Through the antiphonal dirges sung by the chorus, and the moaning accompaniment of auloi – the banshee-like oboe of the classical world – the central tenet of the play shouts out loud: Helen is dangerous, women are not be trusted, least of all those who are articulate, attractive, charismatic and crafty. These are the creatures who bring about the death of civilisations.
In Athens it was a civic duty to attend the theatre and tragic play-wrights became society’s unofficial educators. It has been estimated that in the 4th century BC, 50 per cent of the qualified citizenry would have gone to the theatre.6 That is the greatest single collection of citizens (the Olympic Games and first-division battles excluded) that would ever gather in time or space in the Greek world, and all of them staring at a small stage; all – almost certainly at some point in their lives – watching Helen’s story being played out in front of them.7
As part of a religious celebration, the experience of Athenian theatre was full-blooded. And one festival in particular had developed into a jamboree of epic proportions – the Great Dionysia. The atmosphere in Athens during the Great Dionysia, held in late March or early April, must have been electric. Men from across the Greek world, rich and poor alike,8 flooded into the city. The festival opened with an exuberant and ostentatious parade. Leading the procession was a fine bull, richly decorated, garlanded, sprinkled with perfume and destined for a bloody sacrifice – like countless other animals in the city over the next three days. Behind the bull, a virgin carrying a golden basket. Dancing, singing and drinking carried on hard into the night.
Since these carnivalesque events offered many men a rare holiday, a chance to lay down hoes and sickles and ploughshares,9 there must have been a number who watched Euripides’ Helen and The Trojan Women with extremely sore heads. For some this was an annual event, for others a once-in-a-lifetime experience.10 The plays performed at the Great Dionysia were rivals, all in competition with each other. Expectations and emotions ran high. The tragic Helen was paraded in front of a charged and voluble crowd.
Male members of the recognised tribes in Attica would have taken their theatre tickets,11 either made out of lead or chipped from bone or ivory, and sat under the shadow of the Parthenon to listen and to learn. Inscriptions imply that blocks of seats were assigned depending on social standing. Members of the boule in one, war orphans in another, foreigners possibly in a separate section, metics and perhaps a tiny, token scattering of slaves elsewhere. The seats of the theatron, the watching place, in the Theatre of Dionysus were originally made of wood, but towards the end of the 4th century BC more money had been invested in the outfit and the audience perched on warm stone benches, enjoyed the refreshments that hawkers sold around the theatres and watched the action below them in the orchestra – the dancing place.12
The rock of the acropolis offered a geological cradle for the theatre. Here the gradient creates a natural auditorium with excellent acoustics.13 Towering over the theatre on the Parthenon – Athens’ symbol of power and piety – was an image of Helen, the beautiful problem immortalised in stone on the western end of the northern metopes. Menelaus fiercely confronts Paris while Helen shelters beneath a statue of Aphrodite.14 It was under this masonry reminder of the Spartan queen’s crimes, that the theatrical Helen would be judged.
Women, it seems, were absent from the theatres although some scholars argue that they would have been ranged in the worst, hottest seats in the auditorium.15 The actors were all men.16 Imagine the theatre on a warm April morning: the debris of the night before still fluttering in the streets, wine spilt in the Dionysiac debauches attracting the flies. And in the theatre itself, anywhere between fourteen and seventeen thousand men staring down at the masked male actor playing Helen, men trying to make some sense of their world, and of the women in it.
The man (or boy) who played Helen would have become the most beautiful woman in the world by reciting his lines through the rigid mask of tragic theatre. Made of linen or cork and wood with realistic hair, the masks would have been a pleasing neutral cover through which to transmit ideas about the power of beauty.17 Used skilfully, this artificial second skin can magnify the thoughts and ideas and actions of the performer. At the end of the production, actors left their masks for the god in the temple in Dionysus’ sanctuary. These were more than mere props, they were the triggers that allowed men to speak the words and thoughts of another, and to explore life’s fundamental questions.
