Helen, weaken men by love. Ready to force open the gates of Troy and to force open the women protected by the city’s sloping walls.
As Homer fleshes out the narrative of the Trojan War, we come across a use of language that does not presume a dividing line between the lust for love and the lust for blood. Swords and rapiers stab at yielding bodies. The heroes seek satisfaction in slicing open their enemies’ flesh. Hector teases and intimidates Ajax: ‘
My long spear will devour your white flesh
.’ 6 Or, as Fagles puts it in his translation of the same line: ‘
If you have the daring to stand against my heavy spear, its point will rip your soft warm skin to shreds!
’ 7 Suddenly, in the heat of battle, towering Ajax has become female: in Greek artistic and literary iconography it is usually women who boast soft, lily-white flesh.
Aphrodite’s lovers were Ares the god of War, and Hermes the guide of the dead. 8 And so unfortunately for Paris and for Helen, where love travels,
eris
(discord or strife or deadly conflict) will follow. Helen’s is a gutsy love in pursuit of which much blood will be spilled. She is as deadly as she is delectable. When we talk about desire and death, sex and violence, we couple them because they are distinct, contra. But for the ancients these were closecousins, the malign progeny of unbridled nature, building blocks of the cosmos, creatures close to Chaos. Helen’s love was lethal. She is famous for inspiring men to fuck and to fight. Consequently we remember her, not as Helen of Sparta, but as Helen of Troy. 9
The conflation of sex and violence in the Greek mind can be traced through the language. Both lovers and warriors can mingle together:
meignymi. Damazo
could mean to slaughter or rape or to seduce or subdue.
Kredemna
denotes either a city’s battlements or the veils of a woman. When Troy falls, both will be ripped and blasted – the thing they had hidden will be defiled and destroyed. Writers such as Thucydides and Euripides used the word
eros
in metaphors to describe the fever that roused men to fight. The Spartans sacrificed to the spirit of Eros before they went into battle.
It is little surprise that ‘much-desired’ Helen enters extant written record as spoil. We first hear about her in Book 2 of the
Iliad
where she is described both as ‘a trophy’ and as an instrument of destruction. The gods are gossiping. Hera is warning Athena that the Argives have lost hope and are sailing home:
… Inconceivable!/ … All the Argives flying home to their fatherland,/ sailing
over the sea’s broad back? Leaving Priam/ and all the men of Troy a trophy to
glory over,/ Helen of Argos, Helen for whom so many Argives/ lost their lives
in Troy, far from native land.
10
Helen’s casual introduction here into the plot of the
Iliad
demonstrates that Homer does not need to explain her origins, confident as he was that his audience was already familiar with a fuller Helen narrative. The poems of the Epic Cycle, written a hundred years or so after Homer, which tell of Helen’s earlier life, must have been echoes of older songs, lost now, that dealt in more detail with the tale of the Queen of Sparta.
When we meet Helen face to face in the
Iliad
, in Book 3, she is brought in to survey the men fighting for her on the plains of Troy. Priam, the great king who is about to see the pride of Greece crawling over his lands, slaughtering his men and enslaving his women, calls her over to watch: ‘
Come over here, dear child. Sit in front of me … I don’t blame you
’. 11 So there is Helen, famous, beautiful and desired. A prize for Trojans and Greeks alike. She is watching men slug it out for her, just as they did twenty years before in the marriage contest arranged by her father. But now the bar has been raised as Anatolian heroes too have entered the fray. The need to possess the ultimate beauty will spur Greeks and Trojans alike to a ruthless odium.
Today it is still possible to
As Homer fleshes out the narrative of the Trojan War, we come across a use of language that does not presume a dividing line between the lust for love and the lust for blood. Swords and rapiers stab at yielding bodies. The heroes seek satisfaction in slicing open their enemies’ flesh. Hector teases and intimidates Ajax: ‘
My long spear will devour your white flesh
.’ 6 Or, as Fagles puts it in his translation of the same line: ‘
If you have the daring to stand against my heavy spear, its point will rip your soft warm skin to shreds!
’ 7 Suddenly, in the heat of battle, towering Ajax has become female: in Greek artistic and literary iconography it is usually women who boast soft, lily-white flesh.
Aphrodite’s lovers were Ares the god of War, and Hermes the guide of the dead. 8 And so unfortunately for Paris and for Helen, where love travels,
eris
(discord or strife or deadly conflict) will follow. Helen’s is a gutsy love in pursuit of which much blood will be spilled. She is as deadly as she is delectable. When we talk about desire and death, sex and violence, we couple them because they are distinct, contra. But for the ancients these were closecousins, the malign progeny of unbridled nature, building blocks of the cosmos, creatures close to Chaos. Helen’s love was lethal. She is famous for inspiring men to fuck and to fight. Consequently we remember her, not as Helen of Sparta, but as Helen of Troy. 9
The conflation of sex and violence in the Greek mind can be traced through the language. Both lovers and warriors can mingle together:
meignymi. Damazo
could mean to slaughter or rape or to seduce or subdue.
Kredemna
denotes either a city’s battlements or the veils of a woman. When Troy falls, both will be ripped and blasted – the thing they had hidden will be defiled and destroyed. Writers such as Thucydides and Euripides used the word
eros
in metaphors to describe the fever that roused men to fight. The Spartans sacrificed to the spirit of Eros before they went into battle.
It is little surprise that ‘much-desired’ Helen enters extant written record as spoil. We first hear about her in Book 2 of the
Iliad
where she is described both as ‘a trophy’ and as an instrument of destruction. The gods are gossiping. Hera is warning Athena that the Argives have lost hope and are sailing home:
… Inconceivable!/ … All the Argives flying home to their fatherland,/ sailing
over the sea’s broad back? Leaving Priam/ and all the men of Troy a trophy to
glory over,/ Helen of Argos, Helen for whom so many Argives/ lost their lives
in Troy, far from native land.
10
Helen’s casual introduction here into the plot of the
Iliad
demonstrates that Homer does not need to explain her origins, confident as he was that his audience was already familiar with a fuller Helen narrative. The poems of the Epic Cycle, written a hundred years or so after Homer, which tell of Helen’s earlier life, must have been echoes of older songs, lost now, that dealt in more detail with the tale of the Queen of Sparta.
When we meet Helen face to face in the
Iliad
, in Book 3, she is brought in to survey the men fighting for her on the plains of Troy. Priam, the great king who is about to see the pride of Greece crawling over his lands, slaughtering his men and enslaving his women, calls her over to watch: ‘
Come over here, dear child. Sit in front of me … I don’t blame you
’. 11 So there is Helen, famous, beautiful and desired. A prize for Trojans and Greeks alike. She is watching men slug it out for her, just as they did twenty years before in the marriage contest arranged by her father. But now the bar has been raised as Anatolian heroes too have entered the fray. The need to possess the ultimate beauty will spur Greeks and Trojans alike to a ruthless odium.
Today it is still possible to
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