Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  16 Quispel (1975), 301: Faustus, Chapter 55, English version: The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr John Faustus (London: 1592). Trans. P.F. Gent. (New York, Da Capo Press; Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969) It was Gent’s translation that Marlowe used as his basis for Dr Faustus.

  17 See Hattaway (1982), 181.

  18 Riggs (2004), 234.

  19 For famous cases of this neurosis see Chambers (1923), Vol. 3, 423. Thanks to Julian Bowsher for his help with this passage.

  20 Particularly in Euripidean and Aeschylean tragedy.

  21 Elizabeth I herself was described as a ‘beauteous second queen of Troy’: see James (1997), 18.

  22 Thomas Nashe, ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’ (1590–6).

  23 When Shakespeare writes of Helen, he typically couples her with death: ‘For every false drop in her bawdy veins / A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple / Of her contaminated carrion weight / A Troyan hath been slain’ (Troilus and Cressida, 4.1.70–73) and ‘Show me the strumpet that began this stir, / That with my nails her beauty I may tear! / The heat of lust, fond Paris, did incur / This load of wrath that burning Troy doth bear; / Thy eye kindled the fire that burneth here, / And here in Troy, for trespass of thine eye, / The sire, the son, the dame and daughter die’(Rape of Lucrece 1.471–7).

  24 Shades of the line can also be found in Seneca, Troades 26–7: ‘Plunderers seize the Dardan spoils; A thousand ships cannot contain the booty.’ Trans. A.J. Boyle; see also Tertullian, De anima 34. And a popular school textbook of the time was one written by Baptista Spagnuoli, also known as Baptista Mantuanus. It comprised 10 Latin Eclogues. Interestingly enough, in the Fourth Eclogue, line 154 reads: ‘Tyndaris Aegeas onerauit nauibus vndas’, ‘Tyndarian Helen burdened the Aegean sea with ships’. Did Marlowe also know this launching Helen? See Baldwin (1944).

  25 Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead 18. Trans. F.G. and H.W. Fowler.

  26 Helen does have some Elizabethan apologists. John Ogle in his Lamentation of Troy, for instance, written in 1594, blames the gods for the war, and goes so far as to sanctify her.

  27 Possibly written around 1595.

  28 See Bevington and Rasmussen (1993), in the introduction to their edition of Doctor Faustus: 53–6.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Helen’s Nemesis

  1 Ovid, Heroides 16.141–4. Trans. G. Showerman.

  2 Iliad 5.492–3 [LCL5. 428–9].

  3 Heimarmene Painter, Berlin, Staatliche Antikensammlungen 30036.

  4 Lucian, The Judgement of the Goddesses 15. Trans. A.M. Harmon.

  5 See Plato, Symposium (200e): ‘Eros is forever the desire of something, and that some-thing is that which is lacking’. See Caldwell (1987) for further discussion of these ideas. Caldwell makes the point (p. 89) that ‘Tartaros must come before Eros’.

  6 Unlike Aphrodite, Helen is rarely portrayed naked. While the goddess is wantonly available, Helen, typically cloaked, appears to be saving herself for someone. She is opaque. Men’s eyes search for her but fear what they might find. When Paris sees her, the world changes; the Cypria (fragment 1) tells us that Achilles would fight only once he had looked upon Helen; one glimpse of Helen turns Menelaus’ hate back to love. The ancients found in Helen the perfect tool to explore the notion that the origins of desire are in the seen. Alcman describes ‘the liquid beam of the human eye as the source of erotic desire’. M.S. Cyrino (1995) In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry (Lanham, MD), 83, citing Alcman fragment 3.61, as quoted in Worman (1997), 167, n. 53.

  7 Cypria fragment 8 [Athenaeus 8.334b].

  8 But, interestingly, the Nazis preferred Penelope as a loyal (blond) hausfrau: see, for example, H. Bengl (1941) ‘Die Antike und die Erziehung zum politischen Deutschen’, in Die Alten Sprachen 6: 5. Thanks to Katie Fleming for her help on this point.

  9 There is a suggestion that the worship of Helen Dendritis at Rhodes stems from the hanging of images of the female on trees as part of a ritual act. Helen is often shown with fillets dangling from her arms, as if she could be strung from a tree. See West (1975), 13.

