Bronze Age texts tell us that enormous numbers of men and women ended up as the spoils of war in the 13th century BC. In Hittite texts, these are known as ‘booty-people’. On Linear B tablets from Pylos and Thebes which described human commodities are etched the names Tros and Troia – Trojan and Trojan women.19 In a world where all depended on manpower, wars were started to appropriate not just territories but peoples. One Hittite king, Mursili II, boasts that following a particularly successful campaign he herded 15,000 newly conquered captives back to his city.20 It is no surprise that these atrocities were burned into the consciousness, into the popular mythology of the Eastern Mediterranean – and telling that a woman’s lust should be remembered as their aboriginal spark.
And what of Paris? Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey graces his death with a single line. We hear from the Little Iliad that he is killed by an arrow – by the archaic period a weapon considered to be effeminate and unheroic.21 It is a sufficiently ignominious end for a man without honour,22 a pretty, eviscerated prince who, unlike Helen, amounted to little more than moonshine. And once he has gone, Helen, with unseemly haste, takes on another prince of Troy, Deiphobus.23 Learning that the Greeks are inside the city, Helen steals her new husband’s sword and leaves him to the mercy of Menelaus and Odysseus.24 It is a final act of treachery dwelt on with perverse delight by Virgil in Book 6 of the Aeneid. The hero Aeneas is travelling through the underworld, where the Spartan queen’s perfidy is revealed to him:
Here too he [Aeneas] saw Deiphobus, son of Priam, his whole body mutilated and his face cruelly torn. The face and both hands were in shreds. The ears had been ripped from the head. He was noseless and hideous. Aeneas, barely recognising him … went up to him and spoke … ‘Deiphobus, mighty warrior, descended from the noble blood of Teucer, who could have wished to inflict such a punishment upon you? …’ To this the son of Priam answered … ‘It is my own destiny and the crimes of the murdered from Sparta that brought me to this. These are reminders of Helen.’25
As the fires of Troy-town blaze, Helen is tearing through the streets, desperate to find sanctuary. She is surrounded by hatred: Stesichorus tells us that the Greeks and Trojans gather to stone her to death.26When Menelaus finally roots her out, cowering in a temple (ancient authors dispute whether the temple was consecrated to Athena, Apollo or Aphrodite) his sword is aloft, ready to kill.
But, so the ancients recounted, the fires of lust proved stronger than the fires of revenge. Menelaus drops his sword.27 Electra wails: ‘O misery me! Have their swords lost their edge in the face of that beauty?’28 The scene is vividly recreated on vases across the classical world. Although Menelaus has the perfect opportunity to slice Helen open, the perfect excuse to run her through, he does not do it. He loves her instead, and because of this she is both exciting and terrible. She tricks men into ‘sheathing their swords’ with the promise of perfect sex.29 Even presented with his specious, disgraced queen, trapped in a corner in front of him, Menelaus cannot dominate. She is a woman to remember, a woman who is sexual but not subservient, and because of this she is a warning to history.
One of the earliest surviving images of Helen is on a giant pithos discovered by chance by a smallholder on the island of Mykonos.30 This fabulous 7th-century BC piece is now displayed in the Archaeological Museum on the island. The surface is a press of images. Menelaus threatens Helen with a gargantuan blade – the metal shaft must be a good 4 feet long. All around her there are terrible scenes: soldiers dying, women and children being killed. But Helen does not flinch. She simply pulls her veil around her head, an action that is continually repeated in the representations of her discovery. It is hard to tell whether the Spartan queen is loosening her veil or wrap-ping it tighter around her. The gesture is common in Greek art and can be interpreted in three ways. Sometimes it is a fearful reaction: the woman hides her face when she is afraid. Sometimes it signifies marriage: maybe Helen is welcoming back her lawful husband. And some suggest it is an erotic ploy, a way of letting slip her clothes to hint at pleasures to come, teasing Menelaus with a peep of her famous breasts.31
‘When Menelaos caught a glimpse of Helen’s breasts – naked in whatever way – he threw away his sword,’32 recites one character in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; and in Euripides’ Andromache, Menelaus is berated: ‘casting sheep’s eyes on her bosom, you unbuckled your sword and puckered up for kisses, petting that traitorous bitch.’33
On a number of the artefacts that depict Helen’s recapture by the King of Sparta, she has wild, distrait hair; on one mirror, delicately etched by the Etruscans using the tang technique, Menelaus’ fingers are meshed through Helen’s curls, dragging her away from the image of Athena to which she clings.34 Elsewhere, though, a tender Menelaus respectfully leads her by the hand to his waiting ship. A bronze shield-band from Sparta itself (almost certainly) shows Menelaus with sword aloft looking back at a Helen who carries a wreath – there is no threat here.35 But even though he takes her home, the majority of depictions make it clear that Helen’s actions will be neither forgiven nor forgotten.
In Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, beacon fires are lit to bring the news of the defeat of the Trojans to the Greeks. The archaeologist Dr Elizabeth French (who has spent many years working in the Aegean landscape) estimates that the Mycenaean citadels were so well placed that Greeks on either side of the Bosphorus could indeed have watched as the beacons were torched first from Mount Ida in Turkey, then on Lemnos, Mount Athos, Cithairon and finally at Mycenae’s own watchtower, Agios Elias in the Arachneion range that cradles the great citadel above the Argive plain.36 The fires signalled the fall of Troy, they told of a Greek triumph, and they announced that the Spartan queen would be coming back home.
I
Hot through Troy’s ruin Menelaus broke
To Priam’s palace, sword in hand, to sate
On that adulterous whore a ten years’ hate
And a king’s honour. Through red death, and smoke,
And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,
Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.
He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim
Luxurious bower, flaming like a god.
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
And he felt tired. He hung the sword away,
And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,
The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.
II
So far the poet. How should he behold
That journey home, the long connubial years?
He does not tell you how white Helen bears
Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold, Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys ’Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.
Often he wonders why on earth he went Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came. Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent; Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name. So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried; And Paris slept on by Scamander side.
RUPERT BROOKE, ‘Menelaus and Helen’37
PART NINE
IMMORTAL HELEN
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Carved marble relief showing Helen carrying a torch on the altar in the sanctuary of Lacus Juturnae in the Forum at Rome. Made during Trajan’s reign as emperor.
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HOME TO SPARTA
When the war ends, Helen resumes her place as a matter of course in the house of Menelaus. She bears it with unconstrained and perfect dignity; and her relations to her husband carry no mark of the woeful interval, except that its traces indelibly remain in her own penitential shame.
RIGHT HON. W.E. Gladstone, DCL, MP for the University of Oxford1
WAS IT THE CURVE OF HELEN’S NECK that stopped Menelaus’ steely blade? The gift of beauty, of kharis, the queen’s only shield? Was Men
elaus simply overpowered by his old love for her? I suspect not. Whether he was the real bridegroom of a Mycenaean land-holder, or the mythical consort of a half-divine woman, the beautiful creature in front of him had superb connections. By aligning himself with Helen – and thanks only to that association – Menelaus is told on the journey home to Sparta that he has an opportunity for immortality:
But about your own destiny, Menelaus,/ dear to Zeus, it’s not for you to die/ and meet your fate in the stallion-land of Argos,/ no, the deathless ones will sweep you off to the world’s end, the Elysian Fields … /where life glides on in immortal ease for mortal man;/ … /All this because you are Helen’s husband now – the gods count you the son-in-law of Zeus.2
How could Menelaus have cut Helen’s throat as she cowered in a corner of Troy? He would have been slicing through his one connection to rich Lakonian lands, killing the only mortal daughter of Zeus, and denying himself the chance of an eternal life in the Elysian Fields. Where Helen leads, Menelaus follows.
The ancients imagined Helen’s return on the Spartan king’s boat to be, in some ways, as heady and as charged as her outward dash over a decade before with the Trojan prince; the royal couple had all those lost years to pick over. So much resentment, so many questions. Had she left her heart in Troy? Had the east changed her? Was she defiant, was she humbled? Was she raging, was she broken? Was she snaggle-toothed3 or stooped? Was she – as the tragedian Euripides asked in a rare comic aside – fat?
MENELAUS: She’ll be shipped aboard, Be cargoed home.