In the mystical, drunken atmosphere of the festival, audiences were sensitized to the drama before them. Plutarch, commentating in the 2nd century AD, tells the story of a 4th-century BC Thessalian tyrant called Alexander, famous for his hideous brutality. Alexander’s show-stoppers included burying enemies alive or wrapping them in animal-hides before setting dogs on them. But at a production of The Trojan Women the despot rushed out of the theatre so that the cowed citizens should not see the tears that gushed, could not witness his weakness, his appreciation of Hecuba’s and Helen’s human tragedy.18
And because the The Trojan Women contains such stunning imagery, such muscular rhetorical speeches, such plangent exploration of the human condition, Euripides’ play became a textbook through the Hellenistic, Roman, medieval and Renaissance periods. Alexander the Great, for instance, recited chunks of Euripides’ Andromeda as one of his party tricks,19 and two thou-sand years later Elizabeth I was taught to translate his plays.20 Euripides promotes Helen as a bitch-whore, a gold-digger, a murderess; his plays are works of genius and they ensure that the West remembers her as a problem.
Other playwrights also damned Helen on stage. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon she is known simply as ‘woman’ – ‘that filthy woman’ is the implied tone. Begrudgingly, once she comes back to Menelaus, she is given a name, although the chorus makes much of the fact that ‘Helenan’ has a sinister ring, because she is also Helenas (ship-destroyer), Helandros (man-destroyer) and Heleptopolis (city-destroyer).21 Simon Goldhill has pointed out that a translation true to the original spirit of the words, would read something like this:
Whoever named you so, in absolute accuracy? Could it be someone unseen in foreknowledge Of what had to happen using his tongue to the mark, Who named you, spear-bride, fought-over Helen?
Appropriately named, since hell for ships, Hell for men, hell for cities …22
The Athenians of the 5th century BC hated Helen for her very activity, for the fact that she appeared to have catalysed a significant change in the status quo. Her story marked the end of the Age of Heroes and the end of the Mycenaean civilisation; she distracted men from their linear development. A man making love to a woman cannot lay a foundation stone, cannot write his own history, cannot fight.
On Athenian vases of the archaic and classical periods, Helen is frequently in flight, running away after the fall of Troy, from a condemnatory and vengeful Menelaus.23 The Athenians did not want to remember a proud, powerful queen. For many, with their own women penned and silenced at home, Helen encapsulated everything that a ‘bad woman’ could be. Self-sacrifice rather than self-fulfilment would be the act to earn an Athenian woman a good reputation.
For a 5th-century BC Greek audience, Helen could tot up an impressive list of depravities. She abandons her child, she sleeps with barbarians, she submits to carnal pleasure and she proves that, even once shackled by marriage, women still have the capacity to give men a run for their money. Euripides puts into the mouth of Clytemnestra a typical classical, male Greek judgement of Helen. Clytemnestra articulates why she murdered her husband Agamemnon, who had sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to please the gods and then returned ten years later with his concubine:
If he had killed her to avert the capture of our city or to benefit our house and save the other children, one for the sake of many, it would have been forgivable. But as things were, because Helen was a slut and her husband did not know how to control a treacherous wife, for those reasons he killed my girl.24
But in a sense Helen’s greatest crime is simpl
y her notoriety. Just over fifteen years before Euripides wrote The Trojan Women, Athenians would have heard their golden boy Pericles driving home a singularly repressive message. In his famous Funeral Speech of 431 BC he declares that the greatest kleos (fame or reputation) would be won by women who remained invisible: ‘Perhaps I should say a word or two on the duties of women to those among you who are now widowed. I can say all I have to say in a short word of advice … the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.’25 Xenophon adds his exhortations in his volume Household Management: ‘So it is seemly for a woman to remain at home and not be out of doors; but for a man to stay inside, instead of devoting himself to outdoor pursuits, is disgraceful.’26 The ideal 5th-century BC Athenian woman was not seen, not heard, not heard of. Given these prerequisites, Helen was not just loose, she was a travesty of woman-hood, an enemy to civilised man.
