Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War

by Naoise Mac Sweeney,Jan Haywood

  Contemporary critical responses to Rossetti’s evocative portrait of Helen highlight this idea of dangerous desirability and subversive sexuality. Algernon Charles Swinburne, the essayist and friend of Rossetti’s, wrote encomiastically:

  The picture of Helen, with Parian face and mouth of ardent blossom, a keen red flower-bud of fire, framed in broad gold of widespread locks, the sweet sharp smile of power set fast on her clear curved lips, and far behind her the dull flame of burning towers and light from reddened heaven on dark sails of lurid ships.75

  Some of the qualities that run through the analysis above clearly resurface in Swinburne’s rhapsody. He imagines Helen as a ‘flower-bed of fire’, but notes her ‘sweet sharp smile of power’ – the chiastic ‘sweet sharp’ neatly capturing Rossetti’s double-edged portrait. And the ‘dark sails of lurid ships’ further reinforce the sinister undertones of the narrative that proceeds ‘far behind’ the distant queen.

  Rossetti’s painting therefore invites us to censure Helen, blaming her for her callousness as well as her own dangerous desirability.76 At the same time, however, the picture raises questions about how far Helen could really be held responsible for the destruction in the background. One key feature of the painting is the way that Helen points very clearly towards a pendant on her necklace bearing the image of a burning torch.77 The ambiguities surrounding this firebrand are multiple. Perhaps most obviously, it is a reference to the numerous images of fire that recur throughout the Iliad. For instance, both Agamemnon’s (Il. 1.104) and Hector’s (Il. 12.466) eyes are compared to blazing fires; and the desire for war is compared to a boundless fire on the peak of a mountain (Il. 2.455–56). Even more significant is the use of fire as an ominous indicator of Troy’s destruction, notably when Hector’s death elicits terrible lamentations throughout the entire city of Troy, as though the city itself had fallen, ‘and its towers were smouldering with fire’ (πυρὶ σμύχοιτο κατ᾽ ἄκρης, Il. 22.411). The firebrand pendant hanging around Helen’s neck is therefore highly suggestive. She brings the seeds of Troy’s destruction with her, and perhaps even embodies that destruction; Helen herself is the firebrand that sets the city alight.

  But as much as Helen’s signal towards the flame locket hints at the painting’s connections with this kind of Homeric imagery, it nevertheless invites other reception contexts. Strikingly, as we will see in the next chapter in Euripides’ Troades Helen describes her lover Paris as ‘resembling a firebrand’ (δαλοῦ πικρῦν μίμημ᾽, Tro. 922) and explicitly blames him (along with various other mortal and immortal figures) for Troy’s fall. The meaning of the pendant is therefore ambiguous: Is it Helen or Paris who is the firebrand, responsible for the fall of Troy? By pointing to this flame, Rossetti’s Helen indicates a range of possible causes for Troy’s ruin: her own status as a dangerous object of desire, the firebrand Paris, and the fire that drove key heroes on both sides of the conflict. As with her undirected gaze, Helen’s flame locket establishes an ambiguity at the heart of the painting, at once suggesting her own responsibility for Troy’s downfall, yet simultaneously evoking various other possibilities.

  The painting’s ambiguity is deepened further by Rossetti’s possible decision to portray Helen as a victim of physical abuse.78 Some critics have remarked on the sumptuous, even resplendent qualities of the painting, along with Helen’s unmistakably compelling presence.79 However, as Donnelly has observed, Rossetti also casts the right side of Helen’s face in a shadow, and the viewer can clearly make out a purpled cheek.80 While different readings will no doubt abound, it is possible to detect here the results of an altercation with her Trojan husband, Paris. Whether or not we accept that Helen is the victim of violence, the clearly contrasting sides of her face enable the viewer to reflect on the severe personal consequences of Helen’s flight from Sparta, and in turn evoke the rich extra-Homeric mythological tradition on the abduction of Helen, who was seized not only by Paris but also by various other figures including Theseus and Deiphobus.81

  As these points indicate, Rossetti’s portrait of Helen is fundamentally ambiguous. She is certainly a subversive figure – a woman who is dangerously attractive, and whose desirability has devastating consequences. Yet Rossetti raises questions about how far she can be held to account. Some details in the painting suggest callousness and pride, while others simultaneously hint at Helen’s possible status as a victim and indicate other causes of the conflict.

