Iliad, Book 3 — Helen on the Walls; the Duel of Paris and Menelaus

Reading Troy — chapter 3 of 74 · Iliad, Book 3

Iliad, Book 3 — Helen on the Walls; the Duel of Paris and Menelaus (Day 22 of the Iliad, late morning; the plain before Troy, the Scaean Gate, Helen's chamber)

The two armies meet on the plain — Trojans coming on like cranes that scream in flight against the Pygmies, Achaeans advancing silently in close order. Out from the Trojan ranks steps Paris in a leopard-skin, two spears in hand, challenging any Achaean to single combat. Menelaus sees him and rejoices like a hungry lion that lights on the carcase of a stag. Paris shrinks back into the throng as a man comes suddenly upon a serpent in a mountain glade — the Iliad's first dud, the first cowardice anywhere in the poem.

Hector tears into him. Evil-hearted Paris, fair to look on, woman-mad, beguiler — would that you had never been born. Paris accepts the rebuke (you are hard as the shipwright's axe) and proposes the true contract of the war: single combat between himself and Menelaus, the winner takes Helen and her wealth, both armies swear peace. Hector sets the proposal before both lines. Agamemnon stops the Achaean archers from shooting Hector under truce. Menelaus accepts on condition that Priam himself come down to swear the oath, since young men's minds are light as air.

Iris descends to Troy disguised as Helen's sister-in-law and finds Helen at her loom, weaving the very war into a great web (a scene the Iliad will not enlarge but that has fed two thousand years of poetry). Alexandrus and Menelaus are going to fight about yourself; you are to be the wife of the victor. Helen wraps herself in a white mantle and goes weeping to the Scaean Gate with two handmaids.

There the most quietly devastating scene of Book 3: the teichoskopia, the view from the walls. Seven old men sit by the gate — Priam, Antenor, Panthous, Thymoetes, Lampus, Clytius, Hiketaon — and at Helen's coming they murmur the line every Greek schoolboy memorised: it is no wonder men have suffered so long for such a woman; she is terribly like the immortal goddesses to look upon. But even so, let her go in the ships, lest she leave sorrow for our children. Priam calls Helen up and asks her to name the Achaean champions. She names Agamemnon, a good king and a brave soldier, brother-in-law as sure as he lives, to my abhorred and miserable self. She names Odysseus — cunning in stratagems, ranging the ranks like a thick-fleeced ram — and Antenor adds the great character-sketch we have of Odysseus the speaker: standing he was not the broader; seated, he had the more royal presence; and when his voice came driving from his deep chest like winter snow before the wind, none could touch him. She names Ajax the bulwark, Idomeneus of Crete, and looks for her brothers Castor and Polydeuces — not knowing, the poet tells us in one of the saddest single lines in Homer, that the life-giving earth already held them in Lacedaemon, in their dear native land.

The oath is sworn. Priam comes down by chariot with Antenor; lambs are sacrificed, wine is poured; Agamemnon prays for the oath-breaker's brains to be poured out like the wine. Priam cannot bear to watch the duel and goes back to Troy. Hector and Odysseus measure the ground. The lots are cast; Paris is to throw first. Paris arms — greaves with silver clasps, his brother Lycaon's cuirass, the silver-studded sword. They fight. Paris's spear sticks in the shield; Menelaus's drives clean through and only Paris's twist saves him; Menelaus's sword breaks on the helmet in three pieces (Father Zeus, of all the gods you are the most despiteful); Menelaus drags Paris by the helmet-strap toward the Greek lines and Paris is choking — and Aphrodite, golden Venus, breaks the strap and lifts him in a cloud of darkness to his perfumed bedchamber.

Aphrodite then goes for Helen, disguised as an old wool-worker from Sparta. Helen sees through the disguise and refuses: go and sit by him yourself if you love him so much. The goddess turns furious — do not provoke me, hussy, or I will hate you as much as I have loved you — and Helen, frightened, obeys. In the bedchamber she rebukes Paris: you should have died by my husband's hand. Paris answers with the most peculiar speech of the book: I want you now more than the first time I had you, on the island of Cranae. They go to bed. On the plain, Menelaus stalks looking for Paris and finds nothing. Agamemnon proclaims his brother victor and demands Helen back. The Achaeans shout. The book ends with the truce technically intact, the prize technically awarded, and the goddess of love having already broken the entire compact in private. The war will not end today.

