by Jack Lindsay
Helen of Troy
Woman and Goddess
Jack Lindsay
Copyright © Jack Lindsay 1974
The right of Jack Lindsay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1974 by Constable.
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
To my daughter Helen
*
Whose name but yours?
and yet
here’s no example that I’d set.
Still, Helen is no single thing:
destroying or preserving dream
delusion wildly fluttering
or daily wife who dims away:
she’s all of that, she’s less and more,
found, lost again, forever sought,
lost in the indiscriminate day
and found still at the quiet core,
lost in the self-regarding thought
and found in swarming streets of strife.
Rejoice
and find yourself, I beg you then,
not as Helen but in Helen
Helen as the earth of choice
Helen as the embosoming tree
as well as Helen who steps gaily
into the hells of chaffering men
to blaze her paradisiac trail.
Seek the whole truth and through the maze
of dangerous and delightful days
follow the thread that yet can save
and guide through the deceitful cave
where minotaurs, confronted, fail,
into bare light, which sets us free.
J.L.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations and Journals
Foreword
Part One – The Story of Helen
Chapter One – Helen in the Iliad
Chapter Two – Helen in the Odyssey
Chapter Three – Helen and History
Chapter Four – The Cyclic Poets and Hesiod
Chapter Five – The Lyric Poets
Chapter Six - Helen in the Fifth Century
Chapter Seven – From Gorgias to Late Antiquity
Part Two – Myth and Ritual
Chapter Eight – The Judgement of Paris
Chapter Nine – The Nature of Helen
Chapter Ten – Helen and her Brothers
Chapter Eleven – Runaway Heroine
Chapter Twelve – Nemesis
Appendix
Bibliography
Extract from Joan of Arc by Edward Lucie-Smith
Abbreviations and Journals
Among many debts I must single out that to L.B. Ghali-Kahil for her work on the representations of Helen’s Carryings-Off and her Return. But I must also gratefully mention George Thomson’s work on the moira concept, R.F. Willetts’s on Cretan Cults, Jouan’s on the Cypria, Dietrich’s on Nemesis, and Chapouthier’s on the Dioskouroi.
I have used the following abbreviations for authors often cited: Chap., Chapouthier; CZ, Cook, Zeus; D, Dietrich; F, Farnell; GK, Ghali-Kahil; GT, George Thomson; H, Herter; JH, Jane Harrison; JL, Jack Lindsay; N, Nilsson; PM, Evans Palace of Minos; RE, Paully-Wissow Real-Enc; Sev., Severyns; SS, Schmidt-Stahlin; W, Willetts; WM, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.
*
AA, Archäolog. Anzeiger, ABV, Beazley (1); AC, Antiquité classique; AD, Archaiologike Deltion; AE, Année epigraphique; Aeg., Aegyptus; AEph., Archaiol. Ephemeris; AeR, Atene e Roma; AfR, Archiv f. Religionswiss.; AJA, American J. of Archaeology; AM, Mitteilungen des deutschen archäolog. Instituts; Ann., Annuali dell’ Istituto di Correspondena archeol.; Ant., Antiquity; AO, Acta Orientalia; AO(2), Archiv. Orientalni; ARV, Beazley (2); BBM, Bull. Brooklyn Mus.; BCH, Bull. de Correspondance hellénique; BIAO, Bull. Instit. Arch. Orient.; BICS, Bull. Instit. of Classical Studies; BJRL, Bull. J. Rylands Lib.; BSA, Annual of Brit. School at Athens; CAH, Cambridge Anc. History; CE, Chronique d’Egypte; CMS, Corpus d. minoischen u. myken. Siegel i 1946, A. Sakellariou; CP, Classical Philology; CQ, Classical Quarterly; CR, Class. Rev.; DS, Daremberg-Saglio Dict.; EC, Etudes classiques; IEJ, Israel Explor. Journal; JdAI, Jahrbuch des deut. archäol. Inst.; JEA, Journal of Egyptian Studies; JHS, J. of Hellenic Soc.; JNES, Journal Near Eastern Studies; JRAI, Journal of Royal Anthrop. Inst.; JRS , J. of Roman Soc.; LFE, Lexikon des frühgriech. Epos 1955 onwards; M, Minos; MH, Museum Helveticum; MEM, Mélanges de l’école française de Rome; MKAW Mededeelingen d. konigl. Akad. van Wetens. Afdeeling Letterkunde; Mnem., Mnemosyne; OLZ, Oriental. Literaturzeitung; PAA, Praktika tes Akad. Athenon; Ph., Philologus; RA, Rev. archéol.; REA, Rev. des études anciennes; REG, Rev. des études grecques; RhM, Rhein. Mus. F. Philologie; RHR, Rev. de l’hist. des religions; Roscher, Lexikon d. griech. u. röm. Mythologie; RP, Rev. de Philologie; RPA, Rend. Pont. Acc.; TAPA, Trans. American Philol. Assn.
