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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, and 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, especially, let's face it, men, have poured their anxieties, fears and desires about women?
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This is the third episode in our four part series on Helen of Troy, trying to piece together her story. What we're discovering is that the deeper you go, the harder it is to pin down mythology's most notorious and seductive woman.
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And we're asking not only why the Greeks were so fascinated by this story, but why we still are today. Helen of Troy, it seems, has got a huge amount to say about our enduringly ambiguous attitudes to women, sex and power.
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In this episode, we're looking at what happened to Helen after the Trojan War broke out, including a long stint in Egypt before apparently discovering or rediscovering domestic bliss with husband Menelaus in Sparta. We're looking at some of the arguments, the fierce arguments the ancient Greeks had about Helen. And then we're going to end with the strangely contradictory stories of her death, which only serve to underline her ambiguity. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient 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 Egypt.
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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 either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most
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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 Hangar World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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And I'm William Duranpool.
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In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta.
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You to explore the life of the
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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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So, Mary, last time we left Helen on the shores of Troy, reunited in a, in an ambiguous way, in a troubling way with her first husband Menelaus. And you know, it was a bit of a, it was a bit of a cliffhanger. What's going to happen to Helen? So what actually does happen, Mary? Cause it's a little bit of a twist actually, isn't it, given everything we know about what's gone before.
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Yeah. Well, the key text here is the fourth book of Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus son Telemachus is trying to find out. Odysseus is not yet back home. Telemachus is trying to find out what, what has happened, what did happen to dad. And in his investigations he fetches up at Sparta to ask, as you would, Helen and Menelaus, if they know anything about Odysseus. Now for those of you that following the book club, we did this in some detail in the book club but, but we can pull out some of the big points here, I think, because what is kind of surprising is that when Telemachus gets there, what he finds is a kind of middle aged, rather calm, slightly domestic married couple. I kind of think of them, I'm afraid, a bit like Charles and Camilla, you know, that know, passion's a bit spent. But there they are, you know, very happily together in a, you know, in a slightly middle aged way. You kind of expect, I think that maybe things weren't going to go right with Helen and Menelaus once they've got back from this adulterous escapade in the Trojan War. But everything looks absolutely fine. Helen is still the savvier one and Menelaus is still a bit kind of blokeish, but really they seem to be getting on absolutely fine.
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Yes, Helen is the hostess with the mostess, so she's the articulate, welcoming one. She tells lots of stories about the Trojan War. And actually it's here that we, it's in the storytelling in this part of the Odyssey that we hear about some of the things that happened, example with the Trojan Horse and Helen, which we talked about in the first episode of this little series. But we also, it's also, I mean, I adore Helen in this part of the Odyssey because she's so sort of perfumed and chic and smart and clever and she kind of enters the room almost in the sort of like a goddess surrounded by her beautiful enslaved women. She's, she's, she's, she's exotic and she's smart, but somehow, you know, none of the, the idea that they fought an enormous war over her, you know, this has always been incredibly smoothed over. It's, you know, it's almost like this war didn't happen.
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Almost entirely smooth though. But I think just occasionally you find the ambiguities about Helen peeking through. Because we talked in an earlier episode about strange way she calls herself dog faced and what that really means. Well, again, in this book of the Odyssey, she refers to herself as Dog face. So there are hints of the questions we might want to take. But she is still the chic middle aged woman happily living with hubby. We just never expected, I think.
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B
Exactly. And we also get our first taste here of Helen of Egypt. We called this episode Helen of Egypt for a reason. And one reason is that in this bit of the Odyssey we hear about what happened to them, what happened to Helen and Menelaus before they managed to get home to Sparta. And a big part of their story is that they spent a long time in Egypt. And this is where she picks up some very interesting drugs which she's going to hand round to her guests, Telemachus and to the whole assembled company. And she was given a beautiful golden spindle. And there's lots of interesting storytelling from Menelaus about Egypt.
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Herman gets these little presents. Menelaus gets a great prophecy that Menelaus learns that after he's dead he is going to have a very, very special and privileged place in the underworld. So that cheers Himal, right.