Analysis

The first book of human beings

Book 3 is where the Iliad finally lets us see the people the war is being fought over. Books 1 and 2 are gods, kings, councils, and lists — abstractions of authority. Book 3 introduces Paris, Helen, Priam, the Trojan elders, the human household. We hear Helen speak for the first time and we hear her speak about herself: my abhorred and miserable self. We hear Priam, the old king, treating his daughter-in-law tenderly even as the son she came with cowers in the dust. The Trojan-side colour of the poem — the warmth, the household-feel, the sense of a city that has been lived in — starts here and never goes away. Homer is doing something very deliberate: he is making sure that by the time Hector dies in Book 22, we will have spent enough time inside Troy to know what is being lost.

The teichoskopia

The teichoskopia — "view from the walls" — is the formal name for the scene where Helen identifies Achaean warriors for Priam. It is technically a delayed catalogue (Iliad 2 had given the Greek roster from the camp side; Book 3 gives it again from the Trojan side, through Helen's eyes), but its real work is psychological. Helen has been inside Troy for nine years; the men she points out are men she once dined with, married into. Antenor's reminiscence of the embassy of Odysseus and Menelaus — seated, Odysseus had the more royal presence — is the Iliad's first deep look back into pre-war diplomatic time. And the seven elders' line let her go, lest she leave sorrow for our children contains the entire moral argument of the war in a single subordinate clause. They love her and they want her gone. The Iliad will keep finding this register: not blame, but exhausted compassion.

Aphrodite as anti-Athena

Book 1 had Athena descend to grab Achilles by the hair: divine restraint, divine no. Book 3 has Aphrodite descend twice — once to lift Paris out of the duel in a cloud, once to drag Helen to the bedchamber under threat. Aphrodite is the goddess of the yes that ought to be no. She is also the only Olympian in the Iliad we see actively coercing a mortal woman against her stated will, with a threat of abandonment ("I shall hate you as much as I have loved you"). The Iliad's moral imagination is more uncomfortable with Aphrodite than later Greek tradition would be; she will get her revenge for that discomfort in Book 5, where Diomedes draws her blood. For now, watch what she does: she rescues the cowardly husband from death and forces the unwilling wife into bed. The duel was meant to end the war; Aphrodite makes sure it cannot.

Butler's plain prose and the duel

The duel is one of the great test passages for any translator. Butler keeps it plain — the spear hits the shield; the sword breaks; Menelaus drags Paris by the strap. Compare Pope's To Jove with hands uplifted he prefers... and you see the difference: Pope makes a piece of music; Butler makes you see the action. The choking of Paris on the helmet-strap, the strap snapping in Aphrodite's invisible hand, the empty helmet thrown to the Greek comrades — Butler renders these as a sequence of physical events you could film. The cost is that the speeches lose some grandeur. The gain is that Paris's cowardice and Menelaus's frustration register as real human sensations. Father Jove, of all the gods you are the most despiteful. That is the line of a man whose sword has broken in his hand, exactly when he needed it.

Helen's loom and Helen's voice

Iris finds Helen weaving a great purple double-web on which she was embroidering the battles between Trojans and Achaeans that they had been fighting for her sake. Homer leaves the image alone — six words and a move — but two thousand years of poetry have lived inside it. Helen is making the Iliad on her loom. She is the war's cause and its first audience and its first artist. The image returns in Odyssey 4, where she will be a queen at Sparta receiving Telemachus, still weaving; and in Odyssey 19, where Penelope unweaves Laertes's shroud each night. The loom in Homer is the place where women narrate. Listen also to Helen's voice. She has more lines in Book 3 than any other woman gets in the whole Iliad except Andromache in Book 6. She talks about herself with a hatred so calm it is almost serene: abhorred and miserable. She has the moral self-awareness no other character in the Iliad has yet shown. She is the war's first realist.

