Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Hold in your mind the image of a world in which the stuff of life, agricultural produce, is thought to emanate from a female spirit. Imagine a landscape where that produce is marshalled and allocated not by men but by women and girls. Suddenly significant, commemorated women stop being unreal, liminal, supernatural oddities, but instead are seen as conscious powerhouses at the centre of society.

  So Helen in her lifetime could well have walked the earth, light-footed. And after her death, memories and tales of this incandescent creature kept her spirit alive. Now that she is established as an immortal in the popular imagination, though, she becomes many things in the minds of men – a princess, a queen, a wife, a lover, a whore, a heroine, a star, a goddess of sex. And whatever her guises there is one constant – she is for ever Helen – ‘Eleni’, the shining one.

  APPENDIX FIVE

  ROYAL PURPLE – THE COLOUR OF CONGEALED BLOOD

  … wave after wave of purple, precious as silver …

  AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon 959–601

  One of Helen’s landfalls on her journey home from Troy was Matala.2 For any boat travelling across the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC, Matala would have been a convenient, and possibly profitable, staging post. Tucked into its own westerly facing bay on Crete’s south coast, perfectly placed to enjoy exquisite sunsets every night, Matala today is the home of a slightly alternative, international crowd – a new age community lived in the caves here until they were outlawed in the 1970s.3

  Two and a half miles along the coast from Matala is the archaeological site of Kommos. I have retraced the boat journey that would have been made here from Troy. On arrival, first sailing and then rowing, the galley would have passed the extraordinary rock formation of this particular segment of the coastline – past bays that welcome like cupped hands, where layers of sandstone are reminiscent, from the water, of whipped meringue. Excavations only began at Kommos in 1976, but quickly it became clear that this was a sizeable Bronze Age port – perhaps servicing the palatial complex of Phaistos which lies 6 km inland.4 The connection made between Helen and this stretch of the Cretan coast is fitting. Late Bronze Age traders and diplomats, aristocrats and the itinerant labourers of the sea would indeed have stopped off here.

  And before they reached Kommos itself, its smell would have come out to meet them, because this was a centre of production for the colour purple – one of the most luxurious commodities of the ancient world. The manufacture of this colour of status is a messy business. It involves the harvest, dismemberment and then boiling – sometimes in urine – of a carnivorous sea-snail called the murex.

  In Kommos many of these pre-historic sea-snails have been found with tiny, perfect holes bored into the shells – evidence that during factory farming they have turned cannibal, attacking their own kind to get food. Production here was on a substantial scale, providing dye for an international market.5 A newcomer to Kommos would have been greeted by men and women with livid arms, dyed up to the shoulders with the murex’s gift to humanity. Pliny described dye from the murex as being the colour of congealed blood.

  While investigating the mechanics of Bronze Age trading systems, I have gone diving close to Kommos for these sea-snails. The trick is to lever oneself off the rocks 10 feet (3 m) or so below the surface and not to become a pin-cushion for sea-urchins in the process. Today sea-snails are fairly scarce, but local fishermen recount that forty years ago, when they were boys, the murex carpeted the sea-shore. With such a rich natural resource, Kommos would have been on the mental map of both traders and their clients – the great royal houses of the Eastern Mediterranean.6 In the Late Bronze Age, in Hittite, Egyptian and Mycenaean societies, purple was the colour of royalty. Linear B tablets may provide one of our first records of the concept of Royal Purple, on a tablet which describes what seem to be textiles as porphyreos, ‘of the colour purple’, and wanakteros, ‘royal, kingly’.7 A concept which has not faded over three and half thousand years.

  Even if our Bronze Age Helen never actually visited Kommos, she would, doubtless, have known of the place. Aristocratic women in both Mycenaean and Anatolian cultures would have been expected to weave, and the finest would have woven purple cloth. Homer relates that at Troy, Helen spent the bulk of her time in her apartments weaving a giant piece of cloth. Considering it would have taken 12,000 murex to produce enough dye to colour the hem of a single garment, Helen’s ten-year oeuvre – her vast porphyry tapestry ‘the colour of death’ – would have kept the delivery boys from these centres of purple production very busy. So Helen sits and weaves. Murex shells used to create purple dye8 have been found in some numbers around Troy, 10 kilos in one workshop.10 Hittite tablets show that the city was famous for its textile production. There is no question that aristocratic women in this world would have sat and produced cloth. The intricate and delicate pieces they made might end up as gifts for visiting diplomats, might be worn in grand public ceremonies or might perhaps be offered to the gods, used to dress cult statues ceremonially. Hand-woven, pieces like this could take years to produce. Only the nobility devoted so many hours to so rarefied an activity. Homer envisages her:

  weaving a growing web, a dark red folding robe, working into the weft the endless bloody struggles stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s hands.10

  Some see these lines as a metaphor for poetry – in which case Helen herself is the poet, pulling together the threads of men’s lives, creating her own story, building an epic to be passed on to future generations. In a sense she (not Homer) is the bard, a woman fabricating the world around her.

