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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, especially, let's face it, men, have poured their anxieties, their fears, fears and their desires about dangerous women.
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This is the second in our four part series. Piecing together the story of Helen of Troy. We're discovering that the deeper you go, the harder it is to pin down the myth of this most notorious and seductive woman.
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We're asking not only why the Greeks were so fascinated by the story of, but why we still are today. Helen of Troy, it seems, has a great deal to say about our enduringly ambiguous attitudes to women, sex and power.
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In this episode, we're covering the most famous episodes in her story in the war at Troy fought by the Greeks in her name. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories, 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 Troy.
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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.
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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.
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And I'm William Duranpole.
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In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to 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 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 we left the story Mary in our last episode with Paris, the Trojan prince. Paris just having awarded this very covetable golden apple to the goddess Aphrodite. And his reward for doing that is going to be Helen, who as we know, is married and living with her husband Menelaus in Sparta.
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So a Malial back home. Menelaus is now the king of Sparta and he's reigning with Helen as his queen. Now this is, I have to say, another of those slightly strange inheritance issues that you find in in Greek myth. And Helen is the wife of Menelaus. He has married her, but she does not move from from Sparta to be with him at his home as his wife, he, Menelaus, moves to Sparta to be king on her territory. It's often taken to be a sign of the power of the woman, in this case the power of Helen, that Menelaus status in a sense isn't an independent status. It comes from him having married the daughter of Leda and Zeus and the stepdaughter of Tyndares, the king of Sparta. So they're installed in Sparta, oblivious to what's been going on in the so called judgment of Paris. And they remain oblivious when Paris himself, coming to get his prize, turns up at Sparta as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, I think. And we're in the world of early Homeric Greek guest friendship. And Paris fetches up and he is welcomed and treated as he should be treated according to the kind of Greek conventions of the time, as a guest who requires hospitality. All goes sort of fine, sort of for nine days until Menelaus innocently decides he's got to go to a funeral on the island of Crete and leaves, leaving also an opportunity for Paris.
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So then Paris and Helen get on their ships, get on Paris's ships and depart. But I have to say in that very straightforward sentence, there lies a world of potential variants and differences and completely separate interpretations of Helen's role in this moment. And we will talk about that much more in the next episode. But just to flag here, Helen is sometimes willing in this story, and she's sometimes unwilling. It is sometimes a story of abduction and sometimes it's a Story of, of desire. It's sometimes a story of desire that isn't really her fault or that she is not responsible for because Aphrodite, the goddess who, who has, is orchestrating this moment has filled her with love and lust and desire for Paris. So it's a complicated moment. And there is a wonderful poem by Sappho, the poetess Sappho. I don't know why I just called her a poetess as if she was some sort of Victorian scribbler. The poet Sappho, unromantically called Fragment 16, which talks about desire. It invites the reader to imagine Helen leaving everything she knows and everything she loves, including her nine year old daughter. I mean the age isn't stated in Sappho, but it is in other sources. Her daughter with Menelaus, a young girl called Hermione. And it invites us to think about what it would be like, what would be the lust and the love and the desire that was so strong that you would leave behind your home, your husband and your child to go off with your new lover. So, you know, into this moment floods a world of different interpretations. But the fact of the story is she goes off willingly or unwillingly with Paris, back to Troy.
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That's right. Menelaus, the idiot we now think, has gone to his funeral in Crete. And on that final day, either because Paris forces her to, or because she is complicit in this whole elopement, they leave. And Menelaus comes back home from the funeral to find that Paris and Helen have vanished. I think taking with them quite a bit of kind of stuff from the palace too. One of the instant reactions that Menelaus quite reasonably has, at least in some versions, is he thinks I've got to go and sort this out. So Menelaus goes to Troy to try to negotiate Helen's return. Unsuccessfully, as it turns out. So what happens next goes back to that the deal struck by the suitors of Helen when Helen was first getting married to Menelaus, that you know, this is a kind of NATO agreement, isn't it? That you know, strike against one is a strike against all that they will intervene if anything goes wrong in this marriage between Menelaus and Helen. And so Agamemnon, Menelaus is much more kind of powerful brother. He assembles an army of the Greeks, the Achaeans as Homer calls them, and they go to besiege, invade Troy to get Helen back. And of course the force necessarily because of the agreement includes all those powerful Greeks, guys who had once wanted the Hand of Helen. And now they are. They're actually coming good on the deal that they will help get her back.
