Although Nicetas himself thought the destruction of the statue was motivated purely by material gain – to appropriate more bronze – the rumours ran through Christendom that this Helen had been destroyed by the Venetians to avenge their Trojan ancestors. Just as Troy had been ‘laid waste by the firebrand because of [Helen’s] scandalous amours’,5 so the Venetians had smashed and pulled Helen apart, fired up by vengeance and greed.
So today the Hippodrome is devoid of colossal statues. Only a couple of obelisks remain, stripped of their gilded bronze skins – stumps where once there were towering artworks. Helen used to be here; today she is a ghost.
And throughout history this is what Helen has become, a woman who has inspired such lust and such loathing she is forced into being a will-o’-the-wisp – always changing her form, here today, gone tomorrow. She is Protean and because of that she is perfect. She can become whatever the men around her want her to be; whether, like the ill-fated statue in the Hippodrome, a gleaming reminder of the glory of female sexuality, or, following the desecration of 1204, an amputated, broken memento of man’s talent for acts of greed and execration.
Helen’s journey through history has been as tempestuous as her journey from Sparta to Troy and back again. She has been harried and destroyed in a multitude of ways. When she endures, she often does so by the skin of her teeth. The Queen of Sparta might have survived the historical battles of the Bronze Age, but there were new struggles to come. Great epics such as the Cypria – similar in size and scope to the Iliad and the Odyssey – telling of her early life and love affair with Paris were lost in the Medieval Dark Ages. Tragic and satirical plays that dealt with Helen, and Helen alone, were destroyed by the great fire in the library at Alexandria in Egypt. Painted vases illustrating lesser known episodes of her life were smashed or still lie buried underground. Cult offerings left to her at springs have been washed away by the waters. She leads us a merry dance. The path from the past to the present can be a rocky one. But during her tempestuous journey through time, Helen has had an important ally in the form of Homer: an artist whose work was itself so iconic that, thanks to its preservation and parody, an inky Helen has fluttered on fragments of papyrus and parchment out of antiquity and into the modern world.
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HELEN, HOMER AND THE CHANCES OF SURVIVAL
Homer on parchment pages!
The Iliad and all the adventures
Of Ulysses, foe of Priam’s kingdom!
All locked within a piece of skin
Folded into several little sheets!
Martial, Epigram 14 (c. AD 40–103)1
IN AN UNASSUMING CASE in the British Museum there is a small piece of plank designed to hang on a wall.2 It dates from the Roman occupation of Egypt and was probably intended for display in a bar. With its metal handle and schoolboy scrawl, it looks for all the world like a swinging, Wild West saloon sign, or one of those Victorian homily boards: ‘There’s no place like home’ or ‘God bless this house’. In fact the words written across the uneven wooden surface are Homer’s Iliad 1.468–73 in which the bard celebrates the joys of drinking. The plank displaying Homer’s lines is a brave traveller from antiquity, now rather beaten up and splintered; nine parts driftwood, one part treasure. This rough sign is testimony to the fact that Homer pervaded antiquity, and that for the thousands of Roman citizens who walked, and drank, underneath it the poet’s words were a familiar rubric. Helen’s biographer was a civilisation’s popular prophet.
The physical passage of Homer’s epics – and of most texts from classical antiquity through to the modern world – was perilous. Helen was one of the select host of characters who made this difficult journey. Many great works of literature, many histories and many inhabitants of the classical past were lost on the way. It was an expedition littered with obstacles, and marked by character-changing experiences. Those who survived often did so in idiosyncratic circumstances.
