Some an army of horsemen, some an army on foot And some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight On this dark earth; but I say it is whatever you desire:
and it is perfectly possible to make this clear to all; for Helen, the woman who by far surpassed all others in her beauty, left her husband – the best of men –
behind and sailed far away to Troy; she did not spare a single thought for her child nor for her dear parents but [the goddess of love] led her astray [to desire]
SAPPHO, Fragment 16 (7th century BC)1
COMPOSING WITHIN A HUNDRED YEARS OF HOMER, the female poet Sappho was certain that the Spartan queen seduced Paris, or was, at the very least, willing to go with him, certain that inspired as Helen was by the passion of Aphrodite, she was not stolen but left of her own free will.
Sappho’s treatment of Helen is important for two reasons. The first – and most obvious – is that if you believe Sappho lived, she is a rare, surviving, female voice from the ancient world.2 She does not write with a man’s idea of what Helen should be. The second reason is that Sappho was held in high esteem across centuries of antiquity. The Athenian lawgiver the female of the species is more deadly than the male Solon was said to have memorised a Sappho song at a drinking party, ‘So that I can learn it and then die.’3Plato talks of Sappho as one of the ‘wise men and women of old’.4 In the Hellenistic period she was compared to Homer and was even honoured with the epithet ‘the 10th Muse’.5 Her ideas mattered and so, partly because Sappho and her work were much talked and gossiped about, for centuries no one could quite shake off the idea that Paris might be Helen’s plaything, not vice versa.
Along with Helen, Sappho is one of the few female figures from the ancient world who is still a household name. Yet virtually no historical evidence exists for her life. With the exception of one complete poem, nothing remains of her poetry but tattered fragments. When one looks down at these scraps, Fragment 16 is sandwiched between two glass sheets in the Bodleian Library in Oxford – a pathetically incomplete jigsaw – the poetry shows itself to be more absent than present. But when first examining the tiny pieces I realised that in the frieze of intellectual illuminati that had been painted around the walls of the library between AD 1615 and 1620, Sappho was the only woman depicted: testimony to the acumen of the scant words that have survived.
We are fortunate to have Sappho’s thoughts on Helen at all; at the end of the 19th century a number of Greek fragments came to light in Egypt on ceramic potsherds or on tiny pieces of papyrus that had been recycled to wrap up mummies or to use as compost. Luckily a sharp labourer spread the news that he was turning up these precious scraps as he farmed his fields, and eager collectors from Europe came to gather up the slithers before they were ploughed back into the earth.
Fragment 16, the poem to Helen, was discovered in the centre of a giant rubbish tip at a place called Oxyrhynchus (‘Town of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’), once Egypt’s third city and now the little village of Bahnasa 160 km south-west of Cairo. The morsel, which implies that Helen actively decided to leave Menelaus and elope with a lovely eastern prince, was 2.5m below the surface in a pile of decomposing manuscripts thrown away in the 5th century AD. 6
We know that Sappho was probably a lyric poet – she composed verses to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre. The consensus is that she was a woman born some time around 630 BC, of good family, and that she came from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. It seems that she was a mother: ‘I have a lovely child, whose form is like gold flowers.’ Although her poems were committed to papyrus by the end of the 5th century BC, we have no way of knowing whether or not she was herself literate.
Sappho is compelling. Even in the little we have, she speaks to us directly, and through her voice we get a tantalising glimpse of the culture of archaic Greece. Her poetry embraces big themes – death, love and the gods – but her most famous lines seem to serve some kind of educational purpose, guiding and socialising other (younger) women. And Sappho employs Helen to illustrate how, when it comes to love affairs, the female of the species can pull her weight. If her reputation is anything to go by, she was quite a mentor. The ancient world credited Sappho with being the first both to speak directly about love and to describe eros as a ‘bitter-sweet’ experience (in fact she describes it as glukupikros, sweet-bitter), as well as inventing the plectrum and creating a new musical mode later used by tragic poets.
Helen was an ideal subject for Sappho, a poet genuinely interested in analysing the disconcerting power of beauty and physical attraction. Anyone who has enjoyed or suffered an intense passion can identify with any number of Sappho’s lines: ‘My tongue is frozen silent, stiff, a pale flame seeps under my skin, I can no longer see, my ears whirl and hum.’
