Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  7

  SPARTE KALLIGYNAIKA

  No Spartan girl could grow up modest, even if she wanted to. You never find them staying at home; no, they go out with bare thighs and loose clothes, to wrestle and run races along with the young men. I call it intolerable.

  EURIPIDES, Andromache1 (428–424 BC)

  HELEN’S LOT AS A SPARTAN WOMAN – SO the authors of antiquity would have us believe – was to progress from rape-victim to child-bride, to cheating lover, to trophy mistress and back to dutiful wife. The stations of her life were given marked sexual divisions. Almost no attention was paid to those years that did not involve some kind of intoxicating, erotic encounter. It is no coincidence that once Helen is no longer being chased by men, she fades from Homer’s epic poetry. The last we see of her in the Odyssey is retiring to bed with Menelaus in the Spartan palace on the royal couple’s return from Troy.2 Homer does not care about her quiet old age. Through the twists and turns of her time on earth this story book Helen encounters many men and learns how to deal, only too well, with the manifestations – and consequences – of the sexual urge.3

  The Spartan city-state recognised that its prominent ancestor – whose remembered life comprised a series of rites of passage – was an expert in sex. Beautiful Helen was not shamed because of this. Instead she was considered well placed to foster the development of young Spartan girls. And so she stood at the heart of state-sponsored rituals – rituals that aimed to socialise the city’s adolescents, to turningénues into good wife material, to lead them from the state of parthenos, virgin, to nymphe, newlywed.

  An islet in the River Eurotas was, almost certainly, the site of Helen’s cult worship by Spartan virgins. Located near the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, this marshy area, a liminal place – half-water, half-land – was called the Platanistas, after the plane trees that once shaded it. Here the river banks are wide and flat, the mud firm. It is a natural athletics ground.

  Ritual dancing in honour of Helen was practised at the Platanistas by Spartan girls from the 7th century BC onwards. The displays aimed to replicate those performed by Helen herself when she was a youngster growing up in the city. In the Sparta museum there are racks of grimacing terra-cotta masks4 reminiscent of gargoyles carved in medieval churches – some believe that these grotesques were used to hide the faces of the adorants as they danced and sang to each other.5 To honour Helen the virgins were left alone together throughout the night. Their rituals would have been heady, pulsating affairs, throbbing with adolescent energy. They danced in the hours of darkness, paused, and were back again just before sunrise for more. There was torchlight, drinking and almost certainly sumptuous feasts.6 The celebrants whirled their way from childhood to maturity, starting the night as innocent virgins who by dawn had been transformed into ‘beautiful’ young women ready for marriage.7 The dances, it seems, were intended to drum out of the earth and the air some of Helen’s sublime appeal: ‘kharis’ is the Greek word.

  Kharis is the root of ‘charisma’ and ‘charismatic’ and can simply mean grace or charm. But the original Greek also has a more sexualised connotation – a grace which ignites desire. Kharis was a gift of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love. It is that quality of raw seductive power that Helen possessed above all others. The girls who danced at the Platanistas – led on by the example of their presiding spirit, Helen – were experiencing a rite of passage that made them beautiful in that they were becoming charismatic, sexually mature and sexually available. For them, Helen was not the most ‘beautiful’ woman in the world, she was the most erotic.

  These all-female orgiastic rites inspired by Helen’s story8 have been immortalised by the Spartan poet Alcman.9 In the 7th century BC, Alcman wrote Partheneia, choral odes that were practised by groups of girls in secret and then sung as part of choral and gymnastic contests. These Partheneia were a central part of the Spartan girls’ education, and were learnt and performed by one generation after another. The poems exalt female beauty – particularly the beauty of blondes. They laud the physical achievements of the Spartan woman.

  Alcman’s poetry is ardent and evocative. In the following segments each parthenos – girl or maiden – praises another’s beauty. The lines that have survived are only fragmentary and therefore the rhythm of the verse is much denuded – but it is still possible to appreciate the timbre of the songs.

