Here’s part one, and yes, some of this will be difficult to understand without having read it. I should also note that there’s more of my own interpretations in this part—especially so with the second story, which Brann doesn’t do much with. Thus, the Helen in this post is more of a mix of Eva Brann’s and my own, though both of us are striving after Homer’s Helen.
First Story, Told by Helen: Odysseus’ Spy-Mission in Troy
Books III and IV of the Odyssey reveal clues about Odysseus’ fate which do whet our appetite for his story, and they also provide occasions for others to share reminisces about his character. What Nestor shares (book III) is fairly general, but at Menelaus’ palace, Telemachus is treated to two Odysseus stories on the evening of the visit. The following morning, Menelaus will tell him the special information he has by way of the god Proteus, that as late as several years ago, Odysseus was alive, and on Calypso’s island. The preceding evening stories, however, which both depict Odysseus at-Troy but post-Iliad, are also chock-full of character information about Helen.
The first of these is told by the woman herself, and just after, it should be noted, she has slipped the “heart-ease” drug into the wine. She begins by noting that Zeus sends “times of joy and times of grief in turn,” and since the party has just been weeping over Odysseus’ unknown fate and other Trojan-war losses, she is presenting her story as a turn to joyful memories.
I will tell something perfect for the occasion. …what a feat that hero dared and carried off in the land of Troy where you Achaeans suffered! Scarring his own body with mortifying strokes, throwing filthy rags on his back like any slave, he slipped into the enemy’s city and roamed its streets— all disguised, a totally different man, a beggar, …That’s how Odysseus infiltrated Troy, and no one knew him at all. I alone, I spotted him for the man he was, kept questioning him—the crafty one kept dodging. But after I’d bathed him, rubbed him down with oil, given him clothes to wear and sworn a binding oath not to reveal him as Odysseus to the Trojans, not till he was back at his swift ships and shelters, then at last he revealed to me, step by step, the whole Achaean strategy. And once he’d cut a troop of Trojans down with his long bronze sword, back he went to his comrades, filled with information. The rest of the Trojan women shrilled their grief. Not I; my heart leapt up—my heart had changed by now—I yearned to sail back home again! I grieved too late for the madness Aphrodite sent me, luring me there, far from my dear land, forsaking my child, my bridal bed, my husband too, a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty.( 239-264, Fagles trans.)
So ostensibly, the main point here is a portrait of Odysseus as crafty, and as capable of degrading disguise; and thus, it does prepare us for his later disguising himself as a beggar when returning to his palace in Ithaca.
But notice all the key Helen-information. To begin with the last thing first, here is a plain admission, and in front of Menelaus, about the politically-most-debated question about her life: she was not abducted, but willingly went with Paris, though she presents this with an Aphrodite-made-me-do-it excuse. Brann wonders if this is the first time Menelaus has heard her say this, but given that she has been reunited with him for almost ten years now, and had hinted at the same truth in the Iliad when talking to Priam, I think not. In any case, this is topped with a back-handed compliment to Menelaus (my interpretation—not Brann’s), that he’s not without beauty, implicitly underlining that he’s not as handsome as Paris, nor without intelligence, implicitly underlining that he’s not as smart as Odysseus.
And that latter half-hidden dig goes deeper than one might think, for as Brann helped me see, the story here likely hints that she bedded Odysseus when he was on this spy mission. As Brann puts it, speaking of her ability to recognize Telemachus,
Helen is not working on mere intuition, because as it happens she knows Odysseus well, probably intimately, and her lovely gift to his son may be the fruit of an indiscretion with his father… [When spying in Troy, Odysseus] tried to evade her, but it ended up—she does not say how—by her bathing and oiling him and his telling her all the Greek plans, a very old version of a situation spymasters dread. …she ends the tale with a confession…coupled with flattering comments about Menelaus’ brains and beauty, no doubt to keep him from wondering about that bathing session—such hospitable bathings are normally done by handmaids…
…she is of all mortal women, besides his own mother, best qualified to recognize the son. I doubt he understands her story; he isn’t meant to…
Indeed, after Menelaus shares his story also, Telemachus’ evident reaction is to fasten upon his father’s qualities of craftiness and endurance which the two stories stress, and to lament that these aren’t doing him any good now.
