There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desirable, that calls either for art or for character.
J.-W. Goethe (from posthumous papers)34
HISTORY IS AT ONCE BAFFLED AND ENRAPTURED BY HELEN; we can trace nearly three millennia of ambiguous attitudes towards her. She is difficult to categorise for good reason; a pursuit of Helen across the ages throws up three distinct, yet intertwined, guises. When we talk about her, we are in fact describing a trinity.
The most familiar Helen is the brilliant regal beauty from the epics, particularly Homer’s Helen: the Spartan princess with divine paternity fought over by the heroes in Greece and then won by Menelaus’ wealth. The queen who – led on by the goddess of love, Aphrodite – welcomed a Trojan prince into her bed while her husband was overseas. The head-strong, capricious aristocrat who deserted the Greeks, sailed across the Aegean and then languished in Troy, hated by all around her. The exile who watched heroes suffer agonies in her name – fleet-footed Achilles, red-haired Menelaus, sharp-witted Odysseus, Agamemnon, the king of men; and of course the lads from the eastern camp – Hector, breaker of horses, Priam, lord of a glorious citadel, and Paris with his glistening love-locks.
This is the invidious Helen who walked around the Trojan Horse, imitating the voices of the Greek wives, attempting to dislodge her erstwhile countrymen from their equine siege-breaker. The adulteress who, after ten sad, punishing, faithless years in Troy, was still so entrancing that her cuckold husband, Menelaus, could not bear to kill her. The enigmatic figure who sailed back to Sparta while Paris’ body smouldered on the Trojan plain, back to a daughter whom she had left motherless, back to a bed she had left cold. The creature – flawed and yet strangely dignified – who demonstrated that female beauty was something to fear as well as to crave.
But Helen was not just a finely drawn character from the Greek epics, not just a ‘sex-goddess’ in literary terms. She was also a demi-god, a heroine, worshipped and honoured at shrines across the Eastern Mediterranean. She was perceived as an integral part of the spiritual landscape. Men and women made propitiation to her earthy power. In Sparta she was invoked by young virgins; in Egypt she had uxorial duties, caring for newlyweds and old wives; and in Etruscan society her half-dressed form was carved on the funerary urns of high-born women – a valued companion for the journey into the afterlife.35 Some scholars believe that a mortal Helen never existed, but that she is, instead, simply the human face of an ancient nature-goddess, a full-blown divinity, a pan-Hellenic spirit of vegetation and fertility. A visceral force that brings with it both life and death.
Then there is the ‘shameless whore’,36 the ‘traitorous bitch’37; the ‘Aegeyan bitch, her of the three husbands, who bare only female children’;38 the ‘strumpet’;39 the beautiful, libidinous creature irresistible to men; the pin-up, golden-haired, phantom Helen, lambasted in theological texts and draped across the art galleries of Europe, an eroticeidolon – a Greek word meaning a ghost, an image or idea – an idol of female beauty and sexuality, both lusted after and despised.40
I believe that all three incarnations – princess, goddess and whore – find their root in a Bronze Age Helen, that the template for Helen of Troy was provided by one of the rich Spartan queens who lived and died on the Greek mainland in the 13th century BC; a woman who slept at night and woke at dawn, a flesh-and-blood icon, an aristocrat responsible for orgia – secretive, mysterious fertility rites – a woman so blessed, so honoured, so powerful, she appeared to walk with the gods. A mortal who, down the centuries, has become larger than life.
Because Helen is such an alluring figure of fantasy, because she dazzles as she goes, she can make it hard to see the women of substance who walked through the Bronze Age palaces of the Eastern Mediterranean. But ongoing archaeological and historical projects demonstrate that these women were prominent and significant: broken writing tablets tell us that female aristocrats were used as diplomatic trading chips, highly valued commodities passed from one state to another, the Bronze Age equivalent of the Black Tulip. Within the context of her world, Helen is a historical possibility.
Greece and Anatolia had a complicated, fractious and intense relation-ship at the end of the Bronze Age. Magnates from both sides married each other’s women, fought over each other’s territories and joined together in trade. In Turkish waters divers have found Bronze Age ocean-worthy vessels laden with precious goods, which sank as they made the journey between the Greek mainland and Asia Minor. Official letters sent across the Aegean from one great leader to another can flatter or they can simmer with scarcely contained fury. Stockpiles of sling-shot have been discovered at the walls of Troy. And the civilisations that Helen and Paris represent – the Mycenaeans (based on the Greek mainland) and the Hittites (in command of much of Turkey and the Middle East), along with their allies such as Troy – imploded in a dramatic rush of flame and confusion at the end of the 13th century BC. At the height of their power, something or someone brought these giants to their knees.
Slowly pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are fitting together. As more Bronze Age texts are translated, as more material culture is recovered in archaeological excavations, Homer’s epic, describing the conflict between the Greeks41 and the Trojans, edges closer to fact and Helen’s story rings ever more true. Digs at Troy have not yet produced Prince Hector’s mangled body, nor the remains of a god-like hero called Achilles, an arrow piercing his heel, nor, miraculously preserved in anaerobic conditions, the fetlock of a giant wooden horse. And they are never likely to do so. But what they have yielded is a city destroyed by fire and a culture rocked to its core. The Hittites and the Mycenaeans were mighty – less than a hundred years after the putative date of the Trojan War, they disappear.42 What Helen has come to mean is universal; but her story is proving increasingly appropriate to the circumstances of the Late Bronze Age.
A caveat: to date, no human remains of a 13th-century BC Spartan queen have been identified. Until we discover a Late Bronze Age burial in Sparta itself, containing a skeleton with sufficient uncontaminated DNA to test positively as female, lying next to a Greek king, both corpses wearing Trojan gold, the site surrounded by dedications marked ‘eleni ’ written in a Bronze Age script; then, and only then, can we say, categorically, we have found our human Helen. And the wait for such an eventuality will almost certainly be interminable.
Pre-history is a temporal land of ifs, buts and maybes, a land that up until a hundred and fifty years ago still lay buried and mute. But it conceived the idea of a woman who became the cause célèbre of the most influential work of epic literature in the West. We have the story, and now it is up to us to find its roots.
If Helen is a confection, an artistic construct, she was originally the construct of the pre-historic mind; if she is a nature divinity, her worship began in pre-history; if she is real, she lived and loved as a pre-historic princess. To understand all three Helens, we have to start our journey in her pre-historic world. A world which is other, rich and strange.