Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(24)

Strange variants on the Helen story are not a preserve of science fiction, incidentally. Even Star Trek might stop short of the Helens we see in the work of an obscure ancient author, Ptolemaeus Chennos or Ptolemy the Quail. This Ptolemy lived in Alexandria, in Egypt, at the beginning of the second century CE. He composed a Strange History – a set of peculiar stories based on Greek myths. For him, there are many Helens,37 which he has presumably collected from other mythographers: there is Helen, the daughter of Leda, who gave Paris (Alexandros) a daughter, and had an uncanny knack of imitating voices (this unlikely nugget is also in Homer).38 But then, after the Trojan War, there are multiple Helens: one, a daughter of Clytemnestra, who is killed by Orestes, one who worked with Aphrodite, one who raised Romulus and Remus. He mentions a woman who ate three kid goats a day who is also called Helen (though presumably she may have been too busy digesting goat to answer to her name). And then there is the daughter of Musaeus, a poet who wrote about the Trojan War in the eighth century BCE, before Homer. This Helen owned a diglosson arnion – ‘a bilingual sheep’.39 It’s impossible to see how this Helen isn’t the most famous woman in the ancient world, when one comes across a bilingual sheep so rarely. Ptolemy also mentions a Helen who was loved by the poet Stesichorus, Helen of Himera. This is a particularly cute point because one story which the ancients told about Stesichorus was that he lost his sight after writing ungenerously about Helen of Troy. His vision was only restored when he composed a more generous account of her. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Perhaps the most extraordinary Helen is one who doesn’t survive, however. There is a lost tragedy by Sophocles, called The Demand for Helen’s Return.40 Only a few tiny fragments exist today, so we can get little sense of the plot overall. But the Helen they depict is a remarkable variation on the version we have seen in Homer and Euripides. This Helen is so tormented by her wrongdoing that she is considering suicide by drinking poison: bull’s blood. A second fragment describes her driving writing implements – pencils – into her cheek. None of the Helens we have met – from the child bride in the story of Theseus to the adulterous woman in Homer, from the powerful orator in Euripides to the self-possessed wife in Ovid – none of these women is as pitiable as this Sophoclean creation: a woman so damaged by a lifetime of being defined by her beauty that she finally seeks to obliterate it by self-harm. And not just self-harm, but the most horrific, visible kind: she specifically disfigures her face which so many men have sought to possess. That she uses the precise tool which poets and scribes have used to create her myth, to tell her story kindly and unkindly, fairly or unfairly, is especially poignant. The greatest beauty the world had ever known, trying to take away the cause for all those words written about her, using the object which wrote them. Perhaps this is an image – however distressing – we need to keep in our minds when we think about Helen. That whether or not we consider her responsible for a war (or two wars) matters less than what she believes.

So many artists have tried to capture Helen: she invariably reflects the ideals of beauty in whichever age they create her, from Star Trek’s Elaan (with her black ringlets and purple, sparkly leotard) to Rossetti’s Helen of Troy (a wide-eyed blonde, modelled on Annie Miller,41 whose hands clutch at her necklace but whose face seems almost empty of expression). And so we are left – as Ptolemy’s curious list suggests – with an array of Helens, none of whom seems quite real, and all of whom seem to represent the desires of their creators. Look at the certainty with which Achilles is drawn – his speed, his anger, his love for Patroclus, his commitment to honour and immortality through fame: he is defined by what he wants, and strives for, and loses. And then think of Helen, and how much harder she is to pin down: her confused parentage, her contested childhood, her multiple marriages. One of our earliest narrative traditions states that the most notorious fact about her – that she eloped with Paris – is actually a lie: the real Helen is elsewhere, while a war is fought over an unreal creature, an image. In fact, the more we try to understand her, the more she seems to elude us: Helen of Troy, Helen of Sparta, Helen of joy, Helen of slaughter.





Medusa




HE WHO FIGHTS MONSTERS, NIETZSCHE TELLS US, SHOULD TAKE care that he himself does not become a monster.1 But what happens when we look at this advice from the other direction? Is this how monsters are created: are all monsters heroes who went astray? Not in Greek myth, certainly. Some monsters are born that way and others, especially female monsters, are turned monstrous after a bruising encounter with a god. In the case of Medusa, she can cite both kinds of genealogy, depending on who tells her story.

Most ancient authors follow Hesiod’s lead and describe three Gorgons: Sthenno, Euryale and Medusa.2 They are the daughters of a sea god, Phorcys (a son of Gaia), and his sister Cēto, who produce a tremendous array of sea-monster offspring, including Echidna (a fearsome sea-snake), and sometimes also Scylla, who chomps her way through several of Odysseus’ crew. Hesiod notes an unusual aspect of Medusa’s condition: her two sisters are immortal and ageless, but she herself is mortal – which Hesiod considers a wretched fate.3 He doesn’t emphasize that Medusa must therefore also be prone to ageing, but the correlation is surely implied. Nor does he explain how she has turned out to be mortal when her parents are gods and her siblings are immortal. He simply states that it is the case. To grow old and die might be considered miserable enough, if all your relatives are going to live, ageless, forever. But for Medusa, being mortal will result in a premature and grisly fate.