Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Helen had been there at the birth of the Greek democratic ideal, and now she found herself at the centre of the Roman Empire’s foundation myth. Because the Troy story gave the West its family tree, something rather interesting happens to Homer through the Fall of Rome and the medieval period. Many writers turn their backs on the great bard. While Virgil’s version of Troy, the Aeneid, keeps its popularity, with the spread of Roman propaganda and then Christianity, the Iliad and the Odyssey lose their canonic status.

  Homer, a mere poet, is viewed in a number of quarters as an inappropriate source for moral discourse and a dubious witness to politically relevant events. Suddenly he is not someone to be relied on; he is an ‘artiste’ who shrouds the truth in falsehoods.4 Homer was merely inspired by the Muse; much more could be discovered about Troy via an ‘autopsy’, a scientific analysis of the facts, of hard evidence and of the statements of interviewees. This became a popular standpoint.5 We even have a word for this anti-Homeric stance – ‘Homerepanorthosis’, the correction of Homer.6

  And there are two unlikely characters, Dictys and Dares, who championed their own ‘real’ alternatives to Homer. They are a curious pair; the former wrote around the 2nd century AD, the latter in the 6th century AD, from the Greek and Trojan points of view respectively.7 Throughout antiquity and the medieval period, there was never any doubt that the Trojan conflict took place. Remember that for Isidore of Seville, Helen’s rape was a seminal moment in world history. Dictys and Dares set themselves up as that fabulously valuable resource, on-the-ground war-reporters at an epoch-making military engagement – and the medieval world loved them for it.

  Of course, since they were writing at least one and a half thousand years after the event, these men could not have been there at the time, but they both boldly claimed that they were, and Dictys even goes so far as to create his own back-story to prove how ‘real’ he is, casting himself as a soldier in the retinue of the Cretan king, Idomeneus, whom Homer details in the Iliad as coming to Troy with eighty black ships.8

  Dictys’ Prologue, claiming to be God’s truth, is a wonderful exercise in imagination. It describes Dictys as a contemporary of the great heroes, Achilles, Ajax and Hector, who ensures that the sole copy of his eyewitness account is buried with him in a grave near Knossos. After a massive earthquake in AD 66 the grave splits open and local shepherds, spotting the furled pieces of papyri, rescue the manuscript. Eventually the precious document ends up in the hands of the Emperor Nero himself, who insists that it is translated from ancient Phoenician into Greek. An impressive piece of self-promotion.

  The account that follows is rather stodgy – as befits Dictys’ purpose. After all, he was selling his story as a verbatim report rather than a poetic tale.9 Helen is a quiet little thing here. Menelaus seems more affected by the desertion of his female relatives Aethra and Clymene (two of Helen’s attendants) than he does by the loss of his wife. Paris (called Alexander in this version), a pernicious Eastern barbarian, is as covetous of Helen’s treasure as he is of Helen, ‘driven astray by greed for booty and lust’.10 When the Trojans revolt and refuse to harbour Helen, Paris masterminds a wholesale slaughter of the Trojan population. The killing stops only when Antenor (a Trojan elder and counsellor of King Priam) intervenes.

  Menelaus is not won back by the sight of Helen’s breasts, as he is in the more licentious earlier Greek versions, but instead negotiates for her return through the intercession of Odysseus. Helen and Menelaus’ journey home is emotionless, the prose reading as a terse and denuded guidebook. If Dictys’ version were the sole surviving chronicle of Helen’s life, it is more than likely that this uninspiring, incidental creature would have been long forgotten.

  Dares, on the other hand, enjoys the opportunity to explore the love interest of the tale. Dares probably produced his Trojan version in the 6th century AD as a counter to Dictys’ Hellenophile construction. In the Dares retelling of the story Helen and Paris catch a glimpse of each other for the first time while Helen is at the sea-port of Helaea worshipping in the temple of Diana and Apollo. The pair spent some time just staring, ‘struck by each other’s beauty’.11 Helen leaves with Paris and, after a brief moment of hesitation on the island of Tenedos, enthusiastically takes up court in Troy.

