by Jack Lindsay
Hesiod goes on to give the reasons for the war. ‘And she bore neat-ankled Hermione in the palace, a child unlooked-for. And all the gods were divided by eris. For at that time high-thundering Zeus meditated marvellous deeds: to mingle disorders over the boundless earth. And he was already hurrying to make an utter end of the race of men, declaring that he’d destroy the life of the demi-gods — so that the children of the gods should not mate with wretched mortals, seeing their fate with their own eyes; but that from now on the blessed gods should have their living and habitations apart from men.’ As yet none of the gods knew Zeus’ mind.[124]
Hesiod shows the tendency to add to Helen’s children. He makes her bear her final child Nikostratos to Menelaos, apparently after her return. Klytemnaistra in the Elektra of Sophokles says that Menelaos had had two children, and one of them, rather than her Iphigeneia, should have been sacrificed at Aulis to save the expedition against Troy. Pausanias however makes Nikostratos the son of a slavewoman (like Megapenthes in the Odyssey). The Cypria, we saw, gave Helen two more sons. A scholiast says that the Lakedaimonians worshipped two of her sons, Nikostratos and Aithiolas; he cites Ariaithos as saying that she had a son by Menelaos, Maraphios, from whom the Persian family of Maraphians was descended. Later writers gave her a son Korythos or Helenos by Paris; Diktys gave her three, Korythos, Bounomos, Idaios. Dardanos is added by others to Aganos, Helenos, Aithiolas.[125]
In the Catalogue Hesiod declared that Iphigeneia was not killed at Aulis, but became Hekate through the will of Artemis. A fragment of Philodemos states that Stesichoros followed Hesiod in this point; and as Stesichoros certainly told of the rape of Helen by Theseus, with the resulting birth of Iphigeneia, Hesiod may well have also dealt with that rape.[126] The story was well-known in Argos and around it; for Pausanias tells us of the site: ‘After these comes the temple of the Dioskouroi. The images represent them and their sons, Anaxis and Mnasinous, and with them their mothers Hilaiira and Phoibe. They are made of ebony, the work of Dipoinos and Skyllis. The horses too are mostly of ebony, there is a little ivory in their construction. Near the Lords [Anaktes, the Dioskouroi] is a sanctuary of Eileithyia [birth-goddess] dedicated to Helen, when, on Theseus’ departure with Peirithoos to Thesprotia, Aphidna had been captured by the Dioskouroi and Helen was being taken back to Lakedaimon. It’s said she was with child, was delivered in Argos, and founded there the sanctuary of Eileithyia, giving the daughter she bore to Klytemnaistra, who was already married to Agamemnon, while she herself later married Menelaos. And on this theme the poets Euphorion of Chalkis and Alexandros of Pleuron, and even before them Stesichoros of Himera, agree with the Argives in asserting that Iphigeneia was the daughter of Theseus. Over against the sanctuary of Eileithyia is a temple of Hekate where the image is a work by Skopas. This image of stone and the bronze image opposite, also of Hekate, were the work respectively of Polykleitos and his brother Naukydes, son of Mothon.’ The passage from. Philodemos mentioned above refers to Iphigeneia as Agamemnon’s daughter; but that is doubtless a slip, since what interested the author was the Hekate relation and he thus dropped into the usual genealogy. In a Hesiodic fragment we meet an Iphimēdē, daughter of Agamemnon, who is changed into Artemis Einodiē (Crossroads or Highway Artemis), a form close to Hekatē.[127]
Round mid-sixth century Theseus gained his role as the great Athenian hero associated with the unification of Attika. If we could trust Pausanias’ account of the Chest of Kypselos at Olympia (mid-sixth century) we could argue that he was already Athenian by the early years of that century. Among the items shown on the cedar chest we find:
Menelaos, wearing breastplate and holding sword, advances to kill Helen, so it’s clear Troy has been taken....There is Theseus holding a lyre, beside him Ariadne grasps a crown....There are also the Dioskouroi, one of them a beardless youth; between them is Helen. She’s clad in black and the inscription on the group is an hexameter line plus a single word: The Tyndarids are taking off Helen and dragging Aithra from Athens...Also Hermes leading to Alexandros, Priam’s son, the goddesses whose beauty he is to judge...[128]
But the text of the inscription is corrupt; we cannot be sure that ‘Athanathen’ is correct; the scene may after all be Aphidna. However, certainly by the early fifth century the repertory of Theseus myths was known all over Greece; black-figure vases took up his exploits, especially that against the Minotaur. He became the great Attic hero. In the process he had taken over ancient legends such as those of Helen and Ariadne. The question is how far back that appropriation had begun.[129]
