The Rest Is History - 457. Helen of Troy: Queen of the Greek Myths (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

The story of Helen of Troy, her remarkable birth and her infamous love affair with Paris, the Trojan prince, resounds across the centuries. A figure of condemnation, pity and tragedy, her beauty set in motion the most legendary literary conflict of all time: the Trojan Wars. Yet, Helen’s story reaches far beyond Homer and the Iliad. From her godly parentage and the egg from which she hatched, to her marriage to the king of Sparta and her abduction to Troy, Helen crossed paths with the greatest figures of Greek mythology. But in a story told almost entirely by men, what then is the truth of Helen? Was her fabled life one of abuse and oppression, or was she the mistress of her own fate? And could it be that she did in fact really exist? Join Tom and Dominic as they journey through the life of Helen of Troy, into worlds of myth and legend, and explore the significance of this most iconic of women - both for the world of the Ancient Greeks, and our world today.  EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. A sudden blow. The great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers

push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body laid in that white rush but feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop that is wb yates's poem leader and the swan and tom it is describing one of the most famous women not just in all antiquity or in all mythology, but who arguably ever lived, if she did live, and that is Helen of Troy, by repute, the most beautiful woman who ever existed, the most beautiful woman in the Greek world, the face that launched a thousand ships,

the person whose abduction kick-started the Trojan War. So the woman who is at the centre of arguably the most influential epic narrative ever written. Yeah. So Tom, I know you're a huge fan of Helen of Troy. Love Helen of Troy. But everyone loves Helen of Troy, don't they? I mean, that's the whole point. You deliberately gave me a very difficult poem to read with a ridiculous amount of stuff about loins and thighs.

So thank you for that. No, you're welcome. Tell us what's going on in the poem. So in the poem, it's describing how Helen of Troy is conceived. And so in the passage you read so beautifully, the shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, that is a reference to the sack of Troy. But it's not just Helen of Troy who is being conceived. There is another sister, Clytemnestra, who will go on to marry Agamemnon, who is the commander of the Greeks at Troy. And so that line, an Agamemnon dead, Clytemnestra may have a role

to play in that. So we'll be looking at Clytemnestra, Helen of Troy's sister, as well as Helen of Troy. But just on this poem, which you read so beautifully and without any pauses because you were losing it over certain phrases, it is about a rape. It is about Zeus, the king of the gods, who has disguised himself as a swan. And he is a serial rapist and he's invariably disguising himself to do this. So he disguises himself as a share of gold or as the husband of the woman that he's coming to. But here he has come as a swan. And what is exceptional about this rape relative to earlier rapes that Zeus has perpetrated, earlier rapes, he fathers heroes, male heroes on the women that he has taken but here he

is fathering for the first time a daughter and helen of troy is the only daughter that zeus ever fathers and this is why she is the most beautiful woman in the world all right yeah and you said she's reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world i I mean, in the myth, she is the most beautiful woman in the world. There is no kind of, you know, oh, we all have different standards of beauty. Objectively, she's the most beautiful. And it reflects the way in which, in the Greek world, competition to be the best is the absolute essence of everything. I mean, it's what gives rise to the Olympics, for instance.

And beauty contests are a feature of Greek culture, as every other kind of contest is. So Helen stands as the most beautiful of all. But there is this paradox in this sense of Helen as absolutely unique, which is that at the same time, she is actually only one of four children that Leda will give birth to. And when Leda gives birth to them, she hatches them. She gives birth to two eggs. That's what happens when you've been interfered with by a swan, right? I mean, that's the nature of swan-human relations. I mean, yes, it opens up many questions.

She hatches two eggs. And in one of them, Helen comes out and a boy called Pollux. Oh, yeah, Castor and Pollux. Yes. And in the other egg, Clytemnestra, so Helen's half-sister, and Castor. Yeah. So two of the children are the children of Zeus, and two of them are the children of a mortal. And we'll come to the story of what is going on here, who Helen is, as told by the Greeks in due course.

But just to say, I mean, this is coming off the back of an episode on Custer and we've been looking at the industrial society of America and all that kind of thing. And obviously talking about women laying eggs and being attacked by swans and things, I mean, it might seem very different, but of course we were talking about the power of myth in the context of the Lakota, weren't we? Or indeed of Custer. Custer is a mythological figure. But Custer would have no place for kind of talking animals or things like that. No, he'd stuff an animal, but he wouldn't talk to it. Exactly so. But in Greece, these stories have a kind of power and resonance of the kind that you would witness in the Cota society in the late 19th century. Just mention it because it gives a sense of how these stories are not just imaginative fantasies for children, which is often how Greek

myths are presented. They are terrifying stories. I mean, terrible things happen in them, but they channel aspects of Greek culture that are incredibly significant. And as you say, the idea of Helen as the face that launches a thousand ships, I mean, that's a line from a play by Christopher Marlowe, contemporary of Shakespeare. So that's almost 3,000 years after Helen of Troy is supposed to have lived. And there's still this kind of power. And philosophers have come up with this measure of beauty, which is a milli-Helen. And it's the amount of beauty that is sufficient to launch a ship. So Helen has a thousand Millie Helens. So the potency of the most beautiful woman in the world as a myth, I think, is very enduring. But there's also

the possibility that the stories that the Greeks in the classical period, so that's kind of sixth, fifth, fourth centuries BC, that they might be looking back to a much earlier period, the period of perhaps a historical Trojan War, a period when perhaps there were great queens. Well, people have always been fascinated by this, haven't they? The idea that maybe a queen was kidnapped. Maybe there was some dynastic marriage gone wrong that provokes a war between cities on different sides of the Aegean. Yes. So this also is part, I think, of the fascination of the stories of Helen of Troy.

