by Jack Lindsay
The dramatist Theodektos took Helen for the central figure in his play Helena; and Dikaiogenes, contemporary of Aristophanes, wrote a Cypria, in which he described someone bursting into tears at the sight of a picture — Menelaos before an image of Helen? The passage does not recall the Helen of Zeuxis’ painting, as has been suggested, but the account of the husband’s desolation in Aischylos’ Agamemnon. Diogenes of Sinope also wrote a Helena.[208]
In satyric drama and comedy many poets used Helen and her war. A small kyathos, perhaps of the early fifth century, seems to recall such a drama: a warrior draws his sword from its sheath and chases a woman who runs off, opening her himation; on the left a satyr prepares to throw a stone. The themes of Helen’s abduction and return supplied material for endless jests and parodies, but we know for the most part only the titles of the works. In Old Comedy there was the Helene of Philillis; in New Comedy we have a fragment of Alexis’ Helene (perhaps the same as the Harpage and the Suitors); Anaximandros and Alexandros each wrote a Helen play. The argument of the Dionysalexandros of Kratinos has been preserved in a papyrus. The chorus of satyrs ‘address the audience on behalf of (?) the poet, and when Dionysos appears, they mock and jeer at him. He is offered by Hera irresistible power, by Athena success in war, and by Aphrodite the prospect of becoming the most beautiful and beloved of men; so he gives the victory to Aphrodite. Afterwards he sets sail for Lakedaimon, carries off Helen, and goes back to Ida. Hearing soon after that the Achaians are ravaging the country, he takes refuge with Alexandros, hides Helen in a basket like a goose, and turns himself into a ram to await the event. Alexandros comes up and detects them both. He orders them to be led away to the ships with the intention of delivering them up to the Achaians. But when Helen shrinks from this, he takes pity on her and keeps her as his wife, though he sends off Dionysos to be delivered up. Dionysos is accompanied by the satyrs, who encourage him and say that they won’t desert him. In the play Perikles is satirized with great plausibility by innuendo for bringing the war upon the Athenians.’ There is a gap after talaros, basket, which has been filled with tyron (cheese), but ornin or chēna is more likely, as Athenaios uses talaros as a bird-basket. Paris does not seem to play much of a part in the drama; he turns up as a herdsman on Ida by chance. It has been suggested that Kratinos was rehabilitating him as a chivalric character; but in fact he seems a minor figure merely needed for the discomfiture of Dionysos-Perikles and to bring the aberrations of the play back to an orthodox point of the legend. The date seems 430-29. Goose-Helen may derive from the Rhamnousian cult of Nemesis, which was expanding its influence at this moment.[209]
Sophokles wrote several satyric works on the Trojan War, such as Eris, Krisis (Judgement), Helen’s Marriage (with Paris, probably at Kranae). We are told that the sight of Helen inflamed the satyrs. Euripides in his Kyklops jeers at Helen and Menelaos, who was ‘such a good little man’. Aristophanes, we have noted, parodied his Helena, and in Lysistrata described Menelaos as throwing down his sword at the sight of Helen’s breasts. There are few vase paintings which can be securely referred to the comic poets in question.[210]
We may pause here to glance back at the various points made by the poets as to the archē or beginning of the troubles leading to the war and its repercussions. In Book III of the Iliad Menelaos speaks of the great sufferings brought about ‘through my quarrel [eris] and the archē of Paris’: where atē has also been read instead of archē. The same pair of readings occur in a passage where Helen speaks of the troubles caused ‘by bitch-faced me and the archē-atē of Alexandros.’ Finally in the last book we are told that Hera and Poseidon went on hating Troy and all its people ‘because of the atē of Alexandros’. In any event Homer is declaring Paris’ atē to have been the cause of the conflicts. Elsewhere he selects the ships built for Paris as the start of the evils, archekakoi; but this is to make the same point in a different way, picking on the first moment of decisive action. However, all round the atē and its effects, there plays the Will of Zeus, broadening the perspective and making the actions of Paris only the starting-point of events vast in their complex impact on the whole Achaian and Trojan civilization.
