Olympus let the other women die;
They shall be quiet when the day is done
And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me
There is no rest. The gods are not so kind
To her made half immortal like themselves.
SARAH TEASDALE, Helen of Troy (1884–1933)
Partly inspired by the discovery of pre-historic female figurines, a traditional thesis of early human societies developed, in which God was a woman. This understanding of how pre-historic populations viewed and constructed their world is rather neat and goes on the following lines: a single super-natural mother – often thought to be Mother Earth or Mother Nature – was originally worshipped across the Eastern Mediterranean; some even argue, across the globe. This notion was passionately presented by archaeologists, historians and scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Mother Earth theory was charismatic in its time, because it buttressed the idea that a society led (spiritually or politically) by women, was an ‘early’ form of humanity. A matriarchal, primitive world overseen by Mother Earth was the logical starting point for a race that was destined for greater, more progressive, and more manly things.
What people thought (and a number still think) was that at some point– perhaps with the discovery of bronze technology and the huge developmental leap which that discovery supported, perhaps with the invasion of nomads from the north – female authority gave way to male drive. The Stone Age came to its end, the Bronze Age started, and in the Aegean people set off on a spiritual path that led away from their omnipotent Mothers and ended up with the creation of the Olympian pantheon, headed by a pushy, ‘dark-browed’1 Zeus.
It is not without irony that similar arguments, although with a very different rationale, have also been employed by 20th- and 21st-century feminists who see early pre-history as the domain of a She-God. From this viewpoint, the divine mother presided over a golden age of female superiority ‘in the bedroom and the boardroom’, in the streets and in sanctuaries. So (the arguments go) this was a world of theacracy, gynarchy and matriarchy, the world’s natural state – women in control – realised and made manifest by its visionary and sensible early inhabitants. Men were not absent but they were acquiescent.
There are scholars who believe that Helen herself was one of these she-gods, perhaps the She-God. They argue that one all-embracing Mother Goddess, a goddess closely associated with the powers of nature, was worshipped up until the moment the invaders from the north came and disrupted the native inhabitants of mainland Greece. Many have pointed out that Helen’s association with sex and rape and the natural world makes her the perfect candidate for a personification of this spirit. But I am not entirely convinced. When I look at the range of female figurines made and the variety of contexts in which they were found, I am struck not just by their similarities but by their differences. I do not see an omnipotent She-God, the pre-historic equivalent of Allah or Yahweh, without his manhood and his beard, the sole recipient of Stone Age and Early Bronze Age devotion. To my mind, it is a mistake to project our monotheistic world-view onto the distant past. What may well have been the case is that that gorgeous, piercing, flighty, invisible force – life – was thought of as female by the pre-historic and ancient worlds. And that this female spirit was recognised at every turn. As soon as literature arrives we hear tell of this life-spirit, Gaia – the female power that breathes life into humans and immortals.2
Much of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean world was animist, believing that animae, ‘life-forces’, abounded, that they existed in spirit form. If it is accepted that the spirit of life itself was thought to be female then, in the Aegean Bronze Age, one has to imagine that the spirit in an ear of wheat, in the heavy olive bough laden with fruit, and in the ripening grape that darkens from electric green to blood-red, is female. On Bronze Age rings and seal-stones there are depictions of women gathering up branches and baskets of fruit and leaves while some kind of intense religious ceremony goes on – perhaps these were women tending to their agricultural sisters, in the earth, looking after their own.
The visual and oral evidence we have for the Bronze Age – figurines, storage jars, stories (including Helen’s), seal-stones, frescoes, hymns – suggest that for most of pre-history, the majority of these spirits associated with the fundamentals of life, food, sun, wind, rain, and fire, were indeed female. They might have been ‘virtual’ women, but they were still feminine forces on whom life depended, beings who were wooed with a constant passion.
In the ancient world the language used to describe nature’s larder was highly charged and overtly sexualised. Agriculture was thought to be the love-child of the hieros gamos, the sacred mating of heaven and earth. Desire for fertility and sexual desire were intimately linked. Much of the worship owed to Helen is appropriate for the worship of some kind of a nature divinity. The iconography of the Bronze Age suggests it was the job of the high priestess and her acolytes to summon all her resources to keep the earth fecund and responsive.
