Helen
of Troy
DAWN The Review, August
2000
The face that launched a thousand ships
may never have existed for all we know. There are no contemporary
records of Helen of Troy, who is sometimes believed to have lived
in Greece in the 13th century BC. Excavations at the site of the
ancient Troy, now in modern Turkey, don't help us determine whether
any such incident as Trojan War ever happened there. The oldest
reference to Helen is found, of course, in Homer's two classic
poems but then Homer's own existence is uncertain and the poems
attributed to this blind ancient poet were constructed at least
five centuries after the days of Trojan War. And yet to the ancient
Greek scholars, including the father of history Herodotus and
his more scientific successor Theucydides, Helen and the war allegedly
fought over her possession were unquestionable historical facts.
Helen has remained an inspiration
for poets and artists, long after the famous muses of ancient
Greece have stopped functioning. Right at the dawn of modern enlightenment
she appeared as the heroine of Goethe in the second part of his
masterpiece Faust. In our own century, the Irish poet
W.B. Yeats compared her legendary status with Jesus Christ, two
figures attributed divine lineage at the dawn of two subsequent
milleniums. Helen may belong more properly to the field of mythology
than history, but strangely, it doesn't make her less historic.
If we assume that she existed, and
strip down mythology to retrieve the minimum believable information,
then the story of Helen might go like this.
Helen used to live in Sparta, one
of the several Greek kingdoms in the thirteenth century A.D. Herself
a princess, she was married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta and
probably had a daughter from him. Bewitched by the charms of Paris,
a visiting prince from Troy, she soon developed sexual relations
with him and finally eloped with him to his parent city. What
moved her to do so, we don't know but it was most probably a combination
of physical attraction and the elegant mannerism that the foreigner
prince must have effused with his every gesture.
Helen's attraction to Troy is a
remarkable diversion in her story. The ancient Eastern city was
far more superior in its culture than the contemporary Greece,
which had just begun to emerge from the shadows of savagery. Troy
had existed in its place as an important centre of trade in the
ancient world for nearly a thousand years. The Greeks, on the
other hand, were a herd of nomadic people who had migrated from
some unknown corner of Russia just a little while ago. They barely
had a literature, and until a couple of generations ago they didn't
even know how to read and write. Their major source of revenue
was a mix of loot from their newly learnt craft of sailing. If
Helen was the paragon of grace and beauty that the later generations
believed her to be, then she might have thought herself more suited
to dwell at Troy than the robber kingdoms of Greece. Here husband,
incidentally, didn't see things in a similar light and as soon
as he discovered the elopement he gathered all the rulers of Greece
to enlist them on his war against Troy. Together they built a
mighty armada and sailed across the Dardenelles to storm the enemy
stronghold.
Troy fell after a siege of several
years and Menelaus returned with his wife. He probably never made
an issue of her elopement again, and they lived like husband and
wife ever after. The king's oblivion of his wife's adultery appears
strange in a patriarchal context, and the Greeks of the later
day came up with several explanations. But we don't have enough
knowledge about the sexual ethics of those days, and for all we
know, many societies in the world had just emerged from a matriarchal
system of living.
This might have been the basic story
of Helen that was handed down to the earliest Greek mythologists,
who appeared a few generations later when Greece had developed
into a prosperous land of strength and prosperity (resulting to
no small extant from its plunder of Troy). Now the Greeks needed
their own brand of literature and folklore and their mythologists
created a world of legends more remarkable than produced by any
other civilization. In the process Helen was transformed into
a full-fledged heroine.
Those mythologists, whose names
are lost to us, were also great thinkers. Through simple stories
they related complicated values and truths about life. The material
for these stories came from heroes such as Hercules, who must
have lived a little earlier than Helen, and others whom Helen
might have entertained in her own palace in her lifetime. Among
them was the fearless sea captain Odysseus, later known as Ulysses
to the Romans, who himself had been in love with her at one time.
The Greek mythologist explained
the exceptional charisma of Helen by turning her into a daughter
of Zeus, the king of all gods. Hence we got one of the most amazing
versions of divine conception in the ancient literature: Zeus
turned into a swan and impregnated Leda, the wife of king Tindareus.
After nine months of pregnancy the awesome woman laid a huge egg
from which emerged Helen and her brother. The divine conception
of Helen also solved the ethical problem of Menelaus' silence
over his wife's betrayal: since Helen was a daughter of Zeus,
Menelaus derived his own authority from his marriage to her and
therefore he couldn't annul it!
The conduct of Menelaus thus justified,
the conduct of Helen still remained a problem. But the mythologist
always had a god in the machine to descend on the stage if the
play got stuck. Thereby came the wonderful story about the Apple
of Discord. It was said that the goddess Discord threw an apple
in a gathering of all goddesses and on that apple was written:
"to the most beautiful."
