Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  He composed a poem bringing to a head the condemnatory attitudes we saw emerging in Hesiod and Alkaios. The legend ran that he was then stricken with blindness, but regained sight by denying his previous charges. The Souda states that he wrote his recantation in response to a dream. Pausanias tells us that when the peoples of Kroton and Lokroi in south Italy were at war, the latter called on Aias son of Oileus for aid. Leonymos the Krotonian general attacked at the point where he heard the dead hero was posted in the front line, and was wounded in the breast. He went to Delphoi, and the Pythia sent him on to the ‘White Island’ at the mouth of the Danube, saying that Aias would there appear and cure the wound. On his return, cured, he stated that he had seen Achilles. ‘With them were Patroklos and Antilochos; Helen was married to Achilles and had bidden him sail to Stesichoros at Himera and announce that his blindness was caused by her wrath. So Stesichoros composed his recantation.’

  Plato remarks: ‘The precedent for purification of sinners in mythology goes far back, not indeed to Homer, but to Stesichoros, who, blinded for slandering Helen, did not, like Homer, wonder why, but like a true scholar recognized the reason for his affliction.’ He adds, ‘After finishing the Palinode, as it is called, he at once regained his sight.’ This passage oddly suggests that Homer too was blinded for his account of Helen, but never guessed the reason.[157] (Palinode merely means a second song, a repetition, but through Stesichoros it came to mean a recantation.) The offending poem was a vituperation; Isokrates calls it this in his Helen and says that it found fault with her at the beginning. A scholiast cites the passage: ‘Here Tyndareos one day made sacrifice to all the gods; yet Cypris [Aphrodite], giver of joy, he quite forgot; and she in wrath made his girls marry twice, and marry thrice, husband-forsakers they.’ Again we are told that the poet recounted how men (no doubt the conquering Achaians) went to stone her, but ‘the moment they saw her face, they let the stones fall from their hands’. Here we meet a variant of the motif of Menelaos dropping his sword at the sight of her face.[158]

  Athenaios cites as from Stesichoros’ Helena three lines that must come from a description of her marriage with Menelaos: ‘Many the quinces [Kydonian apples] cast upon the king’s chariot, many the leaves of myrtle, garlands of roses and twisted wreaths of violets.’ The introduction of Theokritos’ poem on the same theme states that ‘certain things in it are taken from the First Book of Stesichoros’. (The marriage scene rarely inspired artists. There is a dinos at Smyrna where the bridal couple are shown in a chariot accompanied by the Twins; and on vase fragments, dated about 380, Menelaos is shown with sceptre or torch, holding Helen by the wrist; behind them a woman wearing a low kalathos is dancing.)

  The ancients referred to a single palinode; but the critic Chamaileon in a papyrus fragment makes clear that there were two poems. The first began, ‘Come hither song-loving goddess’; the second, ‘Gold-winged maiden’. The call ‘hither’ suggests a festival at which the poem was sung and Helen was imagined to be present. But an address to Helen in such a confident tone would hardly suit the occasion of an abject apology. The poet speaks to the Muse; we have two other fragments of this in which he certainly makes this kind of start.[159] His Oresteia shows how he liked to invoke the Muse as co-worker: ‘Come, Muse, thrust wars away, and sing with me in honour of a wedding of gods and a feast of men and also a merrymaking of the blessed ones...’

  Now that we know there were two palinodes, despite some twenty-odd references to a single work, we can perhaps read into a passage of Aristeides a reference to the double set. He is speak-ing of some opponents: ‘So much for that. I’ll go seek another prelude, as Stesichoros says. Now I know that I, like him, have on my hands a shadow fight. Those to whom my words will apply aren’t present, and so in a sense my words turn vain and empty, though at the same time it’s sure they’ll be true and to the point. For it’s obvious the fault is not — nor ever has been, save the mark — mine, but rather lies with the entire and inveterate apathy of these gentlemen themselves.’ It has been said that the change in tone here from self-confidence to self-defence echoes the palinode. We know that the poet admitted, ‘I spoke vanities.’[160]