Did Homer know him? And if so, what did he know? We saw that in the Iliad Helen was accompanied by his mother Aithra. Aristarchos condemned the line mentioning Aithra, refusing to believe that Homer knew of any lover of Helen except Paris. Menelaos shouted at the Trojans: ‘You wantonly carried overseas my wedded wife and much property with her.’ The term used is kouridiē, which Aristarchos took in the usual sense of a quite young girl. The scholiasts and Eustathios also understood the line to mean that Helen was a virgin at marriage. But they were straining the word’s meaning. A further proof however was found in the statement that Helen, during the duel of Paris and Menelaos, felt afresh desire for her ‘first husband’. But Homer may have known the Theseus tale and decided to ignore it; he may have considered the marriage with Menelaos the only true one.[130]
It has been suggested that Helen’s regret at not seeing her brothers among the Achaians is connected with her memory of the Theseus rape and the aid they then gave her; hence her dis-quiet at failing to make them out among the host.[131] A scholiast thus interprets: ‘Helen, carried off by Alexandros and unaware of the mishap falling afterwards on the Dioskouroi, her brothers, supposes it’s through shame of her they haven’t come to Troy. As we’ve seen, she had been carried off by Theseus, and through that rape Aphidna, Attic city, was ravaged and Kastor wounded in the thigh by Aphidnos, the king then reigning. The Dioskouroi, not finding Helen, ravaged Attika.’ He adds that the story was known to the cyclic poets and Alkman.[132] (We noted that the Cypria seems to have known of the Theseus rape.) The reason for the killing-off of the twins may well have been, however, the fact that they would not have fitted at all into the Trojan saga.
The early spread of the rape story is shown by a protocorinthian arbyallos (seventh century). Here Theseus and Peirithoos, one of them holding Helen’s wrist, see the Twins ride up; she lifts her two arms in a hieratic gesture. In the legend as it has come down the two ravishers were absent at this moment, but perhaps the vase gives us the original version, in which Theseus was defeated. Later the Athenians could not admit such a discomfiture for their hero and invented the episode of his absence. That the theme was popular in the Peloponnesos and not in Attika is shown by the fact that the first art representations come from there.[133] On the Throne of Amyklai in Lakonia (probably last quarter sixth century), among the many subjects such as the Minotaur, the rape of the Leukippides, the Judgement of Paris, the Phaiakian dancers, Menelaos and Protesus, there were Theseus and Peirithoos, who ‘have seized Helen’. The Twins appeared on horses at each side of the upper edge. Leda, in art, still appears associated with them, not with Helen. In one of her rare depictions, on a black-figure amphora by Exekias (third quarter eighth century) she holds a flower as she welcomes home the twin horsemen with Tyndareos, while a dog jumps up to lick Polydeukes’ hand. Here we see the heroic scene assimilated to everyday genre. The names are inscribed.[134]
A scholiast on the late poet Lykophron remarks: ‘First Hesiod introduced the eidolon concerning Helen’: that is, he first suggested that a phantom of Helen, not the living woman, went with Paris to Troy. But the poet mainly connected with the eidolon was Stesichoros, and the scholiast may have put Hesiod here by error, especially as he goes on: ‘And Herodotos stated that the true Helen remained beside Proteus, her eidolon sailing off with Alexandros to Troy.’ This is certainly incorrect (Euripides, not Herodotos was meant), so we can hardly trust so careless a commentator. Th
ere is no other evidence connecting Hesiod with the eidolon, but some scholars have accepted the scholiast’s statement. (It has also been suggested that in Lykophron lie some clues to a Hesiodic use of the motif. But his poem Alexandra is an incredibly obscure prophecy out of Kassandra’s mouth. The lover’s mating on Kranae produces the cry: ‘You shall see no morrows, aftermath of love, fondling in empty arms a chill embrace and a dreamland bed.’ Later Menelaos is called ‘the husband seeking the fatal snatched-away bride, having heard rumours and yearning for the phantom that fled to the sky, what secret sea-places shall he not explore, what dry land not reach and search.’ He goes on an endless quest: ‘and all shall he endure for the sake of the Aigyan [Lakonian] Bitch, her three-husbanded, who bore only female children.’ Helen is condemned despite the use of the eidolon, which blurs into a vague symbol of illusion and disillusion. There can be nothing of Hesiod here.)[135]
