by Jack Lindsay
The breach of the sacred wall of Troy in order to bring in the horse is thus a rending of the virgin veil, a raping of the city-goddess, which deprives the Trojans of powers of resistance. What had been a rite enclosing the suitors in their oath, so that they cannot interfere with Helen’s mating outside it, becomes a rite breaking through an enclosing power — through the virgin defences of the goddess into her bowels — so that Helen can be taken out and once more handed over to the successful suitor. We may compare this complex with the episode of Theseus in the labyrinth. With the heroine’s aid he passes through the maze to defeat an evil power at its core, and is able to return to the outer world and claim his bride. We shall have more to say of mazes when we come to consider Ariadne in her full relation to Helen; but meanwhile this brief excursus will give us some idea of the ritual complexes surrounding Helen.
Chapter Five – The Lyric Poets
In broad terms we may say that the Epic Poets with their hexameter line represented the culture of the tribal society of the Dark Ages as it adapted and transformed itself to meet the requirements of the first stages of the mercantile polis or city-state. The Lyric Poets represented the period of more or less successful development of the aristocracies in this new situation, with the first stages of scientific and philosophic thought emerging in some of the advanced Ionian cities where trade and eastern contacts were most active. Drama and History, with fully matured Philosophy, appeared with the growth of democracy. Such generalizations must by their nature be loose and incomplete; for there were all sorts of survivals of the old and embryonic assertions of the new at every phase, all sorts of transitional divagations and combinations; and there were extreme inequalities of development all over the Greek world, where some areas, such as Thessaly and Makedonia, still carried on many old tribal elements, whilst elsewhere trade and money were at work as powerful solvents of such elements. But as long as we understand the complexity of the total situation, we can make the above points, disentangling the main trends or forms of expression.
Terpandros, who flourished about 675, was a poet of Aiolic Lesbos; he won a victory at the Karneia in Sparta in 673-2. He seems to have reintroduced the seven-stringed lyre to the Greek world. Some traditions link him with Kyme in Aiolis whence Hesiod’s father came, or even made him a descendant of Hesiod. A line attributed to him runs: ‘O Sons of Zeus and Leda, most beautiful saviours.’ Here as in the Odyssey Leda is linked with the Dioskouroi.[142] We are on surer ground with three poets of the late seventh and early eighth century: Sappho, Alkaios, Stesichoros. Sappho of Lesbos wrote in its Aiolic dialect. With her lyric verve and passion she could not but be interested in Helen; her ideal was beauty, with a life devoted to it; and Aphrodite dominated her verse.[143] A fragment of hers shows Leda as the nurse of Helen’s egg, not its producer. ‘They say that once on a time Leda found hidden an egg of hyacinthine hue.’ Elsewhere she calls Hekate ‘Aphrodite’s golden-shining handmaid’.[144] Again, she invokes Hera to manifest herself as she once did to the Atreidai, Agamemnon and Menelaos; and her version of the latter event has three differences from that in the Odyssey. The brothers are at Lesbos together instead of having separated; the prayer is not to Zeus alone, but to the Lesbian trinity of Zeus, Hera and Dionysos; and what is sought is not merely guidance in the choice of a passage to Hellas (above or below Chios), but help in some graver difficulties. What Sappho went on to ask Hera for we do not know, though we may guess that she prayed for fair winds and weather for herself or one of her friends. (The occasion of the poem may have been Sappho’s own forced flight to Sicily in a short political exile.)[145]
In the bits of a love-poem preserved in a papyrus of the second century AD we can make out that she compares one of her companions to Hermione. Perhaps the passage ran: ‘When I look you in the eyes, I think that not even Hermione was such as you — that you can be fairly likened to Helen with her golden hair.’[146] And Helen comes right to the forefront in an ode which seems written for Anaktoria, who has gone off with a soldier husband to Lydia; in another poem she speaks of this girl ‘shining among the ladies as after sunset the rosy-fingered Moon beside the stars about her’. The ode runs: ‘Some say the most beautiful thing on the dark earth is a host of horsemen riding. Others say: it’s footmen marching. But I against them say: it is the one I love. It is easy to make this understood by everyone. The woman who was born the loveliest of all on the earth, Helen, left her admirable husband deserted, and she went sailing off to Troy with never a thought for the daughter whom she left, or for her dear parents. The goddess of love drew her aside and she went. And all this has brought into my mind Anaktoria who is living far away...her lovely way of walking and the radiances changing across her face: I’d rather see them than all your Lydian chariots going by, all those fully-armed footmen.’[147] Helen is in one sense reinstated in her Homeric role, above criticism, a pure and spontaneous expression of energy; but the world in which she operates is restricted. Helen-Aphrodite sums up and concentrates the activities of Sappho and her group, their dream image of themselves, the elements of joy in their experiences realized as somehow vitally uniting them with the life process as a whole (which includes the vigours and flowerings of nature); but the larger pattern, the relation to history and its movements, is dropped out. Here we see how Sappho embodies the strong individualism of the seventh century.
