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A
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, Queen. Cause of a civilizational clash between Europe and Asia.
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Destroyer of men, of cities, of ships. She devil, adulteress queen, and the most beautiful woman who ever walked the Earth.
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B
Helen of Troy has been called all of these things and more. But is she just the void into which people, let's face it, especially men, pour their anxieties, their fears and their desires about dangerous women?
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A
This is the last episode in our series, piecing together the story of Helen of Troy. And we're discovering that the deeper you go, the harder it is to pin down mythology's most notorious and seductive woman.
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Today, we're going to look at Helen's life beyond and after the classical world, how she's continued to exert her magnetism and her mystery and has become an enduring and kind of almost omnipresent figure of art and literature and film and tv.
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This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Bearded.
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B
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 Everywhere.
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C
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B
I mean, the fact is, Mary Helen never sort of. She doesn't disappear from culture after the end, after the fall of the Roman Empire, let's say she pops up absolutely everywhere and in every conceivable medium.
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A
But I think what's important is you can get the impression, just from the kind of the name Helen of Troy, the face of lords of thousand ships, ships and so on, that she's been a bit simplified in modern culture. You know, she has become the most beautiful woman in the world, full stop. A shorthand for female beauty. Now, I think what's really interesting is that it's not just if you dive into ancient, ancient literature, that you find a huge amount of complexity very hard to pull out. It's very, very hard to pin her down. I think it's also the case that modern literature, too, and modern art, painting, film, theatre, you name it, modern appropriations of Helen have also really got off on the idea of the puzzlement of her. What's driving her, how do you understand her? And so you get this really ambivalent presence cropping up in movies, in poetry, in whatever. Helen has never been simple.
- [05:08]
B
Yeah. And she's never been just one thing. But, Mary, I want us to just look at this great phrase that keeps popping out of our mouths throughout this series, the face that launched a thousand ships. Because this quote, which is obviously in beautiful English, poetic meter, is a quotation, Right. It does have a place. It does have a context, it has an original place. And it is from Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, which was first performed in 1594. And this play, obviously isn't about the siege of Troy or anything like that. This is about the character, the German Doctor Faustus, who supposedly. I mean, he's based on actually a real person. But let's hope it's all a bit amped up for fiction. He sells his soul to the devil effectively. He enlists the help of the devil's helper, Mephistopheles, and he asks Mephistopheles to summon up a kind of image of Helen of Troy so that she can be seen. That's the first. The first moment, yeah. There are some scholars who have debated who is the most beautiful woman in the world. And they say to Dr. Faustus, you know, summon her up. Let's see her.
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A
I think this is the classic example of unrecognized complexity in modern treatments of Helen. Because people use the phrase the face that launched a thousand ships, as if it was a kind of, you know, slightly artsy, but pretty simple way of kind of encapsulating the most beautiful woman in the world. And the face that launch a thousand ships comes in book titles, in chapter headings. It's, you know, it's a kind of quick brand slogan, in a way.
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B
Helen.
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A
The important thing for me is that you pick away at that and you go back to the original play from which it comes, and you discover it's deeply, deeply complicated. And for a start, as you've just said, what Dr. Faustus looks at when he's looking at this Helen of Troy is not Helen of Troy at all. It is an image. Now, we were talking last time about Helen, the real Helen in the Trojan war, according to some ancient accounts, went to Egypt, and it was only an eidolon, an image of her that went to Troy. Well, actually, what Dr. Fasta sees is an eidolon. It's an image. It's not Helen of Troy at all. And so Marlowe is here absolutely replicating that sense of who is the real Helen. Can you see the real Helen? What's the difference between an image of Helen and the real Helen? And we use it very casually as a phrase. It's a very difficult phrase in the play.
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B
Yes. And one of the amazing things, she doesn't speak. She's just like this sort of breath that passes the stage directions. When she first appears, she passes across the stage. There's something really otherworldly about that. And then the next time she crops up, Faustus is saying to Mephistopheles, please make this woman my lover. And Mephistopheles sort of shows her this image of Helen or this Helen. You know, this stage direction says, enter, Helen. And then Faustus looks at her and says, was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies. Come, Helen, come. Give my soul again. Give me my soul again. Here I will dwell for heaven is in these lips. And so on. I mean, it's heady stuff, but, you know, the idea that Helen is sort of sucking out his soul with her kiss. Or this eidolon of Helen.
