Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s conception of Helen is therefore a bold one. Although Rossetti was by no means one of the most prolific proponents of the classical revival during late nineteenth century,106 it is clear that his painting draws out some of the ideas implicit in Homer’s account of the Spartan queen, as well as other portrayals of Helen from classical antiquity. Like other artists of the period, and in keeping with his wider artistic agenda, Rossetti avoids depicting Helen as a classical nude – a notable contrast with the multiple nude representations of other mythical figures (especially Venus) in this period.107 And yet, this does not attenuate the sense of desirability in his painting; the depiction of Helen with ‘masses of long, wavy hair’,108 bedecked in rich fabrics and opulent necklace against a lush background lends a decidedly sensuous feel to the painting. This, compounded with Rossetti’s visual and verbal references to Troy’s destruction, and his explicit textual references to Helen’s ruinous relationship with Troy, ultimately reveals in stark terms the degenerative effects of a powerful female beauty like that of Helen. Helen is therefore given power through her beauty – because of her looks, she has the power to destroy. Rossetti was of course not alone in this portrayal of Helen – there are many ancient antecedents for this as well as other examples from Rossetti’s own day.
Where Rossetti’s Helen differs most of all from these other Helens, who are subversive through their conformity to the model of female power lying in sexual attraction, is in her power of speech. In Rossetti’s poetry, Helen’s agency is manifested by her enactment of speech acts and her mastery of words and song – a mastery bested only by Odysseus. In Rossetti’s painting, Helen’s own version of her story is (literally) pointed out by Helen herself, with the clear gesture to the firebrand locket. Perhaps also significant is what lies at the physical as well as conceptual centre of Rossetti’s golden image. Surrounded first by the rich gold of her hair and robe and then more immediately by the sallow paleness of her skin, the viewer’s eye is inevitably drawn to Helen’s blood-red lips – a bright and lurid splash of vibrant active colour against a passive background. Helen’s lip, her mouth, her voice, all remain unshamed by the songs of Death.
1 Munich, Staatliche Antikenssamlungen Inv. 2307; Beazley no. 200160; CAVI no.5258.
2 Jan will discuss the treatment of the Trojan women in Athenian drama in Chapter 3 of this book.
3 For Attic vase painting and the ‘illustration’ of epic, see Lowenstam 2008, 80–83.
4 As Friis Johansen puts it, this is a ‘heroised genre picture’ (1967, 211).
5 For a discussion of Euthymides’ innovative use of borders on this vase, see Squire and Platt 2017, 60–61.
6 For the relative frequency of different epithets, see Parry 1971, 142. It is notable too that Hector’s helmet was a divinely charged item, given to him by Apollo (Il. 11.352-53).
7 There is a rich body of scholarship on the symposium, some of the more recent offerings including: Topper 2012, Hobden 2013, and Wecowski 2014.
8 For this debate over the elite nature of the symposium, see: Topper 2012, 9 n.29 and Hobden 2013, 11–15. Archaeological evidence suggests that a wider range of people may have engaged in sympotic behaviour than previously thought, especially from the fifth century BCE onwards. However, the prevailing cultural image of the symposium linked it to the aristocracy (as well as privileging drinking over dining). In the representational repertoire at least, the symposium remained associated with aristocratic men (Hobden 2013, 12, 150).
9 Beazley no. 200161; CAVI no. 5259. Another example depicts Theseus abducting Helen (Beazley no. 200157; CAVI no. 5260).
10 Williams 1991, 288.
11 On concepts and ideas of the body in classical Greece, see Osborne 2011. On bodily distinctions in red-figure pottery specifically, see pp.57–65.
12 Although it is also possible that this was shortened form of Eu[thy]demos, or even a metathesis of Euthymides. I am grateful to Robin Osborne for this point.
13 Although it has been suggested that this word might represent a celebratory cry, such as the modern ‘whohoo!’, or the modern Greek ‘opa!’. This would be appropriate given the symposiastic and komastic context; see Pappas 2012, 78.
14 See Hobden 2013, 117–56 for the limits of acceptable behaviour and the politics of how one was meant to comport oneself at a symposium. In this context, the behaviour of the three revellers on Euthymides’ amphora seems like it would have been at least pushing at the boundaries of acceptability.
15 For references and a discussion of this, see below p.113 and especially n.24. Visual images of the Trojan War multiplied in the fifth century, from the Parthenon metopes and the paintings in the Stoa Poikile (Anderson 1997, 249–55; Castriota 2005) to vase imagery (for which, see p.53 and especially n.37 below).