  This ambiguous depiction of Helen draws from a range of sources. Helen’s role in causing the war is explicit in the Iliad.82 Indeed, when Helen appears on the ramparts of Troy in Book 3 of the poem, the assembled Trojans wonder at the combination of her beauty and her destructive potential, making it clear that her terrible power lies in her physical attractiveness (Il. 3.156–60). But while Rossetti’s painting reflects the Iliadic representation of Helen, the painting equally speaks to a wider nexus of Helen traditions.83 The Odyssey is even more explicit than the Iliad in blaming Helen for the Trojan War (Od. 11.436–9),84 and Rossetti’s Helen is Odyssean in that she betrays little regard for her Trojan kin, as illustrated by her disinterest in the catastrophe that occurs in the rear of the painting. The sumptuousness of Helen’s golden robe in this painting recalls Hecuba’s criticisms in Euripides’ Troades, too, where Helen is lambasted for her haughty behaviour (Tro. 1020–24) and her insatiable extravagances at Troy, in contrast to her modest life back at Sparta (Tro. 993–97; see further Chapter 3). Indeed, we have already discussed the image of the firebrand in a Euripidean context. Rossetti’s Helen is also generally Homeric, insomuch that she is clearly positioned as directly involved in the Trojan conflict, contra the works of other ancient authors, such as Stesichorus and Herodotus, which remove the ‘real’ Helen from the scene of Troy (see Chapter 4). Furthermore, Helen’s salient ambiguity suggests that Rossetti does not fail to recognize her acknowledged status elsewhere in the Trojan War tradition as a victim of the gods’ machinations – most famously during the Judgement of Paris. It is clear, then, that in this visual meditation on Helen, her dangerous desirability and ambiguous culpability, Rossetti drew on a range of works both ancient and post-antique.85

  The Pre-Raphaelite Helen

  In the Helen of Troy, Rossetti portrayed Helen as a dangerous and subversive individual, destructive through her desirability and beauty, but at the same time of questionable responsibility for the terrible events at Troy. This depiction of Helen is one that can be found more widely, both in Rossetti’s other works and in those of his contemporaries.

  A trochaic ballad entitled ‘Troy Town’, published in Rossetti’s 1870 collection Poems, highlights once more the connected issues of Helen’s desirability and her destructive capabilities.86 The poem concerns an episode before Helen’s sojourn to Troy, namely her offering of a cup in the shape of her breast in the temple of Venus.87 It constitutes fourteen stanzas, each one split with two parenthetical refrains – the first ‘(“O Troy Town!”)’ in the second line and the second ‘(“O Troy’s down | Tall Troy’s on fire!”)’ at the close of each stanza. While the poem sings of ‘heavenborn’ (1) Helen’s ‘heavenly’ breasts (3), which are apple sweet (43),88 and repeatedly refers to ‘the heart’s desire’, the equally insistent repetition of the split refrain paints a sharp contrast with Helen’s whimsical and successful appeal to Venus, who permits Cupid to strike his bow towards Paris (78–89). As Wasko notes, the repeated call to Troy’s destruction – ‘Tall Troy’s on fire!’ –reinforces palpably the destructive qualities of Helen’s erotic power.89 And yet, just as the poem advocates the idea of Helen as a danger to men, it instantaneously reflects the limitations of Helen as a mortal agent.90 Although it is Helen who seeks out Venus, it is ultimately the love goddess and her companion Cupid who set in motion the ill-fated union between Helen and Paris (‘Cupid took another dart … Drew the string and said, Depart!”’, 85, 89).91 Like the Iliad and Odyssey, the poem offers a composite mixture of motivations and causes behind Hel
en and Paris’ union, rather than establishing a monolithic rendering of Helen as either dangerous vixen or passive victim. Ambiguity is key here, just as for Rossetti’s painted Helen.

  The same essential elements can also be seen in depictions of Helen by other artists of the time. The 1860s seem to have been a decade where the figure of Helen was particularly popular in British visual art. Only two years after Rossetti’s painting, Frederic Leighton’s 1865 painting of Helen presents her as an anguished and solitary figure, shunned by two Trojan women on the ramparts of Troy. By portraying her in the same frame as separate from other figures, Leighton highlights Helen’s isolated, even cataleptic nature. Even more crucially, Helen is depicted as a passive subject – undertaking no activity herself, but serving as a feast for the eyes. Like Rossetti’s Helen, she is swathed in rich gold cloth; but unlike Rossetti’s Helen, this is combined with a glowing white shawl and an angelic white light, which de-emphasizes any taint of culpability.

