The Trojan War began, of course, when Helen ran off with Paris to Troy, and her husband, Menelaus of Sparta, demanded that her former suitors fulfill their pledge and fight with him to win her back.
The morality, or rather immorality, of Helen's actions is questionable to us. The story is that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, forced Helen to fall in love with Paris, and everything followed that. To modern readers, this would make it seem that the fault lies at the feet of Paris and Aphrodite, and Helen was an innocent victim.
But as I mentioned in another posting, to ancient Greeks, Aphrodite's applying force in this manner didn't make what happened any less Helen's fault than if the whole elopement thing had been her own idea. For a comparison that may make this a little easier to comprehend: in Exodus, it is written that God hardened Pharaoh's heart when Moses asked him to let the Jews go. By rights, it ought to be God's fault, not Pharaoh's, that the Jews stayed enslaved. But most readers have no trouble in believing that Pharaoh wasn't exactly Mr. Sweet Good Guy.
Similarly, the Greeks saw no contradiction in believing both that Aphrodite swayed Helen to go with Paris and that Helen was at fault, a faithless wife.
There were, however, a few dissenting voices in this condemnation of Helen. Stesichoros, a late-seventh-century B.C.E. poet, left a fragment of poetry arguing that Helen never actually went to Troy at all:
"This story is not true, you did not sail in full-decked ships nor reach the towers of Troy."
(translated by Diane Rayor in "Sappho's Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece")
Euripides, who roundly condemned Helen in his "Trojan Women," picked up this thread and ran with it in his late play "Helen." In that drama, Helen was not unfaithful, but a hapless victim in the quarrels of the gods. Here's a sizeable hunk of the beginning of the play, in which Helen, now living in Egypt, tells her story:
[after giving Aphrodite the prize in the Divine Beauty Contest:] "Paris quitted his moutain herds and came to Sparta to collect his bride; but then Hera, disgruntled in defeat, deprived her rival's solid promise of all substance: she gave the Trojan prince not the real me but a living likeness conjured out of air, so that believing he possesses he possesses only his belief. ...Yet all those years the Helen who endured the siege of Troy, the Helen the Greek spears fought for as a prize, was me only in name. For I myself was wrapped in a cloud, hurried through pockets of air and set down in the palace of Proteus here by Hermes -- proof that Zeus did not forget me; indeed he chose the most civilized of men to help me keep my marriage-bed unstained. So here I've been while my unhappy husband, bent on recovering me, mustered an army and sailed off to the battlements of Troy. Men died for me in thousands by Skamander, and I, the passive sufferer in it all, became anathema, for it seemed to the world that I had betrayed my husband and that he had pushed Greece into a disastrous war. Then why do I go on living? For this reason: I have it on the authority of Hermes that once my husband learns the truth -- that never did I go to Troy, never was I unfaithful -- I shall live with him again in famous Sparta."
(translated by James Michie and Colin Leach)
Here we have a masterpiece -- Helen can be sympathetic without completely unravelling the story of the Trojan war. Indeed, that war is more a tragedy than ever, since it has now doubly been a waste of innocent lives.
Homer's Helen is not this Helen. When we see her in Book Four, she is speaking as if she had long repented her running away with Paris, even while the war was still going on:
"I yearned to sail back home again! I grieved too late for the madness Aphrodite sent me, luring me there, far from my dear land, forsaking my own child, my bridal bed, my husband too, a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty."
It's hard to take this at face value, however. Menelaus speaks up here, and we have seen from his former words and actions in this poem that he is a man of honor and integrity. Maybe it's just my own ears, but he seems to be mocking her as he answers that if she'd been cheering for the Greeks to win, and even helped Odysseus in his schemings, it must have been some dark power, then, that made her act as she did when she saw the Trojan Horse:
"Three times you sauntered round our hollow ambush, feeling, stroking its flanks, challenging all our fighters, calling each by names -- yours was the voice of all our long-lost wives!"
I do think that this was Homer loading the dice against Helen having any innocence at all. The reason that it strikes me as entirely an embellishment of his own (in the same way that Milton reallly piled the guilt on Eve in "Paradise Lost," above and beyond anything in the story of Genesis) is that this doesn't make any sense. Why would Helen do this? More importantly, if Helen had given them a hint that the horse might be something more than it seemed, why wouldn't the Trojans, who weren't complete idiots after all, having held the Greeks off for ten years, have checked the horse a little more closely? Asked Helen what she'd been smoking? Gotten a clue, when she gave them such a blatant one?
This was Homer's choice, then: the Helen of all guilt, all responsibility, versus the noble men of Greece who fought and died for her, and the good and faithful wives who were widowed by this war.
Other poets have made other choices. The twentieth-century poet H.D. went with the Helen of Euripides and Stesichoros in her book-length poem, "Helen in Egypt." It's a beautiful work that reads more like a translation of an ancient work than a modern creation.
And as readers, we can make our own choices about Helen. She isn't here to argue with them, so we can load her with guilt or relieve her of it, just as we please. We'll find support for our position in one great poet or another.