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B
He's going to be on the Isles of the Blessed, as they're called. And that's by virtue of his marriage to Helen, because Helen is so special and Helen is the daughter, as we keep reminding ourselves, of Zeus. But there's so much more to Helen's connection with Egypt.
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I think what surprises people when they look at the story of Helen of Troy is that, as you say, that connection with Egypt is more than picking up a golden spindle. There's one pretty powerful version of Helen's story and it's not one that is just in the byways of Greek literature, pretty mainstream, which says, ha ha, folks, Helen, the real Helen, never went to Troy at all. That Helen spent the whole of the Trojan War, hunkered down certain adventures on route, hunkered down in Egypt. And what went to Troy was just an image of her, a kind of facsimile, it's called in Greek an aedolon. So Egypt is where Helen spent the whole of the war, not walking around the walls of Troy at all. That version, you know, as I say, this is not the byways of Greek literature. It starts pretty early. There's a poem by a Greek poet of the sixth century B.C. that is, you know, before the great age of the Greek tragedians, et cetera, which appears. We only have it reported, we don't have the poem itself, but it appears to say exactly that, that she didn't ever go to Troy. But it comes up again in absolutely mainstream Greek authors. I mean, like, you know, Herodotus, the father of history, he does a whole book on Egypt and part of the book on Egypt when he's kind of describing the kind of the almost a fantasy land, the weirdness in the Greek imagination of Egypt, part of his story is that this is where Helen was during the Trojan War.
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B
It's so, I think, so remarkable and so interesting, this really dominant version of the myth of Helen that she never even went to Troy. Because if there's one thing that we maybe all know about Greek mythology, even if we know very little about Greek mythology, we kind of know that there was the Trojan War and that Helen of Troy is involved in it. The sort of notion that there's a very dominant alternate version in which Helen never even went to Troy, I think tells you everything about the nature of Greek myth. The fact that it's so flexible, it's so unstable, that it's always subject to variation. It's mind blowing really. And like you say, this early poem that's lost by this guy Stesichorus. I mean, we do have the first few lines because they were quoted by the philosopher Plato and the lines are addressed to her and they translate as there is no truth in that story. You didn't ride in the well rowed galleys, you didn't reach the walls of Troy. It's extraordinary. And when Herodotus talks about this, this is part of, I think Herodotus desire sometimes to Rationalize ancient storytelling and ancient myth. So he says Helen must have spent the Trojan war in Egypt, because logically, if she'd been in Troy, the Trojans and the Greeks would have negotiated an end to the war rather than go through with like 10 years of appalling death and destruction. I mean, if only history did work like that and wars were prevented logically because negotiated their way out of them.
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And Herodotus doesn't kind of ask the next question which you want him to ask, which is, so do you actually think they fought all those years just for an image? You know, so they didn't fought. They would have negotiated if the real Helen had been there. Instead they had all that death and destruction just for the sake of an eidolon, a facsimile, an image. There's actually even more to it than that, as we'll see after we take a break.
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This idea of the real Helen being in Egypt and an eidolon or an image or a cloud, actually often thought of as cloud shaped Helen being at Troy, is expanded radically by the great 5th century tragedian Euripides in this wonderful play called Helen. And it's a really odd and extraordinary play. It tonally doesn't feel like tragedy, I would say, actually it's a play that survived through antiquity and all the way to us by complete chance, not because it was chosen by Byzantine monks as part of the school curriculum, which is actually how a lot of play survived. It survived on a freak bit of manuscripts, and it's an anomaly. And what's interesting, I think, about the tone of the play is that it shows us that there was a very broad range of tones and styles for tragedy.
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If you pick up the Helen Euripides play, that is, you read it in our terms, you know, at the very most is a kind of tragicomedy. You know, part of it borders on farce. And yet, actually, I mean, I think the really important thing about Helen in some ways that is the play is that, as you say, it shows you that our version of tragedy, our assumptions about what a tragedy is, it's very much formed by a few Greek tragedies. And if you look at the wider range, some survive and many don't. You'll find that the tonality is in many senses, completely different. You know, we are not here just dealing in tragedy with Medea killing her kids. We're dealing with Helen cooped up in Egypt and being herself a bit like Penelope in the Odyssey. She's got a suitor too, who wants to say to Her. Come on, you know I'm going to marry you, darling. Forget Menelaus, you know, it's a wonderful kind of. Well, you know, it's almost, in some cases, in some bits of the play, it's almost a bedroom farce, really.