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A
You really like that, those lines. I think I ought to point out that some, in my view, very unconvincing. Modern critics have read certainly, was this the face that launched a thousand ships? Rather differently to say that I think it doesn't work, I have to say, in the play. But there is a minority scholarly view that what Faustus is expressing is a bit disappointment.
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B
The face that launched a thousand ships. Was this the face. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
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A
I don't think you can sustain that line of disappointment when you come on to see that he's saying, and burnt the topless towers and William, make me immortal with a kiss. Etc, Etc. I don't think the disappointment line is very convincing. But you can see it's another example of people always questioning what people are saying about Helen. You know, is this good? You know, this a thousand ships, this.
- [10:38]
B
And then he sort of go, we won't quote the whole passage, although, frankly, it's very tempting because this is very strong stuff. But he says, I will be Paris, and for love of thee, instead of Troy shall Wurttemberg be sacks. And Wurtemberg is the town where Faustus lives. So it's that sort of bringing Helen and Troy into the present and really thinking about what kind of beauty it would take for it to, you know, this beauty might be worth destroying the whole of Wurzenberg. He's in a very dark place
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A
and. But Marlow is bequeathed that very dark place to the rest of the literary culture. Because it is, you know, whatever you think about the classic phrase itself, it is one place where you actually see Helen being absolutely cast as the. As the devilish, deadly temptress, you know, the woman who is going to destroy the.
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B
Yes. And it's got a very Judeo Christian devilishness to it. This is not the kind of devilishness I think we see her as possessing in classical literature where she is perfectly capable of being characterized as a very bad thing. But this particular sort of sexualized wickedness, I think is sort of a new thing. It's a new thing, but it's not the only thing. And I think, you know, and although we started with Marlowe, because that is the famous phrase. That's the most famous phrase. She's also in Chaucer in Troilus and Crusade, which is, you know, great epic poem of the 1380s. So she's right there at the roots of English literature. And Chaucer's Troilus and Crusade is a key source for Shakespeare's later play Troilus and Cressida, which actually was produced quite shortly after Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. And there's a scene in that play where the Trojans are debating whether Helen is worth keeping, and Hector suggests maybe she's not. And Troilus. Troilus ripostes, why, she is a pearl whose price hath launched above a thousand ships and turned crowned kings to merchants. And he's just going, one better than Marlow there, Mary. Right. This is the face that didn't launch a thousand ships, it launched above a thousand ships. So there's a touch of one upmanship.
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A
I like the way that Shakespeare kind of is putting together Helen and the number of thousands. He does that in the Taming of the Shrew when he says Helen's got a thousand suitors. You can't think Helen without thinking in the thousands.
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B
Yeah, but listen, there are so many Helens that we could probably do a series of 20 episodes on Helen's afterlife, but we're not going to do that. And there is. I think we're going. Mary, we're going to pick out ones that we just sort of spark us off a bit. But, you know, just to say we are not going to talk about Yeats, even though Yeats wrote these amazing poems about Helen. We're not going to talk about Richard Strauss, even though he wrote one of the great operas and based on Euripides's play, Helen the Egyptian, Helen Strauss and hofmannstahl's opera. We love these things, but we're not going to talk about them today. But if you have got any, dear listeners, if you've got any great Helens that you feel that we should have talked about or that you particularly are interested in, we definitely want to hear about them. So do write in and tell us about them.
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A
You can get really bogged down in Helen, I'm afraid. I mean, I said to Charlotte a bit ago, you know, I think there's a fair bet that 25% of Western culture in some ways engaging with Helen. Charlotte thought I was exaggerating, but I think that if, you know, if we had our 20 episodes, I think I would be proved more or less. Less. Right. But as you say, Charlotte, what we're going to do is we're going to pick out some of our favorites, some of the Helens that kind of work for us or sometimes annoy us, actually.
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B
I mean, I've got.
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A
I've got at least one or two really annoying Helens that I want to.
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B
Me too.