  10 Goethe, Faust, Vol. 2. Trans. D. Luke.

  11 Doniger (1999), 42.

  12 One can only hope that the highest-paid Helen of the early 21st century, the German supermodel of Wolfgang Peterson’s Hollywood epic Troy, does not represent our Zeitgeist. Helen is there shown as a simpering shell of a creature, a woman with no personality or power, a blandly beautiful face, malleable, decorative, a flummery – the antithesis of what any real, living Helen could have or would have been. Her essence in one sense was better captured by the pulp-fiction and Cinemascope productions of the 1950s and 1960s: see John Erskine’s novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy, originally published in 1925 but reprinted in 1952 with a controversial cover of a buxom Helen by Earle Bergey. ‘Her Lust Caused the Trojan War’, this Popular Library edition screamed, also boasting on its cover that it is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED.

  13 H.D. (1957) Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press).

  APPENDIX ONE

  The Minotaur’s Island

  1 Odyssey 19.194–6 [LCL 19.172–3].

  2 Site visit 2003.

  3 We still cannot tell whether the move from Minoan to Mycenaean was a glide or a bloody wrench, whether there was absorption of natives, a mutual integration or an annihilation. What is clear is that the transition was irreversible. In places such as Egypt, Syria and Cyprus, by 1450–1400 BC, Mycenaean pottery simply replaces that of the Minoans.

  4 Thanks to Tim Kirby for this imaginative observation.

  5 See finds from Pellana, reported in Spyropoulos (1998).

  6 Iliad 3.277–8 [LCL 3.232–3].

  7 Iliad 2.747 [LCL 2.652].

  8 Details from ‘The Education of Michael Ventris’, a paper given by Thomas G. Palaima at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, March 2004.

  9 ‘The Decipherment of Linear B and the Ventris-Chadwick Correspondence’: exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2003. The Mycenaean Epigraphy Group and the Chadwick Fund, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. Exhibition catalogue by Lisa Bendall: 39.

  10 Tablets featuring names of oxen come from Knossos, and include, in the order of names given above, Ch 896 (Kelainos); Ch 896 (Aiwolos); Ch 897 (Stomargos), Ch 899, 1029 (Podargos). See J. Killen (1992–3) ‘The oxen’s names on the Knossos Ch tablets’, in Minos 27–8: 101–7.

  11 A good, general discussion of this topic can be found in K.A. and D. Wardle (1997).

  APPENDIX TWO

  La Parisienne

  1 (Enneads 5.8). Trans. A.H. Armstrong.

  2 Thanks to Lesley Fitton for her help with this passage.

  3 Site visit 1989.

  4 Interestingly, Minoan seal-stones have never lost their totemic power. Many turned up at the beginning of the 20th century in peasant houses, where they were called galopetres (milkstones) and were still being used by mothers, the cold little spheres tucked in next to the nursing mothers’ breasts to ensure good milk supply. Fitton (1995), 123. Even through the ‘disappearance’ of the Minoan civilisation, the fault-lines of Ottoman rule and the German invasion over a period of three and a half thousand years, locals must have passed on from generation to generation the notion that when fertility and nourishment were important, these cold little lumps of art had real potency.

  5 The Ring of Minos – a fabulous thing, itself the size of a Kalamata olive – has a surface dense with images of some kind of tree ritual. The ring has travelled from one owner to another and only recently came to rest in the hands of the Greek authorities. The officials must be weak with relief to have this vagrant treasure back under lock and key.

  6 See Immerwahr (1990), 174–5, for further details.

  7 See Fitton (2002), 58–9.

  8 See Fitton (2002), 70–2, and 134 on storerooms at Knossos.

  9 See Darga (1993), 103: A131 (Istanbul Archaeological Museum, Bo. 2004).

  APPENDIX THREE

  Women
of Stone and Clay and Bronze

  1 Homeric Hymns (1980), 1. Trans. C. Boer. Reproduced by kind permission of Spring Publications, Texas.

  2 Some argue that the figures may be asexual or hermaphrodite.

  3 From around 2500 BC a few copper, lead and bronze figurines are produced. From 6000 BC onwards, terracotta is the material most commonly used for figurine-production. Thanks to Professor Colin Renfrew for his help with this passage.

  4 See Broodbank (2002), 63–4. The tattooing seems to be representative – copper and bone needles with the remnants of pigments have been found.

