Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  Proteus ordered Paris to be arrested and sent to Memphis. Thonis then took Helen, the treasure and the refugee servants to the same place. Questioned, Paris told who he was, and described his voyage; but when asked about Helen, he grew evasive till his servants blabbed what had happened. Proteus said that he had never put to death anyone driven on to his shores, or he would have punished Paris. ‘You are a scoundrel. You seduced your friend’s wife, and, as if that weren’t enough, persuaded her to run off with you on the wings of the passion you aroused. Even that wasn’t all. You had to take along also the treasure stolen from your friend’s house. But though I can’t punish a stranger with death, I won’t let you get away with your ill-gotten gains. I’ll keep the woman and the treasure till the Greek to whom they belong chooses to come and claim them. As for you and the companions of your voyage, I give you three days to leave my country and find anchorage elsewhere. If you’re not gone by then, I’ll treat you as enemies.’

  Herodotos adds: ‘That account I had from the priests about Helen’s arrival at Proteus’ court. I think Homer was familiar with the story; for though he rejected it as less suitable for epic poetry than the one he did use, he left signs that it wasn’t unknown to him. For instance, telling in the Iliad of Paris’ wanderings — and he doesn’t contradict the account elsewhere — he says that in the course of them he brought Helen to Sidon.’ He then cites a passage from the Iliad, and two passages from the Odyssey, to illustrate this point. (The two latter ones may have been added later, as the intrusion of Menelaos breaks the run of the argument.)[181] He also uses the mention of the Sidon visit to prove that Homer did not write the Cypria.

  He goes on: ‘I asked the priests if the Greek account of events at Troy had any truth in it; and in reply they gave me information which they claimed to have got from Menelaos in person. This was that after Helen’s abduction the Greeks sent a strong force to the Troad in support of Menelaos’ cause, and that, as soon as the men landed and established themselves on Trojan soil, envoys, who included Menelaos, were sent to Troy. Received within the walls, they demanded Helen’s restoration together with the treasures Paris had stolen, and so satisfaction for their injuries. But the Trojans gave them an answer to which they always afterwards adhered, at times even swearing to its truth: that neither Helen nor the treasure was in their hands, but both were in Egypt, and there was no justice in trying to force them to give satisfaction for property detained by the Egyptian king Proteus. The Greeks, taking this to be a mere frivolous response, laid siege to the town and did not desist till it fell. But no Helen was found; and they were still told the same story, till at last they believed it and sent Menelaos to visit Proteus in Egypt.’ He sailed up the Nile to Memphis and there regained Helen and the property. But ‘when long detained by adverse winds, he seized two Egyptian children and offered them up in sacrifice. The discovery of this vile deed changed the friendship of the Egyptians to hatred; he was pursued but succeeded in getting off with his ships to Libya.’ Where he then went, the Egyptians could not say. ‘They told me they’d learned some of these events by inquiry, but spoke with certain knowledge of those that occurred in their own land.’ He adds that he accepted their version, because if Helen had been in Troy the Trojans would have handed her over. ‘I cannot believe that Priam or any kinsman of his was mad enough to be ready to risk his own life, and his children’s lives, with the city’s safety, only to let Paris go on living as Helen’s husband.’ As things grew worse, the madness of holding on to Helen would have been even more incredible. ‘I repeat, in such circumstances there can be little doubt that even if Helen had been wife of Priam the king, he’d have given her back.’ Paris was not even heir to the throne; Hektor, a better man, held that position and would never have tolerated his brother’s lawless behaviour, especially as it caused such distress to himself and every other Trojan; the only explanation is that Helen was not there. However, even with all this rationalization, which completely throws out all the Homeric presuppositions, Herodotos tries to save a fragment of the plan of Zeus. He states that he does not hesitate ‘to declare that the Greeks’ refusal to accept the truth was inspired by providence in order that the utter destruction of the Trojans might plainly prove to mankind that sin is always visited by condign punishment at God’s hands.’ But as in his version only Paris sins and the others fail to return Helen merely because they have not got her, it is hard to see how this moralizing applies. (Helen is not here altogether free from guilt; but her role is minimized and Aphrodite does not appear at all.)

