by Jack Lindsay
Though no reference is ever made to Helen’s age, we know that according to the epic she spent twenty years at Troy and is now nearly ten years older. She is convincingly shown as a gracious and assured great lady, elegant and proper, getting on in years but still aware of her overpowering charms, which have been enhanced by the shattering world events she brought about. She is ready enough to recall the past, and she describes herself, perhaps not without a note of pride, as a bitchface; but the memories hardly seem to ripple her calm. It all happened long ago and is already part of history. She is so quietly and firmly appreciative of the loving role of Menelaos that it is hard to believe any violent troubles have ever disrupted the domestic scene. Not that the role she now plays is out of key with her character in the Iliad. We can imagine that Helen, who strove to maintain her balance in a far more troubled situation, turns in due time into this serene mistress of the palace, who dutifully dispenses hospitality, but who owns much strange herbal lore and can at need become a prophetess out of her stored sufferings and exaltations. Despite the swineherd’s outcry, the general ethic remains that of the Iliad. The gods brought about the war, using Helen as their instrument; and yet her role was also somehow the fated expression of her beauty in such a world as hers.[40]
The Egyptian episode seems rather out of character, though the poet uses it to explain why Menelaos did not appear as the avenger of Agamemnon ahead of Orestes. No doubt it occurred in the epic Returns; but even so, we have no proof that the Returns was composed before the Odyssey. There must have been many chants about the various heroes of the Trojan War, which Homer chose to ignore as distracting from the unity of his theme or belittling its dignity. A passage that does however seem to be an interpolation from the later epic cycle is the story of the Trojan horse, with Helen’s cunning effort to make the Achaians betray themselves. This story is told straight after Menelaos has tried to stress her underlying loyalty to the Achaian cause by the story about the disguised Odysseus. The two tales could hardly stand more in contrast. In one she is the trusty helper of the Achaians; in the other she is an arch-traitress. The contradiction is hardly helped by the half-hearted attempt to say that in the second episode she was under the control of some deity hostile to the Achaians.[41]
Another difficult and submerged point is her relation to Deiphobos, whom in later tradition she married after Paris’ death. When she comes up to test the Horse, she is being dogged by him. We might say that this detail is an intrusion, the whole passage being an interpolation; but in the song chanted by the bard Demodokos in Phaiakia we are told how, when the Achaians emerged from the Horse to sack Troy, ‘Odysseus went like Ares to the house of Deiphobos, together with godlike Menelaos. There it was that Odysseus dared to encounter a most terrible fight, which in the end he won with great-hearted Athena’s aid.’ No explanation is given why the two heroes make straight for Deiphobos; but clearly they are understood to have some special reason for wanting to kill him. So it does seem that Homer knew the tale of Helen’s third marriage, but censored it. We have always indeed to consider the possibility of interpolations; thus in ancient times Aristarchos marked the line about Deiphobos following Helen as dubious. But any argument that excludes all difficult passages as intrusions is begging the questions that it should solve.[42]
It may seem strange in terms of later thought to conceive of a person as guilty of a crime that brings about various disasters, and yet not morally responsible for what happens. But we must realize that the ideas surrounding Helen are only an extreme case of what was generally held in the heroic world about headstrong actions in which the actor was carried away by an irresistible impulse. Agamemnon, who has seized Briseis from Achilles, sees himself as no more reprehensible than Helen, who has deserted husband and daughter. The Achaians, he says, have often blamed him for his action, ‘But I’m not the cause of it — rather Zeus and Moira [Fate] and the Erinys who walks in darkness’ or sucks blood. ‘They it was who in the assembly cast wild ate into my understanding on the day when I arbitrarily took the geras of Achilles. But what could I do? Deity [theos] brings all things to their completion.’ Geras means gift of honour and so privilege in general; to take a man’s geras is to challenge his status, his whole place in society. Just as Moira or Fate means share, what a man gets as his lot.
