Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(16)

There is an additional danger to Jocasta, perhaps, which is that she is a woman who has power that we don’t quite understand. Again, this is partly because it shifts and she changes along with it. In The Phoenician Women, she is an important regal figure, but in her earlier life, which she tells us of at the start of that play – robbed of her baby, married off at her brother’s whim to whoever solved the riddle of the Sphinx – she was little more than a chattel. And how is it that she and Oedipus marry, in spite of the warning he has had about a sexual relationship with his mother? Can we conclude that she is fiercely attractive to him? This idea provoked sniggers even in the ancient world: in Aristophanes’ comic play The Frogs, he has the tragedian Aeschylus say that Oedipus was the unluckiest man who ever lived:23 abandoned in the cold, two swollen feet, and then he marries a woman old enough to be his mother. The very idea.

Perhaps Oedipus isn’t attracted to Jocasta, but just wants to marry into the kingdom of Thebes (although he is already son and heir to the king of Corinth, so he is hardly lacking in status before he meets Jocasta). But in most versions of their story, they go on to have four children: this is no marriage of convenience, but one of love, and perhaps even lust. We know the alternative – a sexless, distant marriage – is perfectly possible (Merope’s husband Polybus not even realizing that she had adopted a son rather than given birth to one). But Oedipus and Jocasta do not have that, so she is that rarest and most dangerous of things: a woman who doesn’t become invisible to men even as she ages. How do we cope with a woman like that? All too often, the answer has been to ignore her.

And that is the core of Jocasta, although some writers and artists have chosen not to see her. She is a woman of sexual potency who transforms from total passivity at the hands of Laius in her youth to something far more complicated, far harder to categorize, as she ages. No wonder it took the genius of Euripides to put words into her mouth.





Helen




HELEN OF TROY, HELEN OF SPARTA. NO MATTER WHICH CITY WE attach her to, she is both a threat and a promise: Helen of Joy, Helen of Slaughter, as Priam calls her, in Simon Armitage’s The Last Days of Troy. She is the face that ‘launch’d a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium’, as Marlowe has Dr Faustus describe her. ‘Sweet Helen,’ he continues, ‘make me immortal with a kiss.’ This version of Helen makes no reply to Faustus. In fact, she says nothing at all. A beautiful woman whom men find all the more alluring because she is essentially mute? I know, I always think the shock will kill me too.

Marlowe didn’t coin the idea of a thousand ships: the phrase appears in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and in Euripides’ plays several times.1 Andromache, for example, in his play of the same name, describes Greece as chilionaus, ‘having a thousand ships’. The number became integral to Helen’s myth (although Homer’s Iliad actually lists rather more than a thousand ships: almost 1,200 in fact). Helen’s name has even been used as a tongue-in-cheek unit of measurement: if one Helen is so beautiful that she launches a thousand ships, then a millihelen is the unit of beauty required to launch a single ship. Isaac Asimov claimed to have coined the term.2

But all those ships, all that destruction, all for the sake of one woman? Was Helen intrinsically ruinous? Or is it possible that she has provided a convenient cover story? That’s certainly what Euripides allows her to argue in The Trojan Women: the defence of Helen is almost as old as the accusations against her. But if we are truly to understand Helen, perhaps we should begin at the beginning. Which in this instance – somewhat surprisingly – is an egg.

Almost everything about Helen is contested, beginning with her parentage. She is brought up as the daughter of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and his wife, Leda. But most sources, at least from Homer onwards, call her the daughter of Zeus.3 In Euripides’ play Helen, she describes Tyndareus as her father, but explains there’s a story that Zeus took the form of a swan fleeing from an eagle, and used this deceit to get into Leda’s bed. It raises a number of questions, even for those of us accustomed to the quirks of Greek myth. Leda is more susceptible to a seductive swan than a seductive man? That is a niche porn category. Or perhaps it isn’t: the image of Leda and her swan/swain has been enormously popular in visual arts throughout history. Tintoretto, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo all painted versions of this story, although only copies of the latter two survive. Tintoretto’s swan looks particularly pleased with himself as Leda tries vainly to conceal her birdmance from a maid. She places a hand on the swan’s wing, as though she might be able to pass the rest of him off as some sort of elaborate cushion. Leonardo’s Leda looks down at the four babies (one of whom is Helen) that have emerged from a pair of cracked eggshells at her feet, and her expression seems to convey that she now rather regrets the whole feathery affair. Only Michelangelo gives the scene an intimacy which seems to have an actual sexual charge: the swan’s neck emerges from between Leda’s embracing thighs and they gaze at one another lovingly, mouth to beak.

A beautiful fresco of the same scene was uncovered in Pompeii in 2018, on the Via del Vesuvio. The story was so popular among the Romans, in fact, that they used it to decorate mass-produced lamps. The Pompeian fresco shows a decidedly sneaky-looking swan nestled in beside a rather worried Leda, her brown eyes wide. His webbed foot is balanced on her naked left thigh, and archaeologists believe the image would have decorated a bedroom wall. Well, if not there, then where?