Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Aphrodite was a primal creature, and when men loved women like Helen, they were embracing a murky, primordial power. Aphrodite was wild in all senses of the word17 and since Helen was a city girl, as she served Aphrodite, she brought that wilderness to the beds of princes and kings, to the citadel of Sparta and to ‘the topless towers of Ilium’.18 Coaxing unpredictable, fickle, fathomless nature back into the new culture of the city meant destruction was inevitable. For the Greeks, the weeds that have now seeded themselves in the broken walls of Troy, and the grasses that grow over neglected flag-stones, would have been reminders of Helen.

  In very many she created very strong amorous desires; with a single body she brought together many bodies of men.19

  22

  THE SEA’S FOAMING LANES

  … [Paris] braved the seas in his racing deep-sea ships, trafficked with outlanders, carried off a woman far from her distant shores, a great beauty wed to a land of rugged spearmen.

  HOMER, Iliad1

  THE DIE IS CAST. Stealing together out of the royal apartments, Helen and Paris race from the Spartan citadel towards the coast. This is a nocturnal adventure. They have just a few hours before the alarm bells are sounded. Colluthus in his epic poem The Rape of Helen, tells us that it was only the following morning that Helen’s absence was noted. He imagines an abandoned, nine-year-old Hermione dashing through the Spartan palace. The young girl is innocent and unsuspecting, weeping inconsolably. Her mother has vanished, so too has the handsome prince who visited the court from Troy. Hermione presumes that Helen must have been taken by wild beasts, or have been drowned in a stream. Of course, she could never, never have done anything as despicable and shameful as running off with another man:

  And Hermione cast to the winds her veil and, as morning rose, wailed with many tears. And often taking her handmaidens outside her chamber, with shrillest cries she uttered her voice and said: ‘Girls, whither hath my mother gone and left me in grievous sorrow, she that yester-even with me took the keys of the chamber and entered one bed with me and fell asleep?’ So spake she weeping and the girls wailed with her. And the women gathered by the vestibule on either side and sought to stay Hermione in her lamentation.2

  But the weeping would be in vain: it was too late. From Homer we learn that the fugitives spend their first night of passion together on the tiny island of Kranai. Ten years later, in the Iliad, as bodies tumble around the walls of Troy, Paris relives the moment. His words are heavy with yearning, spiced with the sorrow of illicit sex. Helen and Paris have just had a row and pricked by Paris’ poor show against Menelaus, Helen lashes out at her feeble lover. But her sharp tongue excites rather than chastens:

  But come [says Paris] let’s go to bed, let’s lose ourselves in love! Never has longing for you overwhelmed me so, no, not even then, I tell you, that first time when I swept you up from the lovely hills of Lacedaemon, sailed you off and away in the racing deep-sea ships and we went and locked in love on Rocky Island … That was nothing to how I hunger for you now – irresistible longing lays me low! 3

  Poor Paris, for the last two thousand years, his making passionate love in the afternoon like this, even to his ‘wife’, has been, for a number of commentators, the final nail in the young man’s coffin, proof positive that he was dissipated and amoral.

  To get to Kranai from Sparta you leave the protective embrace of the Taygetan mountain range and travel southwards to the little port of Gythion.4 Today, with its bobbing fishing boats and pastel-painted guest houses, Gythion is the perfect place for a romantic tryst. Approaching the town there are small hills to climb through and the way can be rough. A traveller from the Hellenistic period onwards would have passed a little shrine on the roadside harbouring ‘Helen’s sandal’ – a holy relic left in the mad dash to get from the Spartan citadel to Paris’ waiting boats.5

  Kranai is easily visible from the harbour-side at Gythion. It is a tiny island, little more than a rock and so close to the mainland that the two are now joined by a causeway. Homer was right to describe it as ‘kranae’– ‘craggy’ or ‘rocky’; the island is still ringed with a curious dove-grey volcanic outflow. These rocks are unevenly eroded; if you try to cross them to get to the shoreline, your hands will be lacerated and your shoes punctured by their edges as sharp as spears. Kranai is a hard place to lose yourself – but at least Helen and Paris would have been alone here. If indeed Helen had been seized by force she could have been raped in the flimsy boat built of cypress wood, held up against the interior skin of stretched, oiled linen, and violated while Aeneas and his men took a break from cataloguing their loot, to watch. Perhaps Kranai was thought to be an opportunity for private passion, a sex act more appropriate to a queen.

