PART SIX
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A skull of a twenty-year-old Mycenaean warrior. Trepanation has been performed on the left frontal lobe. c. 1550 BC
O adulterous beauty! Barbarian finery and effeminate luxury overthrew Greece; Lacedaemonian chastity was corrupted by clothes, and luxury, and graceful beauty; barbaric display proved Zeus’ daughter a whore.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, The Instructor
(2nd century AD)1
GIVING HELEN INITIATIVE AND A SEXUAL APPETITE does not automatically grant her standing. Far from it. When Helen is the active rather than the passive partner, men across time and space rush to label her a whore. And after the 2nd century AD, in an increasingly Christianised world, the notion of ‘Helen the wanton’ takes firm hold. She becomes typecast not simply as a wilful woman but as a tart. The fact that Paris brought gifts to the Spartan court was, to the Christian writers, further proof that Helen’s elopement was prostitution by any other name.
The search for Helen the whore leads to the paradoxically serene surroundings of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. In the 16th century AD, a theologian called Matthew Parker bequeathed to the college an assemblage of rare manuscripts. The original collection is still housed in the Parker Library, where sound is muffled by oak panels and sage-green blinds; the place speaks of stillness and order.
Here there is a compact little codex. One of the entries is a poem by the theologian Joseph of Exeter, entitled Ylias or Bellum Troianum or Trojan War. 2 Joseph seems to have spent most of his life in the French court – with a brief foray into crusading. His own Troy epic ran to six books which were completed some time around 1184. Carefully written out in the 13th century AD on vellum, the lines of chocolate-brown ink are minute and controlled, each letter less than a couple of millimetres high. In the regular lines the only hint of the colourful contents of the poem is that a capital letter every few inches or so is picked out boldly in vermilion-red.
Joseph’s diatribe, written in medieval Latin, is both funny and sad. He clearly derives great pleasure from describing Helen’s attributes, even making a reference to her crurumque decora – the grace of her legs.3 But Helen has become just another nail in the coffin of womankind. Christianity carried on where the classical Greeks – particularly the Athenians – had left off, demonising women and their sexual power. Female physical beauty was coming to be thought of as a mark of evil rather than of inner strength and spiritual merit.4 The medieval literature might make for a diverting read, but the outraged language has a bedrock of bigotry. Men such as Joseph clearly derived great satisfaction from immortalising Helen’s sin.5
Joseph’s Ylias makes it clear that Helen, as an active partner in her own abduction, is not Helen the empowered woman but Helen the dangerous slut. Having conceded that it is Paris’ access to the exotic treasures of the Orient that brings about ‘an easy seduction’, Joseph then expands in a passage that is strikingly salacious:
Lying on him with her whole body, she [Helen] opens her legs, presses him with her mouth and robs him of his semen. And as his ardour abates the purple bedlinen that was privy to their sin bears witness to his unseen dew. What evil! O wicked woman, were you able to put a check on such passionate desire? Was your lust waiting for a purchaser? What marvellous power in the gentle sex! Woman holds back her precipitate lust to obtain wealth and does not deign to give joy unless her smile has been paid for!6
When Joseph was writing in the 12th century, it was considered a sin for women to be on top during intercourse. Anything other than the ‘missionary position’ was unnatural because it made the woman physically superior; it was the mark of a whore and was thought to pervert the course of semen.
So, branded by theologians not only as adulterers but as sexual deviants, Helen and Paris feature prominently in influential Christian texts such as The Plaint of Nature, written between 1160 and 1175 by the poet and theologian Alan de Lille,7 and conceived as a heartfelt cry from Mother Nature herself at the abuse of her natural laws; de Lille even manages to blame Helen for encouraging Paris to turn to other men to satisfy his excess of lust.
Why did I deify with a godlike beauty the face of Tyndareus’ daughter who forced the use of her beauty to decline to the abuse of harlotry, when, sullying the covenant of her marriage- bed, she formed a disgraceful alliance with Paris.