So to begin with, let's look at the life of Helen as told by the Greeks. Yeah. Brilliant. And this is basically, I've kind of stitched it together from various sources. So people are writing about it before Homer. He's not the first. Homer is the first, but Homer leaves lots of space. So he doesn't cover every aspect of her. Oh, so people fill it in afterwards. Yeah. And when Homer introduces Helen, he doesn't explain who she is. He is taking for granted that people already know who she is. She's already a folk figure, if you like. Yeah. And so the birth of Helen is something that is conceived by Zeus. And there is an epic that

follows shortly after Homer called the Kypria. We only have fragments of it. And it explains how Zeus wants to destroy or rather winnow humanity. He wants to diminish it. And so there was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep bosomed earth and Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the alluring earth of men that the load of death might empty the world. And this is something that you get a lot in Near Eastern myths. So, you know, in the Bible, God sends a flood. You get the same in kind of Babylonian myth and so on. What's distinctive about this is that Zeus is advised by a character called Momos, or Blame, that this is really boring. He should go for something much more fun and that he should ensure the birth of two completely luminous and fatal figures. And one of them is the son of a nymph called Thetis. And Thetis, the prophecy is that her son will be greater than the father. And Zeus had been planning to marry her, but gets warned off by this. And so he marries her to a kind of rather dull hero called Peleus. And their son is called Achilles.

Of heel fame. Of heel fame. And Achilles will be the greatest warrior on the field of Troy in the Trojan War. But he also decides that he will father a daughter. And so I think the last time we quoted Yeats was his great poem on the Easter Rising. And there's this phrase, a terrible beauty is born. And Helen is a terrible beauty. And that shudder in the loins, the shudder, I mean, there's a sense of dread as well as of pleasure about this. Because of the number of people who will lose their lives because of Helen, right? I mean, she's fatal. Absolutely. So where does Helen come from? So there are various stories. Greek myth is not like the Bible. There isn't a kind of single canonical account. Yeah. of the sea, so as in the famous Botticelli painting, that the foam hardens and becomes

a swan's egg and it's thrown into a swamp where it fertilizes and Helen hatches from it. So that's one story. That's just bizarre. I'm sorry, Tom. That's mad. Yeah, that is mad. That never happened. I think the thing about the swan is much more plausible. Well, so another story is that Zeus changes into a swan, but the person he rapes isn't Leda, it's Nemesis. So kind of retribution. And he either chases her across the world and they're constantly changing form, a bit like in the cartoon of The Sword in the Stone.

People have seen that. Oh, yeah. And another is that he pretends to be chased by an eagle and Nemesis takes the swan into her fold to shelter the swan and then the swan behaves disgracefully. And the eagle is Aphrodite in disguise. That's a complicated story. Very complicated. Which is why I think basically the version that becomes most popular and is told most often is the story that it is Leda who gets raped. And Leda is the queen of Sparta and her husband, the king of Sparta, is a man called Tyndareus.

And in a way that is never entirely explained, Leda that night sleeps both with Tyndareus and with Zeus in the form of a swan. So she has quite an active night. Very busy night. And this is why when she gives birth to quadruplets, you have two mortal and two immortal children hatching out of the eggs that she lays. And the Spartans are actually very proud of this story. And so Pausanias, who is a Greek writing in the second century AD, he's basically kind of writing

a travel guide to Greece. And he says that in Sparta, you can see the shell of the egg, and it's preserved in a temple on the Acropolis in Sparta. So his advice to travellers to Sparta, Tom, was a thousand times better than your advice to me when I went to Sparta and you recommended that I go to a place that when I googled it, it said notorious hangout for down and out thieves, drug addicts and so on. Well, we'll be coming to that advice because of course, so Helen grows up and Spartan girls are notorious in the Greek world for being educated. They're the only girls who get a state education in Greece. And there's a big focus on kind of sport and athletics

and Euripides, who is an Athenian who writes famous tragedies in the fifth century BC. He has a description of Helen doing gym work with the other girls in Sparta, her thighs naked exposed by the lifting of her skimpy tunic, sharing with boys the running track and the gymnasium. There's a hell of a lot of thighs in this podcast so far, Tom. Well, you know, I've said that Greek myths are often seen as being suitable for children. They are absolutely not. They are shocking.