  The stories tell us that this was a brief stop-over, just enough time for the Trojan contingent to load supplies from the traders at Gythion, Sparta’s port in antiquity and a natural harbour in the 13th century BC. 6 Although Homer’s description of that first night of passion may just be a fable, this is certainly an appropriate setting; there was indeed a Bronze Age settlement here.7

  What were all the world’s alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen’s arms?

  YEATS, ‘Lullaby’(1929)

  Whether Paris was a rapist or a complicit liberator, at this moment his cup was running over. The prince had Helen and he had a boatload of treasure – plunder from the Spartan citadel. The idea of the booty and the beauty leaving Sparta together has offered artists down the ages a lewd and luscious subject. Nicolo dell’ Abate drew a version in 1512 which was then touched up a century later by Rubens, who added details that make the scene bristle with violence.8 In his version Helen’s hair is being dragged back, though in the original she seems resigned to her fate. Rubens forces her to stare back at the Spartans in desperation. Paris is redrawn: his left leg now kicks one of the Greeks in the groin, while a Trojan sailor sinks his hands into the robes of Paris’ living, lovely prize.

  Scholars have made a good argument for the pronounced emphasis on the theft of treasure as well as of Helen herself, simply being a way of ‘re-masculating’ the Greeks. From the classical period onwards, a number of writers have found the idea that Greece should rise to arms over a woman ludicrous and belittling. And so references to the stolen treasure crop up again and again. When Agamemnon led his men to Troy, he was not just drawn by a woman, which would be the act of a feeble fool, but went to steal back Greek riches.

  If an aristocrat had made a sea journey from one palatial centre to another in the Late Bronze Age, it is highly likely that the elegant galley would indeed have been heavy with swag. Paris and his men would have loaded their boats with Mycenaean goods and precious raw materials, as well as with the beautiful Helen. In a sense Bronze Age society was ultimately materialistic – the Eastern Mediterranean was becoming one baggy, local economy and each royal court derived great standing from the exotic effects it could acquire. This was, after all, an age without coined money. The world would have to wait for coinage until the Lydians, in the second half of the 7th century BC, punched out roughly shaped discs of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. Instead, wealth comprised material goods. So axes, daggers, rings, seal-stones and hides, rich tapestries and bronze armour, hippopotamus ivory and rare stones were used for trade and gift-exchange.9

  The mechanisms that kept the flow of Bronze Age raw materials, arte-facts and spoil in circulation were the oceans, rivers and tributaries that linked one great trading port with another – seas that were ‘wine-dark’, sings Homer; ‘the Great Green’, say the Egyptians. It is worth stating the obvious – that the Mediterranean region is the only landmass identified by its adjacent sea. We think of waterways as barriers but the Aegean, the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean and Libyan Seas were the highways and byways of pre-history. Homer even calls them ‘the sea’s foaming lanes’. A single boat of the period had almost 200 times the haulage capacity of a donkey;10 although land trade-routes were we
ll developed, the oceans were heavily patronised by merchants, aristocrats, journeymen, pirates and buccaneers.

  We might characterise Helen as an inanimate object, who famously sat out a ten-year siege at Troy, yet in fact her story is a kinetic one and the rivers and oceans of the Eastern Mediterranean are central to her tale. She is conceived when her mother is raped on the banks of the Eurotas by a giant waterfowl. Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve years later she too will be violated on the banks of the river. Paris comes to her by boat, and she leaves with him to cross back over the waters. A naval expedition is launched by the Greeks to retrieve her. Once Helen leaves Troy she spends seven years sailing with Menelaus; she visits Cyprus, the Phoenician city of Sidon, Crete and Egyptian Thebes where she is given gifts including a fine golden spindle.11 Even after her death Helen flits between the Isles of the Blest and earthly cult sites (many on islands, a number next to natural springs) from Bithynia to Egypt. Or she watches over the Oceans as a star alongside her brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux.12

  Interestingly, it is in the late medieval paintings of Helen’s story that the maritime setting really comes to the fore. The 13th century AD marked a rejuvenation of international trade. The Italian Renaissance was partly funded by the money that came in through Italian ports.13 Perhaps artists and their sponsors felt an affinity with a tale that told of the transfer of precious treasures, back and forth across vast, dangerous seas. During this period Helen is often depicted at the water’s edge; a rowing boat or a fine Trojan galleon in the bay ready for her.