  Dares promotes his ‘eyewitness’ credentials by attempting to blind the reader with an impressive quotient of statistics. Here we hear that the war lasted for ten years, six months and twelve days. He tells us there were 866,000 Greek casualties and 676,000 Trojan dead. There is an incidental point of interest in Dares’ account: Helen is seized tit for tat, as part of an ongoing series of affronts and insults traded between the House of Priam and the Greeks. Dares’ version approximates to the truth of the Bronze Age where women would be used for barter and as diplomatic trading chips. There is a slim chance that Dares had in fact picked up on a bardic or oral memory that preserved Late Bronze Age accounts of the bride market of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC.

  What is significant is that Dares is sufficiently dismissive of Helen to adumbrate her fine features. This is not a Helen who has the face of a goddess – wonderful, terrible, unspeakable. This Helen is a mortal beauty, simply. Dares’ Helen would not make anyone tingle with fear. She is said to be like her brothers, ‘blond haired, large eyed, fair complexioned, and well built … She was beautiful, ingenuous, and charming. Her legs were the best; her mouth the cutest. There was a beauty-mark between her eyebrows.’ 12

  The character of Helen might wax and wane through antiquity, but she never vanishes. Anno Domini she is as tenacious as ever. The Judaic tradition had already established Eve as the primordial transgressive female, so how would a faithless Queen of Sparta be dealt with in an increasingly Christianised world?

  41

  HELEN OF TROY AND THE BAD SAMARITAN

  Whose love is given over-well

  Shall look on Helen’s face in hell,

  Whilst those whose love is thin and wise

  May view John Knox in paradise.

  DOROTHY PARKER1 1936

  AS THE WRITER DOROTHY PARKER pointed out with characteristic wit, in mainstream Christian theology, Helen is clearly not the sort of woman who should go to heaven. She belongs in hell.

  But had you travelled on the stony road from Mount Carmel to Jerusalem between Christ’s crucifixion and the 4th century AD, you would have encountered a Helen, in the heartlands of the Christian faith.

  In the summers of 1931 and 1932, a team of Anglo-American excavators working in Samaria-Sebaste discovered, in a patchwork of fields and fruit orchards, a deserted sanctuary. Scattered around the perimeter of the sanctuary were the broken remains of a statue which had been smashed into a number of pieces. The sorry sculpture had once been a lovely woman. Draped in a chiton and a himation (a looped layer of clothing hung over the left shoulder and under the right) she cut a distinguished figure. On her head was a stephane (a wreathe or a crown) and a delicate veil. In her left hand she carried a pomegranate and an ear of wheat or barley, in her right a huge torch which blazed above her head and reached right down to the ground. She was labelled simply Kore – ‘girl’.

  Traces of paint on the stonework demonstrated that the stone figure had once been carefully decorated. On the wreath were hints of green. Red tinges still visible on the flame of the torch and on the veil could well have been the base for gilding. At some point, the girl’s clothes too had been richly coloured. The carved letters of the inscription she stood above had been freshly touched up.2

  But someone had found this handsome creature deeply offensive. In fury or fear they had brutally violated her. The leader of the excavations, Professor J.W. Crowfoot, found her head and part of the torch in a cistern, hard up against the enclosure wall. The rest of the torch and her right hand were missing. The breaks in the stone were clean and violent. Scattered around the temple were fifty or so candlestick lamps – evidence of some kind of abandoned cultic activity.

  Clearly this girl was t
hought to be potent – at least quasi-divine. Grain is a symbol of fertility, and pomegranates of death and sex. Although Helen’s association with these powerful indices would not be surprising, any number of divinities could lay claim to the same attributes. The pomegranate and grain alone are insufficient diagnostics but the torch is a clue that this figure might have some connection with the Spartan queen. At this point in time, thanks partly to Virgil’s striking description in the Aeneid where Helen stands on the towers of Troy, welcoming the Greeks into the city with an enormous lit firebrand, the torch had become one of Helen’s hallmarks.3 It was something else, however, which encouraged experts to re-label the kore ‘Eleni ’. The discovery, elsewhere at the site, of sections of a relief made of hard, local limestone, showing two curiously shaped caps, make the identification of the statue with Helen almost certain.

