wilderness to the beds of princes and kings, to the citadel of Sparta and to ‘
the topless towers of Ilium
’. 18 Coaxing unpredictable, fickle, fathomless nature back into the new culture of the city meant destruction was inevitable. For the Greeks, the weeds that have now seeded themselves in the broken walls of Troy, and the grasses that grow over neglected flag-stones, would have been reminders of Helen.
In very many she created very strong amorous desires; with a single body she brought together many bodies of men.
19
PART SEVEN
TROY BECKONS
Previous page:
A gold earring from the hoard of treasure nominated by Schliemann ‘The Jewels of Helen’ discovered at Troy.
c
. 2500 BC .
PART EIGHT
TROY BESIEGED
Previous page:
Arrow and spear heads (possibly Mycenaean) discovered outside the walls of Troy. 13th century BC .
28
HELEN – DESTROYER OF CITIES
So now let no man hurry to sail for home, not yet … not till he beds down with a faithful Trojan wife, payment in full for the groans and shocks of war we have borne for Helen.
Nestor, in Homer
, Iliad
1
T HE GREEK VERB φρíσσω(phrisso) is an interesting one, the root of our word frisson. A useful word, it is flexible and while it can be interpreted in a number of ways it is always evocative. It is a word used by Homer in connection with Helen. In Troy we learn from her that πάυτεδ δέ με πεφρíkαιυ, ‘all around me cringe or bristle with fear’. Elsewhere she is ριγεδαυή Eλέυη, ‘Helen who makes you shudder’ or ‘makes you tremble’. She is sweet poison – both dreadful and delicious. 2 And now that she has come to Troy, because Helen trails disaster in her wake, the plains of Troy too will bristle with arms. As Cassandra has predicted, as Zeus has planned, the Greeks want Helen back.
Homer paints a vivid picture of the boats, clustered up on the shore of the Bosphorus, row upon row, blackening the sand with their hulls until the beach below is submerged. The armies are like swarms of flies, seething over freshly collected milk. 3 Elsewhere in the
Iliad
he speaks of the fires around the new Greek camp glowing in the dark, and the men in their bivouacs, tense and expectant. And he imagines these soldiers rank with aggression. Listen to the first lines of the
Iliad
.
Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.
4
Homer makes it clear from the outset of the epic that the
Iliad
is astory of hate as well as of love, of human lives adulterated by the maw of conflict. Furious passages in Book 1 describe two men jarring over a woman – not Menelaus and Paris over Helen, but ‘brilliant’ Achilles and Agamemnon ‘lord of men’ over Briseis ‘the girl with the sparkling eyes’. Agamemnon has already been filibustering about another girl, Chryseis. We do not hear much about Chryseis directly, but we are told that her father, the priest Chryses, loves her and is outraged that she is being used as Agamemnon’s whore. She has been dragged from the temple of Apollo and seems destined to become a spoil of war, as Agamemnon barks at Chryses:
The girl – I won’t give up the girl. Long before that, old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos, far from her fatherland, slaving back and forth at the loom, forced to share my bed!
5
There are echoes of Helen’s fate, if we believe that she too is a woman forced to share the bed of a foreigner a long way from home. The lines also pre-echo the fate of the women of Troy, a fate described with sometimes unbearable brilliance by the tragedians Euripides and Aeschylus. Homer makes it clear to us that men will always use the possession of women to score points over one another. Agamemnon brags to Achilles that he will have another woman, Achilles’ Briseis: ‘
So you can learn just how much greater I am than you
.’ The Greeks are on Trojan soil and they are ready to punish all women, who, like
the topless towers of Ilium
’. 18 Coaxing unpredictable, fickle, fathomless nature back into the new culture of the city meant destruction was inevitable. For the Greeks, the weeds that have now seeded themselves in the broken walls of Troy, and the grasses that grow over neglected flag-stones, would have been reminders of Helen.
In very many she created very strong amorous desires; with a single body she brought together many bodies of men.
19
PART SEVEN
TROY BECKONS
Previous page:
A gold earring from the hoard of treasure nominated by Schliemann ‘The Jewels of Helen’ discovered at Troy.
c
. 2500 BC .
PART EIGHT
TROY BESIEGED
Previous page:
Arrow and spear heads (possibly Mycenaean) discovered outside the walls of Troy. 13th century BC .
28
HELEN – DESTROYER OF CITIES
So now let no man hurry to sail for home, not yet … not till he beds down with a faithful Trojan wife, payment in full for the groans and shocks of war we have borne for Helen.
Nestor, in Homer
, Iliad
1
T HE GREEK VERB φρíσσω(phrisso) is an interesting one, the root of our word frisson. A useful word, it is flexible and while it can be interpreted in a number of ways it is always evocative. It is a word used by Homer in connection with Helen. In Troy we learn from her that πάυτεδ δέ με πεφρíkαιυ, ‘all around me cringe or bristle with fear’. Elsewhere she is ριγεδαυή Eλέυη, ‘Helen who makes you shudder’ or ‘makes you tremble’. She is sweet poison – both dreadful and delicious. 2 And now that she has come to Troy, because Helen trails disaster in her wake, the plains of Troy too will bristle with arms. As Cassandra has predicted, as Zeus has planned, the Greeks want Helen back.
Homer paints a vivid picture of the boats, clustered up on the shore of the Bosphorus, row upon row, blackening the sand with their hulls until the beach below is submerged. The armies are like swarms of flies, seething over freshly collected milk. 3 Elsewhere in the
Iliad
he speaks of the fires around the new Greek camp glowing in the dark, and the men in their bivouacs, tense and expectant. And he imagines these soldiers rank with aggression. Listen to the first lines of the
Iliad
.
Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.
4
Homer makes it clear from the outset of the epic that the
Iliad
is astory of hate as well as of love, of human lives adulterated by the maw of conflict. Furious passages in Book 1 describe two men jarring over a woman – not Menelaus and Paris over Helen, but ‘brilliant’ Achilles and Agamemnon ‘lord of men’ over Briseis ‘the girl with the sparkling eyes’. Agamemnon has already been filibustering about another girl, Chryseis. We do not hear much about Chryseis directly, but we are told that her father, the priest Chryses, loves her and is outraged that she is being used as Agamemnon’s whore. She has been dragged from the temple of Apollo and seems destined to become a spoil of war, as Agamemnon barks at Chryses:
The girl – I won’t give up the girl. Long before that, old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos, far from her fatherland, slaving back and forth at the loom, forced to share my bed!
5
There are echoes of Helen’s fate, if we believe that she too is a woman forced to share the bed of a foreigner a long way from home. The lines also pre-echo the fate of the women of Troy, a fate described with sometimes unbearable brilliance by the tragedians Euripides and Aeschylus. Homer makes it clear to us that men will always use the possession of women to score points over one another. Agamemnon brags to Achilles that he will have another woman, Achilles’ Briseis: ‘
So you can learn just how much greater I am than you
.’ The Greeks are on Trojan soil and they are ready to punish all women, who, like
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