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A
I think what the plays that we've touched on remind us, whether it's Marlowe or Shakespeare or whatever, is of course, one of the challenges about Helen is not. It's not just kind of deciding what her motivation is, et cetera, et cetera, in visual media, it's deciding how the hell you represent her. Right. You've got the most beautiful woman in the world in the story, and now we're going to put her on stage, we're going to recreate her in paint. How do we do that?
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B
Yeah, especially when you can only cast boys, as was the case for Shakespeare and Marlowe. Let's not forget these gorgeous, gorgeous women were lads.
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A
That problem. How on earth do you represent Ellen? That problem goes back to antiquity. You know, it's not just the modern theater. Directors have thought, oh, who am I going to have here? I mean, you've got a great anecdote about the ancient painter Zeuxis, one of the greatest painters of the ancient world, and he's got his Helen problem.
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B
Yeah, his Helen problem is that. And this story is told by both two Roman writers, Cicero and Pliny. The story is that he has to paint Helen and, you know, he's stuck for a model. But, you know, who could you find who could stand in for Helen and be your model for your commissioned painting of Helen? So what he does is assemble an entire sort of bevy of girls to provide his model for Helen. So it's as if, you know, one woman could never be sufficient. You have to create a sort of amalgam, a hodgepodge, a montage of all the best bits of all these different girls to create anything that could come close to Helen. You know, she is. And I think that that is, again, that's a story about she's out of the human range, she's out of our reach, she can't, you know, she's very difficult to depict. But that hasn't stopped people from having a good go, has it, Mary?
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A
And they did it in antiquity and they were particularly interested, and you can see this in Pompeian wall painting, they were particularly interested in that moment when she goes away with Paris. And very often in the Pompeian examples I'm thinking about, it is quite demure, actually, that Paris is kindly taking her by the hand, or they're sitting down in large house, kind of obviously talking about their growing love for each other, etc. Etc. That gets picked up by Renaissance painters, but they are very good at turning it on its head. And there are some real rapes of Helen you get in Renaissance painting, where literally Paris is carrying Helen off, the innocent Helen, kind of literally under his Arm getting her on the ship. Right. And so there's a wonderful kind of set of narrative questions that they. That these images raise. But I think, for me, and it's, you know, in a way going back to what we've just been talking about, is the absolute question of how do you represent the most beautiful woman in the world? The interesting examples for me are when you. When you just want to do a picture of Helen, right, You haven't got much of the story. It is how do you represent Helen? And we. We will put references to these in the. In the show notes, but there are three late 19th century ones which absolutely run the gamut of the possibilities of imagining Helen. And one that people like a lot is by Evelyn de Morgan in, I think it's in the 1890s. And her. Helen, whether it's coincidental that she's a woman. I don't know her. Helen is the picture of innocence, glorious, gorgeous innocence. So you've got this woman in a kind of reddy pink dress looking lovely, and there are kind of birdies around her and doves and she is kind of. She becomes Ms. Butterwouldn't melt in her mouth. And it's interesting. I don't know if anybody's followed up one of the books that we put in the show notes, Ruby Blondel's book on Helen. I mean, that is the COVID of the Blondel book. You know, there's this absolutely lovely, sexy, but innocent picture of Helen. Actually, I find it a bit too much to take. It is one of the images of Helen that annoys me. But it. It marks the absolute extreme of what it would be to imagine Helen and the other extreme or extremes. And again, you can find the references to these and links in the show notes. There is from roughly the same time, a little bit earlier, there's the painter, The British painter F.A. sands, who has created a Helen who is as close to a sulky teenager as you could possibly get. She is scowling, right? And we've used her actually in the intro and some of the visuals for our little miniseries, but she's. She is frowning and looking dead, recalcitrant. And you think, how on earth did Sans manage to see Helen as simply cross? And there is actually an answer to that because Sands had done an earlier illustration for a magazine, actually a British magazine, of Helen, but it wasn't just Helen alone. It was the. The end of the Trojan War. And he was illustrating the scene where Cassandra is really going for Helen, really tearing her off the strip. And Helen is sort of sitting there, she's doing, you know, what I sometimes do. She kind of embarrassingly chewing at her hair, her bit, while Cassandra lets rip and say what Sans has done is taken just the Helen figure out of that encounter and given you this cross patch, Helen. And actually, we have to know that, you know, she's having to listen to Cassandra going on and on and on about what an awful person she is. On one hand, you've got even Demorgan Butterwood melt my mad. Same time you've got Alan being pretty. Pretty kind of grumpy. But I mean, I think it's. Now, you know this one too, don't you? I think it's again, roughly the same time, 1870. You've got Gustave Moreau, your pin painter, who has actually kind of gone one better. He has. He does Helen a lot.