  One version of the story of Troy, written in the 6th century AD, has Paris stealing Helen’s heart as she worships Aphrodite at a seaside temple on the island of Kythera.14 (There are archaeological records of a shrine to Aphrodite on Kythera from the 6th century BC, and of her eastern predecessor Astarte from the 8th century BC.) This coastal version of Helen’s rape was a popular choice for Italian marriage chests or birth trays, ‘desco da parto’. It may seem a little odd that young brides or first-time mothers would be honoured with a scene of such abuse and uxorial duplicity, but Helen’s story is a series of rites of passage – and so as women (flattered perhaps by their conflation with Helen) made their own journeys, becoming wives, mothers and widows, Helen came with them.15

  One such birth tray, in the establishment, neo-classical glory of the National Gallery in London, painted in egg tempera on wood around 1440–50 and attributed to an anonymous artist known as ‘the Master of the Judgement of Paris’, has a nightmarish quality about it.16 It is dark; a sliver of moon lights a black sea sprinkled with islands. Helen’s elegant courtiers stand and watch and talk, inert as Helen is seized. The two figures that immediately beg attention, leaping out of the frame, are Helen and Paris. In a setting where everything is still, they are turbulent. Paris’ yellow-lined cloak whips out in the wind, and his hand grasps Helen’s dress in a thick clump under her buttocks. Helen’s feet are flaying, her delicate red pointy shoes kicking up her white dentate petticoat as she struggles and thrashes about. Paris stares up at Helen’s face hungrily, and still the courtiers do nothing – Helen strains back out to reach them, but still they stand and watch and talk. They are frozen and impotent. Helen’s destiny is the waiting boat, the inky stretch of the sea.

  In one of the ground-floor cases of the Heraklion Museum on Crete there is a scattering of bronze shapes – reminiscent of a selection of beaten-up horse brasses. In fact these are the broken remains of a tripod base, made in the 8th century BC, left as a votive offering and found on the floor of the Idaean Cave in Crete. A boat has been drawn out of the metal. In the prow there are two figures: archaeologists debate whether they should be identified as Theseus and Ariadne or Paris and Helen. Whoever they are, they cling together, tiny black silhouettes looking across the changing, unimaginable volume of the sea.

  One soft autumn day in late October – while looking for traces of Helen’s cults, many of which are by rivers or coastlines – I found myself stuck at the small town of Hermione (Ermioni) on the Greek mainland, clearly just about to muff my 8.00 p.m. rendezvous on the island of Hydra.17 I had with me only my powder compact, 40 euros and a mobile phone. I had missed the last hydrofoil and turned down the offer of a lift from some drunk teenagers in charge of a worryingly large yacht. It all seemed rather hopeless until I remembered noticing a ragged, handwritten scrap of paper pinned to a bench near the harbour advertising sea-taxis. I rang the number, and within eight minutes a little boat buzzed up, the driver tanned the colour of tar. The only other passenger was an old goat. I trusted that my new friend was the equivalent of a London cabbie, and with bouzouki music on the ship’s radio for company, headed off towards the horizon.

  It was an entirely 21st-century experience. Yet because it was novel (and somewhat random), I felt, for a moment, the frisson of travelling to the unknown by sea and a fleeting sense of what it was to be a part of a seafaring nation. This short adventure was a taste of how ancient water-ways once operated. A number of Bronze Age bays would have had their taxi-boatmen, navigating little fishing boats, coast-hugging vessels, with whom one could strike a bargain and hitch a ride. As a Bronze Age Helen and Paris sailed along from west to east they would have passed seasonal beach markets and ports pockmarked with colour, pungent with the smells of livestock and spices, their traders standing by ready to tout their wares. Out on the open sea there would be pirates waiting to relieve the ocean-traveller of vital supplies and priceless consignments of hippopotamus ivories and the like.

