Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  In the archaic and classical mind, violent death on the battlefield could in fact be the very best, the most illustrious way to die.

  Given the right, fairly prescriptive, set of circumstances, death might actively be sought out by the would-be hero.3 By accepting that a premature demise was his life’s ambition, a hero such as Achilles diced daily with mortality. For him, even a life that was nasty, brutish and short was more attractive than a long and happy one. Better to die young than to live contentedly, with the creeping humiliations of old age. Better to be remembered as a hero than to be forgotten by peers and by history.4

  Of course this kind of immortality, this celebrity, was impossible without becoming aoidimos, ‘worthy of being sung’. A warrior only garnered kleos, ‘glory’, by being heard of (the root of kleos is kluo, ‘to hear’). Archaic art was not just an imitation of life; it could give life (and death) its very meaning. The epic poetry cycles were the mechanism through which heroic honour was recognised. In city-states such as Athens and Sparta, a recital of Homer’s poetry was taken to be a defining moment for polite society – Helen’s story was a constituent of the genetic make-up of western civilisation.

  Those in armed conflict emulated the Homeric model – but the bar was high. Even when a warrior lay dead on the battlefield after an awe-inspiring display of heroism, his immortality was not guaranteed. If his body was abused as Hector’s was, when it was tied to the back of Achilles’ chariot by the heels and dragged in the dust around the walls of Troy, or if his corpse became carrion, then the ugly, tattered, physical ignominy would wipe out all the glory gathered by dying well. Dead, decaying and defiled, the hero loses the chance to be perfect, and to achieve a perfect immortality.

  I have held the bones of men and women from pre-history whose corpses have been left out in the open to rot.5 Many are punctured and gnawed by canine teeth. It is impossible to tell whether these would have been domesticated dogs, or the wild dogs and wolves that hovered at the edges of human settlements. But whatever the breed of beast, the frenzy would have been the same as the body was ripped: the sick-sweet smell of decomposing flesh, the growls as human meat was fought over.

  And so to avoid this disgrace, the dead heroes in the Iliad are swiftly collected from the battlefield and are sent off on their journey to the after-life as perfect as they can physically be. They are washed and oiled, their wounds are soothed over with ointments, their hair and clothes and skin are sprinkled with perfumed olive oil. Scrubbed, stroked and massaged, their bodies are laid on funeral pyres. And at this point in the epic tradition, as the kindling is lit and the fires take hold, the shining flesh leaps into flame. The hero’s body spits, crackles and glows its way to immortality:

  There is no fitter end than this.

  No need is now to yearn or sigh.

  We know the glory that is his,

  A glory that can never die.

  Surely we knew it long before,

  Knew all along that he was made

  For a swift radiant morning, for

  A sacrificing swift night-shade.

  CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY, ‘In Memoriam’6

  This was a fantasy and a reality lived again by the young men who fought in the First and Second World Wars. During the 1914–18 conflict particularly, many soldiers carried into combat copies of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and Euripides. Some drew on their classical education for inspiration and comfort.7 Others recognised the desperate fact that ill-advised, ill-planned, ill-omened conflicts are a constant of human history. They read and re-read those passages of the Iliad that are a damning and thunderous survey of the inconsistencies and messiness of war, where Homer recognises that the enmities and allegiances, motives and strategies of Greeks and Trojans are as fragile as a glass made of sugar crystal. And over three thousand years after the fall of Troy, some recalled Helen’s name as they questioned the purpose of conflict and suffering. One soldier, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, fighting at Gallipoli, seems to have borrowed from the work of the classical playwright Aeschylus in the lines:

  I saw a man this morning

  Who did not wish to die:

  I ask, and cannot answer,

  If otherwise wish I …

  O hell of ships and cities,

  Hell of men like me,

  Fatal second Helen,

  Why must I follow thee?8

  Although death – the virile Thanatos – could be viewed as welcome and honourable by the Greeks and those inspired by heroic ideals, it also had a more terrifying, female aspect: Ker. This death is blood-thirsty, bleak and vengeful:

  And Strife and Havoc plunged in the fight, and violent Death [ker]now seizing a man alive with fresh wounds, now one unhurt, now hauling a dead man through the slaughter by the heels, the cloak on her back stained red with human blood.9

  Helen’s complicity with Ker survives to the present day. She is still blamed for the multiple bereavements of the Trojan war – memorialised as the progenitor of the horror, rather than the glory of death.

