Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  Chapter Nine – The Nature of Helen

  As our inquiry has gone on, now and then a cult-aspect of Helen has come up, for instance her connection with the plane tree at Sparta. Now we must examine her cult-relations in more detail and find what light they shed on her origins. First, there is her name: Helenē. From Hesychios we learn that the word helenē was used for a torch. We may compare elanē, torch of reeds, also bundle of reeds. Helenē further meant a wicker-basket used to carry sacred utensils at the festival of the Brauronian Artemis in her bear-cult. Such a basket would play an important part in a rite. We may compare the liknon, a broad basket used as a winnowing fan and sacred to Dionysos; at his festivals the bearer carried it on his head. It was also sacred to Athena and had the meaning of cradle. The Hymn tells us of Hermes: ‘As soon as he sprang from his mother’s immortal womb, he did not lie waiting for long in his holy liknon, but jumped up and sought Apollo’s oxen’. As Liknites, Dionysos was worshipped as the divine babe in the cradle. Ploutarch, seeking to draw likenesses between Osiris and Dionysos, says, ‘The Egyptians point out tombs of Osiris in many places, and the Delphians hold that they possess the relics of Dionysos buried beside their oracular shrine; the Hosioi make the secret sacrifice in Apollo’s sacred precinct when the Thyiades raise up Liknites.’ (He is addressing a woman, Klea, who was leader of the Thyiades or band of female devotees of Dionysos at Delphoi, and who had been initiated into the Osirian rites.) The raising-up of the holy babe in the basket by the tomb of the god can only represent a resurrection ritual. Again, the kalathos was a tall, tapering basket in which women put their work, especially materials for spinning; it was carried in honour of Demeter at the Eleusinian festival and is often shown set on the head of deities, above all Demeter. It had a chthonic (underworld) significance as well as implying abundance of fruits and crops. As a hat it is said to have been developed out of a crown of leaves with sharp points standing up or crossing one another. It would have been worn by young Spartan girls who danced the dance of the kalathiskos in honour of Artemis Karyatis, though some scholars argue it was rather a basket with flowers and fruit which the dancers held. Thus Ovid describes Persephone gathering flowers and putting them in a kalathos just before Hades arrives to carry her off; so we may surmise that Helen was similarly using a kalathos when Hermes came to carry her off to Egypt, as told in Euripides’ Helena. Kanephoroi, bearers of baskets made of reeds, were girls walking in festival processions at Athens, and also priestesses. Pollux, telling us of the basket helenē, adds that the festival in which it was carried was called Helenophoria.[288]

  The importance of the sacred basket is shown by the custom at Athens of carrying one in a vehicle in honour of Athena on a fixed day, a custom imitated by Ptolemy Philadelphos at Alexandreia in the Procession of the Kalathos. In the Thesmophoria at Athens were three crucial moments: the Anodos or Kathodos (Ascent, Descent), the Nesteia (Mourning) and the Kalligeneia (Beauty-birth). In the third rite only the initiated women were allowed to go into the temple with the basket.[289]

  We see then that Helen’s name was used for ritual implements. As both the torch and the basket were made of reeds, we can surmise that the reed was the common factor, especially when we find her name attached to herbs of considerable medical and magical virtue. She seems something of a vegetation-daimōn, though we shall have to test this suggestion by what further evidence comes up. The attempt in later antiquity to link Helene and Selēnē, and to see her as a lunar deity, has less to be said for it, despite the modern effort to find a root meaning brightness behind each name. An altar from the Roman Forum, found close to the fountain of Juturna, of imperial date, showed Castor and Pollux with lances and with stars over their caps, Leda and her swan, Zeus with sceptre and bolt, and a woman holding up a heavy torch with both hands. An Alexandreian coin of Trajan shows a goddess holding a torch, with a crescent over her head, between the Twins. A gem depicts the Twins with their lances at a festival table; the third person is a crescent moon. In a variant the goddess makes the gesture of Aphrodite Anadyomene, with her hands to her hair, a crescent over her head. A scholiast informs us that Helen had a star, its name Ourania. We are told that she went to the moon after her death, or that she was the daughter of the Sun and Leda. But all these ideas or images are late; they belong to the spiritualizing trend we noted in both late art and literature. Certainly much of the notion of her as star or crescent came from her connection with the Twins as saviours of sailors, who took the form of St Elmo’s Fire in storms. Thus, after a sea-battle, the Aiginetans dedicated at Delphoi Three Stars set on the top of a Mast — the Twins and Helen.[290]