The Catalogue of Women perhaps has roots going far back in pre-migration poetry, together with the Catalogue of Heroines in Book XI of the Odyssey. The long Catalogue of Ships, a detailed account of the Achaian mustering in Iliad II, also seems surely, as we noted, to have a strong Mykenean basis. But though we may argue that the bardic tradition was early capable of organizing, listing, and setting out a complex series of tales and relationships, and then of handing it on over many centuries, we cannot without corroborating evidence argue for the antiquity of any particular episode.[136]
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We may digress here a moment to consider an aspect of the Suitors’ Oath which does not appear in Hesiod and which has an indirect link with Theseus. Pausanias says: ‘On the road from Sparta to Arkadia, there stands in the open an image of Athena called Pareia, and beyond it is a sanctuary of Achilles. This it isn’t customary to open; but all the youths going to take part in the contest in the Planetree Grove are accustomed to sacrifice to Achilles before the fight. The Spartans say the sanctuary was made for them by Prax, grandson of Pergamos the son of Neoptolemos. Further on is what is called the Tomb of the Horse. Tyndareos, after sacrificing a horse here, administered an oath to the suitors of Helen, making them stand on the pieces of the horse. The oath was to defend Helen and the man who might be chosen to marry her if they were ever wronged. When he had sworn the suitors, he buried the horse here.’ (Later we shall see Helen’s close link with the Planetree.) When we note that the heroes standing on and in the dismembered horse are the men who are going to get inside the Wooden Horse, supposed to be a votive offering, we feel there must be some connection between the two horses, between the oath and the entry into Troy. But what is it?
First the oath ceremony belongs to two widespread series in which (a) the oath is embodied in an object: thus, the Naga of Assam stands in an oath circle, praying that he may rot as the rope rots if he fails in his promise. (I cite this example because it has its relation with the ritual thread, which we shall consider in dealing with Ariadne’s labyrinth); (b) men stand on bits of a sacrificial victim or pass between them at the making of a solemn covenant. A potent relation is thus established, with great binding force. At Methana, when the winds threatened the vines, a cock was cut in two; two men carried the halves round the vineyard in opposite directions. When they met, they joined the halves and buried the cock on the spot. A magical circuit had been completed and the vineyard was enclosed in the bowels of the body. In Boiotia and Macedonia we find armies purified by being led between the bleeding halves of a victim, eg a dog: we may compare the use of the jugum (yoke) and triumphal arch at Rome. Speke, in his account of travels to Lake Victoria Nyanza, says that ‘the guide, to make the journey propitious, plucked a twig, denuded it of its leaves and branches, waved it like a wand up and down the line of march, muttered some unintelligible words to himself, and threw the separated bits on either side of the path.’ The bough here both guides and provides an apotropaic passage between its halves.[137]
Such rites belong to a yet wider series of passage rites, which express purification and initiation, the movement from one state or level of life into another, eg by jumping over fires or passing through a split tree. The suitors have enclosed themselves in the oath (in the oath object, the horse), and they fulfil the oath by getting inside a horse which gives them the chance of returning Helen to her rightful husband. But there is a particular relation to Troy involved. Troy is a sacred city, as Homer stresses, with Athena its guardian (through her palladion). The capture of such a city is imagined as a rape of its goddess; the unpierced city is seen as a virgin. City and goddess are emotionally and ritually identified. Homer often mentions the sacred veil, hieron kredomenon, of a city which has to be rent or undone before the place can fall. At Troy and Thebes in particular the walls, built by gods, had this inviolable character. In the Hymn to Demeter kings are said to maintain the Sacred Veils of cities by right judgements; the just city has the blessing of the gods, of the protecting goddess who is an aspect of its life, strength, structure. To jump over a sacred wall was to affront and confront the magical power, and was liable to bring about death, as we see from such legends as those of Poimandros, Toxeus, Remus (at Rome), and, in an historical form, that of Miltiades. A vestal virgin who surrendered her maidenhead was a treacherous menace; at Rome she was buried alive to restore the sanctity of the defences. Legends like that of Tarpeia at Rome or Nixus at Megara reveal the same underlying ideas.[138]
