APOLLO (to Orestes): First as to Helen, whom you meant to kill, and move/ Menelaus to rage – your purpose failed; for this is she, whom you see here, enfolded in the sparkling sky;/ Not dead at your hands, but preserved. I snatched her up/ At Zeus her father’sbidding, and saved her from your sword./ From Zeus immortal born, immortal she must live,/ Reverenced as the goddess who savesseamen’s lives,/ enthroned beside her brothers in the folds of heaven.
So, Menelaus, choose for your home another wife;/ For Helen’sbeauty was to the gods their instrument/ For setting Greeks and Trojans face to face in war/ And multiplying deaths, to purge the bloated earth/ Of its superfluous welter of mortality. So much for Helen.
…
MENELAUS: Helen, daughter of Zeus, farewell! What happiness For you, to find a home among the blessed gods!
EURIPIDES, Orestes1
AT SPARTA HELEN WAS WORSHIPPED both as a goddess and as a heroine, in Egypt as a decorous, seemly wife, and across the Greek mainland as a spirit of earth, air and sky. She is chameleon. But just as in the epics she makes long physical journeys across the vast water-ways of the Aegean, so her most common guise is that of a spirit associated with water.
In the ancient world divinities and nymphs with pronounced sexual power were typically thought to inhabit brooks, rivers and oceans.2 Aphrodite was herself conceived within the sea. One fragmentary poem attributed to Hesiod claims that Helen’s mother was not Leda but a ‘daughter of the Ocean’.3 And so the search for Helen’s cultic shrines frequently leads to water-sources and shorelines.
A few miles south of Corinth and a stone’s throw from the classical ruins of Kenchreai is the tiny village of Loutra Elenis – Helen’s Baths – or, as it was marked on Greek maps and road-signs until a few years ago, Tά λoυτρά τής ώρμας 뀺퀼倻ς the baths of the beautiful Helen’. The therapeutic waters were first described as a ritual site by Pausanias.4 Now the springs are hard to find. Once you reach the shore, a good clue to the location is the sight of the charming Greek ladies (generally rather elderly and overweight) who use the place religiously.
The path to the mouth of the spring is hedged with laurels and scattered with the used baby wipes that appear as a constant companion to the lesser-known sites of antiquity. Balancing on the rocks, the silvery bubbles of gas produced by the spring are easy to trace, floating up through the clear water. I was cynical about how efficacious the ‘holy waters’ could possibly be – until I took the plunge myself. Swimming in the outflow of the spring I had the most curious sensation of passing through distinct layers of alternately warm and freezing cold water. Pausanias describes the warm sea as ‘boiling’ and you can just feel the underwater bubbles as they nudge their way up to the surface. This (naturally) is supposed to be a beautifying experience; it is certainly an invigorating one.
During my last visit I had an extraordinary conversation about Helen, while in the fizzing water of the spring, with an ex-merchant seaman, who was wearing only a pair of very small, black Speedos. The sailor had become a chef after he left the navy and because of standing up cooking day in, day out, suffered from dreadful circulation problems. One of his legs, he told me firmly, was once as black as his trunks, whereas now (and here he showed off a trim leg with a small patch of grey on the ankle) there was next to no problem. The mysterious cure, he assured me, had come with his visits to Loutra Elenis.
Helen’s latter-day devotee then pointed out the epicentre of the spring – the point at which the fresh water, filtered through Mount Oneia, meets the sea. As the spring has been channelled, diverted and enclosed, it is now necessary for the visitor to half-swim, half-clamber, into a little niche where fresh water meets saline. Hanging onto the rocks there just above head height, fierce jets of water pummelled me from toes to chest. I could suddenly see why that faithful sailor had had such good results. Devotees are adamant that the place is efficacious both because Helen was worshipped here and because she herself used the spring.
On a hazy day, when atmospheric conditions blur and block out the shapes of modern buildings, the view here cannot have changed an iota down the millennia. To the east, clustering over the current archaeological dig at Kenchreai, there are fields of asphodel. With its lance-like leaves and pale-pink starry flowers the asphodel was a familiar sight in ancient Greece. In popular Greek thought, the meadow of asphodel in Hades received the fleshless corpses of the dead, and Homer describes fallen heroes eating the plant. The fields of asphodel at Kenchreai are a striking sight, each plant standing tall and straight like a man: it is easy to see why the ancients equated the spiny stems with the bones of their ancestors.