Every goddess desiring to become
the recipient of this certificate, the final shortlist contained
three of the most strong-headed deities known to Greeks. On the
instruction of Zeus they went to Paris, the handsome young man
of the ancient world, and asked him to be their judge. Hera, the
wife of Zeus, offered him a kingdom. Athena, the goddess of wisdom
offered him stability. Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love
and beauty promised him the sexual favours of the most beautiful
woman on earth. Paris handed down the apple to Aphrodite. Hence
it was no one lesser than the goddess of love who turned Helen's
heart towards Paris.
The story of Discord had other implications
too, which were duly noticed by its ancient Greek audience. Power,
wisdom and love do not unite in this imperfect world, sadly, and
one has to choose between them, like Paris. The love of a beautiful
woman eats up the other virtues and anyone who would make such
a choice, would end up like Paris -- bringing destruction upon
him as well as on his city. The whole story had a misogynous moral:
if the most beautiful woman of all times wasn't worth the pain,
who else could be?
While the earlier Greeks were satisfied
with this justification, the later day moralists needed a further
twist. Their historian Herodotus heard a story from the Egyptians
who claimed that Helen and Paris made a visit to Egypt while on
their way to Troy. When the ruling pharaoh discovered their licentious
affair he arrested Helen so that she could be returned to her
husband while Paris was asked to leave alone. Hence, Herodotus
argued, Helen never set her foot on the soil of Troy, or else
the Trojans would have given her up at some point in the ten year
long war just to save their skins. Euripedes, the master playwright
lived in the Athens in the fourth century BC, twisted this story
to create a plot in which Helen never falls in love with Paris,
or for that matter, with anyone else other than her husband. In
his play Helen, the goddess Hera orders Hermes (Mercury)
to create a look-alike of Helen out of thin air. It is this illusionary
Helen who makes loves to Paris and elopes with him, while Hermes
carries the real Helen away to a temple in Egypt. Menealus captures
Troy but doesn't find his wife there, only to meet her in a dramatic
climax on the sands on Egypt.
In this sad forgery of the original
tale, the warm-blooded Helen turns into a listless character who
is given such monologues as, "Would God I could rub my beauty
out like a picture, and assume hereafter in its place a form less
attractive!" Euripedes' Helen was a woman cut down to the
size of men living by the values of mediocrity.
The story of Helen had its frills
too. Among other anecdotes, it was added that merely at the age
of twelve she had become so famous for her beauty that Theseus,
the great Athenian hero who had slain Minotaur of Crete, abducted
her and kept her for two years while waiting for her puberty to
marry her. Helen was returned, however, from Athens without as
much disaster as would coincide her return from Troy later.
Another interesting anecdote was
about the numerous suitors who gathered at the city of Helen's
father Helen was declared of a marriageable age. These included,
among others, the famous Odysseus. Helen's father asked them all
to take a vow that if Helen was ever abducted to a foreign land
they would stand united in their efforts to bring her back even
if they had to go to the farthest end of the world. In the Helen
story this oath aided her husband Menelaus to gather the Greek
kings, although historically speaking the Greek invaders of Troy
wouldn't have needed it -- Troy was a rich prey and they would
have attacked it anyway.
However, the most exotic touch was
the remarkable device of the Trojan Horse. There is no way of
knowing if such an event ever happened in history, but the wooden
horse that carried Greek soldiers in its belly and into the well-guarded
city of Troy has become one of the most well-known images from
ancient history. Homer gives Helen the treacherous role of leading
a band of Trojan soldiers to check for hidden soldiers in the
horse's belly. But if we are to believe Herodotus, Helen probably
wasn't present on the site to witness this marvel of ancient carpentry!
One way or another, Helen has caught
the fancy of some of the most imaginative people in the human
history. In the age of Renaissance she became the ultimate prize
of Doctor Faustus at the end of his long quest of unimaginable
pleasures, a fitting reward for which one could sell one's soul
to the devil! In the second part of Goethe's masterpiece Faust,
Helen appears again as the central female figure.
The historic Helen, if she existed,
must have appeared to her contemporaries as a formidable expression
of female existence independent of social and restrictions. Helen
could have been a woman who refused to wear any of the shackles
invented by her heroes: morality, patriotism, common good. The
legendary Helen is a slightly different case from her historical
or semi-historical counterpart.
In the stories written about Helen
by men authors, whether new or old, she represents the essence
of female sexuality as it is perceived by men, its joy and pains,
its threats and promises. Each author has measured her character
by the standard of his own existence. For the spirited earlier
Greeks, for whom the fear of death was an exciting challenge Helen
was a woman of unrestrained desires whose sexual arousal could
unleash war at the largest scale. Subsequent generations modified
her according to the secret desires, and fears, of their own hearts.
