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- [00:00]
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Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
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We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
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All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com
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the face that launched a thousand ships. Sex goddess, whore, bitch, temptress, Rape victim. Cause of a civilizational clash between Europe and Asia.
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Destroyer of men, of ships, of cities. She, devil, Adulteress, queen. The most beautiful woman who ever walked the earth.
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Helen of Troy has been called all of these and more. But is she just the void into which people, and especially, let's face it, men, pour their anxieties, fears and desires about dangerous women?
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A
Over the next four episodes, we're going to be piecing together the story of Helen of Troy. Or maybe that should be Helen of Sparta or even Helen of Egypt. It's a story that will take us from the plains of Greece to the citadels of Asia Minor and to the magical kingdoms of the Nile. She's one of the most celebrated characters of all ancient Greek mythology, and she bears the weight of centuries, even millennia, of artistic and literary reinterpretations as well as plain old erotic fantasy.
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She's been immortalized by writers from Christopher Marlowe, who coined the phrase the face that launched a thousand ships, to W.B. yeats. And she's been played by everybody from Rita Hayworth to Diane Kruger. But beyond the Hollywood femme fatale who was Helen of Troy, okay, we're not going to be arguing today that Helen was a real woman, but we are going to strip back those layers and we're going to find that the Helen of classical literature and art turns out to be a lot more complicated and a lot more enigmatic than we might imagine.
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We'll be asking what the story of Helen is doing in Greek myth and why she's still so fascinating. I mean, why have four episodes on her?
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And we'll be thinking about the implications of this story, and they are complicated ones for female power. Then and now.
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This is Instant Classics, the podcast that explores the stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
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And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week, we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us now this week, Helen of Sparta, our first of our four episodes.
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To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
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To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than
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either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
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A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
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From Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand. And I'm William Durand. In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore explore the life of the father of communist China, Mao Zedong.
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We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution. A time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
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Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.
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B
Mary, in this episode, I think we're gonna start with Helen before she was famous, at least famous in modern terms, right before she gets to Troy. So we're going to hear about how she came into this world, which was through a remarkable event of her mother being raped by Zeus in disguise as a swan. We'll hear about how she was abducted by one man, married another, and then drew the attention of Paris of Troy, which sets the stage for the most famous war of classical mythology, the Trojan War. And then in the second episode we'll move on to like looking at Helen actually in the midst of this disastrous 10 year siege, that she is the proximate cause of the so say cause of. And then in the third episode we'll look at what happens to her after the siege of Troy, which is really interesting. There are lots of twists in that tale. And finally in our last episode of this mini series, episode four, we'll think about Helen's continuing life and existence in art and literature and the imagination beyond the classical world right up to the present day.
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A
Yeah, and I think one of the reasons that the story of Helen is so exciting is that there are so many different versions of it from the very beginning. I mean, in some ways she's classical myth at its most extreme because we have a tendency, I think, and it's encouraged by convenient handbooks of Greek mythology to think that there is somehow a standard orthodox version of these stories. There may be variants on the side. People might debate in the ancient world and the modern world about some aspects of them, but there is an orthodox strand that runs through them. Now. It's often seemed to me that in some ways, and I hope this series will, will illustrate that that myth doesn't work like that at all. You know, there are no such things really as the Greek myths. I mean, I come to think really about the word myth much more as a verb, not a noun. What we, we myth things we tell the stories that make up myths and they're always in conflict with one another. There are always different ways of seeing what might look as if it could be the same episode. And Helen is an absolute fantastic example of that. You know, that from the very, very beginning, Greeks told completely incompatible stories about her. And I think that's, that is really exciting. And I think it is one of the places where we get closest most obviously to that sense of the real fluidity of myth is the fluidity here is absolutely in your face. And that's going to be, I think, part of the fun of this series, seeing just how fluid it is.
