18 Gorgias was considered one of the finest speakers of his day and was said to have won plaudits in Olympia at the Olympic Games, where his audience would have been closer to 20,000 as well as in his homeland of Sicily. See Plato, Gorgias 458c for an indication of Gorgias’ popularity in the ancient world.
19 I remember shivering outside the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall in London, with a queue of other hopefuls, waiting to get returned tickets for the sell-out discussion, ‘What is Beauty?’ in 2004. We were a mixed bunch, artists and academics, tourists and lawyers, young men who looked as if they worked in advertising, young mothers who looked tired. In an age when beautiful things and beautiful people can be swiftly and easily manufactured, we still seem to want to believe that beauty itself has an abstract quality. The programme leaflet promised a lively exploration of the subject. Why does beauty have power? Can the essence of beauty ever be defined? What, indeed, is beauty? The question appears eternally fascinating.
20 Athenaeus, writing in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, reports such contests in his Deipnosophists at 13.565ff and 13.609ff, the latter a male beauty contest recorded by Theophrastus.
21 Agones: see p. 73.
22 Hawley (1998), 53, n. 7 lists a number of ancient sources on beauty contests held at Tenedos and Lesbos.
23 See Spivey (1996), 37, illustration no. 16: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, no. F4221.
24 When describing the education of Athenian girls, Aristophanes articulates beauty as a defining quality of the complete young woman. See Calame (1997), 197, on Aristo-phanes, Lysistrata 641–7.
25 Scholiast on Theocritus’ Idylls 18.22–5, 39–40.
26 This is of course a tradition that continues; in Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, a poem from the 13th century AD, Helen is also cited as the measure of all beauty.
27 Reference from M.E. Waithe (1992), History of Women Philosophers, Vol, 1: Ancient Women Philosophers 600 BC–500 AD: 198, citing Mozans, a pseudonym for J.A. Zahm (1913), Woman in Science, 197–9 (New York: Appleton).
28 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.554c.
29 See Hawley (1998), 38; cf. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.565.
30 See, for example, Cypria, fragment 1; Iliad 24.28–30 [LCL 24.29–30]; and Ovid, Hero-ides 16.51–88. See Gantz (1993), 567–71 for fuller literary and artistic sources.
31 Like Paris, Helen will be ‘unmanned’ by lust. Paris’ mother Hecuba spits out at Helen in Euripides’ play Trojan Women: ‘My son was handsome beyond all other men. You looked at him and sense went Cyprian at the sight.’ Euripides, Trojan Women 991–2. Trans. M. Gumpert (2002), 79.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BEARING GIFTS
1 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 5.18: ‘Beauty he declared to be a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.’ Trans. R.D. Hicks.
2 A sculpture known as ‘The Ephebe of Antikythera’ – perhaps the work of Kleon of Sicyon or Euphranor.
3 Paris’ preparations for combat take up several lines, compared to a terse two lines for Menelaus’ own military toilette: ‘magnificent Paris, fair-haired Helen’s consort. First he wrapped his legs with well-made greaves,/ fastened behind the heels with silver ankle-clasps,/ next he strapped a breastplate round his chest, his brother Lycaon’s that fitted him so well./ Then over his shoulder Paris slung his sword,/ the fine bronze blade with its silver-studded hilt,/ and then the shield-strap and his sturdy, massive shield and over his powerful head he set a well-forged helmet,/the horsehair crest atop it tossing, bristling terror …’. Iliad 3.385–94 [LCL 3.239–37].
4 Those who knew of, or shared, the views of authors such as Herodotus, see Chapter 23.
5 See Hyginus, Fables 91; also Pindar, Paean 8a. The story was also the basis of the prologue to Sophocles’ lost play, Alexandros.
6 Iliad 3.16–18 [LCL 3.15–17].
7 Dares, The Fall of Troy: a History, 12. Trans. R.M. Frazer, Jr.
8 O Polemos tis Troados: a Byzantine Iliad (c. 14th century AD). Trans. Myrto Hatzaki. Thanks to Dr Hatzaki for use of the translation.
9 Through a character called Nereus.
10 Odes 1.19–24, in T. Creech (1684) The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace: Done into English. London.
