Trojan Horse: Going back to the Greeks

Marina Warner

The way the Greek myths have been told has disguised the joins and touched up the weirdness. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne in Tanglewood Tales and Charles Kingsley in The Heroes, who enthralled me when I was a child devouring the stories under the bedclothes by torchlight, patched and pieced the myths into the coherent plots that we are familiar with.

Writers continue to work a ragbag of scraps into whole cloth, disentangling the threads and recomposing the patterns. Very few readers today go back to the sources, to handbooks like Apollodorus’ The Library, or to the work of Quintus of Smyrna, who in the fourth century wrote a sequel to the Iliad in 14 books.

When one does attempt to read these works, it’s often disappointing to find how little their authors tried to shape the stories: some just set down events like clerks in a court of law tallying ‘celestia crimina’, heavenly crimes, as Ovid calls them.

When you look up the first known mention of this or that strand in a myth, it’s hard to keep in mind that it might have been noted 700 years before the next passage was set beside it to form a consistent plot.

Who remembers that Homer mentions only in passing the Judgment of Paris, when Paris’ choice of Aphrodite over Hera and Athena sparked the war in heaven that set in train the Trojan War? Or that the famous episode when the Trojan Horse is smuggled into Troy does not take place in the Iliad and isn’t fully dramatised in the Odyssey, but is known chiefly from the Aeneid, written centuries later by a Roman with a political agenda.

Homer could assume that his audience knew the outline of the myth of Helen of Troy, and that in consequence he didn’t need to lay it all out. But perhaps there never was a consistent and complete version of any myth, one that you could walk all the way around and find that everything matched and agreed from every angle.

In the 17th century, the grandest patrons like Cardinal Mazarin and Cardinal Richelieu had their classical sculptures lavishly repaired, with porphyry and gold additions to re-create a lost limb or a missing nose.

This kind of mending is completely out of fashion now: restorers prefer to make their own work distinguishable and even reversible so that the original state can be recovered if wanted. But a desire for authenticity hasn’t shaped the critical approach to the ruins of stories, except in studies like this one, which pays out the multiple strands in the myth of Helen of Troy.

Greek tragedy, Jean-Pierre Vernant wrote, presents its protagonists as objects of debate, not examples of good conduct or even heroes deserving of sympathy; the same can be said of characters in epic, like Helen.

Laurie Maguire’s literary biography of Helen of Troy makes us face up to moral ambiguities as it tracks the most beautiful woman in the world across time and across media, from Homer to Hollywood, as her subtitle has it.

Since historians can find no trace of the real Helen on a coin, a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day.

Maguire finds traces of Helen of Troy everywhere, far beyond the poems and plays in which she is a character, but an individual Helen disappears, to emerge as the embodiment of a fundamental principle: absolute beauty.

In Homer’s epics, in the Faust story taken up by Marlowe and in Goethe’s long, eccentric poetic drama about the same legend, Helen of Troy makes readers and audiences think about different issues: the good of beauty, the reasons for war, eroticism and women’s sexuality, responsibility and love.

Maguire considers what is meant by Helen’s beauty, what her history was, how much she was to blame (was she abducted by Paris or did she go willingly?), and what implications her story has for women at different times.

Her book is packed with enthusiastic reading and looking, at little-known classical material (Quintus of Smyrna) and at her own academic specialism, Elizabethan literature (John Lyly gives Helen a scar on her chin – the equivalent of the flaw in a Ming vase that perfects it).

The book opens with the Iliad and closes with Derek Walcott’s novel-like epic poem Omeros, in which Helen is a servant in the house of Major and Mrs Plunkett, colonials in the Caribbean; this Helen wears a yellow dress which she has either been given by her mistress or stolen from her, a dress whose colour recalls the golden robes worn by the divine Helen of Troy, woven for her by her mother, Leda. But such continuities are only intermittent.

Maguire treats dozens of retellings: one mythographer has an immortal Helen marry Achilles in the Underworld, while Thomas Heywood describes her killing herself for her sad grey hairs.

Maguire has kept her survey within bounds by setting aside the political uses of Helen of Troy, even though these flourished in the Elizabethan period; she has also set aside the dramatic or performance history, though she can’t resist the temptation to describe various manifestations of Helen on stage and film, including the first stark naked one (seen by the audience chastely from the back), by Maggie Wright in an RSC production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

Such economies are prudent, but the boundaries between representations of Helen and of the politics of war keep collapsing, and it’s a pity to ignore the sharp and timely elements in Helen’s story that have inspired numerous recent dealings with the matter of Troy, as in Tony Harrison’s Hecuba, when the chorus curses:

I pray as a small revenge

For all our dead and for Troy’s burning

Helen ends up as a refugee.

Ever since Mephistopheles summoned a devil to delude Faust into believing that Helen of Troy stood before him and would make him immortal with a kiss, there has been something fugitive about her; for Maguire, her beauty, being absolute, cannot be grasped, and so leaves desire famished, unappeased.

Helen of Troy comes to represent, not an ideal worth dying for, but a gap in meaning, a vanishing. ‘This book, like the Trojan narratives that it explores,’ Maguire writes, ‘is a study of absence, lack, gaps, ambiguity, aporia, and the narrative impulse to completion and closure.’

In this respect, Maguire is setting herself against the synthesising and reparatory impulses of recent fictional or poetic interpreters of Greek myth: tellingly, she quotes another critic’s remark, that the famous lines by Marlowe, usually declaimed in rapture, can be read as inflected with irony and doubt: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’

One version of the myth that Maguire doesn’t mention nevertheless illuminates her argument that Helen’s labile and phantasmic state shapes our vision of her.

According to this version, Helen never sailed to Troy with Paris, but was spirited away to Egypt, where she spent the war years as a priestess of Artemis.

The Helen who went to Troy was an eidolon, which duped the Trojans and the Greeks alike. They fought over an illusion. This strand of the myth is very ancient: the poet Stesichorus, active in the sixth and seventh centuries BC, suggested it after he was blinded by the gods for defaming Helen.

He retracted his accusations in a palinode that is less a chivalrous defence of Helen (and womankind) than a brilliant indictment of the folly of war – and of men.

To be continued