  It is significant that Helen’s great tapestry is purple, a colour associated in the ancient world with power and death. Around her men are supporting unspeakable agonies and Helen sits and weaves the tales of their woe. Perhaps Homer is also trying to associate Helen with the great commodities of pre-literate society, a rich visual image and a story that lasts in popular memory. Pictures are articulate in the absence of literature. The most beautiful woman in the world is the child of, and breeds, both.

  EPILOGUE

  MYTH, HISTORY AND HISTORIA

  My name can be in many places: my person can only be in one.

  EURIPIDES, Helen1

  In the introduction to this book I made it clear that this was an historia – a mesh of inquiry, observation, analysis and myth. It has been, I hope, a valid approach: Helen herself is a conglomerate, an accretion of stories and histories. I have relied on four types of source: archaeological, topographical, historical and mythological. I have linked these with an attempt to understand Helen physically, by travelling through the landscape once inhabited by Bronze Age women and experiencing Helen in antiquity as the ancients would have done – exploring the worship of Helen, Helen on stage, Helen in art and politics.

  The underpinning narrative has been provided by Homer, who in turn used myth-stories as inspiration.2 Homer was not a contemporary of the Trojan War; in one sense, all he writes of Helen is imaginary. Helen would have died at least five hundred years before Homer lived – his stories were new versions of old memories, old mythologies.3 Homer composed at a critical time. He lived on a fault-line in the development of European literature: growing up with the old techniques of oral poetry, growing into the new techniques of literacy.4 My aim has been not simply to prove or disprove the historical accuracy of these epic sagas. Seeking to determine the historicity of myths word for word is a diverting but complicated exercise. Myths and stories are plastic creations – words and images from one world that can be moulded and used to colour another. The aim of the book has not been to set myth and reality up against each other – but to see why the two can be such happy bed-fellows, why some characters inhabit both worlds so confidently. They all laughed at Schliemann when he went in search of Homer’s great war story, but then he found Troy, and ever since the world has had to think twice before it sneers.

  It is worth looking in a li
ttle more detail at what ‘myth’ means. For the ancient Greeks, myths, ‘muthoi’, were not a distinct, fantastical genre. We have chosen to view them as such, but much in Greek mythology emanated from the Mediterranean world’s real beliefs, real history and actual life-experience. In a world before writing, ‘muthoi ’, oral traditions, meant ‘things that were spoken – the transfer of information’, and were a key way that knowledge was shared.5

  At the same time, the purpose of the myth-merchant, the storyteller, was to hold his or her audience rapt and to transmit social and political messages, to explore man’s place in the world, to dissect the human condition. Helen found in Homer the most brilliant of biographers. A man who dealt with the exigencies and triumphs of human nature – a man who tells us truths of all degrees. With such a recorded beginning, Helen’s life was destined, down the centuries, to become as saleable as a modern-day icon’s – a heady mix of headlines, strong visual images and bathos. She has been, and always will be, good box office. She might have died three and a half thousand years ago; she is unlikely to lose her relevance.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  The following abbreviations have been used in the text and endnotes:

  BM

  British Museum

  CMS

  Corpus der Minoischen und Mykenischen Siegel

  CTH

  Catalogue des textes hittites (Paris: E. Laroche, 1971)

  EA

  The El-Amarna Letters

  EGF

  Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Göttingen: M. Davies, 1988)

  FrGrH

  Fragmente Griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby I.G.M.E. Greek Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration

  KBo

  Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi (Leipzig and Berlin)

  KUB

  Keilschrifturkunden aus Boghazköi (Berlin)

  LBA

  Late Bronze Age

  LCL

  Loeb Classical Library

  LH

  Late Helladic

  LFMC

  Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae

  LM

  Late Minoan

  MM

  Middle Minoan or Mycenae Archaeological Museum

  NMA

  National Archaeological Museum, Athens

  F’MG

  Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford: D. Page, 1962)

  PMGF

  Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Oxford: M. Davies, 1991)

  P.Oxy.

  The Oxyrhynchus Papyri

  PRU IV

  Le Palais Royal d’Ugarit IV (Mission de Ras Shamra Tome IX) (Paris; J. Nougayrol, 1956)

  RS

  Tablets from Ras Shamra

  STC

  Short-Title Catalogue

  NOTES

  FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1 An epithet enthusiastically employed in the 19th century AD by writers such as H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang and Oscar Wilde.

  2 An approach, I note, also embraced by Meagher (2002).

  3 The Greeks were only thus called when populations from Italy encountered a tribe from the Balkan peninsula called the ‘Graikoí’. The Italian aliens gave these people a collective name ‘Graeci’. In the classical period the Greeks called themselves Hellenes.

  4 See Latacz (2004), 133–4 for a useful summary.

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Labels noted during a site visit in 2002.

  2 The stele can be read back to front, although in both readings it is Helen’s face that melts Menelaus. Because the warrior appears taller and shaggier on one side, a sensible interpretation is that this is Menelaus after ten years on the Trojan plain: see Pomeroy (2002), 116–17.

  3 Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 2, Act II, Scene 4, lines 87–8.