Her contemporary Alkaios, also a Lesbian, embodies the same assured sense of individual energies as themselves in some way providing their own criteria and right of assertion; but as a man he cannot identify himself with Helen as Sappho did. Two fragmentary poems set out his attitudes. The first sees the episode of Helen and Paris as representing the power of love, of strong emotions, to wreck a world. ‘...And fluttered the heart of Argive Helen in her breast. Maddened with passion by the man from Troy, the traitor-guest, she followed him in his ship over sea, leaving her child at home forsaken and her husband’s bed with its rich coverlet, since her heart persuaded her to surrender to love, through the daughter of Dione and Zeus [Aphrodite]....Many of his brothers the dark earth holds, laid down on the plain of Troy for the sake of Helen; and many chariots overturned in the dust...and many dark-eyed...were trampled, and...Achilles...the slaughter.’ The key word is ekmaneisa, which suggests a woman driven out of her wits, out of her normal adaptations to the accepted ways of the world, by an uncontrollable impulse of desire. Helen is still not condemned, but is seen as the victim of divine forces.[148]
In the second poem, however, she is contrasted with the good wife, Thetis, who bears Achilles: ‘So the tale goes: that through evil acts came bitter grief, Helen, from you upon Priam and his sons long ago, and Zeus gave sacred Ilios up to fire. Not at all the same was the graceful girl whom the noble son of Aiakos married after summoning all the gods to his wedding and after taking her from the halls of Nereus to Cheiron’s house. He unbound the pure maiden’s girdle, and the love of Peleus and the best of Nereus’ daughters throve. In a year she bore a son, the mightiest of demi-gods, the blest driver of bay steeds. But they, the Phrygians, and their city perished for Helen’s sake.’ The occasion and audience of this poem are hard to make out, but the point is clear enough. However there may be a patriotic touch in the praise of Thetis; for the Lesbians had something of a proprietary interest in the monuments of the Troad linked with Homeric themes. Among the most revered of these was the tomb of Achilles. Fighting had gone on in the Troad between the Athenians and the Mytileneans of Lesbos in a dispute about the Achilleid territory; and Pittakos of Mytilene killed Phrynon the Athenian commander, an Olympic victor, in single combat. In one of the fights Alkaios dropped his weapons and ran away. But the wish to elevate Thetis and Achilles would not be enough alone to produce the moralizing tone of the poem; Alkaios has been affected, directly or indirectly, by the new sort of questions which we shall find besetting Stesichoros. Incidentally he is the first known poet who links the Twins with St Elmo’s Fire and makes them Saviours of Sailors; he describes the fire as
leaping to the topmost point of the benched ships, then sitting far-seen on the forestays and bringing light in midnight to the black ship.’
The end of the Geometric period in art had seen a strong orientalizing tendency, with motives such as the Babylonian sacred tree, its boughs connected by ribbons. The poets emerge as strong distinct personalities — Archilochos and Sappho. We meet the rise of the city-tyrant: tyrannos, an old word meaning ruler, its malign sense mainly built up through the hatred of the nobles for such a dictator, who represented a transitional period when the people were stirring against aristocratic controls but not strong to develop secure democratic forms. Kypselos (whose name was attached to the Chest) overthrew the nobles in Corinth; his lame mother, of noble birth, had married a non-Dorian farmer. His traditional date 657 was perhaps somewhat too early. Money had reached its mature form, especially in the trading island of Aigina. In Lesbos, Pittakos became tyrant. The sixth century saw the great Ionian outburst of thought, laying the bases for philosophy and science. In the late seventh century the Spartans, defeated by the Argives, were in a hard fight for survival against the Messenians; they began to work out their militarist system aimed at holding down the helots or serfs. Athens was coming up as grain exporter, owning a larger crop area than most states. A series of internal convulsions led through Solon (early sixth century) and Kleisthenes to the democracy of the fifth century; this destroyed itself by its inner contradictions, which included its imperial expansion in the Aegean and its war with Sparta, now the great aristocratic state. The tyranny of the Peisistrads had been the transitional form at Athens. After the Peloponnesian War the heyday of the city-state system was over; Macedonia steadily rose up in power, bringing about the unification of Greece by conquest with the consequent movement east-ward in war and colonization under Alexander the Great (336-23).