I am not sure Brann is 100% correct about what the usual procedure is for such “hospitable bathings”—Homer has mentioned two of them shortly before this, (III, 464-469, IV, 48-50) and in the first, it is Nestor’s “lovely” and “youngest daughter” who administers a bath/oiling to Telemachus at a set time. Still, whatever Helen does, it must be occurring in her private chambers after she has taken this “beggar” off the streets, since no-one suspects her of anything after a number of Trojans are killed by a Greek infiltrator.
So while I admit that another interpretation of the bathing Helen speaks of is possible, I think Brann’s hunch is correct.
And even if she hasn’t bedded Odysseus, we must notice that she has a peculiar power over him during this episode. He is able to fool most characters in the Odyssey with his various disguises and stories, but not Helen. Could she be his equal in craftiness? And why in the world does he tell her the Greek plans??!! Granted, he is in the dangerous spot of being with a woman who could in an instant cry out and expose him to capture, so it seems plausible that as we later see him do with Circe (X, 321-347, 466-486), he believes the best way out is via sexual favors provided, oaths secured, and confidences given. But in any case, telling her the plans was a major lapse, one not justified by her apparent turn back to Greek loyalty. As the next story shows.
Second Story, Told by Menelaus: Helen and the Trojan Horse
I am not as certain as Brann that Menelaus doesn’t pick up on the hint of erotic involvement with Odysseus. Just after she finishes, he begins with “There was a tale. So well told.” It is proper to read an ironic tone into that, as Fagles’ rendering invites, for whether or not he picks up on the suggestion of sex, we can see that he objects to the way her tale claims she had returned to Greek loyalty, since his own “about-Odysseus” story counters that claim:
What a piece of work the hero dared and carried off in the wooden horse where all our best encamped, our champions armed with bloody death for Troy, when along you came, Helen—roused no doubt, by a dark power bent on giving Troy some glory, and dashing Prince Deiphobus squired your every step. Three times you sauntered around our hollow ambush, feeling, stroking its flanks, challenging all our fighters, calling each by name— yours was the voice of all our long-lost wives! And Diomedes and I, crouched tight in the midst with great Odysseus, hearing you singing out, were both keen to spring up and sally forth or give you a sudden answer from inside, but Odysseus damped our ardor, reined us back.(271-284, Fagles trans.)
There is one more detail about how he also clamps shut the mouth of another fighter about to call out, but that’s nearly all of the story.
In the spirit of how Menelaus frames it, as another proper illustration of Odysseus’ virtues, we might note it places greater emphasis on Odysseus as an endurer than as a tactician, because the focus is not on the wooden horse being a brilliant plan, but on the self-discipline of the man himself, once inside it.
But the story is really more about Menelaus and Helen. A glimpse of the husband’s jealousy is there in the mention of Deiphobus, and a glimpse of his rage at Helen in his mention of wanting to “sally forth.” Menelaus might have lost the Trojan War right there, though his last scene in that scenario, just before a likely suicidal fight of the Greek champions against all the Trojan troops running to the scene of the outcry, would have been one of his smiting Helen.
So his story is not flattering to himself, but what it reports about her is astounding, so much so as to become comedic. What are we shown? Helen of course not sticking to her recent resolution to side again with the Greeks, Helen deploying her powers of seduction on an inanimate towering horse, and Helen deploying them on nearly all the Greek heroes at once!
And notice that she, who is quite capable of bucking the part of the now-dutiful-and-thus-never-husband-contradicting-wife, does not dispute this account.
Now again, an obvious point this story underlines is her inconstancy. First, she abandoned home and expected political loyalty by going with Paris; second, after being on the Trojan side for a decade, by the time of Odysseus’ spy mission, her “heart” had changed, which explains her not exposing him; and third…well, what should we say about this turn? If hers had been a simple form of inconstancy, she would have swung back again to the Trojan side and revealed the Greek plans. Instead, on an apparent whim, which Menelaus tactfully chalks up to a divine “power” swaying her, she tries out an experiment, in which the fate of the war will depend on the Greek fighters resisting her voiced feminine wiles—shades of the Sirens--and also, on whichever Trojans are present not being made suspicious by her odd behavior. While this test of hers certainly has interesting symbolic resonances—her mimicking of the voices of the longed-for wives is the very thing, if responded to, which would rob the men from ever seeing them again—the most important thing is that she can’t know what will happen.