Foreword
There are few serious studies of Helen of Troy; and as far as I can make out, no comprehensive work in any language — one that attempts to cover all aspects of her in the ancient world: in the fields of literature and art, of cult and myth. This book makes that attempt. The first half deals with her character and significance in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and discusses the various stages she goes through in the poets and prose-writers from Hesiod and the cyclic epic poets on to Euripides and Isokrates. These stages are in turn related to the phases of Greek society that beget them; and we examine the various forms of interpretation and their function as part of the effort made by the Greeks to understand their history and its driving forces, constructive and destructive; their ceaseless attempt to revalue the Homeric world in the light of contemporary problems. We find that certain moral or philosophic questions are throughout implicated: the nature of moral responsibility and of human fulfilment; the nature of fate as an inner compulsion or choice and as an outer controlling or determining force.
The second half deals with the roots of Helen in the world of cult and myth, and seeks to clarify her important connections with the early cults in which the earth-goddess, mother and nurse, was the dominating figure. We analyze the judgement of Paris and its triad of goddesses; Helen’s link with vegetation-cults and especially with the plane tree, and so with a series of cult-figures, Hanged Goddesses; her relations with her twin brothers; her role as an Earth-Maiden or Koré who is carried off like Persephone, and her consequent link with Ariadne and Europa; finally her relation to the goddess Nemesis, who is her mother in the early epic, the Cypria. In the end certain aspects that emerge during this line of enquiry merge with others that have come up out of the poetic tradition with its deep questions and answers.
We are left at the end with an insoluble problem. Was Helen a tree-goddess, connected with the dances and initiation rites of the young girls of Sparta, who became the highly individualized heroine of the Homeric story? Or was she in origin an historical figure who absorbed a large number of mythical elements? But in the process of arriving at the final form of the question we traverse a great deal of ancient Greek thought and poetry from a new angle, and we are enabled to explore many aspects of the early religious ideas and cults which reach back through the dark ages to Mykenean days. Ariadne’s Thread, which guided Theseus through the Labyrinth, plays an important part at one phase of our inquiry; and in a sense the whole book is a complex following-up of that clue (clew) through the maze of associations playing about Helen.
As I was completing the book, I had brought to my notice a recent example of the deadly feud possible in a tribal society through the abduction of a wife — though the tribal society here is one in its last stages of dissolution: that of the English gypsies. In November 1968 a fierce battle was fought between two gypsy gangs at Chalgrave camp near Toddin
gton; it ended with two of the invaders being set on fire, one of them dying two days later. The attackers had come to avenge the carrying-off of the wife of a member of their group at Roydon.
Except for some well known names embedded in English literature, such as Achilles (Achilleus), I have kept to the correct spelling of Greek names, with upsilon transliterated as y, and have not used the Latinised forms.
JACK LINDSAY
Part One – The Story of Helen
Chapter One – Helen in the Iliad
The Homeric epics stand at the springs of Greek culture, and the story of Helen lies at their heart. Despite the endless developments, variations, additions, expansions which have happened since Homer’s time, his picture of her remains the essential thing, which all the other versions, one way or another, assume. We must therefore begin by considering his account in some detail, while taking care not to attribute to him ideas, attitudes, or motifs which came up later.