In Sappho’s version of Helen’s story this is the queen of Sparta’s call. She already has a husband, but Paris, a younger, fitter, better option, comes along, and she chooses him instead. This was a view subject to soft-censorship. When fragment 16 was first being jigsaw-puzzled together in 1906, the male editors, Grenfell and Hunt, originally had Helen merely cooing over Paris’ masculine heroism rather than acting on instinct and actually jumping ship.7
It is hard to ignore in Sappho’s portrayal of Helen a distant echo of the renowned Spartan practice of polyandry. Polyandry (‘husband-sharing’ or having a number of male partners) may be part of the Spartan mirage. It may be an outsider’s fanciful notion of the lengths that Spartan girls would go to exploit their reputation as viragos. But then again, it may just be true. We first hear explicitly about polyandry from Polybius, a well-born Greek author who was writing in the 2nd century BC, describing practices that he termed ‘traditional’ – that is, stretching back to at least the 8th century BC, possibly beyond.8
By choosing the prime specimen (Paris), perhaps Sappho’s Helen was living out a custom that the poet was familiar with from travellers’ tales of contemporary Sparta. We are told by Plutarch, the author of the Life of Lycurgus, that for over five hundred years, in Spartan tradition, women had been allowed by their husbands to pair up with nubile lovers if they thought the young bloods would father more vigorous and successful offspring.9 If this was fact rather than a later fabrication, perhaps Sappho had heard of this practice. Perhaps she thought it perfectly natural that Helen, a Spartan princess should – back in the mists of time – have indulged in a spot of polyandry.
We may also be witnessing the impact of the memory of Helen on the mores of classical Sparta – where Spartan women were inspired by the tales of their feisty, adulterous ancestor. Plutarch says they are polyandrous; like Helen. This is not to suggest that Spartan girls took attractive youths home as the continuation of a tradition that originated with a real Helen’s true-life relationship with Paris in the Late Bronze Age. But rather that, given Sparta’s intimate involvement with the Helen story, her track record would have been a useful cultural alibi for such a practice. If Helen was plangently polyandrous, then, naturally, other Spartan wives would be vindicated in following the example of their city’s role model.
Although it was Helen the rape victim or the scheming, grabbing seductress who came to find most favour with writers and artists down the centuries, there were also those who followed Sappho’s line and saw in Helen a woman who, helpless against the powers of Aphrodite, abetted Paris as he stole her away. During the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers brought back from North Italy an 11th-century manuscript copy of a new epic poem. This poem was unknown by scholars: dating to the 5th/6th centuries AD, it had been composed by an Egyptian called Colluthus of Lycopolis.10 The poem turned out to be another interpretation of the love triangle, another ‘Rape of Helen’. In this version Helen, a ‘fair-ankled’‘Argive nymph’, is a willing participant in her elopement.
Colluthus tells us that Helen is stunned by Paris’ beauty. She dilly-dallies, she is ‘perplexed’, but in the end physical attraction wins out over good sense and she resolves to take the plunge. ‘Come now, carry me from Sparta unto Troy …’ she says. She has welcomed into her house her destruction, just as Troy will welcome in not one but two Trojan Horses, the first – Helen herself. This familiar frailty is emphasised by the repetition of the Greek word aneisa, meaning to unbar, let loose, give in to fate or pleasure. Just as Helen has ‘unbarred the bolts of her hospitable bower’ to greet Paris, so at the end of the poem, Troy ‘unbarred the bolts of her high-built gates and received on his return her citizen that was the source of her woe’.11
In yet another (this time anonymous) retelling of the story from the 6th century AD, the Excidium Troie, Helen actually asks Paris to abduct her. The Excidium Troie was a standard school text. It was written in Latin, but sparked all sorts of vernacular versions across the West, among others the 13th-century Norwegian Trjumanna Saga, the German Trojanerkrieg, the Spanish Sumas de Historia Trojana and the 14th-century Bulgarian Trojanska Prica. 12 Following the same tradition in a French illuminated manuscript of 1406 now housed by Trinity Hall in Cambridge, Helen climbs down a ladder to meet Paris.13 Helen stares directly at Paris, a slick of rouge on her cheeks, her leg cocked over the parapet as she grips Paris’ shoulders. Not the climax of the abduction story we have come to expect. Hardly the behaviour of a reluctant sexual partner.
In the course of researching and writing this book I made a point of asking friends and colleagues for their own thoughts of Helen. The majority described her as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ but a bit of a nonentity, a push-over. When I spoke to one legendary actress, fresh from her cameo in the Hollywood film Troy, she described Helen as ‘just a pawn’. And indeed, the Helen in this 21st-century blockbuster bears a worrying resemblance to the other vacuous, submissive Helens that dominate the corpus of western art.14 We have become used to thinking of Helen as a passive prize, but it is only in relatively recent history that she has earned this reputation. For two and half millennia an alternative tradition recognised a feistier heroine. Not just a woman of straw, but a dynamic protagonist, a rich queen. A political player who – with the help of Aphrodite – controlled the men around her.