This excellent volume takes the reader on a tour with Helen of Troy, as she journeys from the Archetype (Pandora) through her complex identities in the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, the lyric poets, Herodotus' Histories, Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, Euripides' Trojan Women and Helen, and finally Isocrates' Encomium of Helen. The book is descriptive in its focus, and shows that Helen, ‘who is a concept, not a person’ (p. xi), occupied roles that are important both in themselves and also for understanding the works in question. For me, its greatest value is in the fresh perspective it brings to familiar works; one may occasionally find B.'s arguments for Helen's importance overstated, but her readings are thoughtful and coherent.
The first chapter, ‘The Problem of Female Beauty’, forms a fitting and logical introduction to a book on Helen of Troy, whose beauty was her main attribute, and also introduces the book's feminist point of view. It describes Greek views that a beautiful woman was a beautiful evil (p. 3), subject to sexual passion (p. 10) and likely to be tricky (p. 17). Since the Eros her beauty provoked was thought to cause men to disregard moral and legal restrictions (p. 4), a beautiful woman was likely to undermine a man's most Greek attribute, namely his self-control (cf. p. 49). Because of this threat, women were subject to social constraints (pp. 22–3), and although virtuous women were self-abnegating and self-policing, they were never free of blame, since modesty itself was a provocation of male desire (p. 25).
Chapter 2, ‘Helen: Daughter of Zeus’, discusses how the figure of Helen encapsulates and even overwhelms these ideas: usually considered to be the daughter of Zeus and Leda (p. 29), in Greek mythology the divinely beautiful Helen was paired with weaker men, such as Menelaus and Paris, who cannot claim control over her person (pp. 31–3). She becomes the cause of the Trojan War when Paris abducts her, but also the cause of the continued fighting when the Trojans will not give her back. At the same time, her beauty is divine and validates a war in which men fight and die for glory (cf. esp. pp. 59–60).
Chapter 3, ‘Disarming Beauty: the Iliad’, elaborates on this theme, arguing that Helen is the most substantial female character of the Iliad. A comparison of Helen and Achilles (pp. 53–4), a discussion of blame in the Iliad (Helen blames herself, but the male warriors, for whom war, like Helen, is an irresistible ‘beautiful evil’, do not p. 59) and a discussion of her isolation from other women (pp. 66–7) begin the chapter. It concludes with a perceptive reading of the passage in which Aphrodite compels Helen to rejoin Paris in their bedroom. B. makes a thought-provoking argument that the scene re-enacts Helen and Paris's elopement from Sparta, and that it reflects both the compulsions of that situation and also Helen's original agency (pp. 71–2).
Chapter 4, ‘Happily Ever After? The Odyssey’, shows that the Homeric poet's interest in Helen did not wane once Troy had fallen. Back home in Sparta, Helen's high place among the divine and semi-divine women of the Odyssey is assured. She ‘outshines [Menelaus] in insight and decisiveness’ (p. 78), but retains divine qualities, weaving bridal gowns (p. 77), interpreting prophecies (p. 78) and mixing drugs of forgetfulness (pp. 80–1). Again, B. offers a fine reading of the speeches of Helen and Menelaus in Book 4 of the Odyssey (pp. 82–6) and a useful review of the complications of Helen's continued existence at Sparta, given everything that has happened. Finally, the chapter compares and contrasts Helen and Penelope.
Chapter 6, ‘Behind the Scenes: the Oresteia’, was for me one of the most interesting chapters. Beyond B.'s sensitive readings of the characters of Clytemnestra and her ‘invisible’ (p. 126) sister, Helen, and of Helen's image in the choruses (pp. 128–31), I enjoyed B.'s clear explanation of how both Clytemnestra and Helen fade away over the course of the trilogy and are finally replaced by the safely tamed Furies.
Chapter 7, ‘Spartan Woman and Spartan Goddess’, offers a reading of Helen in Herodotus. B.'s interpretation of Herodotus' preface nicely shows how strikingly the initial Persian story of the causes of the conflict between Greeks and Persians demotes Helen (they care neither that she is especially beautiful, nor that she was married to Menelaus, but equate her with a series of abducted women not worth fighting over) (pp. 142–8). I appreciated her discussion of how the story of Candaules (pp. 148–50) is paradigmatic for the Persian kings and for the stories in which Spartan Kings, Menelaus included, are moved to folly by female beauty (p. 162). Herodotus thus turns the gender tables, since his ‘barbarian queens’ are ‘assertive, intelligent, and often shockingly violent … they show little of the sexual weakness that Greek culture associates with women’ (pp. 149–50) or that Herodotus associates with male tyrants (p. 149).
Chapter 8 reviews ‘Gorgias's Encomium of Helen’. Gorgias shows that if Helen was seduced by speech to follow Paris, then she was persuaded by an irresistible force, and is not guilty of any voluntary crime (pp. 166–8). He ‘erases the line between persuasion and force’ (p. 169), attributing to speech irresistible powers, and therefore praising himself and his own oratorical powers much more than he praises Helen (p. 171). At the same time he removes the grounds upon which any ‘human being can be blamed for anything whatsoever’ (p. 175). This speech is therefore a joke, as Gorgias said (p. 176), but also an experiment, since it does not differentiate between men and women ‘… the woman who served, traditionally, as the very model of the emotional, moral, and psychological weakness that differentiates women from men becomes a vehicle for challenging that difference’ (p. 181).
After two chapters on Euripides and Helen's contrasting roles in the Trojan Women (‘Enter Helen: Euripides’ Trojan Women') and Helen (‘Most Beautiful and Best: Euripides’ Helen'), B. turns to Isocrates' Encomium of Helen (‘Helen MacGuffin: Isocrates’). B. dissects Isocrates' attempt to establish Helen as an emblem of Greece and the war fought for her sake as a noble Pan-Hellenic enterprise (pp. 227–36). In order to make this argument, Isocrates must show that each man who pursued, abducted or fought for Helen did so on reasonable and virtuous grounds, so that, for instance, both Theseus, whose story included abducting Helen in her youth (p. 231), and Paris, who abducted her later and for the non-Greek side (p. 234), were cast in this light; moreover, the dubious elements of Helen's own story had to be overcome, and were overcome, by focusing on her beauty and depicting her as an Olympian goddess (p. 242). This speech represents the most idiosyncratic management of Helen discussed in this book. Isocrates forces the myths to conform to his idealisations, but as B. shows, the result is logical contortion.
B. does not show any tendency to imitate Isocrates, but allows the myths and the works she analyses to remain contradictory and dense, at the same time as her thoughtful readings offer useful questions and clearly articulated readings of each writer's interpretation. I missed only a focused discussion of how the treatments she finds in the ancient authors so often complicate the generalised prejudice against women she describes in her first chapter. This quibble notwithstanding, B. has achieved a miracle of lucid, useful and responsible accessibility. This jargon and footnote free volume will benefit scholars and students in classics, the humanities and beyond.