  Helen’s herbs were helenion — calamint, calaminthus incana; elecampane, inula Helenium; symphoton — comfrey, symphytum bulbosum. Elecampane has been used by herbalists from ancient times for lung or chest complains, or for kidney troubles, in the form of powder, ointment, oil, syrup, infusion; it promotes perspiration. Plinius comments: ‘Helenium was born, it’s said, from Helen’s tears.’ Columella gives three recipes for preserving elecampane. Ailian thought helenion of use against snakes. Strangely, in the old English Christmas Mumming-Play with its immemorial rite of resurrection, the Doctor often uses elecampane to revive the dead man. At Bursledon, Hampshire, he cried, ‘I have a bottle in my pocket what we calls elecome pain...I drop one drop on his head and one on his heart. Rise up, you man.’ At Camborne, Cornwall, ‘Now take a few drops of my helly come pain.’ At Weston-sub-Edge, Gloucestershire, ‘I’ve a little bottle by my side called Welgunpane...will quickly bring him to life again.’ At Overton, Hampshire, ‘I’ve got a little bottle by my side that you commonly call Elegant Paint.’ At Cocking, Sussex, ‘The stuff therein is called Hallecumb paint’, — pronounced ‘Ha-lo-cum-pain’. At Cuddesdon, Oxfordshire, it was called Champagne. We certainly see in this list a warning example of how folk corruptions operate.[291]

  One more suggestion has been made about Helen’s name: that it is a transformation of the name Aphrodite. Aischylos’ attempt to derive it from helein, to drag, is only a play on words, with the sense of some magical hidden connection that such verbal links often gave the ancients. Helen has in modern times been connected with the root ven: German, wonne, wünschen; Latin, Venus. Helen would then be the Greek Venus, a pleasant idea, but without much force.[292]

  What do we know of cults of Helen? Not a great deal, but enough to show that we must consider her seriously as a vegetation deity. At Sparta she had her shrine, we saw, near the tomb of the poet Alkman. Isokrates says that the Spartans sacrificed to her and to Menelaos, not as heroes, but as gods; and it was no doubt at her Spartan festival, the Heleneia, that maidens rode to her shrine in a special sort of chariot. We may further assume that the festival Helenophoria, where the baskets called helenai were carried, was in her honour. Her shrine at Sparta was near the Platanistas or Grove of Planes, where the epheboi had their traditional group fight. We have no direct evidence of a link between her and this fight; but in view of her connection with the plane tree, it is very likely. She then appears as a daimōn of the boys’ initiation agōn, as she does of the girls’ festival dances where Aristophanes saw her as the dance-leader. We may here recall some lines in Theokrites’ marriage-song for Helen: ‘Even now you are a wedded wife; but we will go out early to the course we ran, and to the grassy meadows, to gather sweet-breathing wreaths of flowers, thinking often of you, Helen, just like youngling lambs that miss the teats of the mother ewe. For you we’ll first twine a garland of lotus flowers which grow low on the ground, and hang it on a shadowy plane tree; for you we’ll first take soft oil from the silver phial and drop it under a shadowy planetree, and we’ll cut letters on the bark, in Dorian style, so that the wayfarer may read: Worship me, I’m the Tree of Helen’. There are four points here. Helen is the daimōn-leader of the girl group on the dromos in racing; she is the leader of the girl group before they have completed their initiation and marry; she is in the position of a nursing-mother to them, the mother ewe to the lam
bs that depend on her teats (now lost through marriage); and she is identified with the tree as a goddess to be worshipped.[293]

  Then there is the Menelaion on the right bank of the Eurotas. The foothills of Taygetos rise some three miles to the west, with the highest peaks of the range rising behind them to some 8,000 feet. Therapne stands itself about 700 feet up, facing Taygetos across the river. Only the foundations of the temple remain, standing on a platform supported by a wall of massive blocks. Mykenean pottery has been found there, and many votive offerings of small lead warriors and women in striped and chequered garments. But we have no proof as to who was worshipped there during the Bronze Age. Pausanias says Helen and Menelaos were buried on the site. Though the temple was called after the husband, it seems rather to have been Helen’s, as we see from the tale in Herodotos about the nurse taking her ugly girl-charge there and the advent of Helen. The statement of Isokrates that the pair were treated as gods, not heroes, we cannot trust too far, as he would have been ready to stretch a point to glorify Helen. Eusebios cites a late Lakonian oracle from Oinomaos which also supports Menelaos’ deification; and as early as the Odyssey we hear of his translation to the Blessed Isles, though that does not imply god-head. Not far from Therapne was a place called the Phoibaion, with a temple of the Dioskouroi. ‘Here the epheboi sacrifice to Enyalios’ (the old form of the war-god).