Yeah. And there are repeated instances, for instance, of rape. And this is what happens with Helen. She is out with the girls, practicing her sport. Probably, Dominic, tradition says, at the site of the temple of Artemis Orthia, which was the temple that I sent you to. And that's the place. Well, I didn't go. We went to a restaurant instead. Anyway, go on. Well, so it's an ill-omened place because this is where Helen, she's 12 years old. So 12 is traditionally the age at which girls become available to be married. So she is on the cusp of being nubile. And she is spotted by

a Greek hero who's very famous, who probably most people who've read any book on the Greek myths will have heard of. And this is Theseus, the Athenian hero who kills the Minotaur on Crete. And in the books about Theseus that I read when I was a child, this episode was not mentioned. But Theseus, he's passing the temple of Artemis Orthia, and he sees the 12-year-old Helen, and he is transfixed. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. And so he abducts her. He takes her back to Attica, the land around Athens. He imprisons her on the Acropolis of a town there called Aphidna, and he appoints his mother, Ithra, to look after the young Helen. And then he goes off to try and abduct and rape Persephone, who is the queen of the dead, the wife of Hades, as you do. And while he is down

in the underworld, he ends up getting stuck to a seat and has to be rescued in the long run by hercules yeah but castor and pollux come and rescue their sister and they sack a fidna and they take aithra to serve helen as her maid which is what will then happen so a question about this that you said this was euripides obviously theseus is associated with athens she's from sparta yeah how much does that story reflect the political culture of the wars, the rivalry between Athens and Sparta? So it's a story of Athenians sacking Sparta or something, isn't it? That's what is ultimately behind this fantasy. The way that Euripides frames it in the depths of the Peloponnesian war, this terrible conflict between Athens and Sparta is definitely

drawing on that. But the roots of the story are much older. Okay. And this is the fascination of it is that elements of the story can just be reworked and reworked by Greeks at various points and with various perspectives. But the kind of the core of the story does genuinely seem to be very ancient. Okay. And running throughout it is this idea that Helen's beauty drives men mad. And so people may wonder, well, what did she look like? So Bethany Hughes has written a wonderful book on Helen of Troy, both as myth and the possible history that might lie behind her. She observes that the wonderful irony about the most beautiful woman in the world is that she is faceless. But there are kind of various traditional attributes of her beauty that

are described repeatedly. So one is that she has white skin like the shell that she hatched from. Yeah. So she is always described as kind of blindingly white. She is golden haired. Her hair is described as xanthus. So that is a color that is associated with the divine. Yeah. Her hair is more beautiful than any other woman's. And she has perfect milky white breasts. And the evidence for this is adduced by Pliny the Elder, the great Roman encyclopedist, who records that in Rhodes, in a temple of Athena, there is a goblet. And it is said to have been cast to correspond to the dimensions

of one of Helen's breasts. And people go and admire it and say, yes, that is absolutely perfect. So just at this stage, I know you'll probably come to this in the second half, so we don't need to get into the weeds of the discussion right away. But obviously so far, everything that has been written and indeed presumably the goblet and so on and so forth has been made by men. And lots of people listening to this will be thinking this is just a kind of male fantasy this is the male gaze run riot tom you know this is just a total male sexist fantasy so we should come to the discussion of that probably later on i guess we will and there is uh one very famous female greek writer who does write about helen and we'll come to her in due course. But you're right. I mean, she is driving men mad. And the fact that she's been abducted and raped as a girl does not put

off her suitors, quite the opposite. So Tyndareus basically says, no, I don't know what to do about this. Every man in Greece, every powerful king in Greece wants her. What am I going to do? And Odysseus, the most cunning and clever of the Greek heroes, comes up with this wheeze. And he says, well, get all the heroes to swear an oath that if any one of them abducts her, everyone else will team together and get Helen back. And Tyndareus thinks, yeah, that's a brilliant idea. I'll do that. And Odysseus' reward for this is that he gets as his wife, Helen's cousin, Penelope, who in the epics will serve as a model of the faithful wife. You know, she's sensible, she's wise,

and in a way kind of a much better wife than Helen. But obviously everyone wants Helen. And the person who ends up getting her is a guy called Menelaus. He's useless, totally useless in all the stories. I mean, he's certainly not on a level with Helen. So for starters, he's a younger on a level with Helen. So for starters, he's a younger brother. Dominic, you and I are both elder brothers, so we approve of the Greek tradition that says the elder brother is generally more admirable. Some even say that

Menelaus' elder brother, who is Agamemnon, the man who will marry Helen's sister Clytemnestra, that he does the wooing for Menelaus. And Menelaus at this point does not have a palace for reasons that we'll come to later. So he moves into Tyndareus' palace and in due course inherits it and Helen's treasure and gold. So he is pretty much completely defined by Helen. And this is emasculating for a Greek king. He is behaving like the bride moving into the person he's marrying home. So basically his rank depends on being married to Helen. And this is a cause of embarrassment. And they have a daughter, but they have no son. And I think there's generally a sense that Helen is too beautiful to have children. She stays kind of naturally beautiful throughout. And the experience of motherhood is not something that ages her,

which presumably is why she doesn't have lots of children. Anyway, so they're all hanging out. Menelaus and Helen and their daughter Hermione are in Sparta when who should turn up but a prince from Troy, a city on the other side of the Aegean. Paris. Yes, called Paris. And Paris has come to Sparta sent by Aphrodite, the goddess of love, because we talked about how the Greeks loved a beauty contest and even the goddesses occasionally like a beauty contest. And a golden apple has been thrown into a banquet with the praise to the fairest and three goddesses, Hera, the queen of the gods, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love. So you think actually, I mean, she was always going to win a beauty contest.