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B
I completely agree, Mary. It's completely fluid. And Helen herself then becomes a very unstable character about whom we are going to be disagreeing, you know, and people have been disagreeing since her name first surfaced in Greek literature. But we are going to piece together a kind of biography of her, having said all of that. And that is a sort of enormous caveat, you know, when we sort of work our way through her so called life. Please be aware that every little thread that we're taking there are kind of alternative threads that we, we could have taken. There is no one ancient source that contains a neat biography. So say of Helen, what we're doing is patching together very much as we did with previous episodes on Cassandra and Athena. We're patching together a kind of life from multiple different stories in literature, in poetry, in plays, in art, to create a sort of spurious, in a sense, kind of biography.
- [09:26]
A
I think that's absolutely right. And I think that we are going to, we're going to try and give listeners something to hold onto in terms of a narrative thread. But at the same time, of course, we are part of that long mythic tradition and we are re mythicizing Helen now for the 21st century. You can't avoid that. There isn't, there isn't a truth out there. There are a set of different versions that appeal to us and make sense to us, but don't worry too much. We are not going to flood you with a hundred different versions of everything we say. But you've got to keep that in
- [10:09]
B
mind all the way through. I think it's worth remembering that. I guess we think of Helen. The first thing you think of is she's the most beautiful woman ever who walked the earth, you know, but there's so much more to her in the ancient stories about her. But let's. Nevertheless, Mary, bearing in mind what we've just said about these absolutely sort of infinite multiple options we could take, let us get into her. Her life story. So, I mean. I mean, the first thing to say, isn't it, is that she. Even her conception is remarkable. She was born because her mother, Leda, who was the wife of the king of Sparta, Tyndareus Leda, was raped by the God Zeus, king of the gods, when he was in the disguise, when he had shape shifted into the form of a swan. So this is one of the most weird and peculiar mythic scenes in the whole of the cosmos of Greek mythology, isn't it?
- [11:16]
A
It's wonderful. And it often gets entitled. When you see it, for example, in paintings, the subject will say, leader and the swan. What it doesn't say is that this is the God's use in the form of a swan, effectively raping Leda. And this is the moment of the conception of Helen of Troy. And I'm always amazed, actually, how both ancient and modern artists are so drawn to the coupling of Leda and the swan. You see them once you're on the lookout, you go into a modern art gallery and you'll see them everywhere. And I've never quite understood what the attraction of this is, because I've never seen. I mean, I'm sure some listeners will be able to come up with counterexamples here, but I've never seen any painting which made this coupling between Leda and the God's use in the form of a swan look remotely plausible. I mean, it is actually a scene that defeats each other. Even the best artists. Right. But they are repeatedly drawn to it.
- [12:33]
B
Yeah. I think the answer might be that it's just pervy, Mary. It's just really pervy. In order to make it remotely kind of. I mean, you have to do something with scale. That's the slight problem. You have to make a giant swan. That's my view. I mean, there's something really strange about imagining. Yeah.
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You have to do this, a grown
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woman thing impregnated by a swan.
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You have to say how on Earth, physiologically, does that happen? And that's, I think, where they fall. I mean, I can take giant swans doing all kinds of things, but it's. When you say, so how does a giant swan make love to a woman? That's what none of them get, right. Whatever the right answer might be, I just recommend that people go away and they just put leader and the swan into Google Images and I think that they will find that my case is a strong one on this.
- [13:28]
B
I agree with you, Mary. But I mean, even weirder in a sense than this kind of, you know, if you really think about it for more than two seconds, actually rather horrific. It's actually rather a horrific story. But anyway, Leda, as a result of this, doesn't have a baby, but she lays an indeterminate number of eggs and out of those eggs hatch. And again, we're in the world of variants, so let's not get too kind of caught up in this. But there's a certain number of eggs, and out of these eggs are produced not just Helen, but probably at least one and probably two brothers. And those brothers are Castor and Pollux. His are sort of, you know, names that trip off the tongue. I think we, you know, lots of people have heard of Castor and Pollux. They're these famous twins. They are Helen's brothers and they are also. At least one of them is also the child of Zeus. And there's a potential extra egg which may or may not contain Clytemnestra, her half sister. Helen's half sister, who is actually, you know, she's the daughter of Tyndareus and Leda. She's not involved in the whole kind of Zeus thing. It's confusing.