On 21 February 1888, William Flinders Petrie, a British Egyptologist, was excavating at the cemetery of Hawara, in Fayum, Egypt. He found the mummy of a woman from the 2nd century AD. Attached to her skull there were still two thin plaits of her jet black hair, and underneath her head a scroll of papyrus. The outer layer of papyrus was already damaged but, carefully unfurling it, Petrie could make out some script firmly inked on the inside.3
As the layers got deeper the script became clearer – until it was apparent that here there were large gobbets of books 1 and 2 of the Iliad. Now the fragments of the papyrus scroll are stored between plates of glass within the Bodleian Library in Oxford.4 A number of the pieces of papyrus have, through time, become raw and spidery. In the body of the manuscript itself and around the edges, fronds of the papyrus reed are clearly visible. Given the volatility of the organic writing surface, the Greek characters – formed in carbon-based ink – are unfeasibly neat. Across the tobacco-yellow papyrus Homer’s words appear as a regular, confident stream.
It is perhaps significant that that nameless Egyptian woman from Hawara should have chosen Book 2 of the Iliad to cushion her journey into the afterlife. Helen first appears in Book 2 and on one, much damaged section of papyrus it is still possible to make out a sliver of her name – three little letters left at the end of ‘ELENES ’: … NES. The Hawara Homer is one of the earliest and most complete surviving copies of any of the books of the Iliad. With those three letters, Helen enters the written record.
Now the Hawara Homer is treated with absolute reverence. If you go to visit it in Oxford, your bags are locked away by security guards on the ground floor, and you bring your pencil and your notepaper in a clear plastic folder and then wait in the enveloping, 15th-century beauty of Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room while the librarian takes different keys out of a series of boxes and drawers, each to unlock another container, the last key eventually unlocking the cupboards that contain the papyri sheets.
On other rare manuscripts in the Duke Humfrey’s, Helen leads a medieval hunt, or, as a plump Germanic maiden, is plucked by Paris from a temple in the German countryside.5 Before careful collectors and librarians were able to preserve these unique pieces, worms had done their best to destroy them. In one valuable volume, Helen sits, quietly, deep in the pages of vellum, but even hidden here, tenacious annelida (the original bookworms) have managed to bore their way through to the Spartan queen.
For two thousand years the survival of Homer’s Helen depended entirely on individuals, each hand-copying Homer’s words. The Iliad itself was not printed until 1488, in Florence, when it was produced in a kind of facsimile version, one that strove to replicate handwriting. The Iliad was first translated into English (from French rather than Greek or Latin) by Arthur Hall in 1581. Of course by now the colossally influential technology of printing had arrived. Close on six thousand different printed texts were to follow. High-profile translators include Thomas Hobbes, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gladstone and T.E. Lawrence. Pope’s translation (1688–1704) has been published in more editions than any other. Over the years Homer has also been translated into an abundance of languages including Turkish (1887), Serbo-Croat (1915), Yiddish (1924), Farsi (1925), Esperanto (1930), Twi (1957), Basque (1985), Azerbaijani (1986) and Luxembourgish (1995).6
When Homer was first written down, ‘books’ – such as the Hawara Homer – took the form of a papyrus scroll.7 Papyrus is the name of a particular kind of reed that grows profusely in the Nile Delta. If you pick up a piece of modern papyrus and hold it up to the light, you can clearly see how it is made – a criss-cross of fibrous strips, firmly pressed together.8
Throughout antiquity there were various recipes for ink (oak gall mixed with diluted egg-white is one, lamp-black in water is another). The pen was a reed sharpened to a point, the end split up the middle. The skill of the scribes who used these materials is admirable. Despite the unpredictable and uneven surface of a piece of papyrus, and the hideous propensity that reeds and quills have of splitting and spraying the text with blobs of ink as they do so, a num
ber of the surviving scrolls from the ancient world show line after line of regular, perfect Greek or Latin script. The majority of the work was done in the great libraries of antiquity. Writing was just on one side, the papyrus was coiled up and then unwound, column by column, left to right, as it was read. Since each papyrus had to be rolled up again as the reader went through the text, in readiness for the next visitor, those libraries would have been filled with a rhythmic scratch and rustle of furling, recycled reeds.