  Apart from the dramatic change from the assertion of guilt to one of innocence on Helen’s part, Stesichoros made the innovation of declaring that Homer’s story was all wrong. Helen had never gone off with Paris to Troy; the gods had sent instead a phantom or image of her, an eidolon. Plato tells us, speaking of true and false pleasures: ‘Does it not follow then that the pleasures with which such men have to do are mixed with pains, mere eidola of true pleasure, perspective paintings of it, taking each its depth of colour from contrast in juxtaposition with its particular pain, and for that reason appearing great, pleasures that make foolish persons madly in love with them, pleasures that are fought for, as the eidolon of Helen, according to Stesichoros, was fought for by the warriors at Troy in ignorance of the true Helen?’ Aristeides in another oration than that cited tells us that Stesichoros declared the Trojans held Helen’s eidolon as if it were a real person and thus excused themselves by blaming Helen.[161]

  Even if there was any slight suggestion of the eidolon in some Hesiodic poem, it was Stesichoros who gave force to the idea and applied it consistently. Eidolon is cognate with eidos, form or shape, and eidein to know; Homer uses it to mean phantom. An eidolon of Aineias in armour is fashioned by Apollo in mid-battle; Athena makes a woman’s eidolon and sends it to Penelope. In the Odyssey the word is further used of the spirits or ghosts in the underworld, where the eidolon of Herakles persists after his real self has gone up to Olympos. There is nothing, then, in the Homeric notion of eidola to deny the possibility of Helen at Troy being all the while a phantom, though the poet’s realistic treatment makes it clear that he is not in the least thinking of her as an illusion.[162]

  With the Stesichorean theme we may compare the tale of Ixion, father of Peirithoos, who, after treacherously killing his father-in-law to escape paying bridal gifts, was purified by Zeus and in return tried to seduce his wife Hera. Pindar, in one only known early account, says that Zeus sent a cloud, nephela, in Hera’s place, and on it Ixion begot the first horse-daimōn or centaur. The ancients used Ixion as the supremely ungrateful man. He gets a cloud as Paris (in Stesichoros) gets a phantom. Since Paris was the supreme betrayer of hospitality, there is parallelism in the two tales, but the effects of the betrayals are very different. Stesichoros included Hesiod with Homer as a maligner of Helen. Perhaps he had in mind the passage about Tyndareos’ daughters deserting their husbands; perhaps he was angry that Hesiod told of Theseus mating with Helen. He himself may have taken from Hesiod the motif of Aphrodite’s jealous hatred of Helen.[163]

  The papyrus tells us, probably referring to the first palinode, ‘Stesichoros states that the eidolon went to Troy and Helen stayed with Proteus.’ The construction implies that the two events occurred at the same time. In linking Helen with Proteus the poet recalls the Odyssey, but makes the connection for the outward journey, not the homeward. The late annotator Tzetzes and a scholiast describe him as originating the theme of Helen in Egypt, where Proteus took charge of her, giving Paris back the phantom (Tzetzes) or a picture (scholiast).[164] But there is evidence making us distrust part of this account. Dion of the Golden Mouth says that Helen did not sail anywhere. Carelessly read, this would rule out her sojourn in Egypt; we would have to assume that she was hidden somewhere (eg Therapne) on the Greek mainland or that she went off at once to join her brothers in the sky or to live in the Blessed Isles. The answer however seems to be that she did go to Egypt, but not by ship. In four lines cited by Plato, Stesichoros says: ‘I spoke vanities and I’ll go in search of another prelude. This story isn’t true. You didn’t go in the benched ships, you didn’t come to the citadel of Troy.’ She went to Egypt by being wafted thither in the air, carried along by Hermes, as Euripides asserts.[165]

  Dion tells us that other poets besides Stesichoros sang of Helen going to Egypt; Tzetzes and the scho
liast probably used handbooks in which various versions were conflated. The location of Helen’s retreat in Egypt no doubt came from the Odyssey’s account of her sojourn there plus the reputation of the country as ancient and mysterious. The later account of her presence there may have been influenced by Egyptian priests; and we can find some clues in Herodotos. His tales, soon to be considered, may well have been partly made up by Greek travellers or settlers in Egypt, eg at Naukratis. Certainly by Roman days there were many honours paid to Helen and Menelaos there.[166] Tzetzes, in making the eidolon the creation of Proteus, probably draws on some Hellenistic poet of love themes. As the myth was rationalized, tortuous explanations were devised to make sense of a long war for a mere phantom; it was argued that the Trojans had no Helen to hand back and the Achaians refused to believe their tale.