11 Hittite gods are shown with their hair twisted into a ponytail and topped with a large conical cap.
12 See Hoffner (2003) and Macqueen (1975), 101.
13 We know from faunal remains that wolves, bears, leopards and panthers were hunted down by Bronze Age aristocrats in the forests of north-west Anatolia.
14 Latacz (2004), 28.
15 Cypria, fragment 1.
16 Iliad 3.44–5 [LCL 3.39].
17 Whose descendants Romulus and Remus would then go on to found Rome.
18 Cypria, fragment 10.
19 Knossos tablet Ld 573.
20 See, for example, Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, on ‘Helen, wife of Menelaus’. Boccaccio continues to describe the story as love at first sight: ‘There he fell in love with Helen as soon as he saw her resplendent in celestial beauty, wanton in royal elegance, and desirous of being admired.’ See G.A. Guarino (1964), whose translation this is.
21 Cypria, fragment 1.
22 For a useful window onto the history of the relationship between the Hittites and Wilusa see the Alakšandu Treaty (CTH 76: there are numerous tablet fragments).
23 Genesis 23:3 and II Kings 7:6. See also Bryce (1998), 389–91.
24 For an overview of Hittite climate and geography, see Hoffner (2003).
25 Some from other centres of Hittite power: Tabigga in the Tokat province, Shapinuwa in the Corum province and Sarissa in the Sivas province.
26 M. Riemschneider (1954) Die Welt der Hethiter (Stuttgart: Kilpper), 93f.
27 Writing arrived, in the shape of cuneiform, in Anatolia in the early 2nd millennium BC.
28 See Bryce (2003).
29 EA 7:71–2 and EA 7:64–70: see Moran (1992). In this paragraph and the previous I have relied heavily on Bryce (2003). Once again, I owe him many thanks for being so helpful with this project.
30 Cypria fragment 1. Apollodorus in Epitome 3.3 reports that Menelaus entertained Paris for nine days, before leaving for his grandfather’s funeral on the tenth day.
31 Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 67.7. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.
32 Herodotus 2.113–19.
33 Dio Chrysostom, the Eleventh or Trojan Discourse. Trans. J.W. Cohoon.
34 The whole story is told in Herodotus 2.112ff.
35 For example, EA 4:47–50 after Moran (1992).
36 In the reign of Tudhaliya (IV).
37 See Bryce (1998), 345 (RS 17.159 [PRU IV 126] 1–10).
38 See Bryce (1998), 344–7.
39 Trans. A.M. Miller (1996), 45.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ALEXANDER HELENAM RAPUIT
1 Duffy (2002). Reproduced by kind permission of the author.
2 Paris is also called Alexander by Homer and known by both names thereafter. Why did Homer do this? One possibility is that he is conflating historical reality with local Anatolian myth – and therefore gives his Trojan prince the names of heroes from both.
3 Cypria, fragment 1.
4 Apollodorus, Epitome 3. Trans. J.G. Frazer.
5 Ovid, Heroides 16 and 17. Trans. H. Isbell. In Dryden’s ‘Introductory Argument’ to his translation of Helen’s letter to Paris he opines: ‘The whole Letter showing the extream artifice of Woman-kind’. Dryden, Poetical Works, 514 (Oxford Standard Authors), cited in R. Trickett, ‘The Heroides and English Augustans’, in Martindale (1988), 193.
6 Apollodorus, Epitome 3.3. Trans. J.G. Frazer.
7 Site visits 1985–2005.
8 Paris, Louvre OA 1839.
9 The artist is thought to be Gubbio: Paris, Louvre OA 1849.
10 Limoges, dated to the 16th century. Paris, Louvre OA 2044.
11 Paris, Louvre OA 7339.
12 See Iliad 24.33 [LCL 24.28] on the ‘ate’ of Paris
, and Odyssey 4.293 [LCL 4.261], where Helen refers to her own ‘abandonment’. See also Lindsay (1974), 28.
13 Herodotus 2.120.
14 Croally (1994), 95.
15 Iliad 14.209–25 [LCL 14.170–83].
16 Iliad 3.62 [LCL 3.53].
17 Iliad 6.415 [LCL 6.350].
18 A term sometimes used to describe the consort of a goddess.
19 I was drawn to this idea by the work of Bella Vivante.
20 Alexander Helenam Rapuit is Isidore of Seville’s entry explaining Helen’s importance to his universal theory (compiled 7th century AD).
