by Jack Lindsay
In his wish to give an heroic background to the settlers in Kyrene, Pindar states that Antenor’s descendants came to North Africa ‘with Helen, after they had seen their native city burned’. So Libya was added to her wanderings. In another ode, Themis settles the dispute of Zeus and Poseidon, who both want to marry the Sea-queen, ignorant that she is fated to bear a son stronger than his father. ‘Let not the daughter of Nereus [Thetis] again place in our hands the ballot-leaves of strife.’ The term used is petala, which reminds us that in Syracuse and Athens olive leaves were at times used for the inscribing of votes (eg in questions of exile); at Syracuse the procedure was called petalismos.[174]
There is not much more of interest in the Lyric Poets. The moralizing strains are strengthened. Bacchylides (c. 516-450) stresses the element of hybris, the presumptuous breaking of limits. In a dithyramb of his Menelaos and Odysseus on their embassy in the market place of Troy demand the return of Helen. Hybris ‘thrives unabashed on shifty gains and lawless follies, and thus quickly bestows wealth on a man, and power, which aren’t his, only to send him down later in turn to deep ruin. She it was who destroyed those overweaning sons of Earth, the Giants.’ Simonides in his long attack on women ends: ‘ever since Death received them that went warring for a woman’. Helen is the final and supreme example of the woman who brings miseries upon men.[175]
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Now let us glance at the art of the period. Often it is hard to be sure we are dealing with Helen. Thus, in black-figure vases her union with Paris can easily be confused with other heroic or divine bridals. Consider an ivory relief of the seventh century, where two women stand frontally, with feet in profile; the one on the right parts a fold of her himation or outer garment; the second (whose head is missing) wears a peplos or upper dress that leaves a breast bare, and is about to knot her belt. The pair have been taken as Peitho and Aphrodite, and compared with the figures of these goddesses on vases where they try to persuade Helen; they have also been seen as Demeter and Korē, or as Arge and Opis (Hyperborean Maidens who came with offerings to Delos); the belt-knotter has been taken as Aphrodite and the other as Helen getting ready to bare her charms to Menelaos. But the attribution of such gestures to Helen and Aphrodite in the seventh century cannot be accepted.
From the archaic era on to the arrival of the free style we meet the finest and most interesting pictures of the carrying off and return of Helen. Some of the types continue to be used; others, showing Helen married, carried off, regained, are dropped and new schemes take their place. The type of a woman led off by warriors may be used to illustrate similar themes, eg the story of Aithra. Especially in black-figure the gesture of Helen in opening a fold of her himation to show her face is not erotic. It is the ceremonial action of the betrothed girl: the unveiling, which has both a nuptial and a funerary reference, and which is found in depictions of the sacred marriage. Later, coquetry intrudes and new values colour the gesture.
In the archaic and black-figure eras all representations closely follow the epical poets. When Helen is set beside Aphrodite, on the skyphos of Makron, we must not infer an attempt at rehabilitation; the relationship is made in Homeric terms. But soon Eros is brought in to support Helen before Menelaos; here we see a weakening of her pure force. To her aid also comes Apollo, protector of Ilion as Thymbraios as well as a god worshipped at Sparta. In early days the theme of Helen being led off or pursued had a popularity which it never regained. Thus on an amphora of the Antimenes painter we see Menelaos dragging her by a fold of her himation and threatening with a sword pointed directly at her. On a middle-Corinthian krater, Paris and Helen mount a four-horsed chariot. Between horses and chariot stand Antenor and Kassandra; to the left are Daiphon (unknown) and Hektor with Andromache; to the right are two warriors. Here we see the marriage at Troy. (Antenor, Achilles’ charioteer, must simply represent ‘charioteer’.)[176]