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B
He paints Helen a lot.
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A
He's obviously interested in the idea of painting the most beautiful woman in the world. And sometimes he gives a fairly conventional Helen, but on more than one occasion, he just nails it, because what he does is he has the figure of Helen, but she just has a blank face. She doesn't have a face.
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B
So smart, just so smart.
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A
Brilliant. You know, he's saying, you know, either it is impossible to represent her or you have to invent the face for yourself. I cannot paint the face of Helen of Troy.
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B
Yeah. I love it. And I do think your three, your sort of trio of Helens is brilliant.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Demure Helen, Sulky Helen and Mystery Helen. I think we should put them into a band and see what happens.
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A
For my money, Moreau is the cleverest one here. He's risen to the challenge, whereas the challenger slightly defeated the other two, I think.
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B
Yeah. Well, I think that everyone should look at the. You know, we'll put the show notes in and make up your own mind. But I agree, I do think the Moreau is superb. It's such a great painting. But after the break, Mary, let's return to the challenge of depicting Helen. After the break, we'll talk a bit about the movies, which of course brings its own challenges. Like how do you cast Helen of Troy? If your team isn't using your CRM, it isn't working. Pipedrive is a simple CRM. It's easy to use, so you can focus on closing. Get 30 days free@Pipedrive.com audio if we
- [25:25]
A
come now to modern movies and television, I mean, the modern director doesn't have the morrow option. You know, he's the one thing, whatever the difficulties, one thing the modern director can't do is give Helen no face. This is the question, and it's what viewers often ask, who's going to be Helen in this movie? Now, Nolan, in the upcoming Odyssey, has got that problem. What's he doing about it?
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B
What's interesting about Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey is that we don't quite know yet what he's doing with Helen. It hasn't been announced, so a lot of the casting has been announced. The casting of Helen is rumoured only, let's say, and the rumor is it's Lupita Nyong', o, which, if true, would be fabulous and fascinating. The very obvious thing to say is that she's not white, she is black. It would be fascinating to have a black. And brilliant, I think, to have a black Helen, because it would fly in the face of so many images of Helen as a sort of blonde beauty. The other part of the rumour is that she's also playing her half sister Clytemnestra, which would, if true, would also be really fascinating. But we have to wait and see on that, of course. And the fact is, Mary, as you know, like Helen, is as old as the movies in the sense that there have been movies with Helen in throughout, right from the very beginning. So that Alexander Corder directed a silent movie in 1927, the Private Life of Helen of Troy, which was certainly marketed in rather a lascivious way. It's actually a kind of bourgeois comedy of manners, not the kind of. Not the sort of epic tragedy that one might expect in that.
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A
I mean, Helen's a sort of flapper, a 1920s flapper, isn't she?
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B
Absolutely, absolutely. And then we sort of pass through that to, you know, in the 50s, Robert Wise directed a film called Helen of Troy with the not very well known Rosanna Podesta as Helen, but her enslaved servant Andraste was played by none other than Brigitte Bardot. So I don't know whether he missed a trick in the casting there. And then right up to 2004, the film Troy, which is an interesting moment because the sort of big epic movies about antiquity had not been terribly fashionable, but then suddenly they were because of Gaddier in 2000. So it feels like Troy was sort of moving in on that territory. It's directed by the German director Wolfgang Petersen, and it stars Brad Pitt as Achilles. I was actually there when this film was premiered at the festival in Cannes in 2004.
