Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

The case of Bathsheba.

It may seem not unfair to compare the case of Helen with the somewhat similar case of Bathsheba among the Jews. If on the one hand we are bound to bear in mind the inferior station of the latter personage, on the other it is to be remembered that the Greeks were further removed from the light of Divine Revelation. Now we are not accustomed to look upon the character of Bathsheba as infamous, though she lived with King David as one among his wives, while Uriah, her former husband, who had been robbed of her, was sent to certain death on her account; and this, so far as we are informed, without awakening in her any peculiar emotions of sympathy, sorrow, reluctance, or remorse. And this, as I take it, mainly for two reasons – first, that we have no signs of any passion, and in particular of any antecedent passion, for the offending king on her part; secondly, that she does not appear to have been otherwise than passively a party to the abduction.

It is in the capacity of wife, and only wife, to Paris that Helen appears to us in the Iliad: where she herself speaks of Menelaus as her πρότερος πόσις1014.

Now the presumed reasons for not regarding the character of Bathsheba as infamous apply with nearly equal force to Helen. Indeed the character of Helen in one point stands higher in Homer than that of Bathsheba in the Old Testament, because she lived with Paris as a recognised and only wife, and because of her gentleness, and especially of her repentance. Of these as to Bathsheba, we know nothing; but such pleas as tell for her tell in the main also for Helen. We have no indication, either in the Iliad or in the Odyssey, of her having at any time felt either passion or affection towards the worthless Paris. Above all, as it will be attempted to prove, the language of the poems not only does not sustain the idea that she willingly left the house of her husband Menelaus, but it shows something which closely approaches to the direct contrary.

But there is no method of measuring so accurately the view and intention of Homer as to the impression we were meant to receive of Helen, as by comparing the language he applies to her with the widely different terms in which he describes the conduct of Clytemnestra, in conjunction with Ægisthus, during the absence of Agamemnon:

τὴν δ’ ἐθέλων ἐθέλουσαν ἀνήγαγεν ὅνδε δόμονδε1015.

In speaking of her own abduction, Helen indeed uses the word ἤγαγε1016. And again in her sharp expostulation with Aphrodite, she says, ‘What, will you take me (ἄξεις) to some other Phrygian or Mæonian city, where you may have a favourite1017?’ Now this by no means implies her having acted freely; the word ἄγειν is that commonly applied to the carrying off captives from a conquered city, as φέρειν is to the removal of inanimate objects. Undoubtedly in one of her passages of self-reproach she says1018:

υἱέϊ σῷ ἑπόμην, θάλαμον γνωτούς τε λιποῦσα.

But, in the first place, it is neither here nor anywhere else said that her flight was voluntary; and on the other hand, without doubt, it is not to be pretended that she had resisted with the spirit of a martyr. The real question is as to the first and fatal act of quitting her husband, whether it was premeditated, and whether it was of her free choice. Now both branches of this question appear to be conclusively decided by the word ἁρπάξας in the following passage1019, spoken by Paris:

οὐ γὰρ πώποτέ μ’ ὧδέ γ’ Ἔρως φρένας ἀμφεκάλυψεν,οὐδ’ ὅτε σε πρῶτον Λακεδαίμονος ἐξ ἐρατεινῆςἔπλεον ἁρπάξας ἐν ποντοπόροισι νέεσσιν.

And the rest of the passage corroborates the evidence, by showing that she was free from any act of guilt at the time when the voyage was commenced. The representation of Menelaus himself, in the Thirteenth Iliad, accords with the speech of Paris. He charges that Prince and his abettors not with having corrupted his wife, but with having carried her off,

οἵ μευ κουριδίην ἄλοχον καὶ κτήματα πολλὰμὰψ οἴχεσθ’ ἀνάγοντες, ἐπεὶ φιλέεσθε παρ’ αὐτῇ1020.

Again, in the only place where Helen refers jointly to her own share and to that of Paris in the matter1021, she distinguishes their respective parts, saying to Hector, ‘You have had to toil on account of me, shameless that I am, and Ἀλεξάνδρου ἑνεκ’ ἄτης, on account of the sin of Paris.’

Picture of Helen in Il. iii.

