Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Joseph’s diatribe, written in medieval Latin, is both funny and sad. He clearly derives great pleasure from describing Helen’s attributes, even making a reference to her crurumque decora – the grace of her legs.3 But Helen has become just another nail in the coffin of womankind. Christianity carried on where the classical Greeks – particularly the Athenians – had left off, demonising women and their sexual power. Female physical beauty was coming to be thought of as a mark of evil rather than of inner strength and spiritual merit.4 The medieval literature might make for a diverting read, but the outraged language has a bedrock of bigotry. Men such as Joseph clearly derived great satisfaction from immortalising Helen’s sin.5

  Joseph’s Ylias makes it clear that Helen, as an active partner in her own abduction, is not Helen the empowered woman but Helen the dangerous slut. Having conceded that it is Paris’ access to the exotic treasures of the Orient that brings about ‘an easy seduction’, Joseph then expands in a passage that is strikingly salacious:

  Lying on him with her whole body, she [Helen] opens her legs, presses him with her mouth and robs him of his semen. And as his ardour abates the purple bedlinen that was privy to their sin bears witness to his unseen dew. What evil! O wicked woman, were you able to put a check on such passionate desire? Was your lust waiting for a purchaser? What marvellous power in the gentle sex! Woman holds back her precipitate lust to obtain wealth and does not deign to give joy unless her smile has been paid for! 6

  When Joseph was writing in the 12th century, it was considered a sin for women to be on top during intercourse. Anything other than the ‘missionary position’ was unnatural because it made the woman physically superior; it was the mark of a whore and was thought to pervert the course of semen.

  So, branded by theologians not only as adulterers but as sexual deviants, Helen and Paris feature prominently in influential Christian texts such as The Plaint of Nature, written between 1160 and 1175 by the poet and theologian Alan de Lille,7 and conceived as a heartfelt cry from Mother Nature herself at the abuse of her natural laws; de Lille even manages to blame Helen for encouraging Paris to turn to other men to satisfy his excess of lust.

  Why did I deify with a godlike beauty the face of Tyndareus’ daughter who forced the use of her beauty to decline to the abuse of harlotry, when, sullying the covenant of her marriage- bed, she formed a disgraceful alliance with Paris.

  No longer does the Phrygian adulterer chase the daughter of Tyndareus but Paris with Paris performs unmentionable and monstrous deeds.8

  For committing similar sexual sins, the medieval laity would expect to have to perform a series of penitentials. For ‘unnatural’ sexual positions penances could last forty days or even more. Denial, fasting, fines, constant prayers, standing outside the church wearing a white hat or carrying a white wand were all typical penances for the period. For adultery the 7th-century Canons of Theodore prescribe for a three-year period of two days of abstinence from sex every week, plus three blocks of forty abstinent days. Women who committed adultery had to do penance for seven years.9 In the 11th century, St Peter Damian preaches a required period of twenty-five years fasting and penance for married couples over the age of twenty who have indulged in ‘deviant’ sexual positions. These ‘bestial acts’ and ‘whorish embraces’ were thought to lead to all kinds of human misery; one late medieval theologian went so far as to say that God had sent the biblical Flood because he’d espied a couple having sex with the woman on top.10

  And, of course, despite all these warnings, despite the carmine caveat that Helen became, despite the bile that dripped from the pens of these theologians, ordinary men and women carried on abusing Mother Nature and incurring the wrath of the Church, regardless. For every woman that was branded a Helen and wore a white penitential cap in the corner of a church, there was a novice in the convent library who pored over translations of Ovid’s love letters. For every poet that wanted to see Helen and Paris burn in hell, there have been ten who held the curtains aside to let the Trojan step into the Spartan queen’s bed.

  Homer’s Helen was created in a time before good and evil were thought to be two vast, magnetic forces – each at a different pole, each sucking humankind towards it. For the Greeks, things were less clear-cut; the gods themselves were in part good, in part bad. Helen is the perfect example of a Greek archetype, a woman who is ambiguous, who is at once chiaroscuro. But for the Christianised West this was a difficult concept to deal with. Although the Christian writers do not dispute Helen’s breeding or deny her her cultic crown, it is hard to describe Helen as very, very good, and there-fore she has to be very, very bad – in fact, a diabolical whore.