  Helen’s role as nurse-mother seems further to come out in the story that the temple of the birth-goddess, Eileithyia, at Argos was dedicated by her. She was said to have borne Iphigeneia to Theseus at Argos and so founded the sanctuary. The stags and griffins decorating her cult-chariot at Sparta suggest her link with Artemis as Lady of Wild Things; and finds in the temple of Artemis Orthia prove that she was linked with the goddess there.[294]

  She had important cult-relations with Rhodes. Pausanias tells us: ‘They say that when Menelaos died and Orestes [her nephew] was still taken up with his wanderings, she was driven into exile by Nikostratos and Megapenthes, and went to Rhodes, where she had a friend Polyxo, wife of Tlepolemos. For Polyxo had been born an Argive, and when her husband ran off to Rhodes [after murdering the brother of Herakles’ mother], she went with him. Left a widow with an orphan son, she was queen of the island. They say she wanted to avenge her husband’s death [at Troy] on Helen, whom she now had in her power. So when Helen was bathing, she sent some serving-girls disguised as Erinyes, who seized her and hanged her on a tree.’ So in Rhodes there is a sanctuary of Tree-Helen, Helena Dendrites. Plinius records that in Athena’s sanctuary at Lindos on Rhodes Helen offered a cup made out of elektron in the measure of her own breast. (In the festivals of Isis at Corinth milk was poured from a breast-shaped golden vase. Such cups were common in Isiac ritual. Apuleius describes an Isiac procession in which the priest ‘carried a round vessel of gold in breast form from which milk flowed down’.) The breast-cup (of milk) again reveals Helen as nurse-mother. The temple of Lindos, by the way, held a long inscription on marble, known as the Lindian Chronicle, put there in 99 BC by the city council. It listed among other things the ancient treasures dedicated to Athena and claimed that these included: ‘Menelaos, a helmet, inscribed: Menelaos, the helmet of Alexandros’, that is, the helmet he pulled off Paris’ head in the duel recounted in the Iliad; ‘Helen, a pair of bracelets, inscribed: Helen to Athena. Kanopos; helmsman of Menelaos, his steering-oars, inscribed: Kanopos to Athena Polias’.

  A rhetorician Polyainos gives a different account of Helen at Rhodes. ‘Menelaos, returning from Egypt with Helen, put in at Rhodes. Polyxo was mourning for her husband Tlepolemos killed at Troy. On hearing that Menelaos had arrived with Helen, she wished to avenge her husband and ran down to the ships with a crowd of Rhodian men and women armed with fire and stones. Menelaos, prevented by the wind from sailing, hid Helen in the hold and dressed up her best-looking serving-girl in her clothes. The Rhodians, believing her to be Helen, pelted her to death with fire and stones; and, thinking they’d sufficiently avenged Tlepolemos by Helen’s death, they went off. Menelaos sailed away with Helen.’

  This variant, however, again links her with Artemis. For Pausanias says that in Arkadia, about a furlong from Kaphyai is a place called Kondylea where there is a grove and shrine of Artemis. In ancient times she was called Kondyleatis; but her name was changed, they say, for the following reasons. Some children, how many is not recorded, were playing about the sanctuary and found a rope. Tying it round the image’s neck, they said Artemis was being strangled. The Kaphyans detected the children in the act and stoned them to death. After that a malady fell on the women and their babies were stillborn, till the Pythian priestess bade them bury the children and sacrifice to them yearly in the manner used for heroes, since they had wrongly been put to death. The Kaphyans still obey this oracle, and at Kondylea from that day to this they call the goddess the Strangled [or Hanged] One, as they say the oracle instructed them.’ Kondylos means knuckle; kondylizein, to strike with the fist, maltreat. The myth seems to record, with the tragic twist, an initiation rite of blows and maltreatment inflicted on the boys in the presence of the Hanged Artemis. We may compare the Spartan initiation rite when lads were flogged at the altar of Artemis Orthia. Not far from the grove at Kaphyai was a tall and beautiful plane tree named after Menelaos and said to have been planted by him when mustering his forces for Troy. Theophrastos however says it was planted by Agamemnon. In any event we see that Helen was connected with the region of the Hanged Artemis and was again associated with a plane. The Greek for the tree is platanas (platonistos in the Iliad), a name derived from platys, broad, because of the tree’s broad crown; we may compare the hat of Helen, the kalathos.[295]

