They called me Helen. Let me tell you all the truth of what has happened to me.
EURIPIDES, Helen27
ANCIENT AUTHORS TELL US that Helen travelled extensively through the Bronze Age world, zigzagging across Greece, besieged in Anatolia and journeying to Egypt. They believed that after her death her spirit lived on in the landscape.
In Helen’s case, locations are particularly germane because we will never hear her voice, first hand, through textual evidence. Although the character of Helen derived from an epoch that used writing (an early form of Greek now called Linear B), the Linear B tablets that have survived – accidentally preserved when they were baked hard by the very fires that destroyed many Bronze Age palaces – deal with relatively mundane details of Bronze Age life. These are administrative lists, tallies of wine, pots, grain, oils and live-stock – the material culture that warrior-overlords controlled.
The Linear B script is utilised primarily for bureaucracy. In the tablets dug up to date there is little that is immediately recognisable as the inner voice of a civilisation, no self-conscious historical record.28 This is not a culture that employed written symbols as a form of emotional expression. For that, we have to wait until the reintroduction of writing around the time of Homer just after 800 BC. Greece in the 13th century BC, Helen’s age, still stands in pre-history.
But Helen’s is a story of two civilisations – of Greeks and of Trojans. There are fuller written sources from the ‘other’ side. Paris, Helen’s Trojan lover, occupied territory in the Troad, the coastal buffer-zone, now in modern-day Turkey, which in pre-history sat at the edge of the Anatolian landmass dominated by the great Hittite Empire. At the turn of the 20th century, excavators in central Turkey uncovered a cache of Hittite texts: diplomatic treaties, ritual tablets, royal biographies, accounts of trade and conflict. Tens of thousands of inscriptions have since been discovered. Some are carved into rocks and along remote mountain passes, others are still being dug out of the earth. Many tablet fragments have lain, undeciphered, in museum storerooms since they were first excavated a hundred years ago. About seven thousand fragments have yet to be published: there are simply not enough Hittite scholars, or research funds, to do the work.29 These Hittite texts give an eastern perspective to the Troy story that has not been fully explored. If Helen is to be explored as a real woman as well as an icon, and in a Bronze Age context, then they are vital testimonies.
Since recorded time, men have believed in Helen. They have believed in her both as an actual historical character and as an archetype of beauty, of womanhood, of sex, of danger. In my own pursuit of Helen, I will look not just at what she has come to mean, but what she meant to the populations of the past. I will explore the praxis of Helen, trying to imagine how she was experienced in antiquity and beyond, as men and women walked past her shrines, as they watched the priestesses of her cult inspect bloody entrails to determine her will, as they scratched lewd graffiti about her onto the walls of Rome, as they listened to politicians and philosophers enveloping her in their rhetoric, as they decorated their palaces and their temples with her image.
Helen’s admirers (and her detractors) have been many and various. Medieval nuns pored over an imagined exchange of love-letters between Helen and Paris from the Heroides, written by Ovid – honing their own skills in literary flirtation as versions of the poems were smuggled out to men, or even passed between the girls in the convent.30 In Renaissance England the rebellious named their daughters ‘Helen’ despite its categorisation by pamphleteers as an appellation that would bring disgrace.31 In 17th-century Europe artists were commissioned to decorate buildings with giant scenes of Helen’s abduction. One example, by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, still survives in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A horribly compelling composition, it soars on the ceiling of the Galerie Mazarine. In the neo-classical boom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries men such as the philosopher, historian and dramatist Friedrich Schiller used the name ‘Helen’ as a term of abuse, to mean a flirt, a tart, an immoral woman.32 Strolling through the Montmartre district of Paris in the 1860s you would have rubbed shoulders with a bohemian throng and an occasional royal, the Prince of Wales or the Tsar of Russia – all heading to the Théâtre de Variétés to watch Offenbach’s operetta sensation, La Belle Hélène.33
Dreamy 19th-century paintings portrayed Helen – anachronistically – as a plump, blonde, classical Greek beauty, dressed in diaphanous clothes. Scores of prostitutes found themselves plucked off the streets to be immortalised in oils, as ‘Sweet Helena’. The Spartan queen has spawned some of the most beautiful poetry of the 20th century, and some of its ugliest. There are sites on the internet that today invoke her as a powerful white witch, others that hail her as the first recorded female role-model. Helen encourages speculation in its truest sense – holding a speculum, a mirror, up to her ever-changing face to see what worlds can be glimpsed in the reflection behind.