Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Those who wrote about the Magus and his followers were keen to high-light the connection with Helen and the Trojan Wars.17 Authors such as Hippolytus vigorously took up the Trojan theme:

  she … ever dwelling in many women troubles the powers in the cosmos by her transcendent beauty. Wherefore also the Trojan War occurred on account of her. For Epinoia herself dwelt in Helen at that time, and all the authorities suing for her (favours), faction and war arose among the nations in which she appeared.18

  It is significant that Helen’s power, in these early years of the 1st millennium AD, is still thought to come from some kind of internal, divinely generated strength. She is no shallow lovely, but a blistering life-force. Helen’s beauty might have ‘confounded the powers’ in the world, but it was her central core, her life-spirit, her intelligence that was recognised as an agent of change. In Simonian sanctuaries, the Magus was frequently represented as Zeus, and Helene/Helen as Athena/Minerva. Although the Helene described by Christian authors sounds more like a friend of Aphrodite, her equation with Athena/Minerva by her worshippers paid compliment to her perceived wisdom.19

  The pagan Helen was given a series of impressive names: Sophia20 (Greek for wisdom), Pallas Athena, Minerva, Sapientia, the Mother of All, the principle of knowledge, and, most significantly perhaps, Sophia Prouneikos. A Sophia Prouneikos is a wisdom that is catalysed, agitated, by the pursuit of pleasure, stimulated by beauty. Helen’s flirtation with Christianity speaks of a time when the boundary between pagan and Christian, between the old gods and the new, was still blurred. Of a time when the world could imagine that a primordial wisdom, would, naturally, be female.21

  Early examples of Christian historical fiction – written between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, and extremely popular throughout the medieval period, such as the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, cast Simon as a pantomime villain, with Helen (described as Luna or Selene) an embodiment of perfect divine power. In these Simon discusses his passion for the Helen figure, but says he wants to enjoy her ‘honourably’. The frisson and cliffhangers (will he, won’t he violate her?) go part of the way to explaining the huge popularity of these texts. In these influential morality tales, we hear again that the Trojan War was fought because both sides recognised Helen for what she was – not a spirit but THE SPIRIT …

  And he says that he has brought down this Helena from the highest heavens to the world; being queen, as the all-bearing being, and wisdom, for whose sake, says he, the Greeks and barbarians fought, having before their eyes but an image of truth; for she, who really is the truth, was then with the chiefest god.22

  The Greeks might have thought of Helen as an instrument of the gods or as a demi-goddess: in her time as Christian heretic she becomes the godhead itself.23

  Simon Magus was considered by some to be a sorcerer, by some a devil, and by all Christian authorities a distinct threat. But whereas the Magus could be damned as a heretic outright, Helen is treated more gingerly – with a begrudging respect. Early Christian writers24 equated her (in her incarnations as Helene and as Helen of Troy, and as the Ennoia herself) not with the devil, but with the lost sheep of the Jesus parable.25

  Helen might have strayed, but no one, not even the most critical of Christian Fathers, can deny her allure. Like that lost sheep she is cherished even more for her adventuring spirit. She is cast in the light of a woman wronged, lost and found again, rather than condemned as a slutty sexual commodity. The Gnostic Helen is an abused innocent. Helen had come down to earth and suffered great torment on behalf of man. Her rapes had been an act of sacrifice. By redeeming Helene (both the prostitute and the reincarnated Helen of Troy) Simon Magus was saving humankind. While the characters from the old world are kept in play, the echoes of orthodox Christianity come to the fore.