Let us now follow the character of Helen, as it is exhibited in life and motion before us by the Poet. In the Third Book, when Paris is about to encounter Menelaus, Iris, in the form of her sister-in-law Laodice, announces the fact to Helen, and lets her know that her own fate is suspended on the issue, which will decide whether she is to be the wife of Paris or of Menelaus. Laodice finds her busied in embroidery, which is to represent the War of Greeks and Trojans. The expression, νύμφα φίλη, with which the disguised goddess addresses her, is a sign that she was held in respect, and that when she speaks1022 in the last Book of the taunts and skits of which she was the object, we must understand her to use the natural exaggeration of impassioned grief. At the call of the seeming Laodice, moved apparently by tenderness towards her former husband1023, Helen goes forth, clad in a robe of simple white1024. On her reaching the walls Priam calls her to his side, that she may tell him the name of a kingly warrior, who proves to be Agamemnon. In doing this, he gently acquits her of all responsibility for the war. She answers in a speech of uncommon grace, ‘that she dreads while she reveres and loves him: would that she had miserably died rather than leave her family, her nuptial bed, her infant, and her friends. But this could not be; so that she ever pined away in tears.’ She designates herself here and elsewhere1025 as κύων, and also as κύνωπις, brazen-faced or shameless; but yet she appears at all times to have retained the fond recollection of her home and friends1026, and to have lived in grave and sorrowful retirement. Everywhere she seems not only not to avoid, but to search for, the opportunity of bitter self-accusation. Thus, when she has pointed out the Greek chieftains whom she knew personally, she proceeds, ‘but I do not see my brothers, Castor and Polydeuces: perhaps they came not from Greece; perhaps, though here, yet on account of my infamy and reproach, they will not appear in fight1027.’

Paris, after his defeat, is removed by Aphrodite from the field: Menelaus remains as victor. But Helen still tarries upon the wall, evidently hoping that the hour of her restoration had now at last arrived. The goddess Venus then appears to her, disguised in the form of an aged servant; and endeavours to attract her by a glowing description of Paris, in his beauty and his splendid garments. By this address Helen was alarmed1028: and her alarm almost became stupefaction, when she perceived the features of the deity. But a strong reaction followed: so that she made a bitter and stinging reply. Gentle on all other occasions, she is here sharp and sarcastic. She1029 reproaches Venus with having come to prevent Menelaus from taking her home in right of his victory; then bids her assume to herself the odious character she sought to force on one who had too long borne it, and utterly refuses to go. Venus hereupon intimidates her, by a threat of making her hateful alike to Greek and Trojan, and so bringing her to miserable destruction. She then obeys, covering her face in shame and indignation; and when placed by the goddess in front of Paris in their chamber, she sharply reproaches him; but the real delicacy of her character is maintained in this, that she does it ὄσσε πάλιν κλίνασα, with averted and downcast eyes. In what follows, she is but the reluctant instrument of a passion, which Homer seems to have described in this place, contrary to his wont, with the distinct purpose of raising indignation to the highest pitch, and covering Paris with a contempt and shame proportioned to the crime he had committed, and to the miseries of which by crime he had been the cause.

Upon the whole, this delineation of Helen in the Third Book may well be taken as one of the most masterly parts of the Iliad. The extreme fineness and delicacy of its shading mark it as an immortal work of genius, and the gentleness of Helen towards Priam, with her severity to herself, and her sternness both to the corrupter, and to the goddess that aided and inspired him, form a moral picture of the most striking truth and beauty. Indeed, if the question be asked, where does Paganism come nearest to the penitential tone and the profound self-abasement that belong to Christianity, we might find it difficult to point out an instance of approximation so striking as is, here and elsewhere, the Helen of Homer.

In Il. vi. Il. xxiv. Od. iv.

In three other places of the poems, Helen is put prominently forward.

In the Sixth Book, before Hector repairs to the field, he goes to the palace of Paris to summon him forth. He finds the effeminate prince handling uselessly his arms, while Helen is superintending the beautiful works of her women1030. By and by it appears that, sensible of the shame of her husband’s cowardice, though without interest in his fame, she has been persuading him to go forth and fight; and she takes the opportunity of Hector’s presence to offer him a chair that he may rest from his fatigues; to revile herself as, next to her husband, the cause of them; and, while grieving that she had outlived her infancy, to lament also that, if she was to live at all, she had not been united to one less impervious to the sentiment of honour.

