Cast portrait: Helen

Reading Troy — cast portrait · Helen

This portrait is released the day Helen's arc peaks in the cycle, after Iliad III — Teichoskopia and Duel. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Daughter of Zeus and Leda — hatched, in the older accounts, from the swan's egg. Sister of Clytemnestra and of the Dioscuri (Castor and Polydeuces). Wife first of Menelaus of Sparta, then carried — or eloped — to Troy with Paris. The most beautiful woman in the world; the war's nominal cause and the cycle's most morally suspended figure. The Iliad never quite makes up its mind about her, and neither do the poems that follow. She is the only mortal woman in the cycle who appears, by name, in all four epics.

In the Iliad

She first walks into the poem in Book 3, on the wall of Troy with the old men of the city. They see her coming and whisper — Butler's plain prose lets the verdict stand: "Small wonder that Trojans and Achaeans should endure so much and so long for the sake of a woman so marvellously and divinely lovely. Still, fair though she be, let her go." She names the Greek champions for Priam from the wall in the famous teichoscopia, and her account is full of mourning — she calls herself "shameless," she misses her brothers (who are already dead, though she does not know it). Aphrodite drags her in Book 3 from the wall to Paris's bedchamber and she refuses, openly and bitterly: "Sit beside him yourself, since you love him so." She is dragged anyway. In Book 6 she greets Hector with one of the cycle's most piercing self-judgements: "would that the storm-wind had snatched me away the day my mother bore me." In Book 24, over Hector's body, she gives the last of the three great laments — Andromache, Hecuba, Helen — and remembers that Hector alone among the Trojans never spoke a hard word to her. The Iliad's Helen is a woman trapped between two husbands, two cities, two judgements, and ashamed of all of them.

In the Posthomerica

She is mostly off-stage but always present as cause. Quintus shows her in Book 10 weeping for Paris's death — without sentiment, almost as if the death frees her — and in Book 14, on the night of the sack, she is the prize Menelaus comes for sword in hand. Quintus reports the older tradition: Menelaus sees her in her nakedness, lets the sword drop, and takes her back. The Posthomeric Helen is the survivor whose beauty saves her at the end of the war that her beauty caused.

In the Aeneid

She appears, electrifying and brief, in Book 2's narrative of the sack. Aeneas glimpses her hiding in the temple of Vesta as the city burns and raises his sword to kill her — "shall the Spartan adulteress return safe to Sparta in queen's array?" Venus appears and stops him; the Helen passage was suspected by ancient editors and is held by many modern editors to be inauthentic Virgil, but Dryden keeps it and it remains the cycle's most violent moment of judgement against her. She does not appear again in the poem; the war has ended for her.

In the Odyssey

She is in Book 4, restored to Sparta with Menelaus, queen of the palace at the centre of the most luxurious court Telemachus will see. She slips a drug into the wine to soothe the company's tears and tells a story of Odysseus in disguise inside Troy; Menelaus tells a different story of her own treachery during the Wooden Horse, when she walked around the horse calling each hero's name in the voice of his wife. The two stories sit beside one another at the same table. The Odyssey's Helen is reinstated, half-divine in her composure, and her past has become two contradictory anecdotes told over dinner.

Across the cycle

She is the cycle's portrait of beauty as both first cause and last survivor. The scholarly conversation centres on her doubleness — willing or stolen, traitor or victim, mortal woman or daughter of Zeus — and on Stesichorus's famous palinode (an alternative tradition that she never went to Troy at all, only her phantom did, while she sat out the war in Egypt, used later by Euripides in Helen). The cycle gives us the more difficult version: she went, and stayed, and judged herself, and survived, and was forgiven, and the war on either side of her arrival and departure killed everyone she had loved.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.