  Think back to that broken pagan statue in Samaria-Sebaste. A clothed, rainbow-coloured mystical creature. A woman who bore more resemblance to strong, wise Athena than to naked, carnal Aphrodite. As was suggested by one of the first scholarly visitors to the newly excavated site, perhaps the cult of Helen had come first.26 The Magus and his followers did not promote Helen as a novel addition to their sect; instead, she nurtured them. If a pagan Helen was being honoured here, as she was in other shrines across the Eastern Mediterranean, it is quite possible that Simon was indeed a magus, one of the ‘magi’ or astrologers who worshipped in her sanctuary. A votary to a charismatic life-force. A votary who had his own ambitions, and who took a substitute human Helen (the prostitute named Helene) along with him for the ride.27

  Maybe the female divinity, this painted Helen, was a viable female alter-native to the male-dominated sects and movements, including Christianity, which jostled for position from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. No one is branded with heresy unless they threaten. The idea of a divine Helen – representing a form of spirituality pre-dating Christianity – would have put up quite a challenge to Jesus Christ’s insecure 4th-century AD followers. Certainly someone was sufficiently fearful to try to eradicate her, to smash her statue in Samaria with intemperate passion.

  From this time on, in the Christianised world, Helen wanders from the angelic to the diabolic. She is both the lost lamb and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Once the whore Helen had been worshipped in Samaria and lauded in Simonian theology as a female God, the Christian authorities would never be able to ignore her.28 She was suppressed, but not annihilated. And for one extraordinary female leader of Christendom of the 12th century AD, the fact that Helen straddled the angel/whore divide, the fact that Christianity could neither destroy nor categorise her,29 could not package her away neatly, offered a unique opportunity for political self-advancement.

  42

  ‘PERPULCHRA’ – MORE THAN BEAUTIFUL

  ‘And were you pleased?’ they asked of Helen in Hell. ‘Pleased?’ answered she, ‘when all Troy’s towers fell; And dead were Priam’s sons, and lost his throne? And such a war was fought as none had known; And even the gods took part; and all because of me alone! Pleased? I should say I was!’

  Lord Dunsany, ‘An Interview’1 1938

  AT NUMBER 111 CANNON STREET near the City of London, embedded in the offices of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, is a grimy, chipped shape, about the size of a small television set. This unpromising object is half-hidden by an iron grille, but by crouching on your knees and peering, it just about becomes clear that this is a stone. In fact this is the remains of the London Stone, a pre-historic lump of the limestone known as oolite.

  Originally part of a much larger block – possibly an altar – in popular imagination the London Stone had magical powers. Throughout the city’s history this was where oaths were sworn and laws passed; Elizabeth I’s sometime sorcerer, John Dee, was convinced the London Stone possessed supernatural properties; there are those today who delight in the notion that its miraculous survival during a German bombing raid in 1941 was not by chance alone – but thanks to the protection of the ley line over which it was laid. Although now it sits stubborn, dimpled and diminished, looking like a lump of sugar sucked by a giant’s child, the stone has been, in its time, the subject of great veneration.

  The London Stone fits into Helen’s story because it was brought to London three thousand years ago, by a Trojan. Or at least that was the version of events that circulated (in a variety of forms) in Britain, throughout the Medieval period. After the Sack of Troy, the city’s inhabitants and their descendants were scattered across the globe. The most famous refugee tale of course is that of Aeneas, the young man who left Troy carting his ancient father Anchises on his back, and then carried on to found Rome.2 As we have seen following this adventure, the Romans claimed not Greek but Trojan ancestry and as the centuries went on, European dynasties and cities invested in the same foundation fantasy.

  Britain was no exception. As early as the 9th century AD, we hear from the Historia Brittonum, attributed to a man called Nennius, that a certain Brutus (variously described as Aeneas’ brother and as his
great-grandson) came to an island (in later sources, called Albion) and ‘filled it with his people and lived here’. And, so the story goes, from henceforth the island was known as the land of Britto (hence Britons, British, Britain) after its well-travelled first immigrant.

  This, of course, is pure invention. However, archaeological evidence has revealed something rather curious. In the mud at the bottom of the Thames a black two-handled cup has been found. It is Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age and originated in Anatolia – modern-day Turkey.3 At the end of the tenth century BC, a trader, either European or Anatolian, brought exotica back from Paris’ homeland. It might not have been at first hand, but those scattered groups who lived around the islands and inlets of the Thames may possibly have been visited by eastern traders, they may have heard Trojan tales, they certainly held Anatolian artefacts in their hands.