But in the seventh century, when Sparta still had a vigorous and even joyous culture, two poets sang there whose work is of importance to us in our quest. The first was Alkman, probably a Lydian from Sardis. Pausanias, describing the Plane Grove at Sparta, says that behind the portico at its side lay various hero shrines. ‘There are sanctuaries of Helen and of Herakles. The former is near the grave of Alkman.’ In the poet’s fragments are several references to the Dioskouroi: their capture of Aphidna and of Aithra; their birthplace at Pephnos near Thalamai; their role as horsemen; their death at Therapne. He calls their mother the daughter of Glaukos, that is, Leda. A fragment uses the epic term for Paris: ‘Dys-Paris, dread Paris [Ainoparis], curse of Hellas the nurse of men.’ But more interesting for us are the songs he composed for girl choruses. In one poem he praises Astymeloisa who ‘holds the garland [pyleōn], like a star that falls through the glistening sky or a golden shoot or tender down...she has come with long steps.’ Pyleōn in Sparta could be used for a garland offered to Hera; and in another song the girl with the garland speaks of herself: ‘To you also I pray as I bring this pyleōn of casidony and lovely galingale.’ Of cyperos, galingale, Plinius says it is a root useful against bites of serpents and scorpions; when it is drunk, it opens the veins; and of casidony, helopchrysos, also called chrysanthemum, he says that it stops the flux of women (three ounces of leaves mixed in white wine). We see Hera as a goddess of health and growth, concerned with marriage and children over whom she watched while they were unwed. Alkman further wrote songs for Artemis rites. He ‘summons Artemis’, writes Menandros, ‘from countless mountains and countless cities and from rivers too’. There are as well signs of songs for Aphrodite and Athena (of the Brazen House at Sparta).[149]
But far the best preserved of such works is the Maidensong found in a papyrus near the second pyramid of Saqqara. It consisted of at least ten strophes, eight surviving. Of the latter, three tell of a myth; the following five deal with the occasion and the participating girls.[150] The myth tells of Hippokoōn and his sons, and the vengeance Herakles took on them for killing a cousin of his. Our text says nothing of Herakles, who must have appeared in the missing part, but it introduces Polydeukes, who does not figure in later versions of the legend. Elsewhere we are told that Hippokoōn’s sons were rivals in love with the Dioskouroi; that there was a feud between Hippokoōn and Tyndareos; and that one of the sons, Enarsphoros, tried to gain Helen by violence in her youth. It seems likely then that the Twins come into the picture as taking vengeance for the attack on Helen, and that that attack explains the warning: ‘Do not fly up into the sky or try to marry Aphrodite.’ There is also a reference to the Graces, Phanna and Kleta in Lakonia, who were worshipped together with the Dioskouroi at Sparta and had another temple on the River Tiasa.
The girls go on to sing of two others, Agido and Hagesichora. The group or agela seems to consist of ten, a sort of sorority, described in kin terms even if not actually related by blood, and certainly united in warm bonds of love. Hagesichora is called klenna, a word that seems related to kleinos, used of boys carried off by lovers in Crete. ‘Favourite boys among the Cretans are called kleinoi. Eager zeal possesses them to carry off boys; and so in the eyes of the handsome among them it was a disgrace not to get a lover.’ We do not need to infer any such custom connected with the klennai, except in so far as both groups, girls and boys, are made up of initiates with ages near the moment of change into adult status. Here Agido seems in charge of the rites, with Hagesichora superintending the chorus. The girls sing in a charming playful way about their leaders, teasing and admiring. The papyrus reads near the end: ‘To the gods belong the accomplishment and fulfilment. Teacher of the chorus, I shall say, I, who am myself a maiden, have screeched in vain like an owl from the roof-beam. But I want most of all to please Aōtis. She has been the healer of our pains, and because of Hagesichora the girls have found the peace they desired.’ Earlier we were told: ‘The Pleiads of the Dawn rise through the ambrosial Night like the Star of Serios [Dog-star] and fight against us as we bear the Plough.’[151]
