Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  But the particular way in which the questions of responsibility, fate and beauty were here interrelated and given their answers, could not carry on as soon as the epic or heroic view of life began to break down. Helen’s innocence as a living woman who is also a creature of Aphrodite’s will could not then be sustained. Homer does not see her departure from Sparta as a rape by Paris, though perhaps we may recognize a detritus from an earlier and cruder level of saga in the way in which discussions about her return always link her with her property and make her seem a piece of war loot. But, emotionally, the loot, the property, always has a secondary place. Helen is what the war is about, the Helen who is strangely like a goddess to look at.

  There was a legendary tradition of beauty as something that called out for a divine ravishment. Pausanias, dealing with the themes of the Throne of Amyklai, says, ‘There is Kephalos too, ravished by Day [Hemera] because of his beauty.’ Ganymedes was carried off aloft by or for Zeus, to serve as his cupbearer, because of his beauty; only later an amorous interpretation of the rape was made. (Helen too had her cup-connections; Plinius tells us of the Rhodian tradition that at Lindos she consecrated a cup made to the shape or measure of her breast.) In tales such as those of Kephalos and Ganymedes we see the beauty as a spiritforce that breaks through its confines; the divine joins the divine.[21] With Helen the force is contained in the overwhelming body but wreaks destruction all around. However a tale preserved by Herodotos shows its creative impact in kindlier form. He tells us that the Spartan king, Ariston, though married twice, had no children; he fell in love with the loveliest woman in the country, who was married to a close friend of his.

  Oddly enough, as a child she had been extremely plain and owed the transformation to her nurse. The latter noted that her looks were not at all attractive, and knew that the parents, persons of substance, were troubled at having such an ugly baby. So she had the idea of taking the child every day to Helen’s shrine at Therapne above Apollo’s temple. She carried the child in, put it down in front of Helen’s statue, and prayed the goddess to take away her ugliness. One day as she was leaving, a woman appeared and asked what she had in her arms. The nurse replied that it was a baby. The woman asked to see it, but the nurse, whom the parents had forbidden to show the child to anyone, refused. The woman however persisted, and at last the nurse, seeing how anxious she was for a peep at the baby, showed it. At that the stranger stroked its head and declared that it would grow up to be the most beautiful woman in Sparta. From that day its looks began to change.[22]

  Though the picture that Homer gives of Paris and Helen is subtle and complex, both as characterization and as evocation of the wider issues involved, he tells us very little factually about them. Helen’s parents are not named. In Book III, in lines that come close together, she is called the Offspring of Zeus, his Girl or Daughter (kourē), but the relationship is not elaborated. Neither Zeus nor any other deity refers to it in discussing the war and its course; no mortal mentions it. Helen herself is not shown as being aware of it, since she explicitly refers to her parents as having been left behind at Sparta; she therefore looks on them as mortals. Her two brothers are mentioned as having died in the ordinary way; there is no hint of deification. Her homes lies in Lakedaimon, but she is often called Argive Helen and Paris once says that he took her away from Argos. There is however perhaps no contradiction here; for the mainland Greeks are called Achaioi, Argives or Danaoi in an indiscriminate way, and Argos seems to mean the Peloponnesos in general as well as a particular town.

  There is no reference to the tale that she was carried off in her youth by Theseus; but Homer seems to have known of it, for he includes Aithra, Theseus’ mother, among her handmaids. This point, together with a large mass of other evidence, brings out the way in which he selected and controlled his material, getting rid of the darker elements in cult and myth, and simplifying where a conglomeration of legends tended to obscure the human lineaments of a character.

  There is no hint that Helen’s suitors took an oath to support the man she chose. Some critics have argued that traces of the story are shown in the speech of Achilles to Agamemnon in Book I: ‘I didn’t come here to fight because of the spearmen of Troy; they’re not at fault in any way towards me. They never harried my cattle or horses; they didn’t lay waste the grain in deep-soiled Phthia. For many things lie between us, shadowy mountains and resounding sea.’ Why then did he come? Odysseus in Book II provides the answer. The Achaians, he says, ‘won’t carry out their promise, when coming here from Argos the pastureland of horses, that you shouldn’t return home till you’d sacked Ilios with its strong walls’. But the situation here suggests an oath to an overlord or great king, who has drawn lesser lords into an expedition. The suitors’ oath was made, not to Agamemnon, but to Helen’s father or rather to Menelaos. If Achilles had been thinking of such an oath, he would certainly have spoken directly about it, saying that he would not keep an oath about the sanctity of Menelaos’ wife when the latter’s brother had carried off his (Achilles’) woman.[23]