What Agamemnon says is not a piece of special pleading, for his opponent Achilles takes just the same view of his proceedings. ‘Father Zeus, great indeed are the atai you send upon men. Never would the son of Atreus have throughout stirred up rage in my breast or led off the girl obstinately against my will; but perhaps Zeus wanted death to come on many of the Achaians.’ Right at the outset of the conflict he spoke of Agamemnon’s atē; and he told his mother Thetis that ‘Zeus took away his understanding’.[43] Any excessively stupid or misjudged action can be taken as the result of ate: a temporary transformation of normal states of mind by an influx of unreasoning impulse or emotion which disrupts the balance of a man and his world. The influx is felt as coming from the spiritworld, which we must not conceive as some remote or transcendental sphere. The spiritworld is in continual interaction with the minds and bodies of men; indeed this-world and other-world interpenetrate one another and are interdependent in various ways. Wine can cause atē by driving a man mad, by making him do things which he would not soberly do; but that is because the power in wine is itself demonic. Atē is not then a punishment sent on a man for some guilty or wild act; it is the act itself, though that act may in turn beget troubles and penalties. Atē is not sin or crime, though it may bring about injustices and calamities. That is why Helen, on whom atē is imposed by Aphrodite, is not guilty in any simple moral sense for the war she brings about.[44]
When Agamemnon puts the ultimate responsibility on Zeus the highgod, on Moira (Share or Fate), on the Erinys or Fury, he is not saying in any crude way that Fate has controlled him. Fate is not an abstract deity or force; it resides both in the total life energy of the individual and in his involvement with spirit-forces outside his conscious or rational control. The spirit-forces and the life-energy are one, and yet distinct; each represents the whole cultural tradition of the group, its relation to the ancestral past and to nature, but from a different angle. Zeus stands over against Agamemnon as the ultimate judgement embedded in both group and individual; but Moira is vitally part of the man, the movement of his whole self in a world of complex relationships, and the Erinys is not just an avenging fury invoked by the act of imbalance and infatuation. She is the active embodiment of Moira, which in turn is the expression of Zeus’ will; yet Moira and her agent Erinys are also deep aspects of the sufferer’s humanity. The law of justice acts both inside the man and all around him, altering his relations to other men and to nature, confirming his aretē (that which makes him man) or destroying him. Atē (the obsession, the infatuation, the impulse leading to a badly misjudged or unbalancing action) begets the Erinys; the Erinys, reacting to a situation of imbalance, intensifies the atē. Odysseus speaks of the seer Melampous ‘suffering grievous pains through Neleus’ daughter and the crushing atē which the hard-hitting goddess Erinys put upon him’. (He had tried to help his brother to win Pero, Neleus’ daughter, by stealing the cattle of Iphiklos, but was caught and imprisoned a year, while Neleus seized his property.) Later as the unity of the early conception broke down, ate came to mean punishment; the Erinyes became Furies exacting penalties for certain guilty acts; Moira became an impersonal Fate standing over the man.[45]
In the early conception the ideas and images are dynamic, expressing both the forces maintaining balance and those that result from breaking it. The Erinys is a protective power, which preserves the limits of a moira. A man’s position in society is an aspect of his moira, his share or lot, which arises out of family relationships, work, property. A parent has something due to him, his share, as parent; an elder brother as elder brother, and so on. Even a beggar has his inviolable moira and can invoke his Erinys to protect it. The gods themselves have t
heir Erinyes. Hera’s Erinyes have the same function as those of Penelope: to protect the status of a mother by punishing an unfilial son. In the epic Thebais the Erinys of the Gods heard the curse of Oidipous, embodying in personal form the anger of the gods invoked in the curse; hence Erinys and curse could be equated. Moira is not only the share that a man gets but also the share he should get; and in the post-Homeric period it can be replaced by Dikē, Justice. Thus in Sophokles when Agamemnon and Menelaos refuse to the dead Aias the right of burial — a moira of the dead — the kinsman utters a curse upon them which invokes Zeus, Erinys and Dikē. Dikē here has the epithet telesphoros, ‘who brings to fulfilment’, which is also a traditional epithet of Moira. Herakleitos said that if the Sun were to exceed his metra or measures, he would be detected by the Erinyes, the ministers of Dikē. The whole idea of metron or measure had come about as a development of the Homeric concept of moira. We can begin to realize, along these lines, how central was that concept in Greek culture and how multiple its enduring effects.[46]
In a sense the moira and the erinys of a man were aspects of his daimōn. The daimōn was not so much guardian spirit as otherself: that is, the self as reflected in the otherworld, the spiritworld — the self as it appeared in its relations with that world. Zeus comes in here with the attempts to generalize and to link the individual fate with larger patterns of purpose.[47] We thus find the daimonion or spiritforce extended till it becomes co-extensive with divine power, the whole sphere of the gods. The complex dynamic link of daimōn and individual breaks down, and daimōn becomes, as we have noted, a sort of guardian spirit linked with, but separate from, the individual.