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B
Yeah. And I think it's almost a satire, because the idea, you know, you get this idea of this huge bloody war being fought over an eidolon, but then we're meeting the real Helen, and that almost emphasizes the kind of utter futility of this war that's been going on over in Troy. And of course, the play was written at a time of war in the contemporary Greek world. And I think under the surface, it is sort of asking the question, what is all this for? What is all this bloodshed for? But the Helen that Euripides writes, and I think this is very Euripidean. I mean, Euripides has this great quality of turning received ideas on their head and upending expectations. And the Helen, the real Helen who's been whisked away to Egypt is almost the opposite of the Helen who is the naughty seductress or adulteress or temptress. She's almost ridiculously virtuous and loyal and chaste. And exactly that point, Mary, that you just said about her being a bit like Penelope. She's loyal to Menelaus, but she's being hounded to marry a fancy Egyptian king. So making Helen of Troy, like Penelope is sort of wonderfully subversive, because they're supposed to be sort of opposites, the loyal versus the disloyal. In this case, they're both super loyal.
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A
But there are kind of wonderfully hilarious moments in it. It's very easy to see what the problem is, because in the story of the play that's Helen, Menelaus does show up, and he's coming back from Troy. He's on his way back from Droy, and of course, he's got the Eidolon with him, him, because he's bringing Helen back, or what he thinks is Helen back, but it's only a phantom of figment. And the real Helen is actually in Egypt, and he's going to meet her. And you think, so how is he going to deal? How is the playwright going to deal with this? There's the image of Helen, the false Helen and the real Helen. How's that going to come together? And what seems to happen is just the eidolon kind of goes up in smoke, just disappears, and we're left only then with the. With the real Helen but the real Helen, you know, is being pressed to marry this Egyptian king when she wants to scarp her back to Sparta with her husband and you know, how are they going to escape? And there's this wonderfully implausible story that they pretend that Menelaus has died in Egypt. Menelaus disguises himself as a servant and they persuade the Egyptian king that they have to bury Menelaus at sea. So they get on a boat as if they were going out to sea to bury the body of Menelaus. The real Menelaus is there but in disguise as a hanger on. And as soon as they get out to sea of course they can whisk away and they can escape the clutches of the king. But you know, that's where it comes a bit bedroom farce Y for me.
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I think if it was Shakespeare we wouldn't call it tragedy because it literally has a happy ending. You know, the lovers get away at the end and everything is restored to order. But like you say it's very, very funny that the cloud version, the Eidolon version of Helen just sort of conveniently disappears into smoke. I mean he could have had, I mean in some ways you could have had two Helens and had them encounter each other.
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That would have been, that would have been the real bedroom. That would have been the real bedroom, fast version of it. We've actually got two Helens and we don't know which the real one is. Euripides sensibly resists that I think.
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Yeah, stops short, stops short of that. This idea of Helen being virtuous after all, Helen being a good egg after all. That becomes a really intriguing point of debate and philosophical question in the 5th century BCE as well. That is an extraordinary rhetorical work, oratorical work by the 5th century BCE Sicilian born philosopher Gorgias, who is well known to readers of Plato, let's say he appears as a character in the philosophical dialogues of Plato. He was a famous, what we call sophist. So these were 5th century BCE philosophers with the reputation of selling their services and their services tended to be teaching citizens to be able to do fancy persuasive rhetoric which was very useful in this radical burgeoning democracy to be able to make, to be able to convince people of their point of view. So Gorgias is a person that we know a little bit about and he wrote this defense of Helen, a kind of almost, it's almost like she's been put on trial Mary, isn't it? And it's a kind of defense of Helen as if she was a real contemporary person, Almost.
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Yes. And it goes under the title now of the Praise of Helen, the Encomium Helen. But it's essentially, it's a legal defense, and it goes through all the reasons why Helen cannot be blamed, even assuming that she did run off of Paris and go to Troy, in other words. So was she overpowered by love? In which case, if it was passion, then that's an excuse for her behavior. Did the gods make her do it? Was this divine will not Helen's will, In which case you have to find her innocent? Was she? And this is wonderful given that this is in a rhetorical little debate. Was she swayed by the power of words? You know, did rhetoric persuade her to do it? In which case, again, Helen, you know, in Gorgias's version, becomes the victim of these forces beyond her, not the person who is responsible for what she did.