  In the 12th century AD the Trojan foundation theme was picked up and amplified by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his best-selling Historia Regum Britanniae. Political successions were being challenged across Christendom – from Scotland to Syria. For rulers with imperial ambitions, lineage was suddenly vitally important, buttressing as it did individual claims to old territories and to new lands. After various Herculean struggles, Geoffrey tells us, Brutus founded Troia Nova, or Trinovantum, on the banks of the Thames (a sad slip; the real etymology in fact derives from the name of a tribe living in Essex, the Trinovantes). Now it was ‘official’, London, or the New Troy, and its rulers were the avatars of Priam, Paris, Hector, Hecuba and the rest. Helen, the limb-loosener and one-time Trojan princess, found herself, once again, entwined in international politics.

  For the rulers of the day, all this was very convenient. The Trojan story was a useful one to manipulate. It spoke to a medieval population of military and heroic prowess, of a direct connection to the almighty Roman civilisation and, most importantly, of impeccable dynastic credentials. If Aeneas was the fons et origo of the might that was Rome, and a ruler claimed descent from Aeneas, then he could argue he had an undisputed claim to European lands. If a dynasty could trace its territories and lineage back to the Kings of Troy, and from there back to God himself (Brutus is son of Silvius, is son of Ascanius, is son of Aeneas, is son of Priam, is son of Noah, is son of Adam),4 it would command the political respect and spiritual confidence of the people.5

  So, from the 11th century onwards, the Franks, the Normans and the English all vigorously perpetuated Trojan myth-histories. Chroniclers wrote ‘factual’ accounts of Trojan histories and genealogies that supported the Trojan spin. Poets composed new epic cycles based on the Troy story. These things were taken seriously; when Henry IV demanded fealty from the Scottish king he buttressed his legal claim by citing the genealogy of his family:6 a genealogy that he could ‘prove’ stretched back to Brut the Trojan. Henry and his lawyers claimed that the genealogies in ‘old chronicles’ were as powerful as the law.7 Henry VIII commands the first printed edition of The Troye Book in 1513 (when it becomes ‘The hystorye sege and dystruccyon of Troye’8) to help sway public opinion in his first French campaign. As late as 1714, a French scholar was jailed by the authorities because he dared to insist that the French people had German rather than Trojan ancestors.9

  No coincidence then that after her accession to the throne as Henry II’s Queen, the Historia Regnum Britanniae was turned into a French epic-poem, the Roman de Brut and was dedicated to that show-stopping medieval monarch, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  Eleanor ‘Duchess of Aquitaine and by the Wrath of God Queen of England’ was an extraordinary woman and a particularly wily magnate. The Trojan foundation stories were as useful to her as they were to any king. But Eleanor takes the Trojan connection one stage further. She had an almost impossible task ahead of her, to survive and rule in a man’s world. In her journey from young heiress to dowager queen, she develops a striking and idiosyncratic relationship with Helen; a relationship that I am convinced was an important part of her quest for temporal power and iconic status.

  The beating heart of the duchy of Aquitaine was the Ducal Hall in Poitiers. To get to it today one crosses a pleasingly typical French square, with ornate iron balconies and the smell of pain au chocolat in the air. The 12th-century hall was hidden in the 18th century by a neo-classical façade; the building still operates as the local Palais de Justice. In the past, to access the court, you would have taken your chances with Eleanor’s henchmen, but now the greatest hazard is the plate-glass door that slides rather too quickly from one side of the entrance to the other. Lawyers of the Palais de Justice still pop in and out of the arches that line the walls, to take a mobile phone call or share a cigarette with the local gendarmes.