We know that Helen was golden-haired, that she made men bristle with fear, or that she loved her child Hermione, thanks to those careful scribes and calligraphers, copying and transcribing and re-copying the works of Greek and Roman authors – in particular of Homer. Papyri fragments bear witness to Homer’s fundamental influence. To date 1,550 Homeric fragments on papyrus have been found (and the figure rises as the years go on). No other author from antiquity comes close.
The well-placed library at Alexandria did most of all to preserve Helen’s name. The quayside here is still a vivacious place. Holding their own against the tankers, fishing and pleasure craft bob up and down, their hulls wildly decorated, their sails gaudy with streamers and flags. Animated visitors arrive from across the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. From all accounts, the ancient city had an equal brilliance. Alexandria’s famous light-house, which reflected the sun’s rays by day and naked flame by night, beckoned in freights of both learning and the learned. Alexandria’s founder – Alexander the Great – would have approved of Homer’s cult status; for him the Iliad and the Odyssey were totemic handbooks. On crossing into Asia Minor in 334 BC, Alexander went on a pilgrimage to visit Troy and it was said that this monumentally ambitious, glittering, grabbing young man slept with a dagger and a copy of the Iliad under his pillow; one wonders which he found more inspirational.9 During his imperialist and expansionist campaigns, Alexander promoted himself as a champion of the Greeks – he was fighting for them in retribution for the 5th-century BC Persian Wars, just as the Persian leader Xerxes claimed the Persian Wars had been a retribution for Troy.
Founded by Ptolemy I at the end of the 4th century BC, and then augmented by his son Ptolemy II, the library at Alexandria had a voracious appetite for ancient texts. The older the manuscripts, the higher the price they commanded. The logic was simple. The fewer copyists’ hands a manuscript had passed through, it was argued, the more likely it was to be the ‘authentic’ version. Often manuscripts were seized from ships docking at Alexandria – the originals ended up in the libraries while duplicates were returned to their owners. The Library and the Museum at Alexandria ensured the survival of much literary material featuring the Spartan Queen through into the modern world.10
The papyri at Alexandria were stored alphabetically (for the first time in the world) on shelves in vast rolls – probably sitting in rooms behind the colonnades where scholars and readers would pore over selections of ancient works.11 Many rolls were labelled with little tabs, giving the name and ethnic derivation of the author. If the librarians had not been so methodical, we could easily have lost track of the character of Helen.
There were a vast number of papyri rolls here, over 500,000 altogether in the city – some duplicates, many variant versions of the same text; parochial Iliads and Odysseys that originated from all the corners of the ancient world, from Babylon, Macedonia and Egypt. The scholars and literary enthusiasts who worked here had a mammoth task on hand – to generate standardised versions of the texts in the collection.
Our problem in the search for the primordial Helen is that the Homer we read today has been much tinkered with. Many scribes and copyists and librarians brought their own viewpoints to the ancient texts. Zenodotus, the first director of the library in the Museum in Alexandria in 284 BC, censored four lines from Iliad 3 in which the goddess Aphrodite fetched a stool for Helen,12 because he thought it unseemly for a divinity to act in such a subservient way. In fact for us, this particular reference – in its original form – gives a clue to the intimacy of Helen’s relationship with Aphrodite, and to Helen’s elevated, privileged status in the eyes of the gods. Zenodotus was wrong to meddle.