  Archaeological finds and Bronze Age written sources have given us a surprisingly detailed picture of the luxury goods that would once have criss-crossed the waters. From the Amarna tablets in Egypt, for example, written in the 14th century BC (and packed with political and social detail for the period), we get tantalising lists of the kinds of artefacts trafficked between royalty and aristocrats across the East Mediterranean. Some of the tablets, first discovered in 1887 by a peasant woman tilling the soil, are now stored in the British Museum.18 The lists are minutely detailed and fascinating, but they deal only with the final flourish of a culture, the end-point of creation – here we have evidence of achievement rather than process.

  Then, in 1983 at Uluburun (near the modern-day town of Ka¸s), thanks to the sharp eyes of a Turkish man diving to collect living sponges, an extraordinary find illuminated the Bronze Age trading scene.19 The diver reported ‘biscuits with ears’, metal ingots weighing between 17 and 26 kg each. Archaeologists investigated and found, tucked into the silt, a Bronze Age shipwreck. Suddenly, precise, untouched examples of Bronze Age cargo could be examined.

  Here there were the copper and tin ingots necessary to manufacture bronze; the lumps of cobalt-blue glass that would be melted down and re-cast as striking figure-of-eight beads, worn around the necks and wrists of women like Helen. There was amber from the Baltic, hippopotamus ivory and a beautiful drinking cup made of faience in the shape of a ram’s head. Ivory trumpets and tortoiseshell sound-boxes lay muted by the sea. On board were ebony logs: dendro-chronological dating from some sections of the wood has been used to indicate that the boat sank sometime between 1318 and 1295 BC. 20 The presence of the scarab of Nefertiti shows the boat certainly sailed some time after 1345.

  Along with the sophisticated artefacts – the female figurine with her feet and lower arms dipped in gold, the scarab marked with Queen Nefertiti’s name, the cosmetic boxes made in the shape of ducks (with movable wings for lids), the fine oil lamps – here too was a ‘ghost cargo’: the base ingredients of seven civilisations, the raw materials that are rarely preserved for posterity.

  Boats like these, if they began their journey in the south, could have cut a direct course from Egypt through to Crete and then on to Turkey, but most would have meandered from the Nile along the Libyan coasts, up to Crete and Italy, perhaps, or stopping off at the island of Kythera and then on to mainland Greece, past the Cyclades, Rhodes, Anatolia and then down to Cyprus, Syria-Palestine and, finally, back to
Egypt.21

  In one of the earliest written sources for the Helen story, the Cypria (we hear this particular detail via Herodotus), it was explained that in just three days the two lovers bolted straight across the sea to Troy.22 I have made the trip, and – at a headlong dash, in a boat comparable to the most sophisticated Late Bronze Age vessels of 15–17 metres, with oars and a sail – it is possible, with the benefits of modern sailing technology to make the trip in just under two and a half days. Homer, however, tells us the fugitive lovers followed the route of those Aegean traders, brigands and buccaneers. We hear, in the Iliad, that en route Paris picked up rich cloths and Sidonian (Phoenician) women.23 These slaves from the literary record join the real lists of human cargo that we find incised into Bronze Age clay tablets.24 Once again, the Helen and Paris story intersects very neatly with Late Bronze Age reality.

  There is an unfamiliar version of the Trojan War story by the poet Stesichorus, writing in Sicily in the 6th century BC. 25 In his interpretation of Helen’s ‘history’, the Spartan queen never goes to Troy, but sends an eidolon (a body double or phantom) across the hazy-bright waters while the flesh-and-blood Helen actually lies low in Egypt for ten years. Plato recounts that Stesichorus wrote his version after he had been blinded for slandering Helen.

  Once Stesichorus had come to his senses and realised what a powerful (angry) creature he was dealing with, he made propitiation to Helen by producing a poem defending the ‘real’ Helen in which she sits out the Trojan War blamelessly, in Egypt. As a result of his judicious volte-face his eyesight was restored.26 There is a possibility that Stesichorus visited Sparta27 (there were close political connections between Sicily and Sparta in his lifetime). Perhaps what we hear in his verse is a more patriotic rendition of the Helen story, a version promoted by the Spartan population, determined to maintain the dignity of their iconic royal ancestor. Although never the most tenacious or popular reading of the tale, this exegesis interested a number of ancient authors.