Desperately Seeking Helen

HELEN OF TROY

Goddess, Princess, Whore

By Bettany Hughes

Knopf. 458 pp. $30

In a temple in Sparta dedicated to Helen's twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, hung a giant eggshell from which she hatched after her mother, Leda, was visited by the king of the gods in the shape of a swan. The egg was worshiped as a sign of the gods' activity in the world, a talisman of Helen's magical origin. She wasn't a goddess, exactly, but she was transfigured by divine power, and at the end of her eventful earthly existence, was snatched up to heaven and turned into a star.

W.B. Yeats dramatized Leda's encounter with the swan and its prophetic violence: "A sudden blow: the great wings beating still . . ./A shudder in the loins engenders there/The broken wall, the burning roof and tower." As Bettany Hughes explores in her new study of Helen, Leda's most fateful offspring became the preeminent symbol of the twinned furies, desire and war.

Helen's flight from Sparta provides the fulcrum of the immense, ramifying edifice of sacred narrative about Troy. Homer did not need to spell out the circumstances of Helen's abduction by Paris because his audience knew the story already. In the two great Homeric epics, she enters the scene like a famous actress coming onstage to sighs of recognition, acclamations from one quarter, boos from another. She is the casus belli , and, in "The Iliad," she knows it. Homer portrays her sadly weaving in her tapestry the events of the long siege and the catastrophe that she foresees and for which she is responsible. In this " pome de la force ," as the philosopher Simone Weil called it, the lines sing again and again of Helen's radiant loveliness, perfumed flesh, luminous and divine presence but also of her treachery and her powers. In a mysterious scene, she ventriloquizes the voices of the Greek warriors' wives to tempt them out of the Trojan horse where they lie huddled.

In "The Odyssey," her appearance is cast in less familiar terms, for there, after the fall of Troy, she's found back in the household of Menelaus, restored to her role as queen of Sparta. She's gracious to her guests, but she is also witchy: She drugs the wine of the assembled company to give them sweet dreams.

The world the poems describe is not one where written records exist: The poets are blind and sing from memory. This presents the crucial dilemma for a historian attempting a biography of Helen of Troy, as Hughes has done here. The current dating of the Trojan War situates it in the 13th century B.C. -- the late Bronze Age, and the earliest written sources about Helen date from 600 to 700 years later, more than 20 generations after the time when she was supposed to have lived.

The peoples who inhabited the Greek world and the Near and Middle East -- all the regions infused with Hellenic culture -- made up fabulous stories to account for such mysteries as giant eggs or giant bones (dinosaur fossils gave rise to myths about fallen Titans), but contemporary historians look for evidence in digs, grave hoards and ruins of shrines, and they want to uncover material facts about marriage laws, sexual practices, tools and methods, as well as real events and, above all, battles.

Hughes brings a passion for ancient history and archaeology, crossed with a strain of feminism, to the figure of Helen. Like one of the Victorian antiquarians who wanted to prove the truth of the Bible by finding evidence of the Flood in the deserts of Asia, she is determined to enflesh Helen of Troy from physical traces rather than explore her as a myth. She enlists readers in her quest for a historical queen, fervently hoping, she says, that the grave of "our Bronze Age Helen" will be found. Real bones will lay the ghost of the legend to rest and allow the real woman to emerge, she claims.

But Hughes's quest was doomed to be frustrated: Nobody has left a single contemporary syllable about Helen, not even a coin. Besides, one wonders about this idea that history can supersede myth: Think of the abundant mythology around figures much nearer our own time and well documented, such as Joan of Arc or Mary, Queen of Scots.

Hughes's method is to recount findings from Hittite, Mycenean, Troad and other digs in Greece and Asia Minor (now Turkey, Syria and Iraq) and attach them to a narrative that follows Helen from birth to death. Hughes moves across the map, from Sparta to Troy, throwing in a loose assemblage of topics, many of them alluring -- from the naked wrestling of prepubescent Spartan girls to the trade in perfumes and spices. She has traveled enthusiastically all over these lands since her young days hitchhiking, and she often pauses in her story to evoke the flowers, smells and even the drifting trash of the archaeological sites that have yielded precious scraps of information about the late Bronze Age. She even participated in making a replica chariot, borrowed horses from "the local gypsy encampment" and experimented to see how such a vehicle handled. Her verdict: The Greeks and Trojans flew at one another in lethal fighting machines.

From this rag bag of information, Hughes then affirms at the end of every one of her short chapters that this is what Helen of Troy might have done/been/experienced -- perhaps. The dominant procedure of this kind of history is surmise; the dominant tense can only be the past conditional.

More seriously, the general effect goes out of focus. If Spartan girls were hard-bodied and tanned from childhood, how is it that Helen's famous flesh turns so milky soft in poetic evocations? More seriously, if Spartan women were so powerful and independent, how is it that Menelaus treats his wife as his creature? We hear that Spartan women were polyandrous, and then that marriage by abduction or rape was the custom, too. Is the implication here that Helen chose Paris as her second husband? Or that he "married" her according to an established practice? In either case, why then would her leaving Menelaus have caused such shame to him? This kind of contradiction fractures Hughes's history throughout; she fails to establish in what way Helen was characteristically Spartan or to find a clear narrative thread about her subject's character.

However, the disappointment of this book chiefly arises from a growing commerce in television history. "Helen of Troy" coincides with a TV series and the need for televisual values -- for gorgeous scenery, striking artifacts and titillating stuff about the past -- even when connecting these traces to the matter in hand requires a long stretch.

Hughes closes with some more thoughtful passages on the legendary Helen in literature and art, and it would have been illuminating to hear more. She lingers on Faustus's vision in Marlowe's play: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" Marlowe's Helen was a phantom, conjured by the Devil, as Hughes acknowledges. But because she is a historian, Hughes also tells us that there could not have been as many as a thousand ships. Treating one of the world's most powerful myths as historical fact has its difficulties, which turn out to be insuperable in the case of Helen of Troy.