HECUBA: Not on your ship!
MENELAUS: Why not? She’s put on weight? 4
Fat or thin, termagant, defiant or burning with shame, at this point in the story, one would imagine that Helen – a dishonoured woman, ‘her hair scabbed with dead men’s blood’5 – is humiliated and dragged back to her homeland. Not so. Menelaus has dropped his sword. There are surprisingly few recriminations. It seems the adulteress is going to get off scot-free.
The reunited royals have time aplenty to kiss and make up because homeward bound, along with other Greek heroes, they are caught in a storm at Cape Malea and their boat is blown a long way off-course. So begins the difficult journey home for the heroes of Troy – recorded in detail in another fragmentary epic, the Nostoi (‘The Homecomings’). Homer, famously, charts Odysseus’ ten years of peregrinations on the high seas in his Odyssey. His wife Penelope has spent the duration of the Trojan War loyal to her husband, but her palace at Ithaca is overrun by voracious, opportunist suitors. Agamemnon is delayed by a storm and at the end of a grand feast to celebrate his homecoming, along with his Trojan concubine Cassandra, is murdered in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aigisthus.6 Diomedes’ wife too is faithless, his kingdom no longer his when he returns. Nestor makes his way back to Pylos safely to ‘grow rich and sleek in his old age at home’ but many – Ajax, Achilles and Patroclus – are now dust on the plains of Troy.7
Helen and Menelaus too have troubles ahead. Hostile winds take them to Gortyn on Crete and to Cyprus, Phoenicia, Ethiopia and Libya. Once again, within Homer’s poetry, Bronze Age trading routes are being tabulated. And for all authors – Homer, Stesichorus, Herodotus, Euripides, the anonymous composers of the Epic Cycle – the great, rich lands of Egypt ‘where the houses overflow with the greatest troves of treasure’8 are an important part of the royal couple’s journey home.9
When Herodotus chronicles the fact that the flesh-and-blood Helen stays in Egypt while the warriors fight for a phantom in Troy,10 he also reports that even here blood is shed – because her presence leads to a human sacrifice.11 Having left Troy and travelled up the river Nile to Memphis, Menelaus has discovered Helen in Egypt, and, impatient to get his (now blameless) wife back home, he tries to set sail. But the winds are against him. Furious, he sacrifices two native children, earning, as he does so, the enmity of Egypt and of its king, Proteus. The Spartan king and queen have to flee for their lives, getting as far as Libya where, for the outraged Egyptians, the trail then goes cold.12
Herodotus’ story is, of course, not the first time Helen has been associated with ritual murder. The most notorious sacrifice is of Iphigeneia, her niece (or her daughter, depending on the source), and the Delphic oracle too connects Helen to ritual death, making reference to a tenacious plague in Sparta: the solution, the annual sacrifice of high-born Spartan virgins. One year, it is Helen who is led to the altar stone. Just before the knife enters the flesh, an eagle swoops down and rips the weapon out of the priest’s hands, dropping it, point down, onto a heifer. From that moment on it is young cows rather than young girls that are lined up for the priests’ cold blade.13
Without hard evidence it has always been immensely difficult to judge whether human sacrifice was in fact a part of the Bronze Age experience.14 But on Crete, a staggering excavation appears to have exposed incontrovertible remnants of ritual murder. Just below Anemospilia (the ‘Cave of the Winds’), a half-hour drive inland from the capital Heraklion, there is a redolent site. When I first visited, retracing the literary Helen’s steps on the way back from Troy, I had to brush past tall grasses thick with herbs to reach the sanctuary.15 The Aegean stretches out beneath, the peak of Mount Juktas towers above.16 Here in the 1970s, four bodies were found – three men and one woman – all dating from around 1600 BC. Analysis of the human remains showed them all to be well built, well fed and well dressed: the elite of society. One man had been carrying a large bowl, a second had collapsed on the floor. Jugs filled with a viscous fluid stood nearby. The third man, aged about eighteen, was lying on an altar, with a bronze dagger laid across his chest. His feet had been bound and his body bled dry. Further forensic tests show that on the left-hand side his neck had been sliced through. The scene is so shocking that some scholars – quite rightly – have been careful to propose less sensational interpretations. But it is very hard to read this as anything other than the sacrifice of the young man.17
It is too simplistic to bring our 21st-century sensitivities to the idea of human sacrifice. A sacrifice means ‘to make something sacred’. For ordinary humans to become part of the divine stratosphere may have been perceived and experienced as a great honour, though an honour bestowed only in extremis. Helen’s story is an extreme one (her impact on the world around her both affirmed life and denied it) and I suspect this is why we find her name linked with a number of human sacrifice stories. In the minds of the Ancient Greeks, it was no surprise that Helen catalysed the ritual murder of her fellow men. After all, this was a woman who traded in blood as well as in beauty.