16 The extent to which the Iliad can be considered a poem for the elite or aristocracy has been widely discussed, with much analysis focusing on the passage where Thersites questions the social order, and is struck down by Odysseus to the general amusement of the Achaean host (Il. 2.212-77: for various readings of the Thersites episode, see Rose 2013, 118–19 and especially n.65 with references). For the failure of leaders leading to the sufferings of the laos in Homeric poetry, see Haubold 2000. See also Rose 2013, 104–06, 132–33 with references for the potentially ‘conflicting ideology’ of the Iliad. It has been pointed out that the presentation of Trojan political assemblies is subtly different from that of the Achaean structures – while the latter are aristocratic and oligarchic, the former are more monarchical (Christensen 2015).
17 For an introduction to poetic performance in the archaic period, see Power 2016. For Panhellenic festivals as a crucial venue for the performance of Homeric epic, contributing to the presentation of collective decision-making in the Iliad, see Elmer 2013.
18 For a discussion, see Nagy 1996, 104–05. The tradition appears only in relatively late texts: Cicero, De Oratore 3.37.137; Anthologia Palatina 11.442.3-4; Aelian, Varia Historia 13.14; Pausanias 7.26.13; Schol. T on Iliad 10.1.
19 Ps-Plato, Hipparchus 228b-c: ‘Hipparchus, who was the oldest and wisest of Peisistratus’ children, who among showed many good proofs of his wisdom, including first bringing the epics of Homer to this country, and forcing the rhapsodes to recite them one after the other, as they do today’ ( Ἱππάρχῳ, ὃς τῶν Πεισιστράτου παίδων ἦν πρεσβύτατος καὶ σοφώτατος, ὃς ἄλλα τε πολλὰ καὶ καλὰ ἔργα σοφίας ἀπεδείξατο, καὶ τὰ Ὁμήρου ἔπη πρῶτος ἐκόμισεν εἰς τὴν γῆν ταυτηνί, καὶ ἠνάγκασε τοὺς ῥαψῳδοὺς Παναθηναίοις ἐξ ὑπολήψεως ἐφεξῆς αὐτὰ διιέναι, ὥσπερ νῦν ἔτι οἵδε ποιοῦσιν…).
20 Diogenes Laertius 1.57: ‘And he established that the reciting of Homer should be from prompt, so that where the first rhapsode stopped, the next would begin from there. In this way Solon did more for Homer than Peisistratus’ (Τά τε Ὁμήρου ἐξ ὑποβολῆς γέγραφε ῥαψῳδεῖσθαι, οἷον ὅπου ὁ πρῶτος ἔληξεν, ἐκεῖθεν ἄρχεσθαι τῦν ἐχόμενον. μᾶλλον οὖν Σόλων Ὅμηρον ἐφώτισεν ἢ Πεισίστρατος ...).
21 Alcmeonidae: Pausanias 2.18.7; Peisistratids: Herodotus 5.65; Philaedae: Herodotus 6.35.
22 This is not to say that a cultural product with elite associations was restricted only to the elite, and either inaccessible or unfamiliar to wider society. For example, the aria ‘Nessun dorma’ from Puccini’s opera Turandot was used as the theme song for the 1990 football (soccer) world cup – an instance of a cultural product with elite associations (opera) being widely recognized and appreciated in a social context that is not considered to be restricted to elites.
23 According to the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, Cleisthenes ‘won over the people (demos), giving over the government to the multitude’ (πρ
οσηγάγετο τῦν δῆμον, ἀποδιδοὺς τῷ πλήθει τὴν πολιτείαν. Athenian Constitution 20.1). For Cleisthenes and Athens’ democratic ‘revolution’, see: Ober 1996, 32–52, Osborne 2010, and Rose 2013, 350–65.
24 Although we tend to attribute the reforms to Cleisthenes, it may be more accurate to say that the reforms were a response to popular demands, and what Ober has called ‘a revolutionary situation’ where ‘the demos stepped onto the historical stage as a collective agent, a historical actor in its own right and under its own name’ (Ober 2007, 86).
25 Azoulay 2014. For other ancient descriptions of the tyrannicides statue group, see: Pausanias 1.8.5; and Lucian, Philospeudes 18.
