The Provo Great Books Club read the Odyssey over the summer, and that’s led to several posts of mine: one on translations, one on the runner-up secondary works(by Gregory Nagy, Luc Ferry, and Bernard Knox), and another on the best, Jenny Strauss Clay’s The Wrath of Athena, and Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments.
As it seems something I need to get out of my system, I plan to write a few more such posts, and at least one of these should focus on Odysseus himself; this one, however, is about Helen. She might be thought of as a minor character, for despite being the putative cause of the Trojan War, and thus of all the action of the Iliad and Odyssey, she is not much featured in either work: in the second, she’s only “on stage” for 30% of book IV, and in the first, for 20% of book III and 60 or so lines elsewhere. And up until reading Brann, I didn’t think she was all that interesting of a character.
On the Side-Tradition of the “Illusory Helen”
In literature outside Homer, there have been two ways of making Helen’s story more complex; one of these is fairly natural, the other, glaringly artificial. The first, which seems to have been undertaken by now-lost parts of the Trojan “Cycle,” such as the Cypria, is to explore whether Helen’s going off with Paris was more of a seduction assented to—perhaps even invited--, or, more of an abduction. Glimpses of this question are discernible in Homer also, but for an extra-Homeric example in the surviving literature, see the two brief sections in Herodotus which mention Helen, I, 3-4, and II, 112-120, wherein both possibilities, of willing seduction or abduction, remain on the table.
But Herodotus more notably entertains an additional wrinkle, one suggested by the tradition of an “illusory Helen,” pioneered by Stesichorus, a 7th-century poet whose works survive only in fragments. His Paris took Helen to Egypt on the way to Troy, and as in the story Herodotus was told by Egyptian priests, she was rescued from her abduction, or folly, by an Egyptian king, and then, she was replaced by a phantom Helen, thus fooling Paris, and soon enough, the Trojans also. As the real one was sheltered by this king Proteus(not to be confused with the shape-shifting god Proteus in Od. IV), Menelaus would find her in Egypt after the war; and what is more, and really the key implication, that whole war was fought over an illusion. Herodotus won’t give the phantom aspect of the story credence enough to even report it, but his account does agree with Stesichorus on that last idea, and on the real location of Helen during the war.1
Euripides, in his perhaps most “New-Comedic” play, Helen, would further fool with the device of the phantom Helen, by having Hermes teleport the real one to Proteus and simultaneously slip the phantom one to Paris! (240-250, 575-624) This set the stage for an innocent Helen to be the subject of a rescue-melodrama (trite, but mercifully laughing-at-itself in places) when Menelaus shows up after the war, since Proteus has died by then and the new king intends to force her to marry him. One could explore—as I make a stab at in the next footnote--whether this fits or not with Euripides’s other presentations of Helen, the ones in Orestes, Trojan Women, and at the end of Electra, but it’s not clear why one ought to care. For one, Helen and Orestes are probably the plays which most expose Euripides to the charges, respectively, of harming Athens’ taste with frivolous drama, and her morality with sophistic reasoning—these are the charges made famous by Aristophanes’ Frogs, and further developed by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. For two, while I have not read all his dramas, the ones I have make me pretty sure that he was not aiming to provide an all-stories-harmonized Euripides-version of Greek mythology, but rather, was improvising as he went, for each play grabbing onto whatever might most provoke his audience this time around.2
So overall, while Herodotus makes some valuable points by touching upon this alternative tradition of the illusory Helen, ones that fit with his mission to be 1) a reporter of non-Greek accounts, 2) a questioner of mythic/Homeric authority in general, and 3) a skeptical reasoner about human motives concerning political matters,3 the literary instances of it are forced, and do not bring us to a more interesting Helen.
By contrast, Brann’s commentary shows us that Homer’s Helen, and she is the only one we will concern ourselves with from this point forward, is much more complex than meets the eye: she is far more than a passive possessor of “the face that launched a thousand ships.”
