INTRODUCTION
Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu’on me fait un rapport, je dis: ‘Cherchez la femme’
There is a woman in every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, ‘Look for the woman’
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, Les Mohicans de Paris, 2, 3
IN THE HEART OF THE PELOPONNESE, in the centre of Sparta, there is a small square, filled with palm trees and roses. Across dappled paving stones and behind an erratic fountain is the Sparta Museum. Built with Greek-American money in the 19th century, the museum has seen better days – the paintwork must have been yellow ochre once; now it is patched and peeling, the colour of creamed butter. Classical sculptures, headless, many with limbs missing, flank the entrance. All is quiet and faded. Inside, there is a small number of artefacts from pre-historic, archaic and classical Greece: each is special and precious in its own way, but the labelling is minimal and rather listless: ‘Possibly of the 6th century BC ’; or ‘From Therapne, thought to be an offering to a Goddess’. 1 Every time I visit, the guards are squashed into a back room watching a Greek shopping channel and I have the place to myself.
My first stop is to pay my respects to a limestone block half a metre high. Two thousand five hundred years old and edged with carved snakes, it dominates one of the rooms. The stone has, front and back, a tantalisingly eroded scene. On one side, a warrior tenderly holds a young girl. On the other, the same warrior is lunging forward, his sword to the woman’s throat, ready to kill. But because the woman has turned towards the man, the impact of her face has transformed his attack into an embrace.2 The man is Menelaus, King of Sparta, the woman, his queen, Helen of Troy.
Helen, ‘whose beauty summoned Greece to arms, / And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos’,3 has been known for millennia as a symbol of beauty, and also as a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Following her double marriage – first to the Greek king Menelaus and then to the Trojan prince Paris – Helen came to be held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. She was, according to the oldest surviving ancient Greek written sources, put on the earth by Zeus to rid the world of its superfluous population:4 ‘[there was] a god-like race of hero men … grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them … [war] brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helen’s sake.’5 For nearly three thousand years, she has been upheld as an exquisite agent of extermination.
As soon as men in the West began to write, they made Helen their subject. Hesiod, born around 700 BC and one of the earliest named authors in history, was the first to chronicle her ‘wide renown stretching over all the earth’; the poet Sappho described ‘her beauty surpassing all mankind’.6 The epithets endured; it is how Helen is remembered today. When the New Scientist magazine debated how to quantify beauty, it was suggested that the measure should be the millihelen. 7 In El Paso, Texas, a multimillion-dollar business, Helen of Troy Ltd, distributes beauty products worldwide from its modernist, metal-clad headquarters. The company’s website beckons with the catch-phrase: ‘Look – and feel – fantastic with Helen of Troy.’ She is still a house-hold name, still commemorated as the gold standard of physical perfection.
A stone’s throw from the candyfloss and the Punch and Judy delights of Bournemouth Pier on the south coast of England, just up the breezy cliff path, is an extravagant Victorian mansion that houses the Russell-Cotes collection of art and curiosities. Inside there is an oil canvas, painted by Edwin Long in 1885 and entitled The Chosen Five. The setting of the painting is a workshop in southern Italy. Pressing in on a middle-aged man are five gorgeous creatures. One is blonde. One, naked apart from a necklace, has a mane of red hair caught up in a gold circlet. A brunette has her back turned, her chiton half-off, draped around her hips. A handsome Romanesque girl leans over a table playing draughts. The fifth, darker than the rest, has a lyre balanced in her naked lap and a leopard-skin rug licking around her thighs. All are statuesque but impassive. The male artist stares hungrily at the women but none meets his gaze.
This scene tells the story of a master-painter from the 5th century BC: Zeuxis, a man much in demand, particularly in Magna Graecia.8 Commissioned to produce a picture of Helen of Troy for the temple of Hera at Agrigentum in Sicily, Zeuxis decided he could realise his task only if the city supplied him with the five most beautiful maidens in the region as models – the sum of their beauty might at least approach Helen’s. The selection process started in the town’s gymnasium. Inspecting young men as they exercised, Zeuxis asked to see the siblings of the most handsome. Word went out and the pretty sisters of the pretty boys began to line up. Edwin Long created another painting, The Search for Beauty, which illustrates what happened next. It is a voluptuous scene. Here Zeuxis is ‘auditioning’ his models. Scores of women crowd around him; many begin to remove their clothes. One woman is drawing out a pin to let fall her blue-black hair. These girls had to be palpably perfect, perfect in every last detail if they were to become second Helens.9 Zeuxis surveys them eagerly, relishing the task in hand.
Across the English Channel and on the second floor of the Louvre in Paris there is another Zeuxis, attempting to paint another Helen.10 The scale of this 18th-century canvas is worthy of its surroundings: it is a mammoth thing, 4m across and 3.3m tall. Here there are five eager girls – again, each is a wonderful specimen. One blonde, with a blue ribbon in her hair and pearls around her neck, is undressed, her modesty precariously preserved by a flimsy drape of cloth – an old woman pokes at her, staring covetously at the plump young flesh which is about to be immortalised. Yet what dominates this painting is not the cluster of beauties – it is the bleak, virtually empty canvas in the centre of the composition. This is where Helen should be: a void that Zeuxis is desperately, abortively, trying to fill.
Because, of course, the wonderful irony about the most beautiful woman in the world is that she is faceless. There are no contemporary representations of a Spartan queen from the 13th century BC, the putative date of the Trojan War. The extant images of high-born Greek women from this period – the Late Bronze Age – are all standards, all recycled replicas within a genre. At this time there was no characterisation in Greek art. Excavators have turned up striking Bronze Age death masks – but only of men. There are precious signet rings belonging to the aristocrats of the time, but the female faces they bear are of abstracted, quasi-divine creatures; these are no portraits.
By the 7th century BC the ancient world does start to paint Helen’s picture, or inscribe her form on stone, clay and bronze.11 Yet these too are stylised, copybook approximations – the vase painters, sculptors and fresco artists of Greece and Rome worked to a recognised formula; we have no lifelike representation of Helen from antiquity. Museum storerooms around the world have shelves crammed with vases showing Helen at various points in her life-story and in her evolution as an idol – Helen as a girl, Helen as queen, Helen as a demi-goddess, Helen as a whore – but these images, without exception, are all made up; they reveal not who Helen was, but who men have wanted her to be.