Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

But go she must. Aphrodite is a hard taskmistress, and the mysterious bond of beauty which chains Helen to her cannot be broken. It is in vain, too, that Helen taunts Paris: he reminds her of the first fruition of their love in the island Cranaë; and at the last she has to lay her down at his side, not uncomplying, conquered, as it were, by the reflex of the passion she herself excites. It is in the chamber of Paris that Hector finds her. She has vainly striven to send Paris forth to battle; and the sense of her own degradation, condemned to love a man love-worthy only for the beauty of his limbs, overcomes her when she sees the noble Hector clothed in panoply for war. Her passionate outbreak of self-pity and self-reproach is, perhaps, the strongest indication given in the Iliad of a moral estimate of Helen's crime. The most consummate art is shown by the poet in thus quickening the conscience of Helen by contact with the nobility of Hector. Like Guinevere, she for a moment seems to say: "Thou art the highest, and most human too!" casting from her as worthless the allurements of the baser love for whose sake she had left her home. In like manner, it was not without the most exquisite artistic intention that Homer made the parting scene between Andromache and Hector follow immediately upon this meeting. For Andromache in the future there remained only sorrow and servitude. Helen was destined to be tossed from man to man, always desirable and always delicate, like the sea-foam that floats upon the crests of waves. But there is no woman who, reading the Iliad, would not choose to weep with Andromache in Hector's arms, rather than to smile like Helen in the laps of lovers for whom she little cared. Helen and Andromache meet together before Hector's corpse, and it is here that we learn to love best what is womanly in Leda's daughter. The mother and the wife have bewailed him in high thrilling threni. Then Helen advances to the bier and cries:

Hector, of brethren dearest to my heart,
For I in sooth am Alexander's bride,
Who brought me hither: would I first had died!
For 'tis the twentieth year of doom deferred
Since Troyward from my fatherland I hied;
Yet never in those years mine ear hath heard
From thy most gracious lips one sharp accusing word;
Nay, if by other I haply were reviled,
Brother, or sister fair, or brother's bride,
Or mother (for the king was alway mild),
Thou with kind words the same hast pacified,
With gentle words, and mien like summer-tide.
Wherefore I mourn for thee and mine own ill,
Grieving at heart: for in Troy town so wide
Friend have I none, nor harborer of good-will,
But from my touch all shrink with deadly shuddering chill.

It would have been impossible to enhance more worthily than thus the spirit of courtesy and knightly kindness which was in Hector—qualities, in truth, which, together with his loyalty to Andromache, endeared the champion of the Trojans to chivalry, and placed Hector upon the list of worthies beside King Arthur and Godfrey of Bouillon.

The character of Helen loses much of its charm and becomes more conventional in the Odyssey. It is difficult to believe that the poet who put into her lips the last lines of that threnos could have ventured to display the same woman calm and innocent and queen-like in the home of Menelaus:

While in his mind he sat revolving this,
Forth from her fragrant bower came Helen fair,
Bright as the golden-spindled Artemis.
Adraste set the couch; Alcippe there
The fine-spun carpet spread; and Phylo bare
The silver basket which Alcandra gave,
Consort of Polybus, who dwelt whilere
In Thebes of Egypt, whose great houses save
Wealth in their walls, large store, and pomp of treasure brave.

Helen shows her prudence and insight by at once declaring the stranger guest to be Telemachus; busy with housewifely kindness, she prepares for him a comfortable couch at night; nor does she shrink from telling again the tales of Troy, and the craft which helped Odysseus in the Wooden Horse. The blame of her elopement with Paris she throws on Aphrodite, who had carried her across the sea:

Leaving my child an orphan far away,
And couch, and husband who had known no peer,
First in all grace of soul and beauty shining clear.

