popular imagination until men like Herodotus could write of it in his Histories: ‘… great crimes are matched with great punishments by the gods.’13 The Judaeo-Christian tradition is often blamed for making sex a woman’s problem. But Helen is easily Eve’s equal. As one scholar has put it, ‘clustered about her [Helen] are all the problems which men perceive about female sexuality, i.e. how their desire for women turns into a problem to be blamed on women’.14 Helen’s culpability is quickly magnified. By telling Helen’s story, men manage to make sex the root of evil, and to identify women as the source of both.

  A piece of curved, painted wood from the 16th century AD, also on display in the Louvre, encapsulates the situation perfectly. Paris and Helen are placed dead centre. The focus of attention, Helen has one hand to her head in a gesture of despair. Her hair waves but otherwise she and Paris seem frozen – the still centre of a seething storm, for around them, piled one on another in a monstrous, heaving, sweaty crush, are the Greek and Trojan armies. Everywhere is hate, fear, distress and cruelty. Helen and her selfish infidelity are central and primordial.

  Sex is powerful. This the ancients knew. In the Iliad, Homer writes a steamy passage about the goddess Hera preparing to seduce her husband Zeus. The goddess needs to distract Zeus’ attention from the battle down below to give her favourites of the moment, the Argives, a better chance of victory. Helen is never mentioned, but the message is clear – this is what women do to manipulate men, this is how they use love as a weapon. And as one reads, aware that the larger narrative here is the love affair between Paris and the Queen of Sparta, one immediately pictures not Hera, but Helen, preparing herself in her quarters for her guest Paris – as he scents her perfume and paces outside, up and down, up and down, in his chambers at the Spartan palace.

  The ambrosia first. Hera cleansed her enticing body of any blemish, then she applied a deep olive rub, the breath-taking, redolent oil she kept beside her … one stir of the scent in the bronze-floored halls of Zeus and a perfumed cloud would drift from heaven down to earth. Kneading her skin with this to a soft glow and combing her hair, she twisted her braids with expert hands, and sleek, luxurious, shining down from her deathless head they fell, cascading.

  … and into her earlobes, neatly pierced, she quickly looped her earrings, ripe mulberry-clusters dangling in triple drops and the silver glints they cast could catch the heart.15

  That night, when Paris and Helen were left alone in the Spartan citadel and the nightjars called, as the palace slept, who, in fact, hovered at whose doorway? Who made the first move? In the Iliad and the Odyssey Helen is the subject of both blame and praise, so who stole whom?

  A host of ancient authors are very clear and articulate on the matter – and given that inventory of violent seductions imagined by latter-day artists, their opinion is perhaps a little surprising. Paris certainly did not have the upper hand. According to Homer, once Helen has teamed up with the Trojan prince, she is never described as his whore or sex-slave, not even as his enthralled bride – but only as his legitimate, equal partner. She is first Menelaus’ ‘parakoitis’16 and then Paris’ ‘akoitis’17 – words which translate as bedmate, spouse or wife. Both the Spartan king and the Trojan prince are described as her ‘posis’, her consort.18 Helen is never given the title ‘damar’ – subservient wife.19

  The fact that Helen is to be seen across the art galleries of Europe portrayed as a victim is a later manifestation of a rape fantasy. As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, Helen, instructed by the goddess of sexual love, Aphrodite, made herself irresistible to Paris. The title of this chapter should in fact read Helena Alexandrum rapuit. 20

  19

  THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES IS MORE DEADLY THAN THE MALE

  Some an army of horsemen, some an army on foot And some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight On this dark earth; but I say it is whatever you desire:

  and it is perfectly possible to make this clear to all; for Helen, the woman who by far surpassed all others in her beauty, left her husband – the best of men –

  behind and sailed far away to Troy; she did not spare a single thought for her child nor for her dear parents but [the goddess of love] led her astray [to desire]

  SAPPHO, Fragment 16 (7th century BC)1

  COMPOSING WITHIN A HUNDRED YEARS OF HOMER, the female poet Sappho was certain that the Spartan queen seduced Paris, or was, at the very least, willing to go with him, certain that inspired as Helen was by the passion of Aphrodite, she was not stolen but left of her own free will.

  Sappho’s treatment of Helen is important for two reasons. The first – and most obvious – is that if you believe Sappho lived, she is a rare, surviving, female voice from the ancient world.2 She does not write with a man’s idea of what Helen should be. The second reason is that Sappho was held in high esteem across centuries of antiquity. The Athenian lawgiver the female of the species is more deadly than the male Solon was said to have memorised a Sappho song at a drinking party, ‘So that I can learn it and then die.’3 Plato talks of Sappho as one of the ‘wise men and women of old’.4 In the Hellenistic period she was compared to Homer and was even honoured with the epithet ‘the 10th Muse’.5 Her ideas mattered and so, partly because Sappho and her work were much talked and gossiped about, for centuries no one could quite shake off the idea that Paris might be Helen’s plaything, not vice versa.