  Critics have often said that Herodotos is drawing on Stesichoros and Hekataios, plus the parts of the Odyssey that tell of Menelaos’ wanderings. But he does not seem to be aware of the eidolon tradition, unless he is concerned to rationalize it quite away; and there is no reason why we should not take him at his word and accept the fact that tales about Helen were current in Egypt, even if he has fitted them together in as plausible a way as possible. The existence of the sanctuary of Aphrodite the Stranger, which he mentions, supports the thesis that Greek legends were well known in the Delta; and we may assume that at least the general lines of Homeric epics were familiar to educated Phoinikians, Persians and Egyptians. The priests of the latter people, with their learned traditions and their wish to enhance their country’s prestige, would certainly have absorbed much of Greek mythology and have elaborated any elements linked with their own past. The ignoble role played by Menelaos and the glorification of Proteus as a righteous monarch seem their work, though the version they took up may have originated in a simpler form in Sparta, like the story of the eidolon. Stesichoros, we recall, had sent Helen to Egypt, though not with Paris.[182] We may assume that there was a Greek (Spartan) account of Helen in Egypt less favourable to the Egyptians than that extracted by Herodotos, but it seems to have dealt with the travels of Menelaos and his wife there. At least in Hellanikos, Thonis, who plays the kingly role in place of Proteus, tried to take Helen by force, thus leading on to Theoklymenos in Euripides’ Helena. But we have no evidence that Hellanikos rationalized the story as Herodotos did, though it has been argued that he did so, and thus affected Herodotos, who here in Book II treats the Trojan War in a perspective different from that of his prelude, where, however, he was setting out the Persian view.

  During the fifth century the tales of Theseus ravishing Helen were expanded. Hellanikos (c. 490), an historian of Lesbos who tried to work out a chronological framework for his material, though criticized by Thoukydides for the period 480-30, tells of the mutual oath sworn by Theseus and Peirithoos to carry off daughters of Zeus.[183] Influenced by the discussion of the Iliadic word kouridiē, he declared that Helen was only seven years old when Theseus took her away. Following writers, such as Diodoros, Ploutarch, Pausanias, Hyginus, repeat the tale with minor variations, but agree in making Helen from nine to twelve years of age; Apollodoros makes her twelve and Theseus more than fifty; Loukian makes her not yet nubile, but by the time she arrived at Troy, ‘very old, almost as old as Hekabe’.[184]

  We may perhaps see Helen in art works where a woman is set between two naked young warriors who take her by arm or wrist, or where a man is about to lift a woman into a chariot while his companion holds the reins or keeps enemies off. The amphora of Euthymedes, however, has names inscribed. Peirithoos on the left, turns to a young woman who is running up (on the other face), while Helen’s attendant Korone tries to stop Theseus from lifting her mistress up and driving her off. Theseus is here shown in a new beardless type, though his friend is bearded. (The names of Korone and Helen have been assigned to the wrong figures by the painter.) In other inscriptions we find Korone as an Amazon or an hetaira. Probably there was a notorious whore with the name at the time; and on the amphora the artist has amused himself by bringing together two women famed for their beauty. On another vase we perhaps see Helen snatched off among her girl friends at what may be the entry to a sanctuary. On a Hellenistic bowl with reliefs Theseus is depicted holding an unwilling Hel
en at the back of a chariot driven fast by Peirithoos to Corinth. In a second scene Theseus tenderly embraces the girl as they advance on foot to Athens. ‘Theseus, having carried Helen off, first [takes] her to Corinth, then to Athens...’[185]

  With Aischylos (c. 525-456) we find the Helen theme bursting with full force into the world of tragic drama. He was about thirty-five at the time of the Battle of Marathon; the thirteen successes in the theatre which are attributed to him occurred between 486 and 470 when Kymon brought the Persian War to an end with a double victory. His deepest idea was that the world was ruled by justice and that sooner or later misdeeds bred their retribution; the fates of the actors in the great myths had a pattern which, if realized in its fullness, illuminated all human life, that of an individual and that of a whole people. He could accept no easy ways out, no loose generalizations: for instance that Zeus willed the Trojan War (to disencumber the earth of men or to stop gods and men mating) and that Helen was thus fated to embroil Trojans and Achaians. Both Helen and Paris were guilty, and Aischylos sought to work the issues out in his Oresteia.

  Paris by his act has roused the wrath of Zeus Xenios; he has outraged the bonds that preserve human dignity, self-respect, and respect for one’s fellows. The motive force of the war is no longer the enmity of Hera and Athena for Troy; Zeus Xenios is the power sending punishment on Paris for his lybris and his country for its complicity. Now the moral issue is what matters, not in the narrow vein which we saw emerging in the lyric poets as the epic conceptions broke down, and which was countered only by a growing stress on the beauty of Helen; rather it is the moral issue enlarged in scope so as to embrace Trojans and Achaians alike, and to illuminate the conflicts rending the poet’s own world. Problems of free will invade the old field of obsessions inflicted by daimonic power. ‘Temptation leads him forward wretchedly, the child of his deliberate curse.’ Atē is conscious, deliberate; men know what they are doing.[186]