  When Chaucer painted a rather gallant picture of Helen as the ‘faire queene eleyne’, he was quite possibly playing on a homophonic connection with the word for a harlot, ‘a quene’.11 In Dante’s Inferno Helen inhabits Circle Two – the sphere of the carnal and the lustful. And come the Elizabethan period she is frequently found in the ranks of those damned for whoring. In 1578, the author of The Reward of Whoredome by the Fall of Helen, Thomas Proctor, paints her as a courtly prize and then comes in for the kill by describing her as encapsulating prostitution’s ‘vilde filthy fact’.12 In Richard Robinson’s The Reward of Wickedness (1574), she suffers indescribable torments alongside ‘Popes, harlots, proude princes, tyrants and Romish bishops’.

  Five hundred years after The Plaint of Nature was written, the notion of Helen as whore was still in vogue. Take the influential words of Alexander Ross, a reforming Scottish minister, who, in 1648, brought out a populist and popular guide to the classics, a kind of alphabetical myth-dictionary:

  … for she had a deform’d soul, playing the strumpet, not only in her younger years with Theseus … but also being married to Menelaus, forsook him, and became a whore to Paris; and not content with him, committed incest with Gorythus, the son of Paris and Oenone; afterward betrayed the city of Troy to the Grecians, and treacherously caused her husband Deiphobus to be murdered in his bed by Menelaus … thus we see, that outward beauty of the body, without the inward graces of the mind, is but a gold ring in a swine’s snout.13

  If their implications were not so tragic, diatribes like this might amuse. Helen is the woman men love to love and love to hate.

  When following Helen’s progression through time it is important to remember one thing: medieval society came to see Helen’s affair with Paris as an act against God.14 But for the Greeks and Romans it was most commonly believed to be the act of a god, or, rather, of a goddess – Aphrodite. Not simply a woman of unbridled lusts, Helen is also a prism through which Aphrodite’s power shines. Erotic impetus comes from Aphrodite – thus, for example, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Helen preserves an air of wronged innocence. This is all the goddess’s doing, not hers. Helen is simply playing by love’s rules, as the Roman poet Ovid in his Art of Love – admittedly with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek – expounds:

  While Menelaus was away, Helen, that she should not lie alone, was welcomed at night by the warm bosom of her guest. What folly was this, Menelaus? You went away alone; your wife and her guest were beneath the selfsame roof. Madman, do you trust timid doves to a hawk? Do you trust a full sheepfold to a mountain wolf? In naught does Helen sin; in naught is that adulterer to blame: he does what you, what anyone would have done … Helen I absolve from blame: she used the opportunity a courteous lover gave.15

  21

  THE PAIN OF APHRODITE

  In her bed, peace of mind is a rare prize.

  Blessed is anyone who finds calm there,

  Where most are driven mad.

  Eros the hovering golden-haired boy with the bow

  Has but two arrows in his quiver.

  The one brings bliss.

  The other casts a net of confusion

  And chaotic pain

  The chorus of maidens from Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis1

  WHEN HE AGREED TO ADJUDICATE the beauty contest between the three goddesses
at Mount Ida, Paris probably had not banked on being a judge who would never be able to shake off one of the contestants. Because where Helen goes, Aphrodite goes too. She is there on Greek vases at the Spartan palace as Paris arrives: indomitable, blocking Helen’s escape into another picture or another story. She is there at Troy, plucking Paris from the battlefield, as the pathetic prince crumples in a man-to-man fight against Menelaus. Coddling her playboy, the goddess both saves and shames the handsome second-born son of Troy.