  In the 19th century AD, when the French romantic painter Gustave Moreau made Helen his subject, the Spartan queen has turned her back on Thanatos. 10 Moreau’s Helen is indeed Ker’s friend. In Moreau’s picture, Helen at the Ramparts of Troy, the sky is gunmetal-grey, and corpses are slumped in piles at Helen’s feet as she stares balefully out from Troy’s walls at the desecration. This Helen is a moulder of hearses, not heroes. She is not shocked by what she sees. She is sullen and complicit.

  I went to visit Moreau’s house, 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld, in the Trinité district of Paris, to try to get a sense of the origins of this and the many other Helens the artist imagined stalking the Trojan citadel.11 Moreau’s paintings are prolific, crammed onto every square inch of every wall of the house, now a museum. Visitors are forced to crane their necks and peer up into dark corners to make out the host of quasi-mythical characters – the majority of them are women – that crowd into the space. Here is Salome, here Cleopatra, here Leda. And here, a striking number of times, is Helen.12

  Making my way up to the second floor of the house-cum-museum, twisting around the spiral staircases and creaking across the original wooden floorboards, I found what has to be one of the most haunting images ever created of the Spartan queen. In many of his depictions, Moreau has given Helen a solid body but a blank where her face should be.13 And the epitome of this ghoulish, faceless Helen can be found on a canvas painted in 1880: Helen at the Scaean Gate. Here Helen’s body is as ghostly as her face. She is white and insubstantial, an eidolon, more akin to the wisps of smoke rising from Troy than to a real woman. Crawling over this vision there are gobbets of gore; swirls and strands of paint – crimson, black, blue and brown. It is a sickening, livid, dribbling representation of the death and suffering that Helen has brought to Troy. This mess, that surrounds and clings to Helen, also seems to burn.

  Here is the horror that the Spartan Queen has become. In those pernicious little blobs of paint, the incriminating flicks and stabs of the artist’s brush, we are reminded that for centuries, Helen has been blamed for all this carnage; she has come to represent man’s ability to use love as an excuse for hate. And while the heroes who killed and died in her name are still thought of as glorious, Helen is remembered as sordid.

  53 Either as a pawn of the gods or as a manipulator of men, Helen was associated with the hideous violence of the Trojan War. Helen’s niece Iphigeneia (some versions say Iphigeneia was Helen’s daughter, the pregnancy following her rape by Theseus) was the first to be sacrificed to its cause.

  54 Here Priam is beaten to death by a club created from the body of his own grandson (Astyanax) and Paris’ sister Cassandra is raped in Troy by Ajax while clinging to a statue of Athena (55, below).

  56 There were mixed homecomings for the heroes of Troy. This Bronze relief from the Argive Heraeum, made in the 7th century BC, shows Clytemnestra (Helen’s half-sister) killing Paris’ sister Cassandra. Agamemnon was said to have brought Cassandra home from Troy as
his concubine.

  57 Menelaus drops his sword as he discovers his wayward wife in Troy – Greek dramatists made much of the fact that it was the sight of Helen’s wonderful breasts that overwhelmed the king of Sparta.

  58 As Aphrodite counsels Helen to make love to Paris, Nemesis points an accusing finger at the Spartan queen. Disaster is inevitable.

  59 The construction of the Trojan Horse came to represent the triumph of Greek (Western) wile over Trojan brawn.

  60 The artist Moreau painted Helen a number of times (top right). Here Troy disintegrates. All for nothing – for a blank, an empty face. As the poet George Seferis wrote in his poem ‘Euripides’ Helen’: ‘And the rivers swelling, blood in their silt,/all for a linen undulation, a filmy cloud,/a butterfly’s flicker, a whisp of swan’s down/ an empty tunic – all for a Helen.’