Again, Homer has thought her not unworthy of the third place, with Andromache and Hecuba, as mourners over the mighty Hector, in the deeply touching description of the return of his remains to Troy1031. The tenour of this speech is kept in the exactest harmony with what has gone before.

We now bid adieu to the Helen of Homer in her sorrow and shame among the Trojans. But the Poet presents her to us again in prosperity and domestic peace, as the Queen of Menelaus; who, though not the heir of the high throne of Agamemnon, yet held a station in Greece, after the Return, of highly elevated influence. This is a picture, which it would not have been in accordance with the usual course of Homer to set before us, had his mind attached to Helen the character given to her by the later tradition; for where does he represent to us the wicked in prosperity, without bringing down on them subsequently the vengeance of heaven? But on the Helen of the Odyssey he has left no note of sorrow, except the most moving and appropriate of all, namely this, that the gods gave her no child after Hermione, the daughter of her early youth1032.

From her stately chamber she comes forth into the hall, after the feast. She is attended by three maidens, who bear respectively the first her seat, the second its covering, the third her work-basket and distaff. She remarks on the likeness of Telemachus to Ulysses, and humbly recollects to confess, that she herself has been the cause of the sufferings of the Greeks. The allusions then made to Ulysses cause her, with the rest, to weep tenderly; and when her husband with his friends resumes the banquet, she infuses into their wine the soothing drug, supposed to have been opium, which she had obtained from Egypt, to make them forgetful of their sorrows. Then she begins to tell tales in honour of Ulysses: and how, when in his beggar’s dress he escaped scatheless from Troy, and left many of the Trojans slaughtered behind him, she alone, amidst the wailings of the women, was full of joy, for her heart had been yearning towards her home.

There is indeed a trait that deserves notice in the speech of Menelaus, which has been lately mentioned. Helen came down to detect, if possible, the Greeks concealed within the Horse: therefore, to act in the interest of the Trojans. Now if, on the one hand, she looked back on her country and her first husband with many yearnings, yet it was not to be wondered at that as a woman, nowhere pretending to the character of a heroine, she should be so far pliable to the wishes or subject to the compulsion of the Trojans – especially when we remember her love and reverence for their head, and for Hector, who had but lately died in their defence – as to make this effort to defeat the stratagem of the besiegers. But Menelaus, in referring to the incident, carefully spares Helen’s feelings by another of those strokes of exceeding tact and refinement for which Homer’s writings are so remarkable, both generally, and as to the chivalrous character of this hero in particular. ‘Thither,’ he says, that is to the Horse, ‘thou camest; and no doubt,’ he adds, ‘it was the influence of some celestial being, favourable to Troy, that prompted thee;’ thus preventing by anticipation the sting that his words might carry:

ἦλθες ἔπειτα σὺ κεῖσε· κελευσέμεναι δέ σ’ ἔμελλενδαίμων, ὃς Τρώεσσιν ἐβούλετο κῦδος ὀρέξαι1033.

Her marriage to Deiphobus.

Tradition has assigned Deiphobus to Helen, as a husband after the death of Paris. This tradition is supported, though not expressly, yet sufficiently, by the Odyssey; for, says Menelaus, when the Greeks had constructed the Horse, and when Helen was brought down to detect those who were within it, by imitating the voices of their wives respectively, it is added,

καί τοι Δηΐφοβος θεοείκελος ἕσπετ’ ἰούσῃ1034.

And by the further passage in Od. vii. 517, which represents Ulysses as repairing straight from the Horse to the house of Deiphobus, in company with Menelaus.

Presuming therefore that this tale was well founded, it may be remarked, that the selection of Deiphobus, as the person who should take Helen to wife, was probably founded on his superior merit1035. It was under his image, that Minerva came upon the field to inveigle Hector into facing Achilles: and Hector then described him as the one whom he loved by far the best amidst his full brothers, the children of Priam and of Hecuba. This therefore thoroughly accords with the idea, that Helen was held in respect. Nor let it be thought strange, that she was not permitted to remain single. The idea of single life for women, outside their fathers’ home, seems to have been wholly unknown among the Greeks of Homer. When marriageable, they married; when their country was overcome, they became, as of course, the appendages of the couch of the captor. Penelope herself never dreamt of urging that, when once the return of Ulysses was out of the question, she could have any other option than to make choice among the Suitors whose wife she would become. Telemachus contemplates her immediate restoration to her father’s home when he, her son, should assume the full prerogatives of manhood.