So it’s like she’s flipping a coin, a coin which will decide the Trojan War, and, whether she stays or returns. And yet, the coin itself is not perfectly random, but involves both the power of her wiles in auditory form, and the power of the heroes to control their emotions which long for nostos (homecoming) and their wives.
I suppose one could interpret that as an appropriate test: only warriors so dedicated to the war and their comrades as to stifle their longing for home are in fact worthy of returning—it’s some archaic/heroic version of the he who gives up his life will gain it idea--and Helen took it upon herself, or was guided by a god, to administer the test. She had robbed the Greek wives of their men by starting the war, but she will make amends by setting it up so that only real men return from it, and additionally, ones who finally understand they have a profound longing for their wives, an understanding solidified by their having to stifle the longing in this instance.
But, this interpretation doesn’t really convince. It’s not just that its logic is strained; or that many of the Greeks won’t get to return anyhow due their angering the gods, Athena especially, by their atrocities and sacrileges during the sack, a factor operating entirely apart from this posited test; or that many of them take female slaves once Troy falls, as they’ve done before. The main thing is this: the strongest note in this scene is of Helen’s capriciousness and desire to be the main player. She is resigned to accepting how the coin flips, but determined to be the one flipping it.
Now, there are two additional motives which might mix with this predominate one.
First, she knows the power of her visual beauty, which arguably started the war, and perhaps now wants to learn whether a more self-created beauty of hers, that of her actresses’ voice, formed, like the notes of a mockingbird, out of her apparently very sharp memories of all those long-distant wives, could decide the war.
Second, though I just argued that the case for her wanting to administer a noble test to the warriors in the horse is weak, some of the same evidence might point to her wanting to mock their pretensions. Here they are in the fabled horse, on the cusp of a great feat of war (and also on the cusp of destroying countless Trojan families), and she reminds them: you talk big and act rough, and make a bid here for glory, but each of you secretly pines for his own wife; it was I, a woman, who brought you all here, and I could now expose you to certain death; your cult of heroic manliness covers over your true weakness before the feminine, even though you are about to act the part of hard men who care not that they enslave women and destroy homes.
Menelaus introduces this “Odysseus” story by boasting of having “studied, in my time, the plans and minds of great ones by the score,”(267) presumably a Plutarch-like study of great military men; he is blind to how the story Helen just told, and the one he is about to tell, both underline how she has been even greater, insofar as greatness resides in acts which decide big events. He doesn’t see what Helen was mockingly hinting at when calling to the horse, and what Homer is meaning to convey to his readers: don’t forget the female factor!
This interpretation of Helen’s behavior at the horse makes more sense than my “noble test” hypothesis, since any of the warriors who thinks for a second after apparently hearing the voice of his wife, would realize that she could not be here in Troy. Helen’s voice-play is thus more of a needling than a temptation, though sure, it remains enough of the latter to cause one warrior to lose his head and attempt—Odysseus prevents him just in time—to call back to his “wife.”
But let’s return to her predominate motive. I assume she did come to feel a longing for return, for Greece, for her daughter and old acquaintances, in reaction to her bad situation in Troy. But I would argue that that could not remain a lasting feeling for her, because she likely foresees what we witness in book IV, that while at her most homely she might enjoy Menelaus’ wealth, as well as an event like marrying off her daughter, both her picked-up-where-we-left-off marriage with Menelaus, and her social relations with other Greeks, can only be rather limited and frosty. Brann describes the reunited Helen and Menelaus of book IV as a “burnt-out couple,”(161) with the one exception to this being what we see her do for Telemachus. That act reveals a beneficent side to her, and a bit of motherliness mixed into the queenly roll Homer assigned her in the Iliad (III, 171-242) of being the main female recognizer of the heroes.
Now Helen eventually does resign herself, if the Greeks do win, to return with Menelaus—i.e., that fate is not so terrible that she exerts herself to keep the Greeks from winning.
But neither does she restrain herself to make sure they do!