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B
For Gorgias, she's innocent on all charges because she was overpowered by a combination of forces, Eros. So desire, persuasion, the gods, necessity, all these other things. And in a way, it should be, you know, hurrah, Helen's got off, at least as far as this guy is concerned. But weirdly, it makes Helen seem so completely passive. Right. Can any of us be said to be responsible for anything if everything we do is the result of forces that cannot be countermanded? So, you know, can we ever be said to be blameworthy?
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A
You know, and Gorgias isn't the only one at this kind of rhetorical, philosophical argument. I mean, you know, you know, Helen is a key witness, a key subject in a whole lot of debates about that kind of responsibility, you know, in a sense, Helen, good or bad. And there's a work by another rhetorician called Isocrates.
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B
He was a pupil of Gorgias', I think, actually.
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Yes, he was over the bit later, 5th to 4th centuries BCE, you know, and he turns it on its head partly in a different way because he said, look, what's the problem with the Greeks? Well, the problem with the Greeks is that they're never united. You know, they never stick together. They're just a load of different cities who are always fighting each other. What was great about the Trojan War is that the Greeks collaborated against the enemy. They were united. And who was the catalyst for that? It was Helen. Well, so, you know, Helen is why the Greeks showed the Greeks that they could stick together, therefore, good.
- [25:59]
B
There's a lovely bit in Isocrates, Encomium of Helen or Praise of Helen, where he claims, or he argues that Helen must have appeared to Homer, a kind of. Homer must have had a vision of Helen or the ghost of Helen, or some kind of apparition of Helen came to Homer and persuaded him to write the Iliad, so that by making all the heroes of the Iliad famous for all of time, that horrific war should be made. Should. Should have seemed worth it. It's such a sort of twisted argument, and it's kind of hilarious that Helen. It was Helen. It was Helen who desired the Iliad to be written.
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A
I think we've got to confess something, though, Charlotte, here, because we've been making these texts about the rhetorical problems of Helen written by gorgeous Nistocrates. We will put them on the show notes so people can look them up. We've been making them sound rather kind of sprightly and sexy, actually. They are pretty hardcore philosophical argument, not at its most exciting, you know, So I think it's worth looking at it because it's taken, you know, really very seriously and, you know, without much, you know, sprightliness in its step. But if you look at them a bit, I mean, as you were hinting a little bit ago, you can see that there are really big issues here in the Greek attempt to judge Helen or to pin down their judgment of Helen. Because, as you said, one of the things that becomes a problem if you go down the Gorgias route in particular, is that Helen is raising the question of whether you can ever blame anyone for anything.
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B
Yeah.
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And so she does prompt big questions about human responsibility, you know, which have been debated, you know, ever since. If gods or the God controls the world, then where does human agency and human responsibility lie? And Helen becomes the absolute symbol of that ongoing question, I think.
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B
Absolutely. And isn't it interesting that it's Helen, above all other potential characters, who is the focus for this kind of debate, because it's around Helen swirls so many questions. She's such the focus for the sort of the biggest story in Greek mythology. So, you know, isn't it a peculiar idea to think of these philosophers debating whether this character from the misty past, who, you know, even the Greeks probably were a little bit ambiguous about whether she existed or not? All these sort of vivid contemporary debates about whether Helen was responsible or not for the war. And it's. She. I don't know, it feels like debate just flows to her because she's so big. But also, these works by Gorgias and Isocrates, they do, to me, have the sort of whiff of philosophical showcase about them, you know, let me show you how clever I am by debating this kind of rather irrelevant topic.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
No, it is from our deep, deep past.
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A
I think that's in part true. It's, you know, it's showing off. I am going to defend Helen. Right.
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B
The indefensible. I'm going to dissent the indefensible. And this is my shop front for the power of my debate and philosophy and rhetorical skill.