There is no doubt that Helen is consistently associated with natural abundance and the forces of nature. Standing up on Therapne in Sparta, surveying the town below in April or May, one might just have been able to catch a glimpse of an all-female procession, worshipping Helen in a pastoral ritual: the young girls of the town carrying boughs and branches and weaving wreaths out of the hyakinthos – almost certainly the Orchis quadripunctata3 – a delicate, native plant that flowers in late spring. One festival is called the Heleneia, one the Helenephoria – in the latter ‘holy things, beyond words’ (perhaps Helen’s flower Helenium) are carried in baskets.4 It is unclear whether or not these two rituals were distinct but almost certain that they were designed to honour Helen and to celebrate the exuberance of the spring and of natural beauty.5
Helen’s affiliation with the elements and natural features is further attested by a whole archipelago of islands that claim a connection with her. There is Pharos off the northern coast of Egypt near Memphis, also referred to as Helen’s Island, where Helen was said to have planted seeds of her own flower to ward off an infestation of snakes.6 At Cos, Plutarch tells us in his Life of Solon7 that she threw a golden tripod into the sea which was then fished out and fought over by fishermen, until the Delphic Oracle (no less) stepped in to arbitrate. The Greek writer Pausanias offers other possibilities – Helen, he relates, married Achilles once they were both dead8 (Achilles was known on Crete aspemptos, ‘No. 5’, because he was Helen’s fifth husband) and lived with him for an eternity on the legendary ‘White Island’,9 part of the Elysian Fields. For some this conjured up an image of a sublime union of the perfect hero and the perfect woman, but for others, Helen’s time in the land of the blest was an excuse for a bawdy romp.
Lucian of Samosata, writing in the mid-2nd century AD, claims in his comic burlesque the True Story to have seen Helen making love to the finest specimens here until she is willingly abducted from the island by Cinyras, the son of Scintharus – ‘a tall handsome lad, [who] had long been in love with Helen, and it was no great secret that she herself was madly enamoured of the boy’. Menelaus, not wishing to be cuckolded yet again, raises a hue and cry. Helen’s lover’s ship is overtaken and secured with a ‘hawser of roses’. Cinyras and his accomplices are bound together by their penises and then sent off ‘to the place of the wicked’.10 Helen, crying and hanging her head in shame, gets away with a mild scolding.
Pausanias, who had ethnographic interests, writes of Helen’s gruesome, vegetative connection with the island of Rhodes. This, he says, is what the Rhodian islanders told him of Helen. After Menelaus’ death, Helen was exiled by Nikostratos and Megapenthes.11 Rejected and homeless, the queen sought refuge with aristocratic allies on Rhodes. It was, as it transpired, a bleak choice. Polyxo, queen of the island, and an embittered Trojan war-widow, blamed Helen for her husband Tlepolemos’ death. Determined to wreak her vengeance, Polyxo feigns friendship and hospitality. While Helen bathes in the sea the widow queen orders her servants to dress up as Furies. These imposters taunt and terrify the aged Helen and then hang her on a tree – watching and waiting until her body has stopped twitching, until the last breath has been squeezed out of a woman who mothered a generation of orphans. The most womanly of women murdered by her own kind.
But – ever irrepressible – Helen’s story does not end there. Pausanias goes on to tell us that this gruesome murder is, paradoxically, why the Rhodian islanders (delighted by the fact that the Trojan Wars sapped the energy and resources of eastern raiders) honour Helen as Helen Dendritis, ‘Helen of the Trees’, with her own ‘Sanctuary of the Trees’.
The fact that Helen was worshipped on Rhodes as Helen Dendritis could be proof that she was, after all, a vegetation goddess – a deity with no real connection to the lived, political events of the Late Bronze Age. Fertility symbols were hung in trees in Greece. Maybe Eleni was one of them. But the evidence from Rhodes has a twist. Built into the floor of a Christian church on the island was a long-overlooked stone inscription made in the 2nd century BC. This stone slab – now rescued and held by the Copenhagen National Museum12 – is densely covered in close, careful script. Each line details the dedications at Lindos to the Temple of Athena. And here carved into the surface are the names of Helen and Menelaus. Menelaus bestows the helmet he tore off Paris on the plains of Troy, Helen offers up a pair of bracelets.13 On Rhodes Helen is remembered both as a tree-spirit and as a distinguished visitor – a queen rich and devout enough to leave jewels for the gods of Mount Olympus.