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And Helen herself, as a character in story, in literature, in art, really, she comes to the fore, as far as we're concerned, modern readers, with the texts that exist for us now in the Iliad, in Homer's Iliad, this great epic, the great early piece of fundamental Greek literature, the Iliad takes place during the Trojan War, but in a very confined part of the Trojan War. So towards the end of the Trojan War, before all the shenanigans with the Trojan horse and the breaking of the siege, but in the ninth year of the war. So this war has been going on for a very long time. She has been living with Paris and the entire sort of Trojan royal family for a very long time. This family consists of King Priam, his wife Hecuba, Priam's many, many sons and daughters. But principally, you know, for the purposes of the story, the main children of Priam and Hecuba are Hector, the most important fighter of the Trojans, and Hector's brother Paris, who Helen is obviously with. Those are probably the most important two for our current purposes. But there she is, living in Troy. And it's an intriguing moment when we first meet Helen, isn't it, Mary?
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Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting is that if after this buildup, you're expecting Helen to be a big character in Homer's Iliad, she isn't. She occurs at some key moments, but she doesn't take. She doesn't herself have a big part, though it is a significant part and significant turning points. And I think that what is surprising, I think, when you first read it, is that already at this, you know, the very first literary account in terms of the oldest that we have, she is already a focus of uncertainty, of dispute. Her motivations are deeply questioned. Her position in Troy is deeply questioned. Her own sense of what on earth she's been doing is all up for grabs. Her biggest role, because quite early in the Iliad, it's in the third book of the Iliad, and we'll put the references on the show notes, because at this point, partly in order to resolve this ongoing siege which has been dragging on, we're in the ninth year, there's an agreement that Paris and Menelaus should fight it out in single combat, and the winner, in a sense, would get the woman, and that would actually then decide the fate of the war. Now, at this point, another of these kind of minor deities, Iris, another messenger of the Gods, a kind of female equivalent of. Of Hermes, goes in disguise to Helen's apartments in Troy and says that she should come and watch Paris and Menelaus fighting it out. Right? Kind of strange spectator sport for the woman who's the cause of all this. But that is what's going to happen. And Iris, Iris says that Helen should come and watch. Now she goes and finds Helen. And I think, and this is really your territory, Charlotte. When she goes into Helen's chambers, what she discovers is that Helen is sitting at her loom and she is weaving a pictorial tapestry, as it were, pictorial cloth showing the scenes of the Trojan War that she's living through now.
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It's an extraordinary moment, isn't it? Because as you said, Helen doesn't take a big part in the Iliad, but every single scene that she's in is memorable, I would say, and resonant and important. So she. We first see her, we sort of come upon her in her chamber weaving, as you say, this vast tapestry. It's a big tapestry of the scenes of combats between the Greeks and the Trojans. And one of the very early commentators on the Iliad, and we're talking about, in antiquity, someone in antiquity, writing a scribble in the margin, effectively of a manuscript, wrote that what Homer, the poet did here with this scene was to give an analogy for what he himself, the poet, was doing. In other words, making art about the war. Helen is in the poem making art about the war. Just as, you know, some misty other point, the poet himself is making art about the war. And it's a kind of lovely moment because it shows us that Helen, in a very discreet and unfussy way, it shows us that Helen has got enormous insight. She has a kind of synoptic vision of what's going on. Very few people are kind of self aware, as we would say in modern terms in the Iliad, about the significance of the events that are going on around them. There's one other character, and that is Achilles. He has a kind of similar sense of being able to zoom out and see this for what it is, in a sense. And she's doing that. It's a tiny moment. It's a very beautiful and resonant moment,
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absolutely quintessentially female, that as Helen constructs this image for herself of the war that she's caused, she is doing that using the absolutely standard medium that women are supposed to control, that women weave clothes, married women are represented at home weaving cloth. And so here she is extraordinarily self aware. And you say she has this synoptic vision of the war for which people take her to be responsible, but she is conjuring that up for herself using the traditional medium of a married woman,
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incidentally, and this is a less exalted point, but you may, dear listeners, be wondering why in the ninth year of the war, they suddenly decided to stage a duel between Menelaus and Paris, something that could have been done as soon as the war broke out. And my answer is, do not ask this question. This is never explained. It feels like something that should have happened at least eight years ago. It's necessary for the purposes of the poem. And the other thing that happens next also feels like it should have happened a long time ago.