Helen’s resilience is therefore particularly remarkable given her crimes. Within three years of staging The Trojan Women, Euripides produces another play, Helen, and this time the central character is an innocent, the Helen described by Stesichorus who spends the duration of the Trojan War living blamelessly in Egypt. Whether it is because he is seduced by the idea of the woman or himself fears the wrath of Helen the immortal, or whether he is writing a comedy elaborating on a grand joke (what could be funnier than the idea that Helen is not to blame), it seems Euripides too is a victim of Helen’s charms.27
On occasion she is, literally, satirised, turning up as the subject of satyr plays, the rowdy, bawdy, comic works that rounded off a day of tragedies at one of the great theatre festivals. The complete texts of almost all the satyr plays are now lost (with the exception of Euripides’ Cyclops); they would probably have been played alongside tragedies such as Hecuba. Just imagine the crowd roaring along to these lines, thumping their seats, as a satyr quizzes Odysseus on his way home from Troy.
When you took that woman, did you all take turns and bang her? She liked variety in men the fickle bitch! Why, the sight of a man with embroidered pants and a golden chain so fluttered her, she left Menelaus, a fine little man. I wish there were no women in the world – except [some] for me.28
We also know of the name of one satyr play which seems to have revolved entirely around Helen. Called the ’O ’Eλέης Гαμóς Σατυριkóς ‘The Satyric Marriage of Helen’, it offered chortles and titillation aplenty, dealing with the timelessly romantic moment when Helen and Paris consummate their love affair on the island of Kranai.29 Scrappy fragments of four other comedies about Helen exist, written by the 4th-century BC playwright Alexis.30 Helen made the audiences of Athens laugh as well as cry.31
In Athens, just a year after the opening of Euripides’ play Helen, in 412 BC, (probably at the Theatre of Dionysus), we come across Helen’s other extant theatrical outing, in the premiere of Aristophanes’ comedy, Lysistrata. Aristophanes’ Helen is to be wondered at, not feared or damned. Here it is Helen’s spirituality and her special relationship with young virgins that are being lauded and broadcast. Helen is simply mentioned (as Leda’s daughter) right at the end of the play. Earlier on in the action, we have already been reminded what gorgeous creatures Spartan girls famously were. In one fabulous scene, a character called Lampito, whose breasts are being admired, describes how she goes to the gym to make her buttocks hard. The closing lines are playful, the atmosphere rapturous.
SPARTAN [singing as the couples dance]:
Step it, hey!
prance lightly, hey!
that we may hymn Sparta,
which delights in dances in honour of the gods
and in the stamp of feet,
and where beside the Eurotas
the maidens prance
like fillies, raising clouds
of dust with their feet,
and their hair bobs
like the hair of bacchants who sport and ply the thyrsus;
and they are led by Leda’s daughter,
the pure and comely chief of their chorus.32
And so the play finishes as the spirit of Helen is invoked – leading those gorgeous young Spartan girls ‘like fillies’ off the stage and on into men’s imaginations.
38
HELEN LOST AND HELEN FOUND
nisi Taenario placuisset Troica cunno Mentula, quod caneret, non habuisset opus.
If Trojan cock had not brought Spartan cunt such fun, This Homer fellow’s book could not have been begun
PRIAPEA: ‘Poems for a Phallic God’1
EARLY IN THE 19TH CENTURY AD a rather over-enthusiastic librarian called Angelo Mai set to work on a rare, early manuscript of Homer. This precious document, created in the 5th century AD and known as the Ambrosian Iliad or the Milan Homer – kept in the Ambrosian library in Milan for two hundred years – had been butchered and botched. Pieces of paper were stuck to the back of the miniature illustrations. Mai realised there were lines of Homer underneath the paper-sheets, and was keen to get to them; perhaps here lay secrets, a version of the Iliad that had been lost for centuries.2
So Mai dissolved the glue that stuck the paper to the manuscript and used reagent chemicals to try to bring the words out of the vellum. One portion that he treated vigorously included, on the reverse side, a picture of Helen (dressed as though in purdah, with an aubergine-coloured apron and matching hem to her full skirts) and Paris, sitting, companionably, next to each other. There was a slight danger that the chemicals might soak through and the images be damaged in the process, but Mai went ahead.
A fine facsimile of this illustration is now housed in the Rare Books Room of the University of Cambridge Library. This is one of the most beautiful, vigorous representations of the Troy story from the Byzantine Empire. Resting on the salmon-pink cushions provided by the library, warriors race across petrol-green landscapes, hemmed in only by the tangerine frames of the manuscript around them, a colour scheme still vivid after 1,500 years.