Homer’s Helen
The relevant Brann chapter is “Helen at Troy and Helen at Home,” though it might be better titled “Helen at Troy and Helen Returned Home,” since Homer’s epics don’t portray, even in second-hand telling, her life in Sparta before her departure with Paris, nor of her meeting him. While most of Brann’s chapter comments on Helen as she is encountered in Menelaus’s palace in book IV of the Odyssey on the occasion of Telemachus’ visit, i.e., lines 121-305, she begins with some recounting of Helen as seen at Troy, back in the Iliad. In that epic, there were three views of her held by three sets of men: 1) the older leaders of the Achaeans, who “resolutely keep up the notion of her unwilling abduction and so of the righteousness of their cause,” 2) the younger fighters like Achilles, who resent having to fight for a woman whom Achilles at one point (XIX, 325) calls “coldly-creepy” (rigdanes), and 3) the Trojan elders, smitten by her beauty while nonetheless wishing their political stance—one set by their having insisted on her having been voluntarily won by Paris—would permit them to let her go(III, 150-160). And that leads to this:
Helen, who is the best judge, blames herself. Indeed she shows her shame almost shamelessly. “Hateful me,” she calls herself, and “me the evil-devising bitch.” She tells Priam that she “followed” his son, leaving behind her beloved daughter and the “lovely women-friends of her peer group”—death would have been better. She contrives to be pitiable without ceasing to be hateful… I think she is the prototype of the hypernaturally beautiful woman who, forever looked at by all men, really likes none of them. What she likes is to be in a throng of Trojan women, the scandalous center of chat…
I might cross-out the adjective “Trojan” in that last line, but all of this is well-judged, and those bits about Helen “showing her shame almost shamelessly” and “contriving to be pitiable” are exactly right, even though Brann goes onto explain why some of Helen’s tears in Troy are genuine:
…[Paris] is, truth to tell, all she has. Yet, she can’t stand him. You take him, she says to Aphrodite… [viz. III, 399-413] Helen has landed in a sad and sordid situation, having neither the gravity of tragedy nor the lightness of comedy…
Indeed. But why should we care about such a woman?
In my first post on Odyssey-commentaries, I did suggest that in Homer’s posing of the heroic model of Odysseus against that of Achilles, we are meant to see that it is not merely the former’s reliance on tactics and practical wisdom that sets the contrast, but also, “how the hero who is to excel at both war and family, must navigate the promises and perils posed him by the fair sex,” and thus further, how he needs a female counterpart, namely, a Penelope. Nearly half of the Hades-souls, in the tale Odysseus tells about his adventures in the Phaeacian palace, were those of the “famous women,” such as Tyro, Alcmene, Leda, Ariadne, and Eriphyle(Od., XI, 225-332), which likely, he related first the better to fascinate Phaeacia’s queen, the real decider in that court; but as for the bigger story told by Homer to us, he surely suggests that the most admirable of all the heroic-era women must be the one which his pair of poems culminates with, Penelope. And thus, as Odysseus’ triumph and character is in large part to be understood in contrast to what we are shown about other possible hero figures, such as Ajax, Diomedes, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Hector, and most of all, Achilles, it follows that we are invited to deepen our reflections about Penelope’s excellence by comparing her to her peers.
And who would they be? Brann points out that by the traditional genealogy Helen and Clytemnestra are sisters, and further, that Penelope is their cousin, although the Odyssey hardly mentions the first relation and never the second. But many of Homer’s first readers and hearers would know, and would thus gravitate towards something like the following comparative schema of the three women: the first’s faithlessness is what provokes the long war which eventually causes all the Greek warriors to wish for nostos, for homecoming--to their own wives if they have one; the second’s faithlessness leads to a murder that is the negation of nostos; and thus, the third’s faithfulness, one of an enduring and yet crafty kind, permits nostos, and is what makes her the model heroic-era woman.(Cf. Brann, 154-55) And if we become convinced, by the shared ancestry of the three, and by incidents we will discuss further on in this essay, that Helen is as gifted with cleverness as the other two women, then it seems that Homer also wants us to consider how a woman might use or abuse this. What, he is prompting us to ask, kept Penelope from becoming like a Helen or a Clytemnestra?