  The hanging-motif is highly important in a large number of myths and legends; but before turning to it, let us deal with other cults of Helen and with the tree element in the nature of Artemis and Dionysos. Helen, we saw, was identified by Herodotos with Aphrodite because of the evidence in Egypt. Simon, the mage of Samaria, we also saw, associated with himself the whore Helen of Tyre, whom he presented as the embodiment of the Allmother, Being and Wisdom; his followers saw this Helen as a reincarnation of Homer’s heroine and set up statues with Athena’s traits besides those of Zeus (Simon). Some scholars have deduced the existence of a Helen Astarte, with a long-established cult in the Delta of Egypt. But excavations at Naukratis have turned up no hint of Helen; and the epithet Xeinē (Stranger) of Herodotos’ Aphrodite at Memphis is best interpreted as referring to Astarte, without any connection with Helen. The cults which Ploutarch mentions in Egypt of Menelaos and Helen must be late, doubtless stimulated among Greeks there by the Herodotean story.[296]

  Athenagoras, a late writer pleading for the Christians, states that among the colonists of New Troy there was a cult of Hektor as a god and of Helen Adrasteia. But ‘Adrasteia’ was an epithet of Nemesis; its transference to Helen must be late. There seems to have been a cult of Helen on the shores of Bithynia. Isis of the many names is called Helen in Bithynia, and in general she takes over the role of the chief goddess of an area, for example she is Atargatis at Bambyke, Diktynna in Crete, Hekate in Karia. We may note too that Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, came from Drepanon in Bithynia. Finally, at Athens a triple sacrifice was offered to Helen in conjunction with the Dioskouroi. But again this development must be late; she found her place at Athens through her brothers.[297]

  In the archaic rigidity of her effigy she is comparable with Artemis Orthia. She is not merely the young girl dancing in honour of the goddess; she is also the commanding presence and power of the goddess herself. In later representations, where she is flanked by the Twins, we find her at times set on a higher base than they, or holding a sceptre.

  The strong element of tree and vegetation in her cult brings out her affinity with the old type of nature-goddess, especially with Artemis. The latter had several tree-titles. In Arkadia she was the Walnut-tree, Karyatis. ‘Karyai is a region sacred to Artemis and the Nymphs, and there in the open stands an image o
f Artemis Karyatis. Here yearly the Lakedaimonian maidens hold chorus-dances, and they have traditional dances of their own’ (Pausanias). At Orchomenos, near the city, is a wooden image of Artemis; ‘it is set in a large cedar tree, and after the tree they call her Kedreatis, Cedar-Goddess.’ Again in Lakedaimon at Hypsoi ‘is a sanctuary of Askiepios and of Artemis called Daphnaia, Bay-Goddess. By the sea is a temple of Artemis Diktynna on a promontory, in whose honour they hold a yearly festival.’ At Boiai in the Gulf of Boiai some inhabitants were said to have come from Sidē; an oracle told them that Artemis would show them where to settle. So, when they had landed, a hare appeared and they took it as guide. When it dived into a myrtle tree, they built a city on the site, and to this day they worship that myrtle and call Artemis ‘Saviour’. (Not far off at Asopos was a shrine of Athena Kyparissia, the Cypress Goddess; at the foot of the citadel were ruins of the city of the Parakyparissian Achaians.) At Syracuse Artemis was Phakelitis, from phakelos, bundle or faggot; presumably her image was wrapped round with boughs as if it were in a tree. At Sparta her image was said to have been found in a willow-brake; it was bound round with withies, lygodesma. On a coin of Perge a fir-cone is her badge; at Theuthea in Achaia she was Nemidia (Nemydia), goddess of woodland pasture.[298]

  Dionysos is the one male god who shares fully the qualities of the old vegetation-mothers. He was dendrites, of the tree; the Boiotians called him ‘he who lives and works in the tree, endendros’. A cult legend of Magnesia told how his image was found in a plane tree which split open; the Delphic oracle informed the people who was the god of the image. Here we see the babe-god emerge from the tree-womb, and the tree is Helen’s. The evergreen pine, which provided torches as well as cones for tipping the thyrsoi, was linked with him. (Helen we saw had a torch connection.) The Corinthians received an oracular command from Delphoi to worship the pine ‘as the god’; they carved his statue from the pine in question, the tree in which Pentheus, Semele’s father, had sat to watch the Bacchantes, who then tore him to pieces. Dionysos was also lord of the fig tree with its genital symbolism, the myrtle (which was also Aphrodite’s and synonym for the female genitals) and the ivy.[299] He turned the myrtle over to Hades at the latter’s wish as a surrogate for Semele, whom he carried off from the underworld.[300] Indeed he was Anthios, god of all blossoming things, and Phytalmos, god of all growth; he had the title of Teeming or Bursting-into-life. His image as a tree-stump was set up in orchards. On a kylix by Hieron we see Mainads dance in circles round him as a rude plank or pillar draped with splendid garments and decorated with grape-bunches, ivy-sprigs, honeycombs, a necklace of dried figs. He was called Perikionis, He-about-the-Pillar.[301]