Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  7 In the 7th century many terracotta figurines of the goddess were left as votive offerings in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in Sparta. See Farrell (1908).

  8 Gg 705.

  9 Odyssey 19.213–17 [LCL 19.186–9].

  10 The Eileithyia Cave in Crete still has a folkloric reputation for causing miraculous pregnancies. Chemical analysis of the pure water found in the cave indicates that drunk in large quantities it could work as a laxative. See Rutkowski (1986), 65.

  11 Pausanias 2.21.8.

  12 Fragment 13 of the work of the poet Stesichorus claims that after Helen’s abduction by Theseus, the Spartan queen founded the shrine. Argos’ pride and joy is a massive Greco-Roman theatre. Originally built in the 3rd century BC, it can still hold an audience of 20,000. Today children mooch around the capacious remains on school trips but when a play is staged here the place hums again as it would have done in the classical period. Many of the women in that ancient press of tourists would also have visited Eileithyia’s shrine, to thank the goddess for the gift of a child or to beg her for more, and as they did so they would have remembered its young founder, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Today experts think they have detected the site of the altar of Eileithyia, hidden underneath one of the town’s Christian churches.

  13 Angel (1977), 88–105. This method has had its critics, but combined with evidence from dental analysis, it seems to show that girls were sexually mature aged twelve/thirteen. There is no reason to believe a gap was left before they started to produce children. From the 5th century BC onwards it was thought that the gap between menarche and marriage for the gyne (a word meaning a mature female, although it can also translate as wife) should be as narrow as possible. It is likely that the ideal for most Late Bronze Age families was that girls should fall pregnant very young.

  14 See evidence from Tomb 11 as published by Hallager and McGeorge (1992). See also opening of Chapter 8.

  15 See Arnott (2005a).

  16 The Mycenaean record is silent on beliefs and rituals concerning pregnancy and child-birth but Hittite tablets are inscribed with detailed descriptions of the Papanikri, the ‘Birth Ritual’. The ritual sounds, quite frankly, uncomfortable. Women had to give birth on a wooden stool in the presence of the priest. If for some reason one of the legs or the seat of the stool broke, the priest would be roused to a frenzy, frantic to cleanse the evil that had been made manifest by the breakage. The mother would have to make a libation to the gods. Sheep and birds would be sacrificed, a lamb would be bound with red yarn and dressed in red material with a hat on its head and rings and anklets on its feet and legs. On the following day, the newborn child seems to have been beaten with a stick by the men responsible for sacrifice. Procreation was not a private affair – it was the business of the whole community. See Darga (1993), 105: A135 (Istanbul Archaeological Museum Bo. 2001).

  17 See Robertson (1990), esp. 24 and Riddle (1992) on contraception in the ancient world.

  18 To date, Mycenaean objects have been found at twenty Egyptian sites. See Bryce (2005).

  19 The oldest prescription for contraception appears to be in the Petrie papyrus, discovered at Kahun in 1889 and written during the reign of Amenenhat III of the Twelfth Dynasty. A wealth of information is contained in a group of documents now called the Papyrus Ebers which were written down in c. 1500 BC. Papyrus Ebers 716.

  20 A papyrus fragment from around 1400 BC describes the wild murmurings and mutterings that would sometimes have served as medical attention – an incantation from the Land of the Keftiu (Crete) written at the time the Greek Mycenaeans were in control: ‘… Exorcism of the Asian sickness in the keftiu language … This spell is uttered over ferment, gas, fluid and urine.’

  21 See Latacz (2004), 131–2, citing W. Helck (1979) Die Beziehungen Ägyptens und Vorderasiens zur ÄgÄis bis ins 7. Jarhrhundert v. Chr., 2nd edition (Darmstadt), 97; and P.W. Haider (1988), Griechenland-Nordafrika: Ihre Beziehungen zwischen 1600 und 600 v. Chr. (Darmstadt), 139, 14, n. 48.

  22 Pliny, Natural History 24.38.59 – used in wickerwork and perfumery as well as for medical purposes; details from King (1998), 86f.

  23 For fuller discussion of this subject, see King (1983).

  24 Plutarch, Lycurgus and Numa 3, 4. Trans. B. Perrin.

  25 The female poet who probably lived in the 7th/6th century BC. See 378, n.2 for questions about Sappho’s life.

  26 P. Oxy 1231, fragment 14. Trans. D. A. Campbell.

  27 She was even on the radar of Adhelm, an Anglo-Saxon theologian who wrote in a letter to one of his pupils Wihtfrith sometime between AD 673 and 706: ‘What, pray, I beseech you eagerly, is the benefit to the sanctity of the orthodox faith to expend energy by reading and studying the foul pollution of base Proserpina, which I shrink from mentioning in plain speech; or to revere, through celebration in study, Hermione, the wanton offspring of Menelaus and Helen, who, as the ancient texts report, was engaged for a while by right of dowry to Orestes, then, having changed her mind, married Neoptolemus.’ Letter III, ‘To Wihtfrith’, in Aldhelm: The Prose Works. Trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (1979). (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield).