- [14:45]
A
It is really confusing. But the basic point is that there's a kind of indeterminate number of eggs and there are question marks about the paternity because it is. Helen is clearly universally agreed, or no, nothing is universal with Helen, almost universally agreed to be the. The child of Zeus and Leda. There are also stories about how these other kids, Helen's siblings or half siblings are actually the story, are actually that the children of Tyndares, her husband. People try to rationalize this. Ancient writers get very keen on trying to make sense of all this. And they say, for example, that Leda slept with Tyndareus and Zeus on the same day. And actually. So how would you know quite who the father was in each case? But I think that the basic issue is that we have a kind of blended family here, blending mortals and immortals with Helen certainly Said by most to be the child of Zeus. The others, possibly the child, the children of Tindares, possibly of Zeus. The jury's out on that. And it is. It's one of those kind of cases where you. You have to blink, really, when you think about people telling this story. You think eggs, you know, so Leader actually gave birth to an egg egg, and you think this is symbolic, surely. I mean, there's an attempt here to say this is trying to capture what it is not to be immortal. You know, she's born in a different way. They didn't really kind of believe that. Well, I'm sure some people reading these stories or hearing these stories in the ancient world thought like we do, you know, too many eggs for my liking here, they must have thought. But there's a marvellous little bit in the second century ce guidebook writer, guidebook to Greece, written by a guy called Pausanias, one of Pausanias names. He goes around the Greek world looking at heritage sites, really. And when he comes to Sparta, he says you can still see bits of the eggshell in a temple at Sparta. So it's one of those cases where Greek mythology, or the telling of Greek mythology sort of sometimes somehow has it both ways that you can think this is all mythical fantasy, which in part, in whole, perhaps it is. But then you find some guy saying, and I've seen the eggshell.
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B
Right.
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So it's that strange mixture of absolute reality that these things happened and a knowledge that this is storytelling that I think is very, very elusive when you come to look at Greek myth.
- [17:58]
B
Yeah, I think that's a brilliant point. Yeah. Both real and unreal at the same time, which in a way is. So, Helen.
- [18:06]
A
Yes. Real and unreal.
- [18:07]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think most. I would say most sources beyond a doubt say that she's the daughter of Zeus. And I do think that's just actually really important to her story that in fact, she's the only daughter, mortal daughter of Zeus. So Zeus has plenty of kids who are godesses. He has plenty of kids who are mortal semi divine men, you know, who have mortal mothers.
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Heracles, I mean, it'd be a good example of that, wouldn't it? Heracles is one.
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But this is the only mortal daughter that he has. So she has this sort of specialness about her, and she's always special, and she's always, it turns out, desirable in ways that are dangerous and unpleasant. So she grows up in Sparta, raised by her mother, Leda, and her, I suppose, stepfather, Tyndareus, Leda's husband, the king of Sparta, but as a young girl. And there are various different accounts of how old she is when this happens, but believe me, they all make her very young. Those who are interested in telling us her age, when she's very young, she is abducted, raped by the hero, the Greek hero, Theseus. I mean, Theseus is a big figure in Greek mythology. Most famously, he killed the Minotaur. I'm sure we'll come back and look at Theseus in another set of episodes, but, you know, this is one story that bring Helen and Theseus together. He wants her, he grabs her, he takes her to Athens, which is where he lives, where he is king. And after him come ultimately Castor and Pollux, these siblings, these brothers or half brothers of Helen. They attack Athens and they take Theseus's mother prisoner. And, you know, this is a foreshadowing, I would say, of all the trouble that comes in the wake of Helen, not necessarily because it's Helen's fault, because of these men who want things from
- [20:19]
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her, I would say, and men who want things from her and men who want her. I mean, I think that part of the message of this bit of the story is that the. There's never been a moment in Helen's mythical life when she hasn't been the object of male competition. I know the famous example we're going to come onto is when she is one, raped, abducted by Paris, which sets off the Trojan War. But that's not the first example. And she is destined, for better or worse, to set men, men against each other. And I think that's this bit of the story which is usually missed out, I think, is terribly important for understanding how Helen was seen to. She must be like this. She's the most beautiful woman in the world, and she cannot avoid being the object of competition.