Throughout the classical period the outlines of boats on the horizon would also have been visible, making their way into the port of Corinth. Finds testify to visitors from across the region, from maritime centres such as Morocco, Cyprus and Chios. Many of these sailors would have followed up their visit to Helen’s Baths by paying their respects to Aphrodite, her sister in beauty, making a bee-line to worship the goddess of love with ta aphrodisia, literally ‘the things of Aphrodite’ – sex.
A number of the remains at Kenchreai have been lost during road-construction – the present rubbing out the past. Those that are left seem most beloved by local fishermen who use them as platforms from which to cast off. We know that, from at least the Roman period onwards, Aphrodite had a temple and a large statue at Kenchreai itself,5 but to reach the site of Aphrodite’s grandest religious complex one has to pass through the old town of Corinth (a jumble of Roman ruins6 obliterating most of the Greek stones, where tourist shops sell the image of Aphrodite on everything from aprons to doormats), and head for the unfeasibly dominant, sky-scraping, mottled grey rock that is Acrocorinth. Travellers making their way up to Acrocorinth (and it is a 4 km climb) any time from 500 BConwards might well have seen gaggles of the prostitutes and temple servants descending to meet devout customers in the town.7
We hear from a fragment of Pindar’s poetry that a doubly victorious Olympic champion called Xenophon, to commemorate his triumphs in 464 BC, dedicated one hundred girls to Aphrodite at Acrocorinth.8 Strabo tells us that in his day there were a thousand of these women working for the goddess of love.9 One has to imagine, since their clients were primarily the port-hopping sailors, that a number of these holy whores would have left the musky-sour stench of venereal disease on the air as they passed.
But the site of Aphrodite’s temple on Acrocorinth, 1,880 feet (570 m) above sea level, runs against the squalid and clandestine stereotype of the brothel. Here the breeze is balmy and fresh. Where pillars and architraves once would have been there is a panoramic view out across the Gulf of Corinth and over to the mountains of the Peloponnese. Just below the temple in the classical period a spring brought fresh water. The location feels exultant and secure. A female phi-type figurine found here, dating from the end of the Mycenaean period, testifies that in the Late Bronze Age Mycenaeans would also have stood on this spot to look and wonder.10 We cannot know precisely why they came or to whom they prayed when they arrived, but the fact that they brought with them votive offerings does show that a visit here was an important spiritual experience.
Worried by the popularity of Aphrodite’s cult in the classical period, the early Christians assiduously obliterated the pagan temple under one of their churches.11 Now the most explicit reminders of the significance of the goddess of love, the armed protector of Corinth and its environs, are locked away in a restricted storeroom in Corinth museum.12 A collection of offerings and artworks commemorating the power of erotic love is thought to be unsuitable for public consumption.
But Helen – the daughter, sister, incarnation of Aphrodite, and as always close to her in body and spirit – is still openly worshipped by modern-day believers. ‘Magic!’ shout the old Greek men and women as they swim in Helen’s Baths, just down the hill from Acrocorinth: ‘Ephcharisto ōrea Eleni ’ – ‘Thank you, beautiful Helen.’13
A Byzantine commentator writing in the second quarter of the 6th century AD, recorded that 200 km east of Loutra Elenis, close to the Turkish coastline on the island of Chios, Helen’s cult revolved around a spring.14 Pausanias described the spring, near Helen’s Temple on the hill of Therapne in Sparta,15 and another close to the shrine of Bridal Aphrodite founded on the occasion of Helen’s union with Theseus.16 And at Rome, in the south corner of the Forum Romanum, Helen’s image – holding a large torch – could be found on the marble altar at the Lacus Juturnae, itself a spring-fed pool dedicated to the water-nymph Juturna.17 The Lacus Juturnae altar was constructed at the time of Trajan,18 and stood between the Temple of Castor and Pollux and the Atrium Vestae. Once again, as at Sparta and in Egypt, Helen finds her worship endorsed by the authorities.