  Here, it seems, represented by their trademark headgear, were the Dioscuri, Helen’s brothers, Castor and Pollux, the twins who, in Greek legend, had rescued Helen as a young girl from the clutches of Theseus. On their crowns were their characteristic emblems, ‘omphalos-like cones wreathed with olive leaves and surmounted with six-pointed stars’.4 There are stone carvings of similar design from Sparta, and Rome too, where Helen is also flanked by her brothers; a trio of heavenly beings.

  What Professor Crowfoot and his team had found in Palestine was a religious precinct dating from, at the very latest, the 2nd century AD and vehemently destroyed around the middle of the 4th century: the epoch of some of the fiercest battles between Christians and pagans. A precinct devoted to mystical, possibly astrological worship. And there at the middle, standing well over a metre tall, was a gaudy, celestial Helen.

  How do you explain a cult of Helen here in the Middle East? A cult vigorously worshipping a woman at the exact time the Christian Church was struggling to establish itself? To get closer to the answer we have to move from the archaeological evidence to written sources. Cue the curious tale of Helen, and a man who has been affectionately labelled the Bad Samaritan.5

  The recorded story starts with Simon Magus, a charismatic, maverick figure who, we are told, lived in Samaria some time around AD 35. Famous for his sorcery and tricks (hence the name Magus, ‘magician’), he seems to have enjoyed quite some influence in the busy, cosmopolitan town; he ‘amazed the people of Samaria’, say the Acts of the Apostles 8:9–12. 6 Although Samaria’s inhabitants were considered impure by the Jews, this was an oasis for traders, and the perfect place for hucksters, opportunists and showmen to congregate. The Acts tell us that one day, fleeing persecution in Jerusalem, Philip, one of the original evangelists, began to perform miracles in one of the towns of the region, quickly attracting a crowd and a number of converts.

  Simon Magus was curious; he needed to find out more about this rival magic-man. The local sorcerer went to watch Philip’s miracles, and like many other Samaritans, he converted, although Simon’s later attempt to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit from Peter and John (giving rise to the phrase an ‘act of simony’) suggests he was more interested in the intrinsic conjuring power of Christianity than in any central spiritual or theological message.7

  Simon Magus’ interpretation of the gospel was liberal. We are told that he embraced the idea that he had been physically imbued with the power of God. He declared he was in fact God in human form – the very incarnation of the ‘Dunamis’, the power of the godhead. Forming his own sect, based on these beliefs, Simon Magus would be branded the Christian Church’s first heretic. Up until the 6th century AD, the Magus (and his followers the Simonians) is firmly inscribed in the heresiological lists – becoming one of history’s most celebrated heretics. And bizarrely, Helen appears to have been at the centre of his idiosyncratic, libertine faith.

  The bulk of Simon Magus’ story was written down by the disapproving orthodox Christian authors, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (a Bishop of Lyons) in the 2nd century AD and then – possibly – by Hippolytus of Rome, a disciple of Irenaeus in the 3rd century AD. 8 A guiding principle of these tracts was to identify and discredit heretics, so we have to take some of the highly coloured details they contain with a pinch of salt. Justin, for example, accuses the Simonians of eating ‘meals of human flesh’.

  It is in Justin that we first get an explicit reference to a woman called Helen or Helene9 involved in the Magus’ sect. The Simonian Helen is a hybrid creature – a flesh-and-blood woman with extraordinary sexual power, a woman who, it was claimed, was a reincarnation of the Greek Helen of Troy. Although she also has a metaphysical presence, this Helene is identified as a real woman – a prostitute who lived in Tyre. Hippolytus is particularly sceptical of Magus’ motives in ‘rescuing’ Helene from Tyre and initiating her into his sect: ‘the rogue having fallen in love with the hussy, the so-called Helene, and having bought her, enjoyed her [carnally] …’10

  The Magus and Helene (if indeed she existed) seem to have been a couple of those magnetic characters to whom men and women gravitated, like travellers to an oasis. Some scholars argue that high-born women from the Greek ‘courtesan’ class were prominent members of the crowd that gathered in ever larger numbers around the pair.11 The Simonian religious splinter group quickly established a footing in the region and then expanded throughout the Roman Empire. Come the 2nd century AD, the Magus and Helene were still actively being worshipped at Rome itself.12

  Simon Magus’ teachings appeared to have advocated sex as a path to salvation. According to Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies, Simon endorsed ideals of free love, and his followers had a proclivity to drug abuse and sexual excess. They used aphrodisiacs and love charms, they summoned up demons and they tampered with men’s dreams. Although these accusations come from a hostile source, it is still credible that the incipient priority of the cult was simply Simon’s sexual fulfilment and it is certain that this was a sect that both embraced women, and promoted the idea of the charismatic, potent female.