  Along with Helen, Sappho is one of the few female figures from the ancient world who is still a household name. Yet virtually no historical evidence exists for her life. With the exception of one complete poem, nothing remains of her poetry but tattered fragments. When one looks down at these scraps, Fragment 16 is sandwiched between two glass sheets in the Bodleian Library in Oxford – a pathetically incomplete jigsaw – the poetry shows itself to be more absent than pres
ent. But when first examining the tiny pieces I realised that in the frieze of intellectual illuminati that had been painted around the walls of the library between AD 1615 and 1620, Sappho was the only woman depicted: testimony to the acumen of the scant words that have survived.

  We are fortunate to have Sappho’s thoughts on Helen at all; at the end of the 19th century a number of Greek fragments came to light in Egypt on ceramic potsherds or on tiny pieces of papyrus that had been recycled to wrap up mummies or to use as compost. Luckily a sharp labourer spread the news that he was turning up these precious scraps as he farmed his fields, and eager collectors from Europe came to gather up the slithers before they were ploughed back into the earth.

  Fragment 16, the poem to Helen, was discovered in the centre of a giant rubbish tip at a place called Oxyrhynchus (‘Town of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’), once Egypt’s third city and now the little village of Bahnasa 160 km south-west of Cairo. The morsel, which implies that Helen actively decided to leave Menelaus and elope with a lovely eastern prince, was 2.5m below the surface in a pile of decomposing manuscripts thrown away in the 5th century AD. 6

  We know that Sappho was probably a lyric poet – she composed verses to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre. The consensus is that she was a woman born some time around 630 BC, of good family, and that she came from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. It seems that she was a mother: ‘I have a lovely child, whose form is like gold flowers.’ Although her poems were committed to papyrus by the end of the 5th century BC, we have no way of knowing whether or not she was herself literate.

  Sappho is compelling. Even in the little we have, she speaks to us directly, and through her voice we get a tantalising glimpse of the culture of archaic Greece. Her poetry embraces big themes – death, love and the gods – but her most famous lines seem to serve some kind of educational purpose, guiding and socialising other (younger) women. And Sappho employs Helen to illustrate how, when it comes to love affairs, the female of the species can pull her weight. If her reputation is anything to go by, she was quite a mentor. The ancient world credited Sappho with being the first both to speak directly about love and to describe eros as a ‘bitter-sweet’ experience (in fact she describes it as glukupikros, sweet-bitter), as well as inventing the plectrum and creating a new musical mode later used by tragic poets.

  Helen was an ideal subject for Sappho, a poet genuinely interested in analysing the disconcerting power of beauty and physical attraction. Anyone who has enjoyed or suffered an intense passion can identify with any number of Sappho’s lines: ‘My tongue is frozen silent, stiff, a pale flame seeps under my skin, I can no longer see, my ears whirl and hum.’

  In Sappho’s version of Helen’s story this is the queen of Sparta’s call. She already has a husband, but Paris, a younger, fitter, better option, comes along, and she chooses him instead. This was a view subject to soft-censorship. When fragment 16 was first being jigsaw-puzzled together in 1906, the male editors, Grenfell and Hunt, originally had Helen merely cooing over Paris’ masculine heroism rather than acting on instinct and actually jumping ship.7

  It is hard to ignore in Sappho’s portrayal of Helen a distant echo of the renowned Spartan practice of polyandry. Polyandry (‘husband-sharing’ or having a number of male partners) may be part of the Spartan mirage. It may be an outsider’s fanciful notion of the lengths that Spartan girls would go to exploit their reputation as viragos. But then again, it may just be true. We first hear explicitly about polyandry from Polybius, a well-born Greek author who was writing in the 2nd century BC, describing practices that he termed ‘traditional’ – that is, stretching back to at least the 8th century BC, possibly beyond.8

  By choosing the prime specimen (Paris), perhaps Sappho’s Helen was living out a custom that the poet was familiar with from travellers’ tales of contemporary Sparta. We are told by Plutarch, the author of the Life of Lycurgus, that for over five hundred years, in Spartan tradition, women had been allowed by their husbands to pair up with nubile lovers if they thought the young bloods would father more vigorous and successful offspring.9 If this was fact rather than a later fabrication, perhaps Sappho had heard of this practice. Perhaps she thought it perfectly natural that Helen, a Spartan princess should – back in the mists of time – have indulged in a spot of polyandry.

  We may also be witnessing the impact of the memory of Helen on the mores of classical Sparta – where Spartan women were inspired by the tales of their feisty, adulterous ancestor. Plutarch says they are polyandrous; like Helen. This is not to suggest that Spartan girls took attractive youths home as the continuation of a tradition that originated with a real Helen’s true-life relationship with Paris in the Late Bronze Age. But rather that, given Sparta’s intimate involvement with the Helen story, her track record would have been a useful cultural alibi for such a practice. If Helen was plangently polyandrous, then, naturally, other Spartan wives would be vindicated in following the example of their city’s role model.