It is on Rhodes that we meet the gloriously complicated Helen face to face. The Rhodians whom Pausanias met must have called their tree-spirit Helen Dendritis to distinguish her from Helen of Sparta – and yet Helen of Sparta was also said to have visited the island. So here on Rhodes we have two distinct Helens. Distinct but complementary. The life-cycle of each woman reflects the other. Both are forces of nature bringing life and death. Both are important, both are gravid and desirable. Both are beautiful, both demand homage. Perhaps men and women wanted to try to understand the power of the earth and the meaning of sex – and via stories of the colourful, globe-trotting inhabitants of pre-history they could explore these ideas. In the cast-list of the Age of Heroes – the Late Bronze Age elite – they found a human character big enough to take on some of these fundamental questions.
What links the divinity worshipped on Rhodes and the rich site of Therapne and the spirit that runs through bathers’ fingers as they swim in Helen’s Baths with the gleaming Spartan queen of the epics, is an unimpeached sense of the power of the female. This is a belief that seems to have been present throughout much of the Bronze Age. It was an idea firmly challenged by the establishment of the Olympian pantheon controlled by the entirely masculine Zeus. The tide had turned, as the poet Hesiod encapsulates so baldly in his revisionist mythological poem Theogony (describing how Zeus’s creation of women punished man for Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods):
the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth … Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil.14
For some, a primordial Helen represents the greatest fire of them all – the sun. They argue that Helen and her twin brothers, the Dioscuri, could represent something rare in Greek mythology – pre-Hellenic Indo-European mythology. The worship of a sister and twin brothers, related to the all-powerful sun god, goes back to a time even before the Hellenes come to Greece. Parallel myths surface in the Rig Veda and the folksongs of Latvia15 where a number of folk-traditions seem to have survived without being supplanted by the ideas and sentiments of the classical and Christian worlds.16
In this context, Helen’s abduction by Paris was the equivalent of winter’s abduction of summer – an event that also brought with it, each year, deaths and acute hardship. Some Greeks thought that during the winter, and when weather conditions were severe, the sun migrated to Africa.17 The sun’s – Helen’s – departure is rarely forgiven.
So a number of academics do argue (sometimes bullishly, often persuasively, always with great erudition) that Helen herself was either just one female spirit, or even the pre-eminent among such spirits, a queen among divinities who was ‘trimmed down to size’18 to became a fabulously feisty mortal to fit in with the Homeric template. Paris did not fall in love with a woman, but with a faded goddess.
The chronology of this thesis is rather odd. Why, one wonders, would Homer bother to mortalise Helen and immortalise her in verse at the same time? And why would subsequent populations decide to turn her back into a goddess again, as a kind of back-handed compliment to Homer and to his power of imagination? Surely it is more likely that the Homeric Helen represented one of those real flesh-and-blood people who simply seem extraordinary. That the memory of this vibrant, charismatic mortal was conflated with the memory of a vibrant, charismatic nature goddess. Although I do not think that Homer’s Helen started out in life as a goddess, it is quite possible that a wildly attractive Lakonian queen was thought of as an appropriate candidate to graft onto an existing belief in sex-goddesses. Perhaps even, in this case, she was someone whose sexual power was indeed so marked that it was presumed by her peers (people who made little distinction between the physical and the spiritual) that she must be some kind of human incarnation of the spirit of fecundity.
Of course, those who argue that Helen was obviously an out-of-date goddess by-pass the possibility that a woman as sensational as Helen – a pivotal, clever, desirable creature – could have existed in the Bronze Age. And that, I think, is a mistake. We are so used to living in civilisations in which women traditionally have little recognition, it is easy to assume that when a spotlight is turned on the female sex the women represented must be extra-special, extraterrestrial, even, ergo, goddesses. But maybe not. Imagine a world where the greatest and most powerful mystery of all – the generation of life – clearly, visibly belongs in the domain of women, and then imagine that as a result, flesh-and-blood women are accorded huge, actual, day-by-day respect.
Hold in your mind the image of a world in which the stuff of life, agricultural produce, is thought to emanate from a female spirit. Imagine a landscape where that produce is marshalled and allocated not by men but by women and girls. Suddenly significant, commemorated women stop being unreal, liminal, supernatural oddities, but instead are seen as conscious powerhouses at the centre of society.
So Helen in her lifetime could well have walked the earth, light-footed. And after her death, memories and tales of this incandescent creature kept her spirit alive. Now that she is established as an immortal in the popular imagination, though, she becomes many things in the minds of men – a princess, a queen, a wife, a lover, a whore, a heroine, a star, a goddess of sex. And whatever her guises there is one constant – she is for ever Helen – ‘Eleni’, the shining one.