  61 Unlike many of her counterparts, Helen’s return home was relatively painless. Once back in the palace at Sparta she displays her sagacity by recognising Odysseus’ son Telemachus (bottom right). In contrast to later Greek authors, Homer continually emphasises Helen’s mental acuity. In fact, in the Iliad Bronze Age intelligence seems to be a distinguishing mark of a number of female characters: Agamemnon lists among the virtues of a good woman: ‘build…breeding…mind…works of hand’(Iliad, 1. 135).

  62 Helen’s cultic sites are often found by oceans or springs. Sexual power – in the form of the goddess of love, Aphrodite – was thought to have originated in the sea. This Greek relief shows the birth of Aphrodite from water. Images of spirits and deities associated with sexual power were bathed in water in the hope that their fecundity would be refreshed.

  63 Helen’s breasts were said to have provided the dimensions for a sacred cup, still used on the island of Rhodes in the 2nd century AD. Breast-shaped cups did carry holy liquid in classical Greece – this particular example was made in Athens in 520-500 BC.

  64 The broken statue of the kore – almost certainly Helen – found at a pagan sanctuary in Samaria.

  65 The distinctive caps of Castor and Pollux from the same sanctuary in Samaria, each crowned with a star.

  67 Queen Elizabeth, tutored by Roger Ascham, was well versed in tales of Helen. Here she ‘confounds Juno, Minerva and Venus’ in a parody of the Judgement of Paris. Elizabeth carries her golden orb as Paris did his golden apple. Note that, in various details, all three goddesses resemble Elizabeth.

  66 Helen features prominently in Athenian tragedy – her character would have been played by a man wearing a rigid mask – horsehair was possibly used to replicate Helen’s ‘golden curls’.

  68 Because of her pronounced sexuality, Helen comes to be damned in a number of medieval and renaissance theological tracts. In Dante’s Inferno she is consigned to the rank of the whore – howling through the circle of the lustful – as illustrated by William Blake.

  69 Was Homer a historian? A fresco image of a lyre player found in the Late Bronze Age palace of Pylos tells us that there were, almost certainly, bardic singers whose job it was to recite the deeds of the Bronze Age kings and queens of the Near East. The Iliad is looking less and less like a fairy tale.

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  THE FALL OF TROY

  Did my mother bear me as a monstrosity in men’s eyes? My life and fortunes are a monstrosity, partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty. I wish I had been wiped clean like a painting and made plain instead of beautiful …

  EURIPIDES, Helen1

  THE PICTURE HOMER PAINTS OF HELEN IN TROY is a poignant and lonely one; he hints that these were ten long years of self-recrimination. Helen calls herself a vicious, scheming bitch and wishes she had been swept away by a storm before causing so much unhappiness.2 In her funeral speech for Hector – the last great oration of the Iliad – she talks about her ‘doom-struck, harrowed heart’, and wishes a premature death had pre-empted her meeting with Paris ‘as magnificent as a god’. Four times in Homer she refers to herself as a kuōn, ‘a bitch’.3 The Greek word was chosen carefully: those who listened to the rhapsodes would have remembered the scavenger-beasts that gnawed at human flesh. And like the dogs that prowled (and still prowl) around the walls of Troy, Helen too was half a part of the city, half an exile.

  Starving, cut off from their millennia-long links with the sea by the line of Greek ships on Be¸sik Bay, even despite her beauty, by the end of the war the Trojans have come to hate Helen. They shudder as she passes – whispering and turning away. We cannot tell how quickly her own doubts set in, when she realises what she has started. The moment the flirtation was consummated on Kranai? Or when Paris loses his gloss and the first flush of the affair is over? What Homer seems to suggest is that pretty soon the scales fall from Helen’s eyes and she realises what a peacock Paris is. He has become ‘blind, mad Paris’. Talking to Paris’ brother, Hector, flirting masterfully, she opines: ‘I wish I had been the wife of a better man, someone alive to outrage, the withering scorn of men.’4 And once the eldest-born prince of Troy has been killed by Achilles, leading the songs of sorrow Helen keens:5

  And so in the same breath I mourn for you and me, my doom-struck, harrowed heart! Now there is no one left in the wide realm of Troy, no friend to treat me kindly – all the countrymen cringe from me in loathing!6

  Helen’s relationship with men in the Iliad sets her up to be a fickle woman,7 but it is with the advent of the Trojan Horse that she is unambiguously established as an archetype of duplicity.8 The Trojan Horse is mentioned only once in the Odyssey and does not feature at all in the Iliad; the fullest account of it is given by Virgil in the Aeneid. The earlier poem terminates with the death of Hector before Troy is sacked; however, with the help of Greek vase paintings, plays, and the snatches of lost epics that resurface in later works of antiquity, we can see the drama to its conclusion.