Maze rituals were linked with the sacred nature of the city. They set up magical obstacles to the entry of the uninitiated. Indeed the names Troy and Ilios seem both to mean a sacred or magically encircled city; and Troia is possibly cognate with the Babylonian tirâni, found on tablets about moo BC, where the word is accompanied by maze patterns connected with entrail divination. One tablet has ekal tirâni, palace of the intestines.[139] There is a whole set of Latin words with the basic meaning of enclosing, surrounding, winding about, which have the root troare, eg porca troia, a pregnant pig; trulla, a cooking-pot; redantruare, to repay a kindness (complete the circular arrangement and enclose both parties in a beneficent or uniting force).[140] The Roman Game of Troy with its manoeuvres would then not be a late invention; it must have gone back to an initiatory maze movement or dance expressing the transition from one phase of living to another, in which all malign forces were baffled and left behind on the other side of the maze.
Much attention was certainly paid to the gates at Troy. Already in Troy I the city-gate had two towers, which could outflank any enemy trying to force the long corridor-like entrance. In Troy VI overlapping of walls was used to make attacks on the gates hazardous. Outside the southern entry was a house that must have been a sanctuary; many bones and burnt patches have been found in it, but no household goods. Prayers were no doubt made there, with sacrifices, at going off on a journey or on returning, or at emerging to fight. Monoliths resembling menhirs at the foot of the south wall of Tower VI, just at the entrance to the gateway, are clearly cult-stones; they are fixed in such strong foundations that they must once have been very tall. A similar stone block has been found at the entry to House VIa. These pillars may be compared with the menhirs in Cypros and Anatolia, or with the more elegant pillars that formed an important part of Minoan worship. The Trojan systems of defence, practical and religious, belong to a widespread type of enfiladed constructions with complicated and winding approaches, which provided both a genuine protection from attack and an apotropaic magic. The earliest tactical mazes are perhaps those found in some Egyptian forts of the 1st and and Dynasties; they also occur in the spiral rampart of the neolithic Trundle and on each shorter side of Maiden Castle, Dorset. Herodotos saw labyrinths at Knossos in Crete and at Hawara in the Egyptian Fayum, both of them mazes in the sense of a confusing complexity. The idea was at times applied to the private house. In China, ‘it is impossible to walk straight into ordinary middle-class dwellings. Inside the front door will be a screen which forces the visitor to turn to the right or the left; the object being to exclude evil spirits, which can only move in straight l
ines’ (Giles, 1911). The same principle appears in Egyptian tombs and mortuary chapels, eg the tomb of King Perabsen of the 2nd Dynasty or the funerary chapel of Sneferu at Medum; it was applied in a large-scale scheme in the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. The Book of Gates, of the second millennium BC, speaks of ‘double walls’ behind the gates to be passed in the death journey. The Greek meander pattern seems to have been used to define the indoor nature of a scene; it may have been derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph for a form of h, which represents the ground-plan of a courtyard; but similar designs from North Syria may well have affected the Greek pattern, which is found on the outside of clay models of the Geometric Age in the Heraion at Perachora near Corinth, where the function must be magical rather than descriptive. The square fret of the 8th Dynasty in Egypt, a time of strong influence from North Syria, has much the same meaning as the meander. One steatite plaque has a rectangular maze pattern on the lower half; in the upper half two seated figures, facing one another, are enclosed. A schist seal shows a single male figure within the maze. (In later Cretan coins the labyrinth encloses a human head, a bull’s head and a crescent moon; on the gate at Virgil’s Cumae, in the picture of the Cretan labyrinth, Pasiphae who mated with the bull, is shown, ‘She who gives light to all’, in some sense the moon.) Later we shall discuss the maze spiral as the genitals of the earth-goddess, which are located at the gates of a city.[141]