The
Writings of Khurram Ali Shafique
.
Helen of Troy
The
face that launched a thousand ships may never have existed for all
we know. There are no contemporary records of Helen of Troy, who
is sometimes believed to have existed in Greece in the 13th century
BC. Excavations at the site of the ancient Troy, now in modern Turkey,
don't help us determine whether any such incident as Trojan War
ever happened on that site. The oldest reference to Helen is found,
of course, in Homer's two classic poems but then Homer's own existence
is uncertain and the poems attributed to this blind ancient poet
were constructed at least five centuries after the days of the Trojan
War. And yet to the ancient Greek scholars, including the father
of history Herodotus and his more scientific successor Theucydides,
Helen and the war allegedly fought over her possession were unquestionable
historical facts.
Helen has remained an inspiration
for poets and artists long after the famous muses of ancient Greece
stopped functioning. Right at the dawn of modern enlightenment she
appeared as the heroine of Goethe in the second part of his masterpiece
Faust. In our own century, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats compared here
legendary status with Jesus Christ as they both stand at the dawn
of two subsequent milleniums, and they both were attributed divine
conception. Helen may belong more properly to the field of mythology
than history, but strangely, it doesn't make her less historic.
If we assume that she existed, and
strip down the mythology to retrieve the minimum believable information,
then the story of Helen might go like this.
Helen used to live in Sparta, one
of the several Greek kingdoms in the thirteenth century A.D. Herself
a princess, she was married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta and
probably had a daughter from him. Bewitched by the charms of Paris,
a visiting prince from Troy, she soon developed sexual relations
with him and finally eloped with him to his parent city. What moved
her to do so, we don't know but it was most probably a combination
of physical attraction and the elegant mannerism that the foreigner
prince must have effused with his every gesture.
Helen's attraction to Troy is a remarkable
diversion in her story. The ancient Eastern city was far more superior
in its culture than the contemporary Greece, which had just begun
to emerge from the shadows of savagery. Troy had existed in its
place as an important centre of trade in the ancient world for nearly
a thousand years. The Greeks, on the other hand, were a herd of
nomadic people who had migrated from some unknown corner of Russia
just a little while ago. They barely had a literature, and until
a couple of generations ago they didn't even know how to read and
write. Their major source of revenue was a mix of loot from their
newly learnt craft of sailing. If Helen was the paragon of grace
and beauty that the later generations believed her to be, then she
might have thought herself more suited to dwell at Troy than the
robber kingdoms of Greece. Here husband, incidentally, didn't see
things in a similar light and as soon as he discovered the elopement
he gathered all the rulers of Greece to enlist them on his war against
Troy. Together they built a mighty armada and sailed across the
Dardenelles to storm the enemy stronghold.
Troy fell after a siege of several
years and Menelaus returned with his wife. He probably never made
an issue of her elopement again, and they lived like husband and
wife ever after. The king's oblivion of his wife's adultery appears
strange in a patriarchal context, and the Greeks of the later day
came up with several explanations. But we don't have enough knowledge
about the sexual ethics of those days, and for all we know, many
societies in the world had just emerged from a matriarchal system
of living.
This might have been the basic story
of Helen that was handed down to the earliest Greek mythologists,
who appeared a few generations later when Greece had developed into
a prosperous land of strength and prosperity (resulting to no small
extant from its plunder of Troy). Now the Greeks needed their own
brand of literature and folklore and their mythologists created
a world of legends more remarkable than produced by any other civilization.
In the process Helen was transformed into a full-fledged heroine.
Those mythologists, whose names are
lost to us, were also great thinkers. Through simple stories they
related complicated values and truths about life. The material for
these stories came from heroes such as Hercules, who must have lived
a little earlier than Helen, and others whom Helen might have entertained
in her own palace in her lifetime. Among them was the fearless sea
captain Odysseus, later known as Ulysses to the Romans, who himself
had been in love with her at one time.
The Greek mythologist explained the
exceptional charisma of Helen by turning her into a daughter of
Zeus, the king of all gods. Hence we got one of the most amazing
versions of divine conception in the ancient literature: Zeus turned
into a swan and impregnated Leda, the wife of king Tindareus. After
nine months of pregnancy the awesome woman laid a huge egg from
which emerged Helen and her brother. The divine conception of Helen
also solved the ethical problem of Menelaus' silence over his wife's
betrayal: since Helen was a daughter of Zeus, Menelaus derived his
own authority from his marriage to her and therefore he couldn't
annul it!
The conduct of Menelaus thus justified,
the conduct of Helen still remained a problem. But the mythologist
always had a god in the machine to descend on the stage if the play
got stuck. Thereby came the wonderful story about the Apple of Discord.
It was said that the goddess Discord threw an apple in a gathering
of all goddesses and on that apple was written: "to the most
beautiful."