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A
I think that's partly true. And, you know, I have no doubt that we would. I think we'd have found Gorgias a bit irritating, actually. But I also think that some of those philosophical debates are raising and kind of latching onto debates about Helen that were much more embedded in more. More, not very, but more ordinary Greek culture than we think. And you mentioned in an earlier episode in this series, the poem of Sappho, who is thinking about Helen and Helen leaving, abandoning her child to go off with Paris. That is that the wickedest thing you could ever do? Or is that in some ways the most understandable way of thinking about what real passion was? So I suspect that partly it's philosophical showmanship when we look at Gorgias and Isocrates, but I think also it's not so far removed from how some other readers, you know, who are not philosophers, would have seen what the problems of Helen, of judging Helen are. I find Gorgesque in some ways a bit sort of. Well, yeah, irritating because he's so kind of clever, clogs about what he's doing. But it makes it unforgettable that there's always another side to Helen's story.
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B
Yeah. And that it's. That she's always unstable. She's.
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She's.
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B
You can't really ever say for sure, is she to blame? Is she not? Did she do it? Was. Was it done to her? And all of that is always in her story, right from the very beginning. So with this fragilely kind of ambiguous. And that's what, to me, that is what makes Helen so. So fascinating.
- [32:15]
A
That's right. And I think we'll see some of that in our next episode when we look at some modern reworkings of Helen. But I think it is the case that kind of the popular image now of Helen is much more kind of standard, much less problematic, much more a straightforward story of woman abandons husband and causes war than it ever was in the ancient Greek world. That. That was one version that the ancient Greeks had of Helen. And we, in a sense, have taken that over in popular culture, at least to the exclusion of others.
- [32:58]
B
And sex goddess. She's. I think she's. She's less sex goddess in. In these ancient Greek debates. You know, she's more a subject for philosophical debate. That's what she's interesting for. Not. Not that she's like some sexy, sexy bird.
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A
No, she. She has a bit of kind of nice perfume and she's quite, you know, she's got aura.
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B
She has beauty. She's not fetishized.
- [33:24]
A
No. And. And she's much more. What comes out of the kind of image of Helen in all these stories. Her savviness, her capacity for language, for telling her own story, for looking at herself critically, for wondering about herself. So, you know, this idea that she's a bimbo who was taken away because she was a bit dim but very pretty and, you know, ended up causing the world's greatest war ever seen. Right. At least in myth, the Trojan War. That is just not what a closer reading of the Greek material gives you, I don't think.
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B
Turns out, guys, you can be clever and beautiful both at the same time, anyway. But her story, Mary, continues.
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It does.
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B
And in the end, you know, she is a mortal woman, despite being the child of a God, and she does. Well, actually, that is debatable. That is, in fact, totally debatable. But her story continues, and it does. In some versions, she dies. In some versions, she doesn't die.
- [34:33]
A
We know that Menelaus predeceases her, and we know because it's been prophesied in Egypt that he's going to have this particularly cushy number in the underworld, on the Isles of the Blessed. The stories are about what happens to Helen, are predictably, perhaps much more confused. Confusing and ambiguous and various.
- [35:04]
B
And various. There are so many versions. One of my favorites, Mary, because it's another Euripides play, and I've got a massive soft spot for Euripides, is Euripides playing Orestes. And it's another one of those plays that is tonally very, very peculiar. So, anyway, the scene is. The story is Orestes and his sister Electra are in a bit of a mess because to cut a long story short, they have just killed their mother for all sorts of reasons. Actually, if you've listened to Odyssey Book Club, there's lots of backstory there, but Orestes and Electra have killed their mother, Clytemnestra, and they are in very, very big trouble. Now, Clytemnestra, as you'll remember from the first episode of this miniseries, is Helen's half sister. So There they are at home, guilty of this murder. Helen. Helen's come to mourn her sister and Orestes and Electra, who, to my mind, in this play are slight desperados. And they're in a hole, they're in effects. They decide that the best thing they could possibly do is now kill Helen because by doing so they'll deflect attention from their own crime. And wouldn't it obviously be a good thing to kill the woman who had caused the Trojan War? So they. To me, this is the play that the Coen brothers should be directing. It has that weird. It has a weird and slightly desperate tone to it. And then they get quite far towards killing Auntie Helen. But fortunately, the God Apollo appears and turns Helen into a star most conveniently, and says that, that. And turns up and says, well, you know, you can't do this. The war was in fact decreed by Zeus in order to relieve population pressure on humankind, which actually that population pressure point does pitch up in earlier versions of the Trojan War. It's slightly weird that, you know, Zeus caused this war in order to keep the human population down, prevent overpopulation, and Helen was just the instrument of this policy. Weird, weird.