Not that Helen needed state sponsorship to perpetuate her appeal. For the Roman people her influence was not just to be found in official religious sanctuaries and works of great literature – it seeped into the culture of the street. There is a plant whose Latin name is still Inula helenium – Helen’s Flower. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, tells us the flower was thus named because it grew where Helen’s tears fell. Inula helenium was enthusiastically used as a beauty aid by ageing Roman women and giddy girls alike who ground up the bitter plant to a beautifying paste. Another common practice was to burn its seeds or drink an infusion of helenium extract, all the while praying that by doing so the hopeful user would acquire just a fraction of Helen’s dangerous beauty. Caesar Augustus’ daughter, Julia, took a daily dose of ‘Helen’s Flower’. To overcome its bitterness, it was ‘dried and pounded into flour and seasoned with some sweet juice’ or else ‘mixed with boiled-down grape-juice or flavoured with honey or raisins or juicy dates’.19Our source, Pliny, enthusiastically promoted its efficacy, describing the plant’s reputation for keeping the face and body fresh and for increasing sex appeal. And if helenium did not work as a love-charm, it had handy secondary uses too – curing snake-bites and killing mice.
Because of its effective use as a tonic and a stimulant, ‘Helen’s Flower’ has been a friend to doctors and pharmacists from antiquity through to the present day. Helenin (C6H8O) is a distillation from the root. Preparations from the plant can be prescribed by herbalists to regulate menstruation, or indeed encourage the onset of a girl’s periods. The connection with Helen is a significant one. This herb brought pre-pubescent girls to sexual maturity and therefore to beauty. The ancients imagined the first ever Helen’s Flower springing from the dark little pools where the tears of the most beautiful woman in the world fell on the ground. They imagined her weeping as she remembered the pain that came with erotic love, weeping as she guided young girls onto the sexual path she herself knew only too well.
It was on one of ‘Helen’s Islands’,20 Helene21 now called Makronissos, that the plant Inula helenium was first said to have sprung from Helen’s tears. Makronissos has a horrific and disturbing history. Today it is still and silent. No boats in the bay, no smudge of movement from a goat or a sheep, no clothes fluttering on a line. During the Greek Civil War,22 this was the site of the ‘white terror’. Over a hundred thousand political prisoners were rounded up and held on the island in a sealed, sadistic concentration camp. There were massacres and terrible tortures. The screams of the inmates could be heard from the mainland. The island has been left empty, a heavy monument to man’s dreadful folly and blood-lust. Prophesying Makronissos’ tragic history, it was said in antiquity that this was a sombre place, a place where Helen sighed.
And on rough nights, those sailors who heard Helen sigh on the isle of Helene could have sensed her above them too, materialising from the ether, because along with her brothers, Castor and Pollux – the soteres, saviours riding their white horses across the oceans – a starry Helen was thought to keep watch over those in danger on the sea and to bring rather alarming illumination in the form of St Elmo’s Fire. Anyone caught out at night on a stormy sea and blinded by the sudden arrival of St Elmo’s Fire will be left in no doubt as to the real respect the ancients must have felt for Helen.23 Called simply Helene in the ancient world, before the phenomenon was appropriated by a Christian saint, St Elmo’s Fire is an electrifying event. In the highly charged atmosphere of a storm, gas can become ionised, causing an electro-luminescent discharge to leap in double or triple jets from sharp points on ships’ rigging. Bluish-white streamers of flame seem to appear from thin air. The effect is breathtaking and disconcerting.
These corposants (literally ‘holy bodies’) typically appear singly or in pairs. The flames can provide a welcome source of light in a pitch black, storm-tossed night; they can also spark fires – a particular problem in antiquity when masts and rigging were made entirely of wood and hemp or papyrus. And so, whereas the twin brothers Castor and Pollux were thought to bring only relief, the single ‘Helen flame’ was often blamed for the devastation caused. A fragment of a work by one Hellenistic author called Sosibius24suggests that Helen’s light was a bad omen, and another Roman author is loquacious on the matter: ‘The ship is lost when the brothers of Therapne have deserted the sails doomed by the fire of their sister.’25 Even out in the middle of the ocean, Helen was believed to crackle with a dangerous energy.