  Alcman, Partheneion 3

  Olympian Goddesses … about my heart … song and I … to hear the voice of … (5) of girls singing a beautiful song … will scatter sweet sleep … from my eyelids and lead me to go to the contest where I will surely toss my blond hair (10) delicate feet … (61) with limb-loosening desire, and more meltingly than sleep and death she gazes toward … nor is she sweet in vain.

  The precious papyri on which these poems are written are preserved in the Sackler Library in Oxford and the Louvre in Paris.10 Originally de luxe productions (witness the fine hand and the generous margins on the document), they are now sadly derelict. Some scraps are the size of a fingernail – the Greek lettering pricked into the surface impossible to decipher. The work in the Louvre, discovered in Saqqara, Egypt, in 1855, is desperately damaged (the document was used to mummify a crocodile, so little surprise) and is kept safely away from the light by the museum’s curators.

  In one poem the beauty of the girls is compared to the scorching heat of Sirius the Dog Star – a cosmic body associated with sinister powers and wantonness. The girls are singing directly to one another of each other’s passion and fine form; the words caress; the flirtation – with a hint of the tribadic about it – is striking.

  Alcman, Partheneion 1

  (45) For she herself is conspicuous, as if one set among the herds a strong horse with thundering hooves, a champion from dreams in caves.

  (50) Don’t you see? The mount is a Venetic: but the hair of my cousin Hagesichora blooms like pure gold;

  (55) and her silvery face – why need I tell you clearly? There is Hagesichora herself; while the nearest rival in beauty to Agido will run as a Colaxian horse behind an Ibenian.

  (60) For the Pleiades rise up like the Dog Star to challenge us as we bear the cloak to Orthria through the ambrosial night.

  (65) There is no abundance of purple sufficient to protect us, nor our speckled serpent bracelet of solid gold, nor our Lydian cap, adornment for tender-eyed girls, nor Nanno’s hair (70) nor Areta who looks like a goddess, nor Thylacis and Cleesithera.…

  – no, it is Hagesichora who exhausts me with love. For Hagesichora with the pretty ankles is not here beside us.…

  And she with her thick blond hair …11

  The Spartans might have left little in the way of written history, but rare, literary sources such as the Alcman Partheneia hint that the Spartan girls’ reputation in the classical world as proponents of homosexuality and homoeroticism was justified.12 It is men who have famously fallen in love with Helen, or with the idea of her, but by singing rapturous lines, such as those of Alcman, women too had a chance to adore her.

  For these young Spartan girls, practising their peculiar paeans together alone at night, Helen was real. It might take a little help to feel her breath on a cheek or hear her voice in the air, but the torchlight, all-night dancing and drinking probably altered the youngsters’ senses sufficiently for them to believe that Helen walked in their midst. To suggestible minds she was not just a metaphysical, but a physical, presence.13 It can be hard to imagine how vivid and present long-dead Helen would have felt to the archaic and classical Spartans, but consider this: for the Ancient Greeks, gods and goddesses, daimons and spirits did not hover in the ether – or in the hearts of men – but occupied real, temporal homes.14 And so we find Zeus residing at Olympia, Athena on the Athenian acropolis and, from at least the 7th century BC, Helen living on as a nurturing spirit in the city of Sparta.

  Homer first describes Sparta as Sparte kalligynaika, 15 ‘the land of beautiful women’, an epithet almost certainly inspired by Helen’s example
. The hugely respected and influential Delphic Oracle endorsed Spartan girls as kallistai – ‘the most beautiful’, ‘the finest’, or, simply, ‘the best’.16 Helen’s sublime beauty was a resource for Spartan women – a gift to the city-state released when carefully constructed rites such as the dances on the Platanistas were performed. ‘Being beautiful’ was an overt goal for the Spartans who, rejecting material fripperies, fetishised the natural beauty of the unadorned human body. It was said that physical beauty was admired in Sparta above all other attributes.17