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What's interesting, she gets summoned by Iris to go and watch, but not without her actually then crying for Menelaus. So she is already kind of regretful and self blaming at this point point. But she then goes with Iris to watch this duel about herself, but also weirdly to act as a kind of interpreter for the old men of Troy who were sitting on the walls also watching this and want to know who's who. Now you might think that by this stage in the Trojan War, the old men of Troy would know perfectly well who these guys were. They would recognize Menelaus, Agamemnon, Achilles, all the rest. But actually we have this moment where Helen is being again being an interpreter, taking, as it were, a synoptic vision of the war for the benefit of the old guys who are not in the fight now and looking out and wondering what's happened or what is happening specifically Priam.
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Priam, the king asks her, who are these? Who are these people? And she points out the Greek fighters, which is obviously useful from the point of view of the poem. It gives us a sense of who's who. But it seems genuinely weird if you give it too much logical thought. So let's abandon logic and go with it. But the fact of the matter is that this is another wonderful scene that there is this. We see Helen walking along the ramparts. I mean, it's very cinematic. I feel I can see this scene. The old men who can't fight anymore. There's a frisson that runs through them. They say among themselves, they whisper among themselves. Well, it's not surprising that she caused a war. She's so extraordinary, she's so beautiful. And the relationship or the kind of conversation that takes place between Priam and Helen is remarkably tender and intimate and father daughterish, given that she has potentially, you know, depending on how you look at it, caused this mass destruction against his people. And she calls him father. I mean, it's absolutely an extraordinary and touching and ambiguous and troubling little scene, isn't it, Mary? But you get the sense of her. I imagine her swishing through along this rampart, the old men looking at her, whispering about her. She's like the girl from Ipanema. There's something about her, you know, she's always so special, except that she's still
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blaming herself as she does when she's talking to Ares. She's. She is still saying that for all that glam that she has, she still regrets what she did. And she calls herself this wonderful and quite puzzling adjective that Homer uses of Helen in various places. And one thing it's clear is it's not flattering, though. It's not quite. It's not quite clear the resonance. She calls herself dog faced, in a sense, that's conjuring up her sort of the betrayal. But I mean, what do you make of the dog in dogface?
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It's a very interesting question, isn't it, Mary? And actually, if you subscribe to Odyssey Book Club, which I strongly recommend you do, we devoted a chunk of an episode actually to this description because it comes up again in the Odyssey of Helen and Emily Wilson in her translation. And the Odyssey puts a very interesting spin on it. To me, Mary, it's one of those imponderables, actually. Our language, the English language, is so overladen with so many kind of connotations around dogs, bitches. It's very hard to peel that back because it's a very Homeric phrase. It's not like this is in constant use in classical Greek and we can really pin down what it means through tons and tons of different contexts. It's a very tricky one. And in the end, I feel like I have to reserve judgment as to what it actually means. But as I say, if you listen to Odyssey Book Club, Emily Wilson's sort of argument about this word is very, very interesting. She turns it round to avoid. Well, a lot of modern translators have gone down the bitch route.
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Indeed, Helen calls herself a bitch, a dog faced woman, a bitch.
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But does that mean bitch in the sense that we would apply the word bitch? I think this is a difficult question. We don't really know the force of it, do we? I don't think no.
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And it is one of those cases where I think looking a little bit. You don't have to know Greek to see that some of these Greek terms and The Greek adjectives, the Greek words that are used about all the characters. But Helen is a really good example. They take us to the sort of verges of our understanding. Know when Helen calls herself dog faced, she's not. That's not self congratulatory, but it's exactly.
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We know it's negative.
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I think that's, that's clear, but it's not clear how. We'd love to know how she is describing herself. The jury's out. However, dog faced or not, one thing that clearly happens in the duel between Paris and Menelaus, which she has come to, to watch, brought there by Iris. Things are looking very, very bad for Paris. He's not going to win. Defeat looms him in the looms over him, faces him. The only way he escapes is that Aphrodite takes him up in a fog of mist and removes him from the fray so he doesn't get killed.
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It would have been a short poem, it would have been a very short poem if he had got killed at that point there's a lot of plot
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to go, yeah, and they could all live happily ever after. And Paris. But no, he is removed by Aphrodite. What Aphrodite also does is she disguises herself and she appears to Helen and tells Helen to go to Paris. Go to Paris. Now what's interesting at this point is we see something of the kind of surprise and shock of Helen because Helen basically goes for the goddess. You know, she, you know, gives her a ticking off. You know, this is. Desire is disastrous. And Helen starts off at least by standing up to the Aphrodite who had actually given her to Paris in the first place, but not for long.
