Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  In the ancient world divinities and nymphs with pronounced sexual power were typically thought to inhabit brooks, rivers and oceans.2 Aphrodite was herself conceived within the sea. One fragmentary poem attributed to Hesiod claims that Helen’s mother was not Leda but a ‘daughter of the Ocean’.3 And so the search for Helen’s cultic shrines frequently leads to water-sources and shorelines.

  A few miles south of Corinth and a stone’s throw from the classical ruins of Kenchreai is the tiny village of Loutra Elenis – Helen’s Baths – or, as it was marked on Greek maps and road-signs until a few years ago, Tά λoυτρά τής ώρμας 뀺퀼倻ς the baths of the beautiful Helen’. The therapeutic waters were first described as a ritual site by Pausanias.4 Now the springs are hard to find. Once you reach the shore, a good clue to the location is the sight of the charming Greek ladies (generally rather elderly and overweight) who use the place religiously.

  The path to the mouth of the spring is hedged with laurels and scattered with the used baby wipes that appear as a constant companion to the lesser-known sites of antiquity. Balancing on the rocks, the silvery bubbles of gas produced by the spring are easy to trace, floating up through the clear water. I was cynical about how efficacious the ‘holy waters’ could possibly be – until I took the plunge myself. Swimming in the outflow of the spring I had the most curious sensation of passing through distinct layers of alternately warm and freezing cold water. Pausanias describes the warm sea as ‘boiling’ and you can just feel the underwater bubbles as they nudge their way up to the surface. This (naturally) is supposed to be a beautifying experience; it is certainly an invigorating one.

  During my last visit I had an extraordinary conversation about Helen, while in the fizzing water of the spring, with an ex-merchant seaman, who was wearing only a pair of very small, black Speedos. The sailor had become a chef after he left the navy and because of standing up cooking day in, day out, suffered from dreadful circulation problems. One of his legs, he told me firmly, was once as black as his trunks, whereas now (and here he showed off a trim leg with a small patch of grey on the ankle) there was next to no problem. The mysterious cure, he assured me, had come with his visits to Loutra Elenis.

  Helen’s latter-day devotee then pointed out the epicentre of the spring – the point at which the fresh water, filtered through Mount Oneia, meets the sea. As the spring has been channelled, diverted and enclosed, it is now necessary for the visitor to half-swim, half-clamber, into a little niche where fresh water meets saline. Hanging onto the rocks there just above head height, fierce jets of water pummelled me from toes to chest. I could suddenly see why that faithful sailor had had such good results. Devotees are adamant that the place is efficacious both because Helen was worshipped here and because she herself used the spring.

  On a hazy day, when atmospheric conditions blur and block out the shapes of modern buildings, the view here cannot have changed an iota down the millennia. To the east, clustering over the current archaeological dig at Kenchreai, there are fields of asphodel. With its lance-like leaves and pale-pink starry flowers the asphodel was a familiar sight in ancient Greece. In popular Greek thought, the meadow of asphodel in Hades received the fleshless corpses of the dead, and Homer describes fallen heroes eating the plant. The fields of asphodel at Kenchreai are a striking sight, each plant standing tall and straight like a man: it is easy to see why the ancients equated the spiny stems with the bones of their ancestors.

  Throughout the classical period the outlines of boats on the horizon would also have been visible, making their way into the port of Corinth. Finds testify to visitors from across the region, from maritime centres such as Morocco, Cyprus and Chios. Many of these sailors would have followed up their visit to Helen’s Baths by paying their respects to Aphrodite, her sister in beauty, making a bee-line to worship the goddess of love with ta aphrodisia, literally ‘the things of Aphrodite’ – sex.