  5 Goulandris Museum Inv. 828 c. 7000–3000 BC.

  6 See Cambridge Archaeological Journal 6:2 (1996), 281–307 passim.

  7 From the evidence we have currently, it seems that the Upper Paleolithic Period (c. 35,000–9000 BC) is the era when humans first make images and symbols designed to last.

  APPENDIX FOUR

  Elemental Helen – She-Gods and She-Devils

  1 Iliad 1.633 [LCL 1.528].

  2 Note the Homeric Hymn to the Earth (Ge) at the beginning of Appendix Three.

  3 West (1975), n. 5, quoting Gow on 10.8.

  4 Pollux 10.191.

  5 Theocritus, Idyll 18. See Chapter 11.

  6 Helen was trapped on the island to escape the attentions of King Thonis of Egypt. It was Thonis’ wife Polydamna who sent Helen there ‘lest this alien should prove more beautiful than she’ – see Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals 9.21. Trans. A.F. Scholfield.

  7 Plutarch, Life of Solon 4.

  8 Philostratus, Heroicus 20.32ff., says there was in fact a temple of Helen and Achilles.

  9 Pausanias 3.19.11–13.

  10 Lucian, True Story 2.25–7. Trans. A.M. Harmon.

  11 Pausanias 2.18.6 says that these boys were Menelaus’ sons by a slave woman. Hesiod, Catalogues of Women, 70, says they were Helen and Menelaus’ sons.

  12 Copenhagen National Museum 7125, discovered in excavations at the beginning of the 20th century: see note 13.

  13 B. 11: see C. Blinkenberg (1941) Lindos II: Fouilles de l’Acropole 1902–14. Inscriptions, Vol. I, 148–99, esp. 166 (Berlin: de Gruyter; Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad).

  14 Hesiod, Theogony 591–602. Trans. H.G. Evelyn-White.

  15 See West (1975) and Skutsch (1987).

  16 See West (1975).

  17 Hesiod, Works and Days 527ff. and Herodotus 2.24–6.

  18 See Clader (1976) and Meagher (2002) passim. Discussed, for example, in Austin (1994) p. 86.

  APPENDIX FIVE

  Royal Purple – The Colour of Congealed Blood

  1 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 959–60. Trans. A. Shapiro and P. Burian.

  2 Dictys 6.4 reports Helen and Menelaus’ stop-over in Crete: ‘When the Cretans heard of Helen’s arrival, many men and women from all over the island came together, desiring to see her for whose sake almost all of the world had gone to war.’ Trans. R.M. Frazer.

  3 ‘The last real hippie’, still wandered through the town when I last visited in 2003, roll-up in hand, tea cosy on his head.

  4 The excavation reports at Kommos can be found in the series of publications by the excavators J.W and M.C. Shaw, eds (1995–2000) Kommos: an excavation on the south coast of Crete by the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

  5 Some of these international journeymen left clues behind them. In the Late Bronze Age while a Syro-Palestinian boat was waiting in the bay, the anchor sheered off its rope (probably made of hemp or flax) and then lay, undetected, for the next three thousand years on the sea-bed. It is a simple thing, shaped like a Swiss cheese with just three holes bored through the block. But it speaks of a port filled with the babble of international voices. Of a place of exchange and communication, of visitors, of the victims of hostile ocean winds, of burgeoning international trade.

  6 Linear B tablets seem to refer to po-pu-re-ja – female purple dyers. See D. Ruscillo (forthcoming) To Dye For: Murex dye production in the Aegean and its social and economic impact in the Greek Bronze Age. Thanks to Deborah Ruscillo for her help in this matter, and for allowing me to see a pre-publication copy of her work. There would too have been local production of purple in the Peloponnese.

  7 Thanks to Lisa Bendall on this point.

  8 Murex brandaris is the most common species in the region. Thanks once again to Deborah Ruscillo.

  9 See Latacz (2004), 43 and n. 52, citing P. Jablonka.

  10 Iliad 3.151–4 [LCL 3.125–8].

  EPILOGUE – MYTH, HISTORY AND HISTORIA

  1 Euripides, Helen 588.

  2 The authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey is a question that will exercise scholars far into the future – but the current consensus is that Homer was one man, who lived in the 8th–7th centuries BC on the islands of the eastern Aegean (e.g. Chios) or the coast of Asia Minor.