  In many retellings of the story, Aphrodite acts as Helen’s fluffer. Take, for example, the following description of Aphrodite (one of the first ever written down). The goddess is on her way to meet Paris on Mount Ida. Aphrodite’s mission, to persuade the boy that of the three premier goddesses she is the fairest – she wants that golden apple. Embedded in the lush, dewy, fecund setting of the natural world, it is immediately obvious the young lad does not stand a chance:

  She set on her skin the garments which the Graces and the Seasons had made and dyed in the flowers of spring-time, garments such as the Seasons wear, dyed in crocus and hyacinth and in the blooming violet and in the fair flower of the rose, sweet and fragrant, and in ambrosial flowers of the narcissus and the lily.2

  Over a thousand years later, the author Colluthus (the man who describes Helen unbarring her door to Paris) imagines how, during the Judgement of Paris, the goddess ‘lifted up her deep-bosomed robe and bared her breast to the air and had no shame. And lifting with her hands the honeyed girdle of the Loves she bared all her bosom and heeded not her breasts.’3

  Aphrodite does not go so far as to make love to Paris, but she clearly gets more than a little vicarious pleasure out of leading Helen and Paris to each other’s beds. Homer, for example, describes how in the dog-days of the Trojan war, Aphrodite stands at the door of the prince’s bedchamber, ordering Helen in, rousing and commanding her two royal work-horses to worship her in the act of sex. Helen whips round on the goddess (her confidence an indication of her own quasi-divine pedigree) and asks: ‘Where will you drive me next? Off and away to other grand, luxurious cities, out to Phrygia … Have you a favourite mortal man there too? … Well, go to him yourself – you hover beside him! Abandon the gods’ high road and be a mortal!’4

  Aphrodite is only ever moments away, because she is both Helen’s muse and her altera ego. And Helen is Aphrodite’s mortal surrogate. In some traditions the pair are mother and daughter. If Aphrodite is the goddess of sex, Helen is sex incarnate. The two are a potent combination and they are inextricable. Paris has got himself caught up in an intense love triangle; he is outnumbered and he is to be pitied, not envied: Aphrodite’s bed is a place you are ‘driven mad’ as Euripides instructed his 5th-century BC audience.5

  So why is the goddess of love so terrible? Why is she such a pernicious partner for Helen? Why is Helen’s allure so destructive? Why do the Greek playwrights and poets sing of her beauty and then describe her as a bitch, a whore, a demon? Why should it seem inevitable that Helen’s and Paris’ excessive love would lead to an excess of killing on the battlefields of Troy? Why credit Helen with the crime of loving and being loved to excess, of willing Eros’ second arrow out of his quiver?

  To answer those questions, we have to look way back in Greek mythology, back to the origins of being, back before the beginning of time. Back to Aphrodite’s birth. Hesiod, in the 7th century BC, wrote a revisionist theology– the Theogony – that told of the origins of the gods and of the earth. As with Homer, Hesiod’s works became canonical. Some of his most striking passages deal with the world’s emergence from disorder and Aphrodite was one of the first inhabitants of this primordial world, the only divinity who was thought to have survived from the origins of the cosmos through to the establishment of the Olympian pantheon. Euripides described her as ‘greater even than the gods’. An archaic hymn articulates the power she has over gods and men alike:

  The sacred Heaven feels the desire to penetrate the Earth (Gaia), the Earth is consumed by the desire to enjoy coitus: the rain comes down from the Heaven husband like a kiss toward the Earth, and it gives birth to herds that graze for mortals and the fruit of life of Demeter, as the spring foliage comes to an end under the dew of the hymen, and I am the one who is cause of all this,6

  The world began with Chaos – a hideous mêlée of nothingness and everything. Out of Chaos, Earth (Gaia) and her dark underbelly Tartarus emerged. Earth then gave birth to Ouranos, the ‘starry heaven’, and proceeded to sleep with her heavenly child. Among the offspring of this grand pairing were the Titans and monsters. Ouranos feared these monsters so he continually copulated with Gaia in order to trap their hideous children inside Mother Earth’s womb.