What to watch for

Watch the truce. The Iliad is going to break it in Book 4 by Pandarus's arrow — a divinely staged treachery whose mechanics Athena will engineer. Note that Aphrodite has already broken it in Book 3, in private, by rescuing Paris and pulling Helen to bed; the gods are simply taking turns at the same act. Watch Hector. His scorn for Paris here is the seed of his greatness and his loneliness; we will see in Book 6 the same Hector with his wife at the gate, the family man whose brother is unworthy. Watch the seven elders at the wall — Priam, Panthous, Antenor and the others; they will be there again in Book 22 to watch Hector die. The Iliad does not let you forget the audience. And watch Helen. Her self-loathing here is the foundation of her voice in Iliad 6, in Iliad 24, and in Odyssey 4, where she will be the calm queen at Sparta who once was the war's cause. The arc from abhorred and miserable self to that quiet hostess is one of the cycle's deepest moves.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Inside the Iliad's first day, Book 3 quietly reverses Book 1. Where Book 1 made the quarrel public and divisive, Book 3 makes the war privately reducible: two men, one woman, one duel. The Aphrodite who carries Paris off here is the same Aphrodite who supposedly began the war by promising him Helen at the Judgement of the goddesses — the back-story the Iliad assumes but never narrates. Helen's loom, weaving the battles between Trojans and Achaeans that they had been fighting for her sake, is the poem's tacit acknowledgement that the war already has a narrative tradition behind it; Helen is the first artist of the Trojan story. Antenor's memory of Odysseus's pre-war embassy reaches back into the diplomatic phase of the conflict that the Iliad places off-stage.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The Aphrodite-Paris rescue here is the structural template for every divine extraction in the rest of the poem: Aeneas saved by Aphrodite in Book 5, by Apollo in Book 20; Paris saved again by Apollo in Book 7; Hector saved by Apollo in Book 20. The Iliad's machinery of the god lifts the man out of combat is set here. Hector's tongue-lashing of Paris will return at Book 6 (his last visit to Troy) and at Book 13. The seven elders at the wall — Priam, Antenor, Panthous — will be there again in Book 22 watching Hector run his last circuit. The teichoskopia's mode of naming from above will be inverted in Book 22 when Andromache hears the cry from the wall and looks down.

Into the Posthomerica. Paris's death in Posthomerica 10, by the arrow of Heracles' bow that Philoctetes brings, is the structural payment for his survival here. Helen's reception of Paris's broken body is shaped against this scene of Helen scolding the living Paris in the bedchamber; Quintus's reader is meant to remember.

Into the Aeneid. Aphrodite-as-Venus rescues Aeneas in Iliad 5 and goes on to be the patroness of his entire epic. The mode by which she works here — wrapped him in a thick darkness and bore him away — is the exact mode by which she protects Aeneas through the Aeneid (Book 1's mist, Book 8's prophecy, Book 12's vision). Helen's loom, weaving the war for posterity, is Virgil's template for the Carthage murals in Aeneid 1, where Aeneas weeps at images of his own past. The visual representation of the war as already-narrated is a Helen-move first.

Into the Odyssey. Helen reappears in Odyssey 4 as queen of Sparta hosting Telemachus, calm, gracious, drugging the wine with Egyptian nepenthes to keep the men from weeping. The Helen of Odyssey 4 is the Helen of Iliad 3 thirty years later: same self-aware woman, same loom (Odyssey 4.130 specifies a silver work-basket from Egypt), same capacity for cool retrospection on her own choices. Odyssey 4 takes the line my abhorred and miserable self and shows what it sounds like when the war is over and the world has agreed to let it lie. Aphrodite's coercion of Helen here is also the seed of the Odyssey's broader question — what does a woman owe a household into which she was carried? Penelope's twenty-year fidelity in Ithaca is set in deliberate counterpoint against Helen's complicated decade in Troy.

Book 3 is the cycle's first long look at the woman the war is for, and at the goddess who insists.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Paris — emerges as the Trojan champion in leopard-skin, shrinks back when he sees Menelaus, proposes the duel, is lifted to safety by Aphrodite
• Menelaus — accepts the duel, charges like a hungry lion, breaks his sword on Paris's helmet, drags him by the strap, finds nothing on the plain
• Hector — denounces Paris's cowardice with the great speech evil-hearted Paris, fair to look on, organises the truce, paces the ground with Odysseus
• Agamemnon — stops the Achaean archers from shooting Hector under truce, prays the oath, proclaims Menelaus the winner
• Priam — comes down from the wall in his chariot to swear the oath; cannot bear to watch the duel and rides back to Troy
• Helen — weaving the war into a purple web; summoned to the wall, names the Achaean champions, refuses Aphrodite and then yields, rebukes Paris in the bedchamber
• Iris — descends in the form of Helen's sister-in-law to fetch her to the wall
• Aphrodite — golden Venus; first appearance; lifts Paris out of the fight in a cloud, then coerces Helen to bed
• Zeus — invoked twice in oath and twice in combat-prayer; gives no answer
• Odysseus — measures the ground for the duel with Hector; recalled by Antenor as the embassy-orator whose words came like winter snow

Mentioned / off-stage

• Antenor — Trojan elder, recalls Odysseus's embassy (no dossier yet — placeholder)
• Calchas — not in this book but the oath's structure (lamb-blood, wine-on-ground, prayer to Earth and Sun) is the priest-form he embodies
• Ajax Greater — named by Helen as bulwark of the Achaeans; will fight in Book 7
• Achilles — conspicuously not on the wall; the day's drama is what the war looks like without him

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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.