  3 In Greek mythology – passed on from the mouth of one male bard to another – there were four periods of human creation. The first beings were the children of the earth goddess Ge or Gaia, the female spirit who breathed life into both the immortals and humans. These firstborn lived in a golden age of peace and prosperity, and were known as the golden race of mankind. Next came the silver race – a society of extreme matriarchy ignorant of the Olympian pantheon – who lived in abject misery. This troublesome group were replaced by the bronze race, phase one, who believed in the gods but were war-like and piteous, and, phase two, the heroes who believed in the gods, who were noble in soul who fought the Trojan War and then (as long as they fulfilled the necessary requirements) went on to dwell for ever in the Elysian fields. Archaic and Classical Greece was inhabited by the iron race, unjust, cruel, and troubled. Helen is a link with both bronze and silver. Each phase was violently, abruptly terminated. Current scientific research – which looks at the attenuated growth of many trees through the Bronze Age – suggests that this was a period of excessive cosmic movement. Some scientists posit that a globally catastrophic comet hit the earth around 2807 BC – a comet whose impact has been estimated at between 105 and 106 megatons. The creation tales of rock-men and giant abysses, of floods and divine destruction were perhaps monstrous versions of the terrible climate changes of around 2350 BC when a number of Bronze Age civilisations disappeared. They could have been a hazy memory of the impact of a major dust event on Aegean communities of 1800 BC – the fallout of more volcanic activity. For comet impact, see Masse (1998), 53; on climate change and dust event, see Verschur (1998), 51. Homer appears to commemorate both seismic and cosmic activity – in this case the arrival of a meteorite – on the battlefields of Troy. ‘A crash of thunder! Zeus let loose a terrific bolt / and blazing white at the hoofs of Diomedes’ team / it split the earth, a blinding smoking flash – / molten sulphur exploding into the air / stallions shying, cringing against the car – and the shining reins flew free of Nestor’s grip.’ Iliad 8.152–7 [LCL 8.133–7].

  4 Latacz (2004), 151.

  5 One group of aboriginal Australians has detailed distinct story-memories of a distant, real place that was flooded eight thousand years ago. Divers exploring the sea-bed of the Persian Gulf found features 1,000 feet (305 m) below the waves, which precisely and minutely matched the aboriginals’ descriptions. See C. Tudge (1988) Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: how agriculture really began (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  EDITIONS OF ANCIENT TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS

  The list of editions that follows includes only those titles from which specific translations have been quoted. All Greek and Latin text references that are cited without translation are taken from the relevant Loeb Classical Library editions.

  AELIAN, Historical Miscellany

  N. G. Wilson (1997) 3 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  AELIAN, On the Characteristics of Animals

  A. F. Scholfield, trans. (1959) 3 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harv
ard University Press.

  AESCHYLUS, Agammenon

  A. Shapiro P. Burian, trans. (2003) in The Oresteia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  ALCAEUS

  A. M. Miller, trans. (1996) in Greek Lyric: an anthology in translation. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.

  APOLLODORUS, Epitome; The Library

  J. G. Frazer, trans. (1921) 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. New York and London: Heinemann.

  ARISTOPHANES, Lysistrata

  A. H. Sommerstein, trans. (1990) Warminster: Aris & Phillips.

  ARISTOTLE, Politics

  S. Everson, trans. (1996) in The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Carmina Priapea

  W. H. Parker, trans. (1988) in Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God. London and Sydney: Croom Helm.

  CATULLUS

  F. W. Cornish, trans. (1988) Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  CICERO, Pro Archia

  N. H. Watts, trans. (1923) Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, The Instructor

  W. Wilson, trans. (1867–8) Ante-Nicene Christian Library 12. Edinburgh.

  Clementine Homilies and Recognitions

  A. Roberts J. Donaldson, trans. (1870) Ante-Nicene Christian Library 17. Edinburgh.

  COLLUTHUS, The Rape of Helen

  A. W. Mair, trans. (1963) in Oppian, Colluthus, Tryphiodorus. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann.

  Cypria

  1) M. Davies, trans. (1989) in The Epic Cycle. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.

  2) H. G. Evelyn-White, trans. (1974) in Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  DARES, see next entry