In the Cypria an attempt is made to schematize the Will or Plan of Zeus by linking it with the widespread myth of world-end brought about by some deed of impiety or a general degeneration of mankind. The Plan is made definite, but at the same time trivialized, by the thesis that the earth needed to be lightened of its load of men. The Hesiodic poems develop the idea of cycles of life, with periodic disasters or completions; the heroic age is ended to stop the mating of gods and mortals — to stop the imbalance, the breaking of limits, the hybris, that results. Here we see the rationalizing trend of thought in the Ionian cities, which is linked with the rise of comprehensive philosophic and scientific inquiry.
The new individualism of the age of the Lyric Poets is not much concerned with final causes. Stesichoros finds the archē of calamity in Tyndareos’ failure to include Aphrodite in his sacrifices. The large issues are brought down to small personal angers or clashes. In the fifth century, with Athenian democracy rapidly advancing after the great national conflict of the Persian Wars, we see on the one hand the Herodotean attempt to find specific social grievances (the abduction of women), interpreting the heroic age in terms of the contemporary situation of West (the Aegean) against the East (the Persian empire); and on the other hand the Aischylean deepening of the moral issues, in which the outrage against Zeus Xenios by Paris and Helen becomes the archē. (The moral issue here is also a social one, since the broken bond is more than that of guest and host, man and wife; it expands to take in all that truly unites men and makes society possible.) Aischylos thus returns to the ate of Paris, which was the key point in Homer, reachieving the epical sense of the kin bond and its disruptions, but in terms of a world in which the question of what unites men and what divides them is immensely more complex. With Euripides there appears a new stress on the Judgement of Paris as the archē, the crucial moment. The chorus in the Andromache sings: ‘Great were the griefs that Hermes began, when he came to the glens of Ida...to the steading of the cowherd, to the cottage of the young recluse, the lonely hearth.’ He then goes on to describe the goddesses bathing in a spring as preparation for appearing before Paris; they go on and make their offers: ‘rivals, they bid high with spiteful words’. The same stress on the bathing appears in Helena: ‘Alas for the springs where the goddesses bathed and made their beauty bright, whence came the Judgement’.[211]
Just as the lyric poets brought the large issues of Homer and Hesiod down to personal problems, Euripides interprets the Aischylean world, with its universal laws of justice and the penalties descending on the infringer, in a much more detailed way, realistically psychologizing and linking his criticism with a wide range of social phenomena. The bathing of the goddesses leads on to the narcissistic self-adoration of Helen with her mirrors; the Judgement with its conflicting moral and social choices reveals a society which has lost its sense of direction, its unity of purpose.
Chapter Seven – From Gorgias to Late Antiquity
Euripides in his analytic method, his use of debate, his finesse in splitting points, was much influenced by the sophistic movement. A typical Sophist was Gorgias of Leontinoi, a Chalkidian colony in Sicily, who in his teaching sought to exalt the logos (word and reason). He wanted to show how words could be used for persuasion, so that men could attain their ends without recourse to force. But behind this exaltation of the logos was a deep disillusionment with rational processes, a belief that men could not ever attain real knowledge; hence what mattered was the form, not the content, of argument. The rhetorical means of persuasion were the efficacy of one’s style, the extent to which one could use all sorts of dazzling or compelling devices, such as antithesis, assonance, rhyme and so on, which had their effect regardless of the ideas in the service of which they were applied. We may relate these attitudes to the art of the last three decades of the fifth century. ‘Th
e flying-drapery style is obviously Gorgian in spirit and appears to emanate from the same pressures as contemporary rhetoric. On the surface it is all elegance, but underneath it may reflect a despairing desire to retreat from the difficult intellectual and political realities of the age and to take refuge in gesture.’ (Pollitt).
At an advanced age, in 427, Gorgias was sent to Athens as an ambassador, to ask for the protection of his home town against the power of Syracuse. Among his works was an Encomium on Helen. Much argument has gone on as to its relation to Euripides’ Helena. Probably it was composed before the play and Euripides knew it. It may indeed have given the poet his idea of reversing Helen’s role. But otherwise there is no affinity between Encomium and play. Euripides used the idea of Helen’s innocence to concoct a complex allegory aimed at debunking war and aiding the cause of peace; Gorgias was merely concerned to use his skill in subtle casuistry to rehabilitate Helen. He is attracted to the task precisely because of its difficulty; and behind his argument lies a moral nihilism.