Thus, I believe we see the essence of her character in these two stories. It is the uncertain situation, uncertain both as to her heart and as to which side will win the war, which unfolds after the Iliad and prior to the fall of Troy, which best reveals who she is. Brann is not quite right to say that what she most enjoys is “being the scandalous center of chat” with a group of women, for what really seems to charge her are the episodes--early on when Paris came to Sparta, and here where Odysseus must come up to her room and when the Greek husbands in the horse get tempted by her voice--where the operation of her charms, loves, and whims might alter history. She blames Aphrodite for much, but what she seems to most like is acting like a goddess, making the fates of myriads of men and women playthings in her hands. When we first meet her in the Iliad, she is weaving a royal red (blood-red?) robe which depicts the events of the war so far. “A work of artful vanity,” Brann calls it.(155) She never has a plan for how the big events she’ll be involved in should go, other than that she should be the cause of them. We might attribute that to her being a daughter of Zeus, but most of us can probably bring to mind certain purely human examples of similar behavior. Alcibiades, Caesar, and Cleopatra come to mind, as do the countless women who love to prove they can seduce the leading men of their era.
But by what powers does she do this history-shaping? One is her royal birth, a far more important one is her superlative beauty, but a third, the most important, is a talent for scheming.(cf. Il., VI, 344) Let’s dissect this last power further. Tactics, often for her involving flirtations, are a part of it, but the horse incident reveals an element even more important. Just as the god Proteus—whom, interestingly, we will be told about the very next morning by Menelaus--can change his shape to become any animal and even elemental substances (IV, 455-460), Helen can alter her voice to imitate1 that of any woman she has memory of. The Odyssey begins by describing Odysseus as the “man of twists and turns,”(Fagles) and continually emphasizes his use of disguises, tricks, and practical wisdom, but it is ultimately a tale of this man seeking to limit himself, to put an end to his wandering and regain home; and because the goal is to return to a home-life of companionate marriage, it is necessarily also a tale of a woman willing to struggle herself, and to limit her own options. So in Helen, I think we see the alternative to Odysseus and Penelope; and, in the linked shape-shifting and story-telling power, I believe we encounter one potent enough to unmoor the soul of any human who regularly deploys it. While she does limit herself enough to be able live that retired life with Menelaus, in this scene, she comes close to becoming a creator of chaos simply, and a chaos which might swallow herself. She arrives at place of not at all knowing what her heart wants, and flipping a coin to decide.
She is an Actor. Did she pretend to care? …You can’t mold the pretender. She slips through when you hold her. Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday, who could hang a name on you, when you change with every new day?
Helen, I say, is a human Proteus—though not one who can be held tight and forced to tell the truth, which determined mortals can do to the god Proteus. She uses her general cleverness and her specific mental power of insight into personal character, the same power which allows her to describe the heroes to the Trojans, to imitate the wives, to see through Odysseus’ disguise, and to recognize Telemachus, to plunge herself and whole peoples into limitless possibilities.2
Now we might push against this interpretation with a more practical set of questions. Assuming her action at the horse is not 100% whim, what is her plan for her own future if her calling out exposes the Greeks, and leads to their defeat? Again, the text strongly suggests that, even if she can calculate some probabilities, she cannot know what will happen there. So if her “coin” had flipped on the side of Trojan glory—say, had Odysseus not clamped shut that one man’s mouth in time--would the victorious Trojans not have become eventually suspicious about her having known the plan? Or would she be able to get past that, presenting her calling out as the inspiration of a moment rather than inside knowledge, and riding the gratitude of the saved city to her own safety? And if so, would she remain with Paris? Or, would Deiphobos be an option for her?3 Should we say she is the type who, whatever happens, makes sure she is set to “land on her feet?” And were we to further to assume she was leaning again towards staying in Troy, we would add that it was her tactical acumen which explains why she didn’t go right to the Trojan leaders with her inside info, because she knew that a straightforward sharing of it would be risky for her.
Thus, all the oddity of the scene can be explained as due to her craftiness.