26 For this phenomenon, see: Raubitschek 1949, 465, Holloway 1992, 272–73, Hurwit 1999, 126–29, and Keesling 2005.
27 Hurwit 1999, 60–61, fig.46. For other potter dedications, see Suk Fong Jim 2014, 133–38.
28 IG I3 824. See Suk Fong Jim 2014, 135.
29 For the Pioneers, see Boardman 1975, 29–36, Robertson 1992, 136, and Neer 2002, 51–134.
30 This is often discussed in terms of emerging ‘naturalism’. For critical discussion, see Elsner 2010 and Neer 2002, 27–86. For ‘naturalism’ in Euthymides, see Stewart 2008, 606.
31 For example, Smikros may have been an alter-ego of Euphronios (Hedreen 2016, 22–58).
32 For these ‘potter portraits’, see: Neer 2002, 87–134, Topper 2012, 147–53, and Hedreen 2016, 233–79.
33 To paraphrase Hedreen 2016, 179.
34 Hedreen 2016, 40 outlines this argument, with especially n.56–7 with references.
35 Hedreen 2009.
36 Topper 2012, 147–53. This interpretation, however, depends on the acknowledgement that the symposium did indeed have aristocratic associations; see p.44 n.8 above.
37 In contrast, specifically Iliadic scenes appear earlier in the sixth century in Corinthian pottery: Friis Johansen 1967, 224–26 and Brilliante 1983, 113–15. Boardman 1975, 230–31 identifies a ‘boom’ in Iliadic scenes in Attic pottery at the turn of the sixth to the fifth centuries, largely due to the Kleophrades Painter’s apparent interest in the poem.
38 Böhr 2006.
39 Friis Johansen 1967, 226 and Schefold 1992, 217. Achilles and Briseis: London, British Museum E258; Beazley no. 200436; CAVI no.4541. Priam’s supplication of Achilles: Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen 2618; Beazley no. 200510; CAVI no. 5318.
40 Boardman 1976.
41 Boardman 1976, 15–19; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 08.258.58; Beazley no. 201688; CAVI no. 5585.
42 This number includes all red-figure vases attributed in the Beazley archive to: Euthymides, Euphronios, Phintias, Sosias, Smikros, the Dikaios Painter, the Gales Painter, the Pezzino Group, the Pythokles Painter, or generically to the Pioneer Group. The membership of the Pioneer Group is debated (see n.29 above). I have conservatively followed Beazley’s list for inclusion (Beazley 1963), which is broadly similar to those of Boardman (1975, 29–36) and Neer (2002). Other individuals who are sometimes included within the group include: the Andokides Painter, Oltos, Psiax, and Epiktetos, but these seem to have been slightly earlier or older contemporaries who did not engage with the Pioneer Group’s sympotic or political play (Beazley 1963; Boardman 1975, 15–29, 56–62; Neer 2002, 205); as well as Douris, Kleophrades, the Kleophrades Painter, the Berlin Painter, and the Foundry Painter (Neer 2002, 56, 65, 77–85), all of whom may have overlapped with and even began their careers in the Pioneer Group workshops, but whose work is generally slightly later and therefore belongs to a different political context.
43 The most common type of scene depicted, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that of the symposium (forty-eight pots), followed by Dionysiac scenes (forty-one pots). Generic images of warriors (thirty-three pots) and athletes (twenty-one pots) also appear, as do a range of scenes from what may be termed ‘daily life’ (nineteen pots). Amongst religious and mythic subjects, there are roughly equal numbers of pots depicting scenes of the gods with no identifiable mythic narrative (twenty pots), pots with scenes of the labours of Hercules (nineteen pots), and pots with scenes from the Trojan War (eighteen pots). Smaller numbers of pots have scenes of Theseus (six pots), and a range of other identifiable myths also appear (on nineteen pots). Many of the vessels, however, are fragmentary and the scenes cannot be identified (thirty pots). In these counts, I have counted pots in more than one category when they depict more than one type of scene – for example, a pot with a Heracles scene on one side and a symposium scene on the other has counted towards both categories.
44 By the early fifth century, images of Trojan scenes were extremely popular: Boardman 1976, 3.
45 Rome, Villa Giulia L.2006.10 (previously New York, Metropolitan Museum); Beazley no. 187; CAVI no. 5724.
46 von Bothmer 1981, 68–69.