The whole Homeric evidence, then, appears to show that, from the moment of her removal, neither the usages of society, nor the ideas of religion or the moral code, could allow Helen to remain in the single state. But it may be said this seems to prove too much on her behalf; namely, that both the abduction and the subsequent life were against her will. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the testimony of the poems, to suppose that her whole offence lay in having permitted at the first, perhaps half unconsciously, the attentions of a flatterer, who became at once a paramour and a tyrant to his victim. In order to comprehend the heroic age, it is indispensable that we should recollect that the responsibilities of women were contracted in proportion to her strength; and that the heroism of endurance, in which she has since excelled, is a Christian product.

That element of weakness and lightness in a character otherwise beautiful, which the incident of the Horse betrays, was probably at once the source and the measure of her offending in reference to the cause of war. It was a mind of relaxed fibre, and vacillated under pressure. Less than this we cannot suppose, and there is no occasion to suppose more. The respect felt, within certain limits, for women in the heroic age, and so powerfully proved by the Odyssey, may perhaps be adverse to the supposition that Paris carried her away without some degree of previous encouragement. I confine myself to ‘perhaps,’ because it is nowhere indicated in the poems, and we can at most have only a presumption to this effect. On the other hand, it seems certain that what she expiated in life-long sadness was, at any rate, no more than the first step in the ways of folly, the thoughtless error of short-sighted vanity, which the state of manners did not permit her subsequently to redeem. Repent she might: but to return was beyond her power.

On the whole, it may be said with confidence that the Helen of the Homeric poems has been conceived, by an author himself of peculiar delicacy, with great truth of nature, and with no intention to deprive her of a share in the sympathies of his hearers; that he has made her a woman, not cast in the mould of martyrs, nor elevated in moral ideas to a capacity of comprehension and of endurance above her age, but yet endowed with much tenderness of feeling, with the highest grace and refinement, and with a deep and peculiar sense of shame for having done wrong. Probably her appreciation of virtue and of honour, though beneath that of the highest matronly characters, may have been in no way inferior to that of society at large in her own time, and superior to the standard of many following epochs; nay superior also to that which has prevailed, at least locally, even at some periods of the Christian era: as, for example, when Ariosto wrote the remarkable passage —

Perche si de’ punir donna o biasmareChe con uno, o più d’ uno, abbia commessoQuel, che l’ uom fa con quante n’ ha appetitoE lodato ne va, non che impunito1036?

General estimate of the Homeric Helen.

The degradation of Helen by the later tradition will be treated of hereafter. Meantime it will be seen how much on this subject I have the misfortune to differ from Mure, who has been usually so great a benefactor to the students of Homer. With him ‘Helen is the female counterpart of Paris1037.’ Paris and Helen are respectively ‘the man of fashion and the woman of pleasure of the heroic age.’ ‘Both are unprincipled votaries of sensual enjoyment; both self-willed and petulant, but not devoid of amiable and generous feeling.’ He finds indeed in her a ‘tenderness of heart and kindly disposition;’ and says that ‘traces of better principle seem also to lurk under the general levity of her habits.’ This petulance, this general levity, I do not find; but rather the notes of a fatal fall, continually and deeply felt under the general grace and beauty of her character. What Mure calls her ‘petulant argument with her patron goddess,’ we take to be the noble and indignant reaction of a soul under the yoke of conscious slavery, and still quick to the throb of virtue. Indeed I derive some comfort from the closing words of his criticism, in which, after expressing his pity and condemnation, he says that still ‘we are constrained to love and admire.’ In the whole circle of the classical literature, as far as it is known to us, there is, I repeat, nothing that approaches so nearly to what Christian theology would term a sense of sin, as the humble demeanour, and the self-denouncing, self-stabbing language of the Argeian Helen.

The character of Paris.