- [37:34]
A
But it's not, as it were, gives Helen an ending when she's, you know, a kind of semi, sort of immortal star in the sky. But there are plenty other rather different stories of Helen having some kind of continuing worship, at least when. When she's died, however she dies. I mean, at Sparta, we saw in the first episode, there was preserved in a temple at Sparta. There was part of the. Or the whole egg out of which Helen emerged to be born. But there is also a cult religious worship of Helen at Sparta. And it's not only at Sparta. There's a shrine in the Black Sea area where Helen and Achilles appear to be worshipped together. I find that quite striking because it's a way of putting together these two main characters, the two main agents of the Trojan War, both of them semi divine, they've got divine parentage and, you know, Helen as the cause and Achilles as the weapon, the prime weapon of the war. And then they end up with a kind of religious cult in the shrine in the Black Sea.
- [39:15]
B
It seems strangely suitable because, again, as we have mentioned before in this little series, Helen and Achilles have something. They have a couple of things in common. They're both children of gods and they both have this. Particularly in the Iliad, we see them with this sort of greater insight into the sort of role of the war in Cosmology. And history in the sort of life of the world than other characters. They both make art about the war. Achilles strums his lyre and sings about it and Helen makes a beautiful tapestry about it. So I like to think of them as being together on this tiny island which is in the. It's associated with, and has been for a very, very long time with a real island which is towards the mouth of the Danube. The reason my eyes are flicking in one direction, actually, is that I've got a map of the Black Sea on my desk here, which is always there because it's got Ukraine above it. Anyway, this island belongs to Ukraine. Snake island it's called now, it was called the White island to the Greeks and it became very famous in 2022 because it has a few border patrol guards on it. And a Russian warship came to try and take over the island and the warship radioed the guys on the island and said, it's time to surrender. And there was a pause and the guy on the other end said, russian warship, go F yourself. This became a very famous heroic moment in the Ukrainian Russian war. So it has this kind of backdrop of Achilles. And then
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A
sadly, in the reporting, the role of Helen and Achilles on this island didn't come to the fore, particularly, I don't think. I think it was.
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B
Missed opportunity.
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A
A missed opportunity.
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B
Now we've corrected this.
- [41:25]
A
Yeah. But I think we ought to finish with yet another version of Helen's end because Orestes and Electra tried to kill her. But one of the stories quite often told is that she actually was murdered. That when Menelaus has died, she goes off to the island of Rhodes. And while she's there, she was put to death by a woman called Queen Polyxo. And the reason for Polixo killing Helen was that Polyxo's husband had died on the Greek side in the Trojan War. So Helen is punished by another woman for being the cause of the death of her husband. I have to say, and you won't be surprised by this point, in another version of the story of Polypso, Helen actually escapes death. And, well, where she ends up, we don't quite know.
- [42:33]
B
I think all of these stories about what happens to Helen, I mean, I said how she dies. I mean, you know, that was obviously a misnomer. How she is, how her life come. Her mortal life comes to an end. Let's say how she is translated into another zone or whatever happens to her is absolutely characteristic of Helen and Helen's story. And a. It's incredibly special and strange, and it's not ordinary. She doesn't, you know, she does not end her life as mortals do. And secondly, it's completely unpinned down. That's right.
- [43:15]
A
I mean, we're left with the option that she was ignominiously murdered, that she was worshipped as a goddess, or that she was sent to heaven to be alongside her brothers and sisters and family. So you choose.
- [43:35]
B
And next week, we're going to find out about Helen's other afterlife in the culture, in the writing, in the films, you name it, of the modern age. And that, I think, is going to be be almost as various and strange as her life for the Greeks and the Romans. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media @instantclassicspod.
- [44:15]
A
Bye bye.