And yet, in Homer there is no scandal attached to Helen’s stay in Egypt, there are no untimely deaths. Instead the royal couple gather up stories and treasures to bring back with them to Sparta. Among the gifts lavished on Helen during her Egyptian sojourn is a golden spindle – a romantic, story-book prop if ever there was one. But real golden spindles have now been discovered in the graves of Anatolian women; one particularly fine example comes from Alaca Höyük in central Turkey. Whether or not ‘precious gifts: a golden spindle, a basket that ran on casters, solid silver polished off with rims of gold’18 were given to a Mycenaean queen, again we find that Homer is not fantasising, but itemising specific details of the Bronze Age past.19
So Helen is on her way home. And, according to Homer, once she lands back on Greek soil, she does so with impunity. Her Trojan husband is dead, his body burned on a Trojan funeral pyre; she is free to become a good Greek wife once again.20 In the Odyssey we find her back at Sparta, in the palace of her birth, relaxed and in control. She runs the household; she chats to guests; when Trojan War veterans arrive she pulls up a chair to listen to their tales and to add her own (note that it is Helen rather than Menelaus who initiates the storytelling session – a sign in Homeric society of the respect due to her); she impresses the assembled company by interpreting, correctly, an omen in the sky.21 She is reunited with her estranged daughter – as her niece Electra bitterly points out in Eurip
ides’ play Orestes: ‘In her [Hermione] she takes her joy and forgets her troubles.’22 She seems fulfilled and content. It is, almost, as if nothing untoward had ever happened.
But beneath the surface there are hints of trouble. What Homer does, very skilfully, is to paint a picture of a woman who is both relaxed and wary, both resourceful and tricky. The royal couple are hosting a wedding party – Hermione is to marry the son of Achilles, and among their guests is Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. The palace is full. In jubilant mood, a bard plays on his lyre, ‘a pair of tumblers dashed and sprang, whirling in leaping handsprings, leading on the dance’.23 Helen enters this scene from her ‘scented, lofty chamber’ with a train of women. But when the feasting is over and the lights are low, the mood changes and thoughts turn to the pain and suffering of the last ten years. Tales told of dead heroes make the entire room weep inconsolably. Helen has the answer.24
Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who had swallowed this dissolved in wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother and father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done.25
The drug was most likely opium – which, when mixed with alcohol becomes pure laudanum.26 There is no doubt that opium would have been used within palatial culture in the Late Bronze Age – and it was much loved by the Mycenaeans. As well as rock-crystal pins made in the shape of poppy seed-heads, Mycenaean women wore beads carved out of red carnelian representing poppy flowers27 and gold rings depicting orgiastic rites to which opium poppies were central.28 One of the goddesses found in Crete, dating from the Mycenaean occupation of the island, has a diadem made of woven poppy seedheads. This stiff, somnolent figure with her arms bent and palms facing out, flat on, has a glassy stare. The seedheads crowning her brow have been split open – the optimum moment for opium latex to be extracted. Homer tells us that nepenthes drugs were imported from Egypt – for the ancients, ‘made in Egypt’ implied top-grade medicinal goods.29 But forensic analysis shows that opium poppies, Papaver somniferum L., were home-grown in the Peloponnese in the Late Bronze Age. At Tiryns and at Kastanas opium poppy seeds have been recovered from excavation levels relating to the late 13th century BC. 30 As well as acting as an effective pain-killer Papaver somniferum L. has acute psychotropic effects.31
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