  Helen reappears just one year later in Frederick Sandys’ 1866 wood engraving, Helen and Cassandra. Here the Trojan princess Cassandra lambasts a pouting Helen, who appears to take no responsibility for the vast conflagration that surges behind them. Once again, Helen is presented as passive. First, the picture presents her as being spoken to, rather than taking on any action herself. Secondly, she is clearly depicted in a sexualized and voyeuristic fashion. Sandys draws attention away from her face; he portrays Helen in almost comical fashion with her childlike, churlish frown. Instead, the diaphanous folds of her drapery draw attention to her sexual organs – her pubis, caught in a dark twist of her thin dress, and her breast, cupped and accentuated by the curve of her arm.

  One year on again, in 1867, Sandys would return to the same mythological heroine in his painting Helen of Troy. In this image, Helen once again pulls a childish grimace, still apparently unperturbed by the consequences of her actions. Like Rossetti’s earlier painting, the isolated queen is imagined with long and flowing hair (though Sandys’ figure is more obviously flame haired than Rossetti’s), pursed lips, and an elaborate necklace, whilst too turning from the viewer’s gaze. Although Sandys contra Rossetti avoids any visual or verbal reference to the city of Troy, his Helen is nonetheless a morally questionable character, and he reinforces a number of the ideas explored in Rossetti’s portrait: Helen’s isolation, petulance, desirability, and potential culpability. Sandys’ Helen is, nonetheless, more eroticized than Rossetti’s – save for her necklace, she appears to be nude (although her body below her décolletage falls tantalizingly outside the frame of the painting).

  These three examples from the mid-1860s exhibit a manifold fascination with Helen as a desirable and mostly passive female. Common to these portraits is an interest in the motif of Helen as beauty – a motif that dates back at least as far as Homer’s Iliad (e.g. Il. 3.156–60; 9.139–40), although Homer avoids referring to specific aspects of Helen’s appearance.92 This feeds into the overwhelming passivity of Helen; where Leighton’s Helen is serenely passive for example, Sandys’ is frustrated in her lack of agency. In general, Helen is presented as the passive object of the viewer’s gaze, her power and her culpability dependent on her visual attractiveness and physical desirability. This trend was to intensify in depictions of Helen over the following decades – including the overtly sexualized images of Helen painted by Evelyn de Morgan (Helen of Troy: 1898) and Henri Fantin-Latour (Helen: 1892). Therefore, while the Pre-Raphaelite Helen of the 1860s might initially seem to be subversive, dangerous, and threatening, she had no real agency. Her power was bound up with her physical attractiveness and her desirability to others. In the vision of the 1860s, she was a passive object – of heroic desire, of the viewer’s gaze, of Cassandra’s insults – unable to undertake action in her own right.

  The 1860s portrayal of Helen must also be seen in its wider context. In British visual art at this time, there was a broader interest in seductive and dangerous women, whose potent sexuality posed a social threat. For example, when Sandys painted his Helen, he did so as part of a series of pictures, in which he portrayed a range of other subversively sexual women such as Medea and Morgan Le Fey.93 In all these cases, as with Helen, the sense of female power is inextricably linked to sexuality.

  Furthermore, other Greek female mythical heroines became a notable feature of British art during the 1860s, with multiple representations of variously romanticized, torpid, vacant, and scantily clad female figures.94 In Edward Poynter’s 1869 painting Andromeda, for instance, the titular heroine is chained nude to the rocks while the sea rages violently in the rear. Serving as a sacrificial victim to the sea monster Cetus, Andromeda gazes downwards, failing to meet the viewer’s eye, whilst her lower left leg is swaddled by an artfully floating piece of silken fabric.95 Similarly, George Frederic Watts’ Thetis depicts the naked goddess against an altogether more becalmed sea, lazily toying with her golden locks whilst too avoiding the gaze of the viewer.96 And finally, in Venus Disrobing by Frederic Leighton (c. 1867) – perhaps the single-most important proponent of the classical revival in Victorian art97 – the exposed love goddess casts a furtive glance to the floor and leans her left arm downwards, modestly covering her genitalia.98 In these three images, as in others from the period, there is an unmistakably voyeuristic tone, coupled with a fetishization of the idealized female form. These classical figures have been denuded both literally and metaphorically: not only are they denied raiment, but they are also largely divorced from their traditional narratives.99 By refusing to focus on the traditional mythic storylines – for instance, Thetis’ marriage to the hero Peleus or Andromeda’s love affair with the demi-god Perseus – these paintings instead serve as blank canvases upon which the viewer is able to objectify the female figures depicted, and inscribe their own fantasies and ideals – a conscious rejection of the agency displayed by these mythic heroines in their traditional narrative contexts.