  Simon’s sect became part of a movement known as the Gnostics – so-called because its followers were thought to have privileged access to divine gnosis, ‘knowledge’, to understand fully the truth about God. We are told by the Christian Fathers that central to their belief was the idea that in the universe there existed an absolute wisdom, and that this wisdom had female form.13 Because our main sources for Simon are post-dated, this radical interpretation of Christian belief could be little more than a slur on the part of the Christian Fathers, a sensational way of bringing the Simonians into disrepute. The evidence is certainly open to interpretation. But in 1945, fragments of Gnostic texts, written in Coptic, were found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. The papyrus sheets had been bound in leather and packed into a red earthenware jar – discovered by chance by farmers at the foot of the Gebel el Tarif mountain. Once translated it was clear that these texts did indeed place a female life-force at the heart of the Gnostic doctrine:

  the image of the invisible, the virginal perfect spirit, the aeon of the glory, Barbelo, the glory who was perfected through the aeons of glory by the revelation of the glory of the virginal spirit … This is the first thought of his image. She became the mother of the All, for she existed before them all …’

  There are echoes of these ideas in the thinking attributed to Simon Magus. He, too, seemed enamoured of this female life-force, the ‘sacred feminine’. Perhaps there is indeed more to his story than the smears of the Christian Fathers. But whether his gyno-centric theology – with Helene commanding a pivotal role – was real or fashioned by his critics, is almost immaterial. The significant thing is that three centuries or so into the evolution of Christianity, the Magus and his prominent female companion called Helene were believable as manifestations of cultic power. A pagan Helen finds herself discussed in worried tones by the Christian Fathers. Helen of Troy was still sufficiently significant to be feared in her reincarnation as Helene of Samaria and whether or not her worship was promoted in concert with the Simonian sect, a Helen certainly ends up surveying her own shrine in Pales
tine.

  If you pick and mix the writings of the Christian Fathers with contemporary Jewish and Samaritan accounts, it is possible to concoct an outline of the – rather complicated – Simonian credo and of Helen’s place within it. It runs as follows. As a godhead himself, Simon descended to earth to rescue his Ennoia – his first concept, his first thought – a thought and primal life-force that was female. The female thought, the Ennoia (sometimes called the Epinoia), was a simple but ambitious one – the creation of the angelic host. But just as this Ennoia had finished her angelic opus, the angels them-selves, jealous of this prism of pure female perfection, rebelled and imprisoned the Ennoia on earth in a sequence of female forms. The Ennoia was then reincarnated as (among others) Helen of Troy – a female spirit, the very cognition of God himself, trapped inside an exquisite female body. This female spirit in the form of Helen of Troy is taken and abused by many men, polluted by many lovers.

  Over a thousand years later, the Ennoia reappears on earth as a woman called Helene, a Phoenician slave and prostitute from Tyre. This is the Helene who appears in the historical records as the Magus’ lover.14

  The Magus seems to have taken it upon himself to release the Ennoia from her centuries of captivity, and thus bring about the salvation of mankind. He effected this philanthropic design by recognising the Ennoia in Helene (of Tyre), where others just saw a base whore. We are told by some sources15 that Simon Magus first caught sight of Helene as she held a torch one night on a rooftop in Tyre.16 A rooftop is a euphemism for a brothel (the Greek word tegos can be used for both), and it may just be that in this account we are getting a mangle of literary and social references (with a sprinkling of fantasy) rather than historical fact. In Book 3 of the Iliad, Helen, the Spartan queen, too had stood on a high perimeter wall to identify the heroes of Greece. Another possibility is that the character of Helene was invented by Simon’s followers in Rome as late as the 2nd century AD. But again, the question of whether Helene was real or not, is in one sense sophistic, subordinate to a broader question. What is significant to this enquiry is that the Magus’ consort should be identified so closely and credibly with the figure of Helen, that her name still carried weight.