But anyway, Paris has been appointed to judge between them. He has chosen Aphrodite. And so Aphrodite in return has promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. And this is why Paris has arrived. And Paris is much better suited to Helen than Menelaus is, because if Sparta is famous among the Greeks as the home of the most beautiful women, Troy is famous for the beauty of its men. So Ganymede, the cupbearer of Zeus, is a Trojan.

And so Paris is, he has a slightly kind of feminine quality to his, his handsomeness. He's a kind of feline figure, isn't he, Paris? Yes, he's feline. Yes, absolutely. And he is stalking Helen and Menelaus makes it very easy for him because his grandfather has died in Crete. And so he goes away and Helen and Menelaus are left alone in Sparta. And Paris sets off with her. Now, the question is, does Helen go willingly or not?

So is this another story of rape? And a lot of contemporary renderings of the story say that it is. But it has to be said that basically the ancients are pretty unanimous. Helen chooses to go. And more than that, she actually dazzles Paris. She takes her treasure with her. When she goes, in all the epics, the tragedies, all the accounts, she is never described as Paris's concubine or whore or slave. She's always his wife. So she maintains her status and her rank and her dignity, but at the cost of being an adulteress. So she is going.

And you asked about, has a woman written about Troy? Sappho, who is a famous lyric poet, we've only had fragments of her poetry, but she was celebrated as the 10th muse. She wrote, for she that far surpassed all mortals in beauty, Helen, her most noble husband deserted and went sailing to Troy with never a thought for her daughter and dear parents. So Sappho is seizing on the things that a woman in Greek culture should probably be doing, looking after her parents, looking after her children, looking after her husband. Helen, not doing any of that. She has a kind of what in Greek terms is a sense of masculine autonomy. And she goes off with Paris and they have their first night together on a rocky island

called Cranae, which is just off the mainland of Sparta. And in the Iliad, Homer's great epic. So kind of almost nine years later, Paris still remembers that night as something remarkable and extraordinary. And he takes her off to Troy and all the Trojans are besotted with her as well. So that when Menelaus and Odysseus come to ask for Helen back, all the Trojans say, no, we're not going to give her back. Even though they know that the Greeks have sworn this oath, that they will get together

and come and get her, the Trojans won't do it. They're so dazzled, like Paris was, by her beauty. Absolutely. And so there's a philosopher called Socrates, an Athenian in the fourth century, who says that this is why the Trojan War is the greatest and most terrible conflict ever fought. So he says, it is clear how both sides felt about it, the Trojans as well as the Greeks. For although there had been many causes of contention between them before, none of these had disturbed their peace.

Whereas over Helen, they fought the greatest of wars, greatest not only for the scale of the passion involved, but also for how long it lasted and the sheer scale of the violence it unleashed. And this violence is made worse by the fact that the gods too end up fighting over Helen. So in the Trojan War, Aphrodite is on one side, the side of Paris and the Trojans, and Athena and Hera are on the Greek side because they hate Paris. But basically they're fighting over Helen. And Socrates says the whole universe goes mad. And he draws this conclusion that beauty by nature rules over strength. So you were saying this is a male fantasy, but essentially what Socrates is doing there is saying the power

of Helen's beauty is greater than the strength of all the men who came to fight her. So if you go to Homer's epic, the Iliad, obviously most of the action, or indeed almost all of the action revolves around the men, Achilles, Hector, Patroclus, Odysseus, and so on and so forth. Does Helen have a, she does have a role in the Trojan war story, doesn't she? Because Paris is killed yeah is he killed by an arrow have I got that right

that's right and then she marries somebody else Di Phobos he's a lucky man because you know he gets the most beautiful woman

well he's not a lucky man actually I mean so he is the fourth of Helen's husbands yeah he's a brother of Paris very good warrior

hold on the fourth oh because Theseus I forgot about Theseus yeah so there's Theseus, I forgot about Theseus. Yeah, so there's Theseus as well. Yeah. So actually, he's not lucky because Helen completely stiffs him over. And Helen is behaving very badly towards the end of the Trojan War. So the famous story of the Trojan horse, all the Greeks have hidden themselves inside the