The song is given at a thosteria, a festival of god or goddess. But of whom? The only name mentioned is Aōtis, which cannot be the same as Aōs, dawn, though it is clearly related. The performance goes on at night, close to dawn, and our choir seem rivals of another called Doves or Pleiads (the daughters of Atlas turned into doves and set in the sky). The song-dance of the Doves might well be linked with the star’s rising, an important moment in the calendar, signalling the farmer to reap; the girls would have had some sort of bird dress. Bird costumes were common in Attic and other rites. (Alkman seems to have written for a Spartan chorus called Halcyons.) The contest between the agelai appears to have been in beauty (with rich ornaments taken into consideration), song, perhaps dance as well (there is a reference to the Sirens right at the end), and finally some sort of race.[152]
Aōtis, it has been suggested, is Artemis Orthia or Helen. There seems no good reason, however, for linking Artemis with dawn or our festival; on the other hand Helen fits in rather well. Not that we can associate her with the dawn, apart from the slight suggestion of some lines in Theokritos: ‘Beautiful, Lady Night, is the face that the rising Dawn [Aōs] reveals, or the bright Spring at winter’s ending; and so among us did golden Helen shine.’[153] But she had her shrine at Sparta and a festival in which girls took part; and the opening myth of the Maiden-song seems certainly to have dealt with her. Her shrine behind the Colonnade was near the shrine of Herakles where Hippokoōn’s sons were said to have been killed. Aristophanes at the end of the Lysistrata, in the joyous song of the Lakonian women, shows that she was the spirit leader of the dancing girl choirs. ‘And the girls, like fillies, beside Eurotas, glitter to and fro on nimble feet; and their flowing hair waves as they go, like the tresses of Bacchanals sporting and flourishing their thyrsos wands. Leda’s daughter leads them, a pure [agna] and seemly dance leader.’ Alkman had made his girls compare their leaders to horses, one of Venetic breed, the other Kolaxean (Skythian); they declare Agido supreme, ‘as if one were to set among the herds a prize-winning courser, strong with ringing hooves, of the race of winged
dreams’. We saw how the Dioskouroi and their White-Mare wives were linked with horses. Pōloi or fillies seem to have a ritual significance, especially in the cult of the Leukippides, whose two priestesses were pōloi. Later, when the cult of Demeter and Persephone was revived in Sparta, after a long lapse, the priestesses were also pōloi: a case of reapplying an earlier usage. In Euripides’ Helen the chorus, singing to Helen of the joys that await her at home, tell her: ‘Perhaps you’ll find the Leukippides by the water of the river or before the shrine of Pallas, and join in time with their dances.’[154]
The reference to a plough, pháros, in the rite is hard to explain however. It has been suggested we should read phāros, robe, since the carrying of a robe to a goddess often occurred. But the evidence for pháros is strong. A plough suggests a goddess in some way connected with agriculture. Still, the weight of evidence supports Helen as the person to whom the girls sing, especially as Hesychios says the Aōoi were deities moved from the Dromos, Racecourse, to Samothrace and Lemnos. The Twins had their shrine at Sparta near the Dromos, indeed right at its entry, since they were the Apheterioi or Starters, while Helen had her shrine close by. Theokritos makes his Spartan girls say they will go to the Dromos in spring to gather flowers, remembering Helen. If the Twins were Aōoi, Helen may well have been Aōtis. We may recall that at least in late times the pōloi of the Leukippides were linked with a boy priest apparently called bouagor or ox-herd; Hesychios mentions the ox-plough, boupharon; and the twins of the Black Mare, Melanippē, were connected with bull and cow. But even if Helen was not Aōtis, the Maidensong certainly shows us the sort of dance-song ritual with which she was associated at Sparta and in which she acted as daimon, as spirit choragos.[155]
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That the legendary and religious role of Helen in Sparta of the seventh century and early sixth was a matter of great moment is brought out by the career of Stesichoros. He had come from the regions of the western Greeks, born at Matauros, a Lokrian settlement in the toe of Italy, and growing up in Himera, Sicily. In such areas the Greeks did not have a dense local folklore and cult-tradition; and we see the result in the poet’s inventiveness. He also drew on Sicilian folklore in such tales as that of Daphnis. Later poets set him by Homer. Simonides said, ‘For thus have Homer and Stesichoros sung to the people’, and Antipatros, ‘In his breast the soul of Homer found a second rest.’ Efforts were made to link him with Hesiod as son or grandson. Among the Ozolian Lokrians at Oineon and Naupaktos was a line of epic poets claiming descent from Hesiod; Stesichoros’ family may have been connected with them.[156]