  28 Euripides, Helen 282–3.

  29 Andromache in Euripides, Andromache 206.

  30 Written around about 20 BC.

  31 Ovid, Heroides 8.91. Trans. H. Isbell.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Welcome Burden

  1 Tomb 8C; see Hallager and McGeorge (1992), 32.

  2 Gates (1992) gives an extremely interesting and useful survey of objects found in children’s graves.

  3 In Grave Xi, Grave Circle B.

  4 See Mylonas (1966), 105.

  5 At Prosymna – the name that the travel writer Pausanias gives to the area around the Temple of Hera, Argos, 3.17.1 – children’s bodies have been found with miniature terracotta animals – maybe creatures that could provide succour in the form of milk on the child’s journey through the afterlife. There are even a few models of horses and chariots (although some academics hotly debate this identification), which could have been left, again, to help comfort the children in their journey. Weapons are conspicuous by their absence; these children were clearly not styled little soldiers.

  6 The wife of a Victorian archaeologist and sponge merchant, a woman named Mrs Brown, allegedly committed the heinous crime of losing valuable Mycenaean goods from a child’s grave. A gold doll, found at a Late Bronze Age site on Aegina, was smuggled out to Mrs Brown so that she could sail out of Greece with her illicit booty. But she died during the journey, her body was thrown overboard and the gold doll vanished from the record. Higgins (1979), 46–51; amplified by Gates (1992).

  7 NMA 28092 (EUM–331).

  8 Excavations of the cemetery began in 1969.

  9 All references from Tzedakis and Martlew (1999), 211–79.

  10 NMA 2899.

  11 For a full description of the figurine, see Wace (1939); see also American Journal of Archaeology 45, no. 1: 91; and American Journal of Archaeology 43: 697 and Fig. 1.

  12 In August 1989.

  13 Iliad 3.207–13 [LCL 3.171–5].

  14 Men are sometimes involved too, but the rituals are predominantly single-sex.

  15 The Linear B tablets from Knossos, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae show that a number of women had particular skills and particular job-titles. There are raptriai (‘sewing women’) and lewotrokhowoi (‘bath-pourers’) among many other examples.

  16 KN Ap 639.

  17 MY V 659. Thank you to Lisa Bendall for help with this list.

  18 Olsen (1998) has a very clear description of the three categories: 384ff.

  19 No Linear B tablets yet discovered talk about midwives or wet-nurses – a gap which is almost certainly a chance of survival or recording practices rather than a comment on Mycenaean practice. It is therefore difficult to know whether aristocratic women such as Helen would have nursed their own infants. Myth stories seem to imply that the high-born handed over their c
hildren to be raised. Apollo, for instance, was farmed out to Themis rather than fed by his own mother Leto. And in the Iliad, as Hector rushes to meet his wife Andromache, we get what appears to be evidence both of paternal affection and of wet-nursing:

  She [Andromache] joined him now, and following in her steps a servant holding the boy against her breast, in the first flush of life, only a baby, Hector’s son, the darling of his eyes And radiant as a star … (Iliad 6.471–5 [LCL 6.399–401])

  20 Meeting with Dr Elizabeth French, September 2004. Once again, many thanks to Dr French for her help with this project.

  21 See Chapter 14. Five ‘smiting god’ metal figurines have been found and a small number of non-phallic male figures from Phylakopi.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HELEN, HIGH PRIESTESS

  1 Pylos tablet Ae 303. Ventris and Chadwick (1973), 166.

  2 Iliad 7.551–4 (LCL 7.476–9].

  3 Hesiod, Theogony 47–9. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.

  4 There is too a female Zeus, Diwia, in Linear B tablets, e.g. Tn 316. Lisa Bendall has pointed out that Zeus does get fairly lavish gifts when he is honoured, such as a gold bowl and a man (Hera gets a gold bowl and a woman) at Pylos.

  5 See Renfrew (1985), 302–10.

  6 See Meagher (2002), 72.

  7 Centuries later we hear that Agesilaus (360/59 BC), a king of Sparta who died in North Africa, was embalmed in honey to be brought back home for burial. And Alexander the Great’s body was said to have been carried from Babylon to Greece in a honey-and-wax cocoon. See Diodorus of Sicily 18.26.3. Studies in the University of Illinois showed neat honey to be a better preservative of turkey-meat than the traditional preservatives butylated hydroxytoluene and tocopherol.