  We hear how the Greeks, demoralised and weak after ten years of campaigning, ten years of camping out, both summer and winter, have put all their faith in a lunatic, brilliant gambit from the master-mind of Odysseus. The Greeks hide close by at Tenedos and burn their camp – at last, it seems, they have relinquished Helen. The one thing that still stands outside the walls of Troy is a giant wooden horse. The Trojans are divided: should they throw this brute creation over a cliff, or would that be sacrilegious – is the horse a gift for their beloved goddess Athena? Tired, gullible, quixotic and superstitious, they decide to welcome the horse in. The people of Troy celebrate with flowers and sacrifices. Helen, Virgil adds, runs like a bacchante around the town, dancing with intemperance – delighting now that Troy will soon be destroyed.9

  But whose side is she on? Helen is also bait, endeavouring to tempt her onetime countrymen out to certain death. Circling the horse three times, stroking its flanks as she walks, she imitates the voices of the women the Greeks have left behind at home – murmuring sweet nothings, torturing the men inside with the memory of their loved ones.10 One hero, Anticlus, is so desperate to leave, so tempted by her siren song, that Odysseus has to kill him before he betrays the crack squad inside. For once, though, Helen’s charms are not strong enough. The Greek soldiers hidden inside – any number from thirteen to three thousand, so the storytellers said – sit tight.11 As the moon rises, one Greek, Sinon, slips out of the horse and lights a beacon to tell Agamemnon’s forces waiting patiently at Tenedos that the ruse has succeeded. The Sack of Troy can begin.

  As the Greeks break into the citadel there are manifold atrocities. Paris’ sister Cassandra is raped by Ajax. Hector’s young son Astyanax is either thrown over the walls or used as a human club with which to beat old King Priam to death.12 On one of the earliest visual representations of the story, a vase dating to 700 BC, now standing alone in the British Museum, children lie bleeding, stabbed by warriors with thick swords.13 The women of Troy are left to watch the homicide, and to wait for their own degradation and agonies.

  Extant legislation from the 13th century BC makes it clear that enslavement, often following a military campaign, brought with it deplora
ble adversity:

  A slave who provokes the anger of his master will either be killed or have his nose, eyes or ears mutilated; or his master will call him to account along with his wife, his children, his brother, his sister, his in-laws, his family, whether it be a male or female slave … If ever he is to die, he will not die alone; his family will be included with him.14

  The moment of subjugation is hauntingly, shockingly described by Euripides in his play The Trojan Women. Troy has been torched. The sad, certain violation of shrines and homes and lives is described by the chorus. The cycle of violence will be unbroken. The soldiers will make their captives suffer because they too have suffered. The women, maimed and petrified, press together. Written during the time of the Peloponnesian War, the twenty-seven-year-long struggle between Athens and its rival Sparta,15 The Trojan Women also had political overtones. The play tells the story of Helen and of Troy, but it was too an exploration of the privations and furies of military conflict. Euripides’ audience was being asked to confront the lot not of conflict’s victors, but of its victims.

  The sometimes cocky Athenian audience must have shuddered as they watched. A hallmark of the ongoing Peloponnesian War had been the hideous brutality meted out by both sides: both had razed cities to the ground (the worst instances were at Plataea by the Spartans in 42716 and on Melos in 41617 by the Athenians) and massacred their men, selling the women and children into slavery. The actors spoke their lines with the very real spectre of military, moral and psychological collapse hovering in the wings.

  The playwright Aeschylus also knew how dreadfully perfect this cycle of violence could be. ‘They raped our queen, we raped their city, and we were right …’18 The ingredients of his play – sexual politics, civic identity, abstract universals and military strategy – were already seething; to add Helen was to throw fat on the fire. Because she was, of course, not just Helen, she was Helen of Sparta. In the eyes of Athens, at war with Sparta, this libertine queen was both their political and moral enemy.