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A
You get to all the best places, Charlotte, you know, and there they all
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B
were arrayed in front of me. Brad Pitt and, of course, Diane Kruger, the actress who played Helen. And what's really interesting about the casting of Helen for that film is that Wolfgang Petersen did not want a star. He wanted someone on whom no previous preconceptions could hover. You know, he wanted someone free of associations, free of baggage. So they thought about Nicole Kidman, apparently. But no, they went for Diane Kruger, who was, you know, a German model who had recently thought. And actually, the film's so interesting because this is really Diane Kruger as Evelyn de Morgan's Helen. Sort of innocent and a bit victimy and a bit floppy, I'm afraid. And the erotic fascination around her, I think, is completely eclipsed by the real erotic scar of Troy. Richard Bradnett playing Achilles. That's where all one's eye was led towards the sort of gloriousness of Brad Pitt.
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A
So Helen's actually upstaged in this. Yeah, by.
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B
Upstaged by Achilles, not given a huge role. She's very much in the background. Ruby Blondel, who we've talked about before, who also wrote a book on Helen of Troy at the movies, which we'll put in the show notes. She calls this Helen. Helen of Abercrombie and Fitch. That's what her chapter's called. Sort of really damning. Anyway, I'm going to tell you my stupid story about being at the. Because it's kind of relevant. So this was my first Cannes Film Festival. I was a very young journalist, and I was desperately. And it was also the first film. It was the opening film of that year's Cannes Film Festival. So I was thinking, how I've got to get a new story about this. How can I find a news story out of this not especially newsworthy film? So Muggins, classic ex, Classic student, puts up her hand and asks a really quite complicated question about the relationship between the ongoing Iraq War and the siege of Troy in terms of this, you know, completely spurious, by the way, idea that there's a kind of clash between east and civilizational clash between east and West. I mean, I don't know believe that. But anyway, I framed a question around the current headlines, which was sort of the sensible thing to do. And the silence fell. And I finished my long question and I said, and that's addressed to Mr. Pitt. And I have to say, Mr. Pitt, Brad Pitt answered like a gentleman, very, very sensibly. But I can tell you that I did not understand that at Cannes press conferences particularly, the first question is always supposed to be, what was it like working with the wonderful Brad Pitt? Diane Kruger, you Know, it's supposed to be a softball. And in fact, the question after me was someone asking Mr. Pitt, what was it like wearing a skirt while you were filming the movie? The little tunic. And everyone was so horrified that I didn't get to ask another question in another can. Film festival conference press conference for about three years. I was blacklisted. Anyway, my article is now quoted at length by Ruby Blondell in her book about that film or her chapter about that film. So I feel like the classicists have come together after all.
- [32:24]
A
And Charlotte wins in the end, you know, terrible faux pas. But in the light of history, her question was the right one.
- [32:33]
B
It was, yeah. Anyway, so that's my self serving, but yeah, I mean, again, poor old Diane Kruger, you know, there was little for her to do. I would say in that film you're
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A
much, much more familiar with these movies and films than I am. And I kind of wondered if you actually had one you liked, you had a favorite, you know, not necessarily related to the Iraq war.
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B
Yes, well, I do actually. And it's not film actually, it's tv. You know, I say this, I'm quite a tough crowd for this kind of movie because I. I don't know about you, Mary, but I just quite often find it embarrassing watching people wearing flowing tunics and robes prancing around the screen. There's something, there's something so difficult about building those worlds on screen. Sometimes I sort of would rather it was all updated into the present somehow. I don't know, it's so difficult to make those worlds feel real and true. However, I do like this old BBC TV series called Fall of a City. Now look, it's on Netflix in the UK at the moment, so it's really easy to find. And it's written by David Farr, who is a really terrific writer who wrote the Night Manager. And he does foreground Helen in a really interesting way. There's a lot of backstory. It's about the fall of Troy, but he does a huge amount of backstory that draws on not only Homer, but the lost epic cycle about Paris. And what is it about the character of Paris that takes him to a place where he is willing to elope with another man's wife? And he does that in all kinds of interesting ways. Go and watch it and see what you think. And I'm not going to talk about the whole series, but the first time we see Helen I just think is really, really interesting. Again, she's someone who perhaps isn't a household name. She's another German actress actually called Bella Dane. Anyway, David Farr clearly draws on a scene in the Odyssey that we've talked about in Odyssey Book club, the scene in which Telemachus goes and visits Menelaus and Helen. So that's after the end of the Trojan War. But he's drawing on it for this scene at the beginning of the Trojan War where, you know, a stranger turns up, that is Paris, in this case, turns up at the house of Menelaus and Helen in Sparta, you know, has a sort of preliminary chat with Menelaus. Menelaus is a bit socially awkward and a bit boorish. And then the doors open, shimmers forth this extraordinarily beautiful woman, Helen, who sort of changes the temperature in the room.