  But Gaia wanted her brood released and persuaded her firstborn Titan son to collude in a dastardly scheme. Together they cut off Ouranos’ erect penis and testicles while he was engaged in his eternal love-making. The bloody castrates were hurled into the ocean and Aphrodite emerged from the foaming spume, dragging herself out onto the shores of Cyprus (hence her alternative name Cypris).7 It was a suitably gory genesis for a female who brought with her as much pain as she did pleasure. Aphrodite was a being to fear as well as to solicit. The ancients talked of love as ‘Aphrodite’s disease’, a sickness that invaded and controlled the mind and body, causing both to melt or wither away. Pausanias reported that some Greeks would bathe in a river in Achaia called the Selemnos because they thought it would bring a cure for the dreadful affliction of love itself.8

  Detailing the generation of the divine powers, Hesiod tells us of Aphrodite’s birth and that immediately after her come Night’s children. The three firstborn are all given the names of morbidity: Moros (destiny), Ker (death) and Thanatos (everlasting sleep). Swiftly following on their heels is Eris, strife. The little deaths, the petites morts, follow Aphrodite as she sweeps through others’ lives. They clutch at her fine chiton (when she is wearing one) but as she passes, the scent she leaves on the air can carry the cloying sweetness of decay.

  Also hanging on to Aphrodite’s skirts is her wounding son Eros. When Aphrodite cannot be there herself with Helen and Paris she sends this spiky spawn in her place. With his beating wings fanning the flames of passion, Eros commits Paris to a febrile death:

  ‘Thou wilt bring conflagration back with thee! How great the flames thou seekest over these waters, thou dost not know!’ A truthful prophetess was she; I have found the fires of which she spoke, and flames of fierce love rage in my helpless breast! 9

  Authors continually played on Helen’s fervid nature. Her beauty sears. It lights a touch-paper, it sparks the infernal abandon of sex. Ovid’s poem Heroides 16 is profligate in its use of inflammatory language. Paris declares he is ‘on fire with love’. Misunderstanding Hecuba’s prophecy at his own birth he muses: ‘One of the seers sang that Ilion would burn with the fires of Paris – that was the torch of my heart, as now has come to pass!’ He tells Helen: ‘Like a great queen you will make your progress through the Dardanian towns, and the common crowd will think a new goddess come to earth; wherever you advance your steps, flames will consume the cinnamon, and the slain victim will strike the bloody earth.’10

  There was duplicity in all this fiery talk. Fire gave light and warmth and comfort, but it was also perilous – one of the greatest hazards of the ancient world. The archaeological record shows that domestic, military and natural infernos were by far the most common agents of destruction. ‘Paris himself is said to have burned at the sight of Helen naked, when she rose from the bed of Menelaus.’11 The ancients chose their words carefully – consumption in a sexual conflagration was thrilling and equivocal. Beautiful Helen, allied with Aphrodite and Eros, delights and she destroys.

  It would take four hundred centuries or so for Greek Eros to become Roman Cupid – a cheeky, impish little putto, destined to pierce hearts with his arrows of love on mawkish Valentine cards. For the Greeks, particularly the early Greeks, Eros, born out of chaos, is something far more pernicious
– forget the cute, plump little baby and think instead of a malevolent, rangy boy. For the Ancient Greeks Aphrodite and Eros catalyse a crazed, keening frenzy for lust and lust for frenzy.

  Eros was well taught by his mother. In ancient Greek literature he consumes flesh and spirit; he can invade like a virus, he can corrode like a poisonous chemical.12 Socrates (if we believe he was faithfully represented by his interpreters) was equally imaginative in his description of the effects of love. For him, love’s kisses resembled the bite of a venomous spider – worse in fact, since Eros13 did not need physical contact between two organisms to start his poisonous work.14 Not only does Eros destroy, he also emasculates. Hesiod’s articulation of Eros’ power has close parallels with the impotence of the moment of death. Eros is ‘lusimeles’: he who unbinds, who loosens, who breaks the limbs.15

  The Greeks delighted in the subtleties of language, in the power of words. Alcman, the poet who gave those young Spartan girls such sensuous lines to sing, such rhythms to dance to, sees women as an even more powerful agent of dissolution than death itself. ‘By the desire that loosens the limbs [lusimeles], she [a woman] has a gaze that is more liquefying [takeros] than Hypnos (sleep) or Thanatos (death).’16 Odysseus’ swineherd Eumaios says of Helen ‘she loosed the knees of many men’.