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And this theme of Helen being fought over, Helen being competed over continues absolutely when it comes to the moment of her choosing a husband. And because she does actually choose a husband, she does choose a husband. So this part of the story is most, I suppose, most clearly put in a text that we call the Library by somebody called Apollodorus. Now, it's actually quite a complicated text because it's probably not by the Apollodorus who lived in the second century bce, to whom it was traditionally ascribed. It's probably a rather later Roman era. But anyway, let's call Apollodorus an ancient compendium of mythical stories, because that is definitely what it is. So in this ancient compendium by this guy, maybe By Apollodorus. We are told that when it comes to the time for Helen to get married to Tyndareus, her stepfather institutes a competitive process and invites heroes, all the great leaders from across the Greek world to assemble in Sparta and kind of compete for her hand. Now Tyndareus, having set this process up, is perhaps rightly afraid that there will be violence and conflict that will break out between the suitors as they, you know, as they compete for this extraordinary prize of this semi divine, very beautiful woman. So Odysseus, who, as we know from, if you're in Odyssey book club, you'll be under no illusion that Odysseus is the clever guy in all these ancient stories that around the Trojan War he is the one with all the tactical and strategic advice and wisdom. Odysseus suggests to him that in order to avoid this trouble he should get all the unsuccessful suitors to swear allegiance to the successful suitor. And that actually will become important later in the story. And Odysseus is very clever because he doesn't want to marry Helen, I suspect because he knows she's going to be trouble. His price that he extracts from Tyndareus repayment for giving this advice is that Tyndareus should help him get Penelope's hand in marriage who happens to be his niece. Everyone's very closely related.
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A
So we've got this situation. I mean, I think there are different versions of Odysseus motives here. And one version is that Odysseus knew that he wasn't good looking enough to get Helen. So he'd be better be the kind of the wheeler and dealer because he wasn't going to win Helen anyway, even though he would have liked her. But we got this position where cleverly, everybody, all the unsuccessful guys are tied into the success of this marriage between Helen and whoever she chooses or whoever she's given to. So that if anything happens, as we know it's going to, if anything happens, they are honor bound to defend that marriage and to support that union. Now the person who is successful in this is Agamemnon's younger and rather less impressive brother Menelaus. Right? And Menelaus is then, as it were, plugged in with the support of all the Greeks to this union with the most beautiful woman in the world.
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B
And it's so interesting, Apollodorus, at least in Apollodorus version, she does choose Menelaus. That's yet another piece of Odysseus's shrewd advice. Odysseus advises Tyndareus that one possible outcome of this competitive wedding process is that Agamemnon, the older brother, more powerful brother of Menelaus, might drop his own wife, who is Clytemnestra, the half sister of Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus. He might just kind of want to drop her and have Helen instead, which would obviously be a terrible outcome. That would be a terrible family outcome. So Helen, who doesn't want to destroy her sister's life, chooses Menelaus. So, you know, Odysseus has got all this form for smoothing out these tricky situations.