Now Homer, unlike Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, keeps Clytemnestra off stage, though he peppers the early books of the Odyssey with five mentions or brief accounts of Agamemnon’s murder, given by Zeus, Athena, Nestor, and Menelaus/Proteus (I, 28-43, III, 233-235, III, 255-270, IV, 90-93, IV, 519-537): each emphasizes the leading role of her lover Aegisthus, though the third reveals her eventual assent to his seduction, and the second and fourth reveal her involvement in the murder-plot.4
But Homer puts Helen directly into the drama, and Brann helps us see that her appearance in Odyssey IV is particularly telling.
She does so by way of four observations. First, she points out a telling detail, second, she appreciates a subtle action of Helen’s, and third and fourth, she explicates the two fascinating stories told to Telemachus about Odysseus, which while they both tell us something about the hero, suggest much more about Helen’s behavior. The rest of this post will focus on Brann’s first two observations, and the follow-up post on her third and fourth ones.
Helen’s Drugs
The telling detail is that at one point in Telemachus’s meeting with Menelaus, when everyone present has been weeping, Helen included, she “slipped a drug, heart’s ease, dissolving anger, magic to make us forget all our pains,” into the main wine bowl:
No one who drank it deeply, mulled in wine,
could let a tear roll down his cheek that day,
not even if his mother should die, his father die,
not even if right before his eyes some enemy brought down
a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade.
So cunning the drugs that Zeus’s daughter plied,
potent gifts from Polydamna the wife of Thon,
a woman of Egypt, land where the teeming soil
bears the richest yield of herbs in all the world:
many health itself when mixed in the wine,
and many deadly poison.
(That’s IV, 220-232, Fagles trans., Remember, with Fagles, you are given two sets of line numbers, the traditional ones I reference here, and his own more prominently-printed ones.)
Three lesser things to notice. First, this is one bit of evidence in Homer, among others, that Helen did get to Egypt at some point. This would have been after the fall of Troy, when Menelaus’ ship had been sent off course, and he engaged in trading and perhaps raiding in various lands. (IV, 83-85, 351) Second, this is some potent drug! Third, the examples used to illustrate its potency remind us of atrocities the Greeks committed during the sack of Troy, especially in the palace of Priam. I.e., in a world where gifts were matched to needs, such drugs would have more fittingly been in Hecuba’s possession than in Helen’s.
But the main information is that Helen, “witch that she is,” as Brann puts it, and reminding us of Circe and Medea, knows how to use such “cunning” drugs. Moreover, the passage underlines that the ability to poison often comes with knowledge of such drugs; so if Helen has not merely obtained a set of potions pre-labelled for use, but also some of the lore behind them, she probably could do to Menelaus what Medea did to Jason. Or what Clytemnestra, in Aeschylus’ telling, did to Agamemnon, but with a woven web rather than with a poison. While it is not a sure thing, I think the text here suggests Helen’s confidence in using the drugs.
Helen’s Recognition of Telemachus
The subtle action of Helen’s which Brann stresses is her recognition of Telemachus. After arrival, he has been engaged in conversation with Menelaus, who to his lesser credit did say that he and his companion Pisistratus (Nestor’s son) “look like the sons of kings,” when Helen comes down from her chamber:
…for young Telemachus she does something truly wonderful, the one thing most needed… She recognizes him. [She says] she never saw anyone—awe seizes her as she looks—so like another as he is like the son of great-hearted Odysseus. …The lovely thing is this: She says she never saw any two…look so alike as Telemachus and Odysseus’ son. She doesn’t say he looks like Odysseus, but that he looks like the son of Odysseus, like himself. Of course, she’s never seen this son before, but she evidently has the intuition to recognize immediately what the son of Odysseus must look like…
As Brann notes, Telemachus had earlier said “Mother says that I am indeed his [Odysseus’] child, I for my part do not know. Nobody really knows his own father.”5
…Moreover, she had taken one look and asked her husband, “Do we know who among men these claim to be who have come to our house?” And she points to him: “that man,” he is the one who looks like Odysseus’ young son. It may be the first time in his prolonged boyhood that he has been called a man, and by such a personage! I think that perhaps Helen is never more beautiful…
So not only does Helen boost Telemachus’ confidence that he is Odysseus’ son, but also, that he is an able man.6 This, let us remember, is the same woman Homer used in the Iliad to point-out the Greek heroes to the Trojan elders. Telemachus is thus being recognized by the very woman who in Homer, functions most similarly to the way the Queen, or the beloved Lady, of a medieval romance would at a tournament of knights.