  Even if the technology impedes a little, it is worth persevering, because inside, the hall is breathtaking. Straddling Romanesque and Gothic architecture with that peculiar hybrid, ‘Angevin design’, the Ducal Hall is a confident, clean, domineering place. The lines of the design are bold and simple, yet staring down at frequent intervals are the grotesque gargoyles and human heads so beloved of the medieval stone-mason. In its day the space would have been buzzing: subjects bringing petitions, advocates wrangling over the wording of charters, musicians strumming and courtiers jostling for favours. It was here that a new kind of Helen was delivered to the Angevin court, for here Eleanor and her husband Henry II would have sat to listen to Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s 30,000-line epic, the Roman de Troie.

  Written some time between 1165 and 1170, the Roman was a whirlwind of historical narrative, covert signals and overt emotion.

  Because the Roman implicitly gave the Angevin court a family tree that stretched back a thousand years or so before the time of Christ, it became a work of fundamental importance. One 13th-century verse translation of the Bible incorporates the Roman de Troie in the Book of Exodus.10 Benoît’s epic was continually copied and translated – it spawned many imitations. This grand, romantic, sympathetic poem was one of the key devices that kept the profile of Helen and the Trojan War high among the literate and aristocratic classes through the medieval period and beyond.

  What is unusual about the Roman is its surprisingly refined and respectful portrayal of Helen. This Helen is a fine lady, she is no whore. There is a good reason for the delicacy. The relationship between Helen and Paris could be read as mirroring that of Eleanor and Henry. Like Helen, Eleanor had left one husband (Louis VII) to marry his arch-rival (Henry II). Like Paris, Henry was ‘enticed’ to Eleanor, ‘by the woman’s high birth and especially by lust for the holdings she possessed, unable to endure love and any delay … within a brief time he attained his long desired union’.11 Like Helen and Paris, the two medieval potentates seemed to share a mutual attraction that was played out in a rich courtly environment. Just as Henry and Eleanor rebuilt many of their fortress-palaces and kitted them out with new artworks, so, in the poem, Helen and Paris live in a land of busy builders and are given a Chambre de Beautés in which to consummate – and perpetuate – their love affair.12

  Helen and Paris’ illegitimate relationship as described by Benoît is, in fact, inspirational, decorous and decorative; it is the characters of Briseida (who started off life as Homer’s Briseis) and her lover Troilus who are introduced to satisfy the need for a salacious sex scandal. Eleanor married Henry within eight weeks of leaving the King of France, Louis VII. The gossips were certain they had already embarked on an affair; an ‘adulterino concubito’ says Gerald of Wales.13 In the Roman, the adulterous affair between Helen and Paris is portrayed as a legitimate opportunity for private love. The consummation of their relationship is blatantly sexual but somehow not reprehensible:

  Greatly did Paris comfort her

  And marvellously did he honour her.

  Greatly did he serve her well that night.14

  A comparison of Benoît’s writing with the other accounts of Helen and Paris in circulation in the 12th century, and with which Eleanor had no connection, amplifies the poet’s restraint.

  Following Em
peror Charlemagne’s vision in the 780s of an intellectual and cultural revival of Gaul, whose focus was largely on expressive writing skills,15 Helen’s story had become a textbook for poetic expression. Writers used Helen as a vehicle for the development of their artes poeticae. On the face of it, a professional opportunity to elaborate ever more febrile epithets had presented itself, but, one suspects, so had the licence to publish private fantasies. Take one example: Matthew de Vendôme’s ‘educative’ text called The Art of Versification.

  Written in 1175 (at which point Eleanor, following a series of court intrigues, and, it was whispered, love affairs on Henry’s part, was out of favour; she was to be kept under house arrest for fifteen years – her political power all but extinguished), The Art of Versification’s official purpose was to show how different tropes can be employed. There are standard metaphors: Helen has a face where ‘rosy hue and snow-white skin contend in most delightful combat’, and again, ‘Her sparkling eyes rival the radiance of the stars, And with engaging frankness play ambassadors of Venus’. But then some of the exemplary language gets very over-heated …