horse and the horse gets wheeled into Troy. Helen comes down to the horse and she walks around the horse and she mimics the wives of the Greek heroes calling out to them. And the heroes have been away by this point for 10 years. And Menelaus, of course, hears Helen's own voice, but two other heroes hear it and they are about to call out. And Odysseus knows what is happening and he throttles one of the heroes to stop him from calling out. Like Custer with his dogs before one of those massacres. Very similar. Yeah, not a parallel that I think has ever been made before, but that's what the podcast is all about. And in due course, Menelaus will blame this not on Helen

herself, but on Aphrodite, that Aphrodite has possessed her. And the ability to mimic is traditionally one of Aphrodite's attributes. But I think Helen is very deceptive. She is very manipulative. And we might see that again as kind of misogynist stereotyping. It isn't really. It's giving her the attributes of a god. This is what gods do. Gods do deceive. Just on that question, is she is she divine i mean she's half divine right she is half divine and we'll come to that the question of you know is she mortal is she divine is she both i mean we'll come to that yeah but just sticking to the topic of how helen behaves badly even as she's trying to and the stories are contradictory on the one hand she is trying to save troy by getting the heroes to come out of the horse. But on the other hand, she wants her husband dead and all the Trojans dead. So she has hidden Deiphobus' sword. And the moment she sees

the Greeks come out, she says, oh, he's in there, go and kill him. So she seems to have decided by this point that she wants to go back with Menelaus. Now you may think, I mean, Menelaus has become the most notorious cookhold in world mythology. Anden by his lights is responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people yeah so what's he going to do and all the sources imply that he's aiming to kill her and there are vases it shows menelaus coming in with his sword upraised it happens in tragedies so euripides again, who's obsessed by Helen and is always kind of giving various portraits of her. In one of his plays, The Trojan Women, which is kind of completely bleak account of what happens to the women after the sack of Troy, their enslavement,

their rape. Menelaus is shown coming in, Helen confronts him, and it's very rare that Helen justifies herself. But basically her response to Menelaus is to say, it was your fault. You should have looked after me better. And then she kind of ends by calling him an idiot. And you'd think this isn't a great way to stop your husband from killing you. But Menelaus is transfixed by her. And you will see on vases that often Helen is shown adjusting her veil. And it's unclear whether she's covering her beautiful face or whether she is unveiling her hair. But in either way, Menelaus drops his sword. In Lysistrata, which is the great comedy by Aristophanes, women kind of trying to stop the Peloponnesian war, there's a description

of Helen's beauty. When Menelaus caught a glimpse of Helen's breasts, naked as they were, then he dropped his sword. So once again, you have the idea that women have this through their sexuality. They have this necromantic power over men, or at least she does. Helen does, because all the other women, they either get killed or enslaved. Helen doesn't. Helen is kept by Menelaus as his queen. They go back to Sparta in the Odyssey, which is the sequel to the Iliad, describes the wanderings of Odysseus for another 10 years. Odysseus' son Telemachus goes to Sparta to ask for help finding his father, and is hosted by Menelaus and Helen. Helen has this kind of potion, which you drink it,

and it eases pain and grief. People have said, maybe this is opium or something, but I think that's reductive. I think it's another expression of Helen's more than human powers that just as she has caused the trauma of bereavement and grief, so fleetingly she has the power to heal it. She can soothe your injured feelings or whatever. Yeah. And what happens to Helen, there are again, various accounts. So Pausanias, this gazetteer, he says that there's a temple in Rhodes again, that Helen got seized by the maids of a woman who had died at Troy and they hang Helen from a tree. But this is very unusual and very late. It is very rare for the death of Helen to be described. So she's hated, she's cursed, she's insulted. But again and again, when people

try to kill her, they just find they can't. She's too beautiful. All the gods intervene. So again, Euripides in another play, he describes how someone has cornered her, is trying to kill her, and then Helen just vanishes. She's been removed by the gods. They're kind of looking after her. And there is this idea, which is very ancient, that Helen has actually gone to the Elysian fields, so like Russell Crowe. So in the Odyssey, Menelaus is told that if he sticks with Helen, then he will go to the Elysian fields well. And he's told all this is because you are Helen's husband and ranked by the gods as

Zeus's son-in-law. And does he? Yeah, he does, according to tradition. He's done very well for such a useless person. Right, but Greek mythology being Greek mythology, there is an alternative tradition, which again is in Pausanias, the gazetteer. And he says that Helen ends up married to Achilles, the great warrior who has actually died in the Trojan War.

And he says that in the Black Sea, opposite the mouth of the Danube, there is an island called Leuke, which means the White Island, and that this is where Achilles lives. And Helen is there, and Helen is his wife. So Achilles is Helen's fifth husband. And in the Roman period, this account is supplemented by a whole load of writers. And have you read Roberto collasso's marriage of caberson harmony i haven't but i'm aware of it it's wonderful weird haunting account of the greek myths yeah and he has a brilliant rendering of all these various greek writings so i'll just read it on leaving the danube for the open sea sailors must pass by luke the white island they

see a coastline of dunes rocks rocks and woods. It's an island for castaways and people who want to offer up a sacrifice. No one has ever dared stay there after sundown and no woman has ever trod at sandy beaches. The only building on the island is a temple with two statues, Achilles and Helen. The temple guards are seagulls. Every morning they wet their wings in the sea and sprinkle water on the stones. Achilles lives on the island as Helen's fifth husband. Some have seen him appear in the dazzling armor that once blinded Homer with its brilliance. At night, they chant the poetry of Homer in high, clear voices. So that's amazing.