We must not however think that at any time the concept of the daimōn was limited to the spirit force of human beings. Everything that existed had its daimōn: all the objects or beings in nature, from stones to trees, from animals to the elements, had their daimones. By his daimonic being man became a living part of the universe, organically related to star and stone. For Homeric psychology the key problem was that of limits. Why and how does a person at times maintain a harmonious and secure relationship to his fellows and to nature — to the gods (in whom society and nature co-exist)? Why at other times does atē possess him and an erinys strike at him out of the disturbed balance? Therein lay the mystery. Helen the elegantly secure lady of the Odyssey is the same person as Helen the disastrous embodiment of beauty-power in the Iliad; the difference lies in the way that the limits function. They have broken down in the Iliad, but have resumed control in the Odyssey. In the Iliad, the atai of Helen and Paris, of Agamemnon and Achilles, have thrown everything into confusion, and the gods are in violent interaction with the world of mortals; in the Odyssey, at Sparta the re-establishment of limits has created afresh a balance in which the gods, receiving their due gifts in sacrifice and kept respectfully in their place by ritual, sanctify the normal routine of life.
Not only unsettling atai but any sudden sense of an exalting power was seen as an influx from the spirit world. In the Iliad, when a man acts with special courage and energy, he is infused with menos by a god. Often the access of menos comes in reply to a prayer; it appears through the act of a god who ‘increases or diminishes at will a man’s aretē’.[48] Aretē means excellence: the positive qualities of an individual in their strongest form or manifestation. In general the aretē of men lies in their strength and fighting capacity, their physical fitness. Thus, the youngest son of Priam is described as ‘making show of the aretē of his feet’ because he is a fast runner. And one of Penelope’s suitors remarks that ‘here day after day we are rivals because of her aretē, and don’t go after other women’. Her aretē is her supreme womanliness, her perfection as a wife. With Helen aretē is beauty and its seductive charms. In her bitchface days she was glowing with the infused forces of Aphrodite. A fragment of Bion runs: ‘The beauty of woman is her glory, that of the man is his strength.’ Diomedes erupts with warlike energies in battle through the menos put into him by Athena. We are told of Hektor, ‘Ares entered into him’.[49]
Menos is accompanied by a conviction of intense power, a physical sensation of invincibility. ‘My feet beneath and hands above feel eager because the god has made them nimble.’[50] In such a condition a man can do with ease things beyond his normal capacities; he can even, as Diomedes does, fight with gods. (We may compare the Norse Berserks.) The man of menos in fact is a man possessing daimonion. The normal division of self and other-self or daimōn breaks down; spiritworld and everyday world are one. The bard, carried away by his mastery in song, feels that a god has inspired him.
