She won the heart
of every man she saw.
They stood in line, sighed,
knelt, beseeched Be Mine.
She married one,
but every mother’s son
swore to be true to her
till death, enchanted
by the perfume of her breath
her skin’s celebrity.
So when she took a lover, fled,
was nowhere to be seen,
her side of the bed unslept in, cold,
the small coin of her wedding ring
left on the bedside table like a tip,
the wardrobe empty of the drama of her clothes it
was War …
…
Meanwhile, lovely she lay high up
in a foreign castle’s walls, clasped
in a hero’s brawn, loved and loved
and loved again, her cries
like the bird of calamity’s,
drifting down to the boys at the gates
who marched now to the syllables of her name.
CAROL ANN DUFFY, extracts from ‘Beautiful’1
PARIS’ SEDUCTION OF HELEN in the palace at Sparta has been inspirational for three millennia.2 Most ancient Greek accounts of the seduction – or at least the extant fragments of those accounts – are fairly elliptical. The Cypria simply states that after giving Helen gifts, ‘Aphrodite brings the Spartan queen together with the Prince of Troy’.3 Apollodorus, writing in the 2nd century BC, records that after nine days of enjoying Menelaus’ hospitality, Paris ‘persuaded Helen to go off with him’.4 But for later writers, such as Ovid, this episode is a spur to the imagination. In his Heroides 16, the poet describes how Paris ‘swells up with envy’ at the sight of Helen and Menelaus together. Paris moans: ‘When he presses your body to his I drop my eyes, and food I have not tasted sticks in my mouth because I cannot swallow.’ Helen in her turn, trembles: ‘I have seen, traced on the table’s flat top, my name spelled in spilled wine, and there beneath it, the two words, “I love”.’5
This moment in the story of Helen has particular pathos: the Spartan queen is seduced because her husband Menelaus has been called away to tend to his grandfather’s funerary rites in Crete.6 Soaking up Lakonian hospitality, Paris seems, at first, to keep himself in check. He might have watched the Spartan queen too closely as they dined together, she might have left her hand in his just a moment too long as they said goodnight. But so far, so good. Things are as they should be. The regal host has her fine gifts, the Trojan prince his audience with the representative of a foreign super-power.
All would have been well had not Menelaus, the dutiful grandson, dallied one night too many with a Cretan concubine after burying his grand-father Catreus. But dally he did, and in the heat of that Mediterranean night it was not Menelaus’ but Paris’ shadow that fell across Helen’s threshold. The bards’ audience must have enjoyed sucking in their cheeks with disapproval as the story unfolded: ‘Isn’t it terrible, do tell me more.’ For visual artists down the centuries the fascination with Helen’s abduction or rape – herenlèvement – has also proved resolute.
The Louvre Palace and Museum in Paris holds several representations of l’enlèvement d’Hélène. With its marble floors, Greek columns and rooms full of treasure, the Louvre is a labyrinthine place. A Mycenaean princess might have felt at home here; she could even have admired the Cyclopean architecture of the new extension – an appropriate place to go Helen-hunting. But just as the Louvre has cherry-picked its architectural inspiration from the ancient world, similarly, the depictions of Helen in the museum show that throughout history this Peloponnesian girl has been represented in a subjective and pernicious way.
One crisp December day I visited the Louvre, in my search for Helen, armed with a list of archive references and the numbers of scores of display cases; I was expecting a visual journey through Helen’s life.7 Instead, what I saw was a catalogue of sexual violence. Throughout the ages, whether in the illuminations of a medieval manuscript, on a grand canvas or a ceramic plate destined for the Pope’s table, artists and their patrons have wanted to remember one thing above all else: the fact that Helen was taken by force. I spent an afternoon looking at thirty ways to rape a woman.
On one platter, almost 18 inches (45 cm) in diameter, painted by Avelli in 1540, a muscly Helen has become the subject of a tug of war.8 Watched over by a kindergarten golden sunset whose neat rays are reflected in the seething, swirling sea, Spartan guards drag Helen back by her cloak, while the Trojans, with their arms around her waist, manhandle her onto their waiting boat. Helen grabs one of the Trojans by the hair; she is desperate. On another plate made in the same year, Helen is strangely childlike.9 Innocent and sexual at the same time, half-naked, she clings to her captor with her legs wrapped around him. She looks as though she is being given a piggy-back, but her eyes, wide with shock and terror, tell a darker story.