  What are we to make of the story of Stesichoros’ blindness? No doubt in one of his palinodes the poet referred to a period of blindness (error) which was ended by a revelation of the truth from Helen. Such a remark would readily be taken literally, assimilated to the many legends of blind poets illuminated by an inner inspiration. Bards had indeed often been blind, as smiths had been lame; the vocation was conditioned by the physical disability. The linking of blindness with second sight, prophecy and poetic power is typical of most primitive cultures. The bard Demodokos in the Odyssey was blind; Thamyris was blinded for boasting that he sang better than the Muses (the Pierides were turned into jackdaws for the same boast); Homer himself was reputed to have been blind.[167] The idea that Stesichoros was blinded may have been helped by his introduction into Greek poetry of the Sicilian folktheme of Daphnis, though we are not clear as to the length of his treatment. The neatherd Daphnis was beloved by a Nymph, with whom he mated; she exacted a promise that he would not mate with any other woman, on the threat of blindness; drunk, he lay with a king’s daughter, and was blinded. ‘From this story,’ says Ailian, ‘arose the pastoral songs of herdsmen, with the theme the blinding of Daphnis. The first composer of such songs was Stesichoros of Himera.’ In Diodoros we see the Hellenistic elaboration which made Daphnis the son of Hermes and a Nymph, who got ‘his name from the abundance and density of the baytrees [daphnai] which grew’ in the grove of the Nymphs where he was born and reared. Daphnis himself invented pastoral poetry and was a favourite of Artemis. Theocritos in his Idyll gave the story an enigmatic twist, with the dying man questioned by Hermes, his fellow herdsmen, Priapos. When he breathes his last, it is Aphrodite who tries to revive him.[168]

  We must also note Stesichoros’ interest in the theme of eclipse, a sort of darkness and blindness come over the world. Plinius remarks, in his praise of men like Thales and Hipparchos who grappled with the problem of this phenomenon, that ‘by grasping the law of these mighty luminaries [sun and moon] they freed the miserable human mind from the apprehension of crimes or death it felt at their eclipse.’ And he adds: ‘an apprehension expressed, we know, by the sublime mouths of poets like Stesichoros and Pindar when they witnessed an eclipse of the sun.’ Ploutarch provides us with some of the phrases used. Stesichoros and Pindar, he says, bewail in eclipses that ‘the most manifest of stars is stolen away’, that ‘noonday is made night’, and that ‘the beam of the sun is in the path of darkness’. Pindar’s ninth Paian, written for the Thebans, gives us an idea of the panicked emotion. ‘Are you driving upon us some new and strange disaster?...Are you bringing a sign of some war or wasting of produce, or an unutterable violent snowstorm or destructive faction, or again some overflowing of the sea on the land, or frost to bind the earth, or heat of the south-wind pouring with raging rain? Or will you, by deluging the land, cause the race of men to begin all over again?’ Further, Eustathios tells us that Stesichoros used Telchines as an epithet of the Dooms (Kēres), as of Skotōseis (darkenings, eclipses). The Telchines, linked with the Idaian Mother like the Daktyls, were a spirit group connected with magic and with metallurgical transformations; one of their evil tricks was to sprinkle fields with sulphur and Styx-water, poisoning people and plants. Earlier, Archilochos had also expressed the dismay that men felt at an eclipse of the sun; he saw the darkness as a threat against all order, not the expression of a superior kind of order; he implicitly identified order with nature, even if all things came under the power of Zeus. His sheer horror at the thought that nature’s uniformity could be broken showed an abandonment of the idea of magic as a realm with its own systems; and he thus revealed a more advanced attitude than does Pindar with his dominating fear of the disasters that might be portended by the eclipse.[169]

  If then to the dramatic change between Stesichoros’ Helena and his palinodes we add the tale of his blindness and its cure, his use of the Daphnis theme, and his deep concern about eclipses, we seem to touch in him a complex of images and ideas centred on a fear of some general disaster, a blacking-out of the universe with a breakdown of its normal laws. He is asking: What has gone wrong? Where have we sinned or erred? What can we do to avert doom? It is a tribute to the key role played by Homer in Greek culture, and by Helen in the Homeric world-picture, that the moral question comes to a head in the attempt to revalue the heroine. Did Zeus use her to set off forces leading to the destruction of mankind? Can we credit the sort of cosmic plan that the Cypria sets out? If only Helen can be cleared of guilt, then there is no such divine scheme of world end. The spiriting away of the sun ceases to be so frightening.