  4 See Fragment 1 of the Cypria: ‘Once upon a time the countless tribes [of mortals thronging about weighed down] the broad surface of the deep-bosomed earth. And Zeus, seeing this, took pity, and in his cunning mind he devised a plan to lighten the burden caused by mankind from the face of the all-nourishing earth, by fanning into flame the great strife that was the Trojan War, in order to alleviate the earth’s burden by means of the death of men. So it was that the heroes were killed in battle at Troy and the will of Zeus was accomplished.’ Trans. M. Davies (1989), 33.

  5 Hesiod, Works and Days 159–65. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.

  6 Sappho, fragment 16 and Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.

  7 West (1975), 2.

  8 Southern Italy and Sicily.

  9 The story is told in Cicero, On Invention 2.1–3 and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.64–6. Cicero sets the story in Croton, Pliny in Agrigentum.

  10 François-André Vincent, Zeuxis et les filles de Crotone. Paris, Louvre INV.8543. The date of the painting is disputed: 1789–91. There are two versions by Vincent painted around the same time.

  11 For comprehensive catalogues of Helen in ancient iconography, see Ghali-Kahil (1955) and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Vol. IV, nos. 1 and 2 (henceforth LIMC).

  12 Iliad 6.357–8. This translation is taken from Austin (1994), 1. All subsequent extracts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are taken from the translations by Robert Fagles, with his line references, unless otherwise stated. A Greek line reference from the Loeb Classical Library [LCL] editions of Homer will also be given. In this instance the LCL reference is [LCL 6.357–8].

  13 A Semitic adaptation of the Phoenician script.

  14 An epos (from which ‘epic’ derives) is a long narrative poem that tells the tales of heroes. The epos was originally composed for oral recital.

  15 See Hesiod, Works and Days 159.

  16 See, for example, Pausanias 3.22.9.

  17 There were thought to be two generations of giants called Cyclopes. The first were loyal handymen to the gods on Mount Olympus, forging, for example, Zeus’ thunder-bolts. Odysseus meets the second in the form of Polyphemus during his long voyage home from Troy.

  18 Descriptions of the relic indicate that the bone was probably the scapula of a mammoth. See Mayor (2000), in particular Chapter 3, and passim.

  19 For example, see Iliad 5.336–43 [LCL 5.302–8].

  20 Also those of Hesiod.

  21 At the time of writing, the papyrology department at Oxford University, using infrared technology with the help of Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, have announced the potential to trace ‘lost’ texts on pieces of Egyptian papyrus.

  22 See Davies (1989), 32. Ancient tradition credited Homer or a man called Stasinus with authorship of the Cypria. Some even said that Homer had given the epic to his son-in-law Stasinus in lieu of a dowry for his daughter.

  23 Cleopatra is the other. There are of course parallels between the appeal of both women. See, for example, Lucan’s Civil War 10.59–62: ‘Cleopatra, the shame of Egypt, the fatal Fury of Latium, whose unchastity cost Rome dear. As the dangerous beauty of the Spartan queen overthrew Argos and Troy town, in like measure Cleopatra fanned the frenzy of Italy.’ Trans. J.D. Duff. Both Cleopatra and Helen are described as Erinyes – ‘Furies’ – Helen, for example, in Virgil, Aeneid 2.573.

  24 Suetonius, Nero 38; Tacitus, Annals 15.39

  25 See Foreville (1952), 198, 209.

  26 Caxton STC [Short-Title Catalogue] 15375. ‘The Recuyell’ roughly translates as a ‘Collection of Trojan Histories’. It was begun by Caxton in March 1469, and actually printed for the first time in 1474 or 1475 at Bruges. It was a translation of a French work by Raoul Lefevre, the Recueil des histoires de Troie. A copy of Caxton’s work, now in the Huntingdon Library in San Marino, California, was owned by Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of King Edward IV. For more details, see Blake (1976) and Painter (1976).

  27 Euripides, Helen 22. Trans. R. Lattimore.

  28 An opinion formed from the extant evidence. Fuller, more eloquent papyri may have been written in Late Bronze Age Greece and subsequently (although perhaps temporarily) lost.

  29 Thanks to Silvan Kosak for advice on this
matter, and for pointing out that as the pieces are often so fragmentary, this is a task that will by definition, be laborious and lengthy.

  30 On medieval nuns and Ovid’s Heroides, see M.W. Labarge (1986) Women in Medieval Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 220. For extant examples of homoerotic poetry from convents see J. Boswell (1980) Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 220–1.

  31 See Maguire (forthcoming) Shakespeare’s Names. Thank you to Dr Maguire for a preview.

  32 See Jean-Luis Backé’s essay in Brunel (1992), 522.

  33 La Belle Hélène premiered on 17 December 1864, marking, so Saint-Saëns wrote, ‘the collapse of good taste’.

  34 J.W. von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections. Trans. E. Stopp (1998), 113–4 (London: Penguin). Goethe’s personal correspondence indicates he spent many years struggling with the notion of Helen. In one letter of 1831 he writes that he carried Helen’s story around with him as an ‘inner fable’.