47 Shapiro 1994, 22–24 highlights how the later of these two scenes is more Iliadic.
48 British Museum E438; Beazley no. 200104; CAVI no. 4591.
49 Berlin Antikensammlung F2278; Beazley no. 200108; CAVI no. 2324.
50 Schefold 1992, 224–25 and Junker 2005, 1–18.
51 Osborne forthcoming, with references for the previous debate on the topic.
52 For kalos inscriptions on Pioneer Group vases, see Hoppin 1917, 171–73.
53 See Squire and Platt 2017, 60–61 for Euthymides’ visual games with the frame on this vessel as a meta-artistic comment on his own craft.
54 Maguire 2009, 136–37 explores the poem’s connections with earlier Helen narratives and Yeats’ own personal-political life; cf. also McKinsey 2002.
55 Scholarship on cultural and political philhellenism in the Anglophone world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is truly vast. See, for example, Turner 1981, Jenkyns 1980, Goldhill 2011, 1–23, and Richardson 2013. On the classics in nineteenth-century British education, see Stray 1998; and, for the wider cultural impact of the classics, see Stray 2007.
56 See especially Wood 1983; cf. further discussion below.
57 On Rossetti, see principally Prettejohn 1998, McGann 2000, Bullen 2011, and Donnelly 2015. For the different phases of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, see Wood 2000; on their raison d’être, see McGann 2000, 106.
58 Surtees 1971, 92 and Bullen 2011, 158–59.
59 Wood 1999, 146–50 offers a cogent, though somewhat misguided, overview of Rossetti’s eccentric later years following the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 (Wood refers to, for instance, ‘the vulgar and grasping Fanny Cornforth’). On the growing body of scholarship on Rossetti’s work, see Prettejohn 2012, 109.
60 Pollock 1988, 131, Paglia 1990, 491, Spencer-Longhurst 2000, 20–21, 36, Wood 1999, 105, 146–47, McGann 2000, xvi, and cf. Prettejohn 2012, 109, noting the potential rift this created with Rossetti’s original intentions for the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1840s. For commentary on Bocca Baciata and further bibliography, see the online entry in The Rossetti Archive (
61 Sonstroem 1970 explores Rossetti’s recourse to different types of women throughout his career, including the femme fatale and victimized woman – tropes that are important for our reading of his Helen of Troy.
62 Donnelly 2015, 3–12; cf. Spencer-Longhurst 2000, 26, who notes the preponderance of Rossetti paintings that include verses etched into their frames; McGann 2000, xviii and Cruise 2012, 56.
63 Although Rossetti is known principally for his engagement with Dante, Arthurian legend, and pre-Renaissance Italian art, it is clear that he had some literary interests in the classical world; see further Donnelly 2015, 6.
64 As Marillier 1899, 131 notes, Woman in Yellow is an effective s
tudy in the varied tones of yellow, and indubitably speaks to the colour palette of Helen of Troy. On Annie Miller, see further Marsh 2001, 374–75; cf. Spencer-Longhurst 2000, 21–26 on Annie Miller and Rossetti’s other chief models.
65 Cf. Od. 15.107-08, where Helen presents Telemachus with a garment that ‘was most beautiful and biggest in its patterning, | shining like a star’; cf. Il. 6. 294–95. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the most lavishly adorned, and is frequently associated with gold and luminosity; see further Blondell 2013, 7–10.
66 Note too Rossetti’s later poem ‘Troy Town’, which also refers to Helen’s ‘golden head’ (96). Prettejohn 1997, 24 observes that Helen’s bountiful strands of hair constitutes one of the more generic features of Rossetti’s (and his followers’) art.
67 Maguire 2009, 160 comments on the cultural inescapability of this Marlowian aphorism. Indeed, Marlowe’s line surely influenced Rossetti, especially given that it is followed by a reference to the burnt ‘topless towers of Ilium’. On Rossetti’s pointed interest in ‘the spirit of the eyes’, see Armstrong 2012, 24–25.
68 Marillier 1899, 130: ‘there is little to suggest that “daughter of the gods divinely tall and most divinely fair”’; Waugh 1928, 133: ‘a negligible little oil painting’, 136: ‘[the model’s hair in Venus Verticordia], like an ill fitting and inexpensive wig, is arranged like Helen of Troy’s’; contra Swinburne 1875, 99, Rossetti 1889, 41, and Spencer-Longhurst 2000, 42: ‘Rossetti’s paragon of female allure’; Moyle 2009, 238: ‘ravishing portrait’.
69 Maguire 2009, 81 remarks on the plethora of paintings that depict Helen ‘looking into the distance, abstractly, distantly’, cf. 41–43.