But the chemicals that Mai used did indeed destroy as well as preserve; and it is the image of Helen that is particularly soiled. She still sits demurely, Paris by her side, but her name is barely legible. Her face, touched too often and for too long, has become an ugly, shady blur.
Between 13 and 15 April 1204 AD, a sailor travelling up the Bosphorus, looking towards Constantinople, would have seen a sky red with fire. A joint force of Frankish and Venetian crusaders was running amok in the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Against the Pope’s wishes, the forces of the Fourth Crusade had taken this rich Christian city. Hanging over the invaders was the threat of excommunication: but so too was the lure of silver and spoil.
In the centre of the city of Constantinople was the Hippodrome. Able to accommodate up to 100,000 spectators this was the sporting and social hub of the Byzantine Empire. Work on the Hippodrome may have begun as early as the 2nd century AD; it was certainly completed by the 4th century AD. By 1204 the race-track doubled up as a forum for grand celebrations, civic, political and religious. It hosts less lofty events now: the workers of Istanbul eat their sandwiches here at lunchtime, a rusting fun-fair sits unused under its tarpaulin covers, letter writers tap out missives for the illiterate of the city.
In its day the site boasted the finest collection of antiquities anywhere in the world. Here were the great and the good of Greece and Rome, cast in bronze and carved in stone: Heracles, Zeus, Romulus and Remus; Paris handing Aphrodite the Golden Apple; the Emperor Augustus. Here too was Helen. And for three apocalyptic days in 1204, it was here in the Hippodrome that the crusaders’ fires burnt the fiercest.
There were cogent reasons for the desecration. The majority of the statues were pagan icons or personalities. Crusaders still thought these metal and stone shells contained spirits and demons. The Venetians and the Franks had already earned the disapproval of the Pope and his Church; they did not want to risk taking on the old gods as well. And of course all that molten bronze was very, very useful. The Hippodrome
was a mine without the effort of digging. Tonnes of statuary and metal decoration were hacked down, smelted and then re-cast as coin. The only artworks to survive and be imported intact to Venice were four bronze horses – now world-famous – that galloped across the emperor’s box. Replicas of the horses still stand on the Basilica di San Marco today.3
But Helen was not so lucky: when the mob came to her, things got personal. An eyewitness (who clearly adored this metal vision, ranged as she was with her companions along the spine of the race-course), the Byzantine imperial secretary, Nicetas Choniates, described the scene:
What of the white-armed Helen, beautiful-ankled, and long-necked Helen, who mustered the entire host of the Hellenes and overthrew Troy, whence she sailed to the Nile and, after a long absence, returned to the abodes of the Lakonians? Was she able to placate the implacable? Was she able to soften those men whose hearts were made of iron? On the contrary! She who had enslaved every onlooker with her beauty was wholly unable to achieve this, even though she was apparelled ornately; though fashioned of bronze, she appeared as fresh as the morning dew, anointed with the moistness of erotic love on her garment, veil, diadem and braid of hair. Her vesture was finer than spider webs, and the veil was cunningly wrought in its place; the diadem of gold and precious stones which bound the forehead was radiant, and the braid of hair that extended down to her knees, flowing down and blowing in the breeze, was bound tightly in the back with a hair-band. The lips were like flower cups, slightly parted as though she were about to speak; the graceful smile, at once greeting the spectator, filled him with delight; her flashing eyes, her arched eyebrows, and the shapeliness of the rest of her body were such that they cannot be described in words and depicted for future generations. O Helen, Tyndareus’ daughter, the very essence of loveliness, offshoot of Erotes, ward of Aphrodite, nature’s most perfect gift, contested prize of Trojans and Hellenes, where is your drug granted you by Thon’s wife which banishes pain and sorrow and brings forgetfulness of every ill? Where are your irresistible love charms? Why did you not make use of these now as you did long ago? But I suspect that the Fates had foreordained that you should succumb to the flame’s fervour so that your image should no longer enflame spectators with sexual passions.4
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