  A number of the remains at Kenchreai have been lost during road-construction – the present rubbing out the past. Those that are left seem most beloved by local fishermen who use them as platforms from which to cast off. We know that, from at least the Roman period onwards, Aphrodite had a temple and a large statue at Kenchreai itself,5 but to reach the site of Aphrodite’s grandest religious complex one has to pass through the old town of Corinth (a jumble of Roman ruins6 obliterating most of the Greek stones, where tourist shops sell the image of Aphrodite on everything from aprons to doormats), and head for the unfeasibly dominant, sky-scraping, mottled grey rock that is Acrocorinth. Travellers making their way up to Acrocorinth (and it is a 4 km climb) any time from 500 BC onwards might well have seen gaggles of the prostitutes and temple servants descending to meet devout customers in the town.7

  We hear from a fragment of Pindar’s poetry that a doubly victorious Olympic champion called Xenophon, to commemorate his triumphs in 464 BC, dedicated one hundred girls to Aphrodite at Acrocorinth.8 Strabo tells us that in his day there were a thousand of these women working for the goddess of love.9 One has to imagine, since their clients were primarily the port-hopping sailors, that a number of these holy whores would have left the musky-sour stench of venereal disease on the air as they passed.

  But the site of Aphrodite’s temple on Acrocorinth, 1,880 feet (570 m) above sea level, runs against the squalid and clandestine stereotype of the brothel. Here the breeze is balmy and fresh. Where pillars and architraves once would have been there is a panoramic view out across the Gulf of Corinth and over to the mountains of the Peloponnese. Just below the temple in the classical period a spring brought fresh water. The location feels exultant and secure. A female phi-type figurine found here, dating from the end of the Mycenaean period, testifies that in the Late Bronze Age Mycenaeans would also have stood on this spot to look and wonder.10 We cannot know precisely why they came or to whom they prayed when they arrived, but the fact that they brought with them votive offerings does show that a visit here was an important spiritual experience.

  Worried by the popularity of Aphrodite’s cult in the classical period, the early Christians assiduously obliterated the pagan temple under one of their churches.11 Now the most explicit reminders of the significance of the goddess of love, the armed protector of Corinth and its environs, are locked away in a restricted storeroom in Corinth museum.12 A collection of offerings and artworks commemorating the power of erotic love is thought to be unsuitable for public consumption.

  But Helen – the daughter, sister, incarnation of Aphrodite, and as always close to her in body and spirit – is still openly worshipped by modern-day believers. ‘Magic!’ shout the old Greek men and women as they swim in Helen’s Baths, just down the hill from Acrocorinth: ‘Ephcharisto ōrea Eleni ’ – ‘Thank you, beautiful Helen.’13

  A Byzantine commentator writing in the second quarter of the 6th century AD, recorded that 200 km east of Loutra Elenis, close to the Turkish coastline on the island of Chios, Helen’s cult revolved around a spring.14 Pausanias described the spring, near Helen’s Temple on the hill of Therapne in Sparta,15 and another close to the shrine of Bridal Aphrodite founded on the occasion of Helen’s union with Theseus.16 And at Rome, in the south corner of the Forum Romanum, Helen’s image – holding a large torch – could be found on the marble altar at the Lacus Juturnae, itself a spring-fed pool dedicated to the water-nymph Juturna.17 The Lacus Juturnae altar was constructed at the time of Trajan,18 and stood between the Temple of Castor and Pollux and the Atrium Vestae. Once again, as at Sparta and in Egypt, Helen finds her worship endorsed by the authorities.

  Not that Helen needed state sponsorship to perpetuate her appeal. For the Roman people her influence was not just to be found in official religious sanctuaries and works of great literature – it seeped into the culture of the street. There is a plant whose Latin name is still Inula helenium – Helen’s Flower. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, tells us the flower was thus named because it grew where Helen’s tears fell. Inula helenium was enthusiast
ically used as a beauty aid by ageing Roman women and giddy girls alike who ground up the bitter plant to a beautifying paste. Another common practice was to burn its seeds or drink an infusion of helenium extract, all the while praying that by doing so the hopeful user would acquire just a fraction of Helen’s dangerous beauty. Caesar Augustus’ daughter, Julia, took a daily dose of ‘Helen’s Flower’. To overcome its bitterness, it was ‘dried and pounded into flour and seasoned with some sweet juice’ or else ‘mixed with boiled-down grape-juice or flavoured with honey or raisins or juicy dates’.19 Our source, Pliny, enthusiastically promoted its efficacy, describing the plant’s reputation for keeping the face and body fresh and for increasing sex appeal. And if helenium did not work as a love-charm, it had handy secondary uses too – curing snake-bites and killing mice.

