The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

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  If you enjoyed The Normans and Their World you might be interested in Helen of Troy by Jack Lindsay, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Helen of Troy by Jack Lindsay

  Chapter One – Helen in the Iliad

  The Homeric epics stand at the springs of Greek culture, and the story of Helen lies at their heart. Despite the endless developments, variations, additions, expansions which have happened since Homer’s time, his picture of her remains the essential thing, which all the other versions, one way or another, assume. We must therefore begin by considering his account in some detail, while taking care not to attribute to him ideas, attitudes, or motifs which came up later.

  Helen, married to Menelaos, has left her home in Sparta with the prince Paris (Alexandros) of Troy; and an army of Achaians, the mainland Greeks, has set out to regain her under the command of Agamemnon, king of Mykenai and brother of Menelaos. The Iliad deals with one important episode in the siege of Troy, the wrath of Ac
hilles, while weaving many lesser themes or episodes into the main tale. The Achaians have to carry on the siege for nine years and are entering on the tenth. (Later attempts were made to explain this length of time by the rudimentary siege methods at their disposal; and it has been suggested that the many references to the town’s pre-war wealth are meant to bring out by contrast the drying-up of resources in the long war. But in fact the ‘nine years’ are a proverbial term; and the episode of Helen’s appearance above the Skaian Gates gives the effect that the war has not been going on long, for she has to tell King Priam who the various Achaian leaders are.) Agamemnon, among his booty, has gained a girl Chryseis, daughter of a priest of Apollo. Moved by her charms, he refuses to let her father ransom her; and Apollo sends a plague on the Achaian camp. After the prophet Kalchas explains the cause, Agamemnon reluctantly agrees to surrender Chryseis, but compensates himself by seizing Briseis (girl of Brisa), to whom Achilles, her captor, has become much attached. Achilles then withdraws his allegiance to Agamemnon; he and his contingent, the Thessalian Myrmidons, take no more part in the fighting. The Achaians have lost their great champion; and despite the attempts of Diomedes, Aias and other heroes, they are driven back on the camp, which they fortify with a wall.

  Agamemnon, on the advice of the veteran Nestor of Pylos, sends an embassy to Achilles, offering to return Briseis with a huge honour-prize, and, when victory comes, to see that Achilles is married, without bride-price, to a royal princess with seven cities for her dower. Achilles, still embittered, refuses. Next day, in the fighting, Hektor, brother of Paris and the Trojan champion, drives the Achaians back to the ships, forces an entrance in their wall, and sets one of the ships on fire. Patroklos, the favoured retainer and comrade of Achilles, gets permission to don that hero’s armour and lead the Myrmidons into the battle. The Trojans, thinking that Achilles himself has taken the field, retreat in disorder; but after a while Patroklos is killed — Apollo helping to bring about his death. The Achaians begin to fall back again. Achilles, in a transport of fury at the news of Patroklos’ death, appears unarmed at the trench round the camp. His war-cry makes the Trojans fall back and Patroklos’ body is recovered. He now wants to go on fighting; but Odysseus insists on ending the feud with the correct procedure. Achilles is paid his due compensation. (His mother the sea-goddess Thetis persuades the smithgod Hephaistos to make him a new suit of armour.) Next day he routs the Trojans, encounters Hektor and kills him in single combat. He returns to the camp with Hektor’s body dragged behind his chariot. Funeral games are held; and Priam, king of Troy, comes secretly by night to Achilles and succeeds in ransoming Hektor’s body. With the latter’s funeral the Iliad ends.

  The carrying-off of Helen provides the epic’s background, but does not directly intrude on the story of Achilles. We may note however a certain duplication of patterns. The war has come about through Helen’s abduction; the conflict among the Achaian leaders, almost wrecking their whole enterprise, occurs through the quarrel about a woman, Briseis, who is forcibly taken from Achilles to compensate Agamemnon for the loss of Chryseis. To appreciate this point we must realize that the Trojans are not conceived as aliens. They are part of the Greek world of the second millennium BC, though on the eastern coast of the Aegean — as were later the great mercantile towns of the Ionians. Achaians and Trojans share the same pantheon. The Trojans are supported by Apollo, Artemis and Aphrodite, while the Achaians are sustained by Hera, Athena and Ares. Athena, though the great ally of the Achaians, is also the patron deity of Troy with her temple on the acropolis. In the Iliad her Trojan priestess is Theano, daughter of Kisseus of Thrace (who lived, says Strabon, in the peninsula of Chalkidice where there were a Mt. Kissos and a town Kissos).[585]

  The story of the Trojan War had come down from the Bronze Age, through dark confused centuries leading to the Ionian colonization, on into the eighth century (when we can best imagine the Homeric poems being composed). It had come down as one of the main epic cycles which told of old heroic struggles and sought to explain how the civilization of the Mykenean Greeks had broken down. The bardic tradition told how the heroic world had been sapped and destroyed above all by two internecine conflicts, a fratricidal strife at Thebes on the mainland and a disastrous war expedition overseas against Troy. In the story of the collapse of a civilization, the war for possession of Helen played the central part; and so the contention between Agamemnon and Achilles over a girl captive was a sort of refraction of the larger pattern. It helped strongly to reinforce the key motif of the Iliad, showing in clear and prolonged detail how the self-assertions, the prides and greeds, of the leaders, involving a complex tribal code of status, of shames, humiliations, compensations and regaining of face, provided a destructive element in the culture — an element continually undermining and breaking down the cohesive forces of kindred, of loyalty of man to lord and lord to overlord, and so on, which held the system together. The Briseis theme thus expressed on the realistic everyday level what the Helen theme expressed on a higher level with deep symbolism and a far wider series of references.

