Fame has indeed made great heralding of you, and there is no land that knows not of your beauty; no other among fair women has a name like yours – nowhere in Phrygia, nor from the rising of the sun.
Paris comparing Helen’s beauty to that of Venus in OVID, Heroides1 (1ST CENTURY AD)
WHEN ZEUS ADDRESSES APHRODITE in the Iliad he counsels: ‘Fighting is not for you, my child, the works of war. See to the works of marriage, the slow fires of longing.’2 And the goddess of love obliges. On an amphoriskos (a vessel used to contain cosmetics or perfumes) in the Berlin Museum, painted in around 430 BC, Helen sits in Aphrodite’s lap.3 Our heroine looks a slip of a thing, an ingénue, an innocent being drilled in the facts of life. Aphrodite is giving the child-queen her instructions in the ways of love. And just in case this young recruit buckles under the strain, the goddess has brought along reinforcements. Eros is there, hovering, naked at the corner, and tugging at the Trojan prince’s arm, staring intently up at him, is another, urgent young male figure, another son of Aphrodite – Himeros, Desire.
PARIS: That is just the thing that seems downright incredible to me, that she should be willing to abandon her husband and sail away with a foreigner and a stranger.
APHRODITE: Be easy on that score; I have two beautiful pages, Desire and Love; these I shall give you to be your guides on the journey. Love will enter wholly into her heart and compel the woman to love you, while Desire will encompass you and make you what he is himself, desirable and charming. I myself shall be there too, and I shall ask the Graces to go with me; and in this way, by united effort, we shall prevail upon her.4
Helen was put on earth to catalyse desire. And for three millennia she has been hated for it: because in entertaining desire, we recognise our needs and our disappointments. Helen embodies mankind’s drive to covet, yearn, raven for what it does not have.5 Helen is both fantastical and terrible because however often she is enjoyed, she still promises more; no one stops wanting her. Theseus rapes her when she is a child but the heroes of Greece still queue up to win her hand. Paris takes her once again yet none the less thousands are prepared to die just to see her face. She has moved on to her second Trojan prince by the time Menelaus storms Troy, but still the Spartan king wants her back.
Helen’s guises may change, but not her role. Like a drop of mercury that will always reunite however often it is split, she remains one thing: the incarnation of sexual promise. She is a woman blessed or cursed by that strange alchemical ability to fuse passion of the head and the heart and thus cause the world, despite its best intentions, to fall hopelessly, disastrously in love with her. She is a factotum for our fantasies. This is the secret of Helen’s abiding celebrity, why she has won out over the many sensational women in Greek stories and histories: the other virgins who have been raped, the powerful queens, the seductive sorceresses. Here is a narrative not just of beauty, sex and death, but of eternal longing, a story born out of the first civilisation on the Greek mainland. Civilisation is rest-less, greedy – it always wants more, what it does not have. Longing propels us into uncharted territories, we go willingly and yet come to resent the journeys we have embarked on. Eros, eris; love and strife. Because we know we have to seek her, but because we know the consequences of the quest, Helen makes the world around her ‘bristle with fear’. There is a frisson as she passes.
Down the ages, different cultures have interpreted Helen in a way that reflects their own preoccupations. We want to categorise her, but we cannot. She is an icon of beauty who flees from view.6 Sometimes she is a victim of fate, sometimes a self-seeking force of evil. For some her beauty alone excuses her anything, for others it is proof that humankind is at its most frail when erotic passion impacts on human affairs. But without exception, all make it clear that once the person and image of Helen are distilled what is left is one irreducible element: a sex-appeal so powerful and so unknowable, that men will simply do anything – however cataclysmic – to possess it and therefore her.
And on that vase in Berlin we can read the punishment for being so desired. Helen is joined by another female figure who stands close by pointing an accusing finger at the thoughtful queen. She is Nemesis, the spirit of fate and revenge. She stares unwaveringly at Helen, inescapable. Some mythographers tell us that Nemesis – a sea-nymph – was Helen’s mother; they make the connection between beauty and fate umbilical.7 Mention Nemesis today and Greek men will swear and spit, to ward off her evil power. But Helen, the sometime child of Nemesis, has no heed of curses, and after two and a half thousand years of vilification, she is used to them.