I mean, Achilles and Helen are chanting poetry written about themselves. Sometimes when boats drop anchor off the beach, the sailors hear a drumming of horses hooves the clashing of weapons and the cries of warriors so this idea of war as something eternal and what makes this passage which was written before the russian invasion of ukraine all the more haunting is that the white island is the island that is also called Snake Island. So that was the first day of the war. The Russians attacked, didn't they? And there was a Ukrainian little garrison. And the Russians famously are supposed to have said, you know, surrender or face attack or whatever.

And the border guard said, Russian warship, go F yourself. And everyone said, what a tremendous thing this is. Hurrah for Ukraine, all that sort of stuff. And it's actually a very Homeric scene, Tom. It is a Homeric scene and it happened on a Homeric place where Achilles and Helen still live to this day. So on that note, perhaps we should take a break. Right.

So what we should do after the break is we should find out what on earth is going on behind all these stories. Where do they come from? Was there a real helen and if there wasn't what are the greeks trying to do by creating this kind of literary mythological figure so we'll see you after the break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. So, the leading men of troy sat upon the tower and they as they saw helen approaching in undertone spoke winged words to one another no blame that the trojans and strong grieved greeks have suffered so long on account of such a woman terribly does she seem like the immortal goddesses to look on that was top writer homer in the iliad and there you have the sense that leading men of troy sitting on the task seeing helen approaching the sense of the desire the kind of yearning the obsession because of her

dazzling beauty but also you know terribly does she seem like the immortal goddess is to look on. The sense that she's frightening, that she is, as we said in the first half, fateful and fatal. And it's not surprising that the elders of Troy, when they see her coming, think to themselves, oh, you know, we're for it now.

Because with great beauty comes great disaster. Yeah. And they actually say we should send her back. Yeah. And then they say, oh, no, let's not. Priam not priam the king of troy says no let's keep her again though if you to pick up the theme from the first half again you could say this is how men have often seen women's sexuality as both something very desirable and something to be feared couldn't you tom yeah i guess so and helen as the most beautiful of women, obviously kind of raises that to a pitch. And I think it has to be something that is overwhelmingly powerful for the whole

story of the Trojan War to make sense. Because the question is, of course, are the Greeks justified? Are the Trojans justified in fighting over her? And I think that that is also a part of what makes Helen so interesting to various Greek writers over the sweep of Greek history, is that she provides opportunities for all kinds of writers from different backgrounds and writing in different styles. She gives the material. So we mentioned Sappho, who is a lyric poet, aristocratic. Euripides, we've talked about this tragedian. He is writing in the context of the democracy of Athens. So again, he has a different perspective. And then we quoted Socrates,

who's this orator who is writing, I mean, he lives a very long life. And as a young man, he's in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War, the great war between Athens and Sparta. And he lives to see the rise of Macedon, which will unleash yet more terrible wars so you can see the power of helen as a mythic figure is that she provides scope for all these kind of different writers to kind of do their stuff and so this particularly this question of are the greeks justified in fighting her i think plays a key role in the birth of history itself so i would argue, Dominic, that without Helen of Troy, we might not be doing this podcast. So we kind of owe her a lot.

Okay. So the two great historians who give birth to history, Herodotus and Thucydides. Thucydides, at the beginning of his account of the Peloponnesian War, the great war between the Athenians and the Spartans, he scorns the very idea that the Greek princes had sworn an oath to get Helen back. I mean, he just says, this is mad. This is a kind of a children's story. And he's very Sandbrook. He takes for granted that the war is a consequence of great power politics and of money. It's fought over material causes. I'm glad that I now apparently own that way of looking at history, Tom. That's very kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. And it sets the template for Thucydides' entire take on history, which is that it is all about, I guess, the masculine pursuits of war and politics. Hey, I'm distancing myself from that because that's not how I do history.

No, no, no, no, understood. And this is why in Thucydides, I mean, Helen is one of only 20 women who were mentioned by name and his history is very, very long. There are very, very few women. He wouldn't have been about 60s fashion, would he? No, he would very much not have done that. Yeah. But I tell you who would, and that's Herodotus. Brilliant.

Herodotus would have loved all that stuff. Yeah. So Herodotus is the first historian and his work, so this is the first work of history ever written, he begins with, in the way that Thucydides will do as well, a kind of demythologization of Helen because he's trying to explain why the Greeks have gone to war with the Persian Empire in the 5th century BC. And he begins by giving the Persian perspective. And the Persian perspective, Herodotus reports

is that Helen was actually just a number of women who were abducted by pirates coming to Greece and stealing women and Greek pirates going to Asia and stealing women from there. A bout of competitive princess rustling, Herodotus calls it. And there's no mention of Helen's beauty. The Persians just emphasize that the Greeks have massively, massively overreacted to her abduction. And so what the Persians are doing by denying that Helen has any supernatural quality of beauty is to make the Trojan War just look like any other war. It's nothing special.