  Because of its effective use as a tonic and a stimulant, ‘Helen’s Flower’ has been a friend to doctors and pharmacists from antiquity through to the present day. Helenin (C6H8O) is a distillation from the root. Preparations from the plant can be prescribed by herbalists to regulate menstruation, or indeed encourage the onset of a girl’s periods. The connection with Helen is a significant one. This herb brought pre-pubescent girls to sexual maturity and therefore to beauty. The ancients imagined the first ever Helen’s Flower springing from the dark little pools where the tears of the most beautiful woman in the world fell on the ground. They imagined her weeping as she remembered the pain that came with erotic love, weeping as she guided young girls onto the sexual path she herself knew only too well.

  It was on one of ‘Helen’s Islands’,20 Helene21 now called Makronissos, that the plant Inula helenium was first said to have sprung from Helen’s tears. Makronissos has a horrific and disturbing history. Today it is still and silent. No boats in the bay, no smudge of movement from a goat or a sheep, no clothes fluttering on a line. During the Greek Civil War,22 this was the site of the ‘white terror’. Over a hundred thousand political prisoners were rounded up and held on the island in a sealed, sadistic concentration camp. There were massacres and terrible tortures. The screams of the inmates could be heard from the mainland. The island has been left empty, a heavy monument to man’s dreadful folly and blood-lust. Prophesying Makronissos’ tragic history, it was said in antiquity that this was a sombre place, a place where Helen sighed.

  And on rough nights, those sailors who heard Helen sigh on the isle of Helene could have sensed her above them too, materialising from the ether, because along with her brothers, Castor and Pollux – the soteres, saviours riding their white horses across the oceans – a starry Helen was thought to keep watch over those in danger on the sea and to bring rather alarming illumination in the form of St Elmo’s Fire. Anyone caught out at night on a stormy sea and blinded by the sudden arrival of St Elmo’s Fire will be left in no doubt as to the real respect the ancients must have felt for Helen.23 Called simply Helene in the ancient world, before the phenomenon was appropriated by a Christian saint, St Elmo’s Fire is an electrifying event. In the highly charged atmosphere of a storm, gas can become ionised, causing an electro-luminescent discharge to leap in double or triple jets from sharp points on ships’ rigging. Bluish-white streamers of flame seem to appear from thin air. The effect is breathtaking and disconcerting.

  These corposants (literally ‘holy bodies’) typically appear singly or in pairs. The flames can provide a welcome source of light in a pitch black, storm-tossed night; they can also spark fires – a particular problem in antiquity when masts and rigging were made entirely of wood and hemp or papyrus. And so, whereas the twin brothers Castor and Pollux were thought to bring only relief, the single ‘Helen flame’ was often blamed for the devastation caused. A fragment of a work by one Hellenistic author called Sosibius24 suggests that Helen’s light was a bad omen, and another Roman author is loquacious on the matter: ‘The ship is lost when the brothers of Therapne have deserted the sails doomed by the fire of their sister.’25 Even out in the middle of the ocean, Helen was believed to crackle with a dangerous energy.

  PART TEN

  THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS

  Previous page:

  A marble female figurine from the Cycladic Island of Naxos. c. 2500 BC.

  37

  HELEN IN ATHENS

  After they heard that Helen had returned to her home in Mycenae, all Europe rushed in dense crowds, wondering at Plisthenes’ daughter-in-law, and were on fire to see the face that overthrew Asia. Indeed, she was proud to have inflamed leaders, to have torn apart the world in war, and to have gained an infamous reputation for her shameful beauty.

  JOSEPH OF EXETER, Trojan War (c. AD 1180)1

  IF A BRONZE AGE Helen really did travel back to Sparta from Troy, following her misadventures, as she looked out over the ragged, bucolic coastlines of Turkey, Egypt and Greece, little could she have imagined that the mediocre pre-historic ports and tiny settlements she and the other survivors of the Trojan War passed would have become great classical cities: Thebes, Corinth, Athens. And could she have ever guessed that in the future she would live on in these cities, as one of their most significant and contentious symbols of womanhood? That her story would be played out again and again in the philosophers’ academies and grand public theatres to a drunk, demanding, intellectually greedy and polyglot crowd?