III. The character of Paris is as worthy, as any other in the poems, of the powerful hand and just judgment of Homer. It is neither on the one hand slightly, nor on the other too elaborately, drawn; the touches are just such and so many, as his poetic purpose seemed on the one hand to demand, and on the other to admit. Paris is not indeed the gentleman, but he is the fine gentleman, and the pattern voluptuary, of the heroic ages; and all his successors in these capacities may well be wished joy of their illustrious prototype. The redeeming, or at least relieving point in his character, is one which would condemn any personage of higher intellectual or moral pretensions; it is a total want of earnestness, the unbroken sway of levity and of indifference to all serious and manly considerations. He completely fulfils the idea of the poco-curante, except as to the display of his personal beauty, the enjoyment of luxury, and the resort to sensuality as the best refuge from pain and care. He is not a monster, for he is neither savage nor revengeful; but still further is he from being one of Homer’s heroes, for he has neither honour, courage, eloquence, thought, nor prudence. That he bears the reproaches of Hector without irritation, is due to that same moral apathy, and that narrowness of intelligence, which makes him insensible to those of his wife. No man can seriously resent what he does not really feel. He is wholly destitute even of the delicacy and refinement which soften many of the features of vice; and the sensuality he shows in the Third Book1038 partakes largely of the brutal character which marks the lusts of Jupiter. No wise, no generous word, ever passes from his lips. On one subject only he is determined enough; it is, that he will not give up the woman whom he well knows to be without attachment to him1039, and whom he keeps not as the object of his affections, but merely as the instrument of his pleasures. One solicitude only he cherishes; it is to decorate his person, to exhibit his beauty, to brighten with care the arms that he would fain parade, but has not the courage to employ against the warriors of Greece.

There are other greater achievements in the Iliad, but none finer, or more deserving our commendation, than the manner in which Homer has handled the difficult character of Paris. It was quite necessary to raise him to a certain point of importance; had he been simply contemptible, his place in the early stages of the Trojan tale, and the prolongation of the War on his account, would have involved a too violent departure from the laws of poetical credibility. This importance Homer, whether from imagination or from history, has supplied; in part by his very high position. Even if I were wrong in the opinion that the Poet meant to represent him as the eldest son, or the eldest living son, of Priam, it would still at least be plain that he is more eminent and conspicuous than any other member of the royal house after Hector; while he is so much less worthy than Deiphobus, for example, that no one, I think, could doubt that his distinction is due to his being senior to that respectable prince and warrior, and to the rest of his brothers. Further, the Poet has raised him to the very highest elevation in two particulars; one the gift of archery, the other the endowment of corporeal grace and beauty. But neither of these involves one particle of courage, or of any other virtue; for the archer of Homer’s time was not like the British bowman, who stood with his comrades in the line, and discharged the function in war which has since fallen to musketry; he was a mere sharpshooter, always having the most deliberate opportunity of aim at the enemy, and always himself out of danger. No archer is ever hit in the Iliad; but Pandarus, so skilled in the bow, is slain, and Paris is disgraced, when they respectively venture to assume the spear. Again, the Poet has contrived that the accomplishments of Paris, though in themselves unsurpassed, shall attract towards him no share, great or small, of our regard. This prince really does more, than even Hector does, to stay the torrent of the Grecian war; for in the Eleventh Book, from behind a pillar, he wounds Diomed, who had fought with the Immortals, Eurypylus, who had also been one of the nine accepters of Hector’s challenge, and Machaon, one of the two surgeons. Thus Homer1040 has been able to make him most useful in battle, most lovely to the eye, and yet alike detestable and detested.

This aim he attains, not by that tame method of description which he so much eschews, but by the turn he gives to narrative, and by the colour he imparts to it in one or a few words.

Paris, though effeminate and apathetic, is not gentle, either to his wife or his enemies; and, when he has wounded Diomed, he wishes the shot had been a fatal one. The reply of Diomed cuts deeper than any arrow when he addresses him as,

Bowman! ribald! well-frizzled girl-hunter1041!

Again, the Poet tells us, as if by accident, that when, after the battle with Menelaus, he could not be found, it was not because the Trojans were unwilling to give him up, for they hated him with the hatred, which they felt to dark Death1042. And again we learn, how he uses bribery to keep his ground in the Assembly; how he refuses to recognise even his own military inferiority, but lamely accounts for the success of Menelaus by saying that all men have their turn1043; and how he causes shame to his own countrymen and exultation to the Greeks, when they contrast the pretensions of his splendid appearance with his miserable performances in the field1044.