nisi Taenario placuisset Troica cunno Mentula, quod caneret, non habuisset opus.
If Trojan cock had not brought Spartan cunt such fun, This Homer fellow’s book could not have been begun
PRIAPEA: ‘Poems for a Phallic God’1
EARLY IN THE 19TH CENTURY AD a rather over-enthusiastic librarian called Angelo Mai set to work on a rare, early manuscript of Homer. This precious document, created in the 5th century AD and known as the Ambrosian Iliad or the Milan Homer – kept in the Ambrosian library in Milan for two hundred years – had been butchered and botched. Pieces of paper were stuck to the back of the miniature illustrations. Mai realised there were lines of Homer underneath the paper-sheets, and was keen to get to them; perhaps here lay secrets, a version of the Iliad that had been lost for centuries.2
So Mai dissolved the glue that stuck the paper to the manuscript and used reagent chemicals to try to bring the words out of the vellum. One portion that he treated vigorously included, on the reverse side, a picture of Helen (dressed as though in purdah, with an aubergine-coloured apron and matching hem to her full skirts) and Paris, sitting, companionably, next to each other. There was a slight danger that the chemicals might soak through and the images be damaged in the process, but Mai went ahead.
A fine facsimile of this illustration is now housed in the Rare Books Room of the University of Cambridge Library. This is one of the most beautiful, vigorous representations of the Troy story from the Byzantine Empire. Resting on the salmon-pink cushions provided by the library, warriors race across petrol-green landscapes, hemmed in only by the tangerine frames of the manuscript around them, a colour scheme still vivid after 1,500 years.
But the chemicals that Mai used did indeed destroy as well as preserve; and it is the image of Helen that is particularly soiled. She still sits demurely, Paris by her side, but her name is barely legible. Her face, touched too often and for too long, has become an ugly, shady blur.
Between 13 and 15 April 1204 AD, a sailor travelling up the Bosphorus, looking towards Constantinople, would have seen a sky red with fire. A joint force of Frankish and Venetian crusaders was running amok in the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Against the Pope’s wishes, the forces of the Fourth Crusade had taken this rich Christian city. Hanging over the invaders was the threat of excommunication: but so too was the lure of silver and spoil.
In the centre of the city of Constantinople was the Hippodrome. Able to accommodate up to 100,000 spectators this was the sporting and social hub of the Byzantine Empire. Work on the Hippodrome may have begun as early as the 2nd century AD; it was certainly completed by the 4th century AD. By 1204 the race-track doubled up as a forum for grand celebrations, civic, political and religious. It hosts less lofty events now: the workers of Istanbul eat their sandwiches here at lunchtime, a rusting fun-fair sits unused under its tarpaulin covers, letter writers tap out missives for the illiterate of the city.
In its day the site boasted the finest collection of antiquities anywhere in the world. Here were the great and the good of Greece and Rome, cast in bronze and carved in stone: Heracles, Zeus, Romulus and Remus; Paris handing Aphrodite the Golden Apple; the Emperor Augustus. Here too was Helen. And for three apocalyptic days in 1204, it was here in the Hippodrome that the crusaders’ fires burnt the fiercest.
There were cogent reasons for the desecration. The majority of the statues were pagan icons or personalities. Crusaders still thought these metal and stone shells contained spirits and demons. The Venetians and the Franks had already earned the disapproval of the Pope and his Church; they did not want to risk taking on the old gods as well. And of course all that molten bronze was very, very useful. The Hippodrome was a mine without the effort of digging. Tonnes of statuary and metal decoration were hacked down, smelted and then re-cast as coin. The only artworks to survive and be imported intact to Venice were four bronze horses – now world-famous – that galloped across the emperor’s box. Replicas of the horses still stand on the Basilica di San Marco today.3
But Helen was not so lucky: when the mob came to her, things got personal. An eyewitness (who clearly adored this metal vision, ranged as she was with her companions along the spine of the race-course), the Byzantine imperial secretary, Nicetas Choniates, described the scene:
What of the white-armed Helen, beautiful-ankled, and long-necked Helen, who mustered the entire host of the Hellenes and overthrew Troy, whence she sailed to the Nile and, after a long absence, returned to the abodes of the Lakonians? Was she able to placate the implacable? Was she able to soften those men whose hearts were made of iron? On the contrary! She who had enslaved every onlooker with her beauty was wholly unable to achieve this, even though she was apparelled ornately; though fashioned of bronze, she appeared as fresh as the morning dew, anointed with the moistness of erotic love on her garment, veil, diadem and braid of hair. Her vesture was finer than spider webs, and the veil was cunningly wrought in its place; the diadem of gold and precious stones which bound the forehead was radiant, and the braid of hair that extended down to her knees, flowing down and blowing in the breeze, was bound tightly in the back with a hair-band. The lips were like flower cups, slightly parted as though she were about to speak; the graceful smile, at once greeting the spectator, filled him with delight; her flashing eyes, her arched eyebrows, and the shapeliness of the rest of her body were such that they cannot be described in words and depicted for future generations. O Helen, Tyndareus’ daughter, the very essence of loveliness, offshoot of Erotes, ward of Aphrodite, nature’s most perfect gift, contested prize of Trojans and Hellenes, where is your drug granted you by Thon’s wife which banishes pain and sorrow and brings forgetfulness of every ill? Where are your irresistible love charms? Why did you not make use of these now as you did long ago? But I suspect that the Fates had foreordained that you should succumb to the flame’s fervour so that your image should no longer enflame spectators with sexual passions.4
Although Nicetas himself thought the destruction of the statue was motivated purely by material gain – to appropriate more bronze – the rumours ran through Christendom that this Helen had been destroyed by the Venetians to avenge their Trojan ancestors. Just as Troy had been ‘laid waste by the firebrand because of [Helen’s] scandalous amours’,5 so the Venetians had smashed and pulled Helen apart, fired up by vengeance and greed.
So today the Hippodrome is devoid of colossal statues. Only a couple of obelisks remain, stripped of their gilded bronze skins – stumps where once there were towering artworks. Helen used to be here; today she is a ghost.
And throughout history this is what Helen has become, a woman who has inspired such lust and such loathing she is forced into being a will-o’-the-wisp – always changing her form, here today, gone tomorrow. She is Protean and because of that she is perfect. She can become whatever the men around her want her to be; whether, like the ill-fated statue in the Hippodrome, a gleaming reminder of the glory of female sexuality, or, following the desecration of 1204, an amputated, broken memento of man’s talent for acts of greed and execration.
Helen’s journey through history has been as tempestuous as her journey from Sparta to Troy and back again. She has been harried and destroyed in a multitude of ways. When she endures, she often does so by the skin of her teeth. The Queen of Sparta might have survived the historical battles of the Bronze Age, but there were new struggles to come. Great epics such as the Cypria – similar in size and scope to the Iliad and the Odyssey – telling of her early life and love affair with Paris were lost in the Medieval Dark Ages. Tragic and satirical plays that dealt with Helen, and Helen alone, were destroyed by the great fire in the library at Alexandria in Egypt. Painted vases illustrating lesser known episodes of her life were smashed or still lie buried underground. Cult offerings left to her at springs have been washed away by the waters. She leads us a merry dance. The path from the past to the present can be a rocky one. But during her tempestuous journey through time, Helen has had an important ally in the form of Homer: an artist whose work was itself so iconic that, thanks to its preservation and parody, an inky Helen has fluttered on fragments of papyrus and parchment out of antiquity and into the modern world.