There's nothing mythical about it. There's nothing kind of supernatural. I mean, to be fair, Tom, there must have been lots of wars and there must have been lots of violence along that seaboard because there are all these states and cities that are trading with each other. So the Persians surely are just employing common sense. Well, so that would very much be how Herodotus would frame the Persian perspective. He's saying that the Trojan War was nothing special. It was just a kind of sequence of endless tit-for-tat conflicts.

And it was ridiculous for the Greeks to overreact just because somebody stole a woman from them. So that is how Herodotus is framing the Persian take on it. But he hasn't finished with Helen because there are two more perspectives that he offers later in his history. So the first is a very, very weird aspect of Helen's story, which is that actually she never went to the Trojan War at all. She spent the whole period of the Trojan War in Egypt. And Herodotus gives an Egyptian account, he says, that this is what happened, that Paris had taken Helen, behaved very badly, and that in the opinion of the Egyptians, the Greeks were right to go and get her back. But that Paris and Helen, when they were going the Egyptians, the Greeks were right to go and get

her back. But that Paris and Helen, when they were going to Troy, had been blown off course, had ended up in Egypt. And the pharaoh had been so appalled by what Paris had done that he wouldn't let him leave without keeping Helen himself. So this is why Helen spends the whole time. And in due course, Menelaus comes and picks her up after the Trojan War and goes back to Sparta. And Herodotus says, well, you may wonder why Homer doesn't mention this, if this is what happened. And he says, well, Homer doesn't mention it because it wouldn't have made for a kind of

epic quality for his poem. So basically, he's not revealing the actual truth because it makes a better story to imagine that Helen actually was in Troy. Can I ask a question about Herodotus? Does Herodotus think this actually happened? By which I mean, does Herodotus believe that Helen of Troy is a historical figure rather than purely a mythological one? Yes, he does. He never doubts that.

He's ventriloquizing the Persians. They accept Helen existed. The Egyptians, they accept Helen existed. But what he is doing is giving multiple perspectives on who Helen was and is. So interestingly, Herodotus thinks that Homer has fictionalized what was previously a factual story. Yes. And you may wonder, well, if Helen spent the whole time in Egypt, why were the Greeks and Trojans fighting then if she was never there? Yeah, mugs. And the answer to this, which gets teased out in a lot of dramas, Euripides inevitably being to the fore, is that the gods created what was called an eidolon, which is a kind of an image of Helen conjured up out of cloud and smoke that looks exactly like her. And that therefore the Helen who is fought over at Troy is a phantasm. And it kind of makes it even worse. They're not even fighting over Helen. They're fighting over a fantasy of Helen.

So that is Herodotus' kind of refinement of the Persian position by giving the Egyptian position. But then finally, he gives the Spartan position. What do the Spartans think of Helen? And Herodotus reports that there's a place called Therapne, just outside Sparta, and that the Spartans, whose daughters are invariably beautiful, Spartan girls are famously beautiful, that if a child is born, a girl is born who is ugly, the nurse will take the girl up to the shrine of Thrapney. And he gives a specific instance of

this. The daughter of a king, baby daughter, gets taken up. And the nurse meets a woman there who is veiled. And the woman says, show me the child. And the nurse refuses. And the woman insists over and over again until finally the nurse hands the baby girl over to the nurse. And the mysterious woman strokes the girl's head and then says, you will be the fairest woman in Sparta. And sure enough, the girl grows up to be the fairest woman in Sparta. And it's clear that this woman is Helen. And it's very strange because Helen is playing the role of a god. And it is a direct contradiction to the Persian perspective, which is saying she's just a woman. In the Spartan perspective, Helen is not just the most beautiful woman who's ever lived, but she is divine. It is just one of a number of markers of Spartan devotion to Helen

as almost a goddess. There's the fragments of the egg, which we talked about, which are kept on the Acropolis. There's a shrine dedicated not just to Helen herself, but to one of her sandals, which supposedly fell off in the elopement. In a battle, the Spartans are said to have fought. She appears alongside her brothers, Castor and Pollux, to help inspire the Spartans to victory. And you mentioned before whether the story of Theseus abducting Helen was merely a product of the Peloponnesian War, of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta. I think not, because there is a story told that when the Spartans invade Attica, they burn everything and they attack every town except for a place called Decalia. And the story is that they

do this because it was the Decalians who had told Castor and Pollux where their sister was to be found. And so this is a tribute to it. Right. So just on this thing about Helen and her divine powers or whatever, how normal is this for somebody who's reputed to be the child of a mortal and an immortal? So normally do those people have divine powers or normally are they ranked with mortals? They're normally ranked with mortals. There is a masculine counterpoint, which is Heracles, who is also a son of Zeus. Kind of like the most masculine of men in the way that Helen is the most feminine of women. Heracles is the strongest of men. And in the end, he becomes a god and sits in Olympus.