  Helen is as guilty, as responsible, as Paris. ‘Helen has gone and left us for our share spear-clang, shield-clang, and clatter as the docks awaken; sure Ruin for her dowry she has taken as she passed lightly through the gate, daring what no one well may dare.’ Her very name reveals the doom she brings: ‘Ship-hell, man-hell, city-hell, Helen.’ She makes herself a priestess of atē; she is the Erinys sent by Zeus Xenios to make brides weep. Thus she reachieves a daimonic existence, but without the innocence of Homer’s Helen. She and Paris know what they are doing, but they do it out of a mad absorption in themselves, which refuses to recognize the social consequences of their action. ‘Woe, woe for mad Helen: one woman who has destroyed so many lives, so very many lives under Troy.’ There is a new force, as well as a new question, in this passionate accusation. Helen is paranous, mad with her own beauty, but therefore all the less excusable. Atē and Erinys merge with her beautiful presence, with Aphrodite as her daimonic self; a new integration is created, using the same ingredients as Homer, but orientating the whole in a new direction, with a new comprehension of history.[187]

  The guilt of Paris and Helen lights up a whole world of guilt, which includes the Atreids who are wronged. ‘Zeus demands the penalty. He curbs the reckless leaders who began a war to please their heaving lust, though wealth had crammed their store-rooms to excess. O, let me live untouched by guilt!’ Hence the widening ring of murder and hate which encloses Agamemnon after the war.

  At the same time Helen is the beauty of the world, however that beauty may have been perverted by self-pride, self-indulgence, hybris and atē. She has been perverted, yet the loss of her enfeebles and destroys life. The point is well brought out in the passage describing Menelaos’ lonely grief: ‘Woe for the house, the man left desolate, her yielding body dinted on the bed. Behold the silence scorned yet uncomplaining of him who sits apart with care. He yearns, but still the sundering sea denies. Queen of his house, a ghost is reigning. He looks with grudging hate on gracious effigies there, and in his empty eyes all Aphrodite has fled.’ Helen has become here a phasma of dream and anguish, deep in daily experience, not a cheating eidolon in an allegory. Menelaos looks on the statues about him, and they are dead. The term used is kolossoi, meaning something like effigies, substitution images. At Midea have been found the first funerary effigies known in mainland Greece, the first kolossoi. The custom of such images had died out long before the fifth century, but by the reference Aischylos achieves a certain magical effect. (Admetos in Euripides’ play says to Alkestis: ‘I’ll find a skilled craftsman to carve your likeness and I’ll lay it in your bed, I’ll kneel by it and throw my arms round it....In my dreams you’d come to cheer me.’)[188]

  *

  How to treat Helen? This question is continually raised by the motif of her confrontation with Menelaos in Troy. With the aid of vase paintings we can make out on the northern metopes of the Parthenon the mutilated figures of two advancing warriors, with Helen fleeing and touching the shoulder of a cult-statue. Between her and Menelaos seems to stand Aphrodite with a small Eros flying from her shoulder to the enraged husband with a crown or phiale. (Who is with Menelaos? Odysseus seems unlikely.) On an oinoche (about 430-25) Menelaos, naked but armed, chases Helen. The sword falls from his hand and a small Eros flies up with a garland, sent by Aphrodite. The goddess faces the husband, drawing up her cloak; Helen with disordered hair and frantic gesture of defiance, grips Athena’s cult-statue on a stepped altar; her breasts are not bare. On the left, separated from the scene by a floral decoration, stands Peitho (Persuasion) with a flowering sprig in her lifted hand.[189]

  The psychologizing trend appears fully worked out in an amphoriskos dated soon after 430. Helen, at centre, sits on Aphrodite’s knees, with hand on chin in meditation; she is at the moment of choice. The goddess has her right arm over her shoulders. Behind Helen Peitho holds a toilet-coffer. Over on the right stands Paris, left hand on hip, with lance and slung sword, naked but for a cloak over his arm. Olive-crowned, he looks down at long-winged Eros, who holds his right forearm and shoulder, bending as he stares up with intense eyes. The inscription Ime(ros) shows that he personifies Desire. At each outer side stands a pair. On the left two women watch with interest, one leaning on the other’s shoulder and pointing a finger of accusation at Helen. Above the first woman’s head is inscribed Nemesis; near the second we can made out ‘..y.e’. On the right two other women face one another, seeming unimplicated in the scene; the one nearer to Paris has her back turned to the main actors and looks at a bird held by her companion, but she is marked Heimar(mene), Destiny.[190]