  8 Meagher (2002), 56.

  9 Ae 303.

  10 The Priestess of the Winds at Knossos on Crete was honoured with a gift of 30 l of olive oil.

  11 Others with hieratic power are the enigmatic ki–ri-te-wi-ja. John Killen has pointed out that more data are needed to draw certain conclusions about the role of women in a religious context.

  12 See for comparison CMS II.6 no. 74 (Plate 276) and CMS 1 no. 46 (Plate 505) in Krzyszkowska (2005). My thanks to Olga Krzyszkowska for her help.

  13 Site visit October 2004.

  14 Mycenae Archaeological Museum, MM 294.

  15 NMA 4575.

  16 There are clues as to the kinds of rites that would have been carried out here in the cult centre in honour of that little goddess. A small clay bath-tub was once filled with water for purification, three hearths around the altar (itself only 60 cm high) are ready to receive sacrificial offerings. Vessels were found here to carry wine and titbits to sustain the goddess. Gifts have been left to appease the spirits in the room: cooking pots, a stone bowl from Crete and the graceful ivory carvings that demonstrate the artistic genius of the Mycenaeans – a lion, the fine head of a young man.

  17 Mycenae, Acropolis Treasure: NMA 942.

  18 In another close association of women with nature, at Thebes, women process across a painted wall carrying lilies, papyrus and rock-roses. Warren (1988), 26.

  19 For a recent survey of seal-stones, see Krzyszkowska (2005).

  20 Thomas (1938–9), 65–87.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LA BELLE HÉLÈNE

  1 Iliad 3.168–71 [LCL 3.139–42].

  2 Odyssey 7.103–7. Trans. E.V. Rieu, revised D.C.H. Rieu [LCL 7.104–7].

  3 Iliad 18.697 [LCL 18.596].

  4 Pylos tablet Fr 1225.

  5 See Shelmerdine (1985), passim.

  6 Helen’s ‘gold curls’ are referred to in Euripides, Helen 1224. Earlier, Sappho, in fragment 23, describes her as xanthe – ‘golden’, which may refer to her golden hair.

  7 PY AN 656 and AN 218 may feature reference to braid-weavers.

  8 Advice to visitors: double-check opening times of site of Pylos.

  9 The most likely areas for production at the archaeological sites of Pylos are Courts 42 and 47.

  10 Terebinth resin is the base of turpentine and is still harvested on an industrial scale on the island of Chios.

  11 Thanks to Cynthia Shelmerdine for her help with this material and for pointing out that a lump of LBA terebinth resin she was given to handle had maintained its distinctive aroma.

  12 Dayagi-Mendels (1998), 36.

  13 For further details see Manniche (1999). The Papyrus Ebers (written c. 1500 BC, see 370, n.19) contained details of medical and cosmetic preparations. Recipes included those to fight wrinkles.

  14 NMA 4575.

  15 Thanks to Diana Wardle for allowing us to conduct a practical experiment based on the LBA findings.

  16 Over a thousand years after these frescoes were painted, in Euripides’ play The Trojan Women, Paris’ mother accuses Helen of ‘impudent flaunting’ (Trojan Women 1028. Trans. J. Morwood), of making an extra special effort to attract Menelaus. But Euripides is giving Hecuba a classical rather than a Bronze Age voice. It is only around the 5th century BC that we have written evidence that make-up had come to be thought of as a means of deception – enhanced beauty enticing men into sexual activity – and as such had become the mark of a prostitute. The Bronze Age Helen would have worn heavy, garish make-up that emphasised her physicality and her gender, but that would not have branded her a whore.

  17 There are other styles of dress too. In a painting from Mycenae, a naturalistic female figurine is wrapped in a single robe. On an earlier ring made of electrum a woman wears either ankle bracelets or voluminous ‘Ali-Baba’ trousers under her skirt. On the frescoes, some women are shrouded in cloaks. The use of paint on frescoes at Mycenae and a tomb from Crete indicates that some women wore skirts made of wrapped animal hide.

  18 See Rehak (2005) on ivory examples; for an example of a gold signet ring, see NMA 3180.

  19 Euripides, Trojan Women 1042.

  20 Hughes-Brock (1998), 260.

  21 Propertius 3.14.17–20. Trans. A. Dalby (2000), 146.

  22 Heroides 16, Paris’ letter to Helen. Trans. H. Isbell.

  23 Pliny, Natural History 33.23.81.

  24 British Museum B376.

  25 Trans. P. Forbes (1967) 363, from ‘Le Sein d’Hélène’, an essay of 1937; and congratulations to Vintage Direct for having such an intriguing website.