- [26:18]
A
Yeah, I mean, other people think that Helen was given to Menelaus rather than chose him, but how do we know? But I think that, you know, at this point, everything looks as if partly thanks to Odysseus, everything's been worked out rather cleverly, you know, that everybody is bound into this marriage and so they can live happily ever after. But that is where the trouble starts in a not wholly expected way, which we'll come to after the break. Meanwhile, in another part of the world, another wedding is going on. It's the wedding of the mortal king Peleus and the nymph, or sea goddess Thetis. Now, Thetis might be a familiar name to some listeners because Thetis is the mother of Achilles. So in another part of the world, the marriage is happening of the union that is going to bring forth Achilles, the main Greek warrior hero of the Trojan War. Now, that's a whole other story, and we'll be looking at that someplace else on the podcast, but it's worth flagging that we've got Helen in Sparta here, one of the causes of the Trojan War being married. And in another marriage, we're seeing the couple who are going to give birth, or Thetis is going to give birth to the main warrior on the Greek side of the Trojan War. There's a link here. But the problem is the wedding ceremony doesn't go entirely to plan. The wedding ceremony of Peleus and Thetis, because the goddess Eris, and her name means strife and disagreement, the goddess Eris has not been invited to the wedding. Of course she's not been invited, because he wants to invite the goddess of disagreement and strife to a happily ever after wedding ceremony. But Eris is extremely cross that she's not been invited to to what looks like the wedding of the year. So in order to get her own back and really living up to her name of strife, in order to cause trouble, she comes in to the wedding ceremony uninvited, and she drops a beautiful, most comfortable golden apple in the Middle of the guests. And this is taking place in Thessaly in northern Greece. And on this apple is inscribed the words to the most beautiful, to the most fair or for the most beautiful.
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Now, trouble.
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Trouble is, you know, absolutely around the corner because three of the immortal goddess guests decide they want it. You know, there's Athena there we've looked at in a previous episode. There's Hera, Zeus's regnal wife. And Aphrodite, we call the goddess of love, but you might better call her Aphrodite, the goddess of sex, the goddess of passion. And they want it. They each go for it. But the question is, who is going to get the golden apple? And it's unresolved until unresolved.
- [30:25]
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They all make a grab for it, but, you know, nobody wins it outright. And Zeus determines that the person. Who there's going to be a person, a human being, is going to decide which of the goddesses get this covetable golden apple. And that person is a prince of Troy called Paris. Now, Paris, owing to an intriguing backstory of his own, which we maybe will not get into in detail, right now, Paris is working as a shepherd in the hills outside of Troy.
- [31:03]
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Although a prince of the royal house by birth, he's been put out to grass as a shepherd.
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And he's minding his own business on Mount Ida outside Troy, looking after his sheep, when one day, three goddesses, the most powerful goddesses in the pantheon, turn up and tell him that he has to decide which of them is going to get this apple. Can you imagine? I mean, there's a reason why this is one of the most resonant scenes in the whole of Greek mythology. It's been immortalized in art down the millennia because, you know, the idea of three shimmering, tall, gleaming, powerful, extraordinary goddesses parading in front of Paris, who has to decide who is the most fair, which is what the apple says on it. This must have been very surprising for Paris. It's a wonderfully resonant scene. The goddesses, and this is very Greek mythology, I would say the goddesses don't play a very fair game. I would say they all offer. Paris bribes. Hera, the queen of the gods, the wife of Zeus, she offers him power to become the most powerful human on the planet. Athena, who, as we know from our previous episode on Athena, one of Athena's big realms of interest is military victory. She offers Paris military victory to become this extraordinarily powerful military leader. Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful, the most alluring, the most ravishing the most spectacularly beautiful woman in the world to be his wife. That woman is Helen. And who does Paris choose? Aphrodite. And this is a massive, massive problem because obviously Helen, by this point, is already married to Menelaus. And there are going to be consequences. There are going to be consequences.
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A
Strife was. Was a cannial thing. And, yeah, she could see that whatever she did with that golden apple was going to lead to trouble.
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B
And.