- [35:35]
A
And that's not unlike what happens in the Odyssey, actually, in the.
- [35:38]
B
Exactly.
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A
You know, when Telemachus visits them. I mean, Menelaus is a bit of a kind of boorish bloke. And when Helen comes in to say, hello, you must be Telemachus, as it were, the whole temperature changes. So it's quite interestingly similar to Homer's account.
- [36:01]
B
I'm sure he knew it. I'm sure he read on it. It just has that ring about it where things go very different from the ancient sources, which, again, you know, and I'm not against this, because, you know, the ancient. If this series has shown us anything, I think it's just how cavalier one can be, and it's fine with what's gone before.
- [36:23]
A
I think in a way, that's quite a good cue to going back to a bit of literature. And you say, I'm afraid we're skating over some of the great works of modern literature. Sorry, Yeats, you're not getting a look in here. It's worth thinking about how Helen has appeared in the whole new wave of women, women novelists writing about the ancient world and in a sense, taking some of the very patriarchal, not to say misogynist, stories and wondering how to turn that on its head, or at least to see those stories from a different perspective. And they've been huge bestsellers, things like Madeline Miller's Circe and so on. There are some really interesting and surprisingly diverse versions you find of Helen and these. And I think looking at new women's reworkings, infections of the Helen's story. And I think it's good for one thing, in showing you how diverse these women's reappropriations are. I mean, it's. It's. You know, I've heard people say, oh, God, this is Another. This is another novel which turns the mythical story around and makes the woman the heroine, not the man. And this is all getting a bit samey. Well, I think that if you look at how Helen appears, it's not samey at all. And I think one of my very, very favourites here, and she has a really nice touch on this, is Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, which is a reworking of the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus wife Penelope. Right now I feel, in some ways I feel almost. I could almost make myself feel sad that Atwood has become so famous for other books because they've rather eclipsed this short reworking of the Odyssey, which I think is truly worth reading.
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B
I agree.
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A
And her. Helen is a kind of foil in some ways to Penelope. And Penelope is the person through whose eyes we see the story. And Penelope has no doubt that it is Helen's fault that Helen is at the root of the tragedy, which has not only killed thousands of people, but has kept her husband Odysseus away from their home for years. But you know, Atwood, as ever, is kind of wonderfully clever. And there's a truly marvelous moment where. And it fits with the story of Telemachus visit that we've just been talking about. Telemachus visit to Menelaus and Helen when they're back in Sparta after the war and he's gone there to find out if they've got any news of his father, Odysseus. He has his time in Sparta. He then goes back home and he has to tell his mum, Penelope, what went on. And he starts off in his account by saying, and this does not go down terribly well, Helen was so beautiful, Mum, you know, she was drop dead gorgeous. And I had this marvelous time, you know. But Atwood is. Is very clever in giving kind of two twists on that because Telemachus realizes this isn't the most tactful thing to say. So he slightly changes tact and he says, well, actually she's really. She has got a bit old. I mean, she's got terrible yellow teeth and some of them have even fallen out. He says it was only when we'd had a real lot to drink that we could sort of see that beauty that there once was.
- [41:06]
B
Yeah, nicely done. Ta. Good try. Good try.