Every goddess desiring to become the
recipient of this certificate, the final shortlist contained three
of the most strong-headed deities known to Greeks. On the instruction
of Zeus they went to Paris, the handsome young man of the ancient
world, and asked him to be their judge. Hera, the wife of Zeus,
offered him a kingdom. Athena, the goddess of wisdom offered him
stability. Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of love and beauty promised
him the sexual favours of the most beautiful woman on earth. Paris
handed down the apple to Aphrodite. Hence it was no one lesser than
the goddess of love who turned Helen's heart towards Paris.
The story of Discord had other implications
too, which were duly noticed by its ancient Greek audience. Power,
wisdom and love do not unite in this imperfect world, sadly, and
one has to choose between them, like Paris. The love of a beautiful
woman eats up the other virtues and anyone who would make such a
choice, would end up like Paris -- bringing destruction upon him
as well as on his city. The whole story had a misogynous moral:
if the most beautiful woman of all times wasn't worth the pain,
who else could be?
While the earlier Greeks were satisfied
with this justification, the later day moralists needed a further
twist. Their historian Herodotus heard a story from the Egyptians
who claimed that Helen and Paris made a visit to Egypt while on
their way to Troy. When the ruling pharaoh discovered their licentious
affair he arrested Helen so that she could be returned to her husband
while Paris was asked to leave alone. Hence, Herodotus argued, Helen
never set her foot on the soil of Troy, or else the Trojans would
have given her up at some point in the ten year long war just to
save their skins. Euripedes, the master playwright lived in the
Athens in the fourth century BC, twisted this story to create a
plot in which Helen never falls in love with Paris, or for that
matter, with anyone else other than her husband. In his play Helen,
the goddess Hera orders Hermes (Mercury) to create a look-alike
of Helen out of thin air. It is this illusionary Helen who makes
loves to Paris and elopes with him, while Hermes carries the real
Helen away to a temple in Egypt. Menealus captures Troy but doesn't
find his wife there, only to meet her in a dramatic climax on the
sands on Egypt.
In this sad forgery of the original
tale, the warm-blooded Helen turns into a listless character who
is given such monologues as, "Would God I could rub my beauty
out like a picture, and assume hereafter in its place a form less
attractive!" Euripedes' Helen was a woman cut down to the size
of men living by the values of mediocrity.
The story of Helen had its frills
too. Among other anecdotes, it was added that merely at the age
of twelve she had become so famous for her beauty that Theseus,
the great Athenian hero who had slain Minotaur of Crete, abducted
her and kept her for two years while waiting for her puberty to
marry her. Helen was returned, however, from Athens without as much
disaster as would coincide her return from Troy later.
Another interesting anecdote was about
the numerous suitors who gathered at the city of Helen's father
Helen was declared of a marriageable age. These included, among
others, the famous Odysseus. Helen's father asked them all to take
a vow that if Helen was ever abducted to a foreign land they would
stand united in their efforts to bring her back even if they had
to go to the farthest end of the world. In the Helen story this
oath aided her husband Menelaus to gather the Greek kings, although
historically speaking the Greek invaders of Troy wouldn't have needed
it -- Troy was a rich prey and they would have attacked it anyway.
However, the most exotic touch was
the remarkable device of the Trojan Horse. There is no way of knowing
if such an event ever happened in history, but the wooden horse
that carried Greek soldiers in its belly and into the well-guarded
city of Troy has become one of the most well-known images from ancient
history. Homer gives Helen the treacherous role of leading a band
of Trojan soldiers to check for hidden soldiers in the horse's belly.
But if we are to believe Herodotus, Helen probably wasn't present
on the site to witness this marvel of ancient carpentry!
One way or another, Helen has caught
the fancy of some of the most imaginative people in the human history.
In the age of Renaissance she became the ultimate prize of Doctor
Faustus at the end of his long quest of unimaginable pleasures,
a fitting reward for which one could sell one's soul to the devil!
In the second part of Goethe's masterpiece Faust, Helen
appears again as the central female figure.
The historic Helen, if she existed,
must have appeared to her contemporaries as a formidable expression
of female existence independent of social and restrictions. Helen
could have been a woman who refused to wear any of the shackles
invented by her heroes: morality, patriotism, common good. The legendary
Helen is a slightly different case from her historical or semi-historical
counterpart.
In the stories written about Helen
by men authors, whether new or old, she represents the essence of
female sexuality as it is perceived by men, its joy and pains, its
threats and promises. Each author has measured her character by
the standard of his own existence. For the spirited earlier Greeks,
for whom the fear of death was an exciting challenge Helen was a
woman of unrestrained desires whose sexual arousal could unleash
war at the largest scale. Subsequent generations modified her according
to the secret desires, and fears, of their own hearts.
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Source: DAWN
The Review, Aug, 2000
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