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Female of the Species Is More Deadly Than the Male
1 This fragment was found in Egypt in 1906, and published in 1914 by Grenfell and Hunt. The translation used here is by Josephine Balmer, from (1984) Sappho: Poems and Fragments (London: Brilliance Books), reissued (1992) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe). Reproduced with permission. It appears in Margaret Reynolds (2003) The Sappho History (Palgrave: Macmillan), 6–7.
2 The ‘Sappho debate’ looks set to run and run. Some argue that she was a construct, invented to create a genre of ‘female’ poetry. For a taste of the arguments that she might be fictitious, see Prins (1999), 8.
3 Aelian, fragment 190. Trans. N.G. Wilson.
4 Plato, Phaedrus 235bc. Trans. M. Williamson (1995), 12.
5 Palatine Anthology 9.506; testimonia 60 in Sappho, trans. D.A. Campbell in Greek Lyric.
6 The papyri in question are the property of the Egypt Exploration Society and housed in the Sackler Library in Oxford, stored in paper folders or between glass sheets. They continue to be studied and more are published each year, but it will be several generations before the work of processing them is complete. Fragment 16 (known by its reference number of P.Oxy.1233) is kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
7 Williamson (1995), 55.
8 See Pomeroy (2002), 46–8 on polyandry and ancient sources for its practice by Spartans.
9 Plutarch, Lycurgus 15.6–7.
10 Colluthus’ work was written in the reign of the Emperor Anastasius I (ad 491–518).
11 Colluthus, Rape of Helen 314; 254; 393–4. Trans. A.W. Mair.
12 See Bate (1986), 19, for a more extensive list.
13 Illustration to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Cambridge, Trinity Hall MS 12, folio 69 r: see Baswell and Taylor (1988), 297. On the following page of the same manuscript, Agamemnon carries his daughter Iphigeneia’s head on a plate.
14 See Peter Green’s excellent ‘Heroic Hype, New Style: Hollywood Pitted Against Homer’, in Arion 12.1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 171–87.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Helen the Whore
1 Clement of Alexandria, Paidogogos – The Instructor 3.2: ‘Against Embellishing the Body’. Trans. W. Wilson. Earlier, in a section entitled ‘Against Excessive Fondness for Jewels and Gold Ornaments’ (2.13), the author refers to women who richly adorn themselves without being truly beautiful, as ‘Helens’. Clement was a Greek theologian, one of the founding fathers of Christian literature. He died c. AD 215.
2 The full title is Ylias Daretis Phrygii; for ease of reference, it will be referred to here as Trojan War.
3 Trojan War 4.189. Joseph based his account on Dares’ The Fall of Troy. In chapter 12, Dares also describes her cruribus optimis. Thanks to Neil Wright for his help with this and other passages.
4 Clement of Alexandria in the Paidogogos dealt in some detail with Helen’s affair and disgrace: ‘For the mind is carried away by pleasure; and the unsullied principle of reason, when not instructed by the Word, slides down into licentiousness, and gets a fall as the due reward of its transgression. An example of this are the angels, who renounced the beauty of God for a beauty which fades, and so fell from heaven to earth.’ Chapter 2. Trans. W. Wilson.
5 And Joseph goes further, slicing Helen open to investigate her heart, lungs, spleen and ‘lustful’ liver: ‘But the itch in her sensitive liver goads her on more lasciviously than it should, destroying the merits of her deserved fame and perverting the praise due to her inborn love. This liver is a monster that cannot be overcome by any voracious vulture, rolling stone, whirling wheel or receding water; when her lust, well slaked and cooling, seems dead and buried, then the old fires breathe afresh in its fertile tissues. So a single part totally sinks Helen, and rouses the very world to disaster as kingdoms clash in war.’ Trojan War 4.193 ff. Trans. Neil Wright.
6 Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War 3.330–8. Trans A.K. Bate. The translation does depend on one’s interpretation of incumbens, which supports either the notion of Helen being ‘on top’ or of her pressing into Paris’ body.
7 De Lille was born at Lille c. AD 1120.
8 Alan de Lille, The Plaint of Nature 135 and 71. Trans. J.J. Sheridan. See also 217.
9 Payer (1984), 22.
10 Brundage (1993), 87.
11 See Baswell and Taylor (1988), 306.
12 From Thomas Proctor’s A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), in Rollins (1926), 81.
13 Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus 161.