The word daimōn tells us much about Greek thought processes. It has the same root as daiein, to divide. The Iliad uses daiein in the phrase: ‘My heart is torn’; Pindar uses it of the gods apportioning pains to men; the Odyssey uses it of men sharing out meat. From Herodotos on the aorist, edaisa, is used for feasting, formed from daiein, but belonging in sense to dainynai, to give a feast.[51] The related word dais means a meal or banquet. ‘The dais is duly shared’; desmos means division or spoil of land, later tribute; daithmos, allotment of land. One’s daimon is thus one’s life-force in terms of the share one gets of life (and death) and it is linked with one’s share of the necessaries of life, above all with food and land.[52]
In Homer the word daimōn hovers between the full early sense and the wider one of deity, of divine power. A man may act against his daimōn, or with it. ‘You might rouse him with the daimōn.’ Here we see the meaning of deep impulse, impulse that comes out of the whole man, merging with the meaning of fate or lot.[53] Demos means a division of the people or land, the land occupied by a clan or the clan itself. Many Attic demoi bore the names of clans. (The Arabic hayy was applied both to the tribe and its land.) The demos in turn consisted of men, each of whom had his moira, his share or lot, guarded by his erinys and defined by his daimōn. The Greeks never lost the sense that each free man should have his share of the land, and at revolutionary moments their impulse was to take over the land and share it out equally.
The Greeks were aware of the original significance of daimōn. A scholiast on the Iliad discusses Homer’s reasons for calling the gods daimonēs and adduces the fact that ‘they are the arbitrators and dispensers of men, as the lyric poet Alkman says: who has allotted them with his own lots and divided to them his own portions’, that is, divisions. An arbitrator, diaitētēs, divided up the land for a new colony; a dispenser, dioikētēs, was an administrator, especially treasurer — under the Ptolemies in Egypt, he was the chief financial officer.[54]
We see how deep into the Greek mind had sunk the idea of individual appropriation of the life-force, which was objectified above all in food and land, and which expressed itself in the particular characteristics of a person. Some persons, for reasons that remained obscure, were liable to influxes of force beyond the normal measure, the warrior with menos, the woman with over-whelming beauty, and so on. Myths sought to explain the ways in which such influxes happened, and the effects they had. But the acute sense of the individual moira was linked in turn with a powerful collective sense, which defined the limits that should rule in life and which in the last resort was linked with a clan conviction that the shares of land and food should be open to all, should indeed be shared equally. The tensions thus created between collective rights and individual appropriations became the driving force in Greek society, in the end bringing about both democracy and its breakdown: a tremendous expansion of energies liberated in a new way, yet dogged by certain contradictions that finally determined their limits and undermined them.
Chapter Three – Helen and History
There then is the Helen of Homer. Next we must ask what verifications we can find in history for her legend, and what direct links can be made out with the Bronze Age. It is generally agreed since Schliemann dug up the early Troy at Hissarlik that the Trojan War has an historical basis; since from tribal days onward we find wars, large or small, provoked by the theft of women, there is not
hing intrinsically improbable in that war being caused by the abduction of a princess from the Achaian mainland. If the traditional date for the war is roughly correct, there was much disturbance in the Near East at the time, dislocation and movement of peoples, and raids by sea-folks as far south as Egypt. We can then conjecture:
Whereas the Great Raids show us Sea Raiders and Land Raiders combining for aggressive action on the Palestinian coast, the Trojan War is the war of a maritime confederacy of the powers south and east of the Aegean, from Rhodes and Kalymnos to Thessaly, against a league of the northern and eastern shores, which are continental, and are represented as acting on the defensive around a central land-fortress on the Dardanelles. Yet some of the most identifiable of the Sea Raiders bear names which refer them to these continental coasts. In the Homeric story, in fact, the world of the Sea Raiders is divided against itself, only very shortly after the victory of Rameses over what seems to have been a very large and important part of its forces. Even the occasion of the quarrel has come down to us, little as this concerned the course or the issue of the war. In the absence of the King of Sparta a Trojan prince came, not as an enemy but as a friend and a guest, and stole his wife and his treasure: and as Helen was the heiress of the pre-Achaean dynasty, she was not only the consort, but the title-deed of Menelaos. War followed, so unanimously that later Greeks, who did not value their women so highly, were at a loss to account for it; pressed with such vigour and tenacity that it may well have had an economic cause as well as racial and political. (Myres and Frost)![55]
Such a position is based on an acceptance of the various legends and traditions as substantially derived from history; it rationalizes them and produces a coherent story. We may well feel that this is going too far in detail while holding that the core of the tradition may own a solid basis in fact. Let us then glance at what we know firmly of Troy and Mykenai, and how Helen’s story fits into the Mykenean world.
