Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  There is no doubt that a Mycenaean queen, with the privilege of rank, perhaps a high priestess, would have known how to use these powerful narcotics, just as the Homeric Helen does. Opium is a useful tool to heal wounds, both physical and psychological; it opens a path to dreams. Mixing her drugs, interpreting omens, captivating the assembled company, the Homeric Helen is both a sorceress and a salve, intoxicating to the last. Having stupefied her household, she puts away her golden spindle and her purple-tinted wool, to bed down with Menelaus: ‘Menelaus retired to chambers deep in his lofty house with Helen the pearl of women loosely gowned beside him.’ This is the last time we see Helen in the works of Homer.

  While at Troy Homer tells us Helen embarked on an intricate tapestry – a never-ending creation that tolds the tales of heroes and of war. Now, it seems, the final stitch is completed, the running thread snipped. But this is a story destined to be reworked again and again; Helen’s prophecy in the Iliad, ‘On us the gods have sent an evil destiny, that we should be a singer’s theme for generations to come’, will be fulfilled. Helen might have completed her own epic work of fabrication back in Troy, but now there would be a whir and a clatter as others settled themselves at the loom to begin their own versions of the life of the Spartan Queen.

  Our Homeric Helen may have sailed home to a warm welcome. The Helens that followed her centuries later described a bleaker route through history.

  33

  THE DEATH OF A QUEEN

  Orestes: Our watchword for today: ‘Kill Helen’ – there it is.

  Pylades: You have it/ … There’ll be cheering in the streets, Bonfires will blaze to all the gods, and prayers rise up/ For blessings on us both, because we justly shed/ The blood of a badwoman. Kill her, and your name/ Of ‘matricide’ will be forgotten, giving place/ To a more glorious title: you’ll be called ‘the man Who killed the killer of thousands, Helen’.

  …Electra: Kill, stab, destroy her, both of you!/ Aim your swords –in! – in!/ Two hungry blades flashing in your hands!/ Kill her! She deserted her father, she deserted her Husband;/ Countless Hellenes died in battle by the riverside – And she killed them! Tears flooded upon tears,/ There, where iron spears flew/ Beside the seething Scamander.

  EURIPIDES, Orestes1

  IN HIS TRAGIC DRAMA ORESTES, Euripides is one of the few to write of the death of the Spartan queen. The play is set in the royal palace at Argos visited by Menelaus and Helen on their way back to Sparta from Troy, just six days after Orestes has murdered his mother Clytemnestra. As the royal couple arrive, Orestes is surrounded by armed guards, with a death warrant from the Argive court hanging over his head. Menelaus refuses to endorse his actions, or the complicity of his sister, Electra – a reluctance which enrages the eponymous anti-hero who (with his accomplice Pylades) hatches a plot to kill Helen and thus drive Menelaus raving mad. Pylades articulates this as an act of sweet revenge – the killing of Helen, he argues, will mean that all Greece will forget Orestes’ infamous matricide and instead call him ‘the man who killed the killer of thousands, Helen’. Orestes is persuaded – within moments we hear Helen’s wretched screams from inside the palace.

  It is Helen’s Trojan slave who describes the murder. The slave stands beside the Queen of Sparta, fanning her with feathers, while she spins a gossamer thread – intended to decorate the purple robe she will lay at the tomb of Clytemnestra. Orestes entices Helen to an altar, while Pylades locks up Helen’s other slaves. Helen is surrounded. As the assassins pull their swords from under their purple cloaks, she runs away with her golden sandals clattering, but Orestes catches her by the hair, bends back her neck and prepares to slit her throat.

  After a brief interlude, Hermione bursts in only to be greeted by the sight of her mother’s corpse, twisted in its death-throes, laced with blood. Orestes and Pylades charge at the girl, and once they have caught her, turn back to their original prey. But Helen has mysteriously disappeared. Was this a miracle? An act of magic? Did the gods steal her away?