He bases himself on the Plan of Zeus in the Cypria. Instrument of love and the logos, Helen must not be blamed for the war; unanimously condemned, she has not had justice. He sets out her genealogy: Zeus and Leda. From her origin came the beauty that fired the hearts of all. Why did she go to Troy? There were four possible causes. What she did was done by the purposes of Fortune (Tyche), by the commands of the gods, and by the decrees (psephismata, usually decrees passed by a majority of votes) of Necessity; she was ravished by force; she was persuaded by words; or she was infatuated by sight. In each case she can be shown to be innocent. If Tyche, the Gods, and Necessity determined her course, she was not responsible for what happened. If she was taken by force, we should pity her. If she was won over by the irresistible power that words exercise, she was as much a victim of compulsion. (Gorgias lets himself go in a passionate exposition of the nature of persuasion and the omnipotence of the logos, producing examples of its overwhelming effects. Persuasion, Peitho, becomes identified with Anankē, Necessity; for logos the word is one with logos the reason of things.) Finally comes the power of love. Eros takes free will away, whether he is a god endowed with divine powers or an evil that precipitates human suffering. Helen is still innocent. Gorgias stresses the effects of sight, the charms and physical attraction of Paris — a point where he is in accord with the art depicting Paris as the rich and fascinating Phrygian.[212]
He thus restates with much rhetorical effect the old doctrine of Helen as moved by a daimonic power that lifts her above everyday judgements; but in the process the Homer unity has evaporated. Energy is vindicated at the cost of making human beings into puppets, governed by fate, words, or their senses, and controlled by the man of logos.
With Thoukydides we move into a very different world of thought. Like everyone else he accepts the general historicity of the Trojan War; what is new in his approach is the attempt to get behind details to a fundamental political and economic pattern. He is interested in the way in which Greeks of those far times were able to unite for the war, and the fact that Homer does not use the term barbaros, barbarian, ‘probably because the Greeks had not yet been marked off from the rest of the world by one distinctive appellation’. As he sees it, a precondition of the war was an increase in the strength of the cities and in the intercourse of men. ‘Indeed they could not unite for this expedition till they had gained a greater familiarity with the sea.’ What made the expedition possible was not the oath of the suitors, but Agamemnon’s strength in armament and in ships, that is, the supremacy of Mykenai in his world. The long duration of the war came about because the Greeks had to disperse their forces in piracy and the cultivation of the Chersonnese to maintain supplies. As aftermath of the war came many revolutions and the growth of factions everywhere, with expelled citizens founding colonies.
Thoukydides thus seeks to supply to the past the critical and realistic sense which he learned out of the Peloponnesian War in which he played a part. He was especially interested in the causes of discord among Greeks and in the possibilities of union: the Trojan and the Persian Wars appearing as the only times when something like large-scale unified action had been achieved. In this quest for underlying social patterns Helen fades out.[213] Not that Thoukydides here or elsewhere in his work arrives at the concept of social forces in an abstract way; he is throughout struggling with his material, in a tension between his sense of such forces and an idiom that reduces everything to a personal and psychological basis, with a mythological background.