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It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because again, you get the sense of. Sense of Helen's power. You know, she a. She recognizes Aphrodite immediately even though Aphrodite is disguised as an old woman. Secondly, she lets rip. She absolutely lets rip and says, why don't you go off to one of the other places that you're interested in. Why are you here making my life a misery Again, Quite a bold conversation to have with an immortal goddess. But you know, Helen is also a child of Zeus, but so they have this kind of girl row because Aphrodite sort of gives as good as she gets and says, well, you know, don't forget that. Don't forget that I am the immortal around here. And she sort of threatens Helen and so Helen sort of gives in and as he would, and she goes back to her bedroom, which is where Paris is. And it all gets very sexy.
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It's all lovey dovey and it is desire. And she goes to bed with Paris. And there's a sense here that in the end, Aphrodite is delivering to Paris what she promised. You know, the judgment of Paris and Aphrodite getting the golden apple meant something. And here, despite Helen's anguish now, despite the fact that she, you know, she does let rip Aphrodite for being so destructive, in the end, Aphrodite delivers Helen to Paris and desire, as it were, envelops both of them, at least temporarily.
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Let's lose ourselves in love, says Paris. Never has longing for you overwhelmed me. So, I mean, this is real, this is kind of sexy sex after a massive row and a huge shot of adrenaline on the battlefield. So.
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But, you know, just. Just following the kind of twists and turns of Helen in book three is, you know, it's a great diagnostic for the complexity of how she's portrayed in this poem that continues. We get. She never comes in at such length after that. But we see those problems, I mean, a few books later, in book six, she's with Hector and she and Hector are ganging up on Paris to say, because Paris is not the world's most eager fighter. You know, he's a bit. A bit of a dandy in some ways. I mean, he's a bit too perfumed. And Helen and Hector are ganging up on Paris, so you've got to get out and fight. And in fact, what Paris is doing is polishing his armor.
- [29:14]
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Yeah. Which is very girly. It's implied that this is somewhat girly. He's a bit too interested in the kind of. The aesthetic qualities of being a fighter rather than actually getting out there and bludgeoning people to death.
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Yeah. I mean, it's not. Polishing your armor is perhaps a displacement activity. And you know, Helen, again, you get the reproach, the self reproach of Helen who wishes she died. Again, we get this idea of Helen calling herself a dog or a bitch. She's kind of thinking about the role of the gods here, how it's Zeus who's caused all this. But prophetically, of course, within the poem, she says they're going to be the subject of poetry in the future.
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Yeah. And again, that's another moment of Helen knowing what the heck is going on here, that this isn't just. This isn't just events spooling out. This is serious, world famous, glorious events, heartbreaking, tragic events which are going to be suitable as the subject for epic poetry in the future. So it's another glorious moment of self awareness. She knows she's in a poem, she kind of knows she's in a poem.
- [30:32]
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And most of the other characters don't realize they're in a poem. And Helen knows she's in a poem. And that wonderful kind of toxic, heady, exciting mixture of desire, beauty, self recrimination, self blame, inconsistency is absolutely, absolutely fantastic. And it's interesting, I think, that she doesn't, after book six, she doesn't come in directly face to face again until the very end of the poem, book 24. She's not quite the last voice in the poem, but she almost is. By this time, Hector has died. His body has been ransomed by Priam from the victorious Achilles and brought back for burial. At the funeral games of Hektor, three women make moving tributes to him. There's his mother, Hecuba, Priam's wife. There's his wife, Andromache, Hector's wife, that is, and Helen. And Helen is the last tribute, almost in the last part lines of the poem. And she thanks Hector for being as to her. He was, she kind of claims, the only person who treated her decently. She says that everybody else in Troy hates her, but Hector was decent. Now, what's interesting, of course, is that what we've seen of Helen in the poem doesn't actually bear out her claim that everybody in Troy hated her. In fact, she says that. But we've seen, particularly when she's on the walls with the old men, we've seen people being very tender and respectful to her. But her final words in the Iliad is that Hector was the one person who treated me decently. So in a sense, she has the
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last lines really, almost again, a moment of pure, sort of the refulgent importance of Helen, that she gets to be the last, extraordinarily in this morning party, the hero's mother, the. The hero's wife. And then Helen, she's the daughter of Zeus giving this, singing this lament. It's another beautiful moment, but I think. Should we take a break here, Mary, and find out about Helen during the end game of the Trojan War? After the break.