  The news of the outrage is leaked to Menelaus and the war-weary king musters his strength and hurtles off in pursuit, but finds Orestes with a sword, this time, to Hermione’s neck. Swearing vengeance, the Spartan king calls upon the citizens of Argos to take up arms and do away with Orestes, but just as he bellows out his last plea, Apollo appears and explains that he snatched Helen up to safety:

  For Helen’s beauty was to the gods their instrument For setting Greeks and Trojans face to face in war And multiplying deaths, to purge the bloated earth Of its superfluous welter of mortality. So much for Helen …2

  Now, soaring aloft to the star-bright sphere,/ Helen I will conduct to the mansion of Zeus;/ There men shall adore her, a goddess enthroned/ Beside Hera and Hebe and great Heracles./ There she, with her brothers, Tyndareos’ sons,/ Shall be worshipped for ever with wine outpoured/ As the seamen’s Queen of the Ocean.3

  This is a textbook deus ex machina. There is no corpse because Helen, saved by the gods, has become a star. And this was how many Greeks imagined her, always perfect, always present – but just out of reach.

  Because the premier extant chronicler of Helen’s life, Homer, leaves her end unresolved there is no one favoured account of her death, but instead myriad theories. For some she lives out her life contentedly as Queen of Sparta. The Roman poet Ovid imagines her caught at last by time, weeping as she sees her ‘aged wrinkles in the looking glass, and tearfully asks herself why she should twice have been a lover’s prey’.4 Other authors describe her as exiled and lonely, suffering a horrible and violent death.5 Three ideas surface again and again. The first is that this adulteress, trailing a past that drips with gore, ends up not tormented in the underworld but as one of the blessed, in Elysium. The second is that Helen gets some kind of retribution for all the suffering she has caused, before her final journey to meet her makers. And the third finds her attaining sparkling immortality – no one wants to lose Helen, no one wants her to die.

  Because Mycenaean tombs offer the richest of all archaeological finds, we can extrapolate a detailed reconstruction of the funerary rites that would have been staged in honour of our Bronze Age Helen.6 There are caveats – structures such as the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ (built c. 1370 BC) or the ‘Tomb of Clytemnestra’ (c. 1300 BC) at Mycenae are showy pieces of archaeology begging to be raided.7 When archaeologists arrive at the heart of a grave the contents are often strewn and sparse, bones jumbled together and the most precious objects long gone.8 Sometimes grave-robbers are the culprits, sometimes tomb-raiders masquerading as officials and sometimes it is the Bronze Age populations themselves, moving aside one corpse and its gifts so that another from the clan could be laid to rest.9 Still, piecing together reliable evidence from across the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean world we can form a composite picture of the burial of a high-born, female aristocrat, and in that picture it does appear that women had as extravagant a send-off as men.

  In order to prepare a woman such as Helen for this moment, her body, carefully washed, smoothed with perfumed oil and dressed in a bespoke funerary dress, would be laid out gently on a bier. A finely carved seal-stone would be placed on her wrist,10 on her finger a silver ring, on her head perhaps a gold diadem.11 Golden spirals might be twisted into her hair,12 a shawl laced with beads wrapped over her head and shoulders, and necklaces of faience and amber fastened around her death-white neck.

  Once this fine, gem-studded corpse was fully dressed, it would be covered from head to toe in a shroud.13 The funeral cortège would then make its way towards the entrance of the tomb – in the 14th century BC perhaps down a dromos (a walled corridor) towards a tholos, a distinctive beehive-shaped grave. At the Tomb of Clytemnestra, the sobering corridor entrance is 36m long. In the Treasury of Atreus, the inner lintel block itself weighs over 100 tonnes. The audacious architecture of these mausoleums still astounds.