  Stesichoros, though a poet of the western Greeks, probably went to Sparta like so many other poets; he may well have been influenced by the priesthood there. The growing tendency to blame Helen must have annoyed and angered the Spartans, and the palinodes were a counterblast to the denigrations. It has been suggested that they ended with the apotheosis of Helen; and an epode of Horace has been cited in support: ‘I’ll expiate my sin whether you ask of me a hecatomb of oxen, or, sung by a lying lute, you’d like to be a golden constellation walking modest and maiden — you! — amid the stars. When Helen was defamed, the wrath of Kastor and great Kastor’s brother was overcome by supplication, and they restored the light to the poet that was blind. Even so do you...’ But Horace here makes the Twins, not their sister, the healers; he is probably using some later version or conflated account.[170]

  *

  Ibykos was another westerner, born about 600 at Rhegion in south Italy, and at first influenced by Stesichoros. He belonged to the Age of the Tyrants, and is said to have been offered the tyranny of his native city, which he refused. He lived much of his life at Samos where the tyrant Polykrates kept a brilliant court. We find in his work a turn from epic narrative to a more personal approach, with secularizing of myth; he takes a stage further the attitudes found in Sappho and Alkaios. He is interested in Helen’s sensuous aspect. A scholiast remarks of the episode of Menelaos’ confrontation with Helen: ‘This has been better arranged by Ibykos’ in his dithyramb on the Sack, ‘who makes Helen take refuge in Aphrodite’s temple and parley from there with Menelaos, who then drops his sword for love of her’. Another scholiast adds: When Menelaos ‘went to attack Helen, he dropped his sword; the tale is told by Ibykos and Euripides’. Ibykos seems then to have invented the sword-dropping; but the motif of bared breasts has not yet come up. It may well have been devised by an artist, winning quick success.

  Homer mentions the hatred felt by Deiphobos for Idomeneus of Crete. A scholiast tells us that he hated him ‘as his rival for Helen’s love, witness Ibykos and Simonides, but...’ (text corrupt). He states that Ibykos has misunderstood Homer; Idomeneus’ love for Helen was of old standing. (He is prominent among the suitors in the Hesiodic Catalogue.) A papyrus fragment speaks of the Achaians setting out at ‘the designs of great Zeus’ and upholding ‘an often sung strife in tearful war for the sake of the beauty of flaxen-haired Helen’. Troy fell because of the vengeance of the gods ‘on account of golden-haired Cypris’. The poet says that he will not sing of the heroes, ‘of host-deceiving Paris or slim-ankled Kassandra’.[171]

  A fragment shows us
the Molionids as Leukippoi: ‘And the White-Horse Lads of Molinoe I killed,’ says Herakles, ‘like in age, equal-headed and single-bodied, born together in a single egg’. This pair were Siamese twins (a detail censored by Homer), but only in Ibykos do we find them as Leukippoi born from an egg. It seems that twin-heroes had a cult-relation to white horses, in which they were incarnated; but how the egg came in, it is hard to see, unless the Dioskouroi got it via Helen and the Molionids via the Dioskouroi. In Euripides’ Herakles Mad the twins Amphion and Zethos are called the White Colts of Zeus; and Hesychios links them with the Dioskouroi in this guise; they were the builders of the walls of the Kadmeion at Thebes.[172]

  With Pindar we reach the height of the aristocratic tradition; he uses myth to deepen his themes and to link past and present in a single imaginative perspective, especially in his epinikia, songs for victors in game contests, which he transformed into a highly complex genre. He was a Boiotian, but was educated at Athens in music and poetry. Living through the fifth century till about 438, he failed to rise to the occasion during the Persian Wars (unlike Simonides), for his Theban aristocracy were compromised on the side of the Persians. He did not add much to the story of Helen. She is still the cause of the Trojan War, but Paris is the destroyer; and Pindar brings in the theme of his mother’s foreboding dream: ‘When Hekabe told the Trojans the vision she had had, when she bore this man in her womb. She thought she carried a fiery hundred-handed Erinys, who with great strength hurled all Ilion to the ground; and she told the portent of her sleep. But her foreknowledge did not avail.’ It has been argued that the Cypria already told of this dream and that Pindar was drawing on it; but we have no evidence supporting the suggestion. More likely the growing sense of crisis in the Greek world, with the threat from Persia, made men feel that the birth of such a destroyer as Paris must have been linked with portents and prophecies. From now on the theme expands.[173]