- [33:16]
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What is really important about the Iliad is that we don't actually see the end of the Trojan War in the Iliad. We talk about it as being the poem of the Trojan War. But as you've said, Charlotte, it's just a poem of a few weeks in the ninth year. But we get glimpses of the Trojan War, actually, in the next poem attributed to Homer slightly later, the Odyssey. And when we. Which is mainly concerned with the return of Odysseus from the war in his attempts to get home. And it's what we're looking at in the book club. But at one point early in the Odyssey, we get a kind of flashback to the very end of the Trojan War, and particularly the famous episode where the Greeks pretend to leave Troy, pretend to give up the siege. They leave this great horse which looks as if it's a present for the Trojans, a kind of an acknowledgement of victory. They hide away the Trojans, despite a couple of warnings, bring the horse into their city, have a huge party because the war has ended. When they're all, as it were, sweeping it off or carousing the warriors who have been hidden inside that horse, the Greek warriors come out and butcher them. Now, that isn't a part of the Iliad, but it's flashed back to in the Odyssey, and it's flashed back to with, again, some really puzzling interventions by Helen, which I find quite hard to understand. I mean, it does start to look, as we learn about this, about what she did, as if she's partly working at the end of the Trojan War as a sort of undercover agent for the Greeks. Certainly when Odysseus goes disguised to kind of have a look round Troy, he talks to Helen and she gives him kind of useful information about.
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Yes, that's another really interesting flashback in the Odyssey, isn't it, to that whole episode where Odysseus, the king of disguise, goes back into. Goes into Troy undercover, meets Helen, Helen recognizes him immediately because that's another thing about Helen, nothing gets past Helen. She washes him and cleans him and puts. Anoints his body with oil and they have a conversation in which she. They exchange information. And again, it's this sort of, you know, whose side is she on? He apparently tells her all the stuff that the Greeks are planning and that everything's going to, you know, that he's already. The end game is in sight and that there are tactics afoot, which is presumably the Trojan horse that is going to bring this whole thing to an end. And, you know, she says that she's. We are told that she was happy about this because she wished that Aphrodite had not sent her mad and made her leave her daughter and her husband. Hmm, interesting.
- [36:56]
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I kind of get that bit. The bit I find weirder is what the Odyssey describes her doing during the Trojan Horse. Episode when the guys are still in the horse and it's been brought in into the city, and it's what the text tells us is that Helen called out to the men inside, imitating the voices of their wives. So she's calling out to the Greeks inside the horse, as it were, pretending in the voice of the wives that they have at home. And again, I'm not sure whose side she's on here. I mean, is it taunting? Is it reminding them of the hopelessness of their position? They've been there 10 years. Is it kind of trying to put iron in their soul that, you know, if they, if they, this one works out for them, they will get back to those wives whose voices she's imitating. But she's so, again, she's so clever. She can, she's. She can imitate, she can pretend, she can plausibly pretend to be the wives of these guys who are going to make one last and it turns out to be successful go at bringing Troy to its knees.
- [38:23]
B
By the way, I think this story makes no sense whatsoever because in any logical terms, if they had suspected that there were a load of Greek soldiers hidden in the Trojan horse, maybe it would have been a good idea to check that before pulling it into the city. So this is another moment where, you know, do not apply too much logic to this. The point of the story, as Mary says, is that Helen has this special quality of being able to imitate anyone disguised as. And of course, the fact of the matter is that inside that horse, it's Odysseus who is preventing, literally putting his hands over the mouths of those soldiers who attempted in their stupidity to believe that it's their real wife calling out. He stops them. They're a match for each other. But it's a peculiar episode, that's for sure. And again, one of those episodes that sets Helen up as being this ambivalent figure who you can never quite pin down and, you know, says some things and does different things and it's hard to know. That's why I love Husso, though.
- [39:29]
A
I mean, we don't want to get to get buried in this, in the Trojan Horse. But the other most famous account of the Trojan horse is actually in Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid, where Aeneas, who's going to found Rome, is actually a Trojan refugee. And you see in Virgil's first century BCE in his Latin epic, you see the Trojan War from the point of view of the Trojans, there is a really kind of quite unsettling moment where Aeneas the hero, is so angry as Troy is crumbling about him, he is so angry that he wants violently to do away with Helen. He blames Helen and he wants to slaughter her. And it's a very strange bit, a very violent bit of the Aeneid, so violent that some people have thought that in fact, it wasn't written by Virgil at all. It was added in later by someone who wanted to decry Helen. But if you want an idea of how an ancient poet can deplore Helen, not see her as ambivalent at all, he doesn't, in the end kill her. But go to book two of the Aeneid and read that account where she is not quite the canny, ambivalent character that she appears in Homer. But that's a whole other story.
