Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(22)

They all sit and eat and talk about the war, and about Odysseus’ heroics in particular. But as they talk of warriors who died in battle, Menelaus becomes emotional and weeps. Helen decides she will mix something into the wine they’re drinking: drugs which she has received from Polydamna, a friend in Egypt.32 These drugs are potent mood-changers: the Greek word is nepenthes – banishing pain or sorrow. Homer tells us that, if someone consumed them, even if they then saw their parent or sibling die, or even if they saw their child being killed, they wouldn’t weep. Without saying anything to anyone, Helen mixes the drugs into the wine and tells a slave to pour it out. No wonder Menelaus didn’t kill her when they got back to Sparta. Is it because he was dazzled by her beauty or dazed by her narcotics?

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Stories of impossibly beautiful women who find countless men vying for their affections are common in folklore and myth. There are a few counter-examples of ruinously beautiful men pursued by women and men: Dorian Gray, Valmont. Joseph, who tempts Zuleikha (or the wife of Potiphar, depending on which religious text you prefer), is another: in one story in the Sefer ha-Yashar or Book of Jasher,33 Zuleikha is so besotted with Joseph that it damages her health. Other women mock her for her infatuation, so she invites Joseph to walk through the room as they peel oranges with knives. His beauty is so compelling that the women cut their hands open as they try to peel the fruit. They don’t even notice until Zuleikha makes them look down to see they are covered in blood. And she has to see this beauty every day, she reminds them.

But the ability to start a war, to destroy an army rather than a handful of individuals, is a rarer quality. It demands a kind of otherworldliness which Helen perhaps refers to when she calls herself a freak or monster in her eponymous play by Euripides. It is incredibly difficult to find a story of a man who is so beautiful he can provoke the sort of desire that might cause a war. Armenian folklore tells the story of Ara the Beautiful,34 a mythical king of Armenia in the eighth century BCE (so four hundred years or so after Helen made her journey to Troy, or possibly Egypt). Semiramis, the queen of Assyria, falls in love with Ara. Her soldiers invade Armenia, with strict orders to capture Ara alive. But he is killed in the battle and Semiramis places him in a room in her palace to be licked back to life by the gods. In some versions of the story, the gods oblige her. In others, Ara is lost for good. But the story doesn’t seem to have captured the imagination of poets, composers, artists and playwrights in the way that Helen’s has done. Perhaps this simply reflects a cultural readiness to accept the destructive nature of female beauty, whereas we tend not to think about male beauty in that way. Though in Roman Britain, there is also Tacitus’ story of Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes. She divorced her husband Venutius and married an armour-bearer named Vellocatus. Venutius takes this rejection as we all might, and declares war on his ex-wife and her new husband.35 He is eventually victorious, and our evidence for Cartimandua ends there. But how much of this skirmish is down to politics and how much is down to passion is hard to say: it’s certainly unusual for a woman to ditch a king for a lowly armour-bearer. Tacitus exhibits little generosity in his writings about her, but that isn’t unusual for Tacitus (who is rarely generous, particularly on the subject of women in any kind of political context).

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Helen has inspired some outlandish retellings of her story, from a silver-painted Elizabeth Taylor in Richard Burton’s film of Doctor Faustus to The Simpsons, who magnificently portray her with a quasi-Grecian version of Marge’s hairdo and a cigarette in a holder, as though she were an ageing Holly Golightly. Even Agatha Christie wrote a story, ‘The Face of Helen’, which was published in the Mysterious Mr Quin collection. Like most of these stories, it is rather peculiar. Quin and his friend Satterthwaite are at the opera when they see a girl beneath them, sitting in the stalls, who has pure gold hair. ‘A Greek head,’ is how Satterthwaite describes her. ‘Pure Greek.’36 They are impressed with her hair but they can’t see her face. Satterthwaite is sure it ‘won’t match. That would be a chance in a thousand.’ When they finally see her from the front, the men are astonished. She is an example of sheer beauty, and Satterthwaite immediately quotes Marlowe’s line about launching a thousand ships, before comparing the woman to ‘The Helens, the Cleopatras, the Mary Stuarts.’

Gillian West, Christie’s modern-day Helen, turns out to be a beautiful but prosaic woman, a talented but not great singer, and the object of affection of two men. She becomes engaged to Charlie, and therefore rejects Philip, who appears to take things on the chin while plotting a sinister revenge. He makes Gillian an engagement gift of a wireless and a complicated glass vase with a delicate sphere seemingly balancing upon it. His somewhat convoluted plan is that she will listen to the opera on the wireless, a high note will crack the glass sphere, and a poisonous gas will be released into her sitting room and finish her off. Sadly for Philip, Satterthwaite puts the pieces of the puzzle together (Philip’s glassblowing skills, his career in chemical weapons during the war) and saves Gillian in the nick of time. A stray cat which dashes into the flat is not so lucky, but provides a convenient posthumous proof of Satterthwaite’s thesis. On discovering his failure, Philip throws himself in the Thames, provoking London’s least-concerned policeman to remark that he heard a splash and supposes it must be suicide, before moving on to something more important (gathering stray cats before any more are poisoned, perhaps). ‘It’s not always their fault,’ the incurious policeman remarks to Satterthwaite, before not jumping into the water to try and save Philip. ‘But some women cause a lot of trouble.’ Satterthwaite agrees and wonders if Helen of Troy was also ‘a nice, ordinary woman, blessed or cursed with a wonderful face.’