  26 Iliad 3.273 [LCL 3.228].

  27 Thanks to Peter Millett.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE GOLDEN APPLE

  1 Isocrates, Encomium of Helen 54. Trans. L. van Hook.

  2 The curved mirror-image was slightly distorted, the face reduced, the world behind clearly visible.

  3 It was also quite common for classical artists and authors to pair Helen with a mirror. The imagery is potent; she is both an eidolon (a ghost, a reflection) and a woman whose image is deceptive. See Hawley (1998), 46–7 for a good further discussion. On Helen’s appearance on mirrors, see ‘Elina’ in LIMC.

  4 Fitzwilliam Museum GR.19.1904.

  5 For example, LIMC nos. 83 and 86.

  6 Euripides, Trojan Women 1107–8. Trans. J. Morwood.

  7 Euripides, Orestes 1112. Trans. P. Vellacott.

  8 For example, Iliad 3.146 [LCL 3.121].

  9 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 68.45 and passim.

  10 Sappho, fragment 23; Euripides, Helen 1225. Down the centuries, heroes have been golden ever since. The Romans, masters of artifice that they were, even wore blond wigs – fashionable and a statement of their heroic credentials.

  11 Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy 14.39–70. Trans. A.S. Way.

  12 Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.138–252.

  13 Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Fourteenth.

  14 The Egyptians were obsessed with ‘beauty’: see Manniche (1999) on evidence for their expertise in cosmetics and other beauty-aids. There is also a love-poem, from the Papyrus Chester Beatty 1, dated c. 1450–1500 BC, which lingers over the components of a woman’s beauty: see trans. by M. Lichtheim (1976) Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 2, 182–5. T
hank you to Nicole Doueck for her help.

  15 There is a hybrid word in Ancient Greek, ‘kalokagathia’ which translates directly as ‘beautiful goodness’ or ‘the joint nobility of appearance and conduct’ – kalos means beautiful and agathos, good. It was thought by many that the two were inextricably linked. Men (the Greeks fought shy of applying the notion of kalokagathia to women) were good because they were beautiful – a perfect face was simply the patina of a perfect spirit. In the fairytale world of Snow White and Cinderella, too, absolute beauty indicates absolute virtue. Kharis, Helen’s beauty, also demonstrates sexual maturity and sexual potency. Herodotus tells us of an Olympic victor called Philippus of Croton who was revered by the people of (non-Greek) Egesta as a hero purely because of his physical perfection. The town erected a hero’s shrine on his tomb and his heroic cult continued for generations (Herodotus 5.47). In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades – the lubricious renegade who for a time sided with Athens’ arch-enemies, the Spartans – holds up Socrates (who was famously ugly) as a noted exception to the kalokagathia rule. And although the philosopher shifted his ideas during his life, in his earlier works, Plato seems to see beauty as an outward sign of virtue. Other thinkers doggedly kept alive the ‘beauty equals goodness’ theme. In AD 260, Plotinus, a man with a Latin name who seems to have been born in Egypt and who wrote in Greek, concluded in his best-known work, On Beauty, that to agathon was the ultimate form of to kalon. But Helen, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, worried him. In another treatise, On Intelligible Beauty, he asks: ‘From what source, then, did the beauty of Helen whom men fought for shine out, or that of all women like Aphrodite in beauty?’ Plotinus, On Beauty (Ennead 1.6) and On Intelligible Beauty (Ennead 5.8). Trans. A.H. Armstrong.

  16 In Neoplatonic thought, from the 5th century AD, Helen’s beauty was interpreted as representing the beauty of the cosmos – a beauty that draws souls into a warring world. See Proclus, Commentary on the Republic.

  17 Both Herodotus and Aristotle noted with interest that in a number of ancient cultures beauty or fineness of form justified political authority. Aristotle, Politics 1290b5. Trans. S. Everson: ‘a government in which offices were given according to stature, as is said to be the case in Ethiopia, or according to beauty, would be an oligarchy; for the number of tall or good-looking men is small’. In Bion’s Ethiopian History, we are told that the Ethiopians choose the most handsome men to be kings. Cf. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.566c. See also Herodotus: ‘These Ethiopians … are said to be the tallest and fairest of all men … they deem worthy to be their king that townsman whom they judge to be the tallest and to have strength proportioned to his stature.’ Herodotus 3.20. Trans. A.D. Godley.