Helen, married to Menelaos, has left her home in Sparta with the prince Paris (Alexandros) of Troy; and an army of Achaians, the mainland Greeks, has set out to regain her under the command of Agamemnon, king of Mykenai and brother of Menelaos. The Iliad deals with one important episode in the siege of Troy, the wrath of Achilles, while weaving many lesser themes or episodes into the main tale. The Achaians have to carry on the siege for nine years and are entering on the tenth. (Later attempts were made to explain this length of time by the rudimentary siege methods at their disposal; and it has been suggested that the many references to the town’s pre-war wealth are meant to bring out by contrast the drying-up of resources in the long war. But in fact the ‘nine years’ are a proverbial term; and the episode of Helen’s appearance above the Skaian Gates gives the effect that the war has not been going on long, for she has to tell King Priam who the various Achaian leaders are.) Agamemnon, among his booty, has gained a girl Chryseis, daughter of a priest of Apollo. Moved by her charms, he refuses to let her father ransom her; and Apollo sends a plague on the Achaian camp. After the prophet Kalchas explains the cause, Agamemnon reluctantly agrees to surrender Chryseis, but compensates himself by seizing Briseis (girl of Brisa), to whom Achilles, her captor, has become much attached. Achilles then withdraws his allegiance to Agamemnon; he and his contingent, the Thessalian Myrmidons, take no more part in the fighting. The Achaians have lost their great champion; and despite the attempts of Diomedes, Aias and other heroes, they are driven back on the camp, which they fortify with a wall.
Agamemnon, on the advice of the veteran Nestor of Pylos, sends an embassy to Achilles, offering to return Briseis with a huge honour-prize, and, when victory comes, to see that Achilles is married, without bride-price, to a royal princess with seven cities for her dower. Achilles, still embittered, refuses. Next day, in the fighting, Hektor, brother of Paris and the Trojan champion, drives the Achaians back to the ships, forces an entrance in their wall, and sets one of the ships on fire. Patroklos, the favoured retainer and comrade of Achilles, gets permission to don that hero’s armour and lead the Myrmidons into the battle. The Trojans, thinking that Achilles himself has taken the field, retreat in disorder; but after a while Patroklos is killed — Apollo helping to bring about his death. The Achaians begin to fall back again. Achilles, in a transport of fury at the news of Patroklos’ death, appears unarmed at the trench round the camp. His war-cry makes the Trojans fall back and Patroklos’ body is recovered. He now wants to go on fighting; but Odysseus insists on ending the feud with the correct procedure. Achilles is paid his due compensation. (His mother the sea-goddess Thetis persuades the smithgod Hephaistos to make him a new suit of armour.) Next day he routs the Trojans, encounters Hektor and kills him in single combat. He returns to the camp with Hektor’s body dragged behind his chariot. Funeral games are held; and Priam, king of Troy, comes secretly by night to Achilles and succeeds in ransoming Hektor’s body. With the latter’s funeral the Iliad ends.
The carrying-off of Helen provides the epic’s background, but does not directly intrude on the story of Achilles. We may note however a certain duplication of patterns. The war has come about through Helen’s abduction; the conflict among the Achaian leaders, almost wrecking their whole enterprise, occurs through the quarrel about a woman, Briseis, who is forcibly taken from Achilles to compensate Agamemnon for the loss of Chryseis. To appreciate this point we must realize that the Trojans are not conceived as aliens. They are part of the Greek world of the second millennium BC, though on the eastern coast of the Aegean — as were later the great mercantile towns of the Ionians. Achaians and Trojans share the same pantheon. The Trojans are supported by Apollo, Artemis and Aphrodite, while the Achaians are sustained by Hera, Athena and Ares. Athena, though the great ally of the Achaians, is also the patron deity of Troy with her temple on the acropolis. In the Iliad her Trojan priestess is Theano, daughter of Kisseus of Thrace (who lived, says Strabon, in the peninsula of Chalkidice where there were a Mt. Kissos and a town Kissos).[1]
The story of the Trojan War had come down from the Bronze Age, through dark confused centuries leading to the Ionian colonization, on into the eighth century (when we can best imagine the Homeric poems being composed). It had come down as one of the main epic cycles which told of old heroic struggles and sought to explain how the civilization of the Mykenean Greeks had broken down. The bardic tradition told how the heroic world had been sapped and destroyed above all by two internecine conflicts, a fratricidal strife at Thebes on the mainland and a disastrous war expedition overseas against Troy. In the story of the collapse of a civilization, the war for possession of Helen played the central part; and so the contention between Agamemnon and Achilles over a girl captive was a sort of refraction of the larger pattern. It helped strongly to reinforce the key motif of the Iliad, showing in clear and prolonged detail how the self-assertions, the prides and greeds, of the leaders, involving a complex tribal code of status, of shames, humiliations, compensations and regaining of face, provided a destructive element in the culture — an element continually undermining and breaking down the cohesive forces of kindred, of loyalty of man to lord and lord to overlord, and so on, which held the system together. The Briseis theme thus expressed on the realistic everyday level what the Helen theme expressed on a higher level with deep symbolism and a far wider series of references.