Rarer are artworks showing the first encounter of Paris and Helen; but they have some importance as bringing out the close relation of Helen and Aphrodite, Paris and Eros: a scheme that grows (perhaps through some lost large painting) into a fixed system from mid-fifth century. Makron’s skyphos shows the meeting on one side, the carrying off on the other. Paris, helmed, leads Helen with the wrist gesture of marriage; she wears a diadem, a fine chiton (tunic worn next to the skin), a cloak covering the back of her head; Aphrodite is behind her with arms outstretched, almost touching her head in a protective gesture; a small Eros hovers between her and Paris. Peitho follows with a flower in her lifted right hand. To the left is Aineias, a warrior with flat hat on neck and lance in hand. Behind Peitho a young man, perhaps Helen’s son, Nikostratos, looks on in astonishment. In another work by Makron we see the carrying off and Judgement. Paris appears as a traveller, with two lances, holding Helen by the wrist; she follows with some hesitation. Behind her a bearded man, also with two lances, turns to thrust off a frightened woman who runs up; he must be Aineias, the woman is Helen’s sister Timandra. Behind Timandra is a group of three: Euopis, holding a flower, makes a reassuring gesture to the first of two old men on the edge of the scene, Ikarios and his brother Tyndareos. Both old men are indignant. Everyone is garlanded, so the occasion seems a festival. These two works by Makron are the purest pictorial representations of the elopement and show the climax of the Cypria’s influence on artists dealing with this episode.[177]
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Looking back over the archaic age we see the breakdown of the Homeric synthesis under the strains set up by the new sense of independent individualism, which is linked with the mercantile expansions and uprootings that accompany the colonizing movements. Homer had expressed a peculiar moment of balance in the early Ionian trading cities between the new economic forces and old tribal elements re-ordered but held together under the nobles, the big landlords entangled with the trading and industrial developments. (Hesiod may be of the same period or only slightly later; his different social consciousness is perhaps based on the way the new forces impact on the mainland, Boiotia, with its more strongly rooted peasantry.) The archaic age sees both a liberation from old bonds, an increase of the economic tendencies worsening the lot of the peasants, and a fight back by the peasants. Partly through this fight back and partly through the slow permeation of the older and more settled regions by the new economic forces, there is a resurgence of ancient cults (above all that of Dionysos) and an invasion of the more urbanized areas by these cults and by all sorts of old popular beliefs and practices. Hence the way in which we find a deepened sense of guilt, partly replacing or modifying what has been called the shame culture of the Homeric world. That is, the sense of conflict, contradiction, failure, implication in evil, becomes much more deeply internalized, whereas in a shame culture what mostly matters is the saving of face, the preservation of respect and of status with all the gifts or honours that ratify it. What underlies the change is the intensifying class conflict, the widening and extension of social division.
The position has been too often incorrectly put. The archaic age did not see the invention of a guilt sense, with a vast amount of devices for dealing with pollution, individual and collective. Certainly in Homer’s day there must have been everywhere at the popular level the sort of ideas and practices that later forced their way into the urbanized mercantile areas. (By ‘popular’ at that phase one means almost wholly ‘peasant’, and one is thinking in the main of areas which are as yet little affected by the developments coming to a powerful head in the Ionian cities.) Homer knows of miasma, defilement or pollution, though he does not use the word, which comes into its own with Aischylos — he does, however, use the kindred word miaros for defilement by blood. At the outset of the Iliad, Apollo, hearing the prayer of his priest Chryseis, descends from Olympos to shoot plague-bearing arrows into the Achaian camp. Achilles calls an assembly and the prophet Kalchas explains the cause of the affliction. That Homer knows of the way to treat miasma is shown by Agamemnon’s order that the Achaians should cleanse themselves and dispos
e of the dirt into the sea.