And Helen is clearly the female counterpart to that. But it's important to emphasize that there are lots of heroes who have shrines to them, very few women. So in that sense, Helen really is someone unique. And we don't have stories really, apart from very late ones, of her ever dying. And so I think that there are scholars who say that perhaps Helen was always a goddess, that she's a goddess who kind of becomes mortalised. But if that is the case, then there's nothing in the ancient sources that suggests that right you don't believe that you don't believe that that's no i don't i think that just as helen's beauty drives men mad in the myths i think she she's an object of such fascination and to women as well as men so that story of the

nurse taking the baby up the idea of of a woman with such power, it's so interesting to people that they think her attributes must be those of a goddess. And so the more that stories are told about her, the more she comes to take on kind of divine attributes and qualities that in a mortal might be condemned, kind of rushing off with strange men or whatever. In a goddess, that's the kind of thing goddesses would do. And so it kind of removes Helen from the dimensions of the traditional standards of judgment that are applied to women. So hold on, Tom, where did she begin? I know you're going to say you don't know, but I'm asking you to speculate. Did she begin as a character simply in a story who over time took on more and more

semi-divine attributes as the story was told and retold? Yeah, I think so. And do you think she began purely as a male fantasy figure in stories? Well, we'll come to who the historical Helen might have been in due course, but I think she is clearly, even by the time Homer is writing about her, she is already very firmly established as a figure that everyone knows about. That's why Homer doesn't need to explain who she is. And I think the idea of the most beautiful woman in the world who has a power over men that is of a divine order, I think that that appeals to something very profound in the way the Greeks understand the cosmos and the universe. Greek men understand the cosmos. Well, women as well. I mean, because Sappho responds to it. And kind of a fascinating

example of the way in which Helen comes to seem like a kind of jealous and angry like a god. There's a poet called Stesichorus, and he writes abusive poetry about Helen, calling her a prostitute and adulteress and so on. She blinds him as punishment, as she had blinded Homer, who supposedly was blind. But Stesichorus is a favourite of the Muses, and so unlike Homer, he understands why he's been struck blind. He composes these lines, "'The story I told is not true. He's addressing Helen. You did not go in the well-bent ships. You did not reach the citadel of Troy.

So he again is saying Helen never went to Troy. He's basically saying all the stories that are told about Helen are not true. But he's doing this because he knows that Helen is a figure so powerful that she can blind him. And this is what gods do. And I think that this is part of what makes Helen so fascinating to the Greeks is the idea of a woman who stands midway between the human and the divine. And it comes to express itself in very weird ways. So there's a sect of Pythagoreans who basically think she's an alien. So they say that she comes from the moon and that on the moon, there's a colony of humans who are kind of infinitely more beautiful, infinitely larger, infinitely stronger than mortals down on earth. And that this is why Helen is so beautiful. So, I mean, that's a kind of very weird idea. And you get an echo of that. Dan Simmons, the great science fiction writer, he wrote a couple of books, Ilium and Olympus, in which the Trojan War is restaged.

And Helen is, again, she's a figure of beauty conjured up by science by that point. But you get a prefiguring of that even in classical antiquity. And I think that it's another marker of Helen's power that you don't need to believe in the Greek gods to be obsessed by her. You know, the stories of Helen continue to be told right the way through the Christian era. I mean, Marlowe is doing it. Yeats is doing it. And Helen comes to obsess people.

And you were asking, you know, was there a real Helen? Of course, into the 19th century, when archaeology as a discipline is starting to be developed, the question of was Helen real, it inspires what is probably the most famous or indeed infamous episode in the history of archaeology, kind of ranking alongside Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen, which is the German businessman turned archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 19th century, who is so besotted by the idea that Helen might have existed and the Trojan War might actually have been fought over her, that he sets himself the task of going to the site of Troy and trying to find it.

So Tom, what an exciting moment that is. Schliemann is on his way, this German businessman, to the site of Troy, and he thinks he's going to discover the truth about the Trojan War and the truth about the historical Helen of Troy. And do you know what? We will come to this in our next episode, where we will talk about what Schliemann found, his theories, who the real Helen of Troy might have been, and then we will turn our attention to Helen's possibly even more terrifying sister, Clytemnestra, and her blood-soaked career. And we can talk a little bit about what it all means, Tom. So if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club, if you're one of the Olympians, you can listen to that episode right away. And you can, of course, join the Olympians by going to therestishistory.com.

You get more benefits, frankly, than you would by being a Greek god. We think of our members as Greek gods and goddesses, don't we, Tom? We absolutely do. Midway between the mortal and the divine. Absolutely, they are. So, Tom, thank you very much for that tour de force on that Hellenic and Olympian bombshell. We will leave you and we will see you next time for the truth about Helen of Troy and her extraordinary sister, Clytemnestra. See you then. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and