This point will become clearer as we go on. For the moment it helps us to see that the motif of Helen, the abducted or eloping wife, who provokes a cataclysmic war, is not a casual or arbitrary one. Through the episode of the wrath of Achilles it is linked concretely with the whole system of balances in what we may call a tribal-feudal society — balances of loyalty and disloyalty, of ardent comradeship and passionate self-assertion, which both build up and rend such a society.
Helen pervades the epic because, as the object for which the long and desperate struggle is being waged, she stands somehow for the supreme good, the most desirable goal in the heroic world. But it is only in Books III and VI out of the twenty-four books that she comes forward personally in a prominent way. She is first mentioned in Book II, where Agamemnon, despairing, has proposed that the Achaians abandon the siege and return home. ‘Already have nine years of great Zeus passed by, and see, our shiptimbers rot, the tackling hangs loose, and our wives and little children, I suppose, sit in our halls and wait for us. Yet unfulfilled, quite foundered, is the task for which we sailed. Come then, as I tell you, let’s all obey, let’s be off with our ships to our beloved native land. There’s no more hope of taking broad-streeted Troy.’[2]
The men rush for the ships and the siege would have ended if the gods had not taken a hand afresh. Hera calls on Athena, ‘Are the Argives then to go scampering across the sea’s broad back to their dear native land? Yes, to Priam and the Trojans they’d leave their brag: that Argive Helen, for whom so many Achaians have died at Troy, far from the earth of home. Go through the host of the bronze-coated Achaians, seek to restrain each man with your soothing words, and stop them from d
rawing their curved ships to the sea.’
Athena obeys. First she goes to Odysseus and repeats Hera’s words about Helen as the brag of the Trojans. He knows her voice and hurries to the general. Taking aside any chief he meets, he advises him against Agamemnon, while, when he finds ‘a man of the people shouting out’, he strikes him with his staff and warns him. He thus quiets the panic, despite the abuse that Thersites, the outstanding man-of-the-people, is heaping on the general, calling on his fellow soldiers to go off home and leave Agamemnon ‘to digest his prizes’. Here we meet a parody of the motif of woman loot. ‘Your huts are heaped with bronze and herds of women are in your huts, the chosen loot that we, the Achaians, give you first, when he take a city. Or do you still want gold as well? Or is it some young girl to hug in love and keep apart for yourself?’
Nestor speaks against withdrawal. ‘Let no man hurry off home before each of us here has lain and mated with some Trojan wife in requital for his strivings and his groanings for Helen.’ The phrase here is ambiguous and the meaning could be ‘the strivings and groanings of Helen’, which suggest prolonged repentance on her part and a desire to return home. But there is no evidence that the Achaians looked on her as a victim carried off by force (as she became in quite late versions). Hellenistic critics such as Aristarchos felt the need to read ‘of Helen’ as an objective genitive referring to the thoughts and feelings of the Achaians, who considered her the cause of their sufferings. (The phrase recurs later in the book, as the fighting starts once more. Menelaos moves among his men, urging them on, ‘and his heart was zealous to gain requital for his strivings and groanings for Helen’.)[3]
Paris-Alexandros appears in the battle with his curved bow and sword, brandishing two bronze-tipped spears, a panther-skin on his shoulders. He is described as godlike but promptly shrinks away from the wronged husband, and Hektor upbraids him, calling him Dys-Paris, Evil-Paris, and giving an account of Helen’s abduction. ‘Dysparis, you’re a pretty fellow, mad after women, you seducer. I wish you’d never been born. I wish you’d died before you took a wife. Far better that than to have disgraced us all and turned a thing of contempt. How the long-haired Achaians must laugh out when they see us make a champion of a prince because he’s handsome to look at, though in his heart there’s no strength, no courage. Can you today be the man who got together a crew of trusty comrades and sailed overseas in your goodeepwater ships, made yourself at home in a foreign land and carried off a beautiful woman from that faraway place and her warrior kin, only to be a curse to your father and your city, a curse to all your people, to the delight of your enemies — only to end here with that hangdog face of yours? Won’t you stand up against Menelaos, that favourite of Ares? You’d soon learn what sort of a fighter he is, the man whose wife you stole. Your lyre won’t be the least bit of use to you then, nor all Aphrodite’s gifts, your fine hair and your good looks, when you lie there in the dust. But the Trojans are a timid lot, or you’d already have worn a stone coat for all the evil you’ve done.’ That is, they’d have stoned you to death.[4]