This is possible, and significant notes of her inconstancy would remain in that interpretation. Still, I disagree, thinking that what Homer really means for us to gather is that for all her Odysseus-like craftiness, Helen is lost to herself, and thus also to any plan for her life, swept into the glamour of history-making and the “charms of indeterminateness.”4 By at least the time of his captivity on Calypso’s isle, Odysseus knows his goal is to get home to his only truly-beloved, Penelope; but even as late as the Trojan Horse’s arrival, Helen doesn’t know her goal, and has made it impossible for her heart to have one.
Conclusion
My interpretation results in a Helen, in what I think is her most telling scene, who seems like a goddess-monster of shape-shifting and chance-play. Admittedly, this fits with the rather constant interest I take in portraits of “inconstancy,” as seen in my dissertation, my essay on Delsol (ftnt. 4), my writings on David Bowie, and my appreciation of the Storeys’ book on restlessness. Nonetheless, I think I’m onto something in my reading of this scene, and perhaps in another post, I will explain why it matters that Odysseus himself will talk of Helen as a man-killing “vile woman”(Od., XI, 384), and, that he may even be imaginatively suggesting her likeness to monsters at certain points of his telling of the core Odyssey.
I stand by my picture of this aspect of her character, but by way of necessary contrast, we should remember Brann’s account (in part one) of her gracious recognition of Telemachus, my detection of her similarities with Homer himself (ftnt. 2), and that, at very end of the Iliad, we learn that Hector, the hero most admirable for family qualities, gentlemanliness, and patriotic service, was careful to never say a harsh word about her, and to defend her from insults. We cannot but be touched by what she pronounces at his funeral, despite her likely wanting to seduce him at one point (ftnt. 3), that he was her only real friend in Troy.(XXIV, 775) There’s no reason to think she’s lying about his behavior towards her, and so, if he saw some good in her, or at least felt it best not to assume the worst of her, we should try, strain though it may be, to do likewise.
I began this merely to provide a single example of how Eva Brann’s commentary reveals great riches in Homer, even in unexpected places. But it has led, guided by her paths, and by my blazing of a few further trails (though some commentators over the ages have likely found them before), into a two-part essay, and into a belief that what we learn of Helen in Odyssey IV is a major key to Homer’s entire treatment of the Trojan-War/Trojan-“Returns” material. It matters a great deal to our interpretations of the two epics that the outcome of the war actually was in her hands, right at its climatic point. Moreover, Homer’s Helen is a character for the ages, and once we have really encountered her, we can retain little taste for the Helens of other poets. Finally, learning what I have here adds to my sense, one not dampened by my awed readings of Virgil, Milton, and even Dante, of Homer’s unsurpassed achievement in epic poetry. The subtitle of Eva Brann’s commentary, Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey (and the Iliad) has in my case been fully vindicated, and I heartily thank her.
That she is mimicking their voices at Od. IV, 279 is clearer in the Murray and Lattimore translations.
Interestingly, taking on the personality of others, connected to the discernment of others’ characters, and, the oft-related desire to recall great events and those involved in them, are the abilities and inclinations of a poet. It is pointed out (Od., IV, 132-135) that at Sparta Helen is still avid for weaving. Is she working on another robe embroidered with the events of the Trojan War? If she is, does her artistry remain merely, as Brann pronounced, self-glorifying vanity? As many have noted, we encounter or are told about three or so bards in the Odyssey, and, we come across Achilles in one scene in the Iliad (IX, 185-191) singing songs about heroes, but if we ask ourselves which character in the epics is most like Homer himself, I believe the answer has to be either Odysseus, or, Helen!
Brann argues (157-158) that we’ve already seen Helen unsuccessfully try out the beginnings of a play for Hector (Il., VI, 343-360).
Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the 20th Century, p. 65. “I can become anything if I say I am nothing definite…Indeterminateness consists in the desire to explore, to refrain from making choices…[It] provides a great euphoria, an illusion of plurality and perfection.” Chapters 6 and 9 are of particular importance to understanding this concept, but the entire book is a feast of philosophic anthropology. See also my “Charms of Indeterminateness” from a book of essays on Delsol’s thought—also featuring Peter Lawler and Paul Seaton, Lucid Mind, Intrepid Spirit—for my comparison of her late-modern “indeterminacy” with the kaleidoscopic soul of Plato’s “democratic man” of Republic, book VIII.