Other authors were subject to similar excisions. In the British Museum there is a 15th-century manuscript of the Aeneid. 13 Scribbled into the margin are lines 567 to 588 of Book 2 – a vivid vignette featuring Helen. Aeneas has chased the Spartan queen through Troy and, as she cowers in the Temple of Vesta, he stands with his sword aloft – and stops just short of killing her. We know of this segment from a single source, quoted in a commentary on Virgil by Servius in the 4th century AD. Servius claims the lines were originally cut out by Virgil’s editors, Varius and Tucca. The censors had chosen to act because ‘turpe est viro forti contra feminam irasci’ – ‘it is shameful for a brave man to rage against a woman’. If we did not have that little commentary entry, the lines would have been lost and the only Helen we would have known from the Aeneid would have been an evil murderess, her name choked out through the trailing flesh and sinew that passed for the mouth of the mutilated corpse of Deiphobus in Hades: ‘These are reminders of Helen.’14
It was in the 2nd century AD that technology dictated the fate of much literature – deciding which classical texts should survive and which should fall by the wayside – to be lost for ever. Papyrus rolls started to go out of fashion, to be replaced by the codex – the forerunner of our book. Parchment or vellum (treated animal-skin) had been used sporadically in the ancient world, but now parchment leaves, bound together by a thong or a clasp, were recognised as being easier to read and easier to store.15 Because there was a demand for texts in this compact, new-fangled format, a large number of works were transferred from papyrus to codex. During the transfer many papyri rolls were ditched; we shall never know what was written on them, never know what thoughts and poetry and histories, what Helens, have been lost.
Once Helen had survived the white-water ride through the classical period, there was also the bottleneck of the medieval Dark Ages to deal with, when the transmission of antiquity became the responsibility of a relatively tiny number of people. Much in classical writing was inimical to Christian thought, but fortunately for us some texts (Euripides, for example) were still considered an essential teaching aid for schools and universities – a select corpus was therefore preserved. It is thought that around nine or ten plays by Euripides were ‘on the syllabus’. The play Helen does not appear to have been one of these. But thankfully a single manuscript with nine other plays of Euripides grouped alphabetically E to K, survived – and Eleni starting with an epsilon (our E) was one.16 A Byzantine scholar Demetrius Triclinius came upon this unique, precious codex in the 14th century.
Many works were not so lucky. From the 6th century until the 10th century, in many countries the parchment that texts were written on came to be of more value than the texts themselves. Verse, philosophies, plays and political speeches were scraped or washed off parchment sheets to make way for other written documents thought to be more cogent or useful – a treatise on law, or a theological tract. In some cases we only know about a classical text thanks to a modern scholar’s painstaking, forensic research – carefully tracing the ghost of a script left behind another. These are palimpsests, like Helen, eradicated and redrawn time after time.
40
VEYN FABLES
veyn fables … hyde trouthe falsely under cloude, And the sothe of malys for to schroude
Lydgate, Troye Book, Prologue, 265–6
IN HIS TROYE BOOK, composed between 1412 and 1420, John Lydgate denies that Homer can tell the truth of Troy.1 Homer is Helen’s greatest advocate, but he does not have a monopoly on her. In the ancient world, there were in fact a number of ‘anti-Homer’ versions of Troy, and therefore different ways of understanding Helen. There were the variant myths and misplaced epics that still circulated and which we find hinted at on Greek vases or referred to by philosophers, politicians, poets and play-wrights. Stesichorus tells us that Helen spent the durati
on of the Trojan War in Egypt. Herodotus concurs – saying he has spoken to Egyptian priests who confirmed that this was the ‘real’ story of Helen.2 Thucydides casts a more analytical eye and pumps Peloponnesians for their local knowledge, to back up his theory that it was economic ambition and bullying by Agamemnon that sent the Greek ships scurrying across the water to Troy – not love of Helen but rather ‘in my opinion, fear played a greater part than loyalty’ he says.3
Some alternatives are more extreme. Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Discourse, written some time between AD 60 and 120 during his peripatetic life around the Roman Empire, states that Troy was, in fact, never sacked. The rationale seems audacious and unexpected until one takes into account that the Romans claimed to be direct descendants of the Trojans, thanks to Aeneas who started out in life as a Trojan shepherd (or prince depending on which version of the story one favours) and then escaped from Troy – begetting children whose descendants, Romulus and Remus, founded Rome. So, for the Romans, the ‘West’ was created by their ‘ancestors’ the Trojans. In Roman popular culture the beloved Trojans needed panegyrics, to be commemorated as triumphant military heroes.
Helen of Troy Page 33