  There is no reference to Paris having been exposed on Mt Ida, where he grew up as a shepherd. With his love for Helen twenty years old, he seems older than Hektor, who is yet the Trojan leader under Priam; moreover he has a specially fine palace which we are explicitly told that he himself had built — a detail that does not at all fit in with any scheme of exposure, Judgement and immediate departure for Sparta, or with his status in the family as shown in the Iliad. He is depicted as odd man out among the Trojan princes; but no explanation is offered. We are not told why Aphrodite favours him, unless the stress on his comeliness and charms is meant to explain the link. Such qualities could be either the cause or the effect of the goddess’s patronage. Paris, like Helen, draws in Aphrodite as both fate and guardian. We are not told of the Judgement on Ida when Paris chose her in the beauty contest — though there is one difficult passage in the last book which seems to mention it. The gods have taken pity on Hektor’s body which Achilles is dragging behind his chariot, and the corpse is stolen away. ‘And the act pleased all the others, but not Hera or Poseidon or the flashing-eyed Maiden [Athena]. They went on hating sacred Ilios and Priam and his people as they had from the first, because of the atē of Alexandros. For he had put reproach on the goddesses [or had reviled, upbraided them] when they came to his steading and he preferred her who furthered his lustfulness, machlosynē.’

  The phrasing is odd. No version of the Judgement, in poetry or art, mentions that Paris reviled the losers; and it has been suggested that the wording here is more suitable for a tale in which a mortal (Paris) refuses hospitality to disguised deities. Also machlosynē is a term usually applied to women; only one late case (in Loukian, who is perhaps thinking of the Iliad passage) applies it to a man.[24] But the main objection to the authenticity of the two lines is that Homer would hardly have introduced so important a motif so late in the poem, and so clumsily. Machlos means lascivious; and lasciviousness or effeminacy would be a peculiar gift from Aphrodite in return for being chosen, unless we strain the meaning to make machlosynē imply prowess as a lover. The ancient critic Aristarchos picked on that word in his argument that the couplet was an interpolation. Indeed it is very hard to defend the passage as authentic; but the fact that it is no doubt an intrusion does not prove Homer to have been ignorant of the Judgement motif. He may well have been suppressing it as a folktale accretion which lowered the whole dignity of the epic theme and weakened the significance of the deeper fate motif surrounding Helen. More of this later.

  We may note however that he explicitly provides a more broadly based set of reasons for the way in which the goddesses take sides. He explains the support given to the Achaians by Hera and Athena as the result of their strong links with the Mykenean cities of the mainland; we may add the point that Hera as goddess presiding over marriage would have further reasons for being outraged by the elopement. Athena was associated with the maintenance of law and order. At Athens she was connected
with the political system through the Apatouria and in other ways; she was said to have instituted the ancient court of the Areiopagos, and one of her epithets was axiopoinos, avenger.[25] Not indeed that in Homer her special position in Athens appears; she is rather a warrior, a shrewd consort of hero kings, a patroness of the crafts. The first extant mention of her by an Athenian occurs in Solon’s poem in which she is still an outstanding member of the Olympian pantheon, but is also the special champion of Athens, assuring her city’s prosperity under the Olympian regime. But her Athenian basis must have been established much earlier. She had however, we saw, strong links with Troy as well in the epic tradition, though as protectress of the wily Odysseus she was an Achaian supporter. Bacchylides in a dithyramb tells of the embassy from the Greeks camped on Tenedos arriving in Troy and knocking at Athena’s temple. ‘The raven-eyed wife of godlike Antenor, deep-girdled Theano, daughter of Kisseus, Athena’s priestess, opened quickly the golden doors of pure [agna] Pallas who rouses to battle [Odysseus and Menelaos] at the knocking of the pair of messengers from the Argives.’ The envoys are led into the market place, where Antenor gives their message to Priam and the companies of the Trojans are summoned. The temple seems taken as the heart of Troy.[26]