Such words, no doubt, fell with honey-sweet flattery from the lips of Helen on the ears of Menelaus. Yet how could he forget the grief of his bereavement, the taunts of Achilles and Thersites, and the ten years' toil at Troy endured for her? Perhaps he remembered the promise of Proteus, who had said, "Thee will the immortals send to the Elysian plains and farthest verge of earth; where dwells yellow-haired Rhadamanthus, and where the ways of life are easiest for men; snow falls not there, nor storm, nor any rain, but Ocean ever breathes forth delicate zephyr breezes to gladden men; since thou hast Helen for thine own, and art the son-in-law of Zeus." Such future was full recompense for sorrow in the past. Besides, Helen, as Homer tells, had charms to soothe the soul and drown the memory of the saddest things. Even at this time, when thought is troublesome, she mixes Egyptian nepenthé with the wine—nepenthé "which, whoso drinks thereof when it is mingled in the bowl, begets for him oblivion of all woe; through a whole day he drops no tear adown his cheek, not even should his sire or mother die, nay, should they slay his brother or dear son before his face, and he behold it with his eyes. Such virtuous juices had the child of Zeus, of potent charm, which Polydamna, wife of Thon, gave to her, the Egyptian woman, where earth yields many medicines, some of weal and some of bane." This nepenthé was the secret of Helen's power. In the fifteenth book of the Odyssey we have yet another glimpse of Helen in the palace of Menelaus. She interprets an omen in favor of Odysseus, which had puzzled Menelaus, and gives to Telemachus a costly mantle, star-bright, the weft of her own loom, produced from the very bottom of the chest in which she stored her treasures. The only shadow cast upon Helen in the Odyssey is to be found lurking in the ominous name of Megapenthes, Menelaus's son by a slave-woman, who was destined after his sire's death to expel her from fair Lacedæmon. We may remember that it was on the occasion of the spousal of this son to Alector's daughter, and of the sending of Hermione to be the bride of Neoptolemus, that Telemachus first appeared before the eyes of Helen.

The charm of Helen in the Homeric poems is due in a great measure to the naïveté of the poet's art. The situations in which she appears are never strained, nor is the ethical feeling, though indicated, suffered to disturb the calm influence of her beauty. This is not the case with Æschylus. Already, as before hinted, Stesichorus in his lyric interludes had ventured to assail the character of Helen, applying to her conduct the moral standard which Homer kept carefully out of sight. Æschylus goes further. His object was to use Hellenic romance as the subject-matter for a series of dramatic studies which should set forth his conception of the divine government of the world. A genius for tragedy which has never been surpassed was subordinated by him to a sublime philosophy of human life. It was no longer possible for Helen to escape judgment. Her very name supplied the keynote of reproach. Rightly was she called Helen—ἑλέναυς, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις—"a hell of ships, hell of men, hell of cities," she sailed forth to Troy, and the heedless Trojans sang marriage-songs in her praise, which soon were turned to songs of mourning for her sake. She, whom they welcomed as "a spirit of unruffled calm, a gentle ornament of wealth, a darter of soft glances, a soul-wounding love-blossom," was found to be no less a source of mischief than is a young lion nurtured in the palace for the ruin of its heirs. Soon had the Trojans reason to revile her as a "Fury bringing woe on wives." The choruses of the Agamemnon are weighted with the burden of her sin. "Ἰὼ ἰὼ παράνους Ἑλένα," it breaks forth: "thine is the blood-guilt of those many, many souls slain beneath Troy walls!" She is incarnate Até, the soul-seducing, crime-engendering, woe-begetting curse of two great nations. Zeus, through her sin, wrought ruin for the house of Priam, wanton in its wealth. In the dark came blinded Paris and stole her forth, and she went lightly through her husband's doors, and dared a hateful deed. Menelaus, meanwhile, gazed on the desecrated marriage-bed, and seemed to see her floating through his halls; and the sight of beauteous statues grew distasteful to his eyes, and he yearned for her across the sea in dreams. Naught was left, when morning came, but vain forth-stretchings of eager hands after the shapes that follow on the paths of sleep. Then war awoke, and Ares, who barters the bodies of men for gold, kept sending home to Hellas from Troy a little white dust stored in brazen urns. It is thus that Æschylus places in the foreground, not the witchery of Helen and the charms of Aphrodite, but her lightness and her sin, the woe it wrought for her husband, and the heavy griefs that through her fell on Troy and Hellas. It would be impossible to moralize the consequences of the woman's crime with greater sternness.