  This interest in portraying women as powerful only through their sexuality also needs to be seen in its contemporary social context. The mid-nineteenth century was a time of rapid social change in Britain, with increasing urbanization and the forging of a new industrialized society with new social groupings and social norms. Gender roles were in flux at this time, and the 1850s and 1860s in particular saw the emergence of societies and associations across Britain that called for greater rights for women.100 The 1860s were also a crucial decade for the suffragist movement. There was considerable campaigning in the lead-up to the 1867 Reform Bill, as well as unrest after it when women were excluded from the bill’s terms.101 Indeed, it can be no accident that this very same decade also produced John Stuart Mill’s influential treatise ‘The Subjection of Women’. Although it was written in 1861, Mill withheld its publication until 1869 when he felt that it would have more impact.102 The insistence in the visual arts on a romanticized, sexualized vision of women must have been in some senses a response to the real-life changes in women’s social roles at precisely the same time.

  Rossetti’s subversive Helen

  So far, we have examined the depiction of Helen in the work of Rossetti and his contemporaries, identifying commonalities in the representation of Helen as an ostensibly subversive figure – a dangerously desirable woman with questionable culpability for the destruction of Troy, but whose sole power lies in her role as a passive object of desire. In this final section of the analysis, I want to return to Rossetti’s Helen and to highlight one aspect that is different from that of his peers. While Rossetti conforms to the prevailing view of Helen in many ways, in one important way he subverts it, offering a uniquely Iliadic layer to his portrayal of Helen.

  In his painting, Rossetti engages with the idea of Helen as an idealized female beauty. He nonetheless eschews depicting her as a passive subject, devoid of agency, as she appears in contemporary portraits by other artists. On the contrary, Rossetti consciously explored the notion of Helen as a dangerous femme fatale,103 giving her agency not just through her sexuality and
desirability, but also by giving her a voice to tell (or in the case of the painting, to indicate) her own version of her story.

  Helen’s voice comes through most clearly in another of Rossetti’s poems in his 1870 collection, the sonnet ‘Death’s Songsters’.104 Here Rossetti recounts the moment when the Trojan horse is first presented to the Trojans, who remain dubious about its meaning. For this reason, Helen is sent to investigate and ‘sing the songs of home’. Helen proceeds to try to dupe the Greeks, falsely singing ‘Friends, I am alone; come, come!’. Although the ruse is not successful, the power of Helen’s song is such that she enforces speechlessness on the men inside the wooden horse. We are told that Odysseus had to hold his hands over his men’s mouths, and that he ‘held them till the voice was dumb’. The story is of course derived from the Odyssey, where Menelaus relates to Telemachus that Helen had thrice circled the Trojan horse, misleading the leading chiefs of the Greeks into believing that they were being called by their wives – a deception that would not evade Odysseus (Od. 4.271–89).105 As we have seen in Chapter 1, the portrayal of Helen as a pseudo-poet, engaged in the creation of song and the transmission of kleos, is a characteristic of the Iliad. Furthermore, the poem pits (the Iliad’s) Helen against (the Odyssey’s) Odysseus – a figure deeply connected with verbal wiles and the manipulation of words. ‘Death’s Songsters’ ends with an enigmatic two lines, which might be addressed equally to Helen or to Odysseus: ‘Say, soul, – are songs of Death no heaven to thee, | Nor shames her lip the cheek of Victory?’

  Returning to his painting, the Helen of Troy, it seems that here too Rossetti may have given Helen agency, not just through her destructive beauty, but also in the form of narrative power. The conspicuous positioning of both her hands, with one pointing directly at the firebrand pendant, is a clear direction to the viewer: ‘Look here! See this!’ Helen is literally indicating what her own version of the story might be and signalling how she might begin to regale these tragic events.