- [41:10]
A
Brilliant. It is only a good try because it her. Penelope then says, having listened to this rather kind of touching, tactful story, she says, I knew he was lying, but was touched that he was lying for my sake. I think Atwood is just brilliant at layering this. You know, is Helen beautiful? Is Helen beautiful? Only if you're completely plastered. What do you say to your mum about who hates her, about how beautiful she is? And, you know, one more time. We find that Helen's appearance, now mediated in writing, is just out of reach. So I think I really would go to the Penelope, Ed, and we'll put that on the show. Notes. I mean, Pat Barker is another one in her. In her reworking of the Trojan War, going from a female point of view in Silence of the Girls. There's two things in that which are rather nice. One is she digs down under the surface of Helen's view about herself and her view of how she's being understood and received in Troy. And so what's really nice is that, formally, when Helen is with the other women, she is very embarrassed. She, in a sense, parades her own guilt. She's extremely polite to the other women of Troy, Hecuba and so forth. As soon as they've gone, Helen is slagging them off for all it's worth. So Helen has these two faces. One thing is what she says in front of the women, and the other is what she says about the other women when they're not there. And so you start to see the duplicity of Helen. Barker also picks out one of the wonderful images that we get in Homer, actually, that what Helen is doing is she is weaving. When she's on her own, she's weaving and she's weaving a illustrated tapestry, which is actually documenting the Trojan War. So Helen is the person who is kind of standing outside the war and representing it. She's representing it to us in the Iliad as a series of pictures that she is constructing. Again, Barker does that very nicely. She also has a very nice twist. Cause she says every time that Helen clips one of the threads of the tapestry, cuts it off. Some warrior dies on the battlefield.
- [44:11]
B
Ooh.
- [44:12]
A
So there's this kind of sense of Helen's responsibilities can never be got rid of. And even when she's doing her tapestry, she cuts the threads which kill the men.
- [44:23]
B
She's got a chip of ice in her heart in Pat Barker, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm. Yeah. There's, of course, there's Natalie Haynes's novel, A Thousand Ships, which, of course, there's the title from Marlowe. And, you know, the subtitle is this Is Women's War. And she tells the story of the fall of Troy from the perspective of not just one woman, but I think, really Interestingly, from a whole chorus of women. And she really knows her stuff. So we have multiple perspectives that do really interesting things with the ancient sources. So one of her characters is Creusa, the wife of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who crops up in the Roman epic Virgil's Aeneid. And she does it in a really interesting set of time frames. It's not linear. She casts forward and casts back, back. But one of her main sources is the play the Trojan Women by Euripides, the play that we've talked about before, where we kind of effectively see the defeated Trojan women lined up on the shore, waiting to be carted off into an uncertain, enslaved fate, basically. And Helen is one of these Trojan women. And, you know, it's a really lovely, interesting Helen, a fascinatingly unpinned, downable character again, that she has this sort of shimmering beauty, otherworldly. And Natalie says she was hard to describe in her absence, as though the mortal gaze could not retain the memory of such perfection, which I like. You know, the idea that you can't. You can't really summon Helen up in your mind. It's a bit like the Gustav. This is mystery Helen. This is Gustave Moreau as Helen. And there's a whole set of debates again, about this idea about responsibility and blame that we've talked about so much in this series. Like, is Helen to blame for the war? And that, of course, does come up in the Euripides. And, you know, definitely Hecuba, Helen's mother in law, the deposed queen of Troy, absolutely blames her. You know, what kind of a woman could possibly do what you did? But then, interestingly, in Natalie's version, she also ends up blaming herself rather than Helen. There's a whole lot of backstory about why she does this, but one thing is that when her child, Paris, Helen's lover, was born, or while she was pregnant with Paris, she dreamed. This one version of the myth, she dreamed of a flaming torch, which was interpreted as Paris would be the cause of the destruction of Troy. It would be put to the sword and, you know, set alight, which, of course, is what's happened. Hecuba blames herself for not having more decisively got rid of her little baby, Paris, after she dreamed, when she was pregnant of a flaming torch. And this flaming torch was understood as being the torch that would put fire to Troy and destroy it. And instead, you know, this is in one version of the myth, she, instead of acting on that dream by, you know, having the little baby killed, they put Paris out into the countryside and Let him take his chances, which is why he survives and why he's a shepherd when he does the whole judgment of Paris moment. But yeah, it's really interesting to see that that question of responsibility comes up so strongly again in Natalie Haynes book which was such a huge feature of the ancient debates. But aren't these Helens all different? That's to me the interesting thing that