The question then is not whether purification rites against pollution existed in the Homeric world; they certainly did. And the answer is not that Homer personally excluded or minimized the peasant cults or practices in his poems, as if the matter was the choice of a single poet. Homer is expressing the new consciousness of his Ionian world, however traditional his material; and though as a great poet he may develop many aspects of that consciousness more sharply and fully than the average man of his day, he is in the last resort expressing the peculiar Ionian balance. That balance was above all revealed in the Olympian hierarchy of gods, with Zeus dominating, which was imposed on the multiplicity of cults, ideas, magics, rites of initiation, purification, and earth-renewal, active among the peasantry with all their regional variations. Homer did not invent the hierarchy, but he must have done much to clarify it and indeed give it the quality of a living system. It is relevant to point out that he lacks the vocabulary to deal with questions of ‘free will’; for to lack the vocabulary to treat such a matter is to lack the specific consciousness of it. In one sense what Zeus wants to happen, happens; and as Eustathios pointed out, the Plan of Zeus is one with the moira of the gods. But if such comments imply that Homer is morally naive or that he takes a simple view of human activity and responsibility, they are wrongheaded. The depth and richness of his definition is what does much to make possible the later analyses, ethical, social, psychological; they emerge from the concrete fullness of his grasp of all that draws men together and all that cuts them apart.
A key point in this creation of his which is highly relevant to our quest is the role he developed for Zeus. He defines with great power and concreteness the tension between the more limited daimones, who embody some particular human quality or force, and the overlord Zeus, on whom in the last resort depends the ordering of the universe, which includes the ordering of human life. His Zeus is neither an abstract dispenser of justice nor a mere avenger of certain crimes that directly involve him, infringements of hospitality and breaking of oaths. In a diffused, subtle, un-dogmatic way he embodies the total human consciousness of what is at stake, the total sum of sanctions without which human life breaks down. Among men there is a ceaseless conflict between all that holds together and all that wrenches apart; moral terms seek to define or express this conflict, which however in its full working-out is vastly larger and more entangled than any encompassing term. So Zeus, with his apparent veerings and confusions, his moments of definite judgement or decision, symbolizes the conflict of values going on among men; he is above, it all, yet at every point implicated. So, for Homer, the Will or Plan of Zeus is a far more complex and comprehensive thing than the attempts to formulate it in explicit schemes or cut-and-dried moral values, which men feel driven to do in the following centuries. It is not till Aischylos that we meet another great poet who can regain the organic fullness of the Homeric universe without discarding all the anxious questions and limited judgements which have been made by men seeking to grasp Homer’s meaning in terms of the increased class conflict and the fragmentation of values around them. Not that the dissections and reapplications of the Homeric theme in the seventh and sixth centuries were merely negative. From Hesiod and the poet of the Cypria, on through Archilochos Sappho, Stesichoros, Alkman, and Pindar, we see a continual struggle of disintegrative and integrative elements; but it is only with Aischylos that we meet a single expression as comprehensive in its reach as was Homer’s.[178]
Chapter Six - Helen in the Fifth Century
With Herodotos a new orientation appears in the attitudes to Helen. Born in Asia Minor at Dorian Halikarnassos about 484, he moved through political troubles to Samos, then to Athens, finally took part in the Athenian colonization of Thourion, and died there about 420; he had travelled much in Syria and Babylonia, Egypt and Kyrene. The main theme of his History was the struggle between Europe and Asia, culminating in the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. He therefore interpreted the Trojan War as the first great clash of East and West, prefiguring later events. In the prelude to his work he sets out an account of the earlier conflicts. Persians put the responsibility for the first breach of the peace on Phoinikians trading at Argos. Some women had come down to the beach to see the market, among them the king’s daughter Io. ‘These women were standing round the ship’s stern, buying what took their fancy, when suddenly the Phoinikian sailors passed the word round and made a rush at them. Most got away, but Io and some others were grabbed and bustled aboard the ship, which cast off at once and made for Egypt.’ The Phoinikians however declared that Io had been going to bed with the captain and was pregnant; ashamed to face her parents, she sailed off of her own accord; no force was used. Later, Herodotos goes on, some Greeks called in at Tyre and carried off the king’s daughter Europa in revenge. Next, other Greeks in an armed merchant ship sailed to Kolchis in the Black Sea and abducted Medeia; her father demanded reparations, but got nothing. Then some forty or fifty years later Paris ‘was inspired by these tales to steal a wife out of Greece, confident that he’d not have to pay for the exploit any more than the Greeks had done. And that was how he came to carry off Helen.’ The first idea of the Greeks was to demand satisfaction and Helen’s return. Their demand was countered by a reference to the seizure of Medeia and the injustice of expecting satisfaction from people to whom they had themselves refused it, not to mention the fact that they had kept the girl.
