Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(17)

Even Helen doesn’t seem fully convinced by the story of her birth, however. He tricked my mother Leda into bed, she says, if that story is true.4 But then her next words make the whole thing seem unimportant: ‘I’m called Helen.’ Egg, swan, believe what you like about her parents: she’s Helen, and you all know who that is. In one version of the story, however, Leda plays a different role. In the lost epic poem, the Cypria, we’re told by Pseudo-Apollodorus (an Athenian scholar writing about the poem in the second century BCE) that Helen was the daughter of Zeus and the goddess Nemesis.5 Nemesis changed into a goose to escape the prospect of imminent, unwanted sex with Zeus. In response to this, Zeus became a swan and had sex with her anyway. Nemesis ditched the egg containing the embryonic Helen and a shepherd found it and gave it to Leda, who kept it in a box until it hatched. When Helen appeared, Leda raised her as her daughter. In Euripides’ play, Helen says she has always been considered a teras – which can be translated as freak, portent, or monster.6

Whichever version of the myth we prefer, Zeus appears to have fathered Helen in swan form, and Helen seems to have been born from an egg. She is then raised in Sparta by its king and queen, Tyndareus and Leda. She is one of several siblings, perhaps all born from eggs (as the Leonardo painting shows). Her most notorious sister was Clytemnestra (the two sisters would marry two brothers: Menelaus and Agamemnon). And their most famous brothers were Castor and Polydeuces, whose exact parentage is as contested as Helen’s. They are either both sons of Tyndareus, both sons of Zeus, or one of them was a son of Zeus (Polydeuces, known later as Pollux). They’re often referred to in Greek texts as the Dioscouri, sons of Zeus.

If Helen’s birth is a little peculiar, it is her childhood – when she is kidnapped – that is more upsetting for a modern audience. Theseus – best-known for his labyrinthine minotaur-slaying – is no longer a young hero, but a man of around fifty years of age when Helen is a child.7 After the deaths of their respective wives, Theseus and his friend Pirithoos decide they would both like to marry daughters of Zeus. Pirithoos wants to try abducting Persephone from Hades, which we might best characterize as a needlessly risky endeavour. Theseus decides that he would like to make Helen his wife. She is seven years old at the time Theseus abducts her. Even ancient authors – whose ideas of sexual propriety do not always coincide with our own – are squeamish about this. Plutarch8 tells us that most earlier writers tell the story this way: Theseus and Pirithoos snatched Helen away from the temple of Artemis in Sparta (there is an additional pathos in this detail: Helen was dancing in honour of Artemis, the virgin goddess, when she was abducted). Once they had made their escape, they drew lots to decide who should get Helen as a wife. Theseus won the draw, and they put Helen in the safekeeping of another friend near Athens, with instructions to keep the whole affair secret.

Helen’s brothers, the Dioscuri, then demanded Helen’s return. The people of Athens could not return her because they didn’t know where she had been hidden, so Helen’s brothers declared war on Athens. Fighting was fierce, but the brothers and their army were victorious. They then took Helen back to Sparta, and also enslaved Theseus’ mother, Aithra, whom he had left as a companion for her. The women in Theseus’ life rarely prosper: his lovers, most famously Ariadne, are abandoned, his wife Phaedra takes her own life, his mother is enslaved in retribution for his actions.

A Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, tells us Helen was ten years old at the time of this abduction,9 but she surpassed all in beauty. Adding three years to Helen’s age makes the story no more palatable, at least to us. The notion of a child being more beautiful than all other women or girls, and this being a valid reason to kidnap her, is a deeply unsavoury one. Not least because, in some versions of this story, Helen has given birth to Theseus’ daughter10 before she can be reclaimed and taken home. But the ancient historians who relate this story seem to find it pretty unpleasant too, hence their rather ham-fisted attempts to make it less so (explaining her great beauty in spite of her extreme youth, for example).

So, even as a child, Helen apparently caused a war. But most of us would feel that this was an unfair characterization of the events described above. Surely we would all stop short of blaming a child for her own abduction? In fact, it is the behaviour of Theseus and Pirithoos – determined to take wives with little thought for the consequences – and the response of Castor and Polydeuces that causes blood to be shed. Helen is nothing but a beautiful pawn.

So what of the second war fought over Helen? The Trojan War is one of literature’s greatest stories, an epic saga which has shaped storytelling in the western world for more than two and half thousand years. Two of our very earliest texts tell the story of this conflict, one way or another: Homer’s Iliad is set in the final, tenth year of the war, his Odyssey in its aftermath. And who do the Greeks and Trojans alike blame for the catastrophic loss of life on all sides? Helen, of course. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Hecabe, the queen of Troy, finally meets Menelaus, Helen’s Greek husband who waged a ten-year war for her return. Her first words to this man who has cost her everything – her husband, her sons, her city – are brutal: I praise you, Menelaus, if you’ll kill your wife. Avoid seeing her, or she’ll fill you with longing. She captures the eyes of men, destroys their cities, burns down their houses, she has such magical power. I know her, and you know her, and so does everyone who has suffered.11