- [48:26]
A
I think is what's absolutely essential to kind of get that Helen is going on being different and the sort of sense that, as I say, that you can get that modern reworkings of Greek my are a bit formulaic, a bit predictable. I think what these authors, and there's plenty more do with Helen
- [48:51]
B
are as
- [48:51]
A
imaginative and as different as what you find in antiquity. There isn't a decent novel, I'm sure there's some bad novels, but there's not a decent novel that doesn't really put a question mark over what Helen does, what her motivation is and what it is to be the most beautiful woman in the world ever. I think that's. That's a kind of a nice link to one of my favorite poems actually by Carol Ann Duffy, Modern poem. Carol Ann Duffy's got, you know, a very, very good line in her own quite different versions of reworking Greek myth and particularly the role of women in Greek myth. But she's got one long poem which is just called Beautiful and the theme of this poem is. Well, it's four women. It's four very beautiful women. Helen, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. And the basic point is the what of how dangerous beauty is to the beautiful person? That the beauty becomes a curse, not a blessing. And so that's a different way of turning the Helen story on its head, but in kind of interspersed with that, that kind of big point that the beauty is not something to wish for. She has marvellous little bits of observation. The poem starts reminding us about Helen's birth, which people often forget. Starts she was born from an egg, a daughter of the gods, divinely fair, a pearl drop dead gorgeous. Duffy's opening about Helen, as you go on, you not only got that theme of the danger of beauty to the beautiful person, but she has marvellous little observations. She's very good at this, at the kind of practical domesticity of these mythic scenes. And there's a marvellous verse where she says, talking of Helen, so when she took her lover, fled and was nowhere to be seen, her side of the bed unslept in cold, the small coin of her wedding ring left on the bedside table Like a tip. The wardrobe empty of the drama of her clothes. I mean, there she is, taking us to the marital bed of Helena Menelaus. And what it's like when Helen has left him. And, you know, just that little wedding rings were not universal, let me say, in the ancient world. But this. This idea that she's left her wedding ring behind is.
- [52:03]
B
Yes. And the coldness of the bed, that lovely. Yeah. Such a resonant detail. Yeah.
- [52:09]
A
And it finishes. The Helen section finishes by recognizing that the only person that she could trust, the only person who wouldn't blab about her, the only person who wouldn't turn her into a celeb, was her servant, her maid. And it's a very poignant kind of last verse where she says her maid, Helen's maid, who loved her most, refused to say one word to anyone at any time or place, would not describe one aspect of her face or tell one anecdote about her life and loves, but lived alone and kept a little bird inside a cage. And you suddenly think, so who is that little bird inside the cage that the maid keeps? Well, maybe it's Helen, actually. She's.
- [53:09]
B
Yes. Slightly sinister. My first thought was, how very unlike Princess Di's butler.
- [53:16]
A
Well, I suspect that Carol Ann Daphne had that in mind, too. But, you know, and. And there is a bit of the morrow there. She's not. She's not going to. She's not going to describe Helen's face. She's not going to describe it. One bit of it. So there's a bit of the mystery, Helen coming out there. And I think that that is, you know, it is, for me, it's really exciting, you know, to see that the sort of Helen and the problems of Helen, the ambivalences, how you explain it. Helen is kind of unfinished business. Still in the modern.
- [53:57]
B
Yeah. There's a new play, Mary. There's a new one. There's a new. There's a new play coming to the Stratford east, the theatre. It's called Bloodsport by Eva Pickett. And that's about what happens when Helen comes home after the war. I mean, the idea that young playwrights are still intrigued by Helen and so intrigued by Helen that they're, you know, want to write yet another new play about her. And she's a good playwright. I'm really fascinated by this. I will definitely go and see it.
- [54:27]
A
We're off to see it together, Higgins. Yes, together.
- [54:30]
B
Let's do it. But like you say, it's unfinished. Helen is never finished business. Right, Helen. Helen is gonna sail on on the prow of her ship now we are.
- [54:42]
A
And four episodes was not enough?
- [54:45]
B
No. We could have done another two on Helen's afterlife.
- [54:48]
A
Yes, but maybe we'll come back.
- [54:50]
B
We need self restraint. Self restraint is a virtue.
- [54:54]
A
Hope you enjoyed it.
- [54:55]
B
Everyone, as ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions, and so if you have them, please do send them to us at Instant Classics pod gmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classicspod.
- [55:13]
A
Bye bye.