Oh Helen, it was not a scandal until it became a headline
#6 — The Greek Dispatches: The war becomes unstoppable
Slowly reading Greek literature, tragedies, and mythology as a long, lived thing by staying inside the events until they start giving me meaning.
When Helen goes with Paris, it becomes public. Menelaus treats it as an insult to everyone, not only to himself. An old oath forces the Greek leaders to join. Agamemnon gathers ships, soldiers, and promises that cannot be broken without losing honor. Once the war is declared, it is too late to stop it.
Helen leaves and grief becomes humiliation
A door closed, a ship left, a bed stayed empty, a man came home, and found his life altered. Helen goes with Paris, and in one version she goes screaming, and in another she goes quiet, and in another she goes as if she has finally been invited into her own life. I do not know which version of this story is true, and the ones I read, they say she is gone of her own will, and a part of me thinks it is because to protect Menelaus with the easier story.
“Taken” gives the husband a clean kind of sorrow, and “chosen” gives him humiliation. I think this is the part where honor slightly has the factor of fear intertwined. More precisely, fear of being the first person to let something slide, and then becoming the example of what can be done to someone like you. Here, Menelaus cannot afford to be a private man with a private grief. Unfortunately a king does not get to have that kind of privacy.
Paris breaks more than a marriage
I wonder if that is what is called a scandal but not entirely a sin, assuming there is genuine love involved. The bigger problem is, a lover running away with a lover, in a small room, is still just desire and can be handled by silence or negotiation or by grief that stays inside a marriage. But here, Paris is a guest, and that guest-hood is public. He eats at Menelaus’s table! If you take that seriously, then Paris leaving with Helen is not a breach of hospitality, which is another way of saying it is a breach of thin membrane that makes civil life possible. I would like to believe that Menelaus treats this as an insult to everyone, and not just to himself. It can easily make a strategic as well as an emotion move. If he can make it everyone’s problem, he does not have to sit alone with the most humiliating question, which is not “Why did Paris do it?” but “Why could he do it to me?”
If a guest can come and take and leave with no cost, then the whole idea of hospitality is comedic. Imagine the headline begins to form as not “Helen left” but “this can happen” is an interesting flip of events. The appetite of other people for the possibility that they too could take what they want and fear of others that they too could be taken from. I am more included to look at Menelaus’s humiliation not about only losing Helen but about being laughed at, though it sounds petty when I write it out like that.
Helen becomes a story other people can use
It is too easy to moralize Helen and Paris into these symbols. It is too easy to say she is a prize, he is a thief, and the war is a punishment, but myths are never entirely as neat as this. Assuming Helen went willingly, then I have to ask what “willingly” means where gods push and push? On the contrary, if she went unwillingly, then I have to ask why the story always points towards the possibility that she walked? Whatever it is, the story keeps it open and this ambiguity perhaps might be useful later.
If Helen and Paris were lovers, then there must have been a period when it was still their secret. Then when did they start lying to themselves in small ways first? They do not tell their friend how much they want them, they do not tell their spouse how empty they feel. They tell themselves they are still the same person they were yesterday, and they do not know when they have started to change.
Menelaus turns injury into a collective threat
Anyways, now that the damage is done, and the rumor has grown legs and is traveling, this is where Agamemnon enters to make this grievance become a war campaign. Then comes the old oaths that forcibly or willingly bind people in this war. The Oath of Tyndareus, I could say a legal solution. A father trying to prevent a crowd of powerful men from turning his daughter’s marriage into a bloodbath. Also a gather admitting that he cannot control men with persuasion alone and he needs something ancient or sacred enough to frighten them into restraint. I always like to think that oaths are something that bind humans together and particularly this oath binds men together in a shared trap. The moment everyone has agreed publicly, the moment reputations are staked, it becomes too late to stop the moving war that might brew years later. When someone tries to stop then, it would require too many men to admit they were carried by something they could have resisted in the past. Some of them basically bound by the fear of what will be said if they don’t go. A social technology, smart!
The old oath wakes up
In Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the oath is described with ritual specificity: they join right hands, pour libations, bind themselves with a curse, and swear that whoever wins Helen will be defended if a rival takes her away, and that they will march and raze the offender’s city.
“Hellene no less than barbarian”
So Menelaus invokes the ancient oath and declares the duty of helping the injured husband. Even if Helen and Paris were lovers and even if their desire is sincere, then this sincerity does not matter once duty and honor are invoked. I think about how often this happens in our time as well but in smaller ways. A relationship ends, and suddenly it is not only two people, but it becomes friend groups, becomes family, reputations, and sides. Somehow it becomes something that must be discussed, interpreted, judges, and it ends up becoming a story which people can carry on.
