Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(21)

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This version of Helen’s story is almost entirely forgotten now: even the Euripides play isn’t often performed, although Frank McGuinness’ excellent adaptation was staged at the Globe Theatre in London in 2009. It has been entirely supplanted by the version we know best, where she sails with Paris to Troy, followed by her husband Menelaus and the massed armies of the Greeks. We have seen from Hecabe’s response to Helen in The Trojan Women that Helen wasn’t a popular visitor to Troy. Just as Helen is hated by the Greeks for causing the war, she is hated by the Trojans for bringing the Greek forces to Trojan shores. And yet, the relationship between Helen and the family of Paris is more complicated than Hecabe’s murderous wrath first suggests. Hector, Paris’ brother, goes looking for him in Book Six of the Iliad to urge him to stop skulking behind the city walls and come and fight a war which he did, after all, begin. We find a rather whiny Paris, but the relationship between Hector and Helen seems respectful and affectionate. The rage that Hecabe has for Helen after Troy has been destroyed is not shared by her son who is going out and fighting to try and prevent this outcome. Of course, we might assume that Hecabe’s views on Helen are calcified by the loss of her beloved Hector in single combat with the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles.

This battle animates the final part of the Iliad: Hector kills Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus and strips his armour from him, Achilles is moved to unquenchable fury, the two men fight and Achilles kills Hector. He then desecrates Hector’s body, tying the great warrior behind his chariot by the feet and dragging him around the walls of Troy. Even in the violence of war, desecrating a corpse is a shocking thing for any man to do. Ensuring that the fallen have proper burial – irrespective of how they died – is a religious duty (as Antigone argues about her fallen brothers in the Theban wars: it doesn’t matter that one brother fought to defend Thebes and one was attacking it. She has a religious and familial obligation to bury them both as her brothers, whether they are traitors or heroes). Achilles takes the body of Hector back to his camp and leaves it unburied. After several days, Priam, Hector’s father and the king of Troy, sneaks into the Greek camp to try and ransom back his dead son. It is a moment of almost unbearable pathos: an old man on his knees, begging his son’s killer to return the body for burial. Achilles allows the Trojan king to buy back Hector’s body and leave the Greek camp unmolested. The Trojans are finally able to bury their greatest defender, and the Iliad concludes with Hector’s belated funeral. The poem is bookended by its two greatest warriors, one Greek, one Trojan: the first line of the first book is, ‘Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles’, and the final line of the final book is, ‘Thus they held the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses’.30

Funerals are women’s work in the world of Bronze Age myth: it is women who tear their garments and rend their skin, women who wash corpses and lay bodies out for burial. As we might expect, therefore, it is Andromache, the wife of Hector, who speaks first at his funeral, lamenting his loss for herself and for their baby son, Astyanax. Hecabe, Hector’s mother, speaks next. But then, astonishingly, it is not one of Hector’s sisters who speaks third, but his sister-in-law, Helen.31 Andromache and Hecabe both speak about Hector’s prowess in battle: this is the funeral of a prince of Troy and a warrior, after all. But Helen doesn’t mention this side of Hector at all. Instead, she speaks movingly about his kindness. She describes the twenty years since she abandoned Sparta (we must presume that she and Paris spent ten years together en route to and then in Troy before the Greeks turned up to fight for her return, if Homer’s chronology is to make sense), and they don’t sound pleasant. She talks of the harsh words she has received from Paris’ brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law and mother (although Priam was always kind to her, she says). But Hector never spoke to her with anything but kindness. And if others were unkind in his hearing, he asked them to stop. Helen weeps for herself and for Hector, the only man who was a friend to her.

Now, of course, we might choose to read this as entirely in keeping with the Helen we saw Hecabe raging about in The Trojan Women. Typical self-absorbed Helen, only valuing Hector for the qualities he displayed towards her, grieving for herself now he’s dead because of a war she started, sad that she has lost one of the many men besotted with her (at least his poor old father is still fulfilling that role). But this sells the speech rather short. Greek lamentations often commemorate the dead by focusing on how the living will struggle to cope without them: Helen isn’t being especially solipsistic in this context. Everyone can talk about the military might of a man who died in battle after ten long years of keeping an army at bay. So why shouldn’t someone speak of his kindness, his generosity? We’re reminded by Helen that Hector was a human being behind the walls of his city as much as he was a warrior before them. It is a perfect way to bring the poem towards its end, with only Priam left to speak over the body of his dead son.

And Homer shows us one further, perhaps more unexpected development of Helen’s character in the Odyssey. Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, visits Sparta to try and find out what might have happened to his errant father (Odysseus takes ten years to get home to Ithaca from Troy: an assortment of women, nymphs, monsters, cannibals, cows, weather and a brief visit to the Underworld reduces his average speed considerably from that of the outbound journey). Telemachus is welcomed into their home by Menelaus and Helen. The former has clearly become no less hospitable since Paris came to visit and ran off with his wife, although his guard, Eteoneus, is suspicious of a young man arriving at the palace unannounced. He goes inside to tell Menelaus, who promptly shouts at him for not being more welcoming. Menelaus does stick around to have dinner with his guest this time, though, so perhaps he has learned something.