  But we cannot expect Homer to give reasons for the position of Hera and Athena when we are not told why Ares, Apollo, Artemis and Leto support the Trojans. They are the deities named in Book XX as on the Trojan side, with Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Hephaistos on the Achaian. In Book XXI Hera makes a physical assault on Artemis and chases her off in disarray. A cup by Douris shows Artemis as well as Aphrodite aiding Paris in his duel with Menelaos. Apollo is linked with Troy as the builder of its sacred wall while in exile; and Artemis could be associated with Paris through her title Idaia as goddess of the wilds. But such links cannot be compared with the complex mythological basis provided for Paris and Aphrodite by the Judgement-tale.[27]

  The will of Zeus appears as an overriding element in the whole story of the siege, but there is no hint of a definite plan or system in his attitudes. The one point with a suggestion of such a plan occurs in the passage about the shipbuilder Phereklos, who brought doom on himself and the Trojans because ‘he didn’t at all know the oracles of the gods’, thesphata, the divine decisions. The plural, gods, is used, so it is not a question of Zeus or Aphrodite in isolation. In the Odyssey, thesphata is used of oracles predicting that Poseidon in wrath will turn the Phaiakian ships to stone and ‘fling a great mountain round the town’. But all this is meagre evidence for an overall Plan, saying little more than that everything happens under the rule of the gods.[28] Yet though the Plan, in the sense later worked out by poets, is lacking, there is present something far subtler and more comprehensive: a sense of the Justice of Zeus as somehow pervading all the actions of men, bringing judgements to bear upon them, weighing them up, and, in the last resort, giving meaning to the total nexus of striving, conflicting and harmonizing wills, aims, hopes.

  Chapter Two – Helen in the Odyssey

  Helen appears in Books IV and XV of the Odyssey in connection with the wanderings of Telemachos. Here we are shown Helen in her later years, with a background largely drawn from the way of life of the lords in the dark age. Telemachos, failing to get rid of the princes who infest his house and woo his mother Penelope, goes off with Athena (who has taken the form of a friend, Mentes, king of the Taphians) to visit Nestor at Pylos. Nestor tells him of a violent dispute between Agamemnon and Menelaos as the Achaians were leaving Troy. Menelaos wanted to sail off at once; his brother wanted first to try to placate Athena, now grown angry, with hekatombs. She it was who caused the break between the two leaders, though Zeus himself also ‘planned in his heart a miserable return for the Argives, since all of them were by no means prudent or just’. How the wrath of Athena was roused, we are not told; but we may assume that Homer knew the story of Aias, during the sack of Troy, dragging Kassandra from Athena’s altar, where stood the goddess’ image, the palladion or talisman of the city. Kassandra’s other name, Alexandra, shows her as a maiden who defends-against-man, so that she appears as a doublet of Athena herself, the impregnable city-goddess; Aias, attempting to rape her, commits a deadly sin. Homer makes no reference to her prophetic powers. (In this episode we see Athena as indeed the defender of Troy, much concerned for its talisman. When we add the tale of Phereklos, we feel there may have been a version in which she was on the Trojan side.)[29]

  Nestor says that the other warriors joined in the dispute between the two brothers; then they paused to rest for the night. In the morning half of them set sail with loot, ktēmata, and low-belted women. At Tenedos they made sacrifices, and some of them, including Odysseus, turned back to the shore where Agamemnon had remained. But Nestor sailed on, ‘knowing that the god was hatching up evil’. Menelaos joined him at Lesbos as he and his men debated which course to take. They asked the god for a sign, and he gave it, bidding them sail for Euboia. That night they put in at Geraistos and made bull sacrifices to Poseidon. On the fourth day Diomedes stayed on at Arhus, but Nestor continued towards Pylos.