Helen whirls through history, often turning full circle as she does so. She is worshipped by the ancient Greeks as a sex-goddess, and becomes that again in the Gnostic tradition. Works of scholarship claim Helen’s responsibility for a huge range of things from the Aryan ideal, fair-haired, blue-eyed superiority,8 to Easter eggs (fertility symbols), from the Hollywood stereo-type of blonde bombshell to fairies strung up on top of our Christmas trees – a much corrupted version of a tree-spirit.9 Men seize her from the Spartan palace and entrap her in whichever sanctuary or castle or brothel or heaven or hell best befits their age. They are attempting, always unsuccessfully, to frame her beauty, both mentally and physically: creating ever more Helens as they do so.
For since I crossed this threshold last, as duty bade,
All unsuspecting, visiting Cythera’s shrine,
And there was ravished by an adventurer from Troy,
Much has befallen: far and wide men tell the tale
And take their pleasure in it. But no tale can please
One round whose name legend spins its false report.10
An aside. Just a week after September 11, 2001 I was taken to Heathrow Airport by my local mini-cab company. My destination was North America and, inevitably, we talked about the cause of the recent attacks. My mini-cab driver laid the responsibility for the entire tragedy at Monica Lewinsky’s door. If it had not been for her, he said, the Bush administration would never have got in. In his opinion Bush was only in power (and therefore al Qu’eda was only so active) because a degenerate woman had made Bill Clinton ‘weak around the trousers’. It is an opinion I am sure a number of classical male Greeks would have subscribed to.
The connection between Helen and Monica was made explicit by Jeffrey Toobin following the Clinton affair: ‘As is demonstrated by the history of scandal from Helen of Troy to Monica of Beverly Hills, sex has a way of befogging the higher intellectual faculties.’11 Like Helen, Monica Lewinsky was memorably described by Bill Clinton not by name but as ‘that woman’.
Helen is an archetype. Men fall for her, have sex with her and then, when terrible things happen, it is she who gets the blame.12
We still – with woeful partiality – focus on the ‘shame’ rather than the triumph of Helen’s life-story. For centuries we have chosen to adopt the post-Homeric, misogynist world-view, a view codified in cities such as Athens from the 5th century BC onwards, as a precedent for our own – but Helen springs from an earlier time. Since the birth of history her name has never been forgotten. Her very survival is proof of her significance. She is special because she is a consistent female presence, both sacred and profane, across three millennia. Worlds have changed, civilisations have come and gone, social, cultural and political sensibilities have shifted, poets have sung and been silenced, but Helen has outlasted them all.
And what of that elusive pre-historic Helen, the Bronze Age queen who sat on the limestone blocks of the Spartan palace? The aristocrat who controlled the men around her. The hieratic potentate who owned land. The woman who glistened as she passed, smelling of olive oil and roses, and who left the palace by night to officiate at heady cultic rituals. The queen who lived in a palace adorned with images, high priestesses, goddess-girls: who prepared narcotics, who walked hand in hand with the spirits of her land. A woman who had pole position – power, wealth and respect.
Evidence of this woman’s life is embedded in the Peloponnesian and Anatolian landscape. She has left us many clues, but she has not left us a corpse. Although it seems from the conditions on the Spartan citadel that this is the one piece of Helen that has escaped for certain from the record, I will share my private fantasy of ‘the world’s desire’: that one day her body will be found. Because it is only when Helen of Troy becomes a desiccated pile of bones, when men can look at a toothless jaw, a tarnished ring and hand that has become an incomplete claw, that she can, finally, be laid to rest. Only then that we will stop hounding her, stop blaming her for being the most beautiful woman in the world.
HELEN
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands
and the white hands
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white
remembering past enchantments
and past ills
Greece sees,
unmoved, God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees
could love indeed the maid
only if she were laid
white ash amid funeral cypresses.13