A medallion, just 10 cm across, primarily monochrome with a hint of blue, shows an anguished Helen surrounded by a rough, primitive looking crowd – wild men from the East who apparently cannot wait to sully this pure Greek beauty.10 A bronze statuette from the 18th century has a more positive passion. Only a couple of feet high, the two figures dominate the room. Originally this piece could be seen in the Palais des Tuileries during the reign of Louis XV. Helen and Paris are caught up in a whirlwind of their own creation. The artwork is vital. Helen surges above Paris, he stares up at her, and their clothes billow around them. She seems weightless, his face lifted by hers rather than she by his arms.11
It was that moment of passion enjoyed by Paris and Helen – a moment not of violence but ‘ate’12 (abandonment or delusion) – that brought about the deaths of thousands of men, women and children, and tied up the Greek heroes in a pointless and protracted war. One sexual slip that took on epic proportions. A peccadillo that grew in popular imagination until men like Herodotus could write of it in his Histories: ‘… great crimes are matched with great punishments by the gods.’13 The Judaeo-Christian tradition is often blamed for making sex a woman’s problem. But Helen is easily Eve’s equal. As one scholar has put it, ‘clustered about her [Helen] are all the problems which men perceive about female sexuality, i.e. how their desire for women turns into a problem to be blamed on women’.14 Helen’s culpability is quickly magnified. By telling Helen’s story, men manage to make sex the root of evil, and to identify women as the source of both.
A piece of curved, painted wood from the 16th century AD, also on display in the Louvre, encapsulates the situation perfectly. Paris and Helen are placed dead centre. The focus of attention, Helen has one hand to her head in a gesture of despair. Her hair waves but otherwise she and Paris seem frozen – the still centre of a seething storm, for around them, piled one on another in a monstrous, heaving, sweaty crush, are the Greek and Trojan armies. Everywhere is hate, fear, distress and cruelty. Helen and her selfish infidelity are central and primordial.
Sex is powerful. This the ancients knew. In the Iliad, Homer writes a steamy passage about the goddess Hera preparing to seduce her husband Zeus. The goddess needs to distract Zeus’ attention from the battle down below to give her favourites of the moment, the Argives, a better chance of victory. Helen is never mentioned, but the message is clear – this is what women do to manipulate men, this is how they use love as a weapon. And as one reads, aware that the larger narrative here is the love affair between Paris and the Queen of Sparta, one immediately pictures not Hera, but Helen, preparing herself in her quarters for her guest Paris – as he scents her perfume and paces outside, up and down, up and down, in his chambers at the Spartan palace.
The ambrosia first. Hera cleansed her enticing body of any blemish, then she applied a deep olive rub, the breath-taking, redolent oil she kept beside her … one stir of the scent in the bronze-floored halls of Zeus and a perfumed cloud would drift from heaven down to earth. Kneading her skin with this to a soft glow and combing her hair, she twisted her braids with expert hands, and sleek, luxurious, shining down from her deathless head they fell, cascading.
… and into her earlobes, neatly pierced, she quickly looped her earrings, ripe mulberry-clusters dangling in triple drops and the silver glints they cast could catch the heart.15
That night, when Paris and Helen were left alone in the Spartan citadel and the nightjars called, as the palace slept, who, in fact, hovered at whose doorway? Who made the first move? In the Iliad and the Odyssey Helen is the subject of both blame and praise, so who stole whom?
A host of ancient authors are very clear and articulate on the matter – and given that inventory of violent seductions imagined by latter-day artists, their opinion is perhaps a little surprising. Paris certainly did not have the upper hand. According to Homer, once Helen has teamed up with the Trojan prince, she is never described as his whore or sex-slave, not even as his enthralled bride – but only as his legitimate, equal partner. She is first Menelaus’ ‘parakoitis’16 and then Paris’ ‘akoitis’17 – words which translate as bedmate, spouse or wife. Both the Spartan king and the Trojan prince are described as her ‘posis’, her consort.18 Helen is never given the title ‘damar’ – subservient wife.19
The fact that Helen is to be seen across the art galleries of Europe portrayed as a victim is a later manifestation of a rape fantasy. As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, Helen, instructed by the goddess of sexual love, Aphrodite, made herself irresistible to Paris. The title of this chapter should in fact read Helena Alexandrum rapuit. 20