  Although it was Helen the rape victim or the scheming, grabbing seductress who came to find most favour with writers and artists down the centuries, there were also those who followed Sappho’s line and saw in Helen a woman who, helpless against the powers of Aphrodite, abetted Paris as he stole her away. During the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers brought back from North Italy an 11th-century manuscript copy of a new epic poem. This poem was unknown by scholars: dating to the 5th/6th centuries AD, it had been composed by an Egyptian called Colluthus of Lycopolis.10 The poem turned out to be another interpretation of the love triangle, another ‘Rape of Helen’. In this version Helen, a ‘fair-ankled’‘Argive nymph’, is a willing participant in her elopement.

  Colluthus tells us that Helen is stunned by Paris’ beauty. She dilly-dallies, she is ‘perplexed’, but in the end physical attraction wins out over good sense and she resolves to take the plunge. ‘Come now, carry me from Sparta unto Troy …’ she says. She has welcomed into her house her destruction, just as Troy will welcome in not one but two Trojan Horses, the first – Helen herself. This familiar frailty is emphasised by the repetition of the Greek word aneisa, meaning to unbar, let loose, give in to fate or pleasure. Just as Helen has ‘unbarred the bolts of her hospitable bower’ to greet Paris, so at the end of the poem, Troy ‘unbarred the bolts of her high-built gates and received on his return her citizen that was the source of her woe’.11

  In yet another (this time anonymous) retelling of the story from the 6th century AD, the Excidium Troie, Helen actually asks Paris to abduct her. The Excidium Troie was a standard school text. It was written in Latin, but sparked all sorts of vernacular versions across the West, among others the 13th-century Norwegian Trjumanna Saga, the German Trojanerkrieg, the Spanish Sumas de Historia Trojana and the 14th-century Bulgarian Trojanska Prica. 12 Following the same tradition in a French illuminated manuscript of 1406 now housed by Trinity Hall in Cambridge, Helen climbs down a ladder to meet Paris.13 Helen stares directly at Paris, a slick of rouge on her cheeks, her leg cocked over the parapet as she grips Paris’ shoulders. Not the climax of the abduction story we have come to expect. Hardly the behaviour of a reluctant sexual partner.

  In the course of researching and writing this book I made a point of asking friends and colleagues for their own thoughts of Helen. The majority described her as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ but a bit of a nonentity, a push-over. When I spoke to one legendary actress, fresh from her cameo in the Hollywood film Troy, she described Helen as ‘just a pawn’. And indeed, the Helen in this 21st-century blockbuster bears a worrying resemblance to the other vacuous, submissive Helens that dominate the corpus of western art.14 We have become used to thinking of Helen as a passive prize, but it is only in relatively recent history that she has earned this reputation. For two and half millennia an alternative tradition recognised a feistier heroine. Not just a woman of straw, but a dynamic protagonist, a rich queen. A political player who – with the help of Aphrodite – controlled the men around her.


  PART SIX

  EROS AND ERIS

  Previous page:

  A skull of a twenty-year-old Mycenaean warrior. Trepanation has been performed on the left frontal lobe. c. 1550 BC

  20

  HELEN THE WHORE

  O adulterous beauty! Barbarian finery and effeminate luxury overthrew Greece; Lacedaemonian chastity was corrupted by clothes, and luxury, and graceful beauty; barbaric display proved Zeus’ daughter a whore.

  CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, The Instructor

  (2nd century AD)1

  GIVING HELEN INITIATIVE AND A SEXUAL APPETITE does not automatically grant her standing. Far from it. When Helen is the active rather than the passive partner, men across time and space rush to label her a whore. And after the 2nd century AD, in an increasingly Christianised world, the notion of ‘Helen the wanton’ takes firm hold. She becomes typecast not simply as a wilful woman but as a tart. The fact that Paris brought gifts to the Spartan court was, to the Christian writers, further proof that Helen’s elopement was prostitution by any other name.

  The search for Helen the whore leads to the paradoxically serene surroundings of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. In the 16th century AD, a theologian called Matthew Parker bequeathed to the college an assemblage of rare manuscripts. The original collection is still housed in the Parker Library, where sound is muffled by oak panels and sage-green blinds; the place speaks of stillness and order.

  Here there is a compact little codex. One of the entries is a poem by the theologian Joseph of Exeter, entitled Ylias or Bellum Troianum or Trojan War. 2 Joseph seems to have spent most of his life in the French court – with a brief foray into crusading. His own Troy epic ran to six books which were completed some time around 1184. Carefully written out in the 13th century AD on vellum, the lines of chocolate-brown ink are minute and controlled, each letter less than a couple of millimetres high. In the regular lines the only hint of the colourful contents of the poem is that a capital letter every few inches or so is picked out boldly in vermilion-red.