No longer does the Phrygian adulterer chase the daughter of Tyndareus but Paris with Paris performs unmentionable and monstrous deeds.8
For committing similar sexual sins, the medieval laity would expect to have to perform a series of penitentials. For ‘unnatural’ sexual positions penances could last forty days or even more. Denial, fasting, fines, constant prayers, standing outside the church wearing a white hat or carrying a white wand were all typical penances for the period. For adultery the 7th-century Canons of Theodore prescribe for a three-year period of two days of abstinence from sex every week, plus three blocks of forty abstinent days. Women who committed adultery had to do penance for seven years.9 In the 11th century, St Peter Damian preaches a required period of twenty-five years fasting and penance for married couples over the age of twenty who have indulged in ‘deviant’ sexual positions. These ‘bestial acts’ and ‘whorish embraces’ were thought to lead to all kinds of human misery; one late medieval theologian went so far as to say that God had sent the biblical Flood because he’d espied a couple having sex with the woman on top.10
And, of course, despite all these warnings, despite the carmine caveat that Helen became, despite the bile that dripped from the pens of these theologians, ordinary men and women carried on abusing Mother Nature and incurring the wrath of the Church, regardless. For every woman that was branded a Helen and wore a white penitential cap in the corner of a church, there was a novice in the convent library who pored over translations of Ovid’s love letters. For every poet that wanted to see Helen and Paris burn in hell, there have been ten who held the curtains aside to let the Trojan step into the Spartan queen’s bed.
Homer’s Helen was created in a time before good and evil were thought to be two vast, magnetic forces – each at a different pole, each sucking humankind towards it. For the Greeks, things were less clear-cut; the gods themselves were in part good, in part bad. Helen is the perfect example of a Greek archetype, a woman who is ambiguous, who is at once chiaroscuro. But for the Christianised West this was a difficult concept to deal with. Although the Christian writers do not dispute Helen’s breeding or deny her her cultic crown, it is hard to describe Helen as very, very good, and there-fore she has to be very, very bad – in fact, a diabolical whore.
When Chaucer painted a rather gallant picture of Helen as the ‘faire queene eleyne’, he was quite possibly playing on a homophonic connection with the word for a harlot, ‘a quene’.11 In Dante’s Inferno Helen inhabits Circle Two – the sphere of the carnal and the lustful. And come the Elizabethan period she is frequently found in the ranks of those damned for whoring. In 1578, the author of The Reward of Whoredome by the Fall of Helen, Thomas Proctor, paints her as a courtly prize and then comes in for the kill by describing her as encapsulating prostitution’s ‘vilde filthy fact’.12 In Richard Robinson’s The Reward of Wickedness (1574), she suffers indescribable torments alongside ‘Popes, harlots, proude princes, tyrants and Romish bishops’.
Five hundred years after The Plaint of Nature was written, the notion of Helen as whore was still in vogue. Take the influential words of Alexander Ross, a reforming Scottish minister, who, in 1648, brought out a populist and popular guide to the classics, a kind of alphabetical myth-dictionary:
… for she had a deform’d soul, playing the strumpet, not only in her younger years with Theseus … but also being married to Menelaus, forsook him, and became a whore to Paris; and not content with him, committed incest with Gorythus, the son of Paris and Oenone; afterward betrayed the city of Troy to the Grecians, and treacherously caused her husband Deiphobus to be murdered in his bed by Menelaus … thus we see, that outward beauty of the body, without the inward graces of the mind, is but a gold ring in a swine’s snout.13
If their implications were not so tragic, diatribes like this might amuse. Helen is the woman men love to love and love to hate.
When following Helen’s progression through time it is important to remember one thing: medieval society came to see Helen’s affair with Paris as an act against God.14 But for the Greeks and Romans it was most commonly believed to be the act of a god, or, rather, of a goddess – Aphrodite. Not simply a woman of unbridled lusts, Helen is also a prism through which Aphrodite’s power shines. Erotic impetus comes from Aphrodite – thus, for example, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Helen preserves an air of wronged innocence. This is all the goddess’s doing, not hers. Helen is simply playing by love’s rules, as the Roman poet Ovid in his Art of Love – admittedly with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek – expounds:
While Menelaus was away, Helen, that she should not lie alone, was welcomed at night by the warm bosom of her guest. What folly was this, Menelaus? You went away alone; your wife and her guest were beneath the selfsame roof. Madman, do you trust timid doves to a hawk? Do you trust a full sheepfold to a mountain wolf? In naught does Helen sin; in naught is that adulterer to blame: he does what you, what anyone would have done … Helen I absolve from blame: she used the opportunity a courteous lover gave.15