veyn fables … hyde trouthe falsely under cloude, And the sothe of malys for to schroude
Lydgate, Troye Book, Prologue, 265–6
IN HIS TROYE BOOK, composed between 1412 and 1420, John Lydgate denies that Homer can tell the truth of Troy.1 Homer is Helen’s greatest advocate, but he does not have a monopoly on her. In the ancient world, there were in fact a number of ‘anti-Homer’ versions of Troy, and therefore different ways of understanding Helen. There were the variant myths and misplaced epics that still circulated and which we find hinted at on Greek vases or referred to by philosophers, politicians, poets and play-wrights. Stesichorus tells us that Helen spent the duration of the Trojan War in Egypt. Herodotus concurs – saying he has spoken to Egyptian priests who confirmed that this was the ‘real’ story of Helen.2 Thucydides casts a more analytical eye and pumps Peloponnesians for their local knowledge, to back up his theory that it was economic ambition and bullying by Agamemnon that sent the Greek ships scurrying across the water to Troy – not love of Helen but rather ‘in my opinion, fear played a greater part than loyalty’ he says.3
Some alternatives are more extreme. Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Discourse, written some time between AD 60 and 120 during his peripatetic life around the Roman Empire, states that Troy was, in fact, never sacked. The rationale seems audacious and unexpected until one takes into account that the Romans claimed to be direct descendants of the Trojans, thanks to Aeneas who started out in life as a Trojan shepherd (or prince depending on which version of the story one favours) and then escaped from Troy – begetting children whose descendants, Romulus and Remus, founded Rome. So, for the Romans, the ‘West’ was created by their ‘ancestors’ the Trojans. In Roman popular culture the beloved Trojans needed panegyrics, to be commemorated as triumphant military heroes.
Helen had been there at the birth of the Greek democratic ideal, and now she found herself at the centre of the Roman Empire’s foundation myth. Because the Troy story gave the West its family tree, something rather interesting happens to Homer through the Fall of Rome and the medieval period. Many writers turn their backs on the great bard. While Virgil’s version of Troy, the Aeneid, keeps its popularity, with the spread of Roman propaganda and then Christianity, the Iliad and the Odyssey lose their canonic status.
Homer, a mere poet, is viewed in a number of quarters as an inappropriate source for moral discourse and a dubious witness to politically relevant events. Suddenly he is not someone to be relied on; he is an ‘artiste’ who shrouds the truth in falsehoods.4 Homer was merely inspired by the Muse; much more could be discovered about Troy via an ‘autopsy’, a scientific analysis of the facts, of hard evidence and of the statements of interviewees. This became a popular standpoint.5 We even have a word for this anti-Homeric stance – ‘Homerepanorthosis’, the correction of Homer.6
And there are two unlikely characters, Dictys and Dares, who championed their own ‘real’ alternatives to Homer. They are a curious pair; the former wrote around the 2nd century AD, the latter in the 6th century AD, from the Greek and Trojan points of view respectively.7 Throughout antiquity and the medieval period, there was never any doubt that the Trojan conflict took place. Remember that for Isidore of Seville, Helen’s rape was a seminal moment in world history. Dictys and Dares set themselves up as that fabulously valuable resource, on-the-ground war-reporters at an epoch-making military engagement – and the medieval world loved them for it.
Of course, since they were writing at least one and a half thousand years after the event, these men could not have been there at the time, but they both boldly claimed that they were, and Dictys even goes so far as to create his own back-story to prove how ‘real’ he is, casting himself as a soldier in the retinue of the Cretan king, Idomeneus, whom Homer details in the Iliad as coming to Troy with eighty black ships.8
Dictys’ Prologue, claiming to be God’s truth, is a wonderful exercise in imagination. It describes Dictys as a contemporary of the great heroes, Achilles, Ajax and Hector, who ensures that the sole copy of his eyewitness account is buried with him in a grave near Knossos. After a massive earthquake in AD 66 the grave splits open and local shepherds, spotting the furled pieces of papyri, rescue the manuscript. Eventually the precious document ends up in the hands of the Emperor Nero himself, who insists that it is translated from ancient Phoenician into Greek. An impressive piece of self-promotion.
The account that follows is rather stodgy – as befits Dictys’ purpose. After all, he was selling his story as a verbatim report rather than a poetic tale.9 Helen is a quiet little thing here. Menelaus seems more affected by the desertion of his female relatives Aethra and Clymene (two of Helen’s attendants) than he does by the loss of his wife. Paris (called Alexander in this version), a pernicious Eastern barbarian, is as covetous of Helen’s treasure as he is of Helen, ‘driven astray by greed for booty and lust’.10 When the Trojans revolt and refuse to harbour Helen, Paris masterminds a wholesale slaughter of the Trojan population. The killing stops only when Antenor (a Trojan elder and counsellor of King Priam) intervenes.
Menelaus is not won back by the sight of Helen’s breasts, as he is in the more licentious earlier Greek versions, but instead negotiates for her return through the intercession of Odysseus. Helen and Menelaus’ journey home is emotionless, the prose reading as a terse and denuded guidebook. If Dictys’ version were the sole surviving chronicle of Helen’s life, it is more than likely that this uninspiring, incidental creature would have been long forgotten.
Dares, on the other hand, enjoys the opportunity to explore the love interest of the tale. Dares probably produced his Trojan version in the 6th century AD as a counter to Dictys’ Hellenophile construction. In the Dares retelling of the story Helen and Paris catch a glimpse of each other for the first time while Helen is at the sea-port of Helaea worshipping in the temple of Diana and Apollo. The pair spent some time just staring, ‘struck by each other’s beauty’.11 Helen leaves with Paris and, after a brief moment of hesitation on the island of Tenedos, enthusiastically takes up court in Troy.
Dares promotes his ‘eyewitness’ credentials by attempting to blind the reader with an impressive quotient of statistics. Here we hear that the war lasted for ten years, six months and twelve days. He tells us there were 866,000 Greek casualties and 676,000 Trojan dead. There is an incidental point of interest in Dares’ account: Helen is seized tit for tat, as part of an ongoing series of affronts and insults traded between the House of Priam and the Greeks. Dares’ version approximates to the truth of the Bronze Age where women would be used for barter and as diplomatic trading chips. There is a slim chance that Dares had in fact picked up on a bardic or oral memory that preserved Late Bronze Age accounts of the bride market of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC.
What is significant is that Dares is sufficiently dismissive of Helen to adumbrate her fine features. This is not a Helen who has the face of a goddess – wonderful, terrible, unspeakable. This Helen is a mortal beauty, simply. Dares’ Helen would not make anyone tingle with fear. She is said to be like her brothers, ‘blond haired, large eyed, fair complexioned, and well built … She was beautiful, ingenuous, and charming. Her legs were the best; her mouth the cutest. There was a beauty-mark between her eyebrows.’ 12
The character of Helen might wax and wane through antiquity, but she never vanishes. Anno Domini she is as tenacious as ever. The Judaic tradition had already established Eve as the primordial transgressive female, so how would a faithless Queen of Sparta be dealt with in an increasingly Christianised world?