- [41:19]
B
It's incredibly vivid, though, and you have this very visually powerful scene of Troy in flames, buildings collapsing, and he catches sight of Helen in the shadow and it's glorious. But that's so. Yeah, unless, I guess, Mary, that whole. That leads up to the entire question of what on earth are the Greeks going to do with Helen once they've won this war and got her back? Now, how are they going to treat Helen? And there are some, really. There's a very interesting answer to this question in an extraordinary play by Euripides, the 5th century BCE Athenian playwright, who writes a play which almost in some sense reads as fan fiction of the Homeric epics. It's called the Trojan Women. And it kind of answers the question that I've just asked, really. So the war has finished. What happens to the Trojan women? And the Trojan women in question are not just Helen, who is a Trojan woman, for the kind of purposes of this, the title of the play, but also Hecuba and Andromache, the wife of Hector. So you have a sort of strong sense of these women having been rounded up. It also involves Cassandra, the. These royal Trojan women rounded up. The Greeks are about to leave. What are we going to do with the Trojan women? And as regards Helen, this is a very, very interesting question. I mean, Menelaus, Mary, her spurned husband, at least to begin with, has the attitude that he's going to take her back to Greece and he is going to kill her.
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A
Yes. Yeah.
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B
But Helen puts up this argument that
- [43:14]
A
she shouldn't be in this part of the play. What you get actually is a pair of speeches that feel as if they could have come from a 5th century Athenian court case in which Helen puts the case in her defense. And then Hecuba, the Wife of Priam really, really attacks Helen as being the person responsible. Helen responds by, in a sense, appealing to the will of the gods, to the role of desire and beauty, which was not her fault. It's all in the kind of aim of Euripides, kind of getting us to the point of facing that question of what's going to happen to Helen, what Hecuba says when Menelaus has said that he's going to take her back to Greece and when they get to Greece, he's going to kill her. He's absolutely clear about that. Hecuba can see the writing on the wall here because she says, make sure you don't look at her, because if you see her, she's going to trap you. She's going to trap you with desire. You know, Helen fights back against this. Helen actually, interestingly, tries to turn the tables on Hecuba and saying that you gave birth to Paris. It is Paris's fault, not mine, or you should be punishing Aphrodite. But Menelaus kind of appears to persist in his plan that they're going to go back to Greece and she's being killed. Then Hecubus says something a bit more precise, which is, if you're going to go back to Greece in a ship, don't travel in the same ship. No, we can see what. What's in Hecuba's mind, that if Menelaus spends any time near Helen, he is going to fall in love with her all over again. Menelaus responds with, I think one of the very, very few jokes in the whole of Surviving Greek tragedy, when he says, why shouldn't I go with her in the same ship? Has she put on a lot of weight since she's been in Troy? I mean, a terrible joke, but it's clearly a joke. He persists, despite the joke, in saying to Hachibera and the chorus and other people on stage that he is going to go back, she's going to kill her. And rather chillingly, actually, he says, her fate, the fate of being killed by me, will give the whole of the female sex a lesson in. In chastity. So there, ostensibly, despite Hecuba's worries, ostensibly, we think that at the end of the Trojan Women Euripides play that the fate of Helen has been sealed, except we know that it hasn't, because you don't have to know much about the story of Helena. We'll be coming onto this in the next episode to know that actually she didn't get killed when she got back to Greece and that in fact she went back to Sparta and she continued to be queen, et cetera, et cetera. And we can see, as we read Euripides play carefully, that Hecuba always telling Menelaus, don't look at her, don't be together with her, don't travel in the same ship. Hecuba already has a sense that if he's thinking of killing her after their long journey back to Greece, the chances are he's not going to go through with it. It's yet another kind of layer in the sense that of is, you know, how far, how far can we ever pin down Helen? What do we argue about Helen for? Is. Is Helen, as you know, Menelaus says here, is, is she a representative of the whole of the female species who need to be told what proper chastity is, or is she a plaything of the gods and what's going to happen next when they do get back to Greece? Now, we've slightly given it away in saying probably she's not going to be killed, but we look at the kind of rather strange upshot of all this when we come back to the story of what happens to Helen after the Trojan War, and also to some of the most amazing and surprising complete variants on the story of the Trojan War that we want to dig out next time.
- [48:35]
B
See you then. 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 at Instant Classics Pod.
- [48:54]
A
Bye bye.