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A
And it did. But, I mean, I think, as you say, this story of what, you know, we give the shorthand to the Judgment of Paris is absolutely everywhere in ancient art and literature and modern too. And there are dozens and dozens of painted Greek pots, for example, which show Paris trying to decide between the goddesses. And there's a kind of Renaissance or early modern European painter who didn't have a go, rather more successfully, I should say, than with Lederim, the swan didn't have a go at picturing that moment where the mortal Paris is going to. Is making his judgment about who gets the golden apple. Now, in part, you can't help thinking that it is. Is in part a very convenient justification for showing naked women, because most of these paintings have a nicely, neatly, modestly clothed Paris and three naked goddesses whose nudity is justified by the myth. But they are all over the place. This scene is all over the place. And, you know, I think, you know, in some ways it is. It is, in the terms of visual arts, one of the most replicated stories. But it also, and this is to go back in a way to the variants, it also, in the ancient world itself, attracts all kinds of different versions about the motivations of the goddesses, different versions of what Paris is up to here. And some of them, I have to say, I mean, this is a nasty, sexist moment, and I shouldn't find it funny, but some of the humorous treatments of this story in ancient literature are, for me, truly memorable. And if I could recommend one, which we'll put in the show notes, it's a wonderfully ironic treatment of the Judgment of Paris as a dialogue by the Greek satirist Lucian, who is living in the second century ce, and he picks up quite a lot of the themes that we've already touched on. But what he's doing is he is showing you, he's lifting the lid on how the Judgment of Paris really worked, and in a way, how embarrassing it was for poor old Paris, because the goddesses, the goddesses are given a guide because they're in Thessaly and they've got to get to Troy, where Paris is on the slopes of Mount Ida. So Hermes, the messenger God, kind of bundles them up and zooms them into Mount Ida. He then says, look, we imagine they're traveling by. By air in some way. Says, we better get. Get down. What? We don't want to frighten Paris. If four gods arrive by air, you know, he'll run for his. He'll run for his life. So we're going to get down and. And approach him, because I can see him over there, and we're going to ask him to do the judgment. What is very funny is then Lucien explored how the goddesses work out what they might be br. With. And Aphrodite is quite interested to know if Paris is already married, because that might make a difference to her bribe. And, you know, in an appalling way, Hermes says, well, she is. He is already married, but it's to a country bumpkin, so it doesn't really matter, right? Which is right. Paris then is confronted with the three goddesses, and he first of all thinks, maybe it'd be possible to make it a draw. Maybe he could give the prize to all of them and that would get him out of a jam, right? Oh, God, if only. He gets quite anxious about this. But no, he's got to give it to one and then we move into another, and it's in some ways quite hilarious. Paris wonders whether he's got to get them to take their clothes off, because at the moment they're dressed and yes, he has to get them to take their clothes off. And so there's several pages where he's saying, I think maybe you could do without the girdle, Aphrodite, maybe you could take that off. And then once he'd had a look at them and questioned them, he says things like, oh, you know, Athena, can you put your helmet back on now, dear? You know, that's kind of. Sort of slightly, kind of lurid satire. He decides he's going to give the prize to Helen. And Aphrodite's been. Everybody's been given a good write up of Helen. They say she's very soft. Helen's very soft. And then, as we've been saying, she's born from an egg, you know. Right. This is all deeply intriguing to Paris, but he goes for Aphrodite. But then he gets worried because he says, but Helen's married already, right? So if I get Aphrodite, how does that work out? And Aphrodite says, don't worry, I'm the goddess of desire and sex. I will fix that. And that is the prophetic bit, the how is Aphrodite going to give Helen to Paris when Helen's already married to someone else? Lucien ends there, you know, knowing. We'll all see the joke in the next episode. We'll find out what sort of really, in mythic terms, does happen next.
- [39:58]
B
See you then.
- [39:59]
A
See you then.
- [40:01]
B
As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodgmail.com or on our social media @instantclassicspod.
- [40:18]
A
Bye bye.