  In pursuit of physical perfection, Spartan women had the advantage over their Athenian counterparts. Unlike Athenians, Spartan girls were given the same food rations as boys and were allowed to drink unwatered wine.18 Adolescent girls were subjected to a strict training regime that made them every bit as fit as their brothers and boy-cousins. Women could be economically independent. They could ride. They were trained in music and poetry recital.19 In the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia a unique collection of metal figurines has been found – girls playing cymbals, flutes and the lyre.20 We hear tell of a female poet (rare in Greece) called Megalostrata who, like Helen, was ‘golden-haired’.21 One, probably apocryphal, tale describes the self-confident Spartan womenfolk manhandling Spartan bachelors around an altar.22 All in all, they possessed an intimidating reputation: the polar opposite of the ideal woman from Athens who would ‘see, hear and speak as little as possible’.23

  Spartan girls exercised naked or semi-naked and their manoeuvres were so vigorous (one involved beating their buttocks with their heels as many times as possible – a move called the bibasis24) that they earned the nick-name ‘thigh-flashers’. Classical sources list as part of a girl’s education racing, wrestling, throwing the discus and javelin, and trials of strength.25 These youngsters are represented on the handles of fine bronze mirrors – they are toned, nude (it is unusual to find the naked female form this early in Greek art), some with flowers behind their ears, their long hair tucked away ready for exercise.

  These were the virginal beauties who in archaic and classical Sparta, worshipped Helen. Her cult attendants were called poloi, ‘foals’ – juveniles not yet subdued by the yoke of marriage.26 When the playwright Aristo-phanes pictured Helen’s acolytes as fillies in his Lysistrata, he was tapping into a common ancient Greek notion that perceived in women the allure of the unbroken mare27 – all the more exciting because she hovered on the edge of domestication.28

  It could be that the reputation of these young Spartan girls as concupiscent, physically fit viragos was simply invented as part of the Spartan ‘mirage’, part of the mystery and secrecy and exoticism that lay like the mist of the Eurotas around this exceptional city-state. The Spartans chose not to write about themselves, not to promote their own histories and mores. And so other Greeks only heard of strange Spartan goings-on second-hand.29 Their reports might, possibly, have been exaggerated. But come the Hellenistic and Roman periods there is no doubting as to the athletic, body-conscious credentials of Spartan girls. Now the Spartans’ excessive characteristics were actively promoted. Boys were whipped and girls raced naked in an odd kind of sado-tourism which attracted visitors from across the Roman Empire. Augustus Caesar himself came to watch such displays in the newly rebuilt Roman theatre on the Spartan Acropolis30 and one Spartan girl was imported to Rome to grapple in public with a Roman senator.31

  Excitable authors imagined Helen in similar lurid scenarios. Ovid, for example, waxes particularly lyrical about the young Spartan princess wrestling naked in the palaestra.32 Other authors enjoyed recounting the story that an unclothed child-Helen, her skin gleaming with olive oil, exercised, raced and danced with her peers. The Roman poet Propertius33 – recalling Helen’s youth in one of his erotic elegies – lets his imagination run away with him as he describes the Spartan girls’ ‘admirable regime’:

  There a young woman properly exercises her body in physical sports, wrestling naked with the young men, throwing a ball too fast for them to catch, spinning a nifty hoop; or at length stands panting, smeared with the mud of the wrestling-floor, bruised in the rough pancration; or binds the leather straps to her brave fists, or swings and tosses the weighty discus, or races her horse around the ring, the scabbard bouncing against her snow-white thigh, a bronze helmet protecting her virgin head; or swims as the bare-breasted Amazon regiment swam in the waters of Thermodon; or maybe hunts with a pack of native hounds across the long mountain ridges of Taygetus.34

  Although outsiders focused on the prurient pleasure the Spartan women’s exercises and dances gave to others,35 there is every reason to believe that this active life empowered its participants. One bronze statuette36 made in Sparta in around 520 BC (but found in Prizren in Serbia, taken home perhaps as a tourist’s memento) represents a girl with honed biceps and strong calf muscles. The figure is in the middle of a dance – leaping forwards while looking back. Such a girl would have pounded the Spartan training grounds. I have held this figure in my hand and although she is only small she speaks clearly of the vigour and zest of the women of Sparta. Women who worshipped Helen.

  The very thing about Helen that made the majority of ancient authors recoil – her liberty, physicality and initiative – may have helped to give Spartan girls a sense of themselves. Helen of Sparta was not a femme fatale but a role-model, thought to occupy the most sacred precincts of the rich Spartan lands.