  This work is linked with the expansion of Nemesis’ cult in Attika. She appears here both as Helen’s mother and as a goddess concerned with the moral effect of actions. The woman by her could be Tyche (Chance) or Oupis, a surname both of Nemesis and Artemis. The composition suggests that Nemesis and her companion are very interested in Helen’s choice, but Destiny turns away, assured that all will go as she wills. Peitho, however, plays so important a role, linked with Aphrodite, that we see the course of fate is not unconnected with inner conflicts, while Nemesis supplies the moral question. Helen is shown surrounded by a large complex of forces and motivations: sexual fascination, persuasion (involving matters of social prestige, self-expression, personal satisfaction), and fate pressures of varying kinds. We are approaching the world of Euripides.[191]

  Peitho is not known to Homer, but with his dislike of such figures the absence proves little. Hesiod knew her as an Okeanid. Given the august title of potnia, she put golden necklaces on the new-made Pandora with the Graces, while Athena knotted the girdle. She seems certainly more than an emanation of Aphrodite. Alkman, Ibykos and Anakreon knew her. It has been suggested that she came into the Trojan tale through Stesichoros, but she may well have been in the Cypria. Sappho was fascinated by her, as we would expect; she made her Aphrodite’s servant or even merged her with the goddess herself. Peitho appears on vases of the severe style, which are often influenced by the Cypria, in representations of the abduction. She is s
hown as an attendant of Aphrodite, holding a flower in her hand. In black-figure and works of the severe style young folk often hold flowers, which do not even symbolize femininity. Peitho is a sort of bridesmaid of the marriage, agent and companion of Aphrodite.[192]

  *

  With Euripides the psychological and moralizing trends reach their climax. Helen and her whole world are stripped of all pretences and idealizations. Euripides is not concerned with the heroic values of epic; he treats men like Agamemnon and Menelaos as if they were the politicians and war-leaders of the fifth century. The link is that both the ancient heroes and the contemporary politicians are hellbent on destroying their societies; but the totality within which each operates has deeply different values and aims. Euripides returns again and again to the theme of the Trojan War in order to set out his world-view, his idea of the destructive forces at work inside Athenian democracy, the hybris of the leaders with their power lust, greed, and disregard of human values — all that Thoukydides set out succinctly, with terrible clarity, in his Melian Dialogue, where we see the raw material of evil which the poets generalized and exposed with relentless truth.

  Helen, as the symbol of desire in such a world, suffers most of all the actors. She is revealed with increasing repugnance as a completely odious character. The plea that she acted in self-preservation is broken down till we see the cold core of her calculated coquettishness and vanity; she is obsessed with her abundant hair and ceaselessly occupied with the toilet, with mirrors and golden sandals. When she sends Hermione to put on the tomb of her sister Klytemnaistra a lock of her hair, she gives her only a small snippet. Elektra cries, ‘See, she’s cut the mere tips of her tresses. She’s always the same.’ The plea that she was compelled by Aphrodite is mocked away. Hekabe jeers, ‘My son was of a rare comeliness, and it’s your own spirit which at the sight of him became Cypris.’ Menelaos remarks, ‘Of her own free will she left her home for a stranger’s bed. Cypris was thrown in only as a bit of brag.’ Her beauty may be fatal, provoking all sorts of crimes, but it has no spirit basis. She prattles away in self-important tones, ‘Since my departure for Troy, where some strange fate, I don’t know what, took me...’ She claims that Achilles had been a suitor of hers. (Euripides is not innovating in this matter; he is making her reveal her vanity with a lie which everyone in his audience could see through.) All who know her accept that she has no morals. Hekabe reproaches Menelaos for leaving her unguarded; Peleus upbraids him for leaving ‘the worst of flirts’ alone with a Phrygian. The old excuses for her provided by the Plan of Zeus are mentioned only to be made to sound hollow. She suffers continual insults. She is DysHelena, Erinys, Miastōr (polluted and polluting) of all Hellas; her sister calls her margos (mad, rampant with lust); to Hekabe she is the loathed of the gods; to Andromache, the atē of the marriage-bed; to Peleus, the worst of all women. The climax in the exposure comes in the scene of the Trojan Women between Helen, Hekabe and Menelaos. Helen tries to keep up the mythological positions which ignore her personal responsibility, and Hekabe mocks them away with rational interpretations, bringing everything down to the simply human level. Here we have the sophistic play of pro and contra used with much gusto and vigour, but at root the poet is in deadly earnest. In stripping Helen, he is breaking down a vast complex of traditional ideas and attitudes, which he considers to be disastrous, providing a veil behind which power lust and greed can carry on unhindered.[193]