  This point will become clearer as we go on. For the moment it helps us to see that the motif of Helen, the abducted or eloping wife, who provokes a cataclysmic war, is not a casual or arbitrary one. Through the episode of the wrath of Achilles it is linked concretely with the whole system of balances in what we may call a tribal-feudal society — balances of loyalty and disloyalty, of ardent comradeship and passionate self-assertion, which both build up and rend such a society.

  Helen pervades the epic because, as the object for which the long and desperate struggle is being waged, she stands somehow for the supreme good, the most desirable goal in the heroic world. But it is only in Books III and VI out of the twenty-four books that she comes forward personally in a prominent way. She is first mentioned in Book II, where Agamemnon, despairing, has proposed that the Achaians abandon the siege and return home. ‘Already have nine years of great Zeus passed by, and see, our shiptimbers rot, the tackling hangs loose, and our wives and little children, I suppose, sit in our halls and wait for us. Yet unfulfilled, quite foundered, is the task for which we sailed. Come then, as I tell you, let’s all obey, let’s be off with our ships to our beloved native land. There’s no more hope of taking broad-streeted Troy.’[586]

  The men rush for the ships and the siege would have ended if the gods had not taken a hand afresh. Hera calls on Athena, ‘Are the Argives then to go scampering across the sea’s broad back to their dear native land? Yes, to Priam and the Trojans they’d leave their brag: that Argive Helen, for whom so many Achaians have died at Troy, far from the earth of home. Go through the host of the bronze-coated Achaians, seek to restrain each man with your soothing words, and stop them from drawing their curved ships to the sea.’

  Athena obeys. First she goes to Odysseus and repeats Hera’s words about Helen as the brag of the Trojans. He knows her voice and hurries to the general. Taking aside any chief he meets, he advises him against Agamemnon, while, when he finds ‘a man of the people shouting out’, he strikes him with his staff and warns him. He thus quiets the panic, despite the abuse that Thersites, the outstanding man-of-the-people, is heaping on the general, calling on his fellow soldiers to go off home and leave Agamemnon ‘to digest his prizes’. Here we meet a parody of the motif of woman loot. ‘Your huts are heaped with bronze and herds of women are in your huts, the chosen loot that we, the Achaians, give you first, when he take a city. Or do you still want gold as well? Or is it some young girl to hug in love and keep apart for yourself?’

  Nestor speaks against withdrawal. ‘Let no man hurry off home before each of us here has lain and mated with some Trojan wife in requital for his strivings and his groanings for Helen.’ The phrase here is ambiguous and the meaning could be ‘the strivings and groanings of Helen’, which suggest prolonged repentance on her part and a desire to return home. But there is no evidence that the Achaians looked on her as a victim carried off by force (as she became in qui
te late versions). Hellenistic critics such as Aristarchos felt the need to read ‘of Helen’ as an objective genitive referring to the thoughts and feelings of the Achaians, who considered her the cause of their sufferings. (The phrase recurs later in the book, as the fighting starts once more. Menelaos moves among his men, urging them on, ‘and his heart was zealous to gain requital for his strivings and groanings for Helen’.)[587]

  Paris-Alexandros appears in the battle with his curved bow and sword, brandishing two bronze-tipped spears, a panther-skin on his shoulders. He is described as godlike but promptly shrinks away from the wronged husband, and Hektor upbraids him, calling him Dys-Paris, Evil-Paris, and giving an account of Helen’s abduction. ‘Dysparis, you’re a pretty fellow, mad after women, you seducer. I wish you’d never been born. I wish you’d died before you took a wife. Far better that than to have disgraced us all and turned a thing of contempt. How the long-haired Achaians must laugh out when they see us make a champion of a prince because he’s handsome to look at, though in his heart there’s no strength, no courage. Can you today be the man who got together a crew of trusty comrades and sailed overseas in your goodeepwater ships, made yourself at home in a foreign land and carried off a beautiful woman from that faraway place and her warrior kin, only to be a curse to your father and your city, a curse to all your people, to the delight of your enemies — only to end here with that hangdog face of yours? Won’t you stand up against Menelaos, that favourite of Ares? You’d soon learn what sort of a fighter he is, the man whose wife you stole. Your lyre won’t be the least bit of use to you then, nor all Aphrodite’s gifts, your fine hair and your good looks, when you lie there in the dust. But the Trojans are a timid lot, or you’d already have worn a stone coat for all the evil you’ve done.’ That is, they’d have stoned you to death.[588]

  Paris takes the rebuke well. ‘Hektor, I deserve all your reproaches. You haven’t said a word too much. Your heart always has a stubborn edge, like an axe driven through a beam by the hand of man who shapes a ship’s timbers with shrewd skill. It adds to the force of his swing. And that’s how it is with your undaunted heart. But don’t hold against me the gifts of golden Aphrodite. The precious gifts of the gods are not to be thrown away. They give them of their own grace and no man may win them by his sole will. But now, if you insist on my going out to fight this duel, make all the troops sit down and set me between the two armies to meet this Menelaos whom Ares loves. Then we can fight for Helen and all her property. The one that wins and proves himself the better man will gain the right to all the property and the woman, and he can carry them home. But let the rest of you swear friendship and binding oaths with sacrifice, and live on in deep-soiled Troy, while they return to Argos with its horse-pastures and to Achaia the land of lovely women.’