  Telemachos asks how Agamemnon was killed by Aigisthos. Was Menelaos wandering afar ‘so that Aigisthos got heart for the murderous deed’? Yes, Nestor replies that he and Menelaos were together till Cape Sounion; but there Menelaos’ helmsman was killed by ‘the gentle shafts of Apollo’ (a sudden painless death) as he held the steering-oar. So Menelaos, keen as he was to hurry on, paused to give the man his funeral rites. Then, when he reached the steep height of Malea, Zeus sent a storm that drove his ships apart, some to Crete, but five of them, including Menelaos’ own ship, to Egypt. So Menelaos roamed about among aliens, ‘gathering much livelihood and gold’, but knowing nothing of Aigisthos’ actions. In time Orestes killed his father’s murderer — on the very day when Menelaos arrived back, with much ktēmata, ‘as much as his ships could carry as cargo’. (As Helen was with him, she too visited Egypt.)[30]

  Nestor now sends his son on with Telemachos as guide to Sparta. There they meet Menelaos, who is living happily with his reclaimed wife. Nothing is said about how they came together after the fall of Troy; there is no hint of recriminations or bad feeling. A marriage feast is going on. Menelaos is giving his daughter Hermione to Achilles’ son, and is about to send her off with horses and chariots to the land of the Myrmidons. At the same time he is bringing home the daughter of Alektor for his son Megapenthes, whom a slavewoman has borne. ‘For the gods permitted no further issue to Helen after she bore her lovely girl Hermione, who had the beauty of golden Aphrodite.’ Neighbours and kinsfolk of Menelaos are making merry, and a bard is singing to the lyre while a pair of tumblers whirl up and down among the guests. Eteoneus, Menelaos’ squire, welcomes the newcomers and introduces them to his master as ‘two strangers, Zeus-fostered, two men like the offspring of Zeus’.[31] He asks if their horses are to be unyoked or if the men are to be sent on somewhere else.

  Menelaos rebukes him. The horses are put in the stalls and fed with spelt and white barley; the chariot is tilted up against the entrance-walls. Over the high roofs is a gleam as of sun or moon. The visitors go on into the polished baths and are washed by maids, who anoint them with oil and throw woollen cloaks and tunics over them. The two men then sit by Menelaos. A girl brings water for their hands in a gold pitcher and pours it in a silver basin, then draws a polished table to their side. And the grave housekeeper sets bread and dainties before them. A carver brings plates with all sorts of meats and golden goblets. Menelaos bids them eat, saying that he recognizes in them sceptred kings. ‘The base [kakoi] could not beget such men.’ In his own hands he gives them roast meat and the fat ox-chine which has been put before him as a mess of honour, geras. They eat and drink, then. Telemachos draws his head close to that of Nestor’s son and expresses amazement at the wealth, the glitter of bronze, gold, elektron (probably here an alloy of gold and silver, not amber), silver, ivory. ‘The court of Olympian Zeus must be made of such things within.’
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  Menelaos hears him and starts telling about his homecoming. ‘After many sufferings and wanderings far and wide, I brought my ktēmata home in my ships. I arrived in the eighth year. I wandered over Cypros and Phoinikia and Egypt, and I reached the Aithiopians, and I came to Libya where the lambs are horned at birth.’ (So Aristotle understood the passage; Herodotos, followed by Eustathios, read it as ‘begin at once to grow horns’.[32]) ‘For there the ewes bear their young three times a year, and masters and shepherds have no lack of cheese, meat, or sweet milk. The flocks yield milk all the year long. While I travelled in these lands, gathering much livelihood, a man killed my brother by stealth and without warning, through the guile of his accursed wife. So, you may realize, I feel no pleasure at owning such wealth. You may have heard these matters from your fathers, whoever they are. For greatly did I suffer and I let fall into ruin a stately house [oikos] — one stored with much noble treasure. I’d rather live in my halls with but a third share of these things if only there still lived the men who died in the broad land of Troy, far from Argos with its horse-pastures. And yet, though I often sit in my halls weeping and grieving for them all, one moment I ease my heart with tears, then I stop, for men soon grow tired of chilly lamenting, yet with all my grief I don’t mourn for the others so much as for one man. When I think of him I hate both sleep and food. None of the Achaians toiled so much as Odysseus or endured so much. His part seems to have been nothing but suffering and I feel indelible sorrow for him. He’s been gone so long and we don’t know if he’s alive or dead. He’s mourned, I suppose, by old man Laertes and constant Penelope and Telemachos whom he left in the oikos as a newborn baby.’