  The memory of Helen would come to be particularly resonant not just in her home town of Sparta, but in classical Athens. In the 5th century BC, thanks to the new art of theatre, and then to the dialogues of philosophers and rhetoricians, Helen’s story takes a significant turn. She was already being worshipped in cultic shrines in the Peloponnese, her song sung in grand mansions, her face etched into metal and applied to vases, but she was about to become a political animal. Once the Spartan queen stepped onto the Athenian stage, the idea of Helen became central to the Athenian democratic experience, and therefore central to the blueprint for western society.2

  For an ambitious polis such as Athens, Helen’s story embraces compelling themes: death and duty, civic responsibility and individual ambition, the relationship between stranger and kin; the purpose of war, the purpose of women; why humanity is flawed. And with Helen embodying a primal force – sexual power – there is the question of how the imperfect, the spontaneous, the animal, can become part of the social, political body.

  Homer’s Helen is always ambiguous, always intriguing. But it is on the Athenian stage that she becomes a paradox: a creature of pantomime polarity, either very, very good or very, very bad. It is here that the fervent debate about Helen really starts. What does Helen mean? How can she be dealt with? Even when she only has a walk-on part in Greek drama, she upstages the other characters and her presence bleeds beyond her scenes. The language the Greek playwrights used was designed to knock the breath out of their audience. And in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and in particular Euripides, how they must have gasped at Helen.

  In Athens, it is still possible to visit the Theatre of Dionysus (the structure still standing was built in the 4th century BC) where much Greek tragedy was premiered. The site is at the geographical heart of the ancient Athenian polis, a generous stone’s throw from the acropolis, the agora and the assembly. The best time to visit is after the tourists have gone back to their hotels and the 21st-century Athenians are out on the streets, promenading up and down the marble walkways, chatting, chewing on figs and spitting out the husks of seeds and nuts much as Athenians would have done two and a half thousand years ago. Street vendors selling cheap religious icons are a reminder of the spiritual impact the location would once have had – the theatre was originally part of a religious sanctuary, the precinct of the louche, debauched god of wine and fertility, Dionysus. It was hemmed in with temples and shrines, littered with votive offerings.

  Greek theatre was born out of religious ritual and was therefore by definition political, a part of the fabric of the polis. As one scholar puts it, ‘the [theatre] festivals were … political because they were religious, sin
ce in ancient pre-Christian Greece the religious and the political were fabrics of thought and behaviour woven from the same threads’.3 It was in the theatre, with a mass audience present, that the Greeks (who relished analysis) could ask themselves who they were, what they should think and how they should live. Helen was at the heart of that interrogation.

  So it was to the sanctuary of Dionysus in the 5th century BC, that people would have come to watch Helen’s story picked over – in particularly exposed form in the work of Euripides.4 In his easy, colloquial, charismatic language, Euripides introduced Helen as a central figure to the tragic stage. And in his vacillating, complicated, portrayal of her, he summed up beautifully the way men have wanted Helen both to be perfect, and to be a perfect scapegoat. Euripides made it clear that the pre-historic Helen had become a Classical Greek everywoman, that there was a ‘Helen’ in every girl-child and virgin, wife and prostitute who inhabited the Greek world.

  In the Trojan Women (first produced in 415 BC), Helen and her one-time mother-in-law Hecuba, widow of dead Priam, mother of dead Paris and Hector, fight a war of words. Menelaus is poised to kill his adulterous spouse but Helen insists she is not responsible for the death and destruction at Troy and does not deserve to die.5 The Trojan queen counters, laying the blame four-square at Helen’s door. The language lunges and thrusts across the stage. This is a rhetorical agon or competition. Cleverly, Hecuba emphasises Helen’s ‘Eastern’, ‘Barbaric’ tastes and loyalties; she is reminding Menelaus that Helen has spent ten years in a Trojan’s bed. The old woman argues desperately, convinced that, once again, Helen’s beauty will floor the man in front of her. Knowing their Homer as they do, Euripides’ audience senses the pathetic futility of the old woman’s words. Hecuba is right: Menelaus cannot resist Helen, he will forgive her. He will let his eyes wander over her wonderful body and face, and decide to take his Queen back home. Paris’ desire for Helen tramples over social codes and international etiquette. Menelaus relinquishes a cuckolded warrior’s right to revenge.