  Herodotus, the 5th-century BC ‘father of history’, recounts a magical little tale about the purview of Helen’s sublime beauty. A baby girl, born in Sparta, was terribly disfigured (the Greek is dysmorphia, ‘misshapenness’ or ‘ugliness’). She was well born, and her nurse had the bright idea of taking this ugly child up on the hilltop of Therapne to Helen’s shrine to seek a cure. As with all Classical sanctuaries, framed by a small stone structure,37 here there would have been an agalma, an image of the residing spirit. Helen’s statue, perhaps made out of carved wood, stood, year in, year out, as it was approached by devotants such as Herodotus’ suppliant. One day as the nurse sat on the warm stones, next to the idol of Helen, a beautiful woman appeared from nowhere and laid her hand on the child’s head. As the years went by, following the blessing of the mysterious apparition (Helen, naturally) the disfigured girl grew up to be the most comely in the kingdom.38

  Writing eight hundred years after Herodotus, Pausanias, who visited Sparta around AD 160, went to the Menelaion to try to ascertain why the shrine to Helen and her husband was so revered.39 He adds a detail relevant to our story.40 When retelling the anecdote about the clever nurse and the transformation of the unfortunate baby, Pausanias makes a subtle linguistic point. Helen’s intervention turns the ugliest girl into the most beautiful woman – gunaikon to eidos kallisten is the phrase used: the most beautiful wife-woman. The story ends with this newly attractive gun? not only being married by a friend of Sparta’s King Ariston, but then involved in a messy and difficult love triangle, desired by the king himself.

  On the hilltop of Therapne; by the banks of the River Eurotas; in the streets of Sparta: Helen’s beauty took on a spiritual aspect. Powerful, sometimes pernicious, her kharis was believed to be undimmed by the centuries, her homeland hectic with her energy.41 This is how Helen was adored in Sparta in the historical period – as a carnal alma mater, a spirit of nature, a proponent of female fecundity. And a thousand years earlier, in the Late Bronze Age, archaeological evidence, still under excavation, suggests that a historic princess, a living Helen, would have been glorified in a remarkably similar way.

  8

  TENDER-EYED GIRLS

  We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her …Once more, the philosophy of darkness will break and fade away over the dazzling sea … Once more the dreadful walls of the modern city will fall to deliver up – ‘soul serene as the ocean’s calm’ – Helen’s beauty.1

  ALBERT CAMUS, ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948)

  IN 1987, ON THE NORTHERN COAST OF CRETE at Chania, during routine site clearance at a private
address, 4 Odos Palama, builders un-covered something rather unexpected – a series of Late Bronze Age tombs. Inside were twenty-nine skeletons dating to the 14th century BC. 2 The remains were carefully analysed and dental examination pointed to stress problems in the teeth of the females between the ages of eleven and twelve – a textbook indicator of the advent of puberty. If at twelve years old girls in the Bronze Age were ready to become sexual partners, it is almost certain that at twelve a Mycenaean aristocrat, a Bronze Age Helen, would have been put on the marriage market.

  The adolescent, marriageable girl was recognised by early Mediterranean societies as a vital and precious commodity – a nubile creature whose burgeoning fecundity would ensure the continuation of the community. It is no chance that Helen frequently was given a twelve-year-old age tag at the time of her abduction by Theseus – a point was being driven home: this was the defilement of a child at the very moment she became most valuable.3 We have no written testimony from the Late Bronze Age for the quantifiable desirability of twelve-year-old girls; however, we do have cogent clues – pictures that suggest how pubescents in Helen’s Bronze Age world looked, the rites of passage they underwent and the high value they commanded.

  Young women are represented on frescoes of the 13th century BC at Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos and on tiny gold discs, gold rings4 and carved ivories,5 but to find the most striking examples we have to travel back three hundred years in time and, geographically, across the Aegean to the Cycladic island of Thera.6 When that angry volcano exploded, destroying the lives of its native population and reshaping the development of the Western world, it showed us a few cultural kindnesses. Preserved in the volcanic residue at Akrotiri was a splendid surprise.