Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(20)

So how does Paris find himself in the invidious position of being the judge? It’s inconceivable that he could pick one goddess over the other two and not acquire a pair of seriously powerful enemies. Who would agree to perform such an unenviable task? The answer is that Zeus decides Paris should do the choosing (no fool he: Zeus would have been choosing between his wife and sister, Hera, his daughter Athene, and the goddess who can cause him so much trouble, Aphrodite. No wonder he directs Hermes to put some hapless mortal on the case instead). And from the moment Paris makes his choice, Troy is in jeopardy. Throughout Greek myth, Hera is especially unforgiving of any slight (as women seduced by Zeus usually discover to their cost).

Which brings us back to the original question: why do the gods give the decision to Paris, in particular? The answer is that they want Troy to have powerful enemies or (if Helen was correct in her prediction of what would have happened to Menelaus and the Greeks had Paris chosen Hera or Athene as the recipient of the apple) to become a powerful threat to the Greeks. The gods have deliberately, intentionally stirred up trouble between the Greeks and the Trojans, and they have used Paris and Helen to do so.

If we keep following the causation of the war back, step by step, we eventually find ourselves here: the war is caused by Paris taking Helen from Menelaus, but Helen is promised to Paris by Aphrodite in exchange for the golden apple, and the apple is put in among the goddesses by Eris, and she gets it from where? We’re told in the lost epic poem Cypria that Themis (the goddess of Order) and Zeus planned the Trojan War between them. One ancient commentator on the Iliad tells us why that might have been: the earth was groaning beneath the weight of so many people. Zeus had instigated an earlier war (the Theban wars, which, as we saw, blighted the life of Jocasta). In the ensuing years, the number of mortals continued to rocket. Another war was needed. It is a powerful metaphor, and interesting that the notion of the earth being too full of too many people is not one which arrived among us when the global population hit the billions. Rather, it began when the earth held only tens of millions.22

But let us return to Helen. Are we really going to blame her, and Paris, if the gods had decided to start a war? Helen herself asked the question of Menelaus: what was she supposed to do when Aphrodite had decided that she and Paris would be together? But the backstory of the war suggests something bigger than divine vanity was at stake anyway. Even if Helen and Paris had resisted the power of Aphrodite (which Zeus himself can’t manage), then war would still have come between east and west, Greece and Troy, because the gods had already decided that it was necessary.

And this idea, that the war was fought irrespective of Helen, is one which ancient writers played around with. Not least, Euripides. In his play Helen, he presents a very different version of Helen’s story from the one we see in The Trojan Women. Helen was first performed in 412 BCE,23 three years after The Trojan Women, which had asked so many unsettling questions about the nature of war and the devastation it wreaks on the lives of victims and victors alike. Euripides’ plays come from a time when Athens was almost always at war: the Peloponnesian War, against their one-time ally, Sparta, began in 431 BCE and continued until 404 BCE. By the time The Trojan Women was written, Euripides and his audience would have heard plenty of speeches in the Assembly, in favour of and against the war. If Euripides was trying to advocate military caution with his plays (which are an incredibly subtle, sophisticated critique against war, rather than overt propaganda), it didn’t work. In 415 BCE, Athens embarked on a ruinous additional campaign against the Sicilians, which wiped out the best part of a generation of men by the time the campaign ended in 413 BCE. Athens would fight on against Sparta for another nine years, but after such major losses, the war was unwinnable.

So perhaps when he was writing Helen, for performance in 412 BCE, Euripides wanted a break from thinking about war. Or perhaps he wanted to ask the most difficult question of all: what if the war you’re fighting is for an unjust or specious cause? Because that is the premise of this play, which is set in Egypt. It opens with Helen telling the audience where she is: the very first word of the play is ‘Nile’. Helen explains her origins (born from an egg), and goes on to recap the story of the judgement of Paris. But with a crucial distinction: Hera was so annoyed at being deprived of victory over Athena and Aphrodite that she interfered with Paris’ reward. Instead of taking Helen back to Troy, Paris actually took an eidolon24 – a breathing simulacrum of her, made out of air. Helen goes on to make the case we saw in that Iliad scholar’s comment: then Zeus’ plans added to my troubles, she says. He wanted a war between the Greeks and the wretched Trojans to reduce the weighty mass of people on Mother Earth. The woman ‘set out as a prize for the Trojans to defend and the Greeks to win had my name, but she was not me.’25 But Zeus didn’t forget about Helen. She was concealed in a cloud and taken by Hermes to Egypt, to live out the war in the palace of Proteus. Proteus, Helen adds, was the most restrained of men, so she has been faithful to Menelaus. It is a fantastic touch by Euripides: Helen has been denounced as a whore, is deemed responsible for countless deaths, and yet here she is, blamelessly living in Egypt, untouched for the past ten years. And none of that will count for anything: when the Greek hero and survivor of the Trojan War, Teucer, arrives onstage a few moments later, he will say that ‘the daughter of Zeus is hated by the whole of Greece.’26

Euripides was a tremendous innovator and invigorator of Greek myth, but he didn’t invent this alternative version of the Helen story. There are fragments of earlier, Archaic writers, including the elusive Stesichorus, who tell a similar story,27 that it is an eidolon, an image of Helen, that goes to Troy while the real woman waits out the war somewhere else, usually Egypt. We read of Stesichorus’ lost version in Plato’s Republic, where we’re told that men fight over phantom pleasures and pains ‘just like Stesichorus says the eidolon of Helen was fought over at Troy, by those ignorant of the truth’.28 If this was a good enough example for Plato to use (admittedly in a pretty high-end conversation), then it can’t have been little-known, or known only by those who’d seen Euripides’ play. It’s specifically the version told by Stesichorus which is mentioned. So way back in the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, an alternative narrative, exculpating Helen, existed. And it was still reasonably well known in the fourth century BCE by Plato and those for whom he was writing. How could a person be both here and in Troy? Menelaus asks Helen, when Euripides reunites husband and wife in his play. A name can be in lots of places at once, she replies. A person can’t.29