  In front of the freshly dead body, hugging close to the head, there would almost certainly have been children, and behind them women, so
me raising their hands to their heads, others with torn clothes and scratched faces.14 Paintings on Bronze Age larnakes (chestlike coffins) from Tanagra in Boiotia depict children and female mourners clustered around the corpse. On a broken-up krater (a large vase) from Agia Triada Palaioboukounia in Elis, a funeral scene shows a child standing right next to the head of the corpse.15 Homer demonstrates that women were important players in funerary rites – a reminder that the females of this distant world were thought to bring life and death in equal measure.

  Once inside the chill, cavernous space of the tomb, the aristocrat’s precious goods would be laid all around her or on a carefully constructed little bench. The Tomb of Clytemnestra, at Mycenae, on being re-opened in 1876 and 1891, contained a crumpled cornucopia of delights – evidence of the capital chosen for the dead.16

  Among the treasures found in the tomb itself and in a grave-pit in the dromos was an exquisite bronze mirror with a carved ivory handle, lapis lazuli decorations and the images of two plump women with tight curls, sitting on palm leaves.17 There were embossed gold strips pierced so that they could be sewn onto the corpse’s clothes, heart- and lily-shaped gold beads, polished amethysts and broken terracotta figurines of women and animals. In one tomb on Crete,18 dating from around the 14th century BC, the female skeleton was found holding a bronze mirror in her left hand, pressed right up close to her face.19 Would a Bronze Age Helen have been left alone with a metal mirror in the cold earth, to stare for eternity at her own lovely face?

  I recently visited the site of one rich discovery at the Late Bronze Age necropolis of Dendra, in the gentle farmland that rolls out south-east from Mycenae, taking with me an account of the original excavation of 1926. 20 Above the tombs, I read the report – the excitement of the revelation was transparent. The leader of the dig, a Swede called Axel Persson, described how in the sweltering July heat, working with knives and small picks, workers exposed a skeleton lying in a layer of blue clay shot through with charcoal particles, and then …

  gold began to appear; round the neck and on the breast was a great Mycenaean necklace of gold rosette beads, 18 large ones and 18 small. It measured almost 80 cm in length after we had rethreaded it. The large rosettes were found on the breast, the small ones at the back of the neck … below the chest there lay the gold binding of a girdle and 35 spiral pendants of thin gold leaf which no doubt had also adorned the girdle … It was a little princess we had found.21

  On 30 July the excavators went on to discover a woman who had apparently been left with a small steatite lamp to light her way into the afterlife. She cradled a gold cup in her right arm. Decorated with gold bulls’-heads, silver and niello, once cleaned with a soft brush and water the cup was found to be still serviceable. Persson and his team filled the liberated offering with Nemean wine, and, along with a gathering of local villagers, toasted their success, the glories of Greece, and then passed the cup round for everyone to share.

  Although this theatrical treatment of artefacts would be considered sacrilege by today’s archaeologists, it was in fact a sympathetic gesture. In a tholos tomb at Kokla, near Argos,22 two drinking cups23 had been drained and then smashed. Did these hold final toasts for the dead? In the Minoan cemetery at Armenoi in western Crete, analysing the organic traces found in drinking and cooking vessels dating from c. 1390–1190 BC, scientists have found evidence of resinated wine (wine mixed with pine resin, partly to preserve and partly to mask the sour taste as the alcohol turns rancid) and wine mixed with barley. These are potent alcoholic drinks. The Mycenaean dead had a good send-off.

  As the invocations and prayers died out, as the flautists and lyre-players fell silent,24 with an aromatic mist still hanging in the air from the incense burners and the small fires that had fumigated the burial chamber before the corpse’s arrival, the tomb would be closed and the entrance sealed. In some burials the dromos, the corridor, has been back-filled. And as the last lick of flame in the lamp next to the body guttered, the aristocrat and her glittering prizes were left in the dark.

  In a tomb such as this, Helen’s body would have been laid to rest.25

  34

  THE AGE OF HEROES ENDS

  [Helen’s beauty] exhausted the divine genius of Homer … [and] tired out many great and famous painters and carvers.

  Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women (ad 1364–70)1

  THOSE BRONZE AGE CORPSES were left alone, but not undisturbed. Just as, in the minds of the ancients, Helen’s actions caused the Age of Heroes to implode, so the Mycenaean civilisation really did disintegrate at the end of the Bronze Age. Glittering palaces would fall, trade would evaporate, heroes would melt into the shadows – and all in the span of a lifetime.

  The dating of ‘the Trojan War’ is a vexed and thorny issue. The traditional systems of the ancient world set it anywhere from 1334 to 1135 BC. 2 The most popular date, however, was c. 1184 BC; archaeology tells that around this time, the cultures of Crete and the Greek mainland and Anatolia did indeed evaporate and current research suggests that there were a series of devastations at Troy: battles and court intrigue in the first half of the 13th century BC, fire in 1200 BC, fire and perhaps earthquakes around 1180 BC, cauterisation of the city as an economic entity for the next 100 years, total abandonment by 950 BC. Popular memory had one thing right: Helen’s death heralded the death of a whole way of life.

  Around the end of the Bronze Age, much of what is now Greece and Turkey experienced intense seismic activity: ‘storms’ of earthquakes. The storms would impact an area of up to 2,000 sq km over a period of around fifty years. So, for instance, in an intensely active period in recent recorded history, say between AD 1900 and 2000, in the eastern Peloponnese an earthquake with a magnitude of over 6.5 on the Richter Scale occurred every thirty or forty years.3 With sophisticated architecture damage is minimal – with the building techniques of the Late Bronze Age4 devastation would have been extreme and it looks as though many of the Bronze Age centres were hit not once, but repeatedly.5 Crude oil lamps have been found by their thousands in Late Bronze Age sites. As buildings collapsed, as sanctuaries juddered and palaces fell down, these lamps would have been sent flying – starting devastating fires. Those not killed by the quakes and flames would have watched as frescoes and painted floors, golden cups and stores of handspun cloth, the trappings of Bronze Age civilisation and the marks of the heroic age, were consumed in front of them. Excavations of Late Bronze Age magazines at Thebes have uncovered carbonised fruit. At the tranquil site of Midea six miles inland from Argos, there are the charred remains of chick-peas, lentils, bitter vetch, grass peas, fava and broad beans; hoarded for men but consumed by fire.

  In the expansive storerooms of the Mycenaean palatial complexes one of the most precious and prolific commodities was olive oil kept in giant stoppered pithoi each holding around 40 gallons (182 l) of highly flammable liquid. Inexplicably, at the point that Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, the necks of a number of these pithoi have been sawn off – as if the jars were being used as incendiary devices. In one palace on Crete, at Agia Triada, in the intense heat of the inferno, the Bronze Age equivalent of a fire in an oil refinery,6 the stone floor of the oil storeroom has not only buckled and serrated; it has vitrified – turned to glass.

  Helen’s world was not wiped out by these calamities, but the impact would certainly have been enough to destabilise Mycenaean society. The chaos would have galvanised local opportunists: men and women empowered to question the authority of leaders (both religious and secular) who had clearly inspired the gods to great ire. The meticulous administrative systems of the Mycenaeans would have been interrupted. Deities were demoted: the strange female figures in the cult centre at Mycenae are laid to rest, the frescoes of beautiful women on the walls are carefully white-washed. A fine film of soil is sprinkled over the cult items and dedications and large stone slabs are laid along the side of the room to cover the significant, potent objects whose home this had once been.7

  The spirits of th
e earth and sky had expressed their displeasure. Were the goddesses and fine female figures on the wall in disgrace? Were they being tactfully demoted? Did these earthquakes and the subsequent fires, which may well have contributed to the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation, herald a new era? An era in which that arriviste god Zeus – who almost certainly originated in the east – became dominant?8 An era which would see the end of female supremacy in the religious sphere, an era which would be remembered and distorted by bards through the ‘Dark Ages’ of Greece? An era celebrated with longing and fear by epic poets like Homer as an Age of Heroes? An era whose warriors had risked all for a woman and cursed her as they did so?