Thus far there had been nothing worse than women thefts on either side; but for what happened next, they say, the Greeks were badly to blame; for they were in a military sense the aggressors. To carry off women is not indeed, in the Persian view, a lawful act; but after the event it is stupid to make such a fuss over it. The only sensible thing is to ignore the whole matter; obviously no young woman lets herself be abducted against her will. The Asiatics indeed took the seizure of their women lightly enough, but not so the Greeks. They, merely on account of a girl from Sparta, raised a large army, invaded Asia, and wiped out Priam’s empire. From that root sprang the easterners’ belief in the unceasing enmity of the Greek world towards them: Asia with its various foreign-speaking folks under the Persians. Such then was the Persians’ position. ‘In their view it was the capture of Troy that first made them enemies of the Greeks.’
There is of course no historical validity in these arguments which rationalize the myths of Io, Europa, Medeia, and attribute to the second millennium BC the same lay-out of peoples, the same sort of state systems, as existed in Herodotos’ own day. (We must note however that he claims to be giving the ideas of the Persians, which are not necessarily his own.)[179]
Again near the end of his History he links the Persian and the Trojan Wars. The region of the Hellespont was governed by a Persian Artayktes, ‘who got hold of the treasures of Protesilaos, son of Iphiklos’, one of the Achaian heroes of the Trojan War — treasures ‘that were at Elaios in the Chersonnese, where that hero’s tomb stands, surrounded by a plot of sacred ground. There was much there of value, gold and silver cups, bronze, rich garments, and other things which had been offered at his tomb.’ Artayktes took it all and told Xerxes, ‘There is the house here of a Greek who made war on your country and met the death he deserved. Give me his house. It will be a lesson in the future to men not to do as he did.’ He carried off the treasure to Sestos, turned the enclosure over to agricultural use, and, when visiting Elaios, took his women into the sanctuary.
The traditions thus put into Persian mouths, it has been argued, come in fact from the logopoioi (prose-writers, chroniclers) Akousilaos, Pherekydes, perhaps Hekataios. But there is no reason why we should not take Herodotos at his word and believe that he did hear similar comments on the Trojan War from Phoinikians and Persians. What is striking is his complete rationalization of myth and the reinterpretation of the Trojan War brought about by the conflicts with the Persians. The fratricidal struggle of the Mykenean world has been turned into a struggle between East and West.[180]
In Book II h
e deals with Helen in Egypt. He treats Proteus as a pharaoh, a native of Memphis, where he still had a sacred precinct; the whole area was called the Camp of the Tyrians on account of Phoinikians from Tyre who had occupied the houses. ‘Within the enclosure is a temple dedicated to Aphrodite the Stranger. Myself I’d guess it was built in honour of Helen, Tyndareos’ daughter, not only because I’ve heard it said that she spent some time at Proteus’ court, but also, and more particularly, because of the description of Aphrodite as the Stranger, a title never given to this goddess in any other temples of hers. I questioned the priests about Helen’s story, and in reply they told me that Paris was on his way home from Sparta with his stolen bride when, somewhere in the Aegean Sea, he struck bad weather, which drove his ship towards Egypt. At last, with the gale as wild as ever, he found himself on the coast and managed to get ashore at the salt-pans in the Nile mouth now called the Kanopic.’ On the shore was a temple of Herakles. If a slave took refuge there and had the signs (tattooing?) of the god’s service set on his body, his master could not reclaim him. (The custom was still being carried on.) Some of Paris’ servants fled into the temple and told the tale of Paris’ behaviour, both to the priest and the warden of that Nile mouth, Thonis. Thonis sent a despatch to Proteus at Memphis. ‘A Trojan stranger has arrived here from Greece, where he was guilty of a villainous crime. First he seduced his host’s wife, then carried her off with a great deal of valuable property. Stress of weather has forced him to land on this coast. Are we to let him sail away in possession of his stolen goods, or are we to confiscate them?’