Agamemnon gathers the machinery of war
I am going back to where I begun, the difference between personal insult and collective insult. I would like to imagine Menelaus is doing something clever when he frames it as a threat to everyone’s house and everyone’s rule, also highlighting how fragile these rules were in the first place. The whole system must have been built on something shaky to be threatened by one act of desire. That is what I always like about myths, how quick we convert emotion into institution. A man feels humiliated, and instead of sitting with it, he recruits others. A father worries about violence, and instead of trusting desire to burn itself out, he formalizes it. A group fears being laughed at, and instead of risking laughter, it chooses war.
Helen here, even if she went willingly and she was in love, she merely became a reason or a banner or a name to be used in speeches. I wonder what it must be like to be her, to feel the private truth of her own desire, whatever it was, being flattened into something other people can chant. I also wonder about Paris, in this lover reading. If he loved her, then what did he think he was doing? Did he think he was rescuing her from a marriage she did not want? Did he think he was claiming what he had been promised by Aphrodite?
“Too late to stop now”. Whenever I say or here this phrase, it makes me think there was a moment when it could have been stopped or there were earlier moments when different choices could have been made. It is easier to say “I had to” than “I wanted to”, or “I was afraid”.
Oaths sometimes are scary. It is beautiful when it forces people to keep their word but on the other hand it lets people outsource their conscience to a past version of themselves. When you swear, you create a future version of yourself who os obligated to obey the past version, which is trapping your future hesitation inside your current conviction. At that moment, you do it because you know yourself or know that later you might falter or have second thoughts. Later you might not want to pay the cost of what you are saying now, so we recruit gods, witnesses, blood, ritual until it becomes harder to betray. We are essentially becoming forced to become obedient to our own earlier performance of virtue here. Creating rules to manage the mess, and then later the rules become the mess.
Even now in families, friends, institutions, nations, people make vows, sign documents, align themselves publicly with causes, and later when they no longer feel connected or aligned, they cannot easily withdraw without social mockery or punishment, so sometimes they keep moving in the old direction while obeying their old self. Putting our loyalty to a decision we no longer fully inhabit. Do you think such kind of oath fulfillment is honest?
There is a similar story in Mahabharata from Hindu mythology about the vow of Bhishma, and that’s eerily familiar. When binding people together, it also binds violence together, then it feels harder to feel responsible for it, and becomes easier to call it history, or fate, or precisely a necessity. Then, somehow, a love story becomes a war story. Here Agamemnon became the one who leads, Menelaus became the one who will not be mocked, and the other kings became the ones who keep their word.
Duty calls.
A love story becomes a war story
Now Euripides’s, Helen.
“It is said by some, however, that Helen was stolen by Hermes in obedience to the will of Zeus and taken to Egypt, where she was entrusted to Proteus, king of Egyptians, for safe keeping, and Alexander went to Troy with a phantom of Helen fashioned from clouds”
— Apollodorus, The judgement of Paris and abduction of Helen
He takes a well known Greek epic and completely turns it on its head. According to it, Helen was never taken to Troy but rather taken to Egypt and hidden away and a phantom sent with Paris namely because the gods did not actually want Helen to be defiled by the Trojans. The idea was that is the Greeks failed at Troy (which makes me think that, in Euripides’s mind, the outcome of the Trojan War was never certain) then she would be safe in Egypt. However, one does question whether, if the Greeks did fail, would the Greek homeland be under threat?
Now, the idea of appearance and reality is that not everything was as it seemed to be. The Helen that was taken by Paris was not the true Helen, but rather a ghost. Also notice that there is a suggestion in the play that nothing may be unique, as Menelaus says “may there be two Spartas”. Let us assume this version of the story is true, then the entire Trojan War was fought over nothing but a ghost, despite the fact that Menelaus has no idea that Helen had been spirited away to Egypt. Not only had he spent ten years at Troy fighting, but another seven years attempting to return home. It adds another layer to the idea of war (and remember that during the time that Euripides was writing, Athens was in the middle of a major war). I suspect that there is an anti-war sentiment coming out here.
However, the one thing that I find interesting about this play is that Euripides is rewriting history to redeem Helen. Throughout history Helen has been seen as in a negative sense, because she deserted her husband and ran off with another man, and it was not as if she went unwillingly. It seemed in many cases that she agreed to leave with Paris. But I really like the idea of the play. The questions that it raised are, what if she was not a willing participant? What if she was forcefully taken by Paris? What if she never went to Troy and was stranded in a foreign land and held prisoner?
Next up
With a stalled fleet and a room full of leaders and soldiers, there is a problem that needs to move, and suddenly the easiest thing to spend is a girl. I am reading more reference and supporting texts on Iphigenia to understand why her acceptance feels both moving and terrifying.
I will share more of my thinking-on-paper thoughts as they come to me. Until then, take care.
Yours in thought,
Yana
Reading list
Apollodorus, Library
Hyginus, Fabulae
Euripides, Helen
Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis
Image credits
The Reconciliation of Helen and Paris after his Defeat by Menelaus, by Richard Westall
Les amours de Pâris et d'Hélène, by Jacques-Louis David
Paris and Helen, by Rudolf Friedrich von Deutsch