14 Helen’s beauty by definition was thought to make her unchaste. As Thomas Heywood would write in his Troia Britannica of 1609: ‘Beauty and Chastity at variance are, / Tis hard to finde one Woman chast and faire …’
15 Ovid, Art of Love 359–72. Trans. J.H. Mozley.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Pain of Aphrodite
1 Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis 544–51. Trans. R.E. Meagher (2002), 28. Euripides describes the white heat of engagement with Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
2 Cypria, fragment 4. Trans. M. Davies (1989).
3 Colluthus, The Rape of Helen 155–8. Trans. A.W. Mair.
4 Iliad 3.461–71 [LCL 3.400–7].
5 See the quotation that opens this chapter.
6 See B. Geoffroy-Schneiter (2003) Greek Beauty (New York: Assouline), 5.
7 Hesiod, Theogony 190–206.
8 Pausanias 7.23.1–3.
9 Ovid, Heroides 16.123–5. Trans. G. Showerman.
10 Ovid, Heroides 16. (excerpts) Trans. G. Showerman.
11 Propertius, Elegies 2.15.13–14. Trans. G.P. Goold.
12 For a full list of ancient sources that deal with this aspect of eros see Carson (1986), 148.
13 Eros was also thought to love beauty: ‘For it is a universal truth that no one has escaped or will escape Eros as long as there be beauty and eyes to see it.’ Longus, Pastorals of Daphnis and Chloe (2nd–3rd century AD).
14 Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.12.
15 Hesiod, Theogony 121.911.
16 Vernant (1991), 101, translating a fragment of Alcman.
17 Aphrodite is often found in the natural landscape. In Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon 741, Helen is a ‘heart-eating flower of love’.
18 Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus: see Chapter 43.
19 Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 4. Trans. D.M. MacDowell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Sea’s Foaming Lanes
1 Iliad 3.54–7 [LCL 3.46–9].
2 Colluthus, Rape of Helen 328ff. Trans. A.W. Mair.
3 Iliad 3.516–28 [LCL 3.441–50].
4 Helen is shown on coins from Gythion as a tree between the Dioscuri: Lindsay (1974), 221, and n. 16, citing Chapouthier (1935), 149.
5 See Roscher (1884), 1950–1, on Helen.
6 Apollodorus, Epitome 3.3–4.
7 The nearby chamber tombs at Mavrovouni were used by the Germans as bunkers during the Second World War.
8 Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques INV. 20268.
9 Animal-skins would have played an integral part in currency since humans started to trade with each other, so it is little surprise that one precursor of metal coinage, talents, are ox-hide shaped blocks of bronze, some the size of small dogs.
10 Latacz (2004), 45.
11 A full list of destinations can be found in Odyssey 4.80ff.
12 A late scholiast was said to
have given her star the name Ourania – see Lindsay (1974), 211, and the scholiast on Statius, Thebaid 7.92, for the notion of Helen as a star.
13 See, for example, R.A. Goldthwaite (1993) Wealth and the Demand for Art 1300–1600 (Baltimore).
14 Dares, The Fall of Troy 10.
15 Cf. Helen on Etruscan tombs; see p. 11 (Introduction).
16 National Gallery, L667.
17 Site visit in 2003.
18 British Museum, ANE E29793 and E29785. For more information on the Amarna tablets, see Moran (1992).
19 Discovery close to the Mediterranean Turkish coast opposite the Greek island of Megisti.
20 An alternative dating system for the Aegean Bronze Age is summarised in Warren and Hankey (1989).
21 Cline (1994), xviii. Michael Wedde has pointed out to me that the fastest route to Egypt – hooking on to the north wind – might depart from Crete, head due south with a landfall at Libya and then on east to the Nile Delta. The return route could travel up the Syro-Palestinian coast utilising light winds blowing off the coast in the early evening light to travel northwards under sail. My thanks for his help with this passage.
22 Herodotus 2.117, citing Cypria fragment. Lloyd (1988) in his commentary on this passage, notes that other testimonia on the Cypria contradict Herodotus’ report, claiming instead that Paris stopped off at Cyprus and Phoenicia on the way to Troy; cf. Apollodorus, Epitome 3, 1ff.
23 Iliad 6.341–6 [LCL 6.289–92].
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