With Alkidamos we return to the sophistic world. A pupil of Gorgias, he wrote, it seems, an Odysseus and a Palamedes’ Treachery. In the first he apparently omitted the Judgement and made Paris journey to Greece through a wish to visit Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphoi. Hearing of Helen’s beauty, he wanted to see her. When he arrived in Sparta, Menelaos went off, called to Crete by the sons of Molos to deal with the property their father had left. Helen is not said to depart freely with Paris; the main blame seems put on the latter. Clearly Alkidamas had been affected by stories put out by the Delphic priesthood, stories that were probably older than this period. Later writers follow him in ignoring the Judgement. Antisthenes, another rhetor or orator, also wrote an Odysseus that mentions the statue which Paris carried off from Greece and on which depended Troy’s fate.[214]
Isokrates, contemporary of these two men, was a far more important orator and educationalist, an Athenian whose family was impoverished by the Peloponnesian War. Advocating Hellenic unity, he saw the only escape from endless internecine warfare in a general crusade against the Persians. He wrote a Helen, once thought to be a work directed against Anaximenes of Lampsakos (according to the critic Machaon cited in the argument), but now seen as a reply to Gorgias. However, whereas the latter was writing a playful apologia, in which the real hero was himself, the man of logos, Isokrates was in deadly earnest. For him the Trojan War represented the War against the East which he fiercely wanted. He praised Gorgias for defending Helen, but considered that he had not gone far enough. He evokes the memory of a woman who raised herself above others by birth, beauty, fame. ‘However, a slight error eluded him. He claims to have made an encomium of Helen, but what he does is merely to defend her conduct.’
Unlike Gorgias, he deals at some length with the myth. He insists on his heroine’s divine origin; Zeus gave her the beauty that dominates might itself. He covers her career in detail and shows that all who came near her fell under the spell of her charms. Theseus the conqueror was conquered; he carried her off to Aphidna. She represented the perpetual triumph of beauty. Paris made his choice, not out of mere desire, but because he wanted to be Zeus’ son-in-law. It was not by chance that he was made the umpire of the goddesses. ‘I am astonished that anyone dares to criticize the decision of a man who chose to live in the company of a woman for whom a number of demi-gods were ready to die.’ Paris thus shares in the rehabilitation of Helen; and the Trojans too are vindicated for refusing to surrender her. Greeks and barbarians alike thought that ‘the land to which the person of Helen remained attached would be the happier of the two’. So important was the question of what man, what country, possesses Helen, that gods took part in the battle for her or let their children take part.
The work ends with a rapturous praise of Beauty, which becomes identical with Virtue. Whereas Euripides had done his best to denigrate the beauty which, drunk with itself, had no sense of its effects, Isokrates praises beauty as itself a self-sufficient good. It is ‘the most venerated, the most precious, the most divine of goods’. Virtue itself is subordinated, gaining its final value only when it absorbs the beautiful. It is above all appreciated because ‘it is the most beautiful of the traits of the soul’. The gods submit to beauty. Zeus twice becomes a swan, to mate with Nemesis and then with Leda. (Isokrates thus gets over the problem of the relation of these two.) ‘You would find more human beings made immortal by their beauty than by all other merits.’ Beauty has made Helen the equal of the gods;
she hands on this power of hers to the Twins and to Menelaos who suffers for her sake. She shares with the latter the cult at Therapne. Her glory, the force of her person, has been manifested in the life and work of such poets as Stesichoros and Homer. But her greatest merit of all is that she brought about the first large-scale united action of Greeks, their first great expansion. ‘She is the cause of our not being the slaves of barbarians. We see the Greeks, united, thanks to her, in a single aim, organize a common army against the barbarians and Europe set up for the first time a trophy of victory over Asia.’
The split between beauty and morality which was signalled by the work of Gorgias is here carried much further. An attempt is made to disguise the split by saying that virtue is itself beautiful. But whereas Gorgias showed an effort to cover up social disintegration with an aesthetic veneer, Isokrates is in the last resort guided by political opportunism. Anything is good that draws the Greeks together in a war of expansion against the Persians. Isokrates ignores the multiple issues of social conflict that are rending the Greek world through the corruption and distortion of democracy (by slavery, the cash nexus, exploitations of all kinds), and wants a unity imposed from above which (he hopes) will solve the internal problems of the Greek states at the expense of the easterners. Thus aestheticism in both Gorgias and Isokrates is used to obscure and conjure away the real conflicts of their world.[215] Gorgias indeed in his Olympikos had proposed that all Greeks should join together in a war of retaliation against Persia, so that the Greek states might stop damaging one another; but the idea was not dominant in him as it was in Isokrates, and he did not relate it to the glorification of Helen. The increased political decay that had gone on by Isokrates’ time favoured the association of Helen with the crusade and the advocacy of the crusade as the only way out from inner conflicts.