Telemachus’ little (Athena-prompted) journey to inquire of Odysseus’ two old comrades Nestor and then Menelaus,—often labelled the Telemachy—delays the Odyssey’s readers/hearers from encountering Odysseus himself all the way until book five, but in terms of its stated purpose, it is a failed mission, since the clues Telemachus gathers about Odysseus’ fate are too cold to follow. But as Brann shows us, its unstated purpose is to serve as a young man’s seasoning trip, a quick equivalent of a “year-abroad,” wherein Telemachus can gain confidence and a sense of himself, by pulling off the initial slipping-away from the suitors, by conversing with two kings, by acquiring a friend in Nestor’s son, and most of all, by Helen’s recognition of him.
While later on Brann will suggest that Penelope is basically right that Helen, due to her starting the Trojan war, “is the cause of all her troubles,” (288) here she interprets her recognition as the key event in the development of Penelope’s son. When Brann is indicating beforehand what Telemachus’ journey will accomplish, she even says “And a woman who hasn’t done the world much good so far will be his saving and enabling grace.” (149)
Next time, the two strange stories about Helen and Odysseus, told on the same night as the recognition.
For what we have of the poem, as well as a fine review of the classical-era instances of the illusory Helen side-tradition, see Stesichorus: The Poems, in the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series.
If contrary to my reading, Euripides was aiming to harmonize his plays’ accounts of mythology, one point he would presumably be making is that the real Helen illustrates the case of a woman assumed guilty, by virtually everyone, of sins she never committed.(viz. Hel., 271-272) But a harmonizing hypothesis, at least for her case, would be quite weak, and while I haven’t looked much, I don’t know of any scholars who try to make it. It would require that what we witness in Trojan Women, a Helen in a court-like speech defending her going with Paris to Menelaus by blaming it on the power of Aphrodite and Zeus, is merely an instance of phantom-talk; and, it would require that the intentions of the Helen of Orestes, who because she’s the returned Helen would have to be the real one, were entirely misread by the main characters (and by most of us in the audience also) due to her words and actions only seeming to be selfish and scheming.
I don’t know if any scholar has pointed this out, but there is a possible retort to Herodotus holding that Helen was actually in Egypt during the war, with the Greeks refusing to believe the Trojan protestations that they didn’t have her. Namely, Are we to believe that for those ten years of the war neither the Trojans nor the Greeks would have sent a delegation down to Proteus to try to prove or refute her presence there? Remember, in Herodotus’ version, Paris, and thus the Trojans also, knew Proteus had taken her. In turn, I suppose the response would be, Well, once the Greek leaders had taken all the political risk of mustering and bringing the Greek army to Troy, that is the last factual dispute they would want settled—they would not investigate themselves nor accept any Trojan report. However it really was, my back-and-forth in this note does suggest that realpolitik-type reasoning can only do so much to get a historian to the bottom of the mythic traditions.
“The murder of Agamemnon is, incidentally, a much starker crime in the Odyssey than in Aeschylus’ tragedy…in [Aeschylus’version] Clytemnestra can persuasively represent the killing as an execution because he has sacrificed one of their daughters to gain the Trojan expedition safe passage; in the Iliad this daughter is safely at home, one of the three the king offers to Achilles…” (Brann, 151; Il., IX, 145)
(Od. I, 214-220, Lattimore trans.) For further reflections on this statement, which invest Telemachus’ uncertainty about his paternity with implications existential/universal, as well as with ones relevant to the absent-father situation faced by many 20th and 21st century sons, Afro-American ones especially, see chaps. XXII-XXIII of Albert Murray’s novel The Seven League Boots.
Brann evidently thinks it unimportant that while old Nestor is skeptical about Telemachus’ announced pedigree upon first meeting him, he eventually does call him the son of Odysseus (III, 123, 352); still, he does so in a way that perhaps hedges his bet, unlike Helen. Also on Nestor’s attitude towards Telemachus, note that the translators Lattimore and Murray have him at least twice calling him “boy” or “child” (184, 254), and that Fagles adds several more such instances by translating certain of his uses of philos as “boy” instead of “friend.”